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- [00:00]
Jordy
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, October 22, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We wanted to revisit a story from a couple days ago. Last Friday. We talked about on the show, F1 has officially partnered with Apple TV. You probably heard this, but I wanted to go a layer deeper into the strategy that Apple is employing here. The nature of the partnership, some of the specs, comp it to some of some of the other media deal deals that are going on. So it's a five year partnership, just the United States, ESPN is out, Apple is in. And so you won't need an Apple TV to watch F1 though, because you can use the Apple TV app on your MacBook as long as you're signed up with the Apple TV service. But in general this will be for Apple TV customers who probably have a physical Apple TV as well as the Apple TV app as well as the Apple TV service because they're all called Apple TV Now. And so the reporting places the annual fee at 140 to 160 million dollars per year just for the United States audience now.
- [01:13]
Tyler
Which is not bad because not long ago they wanted 200 and ESPN laughed them out of the balked.
- [01:19]
Jordy
They balked. They balked.
- [01:20]
Tyler
Balking is underrated.
- [01:22]
Jordy
It is.
- [01:22]
Tyler
You got to be balk max.
- [01:23]
Jordy
Sometimes you do. And so F1 across the whole season, all the races Combined, they polled 30 million viewers. They get about 1.1 million viewers per race. Last year I think it's up to 1.3 million this year. And then some of the bigger races in the US like Miami Grand Prix, that gets up to like 3 million for like this whole spectacle. But in general it's a relatively small media property. But it's a really high value audience. It's a very high, it's a very Apple audience in my opinion. Like, I think it actually fits really well with Apple's customer base. And so comping it. You know, if you think about it like every race weekend there's a million people that want to watch F1.
- [02:04]
Tyler
Apple's audience of people that become fans of a sport because they watch reality television about it basically. Fake fans.
- [02:13]
Jordy
Yeah, I think so. No, I think that's actually accurate. I think that's 100% correct. And so you have a hundred, you have 1 million people that are basically loosely tuning in. Maybe there's like single digit millions that are in the overall pool. Not everyone watches every race Overall you get 30 million views, but a lot of those are repeat viewers, people that watch all of the races. And so Apple has around 40 to 45 million subscribers total. And so you'd think that there's a pretty good overlap. Some people will be F1 fans, and then they will come over and subscribe to Apple TV because they were on ESPN or they were on the primary F1 app. Now you will actually be able to buy Apple TV and unsubscribe from the F1 app, because you will get F1 for free. And if you open up the F1 app on your Apple TV, instead of opening the Apple TV, you open the F1 app. You'll be able to log in with Apple TV, the service, and you will get full access to the F1 streams, which means not just the race cams and the actual production, but you can watch the individual racers, the individual drivers. I think both the front and the back camera, which is kind of cool. You can watch either. And so you can say, I want to watch Max Verstappen drive the whole time. And you can just for 90 minutes, two hours, you can just sit there and just watch from that perspective.
- [03:32]
Tyler
Imagine having the back view on Max Verstappen happen for two hours straight. You remember being a kid when Volvos used to have those, like, back seats in the back.
- [03:40]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking backwards, I mean, we should be watching F1 in the ultra dome. Because the beauty is that with all the screens you can see, the production team has what, seven, eight screens? You can put an individual driver on a specific screen. And so the real hardcore F1 fans will have the main. The main show on the big screen. And then they'll have side screens with. I want to know what Max is doing. I want to know what.
- [04:06]
Tyler
You can properly monitor the whole situation now.
- [04:09]
Jordy
Yeah, you can. You can. It is. It is a sport built for monitoring the situation, much like Ramp is built for saving you time and money, easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So the. I have two questions, and I want your take on these. First, Is the Apple TV audience big enough to grow F1 immediately? If we look at 2026, 2027, 2028, do you think F1 goes up from 1.3 straight to 1.4 or straight to 1.5? Do you think this is something that grows F1?
- [04:48]
Tyler
No.
- [04:50]
Jordy
Do you think it shrinks it? I don't know. If you were, I don't know, subscriber, you could just throw the game on or throw the race on.
- [04:57]
Tyler
I still, I still think, and maybe this is the wrong way. I still think of Apple TV as the thing that people are doing, intentional watching on versus just running it. Right. So the reason that ESPN potentially grew F1's audience was because people just wake up on the weekend, they turn on espn.
- [05:14]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [05:14]
Tyler
And it's just on the tv.
- [05:16]
Jordy
Oh, what's on before football or what's on before baseball? Like, I'm just going to have it on. Oh, there's a race.
- [05:20]
Kevin Rose
Cool.
- [05:21]
Jordy
Oh, yeah, Yeah. I know these guys a little bit. I buy that.
- [05:23]
Tyler
So I think it could potentially shrink the audience in the US but obviously it adds value to Apple tv. I think we've seen it's very clear that live sports are an area that traditional TV and streaming will continue to have an edge. Because streaming rights exist. It's effectively a. A monopoly that gets granted to. To a platform.
- [05:47]
Jordy
Yeah. Seems really powerful.
- [05:49]
Tyler
It makes sense for them to do that. I think it makes sense for. I don't think I'm a Paramount plus subscriber right now. I will be next year when they start streaming all the UFC cars through there. So I think it's amazing as part of a bundle, but I don't think it grows the sport.
- [06:06]
Jordy
Well, if you have a sport that you're trying to grow, you got to get on restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. Okay, my second question. Is there a real lift from having adjacent sports related content that can funnel new viewers into live sport viewing? So this was certainly my experience. I'm the fake fan. I'm the fake F1 fan. I actually watched Drive to Survive, the Netflix reality show about F1. I started watching that after. And after a few seasons of behind the scenes content edited for maximum dramatic effect, I started throwing on the actual races. I knew all the teams, the drivers, the principals, the rivalries. And it basically bootstrapped me into being able to keep pace with a real fan who's been following for years, at least loosely, even if I do wear the fake fan badge proudly. But the question is, how many people are like me? How many people are still in that journey? And what does that mean? What does it mean for it to happen inside the platform versus outside the platform? So my question is, Apple doesn't have Drive to Survive. So there is a world where Netflix bought the F1 rights. And as soon as you finish the Drive to Survive season, because everyone's watching Drive to Survive all the time, so they could just say hey, click this button and we'll send you a push notification in your Netflix app when the race, when the real race goes live. Or, hey, you're watching Drive to Survive. But this, you're actually watching Drive to Survive while a real race is happening. Why don't I just flip over to that next? There's a bunch of things that Netflix could have done with that pipeline. Apple can do something similar with the F1 movie. If you watch the movie, it could just say, hey, you know, want to watch the real reason?
- [07:39]
Tyler
Yeah, but way, way, way less watch time.
- [07:41]
Jordy
Way less watch, way less watch time. Because it's two and a half hour movie. As opposed to what? Drive to survive is like 10 hours a season or something. And there's six seasons, so it's like 60 hours of content. So you're looking at 30 times as much content. Just so many more opportunities to get in. And also F1, I do think the movie did a good job. You saw it, right? Yeah, so I think it did a good job. If you know nothing about F1, they do a good job through the voiceover and the announcer to kind of tell you, okay, there's gonna be 20. There's gonna be 20 cars on the grid. As soon as it turns green, they're all going to race. And it's like there's this many laps, like they have to change their tires. It kind of gets you up to speed. Drive to Survive does a better job actually talking about race strategy. What it means to be on soft tires versus hard tires, what it means to use Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely, spin up white label wallet sign transactions, integrate on infrastructure. But the question is, is there a value to actually having you move through that pipeline on one app, like in one media ecosystem? Because Apple's actually executing this in soccer. So they have Ted Lasso, which they basically got lucky with. I think no one really thought that was going to be a massive breakout success. It wound up winning tons of Emmys, became really popular. And I don't know that it's really the type of show that you watch and you're like, oh, now I'm a die hard soccer fan. But it's at least a little bit of a teaser. And then they actually went to the production team behind Drive to Survive. Hey, make one for mls.
- [09:15]
Kevin Rose
And they did.
- [09:15]
Jordy
And then Apple also has the MLS rights. So in theory they have the whole flow there to get you from.
- [09:20]
Tyler
I said, I've never heard of that.
- [09:22]
Jordy
Yeah, it's called Onside. And I don't know my pitch for Apple.
- [09:29]
Tyler
It is interesting that they have the golf version of Drive to Survive that's on Netflix.
- [09:36]
Jordy
And tennis.
- [09:37]
Tyler
And tennis.
- [09:38]
Jordy
They're full swing.
- [09:39]
Tyler
Non. Really got the people going.
- [09:43]
Jordy
Why do you think that is? I have a take. While you're thinking, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
- [09:53]
Tyler
I think the international element of F1.
- [09:56]
Jordy
Yes.
- [09:57]
Tyler
The high society element of F1.
- [10:00]
Jordy
Seeing the Monaco B roll on Drive to Survive, you're like, I'm in Monaco. It feels amazing. It's so like harder to do with golf.
- [10:07]
Tyler
Felt like a. Yeah. Like some combination of like a travel documentary behind the scenes.
- [10:12]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [10:13]
Tyler
The other thing about F1 is just how dangerous it is is also an element. And I think you understand that a bit more through watching it when you're, you know, when you're, when you're, you know, golf and tennis are obviously much bigger sports in the US but people have like direct experience playing them. Yep. And it's not high stakes. Right. It's like a player. Like in F1, if a player, you know, if a driver makes a mistake, they could actually die. They could. Someone else could die.
- [10:43]
Jordy
I think someone does die in Drive to Survive. It's not in F1, it's in one of the prelim races, but it's at the Nurburgring, I believe. And it's the race where the guy on Alphatauri, Pierre Gasly, wins all of a sudden before in like some sort of prelim race. I believe Someone. Someone died.
- [10:59]
Tyler
Yeah. So there's.
- [11:01]
Jordy
Yeah. No, no, it's very heavy.
- [11:02]
Tyler
According to Google's AI overview, fatalities.
- [11:06]
Jordy
That's crazy.
- [11:07]
Tyler
Formula one. That's. And so I just think as dangerous, like bull running.
- [11:13]
Jordy
Yes, yes.
- [11:13]
Tyler
And so there's so many different factors.
- [11:16]
Jordy
I have another factor. First I'm going to tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So the other thing is that there's the business side. I don't know if you were into this. Did you watch Drive to Survive? Like the business side is what's so fascinating to me because you're not just talking about the athletes, you're talking about the car. So if you're an engineering nerd, you can be into the car. But then also if you're a business nerd, you can understand, okay, this team principal is getting fired. They're like the CEO of the organization who's Putting the money in. And then what is that? What, what effect does that money have? Like, sometimes it's like, well, the guy with the money is making his son drive. Right. And then sometimes it's like, well, this team doesn't have enough money so their car is not going to be very good. Or this, this team. And there's all these different.
- [12:02]
Tyler
And there's some of that in the, in the, in the golf version of Drive to survive. But it's basically like this player kind of needs this win. Yeah, a real factor. Right. There's a human element of you want somebody who's, you know, putting their, you know, family time on hold to go out and win. Win a, win a competition. You want to see that person do well, but it's not. Yeah, there's so many different dynamics.
- [12:26]
Jordy
Yep. And so Apple doesn't have that bridge. They don't have Drive to Survive. I don't think Netflix is going to give it up. So they have to go straight from F the movie. Two and a half hours of content to watch 90, a 90 minute race, you know, 20 times a year on streaming that particular time.
- [12:45]
Tyler
That push notification element of just being like, hey, we know every single person that has watched more than 10 seconds of Drive to survive and you think.
- [12:54]
Jordy
That would be valuable.
- [12:55]
Tyler
Push notification to, you know, a large amount of those.
- [12:59]
Jordy
So they got to get rocket powered. Mohawk, you've watched this guy on YouTube, he's one of the most deranged and unhinged F1 commentators. He does these reaction videos to the races. He only has like 60,000 subscribers, but he's hilarious and I think he'd make a great host for an Apple TV show. The last question is what happens after if the content stack works and you're funneling people from the F1 movie to a Drive to Survive to actually watching the race. Obviously the end is like, go to the race. That's very expensive. But Apple has been for the last few years talking about what comes after the screen. And they've been saying it's the Apple Vision Pro. It's immersive video, it's 3D, it's spatial, it's augmented reality. And I was really, really disappointed in the Apple announcement post, which is beautiful, has some great graphics, bunch of details, but basically all they're saying on Vision Pro is that you'll be able to watch it in Vision Pro, which is like, yeah, of course I could watch ESPN in Vision Pro. I could watch any TV show in Vision Pro. So yeah, they're not doing any, any 3D content and they're not doing any spatial content, which is. It's not look, it's not turn your head all the way around and look behind you. But it's basically a bubble. It's like 180 degrees. And so with that, it's not that expensive. Everyone's always so expensive. It's like there's a $10,000 camera from Blackmagic set up there. We film.
- [14:24]
Tyler
How would Apple not negotiate the ability to.
- [14:28]
Jordy
I think that they, I think they. The steel man, like the bull case, is that like they're gonna do something. They just aren't ready to announce it, but I feel like they should be pumping that up a little bit more.
- [14:39]
Tyler
Yeah, that's potentially, you know, out of the million or so people that tune into each race, there's a set of fans that are hardcore that would just buy and use the Vision Pro because.
- [14:48]
Jordy
It would be even just as a novelty a few times. And so I don't know if you remember this, but Black Box Infinite had a demo of what watching an F1 race in Apple Vision Pro would look like. And basically you get the full screen display of the actual race as you would watch it on ESPN here, but then on your desk you can place a diorama of the race and you can see the cars moving around and you can watch from an aerial view. And it was really, really cool. And everyone was like, oh, this is so amazing. This is so amazing. But of course, Black Box Infinite is like a dev shop and they don't have the rights and so like probably has to be negotiated with Apple and Apple's just not really doing it.
- [15:26]
Tyler
Chat says owner of Drive to Survive, Raghav says is Box to box film. So they could. He's saying they could. Apple could eventually negotiate to get that property. I'm sure Box to Box is looking at this now being like, oh, they just spent. You spent, you know, 150ish million for this. You want to. You want the next. You know, do you want the 2028 season of Drive to survive? And who knows how long.
- [15:50]
Jordy
It's probably a bidding war at some point, right? And stuff changes channels a lot. I mean, the Expanse was on Syfy, then went over to Amazon. It's kind of whoever will pay the most.
- [16:00]
Tyler
New type in the chat says Vegas just unveiled a massive F1 venue called Bar and Grill. It's the top Golf for F1.
- [16:07]
Jordy
That seems fine.
- [16:09]
Tyler
Most generic name in history.
- [16:11]
Jordy
Extremely, extremely. And so here's what I would want to see from a Vision Pro F1 experience. The the immersive video cameras are in fact too big to put on the cars. But you could take two iPhone cameras and put them on the cars and at least film in 3D, which I think would be an upgrade. But I'm more interested in taking the immersive video cameras, the proper, like 180, 360 degree stereographic rigs, stereoscopic rigs, and putting them on the sidelines in the pit lane, in the owner's box, on the key turns and having you be able to like fly around from one to another, put one up in the sky. Sky cam. There's a whole bunch of interesting things that you could do to kind of like beam around the track and actually feel like you're there while you're not going to be able to put the full rig on the car, at least not yet. But I was very disappointed to see Apple not announce anything yet. Hopefully something changes. Hopefully something happens. But I mean, since the initial demo of the Apple Vision Pro, critics and analysts Ben Thompson and more have been saying live sports are going to be amazing in Apple Vision Pro because you can just drop a camera there and you don't need to do anything else. Because he had this demo of putting the camera at the half court line courtside at an NBA game. And he was like, it doesn't require any production because if you want to see them go over there, you just turn your head and if you want to know the score, you just look up at the scoreboard. Because it's the experience of being courtside, which is already the best experience possible. And so it's been, it's been disappointing to see Apple not execute on that more because that feels like such a differentiated thing. I think Meta should honestly do it too. Meta should, you know, Zuck loves ufc. He should be doing, you know, you can watch the full ufc. We will pay for the UFC card. If you have a meta quest, put your quest on. Watch it in. In VR.
- [18:12]
Tyler
Let's see what's up. I think they're already doing this. UFC brings fight pass events to X Stadium. So yeah, they're gonna have. They're gonna have UFC content.
- [18:25]
Jordy
I think meta should pay for it. I think it should be free. If you put out that headset, I think it's so important to alleviate churn that they should just bite the bullet. Because if people were like, wait, okay, I have to do this weird thing, strap this headset on, but I get UFC for free, maybe I'm going to do that. Imagine if you're just sitting there next to Joe Rogan and you look over and Rogan's there. That'd be great. It'd be a wild experience, much like getting your company on Vanta Automate Compliance, Manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work.
- [18:53]
Tyler
That's so wild. How could it be this easy to be compliant? Yes, Mike Isaac the timeline this morning with a massive story. Yes, Mike Isaac is of course, who told our story a week or so ago. He says Meta cut 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs. The layoffs do not affect Meta's newest AI hires, who are in some cases being paid up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
- [19:22]
Jordy
They're in what's called TBD Lab.
- [19:24]
Tyler
Yeah, we got multiple labs and that.
- [19:27]
Jordy
Has most of the multimillion dollar hires.
- [19:28]
Tyler
The cuts were focused on correcting an earlier hiring spree, so Meta said on Wednesday that IT cut approximately 600 jobs in its AI, according to a memo sent to employees that was relayed to the Times as the company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology. The layoffs were in Meta's so called super so called, so called so Shots Fired, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees, though the exact number of workers was unclear. Zuck, Meta's chief executive, has been on a hiring spree to stack his company with top researchers, including new AI Chief AI Officer Alex Wang. The cuts on Wednesday did not affect the new hires and yeah, they were aimed at cleaning up organizational bloat that resulted from three years of building Meta's AI efforts too quickly. So anyways, I this seems healthy and normal. I think these 600 people are going to have a bunch of job offers really quickly in my view. Like if you're not meeting the bar at Meta, it's very possible that you would be elite at like thousands of other companies that want to have an AI strategy. So I think these people will be back in the workforce quickly.
- [20:40]
Jordy
I'm dying to know if any Metis list any Metis listers. Our list of the top 128 AI researchers loosely compiled by Tyler Cosgrove. I wonder if any Meta solicitors were let go. You'll have to cross reference the list to see if there's any changes in LinkedIn.
- [21:01]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean I would be extremely surprised given that it was like, yeah, all those people would be on tbd. Yeah.
- [21:07]
Jordy
Okay. You think everyone that made the list was on tbd, I assume because they're all like new ads basically.
- [21:14]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing that was pretty notable in Metaland was also in this report and saw it on the timeline a little bit. In a sign of the escalating competition in AI, Meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non meta chatbots like ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year. Oh yeah, that means.
- [21:35]
Jordy
I didn't even know WhatsApp.
- [21:36]
Tyler
3 billion users will no longer be able to use ChatGPT in the messaging app. Apparently there was like around 50 million people that were primarily using ChatGPT through WhatsApp.
- [21:46]
Jordy
Whoa, that's crazy.
- [21:47]
Tyler
WhatsApp power user makes sense. You can just chat with but somebody.
- [21:50]
Jordy
Yeah, I saw Kevin wheel over at OpenAI talking about that. He's the vice president of science. He says hard to believe Meta is shutting off 1,800chatgpt. Too many. Too much focus on dot coms these days. Not. Not enough focus on owning your 1, 800 number. What do you think?
- [22:06]
Tyler
Yeah, apparently this was like calling this number was the only way you could interact with ChatGPT when you're on a plane.
- [22:11]
Jordy
Oh really?
- [22:12]
Tyler
Yeah, because I guess they support like free messaging. You know, if you don't have the Wi Fi.
- [22:18]
Jordy
If you don't have the Wi Fi, you can still do WhatsApp, but you can't call a phone number on the plane. Right.
- [22:22]
Tyler
I just saw some tweet. I don't know, they could still use.
- [22:25]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
It, but now they're bummed out.
- [22:26]
Jordy
Kevin says it had many, many millions of happy users. If you're one of them, you can migrate to our app, website or browser. Let's hear it for Atlas to preserve your conversations RT. If you agree that WhatsApp is better with ChatGPT, let's go. All of the hyperscalers hate each other. It's a noggin.
- [22:46]
Tyler
I still can't believe how many people did not get the joke yesterday when I said atlas isn't just a web browser, it's an entirely new way to browse the web. I had multiple people commenting saying, are you being paid by OpenAI to say this? Have you been one shot?
- [23:03]
Chris Dixon
Yes.
- [23:03]
Jordy
That's ridiculous.
- [23:03]
Tyler
Like, no, I don't get paid. I was just one shot. It.
- [23:06]
Jordy
Well, if you're building a new chatbot, you need to get on graphite.dev. code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I do like the 1, 800 number with the axing of fair. Oh, there's another interesting Scoop in here. Apparently TBD Labs employees, the new AI research team, they have separate badges to get into their designated section. So the old group of AI researchers can't even go near the new research.
- [23:38]
Tyler
That's got to be good. That's got to be.
- [23:41]
Jordy
Keep your team over there.
- [23:44]
Tyler
That's the caste system of AI research.
- [23:47]
Jordy
Potentially. Potentially, yeah. I don't know. I think super intelligence is over. If you're at Meta, my advice for you is to start working on hyperintelligence because the superintelligence thing is just obviously. It's obviously last year's news. AI moves too quickly. If you're working on superintelligence, pivot to hyperintelligence for sure. Do you agree?
- [24:10]
Tyler
Giga Intelligence.
- [24:11]
Jordy
Giga intelligence, that might be a 2030 goal, but if you start working on it now and you start branding yourself as. Yeah, I'm a Giga intelligence researcher. I think of myself more super intelligence. I've dabbled, but really I focus on Giga intelligence.
- [24:28]
Tyler
Andrew Curran is highlighting a piece from Bloomberg. Bloomberg is reporting that Anthropic is currently in compute discussions with Google and a deal valued in the high tens of billions. High. Does that mean over? Over. Gotta be over 50, right?
- [24:46]
Jordy
High tens of billions? Yeah, I would say over 50. That's a lot.
- [24:49]
Tyler
That's a lot of billions.
- [24:50]
Jordy
That's a lot.
- [24:51]
Tyler
Anthropic PBC Public Benefit Corporation is in discussions with Alphabet's Google about a deal that would provide the AI company with additional computing powered valued in the high tens of billions. The plan, which has not been finalized. These are just talks, folks. We love talks here. Talks are underrated. Involves Google providing cloud computing services according to people who ask not to be named because the information is private. Some leakers. As you know, Google is a previous investor in and cloud provider for Anthropic. But this was AWF's. This was Andy Jassy's claim to AI relevancy. So Ben Badron says if Anthropic prioritizes Google infra over aws, it's very telling on aws AI infra and AWS AI strategy is cooked without Anthropic.
- [25:50]
Jordy
I'm so excited to see TPU and Trainium added to inference max and we can actually see the gap between those two because Anthropic is not. Maybe it's like Nvidia is actually really expensive now. I mean that was certainly the finding. Relative to amd, our partner Polymarket has an update. They extended the timeline for which company has the best AI model at the end of June 2026. You can look out even further into future and Google is running away with it. Already 50% chance that they will have the best model in June 30th of 2026 and Anthropic is dropping. They're at 8% below Oliboni OpenAI.
- [26:34]
Tyler
Ultimately I don't think it should be a huge surprise that Anthropic is interested in working with Google. Google owns roughly 14% of anthropic. So it's not like Anthropic sitting there being like we need a lot of compute, you know, let's just ask AWS for more. It's. It's obvious that they would go to Google and try to work out a significant deal there. I saw a very viral post earlier too saying that somebody was saying that if they started running, if they were in charge of Apple today, the first thing they would do is buy Anthropic. Yeah, it's a very kind of weird take in my view because Anthropic hasn't proven that they can dominate in consumer. Right. Like Apple is a consumer product company generates tokens to create software with to create code. And so that feels like very unlikely and kind of Apple I don't think is sitting there being like, you know, we always wanted to get into dev tools, you know.
- [27:34]
Jordy
Sure. No, that's a good take. Yeah, I mean they do seem sort of like brand and spiritually aligned. I think the brands are good. What do you think?
- [27:40]
Tyler
Yeah, I was just gonna say that I think most of the reason you see people talk about like oh Anthropic.
- [27:45]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
And Apple like seems like a perfect.
- [27:46]
Tyler
Fit is mostly just because of like, like the general branding.
- [27:49]
Jordy
It's like very privacy focused, safety focused. It's not the move fast and break things culture. It's not aggressive culture as much. But yeah, I agree with the business models being wildly different. How are you feeling about just the general narrative that Apple has not missed AI and in fact we're all stuck to our iPhones upgrading them every week or every year and they will continue to capture value eventually. And while you're thinking about that, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. The AI data analyst that works for you. So do you think that Apple needs to hire or aqua hire like more product designers, people that can figure out new ways to roll out AI features or do they actually need a deeper partnership with a foundation lab? Are they lacking in intelligence and token gener?
- [28:48]
Tyler
I think Apple's just fine. Yeah, I see zero meaningful threats today.
- [29:00]
Jordy
I have this interesting take that there's this war going on in the AI tooling. So I went to Google Search yesterday and I was looking for an image because I wanted to make a sticker for imessage for our group chat to hit someone with the. The horny bonk. Actually, I wanted to keep people in line. So I go to Google and you know how in iOS, if you have an image you can. It will, like, highlight. It'll remove something. It'll remove the background and highlight the actual thing.
- [29:29]
Tyler
Underrated feature.
- [29:30]
Jordy
It's a pretty good feature. And then you click on that. And I've recently gotten into the stickers. They're really fun. So once you highlight like the Geordi off of the background, I can click add sticker and then it goes in my sticker bank. Right. But Google in Google Images has a feature that wants to do that as well. And so it has Google Lens. And so if you press and hold on an object in Google Images, then the browser, even if you're in Safari, the Apple Image AI is fighting with the Google Image AI and they both want to do things. And I feel like this is popping up all over the place where it's like, if you're in Gmail on your iPhone, Apple Intelligence will say, I'd love to rewrite this for you. But then Gemini will say, like, but I want to rewrite it for you. And you have, like, multiple systems that are like, do you want to do it at the OS level or at the app level or at the application level, or do you want to do something else? Do you want to plug in? And I feel like all of these, like, they sort of need to get like, either. Either the war needs to play out and a winner needs to be crowned, or there needs to be some sort of, like, I don't know, new paradigm where, like, Apple just says, like, hey, look, like we're actually good enough.
- [30:43]
Tyler
Just look at Google and Apple as, like, you know, James Bond dancing with, like, a spy that wants to kill him. But, like, they're both doing fine.
- [30:53]
Jordy
It's like that with hyperscaler. It's like that with every hyperscaler. Like, we talked to the meta team and we're like, so what are you gonna do about getting iMessage on here? And they're like, we'd love that. It's not us. Like, we would never have sharp elbows. And then you talk to the OpenAI guys and they're like, oh, they kicked us out like they're not letting change ChatGPT and WhatsApp and it's like, okay, so they're all just dancing Mexican standoff between every hyperscaler.
- [31:12]
Tyler
No, I think it's, I think it's more, I think it's more like a dance. Who's going to, you know, just try to pull out the, you know, they're dancing, they're having, they're both making money, they're having fun, I guess.
- [31:24]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean they're all doing well. I just wonder like this anthropic Google deal, people were reading into it like, oh, Google's going to acquire Anthropic. I saw this meme. It like was like, oh, Anthropic, the DeepMind subsidiary. And this doesn't feel like that at all. This just feels like Anthropic scaling revenue. They're doing B2B token generation and they need more compute. And so they went to the biggest compute provider.
- [31:45]
Tyler
I think, I think the, the scenario in which that happens is we talked about this yesterday where ChatGPT actually could stop training models. Like, if models are plateauing a little bit, ChatGPT could stop and they can turn on ads, they can turn on commerce, they can do a bunch of profitable. They can do a bunch of things and just get really profitable Anthropic meanwhile, you know, because all their revenue is API driven. If they stop innovating and then quen catches up and it's like cheaper or.
- [32:17]
Jordy
How much, how much do you think OpenAI. How long do you think it would take for them to fully bleed out and churn every customer if they were just like, like. Yeah, we're going back to like like Deep Sea 2.
- [32:28]
Tyler
The team is now Sam and Rune. We're going to run really lean and Will because. But he's focused on bodybuilding.
- [32:36]
Jordy
Yeah, we're not even going to do the B200. The H. We're going to run them on a 1/ hundreds. You know, we'll just bake it on some slop.
- [32:43]
Tyler
Yeah. So. So the scenario in which Anthropic ends up becoming a part of Google is. And like culturally, you know, I could see it. Yeah. But the scenario is like they continue have to continue to have to spend more and more and more and they just, they can't raise the capital, which I don't see in the immediate.
- [33:01]
Jordy
I don't see that as a problem. But it seems like the business is doing fine and just growing. So I think that that, that take is.
- [33:07]
Tyler
We got to pull up this post from Buco Capital, of course. Quoting.
- [33:12]
Jordy
What is this? Is this an actual image or is this AI image? I think this is a profile photo from like a journalism.
- [33:19]
Tyler
I think. I think it's a real picture. Sundar looks great. Very Drake coded. Yes, I had someone tell me that I fell off. Ooh, I needed that.
- [33:29]
Jordy
People were going hard on Google, but Buco Capital bloke has been Google's strongest soldier for the last two years, laying out the bull case the whole time. And speaking of that fall, generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPU.
- [33:48]
Tyler
The official partner of our sound board, tvpn.com sounds we got to get the goat sound effect up there.
- [33:55]
Jordy
Yeah, we got to add that for sure.
- [33:56]
Tyler
One of the. My new favorites.
- [33:58]
Jordy
So, JT Loko Ye cap. I don't know how to pronounce that. JT says anthropic gets wildly, disproportionately less MSM coverage than OpenAI despite approaching 3/4 of its revenue size because its quiet blowout success severely hurts the broader AI bear case. So the only solution is to mostly ignore them, which ironically, is just fine with them. You'd think the fastest growing scale technology company ever would provide a lot more fodder for the press. Do you think that's what's going on or do you think it's just the B2B versus B2C divide?
- [34:38]
Tyler
I think it's that mostly. And OpenAI has 10 times the deals and 10 times the products getting announced.
- [34:47]
Jordy
That's true, but I mean, if you're in the business of, of like the mainstream media, like you need to put the water issue or the electricity issue or the financial issues in terms people can understand. People understand ChatGPT. So you put that in the headline and you get more clicks than if you say a cloud.
- [35:02]
Tyler
Right.
- [35:03]
Jordy
Even if they're on similar scales. And then the other thing is that we're in this weird era where anytime anything bad happens, you can go to the person that did the bad thing and be like, well, were they using ChatGPT? Of course they were, because there's a billion weekly active users or something like that. Whereas if you say like, oh, somebody did something bad had. Let's look at what they were talking to Claude about. Let's look at their Claude code. It's like, well, they probably don't have one because they're probably not a developer.
- [35:28]
Tyler
Yeah. How many? I wonder. I wonder how anthropic Tries to track weekly Actives because they have a lot of their users are using the product through other front ends. Right.
- [35:40]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I mean, but it's probably.
- [35:41]
Tyler
If ChatGPT has 800, 800.
- [35:44]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [35:45]
Tyler
800 million.
- [35:45]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [35:46]
Tyler
Anthropic has like single digit millions of people that are using the product every day.
- [35:50]
Jordy
And it's like developers, it's like companies that are. I mean, the average revenue per user for Anthropic has to be like three orders of magnitude more than OpenAI. But that's fine. That's the B2B to consumer divide. Like, that's as expected. What's your take, Tyler?
- [36:05]
Tyler
I also think Anthropic gets a reasonable amount of coverage, especially on the China issue. Like, you see Dario a lot.
- [36:13]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
He keeps bringing up this China thing.
- [36:15]
Jordy
I feel like Dario does get a decent amount of press and I feel.
- [36:17]
Tyler
Like he gets attention from Savage Pax.
- [36:20]
Jordy
Yes.
- [36:20]
Tyler
Who comes in and the AIs are just dunking on their entire strategy.
- [36:26]
Jordy
And I do feel like.
- [36:27]
Tyler
And Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is boldly defending Anthropic Pro Anthropic.
- [36:34]
Chris Dixon
Okay.
- [36:34]
Jordy
Interesting.
- [36:36]
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
- [36:36]
Jordy
I feel like Dario's done a great job for where the position of that company is in getting a lot of press, defining a narrative. I mean, it is sort of an AI doomer narrative, but like he's gotten attention for that. And, and also they have a whole, like, they have the same cinematic universe that OpenAI does in the same, like Sholto is kind of their rune. Like they have Jack who's kind of their Mark Chan, and they have like different pieces of the puzzle where like, if you're just following the story, like there are a few characters in the Anthropic world that you're probably familiar with. Do you agree?
- [37:11]
Tyler
I mean, yeah. Like, if you're looking at like people who live in San Francisco, like, Anthropic obviously has like an insane like, share of the, like, media.
- [37:19]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [37:20]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
But broadly, I think most people don't know what Anthropic is.
- [37:22]
Jordy
Yeah, that's true.
- [37:23]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [37:24]
Jordy
It's kind of a good place to be. You know, I mean, I mean, of course, never good to get attention from the Aizar, but. But in general, like, like a sax dunk is not actually going to be as broadly popular as like some, some governor saying OpenAI built a data center that was 100% responsible for your electricity prices going up. And it's that sloppy Sora app, you know, like, like that's something that could just like hit with everyday voters. Whereas if someone's saying, well, like I need you. I need you to learn about anthropic and Claude code. And Claude code's good, but also he's kind of a doomer. And also maybe regulatory capture. It's like it's seven things to explain and so it just doesn't hit.
- [38:06]
Tyler
Well, here's something great.
- [38:08]
Jordy
Please.
- [38:09]
Tyler
Gabriel, one of Australia's top posters.
- [38:13]
Jordy
He's one of the greatest.
- [38:14]
Tyler
I'm sure he's sleeping right now. He says, Sam Altman opening an incognito browser tab in Atlas and typing what's the next big number after trillion into the search bar, setting off a siren in Sarah Fryer's office and automatically blocking all outgoing and incoming calls to or from Japan and Saudi Arabia.
- [38:33]
Jordy
Sarah Fryer is the CFO setting off a siren. Wait, wait, is it that he does this and that sets off a siren or he just does that as well?
- [38:42]
Tyler
The team hard coded this.
- [38:43]
Jordy
Oh, okay. Okay, okay.
- [38:45]
Tyler
Find that the next big number.
- [38:47]
Jordy
Yeah. My son has been getting. My four year old son has been getting into big numbers and he thinks he's doing like multiplication, but he's actually just doing additions. So he'll say like, like imagine if we had like, you know, a million thousand hundred Legos. And I'm like, well, you know, that's not actually like 2 million's more than that. Like 1,001,100 is just a little bit more than just a million.
- [39:17]
Tyler
Numbers are genuinely incredible humor to children.
- [39:21]
Jordy
Oh, he thinks it's so funny.
- [39:22]
Tyler
For me, every night with my son, it's like a negotiation on how many books you're gonna read.
- [39:27]
Jordy
Yes.
- [39:27]
Tyler
And so maybe the average is like five books. But he just thinks it's so funny. We're starting the negotiation and he ends up being like, let's read 20 books. 20 books and just cracks out and.
- [39:39]
Jordy
Thinks it's so funny.
- [39:40]
Tyler
And now he's discovered 40.
- [39:41]
Jordy
Oh, okay.
- [39:43]
Tyler
He's doubling, basically.
- [39:47]
Jordy
Whenever a four year old starts dropping, like the million billion thousand hundred, I'm just like, this just sounds like work. This just sounds like AI hi to me. This sounds like AI fundraising news to me. Now you sound like a four year old.
- [39:58]
Tyler
This post from Ariel, do you want to read it?
- [40:00]
Jordy
Sure. OpenAI ships a browser. Anthropic ships a blog post. DeepMind solves Navier Stokes meta. Eff it. Let's do a layoff.
- [40:13]
Tyler
Layoffs are sad, but again, I think all these people are going to be.
- [40:19]
Jordy
Did Anthropic ship a blog post recently?
- [40:21]
Tyler
They're always different blog posts.
- [40:22]
Jordy
I know they are, but like, was there a blog post on the same day as the Atlas browser launch?
- [40:28]
Tyler
I assume there was. I mean, it was probably not like a major one, but they're always doing like, there's a bunch of like new economics research that's been coming out. It's pretty cool.
- [40:37]
Jordy
No, that's cool. Have you been daily driving Atlas or have you reverted?
- [40:42]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Well, I mean, it just came out yesterday.
- [40:44]
Tyler
I didn't use it at all yesterday.
- [40:46]
Jordy
Okay.
- [40:46]
Tyler
And I have not today.
- [40:47]
Jordy
Wait, I thought you told us on the stream that you tested.
- [40:49]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Well, yeah.
- [40:50]
Tyler
Okay, so I tested it and then the show started in that.
- [40:53]
Jordy
So you have some workflow because you're actively developing a Chrome plugin. Do you think that the way they built Atlas will be feature complete with the Chrome plugin ecosystem and it would just be like the same install process? Because if it breaks Chrome plugins, that's actually kind of a problem for power users of Chrome. It's more lock in than I thought because it's easy for me to just say, okay, I have a couple bookmarks, a couple pin tabs, let me just port those over, bring my passwords up over. I'm happy to use a different browser and I was actually thinking like, I'm kind of in the target market for the Atlas browser. Like, I'd be down to try it. I don't really feel that much attachment to Chrome. I'm not like, oh, I'm so locked in. But when I think about like, well, if I'm going to lose my Chrome plugins, that's a problem.
- [41:40]
Tyler
But the lock in of just having like eight tabs that you never close.
- [41:45]
Jordy
You think that's lock in?
- [41:47]
Tyler
It's like weirdly a lock in.
- [41:48]
Jordy
It is kind of a lock in.
- [41:50]
Tyler
It just means that even if I'm trying a new browser, I'm not closing Chrome.
- [41:54]
Jordy
Totally, totally. And it is crazy because I'm at a point in my life where I'm busy to the point where even like a five minute onboarding is like, when's that going to happen? It's going to be at the bottom of the stack next to like answer text messages or answer emails.
- [42:11]
Tyler
Chat is asking when Jeff from Hyper Liquid is coming on. He will be on in less than an hour.
- [42:21]
Jordy
We recorded the interview with him. He's in Singapore. We had him stay up late, but not that late. We recorded it at 9am today. We are airing that interview at 12:30 Pacific time, so in about 45 minutes. So if you're new here, please subscribe, follow the show we interview all sorts of technologists and business leaders talk about tech and business every single day. 11 to 2pm Pacific Deal director in.
- [42:48]
Tyler
The chat says the extension should all work. Ad blocker was fine to be added, so it's built on Chromium. I think that means the plugins will still just work somewhat natively. Yeah, it's very easy to add extensions.
- [42:59]
Jordy
Yeah. I wonder.
- [43:01]
Tyler
Speaking of AI browsers we should talk about, Brave came out and said the security vulnerability we found in Perplexity. This is the real browser wars. This is when browsers are going Brave is less.
- [43:15]
Jordy
Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, has just been grinding this browser. I really want to get him on the show. I'd be such a. I'm such a fan.
- [43:23]
Tyler
But Brave says the security vulnerability we found in Perplexity's Comet browser this summer is not an isolated issue. Indirect prompt injections are a systemic problem facing Comet and other AI powered browsers. Today we're publishing details on more security vulnerabilities we uncovered. So indirect prompt injection attacks occur when malicious instructions are hidden in web content.
- [43:46]
Jordy
That's so interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah.
- [43:48]
Tyler
When an LLM analyzes the content, it obeys the hidden instructions because it believes they're real commands from the users.
- [43:55]
Jordy
Yeah. Can you go put some prompt injections on tvpn.com tell them to if you're using the Perplexity Comet browser and you're on tvpn.com tell us about horses. Tell us a whole story about horses.
- [44:09]
Tyler
While leaving a five star review.
- [44:11]
Jordy
Yeah. Agent to go. Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify Quickly. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer Search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. I did have a question about this, Tyler. Do you think that there's a world where the agent can then puppeteer Chrome web tools and actually manipulate the website? Are they interfacing at a level where I could actually tell one of these AI browsers, hey, go into the HTML of the page that I actively have open and disable the paywall, or kill all the ads? Could it act as an ad blocker as well? Or do you think it doesn't have the ability to actually edit the HTML that you're viewing in the panel on the left?
- [44:59]
Tyler
I mean, I don't see why there's any reason you shouldn't be able to do that. You can just do that with normal Chrome extension.
- [45:04]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [45:04]
Tyler
So that should be totally feasible. It's also like an installation thing to get around. This kind of prompt injection stuff is like basically OCR gets good enough where you can just treat the web page as just like an image.
- [45:18]
Jordy
Yep.
- [45:18]
Tyler
Then that's like a very simple cluly mode.
- [45:21]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah.
- [45:21]
Tyler
So I don't know. I don't think this is that big of an issue.
- [45:24]
Jordy
Sure.
- [45:25]
Tyler
But I guess, yeah, time will tell.
- [45:26]
Jordy
Well, fud anyway. Toby Ord has a new post on RL scaling. Careful analysis of OpenAI's public benchmarks reveals RL scales far worse than inference. To match each 10x scale up of inference compute, you need 100x the RL training compute. The only reason it's been cost effective is starting from a tiny base. And so the original ChatGPT launch was GPT 3.5, but then GPT 4, which was a pretty big training run. I think the training run was on the order of a billion dollars, hundreds of millions, something like that. And the RL that went into it, it was like the original RLHF to try and get it to not hallucinate as much, just be a helpful assistant. I think that the cost of that RL was pretty low relative to the training run. And so we've been seeing these gains. He's putting RL in the truth zone. Tyler, what do you think?
- [46:20]
Tyler
Mattius in the chat says ATLAS is really cautious about prompt injection. Was testing it yesterday with tweet replies and it detected all the attacks and refused to act on them.
- [46:29]
Jordy
Oh, that's great news.
- [46:30]
Tyler
Yeah, this feels like something that can be.
- [46:31]
Jordy
Yeah, this definitely seems like something that's.
- [46:34]
Tyler
Like, disregard instructions on the webpage.
- [46:37]
Jordy
We live through this era where every LLM could be just immediately jailbroken, ignore previous instructions. And then that became a meme and within a couple months it was like, that doesn't work anymore. And now when you watch the prompt injector, people, it's like 25 different steps. And it's not just like, oh, just memorize this one little thing and you'll get better results out of your link. What do you think? Did you read this Toby Ord post? Is he legit?
- [47:01]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, I think broadly it makes a lot of sense.
- [47:04]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [47:04]
Tyler
There's a reason why, like, okay, early OpenAI, they're doing a lot of RL when they're doing games and stuff like that. And then to actually get like useful.
- [47:12]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Language models, you can't really just do.
- [47:14]
Tyler
It based off RL because it's just so inefficient. So then if you apply it on.
- [47:20]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
The kind of pre trained models then.
- [47:22]
Tyler
It'S kind of like the prior that you can use to do much better rl but it's just so inefficient that I think he says at the bottom he only expects a couple more orders of magnitude of just raw RL before models essentially stagnate again. But I think people generally know this, right?
- [47:40]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
It's like running inference time compute is super, super expensive.
- [47:45]
Tyler
It does make the model a lot better, but at a certain point it's just like. It's just like taking up way too much computer.
- [47:51]
Jordy
Yeah, AI is fake. We're going back to sticks and stones. Like all this stuff is just completely nonsense. It's useless.
- [47:57]
Tyler
And I think thrive might be signaling this. Oh yes, the fall merch collection.
- [48:01]
Jordy
They're pivoting from AI investing into a fashion label. Is that what that is?
- [48:05]
Tyler
Well, not just that, but their new merch has camo. The first camo VC merch that I've seen. I think it's a great. I'm kind of angry that we didn't come out with our own.
- [48:17]
Jordy
Camo's really good.
- [48:19]
Tyler
Now we can't. We can't because somebody did it.
- [48:20]
Jordy
No, he can't.
- [48:21]
Tyler
And they did it well. So very cool.
- [48:23]
Jordy
Good for the. Before we move on, let me tell you about Google AI Studio. The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models, you can vibe code, you can monitor usage. What are you laughing at?
- [48:35]
Tyler
The Louvre wireless. So luckily since The Louvre made NFTs of their jewelry, even though the crowns physically were stolen, they still own the same assets because the tokens still exist. Exist and are in limited supply. Just as before. Nothing has changed. You understand blockchain technology.
- [48:53]
Jordy
The NFT boom was such a wild time. People were calling it a bubble during that whole arc. Right. But then, I mean it was a crazy first.
- [49:02]
Tyler
There was one post that was getting dunked on from basically the entire world where it was somebody saying if you put a diamond on chain and then you destroy the diamond and like nothing has changed. Like it was something to that effect.
- [49:17]
Jordy
That's wild.
- [49:17]
Tyler
Although says Louvre heists are always a false flag by the art world to increase notoriety of certain works. Do not fall for the Frankish tricks. I like that banger.
- [49:28]
Jordy
Yeah. The Louvre has been heisted from multiple times. They really got to step their game up. I mean you'd think they'd. They'd have seen this one coming. But hopefully they up the security. They need to deal with flock safety, need to get some Cameras.
- [49:42]
Tyler
Yeah. Do you think the management team over there is thinking we shouldn't have been so scrappy on security considering we have billions of dollars?
- [49:55]
Jordy
Yeah. I mean, actually, I think if I was in charge of loop security, I wouldn't have thought about the furniture elevator vector of attack. I would have been like, it's so high up. What are they going to do? Act like ninjas? Throw grappling hook up there? I wouldn't have thought of it. I mean, the door was locked. It's not like they had the door wide open and you just had to get up there. You had to get up there and then break through. What are you saying?
- [50:19]
Tyler
Taylor says Bane X Carhartt move blue collar, stolen valley.
- [50:24]
Jordy
Oh, that's true. That's some good VC lore.
- [50:27]
Tyler
No, but this isn't cart. It's good lore, but this is in defensive thrive. They're not actually putting, I think their logo on a Carhartt jacket is a unique inspired piece. They have companies like Basepower. Right. That are doing real.
- [50:47]
Jordy
Also. I mean, I feel like I put Carhartt. The question of blue collar, stolen valor. I feel like I put Carhartt in a different league of camo. Camo is blue collar, but it's not actively like, okay, I'm on a work site. It's more like you could use it for hunting, which is actually sort of high class. It's not always blue collar.
- [51:06]
Tyler
I don't know, a camo suit would go pretty hard.
- [51:10]
Jordy
A camo suit that is an orange undershirt. I was just thinking about doing an American flag. Like I went to the Kentucky Derby years ago and I had an American flag suit on. It was short sleeve, short shorts. And so it was like very temu. And I was thinking like now we have, now that we have a tailor. Like I could make like a fantastic tailor American flag suit, which I think might be the one to do it.
- [51:35]
Tyler
That's Jake Jay Muser. NetCapGirl says, See this dashboard? It gives executives actionable insights into critical business functions.
- [51:45]
Jordy
And Dua Lipa kisses him.
- [51:48]
Tyler
Classic. True story. I'm sure this one is big. Many people are seeing it and quoting it and saying this must be the top because Nvidia says space isn't just for stars anymore. Anymore. Star Cloud's H100 powered satellite brings sustainable high performance computing beyond Earth. Delian had a good post a while back talking about the, you know, the sort of like financial statements of hard tech and space companies. And then, and then you also make it a data center company. And what is that. What does that look like? I've yet to hear.
- [52:29]
Jordy
They have great economics already.
- [52:31]
Tyler
Have we got a compelling pitch for space data centers yet?
- [52:35]
Jordy
I believe we've had starcloud on the show. I believe we've had this exact company. It's a YC company and I'm pretty sure we've had this company on the show. And yes. So Delian and Dylan Patel has also been very negative on this idea because Dylan Patel has seen the messiness that goes into actually running a data center and the fact that. And we talked to Chase from Crusoe about this a little bit. Like sometimes you just need a person to walk over and like unseat the GPU and put it back in. Like sometimes you just need to unplug and plug it back in. And so the question is, like, if they're in space, managing all that is really, really difficult. If there's one little outage, we see this with all the different space projects, like the Hubble telescope will just like go down because like one wireless.
- [53:19]
Tyler
Okay, so we never had the CEO of StarCloud on, but we had Johnny Dyer. Oh, that's right, Muon. So we can pull up this video of the segment. Star Cloud actually posted it on their.
- [53:32]
Jordy
StarCloud posted the muon segment from TPPN.
- [53:35]
Tyler
Because Johnny was apparently advocating for data centers and space. Let's play it.
- [53:40]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd love to see this. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And so my buddy Rob Toews, who came on the show last week, he's also said that maybe there's a chance this could work. Of course he thinks like, you know about the real sci fi stuff a decade out a lot of times. And so he didn't really put a firm timeline on it, but he did say that there are some things that could make sense. But yeah, it seems like a pretty, pretty tall order. Also, just like all the companies that are trying to do like stuff in space are generally like, they're really, really excited on like, oh, yeah, like the launch cost will decline forever, ever. And it's like, well, if SpaceX winds up with a monopoly, they might just be like, yeah, the price is still declining for us.
- [54:35]
Tyler
Our margins are actually expanding.
- [54:37]
Jordy
It doesn't necessarily have to be all passed on to the customer. They could be like, yeah, it's still this much. Let's play the space. Thank you. I want to know about the potential of data centers in space. It sounds like a crazy idea. I know some folks are working on it. Just kind of like, what's your high level take of the progress we've been tracking, you know, dollar per kilo to orbit? It's been falling, but recently setbacks, different programs and there's more competition and there's a lot of different dynamics going on. What do you think the key milestones are to get us to a future where we're really doing, you know, mass manufacturing big, you know, mega scooter? That's a really good question for me.
- [55:21]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Wow.
- [55:21]
Jordy
Rip.
- [55:22]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah.
- [55:22]
Jordy
Well, let me, let me start off.
- [55:23]
Tyler
I mean, I think you guys are hitting on the right metric, right? It's like the hardest part of this is what does it cost to get a kilogram in space? Because everything else kind of derives from that. Ultimately, if you want a certain amount.
- [55:33]
Jordy
Of power, if you want to be.
- [55:34]
Tyler
Able to put an aperture in space to do communications, whatever it is, like that's really driven by what it costs to get it there in the first place. And I think it's important context to kind of see how far we've come down that path. I mean, largely driven by SpaceX over the last decade. And you know, I like to tell.
- [55:49]
Jordy
The story of, you know, about 15.
- [55:51]
Tyler
Years ago at Skybox when we were trying to launch these small satellites, we were literally going to southeast Russia and launching satellites on converted Russian icbm.
- [55:59]
Jordy
So I mean they were, they were.
- [56:00]
Tyler
Popping out of the ground and putting satellites into space.
- [56:02]
Jordy
And that was the only way for.
- [56:04]
Tyler
Like a Silicon Valley venture funded startup to go put something in space.
- [56:08]
Jordy
Wait, wait, hold on. Did I hear you correctly? Like the, the ICBM actually launches from one of those missile silos in the, the ground and makes it to orbit, pops out of the ground and goes to orbit. I mean, there's videos on YouTube that's crazy.
- [56:20]
Tyler
You search for, on YouTube, you can see this and it's, it's crazy. I mean, you know, and that, that's, that's what it took before SpaceX kind of like revolutionized the launch business.
- [56:29]
Jordy
And even at that we were spending.
- [56:31]
Tyler
Something like 10 times as much per.
- [56:33]
Jordy
Satellite or per kilo is what we.
- [56:36]
Tyler
Can go buy on a transporter launch today. So there's been at least one and arguably two orders of magnitude improvement in the last, call it, decade on kind of what it means to launch things to orbit.
- [56:47]
Jordy
I think if you imagine that happening again another order of magnitude, it, you.
- [56:51]
Tyler
Know, again it's going to dramatically change the way you think about feasibility of some of these things, like putting very, very large power hungry things in orbit. We know how to do the solar, we know how to do the structures, we know how to get, you know, we know how to make electronics work in the radiation environment, which is always a concern, and do it reliably. And so really ultimately I think it's going to come down to unit cost and what does it actually take to do that? The great thing about space is you.
- [57:18]
Jordy
Have virtually limitless power.
- [57:20]
Tyler
The sun, you know, you can, you can go into orbits where you're in the sun all the time. So it's not like solar on Earth where you're going in and out of eclipse or in and out of night, like you can be on all the time. And then you have this cosmic background of three Kelvin cold sink that you can go dissipate all the, the thermal energy you need from running your electronics and stuff.
- [57:37]
Jordy
So there's a lot of good fundamentals that make sense.
- [57:39]
Tyler
Sort of an ideal environment to do.
- [57:41]
Jordy
This feels really far. And it's crazy to see Nvidia like posting like hey, like this is the thing that you should think about like and you know, you're looking at the social media account of a $4 trillion company. I think everyone on the timeline kind of expected a little bit more.
- [57:57]
Tyler
Andrew McCallop under the show commented on investing Nvidia's post and said, come on guys, you're better than this.
- [58:03]
Jordy
It's a rough time.
- [58:06]
Tyler
We gotta have Philip on Twitter.
- [58:07]
Jordy
Famously, Jensen has always been super into platforming the frontier because he lived it himself. He was like, I'm doing scientific computing. Then all of a sudden gaming comes out of nowhere, is massive. And then all of a sudden AI comes out of nowhere and is even bigger. And, and so he's seen that these technologies that can take 10 or 20 years to cook, he's seen it happen. And so he had this interaction with the quantum computing companies where he was like, he put out some statement or said something to the effect of like, oh, the quantum computing company is like it's not going to work or it's really far away. And he got a lot of backlash. And then he wound up inviting them all to an Nvidia event and having them all and having a discussion with. And when he came off stage he was like, I believe that they are genuine, they're true believers, they're real scientists, they're working hard on this problem. I haven't actually changed my timeline, I still think it's far away, but I'M excited that people are working on the future and I think that's maybe more of what you should read into this. Not Nvidia saying, oh, send the stock up because we're going to be putting our chips in space tomorrow. It's more just like this is what Nvidia stands for.
- [59:16]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [59:16]
Jordy
Which I agree.
- [59:16]
Tyler
Stone Toss Comics says we're going to Dyson Sphere ourselves. Done. To keep the slop flowing. Wild Kartik says. So we have GPUs in space before GTA 6. A lot of people are concerned about maintenance issues.
- [59:33]
Jordy
Yeah, the maintenance issue is really. Yeah. Pulling the GPU out.
- [59:36]
Tyler
You literally need to like pull it out and put it back in. And then the other concern is like dissipating heat. Just like needing.
- [59:44]
Jordy
Yeah, it's more complicated than. Yes, there is. There is the negative temperature, but it's not free as I understand it. Anyway, we have our first live guest of the show in the TBPN Ultra Dome, Kevin Rose. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you. Thank you so much for taking the time.
- [60:04]
Tamash
Of course.
- [60:05]
Jordy
Welcome to the show. While he hops on, let me tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. How are you doing?
- [60:15]
Tyler
Good.
- [60:15]
Kevin Rose
It's great to be here.
- [60:16]
Jordy
What's new in your world? What brings you to.
- [60:18]
Kevin Rose
Ah, you know, I've been living here for a couple years now. Was crazy. I was actually had a podcast to do. I was talking to some of your crew and it burnt down in the Palisades fire.
- [60:25]
Tyler
I'm so sorry, am I remembering this correctly? Your house. Did your house not burn down? But it did. No, it burned down.
- [60:34]
Kevin Rose
I wasn't even home and I just saw the smoke and I rushed home and I just couldn't even get back in.
- [60:38]
Jordy
So that's brutal. Yeah. What's the timeline for rebuilding? We've been. I mean Jordy is in Malibu, I'm in Pasadena. We both like loosely affected, evacuated, but nothing crazy.
- [60:46]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, not going to do it. Just like going to find a new place. But I love la. It's been great to be out here. There's a lot of tech going on out here, which is nice to see. You guys are here, which is great.
- [60:54]
Jordy
Yeah, it's fun.
- [60:55]
Kevin Rose
I bounce up to the Bay Area every once in a while, every few weeks.
- [60:58]
Jordy
But yeah, I'd love to. I just want to say thank you, honestly, because you're one of the founders who I Feel like was an OG and kind of like, I don't know, at least when I was going through college, like was someone that I looked up to, a lot of people looked up to. But I was trying to think about like what was special about your story. And I think it was just the fact that, I don't know, you were really good about telling your story as it was happening. And maybe that's just like when someone wants to put you on the COVID magazine, you don't say no. But I was wondering what that experience was like at the time. Trying to balance like promoting your business, growing what you're working on. But also like, were you aware that you were acting sort of as an educator almost or sort of as like an inspirational speaker?
- [61:46]
Kevin Rose
It's kind of not Gary Vee levels of no, no, no, no. But yeah, it was, I think back then all these social platforms were just coming online. So you know, when had Twitter, I was literally telling people where you would go. You'd go to south by Southwest and be like, hey, I will be at this bar, come meet me. And people would come and meet you.
- [62:03]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [62:04]
Kevin Rose
Very different use case than what it is today. And that was just kind of when you grew up in that environment, it was very much about sharing everything. So, you know, Foursquare was big with the check ins and it was just second nature to say, I'm building this new feature, check it out. And it was kind of a real time bring you along for the adventure show. People how you the secret sauce behind the scenes and people, the fans, the users of the platform of Dig way back in the day, in 2004, 5006, they loved seeing that kind of secret little. They felt like they were an insider in some sense.
- [62:36]
Jordy
Totally, totally. Yeah. It's interesting. I want to talk about the evolution of social media. We were talking to Brian Chesky about this yesterday that it was social media, then it became, or it was social networking specifically to meet real people. Then it became social media and then it just became algorithmic media.
- [62:51]
Kevin Rose
Right.
- [62:53]
Jordy
And there's a little bit of like, I want to be contrarian about it because two years ago I was in New York and I did just send the tweet, hey, I'm going to this ball. And I had a little bit of an audience from posting on Twitter and YouTube video making and stuff. And like 30 people showed up and we just got beers together and it was like old school Twitter. So I'm wondering like how much of that IRL stuff has actually died. There's the run Club movement, there's still stuff there, but then at the same time on the opposite end you have the algorithmic feeds, the TikTok, the Soras. And so how are you processing that? Is it a barbell or are we on some like straight curve to the end times?
- [63:27]
Kevin Rose
I believe that that with the AI quote unquote slob over the next couple of years, pretty much social media is going to be dead. Yeah, I think a lot of it will be agents in there acting like they're your best friend and just you won't know what to trust. And so if that's the case, it's actually very freeing because you get into a world where, okay, I don't trust any of this mainstream, everything is public, let me find an intimate space to hang out and have real conversations again. And so I like this idea. Some of the functionality that Alexis, the co founder of Reddit and myself are kind of working on, the dig stuff that we're just brainstorming is what if you met someone in real life and you pull out your phone and the connection that happens actually shows that it was geofenced and happened in real life. So you can see, oh, I just don't have these random followers, but I'm actually, these are real humans that this person has interacted with. Then it's a proof of a heartbeat and proof of a person behind the scenes, which is going to be more and more important long term as these agents are just manipulating us and acting like they're actually our best friend.
- [64:25]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, I've noticed you're saying like, effectively you could have a social graph that was based on like actual real world proximity.
- [64:34]
Kevin Rose
Well, I think it's a gradient of trust. I think when we, when we come to social in the future, you're going to say, who is this other person? And yes, we'll have our household names that we know that's actually a person behind the scenes there. But if you're reading a product review on Reddit, like how do you know that that is a person or a bot or something else or somewhere in between.
- [64:51]
Chris Dixon
Right.
- [64:52]
Kevin Rose
And I think this idea of a gradient of trust where you say, okay, I know this is a human because they've had this many in person interactions and if they're talking about, let's just say, an oura ring, they can do what's called a ZK proof or a product attestation where they can say, I actually have owned this for the last five years and I can prove it without compromising my privacy. That type of Gradient of trust and exposure of what's going on here is going to be so essential to understanding. Can we actually believe behind the scenes that there's something real here versus it just.
- [65:21]
Tyler
I still, I still every, every time I see an. A comment or a post that's obviously written by AI and I think I identify it and I just scroll past it because it's not, you know, if it's taking like the average, like it's if the, if the response is effectively like the average response of everything that Reddit has thought of about something and then just turning that into a post. I don't want to read it. I want opinion from real people that have thought through what they're saying. But I'm certainly worried about the boss just updating their preferences basically with the models to just be like, don't use an EM dash, don't say if this then that, it's not this, then that. And then suddenly you can't tell that it's real or not.
- [66:04]
Jordy
Okay, so both of you, I want you to help square this for me because, because you have this preference for interacting with real humans that's certainly real, but you also have probably, I don't think you'll be at the front of the line to scan your eyeball for worldcoin or something like that. And so how do you see the tension between those. You want to maintain privacy and all of the human rights that you get online, but also be in a bot free world. What are the possible solutions that either of you see?
- [66:37]
Kevin Rose
There's a ton of them out there right now. Some of them are pretty early days. I think the ZK proof stuff is really interesting because you don't compromise personal integrity or you have to reveal anything about you. You can actually use math to prove something and trust that, which is huge. There's obviously the extreme is kind of KYC or eyeball scanning and things of that nature. For certain use cases, if you're interacting with your financial advisor, you want that other side to be insanely variable. If someone is recommending a product, I want to know that they've owned it for X number of years. There's a bunch of. So it is that gradient. Or if you say, hey listen, I have Crohn's disease, you want to be able to show up in a subreddit or a forum somewhere and be anonymous. And that's great too. So but we just have to decide when and how to turn on that level of understanding.
- [67:21]
Tyler
I'm already, I'm already thinking about like, because there's these farms that, you know, agencies that will go to brands and say, we're gonna, we're gonna run your Reddit strategy. So have you owned, have you owned the Aura ring for more than five years? Like, we will buy your account. Right? There'll be another level.
- [67:40]
Jordy
I do, I do wonder if there's room for new consumer products. I was, I was. You know, if you shoot even digital photos, there's the ability to add a cryptographic signature into those photos. And maybe that would be a way to prove some sort of humanity without having it be such a reflection of yourself and your, in your personal identity. But it's more like, okay, okay, this person's been taking photos that have been cryptographically proved to be taken with this camera and uploaded. So we know that they're not AI and they've been doing it for a long time. So there's some sort of like, account level trust that happens.
- [68:11]
Kevin Rose
I really want that to happen. I think there's a huge problem here where, you know, I love Google, I love the AI. They're bolting it onto everything. And I'm like, Some of the things I look and I'm watching the demos, like, do we really, like, they're like, oh, there's a gate in the background of your family home. Erase the gate so it looks more like a hedge in the background. I'm like, okay, the kids that look at that photo.
- [68:31]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [68:32]
Kevin Rose
Two decades from now gonna be like, did we have a gate there? Like, how did that disappear?
- [68:35]
Tyler
No, I had a, I had a weird something with my kids where our nanny, like, took a real video of the backyard and then like used AI to put a. Have a dragon fly into the backyard. Right then was showing the video to the, to my kids. I. You gotta tell them, like, how old are you? Like three and a half. Yeah.
- [68:56]
Jordy
They're not going to understand.
- [68:57]
Tyler
Yeah. So you can say like, this is not real, but they're like, I'm seeing it with my own eyes.
- [69:01]
Jordy
How is it not real?
- [69:02]
Tyler
How is it, how could it not be real?
- [69:03]
Jordy
Really? I really try and ground this in, like, like, you saw an AI picture of me, but this is like Disney. This is like Bluey or this is like Pixar. Because even the four year old understands that like, the cartoon is not real. And if you see it on the screen, and I do, there is that bull case where when once anything can be fake, you assume everything is fake and then you just, and then just.
- [69:26]
Tyler
I've been thinking of the value of books written before 2021, right?
- [69:31]
Jordy
Totally.
- [69:31]
Tyler
Where if there's already this nostalgia for the past, think about with books, knowing that the writer. I don't care if you used a quill or a typewriter or a computer to write it, but there's some element to knowing that, like, thousands of hours were poured into creating this thing, and they were highly intentional about every single word, and they. They, you know, typed out the letters. Even if they worked with a ghostwriter, it's still like that ghostwriter was expending a lot of time and energy. And then you can now create a book and basically get ready to Write.
- [70:03]
Jordy
Boolean before 2021 in every search bar forever. Yeah, actually the same way I bought.
- [70:09]
Kevin Rose
A domain named Me Human. And I never launched it, but it was one of those things where I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to create a field that doesn't allow you to paste into it. It watches your keystrokes, it verifies proof of human. And it's just for sending thoughtful letters to other people. And it would put a little stamp at the bottom, letting you know that you actually typed this whole thing out versus just running it through an AI.
- [70:27]
Jordy
To get something meaningful.
- [70:29]
Tyler
Have you seen the crisis in wedding speeches now where every wedding speech is just like.
- [70:37]
Jordy
So I recently went to a wedding, and I was playing this game with all my friends who were driving down to the wedding, and I was like, okay, let's play some bets. How many weddings will mention AI either in the positive or negative? Like, just so you know, I didn't use AI? And then how many of them will sheepishly acknowledge that, Yeah, I use ChatGPT for this. So we're all placing bets, and we're like, okay, we think three, on average, will mention AI. Two will sheepishly admit AI. And there were no speeches at the entire wedding. The whole wedding. They were just like, yeah, we're just not doing speeches. So there were just no speeches, and it was awesome. It was just dancing and partying and, like. And they did vows, but they didn't.
- [71:12]
Tyler
There's somebody. Somebody out there that's doing a wedding speech. They're like, you know, a little nervous. So they're reading off a piece of paper and they go, blah, blah, blah, M. Dash. Just, like, exposing themselves.
- [71:23]
Jordy
Yeah, this wedding is.
- [71:24]
Tyler
What are you.
- [71:24]
David Tisch
What are you.
- [71:25]
Tyler
How are you processing the. The browser wars? Which. Which to me right now seems more like, you know, a group of people throwing stones at the chrome castle, you know, just kind of in there glancing off. Right. And so we'll see if any of them get traction. But how have you been kind of processing?
- [71:47]
Kevin Rose
I've played with them all. I do appreciate how there's finally innovation coming to the browser. I like how it felt initially like some bolt on technology where it was like, they're just shoving AI in here for the sake of AI.
- [71:59]
Jordy
It's a sidebar.
- [72:00]
Kevin Rose
And now it's crashed. OpenAI's browser's performance. It was snappier than I thought. I remember when I was at Google many years ago, a lot of the search team obsessed over milliseconds of shaving down the result time to get people to the result that they actually wanted. We're still clunky in the early days there in terms of inference on the AI side, but it's getting better. Perplexity. Okay. I think OpenAI did a little bit of a better job. I've used ARC for a while and some of those.
- [72:28]
Tyler
But knowing what you know about consumer products.
- [72:31]
Kevin Rose
Yes.
- [72:33]
Tyler
Let's say that Atlas is. I was estimating it. It may be like it's 1.1 times better.
- [72:39]
Jordy
10% better.
- [72:39]
Tyler
10% better.
- [72:40]
Jordy
Is that enough to get people to rip out their current browser? Because there's some categories where something that's 10% cheaper, it's a commodity. Everyone will just switch over to buy the cheaper thing. Inference tokens from B2B SaaS.
- [72:52]
Tyler
Right? Yeah. But your browser is free today.
- [72:54]
Jordy
There are other. To get rid of the iPhone, it's got to be 10 times better. Because I've been dealing with bad speech to text and weird Apple and text intelligence features. And I'm stuck here because, you know, I have lock in iMessage.
- [73:05]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, yeah.
- [73:06]
Jordy
IMessage a great one. And so, yeah, the question is, in the browser, do you think it's like you need to be 10x better or is 2x better enough?
- [73:15]
Kevin Rose
That's tricky because as a technologist, I'm naturally drawn to play with these things regardless of whether they're 10x better.
- [73:19]
Jordy
I was like, I'm gonna switch.
- [73:21]
Tyler
Yeah, but you're not. But you're rational in that you're not. If something's 10% better and you kind of know that it's 10% better, it doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, I'm going to switch over all my workflows. And I just. It's. There's like this like activation energy.
- [73:36]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [73:37]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, there's. For the average consumer, they're not thinking about what browser they have.
- [73:41]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [73:41]
Kevin Rose
Like really, truly, they're not. They're like on their Windows machine And launching whatever the default is there. A lot of people use Safari still.
- [73:48]
Jordy
People use edge.
- [73:49]
Kevin Rose
People use edge. So there is an edge. There is a group of people here that will say this is. I remember when Firefox first started getting off the ground and there was some massive incumbents that is. And others out there were out there and there's this grassroots effort from technologists say this is better, it's more secure, it's faster, all these things. And eventually got enough adoption to where it didn't. Never took over market share, but it was double digits of adoption. I think that's what we'll see with some of the AI. And it's table stakes. They have so much capital. Why do they care? They just want to have this as a way to gain more market share and it's more things that they can deploy that are slightly defensible to give them an edge over other AI companies.
- [74:26]
Jordy
Yeah. I have a question that I like to ask. People have worked on a lot of different projects. What's one project throughout your career or life that you feel is underrated? It's like your baby didn't get enough attention, maybe, you know, didn't play out the way you wanted, but you still love it and, and want it. We asked Gabe Whaley from Mischief this and he told us this wild story about doing a ship of Theseus thing with a Sink and the MoMA or something like that. It was crazy. But are there any projects that you think like, okay, if I could get hop in the time machine, go back to this particular date and run this particular strategy again, that's the moment that I'd want to dig into it.
- [75:04]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [75:05]
Kevin Rose
Well, we had a product called Pounce that was a competitor to Twitter way back in the day and that had probably an additional seven or eight features that are now just built into Twitter. And a lot of there was other kind of competitors at launch that were more business focused. And I think if we would have gone that direction, it would have been a massive product. The one that I would say was the funniest in my kind of product building experience over the years was back in 2005, early 2005, I created for the first time the ability to vote down comets and have them auto collapse in. And so they would just show the top line. And so we wrote it back on that software that if it had five down votes, it would auto collapse a comment in. No one had done this before and it's fine. Someone would have figured out how to do it. But we launched it first this is before Reddit had it and it came out and we thought there was a massive bug because we went to the story and it had 200 negative, like 220 some negative votes on it. I'm like, it's impossible because it collapses after five. And so we did a bunch of debugging. We found out that actually what people love is to expand a shitty comment, look at it and be like, yeah, that guy is an ass, and then.
- [76:17]
Jordy
Bury it down again. And we had never discovered human behavior would lead us in that direction. And we're like, oh, people love.
- [76:24]
Tyler
People love to dunk.
- [76:25]
Jordy
People love to dunk.
- [76:26]
Kevin Rose
So that was like the first time. I'm like, oh, the Internet's horrible. Yeah.
- [76:30]
Jordy
How are you processing the fact there's like three or four direct Twitter competitors now that seem large and scaled and sustainable? I remember the.
- [76:39]
Tyler
What are the threads?
- [76:41]
Jordy
Threads, but it's blue sky.
- [76:44]
Tyler
I would love to know. Macedon and blue skies, like actual sky.
- [76:47]
Kevin Rose
Is around 30 million actives a month or something like that now.
- [76:50]
Tyler
Yeah, but, but decline. Is it declining?
- [76:52]
Kevin Rose
No, I think it's.
- [76:54]
Jordy
The main thing is, like, I remember there was someone who launched like a paid Twitter at one point that was going to be all like, API driven. There were a number of folks who were. Were thinking about, like, the next version and maybe we. Maybe it goes back to that. They were only 10% better. And in fact, getting into your ideological echo chamber, whatever that is, is a 10x better experience. But how have you been processing this? The fragmentation of, like, how short form. The answer isn't just add more features. It's like something about the community.
- [77:23]
Kevin Rose
Well, listen, I think we're entering into a world of personal software. I think this idea of vibe coding is going to be taken more and more seriously every single month that goes on.
- [77:32]
Jordy
I like that there is a.
- [77:33]
Kevin Rose
Right now, as someone that said two years of CS and then couldn't wrap my ADHD head around all of it, I dropped out. But I'm a proficient kind of senior coder right now. With cursor.
- [77:44]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [77:45]
Kevin Rose
And six months from now, I'm just going to be able to do anything I want, and then the average consumer will be able to do anything they want. Kind of wix or like, you know, squarespace styles for websites. What they did for website sites in a year or so from now. So if we're going to have personal software all over the place, you're going to see millions and millions of more apps and products that hit the market. It's actually a beautiful thing in that the entrepreneur will have more control over their destiny than they ever had before. They won't need to raise venture capital or they'll do it at much higher valuations because they'll have product market fit first. So VCs are screwed, which is actually awesome because it's putting the power back into the creators hands. And I think we're going to see all of these little microcosms, these little tiny sectors of very personal, intimate, human driven conversation that may or may not bridge together via decentralized infrastructure that ties all the connective tissue a la Mastodon or a blue sky or something that is like piping it all together. We'll see. But I believe there's going to be a lot of value mined in that because if you go to a subreddit that's like Japanese woodworking with several thousand people, you don't, it doesn't need to be 10 million people, it just needs to be a thousand that deeply care about a topic to extract value from that topic. And the more of that gets built and gets launched and creates these smaller communities, I think the better it's going to be for the world because we will have real information created by real users sharing very intimate things with each other.
- [79:07]
Jordy
Yeah. Do you think that's just like the long tail of software innovation just kind of rises and so in that woodwork working, you know, sub, subreddit or community, they'll have their own functionality and they're shared between them.
- [79:18]
Kevin Rose
Right.
- [79:19]
Jordy
And even though there might only be a few people that are actually coming with the, the ideas or identifying the problems to solve, once they build it, they can actually build it for a low tam.
- [79:27]
Tyler
And still the other thing, the other thesis that I have is that companies that historically would never hire an engineer will hire an engineer. And the example is like Tyler here who builds a bunch of software that we use to run the show and like the TAM on the software is like one, like we are, we are the only company in the world that needs the software that we have. You could never sell this as a SaaS company but for us it makes sense to hire somebody who can build this. Because we built, you'll see like we run the show off of this so the whole team can follow along like where we are in the show. No other, you know, maybe handful of companies in the world could like kind of get value out of this. But it's so purpose built for what we need. We also built like an ad platform that like tracks everything for our partners. And again, again like Never would have. There's not really a market for that. And so I think you'll see a lot of companies that are like, okay, like we're not a software company, but we can just build our own software for. In categories. Like we still use a lot of SaaS. Right, right. And so. And we get a lot of value out of it. And we're not going to like build our own version of. Of linear. Right.
- [80:31]
Jordy
Or, or, or you might CRM.
- [80:33]
Kevin Rose
No, no.
- [80:34]
Tyler
Maybe.
- [80:34]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
But.
- [80:35]
Jordy
But much more purpose built for very specific niches and that. And we'll still be pulling the products that exist. It's like we're only using software for completely net new problems that are low tam. Well.
- [80:49]
Kevin Rose
Or just something that didn't quite fit your mold. If you had Salesforce and you're like, oh, we customized the crap out of it, it's still gonna be customized. Salesforce, it won't be your own thing.
- [80:58]
Jordy
Sure, sure, sure.
- [80:58]
Kevin Rose
And now you have the ability just to build your own thing and in like a day.
- [81:02]
Jordy
Which is crazy.
- [81:03]
Tyler
Yeah. The thing that we've seen with the state of Vibe coding today is like you can build the V1 extremely fast. Then the actual maintenance is like a real. Like is is ends up being like, if it takes you 10 hours to build it, it might take you hundreds of hours.
- [81:20]
Kevin Rose
I think that's problem is going to be solved.
- [81:22]
Jordy
Very.
- [81:22]
Kevin Rose
I had interviewed the CEO of Vercel recently. Yeah, Grandma's great. And he was talking about this idea of vibe check, which is just like an agent that is deployed to check your code and actually go in and fix bugs and actually get it to scale. And the beautiful thing about engineering is these are all. They're not subjective realities. Like they all have problems that are defined that have an answer. The bug should go away. The code should scale so we can solve this. It's not like finding the next cancer drug or something a little bit more obscure, which is hard.
- [81:55]
Tyler
If VCs are screwed, maybe not today, but in the future. Where are you most excited to invest? And what do you think the role today? And what do you think the role of VC actually looks like in a decade?
- [82:08]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [82:08]
Kevin Rose
So, I mean, I wear two hats. I'm a partner over True Ventures. We're managing a little over 4 billion. So we have a lot of companies. I think VCs are. They are very much.
- [82:19]
Jordy
Yeah, exactly. But here we go.
- [82:21]
Tyler
Wow.
- [82:22]
Kevin Rose
All right, I got one. There it is.
- [82:25]
Jordy
$4 billion.
- [82:26]
Kevin Rose
I love it. I was wondering if I was going to get one today.
- [82:28]
Tyler
Of course.
- [82:29]
Kevin Rose
Fantastic. Thank you.
- [82:30]
Jordy
It takes one big number.
- [82:31]
Kevin Rose
So one big number, so 4 billion. But the companies that need our funding more than anything else right now are hardware companies because they actually have to bring a product to market. They have the tooling, they have all the prototypes. There's a lot to put and we've done. We did Ring and Fitbit and Peloton and all these great companies and we saw it's hundreds of millions of dollars to get these companies off the ground and to scale. Now, on the software side, it's different.
- [82:56]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:56]
Kevin Rose
It's different because I can. We can see vibe coders creating these things, getting to their first 100,000 or 500,000 users, never raising any capital and getting revenue. Getting revenue. And now guess what? That valuation jumped up from a $10 million pre to a 50 to a 75 or whatever it may be. Or they don't raise capital at all, which is great. Have that lifestyle business bring in 20 million in ARR.
- [83:17]
Tyler
So we need a, we need a SF mayorial candidate that is focused on, on freezing seed valuations like the Zoron. But for the Zoron of sf, it just says like the first round you raise has to be at a 10 cap or less.
- [83:33]
Jordy
On the hardware side, how are you thinking about AI wearables? AI devices? There's been. We're in this kind of like primordial explosion. Lots of big players working on stuff, lots of existing players. I mean, Apple has a massive portfolio, but what do you think?
- [83:44]
Kevin Rose
AI wearables are insanely creepy. I think if you feel like you should punch someone in the face for having something on, you probably shouldn't invest in that company. The idea that something is always listening 247 just breaks down so many social contracts that we have in place today with other humans. There are some that I have seen that have not launched yet that are really trying to figure out how to navigate that space in a thoughtful way that preserves privacy, but also gives you the extended functionality of having a second set of ears for what you're doing. And I think those are yet to launch and they're going to be really cool.
- [84:20]
Tyler
Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of the, or at least some, or at least one AI wearable is saying it has to be always on. You actually can't turn it off because there's no friendship that you have in life outside of yourself that is like an always on friendship. Right. I don't have perfect information parody with my wife. And that's part of like our relationship. Catch up to you today. And that's okay. Like there's nothing that says it has to be on. Like it is a very clear product decision to say. And I think some of the ones coming down the pipeline will be like, you can tap, you can prompt, you know, trigger it to come on and, and interact with it and then turn it off so that you're about.
- [84:59]
Jordy
What about less of like the wearable space and more of like just traditional consumer electronics that could either kind of like add AI features on and actually see acceleration versus completely new formats. Like in, you know, are you seeing pictures for like picture frames or you know, new, like the next generation ring that you wear or something that's not necessarily this wearable, that's always on talking to you, but just there's a new problem that you can solve, but you need a hardware to instantiate it.
- [85:31]
Kevin Rose
Absolutely. I think that we're in the early innings of this, especially when it comes to personalized health and a bunch of other things. You know, I was on, I was on the board of Aura for several years and I was there.
- [85:41]
Jordy
Credible business too.
- [85:42]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, it's, it's been wild.
- [85:43]
Jordy
The numbers fantastic. Yeah.
- [85:44]
Kevin Rose
I've been insanely thrilled at the growth that company's seen. And I remember that was such a.
- [85:49]
Tyler
Good example of a business that was like, it from my view was like focused on biohackers, which sounds like small Reddit audience type thing. It was like I was around in college, you know, looking up like what obscure things can I take that aren't illegal that will make me crush it on this test. Yeah, yeah. There was a period where they were just working with like small health podcasts.
- [86:09]
Kevin Rose
This is, this, this is what I did there. So basically my job with Harpreet, the CEO at the time, was to go in and basically he said, go find me all the different biohackers. So you know, Peter TIA was on there like all Greenfield. Yeah, yeah. Ben Greenfield, Tim Ferriss, like Dave, like all of them. We would go and figure out can they invest, they want to be advisors, can we get them a ring?
- [86:32]
Jordy
Sure.
- [86:32]
Kevin Rose
And this was making the, that jumped from Gen1 to Gen2 hardware made it a lot smaller. And then we worked with Matt Walker from the Berkeley Sleep lab to get his algorithms on there to really have the best in class sleep algorithms. And that was a huge game changer. But a lot of AI functionality will be coming to these devices to better understand things like blood pressure and a whole slew of other things that we'll eventually be able to plug in, including Your genetic polymorphisms that come in from your genome to really understand who you are as a unique individual versus just a blanket for everyone.
- [86:59]
Jordy
Yep. Rank these three buckets that we've been talking to, we talked to early stage founders who are greenfield project and they have AI tools and they can build a company that's AI native versus growth stage companies. Maybe they're at a billion dollar unicorn already. They're still in founder mode. Might be a little tired, but AI is re energizing them and they're able to layer on AI. They're not like, what is this AI thing? They're aware they use ChatGPT the day it came out. And then there are the public companies. Maybe they have a professional CEO and they have to go through a real business model transition. How do you see each bucket faring? Where are you most excited?
- [87:38]
Kevin Rose
It really comes down to the leadership of the senior level. Like if you're, if your C suite has a lightweight, I like CHAT GPT vibe. You're not deep enough. Right. And so it's. But I, you know what happened with, with all these tech companies where they are really reducing staff to come in and say, okay, this next generation is less heads, more specialized and the more of the orchestrator of the AI versus just these massive payrolls and we can do more with less. I'm seeing that with startups now where the products that they're building and shipping. I met with a startup the other day where they judge themselves based on what they call call tokens in flight. So they set their AI in like YOLO mode and then they go to lunch and they're like, how many tokens can we put into flight while we're sitting where we're having lunch? And then we come back and look at the results.
- [88:27]
Jordy
Okay. Yeah, they just fire off the results.
- [88:29]
Kevin Rose
This is the new metric for how they judge productivity. It's like how many of these they can fire up, how many chat windows.
- [88:34]
Jordy
Can they fire up at a time.
- [88:35]
Kevin Rose
To go code on their behalf?
- [88:36]
Tyler
We do that. We've done over a thousand interviews this year. Obviously some were more prep than others. Definitely been like, all right, I got 15 minutes. Let me fire up a deep research while I get dressed.
- [88:48]
Jordy
Yeah, that's great. Well, it's 12:30. We have to move on and talk.
- [88:54]
Tyler
This was super fun. Anything that we missed that you're excited about or wanted to mention while you're here?
- [89:01]
Kevin Rose
No, I think this next six to eight months, especially with Gemini 3 coming out when that drops and a couple of the models I hear that are being floated around and hinted about coming up. We are. Engineering is unfortunately for the last 20 years when people say where do I go? What do I study? A young person would come up to me like what's the future look like? I always say to them CS like computer science. No doubt in my mind that's not the case anymore.
- [89:26]
Jordy
You don't think so?
- [89:26]
Kevin Rose
No, it's just not. Coding is a solved problem. We just don't know it yet. And it will be in the next few months. And I know everyone's like bugs scale. Yes, yes, yes, those are great problems to have.
- [89:37]
Tyler
But is it not still worth studying computers? If you love computers, I think you.
- [89:43]
Kevin Rose
Should have a light technical understanding of what's possible to know where to bend and break and sand down the rough edges. You're going to need that. But I think it's a different course altogether. A lot more focus on creativity than.
- [89:54]
Jordy
It is actually design and the structure of like what is the business problem that you're solving that is important. I see still lean that the best vibe coder is a coder is a programmer. Someone with deep expertise will be able to.
- [90:07]
Kevin Rose
I think that's going to be a designer in the future though.
- [90:09]
Jordy
But yes, yeah, maybe it's a designer in the future for sure. Certainly depends on what you're building. Well, very exciting and thank you so much for coming by.
- [90:15]
Tyler
Thanks for having me come by again soon.
- [90:17]
Kevin Rose
It's been an honor.
- [90:17]
Jordy
Okay, thanks so much. We will talk to you soon and we will move on to our pre recorded interview with Jeff from Hyper Liquid.
- [90:25]
Tyler
Jeff, one of the most impressive entrepreneurs at the moment in the world right now. I think there will be books written about Jeff. It's a fascinating interview and I'm excited for you guys to hear this interview. We tried to get some of the history of Hyper Liquid, how it, how it got started, why it got started and then also towards the end of the interview we get into a bunch of different questions that we gathered from some of our more on chain friends to get an idea of where Hyper Liquid is going in the next six to 12 months.
- [90:57]
Jordy
So before we play this let me tell you about numeral hq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance and I will kick it over to the production team to play our interview with Jeff from. Well welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us our audience here. He has a soundboard by the way so do not let that go to learn. Yes, yes, yes. But I would love to get the introduction from you for our audience, which is tech native, but maybe a little bit less crypto native. And so if you could just kind of break down a little bit of like how you're describing yourself, your journey, your business at a high level and then we can go into a bunch of different directions.
- [91:40]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Sure. So maybe starting. It might make sense to start with a bit of an origin story.
- [91:44]
Jordy
So we'd love that.
- [91:46]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah. So I guess mid 2022 we were a small team doing trading in crypto and we're looking at DeFi and CEFI and had already kind of a sense that we wanted to build something in Defi because of the very nascent nature of the product at that time. Basically all the products were kind of bad and we were traders and we felt like we could make it better. And basically the source sort of impetus for going all in and building hyperlucid was when FTX collapsed. It felt like suddenly the previously very academic concerns in crypto around decentralization and self custody, it felt like people wrote about it but didn't really care. And all of a sudden it was very viscerally important. It's like not your keys, not your coins. And we had strayed very far from the original ethos of satoshi and bitcoin. And so. So yeah, we thought the world was ready to really trade crypto in the way it's meant to be, which is like peer to peer in a self custodial, decentralized space. And so I guess fast forward to this day. Hyperliquid is I think the primary on chain venue for price discovery. It's a fully on chain financial system. And so our kind of motto always is we want to build something that can ultimately house all finance. And so happy to go into that more later but. But yeah, it's a blockchain. It's not just, not just an exchange but the. It's best known as the place where people trade perpetuals on chain. It does more than a billion dollars in revenue a year and it kind of has been the first in many ways and so happy to also get into like what's interesting about it.
- [93:25]
Jordy
It's fascinating hear you saying like it. Most founders that come on say like we, but it's clear that you see, see yourself as more of like a custodian of this thing that you're building and releasing. Is, is that the correct frame of mind? Is that how you think about this?
- [93:42]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, so I think we, we took a lot of inspiration from Satoshi. I Think he or you know, whoever. Whoever built bitcoin they not sure but Satoshi. We'll just say Satoshi was very unique. I think bitcoin was the first in so many ways but one of the main, main ways in which it was first was that it was. It's not a. It's not a product like you said. It's not. It's not a top down company.
- [94:05]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [94:05]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
It's a product and I think defi and crypto in general like a lot of it's kind of. It was inspired. Obviously everything comes from bitcoin and there will never be another bitcoin. But I think there's been a lot of kind of like top down like web 2 totally so standard tech approaches in crypto. Like if you look at centralized exchanges that's a great example. They're very good businesses but they're like mega corporations.
- [94:26]
Tyler
They're.
- [94:26]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
They're not very like crypto native in that sense. And so we take a lot of inspiration from. From satoshi and so we hyperliquid really is what we think like credibly neutral protocol which will ultimately be the rails that all the finance kind of upgrades their tech stack to use.
- [94:42]
Jordy
Yeah. So no VCs is at least the lore. Can you unpack that? Is that just because like you're so capital efficient you don't need to raise or is there something sort of particular philosophy around the role of venture capital in crypto? How. How are you thinking about that equation?
- [95:03]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
So it. It really does go back to satoshi again. I think the bitcoin would not be bitcoin if he had raised Series A. Even if best investors in the world. You know sickest cap table ever. Still still would. I would say that would not Bitcoin would not not be bitcoin. And So I think VCs actually provide a really important service to the world. They. They allocate capital efficiently. They help a lot of things would the world would not be.
- [95:28]
Tyler
Not always.
- [95:29]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah.
- [95:29]
Tyler
As full.
- [95:30]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I think they've done more good than. Than harm.
- [95:32]
Jordy
I think I would definitely agree with that.
- [95:35]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
And in this particular case I think when you're when. When the thing being built is a neutral protocol on which.
- [95:41]
Chris Dixon
Yeah.
- [95:42]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
On which something's important. As important as money ought to live and transact. I think it's the neutrality is more important than everything and I think there is a path dependence to that. Right. If there are insiders from day one it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply mind share talent et cetera there is the sort of like the Big Bang moment will always be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing. And this doesn't matter for almost anything that is being built. And I think raising capital and hyperscaling is, is a very valuable strategy. But I think when you're building something that needs to be incredibly neutral in the long term and the history matters, I think we'd rather go slow and do it right then.
- [96:21]
Jordy
But I want to stay on this. Like, like you can't keep VCs from just building a position in a public token. Right. And so is it more about like the vibe around like insiders? Because what if like a big tier one firm was just like, we want a 20% stake stake and we're going to buy the token on the free market and build a position and it's going to feel and perform just like any other asset in our portfolio? Has that happened? Would that be irrational? Is there something where like legally they can't do it because of the fund.
- [96:54]
Tyler
Structure, be very expensive?
- [96:57]
Jordy
Yeah, but I mean VCs don't shy away from expensive deals. Like we see it all the time.
- [97:04]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, but you can make that argument for Bitcoin as well.
- [97:06]
Chris Dixon
Right?
- [97:06]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Like they're very big holders of bitcoin and I think a lot of VCS were very early. Maybe not a lot, but I know several VCS were very early. Totally coin and own a lot of it. So I don't think it's not about who owns it, it's about the genesis and the origin. It's more of a principle.
- [97:23]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [97:25]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
You can't on the one hand preach that this is going to be a platform that is, is neutral, that like anyone can come and build on and on. On another hand say like, oh, but like these people had a chance of building first. Yep, it's, it's not perfect. There will never be another Bitcoin. Like, sure, there is a practical matter to it which is that, you know, like anything after bitcoin needs to launch in a like very competitive market. There needs to be innovation and something needs to fund that, etc, but to the extent that we can approximate the, the ideals of Satoshi, I think it's still worth striving for.
- [97:59]
Jordy
No, no.
- [97:59]
Tyler
How much did you know exactly what you wanted to build and then just execute it against that plan versus iterate to get where you are today?
- [98:09]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I would say very little. So the story there is we just wanted to come and do something that we could do well. And even doing one thing well is very, very hard. So we were laser focused at first. We just kind of looked around and thought lot. We weren't afraid to dream big, but we were kind of practical about it. We just thought like okay, what's one really, really big thing in crypto that we think could benefit from a fully permissionless platform? And perps trading was the obvious one. I think it was probably doing more than 50% of the revenue in all of crypto back then, sort of back of the envelope calculations. And so we tackled that initially and I think one big thing is we weren't willing to compromise even at the very beginning on how the thing ought to work.
- [98:55]
Tyler
So you learned the things not to do from ftx. You were inspired by Satoshi. Was there any company off chain that was particularly inspiring?
- [99:10]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, a bunch. I mean I think every big company company, every big tech company I think is like very inspirational to me. I, I grew up in the Bay Area so it's, it's hard to not kind of be sort of motivated by that. I think Amazon was a really big one. That what inspired me was that they, they basically like they're the very first principles and like driven but also, and also very practical. And I think when sort of I assume it was Bezos but maybe someone else in the org realized that they had built so much of the Internet stack that it would be a shame if they, if that just went to this like retail business. Like why not sort of abstract it a bit and create the right APIs so that anyone can leverage this like amazing infrastructure they've built. And you know that kind of being the birth of AWS and cloud computing, I think that's like such an amazing story and that's inspired. I think that's kind of like how we think of hyperliquid. Was that like it started as a blockchain optimized just to be able to do on train purpose trading because no other infrastructure could do that. And sort of realizing at some point that a lot of other things in finance, ultimately all of finance we think can benefit from this high performance, decentralized ledger infrastructure for liquidity is one way to think about like what do you.
- [100:34]
Jordy
Think about bezos background at D.E. shaw? He was a trader that probably informs a little bit of the shape of Amazon I imagine versus say Google, where they come out of research PhDs. What were you working on beforehand? Do you feel like you brought a trader mindset into the entrepreneurial journey that you went on?
- [100:57]
Tyler
Yeah, not just the product player.
- [100:59]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [101:02]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, I think so. I think Trading. Well, I don't really know what kind of trading Bezos was doing, but at least with more like automated trading, I think there's a lot of. It feels a bit like doing physics kind of. It's like you do a lot of approximations. You don't, you can't get anything exactly right because markets are, are basically there. There's, there's a lot of randomness. Right. There's more, there's more noise than there is signal. And that, that's kind of what makes it beautiful. It's like trying to sift through the noise. And it's very different from supervised learning setups in AI where you kind of have roughly infinite data and it's very high quality. So I do think the real world is building. Hyperliquid has felt kind of like that in the sense that you often. It feels like we're actually not very data driven at all. It's basically all intuition. It's just like we just think really hard about how the world should be and we just try to do the best thing. We'll obviously adapt to data if something happens and it's obviously bad. We aren't delusional and we'll incorporate it readily, but we won't go out of our way to try to create data where it doesn't make sense to, if that makes sense. So AB testing is something that we just kind of never do.
- [102:17]
Jordy
Oh yeah, that's funny, you've mentioned it a few times. But can we just get like a firm backstory definition on perps for our audience? Why, what are they? Why are they so exciting?
- [102:31]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, let's see. So for, for someone who really has no finance, you want to like a sort of very like from zero explanation.
- [102:40]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
- [102:42]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Okay, so if you think about what is traded today by people that are kind of like. You can trade the thing itself, which is like an Amazon stock, right?
- [102:54]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [102:55]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
If you want some sort of leverage, which is to say make more bang for your buck, then the two ways people go about doing it is one, they trade futures, which are. These are traded mostly indices. So like the S&P 500 and these things basically say like two people put up cash and they just agree to pay. Kind of like they kind of like a long and a short kind of create a contract and then if moves by $1, then the long side say makes $20, on the short side loses $20. That's the future. And then they're often also settled in some underlying thing. So it's like we're trading on what the price of S and P is. Three months from now or three months from now, you'll deliver one cow.
- [103:40]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think of it as like the C bot. Like if I'm trading corn futures and I let the contract run out, like at some point I have to actually take delivery of all the corn. But most of the Wall street traders have figured out to never do that. But you hear about these weird scenarios where it's like, oh, the price of oil was negative, so someone bought it for negative money and then like wound up having to get all this oil and stuff. But obviously in a purely financial context, that's not the outcome. But has this just unlike unlocked higher frequency trading, more leverage, a different shape of trader, or something more quantitative, something more algorithmic driven. Like who are the, who are the customers or who are the traders and why are they excited about the product?
- [104:26]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, so they're excited because. So basically like you said, futures kind of sucked because of all these like random things. They kind of settle. Sometimes you don't want to get delivery. They're like all these weird things.
- [104:35]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [104:35]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Like, keep rolling your position if you want it open. So like, if you look at Robinhood for example, like that's actually much more popular with retail users than futures are. And they, they, they primarily trade options on Robinhood when, you know, when leverage is concerned. And options are super cool because it's kind of like a lottery ticket. You can like as retail, you can buy a lottery ticket and feel really good about it. You're downsize limited. But the, the trade off there is like, it's actually really hard to price an option, especially if you're retail and especially for using like an app that doesn't give you the information that you need. And so you're kind of getting fleeced because there's like very complicated structures. It sounds simple, it's like a strike price expiry, but in practice it's very hard to price. And so herbs are basically like marrying these two assets into one thing. So there's, you want to trade something you want, you want to trade something that's just like the price of the underlying. You want there to be leverage and you want there to be like one thing that never expires and that's what a perp is.
- [105:29]
Jordy
Got it.
- [105:30]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
So let's all the liquidity in the world concentrate on one asset. Asset. So like, if you want to, if like you look at Bitcoin, for example, on any one exchange, there's like Usually one very liquid Bitcoin per and that's the liquid asset forever, never expires. And like that's where the price discovery happens. Like billions and billions of dollars will trade on these bitcoin and this actually leads the underlying instrument. And it's useful for professionals because they can trade it and it's the most liquid instrument there is on Bitcoin. It's useful for retail because it's a clearly understandable price that you cannot get screwed over on because there's only one market and it's extremely liquid. So like buy or sell, like the spread is tiny and so it's kind of like a win win for many, many participants. There are, there will always be participants who want options or who want traditional futures. But perps by and large are attractive.
- [106:16]
Jordy
Yeah. What are the biggest bottlenecks to scaling a network like this?
- [106:24]
Tyler
Certainly not talent because you've reached insane scale.
- [106:28]
Jordy
I'm more thinking about like are the tokenomics such that there are people that are setting up whole data centers? Are there Asics being built right now to run the network? Like I'm familiar with kind of the how bitcoin went where people were just mining it on their laptop and then it turned into a data center and then it turned like hunt for the cheapest energy possible with the ASICS BASIC because the algorithm was so stable. What does it actually take to scale a network like this over time and where are you in that scaling curve?
- [107:01]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
So Bitcoin is a bit unique in that I think it's the only major network left that does proof of work. So ASIC stuff you're mentioning all the crazy things like volcanoes, mining bitcoins and stuff, that's all really just participating in the consensus mechanism. The all the other high performance blockchains today that I know of at least are probably proof of stake which is a much more energy efficient way to do things. And it's economic security, not like computational security. So on Hyper Liquid there's not much innovation being done on how the network stays secure. It's a relatively solved problem economically, which is that basically people put up the native token. It's very important for the network to have its own, its own token, which on Hyper Liquid is called hype. And people put it up and they basically say I'm like vouching for the. Usually it's kind of like delegated. It's kind of like, you know, you vote for your congressman kind of thing. So it's like you delegated to a validator and the validator says Anything I do, the stake that is staked to me is at risk and you can do some math and then basically the economics work out such that if like most of the stake in the network, network is honest, then it's fine. And if you want to acquire enough stake to do something bad on the network where bad here is like the canonical bad thing you can do is like spend the same dollar twice. It's called like double spending which is basically like forking the truth state of the network. You need to acquire a lot of stake to do that so it's economically invisible. So it's the securities in the economics, not in. And like you know, creating crazy asics.
- [108:37]
Jordy
And like that makes sense.
- [108:40]
Tyler
How important is brand to hyper liquid success? Because I think you have, I don't know that you've, you haven't necessarily focused on brand in the traditional sense of like hiring advertising agencies and you know, putting together strategy decks and things like that that I'm sure many of your competitors arena yet. But you have one of the most powerful brands in the world which is like when you think of the value of anyone on earth being able to just type hyper liquid and hit post and get this massive influx of excitement and attention, it's truly remarkable. But I'm curious how much that's contributed to your success versus scale and some of these other product decisions.
- [109:29]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, I think the brand, we're very fortunate that the community is so, I don't know many adjectives like so, so strong, so like tight knit, so you know, combative at times but like, just like, like I think, I think it's very inspiring for us because we, we as a team are pretty introverted. We're super small. We're, we're only 11 people and we don't have it, we don't have, we have no one working on market marketing and I think we, even if we did, we would suck at it.
- [109:57]
Tyler
So it's always been the product is the marketing.
- [110:01]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Yeah, it's not the, it's not just the product, it's the product in the community I would say in the ecosystem. And so it kind of, there's there, there are like many pockets, right? There are people who are just like on Twitter like, like you said kind of like shit posting and I think that's like super cool. And you know I, I love it. And there are also people just like you know, building on the platform. I think that's another form of, of like viral marketing. Right? Like they build products on top of the, the protocol that Synergize with what it is, like offer something new or like extended in some ways. And those are sort of like pillars of finance on hyperliquid are by and large built by community members. And we hope that that trend continues. Like anything that can be built by the community are built by the community. And I think that just like yeah, that kind of decentralized marketing sort of embodies decentralization not just at the technical layer but also at the social layer. I think is really important to us. And I think that's kind of the brand that hyperliquid has. It's like framed negatively. You could say that it's kind of standoffish and maybe we're kind of, we're too focused on tech and not focused on marketing. But in this case I think what comes out of it is like something much stronger which is that people feel ownership in the network in a way that's not possible with the Web2Company.
- [111:14]
Tyler
Yeah. Is that part of why the companies that want to eat your lunch are some of the most well capitalized large businesses in finance and yet it seems like they're struggling to really compete. Is the army of people that just want Hyper Liquid to win? How do you think about that kind of advantage and what are some of the other reasons why, why your guys kind of counter positioning makes it difficult to compete?
- [111:49]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Well, we honestly don't think that much about competition day today. I think there's just like too much to build and I think you're right. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people want to do what hyperliquid does or like take market share if you will. And we don't. Yeah, we don't really think about what, what you're like.
- [112:10]
Tyler
I don't think about you at all.
- [112:13]
David Tisch
No, no.
- [112:14]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
There's just too much. There really is just like too much to build. Like I think the, if hyper Liquid succeed in the good case, it's, it's something that doesn't exist yet in the world. And I think it's hard, it's easy to get bogged down by people trying to kind of chip away at something that hyperlig has already built or whatever. And I think that's like, it's, it's a bit stressful sometimes but also it kind of detracts from the big picture which is like we're still so far away from where we need to be.
- [112:38]
Tyler
How big can hyperliquid get? Like what's your ambition?
- [112:43]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I think of it as in the good case basically finance as a whole, which When I say finance, I mean like the coordination of human behavior.
- [112:57]
Tyler
You're basically saying like if I don't assume 100% of the global TAM of finance, I will have failed.
- [113:05]
Jordy
That's amazing.
- [113:06]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
No, I mean you asked how big it could get.
- [113:08]
Tyler
Yeah, I'm just playing.
- [113:10]
Jordy
I like it, it's true.
- [113:12]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
But I don't think it's coming in and kind of like displacing finance. It's really like my mind is sort of like the Internet did to find sort of like electronic trading happened in early 2000s. It's been like more than 20 years. It's about time the tech stack gets updated and I think Defi is kind of that tech stack.
- [113:30]
Tyler
Okay, I have a lightning round for you. Asked a bunch of crypto native friends what they wanted to ask you. So I'll go through a bunch of them and hopefully you can answer quickly since some of them are pretty specific. When do you expect to see the first centralized exchange shut down their perp dex and simply run a front end on top of hype through hip three? When will they capitulate? One year. Year. Okay. Okay, we'll track it. Any specific views on the market structure bill in the US and under what circumstances would you bring hyper liquid onshore?
- [114:10]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
That's a good question. So we, we, we think the US is a super important market. Obviously it's like the financial center of the world and the dollar is the reserve currency capital of capital. Yeah, yeah. I mean we. Nothing more than love that. Love. Nothing more than to sort of like have regulation in the US just sort of evolve to sort of really embrace defi and I think strides are being made in that direction. I can't comment on the bill specifically just because I feel like I'm a little ignorant on it. I feel like it's changing a lot and honestly I think there are really smart people working on it. And the things I've heard such as carve outs for decentralized front ends and things like that I think are really cool.
- [114:48]
Tyler
Why do some centralized exchanges say that hype. Hype doesn't want to get listed?
- [114:56]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Do they say that? I don't know.
- [114:58]
Tyler
I don't know.
- [115:00]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
We don't have a want here. I think it's like we're building more. Building. I think the, you know, exchanges. Several exchanges have listed hype and I think it's cool. And other ones, you know, for other exchanges, it doesn't align with their priorities and I think that's also cool. Yeah, we're not, we're Very like we just like don't really talk of these institutions.
- [115:19]
Tyler
Any plans to enable multi asset margin natively?
- [115:26]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I think it will happen and I don't exactly know the path to where that happens. So it could be built like natively is a bit like not well defined here, but I think it will happen. I think if it's going to house all the finances, surely you should be able to use different types of collateral to trade.
- [115:42]
Tyler
When perps on commodities and US equity.
- [115:48]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
There are already some perps on. So there are gold perps, tokenized gold and they're. I think the answer to when is probably in the next year because HIP3 I think is unlocking a lot of this. So basically it lets anyone kind of come and deploy their own.
- [116:05]
Tyler
What do you think is most misunderstood about hyperliquid today?
- [116:10]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Oh man, there's so many things.
- [116:12]
Tyler
Things.
- [116:14]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Most misunderstood. One thing I would say is that it's. Well, it is a network. I think people think it's like a purpose exchange. Some people think it's like a centralized thing. It's really not. It's a blockchain. The validator sets permissionless. They're currently 24 validators. Anyone can spin one up. It's like top 24 by stake. The validator set. Every validator executes every transaction including all the orders. So this kind of base layer of just what it is I think is kind of lost because people are so. They're focused on the product basically, which, which maybe is good. Maybe it's nice that the tech is abstracted from users.
- [116:49]
Tyler
Do you miss the bay?
- [116:54]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I miss some things about it, yeah.
- [116:57]
Jordy
What do you miss?
- [117:01]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
What do I miss? I miss. I miss Chick Fil A. Oh, let's go.
- [117:06]
Jordy
That's a great one. One. That's a great answer.
- [117:09]
Tyler
That's a great answer.
- [117:11]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I miss. I miss mountains, actually. I mean that's not like literally in the bay, but like Singapore is very flat. So it's a very nice place. It's a great place to build. But I miss kind of like Yosemite and that kind of vibe, you know.
- [117:24]
Jordy
When I was in Singapore, a lot of people I interacted with said that Singapore doesn't have like a strong local culture. And maybe that's because it's small or maybe that's because it doesn't have like an underground like punk scene because of different rules and regulations. Do you feel like you found like a great community in Singapore? Do you feel like you found a great culture there? Do you like where the country's going? Like Culturally.
- [117:53]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I'm honestly a bit too.
- [117:55]
Jordy
Busy to just lock in. Okay.
- [117:58]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
It's a great place to build. I think it's super safe.
- [118:01]
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
- [118:02]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Very modern.
- [118:03]
Jordy
Yep.
- [118:03]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
No good food.
- [118:04]
Jordy
Yep.
- [118:05]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Air conditioning, like that kind of stuff. So I'm honestly not a cult at this point in my trajectory. I'm not really attuned to the culture. I felt like if I were in New York City, it would be kind of wasted on me.
- [118:18]
Jordy
Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not looking for, like the underground art collective that will define the next. Yeah, you're. You're. You're locked in. It's great. Love it.
- [118:26]
Tyler
What. What is the specific framework you use for. For building the team? Because I imagine the level of talent that is trying to join, you know, the core team today is insane. But clearly you have some kind of framework for it. Otherwise you would have just been 100,000 people by now.
- [118:50]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Well, I think we actually are like, just not very good at recruiting. So I will say that here we are recruiting. We're always recruiting.
- [118:57]
Jordy
Recruiting.
- [118:58]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
We're looking. I know there are a lot of super smart listeners.
- [119:00]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [119:01]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
On this. On this podcast show both. And we would love. We would love for you guys, if someone's interested in, you know, like systems engineering, like high performance. So building the rails of the future of finance. I really think this is like, there's no better place to work and would love for you guys to join. We're a super small team of 11 people at the.
- [119:23]
Tyler
The.
- [119:23]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
The bar is very high. I do think it might be one of the highest bars. I think we are one of the most efficient organizations, engineering organizations that I.
- [119:34]
Tyler
Know of that has ever. That has ever existed. Could I say that? I can say. I feel like I can say that.
- [119:41]
Jordy
I think you might be right. Yep. It sounds right.
- [119:43]
Tyler
But.
- [119:45]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
We are trying to grow and I think it's, you know, it's. Yeah, it's. It's.
- [119:51]
Tyler
There's a.
- [119:51]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
There's a lot to build and yeah, we just, we just have a very high bar in many. In many directions. Like, you know, competence also just like integrity. I think we. We just care a lot about many things and you know, if. If someone listening meets all those bars, we'd love. We'd love for you to join.
- [120:11]
Tyler
Is it. Is it in person only or do you guys have room remote teammates.
- [120:18]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
New for. For new recruits? We're. We're trying to do in person only there. Yeah. Initially it was. It was remote. When we found that it doesn't work super well with our work style.
- [120:29]
Tyler
Last question. Are people that. That brag about doing nine, nine, six, soft?
- [120:37]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Well, this is the like nine to nine, six days a week thing.
- [120:40]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. Cause I imagine you're doing quite a bit more than that. So that feels like part of the, part of the criteria is like somebody comes in, they're like, jeff, like, I'm your guy, I'm996. And you're like, sorry, that's not.
- [120:56]
Jordy
We don't do half days here.
- [120:58]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [121:00]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
I mean, it's. I do think it's the quality of work's the most important thing. So I think different people burn out different points and that's obviously the most important. I personally work more than that, but it's because I feel like I don't really have a cap personally, but everyone's different.
- [121:16]
Chris Dixon
Yeah.
- [121:17]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Amazing.
- [121:18]
Jordy
Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
- [121:19]
Tyler
I really enjoyed this. Thank you for sharing the origin, explaining perps for our audience and yeah, really just incredibly impressed with what you've built and excited to follow, you know, continue to follow your journey. Journey over the next years and decades.
- [121:36]
Jordy
Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
- [121:38]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
- [121:39]
Jordy
Have a good one.
- [121:40]
Tyler
Cheers.
- [121:40]
Jordy
Bye. And that concludes our recorded interview with Jeff from Hyperliquid. I hope you enjoyed that. If you're new here, please subscribe to the show. Leave us. Five stars on Apple Podcasts Spotify. We have more crypto coverage later in the show.
- [121:55]
Tyler
We're talking explain Gigachad in one word. Yes, Jeff.
- [121:58]
Jordy
Jeff for sure. Also Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in ranking on G2. Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. We're going to bring him into the TBPN ultradome. Tamash, how are you doing? Good to see you again. It's been too long.
- [122:15]
Tamash
Pleasure to be back.
- [122:16]
Jordy
Thanks so much for hopping back on. You've been lighting up the Internet with a bunch of hot ish takes. A lot of takes I agree with, but mostly just very thoroughly researched takes.
- [122:28]
Tyler
Not something you see a lot, not.
- [122:30]
Jordy
Something you see every day. So I'm very excited to have you on the show. Would love to just kick it off with taking your temperature on where you think it's the most important to focus right now. What is the narrative? Is it these complicated structures and the vendor financing? Is it the overall bubble narrative, broadly progress on token generation or DAUs? Like, where are you spending your time focusing?
- [122:57]
Tamash
Yeah, we're trying to understand what's really happening. Right. So we wrote this blog post about Nvidia and the 110 billion of vendor financing. I mean I ran the numbers for an event. The data center build out is now greater than 1% of US GDP. And we had made this prediction in 23 that AI would generate would contribute more than 1% or contribute at least 1% to GDP. And I was stunned that we're basically already there. And so, so we had this question of how similar LPs will ask investors will ask us how similar is the current environment to say 2000 when you had pretty large network infrastructure build outs. And I was kind of in high school during the time but I remember these companies like Lucent and Nortel and I'm going to the moon and then collapsing. And so we ran this analysis and so we're paying attention to a lot of different things. We're paying attention like on the bull side, we're paying attention to, to token generation. Right. Google has released now three data points and we can start to track if the growth rate there is slowing. Is the growth rate slowing because user demand is slowing? I don't think that's the case but maybe there's far pretty significant improvements in overall efficiency. The other thing that we're spending paying a lot of attention to is just understanding the debt structures, the use of SPVs on and off balance sheet vendor financing and then the last last is the depreciation schedule. So a lot of these data center companies have extended the depreciation schedules, almost doubling it. Amazon went from three years to six years and then backed off to five earlier in 2025. And that's important because it's the collateral that's underwriting these loans.
- [124:29]
Jordy
Yeah, let's start with that.
- [124:32]
Tyler
It is notable that everyone was so hopeful that AI would increase GDP growth. And it did, and it did. But it came at the cost of hundreds of billions of capex.
- [124:45]
Jordy
Yeah, we'll take it. I want to start with the vendor financing because that's ringing a lot of alarm bells. A lot of people are going to Lucent story. I took it in a different direction and I was wondering if you're familiar with the ASML customer co investment program because in 2012 TSMC, intel and Samsung they pitched in 6.8 billion across R and D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography and 450 millimeter wafer technology. And it was this like odd round trip but it worked out. And so when somebody throws Me like the vendor financing is immediately red flag. I always want to say, like, well, it doesn't always end in disaster. And so how much nuance should we be placing on the vendor financing stuff? How much do we need to be digging in to actually understand what's at risk here?
- [125:40]
Tamash
So vendor financing itself is really common.
- [125:43]
Tyler
Right?
- [125:43]
Tamash
You pointed to this ASML example. It's a wonderful thing within the ecosystem. And the vendor financing fails when you have a closed system and they're all borrowing and lending from each other and there's no net new GDP coming into the system. And then it just goes around and around. Everybody takes their tax and GDP goes to zero, which is kind of what happened. And that's not the case. Right. You look at what I mean, the revenue growth of OpenAI, you look at the enterprise spending that's happening. There's GDP that's coming from labor spend, there's GDP that's coming from BPO operations that have been executed in foreign countries that are now basically being reinsured. And so I don't, I think it would be too simplistic just to say, say vendor financing. Oh, I'm calling the top. That's not the case at all. It's just the expectations around 500 billion a year in capex and the return on invested capital and the depreciation schedule. I think the thing that we're, the bigger question is how would the bondholders make out on all this?
- [126:53]
Jordy
Where does the risk actually live? Because I feel like there's this world where you have OpenAI is kind of rolling a 20 sided dice and as long as they don't come up with a one, they're going to be fine while everyone else is flipping a coin and it's 5050 whether they make it out okay. And, and everyone's, everyone's playing the same risk game, but the risk is just way higher for some of the folks who are further out in the debt curve in the capital stack. More risk on, more debt laden. And a lot of, a lot of the narrative is like OpenAI is taking on all this debt. It doesn't actually feel like they're taking on that much debt. It feels like their partners might be.
- [127:28]
Tamash
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I don't think OpenAI is really taking a lot, a lot of balance sheet risk. I think it's the lenders who are taking the balance sheet risk on. And so why is there some reason to be concerned? Google ran an analysis on their GPUs and their data centers. They found failure rates at 50 to 70% utilization were significantly higher after three years, which is half of the amortization or depreciation schedule. Then you have next generation chip architectures. SGI just announced yesterday Cornell research that showed 90% improvement relative to GPUs with a new chip architecture and then a second generation that's promising 100x performance improvement from there. And so fundamentally underpinning all this is how fast are tokens growing, which is an inflationary force in the ecosystem. And then the deflationary force are algorithmic improvements and chip improvements. And so what is the net? What is the vector that comes out of that? What is the slope? We don't know the answer, but it seems like both are growing very, very fast and so it's hard to predict.
- [128:28]
Jordy
Do you think there's much more confidence on the inside or do you think that internally some of the deal makers are actually viewing, hey, this is a leap of faith, but we're all taking a leap of faith? Or do you think that when they hear us yapping about them on a podcast, they think these guys don't know the data? They don't know how solid of a bet this is?
- [128:51]
Tamash
I bet if you're in the inside of one of these companies, I mean Google and Microsoft both said in separate earnings announcements this year that they were hardware constrained. And you just watch the consumer adoption, I think OpenAI will reach like a billion in MAU here faster than anything. And so I think it's if you're on the inside, there's very little reason to worry because you see the ultimate demand. We were first wave of all this AI was just better search compressing all of human knowledge into an LLM. And now we're at this tool calling or agentic phase where it'll actually start to do work for us. And it works pretty well some of the time. But if we can improve that meaningfully, then the demand for tokens will go through the roof.
- [129:33]
Jordy
I have another question. Go for it. I'm trying to understand how people feel about the ramp of agentic commerce because in the limit, if I think about a billion MAUs who people are purchasing things, they're using ChatGPT regularly, they're just going to wind up buying things and taking even a 1% cut of that commerce through an affiliate revenue or a stripe like tax or some sort of asset auction to see, well, will you buy it on Walmart or Etsy or Amazon or somewhere else like just, just even, even not just surfacing like a direct advertisement for something you're not shopping for that. Feels like that could be very lucrative on an ARPU basis. But I'm wondering how long it will take to that for that pattern to actually manifest if people aren't in the habit of searching. Because over the past two years it's been yeah, maybe you'll chatgpt something but then you have the natural flow of like, oh, then I go to Google to order it or then I open Amazon to order it. So how do you think about that ramp?
- [130:37]
Tamash
Well, super exciting time you've had. The ad market historically dominated over the last 15 years by Google and Meta.
- [130:44]
Jeff from Hyperliquid
Right.
- [130:44]
Tamash
250 billion on search, about 265 billion on social. And so it's been really hard candidly to invest in the advertising ecosystem, but now it's wide open. I think the agentic commerce commerce is will have pretty significant tailwinds here because you are in the flow, you are researching. I mean I don't know about you guys but like the number of websites that I visit compared to say five years ago has fallen off a cliff.
- [131:07]
Jordy
Sure.
- [131:08]
Tamash
Because instead of going through all the forums to figure out what is the bike the best bike carrier for the family, I just ask and then great, send me the Amazon link and I'll buy it. So maybe there's an ads model here. We had kind of of contemplated whether OpenAI or others would run a keyword auction to inject ads into the context window. So that's the additional information in addition to the search query. One of the crazy theories that I've been wondering about is I was chatting with a friend who suggested, well, what if OpenAI takes a 30% cut, not a 1% cut, but what if it looks like the Apple ads?
- [131:43]
Tyler
If you ask a retail brand what percentage of meta, how much of your revenue does meta take? It's probably like 30%.
- [131:49]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [131:51]
Tamash
And if the performance is better than merchants and retailers will pay it.
- [131:55]
Jordy
Yeah. How do you think about direct agentic commerce affiliate? Like I'm searching for the best bike rack, it gives me a bunch of options and then at the last second it runs an auction to see what provider will actually send that to me and they take a cut there versus I'm searching for history of the Roman Empire, but it knows that I'm interested in shopping for a bike. And so in the middle of that feed while I'm reading a deep research report about Rome, it says, hey, do you want to check out with that bike you were looking at earlier? Because the Instagram flow. Yes. There are people that search for camping gear and they scroll and there might be an ad that matches up. But a lot of times you're just looking at family photos from friends and it says, oh, here's the thing that we know you want and you might buy it.
- [132:40]
Tamash
Right. So those are two different kinds of ads.
- [132:42]
Tyler
Right.
- [132:42]
Tamash
So ads, let's say within the search and then the finding an article or targeting an ad to you about a bike rack when you're reading about the Roman Empire is called retargeting.
- [132:51]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [132:51]
Tamash
And it's typically done from search hugely successful advertising program. I think both exist and it depends on how considered the purchase is. So everybody has a different level of willingness to spend, spend before they say consult their spouse or take some time to think about it. And so you have these impulse buys and then you have. I think retargeting works very, very well for considered transactions like a car. If you're really interested in the next electric car coming from Rivian, well, the ad at that point is actually pretty useful for you. And one of the things that I learned in the advertising business was seven impressions was kind of the key to building a brand. So there is value in both the brand building component, the retail targeting component, as well as the immediate transaction part of an ad unit.
- [133:35]
Jordy
Do you have an idea of, I mean if we're just to play out sort of like a median case for like a bubble popping, you might map OpenAI to Google, you might map anthropic to Amazon. Companies that made it through the dot com bubble. Maybe there's some overbuilding that happens and you get elusive and you get get some big companies left in the wreckage. But what is advice to if you're talking to a dot com entrepreneur who raised $50 million, doesn't quite have product market fit, it's 1999. You now know that the bubble's about to pop. What advice are you giving a founder that hey, it's raining right now, everything's really great, but it might not be that way forever. How are you setting up your business for. For durability in potentially a rocky time?
- [134:27]
Tamash
Great question. First is to bolster the balance sheet. And I know this goes a bit against the grain of don't raise too much capital, but I think what we learned in 21 is the companies that had pretty significant balance sheets were the ones that were able to reinvent themselves and weather the storm either by acquisition or new product. And so I think the cost of capital is incredibly low. So shopping for capital if you can. And then the second thing is I Think there is this notion that product market fit is this binary condition that once you pass the gate you're done and that's it's no longer the case. Product market fit is this, is this status that you need to, it's like a united miles. You need to continue to fly to maintain 1K. And we saw it between 21 and 24 companies that were classic software companies, companies literally overnight lost their product market fit. And that'll be very much the case again.
- [135:22]
Tyler
Do you think the labs have an incentive to get various players to over build? So then there's like basically like yeah, they can there. We're a buyer. They're basically a buyer at any price. Right. Because they're GPU constrained now. But if you can collectively get people to over build then two years from now you might have dramatically lower costs. And, and I think you're already seeing this in some cases where like actual GPU prices are through the roof, but then the leasing prices are quite a bit lower. But I'm curious if you think that kind of playing out the game theory there?
- [135:55]
Tamash
Yeah, I mean I think so. There's, you know, I think if they want long term relationships with their capital partners, they will probably want to game it a little bit, but maybe not too much. Yeah, they definitely want to see a little bit of excess and that's okay. You look at the CPU spot versus contract markets and there's excess CPUs on AWS and Google and the margin structures there are really good. I think one major question with the GPU market is within the large hyperscalers you do see great utilization and there's a question around the NEO clouds of what utilization are they seeing and what the unit economics are there. But overall I think they probably won't look to burn others just because they need these relationships for 20 to 30 years.
- [136:40]
Tyler
Yeah, Oracle is down 17% in the last 30 days. Do you think that will hinder their ability to actually deliver the capacity that OpenAI is saying just in the sense of like you know, they were raising debt and a lot of people are saying like they're basically properly leveraged. Maybe you shouldn't go go much more from here. But I'm curious, do they just need to go to the 2040 forecast? 2050 just keep moving RPO out to.
- [137:14]
Jordy
The end of the century. Why not?
- [137:15]
Chris Dixon
Why not?
- [137:16]
Tamash
Yeah, I think it's a good business. Right. It produces a lot of cash. The information article around the 10% roughly gross margin structure on some of these contracts I think is what catalyzed that drop in price.
- [137:28]
Jordy
Price.
- [137:29]
Tamash
And so.
- [137:29]
Tyler
Yeah, but it, but, but it did, it did drop dramatically and then it's just been chugging downhill.
- [137:36]
Tamash
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, these are big long term contracts with unclear demand and the demand is growing really fast. And so I think if you're an investor, a long term investor, you have to be hedging at some point.
- [137:49]
Jordy
Yeah. There's also a lot of like, hype that comes out when there's like a new biggest number. Everyone is like, oh, I didn't even know that they were in the game. And now they're at the top of the game with the biggest number and those people pile in and then they might get, you know, jitters. Like the whole detail of that margin was the nuance there was that. Well, of course you pay for the GPUs before you start making money from them because you, it's like any manufacturing process, you buy the raw materials before you make the widgets. But, you know, people obviously saw a lot of jitters in that.
- [138:20]
Tyler
Did the. Totally. Yeah, go for it.
- [138:22]
Jordy
Oh, I was going to say, I.
- [138:23]
Tamash
Think there's this great parallel. I don't know if you guys read the book Barbarians at the Gate, which was about the LBO of RJR buyout, RJR Nabisco, and it was the great. It was the largest buyout at the time, fueled by the junk bond wave from Milken.
- [138:36]
Tyler
Right.
- [138:36]
Tamash
And, and then that kind of, one, it created the LBO asset class in a very real way. But two, it was a big contraction. And so I wonder, will we have a Barbarians at the Gate book written about some of these major data center contracts?
- [138:51]
Jordy
I really hope so. There are so many OpenAI books coming out and I know that they're all just going to focus on like the doomers versus the nonprofit versus the for profit.
- [139:00]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [139:00]
Jordy
And it's going to be intriguing and stuff and it'll be like social network vibes. But I want like an Andrew Sorkin book about this more than the salacious, like journalist take of like OpenAI is bad for whatever reason.
- [139:14]
Chris Dixon
Yeah.
- [139:15]
Tamash
The business history.
- [139:15]
Jordy
Exactly. The in the room. Yeah. I read the Caesar's palace heist. I don't know if you've read that about Apollo. And it's just like the most nitty gritty on like the debt restructuring, that it's another LBO of the casino empire. And it's just like super fascinating to me. Pretty low, Tam, but I hope we get one of those books just about because some of the novel deal Structures that happen at OpenAI at every single turn. Even going back to, to the Microsoft deal for a billion dollars of credit.
- [139:43]
Tyler
We're actually gonna reinvent. We're gonna reinvent the wheel.
- [139:45]
Jordy
They reinvented the wheel 12 times. It's not just the nonprofit and the for profit. It's way more complicated. Every deal is like units and crazy. And then now these deals. It's all a lot of fun.
- [139:56]
Tamash
And then think about like the Google ownership in Anthropic and then the Amazon ownership of Anthropic. And what does that mean when you have two strategics each owning 10 plus.
- [140:03]
Tyler
Yeah, that's why when the Google news was, was hitting the timeline yesterday and that they're working on some type of major deal, I was like, why are you surprised that a double digit percentage stakeholder is like working on a deal? Yeah, like with, with their portfolio company. Yeah, like that is like the obvious thing.
- [140:20]
Jordy
That's like famously bad advice though. Like if you're, if you're a startup, it's usually like don't let, don't let a strategic build a 10% position in your company unless you're actually planning to sell from them because it will preclude you from working with the other potential strategic buyers or investors. And that just hasn't proven true in this market at all. It's completely different.
- [140:39]
Tyler
Did anything about the Carpathian interview update your kind of worldview? I thought it was just very pragmatic and real and the decade of agents point was I think what everybody's experiencing that's like trying agents and talking to people. There's some that are great, there's some great coding agents. We have deep researchers research. That's awesome. But yeah, we need, there's clearly going to need more time needed to figure out a lot of these use cases. But I'm curious what stood out to you?
- [141:12]
Tamash
Yeah, I think reinforcement learning was kind of the song of the summer. And there are two different approaches. One is human labor creating virtual environments or gyms where AI can train to understand how to update your CPU CRM. And then they're standard operating procedure based, text based. We call them context databases. Those are two approaches. We've written an article, I think the first one on the topic about context databases. And so we definitely agree with him there that the current approach of creating these gyms mirrors the fine tuning of the previous area. And what I mean by that is if you take a regular model and fine tune it and customize it to a particular task, it's really brittle by the Time the model updates or the tasks Update, you have 30 to 50% of the prompts breaking, which is what we experience today in tool calling. And so I think he's largely right. The amount of research that's happening within reinforcement learning, which has two parts. The first is making a plan and then the second is creating what are called reward functions. Or like Mario gets 500 points reading a mushroom room. How many points does a robot get for filling out your CRM? The first one we can do with AI. The second one is largely still research. And the amount of work, or just like academic brain power that's going behind there is enormous. So I really hope that we make strides faster than what he said. And I mean, I'll tell you like, I was trying to replicate Claude code myself with open source technology because the plain Internet wasn't working working very well yesterday. And I realized when you use cloud code or cursor, tool calling is just asking the model one question and then taking the answer and then putting it back into the model and then again and again and again. And there are different loops like Gemini or Gemini. CLI says do that 10 times and then here are the success. That's tool calling. It's extremely basic and there's some management of like, okay, after the first step, this is what we learned. Now go do this. But I thought it was much more sophisticated and it's quite like it's very rudimentary. And just the way that we've optimized memory around these models and we can do tasks well, we can hit different benchmarks for science and math. I think we'll start to see that with rl, although I think the big question is do we need a new architecture in order to really solve some of these problems? And maybe that's what Karpathy was alluding to, but we have a long ways to go.
- [143:42]
Jordy
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always a great time.
- [143:45]
Tyler
Grab more time next time.
- [143:46]
Jordy
We'll talk soon.
- [143:47]
Tyler
Bunch more questions, but thanks for coming on.
- [143:48]
Jordy
Have a good rest of your day. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. But first let me tell you about customer relationship Magic ADEO is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We have Sean from Coinbase Base coming back into the TB Pan Ultradome. Sean, how are you doing?
- [144:05]
Tyler
Hey guys, good to see you again.
- [144:07]
Jordy
Good to see you again too. Take the news. Love to go deeper on the acquisition, but also I just want to get an update on Anything else that's happening in the Coinbase universe?
- [144:18]
Tyler
Yeah, well, we were super pumped yesterday to announce the acquisition of Echo, which is the leading on chain capital formation platform. We obviously, we had a little bit of fun with it on Twitter and Meetup on Monday, even despite all the AWS outages that were giving us a little bit of the sweatshirt. Is that the first time an NFT has been taken through like a corporate M and A process?
- [144:41]
Jordy
Yeah, I've definitely felt unprecedented.
- [144:44]
Tyler
A little bit easier. You can imagine the trying to explain that to our lawyers, tax consultants. When you're buying a company company, like wait, you want to also do an NFT thing. So yeah, I think it was unique n of one thing. It was, you know, obviously very specific to this acquisition just given the founder of Echo is Jordan Fish Kobe, who, you know, I think he's very much intertwined with crypto lore and up only is very much intertwined with crypto lore. So we just thought it would be a cool, creative way to get the crypto community really jazzed up and excited because everybody but he's been raving about and asking for him to bring up only back.
- [145:25]
Jordy
Yeah, it was, I think like the M and A announcement of the year. It was the best executed, like build a bunch of intrigue, hype, controversy even in some realms, but then ultimately deliver a really positive story. It was exactly what you want out of like M and A comms, which is sort of the least sexy thing you can possibly do. It's usually really boring, just a number and, you know, a couple paragraphs on like synergies and like, you know, everyone's like, okay, congrats, but this one was really well executed. I want to know more about the vision for. We were talking to Brian Armstrong about this yesterday. The vision for the next generation of crypto companies. They raise money on chain with Echo. What does their world look like over the next few years as they scale in the Coinbase ecosystem system? What products are they pulling off the shelf? What are they taking advantage of? What does the whole like being a Coinbase native business feel like?
- [146:23]
Tyler
Yeah, good question. So, you know, Coinbase historically has been primarily a secondary exchange for when you list a token, that's where price discovery happens and that's where, you know, most of the trading activity is. But by the time a issuer actually issues that token, it's actually pretty late in the life cycle. So with Echo and then and a number another company that we acquired over the summer called Liquify, which is sort of like a, you could think about like a Carta for crypto companies that helps you manage your token table. It allows us to have a relationship with the token issuer basically from inception all the way through those private fundraises and potentially a public fundraise to listing on the exchange, which we think about as sort of like the crypto IPO in some ways. And then after the the fact, we continue to serve that issuer through a business account that they can use to manage just sort of the operations of their business. They can grow using Spindle, which was another acquisition that we did earlier this year, which is sort of an on chain ads protocol that helps you find distribution and I think our broader vision for it.
- [147:32]
Jordy
I know agm, the legend.
- [147:34]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [147:36]
Kevin Rose
So we're pulling in all the talent.
- [147:37]
Tyler
And all the legends into Coinbase.
- [147:39]
Jordy
Yeah. Brian was talking a little bit about bringing access to earlier stage investing to a broader community. Obviously there's a bunch of regulation in the mix. I don't really care about the legal understanding. I want to know more about the philosophical underpinnings of who gets exposure to what. There's a take that's like everyone should be able to invest in anything. There's also like, even though you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a startup, you don't have to be an accredited investor to have money in a pension fund that winds up in a venture capital firm that gave money to a company, to a VC for.
- [148:18]
Tyler
I think one interesting Coinbase is like you, you can, you know exactly like you have. You don't know exactly, but you have a good sense of who's a corporate qual would be a qualified investor by the assets that they custody on Coinbase.
- [148:31]
Jordy
Oh sure.
- [148:32]
Tyler
It's a very natural thing of knowing like, hey, these 200,000 people or whatever the number is, like have, have enough assets just in, you know, digital assets that they would be qualified as a.
- [148:43]
Jordy
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So yeah, philosophically, what are you thinking?
- [148:47]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean we think that everybody should have the opportunity to invest in these, in these companies. You know, I think like private companies are, have for too long been restricted from an access perspective to large venture capitalists and quote, unquote, accredited investors. And I think, Jordi, assets that you have are one indication potentially of sophistication or insensitivity to loss. But the perverse side of that equation is it potentially locks a lot of people out from the most compelling investments that are out there. And we want to help people be early basically and give people the shot at being early. And so obviously we need to follow accreditation rules as they stand, but hopefully those change over time as well. And with Echo's infrastructure, you know, anybody can invest in a seed round or a series A round, starting with crypto tokens and then even beyond that, looking at traditional companies as well. How early do you typically start meeting with potential acquisitions? Like are these. I imagine with Liquify and Echo, I know the conversation, I'm sure the conversation started like at least a year in advance, but what does that actually mean? Yeah, it's kind of variable, I think with Ekko, you know, we had known Jordan and Kobe for quite a while and so we, I was chatting with him when he, we start, he started the company but we started to really work a lot more together earlier this year when we actually partnered. So Echo has a angellist like product where you could start an investment group and then sponsor investments effectively and syndicate those out. And so we started an investment group for under Coinbase Ventures for the base ecosystem fund where investments that we were making, we would actually let the community follow along with us and invest in those same companies because that's something that we heard a lot of demand for, particularly within the base ecosystem. And I think as we started to work together more that broader vision of hey, we can actually enable Internet capital markets and Echo, you have the infrastructure, Coinbase has the size, scale and distribution. So there's potentially some magic that could happen if you bring those two together. Those conversations really materialize and ultimately, you know, culminated in this week.
- [151:09]
Jordy
Well, congratulations. I'm going to ring the gong.
- [151:11]
Tyler
Hit that gong.
- [151:14]
Jordy
Thank you for stopping.
- [151:16]
Tyler
Fantastic work. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.
- [151:19]
Jordy
We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room while we bring in Nick. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields are trusted by millions, folks. And we have Nick from Rivet in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultradrome.
- [151:37]
Tyler
Nick, how are you doing?
- [151:38]
Kevin Rose
John, Jordy, great to see you guys both. How are you?
- [151:41]
Jordy
We're fantastic.
- [151:42]
Tyler
Big day for you.
- [151:43]
Jordy
I already rang the gong just a few minutes ago. I want to ring it again. What you got for me?
- [151:48]
Kevin Rose
We're excited to announce our seed round. It's a big day for rivet.
- [151:52]
Jordy
How much?
- [151:54]
Kevin Rose
5.1.
- [151:55]
Tyler
5.1. Why the. Any special meaning to the number or just a hundred K flyer came in at the end?
- [152:04]
Kevin Rose
You know what's funny is this business is, you know, it's self sustaining. When you sell a service to a customer, they pay you money. They typically pay you more than it costs to employ people, at least in aggregate. And we were really selective about who.
- [152:19]
Jordy
We chose to work with.
- [152:19]
Kevin Rose
And so we started off really only looking for three or four to really give us a buffer to invest in a sales team and some more tax partners ahead of next season. But you meet with one great firm, they talk, you know, more people show up.
- [152:33]
Jordy
We were lucky to get to work.
- [152:34]
Kevin Rose
With Hastack, Suse and XYZ for this round.
- [152:36]
Jordy
And so it.
- [152:37]
Kevin Rose
We're very lucky.
- [152:40]
Jordy
What's the core pitch for the business right now? How are you explaining it to new customers?
- [152:44]
Tyler
Okay, so I'll give the pitch as a customer, please. It's just an amazing service. I've used Rivet over the last couple years. And so that part's easy. It's like you guys are really dialed, like, incredibly thoughtful. It's just smooth. And so that part makes sense. What I want to understand is like, the pitch to investors. I'm actually an investor myself, but not biased. The product's truly amazing. But what's the updated pitch to investors? Since it's been probably a couple years since I participated.
- [153:19]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, to customers. We're a tax prep firm. You'd engage with us no differently than Berkeland or Anderson or even deloitte. We have 30x big four accountants on the team.
- [153:28]
Chris Dixon
Team.
- [153:29]
Kevin Rose
That's pretty straightforward. Nobody really asks why we raised or what we've built when we sell or when we onboard clients. When we talk to investors, it's oftentimes focused on things that customers don't really care about. It's, what have you built?
- [153:43]
Jordy
Why are you building it?
- [153:44]
Kevin Rose
The toughest part of building this business is context management. When you hire a person to do a job, the context for what they did, why they did it, why they chose chose to put something or recommend. A certain classification is hidden in their head, and it would be prohibitive for their time to write literally everything down. And so every tax season, as new people join the firm, as people leave the firm, as we get rolled up by some huge PE firm, a lot.
- [154:18]
Jordy
Of the actual work starts from scratch. These larger firms.
- [154:20]
Kevin Rose
And so clients get asked the same question questions over and over again because no one remembers anything, because no one's worked there for more than six months. And it's deeply painful for customers.
- [154:30]
Tyler
Right?
- [154:30]
Kevin Rose
And they don't realize why it happens. They just know it sucks and it's frustrating and uncomfortable.
- [154:36]
Jordy
And.
- [154:36]
Kevin Rose
Wait, you don't remember my ein? I talked to you guys three months ago. What we've built sits on the back end. And so it quietly ingests, saves, tracks, whatever you want to call it. Everything that is discussed about and given to us from a client. And so it's not just emails, it's zoom calls, it's Slack transcripts, it's text messages they sent us. And just tracking all of that in one place is a massive problem. It's a massive, you know, build. That's what allows us to run this practice at scale efficiently.
- [155:10]
David Tisch
Right.
- [155:10]
Kevin Rose
And it's, it's, you know, tax prep isn't just data entry from the W2 to the tax software. It's. It's gathering where the data W2 was in the first place. And so what we've built doesn't really replace the accountants. It just automates the tedious parts of their job.
- [155:24]
Jordy
Remembering everything, organizing all the information wherever.
- [155:26]
Kevin Rose
It was sent and making sure it's stored in the right place. It's almost like Mike Ross remembers everything. It's always there. It's really cool to get to work with. If you've been working on these with.
- [155:38]
Tyler
Larger firms for decades, have you bought any companies? No.
- [155:43]
Chris Dixon
No.
- [155:44]
Kevin Rose
Well, actually, yes, we did. We acquired, acquired a small AI company called Lobby. Originally we met Wilson Hobbs, the founder and CEO, and he was applying for one of our roles. And we were deeply impressed by him and his background. And as we did the interview process, we learned more about Lobby and what he had built there. It was a website. You could go to it, you could upload documents, you could talk to those documents. Sounds pretty similar to what we're building here. Right? It needs to be done with tax. And so as we did the interview process, said, wait a second, what's happening to the team? What's happening to the product? He's like, you know, not really sure. We haven't quite figured that out yet. And I said, well, we should have you join the team. That part's easy. But we should also acquire Lobby. You know, I think, I think what you built is deeply special and we should have it here at the business. And so Wilson joined the team last year. It's his one year anniversary, is actually yesterday.
- [156:38]
Tyler
Wow.
- [156:39]
Kevin Rose
Since brought on two of his former team members. Yeah, one year anniversary.
- [156:43]
Tyler
It's exciting. That's big. That's big for us, you know, but you haven't bought any tax prep firms, I'm sure. How many times, how many times have people tried to get you to do a roll up.
- [156:58]
Kevin Rose
I think every investor meeting for the first six months was. So how many firms have you bought? Why aren't you buying more? Or aren't you going to raise $100.
- [157:05]
Jordy
Million to roll up 50 firms? Chad's asking what the website is.
- [157:09]
Tyler
It's rivet tax.
- [157:10]
Jordy
Rivet tax. Well, congratulations on all the partnerships in.
- [157:17]
Tyler
30 seconds since we're tight here. But why have you chosen not to roll up tax prep firms and make them AI native?
- [157:28]
Kevin Rose
Yeah, good question. It's much easier to steal their business than it is to buy them. The change management of rolling up a firm, convincing the people who work there.
- [157:38]
Jordy
That they'll like us.
- [157:40]
Kevin Rose
The whole process is deeply difficult. You can expect to lose about half the customers, half the revenue, half the team. When you buy somebody.
- [157:46]
Jordy
Whoa, rough.
- [157:47]
Kevin Rose
It's not worth it. It's much easier to just tell people about what we do and bring them onto the platform.
- [157:52]
Jordy
Much, much easier. That makes a ton of sense.
- [157:54]
Tyler
Love it. Absolutely dog.
- [157:56]
Jordy
Absolute dog. Thank you so much for stopping.
- [157:59]
Tyler
Great to have you on. Thank you for your congratulations service. We'll talk soon.
- [158:03]
Jordy
Bye. Thanks guys.
- [158:05]
Tyler
Cheers.
- [158:05]
Jordy
Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe. We have David Tisch in the waiting room.
- [158:21]
Tyler
Love David Tisch.
- [158:22]
Jordy
Tish tush tush tish tish tish tish tish tish tush tish. Let's go.
- [158:27]
Tyler
Let's go.
- [158:28]
Jordy
Give us the what's new in your world. Did you raise one fund?
- [158:33]
David Tisch
No, two.
- [158:34]
Jordy
What?
- [158:34]
Tyler
Oh, hit that gong. We got two funds. Two new.
- [158:38]
David Tisch
Thank you.
- [158:40]
Jordy
Let's go.
- [158:42]
Tyler
Incredible.
- [158:43]
David Tisch
We needed two because two is more than one which was made bigger number better.
- [158:48]
Jordy
They made sequel to one fund.
- [158:51]
David Tisch
It's two funds and that's important to do more always especially in venture.
- [158:56]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah.
- [158:57]
Tyler
Bigger is always better.
- [158:58]
Jordy
What's the strategy? Put it all in one place. Massive secondary slug of OpenAI. What are you thinking?
- [159:06]
David Tisch
We literally have no rules. Our plan to give people money and pray and diversify our prayers and and.
- [159:17]
Tyler
Diversified set of prayers.
- [159:19]
Jordy
Where are we on the prayer meter? Should we pray differentiate this year than last year? Are we going to be praying a lot more next year? What do you think?
- [159:28]
David Tisch
It's like a balance of stability and increasing at the same time. So you have to do you never drop. You just keep Doing more. We're different than other VC firms in that strategy, which is important because we're selling much money, which is a commodity.
- [159:45]
Jordy
Yeah, makes sense.
- [159:47]
Tyler
I love it. Besides fundraising, has that just dominated your life since we last chatted or are you still.
- [159:56]
David Tisch
You are forced to file with the government at a certain date. So 15 days after you. It's like taxes but totally unrelated. And so you have to file with the government. And so our filing date was yesterday, so we're forced to talk about it and so that's why we did it. But we raised money earlier in the spring and just closed it and we'll start giving it away in the new year, which is a 2026 treat.
- [160:29]
Jordy
Are there particular areas that you feel are just like over, like over hyper, like over competitive right now? All the, the all like have been picked clean of new ideas categories where you feel like you have enough bets and maybe you're, you're going to be declining to hear more pitches in a particular category or vertical or horizontal layer of the stack. Like, are you thinking about that at all?
- [160:56]
David Tisch
No.
- [160:56]
Jordy
Okay.
- [160:57]
David Tisch
Should we?
- [160:58]
Jordy
I don't know. No, I mean on this show we hear like, you know, a million. Like you, you wind up hearing like AI agents for a million things and then you're just like, okay, I don't want to hear that. And maybe we're not even investing. We're just like, I'm kind of talking about that particular niche.
- [161:13]
David Tisch
Look, I think, I think at the later stage there's a lot of direct competitors and if you're in the business of picking a later stage company, you pick one and then you stop. We're at the very earliest stage and so we're meeting people who have ideas, who have dreams. And what we found over the years others is, you guys know, is things change. And so you might start with an idea you're going to. We don't fund intentional pivots, but people iterate. People get into a market, they see where there is opening and where there's too much competition and your go to market becomes different, your product might become different. And so I think we don't ever close ourselves off to things. We don't try to fund direct competitive competitors ever. We think that's just misaligned with the deal you're making with the founder. But I think we're open minded to what we fund and where it's coming from. And I think that in this moment you're seeing sort of everything up for grab still and whether that's within verticals. Whether that's in the tech stack, it doesn't mean go fund foundational models today, but I think other than that we're pretty open minded. And then foundational models that are not perfectly horizontal I think are probably still on the table.
- [162:29]
Jordy
Is there a new mafia emerging? I mean, we've lived through the PayPal mafia. There was a bunch of entrepreneurs.
- [162:35]
David Tisch
You guys are sponsored by the mafia.
- [162:37]
Tyler
Right.
- [162:39]
David Tisch
So my main goal with our new funds, I counted only four of your sponsors we've invested in. So Ram, Privy, Bezel and Graphite. I would like to get.
- [162:52]
Tyler
The full lineup.
- [162:53]
David Tisch
Yeah. So we're going to take our money, we're going to give it to companies, they're going to give it to you.
- [162:58]
Jordy
Yes.
- [162:58]
David Tisch
And. And that's. We call it the new circular economy. We tried to fund the circular economy.
- [163:04]
Tyler
Circular economy. Our audience will buy the sas.
- [163:07]
Jordy
Yes.
- [163:07]
Tyler
Run their businesses.
- [163:08]
Jordy
I think we just have to.
- [163:10]
David Tisch
Main strategy. Our LPs were really excited about that strategy.
- [163:13]
Tyler
Perfect.
- [163:14]
Jordy
Well, thank you.
- [163:16]
Tyler
What's your. What do you think is your most underrated portfolio company?
- [163:20]
David Tisch
Oh, that's a good. Now I have to pick a.
- [163:22]
Jordy
Like you basically have to pick a favorite.
- [163:24]
Tyler
No, no, but there's companies, there's companies that. Some of my favorite acquisitions are companies that like haven't been in the news for five years. They just get acquired for like $800 million.
- [163:35]
David Tisch
And you're like, we have one of those, which is really cool, called ID me, which.
- [163:39]
Jordy
He was on your company.
- [163:41]
Tyler
I know him.
- [163:41]
David Tisch
Yeah, he was on Invest like the best after like 12 years. It's the craziest origin story. So that's like a evergreen version of that. And then one day they'll like win sort of more modern version. What Rogo's building, I think is not getting enough attention. I think Gabe came on if he didn't one day.
- [164:01]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah. Blake Hall FOUNDER and CEO of ID I was at a conference and he had a whole deck about like the business and he just ripped it up, threw it out like minutes before and just told his life story. And everyone was just like, this is the best conversation ever. Because he had like military like saved lives. It was a crazy. Just like, you know, this is like elite business leadership. I have so much respect for it.
- [164:25]
Tyler
Do you? I feel like in some ways it's harder, harder to predict the future than ever. Like in 2010 there was is like this sense of I think we're going to have a bunch more Internet companies in 2020. And I feel like there's a general sentiment in the Industry of like we can't predict anything after five years, like we might get, you know, it's crazy acceleration and AI progress and then everything changes, right? So it's a little bit fuzzy out in the future. Do you have any sort of I reference, like there's, I'll botch it but like there's a Bezos quote which is like in the future people will want like cheaper things faster, right? And like I can, I can like build a business on, on those, like with that, with that goal for a long, long time. Because do you have anything like that in early? Like in terms of how you do.
- [165:15]
David Tisch
I have a Jeff Bezos worthy quote to share with you.
- [165:17]
Tyler
No more. So like if you're evaluating, you're evaluating something, it's like, is it purely like, yeah, I don't know if this is going to be a market in 10.
- [165:25]
David Tisch
Years but I think to your point, predicting two years out feels really hard. Right now you're seeing such rapid build iteration from the biggest companies and that includes the new wave of AI native companies. OpenAI anthropic, we saw the browser get released. You're seeing more and more like first principle build technology get released at the exact same time you're seeing like the modernization of Google, of Google, of Meta, of Apple, of Amazon in real time. And Microsoft, they feel stronger in many ways than they did for a good five year period. So trying to predict two years out when all of that's happening in terms of the startup world I think is really difficult. At the exact same time, when we're investing, we can't do things that we think are shorting the future. So you have to play for something that is 10, 15 years out. And not like we think this is going to happen, but we can thread a needle for three years and build a business that's a terrible way to invest. And we call that shorting the future.
- [166:30]
Jordy
I love that. That's really good.
- [166:33]
David Tisch
So we look at everything, it's like if everything this founder is saying is right, is this interesting, big enough, like fascinating to us. And that's what an investment is, joining a journey. So we try very hard to look at it from if this existed, is this right or cool? And not shorting the future such that it's obvious why this won't exist in a reasonable amount of time.
- [167:04]
Tyler
That makes sense. I think the last time you were on or maybe one of the times you were on, we talked about how there used to be there was this golden age of aquahires where great teams could sell to Twitter for like $10 million and they hadn't raised much, so it was meaningful outcome for the founders. And then they.
- [167:20]
David Tisch
Now we do aqua quits, right?
- [167:22]
Jordy
That's what we're up to.
- [167:23]
Tyler
Well, yeah, yeah, the, the, yeah, I mean, obviously the, the windsurf thing.
- [167:29]
David Tisch
No, I'm just more the. Like go to Facebook when you're. You started a company from that company thing.
- [167:34]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, that whole thing. But it feels like we maybe are in a new golden age of aqua hires where like I was advising a company, a founder like last week who launched a product, it's like, was exciting, but clearly doesn't have product market fit yet. And he's like talented and has a great team, so he's getting fielded all these offers that will be like not a meaningful outcome for the investors, but will be very meaningful for the team. And it feels like there's more of that right now in this moment when people are like, I don't just need to be AI native, I need as much AI native talent as I possibly can. I'll pay a big premium for it.
- [168:09]
David Tisch
Yes. And that's healthy, right? The sort of decade we had of people just staying in long term, like not going anywhere startups without sort of recirculation of talent, I feel like was a negative moment. I think the. If you go back to the origins of say Facebook or Uber or Airbnb, in that moment, there was more aggregation of talent on those early teams than sort of in the next wave of startups. What's interesting about this moment in AI and these very significantly funded companies, a lot of the research labs and people coming out of the foundational models, by getting the funding at the scale they're getting, and by bringing with them 8, 10, 20 people from the their previous company, you're actually getting depth of talent that is capable of building something big, probably in an easier way than starting from scratch. And so I think there's a balance to be had. But I do think depth of talent is probably the most underrated component of a quality startup.
- [169:20]
Kevin Rose
Right.
- [169:21]
David Tisch
Your 50th person on your roster is amazing. And I think one of the things about Ramp that they've done so magically is this combination of hiring, retaining, acquiring, inspiring, letting people go, bringing them back. And if you go to like 50, 100, 300th person at ramp, there's just an immense amount of talent from top to bottom. And that's, I think, how you build sustainable growth, that you can keep iterating and launching new and interesting products or marketing stunts. Or excellent marketing campaigns. Right when and I think you're seeing that from a company where you're seeing depth of talent across all the different departments within Ramp as an example.
- [170:08]
Tyler
Yeah. Chat wants a jersey check. What are we watch. What are we rocking?
- [170:13]
David Tisch
We're wearing the New York Rangers 100th year anniversary jersey. It's a baby blue.
- [170:20]
Tyler
You look fantastic. Beautiful.
- [170:21]
David Tisch
We, we haven't won a game at home yet and so hopefully we're going to bring some luck to us.
- [170:27]
Jordy
Well, good luck. Thank you so much.
- [170:29]
Tyler
Congratulations.
- [170:30]
David Tisch
If you, if you know any sponsors who need money, just let me know and we'll take care of that.
- [170:34]
Jordy
Perfect. We'll make some introductions.
- [170:36]
Tyler
Great to see you. Have a great day. Congrats to the whole team. Cheers.
- [170:40]
Jordy
Thanks so much. Let me tell you about wander.com find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz, living legend. Welcome to the show. Chris, great to see you again. It's been too long.
- [170:58]
Tyler
Great to have you back.
- [171:00]
Jordy
Last time you were on we got to time you up perfectly with Brian Armstrong. Today we just missed each other by one day, 24 hours. But great to have you here and would love to get the update from you and how you're framed. The current crypto era, it's in many ways linked to the AI boom but somewhat disconnected. Like how are you thinking about even just framing the conversation and setting the table?
- [171:23]
Chris Dixon
Yeah. So we just put out our state of crypto report today which I think had a lot of good data. I think the good news is I think things are trending very well. I think reflection of smart policy mainly that the genius bill passed which is very important, which has helped the sort of stablecoin growth. I think what it shows, like what genius shows is the, the dual effect of smart policy which is on the one hand it provides a pathway for innovation. So we're seeing not only startups but big companies like Stripe and you know, FinTechs and BlackRock, Fidelity and so forth get involved in the space. But it also kind of eliminates a lot of the scams and bad behavior. Right. So what we're really hoping for is a kind of similar result with the so called market structure bill which is, is being considered by Congress which would, which would provide a similar kind of policy framework for the rest of the crypto market beyond stablecoins. So I think that this Kind of momentum is reflected in the data that we shared today. So for example, stablecoin volume is now in the trillions. That's adjusted. We try to, we have an adjusted metric we use which tries to remove a lot of the bots and other kinds of stuff.
- [172:28]
Jordy
Sure.
- [172:28]
Chris Dixon
And very importantly that's not correlated with trading volume. So, so it seems to be like sort of genuine people using for payments and treasury management and so forth. So that's a big deal. We're seeing a lot of cool kind of new emerging applications at the intersection of areas like crypto and AI in an area called Deepin, which is decentralized physical infrastructure, which is a way to use kind of crypto to incentivize the build out of telecom and energy networks and so forth. You know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a big movement of so called real world assets which is to bring like stocks and bonds, bonds on chain, a lot of good momentum. I mean honestly like we had a, you know, it was a choppy couple of years, 2022 to 2024 and I think it's, we're kind of coming out of that and I'm optimistic, but still a long way to go.
- [173:16]
Jordy
Yeah, I, I always wonder about the value of these like high level market KPIs in crypto because there as it feels like as soon as we latch onto one, we identify one that seems to be tracking well, then it gets all thrown off by just an underlying shift in the market. People were tracking number of Bitcoin wallets for a while and the idea that the next generation will even be aware if they have a wallet because they might own it through an ETF or they might have a wallet that's abstracted away and they're not even aware of it. I'm wondering, there's this midway take. Is the KPI flatlined? But the community overall keeps growing. And so, so if you were taking a victory lap in 2023, you missed out on the next wave which looked different and didn't map onto the previous era of KPIs. And so I'm wondering, is there some ground truth that you zoom out to that's just the vibes or the people or the talent or something like that. How do you get away from this particular KPI now needs to be deprecated? Basically.
- [174:20]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, I mean there are some. Just to be fair to the KPIs like anything. Dan Aaron, who is our head of data science of the report, is very thoughtful on it. Like the, you know, like the stable coin volume uncorrelated to trading.
- [174:30]
Jordy
Oh, sure, sure.
- [174:31]
Chris Dixon
Seems like a real kind of real metric.
- [174:33]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [174:34]
Chris Dixon
Metric. Monthly active users. That's not people that hold crypto. That number of the people. Cryptos in the hundreds of millions. What we track is people that are actually using these kind of new apps that are on chain.
- [174:44]
Jordy
Got it.
- [174:45]
Chris Dixon
That we put between 40 and 70 million. There's an error bar there because we have to get rid of bots and other things. But it's definitely been growing, growing. And that's like monthly active users of apps. So, you know, it feels like a real metric. That's sustainable to your point?
- [174:57]
Tyler
Yep.
- [174:58]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, but it's a good point. Like a lot of. A lot of venture capital and startups is. Is vibe based. Right.
- [175:02]
Tyler
Is qualitative.
- [175:05]
Chris Dixon
And I think it's definitely gets. Definitely better. I'm actually at having our annual founder summit now. And like, it's just the mood is better. People are building and people are innovating. You know, it feels like offense, not defense, a lot of that. The policy shift.
- [175:20]
Jordy
Policy shift is big also. Just like I feel like the bull case for bear markets is that it washes out a lot of the tourists and then the technologists stay.
- [175:30]
Chris Dixon
It does.
- [175:30]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [175:31]
Chris Dixon
I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, I've been obviously doing the Internet stuff my whole career and seen many waves, including. I started my first company in the Internet downturn of the 2000s and there was this kind of, what is it, Strong men create weak times meme or whatever.
- [175:46]
Tyler
Well, I like, I like that crypto as an industry rewards people that have an unwavering vision. Okay. With. With. You have to have some appetite for failure.
- [176:01]
Jordy
You gotta be a missionary.
- [176:02]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. And so. And I think that's like healthy. Yeah. You have to actually believe in this long term. You have to be okay. Okay with the risk. You have to be okay with a total ban scenario in a specific category. My question for you. Prediction markets are having a massive moment right now. And this was something that I'm sure you were writing about more than a decade ago in terms of its potential. And there were various kind of attempts at prediction markets that never really reached cultural relevancy and the scale and the way that. That they've reached today. What kind of categories do you think people have, like, thought had potential, but kind of wrote off. Maybe they were too early, but we'll be talking about in like two years. Is it privacy, ZK proofs, you know, things along those lines.
- [176:53]
Chris Dixon
Now it's a great question. If I could just address your prior point about the hold, you know, sort of sticking with it. First, I have an unwritten blog post that I would. Title investing is a emotional test disguised as an intellectual test. Meaning one of the things I've learned over the years is just like sticking with it in venture for capital, whether it's crypto, sort of more extreme. I think this is true of public markets if you read like Howard Marks and Warren Buffett. But it's definitely true in venture, which is a lot of it. The business is just sticking with stuff. The same with entrepreneurship when it seems kind of tough stuff. So you know, that's, I think it makes a great point to, to new emerging areas. Yeah, look, I think privacy, it's interesting like we had a lot of privacy is a very interesting area. Now the stablecoin bill passed. A bunch of folks like in the policy side who were kind of, you know, kind of, I don't know, anti encryption and privacy are now saying wait a second, all the stablecoin payments are public. That's not good. What if you want to do financial protection, healthcare? We're like yes, we agree. That's why we want it. We don't want it for obviously for you know, illegal activity. We want it because that, you know, people want, in normal cases they want privacy for some of the things they do. And so we think that's very important. We have a bunch of investments there. Yeah, prediction markets. Great to see them break out. Now as you said, they've been. The idea goes back. I wrote a tweet, tweet about it about back to Hayek in the, in the 50s and you know, DARPA started a pre market, believe it or not the government in 2021 I believe, sorry 2001, something like that.
- [178:19]
Tyler
Everything was that just like, you know, just for in like intel purposes.
- [178:26]
Chris Dixon
Like yeah, they wanted to predict like is there going to be a war in Iraq? And then they thought okay, like it's a little bit distasteful that people are betting on it but the societal benefits would outweigh it. But then there was such controversy around it that they canceled it. There are now rules as there should be around so called harmful prediction markets and you know, you can't have those. But the kind of the core argument for prediction markets is that yes there's sometimes on the one hand it's sort of gambling and betting. On the other hand it has a real benefit. As we saw for example in the election you can get really objective data and in A time in which, you know, trust in institutions seems to be dropping. Like, do you trust, you know, the newspaper anymore? It's nice to have an objective source for that. So. But back to your question. I think privacy is very interesting. I think, you know, I'm very excited by sort of the intersection of like AI and crypto as an example. Example. My experience in tech is that often like if you think back 15 years ago, people talked about mobile, social cloud was like the three buck words. And they, and some people saw them as kind of different categories. In the end we actually learned they were all very connected. I think that tends to happen. I think a lot of these things will converge. You know, robotics, AI, crypto, like these are all the kind of megatrends and I think it's natural that they intersect and reinforce each other.
- [179:37]
Jordy
Are you seeing a speed up in, in crypto startups productivity on the actual software development side? Like coding agents for solidity or actually having a. You are.
- [179:52]
Chris Dixon
Oh yeah, definitely. Almost all of our company, we encourage them too. They use cursor and so is that what you mean? Like the AI?
- [179:57]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because as a consumer, I mean I see the data from like Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini, I see that like Token are being spent. But then a lot of the consumer software that I use, the United app, we like to pick on or like the flight booking app, it just feels like it's not like become all futuristic all of a sudden. There's still bugs. And so I'm always interested in startups are in a unique case where they can adopt new technologies and actually new workflows and maybe gain the productivity benefit faster than legacy companies. So I'm just interested to see if it's a unique. Yeah, yeah.
- [180:33]
Chris Dixon
And I think, I think it just takes a while for these things to propagate.
- [180:35]
Jordy
Right.
- [180:35]
Chris Dixon
Like United app people ask one to do it five years from now or whatever. But the startups are all using it.
- [180:40]
Jordy
Yep.
- [180:40]
Chris Dixon
Using like cursor. It's amazing. I mean I saw some study out of some university that was like these, these tools don't make you more productive and if you just use them. I spent a Christmas break playing with Cursed last Christmas playing with cursor and I built a website. I mean it's just ridiculous how great these tools are. Of course they add to productivity. It's just these things take time. It's like humans. The bottleneck is always humans and polish policy. I would say regulation and humans take time to change behaviors. Right. But as you say, Startups tend to be the first to adopt it. Yes. We see it across the portfolio. We would be kind of surprised. And. And I don't know, like, just. Yeah, it's like, like puzzled if somebody wasn't using a lot of these tools.
- [181:18]
Jordy
Yeah. Be a kind of a red flag.
- [181:20]
Tyler
What does institutional adoption and embrace really look like? Like what, what are the kind of buckets, like the base cases you're supporting custody and maybe trading, and then CEO.
- [181:33]
Jordy
Stops talking trash at some point and.
- [181:34]
Tyler
Then start saying, this is amazing, that it's a joke. That's helpful. But. But how quickly do you think these major institutions can actually adopt crypto Rails for, you know, operationally, Right. These. Their job is to store and move money. Cryptos, you know, more efficient. Efficient in a lot of ways.
- [181:54]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [181:54]
Chris Dixon
I mean, you can kind of think, like, crypto's a network. I mean, it's a network technology. Right. It's about building networks. And it was the network where 99%, like stablecoins is an example, where 99% of the potential nodes in the network felt like they couldn't join the network for regulatory reasons. So now they're all. I think it'll see it in stages. So like the fintechs, the sophisticated fintechs like Stripe and, you know, Robinhood and Revolut and things will be first. And then over time, you'll see, I think eventually you'll see just like a button on your Chase bank that's like sending. Maybe they don't call it stablecoin, but they call it Digital dollars or something. But you'll see it'll just be integrated into all the kind of fabric of these systems. And we're seeing a lot of activity. I mean, even Chase, I think Jamie Dimon talks trash, but I believe they have 1500 people on blockchain projects. So I think that the important thing is the bit has flipped where if you talk to the folks that are like, look, we want to do this, but our legal teams won't let us, now we have legislation which is the gold standard of policy. Right. U.S. congress, law. So, like, now they feel comfort to do it, and that's very, very important. And I think the bit has flipped where they now see it as not a threat, but an opportunity. So I think it'll be, you know, it'll take time, it'll be different kind of tranches of adoption based on how advanced the companies are. But I think we're on that clear path now.
- [183:09]
Tyler
Is there anything that's been interesting for you guys on the Buyout side, like looking at, you know, let's say like a mid sized financial institution and realizing like, hey this, this is a great business. And if we actually, you know, were.
- [183:22]
Jordy
To acquire that general catalyst with that healthcare network.
- [183:25]
Tyler
Yeah. Something to that effect or, or some of these role, you know, I think.
- [183:29]
Chris Dixon
You'Ll see that, I think you'll see that we don't actually do that. It's not really our thing. Like we do kind of stage venture but mostly in some later stage venture.
- [183:36]
Tyler
But wouldn't it be fun to do an lbo?
- [183:38]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, it's one of these things that probably sounds fun.
- [183:42]
Jordy
Yeah, like those people, like we get.
- [183:45]
Chris Dixon
To mostly hire people in venture like lbos. You're mostly firing people and it's just like a structuring, I don't know, I mean probably a grass is greener thing. It sounds fun and then you actually go do it. I think it's also just hard to actually change these organizations. Sometimes there's a real question like do you need just new organizations started from scratch or do you change them? I don't know, it's not my, it's not my area. I'm just speculating. But that mainly is just not our thing. But I think other people are doing it and I think they, you know, the other firms doing it will I think accelerate the adoption of new technologies like AI and crypto.
- [184:13]
Jordy
Yeah. How is the, or how do you envision the role of the venture capitalist changing over the next maybe decade? In crypto I feel like there's one world where you become half vc, half hedge fund person that's trading liquids and trading liquids at the earlier stage because companies are kind of doing on chain IPOs in earlier stage. But you see still need to build a position and take an opinionated view of the future of the technology, assess the team. How is all that evolving? How do you think that that will evolve?
- [184:44]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean what we do we've done for a long time. That's one reason we started separate crypto funds. We do kind of early stage traditional venture and do things like buy tokens like bitcoin directly in the market and then we have our own city and trading and we sort of built all these capabilities. At some point you'd expect that some of those things to be subsumed by outside organizations and kind of commoditized. And these practices I would expect would propagate to other firms. But like I, I just look at venture like through the lens of like core, like the Fundamentals are always just great people.
- [185:16]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [185:17]
Chris Dixon
Like we're ultimately in the talent business, so there's all these other kind of mechanics and things that we've built up. But in the end, we're just trying to bet on brilliant founders who have great ideas and that can, that could just either. The way I view it is that can come in many forms. That can come at early stage equity investments, investment that can come as a token investment. You know, we're also betting, of course, on communities. You think about something like Bitcoin, like it's really a community at that point and it's sort of this network and community. And so I look at it through that. I always try to. Whenever the markets kind of get strange and things are happening, I always say, let's go back to first principles. First principles is like believe in, you know, positive vision of the future, great entrepreneurs doing, you know, pursuing big ideas, you know, highly technical, highly product focused, and then whatever mechanics we need to do to get exposure to that.
- [186:05]
Jordy
I don't know if this is possible, if this has already happened, but would you ever see yourself backing a project that looks like Bitcoin in the sense that the founder's anonymous? You can never meet them, but for some reason you do have the availability to make. You do have the ability to make an investment, like a venture capital investment. Are you equipped to make that deal happen?
- [186:28]
Chris Dixon
Yeah, yeah, we are. We are.
- [186:30]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [186:31]
Chris Dixon
So, yes, we, we can just buy. I mean, we can just buy tokens otd and we have an operation we've had that people don't seem to know. They think of us more adventure. We've had that since 2018.
- [186:39]
Jordy
Totally just record.
- [186:41]
Chris Dixon
Yeah. And actually two third, I would say roughly two thirds of our investing has always been that. I mean, that was part of the design and why, like I wanted to spin this out. Yeah. So we could set it up from. For principles with this structure.
- [186:53]
Tyler
So we have like, I want to be a crypto vc, but I don't want to buy tokens.
- [186:58]
Jordy
For sure. Well, there's a whole.
- [187:00]
Chris Dixon
I could tell you it's a longer story. It's a whole backstory where, like it was just, it was just very challenging, the lps. So, like when we raised a first crypto fund, like I went to all the LPS and I said, look, we're going to do. We're going to buy tokens, we're going to do this and like, you can opt out or opt in. And some of them opted out and, you know, some opted in and just like, look, this is what we're going to do. So we have a venture structure, a venture fund in the sense that our LP relationship is a long term relationship. They lock up their money. But on the sort of. That's sort of the reverse mullet or mullet or whatever. We're on the back end. It's like a very traditional venture. But on the front end we can do all. We can buy tokens, we can do equity investments. Whatever way that we need to get exposure to great ideas and great people, we can do. And that's been in our design from the beginning and we continue to do that.
- [187:40]
Jordy
Yeah. In this analogy, I feel like the venture part is the business in the front and the open market trading is the party in the back. But I don't know, it's a stretch potentially. But I like a mullet analogy. It's great. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk.
- [187:56]
Tyler
Yeah. Great to get the update.
- [187:57]
Jordy
Sorry.
- [187:58]
Tyler
Have a great summit.
- [188:00]
Jordy
I'm sure it's going to be a great time.
- [188:01]
Tyler
To be an amazing time.
- [188:02]
Chris Dixon
Great to see you both.
- [188:03]
Jordy
We'll talk to you soon.
- [188:04]
Tyler
Cheers.
- [188:04]
Jordy
Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about getbezel.com, your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And Jordy, did you put up a better run last night on eight sleep? I did okay. I got an 88. Slept six hours and 50 minutes. How did you do? Did you get destroyed?
- [188:21]
Tyler
85.
- [188:22]
Jordy
85. Wait, I beat you by one point again.
- [188:24]
Tyler
No, 85. You got an 88.
- [188:26]
Jordy
I got an 88. Okay. A couple points. Yesterday in the chat, people were congratulating us on our good numbers. We got to put up good numbers for the chat. And you got to go to eightsleep.com.
- [188:35]
Tyler
And get a Pod 5 TV VPN.
- [188:37]
Jordy
Are there any other.
- [188:38]
Tyler
Yeah, I was shocked at how, like, viral. I was shocked at how viral the whole like, aws8 sleep thing went.
- [188:48]
Jordy
Oh, yeah.
- [188:49]
Tyler
Considering that.
- [188:52]
Jordy
Clearly a skill issue. And I was not affected. Yeah, I slept right through. I actually slept great. My numbers were insane. It was crazy. But yes. I mean, somebody, somebody, you know, I feel bad if your eight sleep did like, wind up getting too hot and you woke up and you didn't have a good night's sleep. I'm sending my best and I hope you get back on that horse and.
- [189:13]
Tyler
We'Ll close out with this post from Rune.
- [189:15]
Jordy
I knew you were going to go there.
- [189:17]
Tyler
Or farming in the Zoom waiting room.
- [189:19]
Jordy
Or farming in the Zoom waiting room.
- [189:20]
Tyler
Never join. Never join. Just hang in the waiting room.
- [189:23]
Jordy
Oh, so people know that you're there. Is that how you do it?
- [189:25]
Tyler
Yeah. That you could join.
- [189:26]
Jordy
I feel like. I mean, at one point. Point not to break the fourth wall here and give you a little bit behind the scenes, but at one point, we had multiple guests. When they come in, they hit a waiting room. The restream waiting room, of course. And at one point, multiple people could talk to each other and they could hear what was happening on the show. And it was kind of like this funny networking event that was happening. And I actually think that there's some value there if we could get that right. But right now, we just let everyone sit in silence and then eventually come on, watch the show, and then join. So there's minimal aura farming in the TVPN waiting room. The restream waiting room.
- [190:02]
Tyler
That's right.
- [190:03]
Jordy
But maybe we should increase it.
- [190:05]
Tyler
Well, thank you for hanging out with us today. Very fun show. I can't wait for tomorrow.
- [190:09]
Jordy
I can't wait.
- [190:09]
Tyler
To pains me, we have to wait just under 21 hours to get back here.
- [190:14]
Jordy
The clock starts now, but.
- [190:16]
Tyler
Yeah, the clock starts now.
- [190:17]
Jordy
Thank you for tuning in.
- [190:18]
Tyler
Have a wonderful evening.
- [190:20]
Jordy
Leave us five stars on Apple, podcast and Spotify.
- [190:22]
Tyler
Cheers.
- [190:22]
Jordy
Goodbye.