TRASHFUTURE - The Tetsuo Economy feat. Wendy Liu
Episode Date: March 25, 2026We get our SF billboard specialist and recovered startup person Wendy Liu in to talk about the newest scandal rocking Silicon Valley: a company that can only be described as Theranos for Compliance. G...et more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to this slightly late free TF. Nova remains on a holiday, but Hussein and I are ably holding down the fort with frequent guest returning champion San Francisco Billboard perplexedness correspondent. Wendy Lou. Wendy, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me back. It's so great to be back here. What sort of kicked this off? And I have a few bits of news I wanted to discuss first, but what really kicked this off?
was there's a company.
I think it's easiest to describe as a new Theranos that said,
the difference between us and the old Theranos is that our Theranos thing will actually
work.
And what we're going to do is advertise.
Advertise, advertise, advertise.
But I think Wendy and I both realized we were working on pieces about Delve.
Yeah.
So the reason I noticed Delve is because this company.
last fall spent, I think, almost a million dollars in advertising around San Francisco.
And I know this number because they had a blog post where they broke down the details of their
advertising expenditure, $750K between September and November.
Billboard's on the highway, just billboards all over the city, bus wraps.
They had a million wraps all over the bus.
Other public transit ads, just you would walk into a station and you would see a column just covered with the delve level.
and then they would have just the logos of the companies that use delve.
And so I noticed this last year and I thought, what is this company?
I bet they're doing something kind of sketchy.
But I didn't, you know, nothing, there's nothing really public about how sketchy they were.
And then just the other day, something came public.
And it's kind of amazing that, I don't know.
It's like, is there any other way for the story to end, honestly?
Probably not.
Yeah.
It's a good thing that you delved into it, found out.
And I'm excited to delve into it further during this episode.
I'm so excited to delve into this M-Dash.
Where shall we start?
What I loved is I believe in that blog post,
I read it with an open mouth the other day,
that they said,
and the other thing is that by spending this much money on advertising,
you signal to your potential clients and investors
that your product is very serious
because it must be making a lot of money.
Oh my God.
They're just admitting it.
It's as though they made a product called
like Theranos 2 colon better than the gods maybe.
It was astonishing.
So, but look, I actually, I actually want to talk, before we get into Delve,
before we get into their awful, awful campaign, I'm just going to link the blog post in
our chat window here so we can all follow along with it later.
There are a couple of bits of news I wanted to share.
First is I have this sense that we are in an accelerating golden age of shitty memes breaking containment from the internet and becoming bricks and mortar locations in real life. Elon Musk's diner did this, but now, Polymarket, you may remember them as the platform that allows Trump industry insiders to profit off of drone strikes, has created a monitoring the situation bar in DC.
Cool. Okay. So what do you do there?
Well, you monitor some situation, but I suppose the question is what situation are you monitoring in this place?
Any situation you wish to monitor. You can monitor there. And it's a bit like, I don't know, this is a bit of a stretch.
Has either of you seen the movie The Sting?
I haven't actually, no. So you've got to have to tell me. Yeah.
So if you go, for all these of you out there who have seen The Sting, a lot of the action takes place in a old-timey 1930s,
like a gambling den that is a place for you go to bet on horses and they have a wire that they like
get the horse race odds and and results now polymarket is basically that it's like a wire it's like a
wire room for horse racing but for like drone strikes and they put it in Washington DC and it's like
fun and you get free majitos and you know polymarket does this all the time and honestly it's like
going for a drink inside Elon Musk's Twitter replies they say imagine a sports bar but for situation
monitoring. Live feeds of X, flight radars, Bloomberg terminals, polymarket screens. This is from a piece in
Wired. Meanwhile, mocked up newspapers with headlines about monitoring the situation are passed around. An enormous
illuminated LED globe served as a rotating centerpiece for people to pretend that they're in the war room from
Dr. Strangelove, but as gamblers. I have to say working there as a bartender sounds just like a
total nightmare. And I don't, it's hard to imagine how much money you would have to be paid to
be able to work there and deal with the kinds of insufferable people you have. I'll probably
asking to change the, change the screen to show some other thing that they're betting on. And then as
soon as they lose money, they're going to be belligerent and start fights. So yeah, that sounds like a,
like a really fun place to work. It's like, hey, can you please, um, this video that's just in your
eye line, can you please change this to a live feed of something that looks like the collateral murder
video. I stand to win upwards of $10,000 if this bomb goes off for the next hour.
The person who was doing this interviewed some of the people who were there. Tobin Stone,
24.
Tobin Stone, he should go work for Greg Stuby.
24. Works at a think tank in D.C. He admits to having placed a bet on, quote,
whether or not something would happen in Congress having a certain of the outcome beforehand.
Others are quick to reject the notion that speculating on war isn't any way wrong.
If you're living in a war zone, having accurate information is really important, said Ben Shindle,
a 28-year-old blogger. He argues Polly Market can provide those caught up in conflict with information
about their livelihoods, whether they should relocate and how long a war will go on. These are
really good things to be able to know and understand, Schindel says. I wonder if there's another
way to get information about what's going on in the world that, you know, I wonder if there's,
if anyone's ever thought of that before. Ah, Wendy, see, we did try that, but apparently everyone involved
was an inveterate lefty who was, you know, bought and paid for by Soros, or
whatever. And you could never get accurate information because everyone was too ideological. It was
the failing New York Times. You need the neutral hand of polymarket. Incidentally, I don't think
anyone's noticed this yet, but if you wanted to make a lot of money on polymark, because like these
guys would argue, like, look, actually, insiders betting on like government activity is good,
because it creates a stronger signal than a reporter might get from talking to someone, right?
Because this is just simply money, right? This is, there's no spin.
there's no political agenda.
It's just someone wants to make money.
They're incentivized as a rational actor
to signal what's going to happen by betting on it.
The problem is,
I don't think anyone thought about this,
is that if you wanted to make a lot of money on Polly Market,
all you would need to do is place a bet
that looked like an insider trade, right?
All you would need to do is create a new wallet
and make a high conviction bet
on something that only say a Trump administration insider would know
and then try to cover your tracks, but not too well.
And then a bunch of people just pile into your bet and then you sell your positions to them.
So it obscures much more than it reveals.
It is utterly socially useless, even in the way that they say it's useful, basically.
I think in that sense, it feels a lot like the crypto bubble.
And honestly, like a lot of the bubbles that we've seen in the last few years where it is just a matter of this new technology that's not really that new, but new enough to evade the usual regulations.
and as time goes on, it just becomes more and more scamy.
People abuse it. People make a lot of money. I've seen amounts of money from it, not providing
anything. And then the behavior that evolves, it ends up really just like resembling scammy
behavior that has been outlawed, right? It's like, we have laws against insider trading.
Those are supposed to exist. They still do, but they haven't yet caught up to this new area.
And it's just so weird just to see everyone act like this is normal and this is fine. And of course,
there is an administration that is probably not going to do anything about it because it's maybe
it's good for them. It's, you know, it's sort of in line with the ethos of the current administration.
So we are just still living in this weird twilight zone and it's lasting, it is lasting too
long and I think we're all losing our minds. We're all losing our sense of reality and how things
should be. Oh, I mean, it all, it's as though you had a bar themed around, I don't know, I don't
You have an insider trading theme bar on Wall Street, essentially.
It's the same thing as having the polymarket bar in DC.
And, you know, this, again, this is quite serious because when you're talking about matters
of life and death, then, you know, the polymarket guys have shown that they are completely
happy to threaten to kill someone who will report something that makes them lose a
polymarket bet.
Look, I also just want to say, right, here's my controversial take.
But these guys have made gambling really lame and really.
like, lose a...
Because, like, this isn't a novel thing.
You know, you could sort of, like,
go to a regional party.
I don't know what it's like in, like, San Francisco,
but, like, in the UK, in London,
like, there was a time where you could sort of make
these types of very strange bets,
with a guy in the pub who's, like,
sort of sits in the corner and he, like,
takes out his little notebook and he'll kind of, like,
sort of, like, let you kind of, you know,
he'll run his own little gambling ring, right?
And you can sort of, like, make the bet that you want,
usually on, like, you know, the dog races,
but you can also do it for like general elections and stuff as well.
And there was at least like a sense of, you know,
forming like a type of, you know, camaraderie.
Right.
It was a very social element to that.
Right.
And this kind of like,
the thing about like polymarket and Kalshi and all these places is that like,
yeah, like the gamble,
like it's sort of like it's not good to sort of encourage this level of like degenerate gambling.
It certainly isn't good to sort of like say,
hey, you know,
whatever's left of kind of like reality.
Why don't we monetize?
Like,
why don't we monetize like time and space itself and,
and try to manipulate reality
through the lens of kind of micro-bessing
and I'm sure there'll be like no long-term consequences of that.
But like above everything else,
it also is like deeply antisocial.
And the thing that like I sort of felt reading
about the polymarket bar,
this kind of gimmick that this company was doing
to I guess appear to be sort of normal.
Is that like I can't imagine any type of socialising happening there.
I want to know what types of conversations
were happening with people,
whether or whether, and this is probably more likely to be the case,
whether it was a group of people who went there to buy like a drink or something
and just spent the entire night looking at their phone.
Yeah, it's the looking at your phone bar.
And, you know, again, like the other thing is,
threatening to hurt people who made your bet not work out,
that used to be the province of Italian American social clubs, right?
And now it's been distributed onto the internet.
This is the polymarket monitoring the situation bar,
the situation room, probably the worst,
the worst hang, imaginable. But there's another thing that I have been obsessed with newswise that
I wanted to talk about before we carry on. And this is like some, I want to call it,
second order effects of what is happening in Iran. I mean, the Trump administration has said
that the situation is largely resolved and they're winding down their military presence.
Again, a bunch of people want a huge amounts of money on polymarket betting that this was a lie.
He said, Trump said on truth social, the U.S. was, quote, getting very close to meeting our objectives,
as we consider winding down our great military efforts.
But, like, this is the third time he's announced that the military operation will be winding down.
And it's on the same day that he's asking Congress for more money and is also sending like
2,500 Marines.
That is how exactly how I wind down before like a long day before bed, just ask Congress for
money, deploy some Marines, and then, you know, in bed with a little glass of milk and a
peak nightcap.
Yeah, great.
Great, great stuff.
I don't, I don't really know what to even say to that other than, you know.
I just, yeah, let's keep the winning happening, I guess.
There's these second order effects that are becoming very obvious.
So Mike Leskin and the United Airlines CFO said,
our plans currently assume oil goes to 175 a barrel and does not get back down to $100 a barrel until the end of 2027.
And for context, United spent $11 billion on fuel last year.
Under these prices, it would spend a further $11 billion.
And the company has never, ever, ever profited more than $5 billion, ever, which means under
a situation in which the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, or even because like all those natural
gas production facilities in the Gulf require so long to get taken back online, even if the
Strait of Hormuz only remains closed for a little while longer, it doesn't look like it's
economical for United Airlines to exist. It's interesting because I feel like they will
of course raise prices. And in some ways, I'm like, this is a terrible thing. Is that good? Is that
maybe good, should we maybe have, should we maybe be trying to de-incentivize flights, you know?
And it's, of course, it's not good for prices to rise in the abstract, but it's almost like,
like, what is the opportunity in this to, I don't know. Yeah, because it does feel like
flight prices are way too low. Every time I look at it, like, it shouldn't cost like, especially
in Europe, it's like, it shouldn't cost like 19 pounds to go somewhere on a plane. Like that is,
that's probably not a good thing. Yeah, it should cost 19 pounds to go on a train.
Yeah, exactly.
This is the insane thing.
And I think like it's not like a new point, but it's just like it costs more to go from London to Manchester than it does to fly from London to like Barcelona.
Well, no more though.
Now it'll, yeah, now it will cost the same price to go.
It's especially weird here in the US because obviously we don't have a great train infrastructure.
And, you know, it's so cheap to get on a flight to go from SF to L.A.
But it kind of shouldn't be and it should probably be really cheap to just take high speed rail.
And like this is the world we want to manifest.
best. And I'm not saying that this is
a way it will happen. Most likely
we won't get trains and flights will
just be expensive. And so
I can't help but hope at that
the oil crisis does at least encourage
a certain kind of investment in
alternative energy sources and
building out trains. Maybe
I'm too optimistic, but
this is just all I want. What you've forgotten, of course,
is like petromachismo,
which is anything other than an
oil belching gas guzzler
is feminine. And therefore,
for something that cannot be acceptable to the sort of average chud. But I go back to United's comments,
right? They purely, whether or not it's desirable that the era of cheap flights is ending, and I think
it's actually arguable to say maybe it is, it is still a second to a refect of like of the insane war
being prosecuted on Iran that the era of cheap flights is globally over, it seems, unless something
changes. But also, I don't know how you square United's comments with the administrations unless
United has like some knowledge about Iranian military capability that the White House lacks.
What we know is that they have a duty to be honest with their shareholders about material
factors that could impact the share price and incentive to make those announcements for others do.
But like, you know, Deutsche said that jet fuel price hike poses an existential threat to the whole
European airline industry.
SAS, Finare, like all the Nordics have slashed thousands of flights.
It is a whole pillar of post-1967, like post-1960s.
life when air travel caused places like Benadorm to replace Blackpool for British holiday
makers that appears to be under threat, like a given of a prior, a thing that you just assumed
to be true and will be true forever, seemed it could be gone. And, you know, the United has to tell
the truth in ways governments don't. And, you know, and the effects of the war in Iran that you're
feeling right now, like interest rates rising or homeowners mortgage rates rising, those are the
effects of predicted higher prices, not even the high.
prices themselves. So right now, the liquefied natural gas from the Gulf, the last tankers that have
the last ordered shipments in them are going to get to their destination in 10 days. Do you, like,
do you understand what that means? I think, I think what it means is that everything's going to be
fine, right? Yeah, of course. Or more specifically, it's that whatever normalcy was sustainable at a time
when higher prices were predicted comes to an end when you can no longer disguise the difficulty
of getting the thing with the prices and abstraction of it, right?
Natural gas, energy costs, they go up and up and up.
But at some point, there's no amount of money you can pay that will cause natural gas
to appear in the amount that it's needed.
And so there won't be any, right?
Because you can't order anymore.
Because the last natural gas that there is is already in the ships.
And the ships are already going to the places that they're going.
And once they drop it off, that's it.
There is no more.
What if we just created a prediction market that incentivize people to bring us natural gas
and had like a bar to monitor that situation?
I just, I feel like there's a solution.
I'm going to place a bet that nobody delivers me a tanker load of liquefied natural gas
in the next two weeks.
There you go.
Yeah, perfect.
I do like the idea of just like human-produced natural gas and you sort of make something
like the matrix, you know, like the matrix
with those matrix pods, but like, yeah,
you know, they're just sort of like extracting
natural gas from the human body to like,
I don't know, fucking power.
Yeah, and you know, you have to use
like 50 people to like power
a very small Toyota.
Perfect. I'll tell the bones crew.
But like, it's not just like
natural gas that passed through the straight.
This hasn't all been covered together yet
generally, but like all of this is affected.
Helium, most of it comes from guitar.
That's used for chip making. So,
what are you going to do
what you have to keep making
the new Blackwell chips?
The gamers are going to rise up
because I feel like,
I feel like genuinely
you think about 2016
and it's like the real gamer moment,
right, in the sense of like
gamer gay achieves
the sort of like political
win in the form of Donald Trump,
right?
All the sort of cultural stuff.
And now 10 years later,
the gamers have got nothing, right?
Their chips are fucked.
Even before all this,
their chips were fucked.
Ram just like doesn't really exist anymore.
The sort of like
professional gaming industry
has moved away from America, and America is not really doing very well in games in general.
And now this, like, I feel the gamer uprising may be the sort of consequence of all this, right?
Guess what else? If you want to, if you want to sort of carry on this particular line of
thinking, plastic is a, is a hydrocarbon byproduct. Like the feedstock that goes into making
plastic is a hydrocarbon byproduct. A lot of it comes from the Gulf. And that's like plastic food
containers. For example, the plastic elements of a Doritos bag, whatever.
Sing-use medical devices, I guess,
the plastic of a game controller.
Like 80% of this stuff comes from the golf.
And like imagine if you don't,
it's not just that you can't power anything.
It's that you also can't make anything
because you don't have any plastic.
And you can't grow anything
because 30% of global, like,
fertilizer imports come through the Gulf.
And like,
the UAE is a huge smelting hub for aluminum,
which is what all this shit is made out of.
So if you want to play games and eat Doritos,
all of the things that make that possible
are currently,
held up in this trade of Hormuz.
The modern world is held up in the
Strait of Hormuz. The gamer, the gamer
uprising is, it's right for this moment,
right? Like, look, Reza Polavi, right?
Had a dream of becoming, like, the leader of Iran.
That's not going to happen. But what I'm saying to
Reza Pahlavi is that, like, you have a constituency
of people who will kind of, like, stand behind you.
You just have to, like, it's for a different cause.
Rezapalavi, you should sort of, you know,
represent the gamers in their uprising
against the U.S. government.
But look, we're here to talk about Delve.
We're here to talk about Delve in their billboards and their strange business.
Wendy, can you tell us about some of what you have seen of Delve in the last year?
Yes.
Okay.
So Delve has, I will say, a very effective marketing campaign in the sense that they are everywhere.
Their billboards are already catching, at least to me, they're interesting, they're strange,
they're confusing.
They have billboards on these little ads all over all over all the buses that say things like
compliance done before your AI girlfriend breaks up with you.
Or compliance done before you're...
I know.
I know.
I know.
That is horrifying.
Compliance done before your co-founder drops what B2B SaaS taught me LinkedIn post,
something like that, you know?
And they had one that was really obnoxious.
That was like a checklist.
And it was like drop out of Stanford check.
Get into YC check.
Raise 50 million from A16D check.
And then the unchecked one is get compliance done with Delft.
Something like that.
You know, it's like they're playing into the mythology
of what it looks like to start a startup in the modern age.
I think they're trying to position themselves as a key part of that ecosystem.
They're trying to ride that wave.
And it's entirely just selling shovels in a gold rush.
Even more abstract than that, it's like selling food to the people who are selling shovels
during the gold rush.
It's so disconnected from anything actually real or valuable.
And one of the things that they were doing with their ads is they would have the logos of
other companies that were using them.
And I looked into all these companies.
And if you look at any of these companies, right,
it'll be like AI code review, AI lead generation, you know, like AI marketing automation.
It's all just like AI to do other things that are so, again, still disconnected.
And it's like how many levels down do you have to go before you get to something actually
valuable and real?
And it's, it just feels like it's this whole ecosystem of companies in the cloud.
So what Delve actually does, which they kind of say in their billboards, the billboards often
have a lot of confusing terminology and acronyms that are deliberately obscure.
but then they also mention Soctu, they mention HIPAA.
They're positioning themselves as this company that can do compliance fast.
And so, you know, they make it seem like everyone else is doing compliance in a really slow,
inefficient way.
But they, because they're young and scrappy and they have AI, they come along and they help
you do it in days, not in months.
And of course, to anyone who knows anything about compliance, that raises some red flex,
how do they do it so fast?
What corners are they cutting?
And then, of course, as we've seen in the last few days, they're cutting a lot of
corners, which isn't really surprising, but also still kind of shocking.
So much fun. I had so much fun looking at it. My jaw was glued. I think I mentioned they
said the top of the episode. My jaw was glued to the floor. It was, it was astonishing what
they claim. But let's go through it. So, and by the way, I'm sorry this is a little arcane,
but we can't not talk about it. The fact that this company was allowed any airtime at all
among serious investors,
serious like,
you know,
like purchasers of services
or even people selling fucking billboard
space. It is just a horrific
indictment of the venture capital
system as a way for allocating resources.
Yes. So it was founded in
2023 by two MIT
AI researchers, Karen Kausik,
who was, I need you to note this.
If you have a bingo card at home, Forbes 30
under 30.
He was a Forbes 30 under 30
like joining fucking Sam Bankman-Fried,
joining Elizabeth Holmes,
and how many other people have we talked about
who were Forbes 30 under 30 who have like,
and the fucking, the lady who sold the student financing app
to J.P. Morgan that turned out to just have no-rower.
Charlie Jarvitz, yeah.
Yes, she was Forbes 30 and 30.
It just has to be looked into.
But anyway, by these two MIT researchers,
Karin and Celine Kosalar,
they say, Delv uses AI agents to help companies
achieve and maintain compliance without the busy work. So Wendy referred to a few like,
like compliance frameworks. Like it's all a little bit arcane. But these are basically things where
you have to show that you're doing it. And then an auditor will say, yes, this person's compliant
with this framework. So like if you're a government, you can contract with them. If you're a
healthcare, if you do use healthcare data, you know that you can like work with them because
they are as secure as you are. It's basically just ways of credentializing what it is you're doing.
So people can work with you easily without having to investigate if you've like turned on
multi-factor authentication for your passwords.
They say, the platform now serves 500 plus companies across industries,
eliminating hundreds of hours of manual processes,
while helping them get certified faster,
backed by Insight Partners, Y Combinator,
funders club general catalysts and leading compliance executives.
So they raised $32 million in 2025 against the $300 million valuation.
That above text, by the way, was from Insight Partners,
which hilariously still has the copy up and accessible.
Based on what we talk about in the rest of this episode,
I think it's soon to be accessed only through the Internet Archive.
Yeah, actually, Riley, I checked last night,
and it looks like they've scrubbed,
they've scrubbed it from their website.
Whoopsie.
You predicted it. Your prediction was too good.
Venture capitalists only do this when they're like,
well, we've achieved our mission with this company.
I suppose we don't need to waste,
we don't need to waste valuable RAM on it anymore
now that no chips are being made.
So Insight Managing Director Pravi Nakiraju said,
since compliance touches every part of how business runs,
from scaling operations to closing deals to building customer trust,
M-Dash,
modernizing this function will modernize the entire generation.
M-Dash, that's what makes Delves approach so important.
I can't not see it now.
We can go through what it's supposed to do and what they actually did.
And again, like Wendy, I know you know about this as well.
But again, like when we talk about compliance, it sounds very dull.
And that's partly because like it is and they're trying to sex it up.
And when they, when someone's trying to sex up a dull process, you should always assume that
they're scamming you.
Always.
Yeah, I think a good analogy for this is, you know,
like a health inspector in restaurants where it's like it actually is really important to have a person
who could walk in at any given moment look around the restaurant check of their mice or make sure people
doing things properly like you kind of need an actual person there imagine if someone were to be like
we're going to do health inspectors but with AI and so what they do is like they have you send I don't
know like a photo or something of what's going on and you you upload like a photo of the food a photo of the
menu of photo of the people. And then some AI is just like check. You know, it's like that's,
that defeats the whole purpose. The point is to have the, the possibility of something
going wrong and being spotted. And it's like, these guys, these are just like children, right,
who dropped out of MIT, they see a shortcut they can take. They don't understand the purpose of this
system. Well, I think it's more than that, though, with what they claim to be able to do. I mean,
we'll go into it. But like most of what this would involve, right? Let's say the health
inspector analogy, as you say, is if you're saying, okay, well, we, we're a, we're some like technology
company provide, like, and we need to, we want to work with a hospital. We need to get HIPAA compliant
before that hospital will share medical information with us. Fine. So we're going to need to, like,
we have all these checklist of things we need to do. And then we're going to do them and then we
hire it. And then there's an auditor that comes in and says, yes, you've done that. Yes, you, all the evidence has
been given to me. So I can see this screenshot that says, of a little tick box in AWS that just says, have you
turned on MFA, yes. Okay, tick, you've turned on MFA. Great. And in reality, most of it'll be like,
okay, MFA is on for like 95% of people. We now have to go chase those other 5% of people to turn it on.
And then we're hippocompliant and then we can, you know, you get this done. And they're saying,
okay, well, to go back to your health inspector metaphor, what if instead of taking a bunch of
pictures of the kitchen and then saying, okay, well, there are no rats here? Our AI has seen no
rats. They will have an AI agent walk in, start taking pictures. And then you don't even have to do
that. So yeah, it'd be like, oh, you need to comply with GDPR. Great. We're going to hit a little
button. And then an AI agent, which is barely a real thing, is going to get to work,
automatically scanning everything about everything you're doing. It's going to create all of these
wonderful, you know, like artifacts. So here's a list of all your data sources and so on and so on.
And you need to comply with stock too. Great. We'll auto test your security controls.
take screenshots. We'll auto fix like patching issues and stuff. That's fucking crazy that they said
they do that. But like you said earlier, Wendy, right? These are people getting into a complex
industry deciding it can be done simply because they have contempt for it and don't understand it.
Their MIT dropouts in the Forbes 30 Unit 30 list starting a company that's being discussed in
this podcast, what could possibly go wrong? It feels a little bit like T-Moo for compliance. That's what
they're doing. You know, it's like you just, you look at the screenshots of what they provide and it's just
so shitty. Like, it's so obviously shitty and cobble together. The, you know, the report we're
looking at that leaked all the things that are going wrong. We see all these, like, Google spreadsheets,
Google Docs, the typos everywhere. Like, it's just so obviously terrible quality. And it is kind
of, I think what's impressive here. And what's really sad, and like you said, Riley, an indictment
of the VC ecosystem at the moment is that this company did manage to raise so much money. And in a way,
it's like, it was only 32 million compared to all these other AI companies, not even that much
money. That is also an indictment of the moment we're in now where this sort of TEMU for compliance
fly-by-night company can raise 32 million and that doesn't even feel like a lot of money because it is.
And we should we should think of it that way. If we calibrate it to earlier moments, you know,
even just like 10 years ago, I think 32 million would have seemed like a huge amount of money
for a company that was founded a few years ago and barely has anything to show.
That doesn't even have any underlying technology, which we're also going to get into. So basically,
what Delve says, right, is say, okay, look, you have to get Sok2 compliant. Cool. We've got an agent that's
going to do this. You don't need to re-engineer your back end to support like this being done with
AI because the whole point of AI agents is that it's a way to just wish away the problems with like
ever having to do any engineering because you can just be like, okay, well, it's a robot that
works in a physical setup that's meant to accommodate humans. So again, by the way, this is,
this claim is insane. The idea that like, I'm going to handle all my health information and the thing
that's going to see if it's being protected properly is like the quop robot, essentially,
that is able to like choose the right thing in a highly controlled structured experimental
environment, 14% of the time when Delve made their funding pitch. That was the widely known
benchmark and Insight Partners was still like, fuck it, 32 million. Why not? You know, take the money.
And, you know, this is, this is an insane claim. So they even claim like, okay, well, we have a
framework of security controls. We're going to send an AI agent through your environment,
not your test environment, your production environment.
It would like find servers,
maybe servers that hadn't been patched
or had passwords rotated.
Then it would just patch them,
which is also an insane claim.
And anybody listening to this with any kind of technical background
probably just barked like a dog in public and I'm sorry.
This is like, what I'm building,
when I'm driving at here is like,
if you were a venture capitalist who was even minimally technically minded,
you would have seen that that was lies.
You would have seen it was lies.
But again, like, you're not because last time Mark Andrieson touched a keyboard,
was when he was making Netflix or when he's like, you know, posting his epic essays or what have you.
These are no longer people who understand the nuts and bolts of what they're investing in.
I think, I mean, there's definitely that, but there's also the sense in which I think even if the
investors know that it's a lie, I think the market right now rewards a certain level of audacity and,
you know, fake it until you make it.
And, I mean, it's always been the case, but it feels like right now with anything that involves
the concept of AI, there's so much more of an appetite for a company that doesn't really know what it's doing.
that doesn't really have the right technology, but as long as the founders are really ambitious people,
they're going to raise money. You know, as long as they can pitch something, they're going to raise
money. And the idea is that, well, at some point, someone will figure out, you know, the tech will
just get better and then some sort of use case will emerge. And that is a really, really weird
behavior. Like, I think that is a thing I want to emphasize. Like, that's not how, it's kind of not
how it should be. And it's definitely now how it should be if the, if there's this much money at stake and
this much of a gap between the promises and the reality. And I think, I don't know, it's just,
it is such a weird moment that we're in where a company like Delve can have billboards all over
the city, raise all this money. All of its companies are basically other AI companies that don't
really do anything themselves or have, you know, grandiose claims. And there's a whole ecosystem
of which Delve is just like one tiny part that rests on this, um, this gap between what AI is
capable of doing in the moment and what is actually doing. Because, I mean, I'm sure as I'm sure we'll
go into it, but if we look at what Delve actually does and how little AI is, I was going to say,
let's do this next. Yes. And that's fucking crazy. It's okay, yeah, please, Riley, please go, go through it.
Oh my God. Okay. So, the reason I've sort of gone through like what ordinarily it would look like to try
to get compliant with something is like, okay, you first have to like go manually do things.
Talk to people. Look at stuff. Right. It's boring. It's repetitive. But that's how you feel.
find things like, oh, hey, we've accidentally left all of the pictures of people's like,
you know, broken legs or whatever on a publicly facing like internet of an open server.
Okay, well, we're going to have to fix that, obviously.
What they say is, okay, we're going to just do this automatically with an agent.
What they actually did, and this is so, so, so fun is they would, um, they would just
auto generate all of the, they would auto generate fake evidence.
They'd be like, oh yeah, here's your board meeting minutes that you didn't have.
because, I don't know, let's say it's TF, like this trash future, right?
It would generate our board meeting when we decided our security policy.
We don't have a board.
We've never written that kind of policy.
Background checks for employees that we didn't perform.
It would show us having completed full vulnerability scans 20 minutes after we signed up.
And there's just a big box that says, you are now certified.
And then 90 days later, you get an, quote, independent U.S.-based auditor report through where the leaked spreadsheet of 493 companies,
492 of them, the auditor reports were just,
find, replace identical documents that even had like the same spelling mistakes in the same places.
I really liked the phrase I use, which is, this is an incredibly high quality report.
And it's like every person gets that email saying that it's an incredibly high quality report.
That kills me.
Yeah.
Oh, this is so good.
And so like there was never an AI or the AI that there might have been would have been to like
automatically generate fake reports that an auditor based out of a post office in India would
then send back to you saying,
congratulations, you're compliant.
And what I find really ironic is, you know,
you note this a few times that like their client
bases other fake companies largely
pretending to do stuff. You know, one of their
clients was, Cluelly.
Cluelly.
Clue is not, all that
cheating that you're doing through Cluelly,
none of it is protected by anything.
I mean, is anyone surprised?
Are we said, like, isn't that
what we expect from them? Isn't this
the Cluelly way, you know,
just to, I don't know. I mean, the other companies got Whisper. What a, just bland, lovable.
They're all, first of all terrible names, terrible products. Just everything about them is terrible.
I think the other thing that we should, we should at least mention is if you look at the fake addresses,
because all these companies, it's like they have, they've registered addresses in the U.S.,
sometimes in the UK. They had, there's one in Canada. It looks like there's one in Canada that was like a
vape store, which was amazing. And then there's a Wyoming address, which was the same registered mail
address that a lot of scammers use. And so the people in that town are like, oh my God,
it's so frustrating that all these scammers are signed up, you know, it makes her town look bad.
But it's like, it's just, it's, there's nothing real about it. There's, it's all virtual.
It's all just like this sort of, you know, shell game, these like shell corporations.
And I think that's what's kind of amazing because that on the one hand feels very wicy.
It feels very much like what a lot of YC companies try to do just, you know, fake it till you make it.
And it completely violates the spirit of what this company is supposed to do because compliance
is supposed to be about more than just faking and telling me. It's supposed to be about integrity,
about ensuring that things are done properly. I think that's what's so funny. I think that's what's
so interesting about this specific case because they're operating in an industry where the whole
idea of it is about ensuring that things are done well. And they're deliberately trying to do things as
not well as possible for the purpose of making a lot of money, building some sort of empire. I mean,
they talk about expanding into other areas like cybersecurity and it's like guys please don't expand like
you have nothing to offer beyond this sort of like team who ass model of how to do anything but that is
their whole business model and I think that is probably how they pitched it like we um you know it's like
they they probably pitch it and I think investors probably understood that these guys don't really have
anything real but that eventually they will and it just feels like um a giant wrecking ball going through
society and, you know, just knocking down all these things that have been built and refashioning
that were like building out of the rubble, this sort of awful, you know, inferior version with the
purpose of just distributing profit among a smaller group of people who went to MIT.
Yeah, I mean, you, you want to sort of combine a couple of, a couple of things together, right?
We're in the era of the ends of things, right?
The era of cheap commercial air travel.
It's over.
the era of, I just sort of assume, and again, when I say trust, I don't mean trust to be good people,
trust to be non-exploitative, but just trust to be regulated by things that will force them,
whether or not they want to, to like, protect my medical information, right?
All of this is being undermined by the same stuff because that those things were boring,
those things weren't exciting.
And the whole idea that these quite like, again, I say respectable, advisedly, they don't mean
respectable to mean, great, I mean respectable to mean they have authority.
authorities, whether that's, you know, Trump and this and the administration saying, oh, yeah,
well, we're going to be gone in three weeks. Everything's going to be fine again. You're all going
to be able to take short haul flights. It's going to be, it's going to be cool. Don't worry. Don't
worry about the TSA people. Or whether that's like these, you know, tech lord investors say, oh,
yeah, it's securing, yeah, your medical information, whatever. That's like, we're doing this
a new way now. And it's just, it's like a body that is starving and consuming its own muscle, right?
It is the stuff that made the thing kind of reproduce itself.
You know, again, not saying the reproduction was good,
but the stuff that made it actually function is getting eaten by the same kinds of motives.
And it's happening in the same way, which is like people in power don't know or don't care what it is that they're doing.
Yeah, I think what we're saying, and I think this really does connect everything we've been talking about with Polymarket, Delve and, you know, Airlines.
I mean, it really does feel like there are all these things that are.
kind of, there's sort of like replicas of things that already exist, but shittier and less regulated
and less good for the world. I mean, I think we're seeing this in every sector. I mean,
the Shianification of everything, right? It's like you, there's so much money to be made in
producing products that are much worse than what already exists and, but, you know, more
convenient. I think you can kind of see AI in that vein as well. And it is just really disheartening
to look at the world that we've built that all these other people around us.
have built and see what is happening to it. And it's sort of cannibalizing itself because we have just
too much capital swirling around the system, looking to make a quick buck. And it's, I mean,
it's like, I don't want to be too pessimistic because, I mean, well, this is kind of a pessimistic
podcast. But at the same time, it's like it's, it's like, it's like, we did all this for what,
you know, it's like people, people pour their lives into building things. And, you know, it's like,
we have a whole economy that's structured around work and people building things at work. And it's like,
what for what everything is just getting worse, you know? And the only people who are benefiting from
it are the sort of the people who get to party on Epstein's Island, right? It's like, it's, it's,
it's like we're doing all this for what? Um, what is the point of any of this? And it is really,
uh, enough to kind of just make you despair. I mean, you know when this is, again, sometimes I
say stuff as laser targeted to Hussein, but when I, when I look at the economy behaving this way,
what you're, what you're talking about, right? The, this just replace, this. There's,
shineification, teamification of everything.
And you look at this, especially at the way that the AI is being driven into things,
whether that's movie making, whether that's writing, or even whether that's like non-creative
stuff, not obvious stuff, like Soctu compliance, all of it.
I'm put in mind of Tetsuo at the end of Akira.
Yeah, that's right.
You got me.
You got me.
Very good.
At the end of Akira, if you've seen Akira, this is, the Tetsuo is growing.
in every direction. And he is crushing, he's literally crushing the people inside of his like
rapidly expanding body. And it's quite grotesquose, it's quite grotesque, monstrous mutation.
But where he becomes this gigantic, all-consuming baby that's made of just whatever's around him,
that just is completely unstable under its own weight and melts in a way that destroys everything
around it. Like, we're living, what delve and cluelie and all of this,
Hollymark, all this fake shit represents is the
tetsuification of everything that these things touch.
Yeah, except Tetsu, the big, big Tetsu is kind of cool and interesting, and these guys are not.
Yeah, at least Big Tetsu is cool to look at.
And also is very much the case of just like, well, at least big Tessu is doing something
in service to like Vessori and stuff.
But these guys are sort of like, they're kind of growing, but they're not.
I think I was going to make this point, I think I think, like, Wendy's point just about
like, I mean, generally, it's just like how, like, they can't, they emerge out of an existing
fiction and their job is to sort of like continuing, continue to spin this fiction.
Like, there is an extent to which everyone sort of, you know, admittedly wouldn't sort of know
what's going on, but no one can really say.
No one's really allowed to say that, hey, like, this stuff doesn't really work or it's fake or,
like, they doesn't really sort of serve a purpose.
But, like, I think the biggest thing is, it's like, it's objective.
It does not sort of solve.
It's like they'd sort of say an objective.
But I think, you know, one of the.
this sort of big issues at this point is like, you know, in a lot of ways these companies are
allowed to exist. And I guess this is like the interesting, this is where it sort of diverts
away from like your ferrinosis and stuff because it's like, well, Ferranos kind of purported
to do something but it didn't do. And the sort of scandal was how it obfuscated that, but like it was
always sort of held, you know, ultimately it would, like this obfuscation would always kind of come
back to bite them in the ass because it was like, well, you promised this thing and it didn't work
and you sort of did a lot of kind of crime in order to sort of like pretend the
that wasn't the case. But I think with these guys, like, what's sort of worse about it is because
they already exist within a system in which everyone is producing fake stuff anyway, no one can
really sort of say to them, hey, what you're doing isn't a real thing. You're like creating of
creating a fiction because they're not, they're contributing to a larger fiction that everyone
sort of has to sort of believe in because the moment that they don't or the moment that the tide
sort of turns, everything collapses. I'll take it and turn it a little bit, which is that
they are falling apart because they couldn't do the fiction well enough.
Right. Okay. Fine. Yeah. But to your point, right, if you're at Insight Partners and these guys walk in, right, they say, we're going to do AI agents for SOX2 compliance. We have all these witty billboards and we're going to put like, I don't know, Deloitte or whatever out of a job. Then they're like, okay, yeah, great. We'll fund that. If you're the person who says, hold on, let me look at how you do that. Then what you're doing is you're, you're,
going to send them to the next guy who is going to invest and they're going to allocate the capital.
So you're incentivized to believe the fiction. It just, the problem is the fiction has to be good
enough that maybe someone could believe it. And it's like these guys, it's a little, and there are a lot
of other examples like it. I always think about we work as you guys were 5% too lazy and 5% too weird
to get away with your gigantic scam. These guys, it's the same thing. You are actually too lazy.
to do a good enough plausible fake company to get away with this scam for a little while longer.
You only got like a year out of it.
This amateur hour.
They could have spent maybe like 500K less on billboards and 500K more on just like a slightly more reputable registered address in Wyoming.
You know, and it would probably would have been better.
Like just they could have allocated their money just like a little bit better.
And I think, I mean, what's kind of funny here is that once you see the scam that this company is,
it really makes you wonder all the other companies that rely on them that have used them,
to a degree are they scams too?
And is this just the tip of the iceberg?
And I do wonder if any of that's going to come out.
It's also funny because RSA is this week.
It's like a big security conference in San Francisco.
And Delve was supposed to be there.
It looks like maybe they're not going to be there.
It's sort of unclear.
But I feel like this is probably going to talk at the conference.
And I wonder what else is sort of under that,
what comprises the body of this giant iceberg that is maybe about to
notes or something.
Like we talk about before that is that the other thing AI represents is the dream of
executives, which is to do, it's just to produce things, even though something like,
like compliance is so abstract, like for its role in production, right?
It still has something, which is that it enables people like work together easily.
It's super, super, super abstract and like very, very far away from like any kind of value,
but like it is there.
It does do something.
So I want to go back to insight writing about delve, which by the way, you can't find
anymore because they deleted it all of it.
this was actually posted on the LinkedIn.
As you know, I'm very committed to being a hater.
And I will go on someone's LinkedIn and find embarrassing things they've done.
In this case, Insight Partners, managing director, Devin Parek, took Karin Kauschik from Delv for a conversation with Satya Nadella on the importance of building and deploying AI that businesses can trust and people can rely on.
And there's a big picture of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft shaking hands with this kid, being like, yes, you're the future of trust in organization.
And he knew.
Oh, God.
It's like, and fucking, like, Parak knew that what, that he, that he, that he didn't know what
was going on to the hood.
He doesn't want to know because that means, like, the opportunity to make money is going
to walk out the door.
And, like, fucking Karin Kowshik, he knew that he was promising things that based on current
technology cannot happen, right?
There is no way an AI agent, again, this sounds a bit arcane.
There's no way that an AI agent can wander through a bunch of, like, servers patching stuff
without like saying that's what's happening.
That would be insane if that happened.
It would be,
that would be genuinely crazy.
That's not doable.
And the idea that it's like,
oh yeah,
it doesn't matter what you use.
Like,
our AI agents are so perfect.
Like,
no,
we talked about AI agents before.
You turn them on
and they start ordering eggs for you to a house that you don't live in.
Like,
this is literally what they do.
And then,
but it's being like,
okay,
well,
but I know that I'm,
they may be sometime in the future,
someone's going to figure it out,
and then all have been here first and I'm going to get rich.
and everyone has an incentive to believe one another, right?
Everyone has an incentive to believe one another.
And no one has an incentive to ask any questions.
Everybody's just like, if we all just smile,
look at the camera and shake hands,
hopefully we will be rescued by something else.
There it is.
Yeah, yeah.
There's this whole ecosystem where all the incentives are
to just keep building, keep pretending.
There's really no way to verify it.
And even if there was, no one really wants to
because they all want to keep this thing going.
And I think it's, in some ways, it's like we can look at it from a distance and kind of make fun of it and laugh at it.
But I think we can't forget that this is just like, this is like our world.
You know, like these are the people who are taking the real money that has been generated by the people who have been working in, you know, on this planet, creating things.
And this money is being allocated towards these people who are not doing anything that is good for the world.
And I like, it's such an elementary point, but I cannot stress this enough.
and I think that is a thing we should be mad about.
It's kind of crazy making to just, especially for me, living in San Francisco,
seeing all these stupid billboards all the time,
and just remembering that all of the money here is being funneled towards these stupid,
pointless, awful things that are just making the world worse.
If they're doing that, if they're doing anything, they're making the world worse.
They're all, you know, they're all about how can we, how can we do customer service without
increasing headcount, which just means like shitty AI generated customer service and firing people
in the process. And it's like they're not even pretending that they're trying to make the world
better anymore. I think that is the weird, the other weird thing we should note. There is kind of a
vibe shift since the kind of 2010s era of techno optimism where it feels like people back then
were at least saying they wanted to make the world better. And now I don't know if anyone is even
trying to say that. They're like, they're not even talking about anything as grand and abstract
as that. It's all just like, here's how we use AI to streamline your business processes without
increasing headcount. It's always about increasing headcount. It's always about profit margins and
revenue and costs. And there's no pretense of doing anything bigger. And I wonder, you know,
I wonder how far this goes. Like how far can this keep going before people stop accepting the tech
sector as the kind of the keystone of the economy? Like how he felt like they were, maybe the tech
industry felt like it had to legitimate itself for a while. And now it's like it's dropped any
attempt to legitimate itself. And so how long can this go? How long can the hype and the bubble
and the scam go on before people get set up.
And they're like, why do we need all of our money to go into this stupid scan-filled industry?
I mean, you know, you say, oh, it's, we're all about doing things that are increasing
headcount.
It's expensive to pay people.
It's just expensive to do anything.
And you realize, well, we don't have to do anything.
All the do, only suckers do stuff.
We don't want to do.
We just want to own.
But it's like, it's so strange because entrepreneurship is supposed to be the thing that
legitimates capitalism, right?
it's supposed we have this idea that you put money into, especially, you know, with the whole Y-C
myth, you put money into these smart MIT dropouts and they'll create useful things that will make
the world's a better place. That's the whole myth. And it's like, we're at the stage where
it is sort of like the sort of vulture stage or the almost like auto-cannibalist stage where
they're not even, they're undermining themselves. They're undermining the whole
mythology behind everything they do. And it's, you know, it's just so strange. It feels so short-sighted.
and I just don't know how long this can go on.
But I don't know, maybe it can go on for a long time.
I don't know.
That's kind of a scary thing to consider.
I suppose it's like systems like this can go on until they become decrepit, right?
How long could the like banking sector, you know, of the 1980s and 90s go on until it became
decrepit?
Well, it went on until about 2008 and then it fundamentally changed.
You know, it's a, but how long can this go on until it becomes decrepit?
Well, it certainly threw its lot in with people who can prove it.
protect it politically, but God fucking knows how long it can go on before it just is pushed over
and replaced by something else. But, you know, in every case, but I think the cycles are just
getting faster where the new productive paradigm comes along. And then it is at some point in that
paradigm, it just gets more and more efficient at creating growth with like the fully fictitious
companies now that are being created with AI or the rise of gambling or whatever as part of all
of society. It's getting so efficient it can produce growth with no inputs, right? It's like a,
it's like a black hole of incredulity where no piece, no work can enter or leave. It's just,
it's just numbers and stories. And the suckers who don't live in Elysium can go on and do the
stuff, whether that's taking a screenshot of an MFA password or flipping a hamburger or
teaching a class or doing a surgery. It's like, no, it's all,
These things that make life happen are for rubs and suckers.
And I mean,
Sunti,
you can almost see it as like courtly rituals,
right?
Where instead of creating justifications for their own power,
what guys like Andresen and Musk and the companies that they choose to fund do
is they are merely engaged in displays to one another of power.
There's no more legitimation.
It's just rituals that reinforce their power among one another of this existing sort of,
rulership,
legitimation is gone.
The idea that you have to do something is,
I don't know,
it's for the birds.
Because you just tell a story now.
You just tell a fun story
that says to,
that says you too,
you executive at some company
that,
you know,
does something,
that makes movies say,
because we talk a lot about
AI and film,
you can have the efficiency
that we do.
You can have the efficiency
of growth without production
because you can just wish it
and it will happen.
You, startup founder,
or a company that sort of wants to handle medical information.
You just wish that you were compliant with all these, you know, very abstract frameworks.
And it'll happen.
Don't worry.
It's just people in the club inventing numbers that they have.
That's it.
I want to say one thing, like, we read one thing about Insight writing about Delve, which is so fucking arrogant.
This has now also been scrubbed on their website as far as I'm aware.
Maybe it's got backup.
I don't know.
Customers were as obsessed with Delve's pitch as our team at Insight was.
startups posted their SOC2 certification announcements on LinkedIn, publicly thanking Delve for making the process
painless. Oh no, no. That's got to hurt because they've just lost a lot of business. Founders went out
of their way to recommend Delve within founder networks, incubator communities, and so on. These companies
saw Delves abstracting away the remediation and monitoring work that frustrated them for so long,
thus turning compliance into a low-cost, low-effort process. Again, it's frustrating because it's hard.
that doesn't mean it's nothing.
It means it's hard.
And maybe it's worth something.
But if you are these people,
you are not able to comprehend
that if something is hard, that might be good.
If something is difficult,
that might mean,
doesn't mean you have to outsmart it.
You might just have to have some domain knowledge
that you don't have.
I think this is just the sort of extreme end
of the kind of YC model
where the idea is like,
anytime you look at an industry
and you see something that seems inefficient,
this is your chance to disrupt it.
and to create a platform that takes all the money in that industry and you have this kind of
modern YC brain approach. And like that's, it kind of works in some ways, although of course
we know that there are all these terrible side effects that are produced often in terms of labor.
You know, it just conditions get worse for workers. Quality gets worse for consumers. But this is kind of
the logical endpoint of everything that people like Paul Graham advocate. And it's weird because
I'm sure it probably seems weird for people like that to look in with these founders.
are doing and to see it that way. But I think what these, you know, it's like they're young.
They're, they dropped out of college. They've never really been in the real world. They're
interpreting the words of investors and people in the startup ecosystem and they're filtering
it out and they're, this is what they're getting, right? They're getting that, okay, we have to go
into this industry and find a way to modernize it, which means just cutting out the stuff that we
don't think matters. And we're going to raise money from people and we're going to create a platform
underneath everything. I mean, this is the YC dream, right? This is what everyone wants to
to do. This is what's incentivized. And I think that's, that's kind of the thing we should remember
here that this is what, this is what the investor ecosystem is incentivizing at the moment and that
Delve is the logical endpoint of that, right? And all these other companies have some aspects of what
we see going on with Delve. All the companies that rely on Delve, if they're using Delve in the
first place, you know, they have to be cutting corners. They have to see the value in cutting
corners. And it's like, of course, we all know this. But at the end of the day, it's, there's
nothing we can do about it. I think that is the frustration.
thing to see this whole ecosystem of fraudulent or sketchy flyby night companies taking all this
money all around us and just to feel like there's nothing we can really do about it except just to
watch this happen watch it happen or have it happen to you you can't pick your hospitals like cloud
storage provider you can't pick their auditor so it just it just it just happens to you uh so the
insight goes on with del we knew we were betting on the team that could reinvent compliance they
sort of did, I suppose. Covered and Celine have a special combination of entrepreneurial
scrappiness, customer dedication, and technical acumen. They built integrations that
customers requested overnight. They hand-delivered 10,000 donuts to early adopters as a
marketing move. One customer told us, this team will die for you. So we are thrilled to lead
Delve's $32 million series A. If you're an executive looking to get and stay at compliance seamlessly,
be sure to check out Delve, to which I of course added the final editorialized sentence.
We sure fucking didn't.
Anyway, look, last word, Wendy, and then I think we're going to wrap up.
I guess, yeah, my last thought is, you know, like Riley, like you were saying that, you
and I don't have a choice. I guess consumers, we don't have a choice. I think here we see this weird
paradox of the free market where the idea, I mean, the whole idea behind government stepping back,
letting markets regulate themselves is like, well, companies can kind of, you know, the free market
somehow magically works. Customers will just choose different companies, you know, it was just
there's some sort of magical mechanism by which everything will sort of become, the best will rise to the top, whatever.
And I think what we're seeing now is there is a limitation to that, especially as companies are getting bigger and more complicated, more obfuscated, and you have all these complicated supply chains that rely on technology that no one really understands, no one is really in a place to observe and to audit even.
And so it really does feel like we're reaching the end of days of this kind of the free market will regulate itself mythology.
Like that doesn't seem, it doesn't seem like it really holds up.
but it doesn't really feel true in an era of giant monopolies of these really complicated products
and, you know, just like these supply chains that aren't really visible to anyone,
and where there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no,
there's no locus of, uh, changing anything for anyone on the outside. And I wonder what,
you know, I would, I, the question I have is like, how much worse does this get?
Because I don't think we've reached the bottom yet. And I think we have, uh, only a more
trash future to expect, unfortunately.
Would you say it's time for people to,
crack each other's heads open and start feasting on the goo inside.
Anyway, look.
Yes, exactly.
And hey, you can apply the same logic to private credit, by the way.
Awesome.
Especially private credit now that interest rates have gone up.
And suddenly, some companies are going to be unable to service all those debts that
they've taken on to keep going while not having any business.
Awesome.
Anyway, anyway, that's a whole other different part of the economy, which is equally fake.
Wendy, thank you so much for coming on.
It's always a delight to talk to you.
As a reminder, where can people find you?
Yes, I write a column for Bay Area Current about billboards,
about the strange, bizarre, awful tech billboards I have to see every day.
And I also have a personal website, DellSystem.m.
And you can also find me on Instagram, Twitter, blue sky, whatever, just all at DellSystem.
Wonderful.
Anyway, we will see you on the bonus episode in a couple short days.
Bye, really.
