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You're watching TVPN.
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Today is Monday, September 29, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome.
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The Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital.
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A lot of people have been asking, was the TBPN ultradome built by human beings? It just looks like something that humans don't know how to build anymore.
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Kind of like a boss civilization.
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It's possible. We haven't confirmed it. We're not commenting.
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It just appeared here one day.
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It's. I'm just. I'm. I'm just asking questions.
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Yeah.
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Just want to dig into it a little bit further.
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Yep.
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So that's why we have free speech.
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A lot of people have been afraid to ask that question.
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Yes.
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And we're here saying with you, we also.
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Yeah, we also have questions.
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It showed up one day. We went. We went off the air.
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Yep.
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We showed up the next day. There was this. I could dome shape. Almost a monument.
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Yeah.
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To entertainment and capitalism.
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Yeah.
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Just appeared overnight.
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Where did this come from?
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Where did that come from?
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We're getting some claps.
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Team is fired up. Best day of the week.
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Most underrated day by humans dot com.
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True.
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Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Most underrated.
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I think Monday is potentially the most underrated day of the week.
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It really is.
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You're fresh, excitement, optimism. You're back. You've never been more back than on a Monday. First day of the work.
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Friday is the day of being over. It is so over.
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It's so over. And Monday, we are so back.
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You're so back. Yes. It's perfect. Well, continuing, we're going to talk about Dorkesh on Sutton. Some AI stuff, some other AI stuff. The Meta AI app, Vibes people. The reaction, I think this came out on Thursday and then the reaction happened on Friday. For the most part. We talked about it a bunch, debated it. Naval said, fired shots. Creation without a creator is meaningless. And I think it's an interesting post because I kind of disagree with this. So I think when I open up the Meta AI Slop app, the Vibes app, they should have called it Sloth. It would have been so funny.
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It would have been.
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It would have been.
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Or trough.
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Trough would have been good too. Just lean in all the way.
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Our new feed called Trough Meta AI App.
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It's already a feed. You're feeding. So when I open the app and I scroll it, I don't think it's. It's creatorless. Like, I think that There is a creator. It's David Holes. David Holes is the one that created the Midget.
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It's feed with one creator.
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One creator. And I'm down to look at it for like 10, 15 minutes and then I'm like kind of done. I didn't feel the urge to open it up over the weekend for any other reason than research and just understanding the platform a little bit more. I wanted to know if you got past the first like pre scripted 15 shorts or I guess Vibes is what they're calling them. Like, would I see ugc? Would I see other stuff? Would I see people in my network? Like, would the for you algorithm have taken hold by then? I didn't notice anything like that. There were a couple of accounts that were like, this person's clearly into like monsters. So they do like really big monsters. Or like this person does like POV Dogs driving cars. Which honestly was awesome.
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I think that Monkeys on jet Skis. Dogs driving.
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Dogs driving cars. Yeah. Although some of the renders were really rough where it was like the dog was at the wheel, but then the front of the car was behind the dog. So it like didn't get it right. But it was still fun and it was funny. I noticed it was. The one that I enjoyed the most was one of the golden retriever, like jumping and chasing the camera with this wave going over it. But what made it really special was that the song that was paired with that was who Let the Dogs Out? Who, who, who, who, who Let the Dogs Out? And it made me realize that like there is a little bit of a game mechan where if you have a song that you like, you can now go and basically direct a short form music video for it. And so if there's a song that you think is fun, you can go into the Meta Vibes app and start with the song in mind. Instead of layering the song at the end. The default flow is image prompt, animate it, then add a song. But I think that it might be more fun to flip it around and think about this as like I'm curating a playlist almost.
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Music Visualizer.
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Music Visualizer.
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Which went incredibly hard when I was 10 years old.
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Exactly. The Winamp visualizer. Just put that thing on. Or itunes had one for a while. Some of them were reactive to the.
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Music, which is cool.
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That one was cool. And I think that there's something there where I thought it was mostly I thought it was interesting that everyone is saying this is a creation without a creator. This is pure AI. Even Meta is marketing this app as. There's nothing human about it. It's just the AI content.
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Except the music.
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Except the music. There's no AI music. It's all iconic, licensed songs from like the most recognizable musicians in the world. You can actually just go put a Taylor Swift song over something, which is crazy to think about from a music.
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Generate music too?
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No, you can't generate music. Of course, there are some songs that are AI generated that have, like, snuck into the Instagram library on Spotify, because you can use any song from the Instagram music library. So people will put stuff up there and then you can pull that in. But by and large, the flow is generate a mid journey image, animate it with Black Forest so that it has a little bit of motion, and then pick a real song from the real library.
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Black Forest, which just announced a new fundraiser.
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Four billion.
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There we go.
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European company.
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There we go. Let's give it up for the German artificial intelligence industry. So we got a comment in the chat that said, I like the table. When it was messier. We did go to a round table. We cleaned it up a little bit. I'm sure it'll get messier.
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Yeah, don't worry.
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So don't worry. We're working on it.
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The mess comes back over time.
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It's relentless. Yes, it's relentless.
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So, yeah, I mean, I'm still unclear about, like, will this be successful? A lot of the takes on the timeline were presuming that it will have very low churn and be so good it's irresistible. Like. Like, it could just have high churn. It could just be a product that no one likes and everyone tests it out and they're like, yeah, okay, I'm done with that.
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And Meta's no stranger to launching flops.
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Yeah, that's happened a number of times.
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With Facebook camera trivia.
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Yeah, they've had clones of a lot of things.
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Even threads, arguably. Probably wouldn't have worked if they couldn't have just continued to push people to the app and grow it steadily in the existing distribution they had.
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Yeah, I think that if I'm trying to get serious about a take, I would probably land on. They have the flywheel down. It works because you can already share vibes to Instagram to your story and whatnot. And I feel like there's gonna be a flow back and forth and they will get that to work and they will actually inject them back and forth. And even if it lands as like a tab on Instagram, it will be adopted. But it was just Funny that everyone was like, this is. There's zero percent chance this doesn't work. And it's like, there, there is risk to these things. Anyway, I thought it was interesting. It made me think like I was listening to the David Senra interview with Daniel Ek.
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I think one interesting thing is if they had added all of the functionality and vibes, the creation tools into Instagram, it would have been even more controversial.
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I think so. I think so.
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They would have had to deal like, this is an experiment that, you know, basically it's a. It's a sandbox that you can do anything in low stakes. They can get users using it, they can get some feedback, get some information, test stuff out without saying, we're launching this into Instagram, which has millions of creators that are going to feel super strongly about it. They might start saying, they might start campaigning to like, keep it. Let's keep AI off Instagram.
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Totally.
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They don't want.
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This is keeping AI off AI content.
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Will, you know, I would, I would assume, you know, it's only so long until every piece of content on Instagram has some AI element to it, whether it's just editing or enhancement or whatever.
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Yeah, yeah. So the other interesting takeaway I was talking to, I was listening to David Senra interview Daniel Ek, the founder of CEO of Spotify, and I was almost thinking like, is this more of a Spotify competitor than an Instagram competitor? It's so music driven. Should. Should Spotify have an answer to this? Should they buy something similar? Should they do a similar deal with Midjourney so that anyone who listens to a song can generate imagery and then the most liked imagery can become kind of that cover art and you can have like your community. You were kind of saying, like, that's not the way short form video works.
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But I think with Spotify, they also have the benefit of the best songs end up having music videos which are the artist's interpretation of a visualization of the music.
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Yeah.
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And it's gonna be.
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Do you think that's the way it always works, though? I feel like sometimes.
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But they also. Spotify has also done something where they basically take an asset from the artist. That's not a music video.
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Animate this.
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It's like a gift.
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Loop it. Exactly.
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And I think that's smart.
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Yeah.
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Because I don't, I don't think that people are primarily consuming music these days by, you know, setting up just. I remember being a kid and being entertained at a desktop Macintosh, just putting on the itunes visualizer and just hanging out being like, this is awesome. Yeah, but I don't want, if I'm putting on music, I'm not wanting to watch the music anymore as an adult.
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Yeah, I almost view the Vibes app right now as a music discovery tool. Go and swipe a little bit, find some interesting songs, add those to a Spotify playlist. Go listen to the real songs.
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Yeah, but the reason that that's not a hit consumer product is because people can just easily discover music in every other short form. Video feed. Yeah, right.
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Yeah, that's what you were saying.
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TikTok already functions.
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TikTok works that way as a discovery engine anyway. Well, if you want to live stream some music, get on restream one, livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. But the big news over the weekend was Dwarkesh Patel dropped a band banger of an episode with none other than Richard Sutton, the Turing Award winner who is essentially the Nobel Prize in artificial intelligence and the author of the Bitter Lesson, the blog post that says that again and again in artificial intelligence, there's an inclination for seeking out a new algorithm, a new design, a new architecture, but in fact, progress comes from Scaled Compute. And so that was used to underwrite massive investments in data centers. Massive capex.
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Continued investments.
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Continued investments. A lot of people, I mean, the Andreessen Horowitz partnership has been throwing around, we are better bitter lesson pilled. A lot of people are bitter lesson pilled. That's certainly been a rallying cry for the AI capex build out. But Mr. Bitter Lesson now sounds exactly like Gary Marcus. According to Gary Marcus, Gary says, of course, he's been a long, long time LLM hater or LLM criticizer. He says, astonishing. It's been a long, hard, unpleasant road. But one by one, every major figure in AI has come around to the critique that LLMs of LLMs that I began giving here in 2019. Yann LeCun was first. Demis Hassibas sees it now two touring award winner Richard Sutton is now on board. And Richard Sutton says, you were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight and to make the argument well again and again for the limitations of LLMs, I salute you. And for this good service. And so I think that there's something interesting going on where we heard about like the Infinity story, right? This idea that there's a few firms that are working on AGI superintelligence. God. And if they achieve it, it's the last innovation, the final Investment, all future companies will be. All future economic value will be birthed from the AI supercomputer. You can finally hang up your Patagonia vest. You'll be done. You'll retire as a capital allocator who got into the correct final deal. If you get a slice, if you're, you'll be good. It was a little bit sloppy as deal logic, but it was directionally correct. Like if you LLMs were a useful technology, there were compounding businesses to be built on top of them and investing in them even at unicorn valuations in 2013 pencils out pretty easily now. But many in AI didn't like Sutton's take. My interpretation of his claim is that biological systems don't learn purely through imitation, whereas LLMs do. His example was like, if you think about a bird that's learning to sing a bird song, the bird doesn't necessarily need to study the way that the mother bird moves the vocal cords. It's more just listening to the song and trying to imitate the output. And then the internal mother's learning through its own actions. Exactly, exactly.
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Like when I take this thing and I put it in my mouth, I get sustenance.
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Yes, yes.
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And so it's not just watching the mother bird do the same thing and just realize, hey, maybe I should do that thing.
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Yeah. And so a lot of the, a lot of the AI researchers are kind of like. And this is why there was this discussion of like, were Sutton and Dorkash talking past each other? Because a lot of people in AI research tend to view the internal structure of the neural network, the training of the weights as exactly the same process. You are just mimicking the output tokens and the internal logic, like the muscle movements that create the bird song are learned in the same, like random way as the actual bird does. And so there's continuing to be this debate over like, are we on this, are we on the correct path? But it kind of doesn't matter in the, in the broad sense of the market, because you can just put aside the super intelligence AGI question and just start underwriting the companies as just normal businesses. Tokens clearly have value. Anyone who's used an LLM to answer a question understands this. They also have a cost, and if you balance those, you make a profit. So we're back to econ 101. And so in the real world, the question is like data center overbuild. The bitter lesson said, just keep scaling, compute, and you will always see improved performance. At least that's how it was interpreted. But exponential cost growth for linear gains doesn't always math out. If someone says we're going to spend 10 times as much money training this next model and it's going to be 5% better, it's like, okay, well maybe we don't need to do that one. Like there might be an.
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Again, if you look at the leaders of various hyperscalers, they are not concerned about roi, they're concerned about winning.
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Yes, yes. And so this like landed on Oracle's plate. People were worrying about Oracle's 500% debt to equity ratio, which Search with Surface from this JP Morgan note. Now the interesting takeaway is like it's pretty clear the debt is on the horizon. Microsoft has a lower cost of capital than the US government right now. And so like the ability to borrow is extreme.
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People trust. Satya.
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Yeah. And people are just ready to buy debt in these projects. Like that's just the thing that's going to happen. But you can't overreact to this viral chart. There's a, like Oracle has $100 billion in debt, it's an $800 billion company and they produce 11 billion DOL cash flow last year. And so the question is more about servicing of the debt than true book equity to debt ratios. McDonald's actually has negative shareholder equity because they've been doing so many buybacks that they bought back all the equity. And so you can get really weird like divide by zero errors. And I would expect that we start to see those, especially at Oracle if they.
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Yeah, that's the thing with Oracle. You know, Ellison just owns so much. You know he's bought.
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Yes.
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He bought back so much of the company.
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Yes, yes. And so I don't know that that chart is like the red flag that people thought it was. Doug o' Laughlin had a good post about this. So the chart weirdly makes no sense and doesn't matter. Time for the feed to relearn buyback math impacting book value. And it is somewhat complicated. So maybe that's Econ 102. But basically it feels like as we get closer to the efficient frontier of AI CapEx, risk does increase because you have that risk of doing the $100 billion training run and only getting 5% gains. But ROI is become increasingly predictable as we move away from the infinity narrative. And even if there is an overbuild of infrastructure, there will be immense benefits to America broadly. This is the real American dynamism story, in my opinion. Multibillion dollar projects are moving through government approvals Massive structures are being built in America again and there's a real chance that we will see per capita energy increase.
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What's your read on Satya pulling back on? You know, obviously he's scaling Capex but not being as aggressive as some of the other players. Do you think he's happy to let the industry over build and then come in later and say I'll take that off you for, you know, pennies on the dollar or some, some fraction of what it actually costs to produce?
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I think so. I mean that was certainly the lesson from the.
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Or another. Another way to look at it is, you know, I control a huge amount of the demand for tokens through the Microsoft Office suite, tokens in the workplace. And I'll just come in and I'll just do deals once this infrastructure is built off my balance sheet and I'll get the benefit of it.
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I would love to know how Satya processed the dot com boom because we always go back to that story of there was a massive overbuild of fiber. Everyone thought that the Internet was going to be this overnight revolution. It took 20 years to really, we use all the value out of it. Right. But Google was a massive beneficiary of the over build in fiber because they were able to go snap up a bunch of cheap fiber and build a massive consumer Internet company on top of it. So I don't know exactly how did that impact Azure? How did that impact Microsoft? Because if Azure was able to build a, a very serious player in a three party oligopoly in cloud, basically between aws, GCP and Azure. And so if Satya is saying, look, in the future there will be a consumer Internet company that's OpenAI, we have a stake in that and they're the new Google. And then there will be cloud providers that are token factories and I'll need to get in that market and I'll need to make sure that Azure is monetizing those tokens effectively. And Azure has data centers, they also lease data centers. We will adopt the same position, the same strategy and so we will skip on the overbuild, skip on the high risk stuff, but eventually buy in at prices that make sense. You could be looking at it through a very financial lens.
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But Satya joined Microsoft in 1992, so we got to see the full cycle in this first decade at the company.
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Yeah, and he was the, I mean he's remembered as like the architect of the cloud transition. And Ballmer was the one who like missed mobile and missed cloud. But you know the company has done really well now so maybe that was maybe, maybe if the risk like what would a worse ballmer look like? Well it could have been someone who put the business like out of like bankrupted the company by taking too much debt and going too long into the dot com boom and getting over leveraged and really losing the company.
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We should read this post by Anyan I he says quote this feels like 1999 again he goes no it doesn't. And I was there. I joined Cisco in January 2000 as a co op, then full time in May 2001. At the time Cisco was the hottest infra company on the planet riding the wave of the dot com boom. But by the time I started full time the crash had already begun. A month in, my manager was laid off. The party was over. Entire industries vanished. Here's what actually happened. One the users weren't ready. Most people were on dial up. Mobile didn't exist. E commerce logistics were immature or non existent. Everyone had ideas but the end user wasn't there. 2. Capital vanished, the IPO window shut. Venture funding dried up. Startups that depended on future growth couldn't raise and died fast. Metrics were fake. Companies like cosmo, webvan, pets.com burned cash chasing usage that never converted.
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I was a Webvan user.
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We see some companies burning cash.
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Yeah, I got some groceries delivered when.
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I was 10 back with Webvan.
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With Webvan, no way.
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They were so right and just waiting.
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There was another company called Home Grocer that was more popular in Pasadena where I grew up and they got acquired by Webvan and I'm pretty sure the founders of Home Grocer probably did very well because they probably got some crazy buyout. Hopefully they didn't take too much stock.
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Things like ltv, CAC wasn't common enough. Vernacular, that's great.
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Oh yeah, that was a new concept we were in.
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What a concept. Arithmetic for infra got overbuilt. Telcos like Global Crossing and WorldCom spent billions on fiber and data centers. The demand never showed up. Cisco's customers disappeared not because they lost, but because their customers died. Five Business models were broken. Most dot coms were never real businesses. They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch up. It didn't. Now look at today. OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up. Jensen put it plainly. Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt. Every forecast we've seen has been too low. We're not building for speculation, we're building for active workloads. So no, this isn't 1999. This isn't pets.com, ipoing on vibes. We are not in a hype cycle. We are in a compute bottleneck.
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B
And this certainly, I mean, this feels real if you've used the apps like there have been multiple times over the past few years where I've just had LLM queries fail even though I'm paying hundreds of dollars. And so like maybe the cacti LTV math is a little bit iffy because what's the margin? Am I overusing it with the deep research?
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Recently during.com people, I just use webvan to deliver groceries and it took 48 hours and all the food was rotten. Like, how do I short this stock?
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Yeah, that was happening in Wall street memos, I guess, like Mary Meeker reports, basically. But yeah, I think this. So he's quote unquoting the Spencer Hawkins chart of the AI bubble now versus the dot com bubble. And if you're apophenic and you like a pattern, you will love this chart. I think we have to commit ourselves to revisiting this exact chart a year from now and seeing how closely does it keep tracking because it could be wildly different in either direction.
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Right.
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Like that's.
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Why don't we just make a live tracker?
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We should.
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Tyler. Tyler's not in the studio today. He had a travel. But we should just make a live tracker of.
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Yes, of this chart and see how are we actually tracking to this or are we diverging it?
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A
There was another post that was going pretty viral.
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B
Before we cover this, let me tell you about Privy Wallet Infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. What was the other post?
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A
The other post is the. From Steven Fiorio. He went pretty viral. 2 million views yesterday. He said the AI doesn't. The AI bubble doesn't exist. The bears are wrong. Time and time again, I've turned on a major financial news network, listen to a financial podcast, or seen a post on X indicating that we're in an AI bubble. The rapid surge in AI related investments and some stock valuations have created a narrative that the current environment is similar to the dot com crash of the early 2000s. The main arguments I've seen are that the current euphoria outpaces real world results. Valuations are detached from fundamentals. There's a lack of roi, companies are hitting infrastructure and resource constraints, and the escalating Costs are creating unsustainable business models. The bear narrative almost always leads back to the idea that AI stocks and startups are trading at premiums and that resemble past bubbles and are being driven by FOMO rather than profitability. It doesn't help that users on X are posting triple and quadruple digit gains that are often hundreds of thousands or millions in profits from the actual accounts. Some accounts on X are twisting the dagger deeper as they're posting gains from naked options or call spreads which have finance professionals screaming into thin air as some of the underlying equities are unprofitable and pre revenue businesses. Remember there was that company Fermi that is going to ipo?
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Yep.
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They have a, a lease to a piece of land in Texas. They, they're planning to go out around $14 billion and they're about nine months old. So I think that it's very fair. You know, there can be distortions, things happening in the market that don't exactly makes sense while simultaneously there being some businesses with strong underlying fundamentals and incredible opportunities that are trading at relatively fair multiples.
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Yep. So Shkreli had a good take on this too. He said, I know there are some questions about this, including some smart people, but there is a word for this that describes the exact situation where Nvidia is investing in OpenAI. OpenAI signs a compute deal with Oracle. Oracle commits to buy Nvidia chips and it seems very, very circular. Martin Shkreli has a word for it. He calls it an. He says the way you measure its success is not by the trading between partners but by non party demand. That demand is pretty high and growing quickly. I am demanding it. I'm prompting it. Everyone is prompting it. Companies are prompting it. There is a lot of demand for tokens.
- [26:11]
A
So anyways, Stephen continues, he says I have a news flash for every bear. AI is not a bubble. In every market environment there are always companies that become overly expensive with valuation that look unsustainable for no reason other than they have built a cult like following and there are more buyers than sellers. This is not a period of extreme speculation, unlike the dot com bubble where investors poured capital into any company with a dot com in its name. Yep, that was a, that was a big factor. The rapid growth of the Internet changed how information was disseminated and how people communicated which led to the overvaluation of startups as venture capital flooded the market fueling unsustainable growth. The dot com bubble burst because many of the companies from height of the era were nothing more than hype prioritizing user growth over sustainable businesses, models that focus on revenue and profitability. Again, I'd push back a little bit here. There certainly has been companies that are scaling revenue really quickly, unprofitably, sort of betting on, you know, capturing market share and token costs coming down. Anyways, I'll continue. The Fed hiked interest rates several times during 1999 and 2000 which caused investment capital to tighten, making it harder for cash burning companies to sustain operations or rollover debt leading to bankruptcies. And then he goes into how Microsoft, Amazon Alphabet Meta, et cetera says these are not startups or companies tapping the debt markets to build out new business ventures with the promise of becoming profitable. These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability. Everyone has the right to their opinion, but when the CEO and board of directors are taking a blank check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct. Here are some statistics about Microsoft and keep in mind that their 2025 fiscal year just ended as they are not on a calendar year. So since 2022 fiscal year ended over the next three years Microsoft long term debt has declined by 14% while they have increased their allocation towards capex by 170% over this period Microsoft has increased the cash from operations it generates by 52% $47 billion from 89 billion to 136 billion which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards capex while paying down their debt obligations. Microsoft is now generating 70 billion of free cash flow while allocating 64 billion toward capex and they did this while repurchasing $18 billion worth of shares and paying 24 billion in dividends during the 2025 fiscal year.
- [28:38]
B
It's a lot of money.
- [28:40]
A
Mic drop from Satya this is much different period than the dot com era and when companies like Microsoft are leading the way funding the data center build outs organically from their cash from operations there's no bubble in sight. So and he does the same kind of analysis for Google and some of the other players. So worth going and finding this the account is at dividendstreams and anyways worth and the other last thing I'll say here I was talking with a buddy who runs research for a multi trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party and he was saying the market is like generally even though you see this euphoria right you see retail traders Posting screenshots of their Robinhood accounts, posting these insane gains. If you look at cash tied up in money market funds, that sends a signal. At record highs, that sends a signal that actually people are quite bearish. Right. So it's interesting, certainly living through history.
- [29:49]
B
Yeah. I feel like the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just one. Wildly different than 1999. Like if you're mp3.com, which was a good idea, like the idea was Spotify. Right. It was $100 billion opportunity. At least. They IPO'd with just a.com domain and a business plan. And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores that sold CDs and they had to build databases, licensing agreements with everyone.
- [30:32]
A
They didn't have the Facebook ads platform. They didn't have the Google Ads.
- [30:35]
B
They didn't have cloud hosting. They had to build servers and mobile apps. And where do you listen to music in your car? Okay, how are you going to listen to mp3.com in your car? Well, normally you'd put in a cassette tape or a cd. Well, there's no integration there. Whereas today, if you come up with some app OR product or B2B software, which is where a lot of the money is, you call someone up and you say you want to switch to our product or you want to add our product on to what you're already using, they're like, sure, send me the link. I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow. And it's just like everything is set up for acceleration on the actual product development, getting. Getting some sort of value delivered to a customer. It's just more possible now. I don't know that we're in an era of, like, wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like, eat off of other people's plates. We see this with like, there is a bubble, but a lot of it is like the SaaS apocalypse is, you know, legacy companies are actually selling off. And so there's. There's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just completely new market cap that's being.
- [31:55]
A
Created out of thin air with disrupting ourselves.
- [31:58]
B
Yeah. And that disruption, actually, it was more.
- [32:01]
A
Fun for tech when they were just, you know, brick and mortar.com was just trying to disrupt the record store. Right. It was another industry that we were disrupting. Now we're eating we're eating our own.
- [32:11]
B
Yep. Well, quickly let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Back on the bitter Lesson Nando Defritas says the only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations. Underpinning LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable mod. We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry. We're still compute hungry because there's a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute. From exponential from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation, scaling is largely about data and evals. But the models are now trained on almost all of the web in an equally large but growing self generated synthetic data set. Sifting through such vast quantities of data the whole of human creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users and with it will come billions of tasks every reasonable user need. This scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than pre LLMs. And if you think about the yeah, every time any user of the ChatGPT app, for example, fires off a query like that's more training data. Especially if you're using the reasoning models. Those rollouts will become reinforcement learning environments as well as training data. And if you're not on the enterprise plan, they will be training on that data. And that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better and the gains will probably be less zero to one feeling. But there will just be continued progress. And unfortunately at least for OpenAI, a lot of the other companies are in different positions. But at least for OpenAI, the monetization in front of them, whether it's from the freemium model to the ADS model, agent to commerce model, like there's a whole bunch of news today about their agent of commerce stuff. It certainly feels like it can, it can support a lot of spend a lot of totally.
- [34:20]
A
The other the other thing, you know, happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so so quickly that it's placing pressure on other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks right? Or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong. Counting, you know, one time revenue and.
- [34:42]
B
Bundling it into well ARR is yesterday's revenue times 365, right?
- [34:48]
A
Yeah. Or last minute's revenue. Last minute's revenue times 60 times 24.
- [34:53]
B
As soon as we be refreshing the stripe dashboard and then Multiple Multiply it by 60 by 24 by 365. Don't do that. Stay serious. Stay compliant with Vanta Automate Compliance, Manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Should we pull up this Citrini video? It seems like they flew a drone around.
- [35:20]
A
Citrini Research has been an absolute tear. I'm going to read. I'm going to read this. So they had a post from 2023 which was the first phase talking about global Data center hyperscaling. May 31, 2023. The first phase is centered around the development and build out of robust computational infrastructure. This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference. The enormous computing power required for AIML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors. The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand. This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, data center construction and management, and more. And again, even storage is a category that was ultimately overlooked. 3x and again, we covered, I think Western Digital at the end of last year and it is up 146% year to date.
- [36:33]
B
Yeah, it was pulling up a Wall Street Journal article and the thesis is like, oh, like storage probably gonna be important. Yeah, there's a lot of data.
- [36:42]
A
They're seeing some demand, of course. Wow.
- [36:45]
B
Missed a generational trade.
- [36:47]
A
Yeah. So Western Digital, up 146% since Q4.
- [36:52]
B
But you should really read this whole article. Stargate, they went to Stargate and they.
- [36:57]
A
Yeah, so they just decided, hey, let's fly a drone over Stargate and see.
- [37:02]
B
It's so remarkable. The scale of this thing is insane. They show a ton of images of what it looked like before. Just a field, basically. It's so crazy that Chase Lockemiller over Crusoe like really like clocked this as a logical place to go.
- [37:21]
A
Yeah. So they go through all the different categories. Stargate power and energy, Stargate thermal, Stargate mechanical, electrical and plumbing, Stargate civil and structural, Stargate fiber and Stargate Construction Services.
- [37:32]
B
600 football fields filled with cables, pipes.
- [37:36]
A
And that's the building. That's 600 football fields worth single facility buildings.
- [37:42]
B
Yeah, it's remarkable.
- [37:44]
A
Try and pull up this before and after. You can Just see the screenshot of the lan. This looks like a Google Earth, which.
- [37:51]
B
Is literally a ludicrous building. There are eight under construction on a single site. And this is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more. Colossus 2, Meta's Louisiana Hyperion, Microsoft's Fairwater Quantum Loophole, Nebias is New Jersey, DC, Pennsylvania, Amazon's Pennsylvania project, Google, Anthropics Project Rainier, just to name a few. Together the current footprint is roughly the size of Lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge. And apparently Meta's Louisiana facility will be even bigger. Even bigger. Which Zuck shared on threads.
- [38:31]
A
So there was also some news over the weekend. Residents shut down Google Data center before it can be built. So they Google Nick's plans for gigantic $1 billion data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought. It's funny, Futurism is a crazy website. I'm looking at the recommended they all.
- [39:02]
B
Seem to be fans of the future.
- [39:03]
A
Yeah, so I'm going to just the trending articles on the brand to return.
- [39:08]
B
Returnism.
- [39:09]
A
Yeah, Back to the land trending articles right now. Bon Ivers. Bon Bon Iver.
- [39:16]
B
Bon Iver.
- [39:17]
A
Bon Iver. Right, right, right. Side projects. It's funny, I've seen Bon Iver live and I still botch the pronunciation. Side Project Spotify page features an AI slop song. The second article ChatGPT is blowing up as spouses use AI to attack their partners.
- [39:37]
B
Whoa.
- [39:37]
A
The next one sun fires energy blast at mysterious interstellar object.
- [39:45]
B
They might be algo maxing.
- [39:46]
A
AI coding is massively overhyped report finds.
- [39:50]
B
Yep.
- [39:51]
A
And of course OpenAI's new data centers will draw more power than the entire audience captured, baby.
- [39:56]
B
Let's go. Anyway, VC say some AI startups under pressure to show rapid ARR growth are using questionable accounting practices like counting one time deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this. Bill Gurley chimed in to say, sad to say this isn't new, but as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose. Is Den of Thieves that movie with Gerard Butler or something? What is Den of Thieves? Is this a book or something? I'm out of the loop on this. But in other news figma.com Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free, but the Real news, of course, is Claude Sonet 4.5 is out and Claude is declaring it the best coding model in the world. They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents. It's the best model at using computers, and it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math. And of course, we will be joined by by none other than Mike Krieger from Anthropic in just a few minutes. But the model card is out.
- [41:03]
A
You remember Mike joined figma's board, part of the IPO as well. So we have perfect overlap. We'll be joining the whole FIGMA board today. Board meeting Board meeting live on tv.
- [41:15]
B
But the model card is up and the benchmarks look great next to GPT5. Claude Sonnet 4.5. Interesting that they didn't just go fully to Sonnet 5. OpenAI is on the fifth iteration. Gemini is at 2.5. There's a little bit of like all of these are just going to go the way of the. So the cars are like, it's the 2025 car, it's the 2025911 or the Ford Explorer. And now the phones are doing that too. Like iOS 26. All the phones kind of jump forward just to say, hey, just keep it on the year cadence. And I wonder if the models will wind up doing that too. I won. People will care about the models. Certainly people, you know, enterprises will demo these against the Pareto Frontier. How much value am I actually getting out of this API relative to the cost? And they will benchmark it in their own internal uses.
- [42:09]
A
And of course, satya sharing. Four decades in. Some things never changed then and now. And it's an old ad for Microsoft Excel saying Microsoft Excel Aces final exam spreadsheet for Windows trademarked, of course.
- [42:28]
B
Yes.
- [42:29]
A
And they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new copilot in Excel Agent mode.
- [42:35]
B
It's way better than the previous copilot in Excel.
- [42:38]
A
The founder of Shortcut was taken. Taken some shots.
- [42:43]
B
Oh, shortcuts here at 46.6.
- [42:45]
A
He was saying get ready. He said something, something to the effect of. Something to the effect of like get ready to dance for the next few decades or something like that. So competition heating up in the Excel agents category.
- [43:04]
B
Yeah.
- [43:04]
A
Well, this post, Kathy D hit the timeline over the weekend. CTO started coding the second we got to the gate. Colin Frazier says he went on his laptop at the airport. That is crack. Very rude post, but I think it's a fair post from Kathy. But at the same time, I think if you're traveling and you want.
- [43:30]
B
It's not the biggest flex in the world to do some work at the.
- [43:33]
A
Airport, but it's been done before.
- [43:35]
B
It's better than watching slop videos. I suppose I'd rather the CTO work when possible when on the move. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our first guest of the show, Mike Krieger from Anthropic. He's in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the tvpin ultradome. Mike.
- [44:01]
A
There he is. Looking sharp.
- [44:02]
B
You look fantastic. Congratulations on everything.
- [44:08]
A
You wore a suit. Look at that.
- [44:09]
B
Love the scene.
- [44:10]
C
You know, I was going to TV fan.
- [44:11]
B
I had to thank you.
- [44:12]
A
It's a great sign of respect in our culture.
- [44:15]
B
Yes.
- [44:16]
A
And we appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to see you. Big day. Big day for you.
- [44:20]
B
Big day.
- [44:20]
C
Yeah, we're super excited, you know and actually I was listening to you guys, I was falling asleep last night and I was like, we should have called it Sonnet 5. But you know.
- [44:27]
B
Oh yeah.
- [44:28]
C
You never know how good it's going to be until the very end, really.
- [44:31]
B
Well, well, I mean, I raised the bar.
- [44:34]
A
You threw that. You raised the bar even higher for five, right?
- [44:37]
B
Yeah.
- [44:37]
C
That's what happened with three and four is that we ended up with this like, well, it's, it's getting better. But what's 4 going to be? And we're like 3, 3, 7. And we're like, should we call the next one 3.999?
- [44:46]
B
And we're like, I would love that. Yeah. Well, you can take all of our criticisms or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here. And it is very different being in the arena. I do wonder how long it'll be until the numbers just melt away. And it's just like, you know, OpenAI is powered by GPT and anthropic is powered by Claude. And you know, we stopped caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm.
- [45:14]
A
Yeah. I think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited to buy this, you know, app, iPhone, 17, Xbox.
- [45:24]
B
But at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an announcement, sharing new data. And it seems like that's just a way to re engage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried.
- [45:37]
A
It's also very satisfying to Win place at the top of benchmarks against people that have a higher number than you.
- [45:44]
B
Of course everyone wants to win.
- [45:47]
C
I always wonder when I came into this role, I think, why don't companies just want us to be on dash latest and just getting the latest and greatest and then they're like, but the model might change and we want to be careful. So I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade. That could be a little bit easier.
- [46:05]
B
Yeah. What are the other trade offs like? The benchmarks tell one story. There's been this previous story about 3.5 having this particular personality. Are there other things that you find that customers and counterparties are looking for in a release like this beyond just benchmarks?
- [46:26]
C
One of the biggest ones is how eager versus lazy the model is. Maybe intuitively you want the model to be as eager as possible. We had this with Sonnet 3.7 where it was great, but it was a little too eager. You'd be like, hey, can you make this button blue? Like I made it blue. And I also refactored your entire website and it was like too much. So we scaled it back with four and then four was a little too lazy. Where people, you know, we actually have a monitoring signal inside anthropic where if we're finding people are saying like keep going, just go like guess, come on. Then it's probably being too lazy. And so we try to tune it for this one, which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible. So that's a big one.
- [47:03]
B
Yeah. What about on the compute infrastructure side, the actual being able to keep up with demand? Is there any messaging that you're sharing around what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability? Because it seems like there's so many businesses that are just like, it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it.
- [47:29]
C
Yeah, no, for sure. We think a lot about capacity and infra and for us it was really big to be able to deliver something that was more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost. And you can imagine that we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale. So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really, really big for us to be able to scale up to capacity. I think earlier this year, a lot of the conversations I have with customers, like, how do I get more sonnet? Like I'M at capacity and we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand.
- [47:58]
B
Can you? I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to start filtering a photo, it would start uploading to the server and then the filter would be applied on both sides, so when you hit post, it would automatically be live and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that? Yeah.
- [48:29]
C
That's rough.
- [48:29]
A
Yeah.
- [48:29]
C
And we gotta go flashback. And it was 2009, like networks were really slow, so we did everything to try to make it fast. So that was one of the things we did was the second people would type messages, it would take them five minutes. And all that time we were just doing all the processing in the background. And then that last post, you sync it up and then you post it to the timeline. So that was a really big thing we did. We also did a lot on the timeline itself where which photo you fetched next was a lot of optimizations that we did. It's funny, like now the person who initially started Claude code, one of our products, his name is Boris and he came from Instagram as well. And he brought some of the kind of perf ideas from Instagram into Claude code. And so there's some lineage of Instagram to Claude code now.
- [49:07]
B
That's why I was asking about that story. It feels like there's. We're in this wave of consumerization, just like where the user experience really matters for these models and there's. I have to imagine that there's low hanging fruit. I was joking that at a certain point there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things. Because like how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for like the capital of California and you can actually get a.
- [49:40]
C
Lot of messages that just say hello. And then I feel like we could cache that one.
- [49:44]
B
Yeah, yeah, you cache that. And then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things. And I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like you've reached into your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre AI era.
- [50:09]
C
Yeah, I think the biggest one. So I think one thing we did while at Instagram early on was just make it look good, make your photos look good and it's gonna be something that you're proud to share. And you know, flashback, like was iPhone3GS, the camera was pretty bad. Right. So you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and shareable. So we were working on like, you can now create PowerPoints and Excel files within Cloud AI and then you can edit them further if you want. And the thing I was really pushing the team on is, you know, we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours, but the thing that it produces has to be good. You don't want it to be autonomous and bad or autonomous and slop. So a lot of what we've been doing on the, on the office front is like the anti slop, like make something that is actually good out of the gate and of course you're going to polish it up and, and correct it. So that's, that, that, that effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around. Can you given some instructions, get it some data and then have it produce something? You're like, yeah, that was pretty good, pretty close. And I'm going to like finish it up myself.
- [51:01]
B
Yeah, I feel like that has been my biggest hot take around. The Meta AI Vibes app is just that people say there's no artist and I'm like, no, it's David Hull's vision and that he has honed that at midjourney and it's his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through.
- [51:20]
A
And the downside there is that it's great if you want to consume that style of content, but people like being in feeds and having randomness and new ideas and perspectives and aesthetics. Whereas if you're generating UI for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view. If it like feels like clot. Right. Because it's like a. It's not necessarily. Even if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand. Right, sure. And so having like a distinctive style and if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop, then I think that's a good trade off.
- [52:03]
B
Yeah, that's fine.
- [52:04]
C
I think it's good. The Figma connection is real there too. I think if you ask Claude to make a Website. Most of his websites look kind of similar, but then you can incorporate your design language or library so it actually looks, you know, generically yours at least. Like it's something that could have been created inside your company. And sure, it doesn't have like the hand of a designer on it, but at least it's not the full generic version as well. But yeah, it's interesting watching vibes. How much of it is. It's like 70s prep school summer camp vibe and. Or futurism and it's. It kind of falls into one of those too.
- [52:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely like found its way into some like local minimum Axima or something. It feels like almost overfit, but maybe in a good way because the alternative is maybe sloppier. Who knows? I'm also interested in how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a company like Anthropic. Going back to Instagram again, I remember hearing stories they might be true, maybe not, but about the initial filters were hand coded where you were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way. And that was the expression of basically a single individual. And I'm wondering if there's. When you think about the texture and the flavor of what Claude 4.5 is putting out, is this something that's coming from selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline? Are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion, or is it an emergent property? Is it the whole team? Like, how does all this fit together to actually create something that has taste in something that's just a big bag of numbers?
- [53:47]
C
Yeah, I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training, is how much individuals and their taste really matters. Like, I think our particular post training team, I think, has excellent taste on the code environment and just the code production itself. One of the things that we found with Sonnet 4.5 is that if you point it at some code that previous versions had written, it'll go clean it up and be like, what is this comment here? It's totally unnecessary. It'll rip it out. And so it's like improved in some taste. So there's that part and then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the model, around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content. And there it's actually reminds me a lot of Instagram where we're looking at outputs and saying, all right, can you get it to make it make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real. Can you make the docs, you know, they don't need five fonts, it can be simplified that down. And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffolding where taste can come in around how you shape the model and like, again, get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good.
- [54:39]
A
So do you think slop is a function of laziness?
- [54:44]
C
I think it's, you know, if it's the default parameters. I saw a talk by Ted Chiang, amazing sci fi writer, and he was talking about AI and creativity. He's like, creativity is a bunch of choices. Right. And if you just type to any of LLMs, like, tell me a story, it's going to tell you a pretty similar story almost every time. And that's kind of like a nature of the model. But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of custom things now, it starts becoming a little bit more you. And it's not a zero to one thing. Right. There's some spectrum on there as well, I think. To me, the slop is the stuff that tends towards like the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices. And then when you tend to a bunch of choices, even if they're like not the best choice, at least it's got some creative spark in it.
- [55:23]
A
Yeah.
- [55:23]
B
How are you thinking about imagery? I mean, rich history there. With Instagram, models are becoming multimodal, generally anthropic. Hasn't been chasing that really publicly, but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.5, I'm sure, and say, draw me a cat with ASCII art and it'll do it. And there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, just write out the individual RGB number and I will encode it as a PNG or something. It feels like if the text models get really good, I can just get images out of them. So how do you think that develops for Anthropic or where do you think you want to bring that to bear? Is there anything that's interesting there or do you just see it as a completely different set of the tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on?
- [56:12]
C
It's funny you say that one of the launch, kind of like internal things, One of the PMs put together was a self portrait of Claude that it drew using cells in Excel. It's actually pretty good. Yeah, I. For us, I was zoom out. What's the goal here? The goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way. And we think that this direct, I love your tech tree kind of metaphor. The direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time, act agentically, can write code, can execute code and keep track of state. And almost everything that's not in that tech tree we've not focused on, I think been good. We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs. But it's meant that on things like image generation that's like maybe we're leaning on partnership or bringing some images in via mcp or to your point, maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both write and run that code. The late breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes. So given a virtual machine, Sonnet 4.5 can take a basic image and then put in the butterfly meme. Like is this AGI? And it's actually pretty fun funny too. Like another thing that I think people will see over the next couple weeks is Sonnet 405 is like our funniest model, I think. And so there what.
- [57:26]
A
In what, in what, what, what types of ways? Because there's a lot of ways to be funny and, and, and and to, to date I think the thing that consistently everybody has enjoyed is, is like the you know, like be me format is one format and then. But like stand up. Every model that I've seen has struggled.
- [57:47]
B
Yeah. And specifically the funny examples where people say oh, AI generated this. It's usually like a top voted joke on R jokes on Reddit and so it's kind of stealing the joke and it doesn't really count as like a new joke in my opinion.
- [58:01]
C
But anyway, so we need to like formalize an eval for this at some point. But the thing that we do is we bring Claude into our slack channels mostly in serious ways. Like we have Claude help out with, you know, if it's a coding task or whatever. But we also have Claude in our basically like internal posting, you know, channel. And we'll do it for every model. And I most anthropic employees at least many of them were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the like water cooler channel that it's like funny. It's like kind of roasting people but not in too mean a way. It's like reacting to in jokes, it's making back references to something happening Earlier. It's definitely not like you wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways, but it definitely like had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to.
- [58:47]
A
Water cooler bench. Call it Water cooler Bench. Exactly. How are you? I loved your guys's recent campaign around, you know, Claude being for, you know, it's never been a better time to have a problem. I've seen some, some out of home that you guys have done around la, which is great as you kind of introduce more and more of the world to Claude. How are you thinking about, you know, kind of pouring? Do you think there's ways to pour fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs? I mean, you're very qualified to, to comment on some, some, some of that. So don't, don't feel like you need to give away your roadmap. But I'm curious, you know, what, what's been under explored in your mind?
- [59:40]
C
No, I think about the things that like where Claude feels like it had some breakouts and I think there's been like three or four in the year and a half have been at Anthropic. One was we had Golden Gate Claude. We actually put a research demo up where you could talk to Claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I still talk to people a year and a half later. I was like, that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work. And that was like a cool breakout moment for that. There was also like the sort of point where people realized like, Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice. And there was like, lots of like college students posting the, like, you know, you know, talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had like a viral moment. And then who knows if this will go viral, but I'm excited to see what people build with it. We're putting something out today called Imagine with Claude, where you can talk to Claude and Cloud will like create whole software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button so it doesn't write sort of a backend code. It is the backend code, which sounds a little trippy. You kind of have to play with it. But people have been doing all sorts of stuff like, hey, show me what Steve Jobs desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launched. It's like, okay, well, here's the finder window and here's a keynote file about his keynote. So you click the keynote file and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what Keynote looks like now. And it creates that from scratch. And it's kind of this glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic and drawn on demand. So we'll see what people build with that. But that's another one. I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going. And it's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through to the right people who are thinking about this stuff.
- [61:07]
B
Yeah, a product like that seems within reach. Magical. Amazing. It also feels like if I was using Generative UI fully, a fully generated app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency. We've seen this with the benchmarks. I mean, just in 20, 20 gpt3 on the meter length of AI task that they can do at a 50% success rate. It was like 10 seconds and now we're blowing past an hour. I'm interested to know how you're thinking about four, five, if you think about that internally as a benchmark, it wasn't on the model card. Should it be? Are you seeing promising results there? And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be? Because I was trying to think about, like, yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long time, but what is a human's task length like? Is it 100 years and how long does it take to get to 100 years? If we're doubling every seven months, it turns out it's like a decade. And I'm wondering how you think about just the length that the model can maintain consistency. Do you like that as a metric? Are we on track there and what are the consequences of that?
- [62:21]
C
Yeah, a big part of Cloud 4.5 training was around both keeping its own memory and staying being able to work for a longer period of time and keep that consistency. I put a video up on my X, which is for every version of Cloud. We asked it to build Cloud AI, so kind of like a flagship AI product and one through three just can't even do anything out of the gate. 3.5, you're like, I kind of showed something on screen, but you can't log in. 3.7, you can log in, but it doesn't work. 4 works a little bit, but message sending fails. 4, 5 didn't just implement, it also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its prototype. So think about that whole kind of thing and it's a fun time lapse of just even watching it do that. So I think it is really important. Even if for most tasks you're not going to set it off on a 30 hour task like a couple of our customers did during testing. The fact that you could, I think lets you start trusting it for longer and longer. The way I see our engineers actually use cloud code now is they have like three or four terminal windows open and they're running cloud code concurrently on multiple ideas at once. And the only way you can do that is if it's not going to interrupt you 10 seconds and be like, wait, what did you mean again? Or trust that you're not going to go off the rails. So I think it's, if not the, it's one of the most important kind of metrics to look at is how long they can maintain coherence.
- [63:30]
B
Yeah. That Claude example you gave is crazy because do you know how many man hours it actually took to build the real product?
- [63:38]
D
A lot.
- [63:39]
B
Like it's more than an hour, it's more than four hours. It's more than anything on this chart. If it's. And yeah, that's a very, very mind blowing concept that like we're still like it's working for an hour, it's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of man hours. If you were to try and create an apples to apples comparison, very.
- [63:59]
A
It's hair raising.
- [64:00]
B
Yeah, I mean it's exciting. It's exciting.
- [64:03]
C
It really is. And also like, it hopefully makes us more flexible too where I think there's a lot of sunk cost that happens in software.
- [64:08]
B
Right.
- [64:08]
C
Like, oh, when I rebuild it, it's. We did involve with Instagram was saying like, yeah, you built it, but if it's not going to be good, just rip it out and then start over.
- [64:16]
B
One of the most magical experiences I had with Claude Code recently was I essentially, I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications, but I do a lot of research. And so I asked Claude Code to do a deep research report, but instead of just creating a markdown file like I would get in any other deep research product, I asked it to build an HTML5 website with all of the nice features, bar charts and graphs and all that stuff. And it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this generative UI world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering if there's A how you see that flowing into just consumer Right now when I think of Claude code for deep research, I think of a prosumer product and I'm wondering if you think that there's a path, maybe it exists through mobile, maybe iframes. How does this actually work its way into my mom's life? Someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way.
- [65:20]
C
Yeah. Something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is giving the same sort of agentic multi turn thing in Claude but with your local mobile capabilities. And it's a little easier on Android. You can do a lot of this in iOS but not all of it. And you can say things like, hey, you know, look at my calendar for tomorrow. Like I have these three meetings. Do some local searches, like find out where I should have coffee, remind me to like grab my coat before I leave. And by the way, like compose a text to these three people because I need to like let them know about it. You'll see it work through all. It'll use all these local tools, do it agentically. You can't send it automatically, so you have to like press a button still to like send the message. So it's not like all the way. But I think that's where it's going to start showing up in consumer applications. And I think for better or for worse, it's going to require more partnership with the device makers because a lot of that's gated on the os. You can do a lot more on the web, but I think that's where things are going. I think that's where we'll start. Feel real to people.
- [66:12]
B
What's the biggest lesson from Artifact? I was a huge fan of the product and I feel like with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web, creating summaries, like, it feels like we're on the cusp of another breakout like product or problem solution in that space. What are you.
- [66:33]
A
Yeah, it feels, I mean for better or worse, it feels like you could ultimately like Claude could one day function as what I loved about Artifact. Right.
- [66:48]
C
Yeah, you can like see it already, like search the web, do the synthesis and then like create a briefing. For me, I think one sort of underappreciated Artifact lesson was if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to you, that's a hard sell for newcomers. Right. They're going to. We had a, like, our retention was actually really good if you stuck around. But it was that kind of activation that was the trickiest. Plus, like any shareable thing in news is really difficult. But think about that now with cloud, where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things, we actually can because cloud can be conversational. Say, I'm going to be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive, is that okay? Or I'm going to be on your iOS, it's going to be way better if you connect your maps or your calendar for this. That's, I think, where we need to go, which is don't expect people have done all the upfront work because that's going to be too hard for most people, then they'll churn. But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state or it's going to be actually useful to you.
- [67:48]
B
Everyone in Teapot on X in Tech Twitter is reacting to Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Richard Sutton. Are you bitter? Less and pilled is anthropic Bitter lesson pilled. How did you and the team kind of process the debate between Dwarkesh and Richard Sutton?
- [68:09]
C
I think we're overall super bitter lesson pill. One interesting example, and this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative, but I think kind of feeds into the same kind of idea you mentioned, deep research. So our original advanced research implementation in cloudai was like thousands of lines of code, some pretty complex infrastructure we've since reimplemplated. We haven't launched this yet. It'll come out soon. We re implemented on top of basically the cloud Agent SDK which we put out today too, which is basically what cloud code runs on too. And it was basically just a prompt and some tools and like none of that like custom scaffold and instructions and all of that. And like that to me speaks the same idea, which is like you want to like let the model do as much itself as possible. Don't try to like overly specify all of like the steps and the infrastructure and all those different pieces. So that definitely shows up even in product, which is, you know, not what the bitter lessons is about, but it kind of feeds into that as well. But I think overall like very bitter lesson pill, but also still really bullish I think on the possibilities of rl. You see it in how much the models have advanced even since February.
- [69:10]
B
Do you think you're bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes a material change in architecture or just like how AI research is done. We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer based large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and synthetic environments, synthetic data. Does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas?
- [69:45]
C
I think so. And I think the other piece that's going to be really interesting one just the scale of all of these RL runs is getting enormous and I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting too. I don't think we're there yet too. And when we get there we got to do that very carefully and with the right kind of safety kind of guardrails in place. But I think that'll potentially yield to some kind of divergent ideas at that point.
- [70:08]
B
What are your thoughts on hardware? What's going to change in hardware over the next few years? Instagram was so interesting. I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical. It was such a vertical app, even though people were so used to turning their phones. And in some ways the hardware, like the medium is the message. The hardware kind of defined what you built. But then eventually, you know, we got more cameras on the phone probably because of Instagram. And I'm wondering if you think AI will change hardware or hard or will get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places. Just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple of years?
- [70:47]
C
I think this is the consumer side where, you know, like I think the AirPods Pro is going to be like the sneaky like AI sort of thing that actually does the mass market. Not a super controversial take. I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this? We've designed these open Office plans, but I think in the future we're going to actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done to delegate tasks. It's really nice. Already people have hooked up cloud code with Open Whisper or something so they can talk to it and it feels very natural. What does that do for office design? Are we all going to be using these like sub vocalization things now that people are prototyping?
- [71:22]
B
Those are really cool.
- [71:23]
C
Yeah, but it's like walk through an office, a bunch of people mumbling like.
- [71:28]
A
Or the dark sci fi of just it's, it's wall to wall. The phone booths, you know, just like thousands of phone booths and everybody's sitting in their phone Booth recreated like 1960s IBM.
- [71:40]
C
Like, I feel like there's got to be something better to. I'm also really interested in what the sort of multiplayer, like I mentioned, like Claude talking to us in our social channel. But like, there's also. What is, like, what is it like to not just have an AI note taker in these meetings, which everybody has, but like an actual participant and how does it know when to chime in? And what is it listening for? Can it be like, hey, you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about? Or hey, I'm detecting a lot of like, you know, disagreement here. Can we move forward? So that's going to be an interesting. It's like the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex, but it will need to show up in more and more places.
- [72:11]
A
Yeah. How, how do you guys think about what comes to mind around the word focus? Anthropic feels incredibly focused and not every lab feels that way. Is that, is that something that you guys, you know, just keep coming back to, around, or what does that mean to you?
- [72:32]
C
Oh, for sure. Like, I think that the. One of the things that we've done well is like, there's been that extreme focus from the research side, I think, you know, before anything else, which is like, here's the path. Like, we're going to build that. We're not going to have as many people, perhaps as much compute, but we're going to like remain focused. But like, that is actually another kind of bridge to Instagram. We were very, very focused. I think they finally shipped the iPad app. You would always ask me, why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app?
- [72:54]
B
I'm like, it's focus.
- [72:55]
C
Like, you know, you're not going to get a lot of new users that way and most of the user is going to be on the iPhone.
- [73:00]
B
Web. Web. Took years to have a web app.
- [73:03]
C
You know, people think we were stubborn, but it was actually, you know, every new platform you add is like another thing that you're going to have to think about. And you know, yes, you can staff up for it, but it's just that that coordination cost, it's the kind of additional overhead. So we've really pushed the focus thing here as well. You know, it's like, do, do more with less and do fewer things better. But I think it's really important and it's meant that we've got more of this sort of prosumer or power user and then business lens. But also I think that's like an interesting place to occupy in the market.
- [73:31]
B
Last question from my side. Jordy, you have another.
- [73:33]
A
Yeah, kind of last question. We're having Dylan on in a bit to catch up on Figma make. And I know you joined the board prior to the ipo. What are your, you know, with Figma, the AI opportunity and current reality is very obvious. Right. It's a place that people go to make things and build software. But what are your conversations like with, I'm assuming other public, you know, public SaaS, CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time, trying to get your read on where software is going. Are those conversations happening? What do they look like today?
- [74:10]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think there's this. If you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over your employee records, plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs, all these pieces. I think the concern, I think from a lot of these SaaS providers is do they become just document and data repositories? Right. And how do you like modify that? But then I think that there's the sort of like way of making that actually interesting is if you actually connect an agent with another, which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it. It's really powerful. I saw this demo of Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data. And rather than just like search for Salesforce data and then get results back, it had a conversation. They had like two back and forth conversations where the cloud agent was like, here's the email I'm thinking of sending to this customer. And the Salesforce thing built on top of Salesforce, like, no, no, no, they're not going to like it. I looked in the earlier messages and they really hated that turn of phrase. They ping pong back and forth with actually like very little human input and at the end had a message like ready to send. So that's where I think like you can move from worrying about, oh, are people going to visit my website less because of agents to more like, well, maybe not. But if you're actually building value beyond just the data store, you can still play a really key part in that exchange.
- [75:23]
B
It goes back to what we were talking about, about Claude being able to generate images, but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas. There's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference that can just do all the math in the world and has every number, every calculation memorized. Or you could just say, hey, here's Python. Just write some Python and you get the exact result. So it's a beautiful synergy. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.
- [75:51]
A
Congrats on the launch. We're looking forward to 5 or 4.9999.
- [75:55]
B
4.999 would be extremely hard. I would love that. The pressure is on 4.9999. Awesome.
- [76:04]
A
Well, we're excited to play around with Core 5 and get into it.
- [76:10]
B
Thanks so much for having me on. We'll talk to you soon.
- [76:12]
A
You're the man.
- [76:14]
B
Let's go over to Polymarket and check in on which company has the best AI model. By the end of 2025, Anthropic has jumped in the rankings. This is, of course, LM arena, which is a different benchmark, but anthropic jumped from 1.8% to over 6%. Google is in first and continues to be OpenAI was giving them a run for their money towards the end of August, but Google seems to be running away with it. People on Ala Marina are really enjoying Google.
- [76:43]
A
Yeah. It's interesting how you know this. This continues to be the probably the most popular market on AI.
- [76:53]
B
Yeah.
- [76:53]
A
And yet all the underlying labs are focused on different things.
- [76:56]
B
Right.
- [76:57]
A
Like Anthropic is values a bunch of different things differently than Google does.
- [77:01]
B
Yes.
- [77:01]
A
Right. And. And Xai. Same thing.
- [77:05]
B
Right. So anyways, well, speaking of ChatGPT, they launched a new brand campaign. Each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative, proactive creators. Users were showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with. Our goal is for people to look at these moments. And Emily Sundberg said part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivens is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring breakers worked on it. So they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting.
- [77:31]
A
This feels. Even the colors and the tones feel a lot like Anthropic's recent campaign.
- [77:38]
B
And it feels solar punky. It feels a little bit like the drone delivery company.
- [77:45]
A
How's this guy with his barbell set up in this?
- [77:49]
B
Like he's doing exactly what I do. He's tracking his splits, he's tracking his lifts. He's trying to hit a one rep max. He's saying, if I eat this much protein, can I guess he only has £65 on the bar, though? So, you know, oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curl. But, you know, with the power of chatgpt, I think he's going to be benching three plates in no time. But, yeah, very fun campaign. We're having Dylan Field join in just nine minutes. He was getting in a tussle on the timeline talking about the definitions of software engineering. Elliot, I guess, at lovable said, we just killed software engineering, by the way.
- [78:28]
A
Which is like, I don't know if Elliot is rage baiting.
- [78:33]
B
Yeah, it is a little rage baity.
- [78:37]
A
But, oh, well, like, who is that post for?
- [78:42]
B
I don't know. In other news, Thrive has a new citation sovereign under management. I know you were all wondering about this. This is from Preston Holland. It's a nice touch. So this is a private jet.
- [78:56]
A
This is Thrive Aviation.
- [78:57]
B
To be clear, everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital, of course, Josh Kushner's firm expanding into private aviation, as he probably should. But this is a different company, I.
- [79:09]
A
Believe, but different company.
- [79:10]
B
It is funny to imagine put the.
- [79:12]
A
Words Big Dog on the end.
- [79:14]
B
Big Dog looks great.
- [79:16]
A
Dog with a Dawg Turbo S. You.
- [79:20]
B
Get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from, you know, Orange county to Burbank just to save a couple minutes. But if you put Big Dog on the engines, I think you get a free pass. I think it's the way to do it.
- [79:32]
A
Drive's tagline is above your standards, beyond your expectations. Above your standards.
- [79:40]
B
Is that not above your standards?
- [79:41]
A
We're actually above your standards.
- [79:42]
B
Yes. Whatever your standards are. We're not going to ask you about your standards. We're just going to tell you that this is above.
- [79:47]
A
We're above you.
- [79:47]
B
It's above your standards.
- [79:48]
A
We're above you.
- [79:49]
B
Well, you know what else is above your standards, Julius? AI. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required. In other AI news, it's a busy day. ChatGPT is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify. We were kind of debating this. Like, is the stripe integrated?
- [80:13]
A
We are having. Jeff from Stripe on, who worked on, has been involved with some of these new features. So we'll have to ask him about this. Unclear to me yet how the dynamic. Obviously Stripe powers Shopify, but how do these different partnerships work? But I think there will be companies.
- [80:34]
B
I think there will be companies that vend their essentially their product catalog into ChatGPT, maybe with like an MCP server or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe. Because all of their plans, everything that they sell is sold through Stripe. And so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system and all of the features that you get with Shopify and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SaaS companies do that. So you can imagine in the future, if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory, you could buy it in ChatGPT directly with Stripe. But then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations and you're storing that data in Shopify and doing downstream marketing on that, and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear, you will benefit from the Shopify ChatGPT integration. So I don't know that they're. I mean, they're clearly jumping over the precipice together.
- [81:36]
A
I am very. When you think about using products, any LLM, how efficient it is to find the information that you're looking for and now how efficient it's going to be to find the products that you're looking for. There's. There's plenty of categories that I'm. That I don't expect to use LLMs for shopping. Like, hey, you know, like, I'm not going to go in here and like, look for, I don't know, some jackets. Right? Like casual jackets.
- [82:10]
B
Right.
- [82:11]
A
Because that to me is like, I don't know, I care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that. But in the context of, like, purely functional goods, I'm looking to see what Amazon does in regards to ChatGPT. Because think about how terrible it is to search for products on Amazon. It's rough right now. I'm an Amazon respecter. Andy Jassy respecter. I'm a Jeff Bezos respecter. But whenever I, if I could search on ChatGPT, find me, you know, I don't know a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than 100 years ago. Right. I don't want to go and buy a paper towel holder. That's some cheap knockoff $4. That's a knockoff of an American.
- [82:55]
B
And they hack the SEO and they hack the star rating and they pack the reviews and they're paying for ads.
- [83:01]
A
And so, Chad, I've always wanted a. To be able to shop on Amazon, Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese like, and they should be able to do that.
- [83:10]
B
They should be Able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box and letting you search natural language like you're already searching. Just let me query whatever I want.
- [83:22]
A
But also I think the average Amazon user probably is like just give me the paper towel holder. That's $3 direct from the factory. But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is.
- [83:33]
B
Yeah. So maybe those hundred year old paper towel holder companies will say now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe and profound to get mentioned in ChatGPT. Right. And then from there assume that they are not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore because it's being temu ified. And so those brands will move over and, and like, you know, generate customers from ChatGPT users.
- [84:04]
A
The question is, I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here because they will these brands. Certainly in the example that Toby gives, I'm looking for lightweight trail running shirts. That's that stay cool. Can you help Historically that if somebody's searching that and buying. Historically Google is taking, taking a cut right through AdSense or if somebody's just scrolling a brand on Instagram or they get an ad for.
- [84:33]
B
I would assume that it's exactly the same as the Facebook and Google take rate and that you will look back on E commerce and you're like, I pay the Google tax, I pay the Facebook tax, I pay the ChatGPT tax.
- [84:46]
A
Yeah.
- [84:46]
B
And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth. The alternative is no customer.
- [84:52]
A
Yeah. And the question is again, this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back, you know, is what if, what if the best product is not on Shopify or not set up in a way that you can buy it. Right.
- [85:06]
B
Yeah. I mean the hope is that only.
- [85:08]
A
Recommending products that they have partnerships with.
- [85:10]
B
Sure.
- [85:10]
A
If so, then that sort of violates the trust that the user's been developing. So they have some stuff to figure out.
- [85:16]
B
Yeah. The hope is that there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the team that surfaces like knowledge retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information and then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of those. But we will see in other news.
- [85:36]
A
There'S a post here from Oxon says God forbid men have hobbies. Arkansas men arrested for taking turns shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after drinking.
- [85:46]
B
Why were they arrested? This doesn't seem illegal. This seems like top tier operator guys being dudes. Yeah. Give them A break.
- [85:54]
A
I feel like this post has gone viral many times. Many, many, many times.
- [85:58]
B
Yeah, it's from 2019 and then somebody just found it and quote, tweeted it and it went viral. 200,000 likes. Wow. Interesting. Well, Gas Station Barbie says. Feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby. Like that's a new citizen.
- [86:15]
A
Social Security.
- [86:17]
B
Yeah, they do. They do. I guess they literally do. Yeah. It should just be a birthday card instead of something you have to apply for. GrowingDaniel says JD Vance. I know you see my tweets. This would be a nice touch. Apparently in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born.
- [86:34]
A
That's sweet.
- [86:34]
B
That's very sweet. Well, Eliano is describing the wide range of Palantir all understanders with Nick Fuentes and Tim Dillon on the left and of course a Palantir insider on the right and Jim Cramer right in the middle. I suppose he kind of. It seems like he's slightly edging to the right. If you look at his shoulder, his head is at like negative one, but his right shoulder.
- [86:59]
A
We're gonna have Jim on the show soon. We'll ask him what Palantir does.
- [87:03]
B
I think Jim has a very good thesis for Palantir. Actually. I think he has a pretty strong understanding. I would put them closer to a four or a five on this. Well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen Kyunkan in Japan and has been in business since 705 AD. It's still a family business for 52 generations.
- [87:28]
A
Let's give it up.
- [87:29]
B
So long. Oh, oh, you think in decades with.
- [87:32]
A
Your business, Are you thinking generations?
- [87:34]
B
Oh, you're going to on a 100 year run. That's nice. That's quaint. What about a 1300 year run? Let's step it up. Let's step up the ambition, folks.
- [87:43]
A
I think they should make this.
- [87:44]
B
You're a founder, they should make it. In Amman. Shield says in Japanese tradition.
- [87:48]
A
53Rd generation has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.
- [87:53]
B
Just turn it into a Motel 6 and bring in private equity. Lever it up, Turn it into a McDonald's or strip mall.
- [88:00]
A
I've been learning about finance. I think we should play around with leverage.
- [88:04]
B
What is going on that the 52nd grandson doesn't botch it? That's crazy. So much tradition and reliability.
- [88:14]
A
I hope Dylan Field does this with Figma.
- [88:16]
B
Me too. That would be a fantastic.
- [88:18]
A
We should ask him. 52, can you do 53 generators.
- [88:23]
B
Where will Figma be in the year 3300? That's what I want to know. Dylan, let's start thinking in millennia. Shiel has some extra context here. He says in Japanese tradition you adopt a capable manager or have arrangement to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family. Otherwise there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long. This is still common practice. 98% of adoptions in Japan are adults, almost all men 20 to 30 brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son in laws to keep them in the family business.
- [89:02]
A
That's crazy.
- [89:02]
B
Wow.
- [89:03]
A
Well, let's bring this concept into enterprise software.
- [89:06]
B
Dylan is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultra Dome. His first virtual appearance I believe on the show. He's of course hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange which is which we slight upgrade.
- [89:20]
A
From Zoom retired the gong.
- [89:22]
B
But thank you so much for joining us. Dylan, how are you doing today?
- [89:25]
E
Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys.
- [89:27]
A
Great to see you.
- [89:28]
B
Great to see you. What's new in your world?
- [89:32]
E
Well, I've been deep in it this weekend with Cloudsonnet 4.5. I'm going to be real with you in Figma make.
- [89:40]
B
That's what I wanted to hear.
- [89:42]
E
Still swimming in that.
- [89:44]
B
Give me your initial reactions. Do you care about the benchmarks model card? Are you tracking the the meter like how long a task can run? Are you more like just chat with it like it's a person? Have really short back and forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the words that are coming out. Are you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers or something. Like how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO?
- [90:12]
E
Well, okay, so there's the personal side and there's the Figma side and there's CEO side maybe.
- [90:17]
B
Sure.
- [90:18]
E
So I'll start with personal, which I have not got into yet. But I love playing with these models, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can, you know, get them into sort of weird headspaces. And that's just like a hobby of mine.
- [90:34]
A
What's a weird, What's a weird.
- [90:36]
B
You're trying to one shot them?
- [90:37]
D
Yeah.
- [90:38]
E
Oh, I mean look, it doesn't have to be a one shot or, or like single prompt. The longer you go, the more interesting it gets.
- [90:45]
B
But yeah, you keep going and the.
- [90:47]
A
Models I'm seeing, what's the weirdest? What's an example of like you don't have to name the model, but like what kind of weird, what's the weirdest headspace you've gotten a model and is there just hallucinating more and more intensely type of thing?
- [91:04]
E
Look, I mean, models are trained on the Internet and the Internet has some weird stuff on it. And you know, what do you find it in there? It's kind of fascinating. And I won't give examples or definitely not companies or model providers. What I do instead is I try to like, if I find a good repro case, I send it over to the models and that way they can figure out what to do with it.
- [91:27]
A
Yeah, it's funny, if you think the models are the models trained on the Internet, that means like the model is effectively trained on StumbleUpon, you know, like that level of range. Right. Which is quite, quite wide.
- [91:40]
E
There's a lot to the Internet.
- [91:41]
B
Yep.
- [91:42]
E
It's deep for sure.
- [91:43]
B
So take us to the other.
- [91:44]
A
Let's get into specifically at the. Not even at the figma.
- [91:47]
E
I haven't even gone there with 4.5 yet another time, but I'd say that for Figma, that is where my attention has been focused so far. And with Figma make in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay, how do we make it so that we're able to quickly Pull in Sonnet 4.5 to make and then evaluate, you know, are we ready for it? Do we have to do anything differently? Is this a good addition, a good improvement? And the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used was so impressive. How it made MAKE better, everything from planning and just thinking through and evaluating, understanding the code base that it was working on, whether it was like a shorter prompt or a long running session to thinking through, just sort of like the way it should evaluate a prompt and giving better results. And also we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy from make output into Figma design. And we've since launch had a way to basically go from Figma design into make and basically copy paste in. And that way you can bring your design into whatever you're coding and creating. And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible. And it's so just kind of like gives me the chills a bit because we literally launched this feature where we copied from make output to Figma design Last week, not knowing when we launched it that 4.5 was coming, it would make it so much better. And here we are and we're like, okay, well that's a good surprise. But I guess the general point is just it's really nice to be in a place where. And I think this is an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software. As the models get better, you need to get better. So for us, we look at the models getting better at figma, we're like, okay, great, Figma gets better. All of our users are going to benefit from this. And I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headspace of how to make sure that you're setting up your strategy that way.
- [94:09]
B
How do you think about the figma make user base, the community? Right now there are so many different subsets of AI users. There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph, oh, that came from 4. 0. That came from Sonnet 3.5. And then there are people who are like, I gotta try that AI thing out soon. Is the Figma make community in a place where 4.5 Sonic can just be like a strict upgrade that there's no resistance to? Or is it something where you have to think about model switching and leaving some choice up to the user? Are there cost considerations? How much work are you putting on the user or the community? And where's the right pivot point for that?
- [94:58]
E
Yeah, I think there's to your question about sort of the diversity of use cases and Personas that might be applicable here. There's so many different users on our platform and types of behavior that we see, you know, about, you know, a third of our users are designers, two thirds are non designers. Designs always at the core. And I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend, one thing I keep coming back to is like, I think we're just entering this era of the 10x designer where the designer is going to be able to do so much more than ever before. Designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack. And the designer will be in this position of leverage where they're going to be able to do a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping lead in the charge. And I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough. Good enough is mediocre. You have to be Great if you want to make it so that you can win. And I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win. And so that's just kind of like how I see things going in general. And on the implementation side, I think it's like, not as relevant. You just kind of have a variety of ways that people want to interact or different cycles of AI adoption people are at, and you need to meet them where they're at, and you need to create and provide an amazing product experience. And so it gets back to the basics there.
- [97:01]
B
How do you think about the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models? I keep coming back to the mid journey example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like, or like, you know, minimize the loss function. It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation, no matter what your prompt is. And then you can do a lot of different things on top of it. And so it's almost this like, collaboration between the artist, David Holz, and the artist who's the prompter. And I'm wondering if you think that, like, how does the flavor of design that's coming out of 4.5 plus figma make? Like, where does the human opinion get inserted at each level and how does that, like, how much of that is actually happening? Like, can you tell a difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model?
- [98:07]
E
I think we're not yet at like a Dolly2 moment for Zyin or a mid journey moment for Zynes, as happened relatively the same time.
- [98:16]
B
Yeah.
- [98:17]
E
And look at Dall E1 compared to Dall E2. You know, it's. It's easy to dismiss. And I think design generation will get better. At the same time. I think that the law of averages concept that you kind of mentioned is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time.
- [98:39]
B
Yeah.
- [98:40]
E
And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to great. And if you're able to do that and you're able to advance your craft, if you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are and what the engineering challenges might be, bring it all together with a great design user experience, aesthetic is. It's like, it's not just the style, it's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out along with Brand marketing point of view, how is it all going to work together? And if you can do that, that's like where I think everything unlocks.
- [99:27]
B
Yeah.
- [99:29]
A
What's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI? Because on, on our side as a business that, that is constantly working with creative people externally, obviously we have people internally, but we have like, basically as much demand as ever for like talent, talented creative people. Like, we don't. We have a ton of work that we want to do and.
- [99:55]
B
But we also have an unlimited demand for figma make and tools that help us instantiate ideas. And there's a lot of stuff where.
- [100:03]
A
We'Re like, well, and we just improve.
- [100:04]
B
The photo or the layout or the buttons and like, the faster we can get that out, the better.
- [100:09]
A
Yeah, but, but, but there's this sense of we have a insatiable demand for novel thinking and ideas and concepts and it's, it's less a. It's less a. I can't tell if.
- [100:22]
B
You'Re saying we humanity or we tvpn.
- [100:24]
A
Because I'm talking about both, but tvpn and it's less of, oh, is this possible? Like, is making this animation going to be, you know, within budget? It's more, it's more like, well, what animation should we make?
- [100:39]
B
Yeah.
- [100:40]
A
Did you come to pay? We're willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking. But I'm curious, like, where, where you see the kind of where sentiment is at today. Because on the software development side, it seems very clear as, as when you can build software faster and cheaper. Well, we want more engineers to build more software because the world needs a lot of software and I think same thing for truly great, novel, creative work.
- [101:05]
E
Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm hearing a strong advertisement on TVPN for TVPN y' all are trying to hire. So hopefully your viewers can like apply somewhere. But the thing that I would call out is I think that we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI talent wars with design right now. At least amongst the companies that are really getting it, the ones that have internalized the design is going to be how you win or lose. And that's the craft, the details that matter. They are really getting aggressive. Not like meta AI aggressive, I want to be clear, but very aggressive. And it's, I think just again, value moving up the stack. And that's something that all companies will eventually figure out. I just hope that a bunch of companies don't figure out too late. But yeah, I think Jevons paradox as applied to talent that is adept at using models and doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created and how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people. That's real. And the demand for development is certainly not shrinking. I think that, you know, it's never been met. And at figma, I mean, we're doing headcount planning. Like, we're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year, and in big ways. I think just generally, you know, our point of view from the start about AI at FIGMA is like, how do you both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so designers can do more. And I think that's something that's a shared view. Maybe we were one of the first to articulate it, if not the first. But I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to make it so that more folks are able to be part of this life cycle. And also they're trying to make it so the people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before.
- [103:25]
B
Do you have a view on, like, the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization? Are there more design firms than ever? Are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever? Is the power law getting steeper or is the floor rising or both? Do you have any idea on the shape of the design community and the shape of how designers work together or just make money independently in the age of AI?
- [104:05]
E
Yeah, I think there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of company side, and we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design and more design hiring. Yeah, I think in that more freelancer agency segment, there's more research to do to understand is the same effect happening. But I'll maybe think back historically, you know, when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success, one of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies and they would just start acquiring agencies of great design talent. And so that's how like, for example, T. Hanan Lacks became involved in then Facebook, then Reality Labs, and John Lacks ended up leaning up Reality Labs for a while. And they got someone who is legendary design talent to be able to be at the forefront of their work on Oculus for, for quite some time and I would not be surprised if similar things started happening. But, but I also think that, you know, back in the early days of Figma, it was this question even of like how many designers are there in the United States in the world? I mean the bureau labor statistics said that there were 250,000 designers. It's like, well that seems wrong in 2012 but like how many are there actually? I don't know, Maybe it's like 500,000, not 250,000 but like is it like a venture scalable business? We don't know. And, but what we noticed was that values moved the stack and it was going to be the case that everyone's going to build up their design team and the design would be so important as this overall system changed. And I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012, it has not changed. It is the same thesis we hold today. And I really believe that sort of this era of the 10x designers here, it's just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible. And it'll require more designers to step up as leaders and for them to lean into leadership roles that they may have otherwise not considered. But you know, if they don't, then I think it's going to be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design and they don't really know the guardrails or how to do it exactly. And you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts but not many like railways built, tracks built for folks to go down. So that's the challenge I think that many design oriented folks will have and the need for design leadership this time.
- [107:05]
A
Shopify just acquired a design studio last month. By the way, someone in our chat mentioned this. What's your thinking around open source? You obviously have a close relationship with Mike over at Anthropic. He's on the board and obviously Claude has consistently led on CodeGen, so they're a natural partner for Figma make. But is open source something you're exploring just given that they're not?
- [107:36]
B
Yeah, there was for a while. There was like commoditize your compliments but maybe the lms. Yeah, I'm super interested to hear what you think.
- [107:43]
E
Yeah, I mean look there's, I think first of all, I mean Mikey and I, from the start of just looking at him being on the board, we had to make sure that, you know, it was clear we as Figma have to choose whatever is best for Figma as models. Get better, we get better. But if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. Son. 4.5 Both of the evals Easy choice. Roll it out to users. There's going to be a lot of other model improvements and of course open source is something we're always watching too. And so it's exciting just how much is happening right now and I think that it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases. I'm pretty psyched.
- [108:37]
B
What are your thoughts on hardware right now? That feels like a place where we're seeing a reemergence. A lot of hype around Meta's new devices. Potentially a new design surface as people design more, more physical products that are maybe enabled by AI. It just feels like that could be kind of the next thing. Some sort of like Cambrian explosion of hardware devices. Or maybe it's all just AirPods forever or something. Who knows? But I'd love to hear your take on like, how is there a demand from you for new hardware devices like the Wacom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community, but it's a completely prosumer professional device. Just how are you thinking about hardware these days?
- [109:28]
E
Well, I think in the Figma context, what we think about is, okay, what are the screens that we need to serve and our users need to design for? And so that's why I was so excited to be able to check out Meta's new glasses. And also the neural band. The band is like underappreciated. It's so cool.
- [109:51]
A
People need a. People won't. It won't get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it because it's.
- [109:58]
B
It looks just like a whoop band. Like there's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it and you're like, oh yeah, fully see what's going on.
- [110:05]
E
Yeah, yeah. And. But like, let's be clear. I mean this was years in development, many years. I mean, I mean they've been at it for so long now and I think the first time I got the demo was almost a year and a half ago. Year and a few months ago. And then I saw it again right before config, but like the sort of new improved version and it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors. You know, the same thing is being true in auto. It's true, you know, in wearables in general. It's probably going to become true in other surfaces that people will find. And I think that whether it's AR VR, curved glass, small screen sizes, large screen sizes. There's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target and we haven't even gone into AI and agents. And what do designers need to do to create context in these places too? I think in many ways we're just in the Ms. DOS era of AI. We are still figuring out how to explore this amazing latent space. You've got this lm, it's your spaceship, but you're in this N dimensional space and the best way to figure out where you are, your compass, is your prompt, natural language. It's like what interfaces will be built for that, how we'd be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction, figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architectures fundamentally improve. And also what protocols between the models should exist and what's the best way to create those. Because I think that there's a reason MCP has really caught on so fast. It's extremely valuable. And we just launched with Figma, the Figma MCP for design as a remote service. Before it was only desktop and local. And also we improved the capabilities and then we did it for make as well. So we want to make sure that people know you're not trapped to make Figma Make. If you're one prompt to code and you're making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're spending a lot of time on it, awesome. Like you always had download code, but now you can just have your MCP connect to Figma make and pull all your code in.
- [112:36]
B
How is MCP adoption going? It feels like there's a world where like I was promised, like the AI didn't need an API because it would just use the computer. Right. And I imagine that there's a. Maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my AI just literally opens a browser, goes to figma.com, does whatever it needs to do, just like a human. And yet MCP seems to be like what you're identifying with. The energy around it is immense. How are people actually using it? Is there a killer app, killer feature, Some story where you've been really excited about the impact that it's had on an actual design project or designer or firm or your company.
- [113:16]
E
I mean, you should definitely try it out. It is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structured in Figma with auto layout, you've got your variables defined and then you're able to just, you know, basically press a button and with mcp you pull in all that design context into your code base.
- [113:35]
B
Sure.
- [113:36]
E
And you can use inference to basically go figure out how to map it. And I'm not saying it's all one shot, but like with either one shot or a little bit of it, or a prompting, if you have your design set up in a structured way. Yeah, it, it's a pretty wild experience. You know, Coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow and you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but how much it's affected them and how powerful it's been. And overall, yeah, people are super excited. We've been thrilled with the response. That's why we're investing so much time into it, is because we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company is being more open and making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI. There's so much that we've done in so many places and design is context and that context is valuable in so many different spots.
- [114:33]
B
So I should think of the MCP efforts as almost like a business to consumer, like a consumer benefit, not necessarily just something like an API that enables like better, like B2B partnerships and integration. Is that roughly correct?
- [114:49]
E
Yeah, I think it's, you know, I think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure, but I think that yes, with the right MCP services out there, the ways that they can affect, you know, all sorts of places that you consume inference, it's pretty big. And I think we're just kind of at the start. So yeah, for Figma, we're very, very excited about where we can go here. And then, yeah, I think just if you zoom out, the bigger story that is being told is how do we go from idea to product? And it used to be this very linear process, but now we're no longer in that world. We're in a world where instead people try various directions, various paths, and you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas, explore them with your team, figure out that option space. We hope Figma may be a big part of it, but even if someone has a different tool that they've they're using, we also want to make sure that they're able to bring their design context in and with that design context, really help that other surface improve. We think that's a win win for everyone. And it's most importantly a win for the user.
- [116:22]
A
I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools. Like can you imagine if you had Figma make?
- [116:30]
B
It's incredible.
- [116:31]
A
Like when you at that age, like you let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade, what they're gonna be.
- [116:37]
B
I mean I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about like 15 year old, sold a company for like $50 million or something. Like there's crazy stuff happening all over the place, but it's just gonna be.
- [116:46]
A
More and more and more.
- [116:47]
B
Thank you so much for joining.
- [116:48]
E
Last question will be wild.
- [116:50]
B
Last question from the chat. Do you miss the ratty? Oh.
- [116:56]
E
Not really, no.
- [116:58]
B
What is it? It's the university dining hall. Is that right?
- [117:01]
E
One of them, yeah. I was more of a VW guy.
- [117:03]
A
But okay, there we go.
- [117:05]
E
Yeah, the, the Roddy was a great place to see people.
- [117:12]
B
Okay.
- [117:12]
E
And, but then again, I also like, I, I hate standing line. So like I would time out everything so that I either arrived super early or super late. So I wasn't in the long line. But yeah, the food, maybe not the best, but the vibes, right, the memories.
- [117:29]
B
Good vibes. Well, thank you so much for bringing good vibes to this appearance.
- [117:33]
A
Yeah, massive week for you guys.
- [117:34]
B
Massive week. We'll talk to you soon, Dylan.
- [117:36]
A
We'll talk soon.
- [117:36]
B
Have a good one.
- [117:37]
A
Good to see you.
- [117:38]
B
Quickly, let me tell you about Fall, the 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.
- [117:49]
A
GPUs and on demand plus Korra, perplexity and many more.
- [117:52]
B
And we have our next guest from Stripe in the Restream waiting room. We will bring in Jeff.
- [117:56]
A
It's time to Jeff.
- [117:57]
B
PVPN ultradome. Jeff, how you doing?
- [117:59]
D
Whoa.
- [118:00]
A
Okay, we're purple.
- [118:02]
B
I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on?
- [118:05]
F
We're here in New York. We're finishing up some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Stripe tour. But I imagine you all want to talk about some agentic commerce today.
- [118:14]
A
Yes, it's looking wild in there. I get excited enough about payments. Even without the neon lighting. Looks like a lot better in purple.
- [118:25]
B
Yeah. Give us the actual news item. It seems like Sam Altman just found out about Stripe recently and decided to do some sort of deal or something. No, of course the companies go back a long way and so my question is, what's new about the relationship between the two companies today.
- [118:43]
F
Yeah, really exciting. So today for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt and inside of ChatGPT you're able to discover products as lots of people are already doing. But now you can buy from businesses right in the chat. And so we partnered with OpenAI to build this as well as a open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling agentically. So I'd love to get into all that.
- [119:13]
B
Yeah, name every product I can buy today. I mean give me an example because I can imagine there are products where the company wraps in different content management system or order management system versus there are other companies where they sell stuff and it's really just stripe and a website and so that makes a ton of sense. So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like?
- [119:38]
F
Like, yeah. So anytime you discover a product in ChatGPT, if that seller is enabled on the agenda Commerce protocol and is working with OpenAI, you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment methods you've already saved with ChatGPT for subscription or be able to add one. And what's really interesting is one of the big unlocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to agentic commerce and how do you scale accepting agentic payments? And we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the agentic commerce protocol which is an open standard that we co develop with OpenAI for businesses to make their checkouts agent viable, agent ready. And so as a business you're used to, you know, first you're selling in the mall and then you're, you know, sold over the phone and then you sold on the website and now you're going to be able to express your checkout in a way that you want for agents to be able to initiate transactions. And the second big thing is how do you actually move the money? How do you get the payment from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way? Which is why we built this shared payment token API which lets businesses on stripe and businesses that might be using another processor be able to process agenda payments. And that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this.
- [121:04]
A
Getting more into the details if, if for an e commerce company in particular, like where, where does, where is inventory managed is. Are you guys integrating? I know Shopify had an announcement today too. Is that connected to this? Are these two totally different experiences like help me understand and how a specific company like an E commerce brand can get started selling in line in these LLMs.
- [121:36]
F
Yeah. So today's announcement for ChatGPT has Etsy Live. So today rolling out this morning, you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers directly in the chat. And Shopify is coming soon in the same program. So these are the first two merchant partners. The first two e commerce platforms that are are working with ChatGPT to be able to sell agent sell agentically through their LM system and their consumer base for merchants going forward. You know, how do you at scale have a way to express your checkout as a merchant as an e commerce platform that isn't just hey, have the agent like pretend to be on my site and click around to do so. How do you have a standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations? And that's what the Agentic Commerce protocol is. It's a way for any e commerce platform, any business to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction. And we think this is a big unlock for how to scale gentic commerce. The world has already had lots of product feeds. There are many at scale product feeds. But there isn't yet a way for a business to programmatically express their checkout in a way that they can control and have it be agent initiatable.
- [123:00]
B
How does the standard that you built differ from mcp? Is it related? Is it compatible? Are these two separate paths in the tech tree?
- [123:08]
F
Yeah, we think that the Agentia commerce protocol is is specifically designed to help with initiating agentic checkouts online and it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case. It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LLM first as MCP does for generic tool usage. But checkouts are complicated. They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and SKUs and inventory and payment failures and payment success. You need a dedicated specification and that's why we're so happy to partner with ChatGPT with OpenAI to both build the standard but also have it be the way that they're going to scale their merchants. And so you can get started@agenda converse.dev that URL happened to be available last week, so I might have bought it and that's. We went forward with.
- [124:02]
B
How does the Apple tax feature in all of this? It seems like I use ChatGPT on my phone and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital.
- [124:11]
A
If I say Amazon physical goods historically have been exempt exempt.
- [124:15]
B
But if I'm buying a digital good, do you play Nice with that. How do you see that all playing out?
- [124:21]
F
Yeah, today's launch is focused on physical goods and I think there's going to be a variety of ways that these third party services are able to charge in various ecosystems. But today's launch works on web, on iOS, on Android and is rolling out to all US ChatGPT consumers this morning.
- [124:40]
B
Very exciting.
- [124:41]
A
Do you think people are underestimating how much of a shift this trend is going to be? Because we were explaining before you got on earlier, if I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want, be served a number of options and in one click buy it, that's incredibly useful. Even I was giving the example of, of even browsing Amazon and trying to just find, if I'm trying to find a. The example I gave is like a paper towel holder. This is personal for me because I bought a really cheap direct to factory paper, you know, direct from factory paper towel holder and I was just like, just give me.
- [125:23]
F
That's not the place to skimp.
- [125:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You use it multiple times a day. Right. But I, I've always wanted almost a layer over Amazon to just products that have existed or from brands that have existed for more than 100 years. Right. And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of, I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old. Right. If they've been around for saying it's.
- [125:46]
F
Like your futuristic purchase is a. I want the legacy provider. It's a perfect combination. I think, I think you're expressing what that many of us are all feeling in our lives, which is the modality for discovery has completely changed and we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent. And it's certainly having worked on and tested this for the last many months, it feels extremely natural to purchase where you are discovering. My garage is full of things I bought from Etsy as we tested over the last month. And this is just the beginning because with this type of foundational agentic Commerce set of APIs and open standards, it's really an unlock to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale, all types of new consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the beginning here. But we have, I think, unlocked, we hope, how to take these things from prototype to at scale production. And I really encourage folks who are watching today to, to look on ChatGPT and try to find something fun that you've always wanted to buy that might have been on page 10,000 of your search engine, but might be like right there as the LLM really can provide you very personalized recommendations. It's just very fun to on the go buy in a tap in this kind of way.
- [127:12]
B
I love it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and give us a ton more.
- [127:16]
A
Questions I have, but probably stuff you can't even get into. But we'll have you on again soon to talk more. Congratulations.
- [127:22]
B
Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Jeff.
- [127:23]
A
Great to see you, Jeff.
- [127:24]
B
And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15.83% on the news. It's a $7.42 billion company. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions.
- [127:41]
A
Not financial advice.
- [127:42]
B
Our next guest. Yeah, maybe you want to go long, maybe you want to go short.
- [127:45]
A
15%.
- [127:47]
B
But big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chatgpt.
- [127:51]
A
Well, we have Adam Draper in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Whoa, There he is. Let's go. What's happening? Jordy.
- [128:03]
G
John, so excited to talk to you.
- [128:05]
A
Let's go. We're excited to have you Give us, give us the news. What's happening?
- [128:10]
G
All right, well, we raised $87 million actually.
- [128:18]
A
Yeah, let's go, let's go actually. What actually?
- [128:22]
G
Well, it was 87, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, $1 because, you know, that's how rockets go off. 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, three, two, one.
- [128:33]
A
There we go. Boost VC. It's a rocket.
- [128:36]
G
We get it. Continue to do what we're doing. Our investors love our returns, so we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last 13 years, which is backing great founders on the fringe.
- [128:46]
A
Amazing. You were early to sci fi investing. Or maybe did it before it was so on trend.
- [128:57]
G
I was early investor in Coinbase, a company called Virgin Labs that became Snapchat Spectacles. I've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last 15 years. I just flew a jetpack.
- [129:17]
A
No way. No way. Yeah, somebody sent me. Somebody sent me a video earlier. Maybe it was the same company. Were you flying with Jackson Moses? Is that Gravity Industries? Is that the company I was flying?
- [129:32]
G
So, okay, this is the coolest thing I, you know, I read my first Iron man comic when I was like 6. And then about a decade ago, we invested in Iron Man Thesis, which ended up investing in Gravity.
- [129:49]
A
There we go.
- [129:50]
G
I got to fly A jetpack today.
- [129:55]
A
There we go.
- [129:59]
B
I heard there was some fundraising news.
- [130:02]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [130:02]
A
John's back. Hit that, hit that gong. 87 million. There we go. Adam's the most fired up. You're the most fired up guest I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping. You're at the standing.
- [130:16]
B
That's fantastic.
- [130:17]
G
Thank you guys so much for doing this. You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world.
- [130:23]
B
We appreciate it.
- [130:25]
A
We love. Nobody loves technology. I would hate if somebody loved technology more than us. Maybe you do. But. But break down the jetpack. How does this. Like, it's a good example of, like, a specific portfolio company. How does this go commercial?
- [130:39]
G
I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital, is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a 12 year old, and they end up coming true. And I got to do that with a jetpack. I, like, I invested in, like, exactly what my childhood self would have loved to have invested in, except it was seven years ago. And then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it, anyone can do it. I was. I just flew down to. I got to Bakersfield, and then I got to fly a jetpack. And so I am.
- [131:18]
A
Okay. Okay. I love. I love everything about jetpack. How. How does gravity specifically. How are they looking to commercialize? You know, what are some of the use cases? Is it going to be the kind of thing that is more initially, you know, consumer. It's just fun to fly a jetpack, so people pay to do it.
- [131:41]
G
One of the things I always noticed when you guys are doing your thing is that your cans pile up.
- [131:45]
H
So I want to make sure.
- [131:47]
A
There we go. You got double fisting.
- [131:50]
G
So we. So first off, we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great, incredible things. Gravity, specifically. We saw the. I saw a man fly. So he flew in my back parking lot back here in San Mateo. And when someone flies, you got to.
- [132:10]
A
Write him a check.
- [132:11]
G
You write a check right there. And so we wrote a check right there. Seven years later, he's built a, you know, multimillion dollar business. And it has two parts to it. There's the defense part and the media part. And also this training school so that people like, I could become pilots, jetpack pilots. And basically, I highly recommend.
- [132:32]
B
We should go do it. We should go. That sounds fantastic.
- [132:35]
A
I've always wanted to have a jetpack in the studio, in the Ultradome.
- [132:38]
B
Yeah. For really big fundraising.
- [132:40]
A
What's the, what's the defense, what's the defense use case here in your view? Because I can imagine and sort of more controlled environments, this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone. But at the same time on the battlefield, I don't know, with a lot of drones, I don't know if I'd want to strap myself in and get into the air, just considering you might be a target. But how do you view the defense opportunity?
- [133:07]
G
It turns out boarding boats, it turns out, is one of the best defense capabilities. So being able to go from one boat to another boat, you see that.
- [133:14]
B
With the Navy seals show up in the little space.
- [133:17]
A
That was the other demo they did, right?
- [133:20]
B
That was gravity.
- [133:21]
A
Yeah, that was insane. So gravity. Every time I've seen a jetpack, basically the last seven years, it was gravity.
- [133:28]
G
And it's really an innovation in vertical takeoff and landing engines. People didn't believe, there was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground with enough fuel to live for long enough. And so this has been a huge innovation. Also paramedic is a big deal. Like if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within a small amount of time and get it and then the. Yeah, dude. I mean I, I, it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew. I'm gonna be a, I'm a jet pack racer.
- [134:05]
B
Jetpack racer.
- [134:09]
A
Just deploy, deploy the fund in like.
- [134:11]
G
The in cube stuff.
- [134:13]
B
Yeah.
- [134:14]
G
Like it could be bio jetpack things. Things just it needs to have jetpacks.
- [134:20]
C
Evidently.
- [134:21]
B
Amazing.
- [134:22]
A
Last question. What, what's the next category? That is maybe if jetpacks were under hype seven years ago. What, what, what are you looking at? Today.
- [134:33]
G
These founders are coming into my office and they're saying, I'm going to make you live 50 years longer. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to just cure all genetic disease. We're going to move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the healthcare and science world. So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say. And also one of the things we do is as Boost VC is we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech early stage venture community. And it's coming up on Wednesday where you can see some of these bio future forward companies. Actually a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on tvpn. Doug from Radiant.
- [135:15]
B
Love him.
- [135:16]
A
There we go.
- [135:17]
B
Incredible people.
- [135:18]
G
Gravity.
- [135:19]
A
There we go. I expect to See you flying around the floor.
- [135:22]
B
Yeah.
- [135:23]
A
Of the demo.
- [135:23]
D
Okay.
- [135:24]
G
We'll go down together. We'll do it together.
- [135:25]
A
Love it.
- [135:26]
B
Yeah. You need a jetpack into the show. The chat is demanding it. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk.
- [135:31]
A
Great having you, Adam. Congrats on the new fun.
- [135:33]
B
See you soon. Thank you.
- [135:35]
G
We just get to keep back in the founders.
- [135:37]
A
Amazing, incredible rest of your day.
- [135:39]
B
Let me tell you about turbopuffer search. Every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
- [135:48]
A
We puffin Turbo Puffer tomorrow live in the tvp. Can't wait.
- [135:54]
B
But for now we have James Hawkins in the restream waiting room. Post hog.
- [135:58]
A
Post hog. Here he is.
- [135:59]
B
How you doing?
- [136:00]
I
Yeah, very well, thank you very much.
- [136:03]
B
Give us the fundraising, give us the news.
- [136:04]
A
Let's amp it up and we'll figure out what you do.
- [136:06]
B
Let's amp it up. What you got for us? Sure.
- [136:09]
I
Well, first of all, I am very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza.
- [136:14]
A
Whoa, whoa. Shots fired.
- [136:16]
B
I love pineapple on pizza.
- [136:18]
A
I don't, I don't. I'm riding with James here.
- [136:21]
B
Okay, well then you can hit the.
- [136:21]
A
Gong, because I'll hit the gong.
- [136:22]
B
I like this guy now.
- [136:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [136:24]
B
He's my mortal enemy. No, I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that? What timeline? Debating that. That's an eternal point of debate.
- [136:36]
I
It's fine or not. It's not a debate.
- [136:38]
B
What about hot dog? Is a hot dog a sandwich?
- [136:42]
I
No, I don't think that's true.
- [136:44]
B
What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it 90 degrees, then it looks like a sandwich.
- [136:48]
A
I feel like I'm not American.
- [136:50]
I
I have a left strong opinion on this. I think. I think you guys are more.
- [136:53]
B
If a dog wore pants, would it wear them on the two back legs or across all four legs? These are the.
- [137:00]
I
You're not straying from the hard questions.
- [137:02]
B
These are the hard questions.
- [137:06]
I
I've got one more thing.
- [137:07]
B
Please.
- [137:08]
I
I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised Our Series E 1.4 million posts.
- [137:14]
B
Congratulations.
- [137:15]
A
Massive.
- [137:17]
B
What unlocked it? Walk through the business, what's working, the customers, the problem set, Everything. Sure.
- [137:25]
I
So postdoc is a very developer focused set of analytics tools and feature flags and stuff at the moment. We try and help you understand how to build a better product, basically. So we help you understand your customers in lots of different ways, like errors, analytics. We have 16 products. What's working well.
- [137:42]
A
16 products should be hitting the gong.
- [137:45]
I
I think about 10 or 11 that are charged for and the rest is production. That's right. So yeah, we've been busy bees building stuff. What's working? Well, we've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after. We think there's been a big rise in product engineering engineers who want to decide what to work on. And so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them. I think we have about 240,000 customers across, like free and paid. And so we're kind of like heavy product led growth from engineers just installing our stuff basically.
- [138:13]
A
Basically.
- [138:15]
B
Some of these tools I imagine would be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition. What's been the secret to maintaining differentiation against the big cloud platforms?
- [138:30]
I
All the products in one has been the main thing going very, very wide. Because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you. There are feature flag products, there are experimentation products, there are analytics tools, but it's the same customer underneath all of these. And so we kind of felt it's just better. It is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that than it is to buy like 15 point solutions basically.
- [139:01]
B
What's your take on the idea of the compound startup versus iterating and adding one product after the other? How focused do you want to be on a new product at one time? Do you want to orient the entire company around the next product product or do you want to have, you know, let's just get a bunch of things started. We'll iterate towards greatness in all of them kind of simultaneously.
- [139:22]
I
Much more the latter. So we start a couple of products at a time, but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product. So back in the early days when we're smaller, we would go hey, new shiny thing, everyone would move over. But then as the existing one got.
- [139:35]
A
More and more growth.
- [139:37]
I
We'D start. We just weren't very responsive to customers and so on. It didn't feel like we're looking after people properly. So we have tiny little teams like the average team size of postdocs, probably three people on each product. It's just like three engineers deciding what to build. We just try and get out of the way. So fiercely anti bureaucracy internally this small team structure has worked great. Very flat, very wide and a lot of autonomy for engineers.
- [140:00]
A
Yeah. When you're thinking about creating a new product, what Is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment, at what point would you launch something and maybe shut it down? Or if you're launching or by the time you're launching something, are you committed to maintaining it over the long run? I'm curious what kind of the framework is.
- [140:21]
I
Sure, yeah, we start at the bottom end of the market. So the bar to us launching something's pretty low. Like we'll start targeting two person startups kind of doing YC for example. It's kind of start from the start is a phrase you hear a lot internally in terms of retiring stuff. We haven't had to retire a product at this stage. We've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage. We consider it. So we're going in after a lot of the market. This is actually a behavior that we're going to change now with AI in particular because we're looking at figuring out how can we use this sort of multi dimensional data and all these different tools together, which is one of the challenges. And that's partly why we did this round because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kind of go nuts. Trying to automate the way I'd kind of consider it is a bit like if you're trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue, like one data type, you'll get a rough idea, but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening. And so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors. But this is something that's new to us and it will take a little bit of time and some confidence. So that's kind of. Yeah, it's probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point.
- [141:25]
B
Last question for me. How has AI changed the business over the last few years? There's so many different ways that you can launch AI products. You can use AI to speed up product development. There's a million different ways. But what's been the biggest thing that's actually worked for you?
- [141:42]
I
It's massively sped up product development because of so many products at once. It's given us a big. We already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available and it's just ramped up fully. So now kind of we even have companies quite regularly emailing us like smaller startups being like, hey, would you consider buying a company? We don't know how to compete with compound approaches in Our industry, like we've become a feature of a bigger platform, for example. And so I think we got lucky with that respect. We are targeting engineers and their workflow is entirely changing. And so we're trying to move towards a world where we're generating kind of pull requests for people based on like error data session, like video clips of using their products, like their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in. So, yeah, it's a totally dramatic change for us. I think we've gone from fear, honestly, to complete excitement about what's going on.
- [142:32]
B
That's great.
- [142:34]
A
One note Chat. Absolutely loves the website. You should look at it, John. It's absolutely stunning. It's probably the best iteration I've seen of building a desktop and making a website. Just like a desktop feeling.
- [142:46]
B
Oh yeah, really good.
- [142:48]
A
Absolutely stunning. One question, was Posthog a hot company at YC demo day or did it take time to get people to kind of come around to the team and.
- [143:01]
I
The opportunity we actually had, I think relative to our batch, we were doing quite well. We had a lot of traction, just free open source usage. We just had an open source project to start off with. But our seed round was a train wreck to raise. It was like March 2020. And so I was like, man, we're getting this thing done in like three days. And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this. So, yeah, we made like, you know, we've made a bunch of people who've put in like random little 5k checks a bunch of money, which is actually one of the most fun parts, if I'm honest. So, yeah, the seed round was very hard. Later rounds, it kind of got easier. Like the Series A was Google Ventures kind of preempted and we went with it because we. There was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time. And then the later rounds all got much easier because we just had obvious traction and we're quite an efficient business because we're inbound and so we haven't really needed money. And that's our first rule of fundraising is do you not need to fundraise? But we're not against fundraising and that served us extremely well later on. But yeah, the start, the first round was the hardest, by miles.
- [144:02]
B
Fantastic.
- [144:03]
A
Such an important lesson for anyone out there. It's like, it's okay if your seed round is brutal. You know, it's not necessarily. Can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path. It can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or just how good the team is. So thank you for coming on and giving the update and congrats on the round.
- [144:23]
B
Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon.
- [144:25]
A
Great to meet you, James.
- [144:26]
B
Bye.
- [144:26]
A
Cheers.
- [144:27]
B
Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for building and planning products. You heard it from him, they built a lot of products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.
- [144:39]
A
People forget they created modern. They basically created the modern software as a service website.
- [144:45]
B
That's true, that's true.
- [144:46]
A
How many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it? But.
- [144:49]
B
Well, up next we have Eric, the CEO of Modal Labs. He's in the restream waiting room coming in to the TVPN ultradome. Welcome to the show.
- [144:56]
A
How are we doing, Eric? What's happening?
- [144:58]
J
Hey, how's it going?
- [145:00]
B
It's great.
- [145:01]
A
Great to finally have you. Yeah.
- [145:03]
B
Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company?
- [145:06]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [145:07]
J
So we build infrastructure for AI and so basically if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI or sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker, things like that, it really doesn't work well for all these new AI applications, you know, whether that's, you know, generative media or like large language models or things like that. So we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that.
- [145:30]
B
Where does that sit in the stack? Like are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at these massive, massive data centers? Or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at a smaller scale? How does the market actually bifurcate?
- [145:49]
J
Yes, we focus on slightly smaller companies. Initially we saw a lot of PMF with startups, but in the last year or so we've seen a lot of traction also with later stage companies, public companies and enterprise companies.
- [146:01]
B
What's the pricing model?
- [146:02]
J
Not quite at Stargate level.
- [146:04]
B
Yeah. What's the pricing model for something like this?
- [146:07]
J
So it's all usage based, which means sort of traditional, basically like a traditional cloud vendor. Like we charge per GPU hour, essentially.
- [146:14]
B
Sure, sure. And then do you offer like abstraction layers on top of this? Do you want to build a piece platform at some point or are you happy vending it into another cloud partner where the customer might not even be aware of you? How do you sit in the market over the long term?
- [146:32]
A
No, we offer a very fat layer.
- [146:34]
J
Of all these Software abstraction that focus on engineers writing code. We consider ourselves a high code platform. It's meant for engineers who want to write code and they need a better infrastructure than maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of. Of scaling up and down, working with GPUs, working with capacity all over the world.
- [146:53]
B
Sure.
- [146:53]
J
And they want to write code.
- [146:55]
B
What are the. I mean, have you. What's the biggest, like, nightmare story from misconfigured infrastructure or, like, the problem you're solving? Have you seen just like millions of dollars go up in smoke? Is it pretty rare? Like, what's the shape of failure in the AI? What are the stakes right now?
- [147:16]
J
I don't know if I can recall anything. We're pretty good at catching. I mean, in a couple of cases, customers.
- [147:22]
B
I don't mean with your software.
- [147:23]
A
Yeah, it's more like people coming to you, having had issues in the past, configuring this stuff on their own.
- [147:31]
J
I would say the biggest thing right now is just people wasting a lot of money on GPUs. Especially, I think a year or two ago there was this kind of hyped up scarcity of you got to get 1000 GPUs. So a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations and now they're sitting on them and, like, they're underutilized. Right. So they're like, you know, what can I do with these?
- [147:50]
B
Yeah. Is there. Is there value for those folks just to like, sell it back as spot instances for someone else? Like, what are companies actually doing when they wind up a little bit too GPU rich?
- [148:05]
J
I know there's a couple of other companies I think, just like Mithril is one of that. It's not like a space we're like super focused on. Like, we kind of think that model is kind of broken. Like the idea that companies go out and make big reservation, we think companies should just pay for is exactly what they use. And so that's something Moodle does really well, is we scale up and down and you only pay for the time the GPUs are actually running.
- [148:23]
B
Yeah.
- [148:24]
J
And.
- [148:24]
B
Yeah. Yeah. What's your view on the GPU war? Nvidia is obviously dominant. AMD has been in the year of the comeback. They're taking feedback from George Hobby. They're listening to Dylan Patel. What does the race look like? There's also a lot of Asics companies. There's Broadcom's doing stuff. What does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years where you kind of. Where are you partnering up and investing for the long term.
- [148:56]
J
So I think in the next couple years it's going to be all Nvidia. Our customers only want Nvidia. Nvidia is like such a massive advantage in terms of the software ecosystem, but I think look a couple years beyond that, that's when it starts to get more hazy. I'm personally quite bullish on TPUs, for instance, like Google's product. But of course also AMD, like you mentioned and other players.
- [149:16]
B
Yeah. Are there. Yeah. Are there other like anything that you're looking at in terms of like abstracting away some of Cuda's advantages? It just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding. You should be able to take some sort of model and just port it. But that doesn't seem to be working. But people are certainly. They have a lot of economic incentive to do that. Are you bullish on any of that? Kind of like breaking the CUDA lock in?
- [149:47]
A
Yes.
- [149:48]
J
It's funny because people are like, cuda is like a moat. It's such an amazing. But I don't know, for anyone who's actually tried to write Cuda, it like fucking sucks.
- [149:56]
B
It sucks.
- [149:57]
A
It's very hard to work with.
- [149:58]
J
So I don't know why it's been so hard for AMD or for other providers to build a better software layer. Because CUDA is very hard to use.
- [150:07]
B
Yeah.
- [150:08]
J
So yeah, give it a couple of years. I would hope that there's better ways to write these kernels.
- [150:13]
B
Yeah. I just remember the story of like Facebook was written in all php. They wanted to move to C. They didn't want to have everyone rewrite everything, so they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP to C. It's hard to. Yeah, that's it. Right. And so it's like, couldn't you. Couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different gpu, like create a new abstraction layer. I don't know how the economic incentives play out. I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry.
- [150:37]
A
Yeah.
- [150:37]
J
It comes down to what modular is trying to do in a way.
- [150:40]
B
Okay.
- [150:41]
A
Yeah, it comes down. It's hard to be low. Right.
- [150:43]
J
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
- [150:44]
A
Yeah. I was saying it's hard to be like extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that Cuda has this like long term hyper durable, you know, moat.
- [150:54]
B
There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there. Right. Like they both can't be true.
- [150:57]
A
It's like why can't I run a 30 hour Claude code prompt at some point or Claude code in the year 2030 and just like, you know, rewrite this for AMD.
- [151:07]
B
Don't make mistakes and it just doesn't. I would hope that's how it plays out but who knows, I mean we might be years away. Anyways, I generally like your.
- [151:14]
A
I've always enjoyed your takes and would love to have you back on stage some time when we have more time. But congrats on the fundraise. John, did you want to do the honor?
- [151:23]
B
Oh, absolutely, yeah. Give us the details. What's fundraising?
- [151:26]
A
$87 billion. 87 billion soon. 87 million. Series B. Yeah. So Lux is leading. There we go.
- [151:40]
J
Existing investors putting in a bunch of money to.
- [151:42]
A
Yeah, we're super pumped. Great stuff. Eric, thank you for joining and have a great rest of your day. Talk soon.
- [151:51]
B
Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral HQ to get started.
- [152:00]
A
Well, on that note, I believe we have our first in person guest of the day the day of the week from Applovin.
- [152:09]
B
Welcome to the show. Adam, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBPN ultradome. Welcome to the show.
- [152:18]
A
Here we are.
- [152:20]
B
Great to have you. Would love to have you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Just kind of set the table for us.
- [152:27]
H
Yeah, totally. We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do.
- [152:31]
B
That's a good title. Thumbnail for some people.
- [152:34]
A
I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do.
- [152:36]
B
Right, yeah, same thing.
- [152:39]
H
Let's break it down. So we started the company in 2012 advertising inside mobile games. And really the goal back then hasn't changed now. We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves, but do it on a revenue based pricing model so that they can come in and say, look, I want to generate $1,000 of revenue by day 30. Be able to get me $1,000 of media spend against that so I can break even, make a profit. I'll scale unlimited if I can do that. And I've been in ads for 20 years. I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising. You don't know what works, what doesn't. You try to convince them an audience was there. It's all a bunch of make believe until you go to top of funnel revenue based pricing. And so we ended up working with a lot of game developers. These are companies all over the world, a lot of smaller indie businesses. And when you're working with a customer that where the CEO is the founder and they're on the front lines of marketing. It's a great dynamic because usually they're technical. They want to actually understand the math around marketing. And so we built our business really being inside this niche working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world. Well, business started growing a ton. We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games. And over the decade that we ran up, up until going public, this business super lucrative, super successful for our customers. We helped these game developers really build their businesses. But no one had heard of us anywhere.
- [154:08]
A
We weren't vc, right?
- [154:10]
H
Well, not by desire, I'll say. We're one of the biggest misses for Sandhill because we couldn't raise a million over four back in 2012. This was after we launched the product. Business was growing like a weed. We were doubling every single month.
- [154:25]
A
What was the, what was the pushback?
- [154:26]
B
Do people just think like oh Google will take it all.
- [154:28]
H
I think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know. I mean I've worked on the skills over the years. But the pushback was Google will eliminate you if it's not Google. Facebook will eliminate you if it's not Facebook. Here comes Amazon. So it was. Why is this goofy named company gonna be able to do well inside advertising really quickly?
- [154:44]
B
You said you've been selling ads for 20 years. 2005 is the start of this. What's the first ad you sold?
- [154:50]
H
We were affiliate marketing, social. So a couple of us, one of.
- [154:54]
A
And that's how the most hardcore marketers started out in affiliate because it's just you eat what you kill.
- [155:01]
H
If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. It is brutally tough.
- [155:07]
B
That's amazing. And what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the actual games that were the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zynga era?
- [155:16]
H
This is the tough part. It's a lot of casual games. Like the environment we have now is a billion plus daily active players playing solitaires and puzzles and words match three. Yeah, totally puzzles. So if you walk down an aisle of a plane you'll notice like puzzles on everyone's phone. Those are the types of people playing it turns out it's a lot of middle aged women, it skews female. It's a really Strong audience of people. But a lot of us don't relate to that. So you think mobile gamers, well, shooter games and like traditional gamer. And so that was always one of the things we had to. There was a challenge in the business is how can that audience be good for. Especially as we get into E commerce and talk about our launch for broader brands because people, they control so much purchase.
- [156:00]
B
I was about to say it's all.
- [156:01]
H
The heads of households. We're on the platform, we only have adults, we don't work on any child apps. So you've got adults, head of household, skew, female people with money. These are people on a thousand dollar phone playing for 45 minutes a day. It's a perfect audience. People just never realized it until we became more mainstream.
- [156:19]
B
Yeah. How do you think about. There's this critique going around with OpenAI, doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with Nvidia and there's this like circularity to the economy. But then of course there's outside demand. People want to use the products. How do you think about circularity within the mobile app ecosystem where I'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile games and it feels like oh well, like you know, is this just all circular? When does the actual money come in? How have you addressed that throughout the history of the company and like where do we stand now?
- [156:52]
H
I mean again you got to find a purchaser at some point in that circularity. Right. So if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported, be a house of cards. At the end of that you have two inside gaming, two things you're trying to do. Take a user from a game where they're playing X time per day and take them to a game that they're going to be more engaged with and play 2x or 1.5x. You can do that. You create more ad inventory. So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply. It's not any different than social networking. You get more ads viewed, then you got to make more use of the advertising. So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transaction. So you get them going from a solitaire to Candy Crush. They pay $2,000 a year. You've created transactional value in the middle there. There's a lot more value than where the user started.
- [157:41]
B
Yeah. How did the company actually scale? Like how like meat and potatoes were the first deals. And then I imagine everything's like Full tech platform now. But we're the first advertisers who were onboard on the platform. Kind of like a handshake and a contract. How do you actually inventory?
- [158:01]
A
How do you sell this in your app at this moment? And we'll give you, you know.
- [158:06]
B
Yeah. How much of like doing things that don't scale.
- [158:08]
H
There was a ton of wheeling and dealing. Actually cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office. We had a gong and like no, it was a bunch of One of the guys who runs my business team and now runs growth slept in the office for the first six months. So we were affiliates. Right. Wheeler and dealers. So you'd go up to the early game developers and just give them a value prop of you can actually buy an install. Back then there was not even the chance of buying an install. Now I said sell them revenue. You're talking about 13 years ago. Being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative. And so when we went out to the market and pitched the Zyngas of the world on instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens, buy install. That in itself was oh wow, that's great. And then you pair that with video. The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated. 35 seconds of average viewing time on our ads. You can't do anything else. So when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not describing non skippable. Well it's a mix of skippable and non skill but half the ads the user actually it's a great point. Opt in to watching the ad for currency inside the game. That's up to 60 seconds of viewing time. Unskippable. You can't do other things. So we live in add rich environment. This is the most non add thing anywhere in the world. You've got to watch that advertisement.
- [159:26]
B
Yeah, that's fascinating. How do you think AI is going to change mobile gaming? I've seen there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this like character. That's right. I'm sure you've seen these. And then people are like but that's not the real game. It's a pick three underneath. And then I found someone actually built the real game. Because game development's getting cheaper, it feels like we might be entering like a new. There's a couple companies that have been pitching vibe coding platforms for games that will become their own app store. It feels like we could just Be entering a new primordial or Cambrian explosion of gaming. How are you thinking about vibe coded games or more custom software? Obviously they'll all need ads to power this, but how are you thinking about it?
- [160:10]
H
Short answered it for me. We create discovery. The more content that's out there, the better. So if AI creates an environment where anyone can build a game and we're all creative and most people now today have played games at some point in their life, everyone can write an idea down, create a game, they're going to need discovery on the game, they're going to need monetization on the game. So that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform. More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working. So we always talk about AI as LLMs, but if you just talk about AI as modern use usage of neural nets. Recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today. They power Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they power our system.
- [160:52]
A
This is why we always felt like, you know, Zuck, you know, spending however many hundreds of billions like it was, it was very easy to underwrite because you could just get. There's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business, right?
- [161:08]
H
Totally. I mean there's a simple function to all these models. It's more data, more complex model, more compute, better output. And if your whole business model is built on an advertising business, that this technology continue to evolve at the pace it is is fantastic.
- [161:22]
A
Yeah.
- [161:23]
B
How do you think about AI on the ad side? Everyone's kind of predicting, I mean there's already probably some tests out there that a lot of what Meta is doing will be just look at your product catalog, look at your inventory and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text. How are you thinking about implementing that? Are you already running tests? How have the test gone?
- [161:44]
H
This is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like ours. It's the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog. Create an optimized appearance of that catalog through a recommendation system. We already do that. The more complex is today people upload a video ad into our platform, not always adapted for the platform. We're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping, so a lot of times they'll bring a 10 second clip from Facebook uploaded to us. Well, if you could have gotten 45 seconds of viewer time, that sucks. As a brand, that's a total miss. They don't have the resources at every level to go. Let us create 100 ads a week for this company. Now we'll rebrand as Axon and we can talk about that in a second. But this Axon advertising platform, they just don't have the resources is to create that ad count at the scale of the time that you need into our platform. And so when you can apply LLMs to go, here's a couple cool ads out there. Let me create 100 versions of this a week and put it into the system. That'll be a huge uplift in user response to all the brands products that are being marketed on our platform.
- [162:45]
A
Yeah, when you think about we're very close with the Ridge Wallet team and so I got to early on in the Ridge days and I know they're an app lovin customer but early on I would just see the effort that Connor the CMO is just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day. And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, et cetera. It's wild. Wanted to ask how you're thinking about M and A this year, next year, in the future. You guys market cap has grown tremendously and you guys are now in a position where you could. There's a variety of different platforms out there that have a lot of attention that are maybe under monetized or at least not monetizing as well. So I'm curious if that's at all something you guys think about or the opportunity in gaming is big enough that it makes sense.
- [163:54]
B
You're thinking specifically of a Snapchat or a Pinterest.
- [163:57]
A
Yeah, I mean TikTok was in the news last week, you guys were. And that felt like a transaction that was more of like a political transaction than a purely economic deal.
- [164:08]
B
But I guess the broad question is like vertical integration. Do you want to own games at some point or. Or where media is developed or social media platform or does that just make no sense for you?
- [164:17]
H
Well, I mean like we bid on TikTok so the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models than anyone else out there is sound at least to us. But there's a couple things that constrain us. One, our culture is pretty unique. We've got very few people doing an exceptional Large amount of output company is still under a thousand people. So you just don't tend to see scale like ours at that crazy headcount. And so putting companies together into that is really tough. The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us. We're at a point now, I mean, I put out a couple months ago that early in the year we were $11 billion of ad spend on our platform. Plus now we've grown a couple of quarters, a bigger number today, and we only work with somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 advertisers on the platform. We've been completely, completely managed. We haven't opened up the platform. So you think about that. When Facebook opened up Ads manager, they had five, $5 billion a year revenue and we've got more than double that today on a very large platform. We haven't even opened it up. We're going to open up our platform, the Axon advertising platform, in two days. So once we take the advertiser count from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds and of thousands and then subsequently millions, we think the opportunity in front of us as many quarters to possibly years.
- [165:32]
A
And that's so distracting. You know, it would have been cool to own TikTok. It's a solid asset, at least from, from observing from the outside. But the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that that it, you know, you may as well just focus on what you guys already do.
- [165:50]
H
Totally. And with a lean team, we don't have the resources to distract ourselves. So it's full speed ahead. We want to give our solution to all the advertisers in the world. We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming more successful. We want to do that across the board. We've seen it in a very small pilot in E commerce over the last year. The few hundred like Ridge Wallet and others that you said, they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on Meta. And it's on us to execute, to get this in front of all the advertisers out there. If we can do that and become another destination like Meta, where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel to bottom funnel revenue priced. All these businesses around us are going to grow, so we don't want to distract ourselves from that opportunity.
- [166:30]
A
How, how are you rallying the team around Q4? I'm assuming Axon is timed with the championship season for every retail brand. But like what does it look, is it going to be people sleeping in the office more?
- [166:45]
H
I mean there's been a bunch of that. It's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed. Right. So opening up an ad platform at our scale is a pretty complex undertaking. You worry about like, I mean fraud is an obvious case. You don't want to see fraud, you don't want to see scammy ads on your platform. That's the first thing that happens. And like we're probably arguably the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up self service in any sort of form at this, at this moment. And so when you've got that, you got to do a bunch of work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human managed environment. So you've got that, you've got user experience, you need to make sure a customer can go live on their own all the way through to being able to pay you. And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right. We've been doing that for the last year. We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform. So the team is no joke working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple days.
- [167:43]
A
Yeah, you can't, you don't have the luxury of missing Q4 if you want to open up an ad in the.
- [167:50]
B
Ad business, it's the most critical time. How are you thinking about COMPUTE infrastructure? I feel like we're seeing Meta build these massive clusters and feels like maybe that's because they're going to be generating so many ads or doing so much gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute. They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching. Have you had to do on premise deployments, cloud stuff? How do you think about building out your infrastructure for the long term? And potentially a very different just economic dynamic around how COMPUTE falls on the income statement.
- [168:25]
H
Yeah, I mean we work with Google Cloud so it runs through our income statement. So it's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost because we're so lean and, and because we were bootstrapped. Maybe going back to the beginning, we think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization. As everyone's a founder, you're spending money out of your own pocket. And this holds true with COMPUTE as well. I went into my team and said look, we're going to go spend $5 billion, buy a bunch of compute and at our scale we can't do $100 billion of investment. So let's say 5 billion. We'd be wasting that money and it would make them uncomfortable. We try to constrain it to, to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth. So that becomes a cost of your future revenue growth. But what does that mean? If our engineers create a more complex model, they could consume more GPUs if we had unlimited capacity. They just deploy the model. Well in today's world, if they see more GPU consumption and they go holy crap, this is fantastic in result but is going to consume too much GPUs. We just don't have it. They've got to go optimize their code and you may get like you get, okay, maybe we lose one point on accuracy, but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90%. So across the org, we're wired to think about things that way. Optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible so we can have the best business, so we can fund our mission long term.
- [169:41]
B
Makes a ton of sense. Partnering with Google makes so much sense given where they are on Nano Banana and where they are on Gemini. And like just the cost per performance. Even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there. How. How did the Google will kill you like narrative? It clearly didn't happen. But walk me through the various. It seems like you were getting that criticism from venture capitalists early days. How did that actually play out? Like how do you sit together in the market of ad buying? Because you do compete even though you work together on the cloud side. How has that relationship evolved? Like why did the market play out the way it did? And, and was anything. Were there any decisions where you think like we made a really key decision.
- [170:24]
A
If you talk to advertisers, let's use the ridge guys as an example. Again, you want performance and you want to constantly be experimenting and you want, you don't want platform dependency.
- [170:35]
B
Yes.
- [170:36]
A
In a perfect world you'd be spending like 10% of your budget here, 10% of your budget here. 10%. So that one the as prices fluctuate based because they're all markets. Right. You can. Your business isn't, you know, and we saw the businesses that were, you know, in the DTC era that were dependent purely on, you know, a meta and how bad things could get companies going bankrupt based on, you know, small Changes in price.
- [171:00]
H
But anyways, yeah, I mean Google is a, is sort of a bottom funnel channel for most dollars spent.
- [171:06]
B
Right.
- [171:06]
H
If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, Ridge wallet appears there. Well the consumer already knows they want.
- [171:12]
A
To find a wallet.
- [171:13]
H
We were always going to be additive to the Google advertising story. So they did a really good job finding us early and betting on us across multiple business slides and it became a really, really good partnership. If you think about the business model we deploy, it's top of funnel to bottom of funnel priced on revenue. Facebook does that. And if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad, for every single product in the world where there would be no other market, Facebook would capture all the top funnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel. Turns out not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook. So along we come with these really immersive ads capture users attention. When we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets. So in a way when you do it this way, they're getting an arbitrage, they're getting a customer that pays them immediately, they ship the product after the fact and they make a spread on that sale. If they can do that, there's no budgetary constraint. So we don't have a sales force at all really at the company because we're not going and asking for budget. We're going and saying look, if you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite as many wallets as you can go get in inventory. And so with that business model we became additive to these other platforms. I think really that's the only way a small brand or a niche company like us was able to have the large scale success.
- [172:27]
B
If you're advising know public company CEO $100 million in market cap. But they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else. Like what are the trade offs we've seen? Uber's added a bunch of ads, Netflix added ads, there's ChatGPT is going to have ads soon. What are the different levers that a CEO should think about pulling? Have you done partnerships? How do you think about partnering with like those large scale new platforms?
- [172:58]
H
Yeah, we haven't yet. I think at some point in our narrative we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out but we don't have excess demand with so few advertisers today, if we got 100,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out.
- [173:10]
B
Sure.
- [173:10]
H
But I think a lot of times people forget one the technology is really complex. You've only had in terms of a model like ours is scalable us and then obviously meta, a very large scale that's been able to execute on this, this discovery type of product, price on revenue. And so if there's only a couple of cases not trivial and people over trivialize it a lot. The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at. Otherwise it takes a lot of work. And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places. Now in television you do. And that's an area that's, that's been interesting to us specifically like streaming or anywhere where you can see 15 to 30 second clip.
- [173:53]
B
Yeah.
- [173:53]
H
So streaming is a great example. Pre roll video is a good example. But a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent. So if the ad format isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for us. But it's something we can execute on over time and I think that'll benefit the publishers because really these third party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part. And there's not another solution out there that's really that focus on them with Google maybe deprioritizing their third party ad stack for the most part.
- [174:25]
B
Yeah, yeah. What about Apple? I feel like there was a rumble years ago about a developer kid in SDK for adding ads into mobile games and it certainly hasn't stopped your growth. So how did that play out?
- [174:39]
H
Yeah, I mean they have ads on search, they can monetize their own properties presumably. I always say look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the P and L of the businesses in the market swells. So let's say Apple rolls out a great ads product and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game. Well you weren't going to discover that game before. So now that developer who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer got a better arbitrage their business, their P and L grows. What happens when that happens? Well, they have more money to reinvest in us, they have more money to reinvest in meta. And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem. If it's non performant then the customers are getting ripped off. And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off.
- [175:22]
A
I had seen a few pitches over the last couple years for businesses that were trying to effectively create app love and specifically for LLM type products. Why or why not is that an interesting opportunity? Because I would assume the applovin for LLM is applovin.
- [175:41]
H
You probably never thought you'd be saying that statement. I think the day people started saying I want to be the applovin of this was when we knew we made it. I guess like LLMs, they don't have a lot of space so you don't want to interrupt the user experience. You can't alter the output. The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago.
- [175:57]
A
Yeah, one thing that was like a deep like if somebody put in like a deep research query somewhere, waiting 10 minutes, wait 20 minutes, they're waiting, maybe accelerated.
- [176:06]
B
You really sit in front of everyone's bailing.
- [176:10]
H
Yeah, that's a non viewed ad.
- [176:12]
B
Yeah.
- [176:12]
H
Totally worthless.
- [176:13]
A
Yeah.
- [176:14]
H
So yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions which again for us is good. If you think about dollars spent a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want. If they go to the LLM and they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's going to happen is those dollars are going to shift around from search to these LLM outputs and that's good because that's already bottom funnel. The user knows that they want it and in theory it's good because it's just going to be cheaper to the advertiser. So again if it's effectively cheaper, that wallet company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours where they're truly getting discovery from the customer.
- [176:49]
A
Yeah.
- [176:50]
B
Talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds. Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the nature of the market? Do you have a lot of data scientists? Do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways?
- [177:04]
H
Yeah, engineering first for sure. Research science runs the models. Those are typically very intelligent math people alongside. They're also engineers so they can implement their own research. And then on the business team most of the the business people are math econ, they know how to do Python, SQL queries like so we're mostly more technical across the Board now core advertising business. Our business and engineering teams are around 300 to 350. So if you just slimmed it down to what drives the 98% of the value of the company, it's a very, very small team. I always liked when I listened to Steve Jobs talk about the original Mac team. It's a players like to work with A players and then they despise that. Like everything dilutes when you go to B and Cs and we've got a really cutthroat ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong IC where you can output a ton or you're not going to make it. And so we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it. But the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an A player.
- [178:09]
B
Yeah, makes sense.
- [178:10]
A
How do you think about, you know, what's, what's your headcount plan look like over the next few years? Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming you want to multiply revenue by a lot and without adding heads.
- [178:22]
H
Yeah, I mean look, I'd love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world.
- [178:26]
A
But like I remember good old days.
- [178:28]
H
Yeah. I mean up until 100 I knew the story and the name and every, every everyone that was at the business and so we've surpassed that. But being run this lean allows us to maintain a really high quality. So even our go to market team on E commerce, which every investor looks at is a huge opportunity. It's 30 people today. It's really hard to add a players if you maintain a high quality bar. And you don't need to go into the state of look, we've just got hiring quotas. Second you do that, I think you blow up your culture and your organization. So we're slow and steady now. The company's built on automate first, hire second. And so LLMs let's us do a ton. Most of the coding at the company is done by LLMs. Now a lot of the business functions are done by LLM. So we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly. So we should be able to do more with less. And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue without having to add heads. And then it's nice that the product's also so good it sells itself well.
- [179:26]
B
Thank you so much for coming by the TVPN Ultra Show.
- [179:29]
A
This was fun. Nobody Nobody loves ads more than maybe than us. Thank you. You maybe.
- [179:33]
B
Yeah. The chat says because you're a gong respecter or gong ally, we have to hit the gong for you.
- [179:38]
A
There we go. There we go. We'll talk about Axon later this week. Excited.
- [179:47]
B
And before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. And let me also 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 David Senra live in the TVPN UltraDome. We have a video that we're gonna play.
- [180:11]
A
Go bring him on. Come on in.
- [180:13]
B
Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection. To the history to the world of business and podcasting. Welcome to the show.
- [180:25]
A
24 hours post launch.
- [180:28]
B
Yeah. What are we watching here? Oh, it's a drill. What is this? Do you have explain this video?
- [180:33]
D
The text?
- [180:34]
B
Yes, yes, I played it.
- [180:35]
D
Okay, that's the video. But do you have the text that Rob put above it?
- [180:39]
B
What did he say? Right way is the hard way. Jerry Seinfeld intro for yes, they bought a Rolodex. This is for your new show. Break it down for us.
- [180:48]
D
What's going on here? This is why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman on this, because I been friends with him for like three years.
- [180:54]
B
Yeah.
- [180:54]
D
And I know he said I gesticulate wildly, so don't break your new microphone. So I knew how serious they take their work. The first time I ever met Rob was in. They invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio. We talked podcasting for nine straight hours. That's not an exaggeration. We stayed at the same restaurant. We sat there for lunch, and then we started talking podcasting. And like four hours later, the waitress like, we're serving dinner now. Do you want to stay? And we're like, yes. We had lunch and dinner. So I didn't even know they were doing this. They know that I was like, kind of anti intro for podcasts. I just, like, want to get right to it. They're like, we're make a bumper for you. I was like, I don't even know what a bumper is. So that's what they call this. And I was like, it's got to be short, though.
- [181:33]
B
Wait, that's the. Oh, that's from the video Intro. Video. Oh, it all makes sense now. I Remember seeing that? And I thought, oh, it's just CGI or something.
- [181:42]
D
No, it's not cgi.
- [181:43]
A
That's the handmade. Exactly.
- [181:45]
D
They bought a drill, they bought a Rolodex, then they printed out all the. A bunch of companies and the founder names of people I've covered on founders, of course. And then they did all the, like, the editing. And so the whole thing is like the idea behind it was, okay, you turn on Netflix, you hear that sound, right? Or hbo. You hear that sound. I'm cool with that. I don't want a super long intro. Like, I want a very wealthy audience and we got to get to the goddamn point. So, yeah, I just love that it's like an indication of like, how serious we're taking the new show.
- [182:09]
A
No AI. The first made it with a drill.
- [182:12]
D
I'm a human AI.
- [182:13]
B
Yeah. The first episode dropped Saturday. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
- [182:17]
D
They're coming out every other Sunday.
- [182:18]
B
Every other Sunday. How's the response been?
- [182:21]
D
I'm like wired. I couldn't sleep last night.
- [182:23]
B
Excited.
- [182:24]
A
You couldn't sleep Saturday night too. I saw David. David. I called David yesterday even though you.
- [182:29]
B
Haven'T sleep dot com.
- [182:31]
D
Yes.
- [182:31]
B
Get a pod five five year warranty 30 trial. I actually enjoyed your eight sleep ad integrated into the Daniel Ek episode if you want to go here.
- [182:40]
A
I guess I was sleep solidarity with you last night, David, because I put up a 55 I didn't see.
- [182:46]
D
I'm staying at a friend's house in Malibu right now and I don't even have my eat sleep.
- [182:49]
A
We got. We got to correct that. But yeah, it was so funny yesterday I called David. We're just catching up. And we realized we were like 30, 30 seconds on the same. On the same road like 500ft from each other. So we're like, let's just pull over and. And hang out. So I got to get the immediate reaction. But no, it really is. There's. There's. To me, one of the most satisfying things is watching ultra talented people do a new thing and, and just demonstrate the level. The level that they're on. And you and Rob and Andrew have done that.
- [183:23]
D
No, I appreciate that.
- [183:24]
B
Congratulations on the note of, like, you got it. You got busy people. You got to get right into it. Talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question. I was listening to Dwarkesh over the weekend. He kicks it off with like a pretty quick intro, but he does introduce the guest. My guest is Richard Sutton. He's one.
- [183:44]
D
He's very Darkesh. Is Insanely talented.
- [183:45]
B
Insanely talented, especially for a young kid. And you know who else is a talented podcaster? Chris Williamson, friend of mine.
- [183:51]
D
Oh, he texted me today.
- [183:52]
B
And Chris kicks off with no introduction.
- [183:55]
D
He had a thousand episodes.
- [183:58]
B
A thousand episodes came out.
- [183:59]
D
Tay with Matthew Pineapple.
- [184:00]
B
That's amazing.
- [184:00]
D
Incredible.
- [184:01]
B
What a run. But they do introductions very differently. Chris kicks off with one short, punchy, ungoogleable question. Basically, there's no right answer to the question. He'll just say, what is the value of hard work? Or what is your life's goal? And then the person just tees off and it gets you right in the episode. Dwarkesh gives you a little bit more of an intro, and they go back and forth. And then he hits some with a question. How do you think about opening an episode? Do you like the way you're doing it? Do you think it'll evolve? We obviously open with one of the most over the top openings. You're watching tvpn and it's like this crazy thing that just evolved. How do you think about it?
- [184:38]
C
All right.
- [184:38]
D
I think the important thing is I'm not interviewing anybody. And so the tagline is conversations with the greatest living founders. I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have unlimited energy to have long form, deep conversations. You guys have been on the receiving ends of this. Like, when we have dinner, it's not like, oh, we're gonna talk for 30 minutes. No, we talk for like four goddamn hours. And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out, they're like, you're talking too much. In the Daniel Eck episode, it's like. It's like a conversation I like.
- [185:07]
A
Well, it's important. I think the. Your opportunity is to not be. It's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests. Yeah, that's not a good position to be in. Right. People watch Joe Rogan. There's a cohort of people that watch Joe Rogan just when they're. Just when Donald Trump's on. But a huge amount of people are watching it because Joe Rogan, they're like, who's he talking to?
- [185:31]
D
That's what we're doing. So I think somebody. I saw, they did analysis on, like 2000 of Joe's episodes, and he spoke like 45 or something percent of the time. He's just like, the whole genesis of this. And I think I talked about it on the Daniel Ek episode. Episode. It's because, you know, Patrick o', Shaughnessy, who, again, I think is the best business interviewer in the world. Like, if I'm gonna start an interview show and compete with him, that's just stupid. Like the main message of founders, the founders podcast is like the importance of differentiation. So like, there's been a million let's interview business people shows. I'm gonna lose that game. I only wanna play a game that I can be the best in the world at. And so what? Patrick, we've been really close friends. We're brothers, we talk every day. We've have a ton. He's in these dinners with me, he's in these conversations and it happens over and over again. And he's mentioned to me for a few years. He said it before I was on Colossus. He's just like, man, I really think, have you ever thought about doing a show where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room, fucking reading books and doing the crazy shit that you do. He's like, I've been around this. No one can have these conversations. And so what really pushed me and I said it on the Danielle episode was me, him and Daniel had this super intense four hour dinner. I don't meet with anybody. When I. The first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to Austin. Five hours, we talked for five hours. You think I sat silent? I can't sit silent for anything and they don't want me to sit silent. The whole point is you're this weird human AI with all this knowledge and they want prompt and get me going. So we get in the car because we're leaving New York and going back to Greenwich. I'm staying at Patrick's house at night. And the first thing he says to me, me when we get in with his driver, he's like, you have to start recording these. He's just like, I. He goes, I've known Daniel for four years. You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years. He goes, I talk 2% of the time. He talk 49% of time. You talk 49% of the time. He's just like, no one can speak to the soul of the founder like you. You have to start recording these.
- [187:25]
B
Yeah, it's fascinating. There's that story.
- [187:26]
D
That's the whole idea. There's no interview. It's just like, I'm going to talk to the greatest living founders and we're going to have insane conversations that are not predictable.
- [187:32]
B
Yeah. There's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has like extremely high question to talk ratio. Like he Lets other people talk a lot. And that was seen as, like, you know, bullish on his ability to, like, hoover up information. At the same time, in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge. Like, I noticed somebody sent me a short that we didn't post that someone else posted of me and Jordi talking to Marc Andreessen, and it was clear that it was like, Mark had a funny take, and so that was what would get the views. And so we were there kind of as like, accoutrement to the main event. And there's like, window dressing. Like window dressing. And so there's just like, there is a natural pull in the algorithm for. If you're starting an interview show, I should just get someone, really. No, I know. That's the point. But I'm saying. I'm saying.
- [188:25]
D
Did you not just do it?
- [188:26]
B
No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is that, is that if you're just purely viewmaxing, it's like, go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them and say, go. And then just film and then say, what's next? What's on your mind? And those two things, you have to actively resist the view capture, the algorithm capture, and that's what you're doing.
- [188:46]
D
Before, I didn't even know. You know, I don't view Max. I didn't legitimately. Before we did the giant ramp deal for founders. Right. I did not know how many people listen to founders.
- [188:56]
B
You didn't look at the analytics. That's great.
- [188:58]
D
What does that tell you? I don't give a shit. I want the best audience.
- [189:01]
B
Yeah. It's the best, not the biggest.
- [189:03]
D
The reason the ramp deal came about.
- [189:05]
B
Yeah.
- [189:05]
D
Because somebody we cannot name who. If, you know, if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is. Whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is. It's interesting that the probably the smartest and best one, maybe the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes, like, no one knows, like, potentially invisible, literally came because she's like, I was at Michael Dell's house. He wouldn't stop talking about your podcast. He didn't know we were friends. I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show. We have to find a way to work together. That's the genesis of all this. It wasn't how many downloads you get. It's. You have the attention and the trust of the most elite people in the world. Look at the guest list on the new David center show.
- [189:44]
B
Yeah.
- [189:44]
A
Just like David Senner by David Center. Yeah, that's hilarious.
- [189:48]
B
When you pull it up on Spotify in your car, it says, Daniel, David, Sandra, David, Sandra, David, Sandra. It's headed three times.
- [189:55]
A
Are you ready? Are you ready? Somebody in the chat says, hey, David, I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday. You're quite tall and handsome.
- [190:00]
B
Let's hear.
- [190:01]
A
Are you ready to be? Are you ready to be? Are you ready to be a household?
- [190:05]
B
This is a live chat.
- [190:06]
D
You know, Joe, this happened twice. So first of all, I land because I came out here just for you guys. Just so you know, means, like, legitimately. I was like, I don't want to. You guys are really important to me. I want to, like, do this in person. We got to talk about this. How much has changed since. But yeah, this is. It's kind of. I don't like to think about this because I walk in some. I don't know which case this is. One happened at the Tesla supercharger and another at. I walk into Sun Life and get a smoothie and like, I walk in, there's only three people in there, and two guys turn it like, David Senra. And I'm like, what the. And then another guy was charging and.
- [190:41]
A
You used to only get recognized that aman properly. Now it's about to be everywhere.
- [190:47]
D
I can't tell you.
- [190:48]
B
Everywhere.
- [190:50]
D
The new show is going to be the first one that's associated with Iman.
- [190:52]
B
That's very excited.
- [190:53]
D
Yeah. I shouldn't say anything yet, but, like.
- [190:56]
A
We'Re 99% sure that this, your personal brand's already associated with Iman.
- [191:02]
B
How much variation do you think there'll be an episode length?
- [191:05]
D
A ton. A ton? Because, like, again, I'm not. There's no formulaic. There's no formula here. So, like, the way I think about it's like Founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about and in many cases aren't even books. Like, I think the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team are making are so remarkable. I didn't know who Thomas Pefferty is. I read that the article just came out. Do you guys know about this guy? He's worth $80 billion. He's 83 years old. I think he owns 80.
- [191:34]
B
AI will not make you rich article.
- [191:35]
A
No, no, no.
- [191:36]
D
This. This is a guy. I think he started Interactive brokers. Oh, yeah, 80% of it.
- [191:41]
B
That's legit.
- [191:41]
D
Okay.
- [191:41]
A
Yeah, he's original size. Chad.
- [191:43]
C
Yeah, he's.
- [191:45]
D
He's a Hungarian immigrant. But you read this profile and like, I couldn't put it down. I was. I called Patrick. It was midnight. I literally got him the phone. I was like, these things are incredible. And I was like, okay. I'm so excited to. That I read this. Even though it's not a book, I have to make an episode. So that's the episode I'm working on.
- [191:59]
B
Right. Totally.
- [191:59]
D
Right. So that's how we would think about Founders.
- [192:01]
B
Yeah.
- [192:01]
D
David Senra. By David Senro. By David Senra.
- [192:04]
A
Hosted. Hosted, yeah.
- [192:06]
B
Why did you pick David Senra to host the David Senra Show?
- [192:08]
A
You could have picked anyone.
- [192:10]
B
You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in Easy ran.
- [192:14]
D
The funniest response was by Christian Keel. I think he used to be at Astronis. He's like, where'd you come up with a name?
- [192:21]
B
Yeah, that's great. With the Founders podcast, I feel like you have your thinking on episode length. How you divide up the episodes has changed and you have a philosophy around it and. And you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser focused on what it takes to deliver a quality episode. Do you think that will happen over time?
- [192:42]
D
No, because this is the thing. Okay. I am a control freak.
- [192:45]
B
Yeah.
- [192:45]
D
Right. As you both know. So, like, Founders is a one person thing.
- [192:49]
B
Sure.
- [192:49]
D
Like I. To the point where I'm now hand editing the transcripts.
- [192:52]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [192:53]
D
Everybody's like, outsource it. This is why I wanted to play this thing. Because Jerry Seinfeld way, the hard way is the right way. Right. It's like I'm complete. I have complete control. It's like permissionless. I feel like I'm like, you know, creating a statue or like some kind of art. It's like a very intense love affair that I have. An irrational love affair I have with that show. This one, I'm. Now I have a partner. Like, I didn't even mean. I have an entire team now. We don't have a team of Founders. What I mean is, like, there's some. I don't have control over what that person is going to say, whether they're going to be interesting or not. And so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with and we have a crazy guest list, they all came from the audience, Founders, audience. Because that way at least they have, like, they know what I'm into, like, what I like to talk about. They're more prone to say yes for me. Show. But there's wide variance between, like, some. In many cases, in Some cases, like, they're. We've recorded some with incredible people and they halfway through, I'm like, oh, they want me to do a founders episode for them. They just want, literally, they like, just. I'll ask them a question like, hey, what about this? And then they'll like, look at me and like, want me to talk.
- [193:59]
B
I mean, that has to be the same case for Joe Rogan. It's like if you're getting invited to the mothership, you're like, yeah, I want to hear. I want to hang out with Joe Rogan today.
- [194:06]
A
Yeah.
- [194:06]
D
So no, I have to. What I'm learning and you know, this is new to me is just like, loosen up a little bit. Like, obviously the quality has to be good. Like, we have to edit ruthlessly. We're not gonna. There's a bunch of different ideas. Most of them came from Daniel Eck that I can talk about. Like one example he gave me. And again, like the guy's most powerful person in podcasting, he's willing to just fucking counsel you. You should take his advice. So he's like, listen, you need to build up the original feed, right? And then maybe a year in whatever the time frame is, he's like, you need to have a bunch of separate feeds. So he's like, have the two hour conversation that we had and then edit it. Have another feed where you edit those conversations down to like 30 minutes. And then he's like, then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 fucking clips that were incredible. Just that.
- [194:53]
B
Isn't that something that he should be solving on the product side? Like when I, when I went to your show, I saw that I could do in Spotify. I could do. I watched it on Spotify out of respect to Daniel Ek, but I noticed that I could switch the artist intended as the artist as the host and the guest intended. And I also left a comment and it fun in the comment section. But you could watch video, switch to audio. But then there were also short form video clips that were all linked to the same profile. I didn't have to go find David Senra shorts.
- [195:23]
D
Yes.
- [195:23]
B
Why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their side?
- [195:27]
D
That's a really interesting. I don't know. I'd ask them. Okay, I'm not sure, but. But this was. We were in Stockholm together. This. He told me this in January, so a few months. Because the original idea, I guess I should back up to the original idea was to launch in April because again like, you guys have a deep relationship with Ramp, just like I do. And, you know, I had this idea, give credit to Eric and Kareem for the level of trust they put in me where I was like, I want to do this where I have long form conversations with, starting with the people that are in my audience. And like, I think it'll be good. But, like, I think I would love if you guys are the presenting sponsor, like done, like immediately. Right. And the original idea was to launch in April.
- [196:09]
A
April of next year?
- [196:10]
D
No, this past April. But me and Daniel couldn't sync schedules and I'm like, I'm not launching until. Yeah, he's got to be number one.
- [196:18]
B
Yeah.
- [196:18]
A
Because of the podfather.
- [196:20]
D
No. Yeah. It's like the respect I have for him that like, I just knew, like out of every. I'm friends with a bunch of people recorded, but not to the level of like, I've spent hours and hours talking to him. I just knew he's just so wise and he's not. I just knew I could get stuff out of him that, you know, I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else. And so we recorded that like a few months ago, but it was like the beginning of summer. And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify and the head of product, and they're both like, you don't launch a show in the summer. And so that's why I got put pushed back to end of September.
- [196:52]
C
Yeah.
- [196:53]
D
Because everybody's like, they're just distracted. It's just like, you want maximum impact.
- [196:56]
B
Yeah.
- [196:56]
D
And so we waited for a while.
- [196:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, the launch.
- [196:58]
A
Do you expect to record and scrap episodes entirely? You think that'll be frequent or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get.
- [197:06]
D
The unfair advantage we have is that, like, I do a monologue podcast and maybe better than anybody else in the world. And so like, if they're gonna sit there and just listen, I can go forever. Like, forever. No, I don't think I'll scrap it. I just think you have to be. Be again. You have to respect the time of the audience. And so. But this is different. So you mentioned the founders, the formula for founders, like, I don't like doing them longer than an hour. So that way you're listening on 1.5. So it's like a 40 year career. 40 hours of reading. Right. That you can listen to in 45 minutes. That's the value prop of founders. And that will give you a very high end audience if you Just idea after idea after idea. This other one, like if, if I can have an interesting four hour conversation, they're go four hours long. I don't think I can. I think I could talk. We could talk for four hours. And you should edit it down to probably like two.
- [197:55]
B
You're going to do Gaston Glock's daughter.
- [197:57]
A
We should do the first.
- [197:57]
B
Did you see her? No, she's on X. No. Yeah, she took over the company. I believe it's his daughter or maybe granddaughter, but did you listen to that? Oh, yeah, it's one of my favorites.
- [198:06]
A
We could do. The three of us could do a 24 hour podcast on podcast. Podcast for sure.
- [198:12]
D
We could do that. It'd be boring as hell for the audience. But you guys have invited me before. You're like, like, do you want to be here for the whole show? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. Like, I can't live stream for three hours. I will get in trouble.
- [198:22]
B
It's easy. It's easy to watch. No woman in San Francisco charging $30,000 to name your baby.
- [198:28]
A
What do you think you're using that?
- [198:29]
B
Were you using that?
- [198:31]
D
No. You shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it.
- [198:33]
B
Good take. See, it's easier than you think.
- [198:35]
D
I will get in trouble. I will literally get canceled because I don't have a filter. I can't do live, remember. I can edit the shit.
- [198:41]
A
I think the only thing do is swear. You're very, you're very, very, very tame. Other than that, you just always divert. You're just always any. You naturally divert to history and talking about.
- [198:51]
D
Okay, so that's, that's the key where it's like, if you go back to differentiation, right? This is. Somebody said the funniest thing where there's like a Red Bull futurist.
- [199:01]
A
Yeah.
- [199:02]
D
Okay. He's like, somebody ripped, literally said we're going to be the TPBN of Europe. And he, quote, treated them and no disrespect to them, I don't know them. But like, he's like, of course, course, like the Cuban Europe works two days.
- [199:14]
B
Two days a week. To their credit, they leaned into it and they were. Which I really appreciate. No, but that's the point.
- [199:19]
D
Yeah, it's just like, God bless your soul. It's just like, then you're. You want to avoid direct comparison. And I can tell you right now, they haven't asked me for podcast advice.
- [199:28]
B
Yeah, but there's.
- [199:29]
D
I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd want to avoid direct comparison than you two. It's like, you're gonna lose that because everybody's gonna be like, like, let's compare this to tpvn. What is this thing?
- [199:39]
B
What is this?
- [199:39]
A
The ultra drum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main. Go to the main. Wide.
- [199:43]
B
Big wide.
- [199:43]
A
We're here in the drum.
- [199:45]
D
I don't know where the. What camera I should be looking into. There's like, fucking 10 of them in here.
- [199:48]
B
You know, I understand how serious, because someone just copied our last set, and we completely changed the set.
- [199:55]
D
You don't understand how serious these two guys take it. Yeah, it's just stupid. It is a great line in Zero to one, right, where Peter Thiel says, if you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him.
- [200:05]
B
Yeah.
- [200:05]
D
You copy. You don't copy the what? You copy the how. Yeah, it drives me insane. So my point is, like, I'm not going to start another interview show. I'm going to say, hey, I'm gonna have conversations and the conversation show. No, no, not even that. But there's other conversation shows, like Joe Rogan, what you just said, I can't help myself. Everything I hear, read anything, it all ties back to the. That I learned from founders.
- [200:28]
B
Yeah.
- [200:28]
D
So it's like, oh, like the first time I met Michael Dell, when I flew the first time, you know, we were talking, we went through Zach Dell's base power. We're going over, and they were showing, like, me, these. These dashboards, everything else within, like, the first five minutes. I'd made references to, like, Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs. This is, like, this just comes naturally.
- [200:44]
B
Yeah.
- [200:45]
D
So it's like, the important thing about podcasting, or I think any kind of business has to be, like, natural to you. So in our private conversations, we pull ideas from Ogilvy all the time or anybody. So, yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. And so people are like, I liked it, but you should do this. I don't know what to tell you, because it's like, this is just who I am. I can't. I'm not acting like I can only be who I am.
- [201:05]
B
Yeah.
- [201:06]
A
I think the thing that's so. I think. I think the conversations that. Giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or Ovitz, these people, like, I feel, like, incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and get the David Senner experience of, like, having A normal conversation, but then always. You're always pulling it back and, like, contextualizing it with history. It's, like, incredibly addicting. I could just. I could do, you know, go to dinner for six hours because it's still going to just be wildly interesting. But now creating that product, I saw somebody. Somebody in the chat was looking earlier. They were looking at the first few guests, and they were like, I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion. But it's actually the exact opposite of that. It's like, no, just giving this product is something that's completely free. Anybody can just go listen to it, and you get to be. Get the experience of being at dinner with you and somebody that's created a $150 billion company, a $10 billion company.
- [202:07]
D
So there's two things on that. So I did this, like, my very first viral episode of Founders, because I don't, obviously don't try to go viral is when I did the I Had Dinner with Charlie Munger episode.
- [202:15]
B
I remember that.
- [202:16]
D
And, like, it went so Founders to the top of the charts over all, for all podcasts.
- [202:20]
B
The funniest thing about that was that didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like, he didn't want people to write about it. And you got scoops, like, because of reporting on it or.
- [202:32]
D
No.
- [202:32]
B
So new information.
- [202:33]
D
Berkshire's. So again, the reason why people love Munger and people. People I admire is like, they're chaotic, uncontrollable people. I am one of those people.
- [202:40]
B
The best. Right.
- [202:41]
D
It's like, Rob is not going to. Rob Moore is not going to be like, we. I'm gonna try to box this guy. There's fucking no way. So Berkshire was. They're very like, they understand the power of story. They control everything. And Charlie was uncontrollable. And so it was not like I. They knew I was a podcaster. They knew, like, I was gonna make a podcast about it. I wasn't gonna record anything.
- [203:04]
A
Yeah.
- [203:05]
D
And so Berkshire's PR was super mad because they kept. Not because of the episode. They actually. The episode was very positive.
- [203:12]
B
Yeah, it was amazing.
- [203:12]
D
But what they were upset about is then you had all these journalists hitting them up. They're like. I thought.
- [203:17]
A
What did you mean by this?
- [203:18]
D
I thought Charlie didn't give interviews. I'm a.
- [203:21]
B
This one.
- [203:22]
D
Yeah.
- [203:22]
B
No.
- [203:23]
D
So he's like, he's not. I thought, he doesn't give interviews. I'm like, I'm not a journalist.
- [203:27]
B
Yeah.
- [203:27]
D
I'm an enthusiast. This guy's my idol. I have a bust. I have a bronze bust of Charlie Munger in my house.
- [203:34]
A
Journalist. I'm an enthusiast.
- [203:36]
B
Enthusiast. That's true.
- [203:38]
A
That's true.
- [203:39]
D
And so then I feedback. I was like, listen, if Charlie. If Charlie says delete the episode, I will delete the episode. But some lady abrupt. No, that's not going to happen. Like, I'm very proud of that.
- [203:50]
A
Have him call me.
- [203:51]
H
Have him call me.
- [203:51]
A
Here's my number.
- [203:52]
D
And. And we found out Charlie didn't give a. Because he doesn't. He didn't give a. He's almost 100 years old. So to answer your question, or to piggyback on your comment, so I was doing all these, like, I had dinner with episodes where I'd have dinner and then I'd summarize in an episode, but you didn't hear anybody else. And so the original idea I had for David center by David center, by hosting David center is record. Jay Z is one of the most fascinating people to me. Episode 238 of Founders is his autobiography. And he doesn't ever do podcasts. And he did a podcast that was a title exclusive when he was trying to build up title. And the podcast was fascinating. It's called Rap Radar. They rented. They were in a private dining room in Beverly Hills. So it's the two hosts and then Jay Z, and they just have lunch. Right? You know, he's not, like, chewing like that. So you edit that stuff out. And I'm like, that's a. That's exactly what I want. Because what you just said. How much would people pay to have dinner with Brad Jacobs or Daniel Ek or Mike Ovitz? I'm going to New York again in, like, two weeks to have dinner with Ovitz again. Ovid's come like a crazy friend. Like, he texts me all the time. He just booked a guest. I can't tell you who. Let me tell you the funny Ovitz experience. I had this. This week. He goes, hey, I just had dinner with X.
- [205:04]
B
Okay?
- [205:04]
D
I'm not. I can't say who.
- [205:05]
B
Elon Musk's son?
- [205:06]
D
No. And he goes, he's unbelievable. You should get him for the new show. And I was like, do you think you could help convince him? He goes, that's why I'm fucking texting you. Two hours. No, but give him credit. He's like, what's your email? Like the email to the person that can book this for me?
- [205:22]
B
Yeah.
- [205:22]
D
Two hours later.
- [205:23]
B
Yeah.
- [205:24]
D
Date done. Like, he's a He's a shark.
- [205:26]
B
There we go. That's fantastic.
- [205:28]
D
He's crazy. So I do want to say one other thing about being free. I. I just retweeted my own tweet.
- [205:34]
B
There we go.
- [205:35]
D
Because I think this is a pat on the back. No, because I think this is important. What you just said about the fact that it's like a miracle is self is free. And I was feeling this today because, like, the message I've been getting for the, for the Daniel episode. And it's like podcasting is a miracle. You can receive a world class education on any subject you want, on demand, while your eyes are busy, for free. And I understand that. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It's still a fucking miracle to me. I still cannot believe that I can listen to these conversations. I can just. I never.
- [206:09]
A
I still feel that podcasts were much more important to my education than my traditional education. I thought back of. I was lucky to discover, like Tim Ferriss when I was 18.
- [206:24]
E
Right.
- [206:25]
A
And being able to. Yeah, you just did the show with Tim. And just like being able to sit in on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and how to work and how to be healthy, all these different things were incredibly formative. And I just thought I was never growing up. I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all. Right. I had a. You know, there's some people that are. That benefited from that. And I just feel like it is the greatest public, public good.
- [206:55]
E
You nailed it.
- [206:56]
D
Like, okay, if you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like, my parents didn't even fucking graduate high school. That was just never gonna be an option. I had to work full time. Like, maybe you get work. There are a small percentage of people that get world class education and they're surrounded by the crazy network. Like, think about, like, the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all like Jewish. These, these like Jew, Jewish genius Harvard people. They were all school the same time. And then you fast forward, they've been out of school for like 15 years and they're all completely like, absolutely dominating. Like, I couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18, like life changing. And they're still.
- [207:30]
A
You go to your.
- [207:30]
D
You go to.
- [207:31]
A
You go to your friend's house for the weekend and the dad. Just the conversations at the dinner table. Right. But now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone.
- [207:39]
D
Exactly. And so, like, I've learned More. I'm looking for this. We. You know, you were one of the first advertisers on Founders years ago, and I'm actually looking for this text now. Text that you sent me. Probably, like, 2023.
- [207:53]
A
Oh, way back.
- [207:54]
D
Yeah. But you were just like, Founders is essentially, like, the only show that I'm listening to these days.
- [207:59]
A
Yep.
- [208:02]
D
And I want the response, though, because my response was kind of arrogant.
- [208:05]
A
Well, no, I tried. I think it was like, I asked if you were open to being acquired, I think. And you were.
- [208:11]
B
Yeah.
- [208:11]
D
And you wanted. You wanted to buy all. Oh, no. You're, like, the only podcast I listen to religiously. This is. Hold on. This is gonna be funny. Do you think this is an act? So this is back in March 22, 2023 is when this is happening. Okay, so you text me. Only podcasts I listen to religiously. I go, no days off. I'm coming for everyone.
- [208:30]
A
Fact check. True narrator.
- [208:33]
B
He did come for everyone.
- [208:34]
A
How do you explain your approach to work? Because I know you. My experience, you're working around the clock. Like, you're always on, but it doesn't always look like being in front of a, you know, a computer, you know, editing an episode or whatever. But what. What and what have you kind of pulled from the greats to kind of inform your own process?
- [209:03]
D
So I think, like, man, sometimes. So I just did Tim Ferriss, and sometimes, like, I think I said this on Tim Ferriss. Like, I say stuff, and I'm like, I should not be admitting to this. But then every time I do, people are like, man, I'm so glad you said X, Y, or Z, because, like, I feel that exact same way.
- [209:21]
A
What, do you procrastinate sometimes?
- [209:23]
D
No, no, no. So my issue was, I think, for years, episode 222 of Founders at Thorpe. And if you look at the subtitle of that episode, it's like my personal blueprint. And what I thought was interesting about Ed Thorpe was like, oh, this guy, like, mastered life more than almost anybody I've ever come across out of the 400 episodes I've done. And what I mean by that is, like, he actually was, like, balanced. Like, he. You know, he hasn't. He lived a crazy, adventurous life. He invented a system for counting cards in blackjack, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon, created the world's first quantitative hedge fund, Made more money than you could ever spend. But he took care of his health. He was a good family man. And so that's what I meant. I was like, oh, he's all well balanced. And I was like, this is my blueprint, and the closest thing I have to a mentor. I would say, like, an explicit mentor and kind of like an older brother is Sam Hink. And I was on the phone with him recently. I mean, recently. It's probably like nine months ago. Because I kind of understood this about myself for a while. And I'm like, man, I think I'm fucking lying. Like, I think I'm lying when I say, like, that's my blueprint. Like, I don't. Like, I don't want to be balanced. Like, I don't. Like, I, like, I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am like Ed Thorpe. And, you know, I think Sam's point, he's just like, he's a way better person than I am. Like, legitimately better human being than I am. And his point is, like, trying to pull me back in that direction. And I just think that's, like, not going to happen. So the answer to your question is, like, if my eyes are open, then I'm thinking about work, and I'm only thinking about work, and it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession. Dude, I don't want to talk about this. I literally. Like, this sounds so, so terrible. I literally, like, had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so fucking important to me. And I knew it was. I knew that yesterday was, like, a big turning point in my life. But I woke up from a private message from Daniel. And it's like, I read it and, like, immediately started fucking crying. Like, not, like sobbing, but, like, tears in my eyes. Because to have somebody that you respect so much say, you're like, you.
- [211:24]
C
You're.
- [211:24]
D
I'm really proud of you. Like, what you're putting out is excellent. Really great. And to have that and also love it the way I do. It's like, the reason I said Enzo Ferrari, because he said a man dominated by passion such as mine, like, can't be cut in half. His whole point was, like, he wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari. And so my work thing is just, like, I'm infinitely curious. And so, like, today, you know, I worked out, and then every other thing was just reading. And, like, I'm reading two books at the same time. I'm working on founders episodes. I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode. Like, I don't know. And then I just come over here and, like, we're friends, but this is kind of work too. And then after this, like I'm going to go back and work some more and like that's all I want to do.
- [212:08]
B
I have a follow up question, but first I'm going to tell you about Ad Quick.com out of home advertising made Easy, measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
- [212:20]
D
I don't, I don't mind the ad. I love the ads and I love how they're weaved in. But if I'm sitting here, it's got to be a ramp ad.
- [212:26]
B
Okay, can we do a ramp?
- [212:27]
A
Run it back. Run it back.
- [212:28]
B
Time is money. Save both.
- [212:30]
A
There we go.
- [212:30]
B
Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. my question, do you think that there is a material difference between retired and live player, active CEO, post fu money, post economic in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out. If you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel Ek and Brad Jacobs and Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're gonna interview were.
- [213:01]
D
I'm not interviewing them.
- [213:03]
B
What? Yeah, conversing, talking to. Do you think that they would be able to tell, okay, this person's still in the arena. This person is post economic checked out bad.
- [213:15]
D
It's not a money thing, it's not a retirement thing.
- [213:17]
B
What is it?
- [213:18]
D
It's like a personality thing. Wait till you see the Brad. I cannot believe some of the stuff we got on film that Brad Jacobs does.
- [213:25]
B
There we go.
- [213:26]
D
Because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is and obviously like he's a public company. I don't know if he's a CEO. He's definitely chairman. But like a lot of these happen to be public company CEO. So like I have to be. You know, they have, they have comms people and they have all this crazy stuff and I'm not going to, I'm not intentionally trying to get in trouble with anybody. You know, again, I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist. I just think, hey, you're brilliant. Can I pull something out of you that other people. But I benefit a lot from talking to you. And so it's kind of selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you. Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversations we have Anyways, and so person like Brad doesn't give a shit. He is 68 he's got the most energy of anybody else have been around. He also has nothing to be insecure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies and he's a.
- [214:09]
A
He wrote the book on starting billion dollar companies.
- [214:12]
B
And I think it's not asking for, you know, like, are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in? That's not relevant.
- [214:20]
D
We don't talk at all about current affairs.
- [214:22]
B
Sure.
- [214:22]
D
Current events. My whole thing is like, which is.
- [214:25]
A
This is why we're beautiful yin and yang. Because obviously we're focused on another point.
- [214:31]
B
Another huge point of differentiation against like a Rogan is like, you go on Rogan, it's going to be like, well, let's react to the news right now. It's very different.
- [214:37]
D
No, and my point, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not.
- [214:40]
B
We talked about this.
- [214:41]
D
John was like, will you do a podcast with me? I was like, what are we going to do? He's like, talk about tech news.
- [214:45]
B
I'm like, yeah, talk about tech news.
- [214:47]
D
No, I'm not going to talk about tech news.
- [214:49]
A
Would you. Rav is asking, would you interview David Senra on David Senra by David Senra, hosted by David Senra.
- [214:57]
D
Okay.
- [214:58]
A
Would you interview yourself?
- [214:59]
D
Okay. So the, the, the, the.
- [215:01]
B
Hold on.
- [215:01]
D
The reclusive genius that we all know and then we can't name his name literally called me yesterday.
- [215:05]
B
Yeah.
- [215:06]
D
And had a long conversation about this.
- [215:09]
B
Yeah.
- [215:09]
D
And he had a. I'm not, I can't say I'll tell you guys off there, but he had a great idea and he's like, once we. We should do this for episode 100.
- [215:16]
B
And I'm like, yeah, well, here's another great idea. Go to getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, Any watch. Get a look.
- [215:25]
A
Last question I have on my side. Then we should, we should grab lunch. I'm sorry, do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting.
- [215:37]
B
Era?
- [215:38]
D
We had this conversation yesterday.
- [215:40]
A
It was, I mean, there was a. There was a beautiful. There was. There was a. There was about a decade and a half where you could start a podcast and have a.
- [215:50]
B
You know, I was doing media part time. I was one of the worst.
- [215:54]
D
Yeah, but we had this conversation.
- [215:55]
B
No, you convinced me.
- [215:57]
D
I had this conversation when it came in because it was just obvious. We'll talk about this later. It's the first fucking video I saw of yours. I was like, this guy. We have to be Friends. He's a generational talent. Like, it's just.
- [216:08]
A
We had it. We had a guy stop John while we were at breakfast this morning. Had no idea about tvpn, but was obsessed with John's videos. And John's like, I published a video. Published a video. And, like, over a year.
- [216:21]
D
Yes, I was. I wouldn't think it was that early, but I came in really years early. So anyways, we. Me and Jordi just randomly talk about this because we can't help ourselves. Yesterday, when we randomly ran into each.
- [216:33]
B
Other.
- [216:35]
D
This is where I. Like, I don't mean any disrespect to other people. So.
- [216:39]
A
So we are live.
- [216:41]
D
I know I have to be very.
- [216:43]
B
Careful, and that's a great place to end it.
- [216:45]
D
No, no. Okay. No disrespect. There's no way this guy's watching.
- [216:50]
A
No, no, no, no, no. It all gets back.
- [216:53]
D
Okay, okay. Right, Okay. I was induced into a state of rage. I was at a dinner, and I was introduced to another podcaster, and they mentioned, like, again, they're from, like, the old school, right. When you can, like, come in and, like, it's just different. And basically his point was just like, yeah, there's, like, I have to figure out, like, a new form.
- [217:15]
B
There were a lot of people that saw podcasting as just, like, a marketing side hobby.
- [217:20]
D
But you can't say, I need, like, I need to fix my show, and I need a different, like, I need it, like, a new, like, take on my existing show and also tell me that I'm gonna take three months off to do something else that's not the. The podcast.
- [217:33]
B
Yeah, I told him.
- [217:34]
D
I go, you're gonna get up, like, because what's happening now. This is exactly what I said, though. But this is what's happening now is people used to come in and they're like, oh, I'm just gonna, like, I can do three other things. Podcasts could be your third, fourth, fifth most important thing in your life.
- [217:47]
A
Yeah. It's just 90 minutes once a week. Yeah.
- [217:49]
D
But now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in. And the conversation we had is like. So I think of, like, obviously, I approach this as if. If an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a Munger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing, or Edwin Lam was doing what I was doing, what would they do? That's exactly how I think. And then I come into this, and I'm like, oh. And I knew you guys think like this anyways. But what I Was just telling them because I was like, where did the rest of you had like 15 people last time I was here. The interns went back to college.
- [218:16]
B
Yeah.
- [218:16]
D
I'm like, no, they're going to learn more. I go, these two or one of.
- [218:20]
A
Our interns didn't go back to college.
- [218:21]
D
But I go, this is what I said. I go, these two are going to take this. This as far as it could possibly go. There's no way, if you have a front row seat to that, skip a year of college. They're going to take this as far as possible. You guys are not at. You're not. You are podcasters, but you're entrepreneurs and you just realize, like, this is the product. Look what it's got. Your one year anniversary is what, four days from now?
- [218:43]
B
I think so.
- [218:43]
D
Yeah.
- [218:44]
A
Yeah. We need to figure out when.
- [218:45]
B
365 probably.
- [218:47]
D
But look at what you guys done.
- [218:50]
A
We didn't start. We didn't. Well, we didn't. Yeah, we didn't start. No, you didn't.
- [218:53]
D
Doing daily until I cornered you at the Feena in Miami and started yelling out of love.
- [218:59]
A
That's the real. That's the real founding date.
- [219:02]
B
Yeah.
- [219:02]
D
But my point being is like we were just looking at episode one right before I came on and look what you guys, you're entrepreneurs. You've iterated tremendously in a year.
- [219:12]
B
Yeah.
- [219:13]
D
And so, yeah, good luck competing with John and Jordi. You're not going to do that.
- [219:16]
A
Yeah. It's also, I mean, the function of, you know, John spending years building up, figuring out how to create great content online, me starting my career basically selling ads on the Internet, just a bunch of different. And then, I don't know, it's a. Would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did prior to.
- [219:38]
D
But then there's also something that is not copyable, which is the chemistry between you two. Which is why I was so like emphatic about. You need to take this more seriously. Not that you weren't, but like you. You had. There's just. You can't buy that.
- [219:50]
B
What do you mean? Chemistry? We're mortal enemies. No, you just play the amount of time.
- [219:54]
A
Yeah. We're just great actors. We're here in Hollywood.
- [219:56]
B
Yeah.
- [219:57]
D
There's so many times where I remember.
- [219:58]
B
When I went to casting and they were like, you're gonna play this guy.
- [220:00]
D
This is a lie. You don't lie to your audience.
- [220:03]
A
The character, the friend. A character that's friends with for this other host.
- [220:07]
D
There's so many audience, they're lying. There's so many times when I'm with one and the other one calls the other one and it's just like they love each other. Like, I can't hang out with anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them. So, like, I'm much nobody.
- [220:23]
A
I just. Hey, nobody likes.
- [220:25]
B
Talking about 225 is not gonna pitch itself.
- [220:27]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We. We can't.
- [220:29]
B
Who else will I get to shoddily spot me while they're on their phone? And I'm dying from the sex therap.
- [220:35]
A
I've. I've definitely got. I've gotten better at spotting. But when? When? In the morning when we're working out. It's. It's gonna be a couple times. John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was batching.
- [220:47]
D
Dude, you're back. But it's the joint workouts are working. I saw the pictures of you at the beach. Your back's getting.
- [220:52]
B
It's getting big. Way wider on the juice. Look at this.
- [220:56]
A
No, no juice. I do. I do that here. You know the secret? I eat a ham. I eat a double smash burger every morning.
- [221:03]
B
There's secrets anyway.
- [221:05]
A
Secrets. This is a lot of fun.
- [221:07]
B
Let me tell you about wander. You want to sing with us? Find your happy place. 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. No, but better.
- [221:19]
A
Cody Hayes, I just have to say I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you.
- [221:24]
B
Congratulations.
- [221:25]
A
I feel lucky to have met you before you became a household name. And nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive. Anything. Anything along those lines. So it's one I.
- [221:45]
D
Thank you very much. The second part, I think is really important because at the end of the day, if you're insanely talented, it's like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships. Like that is all outside of work work. I care deeply about the friendships that I build. And like, I don't purposely. You know, I talked to Kareem about this. He's like, man, you're selling all these ads for other podcasters. You're doing all sorts of stuff. Kareem from Ramp, one of the gene, maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today. Technical mind working in finance today. Listen to the Daniel episode. You'll see how he's similar to how Kareem's working style is very similar to Daniel's. And he's like, why don't you start, like, a, you know, business doing this?
- [222:19]
B
It's like, I don't.
- [222:19]
D
I do it because I love the people. I love podcasters, and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously. And it's like, I like seeing my friends win.
- [222:27]
B
And no side hustles.
- [222:29]
D
Yeah. And that's another reason.
- [222:30]
A
Never side hustle.
- [222:31]
B
Well, let's ring the bell for the first episode.
- [222:34]
D
Thank you.
- [222:37]
A
There we go. Great hit. Thank you for tuning in, folks. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow.
- [222:43]
B
See you tomorrow.
- [222:43]
D
Thank you.
- [222:43]
A
Cheers.