TBPN Live - Synthetic Humanoids, Quantum Chip Breakthrough, Nikola is Cooked, Salesforce vs Microsoft

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Thursday, February 20th, 2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you all today. We're breaking down some new humanoid robots. They're not terrifying at all. They're absolutely horrific out of a horror movie. We're breaking down Satya Nadella. He went on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. It was a fantastic breakdown. He also announced a new quantum computing unit. From there, we're breaking that down.

We're going into the history of Nikola, the trucking company, the electric truck company that just went bankrupt today and telling you the whole history of that company. And then we're going to break down the timeline, run through some posts on X, give you a bunch of fun hot takes. We're discussing Seed Stage VC, Google AI Agents, the new Apple iPhone launch, a bunch of good stuff for you guys. So stay tuned. Thanks.

And should we go through some of the posts? Yeah. I mean, so they follow it up and they do give a little bit of explanation here. They say, the protoclone is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 myofibers and 500 sensors. And so I think that, you know, whether or not you think complete replication of the human is important in robotics context. There's a lot of questions about like, hey, do we even need to give them legs? Like maybe if they're running around a factory or a dig center, like throw some wheels on them. The Unitree one that's like dog shaped will just be flipped. But it also has wheels and it can do all these things.

It can stand up, but then it can go four legged. So I think, I think like if you're starting from scratch, thinking first principles, you would actually kind of refactor some of the problems from a human and give it more arms or less arms, depending on what the job is.

I don't know. They want to be, you know, don't want to be a full of hubris, uh maybe we are perfect we might be goaded we might be goaded yeah the the bipedal the bipedal bipedal form factor it did evolve over millions of years allegedly yeah yeah well uh scientists say let's go to the bro scientists uh well let's go to samoyed online. Samoyed says, yep, boss.

The promo video is going great. I got the twitching humanoid robot strung up on a meat hook and flickering lights. They'll love it. It's amazing. I mean, it's just working exactly as intended. This got 70K likes and another 2 million views. Oh, my God. This did get another 70K likes. So, yeah, a lot of these views have to be driven by quote tweets because it's so easy to go viral here.

20 million views is tough to do. Fantastic. And then Atlas, good friend of the show, chimes in and says, terrible quad insertions and the delts are hardly capped. Midsection also looks to be in poor condition. And I actually laughed out loud at this. I think it's so funny.

Yeah, we need to be. So Atlas is absolutely right. You need to be evaluating humanoid robots as though they were going for their IFBB pro cards. Yes, exactly. Presumably there will be humanoid bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting competitions. And it's important to put them,

really try to put them up against the best humans this isn't close to sam sulak by any means yeah i i yeah even opposite shade i'd like to see them give the clone a spray tan like give it like a sam sulak spray tan just super dark yeah super multiple layers of spray tan for sure. Give it a face, some smiling white teeth. Yeah. You know, a little hairstyle. We won't have humanoid AGI until one of these wins the Arnold. Yes.

That is the only benchmark. That's the real benchmark. That's the benchmark. Yeah. I don't care about MMLU or Chatbot Arena. I care about the Arnold. That's a Coogan-coated post. Yeah, exactly.

And Llama here says 60 gram protein diet, never reached failure, barely even tracks reps, sets or weights, thinks creatine is illegal. Not going to make it on that. But we're talking about ways to get attention. Obviously, viral videos work very well if you have a viral product like a synthetic humanoid that's super creepy. But sometimes you don't. And sometimes you just need advertising. And that's why we want to talk about ad quick, big sponsor on the channel. They make out of home advertising easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home experience expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless and ad buying across the globe.

And what I want to add here is ad quick can also help sponsors get very you know sort of brands get very creative oh yeah so uh this is sort of dark but you know how the cartel will sort of hang up you know okay uh bodies over you know overpasses maybe clone could hang their their their uh humanoids from meat hooks like they did in their video just hang them from like overpass on the 101 right i think there's a collab in the future there's a great collab there but yeah if you want to if you want to get creative hit a bad quick and uh let's get back to the show uh so paki mccormick says uh jesus dorkash patel is cooking because he launched a new podcast with uh sacha nadella and uh it's it is crazy seeing how far this podcast has has has come uh dorkesh has done zuck he got the exclusive for the llama 3 release uh and that was fascinating because the

new york times wrote a piece about meta launching llama but they didn't get an exclusive interview or a real interview at all they just got a. It really is the death knell of traditional media. Totally. Basic value is that they would get the exclusive. Exactly. And now that you have trillion dollar company CEOs realizing that they can get more impact and still get the news out on the New York Times by going to somebody who's who's much more likely to be friendly and not try to sort of position them negatively yeah just focusing on the you know you know Dwarkesh is not like oh like you know talk about your relationship with Sam Altman he's like let's focus on on like the reality of what's happening here and the New York Times would just take it to this place exactly that Satya doesn't want to go

nobody really wants to go there yeah let's just focus on the matter at hand. Yeah, it's the TMZ. Like Dwarkesh is not, Dwarkesh by nature of being an AI oriented podcast, he does not need to do clickbait in order to, you know, he doesn't need to try to make it more dramatic than it is to get listens. Like every single person that, you know,

is relevant in AI is like going to at least figure out what they talked about here. Yeah, yeah. And so Satya really did break the news about Microsoft's new quantum computing project on the Dorkesh Patel podcast, which is incredible. And there's a little summary here by Prakash, Adapai, Satya is out, TLDR, Microsoft doesn't believe in AGI.

They're wary of overinvestment and the open AI partnership is over allegedly. AI and AGI are overhyped. Satya says, us self-claiming some AGI milestone. That's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10% GDP. I love this. We've talked about this before. Artificial economic intelligence. I was trying to coin something around it. And I was basically just saying like, I don't care about any of the evals. The eval is the economic output. And Satya did a better job condensing it than I did. But really like that is how you measure the value of AI is what is it doing? And that's

something that everybody like, it's very, as somebody who will be a power you know microsoft uh presumably will be one of the most powerful companies in ai just by nature of the the overinvestment in in compute um and positioning it's very smart for satya to say you know what i actually think is most exciting is the excessive gdp growth which will create massive surplus in our economy and enable everybody to benefit from it. Even if right now they're just, you know, watching brain rot slop on TikTok. Right. So like even the people that are just doing nothing to be participate in this sort of broader technological trend, if this plays out, they will benefit from it massively. And I

think that's beautiful. That's capitalism at its best, baby. It's it is. It really is. Such a goes on to talk about he's very negative on more capex spend from Microsoft. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, there was a lot of money lost, which is hilarious because everyone say, oh, this is the next Industrial Revolution. He's like, I don't want to be the person that overinvested in the wrong type of windmill. So this I think was in response to Dwarkesh saying, hey, if we can get to 10% GDP growth, which would basically be 5X-ing our current growth, which would be tremendous. Dwarkesh was like, why don't you spend 10 times more on data center build-outs? And he basically said, well, we're kind of like scaling it appropriately. It's like finding this balance between you don't want to have oversupply of of you know i'm excited to

be a leaser i build a lot i lease a lot yeah i love it yeah so he's he's saying here he's fine if if other people overbuild because he'll come in and say well we have basically all this demand we'll help we'll basically bought you know we'll sort of uh you know make long-term commits to your compute and then we'll sort of chunk it up and sell it you know in consumer in some categories there may be some winner take all network effect chat gpt is a great example of an at scale consumer property that already has real escape velocity in enterprise buyers will not tolerate winner take all where the buyer is a corporation enterprise and it department they will want multiple suppliers that is what will happen

even on the model side and so this is why uh this is we've talked about this a bunch of times on the show our sort of generalized belief that elon thinks the value he was able to catch up with xai in terms of like general model capabilities at at least like within the ballpark. He still clearly believes that, you know, it seems obvious that he would like to control ChatGPT as a consumer product company, right? And he sees that as potentially being, you know, this trillion dollar company.

And now there's all this FUD, like, you know, a lot of people like to say, oh, OpenAI is Yahoo, you know, look at their market cap. But, you know, I of people like to say oh open ai is yahoo you know look at look at their market cap but you know i think there's a strong case for you know a dominant consumer you know new consumer app company yeah so prakash uh closes out with five opinion uh sections or maybe four takeaways uh satya is calling the bubble in the build out the crazy people like governments are entering the game he's happy to lease from them when they over build. Yeah, so he's talking about like a country,

like Malaysia, who's like, we should get in the data center game. And then realizing, oh, we actually don't have the technical expertise to efficiently deliver this compute to end consumers. Okay, we should just partner with Microsoft and kind of let them operate it. And Microsoft is happy to end consumers. Okay. We should just partner with Microsoft and kind of let them, you know, operate it.

And Microsoft is happy to take over that supply. And then Ada pie goes on. He's disappointed in the eight, in the open AI partnership. Satya sees them as having built a great consumer app for themselves with dominance in the category, but models for enterprise usage have gotten commoditized, which is kind of interesting.

Cause it's like, yes, you are disappointed, but like it only because you didn't predict that, I guess, which is kind of interesting because it's like, yes, you are disappointed, but like it only because you didn't predict that, I guess, which is kind of odd. He's so done with the AGI talk. If you can't get to 10% global growth, your AGI talk is meaningless to him. I love that. And then the last thing he's backing Microsoft from the CapEx precipice. It's funny because he certainly did make Google dance, but now they're committed and now they're committed to insane capex but he's out of here uh yeah one of the most meaningful dwarcash interviews so far making google dance it's a it's a good really i mean it does not feel

like uh the the the you know sacha is in a different league than than google's leadership at this point like it's just yeah seem you know I'm sure that they'll say, hey, we should get our guy on Dorcash. Yeah. But, you know. Yeah. Yeah. He's still making them dance.

Has Sundar done it? I know he's done some interviews with a few people. I mean, he's done some with MKBHD, but I just don't see Sundar pushing as much. And also it's a very different organization where the founders of google are still dipping their toes in every once in a while like i firmly believe bill gates has not been back uh like you know hey satya i got an idea for you in years yeah definitely not so sundar has not been on dwarkesh oh and what was his last like we need to build uh speaking of our next uh i don't know can can sundar is sundar the guy to go on a two-hour podcast or is he more of the is he more on com manager mode com manager mode yeah uh maybe i mean he should figure it out um because it's an important skill

if your ceo can't go on a two-hour, you're cooked. You know how during the, uh, during the election, I said that there was the, the Coogan parlay, which was you, you bet on Polly market for, uh, Trump to do over three hours on Rogan for Kamala to do under two hours on Rogan. She wound up doing none. And then whoever does the longer rogan interview wins the election because i had this whole podcast election thesis um i want to see on on public uh a basket of of tech stocks for where the ceo has done an hour long plus interview on drawer cash i want to own that basket the new qqq oh oh oh yeah basically if you're running a public company, if you're running a public company and you have the chops as a CEO to duke it out with more cash for a couple hours, I think the podcast CEO index is crazy. Yeah, yeah. You know, Carp's done them. There's a lot of people that have done them. So that takes us to our next sponsor, Public, investing for those

who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Public earns high marks for ease of use and investment selection. So go check it out at public.com. And I wanted to mention Public because I wanted to know after Satya did Dwarkesh, what happened with the Microsoft stock. So I have a chart here on the next slide, which is Microsoft's past week. And you can see, he goes on Dwarkash,

he announces this new quantum computing thing that we'll talk about, and the stock popped up 2%. And so the company has been doing phenomenally. And shout out to Satya, the absolute dog. Let's go back to his discussion about AGI and that 10% milestone. I think there's some interesting quotes here because Dwarkesh pushes back. And so Satya is saying, you know, us claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10%. And then Dwarkesh says, hey, look, if the world's growing at 10%, the economy is 100 trillion globally. If the world grows at 10%,

that's an extra 10 trillion. You're investing 80 billion as a hyperscaler. That's not that much money. Shouldn't you be doing 800 billion billion if you really think in a couple years we could be growing in the world economy at this rate so you know revealed preference yeah he's he's gonna be like look masa thinks he should do 500 what are you doing yeah yeah that's basically what he asked which i like because it's like this is this is a this is actually a hard question but it's not framed as a gotcha or some sort of like you know negative thing it's just yeah hey this is actually the real question that we should be discussing. And Scott Jeff says, that's correct.

But by the way, the classic supply side is, hey, let me build it and they'll come. That's an argument. And after all we've done that, we've taken enough risk to go do it. But at some point, the supply and demand have to map. That's why I'm tracking both sides of it. You can go off the rails completely

when you're hyping yourself up with supply side versus really understanding how to translate that into real value to customers. That's why I look at my inference revenue. That's one of the reasons why even the disclosure on the inference revenue, it's interesting that not many people are talking about their real revenue. But to me, that is important as a governor for how you think about. So he's like, hey, Microsoft, we tell you how much money we're making from inference and that's the real value of AI. It doesn't matter how much you're spending

training the models. It matters how much money is being generated from the usefulness of those models. Like that is the big risk right now. Like the risk for the hyperscalers is not getting in the general route, like not having a generally accurate demand prediction, right? So if you way overdo it, you're going to get crushed because people just say, look, you know,

these guys can't accurately predict or utilize the supply they're bringing online. And then the other side is probably what Satya would prefer, which is, hey, we went big, but not big enough. And we're trying to race to kind of fulfill that, right? And especially now with Elon showing how quickly you can build these massive clusters, you know, 200,000 GPU cluster, and he's wanting to ramp to a million as soon as possible.

So it just shows. And I think it goes back to Google. Like we saw in Google's cloud earnings report that they were capacity constrained. And so I think they missed earnings on Google Cloud because they weren't able to deliver services. But I think that Satya's saying, hey, were they capacity constrained on the training side or the inference side? Because those tell two different stories about the actual value because a whole bunch of companies can go raise a lot of money and show up at the hyperscalers and say, Hey, I need it. I need $10 billion worth of, worth of training compute right now. And that's not the same as $10 billion of useful AI and product GDP growth, right? Like training does not necessarily get us GDP growth. And so, uh,

Satya's really throwing the gloves down saying, let's see it. Let's see GDP growth. Show me something. AI. He's for the people. Yeah, it's great. And that's exactly how we should be thinking about this stuff. It's so good. And so Dwarkash goes on, he says, so if you really think there's some potential here to 10X or 5X the growth rate of the world, and then you're like, well, what's the revenue from GDP for? If you really think that's the possibility for the next level up, shouldn't you just, let's go crazy crazy let's do hundreds of billions of dollars of compute i mean there's some chance right and so drawer cash is like doubling down on this question good follow-up and such just says here's the interesting thing right that's not that's why even that balanced

approach to the fleet at least is very important to me it's not about building compute it's about building compute that can actually help me not only train the next big model, but also serve the next big model. Until you do those two things, you're not going to be able to be in a position to really take advantage of even your investment. So that's kind of where it's not a race just to building a model. It's a race to creating a commodity that is getting used in the world to drive. You have to have a complete thought, not just one thing that you're thinking about. And by the way, one of the things is that there will be overbilled to your point about what happened in the dot-com era. The memo has gone out that, Hey, you, you know, you need more energy. You need more compute. Thank God for it. So everyone's going to race. In fact, it's not just companies

just deploying countries are going to deploy capital. And there were clearly, uh, and so I'm excited. And he's about to say like, they were clearly like, actually these countries are going to deploy capital and they will clearly uh and so i'm excited and he's about to say like they were clearly like actually he's like these countries are my pay pigs uh and so i'm excited to be a leaser because by the way i build a lot i lease a lot and so he's saying like look yeah some of that cap expense gonna go out but also we're gonna be leasing because we don't want to be holding the bag and so there's a little bit of game of musical chairs going on with some of the build outs. A little bit of nervousness. I don't know.

He might be wrong. He might be under building. The Pascal's wager for AI build out at the hyperscalers for a long time was if AI is fake and you over invest, you still don't lose your job. But if AI is real and you under invest still don't lose your job. But if AI is real and you under-invest, you definitely lose your job. And so just in terms of like, I want to maintain my job, everyone had the same incentive of like,

we gotta go all in because there's no downside here. Let's move on. He says, he's talking about how AI takeoff is a risk and, uh, and Satya's and Satya's bringing it back to like, okay, how would that actually happening? Uh, he says to your point, I think that one of the reasons why I think about even the most powerful AI is essentially working with some delegated authority from some human. You can say, oh, all this alignment and all that. That's why I think you really have to get these alignment to work and be verifiable in some way. But I don't think

that you can deploy intelligences that are out of control. For example, this AI takeoff problem may be a real problem, but before it is a real problem, the real problem will be in the courts. No society is going to allow for some human to say, and that's, and that's why I've said that the, you know, a lot of people say, oh, lawyers are cooked. Why are you going to need lawyers to, um, uh, to do, you know, things when you could just ask an AI, Hey, can you create this document and send it for signature? And boom, it's done. And people I think are still going to want to be able to say like, we had a human sign off on this AI output. And so lawyers might spend less time on individual documents, but they will probably do more.

They have a higher output because business owners, as an example, will do more legal work because it's cheaper. And right now, all day long, business owners will skip a doc because they're like, oh, this person's just working on this small thing. We don't need to put it in a contract. It's not a big deal. But then as it gets easier to just like, you know, basically chat GPT, Hey, can you make the stock freelancer agreement, send it out for signature. Boom. It's done. It will just happen more.

Yep. And same thing, same thing with capital allocators. You know, these big endowments are like, cool. I'm glad your hedge fund is using AI to make investment decisions, but you better be signing off on, you know, the vast majority, any transaction over a certain amount, because if you lose our money, like we want to know who's responsible and why it happened. And you can't just say,

you know, blame it on your algorithm. Do you want to summarize that experience we had with that young kid who was thinking about going into fund to fund management? Yeah, so we met up with a listener on the show who goes to school at USC, which is around the corner from us. And, um, yeah, he, he was, you know, our, our advice to him was generally, uh, you know, he was saying, just trying to get a

sense of what jobs are still going to exist within the space. And we felt pretty strongly that, you know, specifically he had an offer from a fund of funds to go join and go there. And I think our advice to him was generally that job will still exist for a number of different reasons, but you should still figure out how to use AI to be exceptionally good at your job, to write software for the work that you do to just be even more efficient. And you should be thinking of it as how do I use AI so that I can manage, you know, exponentially more capital for my firm? Yeah. Basically on day one, being the most junior employee at a company, historically, that has not meant you show up and you have 20 direct reports unless you're like, I don't know,

like a new, unless it's like, oh yeah, you're some direct reports unless you're like, I don't know, like a new, unless it's like, oh yeah, you're some new grad and you're hiring a bunch of people that are, you're managing people that didn't go to college. But in most firms, in most investment firms, you come in, you don't have any direct reports. And then after a few years, they give you one intern. And then after a decade, you have a team under you.

But with AI, it's like on day one, you can have 20 employees effectively. And you can have a Devin working you can have a dev in working for you and a deep, deep resource. It's actually a very interesting way. You're going to have the younger generation who learns to manage. They should be managers on day one, for sure.

Before they ever manage a human. Yeah, no, totally. And it's many of the same like workflows for managing people you can use for AI. It's like, yeah, you don't want to let the AI just run off for four days, just like spinning their wheels, like doing random stuff,

spending money or time or inference. You want to have them execute something, give them quick feedback, you know, make sure it's good, have them keep going, right? But then you're balancing that. Now you can manage, you know, you could be managing five or six,

10, 20 agents at once that are all carrying out individualized tasks yeah uh and so uh yeah i mean they talk about rogue actors a little bit and how some societies might allow for a fast takeoff but again i think that uh there's there there's a huge pressure against that in the same way that we haven't had nuclear war even though yes there are some countries that are rogue states yeah there's enough pressure to globally. I don't think Satya wants to say that, but I do think that if there was some AI lab that was truly working on some, you know, killer AI, there would be a lot of pressure from the international community

militarily to stop that. And it would be the same thing if you tried to build it in San Francisco. And at the end of the day, someone has to push the button to deploy the killer AI, at least initially. And that person wants to survive. And there's the threat of violence from governments. And so it's less of a risk than I think most people think. Anyway, I love this question because it gets to the kind of just a really interesting narrative violation in Silicon Valley. Dwarkesh asks Satya, is being a company man underrated? You've spent most of your career at Microsoft

and you could say that one of the reasons you've been able to hold, add so much value is you've seen the culture, the history, and the technology. You have all this context

by rising up through the ranks. Should more companies be run by people who have this level of context? And he says, that's a great question. I haven't thought about that way. We have to have a company man of the year award for sure this year, for sure. I think it is underrated in Silicon Valley. And I think, um, it's very, it's very interesting.

Uh, and so he says through my 34 years now at Microsoft, each year felt more exciting about being at Microsoft versus thinking that, Oh, I'm a company person or what have you. So no ego about it, which is, there's a huge memetic pressure in Silicon Valley to not be a company man. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it'd be better to run a $1 million seed company. It's almost to the point where people, people don't realize, like many people in tech, the things that they want in life are all achievable on a million dollars a year total comp sort of salary right yeah like everything you could want like the nice house the cars the second home kids in private school it's all achievable on that yet they think that the only

way they can get that is if they have some big liquidity event i need a big liquidity event before i'm 30 yeah and i need another one you, and then I'm going to do my big company. And then it's going to, I saw a guy who had his like life. A lot of those people, like how many of those people would have been a great PM at meta and just don't realize the kind of compensation that you can get by just working up the org and the excitement of working on products that instead, instead of working on your like vertical SAS app that has five users working on some, working on products that instead of working on your like vertical SaaS app that has five users, working on a feature where you're like, like people joke about, oh, you're just changing like the rounding on the button, the key of the button. It's like, well, that's pretty cool if you

have 20 million people clicking that button every single day. Or two billion people in the case of meta. Yeah. Like two orders of magnitude of that. But I'm just saying, even if you're working on like some obscure part of the settings app, you're still getting millions and millions of clicks potentially an hour potentially adding more value than someone who's adding value to the world saving people time and exactly time is money yeah yeah i know it's fantastic uh and so he says i take that seriously even for anybody joining microsoft it's not like they're joining Microsoft as long as they feel that they can use this as a platform for both economic return, but also a sense of purpose

and a sense of mission that they can accomplish by using us as a platform. That's the contract. I love that. That's a great distillation of what it means to like hire. And you can tell that he's hired well because of that. So I think, yes,

companies have to create a culture that allows people to come in and become company people like me. Microsoft got it more right than wrong, at least in my case. And I hope that remains the case. Yeah, it's interesting that when you look at Apple, Google, and Microsoft now, they're all run by company men. Yeah. And the thing that we're seeing with Satya is Satya goes founder mode, right? Founder mode is going on the up and coming AI podcasts and being willing to talk for two hours about what you're doing. Right. Yeah. Sundar, on the other hand, you could argue, no, these guys are in manager mode. Tim Cook is over at the John Summit concert dancing, you know, instead you know working on the next uh computing platform and like

you know he's done a great job of that type of manager at least to date yeah well speaking of the next computing platform uh the big announcement was uh a new quantum computing chip and so uh that they had sitting on the desk yeah yeah so So quantum computers you might have seen have been, you know, it's usually like this superconductor, like frosty, like super cold, like gold, like crazy looking device in essentially a lab. Certainly not something you can rack on a server. Microsoft claims to have boiled it down to a point

where this could potentially be scaled into, you know, millions of qubits, which arebits, which we'll go through here. So Elon shared a Grok analysis of quantum computing and the Majorana 1 chip, which is Microsoft's new quantum processing unit. So we'll give a quick overview of quantum computing. Imagine a computer so powerful it could solve problems that today's supercomputers can't even touch. That's the idea behind quantum computing. Unlike regular computers, which use bits that are either zero or one, quantum computers use qubits. Qubits are special because they can be zero, one, or both at the same

time, thanks to a quantum property called superposition. This allows quantum computers to process huge amounts of information all at once, making them potentially game-changing for tasks like simulating complex molecules for drug discovery, optimizing massive systems like traffic or supply chains, and cracking tough math problems. There's a catch. Qubits are incredibly fragile. They can lose their quantum state and thus their information due to tiny disturbances like heat or noise. This fragility is one of the biggest hurdles in making quantum computers practical. Now, Microsoft launched the Majorana chip, Majorana 1 chip.

And it was funny because in the interview, Satya's like clearly heard about the project for a long time, but he like didn't know the final code name because they probably have code names and they're launching it. He's like, I think we're calling it Majorana. He kind of had to like check that um but that's founder mode it's a new qpu quantum processing unit which could be the successor to the gpu the tpu now the qpu is designed to tackle this fragility problem uh it's the first chip to use a topological core a cutting edge approach that leverages exotic particles called Majorana particles. These particles help create a special kind of qubit called a topological qubit, which is more stable than the qubits in most other quantum computers. Here's what stands out. Material, it uses a new type of material called a topo conductor. It's more stable and it's more scalable.

And so Microsoft designed this explicitly to support a million qubits, which is a huge leap. And at that point, you can actually start doing like real math and real problem solving as opposed to a lot of the systems that IBM and Google has worked on. It's a science project. It's like, oh yeah, it's 10 qubits. It can theoretically do the hard math,

but it can't practically actually solve the major problems. There's so many companies that had, what was that AI project? I forget who he was in, but it wasn't started with a W maybe. They're always saying, oh, it solved this. There's D-Wave.

D-Wave. And there was Rigetti. No, no. I'm not talking about Chip. It was like IBM. What was IBM's big AI project? Watson. Watson.

Yeah, Watson. Watson got smoked. Watson did get smoked. Watson fell off. Yeah. Well, they crushed in Jeopardy for a while. That was a good stunt. It's interesting that it seems like these big, you know, legacy computing companies had these science projects and they seem to be content with them being science projects and being this sort of marketing, right? Because Watson, I haven't

even seen anything about it in the last year. Well, now Watson is a consulting group that will help you implement Lama, essentially. Mogged. Mogged. Mogged, but also, as we've seen, there's a lot of money to be made in just AI transformation. Sure, but why have a decade-plus long science experiment that you just end up as a consultant implementing Lama? Because it's a marketing it's a marketing project for your consultancy okay and so i'm just saying and so like when you call uh

you know exxon mobile and you say hey we want to help you implement ai and you say uh oh what company are you from we're like ibm we're the watson group you remember the jeopardy thing yeah we've actually partnered with facebook and meta to vend in one of the that were being released around the same time he read the transformer paper and was like this is it and he identified that and was like let's go implement this and let's scale this and that was like and that was just a very very key thing um it is interesting that everyone else is catching up and watson isn't like hey us too because they could have done you know if they were cracked they could have done like a deep seek thing or a llama fine tune or mr i. I also wouldn't be surprised if the best people at Watson got poached to go to the other.

Yeah, but I mean, yeah, the company is not set up as a research software enterprise company anymore. It's very much a lot of consulting. Anyway, let's go back to the Majorana chip. It relies on Majorana particles, which are fascinating because they are their own antiparticles. This property makes them ideal for storing quantum information in a way that's naturally protected from certain errors. Picture it like this. Think of a regular qubit as a spinning coin that's easily knocked over by a breeze. A topological qubit is more like a knot tied in a rope. No matter how much you shake it, the knot stays secure. Interesting metaphor from Grok.

Microsoft achieves this by using a topo conductor, a material that combines the properties of a conductor and a topological insulator. This setup allows them to create and manipulate Majorana particles, forming stable qubits. Why is this a bigger deal? Well, more stability, faster progress. And Microsoft is super committed to this.

They've been researching this for 20 years. And they've had a bunch of stuff. See, that's the kind of stuff, like, I want to see the 20 years of research and then boom, we're going to commercialize it. Yeah. And so they actually had some setbacks.

Uh, in 2018 they published a paper on quantum computing and they had to retract it because there was so much pushback from the scientific community. Uh, and so, uh, the article highlights potential applications. They're going to work on self healing material,

sustainable agriculture, safer, safer chemical discovery, and going forward, they still have to scale up. Going from eight qubits to a million is a massive engineering challenge. It's not just about adding more qubits. They all need to work flawlessly.

We're focused on doubling here. Yep. They're focused on going eight to a million. But all the best projects are. But let's go to nature. So I believe Microsoft published their paper in nature and there was some pushback and I have an article here from nature

that will kind of show a little bit of truth zone on Microsoft claims. We'll see if we agree with it or not. We'll let you be the judge. So he says, Microsoft claims quantum computing breakthrough, but some physicists are skeptical. The tech giant aims to make topological quantum computers that will reach useful scales faster than competing technologies. And so machines based on topology promise to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies. So again,

it's not that they've built the million qubit machine yet. They're just saying, Hey, the tech tree has been going this direction. And we think if we go in this direction, it'll be a faster shortcut to the quantum computer that we want that we'll actually be able to like, you know, simulate the universe essentially. Like the, the qubit, the whole thing with quantum computing is that like, you can do such complex, like you can break encryption, but you can do such hard computing problems that you can actually like instead of just physically like modeling like the pen dropping and and it's like the pen has a weight and it and there's like a force it's like you can model each atom in the pen and and it's like yeah no problem like sure

that even though that would be like sounds insane amount of calculations. So the announcement came in a February 19th press release containing few technical details, but Microsoft said it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research center in Santa Barbara, California. Would I bet my life that they're seeing what they think they're seeing? No, but it looks pretty good, says Stephen Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was briefed on the results. It's got to be such a crazy dynamic doing this frontier research in a space like quantum computing. And any day you don't know if you're going to wake up and your nemesis is going to publish this sort of groundbreaking piece. And you have to sort of react to it.

But you've got to be somewhat supportive because you want to you you ideally want the space to be pushing forward and getting more investment yep but then simultaneously there you know you want to be the guy that like has like the the breakthrough that really matters yep so he's like yeah like it seems seems legit yeah wouldn't bet my life on it you know and so uh i say at the at the same time company published intermediate results, but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits. And so big question on what was on that chip. Because it's kind of the classic like, I got the thing and who knows if it's working and it's not working. And it's like, why did you instantiate in the physical world? But clearly from a marketing perspective,

the reason that you say like, I'm showing you the iPhone is because like, it's real and you can buy it. And like Steve Jobs pulled it out of his pocket and was like, this is a real thing. You wouldn't, you won't believe it. Beth brings a chip around. Yeah, Beth Jesus does this too.

I think Beth Jesus is in one of these tweet threads being like, why is this a big deal? Like, I don't care about this. It's heating up. But I mean, in the markets generally, quantum computing has become very hot. There's a lot of SPACs that were down and now they're popping again.

And so I'm sure we're gonna be hearing more about this. The very interesting thing is that most of the techno optimists, really smart people. Yeah, I'm gonna pull up on public. What was the? Look up Rigetti computing. Rigetti. I think that's probably a good one.

D-Wave, I think as well. But it's very interesting because you can look at all of this. It's like one of those things where people overestimate what can be done in a decade and underestimate what can be done in a century or overestimate what can be done in a year or underestimate what can be done in a decade.

Yeah, Regetti is all over the place. They're up 16% this month, but it's been up 700% the past quarter. Yeah, Rigetti's all over the place. They're up, they're up 16% this month, but it's been, it's been up 700% the past quarter. I told you. Yeah. So what's the market cap now? They're 2.68 billion losing 60 million a year on 11 million of revenue. Yeah. I mean, they can't possibly have revenue because they haven't created a quantum computer. No, no one has like it's, it's not like there's no work to be done it's a research organization now but you're betting that they will be one to commercialize and if they do it'll be extremely valuable uh so good luck to them um wait what you got somehow up that yeah i i misread it's it's

960 percent over the past quarter so it's 10X over the last quarter. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Not bad. So it's a $270 million company and now it's a $2 billion company. Hopefully other, you know, companies, you know, Satya sees this and says, okay, this is a new bar now.

I need a 10X Microsoft in the next quarter. Let's go. What would you have to, what would you have to announce? You would have to announce we solve quantum computing. But I mean, to my earlier point, like a lot of really smart tech people that I talk to do say, yes, like this is the century where we will solve quantum computing. It's gonna take a long time,

probably longer than we estimate. It's hard to exactly forecast it out, but when we do, it will result in crazy, crazy new abilities. And yeah, one guy I was talking to a very successful founder was like so million qubit uh you know quantum computer by 2040 2050 uh talking to somebody else and it was like yeah maybe and he's like so dyson sphere by 2100 uh and it was like yeah that sounds about right and it was like so casual but i was like that crazy. But also like that things are really accelerating and we're building crazy stuff. Like, you know, you think about a hundred years before we can talk to the computer now.

Yeah. A hundred years ago, we didn't have computers at all. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. It was like, you know, it was like trains are cool. A hundred years ago. Yeah.

Trains are still cool. Trains are still cool, but we don't need more of them we don't need more of them but yeah uh well let's go through other uh interesting hard tech demos that kind of went off the rails and landed one guy i think in jail um we're moving to nicola and uh we have a chart here from uh the the stock is all over the place. The market cap is at 40 million. They declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. They were in the Wall Street Journal. And so it's pretty rough. It's interesting that there's somebody out there that's still buying Nikola shares today because it's still they declared bankruptcy. But obviously, you can

still trade it. So somebody out there is watching some like slop YouTube video of like Nikola being the future. And they're like, oh, this company seems really cool. A lot of slop. Yeah. But at their peak, they were in the multiple billions market cap and they've dropped significantly.

Let's give a little bit of an overview. They popped. So in June of 2020, a few months after the pandemic started, they went public at around $20 billion. $20 billion. They didn't go public. That's crazy. So they SPAC'd.

That's crazy. SPACs are normally like $4 billion companies. And this is five times that size. But think about the pop on so many of these. I know, I know. know it looks like a meme coin chart it really does look like a meme coin chart uh and and it had about as much tech as a as a meme as a meme coin yeah and what a silly name it's like tesla already exists let's make a company called nicola clearly people will think it's literally meme coin it's like how there was like uh you know there's trump coin and then there's melania coin it's like oh like let's just joe boden and kamala harris or whatever

yeah hillary clinton coin or whatever uh or even after doge coin there were like cat coins and uh you know there were like the monkeys and then the dogs and then the owls and all sorts of stuff uh people know when there's a tension just farm a little bit sneak a little bit off the side yeah proven proven uh path so this story starts back in 2009 uh trevor milton the ceo of nicola uh he had a project called d hybrid for swift transportation it fails amid accusations of misused funds hinting at future deception uh in 2014 uh he founds the nicola motor company after selling d hybrid touting revolutionary hydrogen electric trucks with hefty seed investments 2016 the nicola one truck is announced with claims of thousands of reservations and technology years ahead of its competition what was the nicola one truck? Was it actually like a commercial?

I think it was a semi, like an 18-wheeler type truck. I don't know. Yeah, and it's so funny because the strategy of saying, hey, we have this, you can reserve it for either no dollars or $100. Remember the side of the truck? It was like $100. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had numerous friends who were like, oh, I reserved one. Yeah, I threw $100 in.

Because the novelty of being able to say like oh yeah i threw a hundred bucks the novelty of being able to say like yeah yeah i pre-ordered versus the roadster i think you have to put down like 50k yeah which is like a wildly different bar yeah but for that buyer it's you know true but change but but like they hadn't announced pricing so i guarantee there'd be there's like a massive price elasticity to, uh, to, you know, electric car preorder deposits. So if the roadster was a hundred bucks down,

a hundred bucks down, and they were like, Hey, maybe it'll cost 50 bucks and it'll be better than a turbo S. Like people would definitely be jumping in 50 K. Yeah. They're like, Hey,

maybe it'll be 50 K and you only have to put a hundred bucks down now. Like even if it came out at 200 later, people would pre-sell a ton, um, which could be good for just establishing demand but i don't know and just for context i think uh like to to put in some of these like pre-orders like i think the humane pin even at their price point got like 7 000 pre-orders so like they couldn't even get pre-orders based on a device that didn't actually

you know the humane device didn't work reliably yeah but uh anyways back back to trucks okay so uh december 2016 they unveiled the nicola one prototype despite obvious signs it was not fully functional i.e visible external power cables so people are like wait a minute there's a there's a cable coming out of this car. You haven't untethered this thing. Uh, and in January of 2018, that's a, that's a year, year later. It's funny because it actually wouldn't be that damning if they were like, Hey, we're going to make the car roll uphill because then you could say, well, we don't have the battery set up yet, but we have it connected to basically an extension cord. It's like a vacuum. And then we're going to get the battery, the engines going now we're gonna get yeah the motor's working now but but instead they you know

put it in motion two years later yeah yeah basically yeah a year and two months yeah so they do the rolling truck video a promotional video shows the truck quote-unquote in motion but it was later revealed to have been rolled downhill to simulate they actually towed it to the top with a tow truck and then rolled it down what's funny is like is like i'm sure if you're building a car there is a process where you go from like we're in the clay you know the clay like like where they carve out the design then it's like hey we have cad designs hey we hey we we fabricated like the external shell yeah hey we we fabricated like the external shell. Yeah. Hey, we fabricated like the wheels and the transmission and the axles enough that it actually moves.

And that could have been just a cool thing if they didn't lie about it. And then like, look, yeah, it's not actually working yet, but we got it rolling at least. It's just funny because you presumably could have got the rolling truck video in the first month.

Oh yeah. By just building out the frame putting wheels on it yeah you know getting i mean there are like kit car guys that can do that in their like garage on the weekend there's some great there's some great videos of people making like like things that look like porsches that are just totally fake yeah you've seen the uh the the uh for the fiero the pontiac fiero people put body kits on that to make it look like a because it was a mid-engine sports car from the 80s by pontiac but it's like you know 10 10k or something so you can just mod it like crazy uh this is hilarious in may of 2018 they sue tesla

for two billion dollars over design features an action scene is both bold and bizarre just like the company that the company that names themselves after a derivative of tesla then goes back and sues tesla yeah it's like you'd think you'd be getting sued bold and bizarre egregious uh nikola the whole thing the whole thing nikola bold and bizarre to boost credibility they refund all pre-ordered deposits despite not having delivered a product probably just because they raised some money off of the off of the off of the pre-orders and they didn't want the pressure from the consumers uh april 2019 nikola world spectacle spectacle is just not a good name for anything a lavish event unveils multiple prototypes and secures a high profile order from anheuser-busch so they're they're you know they're deal guys they're making deals happen i guess uh but rough milton purchases a 32 million

dollar utah ranch and uh and public offers proposing a Tesla pickup design draw increased scrutiny. And so by November of 2019, people are getting real suspicious of this guy. He's suing Tesla, launching these weird truck videos where they're kind of fake. He's proposing the guy who was just suing them for $2 billion is now giving them design, saying, hey, Tesla, you guys should make this.

Yeah. Wow. H. Wow. Hilarious. Do you see the next one? The Nikola Badger. Do you want to read this? February 2020. So this is a few months before they SPAC.

The company unveils the Nikola Badger pickup with over-the-top features, including a built-in water fountain from fuel cell exhaust. Can you imagine? I mean, as a built-in water fountain from fuel cell exhaust. Can you imagine? I mean, as a father, I do like trucks. Yeah. I mean, you're in the filtered water game, Jordy.

Why not put that in the car? Yeah, as a water fanatic. Yeah. Maybe we need to hook the Aurora up to the exhaust of the coolant of the turbo. It's funny. This truck looks like, I've got it pulled up right now, it looks like a complete knockoff of the tundra meets a trx sure uh and uh a water fountain using the the dispensed fuel is pretty cool so funny uh but but like again great viral story little feature

and you know to be fair like the cyber truck and other tesla products have had similar things like that like the model x has the gullwing doors that are like total showstoppers and it's like you could just do minivan doors on those but actually so yeah you could do the minivan doors the uh the one thing about minivan door i mean all these types of doors having kids i got i got a mercedes van because i realized being able to just sit, stand. And just put the kids straight in. Put the kids straight in with the seats. But then the doors are always kind of worried. Like, are they going to get? Yep.

Anyways, I thought that was very smart. Elon has always been able to thread the needle and the Tesla team around novelty and actual function, utility. Totally. Because think about another feature. Steer-by-wire in Cybertruck is very gimmicky, but it's also amazing because you're in this huge truck and you just move your hand like two inches

and you're turning. And then Tesla also does the novelty of, oh, we're going to make a fart sound effect in the car. Yeah, totally. Nikola could never. No, no, no, never. So June 2020, the frenzy begins begins nicola goes public via a spack skyrocketing value despite having zero revenue as investors buy into the hype so immediately

uh can see on public goes you know basically pumps to 20 billion dollars and then just drops basically every single day for the next uh five years I'm sure they had. I got to look. They had some bounces at different points. Our boy gets mentioned here. Who's that? Hindenburg. Anyways, so in September 2020, it's back in March or June, sorry.

So just a few months later, GM announces an 11% stake. So they take a public position in this public company and plans to manufacture Nikola trucks only for Hindenburg research to expose a series of deceptive claims. So terrible look for GM. Sounds like they didn't do a lot of technical due diligence. Should have called Hindenburg first. They went and visited the ranch in Utah, and they were like,

this ranch is awesome. I want to hang out with this guy the tech must be great shortly after milton resigns amid mounting evidence of fraud and the gm deal is dressed dramatically scaled back um yeah i'm sure they still like had their position you know uh hopefully um and then at that point like this is so long ago like a little under five years ago. And so there's all this legal fallout. July 2021, still the absolute top of the market. Milton is indicted on multiple fraud charges.

In October 2022, he's found guilty and sentenced to prison with hefty fines. They're clearly clawing back. I'm sure he did various transactions over time uh that he benefited from personally nicholas settles with the sec for 125 million dollars over misleading investors so they had raised i'm sure billions of dollars through through their public offering um and then in february 2025 today with production delays financial struggles and a tarnished reputation nicolophiles for chapter 11 so um anyways wish wish the story had a better ending um but uh it's it's honestly in some ways amazing that they uh are uh made it so far even after their founder you know went um uh was was out of the picture. It's crazy. On public, there's been $27 million of volume today. Whoa. So is this...

I'm trying to understand who's buying the stock at this point. Do they feel that... I mean, who knows, right? It's so bizarre. I mean, this is just such an interesting company because I... Because they still are loaded up with debt. Similar to Theranos. Similar to Theranos.

Like this is one of those companies that I feel like was like an open secret in Silicon Valley that everyone knew that this was fake. Yeah. Like there was never a moment where people were like, oh, maybe this will work out. It wasn't like Tesla was losing engineers to Nikola. That never happened. And also, there were never VC funds piling into this. I just pulled up Crunchbase. And it was the US Department of Energy,

CNH Industrial, General Motors, California Transportation Commission. So the guy was clearly just really good at rizzing non-financial investors who don't do this stuff. And I'm sure that if this founder had walked into like a Holy Trinity firm and tried to pitch this, they would have gotten laughed at. At this time, the other car manufacturers didn't really have a strong EV strategy. It did make sense from a narrative standpoint that there would be a commercial focused version of Tesla focused on trucking. Everybody knew that Tesla would eventually do this, but it wasn't a priority for them. Right. And so from a narrative,

it all made sense. That doesn't mean that they can actually execute on that narrative and capture value based on that long term trend. And and who knows? You knows? I know Amazon has EVs now, but it doesn't seem like EVs have gotten that sort of widespread commercial. They haven't had the level of traction that EVs have had in the commercial market. So Milton is indicted, the CEO, on multiple fraud charges. This is around 2021, 2022. And in October 2022, he is found guilty and sentenced to prison with heavy fines. Nicholas settles with the SEC for $125 million over misleading investors. And

just now, the reason we're covering it today is that it's basically the end of the road. With production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished reputation, they struggled for, they filed for bankruptcy. He's going to be out of prison in 2027. Let's get him on the show.

I mean... I mean, maybe, you know, this is another thing. We believe in redemptive justice, right? Yes. And, you know, if he does his time, the main thing is I want to see some banger deep tech analysis.

I want him to come out with some ground. I want him to hit the books. I want him to be the Dylan Patel of the commercial EV space. Yeah. Handwrite analysis on happenings. Prove that you're the real deal. Yeah. Not just a charlatan.

Come out with some groundbreaking research. Show me that you've at least read every book about battery cell technology he's 42 so he's not even gonna be 50 when he gets out he's born in 1982 it'll be great a little bump in the road and um get him back in the game get back in action yeah i love i love a comeback story america loves a comeback story uh let's see so another green green energy unicorn died wednesday as nicola corp filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy the 11 year old ev maker aspired to be the tesla of trucks they went public through a spac uh they got uh they they benefited from the green new deal

that's a 27 billion dollar market valuation at the time that was greater than Ford's. What a coincidence. Wow. Lots of people trying to take a shot at Ford. Ford gets, I mean. Ford's Lindy. They're going to be around longer than all these companies. If Ford had a Satya, that is a $100 billion company. For a while, there was like a grandson of Henry Ford running the company, Bill Ford,

which was awesome because their tagline was Built Ford Tough. And his name was Bill Ford, Bill Ford Tough. I love Ford. He was in the commercials. I love Ford as a first name. Yeah. Oh, that's great. It's on our list for the next son, Ford Hayes.

That's a good sounding name. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to see Ford make a comeback. I had a Ford Explorer at one point. That was a great sounding name. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to see Ford make a comeback. I had a Ford Explorer at one point. That was a great car. The Expeditions, fantastic. Ford GT, fantastic. Mustang, also great. You know, these are great cars, but let's bring them back. Supposedly sophisticated investors were taken in by its marketing hype. General Motors took the 11% stake, which CEO

Mary Barra hailed as an industry-leading disruptor. It was supposedly sophisticated. It was disruptive in a different way. They posted a video on Twitter of its model truck appearing to power effortlessly down a flat road with the caption, the Nikola hydrogen electric trucks will take on any semi truck and outperform them in every category, weight acceleration, stopping safety and features all with 500 to a thousand mile range. It would, that would be revolutionary. If true, it wasn't according to a 2021 federal fraud indictment of founder Trevor Milton, an inoperable prototype was towed to the top of the hill. Then nickel employees released the brakes

so it looked like it was cruising along, all while the door was taped shut to keep it from falling off and its batteries were removed to prevent the truck from catching fire. Rough. After taking investors from a ride, Mr. Milton was... The only ride they actually went on. Good writing. Good writing. Good pun.

Journalists are underrated sometimes. Underrated, Bloomberg. Sometimes when they're not. Who is this? This is Wallrated this is wall street journal opinion section it's great uh california regulators and the biden administration tried to boost the electric truck market with mandates and subsidies the inflation reduction act included a 40 000 tax credit for buyers of electric trucks epa rule last spring requires that electric truck models make up 25 of long-haul tractor sales by 2032. Man, talk about a bull case for Tesla now. It's crazy. Another electric truck maker, Lordstown Motors, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Fisker failed last June. Rough time. The British electric bus startup

Arrival sold its assets. Lots of bad stuff going on in the EV truck market. Power law rules everything around me. That's the story here. Anyway. Great opportunity though, for one of our listeners to become a hero, come in, pull them out of chapter 11, run it back up to the top. You're definitely going to get, you know, you could, this could be turned into a meme coin. Turn it into a meme coin. Yeah. And we were saying earlier. I mean, actually, just continue it. You know, Trevor's going to try and come out of the clink, hit the ground running, build a new company. One thing in the clink.

Still going to be a young man. In the clink, bed's famously uncomfortable. Maybe he needs an eight sleep. That takes us to our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience you can get one at eight sleep.com and we have another post from eight sleep they formulated and sleep elixir with valerian root nature's secret to winding down faster you can

check that out at eight sleep.com as well and so we love eight sleep and thank you one note on they set up a url eight sleep.com slash tbp. Oh, cool. And they say TB approves the pod, which is the name of their product. Oh, yeah. So they could just say the pod approves the pod. We have a quote up here that says you can't publish 15 plus hours a week of live content without being at peak performance. We simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without 8sleep. And if you want to win as bad as we do, you can't afford to not sleep. Wait, they really made a whole thing? Oh, that's amazing. Yeah to not sleep yeah yeah that's amazing okay yeah we simply gotta show that we

simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without eight sleep and if you want to win as bad as we do you can't afford not to sleep on the pod so uh check it out same same pod that hubrin uses i love it i love it and rob over there uhute boys. Let's move on to some drama between Salesforce and Microsoft. You know, we love it. It got spicy. I love when I love being there on being there. Violence. I love it. I love it. Mark Benioff and Satya Nadella have been going back and forth. There's an article in the information breaking it down. But first, I wanted to pull up what the stock has been doing. So we went to public.com. We looked at Salesforce. They're up 20% in the last six months. Market cap's $310 billion. It's a big company.

Big, big, big, big, big company. CRM, big business. But they own everything now. They own Slack. And they're trying to get everyone to upgrade to Slack AI. Have you been getting those notifications? I haven't seen Slack. Oh, man. Like, whenever you're in Slack now, there's a modal that pops up upgrade to Slack AI. Have you been getting those notifications? I haven't seen Slack. Oh, man.

Like whenever you're in Slack now, there's a modal that pops up. Request AI. David Sachs launched like a Slack competitor that leverages AI. Didn't he build like a Slack before Slack? Like that was his main thing, right? That he sold to Microsoft?

I almost clicked on David Snacks, which is a parody account. Well, um, Saks, what Saks pulled, uh, his chat. I was thinking of Yammer. Like that was the company he did after PayPal and he sold that for a billion dollars. Yeah. So he, uh, last year he announced an AI powered work chat app rivaling Slack called Blue. Um, anyways, I didn't know about that. Interesting. Okay. Well, anyway, let's go to this article in the information. Salesforce in talks with Microsoft, Oracle, and Google about cloud deal to handle AI. Salesforce Mark Benioff has long been a vocal critic of Microsoft.

A couple of years ago, he accused the company of violating antitrust laws and how it sells software bundles. More recently, he slammed its artificial intelligence chatbot for giving inaccurate responses and being difficult to use. I think he dropped Clippy as a pejorative. It got spicy. We love Clippy. I think it was in Aspen or Sun Valley. It was an iconic moment. But that history hasn't stopped Salesforce

from including Microsoft in negotiations it's having with several cloud providers, also including Google and Oracle, about a major new cloud agreement. The deal is likely to be worth more than a billion dollars over several years, said a Salesforce manager with direct knowledge of the deal. And so here's the takeaway. Salesforce is in talk with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for a big cloud deal because they need AI inference, of course. The deal could be worth more than a billion dollars over several years. And they're currently on AWS, but they're bidding it out according to this reporting. But we'll see what Benioff has to

say. Salesforce wants to rent the servers to run its customer management, AI agents and other applications, a sign of how new AI products are expanding Salesforce's computing needs. So obviously Salesforce is stuffing AI in every single product they own. They need inference and they need more servers. So they're going to the hyperscalers and they're bidding it out. Allegedly Salesforce already uses AWS in addition to Google cloud and its own data centers. So we don't know who is the, who's emerging as the favorite to win. He also didn't specify the size and scope of the agreement. A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment,

but the agreement will be in the same range as Salesforce's past agreements with AWS. The negotiations which haven't previously been reported signal Salesforce's shift to public cloud providers for more of its computing needs. They're getting out of the data center building business, more or less. That's the shtick here.

Salesforce has told customers that eventually it will sell its applications through all major cloud providers. AWS didn't comment. Oracle didn't comment. Google didn't comment. No one's talking to the information. No one's commenting. The information is commenting, though. The information is commenting. Didn't stop them. And we'll go to Mark Benioff because as soon as this dropped, he said, the story and the information is incorrect. In 2024, Salesforce explored a fourth deployment

option for our customers alongside our existing choices, proprietary data centers, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud. Last year, we decided to extend our partnership with Google, giving customers the option to deploy Salesforce customers, 360 apps, Hyperforce, AgentForce, and Data Cloud on Google's platform in future Salesforce releases. So he's coming out and saying, hey, I'm not rugged in AWS. I'm expanding. I'm not switching. Yeah. I mean, some of these quotes are just damning. I mean, he's saying Clippy was a disaster. Copilot is a gimmick. He's saying, I think this Copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them. So he's just publicly dragging them.

So what's going on here? It seems like the information is trying to, you know, sow a little chaos. Over at Microsoft, Frank Shaw says, Mark has no idea what he's talking about. This is 2025. I love this. Right after he says,

I think this copilot thing has been a disaster. Yep. And Charles, who's over at Microsoft, says, one of the execs there working on copilot, he says, this is a big moment for Salesforce because CRM is not going to be the future for customers. It's going to be a strategic imperative for customers. I think that's why you see Salesforce taking jabs at Copilot, because there's that pressure is very real and it's here. So that was just this month in February 2025. So going back and forth not

mincing words uh we love i mean we we called that we need to get people in tech need to get more you know fired up combative yeah right more physical more physical altercations yeah i want to see oh mark benioff and scott nadella were leaving the club after an altercation the shirt ripped and honestly if you're a Senti, one of the best things you can do is go prison mode and take shots at the big dog, right? Go take shots at Benioff. Yeah, this is like the East Coast, West Coast rap battle.

Say, hey, the lineup this year at Dreamforce sucks. Sucks. Slop. Slop. You should call it Dreamslop. This wouldn't even be on the, you know, this wouldn't be on what what are some of the like, I haven't been to Coachella in so long,

I forget about their feeder stages. This wouldn't even hit the side stage at 12 noon on Friday at Coachella. This doesn't even make, you know. This is garbage. The do lab. It's not going on the do lab. On the do lab.

I don't even know what that is, but I get it. You've never been to Coachella? I've never been to Coachella. Wow. I've been to Outside Lands and maybe a few others, but I'm not a big festival guy. Sometime I'll have to talk about

going to, I've been to both weekends of Coachella in the same year. Ooh, dusty. Which is dusty. Dusty. Dusty. That actually kicked off

my original fitness arc. Oh, okay. That was the catalyst. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. yeah yeah i think we i think we did mention that yeah point um and so uh yeah the information is uh sowing seeds of descent between the hyperscalers i'd love to see it uh there's a hyperforce rewrite going on this is interesting salesforce has already rewritten the code for its applications databases and other

operating systems to run on abs services in a project called Hyperforce, the AWS version of Salesforce's applications became available in 2020. Salesforce intends to make the same applications available on whichever cloud provider it picks in the current negotiations. While Salesforce incurred a significant upfront expense in developing Hyperforce, making it available on another cloud wouldn't be as costly since roughly 80 to 90% of its code built for AWS would run on other providers. Interesting. So customers of Salesforce want to run on their own clouds. Salesforce needs to do deals to make those clouds happy and get them going. And Benioff wants to keep everyone happy and wants to be able to play all of the different hyperscalers against each other without... I mean, you can do that if you're throwing billions of dollars around. Every single one of these hyperscalers has like a sales team

dedicated to Salesforce and they're trying to win said business. But there's Bean Air on Bean Air. But he has been nagging Microsoft a lot. And so that's got to make that negotiation harder. And they also have the most competitive products. So doing a deal to- What's Microsoft's CRM product? Do they have? I mean, they have a product for everything. Yeah, I guess Excel, but they have a whole bunch of things. So Microsoft Dynamics 365 is their CRM.

I mean, I think the big war is Slack versus Teams. Teams really crushed Slack. And I don't know how you would value Slack as an independent company now, post-acquisition, but Salesforce bought Slack. And whether or not that was a good deal for Salesforce kind of depends on Teams execution. And Teams has become really popular because it's bundled with like the Microsoft Office that goes into like so many different companies. Well, speaking of software to help you run your business, this show is of course supported by

Ramp, our good buddies over at Ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Okay, I'm going to give you an example. So we launched PMF or Die on Monday. Yep. And turns out running a 24-7 live stream with multiple camera feeds, multiple audio feeds,

hundreds of concurrent viewers streaming on multiple platforms. Very hard. We had to tap in a guy named sam sheffer this is very was that humane he was at humane on monday humane gets acquired by hp he decides i'm not going to go into the ai printer business even though i kind of we've talked about this we want a better printer i'm excited for better printers but uh so i talked to sam this morning at i was driving to work it was 5 30 a.m yep and so he's coming online. He's on the East

coast where, you know, Tyler gold introduced me. I'm like, dude, like you got to help us out. Like we need to level this up. Like we've, we've got all these viewers. Like I think PMF or die has product market fit in the sense that like viewers are super excited about it. Sam's like, I'm down. I got to go pick up like, you know, basically like my exit package. But after that I'll go. And so he rolled into the PMF for Dice stream today. And, and right as he was headed over there, I just made him a card on ramp. And I was like, if you need to buy any supplies. And so he gets the invite, downloads the app, adds it to Apple pay. And he can now buy products on our ramp account, even though he's like a, you know, a contractor. Right contractor right so uh that

level like that that used to be like so annoying of like okay go and and and get the receipts and we'll reimburse you or we'll pay you so just so fantastic and uh ramp gets it done um let's go into let's go to the the timeline i the timeline. I want to do this. Eric Stromberg post on boot scaling. I thought this was interesting. You flagged this. He writes a little screenshot essay. Eric,

if you don't know him, he was a bedrock with Jeff Lewis, absolute dog of a capital allocator. And Eric writes traditionally startups raise millions of dollars to start in hundreds to scale. Today, AI is giving everyone an army of agents to design, engineer and build on their behalf. Perhaps AI will deliver so much leverage that founders will raise only one round and be done.

Profits will fund from there. This is a comforting idea for seed VCs, but not right. If you can reach one million of ARR in 90 days from an apartment, why raise seed money? Instead, I expect a different strategy to grow. Boot scaling. Founders will bootstrap at the start, leveraging near zero cost of experimentation. They'll only raise after achieving product market fit and building conviction in a venture scale business. At that point, they'll use capital to scale distribution. Boot scaling allows founders to avoid early dilution while later securing capital to win versus well-funded competitors.

A prior generation has proven this model works, and he flags a few here. Atlassian, founded in 2002. They first raised money in 2010. They raised $60 million. Qualtrics, founded in 2002. They first raised in 2012 for $70 million. GitHub, founded in 2007, first raised in 2012. 1 million. GitHub founded in 2007, first raised in 2012. 1Password founded in 2005.

They raised in 2019. Unity, they started in 2004. They didn't raise until 2009. And so a lot of these companies that build for a long time independently, and then they start doing the growth rounds while skipping those early seed Series A rounds. This shift will reshape the landscape of seed VC. Those stuck in existing structures

and clinging to old assumptions will lose to those who adapt. So break it down. What do you think about that? I thought that was an interesting post. Yeah, so I mean, the obvious example here is PMF or die. Blake came out, built a few sort of these like AI native apps, like generated so much revenue

that he's now building his fourth app in like two years which he's announcing on pmf or die tonight yep and uh he did not want to raise money at all for this business because he's like i have the cash i don't really need to spend that much money i have like the equivalent like just by using cursor and some of these other ai tools i have the equivalent of like a bunch of developers that are on demand. And so he's very ambitious with this next business. Like he wants to, uh, you know, he's going to, I'll let him announce it tonight, but it could easily be a multi-billion dollar company. He will get to the point where, you know, he could say, yep, I'm going to raise like $20

million at a 200 post and sell 10% of the company. Uh, but it's very possible. We're going to see a lot more of these businesses that just basically never raise, right? And that's not necessarily, like the good thing for VCs is there's still plenty of businesses. It actually frees up capital for VCs to invest in these sort of capital, CapEx intensive businesses. Defense tech is a good example. Like the foundation model companies too.

The foundation models. AI is bifurcated. It's like the consumer app companies that are building AI companies need no money to start. And then they need money to scale distribution. And then the foundation model companies need a billion dollars upfront to do the training run. And then once they have it,

they've kind of cornered the market and they have the commodity and then they can just sell it. Yeah, and so I see more rounds happening where it's like kind of these YC style rounds where it's like, hey, we need 500K. So if you're working somewhere and you want to quit your job and still be able to have like decent health insurance maybe, but it's really more so the, the, the, you know, these companies across the board are just getting way less, you know, capital intensive.

And then simultaneously attention is free. Now, if you understand algorithmic feeds, right? Like PMF or diet. Another good example. We spent $3,000 producing the video. It should have like a million views at this point, right? Super high leverage. And so, yeah, if you're a CBC, how does that change your strategy? Do you need to go and convince someone

who doesn't really need money just to get you like a little allocation? Maybe you're the only person you're putting in, you know, maybe the initial dilution is 1%, but you got your 1% like you're an angel in a larger round, but there just isn't that lead anymore. Yeah. Or,

or are you just out of the game and, and focusing on growth, growth fundraising? Yeah. I mean, VCs will still have the opportunity, you know, basically say sell 10% of your company to me because like,

I'm going to go to bat and help you win right with distribution on x you know LinkedIn etc those are maybe tougher sells right now but that's why YC's product which is which is you have to figure out what product to make and you have to make your product but we are going to help you figure out how to make a company which is really the product of YC and also the pressure cooker and the. The value of YC is you're sitting there listening to some generational entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg's on stage and you look over and the guy next to you is coding on the laptop and you're like, I should go ship a feature right now. Like people are grinding. And that pressure of seeing everyone else, all your competition move super fast makes you want

to move faster. So yeah, YYC has a bunch of interesting value ads that don't really come in the form of just the money. It's fascinating. Well, if you have a business that's throwing off a lot of cash, highly recommend you pick up this beautiful car posted by Joe Wisniewski. One of my favorite builds for a VIP,

a PTS 911 ST with $55,860 in in cxx options uh break it down jordy why did you want to cover this on the show so uh this guy joe talked to him before uh he works at a dealership i think in like potentially memphis cool i forget exactly uh somewhere um on the other side of america but he basically i I think he sources the best Porsches, AMGs, Bentleys in the entire country. And so he's constantly sharing these incredible examples. This is one of the best, that silver on tan interior, the sort of heritage interior. I think it's just fantastic. So need to get one of these in my garage at some point. But if you're in the market, go hit up Joe. He's also got an Instagram account with like some of the best car content

and he wears a suit when he's talking about these cars. So he, he respects the cars and says, I'm not just gonna, you know, film this, you know, uh, slop video. Uh, anyways, that's great. Okay. Well, let's go to this, uh, next. Untapped market. No one has my current dream project. Opposite of friend.com. Pendant named foe. LLM text-to-speech. Computer yells at you. Adversarial computing, guys.

It's on the come up. I mean, this is sort of what friend did, right? Yeah, friend is very adversarial. It's more not adversarial, but it's like, hey, save my life kind of thing. That's hilarious. And Yannick chimes in. He says, POV, you're smiling for a picture, but unaware that they're debating how to build a computer that yells at you.

I love it. That's so funny. Yeah, lots of fun opportunities. He's building this. I think the adversarial friend.com is probably friend.com. I agree. I agree with that.

But I think that there is something beautiful in here, like the story that we kicked this off with about the horrific humanoid robot as opposed to the friendly Asimo humanoid robot. The computer that yells at you, that is a viral concept. That will get a lot of downloads or installs or people testing it out and get you a lot of attention. And then from there,

you can kind of figure out, okay, what's the real product here? What really has product market fit? And friend.com certainly did that with their market entry. Uh, let's talk about Apple. Uh, this week they launched, uh, the iPhone 16 E uh, it's $599. This is a big jump up from the 429SE. Mark Gurman has had the scoop and then the breakdown. Here he says it has an action button, is in, 128, 256, and 512 gig options. Black and white color options, iPhone 14 and iPhone SE are discontinued uh pre-orders start on february 21st 28th for release and the c1 apple modem is official and this was a big uh a big story uh although it was kind of buried uh mark german says the c1 apple modem which is a uh the cellular modem that actually connects to the cellular network normally these are made by broadcom i believe is a monumental

technical achievement because there's a ton of intellectual property. They're not just like hard. It's like it's as complex as making like an NVIDIA GPU apparently. And so he says a several billion dollar effort that has been in the works for seven years. In the end, it gets two sentences in the press release and 15 seconds in the announcement video. Apple is clearly downplaying this intentionally. Daniel does what it do yeah beth says why and steve says patent cases hinge on how significant a feature is in the whole injunction depends on novelty and criticality the more words the more to hang in the inevitable qc litigation on and so uh steve is saying hey and steve sanoski is very sharp i think he's at

andreessen but he was uh i think at microsoft for a long time and he understands this stuff really well and he was saying that basically hey they they built this modem it works and it's going to be able to connect the phones to starlink do a whole bunch more stuff it's just retooling their supply chain gives them a huge advantage on on the supply side but they're going to get sued and so they can't make too big of a deal out of it because if they do, the lawsuits are going to come for them. That's the thesis here, at least what people are thinking. And so there's a little bit of extra context here.

C1 was birthed from Apple's $1 billion acquisition of Intel's smartphone modem biz in 2019. C1 is going to give Apple more leverage in carrier negotiations because they say, hey, Verizon, we can be independent we can use Starlink we can use whatever and it will allow deeper device integration and better battery life

so you know they'll be able to have 100% battery life right up until they release the new phone on the day exactly Apple Silicon team is consistently underestimated I'm so used to the landline mode now apple landline i like this one uh i actually would like an apple charger made from apple that's

one of those like stretchy landline type things you know yeah so you can maybe people used to walk around the house yeah yeah give me the give me the give me the printer the ai printer give me the ai landline uh these are the things i want here we got the polycom on this on the table uh but let's move on to uh a promoted post from bezel uh you can shop over 22 000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts a lot of people probably don't know this but when you buy a watch on bezel the person who's selling it doesn't just ship it to you they actually ship it to bezel first and then people at bezel verify that you're getting a real watch which is really into the space yeah it's a fortress and uh there's just guys nerding out all day long yeah uh and uh you

know just making sure that the watch you actually get is legit. And they catch a shocking number of fakes floating around. I was Googling for some watches and I just saw a, like in Google Shopping, it was like, you know, Patek Nautilus, $300. And you click on it and it's like, it's from like a knockoff website. I'm like, how is this even like on Google? It's crazy.

Now, Google clearly has not made an effort to catch fake watches because if you look up, yeah, if you look up Patek Aquanaut, it'll pull up a, some sketchy website. Yeah. It pulls up these watches that are just objectively, you know, obviously not real. Yeah. And, uh, Google's happy to put them in front of you. And so when you buy a watch on bezel, I'm actually going through this right now. The seller shipped it to bezel. They received the watch and I have the update. They've started the authentication process. And so it's very fun. You get a little Domino's pizza tracker and you get to see exactly where it is in that process, which is very fun. And I also wanted to go through this fun uh little post that they uh ripped explaining the perfect three watch

collection say less they argue that the perfect three watch collection is a steel sports watch for the everyday flex a dress watch for closing deals and a wild card because it's fun here's what they're going with and let us know in the comments what you think about this they recommend for the everyday uh flex a rolex submariner hulk reference 116610 lv which matches our new color color you might see it in the corner we're using uh a beautiful uh is that a kelly green i don't know i don't even know what that's like uh it's great question uh uh it's built like a tank water resistant to 300 meters for all the diving you'll never do yeah i need i need to relax the next time i go back diving i actually scuba dive a lot uh and somehow it goes with everything even though it's bright green for the dress watch

like can we figure out how to underwater pod you could do it if you had a rebreather set up scuba diving yeah in a in a tux yeah underwater. This would be potentially viral. Yeah. The dress watch, they recommend the Cartier Tank Louis, reference WGTA 011. Arguably the Cartier to have. The Tank LC is pure old school elegance. This is timeless sophistication at its finest. Perfect for closing deals, sipping Negronis, or just reminding people you have taste. I love the Cartier Tank. I think it's a fantastic watch worn by Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali and Jackie Kennedy.

And it's just a fantastic watch with a beautiful history. And for the wild card, they recommend the IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph Top Gun. Big, bold, straight out of a fighter jet. This Top Gun Chron's lightweight ceramic case laughs at scratches. The military aesthetic means business and the flyback chrono is just plain old cool. Great option for a hard tech, deep tech founder.

For sure. You don't know if you're going to end up in an Apache that day. Yep. Just a fantastic choice. So why not pick up an IWC Pilots watch chronograph top gun and so there you go uh jordy you're you're working on a watch collection what do you think is going to be next any any teasers i actually need it i need a you need a dress watch tank would be great i still think uh jlc ultra thin would be really good yeah um i think uh there's a lot of good options or of some sort or yeah but anyways I think the 222 is the

Vacheron that you're going to wind up with that's that's the only one that I actually want it's so good sometimes in life you have yeah you sort of justify you know purchases that are adjacent to the thing that you actually want but you need to just now look in your heart and understand what it is you actually want and figure out a way to get that thing. Exactly. Well, let's go to Zach. He says the mission of aura, make it easier, more beautiful and more customizable to share your workouts with the world. Hundreds of millions of people use apps like Strava, Nike Run Club to track their workouts.

Tens of millions use apps like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to share their workouts. His goal is to start giving creative tools so that second behavior sharing becomes an art form of its own. And as a byproduct, I believe if you make training more creative in public, athletes want to train more. So Zach is based in New York City, operating under the PMF or die mentality right now, working on Aura, which is a new app. John already said it, but it's basically think about, yeah, a workout app that makes these sort of beautiful graphics

so that you can share your progress. A lot of running is this sort of like communal activity. Everybody's sort of pushing themselves independently. And Zach has a million plus followers on Instagram, wants to build a product for himself and them to just be able to share their training more. And I'm super excited to see it. Uh, I don't run much myself. We should go over to New York and just go for a run with Zach and just get absolutely smoked. Um, but we're getting a treadmill in the cage for PMF or die. And so we'll have to have

Zach go on a, on a Tesla app in there. So love to see it. Excited to see Zach roll this out. Yeah. So good luck to him as he builds this app. We'd love to see it. Let's go over to Andreessen Horowitz. Chris Dixon was on a podcast with their head of growth, David George, talking about what will happen in the world of AI just to the internet and just to websites, which I thought was very interesting

because everyone jumps to Terminator or complete job loss. Chris is thinking in the future, but not so far in the future, about something that seems like a very real possibility. So he says, what happens to the billions of websites if they aren't getting traffic? AI isn't just disrupting search, it's changing the internet's economic model.

For decades, websites provided platforms with content in exchange for traffic. This was the covenant, as he puts it. AI flips this. Content fuels its model, but traffic doesn't always flow back. So historically on the internet, the beautiful thing is that if you had great content, the traffic would show up. The Google search crawler would find you. You would go viral on LinkedIn or Facebook. You stumble upon Twitter used to link out.

Those things have stopped. And then the LLMs will just give people answers directly. So as users turn to AI for answers instead of the traditional search, control is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant systems. He's worried about the future of the Internet and what this shift means for creators. To address this, he asks, what new incentive structures or architectures should we be thinking about? And so he's not saying, hey, we got to ban AI. He's just saying that, you know, there needs to be a new deal for content creators. And what does that look like?

Whether that's a content, we've talked about this, like the content licensing model from the LLM. Like if you are really great at crafting recipes at a superhuman level, you craft them and then yes, you only get one hit from the open AI scraper and one hit from the anthropic scraper. But that one hit is then you're basically

on like a YouTube style creator fund where they split the profits with you. And they're saying, yeah, we're taking your content. We are training our model on it. But when we, when someone asked for this recipe, we used 50% of yours and then 50% of someone else's. And so, yeah, we're going to send you, you know, a couple cents for every query that we turned over. And there's this abstraction layer, but we're still paying you somehow. And that would definitely keep the economic model in place. I'm sure Chris, as the head of Andreessen Crypto and a massive crypto investor, former number one on the Midas list, has a bunch of ideas for how crypto can be involved in that. He doesn't explicitly break that down in this clip, but you know he's thinking about that as well. What was your take? Yeah, I'm excited to see, you know, crypto is entering a new

regulatory regime, right? Starts with a bang a few days before David Sachs gets into his official position as crypto czar. We have presidential meme coins coming out. And so this new administration will seemingly be getting, you know, trying to get innovative around the actual regulations that have been in many ways forcing the cryptocurrency industry to orient around meme coins, right? If you can't invest in value, because oftentimes, you know, many of these tokens couldn't be tied to cash flow or anything like that. So if that changes, which, you know, we're all sort of waiting around to see, there's going to be so many new actual ways for companies that operate on chain to like generate revenue outside of trading. And so Andreessen Crypto has been making a bunch of bets, sort of betting that this will eventually happen. And I'm just excited to see. I expect that

Chris Dixon is actively working with Saks and many of the other people in the White House admin to try to figure out how to influence this policy to fully unlock crypto's potential, right? Because it's been handicapped for years and years and years by the regulatory environment and not allowing like the most exciting use cases to flourish. Yeah. Yeah. I always think it's interesting, Chris's framing, like he is somewhat an early entrepreneur in like kind of post.com era, started two companies, sold them both, has been deeply involved in like the early post.com era, started two companies, sold them both, has been deeply involved in like the early internet and these like weird, like he, I'm pretty sure he did the Oculus seed deal or like a very early Oculus deal. He did some drone companies, Skydio. He, I sat on a board with him for a number of years, worked with him very closely and

really enjoyed that. And he also backed Kickstarter and a bunch of like crazy, like he's really close with Fred Wilson and the USV guys. And so he's, he sees the internet as something that's valuable by itself, like to humanity. And he has a real reverence for internet communities. A lot of his investing thesis early on was like find, uh, I think he had some quote, like, like what people do on the, on the internet, on the weekends will be your job in five years, something like that. And I thought that was very interesting. And so he's, he's very driven to maintain what is great about the internet. Well, anyway, let's go to how startups are changing. Anthony Pobliano says the real flex is raising as little money as

possible for your startup and succeeding with the smallest team necessary. I thought that was interesting post because are we in the business of flexing? Like, does it matter? Does it matter if you build a massive business with 10,000 employees or a hundred employees? Like, uh, I, I, I guess it's, it's always impressive when you see a high revenue per dollar or revenue per employee number. But at the end of the day, market cap is the only thing that matters, really. And durable market cap and durable value and durable cash flow and how you get there. Amazon has an order of magnitude more employees than Google, I'm pretty sure. Because Amazon employs people that do pick and pack.

I think the revenue per employee is always a fascinating metric to look at. It's always, it can be very impressive if you look at Tether, right? I think they do like $8 million of net income per employee or something ridiculous, like multiples of what BlackRock does or these sort of more legacy financial institutions.

And you see Cursor with 30 employees, you know, multi-billion dollar valuation. So I think it's awesome. I, you know, I think that, but, you know, I think Pomp is probably just like baiting people a little bit here. And ultimately it shouldn't be what you fixate on early. It's how do we build a really massive, durable company.

Yeah. Many paths to success. And it kind of we build a really massive, durable company. Yeah. Many paths to success. And it kind of depends on what kind of company you want to run. Like some people want to have the small, like David Holes, mid-journey. He hasn't raised a lot of money. He hasn't hired that many people. Clearly, he wants to run this lab and this product that's like very dedicated, user-based, very profitable. Yeah.

But he's not like in this takeover the world like raise as much money do the deal with masa build the data center like immediately i think he's i think he's building what he wants and it's more about finding the ica guy or like the life's work that aligns with you uh but anyway let's move on to wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel grade and amenities dream beds top tier cleaning and 24 seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better head on over to wander.com. They're given $400 off your spring trip with spring 400.

And there's a beautiful photo of a wander in Rockaway beach, Oregon. I've never been there, but that looks fantastic. So crazy. Check it out. Like every single one of their homes looks like that. I know.

It's really crazy. So I really want to partner with Wander for the, you know, if we do a season two of PMF or die, they have this private island somewhere in Florida. Yeah, you mentioned that. That would just be absolutely perfect to, you know, pick up the drawbridge, lock them on the island. If you want to leave, you can, but you've got to swim, you know,

a few miles. Yeah, it would be great. So head on over to Wander and check it out if you're looking for their you can. You got to swim a few miles. Yeah, it's perfect. So head on over to Wander and check it out if you're looking for your next vacation home while you're traveling. Did you see this one from Overfit? Quantitative strategies. Great meme account.

Good watermark on this. I don't know if we can pull this up here, but it says, choose your Silicon Valley think boy. Mark writes more manifestos than gender neutral communist undergrad. It's time to build, but not in his backyard. Is a techno optimist. He shills meme coins. Brian injects his son's blood to stay eternally young. Guern lives in the woods and on a 12k income. Sammo, San Francisco's Rasputin. Andrew, cumulative probabilities, final boss. Yes or no?

No coffee, no alcohol, no medication in the morning. Meditation in the morning. Do you enjoy life? It's very, I don't know. I don't even understand that. Naval writes Facebook captions, but for millennial tech bros instead of boomers. Mark, his career at Oracle taught him

that software can be a more profitable racket. Paul wants to be in founder mode. Naval's reading list is the airport books hall of fame which is i feel like part of that is when he recommends a book it probably goes into the airport yeah because he actually does have a massive audience but who knows it's very silly very very silly but i you know you love to see some wojacks from the guys you know uh and uh and love the guys you know and love and a lot a lot of good a lot of good content from these guys i don't know i think

this is a fun silly little uh silly little post having fun poking fun at some of the legends in silicon valley uh you go on door dark door cash door cash and you're drowning in e-girls he says anyway uh let's go to trey stevens he is hosting an event in san francisco if you're in there you should check it out uh he says a little over two years ago marky wagner and i published an essay in pirate wires child entitled choose good quests that blew up way more than i was expecting i was also surprised that more than a few readers were able to read between the lines to see the theological underpinnings of the central argument. I'll be giving a talk hosted by Axe17 and Gary Tan on the evening of March 6th in San Francisco, in which I'll draw out the explicit theological message and its implications

on how we think about our quests in tech. Invite link in thread below. Should be fun. And so if you're in SF, go check it out. Uh, I think it's $50 to attend and, uh, some absolute killers in Silicon Valley attending this. Uh, I talked to, uh, Trey's wife yesterday who is organizing the event and, uh, the lineup for the speaker cities is fantastic. And just the people that'll be in this room could probably put together a $5 billion round with a few techs. So, uh, good room to be in and a fantastic topic. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very, it's a great post. If you haven't read it, read it. Uh, the, the, the good quests idea is, uh, trying to answer this question of, yeah, what, what should

you do? Where, where, where do you fit in within the messy world of Silicon Valley? Is it an employee at a company that's working on something that you really think is extremely valuable? Is it founding a company? Whatever you choose, he kind of lays out a framework for thinking about that. And it's a rallying cry for young folks in Silicon Valley, and I really enjoyed the piece.

So go check it out. Let's go over to Guillermo Rauch. I need to learn how to pronounce his name. Guillermo at Vercel. We love him. He says, inherent to founder mode is the courage to be disliked. For a founder, the mission, customer, and product reigns supreme. Effective

leadership is not about making everyone at your company happy or producing the average of everyone's opinions. It's about doing what's right. Great post. Very inspiring. We love Guillermo. Yeah. I mean, that really is the distillation of founder mode and also going direct.

It's like this authenticity and not being afraid of cancellation or just negative pushback. That's the pressure of being a CEO. You're trying to make your team, your customers happy, your team happy, the media happy, you know, other shareholders, whatever, you know, partners, infrastructure providers, like you're never going to make everybody happy. And so you're saying don't try to make everybody happy. Try to try to do what's right, you know, generally for the company. And, you know, usually it'll net out to being what's right for, for everybody else in the long run, at least. Yeah. And I loved you on from ramp chiming in

here. Uh, well said Guillermo, many people dislike me probably because I'm so founder mode, uh, because he's, he's been posting a day 99 of asking ramp for a raise. Uh, he's getting the raise. I think once he gets to day 90 we need to get ramped to put him in the cage put him in a cage if he can live stream for 90 days and add a million of arr to ramp then he gets his raise but i think the first 90 days of asking for a raise were just the warm-up for him totally he's not grinding hard enough you're on notice juan good luck uh let's go to andrew ross sorkin have you read too big to fail the book or seen the movie it was adapted into a movie yeah yeah andrew ross sorkin mass monster uh noted noted mass monster run at the arnold yeah yeah yeah uh let's see it let's watch andrew

ross sorkin get diced let's see him i want to see his traps eating his head. Some Death Star delts. I want to see him on some gear, get some deep ball, some Anivar, some tasks. Yeah. Andrew, come on the show. Let's talk about your stack. Yeah. Let's get you too big to fail. But you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin is a fantastic interviewer. And the book is fantastic if you haven't read it. It's a breakdown of what happened during the housing crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis, and he's been working on a follow-up book, 1929. For the past eight years, he's been working on a follow-up to his book, Too Big to Fail. It's written as what he thinks of it as a prequel, a nonfiction character-driven, behind-the-scenes account of 1929, the year, the most infamous market crash of all time happened.

It'll be out in October, but you can preorder it now. I will definitely be reading that. That sounds fascinating. I know that's a good breakdown, the great depression. And I know about 1929 and a lot of the anecdotes. I don't know the character driven story behind it.

I can't name the guy who lost it all or the person that made it through it's very abstract to me and so i'm sure this will be a fantastic read he's a great writer great reporter and uh you know go check it out if you're looking for your next book um let's go to vc braggs you want to check out this one i had to throw this in leaked image of the latest humane ink product from hp printer division you put on the pin and it tells you the toner is low this would be helpful for us because our toner is low all the time okay enough trash talk about printers printers are back uh this is important technology folks yeah we got a i hope that they roll this out i mean it's actually it's actually smart for hp to

say hey you know a lot of these other companies i'm sure a bunch of the best people at Humane are already taking offers from a number of great companies. But still for Humane to add the Humane product, while it didn't solve a critical need for consumers, it was very cool tech. The tech itself was great. And so I'm excited to uh see what they do great great hopefully maybe this was maybe this was hp's way they they probably know at this point that we run on a brother usa printer this is their way to kind of just like get on our radar and say hey why don't you bring your posts over to a powerhouse hp printer yeah we'll give you a pin that allows you to you know better interact with your device.

I mean, what is the bull case for the HP Humane acquisition? I think there's probably two that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of a few others. One is, you know, there might be some sort of industrial or B2B application where you go and you give these pins to a workforce where they're in a medical environment or industrial environment and there need to be hands-free and you sell these pins into this one workforce and it's highly specific, highly specific. And so I'm, I don't know, I'm imagining like I pick up an Amazon package and then the, the micro projector just projects exactly what I need to do with it onto the package. I don't know, something like that.

Do we know that they actually got bought by the print like it wasn't no no no no people are just they got bought by hp yeah and hp is just known for printers now but they do make other stuff like it's hewlett packard it's like a big company yeah um but uh the other thing is that uh yeah they actually still make computers yeah of course and the other thing is that they might be in an ibm type arc where they're going to wind up doing more consulting and they actually have some good looking desktop computers let's go um and and if i'm if i'm working with hp on some sort of project and you're saying i have two options on your staff one is the person who designed the latest hp printer and the other person is the person who designed the humane pen. So I actually have... I think the design language is better on the pen.

I have hp.com pulled up. They have their printers, which they highlight first. So clearly important. And they have their PCs, desktops, and they have monitors and accessories. So it's totally possible that what Humane built is actually super relevant to their monitors, their like cameras, mounted cameras, right? You could imagine a world where you just go like that and it like shuts your computer off. And like Humane was like focused on using gestures to control devices. And so stuff like that, it would be cool if I go like that to my app, you know, maybe I can, maybe I can't, but just being able to go like that, turn off my computer, you know, clap, turn it on, all the stuff that Humane was kind of working on.

Yeah. I heard some theory that the company was kind of working on yeah i heard some theory that they the the company was bought for 100 million they might have had around 100 million left in the bank because the company kind of failed pretty quickly post-launch and so it's possible that it was kind of like almost more like an aqua hire and you just get a bunch of people that are you know uh surely they didn't they didn't solve the overall product in a way that was cohesive, in a way that could actually gain traction. But they clearly have great people who work on projectors, great people who work on batteries. They have great people who work on all these different things.

And so you can deploy those people into the different arms of HP. And it seems like it could be a good deal. And one of the humane guys is working on PMF for Dyno, which is great. HP couldn't lock him down that's why shutdowns are good sometimes because it frees up super talented people to just go work on new things yeah maybe uh maybe hp should uh start a live streaming division but hp if you want to sponsor a live stream where where guys code all day long and work out shirtless and jeans. Send a printer. Send some printers over.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Well, speaking of gadgets, these ones didn't fail. Nat Friedman says, what's your favorite new gadget? And there's a couple interesting ones on here. Unify AI key is the top result. Locally embeds your camera feeds. Not yet mind blowing, but that's a software update away.

And Nat Friedman says he got one of those and it's really promising. Kyle Russell, buddy of mine says still, still the Ray-Ban Meadows he got last summer. So he's a DAU of those, I guess, or regular driver of those. We both kind of churned from them, but I think we're pretty optimistic about them as a product long-term. And then there's some other people that chime in. One guy says a dad bike, the Turn GSD S10. It has room for the kids in the back,

which is kind of cool. And it also has electric boost. Thought that was fun. Matt Mullenweg chimes in and says, really digging the Daylight Co. Like a Kindle meets iPad allows for lifestyle change. Actually, I'm an investor in Daylight. Yeah, you said it was pretty good, right?

We got to get one for the set. It basically mimics paper really well. It's the same feeling of using a Kindle, but you can navigate the internet, have a browser, et cetera. Spencer Bratman says the things he uses daily are an Ember mug. Have you ever seen those?

I have an Andreessen Ember mug. Oh, you do? Yeah. He says AirPod Max, 8Sleep, of course. Love course love it uh an aura frame which is kind of cool it's like a picture frame that you can upload photos to a juicer vision he uses the vision pro no way i'm surprised by that uh whoop pretty good for tracking sleep haven't seen that another daylight co shout out this hackable e-ink watch is kind of interesting the sq fmi watchy

not to use as a watch but to wear at night to detect movement past a certain hour and wake me This hackable E-Ink watch is kind of interesting. The SQFMI watchy. Not to use as a watch, but to wear at night to detect movement past a certain hour and wake me up more naturally. Cheap, easy to code. So a little bit hacker stuff going on there. I thought that was fun. It was a good little, hey, let's get some community engagement from Nat. And I'm sure Nat's cooking up the next idea for some sort of side project. Put some kid on it. Well, let's go to nikita uh nikita beer says ladies and gentlemen the king has been dethroned because

grok ai is now the number one app in the app store under free apps all apps and is one above of chat is one above chat gpt and he attaches a meme uh from a high school yearbook quote that says it is not enough that I should succeed. Others should fail. And this is from Kevin Chang, the guy, one of the guys leading the charge at XAI. Wait, really? Yeah. No way.

Real quote. That's hilarious. I had no idea that was actually him. That's so funny. And what I love about the screenshot, Deep Seeks nowhere to be seen. Yep. They're probably thinking about, I got to get on intro. I got to hire nikita we

gotta go number one again yeah um and we gotta get nikita on the inside and so uh how uh there's a bunch of uh there's a bunch of back and forth here the app store ranking doesn't mean anything and they're just pure vanity and nikita says wow major buzzkill man uh so interesting to see obviously we've talked about how the Apple app charts are momentum driven. So it's unclear if Grok usage really is higher than ChatGPT or getting close. But certainly, there's a lot of momentum. They just launched Grok 3. There's a lot of big news.

I'm 90% certain Nikita works on XAI or advising them as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. Well, let's go back to seed investing. Delian has an interesting post here. He says, doing VC full-time is a bad setup for seed investing. If you have a company you're working on, anytime you spend on VC, you're trading against your life's work. So you spend time only with the four to six companies a year that truly matter. If full-time, WTF do you fill your day with? A lot of meetings, probably.

What do you think? This is another pitch for moving away from full-time seed investing, running around spraying checks around Silicon Valley. What do you think? Is it possible to do it full-time well? I think that if you are a VC operating with little to no brand,

which is 99% of venture capital firms, right? Where they technically have a website and a brand, but they're not being sought out by the generational founders. I think this works really well for founders fund where when founders fund bids on a company, they can bid lower than everyone else. And the founder is still like, yes, I want to work. You know, I just went through that with a company with one of my portfolio companies that I did. I did the pre-seed

and when they were raising their series A, they were, even before they started the process being like whatever price founders fund bids, you know, within reason we're going to take it. And they had other tier one offers. Right. And so there's like a certain, I think, you know, you're on the inside, so you'd be a little too conflicted to say this, but Founders Fund is in a unique position where I wouldn't recommend necessarily the part-time strategy to a no-name seed VC who's got $50 million to deploy. And it's like, yeah, you probably should be spending all your time trying to meet founders that aren't coming to you. Yeah. I think the other takeaway here is just that one of the ways to bootstrap a brand as a seed stage investor is to build a great company because then all of a sudden you're meeting

founders. They're coming to you for advice and just through the founder network, founder to founder conversations. And then you can write seed checks. It doesn't need to be full time. And then over time, you can kind of scale that up and take it more seriously. And that's certainly been Deleon's experience at Varda. He's met everyone that's relevant

in the space industry and seen all the deal flow there. Because even if you don't even think of him as a VC, you're going to want to reach out to him just as a fellow founder in the category. Sane advantage. Yeah, big advantage. Helps when you're putting devices up and down. going to want to reach out to him just as a fellow a fellow founder in the category advantage uh yeah big advantage helps when you're putting devices up and up into space uh yeah i mean there's a lot

of advantages going on there um what was funny here is uh joe morrison here chimes in says your best posts are the ones where you're a little self-loathing and delian's like what are you talking about like this this is actually like he's not gassing himself up he's gassing himself up he's basically saying like i'm doing it perfectly yeah yeah yeah and he's like don't even try and compete with me i love someone else's comments i'll take the other side to the odds you'll find and lead the seed round of a generational company while working 60 plus hours a week operating or dramatically lower delian just says look forward to comparing and contrasting our approaches at the end of the decade. Do not try and dunk on Deleon. There's just been a graveyard on X this week of people that tried and got smoked.

It's very rough. But yeah, I mean, when you're a seed investor in Ramp, it's pretty easy to drive solid returns. He's got a whole bunch of great seed stuff. And he's like the main, he does a lot of seed stuff, it's great. Well, let's move on to Kim Kardashian. This is crazy. Yeah. Narrative violation. Okay. So, uh, skims has grown into an absolute powerhouse closing in on $1 billion in DTC revenue and has raised $730 million most recently at a multi-billion dollar valuation. Kim owns 5% of the company after raising so much money. They recently did a partnership with Nike. The business is on a tear, but Daniel here asks, absolutely wild to me. I get it, amazing and

valuable brand, but is it worth it when you own almost none of it. She owns $200 million. So the question, Jordi, is, is, is it worth it to have $200 million? What is $200 million worth? I think it's worth $200 million. And so I don't know. What's her opportunity cost? Is she really, is she really putting more than $200 million of effort into this project? Yeah, I don't think so. So I think absolutely it's worth it. It's more of this perception that people see Skims as a proxy for Kim Kardashian's brand. But the pushback there is that if you talk to Skims customers, they will say these products are just better than other products that I can get. And it's at a point where, you know, you could argue that Kylie Jenner's products, people wouldn't care to use them as much if there wasn't her association. Kim Skims and Kim Kardashian, I think it's different in that they make really

good products. She's non-operating. She's sort of the face of the brand and it's going to net out. Like if you're going to make hundreds of millions of dollars for being the face of something, that's better than doing a bunch of brand deals for Nike and Lululemon and Aloe. And it's going to net out. It's going to net out fine. But it's still the idea that, you know, there's been a lot of press recently

around these creator-driven holding companies and this idea that just having a big audience will allow you to build a big company in an inexpensive way. But Kim Kardashian basically has one of the largest single audiences and the most consumer influence of any person in history. And she still needs to raise $730 million to achieve what, maybe she didn't have to, but she's done that. And yeah, it just goes to show that, you know,

I've talked to a bunch of founders recently that think, oh, I'm just going to work with this one influencer and it's going to, you know, dramatically change my business. Or my co-founders got, you know, 200,000 followers and it doesn't mean anything because you tap that following pretty quick, right? Like quickly. Yep. And so she is big enough to actually get market entry. But if you run the numbers on the dilution here, you know, seed series A, series B, series C, 20% dilution rounds, let's assume. She got diluted maybe 75%. I don't even know. But that means that she still only started out with 20% of the company. Yeah. And I still think that's a phenomenal trade.

I don't think that's crazy because she's in a non-operating role. And what would it take for her to make $200 million in profit? Otherwise? Yeah. I mean, we got, we learned a little bit from the Ethereum max thing that I think she, she gets paid about a million dollars per like one-off brand deal,

like post or something like that, or like partnership. And so you're talking about 200 of those. There's only 200 business days, 250 business days in the year. All of a sudden- She can't do a post every day at a million dollars a post. Certainly not. No, no, no, no, certainly not. And so even though she's a huge figure, this is a great way to monetize her audience. It looks way better for her brand because it builds her brand as a co-founder, as a business person. It's more aligned. she only needs to focus on the reputation and products of one company whereas if she's if she's advertising for six different brands what if one of them has a scandal what if

one of them is making the product and it's low quality all of a sudden that roads hers she can just put all of her all of her eggs in one basket more or less obviously she's done that she had her i think it's a good strategy she had her private equity firm that you know had a huge fundraising target didn't come close to achieving it i think they made one investment in a like a hot sauce or like a okay some hot sauce company yep um but this goes to show that like maybe even the strategy of this creator-led private equity firm was not even that good of a strategy if if if if a if her primary company had to still raise hundreds of millions of dollars then maybe maybe it's not enough like maybe it's not enough to be differentiated as a you know private equity firm yeah yeah very interesting anyway let's move on to x we got

some fundraising news katie roof has a scoop about. They're thinking about a new financing round that would value it at $44 billion, same as the take private price in 2022. Elon Musk has never done a down round, not about to start in 2025. So earlier this week on the show, we were talking about if you looked at X.com investors, Washington Post would pull up, Google, like Gemini would pull up a summary. Oh, you lost all their money. So-and-so lost 700 million.

Sequoia lost X, you know, 200 million, et cetera, et cetera. And they didn't ever lose the money. If they would have lost money, if they would have sold it, right? And so now they're going to be back up. This is great for the employees. X had marked down their valuation internally. Interesting.

So the employees were getting their options at a $20 just got a pop so they just they're gonna get a nice pop out of this and um i'm sure that elon will start to allow employees to sell you know do these sort of um yeah he's very good about laddering up the valuation doing the secondary sales making sure everyone's taken care of like he is very very good at that um and yeah i mean it's interesting because uh the media was very anti-Twitter X saying it's not going to, it's going to fall apart. Everyone's going to leave.

There's going to be no users. All the advertisers are going to leave. Well, we got data from Ramp that is Ara Karazian. He's their chief economist and the economist at Ramp looked at the spend on corporate cars across all the Ramp data,

showed that advertising on X is increasing. So that was another bull signal. Then we got the leaked financials showing that they might have over a billion dollars in EBITDA. And so, yeah, you apply a 44X multiple on EBITDA for a growing tech company. That's not that crazy. And then we have that great post from Liran Shapira saying, everyone was worried that X was not going to even stay online. Well, now you click on X and in one of the new tabs, you have access to a cutting edge frontier model. And there's just, you know, live streaming has been taking off. I've been doing really well there on PMF or die. And all of my core tech friends are still there. Like there's a lot of

craziness and the algorithm changes every week, but it's still fun. It's still the app that I open. And for a lot of people, that's what their experience is uh but it's still fun it's still the app that i open and for a lot of people that's what their experience is and i don't think it's going away and so i think elon's got it are back we are back uh well speaking of pmf or die i thought this was an interesting post from will at shouldn't speak he says startups used to be two guys a laptop and a dream just now laptop yeah just one laptop so now he says now it's 50 engineers 100 million dollars in funding and a full-time dc lobbying strategy what happened gang and i just tagged at pmfr die deep tech happened yeah deep tech happened defense tech and and ai like regulatory capture stuff happened and just the threat i mean honestly a lot of this happened from lena khan it

was like well maybe you do need a dc lobbying firm if your plan is to sell your company at any point in time. And there were just so many different things where there was now, oh, well, if you're not playing in DC, you're not in the big leagues, maybe you need a government contract. Even if that government contract isn't going to drive the most profit or the most revenue, it's going to make people take you more seriously. The kind of the volunteer narrative pulls over. So there's a lot of different things that make sense and can justify 50 engineers, a hundred million in funding, full-time DC lobbying strategy.

But you can still just do the two guys, two laptops and a dream strategy if you want. And PMF or die is a great example of that. And we see examples of that on the timeline every single day. Yeah. The next post from Santi Ganga shots. If you can skip to that. So he the day was definitely a day of product progress coded talk to users got Jack's time with

friends more users for his product love and master PMF or die really helps you bring your a game and I love to see it we've seen a lot of people since PMF or die kicked off posting and just saying, I'm locking in from home and just putting this on. Because one thing is for certain, if you're solo building an app remotely, the biggest downside, it can be a great lifestyle. I've done it.

Many people go through phases where they're just sort of building. And being able to turn on PMF or Dye and just feel like you're a part of building and being able to turn on PMF or die and just like feel like you're a part of something and have that motivation is awesome. So yeah, it's free to lock in. It's free to outwork your peers and we'd love to see it. That's great. Well, we have the R. Karazian post here that we should cover because he has the actual real data on what's happening on X with advertisers. He says advertisers were leaving X in January 2025.

They came back in droves. Here's the latest from Ramp. Last month, 68% of advertisers increased their spending on X slash Twitter. If you're surprised about X's latest valuation, you need to look at this chart. And it's from Ramp. It says, advertisers were leaving X in January 2025.

They came back in droves. And you can see the trend month over month. Now people are ramping up. I'm certainly ramping up on X spend. And I think a lot of smart companies are because they realize that the AI is going to get better. The targeting is going to get better. The audience is going to get better.

Everything is getting better. So there's a good opportunity. And at the end of the day, these advertising markets, they're just markets. So if there's cheap CPM somewhere, it's going to get sucked up and hoovered up by someone. And so that's the nature of these things. Let's go to Zoomer. Zoomer says SF man hogging the umbrella while his fold out is left out in the rain. Sad. And yeah, we need to bring back some chivalry, some hospitality, some manners.

Don't hog the umbrella. You shouldn't be caught dead under an umbrella if your girlfriend, wife is using a jacket to cover herself. Terrible look. This is a career ending picture potentially. So hopefully the guy's not identified. Yep. You don't want to dox him. He just gets to fade into obscurity.

But if this is you, you're on notice, you got to have better umbrella etiquette for sure. Absolutely. And better etiquette in general across the internet, across the real world. Hold the doors. Use the correct forks. Don't swear.

Don't swear. what would your mother say don't say the s word the r word the f word what about the c u c k word i don't know if we should sense we don't say that on the show okay uh but we need an alternative to that because i need to fill that in anyway we're going to ravi shiftman wrecking yourself there we go uh if you are building in any other industry than love or entertainment you are wrecking yourself. There we go. Uh, if you are building in any other industry than love or entertainment, you are wrecking yourself. You are building an abstract. I don't know if I fully believe that it's great that that's what he's doing.

And I think that's his life work, but, um, I don't know that that's the only option, but you know, engagement friend, new round at 500 million confirmed. Uh, no, I mean, I think, I think obvious, But friend new round at 500 million confirmed.

No, I mean, I think Avi's like very convicted in what he's doing. And I think what he's doing, building in both love and entertainment in some ways, building a digital best friend is a good strategy. I think there's a very real scenario in 10 years where a lot of people the average person is working less potentially than they are now we're already at a point where even though lots of people have jobs they're still working less than they were 30 years than they would have been 30 years ago because half their day is spent on at work is spent on tiktok right like imagine jamie diamond realizing realizing how much

i'm sure i'm sure like they could see through the wi-fi somehow that like 20 of all of our bandwidth is going to like tiktok or something like that and he's probably just raging right but uh but yeah so so anyways we'll see what happens but But it's a good strategy to, a lot of founders don't know what they're actually selling. So if you're working on a consumer app, are you selling love, like something that's solved for loneliness? Are you selling entertainment?

I think for us, we talk about, we are in the news and entertainment business, right? So like we're here to deliver the news. We hope to do it in an entertaining way. Yes. There's other media brands like Jason Carman, who's in the inspiration business. He's like focused on telling these massive stories and following these trends and inspiring people. But Jason, if you want to throw in some hot takes and some jokes in the next documentary, we're available. We're available. Come spice it up.

Spice. Just all of a sudden. Spice up the doc. Super serious interview with Elon and then we're just there like just chopping it up. It'd be great. Anyway, let's move on to Kip Mock. We said congratulations to Isaiah Taylor for raising the seed round for his nuclear company. And Kip has been a huge supporter of the show.

We've had him on before, but he shares an awesome picture. And he says he's pleased to announce what I've been working on for the last year and looking forward to seeing this project through in the Philippines. So they signed a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. Isaiah went all over the world trying to find a hospitable government that would let him build a nuclear reactor very quickly and efficiently. And he found one in the Philippines. And everyone's excited for them to repatriate this technology once they get it up and running. But nothing to put a little fire under the U.S. government then saying, hey, we're gonna build it internationally if you don't let us build it here. And so you take this to the INL or to the,

what is it, the IRC or NRDC, the National Nuclear Reactor, I don't know, the guys who approve nuclear reactors in the United States, and you show them, hey, we did it in the Philippines. Let us do it here. It's a lot easier than saying, hey, we've never done it anywhere. So I love that they're moving quickly. I love that they're globetrotting and getting stuff done. So congrats to the Valar Atomics team once again.

And Jordy chimes in and says, absolute legend, making us all proud. We got to bring up more of those phrases, some of those great phrases, like guns phrases like gunslinger gunslinger yeah gunslinger is such a good one these are some oh yeah he's a nuclear gunslinger for sure gunslingers uh anyway uh we got a post from uh colin dunn i've talked to colin a couple times we actually have used uh his app visual electric to uh generate uh generate like assets for the show at various stages very cool product sort of takes a place of stock footage allows you to just very efficiently generate um you know uh images for various uses decks marketing etc uh he says figma should use their one billion dollar breakup fee from adobe to buy cursor could be their instagram

um near comments another friend of the show, how do you come up with this price? I don't think that cursor would sell for anywhere close to 1 billion considering how much acts, you know, their, their growth right now and access to capital. But Colin would probably push back on that say, and, and say like figma actually has access to plenty of capital themselves they could probably there could probably be a price there's always a price right yeah and people always forget with these mergers that if you like instagram everyone says like oh they uh like they they they sold out for a billion dollars and then uh instagram wound up being worth like a hundred billion so they left a ton on the table. And that's kind of true. But if you get meta stock in the transaction,

then you see upside. And if Facebook 10Xs, yeah, it's like you sold for 10 billion because you can just hold it. Well, the other difference is Instagram had no revenue. Yep. And Cursor has over nine figures of revenue. Yeah, it's very different. And so you could imagine that the multiple they would get on that revenue

with their current growth and how small the team is would potentially, like there's a world where Cursor would do a round in the next year valuing them at $8, $10 billion. Yeah, totally possible. Cool idea. I'm sure that Dylan would, as Dylan, I'm sure, has looked at a lot of deals like this, right? Yeah, totally.

Yeah, it's interesting. I do think something people miss is that idea of like viewing it more as a merger. You get equity in the combined entity. And if the combined entity really has a chance to make a serious run at a hyperscaler or a really massive hundred billion plus enterprise tech company,

that could be very, very accretive for you even though you quote unquote sold yeah uh because you have stock in the new entity uh and these all and these all stock deals are like partially stock deals can be heavily incentivized towards future growth if you're bullish on the on the partnership and speaking of cursor we got ben lang saying from intern to co-founder of the fastest company ever to hit 100 million in ARR. Amon Singer, a singer. He's coding at Cursor. And just a few years ago,

he was an intern, software engineering intern at u.com. Okay, so Amon, great name, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Nominative determinism right there. He'll be definitely spending nights at Amon. He followed me on X in 2021 while he was an intern. And so it's so good. Next time an intern follows you, DM them immediately and say, I want to lead your next round for sure.

That's that's the takeaway. You do that 100 times. You might get the next cursor. Maybe make it all back. Maybe. Should we close out with zoomer zoomer second time on the show today this is some news from google i haven't fully uh done a deep dive on this we'll have to dig into it anytime that there's these new ai announcements google's so bad at marketing it's actually it's it's brutal because like they they did that they did a thing where they announced the the ai and they sped up the demo and so now they've like kind of broken trust and no one you need to validate all these things. It's kind of unclear, like how real is this, but Google AI certainly wants you to believe it's real. And we'll see. Today we introduced an

AI co-scientist system designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses and research strategies, learn more, including how to join the trusted tester program at Google. And so Zoomer says, Google's AI agent independently discovered a new leukemia drug that then successfully tested in vitro at clinical concentrations, a novel liver fibrosis drug targets, and bacterial cell level antibiotic mechanisms. It looks like the novel scientific discovery line has been passed. And Zoomer then follows it up and says, the Dwarkesh question of AI insight has just been solved with a blackboard and a for loop. Interesting. So it's always hard to tell, like you need the scientists to kind of weigh in on this and say like, was this just brute forcing? Was this really novel discovery? People are

obviously, you know, very hyped up anytime AI does anything. And, oh, we just crossed some Turing test. We just crossed some new threshold. ASI is upon us. Kind of unclear how big this is. Whenever I see one of these, I always look to, well, did the market move? You know, what's GDP doing, right? But GDP is maybe a lagging indicator. But my question is, okay, so there's a massive breakthrough. There's allegedly a massive breakthrough in novel scientific discovery, right? Yeah. What did the biotech stocks do? What would you expect them to do? Yeah. And I watched this during when Google, when Google at DeepMind, they solved the protein folding problem.

That was one of the hardest, most intractable computationally complex problems, figuring out how proteins fold. Very important to drug development. It's something that is a, is a cost center, I guess, in every drug development,

every pharma company. DeepMind solved the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. The market didn't really move. And what it turned out was that, yes, it's a really hard problem, but we have machines that do it. And we have PhD students that can just kind of run the assays. And they do the, I think it's like x-ray crystallography or something like that, to run the human-based algorithm. And it wasn't a fundamental change in the structure of the profitability of biotech companies. And so the market didn't really move. And so I haven't looked it up. I don't really know, but I'm kind of waiting. But sometimes these announcements go out

and it takes a while for the public markets to catch up. Yeah. Trey also says it's definitely difficult to, in the chat, he says it's definitely difficult to predict how this shakes out because the in vitro part is, quote unquote, easy. Most of the failure happens after that. Yeah. So a lot of the stuff comes out splashy. But then how does it actually roll out? track to be working on and very, very cool stuff. And I'm sure that from an AI perspective, this was a, you know, a state of the art, like reasoning agent, a co-scientist. It's great that they're building this in the same way that deep research was great and is still a great product. And I'm excited for this. I'm sure it speeds up people's work. But I probably pumped the brakes on the idea of like, this is some sort of fundamental shift in how we do science in the world, at least at this point.

But who knows? We're close. Well, speaking of science and healthcare innovation, our very own Ben is probably coming out of surgery right now. Yeah, wish him well. He has emergency wisdom teeth surgery, had to get those removed. He's got plenty of wisdom so we're not

too worried about uh a lack thereof but ben was an absolute stud this week he was he was basically in pain as of like tuesday and it just got worse and worse and worse still came into the office crushed it still grinded through it yep and uh we're and that's why we did not do a dom perignon episode we didn't think it would be fair to be sipping champagne without him. But we did hit 16K on X. So thank you to everyone that's followed us. The growth has been outstanding. We've been really happy to watch the show.

And as soon as Ben is back in the studio, the Dom will flow. It will pop. We already have the bottle ready. Yeah, it's right there next to you. The bottle's ready to go. And so you can expect a Dom episode any day now. And I'm sure that'll be one of the more fun ones. Maybe we'll just do all timeline that day.

Just rip a bunch of hot takes. Just for old time's sake. I think so. Let the takes flow. You don't want to do a deep dive on a Dom episode. You want to just have fun. Well said. Anyway, thanks for listening.

Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Check out all the sponsors in the description. And we will see you tomorrow have a great rest of your day have a great thursday watching and listening we appreciate