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- [00:01]
Jordy
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, March 17th. It's St. Patrick's Day. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome.
- [00:09]
Tyler
The temple of technology, the fortress of finance.
- [00:12]
Jordy
Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let me also tell you about Shopify because that's why I have this green suit. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, Happy agents, happy sellers.
- [00:31]
Tyler
St Patrick's Day. We are not drinking Guinness currently, but we hope that you are.
- [00:38]
Jordy
Yeah, enjoy it. Very exciting. I haven't seen a lot of St. Patrick's Day posts on the timeline. What's going on? We gotta step it up. I feel like we should have planned much, much more, but it seems like Tyler is in the St Patrick's Day mood and is wearing a fantastic St Patrick's Day hat.
- [00:57]
Intern Tyler
I'm thinking my hat.
- [00:59]
Jordy
How did you wind up here? That's a nice hat. Where did that come from? Did we just have that?
- [01:06]
Intern Tyler
No, I had this.
- [01:07]
Jordy
Oh, you just.
- [01:07]
Tyler
You had it. You had it handy.
- [01:09]
Jordy
You just daily drive that?
- [01:10]
Intern Tyler
Yeah.
- [01:11]
Jordy
Okay. Yeah. It wasn't in your car?
- [01:13]
Carried No Interest
Yeah.
- [01:14]
Tyler
You wore it to the gym this morning.
- [01:15]
Jordy
Okay. Oh, yeah.
- [01:16]
Shemsankar
Cool.
- [01:16]
Jordy
Yeah. Apparently gotta wear green. Jordy's going with a little bit of a darker green today, but we will still be having fun. Let's pull up the linear lineup, show you who we have on the show today carried no interest. The. The anonymous poster is coming on the show at 11:45. Then Shemsankar from Palantir Technologies is coming for a massive book launch. We're very excited about that. And then we have a lightning round going through cybersecurity. Ceramic AI. We have Gecko Robotics on the show. I don't know how familiar you are with Gecko Robotics, but it's a very, very interesting company where they crawl up oil and gas infrastructure literally like geckos, and will inspect everything. There's a lot more to the business.
- [01:52]
Tyler
So, like, humans in gecko outfits crawling around?
- [01:56]
Jordy
No, robots.
- [01:56]
Tyler
Robots, yeah.
- [01:57]
Jordy
Okay. They've been doing robots for a long time.
- [01:58]
Tyler
Okay.
- [02:00]
Jordy
Well, linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. So in the news, the Wall Street Journal has an article about. This is a scoop from Berber Gin. We didn't have to break down the paywall because we get a copy of the Wall street journal every day. Although I don't know if this particular piece made it into the print edition today, it might be in the print edition tomorrow. But Berber Ginn has a Scoop. He says OpenAI's Fijisimo told staff last week that the company could not afford to be distracted by sidequests. Main quest only. Main quest only. What is the main quest? Probably just scaling compute, but we'll get into that and there's a whole bunch of takes back and forth, said the company execs are actively looking at areas to deprioritize. Of course, throughout last year OpenAI launched a ton of different initiatives across consumer hardware. And I think a lot of people are starting to say like okay, like do you want to be fighting a battle on all these different fronts or do you want to just really nail consumer, nail enterprise? And now that is what they are signaling internally. So from the Wall street journal article, OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do everything all at once strategy has put them on on the defensive. Fiji Semo OpenAI, CEO of Applications, previewed the changes to employees at an all hands meeting, telling them that top leaders including Sam Altman and Mark Chen were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks. We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. Side quests is the key term there. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. I was listening to a podcast with the head of ChatGPT last night and there were a bunch of things. Yeah, Nick Turley just talking about like it's such a weird product surface area because people come to it from all these different reasons. So how you prioritize things within there like images and chatgpt clearly very important. That was a separate app at one point. It got rolled in to good success. Nanobanana was also sort of like a okay, everyone should download this particular app because you're gonna get the best frontier image model for a while. Sora.
- [04:16]
Tyler
Yeah, we had talked about this a while back and it seems to be confirmed now that Sora's functionality will just end up in the main ChatGPT app.
- [04:25]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. So last year OpenAI announced an array of new products including the video generator Sora, a web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device, and e commerce features for ChatGPT. Some of those are wildly different timelines for these things yeah, and remember during
- [04:45]
Tyler
this time, that's when I started talking about viewing OpenAI's activities like they were a hyperscaler. When Google launches a new product, you don't have to assume that, hey, it's going to work every single time. And in fact, it's the exact opposite. A lot of these experiments don't end up going anywhere. It's fine. And OpenAI, again, you have this massively scaling core business. You start to say, hey, let's experiment in a bunch of these different areas. Some of them are going to work, some aren't, it's okay. But then ultimately that creates a scenario where you're sort of like opening up maybe too many fronts to the competition. Right. You're competing with meta and social, with Sora, you're competing with, with Google in some ways, you're competing with even like the Microsoft's of the world in other ways. And ultimately this just feels like, hey, let's like narrow the fronts. And I think a lot of people expected something like this for the last few months.
- [05:50]
Jordy
OTB in the chat is surfacing. A very interesting old take from Ben Thompson about OpenAI should not be in the API business. And now based on the way things look originally that was like, oh wait, well, maybe Microsoft will be able to handle and scale the API demand. But API demand has been so huge and it's allowed Anthropic to develop such a solid business there that it's undeniable that OpenAI should also be in the API business especially.
- [06:17]
Tyler
Yeah, the other side of that is like they clearly need to be in the harness business too, which is why Codex is.
- [06:23]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. And so the hyperscaler, like your take of think about OpenAI as the new hyperscaler. I think the takes aged extremely well, especially with recent interviews with Dylan Patel and Dorkesh Jensen just went on Strathery. There's a whole bunch of new data points that show how compute constrained we are, how tricky it will be, how chips will be the key bottleneck. There was that interesting story that Tyler was recounting from Dylan Patel about how the TPU was developed by the TPU team. DeepMind didn't realize how important it was going to be, how compute constrained they were going to be. So the TPU went and sold it to anthropic and then DeepMind went back to them and was like, wait, wait, wait, we want those chips, we need the chips. And so there's this like the hyperscaler phrase is really, really important in that it designates not just A big consumer company or a big business. It's particularly about the ability to marshal compute at hyperscale. And so I was interested to look at like the history of sidequests among MAG7 companies, among trillion dollar tech companies because it's all over the place and so it's very hard to paint with a broad brush. I think right now there's a huge narrative around like OpenAI was doing way too many side quests. They need to do zero side quests. And the reality is probably like, you know, we've seen this with Riley Walls joining the Labs team. Like there will be small projects, there will be acquisitions, there will be a continuum of bets. There's just a level of refocusing that's going on right now and reorganization. And this has happened at many, many.
- [08:01]
Tyler
Yeah. And I think the bet with the OpenAI Labs team is you have a really small group of people that are focused on creating or being quick to new product like approaches. But that can be again like a two pizza team. And that type of experimentation is going to make more sense if the rest of the companies needs to refocus on enterprise and the core business.
- [08:24]
Jordy
Yeah. Tyler, is that data point you shared earlier like public about the size of that particular team? I didn't want to mention it if it was. Yeah, I think it's.
- [08:33]
Intern Tyler
People know it.
- [08:34]
Jordy
Okay.
- [08:34]
Intern Tyler
People know at one point it was very small.
- [08:35]
Jordy
It was like six people.
- [08:37]
Intern Tyler
Also I was going to say, I think now that you have so many neolabs doing these kind of like weird like kind of moonshot research projects, I think it also you know, adds to this thing where like maybe you don't actually need people internally doing those same things. You can just acquire them if they work.
- [08:49]
Jordy
Yep. Yeah, we got to get into that conspiracy theory later. But there's this idea of like all the neolabs teaming up to marshal together. We got to dig into that. Anyway, history of sidequests in tech. Can we paint with a broad brush here? Spoiler alert. I think the answer is no. But there are some fascinating stories. So Google has a balloon Internet platform that's a serious company called Project Loon where they inflate balloons that go into the stratosphere. I believe they go high up and then they deliver Internet sort of competitive Starlink. Some promising stuff there.
- [09:26]
Tyler
They also have the Fiber Play too.
- [09:28]
Jordy
Fiber Play? Oh yeah, they just sold that. People are so upset about that because dealing with your ISP is one of the roughest things ever. I've had such a bad time with various ISPs oftentimes I would. Running a small business, running a startup, I would put it on my personal account and then I would have like six lines for like different people and then one of them wouldn't get paid and I'd get sent to collections for like.
- [09:54]
Carried No Interest
That happened to you.
- [09:55]
Tyler
The only time I've ever had like some issue was I returned the router and then even though I still had an active account, just another line with them, they were like, you didn't return it. We billed you.
- [10:12]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [10:13]
Tyler
And somehow, Nick, are we still paying
- [10:15]
Jordy
Internet at the Jonathan Club or did we fix that? I sent you this.
- [10:21]
Carried No Interest
We canceled the plan.
- [10:22]
Jordy
You did, but we haven't returned the equipment. I returned the equipment. Okay, we're definitely getting, we're definitely getting fleeced for sure. But that is the status quo. And it was awesome when Google was just handling it with Google level service.
- [10:37]
Tyler
But hard to sell ads against, hard
- [10:38]
Jordy
to sell it again. So they divest it, I guess. But that's not even close to the weirdest thing. The weirdest Google side project that I found is they make a contact lens that will tell you how drunk you are. I'm not kidding about this. Google, they have a project, it does more than that. It's supposed to do biometrics and it can do a lot of different things, but one of the things that it can measure, it can measure glucose in your tears, it can measure any sort of biomarker that's in your tears, which apparently is like a rich source of data. But one of them is blood alcohol level. So you can put in this contact lens from Google and it will tell you how drunk driving. Jarvis, am I drunk?
- [11:18]
Tyler
Am I good?
- [11:19]
Jordy
Am I good? Am I good to drive?
- [11:20]
Tyler
You're absolutely not.
- [11:21]
Jordy
He's like, sir, you should take a Waymo tonight. Would you like me to connect? You see, this is all part of the plan. They're going to stop people from drunk driving, give them waymos. It works. So that was a weird one. They also briefly owned Boston Dynamics, but most Importantly, they bought DeepMind, which was completely seen as like this wild card side project. How does that fit in? You know, it's a bunch of researchers. And then it became like the most
- [11:42]
Tyler
critical thing in Amazon has taken tons of shots at drone related delivery and home security stuff. They also own Twitch, but they never really linked the site to live shopping and closed that loop.
- [11:54]
Jordy
Have you thought that that's weird?
- [11:55]
Tyler
Jassy doesn't do earnings calls.
- [11:57]
Jordy
He doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch. She should. And A lot of the looks maxing live streamers have decamped to a different platform.
- [12:03]
Tyler
Let me get some W's, Let me get some W's in the chat for
- [12:08]
Jordy
this quarter for this Capex guide. Let me get some W's in the chat for the Capex guide.
- [12:14]
Tyler
Of course, Apple tried to build a
- [12:15]
Jordy
car, then pulled out. Who knows where the Apple Vision Pro goes? Although of course I hope it continues. I'm hoping for another Apple Vision Pro. Apple Vision Air. Just make it lighter, same screen. That, that's the trick. Make it like 1000 bucks. I think it'll sell. And they have a bunch of health moonshots. They've been working on non invasive glucose monitoring, which is, there's some book about it called the White Whale of Biotech or something. It's something that people have been working on for so long and they've never been able to crack it. They've worked on this. The best thing I think they have is that you can get a continuous glucoma. Thank you for the W's in the chat, by the way. There's a lot of W's in the chat. You can get a continuous glucose monitor that is invasive, meaning it is pricking you. It is measuring your blood and then calculating the amount of glucose in that that's helpful for continuous glucose monitoring. There's a number of companies that do that in sort of a D to C realm levels. There's a number of biotech companies that offer that as like a healthcare product. And you can wirelessly connect that now to your Apple Watch. But they can't do it in the Apple Watch. There's always been the question about like, could you just shine a light through your skin and detect the blood, the glucose in the blood. Very, very difficult to do. Potentially always possible. Everyone thought, oh, it doesn't break the laws of physics. Lots of money spent with little to show for it. At least so far, Meta is probably the most egregious side quest.
- [13:37]
Tyler
They don't do side quests. They do full quests.
- [13:38]
Jordy
They create side quests in VR. There's actually one of the popular games. It's all about doing side quests. And yeah, I mean they bought Oculus, they bought a bunch of VR studios, they rolled everything up, they renamed the company, spent tens of billions of dollars on what is starting to feel like less of a side quest, but still is so early. You know, the Meta ray bans are like a success, but to the tune of millions of units, not, you know, billions of units or anything. Like that or hundreds of millions of units. I think the iPhone has an install base over a billion now. And the ramp from here to there on Meta Ray Bans is going to be long. Tesla launched a premium tequila in a lightning bolt shaped bottle. So, you know, it comes for all different Max 7 companies. That one's more of a stunt. But truly side quests come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just good for morale. It's just fun. We do side quests here all day long. TVPN simulator, that's a side quest. What was the other simulator? Jeremy Gifon simulator. That was a side quest. They're just fun. Some of them are good for marketing, good for attention, good for fun. Some are complete dumpster fires where you just pour money in and it just sucks all resources and you get nothing out. And then some reshape businesses entirely. DeepMind's a great example and there's certainly others in the Mag 7 that have really, really changed the business.
- [15:00]
Tyler
Gabe said, seems like the entire boring company is a side quest.
- [15:03]
Jordy
Yeah, it's technically a separate company, but Elon's king of side quest.
- [15:07]
Tyler
Although I think, yeah, I mean it just feels like the company that gets the least amount of attention that's not on the critical path for many of the other projects.
- [15:17]
Jordy
Totally, yeah. Still a very cool idea. I mean every time you're sitting in traffic, it's so like tangible to know. Oh, like if we just had more
- [15:27]
Tyler
yearning for the minds, basically.
- [15:29]
Jordy
Yes, yes, yes. But very, very difficult. And I mean it's been what, over a decade and there's really like very limited rollout of that technology, but it's still cooking. I think the business is still going and they're working on it. So some of OpenAI's teams come from very small teams with relatively tiny compute budgets, but they get a lot of attention sometimes because of the particular product category. So Soar is a great example where small team, not huge resource investment, probably a lot of inference and training cost. But relative to Codex 5.4 spar, I don't know. I don't actually know like how we're looking on the order of magnitude there.
- [16:09]
Tyler
Yeah, I think a big. Yeah, big part of super viral. Right. And what, what percentage of the team, the overall team's energy is going towards a specific product.
- [16:18]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. And then, but so the idea of experimenting quickly and then consolidating efforts even faster makes a ton of sense. Nano Banana was a big deal for Gemini, bringing image, video and audio generation together in a single chatgpt flow. Is clearly the next step. And so some of this is not. It's probably not going to take the form of like, stop doing the side quest. It's like, let's fold that into the main quest. Because clearly the interaction pattern of ChatGPT is, is where people want to go. And so once we've done the experiment, it works. Put it all together. Dylan Patel and Doorkash said the Tam for GPT 5.4 was north of $100 billion, which is crazy for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it's a huge market that was created in just a few years. The enterprise opportunity in general is crystal clear for anyone involved. At the same time, you still do need to experiment to make sure you are early to create the next breakout product experience. And so with that backdrop, OpenAI Labs and being more efficient with the shots on goal makes a lot of sense. I still think that the overall narrative around AI, just in AI broadly this year, will be about the main quest, which I see as like compute scaling. Yeah. And so raise the money, do the deals, grow the capacity. I was thinking back to Travis on the show saying, if you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. The key is if money matters, which I think we say we would say it does, especially in certain categories. He's probably thinking of ride sharing, where there was a capital war, and AI compute, where there's also a capital war. You need to be the best in
- [17:50]
Tyler
the world at it. Yeah, yeah. And I think overall there's real competition now. It's intense. Right. You have, you have OpenAI, anthropic at the frontier, pushing very, very hard. But the other side of this for OpenAI is like all the. Yes, there was a ton of stuff that was announced last year. There was hardware, sora, et cetera. But Sam was running around doing all these different mega deals for the compute side that now serve the main quest. And so the positioning is actually great.
- [18:22]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you about Labelbox, RL Environments, Voice Robotics, evals and expert human data. Label box is the data fact behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And speaking of Google, Google Capital bloke, the longtime Google bull, says, so anthropic and OpenAI are going to just give the consumer market to Google. And I don't know how I mean? Yes. OpenAI reportedly planning to shift the strategy to refocus around business users and vibe coders. There's a lot of stuff going on there. Listening to some of the data around the retention curve of the various products, I don't think that they're giving up on consumer at all. That seems like sort of an odd read. It will be interesting to see the next iteration of Google's consumer surface area because they have AI search overviews, AI mode, the Gemini app. It's in Gmail, but there's clearly some UI fighting going on. It's so funny when you're in Chrome and you have the ability to open one Ask Gemini panel in Chrome and then you can open a second Ask Gemini panel in Gmail. The app, both at the web layer and the browser layer, you have two chat boxes that look exactly the same and do the same thing. This feels very much like a V1 of what they will do here. So there's certainly an opportunity for Google to reintroduce the AI features, make them more tightly aligned with what people are actually doing. And you have to imagine that a lot of the progress they're making on agent encoding can then come to the Gemini surface area in consumer overall.
- [20:17]
Tyler
Yeah, and we can pull up this chart that Sam showed of codecs usage. This is like the. Again, this is like what I think is informing like the battle with Anthropic as well as like this chart is going to inform the strategy shift, which is like, hey, we can run. We can take revenue into the hundreds of billions of dollars with the current products that we have. Let's focus on them and make the best possible products.
- [20:47]
Jordy
Dean Ball is using Codex. Is that what he's saying? Just hit a personal record for single coding agent session of a little under 10 hours GPT 5.4x high in the Codex app. Unsurprisingly, no flashy app, just really complicated economic research prompt at this point. Most of my prompts do not stress these agents all that much. To be clear, this is 10 hours of continuous work. I have meaningfully exceeded 10 hours if we include periods when the agent was waiting for jobs to complete. So what does this mean? Is he talking about like firing off one prompt and coming back 10 hours later or just. Or just going back and forth? Because he says agent session.
- [21:23]
Tyler
I think he's talking about firing off 110 hour.
- [21:26]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, I thought he meant he's in Codex, like the terminal and he's in
- [21:31]
Jordy
there for 10 hours locked in. That's amazing.
- [21:36]
Tyler
Oh, wow.
- [21:37]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, it is very interesting to see. I mean, Doug o' Laughlin was talking about how he moved a lot of his research. He wasn't building software.
- [21:46]
Tyler
No, he's saying it's not a flashy app that he's building just a really complicated economic research prompt. To be clear, this is 10 hours of continuous work. I've meaningfully exceeded 10.
- [21:58]
Jordy
So I think what he's doing is he's asking like, okay, pull together all the census data about jobs. Now go and pull together all the economic indicators. Pull together all the inflation.
- [22:09]
Tyler
Somebody asked how much was back and forth was going on versus the agent spending time on its own. He said zero, back and forth. So this is 10 hours of the agent. Just like cooking.
- [22:20]
Jordy
Wow, that's really crazy. What is this prompt? It must have been pretty long, I imagine. That's crazy. It fit within his current rate limits on the $200 OpenAI tier in the Codex app, where rate limits are currently higher than usual. Did it outperform expectations? The prompt was primarily about the political economy of central government transfers to Indian states, Union territories. I think honestly this matched my expectations expectations of what 5.4 can do when it's properly prompted. What did it get stuck on? It encountered a bunch of problems along the way, but doesn't appear to have gotten stuck for too long on any one thing. It was just a steppy process, so it just kept working. That is absolutely crazy.
- [23:03]
Tyler
In other news, OpenAI is forming a joint venture with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management.
- [23:11]
Jordy
This is great news to form a joint venture.
- [23:13]
Tyler
AI is coming to distribute enterprise products across the firm's portfolio companies and beyond. The proposed deal as coming to Fogo de Chao.
- [23:21]
Jordy
Bain Capital owns Fogo de Chao, the Brazilian steakhouse.
- [23:24]
Tyler
Maybe now they can take Apple Pay.
- [23:26]
Jordy
Oh yeah, we got cooked on that. That would be a good. I don't know, maybe they deliberately don't. I wonder. I wonder if Apple pay is expensive for them and this is actually a cost consideration. Fiji Semo said. This news came out a little bit earlier than we planned. We're excited to be building a deployment army and we'll share more details soon. Companies have a ton of urgency to deploy AI in their organizations, and we're sprinting to meet that demand. More than 1 million businesses run on OpenAI products. Codex is now at 2 million weekly active users, up nearly 4x since the start of the year. API usage jumped 20% in the week after GPT 5.4 Watch launched in Frontier, which launched last month to help enterprises build Deploy and manage AI coworkers that can do real work has way more demand than we can handle. That's why we launched Frontier Alliances. So we leverage our ecosystem of partners and scale and to scale. And that is also why we're launching a dedicated deployment arm tasked with embedding forward deployed engineers deeply inside enterprises. This project has been in the works with our investors and alliance partners since last December and we are grateful for them and their partnership. We're still early, but the speed of adoption is a clear signal of where this is headed. We're excited to not just be building these technologies, but also building many ways for companies to deploy them and get impact. Interesting because there was a big, there was a big talk for a long time about like the, the next gen private equity firm will. Will buy businesses and like deploy AI inside them. And this feels like, well maybe that works at the mid market private equity level, but you don't necessarily need a new AI native private equity firm because Bain Capital.
- [25:04]
Tyler
Yeah, this is what I've always said like traditional private equity is not. It's not going to just be like oh well we'll figure out AI in like 2030. It's not really on a roadmap right now. They're working as hard as they can to implement it. The question is like will, will traditional private equity be able to basically like roll out and unlock the value of AI better than some of these? Like AI native, more like venture oriented roll ups.
- [25:30]
Jordy
Okay, so 5.4 mini announced today. So different sizes of models don't count as side quests. These are main quest. Right. These are main quest aligned. But what is the pitch for a Mini or a Nano model?
- [25:44]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, I mean so this is just like. I think someone ran some evals and the MINI models are like equivalent to GPT5 when that first came out. But it's just way cheaper.
- [25:52]
Carried No Interest
Right.
- [25:52]
Intern Tyler
So if you're like cost sensitive, if you're running a ton, a ton of queries but they don't need to be like the max intelligence, then you just use this.
- [26:01]
Jordy
So cheaper but also faster.
- [26:03]
Intern Tyler
Yes, probably. Yes.
- [26:04]
Jordy
And potentially runs on older hardware.
- [26:09]
Intern Tyler
I think that's unclear.
- [26:10]
Jordy
This is bullish for our vintage Neo cloud.
- [26:13]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [26:14]
Jordy
The oldest GPUs.
- [26:16]
Tyler
Yeah, this was crazy idea yesterday.
- [26:17]
Jordy
Yeah, we're going to run this on 1080TI for my gaming.
- [26:21]
Tyler
People love, people love classic cars. Why not classic GPUs?
- [26:26]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, I mean it's like doesn't like how small the model is. Doesn't actually like matter on what.
- [26:32]
Tyler
Imagine, imagine Running your vintage Neo cloud with a wood fired hearth powering it all.
- [26:39]
Jordy
Yeah, but I mean you have to imagine that what's after Blackwell? What's the one that announced today? Vera.
- [26:48]
Intern Tyler
Rubin.
- [26:48]
Jordy
Rubin. Rubin. You have to imagine that there will be models that only run on Ruben and need to be sort of re architected to run on Hopper. I would imagine. Sure.
- [26:58]
Intern Tyler
I mean I think there's like small performance boosts that you can get. Or it might just be slower, but you can always. You can run any model on like any hardware. It's just like it could be like
- [27:08]
Jordy
way, way slower because you have way way slower.
- [27:10]
Intern Tyler
The memory is on a fleet of
- [27:11]
Jordy
A1 hundreds where you could just be on like like a smaller rack of Rubens. Interesting. Well, that's exciting.
- [27:19]
Tyler
Calsheet came out with the 1 billion dollar.
- [27:21]
Jordy
Before we talk about this, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So what did Kalshi launch?
- [27:41]
Tyler
Kalshi launched the $1 billion Perfect Bracket Challenge. $1 billion for a perfect March Madness bracket.
- [27:47]
Jordy
So you can win $1 billion for entering this competition.
- [27:52]
Tyler
I haven't read the fine print, but it seems it is positioned that way. Vinnie says it would be hilarious if Citadel built out a team to attempt to financially impair their competitors. So Sig Parametrics from Susquehanna. Yeah, is is basically like the financial backer for this promotion. So if Citadel can figure this out, they could leave their competitor with a $1 billion bill.
- [28:17]
Jordy
Yes.
- [28:18]
Tyler
Obviously trying to nail the perfect bracket is functionally impossible, but never put it past.
- [28:29]
Jordy
So there are nine quintillion possible brackets. So the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9 quintillion. And I believe that they are capping.
- [28:40]
Tyler
I like my odds.
- [28:41]
Jordy
I like my odds and I believe that they are capping entries at 10 million entries. So if you math that out and then you take some insurance out like you should be able to hedge out any of the risk. If you are good and you don't suffer from any skill issues, you can basically with strong basketball knowledge, if you have ball knowledge, apparently you can get the odds down to like 1 in 10 billion. And at that, you know, not from 9 quintillion to 10 billion.
- [29:15]
Intern Tyler
If you have non quintillion, you can Sort them by how likely they are. Take the top 10 million. That's, you know, maybe there's some kind of power law thing here where we actually. Yes, you're getting.
- [29:22]
Tyler
Your odds are getting close.
- [29:23]
Jordy
We get close, but I think, I think if there's 10 million. If there's 10 million, like, assume that there's 10 billion reasonable brackets. And out of the 9 quintillion, so you're, you're discarding like all the craziest upsets to get to that 10 billion. You already ranked it and narrowed it down by like, what, six orders of magnitude or something. And then you're submitting the top 10 million of those 10 billion. Like your odds of winning are still one in a thousand.
- [29:53]
Intern Tyler
You can make it a thousand accounts.
- [29:55]
Jordy
And that's a no. No, no, no. I think that they are capping the Entire campaign to 10, the first 10 million entries. So you have to be on Kalshi
- [30:03]
Tyler
and you have myopenclaw already submitted
- [30:07]
Jordy
nine quintillion.
- [30:10]
Tyler
The SEC prepares proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting. If you liked earnings.
- [30:16]
Jordy
I was thinking like, is this bad for us? We like earnings days, but it's not like our whole shtick. So I think we'll be okay. We will continue soldiering on.
- [30:24]
Carried No Interest
Good.
- [30:24]
Tyler
Alexander says finally, less transparency around financial results. Yeah, I don't know if this is going to be enough to make it easier to be a public company. It's certainly a burden, but the kind of shareholder lawsuit risk and all that other stuff feels like a much bigger burden. What this is just going to do is create more volatility. If you're only getting updates twice a year, you can just see these massive swings because it's like, hey, we haven't heard from this management team in a formal capacity for six months. The business could have changed wildly. Growth rates, fluctuating, et cetera. And so again, if you love volatility, you're probably going to love this.
- [31:13]
Jordy
So it's good for the vix. That's bullish for VIX investors out there. There is a world where, I mean, the typical public versus private debate is that when you're private, you can think in multiple years, depending on who your investors are, maybe think in decades even. Whereas when you're in the public markets, you need to think in quarters. And so advancing that from quarterly to six months, and you start putting management teams in, okay, what can we deliver that will show up in six months as opposed to what can we deliver that shows up in three months? That's twice as long as it Feels like you could wind up with better run companies doing more ambitious things. I don't know. There is a bull case.
- [31:55]
Tyler
Yeah. I mean the other side of it is you just get more complacency. There's less of that. There's less of that. You're not like on the daily, the daily march, you know, you finish earnings and you're like, okay, in 90 days we got to do this again. Like there's no days off kind of thing.
- [32:09]
Jordy
So are you, are you an advocate for monthly reporting?
- [32:12]
Tyler
Daily, daily earnings calls, potentially hourly.
- [32:16]
Jordy
Just put, I mean this is the, this is the crypto folks. They're like put on the blockchain. I want to be able to see in real time the revenues of this asset stream and how things are moving around. I want full transparency at all times as an investor. I don't know. I think that there is a, there's a potential for a good outcome here. But we will have to keep an eye on it and see what actually happens. This is just a proposal. It's just the proposal isn't even. We are preparing for a proposal. So the proposal hasn't happened. We're preparing for the proposal and then the proposal.
- [32:44]
Tyler
It's an advanced idea.
- [32:45]
Jordy
No, it's a preliminary talk.
- [32:46]
Tyler
It's an advanced idea for early talks. Around a proposal.
- [32:52]
Jordy
Exactly.
- [32:52]
Tyler
Around a potential proposal.
- [32:53]
Jordy
You know, the FDA actually works that way. Anprms. It's like advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. So they tell the industry, okay, we are thinking about making a rule.
- [33:06]
Tyler
Good luck.
- [33:07]
Jordy
Good luck. And then everyone's like, we're suing. Don't change the rules. Because I have set up my entire business for this particular set of rules and if you change it, it's like completely over for me. Because every business is like set up like this. Narrowly thread whatever regulation is there. Really quickly let me tell you about vibe co. Where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value.
- [33:36]
Tyler
With Cisco, Nvidia, Nvidia announcing Nvidia DLSS5 and AI powered breakthrough in visual fidelity for games coming this fall.
- [33:45]
Jordy
Video games are going to get more realistic prepare over the next couple decades this is going to be. It's entirely possible this happens. Continue.
- [33:56]
Tyler
Let's pull up the video. It's funny because when I see the
- [33:58]
Jordy
video, I want to see it big.
- [33:59]
Tyler
When I see the video, my Thought was weren't video games already this realistic? But I haven't played video games besides Tetris on the matic.
- [34:10]
Jordy
Oh yeah, long time. So let's play GeForce RTX DLSS 5. DLSS of course stands for deep learning, super shading, something like that. Dlss, it uses deep learning. It's used AI for a long time. The whole pitch for DLSS super sampling, super sampling has, has always been go from a 720p render to 4k up res. Just interpolate the pixels. This is different. You can see that the. It's not just becoming higher resolution, it is becoming gen AI. Like there is a world where you render that at higher res. The lighting is changing, the shading is changing, the makeup, the structure of that person's face is changing. But it's still driven by the underlying. Why are you posting the bubbles? Because I'm ranting.
- [34:56]
Tyler
I want to see. You're not DSS5 do this.
- [35:01]
Jordy
Oh yeah, but, but this is what we were talking about yesterday. We were like what will it take to get TVPN simulator photo real? I think we should try and pipe it through DLSS5. Although who knows what this is going to run on because Nvidia is not shipping new graphics cards to gamers or something like that. They're delaying the next. The next gaming graphics heard. But I think that looks better. I don't know. People are upset. There's a community note that has yet to be accepted but the community notes are not happy. One of the community notes is just AI slop and it's like yeah, that's in the name. It's deep Learning. What do you think DL stands for? And also why are we on DLSS 5? Oh, because this is like a decade old technology. I don't know. People are, people are very upset. One of the community notes on the environment, the majority of gamers did not
- [35:51]
Tyler
ask for this is that the. Are those the most photorealistic video games that we have today? And then they're showing how they're even getting more realistic.
- [35:59]
Jordy
No, no.
- [36:00]
Tyler
Yeah, because they don't look. They don't look. They look like games that are kind of like animated characters that aren't trying to be photoreal.
- [36:08]
Jordy
So there's a range of games there that some of them have pretty outdated engines, pretty outdated rendering pipelines. Some of them are on the latest and greatest and look very high fidelity. There's also a whole bunch of trade offs in game development around the scale of what you're building and how many poker chips you want to put into great graphics. If you're making some moody first person shooter that's going to be dark and there's going to be lots of blood splattering and aliens and stuff, you could potentially make it ultra photoreal. But if you're trying to build something like Minecraft, that's this massive world that's interactive with a ton of different people, by narrowing down the scope, the beauty of Minecraft was that the whole thing's voxel based, which is these little blocks. And so the computer can store an entire world very efficiently because all it needs to say is just there's a cube there and it's green, there's a cube there and it's black, there's a cube there and it's gray. What do you think?
- [37:12]
Intern Tyler
I was going to say Minecraft is a good example of what this can improve.
- [37:15]
Carried No Interest
Right.
- [37:15]
Intern Tyler
If you go to the next post, this is what Minecraft could look like.
- [37:19]
Jordy
This is what Minecraft could look like. There are drawbacks, obviously, because you're driving the style transfer from the particular images from the shape. You're not reconstructing the entire image. You're just applying this re rendering on top of the underlying structure. So you can get really weird outcomes like this. Of course you can re render the full scene, but if you're doing that on a per frame basis, that's powerful. So right now that's powerful stuff. Basically, what we're seeing with DLSS is the best AI can do in 10 milliseconds, I think, or something like that. Because it needs to do this. Basically, if you're running a game at 60fps, it needs to be able to do it 60 times per second. So you can't be waiting around for images in ChatGPT or Nano Banana to cook for a minute on each frame. It has to be real time.
- [38:16]
Intern Tyler
But also on consumer hardware, right?
- [38:18]
Jordy
Yeah, on consumer hardware.
- [38:19]
Intern Tyler
This is not going to be like hosting the cloud.
- [38:20]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [38:21]
Intern Tyler
The whole point is that it can run in your gaming PC.
- [38:23]
Jordy
And by that token, this feels like it's not just four years behind. This feels like it's like one or two years behind in terms of the actual quality of the output. I'm actually pretty impressed. If this was going back to like Dall E2 quality, I would have expected that. Because Dall E2 is running on a fleet of A1 hundreds, H1 hundreds, something like that. Sure.
- [38:46]
Intern Tyler
But I mean, the underlying tech is very different. Right. Because you have like a very clear ground truth.
- [38:51]
Jordy
Ground truth, yeah.
- [38:51]
Intern Tyler
Right. Where it's like, you know what's supposed to be there? There's this kind of upsampling.
- [38:55]
Jordy
Well, so I mean the data pipeline here, the actual ground truthing is a little bit harder for something like this. They probably have to use ImageGen to generate the high res versions to actually generate all that. Because previously DLSS was really easy to train because you would just go and run the game at 4K on great hardware and then go and run the exact same. You would render it twice from the same exact game footage. So you'd have someone play the game and on one monitor it would be 720p, on one it would be 4k. And then they would record both and they would say these are exactly the same thing. Every frame is the same. Learn how to take the 720p image and create the 4K image. Now they have to say, okay, well we have a 4K image. Let's run that through a Genai pipeline to make it like photo real. Do that a ton, probably on a fleet of GPUs that are not consumer hardware. Then you have your training data. Then you go run the DLSS pipeline and get this style transfer algorithm that can run 60fps anyway.
- [40:00]
Intern Tyler
There have been open source image models that have done really good upsampling for a while now.
- [40:04]
Jordy
But at this level. Are you talking about up resing or are you talking about. I would consider this re rendering using something that feels like diffusion. This feels like. Because if you look at any of these examples, it's very clear that they're not just increasing the pixel count. Like the hair in that woman's image, the hair has a different shape after you turn DLSS on. It's not just higher resolution.
- [40:33]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, that's true.
- [40:34]
Jordy
So there has to be something that they're training on. And I think that there probably will be very small hallucinations still if you were to zoom in. Whereas that wasn't really True with the 720p to 4k pipeline, you would get whatever the cutout of that image was that you were up reszing would remain the same. Whereas this is actually re rendering it.
- [40:55]
Tyler
Basically, well, none of this will matter when we have a billion GPUs in space. Let's head over to space.
- [41:01]
Jordy
Let me tell you about Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. And let me also tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted agent. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with
- [41:14]
Tyler
OKTA take us to space, Jensen.
- [41:17]
Jordy
Let's listen to Jensen talking about data
- [41:19]
Tyler
centers in space, courtesy of Nick.
- [41:22]
Jordy
I'll spend very little time on this at this time, however, we're going to space. We've already been out in space. Thor is radiation approved and we're in satellites. You do imaging from the, from satellites. In the future, we'll also build data centers in this, in the, in the, in space. Obviously very complicated to do. So we have, we're working with our partners on a new computer called Vera Rubin Space one. And it's going to go out to space and start data centers out. Out in space. Now, of course, in space there's no conduction, there's no convection, there's just radiation. And so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space. But we got lots of great. I'll spend very little time on it. Lots of great engineers working on. Was very funny listening to Dylan Patel talk about space data centers and saying that like, yeah, even if you solve everything, like it's still hard to make chips, it's just like it still comes back down to the chip bottleneck above, above all else.
- [42:20]
Intern Tyler
Yeah. I mean this is why you see Elon doing the terafab thing, right?
- [42:23]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. I really want to know what his plan is for that because has he put in an order for a tool or is he going to do Terra ASML? Like, because there's like the supply chain is what, 10,000 companies. 10,000.
- [42:38]
Intern Tyler
I mean historically they've gone super, super early in the supply chain.
- [42:41]
Shemsankar
Right?
- [42:41]
Intern Tyler
They've done like, you know, mining stuff.
- [42:44]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't know. Tool making is special, special industry. Well, speaking of Dylan Patel semianalysis was featured at Nvidia gtc. The Inference King has been crowned. Nvidia won a massive belt and it looks like Jensen's holding it up. He is in fact standing in front of a LED wall or projector. But a beautiful thing to see. The Semi Analysis logo.
- [43:13]
Tyler
It's all WWE. The entire world is WWE.
- [43:19]
Jordy
Nvidia extreme co design revolutionized token costs. The GB NVL72 is the inference king with 50x higher performance per watt on inference x by semi analysis, 35x lower cost. Very, very exciting. And congrats to Jensen for becoming the Inference King and winning the Inference Max Award or Inference X as it's now known. Jensen is also confirming what we see in our GPU availability data. There is an epic scramble for computer B200. Basically unavailable availability for GH Grace Hopper 200 H200 and A100. Also collapsing. Low availability means high demand. And people, people were kind of going back joking about like he said, like 1 trillion of demand or something over some period of time. And people were like, oh, so he's guiding down. It's like, I guess that's where we're at.
- [44:18]
Tyler
Yeah, it's hard when you're doing, when you're doing cumulative, well, revenue.
- [44:22]
Jordy
Let's move over to a much smaller deal for Netflix and Warner Brothers and the final deal which went to Paramount, of course. And David Zaslav is in the Wall Street Journal. First, I will tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So David Zaslav deal could Deal Pay could top $800 million after last month tax benefit so Warner Brothers chief executive David Zaslav could collect more than $800 million in severance and other payments after rival Paramount acquires the company. The sum of cash includes sum includes cash and payments for options and restricted stockholdings as well as a newly adopted tax reimbursement for Zaslav in a securities disclosure filed late Monday. The total doesn't include the more than 20 million he's likely to get from for shares he owns outright. So he's been investing as well. About 504 million is due to Zaslav if the deal closes, the company said, while 47 million would be triggered if he is fired or leaves under certain circumstances within a year of the close 116 million in equity has already vested. Some 335 million would only kick in if other payments trigger a 20% federal excise tax on golden parachute severance payments he receives. The ultimate value of the payout is based on tax code rules that are expected to cause it to significantly decline with the passage of time, the company said in a filing. Without the tax payment, the total would be about 667 million. Companies typically try to keep severance at or below three times salary and target annual bonus to avoid or minimize the tax. And investors often criticize companies for reimbursing or granted grossing up executives for the tax. The company said Zaslav wouldn't have to pay the excise tax if the deal closes in 2027, which would save the company costs of the tax gross up. So there's been a lot of back and forth.
- [46:14]
Tyler
Yeah, a lot of people are did he earn that? Yeah, absolutely pissed. And the reason that I think it is warranted from a business standpoint is when we were sitting here last year talking with someone who won't be named in the media space, who has done deals not at this scale, but in the billions of dollars. He was sitting here telling us at this very table that he didn't think there would be any bidding process at all. And it was just going to land with the Ellisons for a pretty predictable price. And Zaslav did his job as CEO to get the best possible price for shareholders.
- [46:56]
Jordy
And it's remarkable.
- [46:57]
Tyler
And that is why, you know, he was able to have outsized impact. He's getting, he's getting outsized compensation. He increased the enterprise value through his deal making by tens of billions of dollars. And he's getting a significant but I think warranted payment. And if you, if you don't like this, then you probably have, don't like the game of business very much either.
- [47:23]
Jordy
Or you think Warner Brothers Discovery should have just used like Open Claw on a Mac Mini or something like that to negotiate the sale. Put the whole company on ebay and
- [47:35]
Tyler
let everyone bid, just do an auction.
- [47:37]
Jordy
Actually ebay's fees are pretty high. I think ebay takes like multiple percentage.
- [47:41]
Tyler
So they would take a higher fee.
- [47:42]
Jordy
I think they would take a higher fee. Actually it's like $100 billion deal. Don't they take like 3%? So by that maybe we're saving money using a human in this case. But of course, some of what he did, you know, between the dinners and the photos and all of these different negotiations and somehow continuing to get Paramount to make offers but then say that it wasn't their best and final. I don't know how you do that.
- [48:08]
Tyler
He's clearly multiple offers back to back that were not the best and final.
- [48:11]
Jordy
But quickly, let me tell you everyone about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, super computers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have carried no interest. The anonymous X user with.
- [48:28]
Carried No Interest
There he is.
- [48:28]
Jordy
Most fantastic profile picture. How are you?
- [48:31]
Tyler
As always, no interest.
- [48:34]
Carried No Interest
No doing pretty well.
- [48:36]
Jordy
I'm going to repeat carried no interest as many times as possible so that I don't say your real name. Carried.
- [48:42]
Tyler
I'm gonna say your real name.
- [48:43]
Jordy
Good to have you here, Carried. Thanks for taking the time to join the show. Why don't you tell us what's been on your mind lately?
- [48:53]
Carried No Interest
Well, it feels like the chickens are coming home to roost in old private credit software land. And gonna take a little cheeky victory lap here and see.
- [49:02]
Jordy
Who could have predicted this?
- [49:03]
Tyler
Who could have predicted this? No one could have predicted this, except you. On December 12th of 2024, you wrote a post called the Bubble in Software Private Equity, Private Credit Edition. And you did a deep dive on a ton of lending data and discovered you said some hilarious stuff. You said, for a while there have been rumors forming that a bubble in private credit related to private equity. I'm somewhat certain a mini bubble forming in software, private equity, private credit, and then you get into it. So what were you seeing back then that prompted the post?
- [49:40]
Carried No Interest
So what I was seeing, and it's wild, that kind of a nameless private markets investor with a pitchbook subscription, no intentional advertising for them, just there, was able to pull this data and knew it themselves. But anybody with a pitchbook could have done it. What prompted this is that I was simply being shown deals by investment bankers where the financing structure, I think, would make the average American scratch their head. If you had told the average person on the street that you could take a business with $100 million in revenue and no profit and lever it up to buy it with no profit at all and have to repay a good chunk of it in four years, your average American would go, no way. That's not a thing that you're allowed to do. But depending on how good your relationship was with a certain subset of private credit lenders, that is certainly a thing that was allowed to do do. And so what prompted the post was that I kept being shown deals with financing structures I could not believe from very good sponsors historically, who were excellent. And then I thought to myself, you know what? I'm just going to pull this data from Pittsburgh, do this thing myself. And what I found was this giant bar in the years 2028 and 2029 where a lot of my wonderful colleagues in software private equity would have to pay a good chunk of that debt back. And it terrified me because something else was happening at the same time that was somewhat scary, which was you could see there are a bunch of different investment banks who have published this, Carl Square, a bunch of the other ones that are software boutiques. You could see on a graph that the multiple on ARR was coming down in private market transactions. Let's not even talk about publics, which now become more relevant than ever. I looked at that graph and the graph of all the debt coming due to, and my stomach churned a little bit. And then I wrote.
- [51:25]
Tyler
And so the sponsors, their idea was, hey, the debt's going to come due in 2028 or 2029, but we're going to roll it over and we'll just kind of kick the can down the road. But then now with AI disruption and a lot of questions, people aren't going to want to lend in the same way to these businesses.
- [51:46]
Carried No Interest
I mean the irony is it all kicked off with interest rates back in like 2021 and 2022. And you can see in the post from Carl Square in 2021, an unprofitable growth software company in Carl Square's own investment banking Data traded at 9.1 times ARR in 2022. I'm so excited to hear what sound you use next. In 2022 it was 3.4. So you went from nine times. Yeah, there it is. That was very good. Very, very mature. He went from 9.1 times ARR down to 3.4 times ARR. And you can even like how much software amenity took place in 2020 and 2021. That was sponsored back was a lot. Who is in control of.
- [52:36]
Tyler
I am sorry, I'll stop.
- [52:38]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Oh wow, you're really good at that, man.
- [52:40]
Jordy
You got a lot of talents.
- [52:44]
Carried No Interest
And so it's kind of scary now we have 30% of sponsor backed transactions with software at one point and everybody's been kind of kicking the can for a while and now everyone is noticing.
- [52:56]
Jordy
Okay, take us back and explain. When I think about these software deals, take privates or buyouts of private companies and there's debt involved, I go back to like the LBO boom, the Milken era barbarians of the gate. Obviously the those were big deals. Is that the correct structure that I'm thinking of? It's just lbo but instead of like a cigarette company or a food company or some other industrial company, it's a software company now. And then after some of that history, I want to know like what is fundamentally different about these software deals? Because that LBO boom seemed to last for decades.
- [53:40]
Carried No Interest
Yes.
- [53:41]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [53:41]
Carried No Interest
I think that it all comes down to the fact that they were borrowing against ARR and not ebitda. There's very little profit to borrow against with a high growth enterprise software company. What do you do? You need to juice your IRR somehow. So you need to borrow. So you'll go to a bunch of private credit funds and you say, look, I've never lost money. I'm talking about a very specific firm right now. I've never lost money on a deal. You can't lose with me. Just let me borrow against the ARR and before it comes due, you know me, I'm going to sell it and we're all going to Buy another Gulf stream and we're going to laugh about this in four years. The problem was is that the liquidity just left both in terms of the most important person who could buy it, which was a strategic acquirer. When stock prices fell and interest rates went up, you're just not as inquisitive. But now you lump in the fact that AI is creating all these existential questions for enterprise software companies.
- [54:38]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [54:38]
Carried No Interest
And you have the depressed public valuations, you know, and you have no profit. So your recovery rate with your lender might even be low. Right, sure. You can't even, you can't even take the keys of this business and milk it for dividends.
- [54:51]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:52]
Carried No Interest
You have to do a massive restructuring. That's a really scary proposition.
- [54:56]
Jordy
Did you see the, the, the AI disruption of enterprise software coming or did that hit you like a flashbang?
- [55:04]
Carried No Interest
I mean I did, but I was also an AI or data scientist as you know, for many years, so I thought it was inevitable. That was good.
- [55:18]
Jordy
Throwing flashback. Okay.
- [55:20]
Tyler
Yeah. To almost said your name carried's credit. This time last year you were talking about a specific product category and you were saying, you know, 10 years ago to build a product in this space, I would have needed to raise $30 million to build something competitive.
- [55:39]
Jordy
Yep.
- [55:40]
Tyler
Now I can do it with 300 grand.
- [55:42]
Jordy
Yep.
- [55:43]
Tyler
And I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna go after it. You were working on some deal.
- [55:46]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [55:46]
Tyler
At the time. And so I think you did. You know, I don't know about, on, on December 12th of 2024, but certainly at the very beginning of 2025 you were seeing that like, hey, a lot of these companies that previously would have taken tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild and actually be competitive with you can now do with much less capital.
- [56:09]
Carried No Interest
Oh, 100%. And I mean I think that that is kind of, I think that. And here's maybe even a spicier take that. I swear I'm going to write a longer post on. I think a lot of the stuff around a really good enterprise software company is cooked because somebody's going to vibe code it. I don't think that's going to happen. Right. I think that the scarier thing that's occurring now for private equity actually is actually that we're hearing rumors of customers that aren't signing three year deals. Right. The entire basis of software PE being one of the best private market categories was that you had enterprise customers with three year contracts.
- [56:48]
Tyler
Sure.
- [56:49]
Carried No Interest
If every other enterprise customer says actually AI is just so amazing now and we don't know where we're going to be and what it's going to look like. We're only doing one year deals.
- [56:58]
Jordy
Okay.
- [56:58]
Carried No Interest
That has like much bigger implications than, you know, somebody vibe coded a notion clone. Right. That's a big deal. And I think that the reason that they're doing that and this is the bigger threat I think to a lot of these companies is the adjacency within the market map. Like if you look like Rippling and you have a very talented like group of people like Rippling's employees, they can attack so many parts of the HR platform space now that they simply couldn't three years ago.
- [57:27]
Jordy
Sure.
- [57:28]
Carried No Interest
And I think that's a lot scarier than the Vibe coding to my colleagues in software private equity than, you know, somebody just whipping one of these up and going out with a bunch of cold emails. It's the adjacency threats in the market map because now who's really going to go after it.
- [57:43]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you have like previously there was like, it's not like a HR company. It's like HR for hospital or HR for golf courses or some sort of narrow niche in a niche. And that all of a sudden has been pretty easily added to Rippling's tam, for example.
- [58:03]
Carried No Interest
Yep.
- [58:03]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Okay.
- [58:04]
Carried No Interest
And you know, and another thing that I'm seeing just when I talk to people in the industry, I don't know that there's a scarier seat right now than at Tomah or Vista because the liquidity is just evaporating. The appetite in the public market's gone. The ability for these mega technology companies to do splashy 15 times ARR acquisitions for $15 billion, gone. That's a really scary story.
- [58:29]
Tyler
Yeah. The hyperscalers want to put money into capex or various core AI bets. The public markets are going to put a massive discount because they don't know what you're going to be doing in 10 years or even three years. There's so much uncertainty. And who wants to buy these companies at least the marks that they've had over the last few years because of that same uncertainty. So it's like, where do these companies go? The funds can continue to do continuation vehicles, but it's just like everyone is just kind of kicking the can down the road forever.
- [59:05]
Carried No Interest
It's a scary time in the asset class. I don't think that there's, I think that there's going to be a massive kind of resurgence of super ops focused software funds that might even be far more AI focused than we could imagine. Right. Where you have funds where 50% of management fees is going to AI professionals. I could see that very near term.
- [59:27]
Jordy
Yeah. What's on partnerships between the labs and the private equity firms. We've seen a bunch of those happening versus like starting a new private equity firm that is like quote unquote, AI native.
- [59:38]
Carried No Interest
Oh. I mean, I think that, not to use the cliche, but like it has to be like founder mode from the top. Like you can't be trusting OpenAI to make your poor coast more money. I think that it needs to be very much from the top of the firm really understanding what AI is capable of. Because I don't know how many times in history that it used to take five years to build a factory. Now you can build it in two weeks. Right. That's the scenario you probably want an expert in. Factory building at the top of the fund. Right. Or near the top. And the rumors are that there's been a very slow adoption at some of these funds that were just used to zur. And they were. They were rolling in it. Right. For 15 years.
- [60:19]
Jordy
And I don't think when you say slow adoption. Slow adoption for AI, like actually pushing AI first initiatives across the portfolio companies 100%. Like not the deal teams, but the actual operations teams. Yeah.
- [60:34]
Carried No Interest
So you own six different businesses that are doing 30 million low end of ARR. How involved is your deal team in? I'm not even talking about AI adoption in the ops level. I'm saying full blown AI adoption across both product and ops. And I think that if you're not doing that, you're going to be in big trouble in like three or four years.
- [60:55]
Tyler
What's the takeaway from Mark Leonard's kind of half retirement last year? It felt like in many ways he, he like perfect. I don't know if he. He didn't. He didn't like his exit. Didn't top ticket. But he bailed right as there was going to be kind of like infinite questions around the sustainability of the. The model that, that got them to that point. Obviously built a fantastic collection of software companies.
- [61:29]
Jordy
Well, here's the trick.
- [61:30]
Carried No Interest
Constellation never overpays. They didn't do what, in my opinion, firms like Vista and some others did, which was borrow and pay large ARR multiples for unprofitable businesses. Constellation does not pay frequently more than six times EBITDA for a software company. Price is such a good insulation. So if you just assume like a certain gross retention and you pay a certain price, Constellation is likely safe. Yeah, I think that they face the same threat that others do in the adjacency of the market map. Right. But their risk is much lower simply because they never overpay. Right.
- [62:09]
Jordy
So how are you seeing like diffusion amongst these, like sort of deeper in the economy software companies where the small business that they sell to might not be tracking the latest frontier model development. Oh, 5.4 nano launch today. I can cut my cost. They're just like, yeah, my business is golf courses and I need to pay my employees. So I'm just on this particular platform and I don't even take calls from competitors because it's just so far down the stack. It's only 1% of my cost here. I don't think about it like, is there a world where because AI takes time to diffuse, there's a whole bunch of humans in the loop that some of these software companies are actually just stickier than we expect them to be, even though in principle they should be disrupted faster.
- [63:04]
Carried No Interest
I 100% think that we are overestimating the rate of churn. Right. I think that that is pure timeline nonsense. As somebody who sees, I was just going to write this like because I was actually getting frustrated.
- [63:18]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [63:19]
Carried No Interest
I literally see these company financials, you know, I've seen them many times. I'm not seeing this alleged vibe code churn yet. Right. It's just not showing up. Horses.
- [63:30]
Tyler
Horse. Horse. Carriage manufacturer says order, order flow looks great. We have a big backlog. There's no issues.
- [63:39]
Carried No Interest
Sure. Maybe at some point you're going to see every other middle market electronics distributor rolling their own erp, but it's not happening right now. I try to keep a check on my colleagues in other industries that are non tech and I literally once a month I just say, are you going to roll your own ERP this month? And the answer is always no. At some point that answer will start to shift and then one or two will do it. It will go horribly and then I will.
- [64:06]
Tyler
But, but people, people have, you know, VCs are still funding AI native ERPs. Like they're funding more ERPs. But so, so I don't think the question has ever been, I haven't seen anyone saying all, you know, you know, these like core system of record businesses are totally cooked. It's every other. It's the Next, you know, 50 pieces of software that might integrate into said ERP that there's a big question mark around.
- [64:38]
Carried No Interest
So this actually circles back to. This actually circles back to what I was saying before. Right. There's a reason I said half of your deal team if you're in PE should have some level of AI expertise because of that exact situation. That's actually what I'm talking about.
- [64:57]
Jordy
To clarify there deal team, you mean evaluating the transaction, setting the product price versus the operations team that's actually going to go and work with management jump on the board.
- [65:09]
Carried No Interest
Great question. Depending on the size of the fund, those could be the same group or they could be separate. But no matter what, there should be a good amount of either AI first developers or just like AI first product people that are helping your portfolio companies compete as the VCs subsidize the CAC of the next wave of quote unquote AI first replacement.
- [65:30]
Jordy
Yeah, because my default assumption would be okay, yes, you need your deal team to be able to understand what moats are AI resistant, what aren't like re evaluate the prices in the AI era, but then the real AI expertise of selecting products, advancing software development workflows, figuring out the right structure of the team mix, like that's going to be much more on the operational side of the folks that you deploy into these companies. The management teams that you hire.
- [66:02]
Carried No Interest
Yes, like an investment banker, no offense to my pals in investment banking is not going to help your port codes be like AI first competitor proof. That's not going to happen. That's your biggest existential threat. Right. So I think you're going to see a reshuffling for the best firms that can see what is so clearly the future of ops around that to deal with all of these AI first, YC and venture backed competitors. I think that's inevitable or you're going to be in trouble. I think another side of it is I think that you're going to see a lot of point solutions not trading hands at good multiples. Right. I think that you will see a big flight to pure mission critical software and pe. Whereas I saw plenty of point solutions changing hands in 2023, 2024. Now I don't see them trading and I don't. I think you can't underwrite that risk for your LPs. You simply can't. If I can swap it out in 12 hours, I don't think you can use your LP money on that in private equity.
- [67:05]
Tyler
How, how existential do you think everything that we're talking about is for like the big platform software PE funds? Like do you think, do you think they can, you know, eventually figure out how to exit some of these businesses? They have some funds that underperform or lose money, but then they're able to kind of reposition or do you think it's just it's over?
- [67:34]
Carried No Interest
I don't know man. It's not looking good. The public markets are telling us what the appetite is for these late stage software companies without massive AI tailwinds. And it's a very scary proposition. I don't see a shift, barring interest rates going down and everybody jumping back into the casino. I don't see it. But I've been wrong before.
- [67:59]
Tyler
Well, the good news is interest rates are going up the last couple.
- [68:03]
Carried No Interest
Perfect. This is going to be great for everybody. This is going to be wonderful. But yeah, I think it's existential. I think there's no doubt about it. There's no seat I would want less than one of the bigger software PE funds right now. Scary stuff. And the rumor is that a lot of people are looking for the doors.
- [68:21]
Jordy
What about other stuff that's like software adjacent? AI adjacent. Like we've seen a lot of the private credit funds do deals for large AI data centers and that feels like a complete balance against like, you know, people are worried about software PE debt. But then if that firm has a, you know, some contract with Meta for some big data center like Meta, seems like they're going to be able to pay that bill.
- [68:48]
Carried No Interest
Well, it's funny you say that. I think it all comes down to the recovery rate. Right. Like, you know, if the recovery rates are poor enough, there will be nothing that Daddy Zuck can do to save them. Right. There's nothing he can do. Right. If recovery rate
- [69:04]
Jordy
his data center bill on time.
- [69:07]
Carried No Interest
Well, yes, there will be very little to hide from. The recovery rates are really low. I don't know what those are going to look like. Right. And there's a whole new asset class coming in my opinion. What's that of software special situations. That's eminent. And you can think about a deal structure that that would look like. This is actually a really fun thought exercise. Right. So you have a software PE fund that was over levered. Right. And the private credit fund takes the keys. And they're just trying to hope, they're hoping to get anything back. And you could see a special situation,
- [69:42]
Tyler
John Zito saying, I think some of these deals you're going to be lucky if you get 30, 40 cents back.
- [69:48]
Jordy
Is that technically a bankruptcy or just the shareholders get wiped? Would you be declaring bankruptcy in that scenario?
- [69:56]
Carried No Interest
Equities taking a zero? Almost undoubtedly. Right. And depending on how the restructuring plans pans out, it certainly could end up that way. But you can see where a very like a bending spoon like entity might come in and say, you know, hey creditor, we're going to help you out. We're going to, we're going to run this thing. We're going to shift it to the Constellation model.
- [70:17]
Tyler
Help me help you.
- [70:20]
Carried No Interest
Yeah, help me help you. Right, and we're going to shift this to the Constellation model. And you know what, we're not going to focus a lot on growth and we're just going to focus on dividends and we're going to try and get you out. That's something that a special situations investor might look at. And I think that's a much more reliable way to derive ROR than we're going to turn around this thing that went flat and isn't profitable at all today. I think AI enables some of these special situations a little bit more. And that's the whole bending spoons thesis. On some level I think there will be a new wave of software special sits people that come in and try to do something with these over leverage software codes with the creditors in some form. Right, okay.
- [71:01]
Jordy
So I mean you said that like software PE investors might be like heading for the door, but isn't it possible that they spin up a new fund that does special situations like develop new expertise like just reorient their strategy around curing logjam?
- [71:20]
Carried No Interest
Yeah, I mean, well, you're already seeing people leaving Constellation to pursue this and I think that when LPs evaluate who's the better option, they're gonna go with the guy from Constellation. Since then somebody from TOMA or ta.
- [71:34]
Jordy
I was thinking about, I was thinking about like internal to they're like it
- [71:37]
Tyler
was a special situation. When I paid 50x ARR for this, it was quite special.
- [71:43]
Carried No Interest
Look, you just didn't see my vision for this thing. Okay, what's your go ahead?
- [71:49]
Tyler
What's your take on, on Zuck's move with Manus? You were an early Manus. When, when I was, when I was kind of. When I saw that acquisition, I was thinking, hey, obviously talented team have built a product that can get to real revenue. But I think there were some questions of like is Zuck just going to kind of wind down whatever they were
- [72:14]
Jordy
doing and refocus Talent acquisition.
- [72:16]
Tyler
Was it a talent acquisition or product acquisition? I was leaning more toward product acquisition. They seem to continue to be investing a lot in it, which is kind of interesting because it's a product category that meta doesn't. They obviously serve a bunch of small businesses, but Manus is being positioned now as like an agent that can help you with your business or a school project. And it just feels like, you know, obviously hyper, hyper competitive. But what's your read on. On their strategy with Manus and their odds to actually compete in productivity against OpenAI, anthropic, you know, Microsoft, other players.
- [72:53]
Carried No Interest
Zuck, if you're listening right now, you got a deal. Man, that was good. That was a good deal.
- [72:57]
Tyler
I love it.
- [72:58]
Carried No Interest
I think that Zuck looked and he saw an absolutely magical product that he could have and he bought it. Right. It's magic. I have spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on Manus, and it was worth every penny. There are simply things that you can do with Manus that no other infamous provider or product can do. And I would reveal them, but they're,
- [73:20]
Tyler
by the way, Manus.
- [73:21]
Jordy
Manus, it's an American company now.
- [73:24]
Carried No Interest
Yeah. And like there's. There's like, literally things you can do with it. I'm sure you saw the same thing. Like they figured out context, like LLM context in browser before anyone else in ways that no one else has yet to figure out. Right. And I think that if Anthropic had figured it out, they would have pushed it. I think if OpenAI could figure it out, they would have pushed it, and they simply haven't yet. And he saw a piece of magic and he said, what do we got to pay to get the magic? And I think it was right because it's generational. Like I said, I've spent a lot of money on Manus. There's things Manus can do that no other inference provider can do, and they benefit from open source. But there's another cheeky thing that Zuck realized.
- [74:04]
Jordy
Are you broadly an open source bull. I feel like a lot of people are saying, like, all the money flows to the frontier. Everyone just wants to use the best model. The Opus 4.6, the GPT 5.4 Codex desktop can do a lot of these things. Have you actually tried the other harnesses and found a real big delta?
- [74:26]
Carried No Interest
I am a Manus and Anthropic maxi, so those are my two favorites. I use Manus for certain tasks and Anthropic for others. But I'm certain that what Zuck realized is that I don't have to care about inference and who's giving it to me, because these guys figured out some really special stuff around how does an LLM process data in and around a web browser? So he realized, okay, this is kind of inference provider proof. They figured out this piece of magic, this secret about LLMs using a browser. I'm going to pay whatever price I
- [75:00]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
need to get it.
- [75:02]
Carried No Interest
And now you've heard he's already integrating it with like ads manager.
- [75:07]
Jordy
That makes so much sense.
- [75:08]
Tyler
Manus, I want to grow my business. All right, Give me every dollar in your bank account right now.
- [75:15]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [75:17]
Tyler
No credit to Zuck for kind of either knowingly or accidentally realizing that harnesses would be quite important.
- [75:26]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [75:27]
Carried No Interest
Yeah. And like I said, there's a lot of stuff Manus can do that no other like AI related product can do for me.
- [75:34]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [75:34]
Carried No Interest
And it's just. It's just really special.
- [75:37]
Tyler
So.
- [75:38]
Carried No Interest
Yeah, I think you got to steal. You pay whatever price you got to pay within like the, like the history of M and A. Right. I think it's a good that it's a great bet.
- [75:45]
Jordy
Yeah. And especially for their scale and the compute that they have, like there's a lot that they can deliver there that another buyer would not be able to just.
- [75:53]
Carried No Interest
I actually think Manus is like one of the most underrated AI products.
- [75:56]
Jordy
Okay. I just downloaded. I'm going to try. I'm going to try it out. We had our intern Tyler download it and give it a try yesterday. We'll get a review from him later on the show.
- [76:06]
Tyler
Well, I'll read out one. Somebody in John in the YouTube chat says, says would be interesting to have Jeremy Gafon back on with Carried. No interest. Do a sort of roundtable style back and forth on here. I like Carried's analysis so much. Feels up Jeremy's alley.
- [76:21]
Jordy
That'd be a cool.
- [76:22]
Tyler
I totally agree. We should do that sometime.
- [76:24]
Jordy
That'd be great.
- [76:25]
Carried No Interest
I've heard of that guy. I've heard of that guy before. Smart, smart cookie.
- [76:28]
Shemsankar
He's a good dude.
- [76:29]
Jordy
You're both former TVPN guests. He's been on the show. We'd love to have you back. Let's. Let's throw a smoke grenade and get him out of here.
- [76:38]
Carried No Interest
Yeah, do it.
- [76:43]
Tyler
It's great to see you, Carried.
- [76:45]
Jordy
See you later.
- [76:46]
Carried No Interest
I'll get behind this production.
- [76:47]
Jordy
We'll see you soon. Goodbye to daughter. And let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Midjourney's financials are crazy and underrated. This from Amrit. Did not raise Anything built things in house. 200 million ARR as of late 2023. Confirmed. $500 million in ARR as of 2025. Maybe. I don't know. That sounds reasonable to me.
- [77:24]
Tyler
Yeah. The question is like, how was the, how was the Meta deal structured? Right. I assume that Meta was just like, we're going to give you a ton of money.
- [77:32]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [77:32]
Tyler
Every year for some period of time. So I'm sure that, that, that, that factors in.
- [77:36]
Jordy
Yeah. Yeah. They must be making a fortune.
- [77:39]
Tyler
Okay. John, I said yesterday I wanted to order beef ranch with a livestream.
- [77:45]
Jordy
Yes.
- [77:46]
Tyler
To allow me to be.
- [77:47]
Jordy
Yes.
- [77:47]
Tyler
Present.
- [77:48]
Jordy
Yes.
- [77:48]
Shemsankar
Where.
- [77:49]
Tyler
Where the cattle are being raised. And this Indian startup lets you own a mango tree for $111 per season.
- [77:57]
Jordy
That's cool.
- [77:58]
Tyler
Allows you to rent a mango tree and enjoy the entire harvest. There are three types of trees you can rent. Base, you can get a base tree, standard tree.
- [78:06]
Jordy
No way.
- [78:07]
Tyler
You can get 30, 30 kg to 60 kg of mango.
- [78:11]
Jordy
That's a lot of mangoes. I love mangoes. We're going through.
- [78:13]
Tyler
This company is operating in three states in India. You select your favorite tree, pay the money, you get a dashboard with all the information about the tree you rented. Connecting farmers with direct customers who love chemical free fruits. This is awesome. Very, very cool.
- [78:29]
Jordy
I love it. Yeah, we should definitely get a mango.
- [78:31]
Tyler
Tyler, can you get us one mango tree on the max plan?
- [78:36]
Jordy
On the mango max plan.
- [78:39]
Tyler
I want the mango max plan, please.
- [78:40]
Jordy
So, Tyler, have you had a chance to fire off a Manus prompt and see what it's cooking?
- [78:46]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, I mean, I think so far maybe I'm just not creative enough. But it's felt very similar to the cowork kind of thing, which is essentially just like a wrapper around cloud code on your desktop. It can interact with my desktop.
- [78:58]
Jordy
That's cool.
- [78:58]
Intern Tyler
Interact with local files. I haven't tried using computer use yet.
- [79:03]
Jordy
I'll do that now I have no local files anymore. Everything's either in the cloud camera roll or I get a new computer. I don't even transfer anything over. I just sign in to Gmail. I'm good. It's a very, very thin client these days. But if you do have a lot of files, I guess that makes sense. And I still do like that idea of color grade every image off this thing. There's a ton of different research things that you can do. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes Care of scaling, monitoring and security. So the AI boom has exploded the San Francisco housing market. I believe we will have an expert coming on the show soon to discuss.
- [79:51]
Tyler
Rohin Dhar is going to be joining next week to talk about this but
- [79:56]
Jordy
the Wall Street Journal has a report today that we will read through some of it. Pacific Heights open house. In January, a line of people made their way up the steps of a two bedroom one bath co op. There were 85 of them. Steps, not people. Eight flights, no elevator. The property received 14 offers and sold for over 1.62 million. More than $400,000 over the asking price. While much of the US housing market has been stuck in a rut, slowly elevated by mortgage rates, slowed by elevated mortgage rates and home prices near record highs, pockets of San Francisco are rebounding in a big way. The AI boom, a new mayor and other changes in municipal leadership have helped bring the city back, reversing a years long slump that was compounded by the ripple effects of of the pandemic crime and persistent struggles with homelessness. Rents citywide were up 14% year over year in February. And this is what we dug into when we looked at Daniel Gross's AGI bets. He was saying is San Francisco the new Detroit? And it was unclear if he meant the current. Is San Francisco going to be like the current Detroit or what Detroit was in its heyday as a boom town? Well it certainly feels like the latter. An uptick in demand with the city's notorious lack of housing supply. They gotta build the cube. They gotta build some cubes. They gotta build some skyscrapers. This is the way.
- [81:14]
Intern Tyler
The Munger. Munger dorm. Yeah, they're sending that out to general.
- [81:17]
Tyler
Windowless dorms.
- [81:18]
Jordy
They should build one of those. They should tear down those houses. They call them like the painted Ladies, you know. They should tear those down and build like the Munger dorm with no windows. That would be ideal. Maybe BlackRock should start investing in San Francisco Francisco real estate. I feel like they would have a good financial opportunity here. Wow. Everything's booming.
- [81:37]
Tyler
Condo prices, which have been sluggish for years, grew 12% year over year as of February ahead of the spring peak. According to real estate brokerage Compass, the median sale price was 1.23 million single family homes. Prices are up 23% with the median price at 1.96 million. By comparison, the year over year median increase for existing home sales nationwide is just pointing 0.3%. Last month 16 homes in San Francisco sold for 5 million or more. A 220% year over year bump, it's just skyrocket, said Kelsey Carson, 34 years old, an attorney who is expecting her first child in June and has been house hunting with her husband since April. You're more likely to get outbid by an all cash offer. Carlson was outside a packed open house for a three bedroom, two bath condo on Buchanan street and Pacific Heights. The area known for its breathtaking views and mix of mansions, Victorians and pre war apartment buildings has long been sought after. Carlson and her husband have been outbid on four properties so far. Brutal. Even a house in nearby Presidio Heights that needs hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. With AI everyone's coming in with these huge salaries, she says. We just can't keep up the pace.
- [82:50]
Jordy
There is some good news. There's a housing mark that I think is potentially better than San Francisco, growing a lot slower. It's only up 4% this year, year over year as opposed to San Francisco, which is up 12%. It's Alaska and I would highly recommend if you've made your money in an AI pick up, pick up a house in Anchorage. Average house prices up there, $400,000 doing very well and you can throw a star.
- [83:17]
Tyler
Let's move San Francisco.
- [83:19]
Jordy
The locals will love Anchorage. The locals will.
- [83:22]
Tyler
John has a long history with.
- [83:24]
Jordy
I shouldn't even joke about it. I need to lock my account again. If you see me with a locked account, you know that I've.
- [83:30]
Tyler
I've pissed off the hornets. Nasty Alaskans. Anyway, so we're going to have Rohin who is an SF realtor and has 100,000 followers on X just talking about investing and advising clients.
- [83:45]
Jordy
Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI and let's see what Adam Newman is up to because he's in Miami and was featured in an instagram reel a TikTok collab with none other than Caleb Simpson. Caleb W. Simpson. Adam Newman.
- [84:05]
Carried No Interest
What's up, man? Nice to see you.
- [84:06]
Jordy
Caleb.
- [84:07]
Carried No Interest
How much do you pay for rent in Miami?
- [84:08]
Jordy
In Miami, I don't rent.
- [84:09]
Intern Tyler
I default.
- [84:10]
Jordy
Okay, developer, I come into the mainland.
- [84:15]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
What's going on over here?
- [84:16]
Jordy
Adam, you should do one of these in Alaska. I don't know why he's doing in Miami.
- [84:21]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
He's getting after it. Yeah, I've always wanted to do one of those classes.
- [84:27]
Jordy
You can go as low as 2000. Okay. Price.
- [84:30]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
What a view.
- [84:31]
Jordy
Oh my gosh. What does 2000 get you in Alaska is safety and clean. After it's safe and clean. Now we can talk about community.
- [84:40]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
And if you can put those three
- [84:41]
Jordy
things together, you're starting to have a great experience. There was a company once as a television show, but it was called WeWork. I think it looked like this.
- [84:48]
Tyler
Huh.
- [84:50]
Jordy
What they doing now?
- [84:51]
Tyler
Still got bits. Still got bits.
- [84:53]
Shemsankar
Smells so good.
- [84:54]
Jordy
That is so important.
- [84:55]
Shemsankar
It smells so good.
- [84:58]
Carried No Interest
Yoga.
- [84:59]
Jordy
Yoga. That coffee shop was downstairs that's open and even the public can come into it. This is just for the residents.
- [85:06]
Gili
All these products are all flow products
- [85:09]
Jordy
done in the flow kitchen. And there's a whole spread out. Everything is fresh and whatever one sell today will go to the residence. At the end of the day. There are people working out in this gym all day long. Hello. I've lived here since it started, but I've lived in this building for about four years. So he was here before we bought the building. You're going to see the building before, before and after. When I moved here, it was a great building, but it turned out way better. Now the same price in Alaska, you can get a whole house, but okay, it's probably fly in only or there's limited road access.
- [85:40]
Tyler
Limited road access.
- [85:42]
Jordy
Limited road.
- [85:43]
Tyler
How many square feet?
- [85:45]
Jordy
At least like 2,000 square feet. Okay.
- [85:48]
Tyler
Okay. Yeah. I mean, so. So I think Adam will create a great apartment living experience.
- [85:56]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [85:57]
Tyler
The question is, how different is it from every other kind of apartment complex in Miami? How much do residents care about, you know, a cafe, differentiator, workout classes? A lot of. A lot of apartments have gyms, they have, you know, spas, things like that. So I just think, yeah, ultimately I think Adam will be successful, but with this, purely because he has high energy, he cares a lot about customer experience. And then the question will, like, the question coming out of WeWork is like, can he keep the costs in control? Because it's. If you don't want to make it, if you don't care about making money, it's really easy to deliver the best apartment living experience in a given area. The question is, can he deliver services and keep the margin? Because I think ultimately this time around, the business will be valued. Maybe there's some brand equity to the. To the flow apartment platform, which is. Which is a brand that he's doing this around. But ultimately it will be valued based on earnings given. Given enough time. So I think it'll just be a balancing act. But looks. Looks nice.
- [87:06]
Jordy
Yeah. Well, Florida man. Florida man sold his house in just five days after letting ChatGPT handle the entire process. Instead of a real estate agent, there's some community notes on this. He didn't go to ChatGPT and say, Sell my home. It's the same thing as the dog cancer story. He used chatgpt to conduct market research.
- [87:27]
Tyler
Everybody wants to move the goalposts and.
- [87:30]
Jordy
Yeah, but you can just sell your house. That's good news. I was listening to Ryan Serhant talk about the opposite scenario, which he said he was working on. I think it was like a $50 million house sale. And they'd spent. He was like, our agents had spent like months getting these two buyers very educated about the value. They'd agreed to a price. And then the seller went to ChatGPT and said like this, Should I sell or is the price too low? And chatgpt said, you're absolutely right, it is too low. You should pull out. And then the buyer went like, is this a good deal or is the price too high? And chatgpt said, you're absolutely right, the price is too high. And so they both walked away. And Ryan Serhant was like, what the. Like, now I got to get these people to come back. This is like a funny thing.
- [88:19]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [88:19]
Jordy
Who.
- [88:20]
Tyler
Who knows?
- [88:20]
Jordy
I think they need to be in a shared chat window going back and forth, arguing with the AI. The same AI in the same group.
- [88:29]
Intern Tyler
You can do that?
- [88:30]
Jordy
Yeah, that would be the correct way because then the can fire back and forth anyway. Let me tell you about figma. No matter where your idea starts, figma may clog code, codex or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction. With figma Reorg and the Copilot division of Microsoft. So company scraps divide between consumer and business app teams. AI chief Mustafa Suleiman will focus on AI models. He's freed up, apparently. So Microsoft is reorganizing the teams that work on the different versions of its flagship Copilot AI product. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Altering a strategy that some employees said created a disjointed user experience and consumer confusion. The software giant is unifying the teams that work on its Microsoft 365 copilot productivity offerings and the consumer version of Copilot, According to a memo from such a Nadella Jacob Andreou, who leads product and growth for Microsoft AI.
- [89:28]
Tyler
The man who is sat right here.
- [89:30]
Jordy
Yeah, he brought back Clippy. He's the man that brought back Clippy. He will become the executive vice president of Copilot, of just Copilot itself. That's the brand and it's a great brand name. I'm a big fan of Copilot.
- [89:46]
Tyler
Yeah, these are prosumer tools. Prosumer tools, they kind of, they're going to be used in and out of people's work life. I think businesses everywhere are kind of realizing that individual employees are bringing their own AI tools to work just because they help them do a better job.
- [90:02]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [90:03]
Tyler
And this is what happened with Apple.
- [90:04]
Jordy
I mean Apple was like a consumer company and then all of a sudden everyone was using Macs at work. And I think that's also a little bit of what's happening with the, the, the OpenAI story about like refocusing on business enterprise API. It's like no, like their Thibaut is also saying he's going to put Codex in ChatGPT. So you're just going to be like, build me an app that does the thing that I want. There's a lot of times when you go to ChatGPT and you ask something to hey, go transcribe this YouTube video. And like within ChatGPT, it might not have that tool, but Codex could absolutely one shot it. And so bring that ability whether it's cloud hosted or running on your computer. Bringing that over makes a ton of sense. And Microsoft should probably follow a similar strategy. So exciting news there. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And we have our next guest, Sham Sankar from Palantir. He is the chief technology officer in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in the TV show.
- [91:03]
Shemsankar
I'm Sean.
- [91:03]
Carried No Interest
Good to see you.
- [91:05]
Shemsankar
Good to see you guys.
- [91:05]
Jordy
How are you?
- [91:06]
Shemsankar
Jordy, welcome back.
- [91:07]
Jordy
It's been far too long. It's been like almost a year. You were one of our earliest guests. A huge moment for the show. Thank you so much for joining then and thank you so much for joining today. How are you doing?
- [91:15]
Tyler
Big day.
- [91:16]
Shemsankar
I'm doing great. I'm pumped to be back on St. Patrick's Day. But more importantly on the book launch day on Mobilize.
- [91:23]
Carried No Interest
Yeah.
- [91:24]
Jordy
What's the Straussian reed of?
- [91:25]
Tyler
You sent us a green package.
- [91:27]
Jordy
Should we open this? Can we open this?
- [91:29]
Shemsankar
You gotta open it.
- [91:30]
Jordy
Oh yeah.
- [91:31]
Tyler
Send us a green package because you knew to take it was because it was going to be on St. Patrick's Day. Look at this thing.
- [91:38]
Jordy
Look at this thing. So it opens.
- [91:43]
Tyler
This is a real piece of hardware.
- [91:45]
Jordy
So big.
- [91:46]
Shemsankar
It's an actual US army ammo box. It held 20 millimeter electrically primed munitions. And now it holds. Mobilized. It's got the book, it's got some swag.
- [91:58]
Tyler
You've outdone yourself. So cool.
- [92:00]
Jordy
I'm gonna step back.
- [92:01]
Tyler
You can move.
- [92:02]
Jordy
That just might get in the way of the camera. Anyway, so I mean, you've been working at Palantir for a long time. Has it been almost two decades now?
- [92:12]
Shemsankar
It'll be 20 years this Friday.
- [92:14]
Jordy
Oh, this Friday. Congratulations. Success. Amazing. So when did you feel like, okay, now's the time to write the book? What was the thesis? What was the moment where you were like, okay, it makes sense to actually take all that experience and distill it down that can be instantiated in an actual book.
- [92:35]
Shemsankar
Well, the book is the long form version of the 18 theses. So I put the Defense Reformation out there in October of 2024. And that was kind of the welling up of all these feelings I had. Working more or less in the bowels of the Department of war for 18 years, watching deterrence slowly erode. Seeing that we had a problem, you go back in time and you say, we had the annexation of Crimea in 14, we had the militarization of the Spratly Islands in 15, breakout capability for Iran to get the bomb in 17, we've had a pogrom in Israel, the invasion of Ukraine, conflict with the Houthis. What's going on here? We're spending a trillion dollars a year.
- [93:10]
Jordy
Where's our deterrence?
- [93:11]
Shemsankar
And that's one piece of it. And you look at what's looming with China, then you look at the other side of this and you really look at history and say, what gave us deterrence in World War II, in the Cold War, how did this stuff work? You recognize how much the industrial base that won World War II and the Cold War is not the industrial base we have today. You know, the astonishing statistic is that only 6% of major weapons systems were built by defense specialists in 89, when the Berlin Wall still stood. So 94% of spending went to companies that were what I call dual purpose. Chrysler was the prime on the minute intercontinental ballistic missile. So Chrysler made missiles and minivans. Ford made satellites. General Mills, a cereal company, made torpedoes. We had an economy that was equally invested in freedom and prosperity. But the corporate story is not enough. So that's a precondition. You could kind of say, well, what were these companies like? You know, because we think about it today as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. But it was Glenn Martin, it was Jack Northrop, it was Leroy Grumman. It's something that your audience would understand foundationally. It was founders. You know, our entire industrial base was made up of founders. What's happened? You know, at the end of the Cold War, we had this enormous financialization of defense. These companies became run by the third, fourth generation. Buybacks, dividends, financial engineering over real engineering. And by the way, that's not specific to defense. The same thing happened to Intel. The same thing happened to a lot of great American companies. The rejuvenation of our economy comes from the heretics. And then I started researching a lot about the history of innovation in defense. It's like nothing worked because of the system. Everything that worked worked despite the system. You look at Andrew Higgins, this Scots Irishman in Louisiana who built the boat that won the war. 92% of all boats in World War II were Higgins boats. But the Navy didn't let him compete. Then when they finally let them compete and he won, they stole his designs and failed to copy it successfully. In the end, after all these things are like, fine, we'll buy the fricking boat. And the boys in Normandy landed on Higgins boats.
- [95:07]
Jordy
That's great.
- [95:07]
Shemsankar
You know, and you go story after stories.
- [95:09]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [95:10]
Shemsankar
Hyman Rickover, who built the nuclear Navy, his first office was a women's restroom. And I think part of documenting these stories of the heresy, because of course, the Navy wanted to humiliate him into quitting. And then think about the chutzpah. Like Oppenheimer told him, this is not gonna work. You're not gonna be able to build a nuclear powered submarine. And in the face of Oppie telling you this, you're like, no, you're wrong. I'm gonna do it.
- [95:29]
Jordy
That's bold. Have you heard the story of Ball Corporation? They make Mason jars. You know those Mason jars? Also a defense contractor. Yeah. I think they eventually sold it to BA Systems in 2024. But for a long time, the company that made the mason jars that are in every, like, hipster millennial burger joint in America was also making like, satellites and sensors and all sorts of stuff. And so there's just endless stories about that of re industrialization. I'm wondering, like, there's a huge boom in new startups that are saying, we're going to build boats from scratch, we're going to build missile systems from scratch, we're going to build satellites from scratch. But is there some underrated industrial capacity in America where we haven't actually gone to Chrysler and said, what can you do these days? I know Chrysler Might be a bad example because it's an older company. Is there still some latent industrial capacity where in the worst case scenario, like America can actually adapt?
- [96:27]
Shemsankar
Well, that's the important part of the book, is we're telling the story that it's not the facile version of the story where we flipped a switch in World War II and then, bam, the automotive industry started making munitions. It was actually a journey. It took 18 months to retool and rebuild factories to produce war material.
- [96:43]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [96:44]
Shemsankar
And so you really want to get moving early now. We have a lot of this latent capacity you think about. GM produces a new Escalade every 90 seconds. You know, right about now we need some SM6s, SM3s, and Tomahawks rolling off the line every 90 seconds too.
- [96:58]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [96:58]
Shemsankar
And so how do we take the kind of exquisite, artisanal approach to a low number of munitions we built and start scaling that out? And you're going to need a breadth of approaches. You're going to need the new entrance building entirely new classes of things. And you're going to need to make the exquisite things much more quickly. What makes this stark is we have eight days of weapons on hand for a major fight with China. Nobody thinks that's deterrence. Nobody thinks that's enough. We need 800 days. How do we really fire up the arsenal of freedom here and get serious about building? And we're going to have to build those things in new ways. And a lot of that skill exists in El Segundo. It exists in the modern American manufacturing economy.
- [97:34]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. I'm always reminded of this, this like Palmer lucky take about, like the younger Generation throughout the 2000s got obsessed with building consumer software ad platforms. We love ads. But I take the point. Is there something similar going on right now with AI? Because AI can be important for the military. But also, you see, there's only a few caterpillars or electricians and they're working on data centers. If that doesn't become critical to the defense and deterrence of the nation, it actually just winds up being more just juice for the economy, which is probably good. But at the same time, it might be sucking capital, sucking human talent out of true industrialization efforts.
- [98:22]
Shemsankar
Well, I think so. I think with AI, we have to remember that we have huge human agency. AI doesn't do X or Y. Humans use AI to do X or Y. Let's pick intelligently, let's pick things that are in the national interest, that give the American people prosperity, that actually propel civilization Forward. And aren't AI slop and you know, AI slot machines?
- [98:40]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [98:40]
Shemsankar
And I think the promise in front of us is that AI is an opportunity to give the American worker superpowers. How do you make the American worker 50 times more productive than any other worker anywhere in the world? And that solves the math equation of like, how do we re industrialize economically? This is actually.
- [98:56]
Tyler
Yeah. How do you, how do you, how do you rate the current re industrialization process? There's a lot of founders you mentioned in places like El Segundo that are working as hard as they possibly can. But, but is, are we 10% of the way there for what you want to see? Are we 20% of the way there? Are we 5%? Like where, where do we stand right now given all the effort that has already started? But we're still, you know, early in this process.
- [99:23]
Shemsankar
Well, I'd say three years ago at the first reindustrialized, there was an aspirational aspect to it. Now I think we're closer to 5%. Like this is happening. Yeah, we're in the early innings of it, but it's happening.
- [99:33]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [99:34]
Shemsankar
And I think people are starting. You know, one of the amazing things about the American spirit is people just roll up their sleeves and get busy trying things, you know, And I'm working with people on the factory floor every day who are using AI to change how they do production. One of our submarine parts manufacturers actually added a third ship. They were able to use AI to automate the planning process, which meant instead of having to have tools down while they did planning and quoting, they were actually able to get that done in 10 minutes. They needed to hire a third shift because there was more work to do. And these are the sort of narrative violations that aren't being reported. And I think the underlying phenomenon is that we are listening. So these revolutions are always tools driven revolutions, not concept revolutions. And the impact of the revolution is determined by the people who wield the technology, not the people who invented it. Galileo did not invent the telescope. He used the telescope to discover the planets in planetary motion. The microscope, the power loom, the personal computer, thing after thing, it's the wielder of the technology that determined its impact on society. Today we are way over index on listening to the inventors of AI. They're very smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. And the future of AI is going to be written by the American worker.
- [100:43]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. How do you think AI interfaces with the re industrialization effort? There's Also, like, yes, use AI in the factory, but I imagine that retraining is a really underrated opportunity. I've already heard, just years ago I was talking to Chris Power from Hadrian about how he was able to hire someone and just get them forklift certified and teach them how to use these things. And reskilling has always been happening, but it feels like we're going through an acceleratory phase of reskilling. But what are you seeing on the reskilling side related to AI?
- [101:14]
Shemsankar
Well, enormous thing. So, I mean, I think Chris has really led the way with Hadrian here. He's going to have a huge factory opening on Friday. Hopefully you guys get a chance to cover that. Factory four, the Panasonic Energy. I work with them. So they're located in Sparks, Nevada, inside the gigafactory. They make every cell for the gigafactory for Tesla.
- [101:32]
Jordy
Interesting.
- [101:33]
Shemsankar
The population, your employee base there are prior casino workers. And this is high end, exquisite Japanese equipment. It used to take three years of apprenticeship to learn how to be a battery technician for this equipment. With AI, it now takes three months.
- [101:46]
Jordy
Wow.
- [101:47]
Shemsankar
So that's a very concrete example of the reskilling. More profoundly, I'd say one of the things we cover in the book is the story of Colonel Cukor, the father of Maven. And it's the newest heretic. He's a contemporary, he's alive today. And obviously what I think is really compelling about that story is this is actually the most consequential AI system in the world today. But because it exists in the Department of War, it's not something that broadly the Valley interacts with or thinks about. And I think one of the reasons it's so consequential is the stakes are existential. People are not. They don't have lame goals like how do I get 10% more efficient or reduce headcount by X or Y? It's really like, how do I have complete dominance and overmatch? And as a, as a result of this, the people who are building it are not just formally trained computer scientists over here, but it's become a platform that the vocational expert, the intel warrant officer, the fires officer, is able to really encode their knowledge, build agents that are their kind of team working with them to get things done. So the efficiency, the speed, the scale of what's going on, like really we're learning more from those users today than we are anywhere else.
- [102:51]
Jordy
Yeah. How are you thinking about the role of the forward deployed engineer in the AI? Boom. It feels like there's the capability overhang an incredible amount of genius intelligence from the machines. And yet there's so many processes that are still manual. I went to the doctor recently and I had to fill out a paper form. And so in many ways, like there's still a capability overhang just from like HTML web forms. And it feels like as amazing as the AI is getting, and we're seeing so much progress there, there's still something that needs to fall into place to actually get systems deployed.
- [103:31]
Shemsankar
I think that's right. There's a huge. I mean, in air quotes, mockingly, I'll call it the last mile problem. You know, everyone's. The first 80% of the problem was building the genius technology. The second 80%, it turns actually how do you implement it for economic value?
- [103:44]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [103:44]
Shemsankar
And that's where we're. That's kind of our jam. That's what we do for a. And I think it's never been more fun to be a 4 deployed engineer than right now because the speed at which you can take new product ideas that you're learning, systematize them, generalize them, it's crazy. And I know Ted's talked about this, but like we have to reinvent for deployed engineering as we go right now. Things that we used to think would take four weeks, take four hours. And so the amount that you can get done, how you go to market with that, it's like, let's just sit in a room with the customer that there's no sales meeting. It's sit in the room, let's go build agents that are automating actual workflows today. By tomorrow, you decide.
- [104:18]
Jordy
How do you think about advice for young people? I imagine that you'd say come work with you. But also it seems like there's some potential alpha in being a young person that goes to a Chrysler and says, I'm going to be the AI czar. I'm going to be the 4G deployed engineer, fully foil deployed, because I'm just going to work at this company. Where are the opportunities for young people during this tumultuous AI revolution?
- [104:43]
Shemsankar
So I'll give you two answers to that. The first is, what would I tell my children? What should they learn right now? And really what I would want to cultivate in them is agency, extreme agency. I think all the other skills you'll be able to figure out as you go. But do you really believe that your human effort can make a dent on the planet? And how do you experience that and live that? Then where would you spend time? I Think Palantir is an amazing platform to have impact on the world. The things that you do in the commercial sector impact the government and vice versa. And you know, you have access to the problems, you're in it. But second to that, it's like when you're thinking about being inside of a company. I think AI is going to be the antidote to the managerial revolution of the 20th century. All this power that was sucked away from the frontline worker who actually knew what they were doing to an amorphous blob of middle managers. And even actually they suck power away from the senior leadership. That's being reversed because all the bureaucracy is getting cut. The agency that someone has. I was thinking about this because I in the military, I'm seeing incredible AI application developers who are not formally trained computer scientists. And I was like, what happened? I've been doing this for 20 years. This feels like a discontinuity. Where do these people come from? And I realized like, oh, they've always been there. The thing is like, what would this guy have done 10 years ago? Make a PowerPoint? Try to convince some program manager that his ideas were good, only to be told they weren't knowing full? You know, he's too smart for that. He's not gonna waste his time now. He just goes away in a corner for two weeks and builds it. And he's arguing about something that's empirical. And the commander's like, shit, this works, let's go.
- [106:08]
Carried No Interest
You know?
- [106:08]
Tyler
Yeah, I think, I think that's like the most underappreciated part of this moment. I mean we've been covering. We covered a story yesterday of a guy in Australia who's gone on like a year journey to try to cure his dogs cancer. And he had experience building in AI and ML, but didn't have any experience in, you know, biology or pharma or any of these things. And he. And just by leveraging the models he was able to kind of figure out the right path to go down. Figure out like even he took a recommendation from ChatGPT of like which professor to go to in their sort of local university system to get help with the problem that he was working on. And he ultimately has been able to show like real results on this sort of experimental vaccine. And you apply that to that type of, that sort of nationwide realization that like, you don't need to be an expert, you don't need to have gone to school for a certain thing, you don't need to be a software engineer to build software, you don't need to be an electrician to start figuring out how this stuff works. And I think that that unlock across all the entire world where just like bringing down the kind of like knowledge boundary around so many different tasks is going to dramatically transform huge parts of the economy.
- [107:27]
Shemsankar
I couldn't agree more. I mean, and talk about an example of agency. Like he couldn't have started that unless he thought, I could do this. Yeah, it's going to work.
- [107:34]
Tyler
Yeah. And like you said it was, it wasn't like it didn't, it wasn't like he just one shot at anything. And that's the point. That's what people need to realize. It's like if you just want AI to one shot everything, that's like saying like I want results in life and I don't want to have to work. And it's like anybody throughout all human history, if you want results and you're not willing to put in the work, you're going to have a bad time. But like now there's never been a better moment in history to want to build something, to do something and have a better shot at actually achieving that or learning how to do that than right now. And so again it's all, it all comes down to agency. I guess the question is like, can you teach agency or is it innate? I find if I'm talking with somebody about their career sometimes it's like, you know in your head all the different moves that you should make in order to achieve the outcome. And yet some people just think, okay, I'm just gonna go back to like submitting resumes that never get answered because that's like the straightforward path. So anyways, we're going to find out
- [108:36]
Shemsankar
if you wanted to go back in. Remember he wanted to eat his fake steak. And I think, look, obviously there's a part of it that's innate, but there's a part of it that you can cultivate.
- [108:47]
Jordy
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I was talking to my wife about my 5 year old last night and was talking about AI and sort of like what he might do for a job and how it is nervous, it's nerve wracking. It's like, okay, what, like, what if I try to predict and set him up for success in some particular career? Like how is that tractable at all? And then I was reflecting on my own career and I was like, well for like 10 years I sold things online and when I was born, E Commerce literally didn't exist because I was born before Amazon.com and before Webvan. So it was not fathomable to click a button.
- [109:23]
Tyler
It would have been a door to door protein sales.
- [109:25]
Jordy
Exactly. And now I have a live stream, which was not a thing before the Internet. And so, like, every career opportunity I've had has been adjacent to other things. People sold things before and they talked on TV before, but the actual shape of the career has been wildly different. And so I felt very relaxed at the end of this conversation. But it is nerve wracking. If you really do want to just think, okay, yes, like doctor, lawyer, merchant chief forever, and it will never change. But even the lawyer's role has changed a ton with the electronic revolution, the information revolution. But yeah, it's just a fascinating time. Where should we go next? Jordy?
- [110:05]
Tyler
Any other stories that stand out? And you can give kind of like a trailer so that we want people to go and buy the book. So just give us another trailer, another story.
- [110:17]
Shemsankar
Yeah, well, we can talk about Colonel Cukor a little bit more. You think about. So you have this Marine colonel who's just. I call them heroes and heretics because it is somehow their rebellion that gets all these things started. So he had this seminal experience where he was on a helicopter waiting to land on Mount Sinjar to evacuate the Izadi who were fleeing isis. And there was a young Marine who thought he saw a rocket propelled grenade. And because of this misidentification, this human error, they waved off the landing. It was obviously unsafe. And you have order of a thousand people who are raped, tortured and enslaved from this small little decision. And so this is the sort of thing that he was like, there has to be a better way of doing this. And that kind of set him up on this crusade to go figure out how to bring AI to the department. What I think is interesting, we document is how everyone tried to kill him in doing this. I mean, up to the point, you know, the services were threatened by it. The bureaucracy was threatened by it. People filed IG investigations. People claimed he was housing Iranians in his basement. Here you have this Devout Mormon with four daughters living in a 1400 square foot home that has no basement. They actually sent investigators out to go do this, but just through that, never giving up. And that's what you see consistently when you see Rickover. You see in his memoirs that the humiliation of the women's bathroom, all these slights. It's not that they didn't get to him. He documents how much they did hurt. But despite that, he would push through and get all these things done. And perhaps one of the greatest heretics Billy Mitchell, who's the father of the Air Force, he didn't even live to see the creation of the Air Force. But his little rogue act of rebellion was the navy was trying to sink a ship at this. They call it a sink X, an exercise to do it. And they were failing to sink this stationary ship. And he's like, you know, I'm just going to drop a bomb from a plane. And there was no permission. There was no rules. And, you know, you get this, like, feisty. He sunk the ship. But before then, people thought air power was about sending messages back and forth across the front line. Nobody thought about actually using these as weapons of war. It's totally crazy. And so I think hearing these stories, what I really hope is both the heretics inside and outside the building are inspired because your country needs your heresy right now. And every one of these wars, it really comes down to Churchill in the tank. As the head of the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill funded and built a landship. He could only build ships. Of course, that's the tank. Because the British army was like, we got horses. We're good, dude. No, thanks. You start discovering these stories and you get emboldened to say, I got to pursue what I think is right here. You go back to World War II. We built 154 different airframes, different types of aircraft. I think 10 really mattered, but just in the sense of the American free market system. Obviously, you can't know. You need a market for competition. That's part of what makes defense really hard. It's a monopsony. There's a single buyer. People have a penchant for control. I like to quip that, you know, everyone's given up on communism, including Russia and China, except for Cuba and the DoD. You know, we have this deeply centralized planning approach that we thought would provide for what the what. What we needed to win wars, and it's just not the case.
- [113:17]
Jordy
That's a good hot take. Do you think that the next batch of defense tech companies should go public earlier? Like, what advice do you have for the current crop of private defense tech companies? It seems like there is appetite in the capital markets. Palantir's obviously done very well in the capital markets. At the same time, the private markets seem to be able to find any amount of money in the couch cushions, especially if there's AI attached to the narrative. But how are you talking to leaders of private defense tech companies right now about the markets broadly?
- [113:52]
Shemsankar
My advice to them is all the same. I think one of the hardest Things about doing the defense tech thing is you need to hold two contradictory ideas in your head. One is like you need to run towards the pain, you need to run towards proving real results operationally, but that's not your buyer. And so you could say there ought to be a mark to market moment right now. Who's in the fight today in Iran?
- [114:15]
Jordy
Sure.
- [114:15]
Shemsankar
Where have these companies started bending the curve? What are the opportunities to prove this capability? I'm hearing about incredible things SHIELD's doing in Ukraine right now that's really important. You're not going to get paid for that, but that's the validation you need. And then you have to figure out how to get programs of record, all those sorts of things. But if you just focus on the programs of record, if you just focus on treating the Defense Department as a buyer, you'll lose the magic, you'll lose your own heresy that leads to the innovation.
- [114:42]
Jordy
Yeah, there was a little bit of that in the space economy where we saw there was pretty quickly a bifurcation between space companies that were doing a lot of interesting work in signing deals and then other space companies that were like, they got on the rocket and they went to space. And I feel like that was like an important binary. I don't know how the binary is sort of coming down now as more companies get to space, but it felt like actual deployment, where the rubber meets the road. It's always important in startups, but it feels especially important in this scenario.
- [115:13]
Tyler
What about stories from history around copying what works? Does anything stand out? And the reason I ask is because one, it was somewhat surprising seeing that we have American made versions of the Shahed drone. And I feel like America has always prided itself on being inventors, you know, these sort of like zero to one, zero to one projects. Right? You said 100 something airplanes created or airframes created during World War II. And yet here it felt like the smart decision was like, hey, this is like a battle tested form factor. Like we can just make the thing that is delivering results on the battlefield. But are there any other kind of stories that stood out around America kind of swallowing its pride and saying like, hey, this thing has worked, let's follow,
- [116:04]
Shemsankar
let's fast forward the best one that also speaks to the importance of founders and people, the primacy of people is Operation Paperclip. You know, as the as, as the Nazis were losing, we started, we actually had two competing programs. We had Fiat and Paperclip. Fiat's theory of the case was we don't need these people, these Dirty Nazis. We're going to go steal all the technical papers and we're just going to be able to figure it out just by having all the papers. That was an abominable failure. It did not work at all. Instead, what worked was you go get the founders, you get Wernher von Braun, you get the people who actually know. Because there's something more three dimensional to the knowledge than what's on the. Just the 2D paper. And I think that's a. There's a huge swallowing of pride. It's something we had to really hold our nose to these Nazis and recognized that actually it delivered ICBMs, it delivered the space program, it delivered a fundamental offset against the Soviets. But we did that other times as well. I think probably the most famous one is there was a North Korean defector. I don't have the dates exactly right. He flew out of North Korea on his MiG. The MiGs were killing the Korean War on his MiG. You know, they tried to shoot him down. He escaped. Fortunately, we didn't shoot him down. We figured out he was defecting. So we reverse engineered the MiG and built our own. I'm forgetting, was it the F86 or the. Something like that. And that actually helped us restore air dominance once again. So, you know, it is the primacy of winning whatever it takes to win. You don't want to be like, hey, I didn't steal anything from the adversary, but I died nobly.
- [117:37]
Jordy
No. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on launching the book.
- [117:43]
Tyler
Yeah, I can't wait to get into it. We're going to have to. We'll share our copy, we'll fight over it, but we maybe got two.
- [117:50]
Jordy
But thank you so much.
- [117:51]
Tyler
Yeah. Congratulations on the launch and great to catch up.
- [117:54]
Jordy
Goodbye.
- [117:55]
Tyler
Cheers.
- [117:55]
Jordy
Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And let me also tell you about Restream One livestream. 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com the timeline is in turmoil. Doug O' Laughlin at Fabricated Knowledge is going back and forth with Buco Capital bloke over Google. So Fabricated Knowledge says people keep thinking that their distribution think Microsoft or CRM is bigger than the technology AI. But the fact that people are buying Macs to mess around with clogged code and other coding agents, they're also good machines. Well, tells me that this technology is much bigger than any distribution this time like whatever distribution is there. If you're willing to go to the Apple store, buy a MacBook Pro or a Mac mini, wire it up, install OpenClaw on it, verify everything. Like you're willing to jump over the default of the distribution.
- [118:55]
Tyler
Yeah. I think another question here is how many small businesses in America don't pay for any AI products directly and yet their employees are bringing the product to work.
- [119:05]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [119:06]
Tyler
And it's just not appearing on the. On the actual.
- [119:09]
Jordy
But Google Capital bloke fires back. He says these people are dweebs. It's like zero point. It's like point zero zero zero zero zero one percent of the market that's buying Mac Minis. In his opinion, distribution does matter. It will always matter. It doesn't mean the incumbents will win, but it certainly gives them an advantage. Just look at the sentiment shift on Google. Google in one year. That's a good point. Doug fires back. He says I am going to just put the distribution. Friction is the only thing that matters if we are going to be software brain. I do understand and appreciate it but I do think this is a big thing and making it all about distribution is such a technology loser. Way to look at it. Lots of great tech companies with awesome distribution lost. Like IBM had CTO relationships with every company. LMAO. BuCo says yup, I am not pounding the table for Salesforce. But they're not dead yet. The long game. Also, IBM beat QQQ over the last five years by a lot. I had no idea.
- [120:11]
Tyler
Let's give it up for International Business
- [120:13]
Jordy
Machines and they keep going back and forth but let's give it up for IBM and let's give it up for our next guest from cyberspace starts. How do I pronounce his name? Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultra dome.
- [120:26]
Tyler
What's going on? Great to meet you.
- [120:28]
Jordy
Help me pronounce your name. I don't want to get it wrong.
- [120:30]
Gili
Gili. Hey John. Hey Joji.
- [120:32]
Jordy
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How you doing?
- [120:36]
Gili
I'm doing great. I'm speaking for you with you from Miami. We just finished the first day of our annual conference cybersparks. We had a lot of fun. Lots of terrific guests and speakers. We just had Nikesh Arora from Palo Alto NETWORKS, Joe Coort, CEO of CrowdStrike.
- [121:00]
Jordy
We love Joe.
- [121:01]
Gili
My friend from Sequoia Capital. Royal Flush, the founders of Wiz, a small company that you might heard of, completed a tiny acquisition last week.
- [121:15]
Tyler
Congratulations to you on that one. Yeah, great, great outcome.
- [121:22]
Carried No Interest
Yeah.
- [121:24]
Tyler
What are people talking about? What is top of mind for everybody at the event?
- [121:29]
Gili
Well, the whole idea of cybersparks is to bring together the top 300 leaders in cybersecurity. So you've got here about 100 executives, CEOs and founders of the top cybersecurity companies in the world, and the top practitioners, chief information security officers of Fortune 500 companies. And the whole idea is to work together and talk about what's next and how we can work together in order to deal with what's upcoming. And there's lots of risk and, you know, an expanding threat vector. You, you probably talk a lot about artificial intelligence and the new capabilities that it brings in your show, but with every technology wave, you know, think about Internet, think about cloud, there are new risks introduced. So we kind of spend couple of days together to talk about, you know, the future of cybersecurity.
- [122:35]
Tyler
Is there, do you think there's more, more fear or excitement around the technology shift? Because there's obviously this new kind of new threat vector, but at the same time that creates opportunity for the industry, for product expansion. And so it's go time from a business standpoint to kind of meet, meet the threat. But also, I'm sure some people in the room are a little bit scared of what's coming.
- [123:02]
Gili
I think there's mostly uncertainty about where this thing is going. You know, what we've seen in the past 12 months is accelerating and there's, there are so many things that we simply don't know. You know, I wish I could stand here and give you all the answers, but in the room we had a lot of conversation around the uncertainty on one hand and the pressing need to make some decisions about safeguards to make sure that, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movie, you know, doesn't become a mild story relative to the reality in 10 years. And I think that what we are going through right now, we call it, or I call it technological doubling. You know, if you think about technology used by us as a race, as human, and you think about what we have today as the 100%, and let's say the zero is the invention of writing. Like 4,000 years ago when we lived in caves and started to write in order to accumulate knowledge so we can build tools, then the 50% is probably at the point in time of the invention of the steam engine, which allow us to build machines that would perform tasks too difficult for men. So the Last doubling took 170 years. The next doubling would take place in the next 25 years. That means that all of us, all three of us and everybody who listen to or watch the show are the first people that would witness technology doubling within their lifespan. That never happened. That's the exact reason no living person have seen doubling of technology. And you know what? When you just follow the curve, you know the curve I just described to you, that means that in 25 years we'll be at 200%, but in 100 years we'll be at 2000%. This is just math. It's not a prediction. This is just following the math. Meaning that people that would live 100 years from now would look at our technology in a very same perspective. We look at the technology used by our ancestors living in a cave, drawing something on the wall that's exactly the same. So we are going through a radical change in technology that we have never experienced. And that would require dramatically different type of thinking about safeguarding the new capabilities. Because this is enormous opportunity ahead of us. AI would change everything about health care, it would change everything about education. So there's an enormous opportunity conditioning under the condition that we can control it and that we are not losing control. So that was the core of the conversation.
- [126:24]
Jordy
Yeah, very cool. What is the shape of the cybersecurity threat landscape right now? It feels like there's entirely new capabilities. When I think about like, like a phishing attack with a deep faked voice on the phone, that's like, I guess you could get an impersonator, but it's sort of a new threat area. But then there's also just like hammering a coding model to spam a whole bunch of SQL queries or SQL injections, like all the old stuff, but just multiplied. Where are you seeing the biggest new threats emerge? Or what are people discussing on that front?
- [127:00]
Gili
Front, it's all over the map just because of what you said, because it becomes very asymmetric, even more asymmetric than we used to see. Because the guys on the offense, threat actors, they have a huge advantage because they can simply take Claude and just apply it for new attacks. While the pace of adoption of AI tools and machines for defenders within large organizations, within the enterprise, is significantly slower. So that puts AI in the hands of the bad guys much faster than it puts it in the hands of the good guys. And if that would be the case for long, then the bad guys would win. And the bad guys today are really bad. You look at state sponsors attack and everything that's going on in the world, and that's a Real risk.
- [128:03]
Jordy
Is there a bit of a white pill here in the sense that because there's a lag between open source capabilities and proprietary systems. And then you also have the Big Frontier Labs, DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic. They're definitely running agents over their user bases and their APIs to know, hey, this person just spent $5 million on our API and it's all cyber attack related prompts like let's maybe turn them off or figure out what's going on over there. They have a huge incentive to sort of control their customer base so that their customer base is not using these tools maliciously. The hackers sort of wind up on the lagging edge, not on the front, but all of the cybersecurity companies like Palo Alto, Networks, like Crowdstrike, like the folks that you've had at your conference, they maintain access to the Frontier and so they're always fighting with a bigger weapon. Is that sort of the equilibrium we should expect here?
- [129:05]
Gili
That's a great question. And by the way, we did have today the two top cybersecurity experts at Anthropic, the head of security and the head of product security, sharing the roadmap and thoughts about the upcoming capabilities of Anthropic and other platforms. I think the answer to that is our continuous investment in innovation in the space. It's not just about Wiis that I mentioned or Sierra. Those are larger, you know, established startups. But we did have one company going out of stealth last week, Onyx Security. All they do is agent security. We had today a major launch out of stealth for another company, Surf AI, which takes care of, leverages AI to complete tasks much faster for organizations. So there's definitely, there'll be a battle between machines, machines that are used by threat actors and machines that are used by the good guys. And we obviously our job in this world is to identify the best teams, the best talent and help them build and utilize AI. So we live in a safer, better world and that that's the plan.
- [130:42]
Tyler
What's the general sentiment from guests around the actual competitive threat of the labs releasing various agents and security focused products? Obviously they feel threatened when they announce new products because they tend to send the stock price down or they have over the last month. But is there real sense that this is a threat, the labs could threaten their business models, or is it more just kind of frustration with how the market perceives the threat?
- [131:15]
Gili
We always overestimate the impact of disruption in the short term and we always underestimate it on the long term. So I think that what we would see here is that in the next two years, the frontier guys, they have different focus and different priorities. So their impact on cybersecurity companies would relatively be low. But in five, seven years, I think that they have a chance to take over. And I think that we would see three cohorts, three groups of competitors. You would see the traditional cybersecurity platforms, you know, the Palo Alto, the Wiz, the crowdstrike of the world. You'd see the cloud providers, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. And there'll be a third group which is the AI platforms. And we shall see who would hold keys for cybersecurity. And if you ask me the same question 12 months ago, I would not even mention the third, the third group. So it's really hard when technology moves at the space. It's really hard to make predictions. And I'm not afraid of making a fool of myself. I do that almost every day. But making predictions right now is guaranteed to make fool of yourself.
- [132:51]
Jordy
I was just going to ask you for another prediction, but I guess I'll table it for next time. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [132:57]
Gili
I can share with you the predictions I made today in closed room, but maybe I'll start with the predictions I made 12 months ago. 12 months ago I told the room that my prediction, and keep in mind it was really the big wave of AI. I told them that I expect to see a million dollar ARR company, a million dollars in revenues company with a single employee within two years. And I told them that I expect to see $100 million revenue company with less than 100 employees within two years. I was wrong twice because those two things materialize in less than 12 months. We've seen base 44 with one founder who reached three and a half million dollars ARR before acquired by weeks. And we have seen cursor reaching $100 million of ARR with less than 20 employees. So things are accelerating. And therefore the predictions I made today were that I anticipate that we would see Fortune 100 company with a cybersecurity group of less than 10 employees. Keep in mind that today those companies employ thousands of employees. So I believe that we would see AI making huge impact on cybersecurity and would turn cybersecurity from a profession into function. That would be a major shift in the market.
- [134:43]
Jordy
Yeah, makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and we will look forward to see
- [134:50]
Tyler
how these predictions play out.
- [134:52]
Shemsankar
My pleasure.
- [134:53]
Jordy
We make predictions all day long.
- [134:55]
Tyler
Risking risking here, risking it all to
- [134:57]
Jordy
we're in the random prediction off the cuff business and I completely agree with you. It's extremely hard to make predictions that hold for any amount of time. Right. But it's an exciting time.
- [135:09]
Gili
I love it. It's entertaining. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.
- [135:12]
Tyler
Yeah. Give our best to everybody at the event. Great to hang.
- [135:15]
Jordy
Have a good one.
- [135:16]
Carried No Interest
Take care.
- [135:17]
Jordy
Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 labs built intelligent real time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. Let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized business.
- [135:33]
Tyler
All right, someone in the chat share this earlier but it is important to the Manus deal in the New York Times China ramps up scrutiny of a Meta AI deal the country appears to be cracking down on people linked to the acquisition of Manus Singapore company with Chinese roots. As President Trump prepares to visit Beijing, Chinese government is taking actions to penalize people linked to Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus in an apparent effort to discourage Chinese AI executives from moving business businesses offshore. Sounds like they want to make an example of them. Officials at China's National Development and Reform Commission, a high level ministry that oversees economic planning including AI, called in Meta and Manus executives for meeting late last week to express concerns about the deal, which was announced in December, said the people, who declined to be named publicly. The scope of the Chinese government actions remain unclear, but appears to include an effort to restrict manuscript executives from departing China for Singapore. Beijing has issued exit bans in the past for corporate executives who are under scrutiny. The transaction complied fully with applicable law, said Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman said in a statement. The outstanding team at Manus is now deeply integrated into Meta, he added. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry. Manus did not respond, but they are owned by Meta and Meta did so anyways. Not surprised to see China frustrated that one of their great AI teams just kind of bounced poached by the Zuck. But who hasn't been poached if you haven't had somebody poached from Zuck?
- [137:13]
Jordy
If you haven't had Zuck come to town, work harder, not doing something good. Yeah, work harder, exactly. Chamath Balihapitiya chimed in on the timeline, he said. What if AI doesn't need to show an immediate immediate roi, but instead is the plausible deniability companies use to riff 50% of the workforce they already knew did nothing and expat Non says the real question Here is why is an allegedly cutthroat hyper capitalist economy with every large white collar firm maintained by a workforce 3x the size it actually needs to run its operations. Why would they stop now and not before? And that is a good question. Like private equity has been trying to find the right size for every company for a long time. I think there's natural bloat that happens. We were talking about the question of you are an AI company. If your revenues are accelerating, it would be very interesting to see what companies ramp up hiring this year. Obviously the startups and high growth companies are. But of the older school economy, what management teams are guiding towards more human capital needs. That should tell you a lot about where that management team sees the business and economy going in the AI era.
- [138:33]
Tyler
Great story here. Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone, 80 year old billionaire, was badly beaten up in a brutal mugging outside of his Night Bridge office last month. I believe this is a. This is certainly a historical piece. But undeterred, he allowed his bruised face, complete with an impressive black eye, to be used in an ad for an exclusive Hublot brand of Swiss watches last week with the slogan see what people will do for Hublot.
- [139:02]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Great.
- [139:04]
Tyler
Gnarly Bernie Eccleston.
- [139:06]
Jordy
His reaction was how. How can I turn this unfortunate event into money? That's remarkable. Yeah, there's a number of crazy Bernie ecclestone stories. The F1 acquired episode goes into a lot of Bernie Ecclestone's history and stories there. It's a remarkable episode you should go take a listen to. Let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to FIN AI.
- [139:37]
Tyler
Noah Smith, sharing some unfortunate news. We certainly hit the gong when the GDP numbers came out in Q4 of 2025. But the AI productivity boom story is gone, at least for now, according to NOAA. Instead it's all just AI. CapEx data centers are the only thing keeping our economy afloat. Of course, the other thing keeping our economy afloat is all the economic activity that is still there despite a lack of excessive growth. But certainly data centers are making the overall picture a little bit rosier.
- [140:18]
Jordy
Makes sense. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Tyler, have you had a chance to fire up Manus again? Take it for another spin?
- [140:31]
Intern Tyler
I mean, I had it organized. My desktop.
- [140:33]
Jordy
Okay. Was it effective?
- [140:35]
Intern Tyler
Yeah, I did a good job.
- [140:36]
Jordy
Because you look like a man with
- [140:37]
Tyler
an organized Desktop now A suit like that.
- [140:41]
Jordy
Yes.
- [140:42]
Tyler
Can't afford not to have an organized desk.
- [140:44]
Jordy
What is a good benchmark these days? We need a new benchmark. Like our comedy bench. Like our. What is it? The shrimp fried rice. Shrimp fried rice bench. We need a benchmark for desktop. Something with a very disorganized desktop. That would be difficult.
- [141:02]
Intern Tyler
I mean I feel like that's not a good benchmark because that's like not arbitrary. You don't need to use that very often. But it's something like interacting with actual applications. Like can you open premiere and edit a file? That's a great computer use benchmark.
- [141:14]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. When I was.
- [141:15]
Intern Tyler
We're very far away from that.
- [141:16]
Jordy
Yeah. When I was thinking, I was thinking like I would like to be able to pick a song and then have it go and find stock footage, AI footage, movie clips and cut together a vibreal to the beat like I see on Instagram from just a prompt. If I just have an idea of oh, I like this song. I would imagine that this song with this footage would go really well together. That's like several hours of work. I could make a lot more of those videos. Have a lot of fun with those meta vibes is a little bit of that. Because you pick a song and then you can generate one mid journey image and do some light animation on top. But it's not truly finding iconic footage from around the Internet. And that feels like something you could do in openclaw. You could do with a co work product or Manuspur. Yeah.
- [142:07]
Intern Tyler
Because I mean you can just use like FFMPEG and you can cut videos down from the terminal.
- [142:11]
Jordy
Yeah. So it could.
- [142:12]
Intern Tyler
They could do it without even using computer use technology.
- [142:14]
Jordy
Well, the models could do that. Is that what you're saying?
- [142:17]
Intern Tyler
Well, I'm saying like cloud code could do that.
- [142:18]
Tyler
Right?
- [142:19]
Intern Tyler
You can tell cloud code to edit a file and edit a video from
- [142:22]
Jordy
this time and it should download ffmpeg do it, but who knows how good it is yet. Okay, that's our new benchmark. Music video driven live reels. Let me tell you about console.com Constable builds AI agents that automate 70% of it HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we have Anna Patterson from Ceramic AI here.
- [142:47]
Tyler
What's going on?
- [142:48]
Jordy
How are you doing, Anna? Good to meet you.
- [142:50]
Tyler
Great to meet you.
- [142:51]
Anna Patterson
You too.
- [142:51]
Jordy
Thanks so much for joining us.
- [142:54]
Anna Patterson
Are you guys having a good St. Patrick's Day? I see the green.
- [142:58]
Jordy
Yes, we're very happy.
- [142:59]
Tyler
Greened up.
- [143:00]
Jordy
Yes. We have these bright green suits from a show we did on Black Friday about Shopify. And I thought, certainly I will not be using that until next Black Friday, but here I am.
- [143:13]
Tyler
Here we are.
- [143:14]
Jordy
Well, happy St. Patty's Day to you. Since this is the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.
- [143:20]
Anna Patterson
Hi, I'm Anna Patterson. I'm founder of Ceramic AI. I was a longtime Google engineer. I started in 2010 and I'm best known for building large search engines.
- [143:33]
Jordy
That's amazing. So, yeah, give me the pitch for Ceramic AI.
- [143:38]
Anna Patterson
So ceramic brings the cost of search in line with the cost of inference. As you know, inference costs have been going down and down and actually inference is faster and faster, but search is 5 to $15 per thousand searches. But inference is maybe $0.50 per thousand searches. So the kind of analogy I like to use is tacos and salsa. Right? Tacos is kind of the meat, the meal, and that's kind of what inference is. It's the thing that's really delivering intelligence to your application. But salsa kind of makes it better. Right? But search is now the dominant cost in tacos and salsa. You're adding search, but it's, it's five to fifteen dollars per thousand queries. So it's really kind of time to bring salsa in line with tacos. So ceramic is 5 cents per thousand queries.
- [144:38]
Jordy
Amazing, right?
- [144:38]
Tyler
So you're saying this historically it was like you were getting a taco and it costs you $5. But then they were like, well, if you want salsa, it's going to cost you an extra like $500. And you're like, well, I don't. Not sure I really want the salsa.
- [144:52]
Jordy
It's a weird, weird.
- [144:53]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Exactly, exactly.
- [144:54]
Jordy
Okay, so help me define, help me understand what search means. Because search can mean over the Internet. That's already sort of baked into LLMs. It can mean web active web search, like in proprietary database or just the open web. How are you thinking about the surface area of search?
- [145:13]
Anna Patterson
Yes. So we do have a 40 billion page web search and that is the open web. And then we've built proprietary systems as well. One of the things that we're announcing is this idea of supervised generation that as the model is generating, it's double checking what it's saying with search and it's also double checking with search. What else should I say to make a comprehensive topic. That way you can really enable new applications with 10x fewer hallucinations, but also make the whole product affordable and fast.
- [145:52]
Tyler
Okay, so who do you Sell sounds super valuable. Who do you sell this to? Is this going to be maybe similar to kind of like the data labeling market where there's like five customers that really matter and you want to get all of them or are there a bunch of other applications that you want to actually sell to? Vertical specific AI applications that can vend you in like kind of in line with their alum products?
- [146:21]
Anna Patterson
Yeah, I think there are kind of two strategies there. You mentioned one of getting all the big players. That definitely would be nice. But we also have a self serve every agentic workflow. We have one startup, their agentic workflows do 1100 searches. So our search engine responds in 50 milliseconds. So it's both affordable and more real time than the other search engines. So we see a number of agentic workflows happening, but to your idea of a custom index or a custom application we see that as well. Because let's say you're a pharmaceutical company or some banks are very privacy centric. They don't want their searches going out and they don't even want their searches to models going out. So they kind of host their own copy of a model and here they'd host their own copy of search as well so that they get their own proprietary environment for all their agentic flows inside their enterprise.
- [147:28]
Tyler
Makes sense.
- [147:30]
Jordy
Talk about just how the open web is changing in the age of AI. I've seen some crazy stats about how much more of the Internet Googlebot sees because everyone has been indexing and been very friendly to Google for a very long time. Other publishers are getting more closed off. How easy is it to actually search the Internet broadly these days?
- [147:55]
Anna Patterson
So the 40 billion pages that we have are available on the open web. We do not disobey or I should say we obey robots. Txt so we don't actually crawl news sources that have blocked us, but we are in active talks to make deals to them and to have a proprietary API that costs more but also reflects back revenue to those proprietary sources.
- [148:26]
Jordy
Cool. Are you. Is there any value in having like. I've always been interested in the flip side side of Google search versus Google Alerts where the search is happening internally and then the information is actually getting pushed to you. That product is probably like 0.0001% as important to Google as search, but it's always been interesting to me. Is that interesting to you? Is that relevant in the age of AI? Does anything change about that ratio going forward?
- [148:56]
Anna Patterson
Well, one of the interesting things is that inference a lot of times with these MOE models, inference has a lot of spare compute because it's memory bound with that. It means that it could be thinking as it's inferencing. It could be getting a stream of search results, searching all the time and actually bringing you alerts. Only the most interesting information or information that it doesn't think that you already know by looking at your history. So I think it's going to enable a lot of new applications.
- [149:37]
Jordy
Amazing.
- [149:38]
Tyler
Jordan, wild card question. How long until we see ads in Gemini? There's been some reporting this week. Obviously, Demis had come out and said, why would we put ads in Gemini?
- [149:51]
Jordy
For the record, on this show, we are extremely pro ad.
- [149:53]
Tyler
We're extremely pro ad.
- [149:54]
Jordy
We love it.
- [149:55]
Anna Patterson
Exactly. Yeah.
- [149:57]
Tyler
And I. We both expect ads to be in Gemini. I would say this year is my
- [150:04]
Anna Patterson
guess, but that's probably my guess as well. Before the end of 26. Yeah.
- [150:10]
Tyler
Cool. That gives me a lot of hope. We're going to be very excited and excitement.
- [150:15]
Jordy
Faith in humanity restored.
- [150:17]
Tyler
What's the story of the pink guitar on the wall there?
- [150:22]
Anna Patterson
Well, if you want to do something really humbling, learn an instrument from your children.
- [150:28]
Tyler
Oh, okay.
- [150:30]
Anna Patterson
They're absolutely brutal with telling you to practice everything you're doing wrong. And so I kept borrowing my daughter's electric guitar after she taught me acoustic guitar, and so she decided to get me my own because she saw her guitar, like, laying on my couch and she said, a guitar should be hanging on the wall. And I said, I think I've been told to clean up my room by my child.
- [150:58]
Tyler
That's amazing.
- [150:58]
Anna Patterson
My work here is done.
- [151:00]
Tyler
That's amazing.
- [151:00]
Jordy
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of the show.
- [151:05]
Tyler
Great to meet you. Excited to follow ceramic and we'll talk to you soon.
- [151:07]
Jordy
Anna, we'll talk to you soon.
- [151:08]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Thank you.
- [151:09]
Jordy
Goodbye. Speaking of ads, let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further, further ado, we have our final guest of the lightning round, Jake from Gekko Robotics. Jake, how you doing?
- [151:26]
Tyler
What's going on?
- [151:27]
Carried No Interest
Doing great.
- [151:27]
Jordy
Thanks so much for taking the time. I don't believe we've met, but I've heard about Gecko for a long time. I think Trey introduced me to it when I was at Founders Fund. But since this is the first time on the show, I'd love a little bit backstory, like, how did you get into the industry. How did you start the company? And then we can kind of get up to speed on what's happening today.
- [151:44]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Yeah, well, Trey's awesome and I'm so glad he originally spoke so highly of us, I'm sure. So I founded the company about 13 years ago out of a college dorm in western Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I was studying electrical engineering. Really wanted to figure out how things like energy was created. And so I went to a power plant in Franklin City, Pennsylvania. For those history nerds out there. That was where the first commercial oil rig was drilled and got to see a power plant, how it was made. And I dove in headfirst through this little manhole that I could barely fit through and, and got to see what a boiler was. And so that was like a football field sized room that was completely covered wall to wall with these steel tubes. And this whole job of this boiler was just to get really, really hot. And so shot water through it got really hot. Anyway, this boiler kept on having failures. 30% of the year it was shut down because of catastrophic failure that was occurring because the pressure vessels would keep exploding. And the only way to stop it from exploding was a guy on a rope 100ft up in the air trying to figure out where the next explosion was going to happen. And that just wasn't working. And that guy actually died that year before doing the job of gathering data sets by hand in the real world. And so I was like, my gosh, like, where is, where is the tech innovation like for these guys that are making, making sure that our homes stay heated and you know, just begin to look more and more at least like how we understand the health of the built world and, and also what kind of technology exists for these sorts of heroes that are, you know, they're hidden behind the scenes, if you will, whether they're a poor engineer or they're boiler engineer and folks that are just like helping us do all this stuff and Silicon Valley for the most part, forgot about them. And I decided to build a company that was specifically dedicated to helping these guys out.
- [153:24]
Jordy
Yeah, so I'm imagining a big vertical tank, sort of like what you might see at a brewery, but instead of filled with beer, it's water that's boiling. Why not just fly a drone up and use video camera and, you know, just be close. Why did you choose the what, what decisions did you make technically and why did you make those decisions?
- [153:47]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
You basically, if you're diagnosing the health of built structures, whether it's a Boiler, a pipeline, a bridge, you know, whatever it is out of a ship, you got to actually get close to it, just like you would for a sonogram. So you use jelly and then you use ultrasound to see inside of a belly. For the pregnancy example. Yeah, same kind of idea. Use ultrasonics is one way of gathering information. Data sets in this case, you know, what you're seeing is some of the electromagnetics that we developed, sensors. And the robots are just the vehicles by which we get sensors around places that are typically hard to reach and then also localizing and seeing like where, you know, to track that year to year to year to understand. How do you predict into the future? I mean, this idea of creating the minority Report, you know, for the built world was kind of this idea of predicting, you know, what death or catastrophe is going to happen for like built structures before it did and the pre cogs in this case of these robots, you know, but all the data is being collected and then fed into the central source of truth, which is Cantilever. And then we sell Cantilever as our way of predicting and preventing catastrophic failures for the built world.
- [154:42]
Jordy
Yeah. So what's the shape of the business? It feels incredibly dual use. I mean, we just saw a video of the robot crawling along what looked like an aircraft carrier battleship. But I imagine that the oil and gas industry, the industrials industry, there's huge demand for this. What's the mix of the business and what's. What are the best practices for working with both the government and private businesses?
- [155:05]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Yes, we started in the energy sector in those power plants. I actually bootstrapped for three years and then was down 100 bucks to the name. I know it was bad. I was like homeless, living with best friend, sleeping on the floors, really roughing it. And I was out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There's no VCs out here. And so then before I got an acquisition offer and then, you know, and then the folks over at YC in 2016 were just like, you're going to build a huge trillion dollar company. And like this is. You're having incredible success. Come out and do that. And so I was like, I'm already poor. I want to. This is an amazing vision. I already know what the worst feels like, you know what I mean? So it's like, what could be worse than this? And so, you know, just decided to do that. Got one up to California and yeah, we're in this YC batch. It's like really, you know, just like black sheep with a batch, you know, working in energy and robotics based in Pittsburgh for first time founder. So you know what I mean, it was just like, it was kind of, kind of wild and crazy. Then we came out like one of the top companies but we started in the energy sector because what was the actual first company?
- [156:04]
Jordy
Because like energy sector could be you know, meeting with the CEO of Exxon or it could be like the local guy who just wants to buy these as like a prosumer tool almost or something. Like what was that actual deal?
- [156:16]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Like it was this group of power producers called ipps, okay, Independent Power Producer. So these guys were just like, they actually don't have these like massive contracts utilities have that they can just like rest and just like pass all their losses down to me and you to pay more bills if like, if things just like blow up and don't work.
- [156:32]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [156:33]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
And so these, these folks like actually have to be making sure that they make stuff. And so in PA there's a lot of them actually in the tri state area. And so we actually get a lot of access, you know. So the first three years I was bootstrapping, I was every single day at a power plant for the most part like trying to the, build the robot actually in the environment. And that was a really core thesis, thesis and core principle for the company. And we cannot still hold that today of build technology in the, in the real world, not in the labs. Actually one of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley said don't, don't leave, build this in a lab, make it autonomous and then launch. I was like that's fucking stupid. That's so bad. And today is like, you know, top three investor in the world, you know, saying the company's worth like 10 plus million. I was like, me and my one
- [157:11]
Tyler
shot it don't, don't iterate, don't, don't,
- [157:14]
Jordy
don't, don't talk to your customers.
- [157:16]
Tyler
Trial and error. Just got it in the lab.
- [157:18]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
So, so anyway, so power man, it was like we, I moved back to Pittsburgh because it was close to these customers. And so that was like the core, the core ethos of the company was build tech, you know, for the people in the environment. And so that's, that led us to oil and gas next. We could apply the same kind of technology, diagnose the health of structures that make the oil and gas assets go. And then it was mining and metal manufacturing and then it began to get into things like building and manufacturing for building ships or submarines, injecting the same kind of tech and robotics and software there because we have the most data about the health of, and the material science of the world. And so applying it for actually building and welding and then the Navy side, what we're doing there is helping to achieve readiness. 80% readiness was the Secretary Phelan's objective. And, you know, right now it's about, you know, two out of every five ships are stuck in dry dock somewhere. And that's a global issue. And so our technology allows for us to be able to make up that difference by getting as so much information, you know, in some cases two to, you know, two, three, four months faster, to be able to get these ships out of dry dock in time and then begin to plan it for the future. It's just like idea of if you always had a living, breathing understanding of the health of these sorts of assets, my goodness, like, maybe you'd never have to shut down. You know, that's, that's the thing that I'm trying to build. And you know, these, you can see now, like some really large energy companies, like the ones that we work with are beginning to adopt this. Like, you know, the data doesn't exist. In order for the data to be able to drive AI models to actually be impactful, we actually have to go out and gather information and data sets and oh, by the way, maybe one day, maybe not into the distant future, you can actually begin to augment these, you know, these very commoditized sectors and industries that are very capital intensive, you know, with robotics, native AI, native approaches and operating systems that make commoditized industries less and less commoditized. And so that's the kind of vision that we're trying to build at being the company that's, you know, that's very pragmatic in its results and, you know, aren't just promising in five or ten years all this impact, but like actually delivering the thing today.
- [159:19]
Tyler
You know, where are you, Are you, I'm assuming, the same kind of VC that told you to just one shot, the, the product in the lab, make it autonomous and then go to market, would also ask you, are you doing anything in data centers? Can you, can you get any, are there any tailwinds there? I can imagine one of your robots just crawling around a data center. But what are you seeing on that front?
- [159:44]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Yeah, well, it's a good question. You know, what ended up happening was we ended up really putting a lot of effort and energy into customers where, when things weren't working, it was extremely painful and extreme expensive. You know, so think of oil and gas when you're down for a day. Could be 30 million bucks you're losing. Or if you're down, if your ship isn't patrolling, you know, the certain places in the Pacific or Atlantic, you know, that's really expensive and harmful too. So that's where we focus. But what's happening now is like, all the attention on infrastructure is actually put a large attention on how efficient can you run your. Your power plants? In this case, a lot of natural gas, and then also how reliable are those assets? And also the assets that were depreciated, not invested in for 10, 20, 30 years because banks wouldn't fund continuation of, you know, putting capital into coal facilities or even natural gas facilities because of these, these carbon. These carbon strangleholds on these companies. It ended up creating this really interesting opportunity for companies that are really good at understanding the health and the value of assets and can convert them into something really much more valuable, something that we're taking a very close look at. So anyway, power and the ability to make a power plant run more efficiently and also more reliably is core competency of Gecko for a long time. And so we're putting a lot of efforts into that. You'll have a big launch, you know, in the. In the middle of. For the 250th anniversary and coming out in July 4th on the power production side. So it's, you know, we've got something that's, you know, if we pull off what our, what our, you know, six or so trials have proved, we might be able to, in the thermal fleet, be able to increase by 15 to 20 gigawatts the amount of power in the US without even building a new. A new power plant.
- [161:22]
Carried No Interest
Whoa.
- [161:22]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
It's this kind of efficiency, man. That is possible.
- [161:27]
Jordy
Yeah, it's all right.
- [161:33]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
We have a 71 million dollar.
- [161:35]
Tyler
I know. Let's hit the gong.
- [161:36]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Let's freaking go.
- [161:37]
Tyler
Where's the mallet? That's a big number.
- [161:40]
Carried No Interest
Hit it hard.
- [161:41]
Tyler
Hit it hard.
- [161:42]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Oh, my God. I feel the vibration vibrations over here.
- [161:45]
Tyler
Yeah, we're feeling it. I wish, I wish you were here
- [161:47]
Jordy
for, for a much dumber question.
- [161:50]
Gili
How.
- [161:51]
Jordy
How do you actually stick a robot to the, to a vertical surface? I mean, Gecko, I imagine suckers. But are magnets involved? Like, I imagine that there's some surfaces where a suction cup won't work because it's. Maybe it's like stuck out or something. Like, do you have multiple tools in your toolbox? Like, talk me through that.
- [162:10]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Yeah, great question. Well, I really was Desiring to use nanofibers. Just like a gecko we use. Unfortunately we can't live up to the biology and so we actually use neodymium.
- [162:19]
Tyler
Why not just get hundreds of actual geckos?
- [162:25]
Jordy
It's a biotech company actually.
- [162:26]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
I actually that's a great idea.
- [162:28]
Jordy
So you use rare earth magnets, is that right?
- [162:31]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [162:31]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
So we put them in a Halbach array instead of wheels to optimize pool force. So magnetic force into the. Typically like most of our infrastructure is.
- [162:39]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [162:39]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Is carbon steel. So it's magnetic. If it's not, if it's concrete or if it's over stainless, then we'll use the best adhesion is actually suction for non ferrous materials. Like you were right.
- [162:49]
Jordy
Okay.
- [162:49]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
So it's actually just like creating a really great, a really great.
- [162:52]
Jordy
Like a vacuum.
- [162:54]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Vacuum. Yeah. And so that can actually air pump
- [162:57]
Jordy
that's sucking in air and creating that like.
- [163:00]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Yeah. Literally just a Dyson vacuum head. And then you create like a nice chamber, you know, for, for you know, unfortunately it's like, it's not great for dusty environments. But like you know, you can so, so it's like it's less applicable but also there's less cases like so the food and beverage space, a lot of stainless steel and so there's not much dust there either. And so you can actually apply.
- [163:21]
Jordy
Okay. That sense.
- [163:22]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
But it's the same kind of concept too which is like you don't want to crack, you don't want a failure to occur.
- [163:26]
Jordy
You don't want to damage the material you're inspecting with some crazy, you know, rock climbing shoe with spikes on it. You're not going to be the ice climbing up the side of something that's going to totally.
- [163:35]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
So actually funny a really, a really like geeky cool like thing that we built for the Navy was you typically have like, you know when you, when, when Maverick lands is like fighter jet onto the plane, onto the, onto the, the aircraft carrier. He's landing on this like this, this coating, this non skid is what it's called. It's like really rough and grainy. You have to actually remove all that stuff every like three years or so to be able to evaluate how healthy you know, is the platform is the flight deck because there might be a
- [164:01]
Jordy
crack and you got to take all that off. Got it.
- [164:04]
Carried No Interest
Totally.
- [164:04]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
And so you just didn't even know like, you know, how healthy the structure is underneath it. Yeah. So we've developed technology that actually uses electromagnetics to excite the surface. You can Actually measure how healthy things are underneath the non skid.
- [164:17]
Jordy
Sure.
- [164:17]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
You know, it's like things like this where you just remove this like, you know, this, this orthodox way of thinking about how do you figure out like what's wrong, what to fix, how much budget to put to use and, and where does the supply chain, you know, how does the supply chain meet my need in terms of what things I need to fix and get the ship back. Patrolling and deterring conflict. It's like this kind of stuff that we have just built such an expertise and now models around ensuring we get all this information data set. So it really is like it's going from like a three to four month process to now click a button and you know exactly like where to make all the repairs and the next time you do it, you know, you spend a lot less time in the dry dock and you should do this stuff more and more just like as it's like patrolling and on duty. So like robots, you know, specialized robots that can be like on these ships, that's like, that's what we want to work towards.
- [165:07]
Jordy
In the basic example of like there's a boiler, the gecko robot climbs up, finds the crack. Let's say I don't know exactly what happens but erosion, corrosion, crack, erosion, corrosion. Are you thinking about an Act 2 where you're actually doing repair as well? Well, are you already doing repair or is that something where it's like, oh, that's a too. That's a big technological challenge.
- [165:27]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
It's a great question and it's something we're working on right now on the manufacturing side. But I think the key was the first idea was like what if you could own the health data of the world's most critical pieces of infrastructure? Yeah, that'd be cool. That seems like a pretty interesting thing to do. And then you begin to get into, if you can understand the health of things, then you begin, then you can just pull in existing information, time series data sets. These are kind of things you pull in now. And so you know, if you're a power, if you're a power plant or you're a refinery and you want to, you want to really capitalize on the fact that you know, oil, oil barrels per day is 100 bucks, 100 bucks right now. And so you want to maybe increase production. Well, you don't know if you can. This is where like the consultant with software and AI companies really have a hard time is because you don't know if you push the asset, will it like break down and not work and explode. So that's like where the missing data set that never existed for that atoms to bits side of the robots allows for us to be able to make these operational changes now and which is a lot more valuable than actually fixing the problem right then and there. So we're going after these big value propositions and if you think about the ability to run functional finite element analyses. So like these like ansys type of like you know, models like these are the sorts of things that Gecko is working on because we have this unfair data advantage that we've been collecting for 13 years on half a million assets now inside a cantilever. And, and so what we're trying to get to man is like you're totally right in where to go. You want to find the problem, fix it right then and there using these tools. And so you want to build towards that but you want to be really smart on the best techniques, the best kinds of approaches and ways to fix things and solve the most valuable thing first. Then keep on solving more problems that your customers offer you. But man, I think the future is really going to be, it's going to be interesting because these capital intensive industries, yeah. You know, that can adopt technology like we're talking about here really, really quickly are going to be so unfairly advantaged. And this is like where, you know, we're, we're like in those rooms creating the strategies, you know, for the top, you know, top 10, top 15, like you know, large oil and gas companies in the world, helping them with like how do we make and optimize this future because you know, the future is going to really belong to folks that can figure out how to run this stuff unfairly.
- [167:37]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [167:39]
Tyler
Well, the chat absolutely loves you.
- [167:41]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [167:41]
Tyler
So come back soon. This was really fun. Congrats to the whole team.
- [167:46]
Jordy
Thanks so much for taking the time
- [167:47]
Tyler
and I'm so glad you started this company 14 years ago. You're not coming on just pitching, pitching the concept but you've actually done the heavy lifting to figure this stuff out and yeah, the opportunity scale of it, it's just insane.
- [168:03]
Jordy
Yeah. Have a good.
- [168:04]
Jake from Gecko Robotics
Thanks, I appreciate it. Nice to see you brother.
- [168:06]
Tyler
Hang Jake.
- [168:06]
Jordy
Thank you. Happy St. Patrick's Day. We'll talk to you soon. And I will tell about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. We have some good News. For just $3.9 million, you can fly private to every F1 race on the calendar this year. It's called the ultimate experience. All 24 races, $3,911,100 per person. So don't think, oh, they're flying me. I'll just have my buddies tag along. You're gonna have to put your buddies in a really large suitcase.
- [168:45]
Tyler
It's so funny because for some people, they would have to pay them $3.9 million to go to all 24 races. Because it's not just if you're really doing this on a fixed schedule, it's like at least four days a week, 24 times a year. And this feels like a full time job. Also, there's some AI researchers out there that would just say, like, I can make.
- [169:09]
Jordy
Yeah. So there's a wrinkle here. They're saying, hey, flat price for private jet to all the races. And they're like, well, like, even if you're based in Paris, like, there's a race over there, you know, you're based in Miami, there's a flight over there. They haven't considered the fact that if I live off grid in Alaska, it's going to cost the them $10 million to fly the private jet to some remote landing strip that I've constructed outside of Nome, Alaska.
- [169:36]
Tyler
Yeah. Is there like a SaaS company that could take advantage of this basically being like, we know we've got a bunch of buyers here. We're going to take our top rep and we're going to have them jet set around the world. 24 strike missions. Make it math out.
- [169:50]
Jordy
Yes.
- [169:51]
Tyler
If you're selling bigger deals, spend it
- [169:53]
Jordy
in a conference room, pitch it. Doing demo the whole time.
- [169:57]
Shemsankar
Yeah.
- [169:57]
Jordy
Demos and then hop back on the jet. Somehow I think that if you price these flights individually, it would be cheaper, but it is very funny. Also, not by much.
- [170:08]
Tyler
You're talking about going, it depends on the jet.
- [170:10]
Jordy
Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of. It's a lot of travel, a lot of miles, a lot of hours. But $4 million is a lot of money. And I think it gets you a lot of flights.
- [170:19]
Tyler
Going to all 24 races. If you're not a driver, working does not sound fun.
- [170:24]
Jordy
Also, they didn't. They just said private jet travel between every race in the calendar. They didn't tell you how many other people are on this private jet.
- [170:31]
Tyler
That's what I'm saying.
- [170:32]
Jordy
Imagine you hop on and then there's 17 stops while they pick up other people.
- [170:35]
Tyler
Unfortunately, standing room only. This.
- [170:37]
Jordy
Yeah. It's kind of a Southwest vibe. Yeah. You know.
- [170:39]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [170:40]
Jordy
Anything could happen. Anything could happen. But we'll let you decide whether or not you want to spend $3.9 million to fly private to every F1 race on the calendar. If you do, let us know, give us a review, send us a message, subscribe to our newsletter@tvpn.com, then email us when we email you the newsletter and tell us how the private jet experience was the ultimate experience.
- [171:00]
Tyler
Last but not least, the new roadster is apparently going to be unveiled next month.
- [171:07]
Jordy
Hopefully.
- [171:08]
Tyler
Hopefully.
- [171:09]
Jordy
If Elon puts hopefully in a tweet,
- [171:11]
Tyler
he says it will be a banger next level.
- [171:14]
Jordy
I'm very excited and Travis Kalanick said, when I've run into people who are in the know, I inquire, they tell me nothing, but their eyebrows raise and their eyes widen in a way that can only mean something of sorcery and magic is coming. Hopefully it's a flying car and I hope that it it is revealed in April. He should, he should unveil it on April 1st. Everyone would be so confused. It'd be very funny if not. I can wait till Matt's flying car. I can wait till May, but I'm very excited for the next roadster. Expectations are incredibly high. There have been so many electric supercars, a lot of depreciation, not a lot that have filled that, like, special territory. Even the electric sports cars have not done well.
- [171:55]
Tyler
The Boxster, my sense is like, it's not going to be like a true supercar. It's going to be a turbo s the kind of thing that people are going to just daily, daily. And it's super fast. It's fun.
- [172:06]
Jordy
But it probably, I mean, I would
- [172:08]
Tyler
expect the kind of thing you keep like with low miles, but you expect it to appreciate.
- [172:12]
Jordy
I would basically expect like a Rimac nevera like, which is like a $2 million car but at like a $200,000 price point. Everyone's like, it goes 0 to 60 in 1.6 seconds or something like that. Like this, it's going to have some headline stat that everyone debates and it's like, oh, well, technically it wasn't this blah, blah, blah, blah. But it will be like shocking in its own way and I'm sure people will have a lot of fun with it. So excited to track that story. Well, thank you for tuning in to TVPN today. We will see you tomorrow.
- [172:41]
Tyler
Go have the best day.
- [172:44]
Jordy
Give us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify.
- [172:46]
Tyler
It's been an honor.
- [172:46]
Jordy
Why don't you throw that flashbang? Throwing flashbang. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.