Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Figma's AI Assistant | Dylan Field, Brian Chesky, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Summary – May 20, 2026

Episode Theme:
This episode is a dynamic, multi-guest breakdown of the 2026 Google I/O announcements, the state of AI-powered products, emerging IPOs (especially SpaceX), and candid founder/operator insights. John Coogan and Jordy Hays helm this live show, joined by leading voices: Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Figma’s Dylan Field, investor/journalist Tae Kim, Socket’s Feross Aboukhadijeh, Mercury’s Ahmad Akhund, and Marcus Milioni of Minted NY. Key topics include: Google’s AI ambitions and product misfires, the future of smart eyewear, the big IPO pipeline, product-led AI trends (Figma, Mercury), and strategies for enduring, community-driven brands.

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Google I/O 2026 Reactions & Smart Eyewear Wars

(04:00–14:20)

• Main Announcements: Google’s new products center on "Intelligent Eyewear" collaborations (with Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and Samsung), an updated Gemini AI platform (Gemini Omni, Spark, Flash 3.5), and surprising anti-gravity demos.
• Eyewear Partnerships:
  • Meta has Ray-Ban, Apple rumored with Carl Zeiss, Google partners with Gentle Monster/Warby Parker.
  • Gentle Monster praised for a camera design that’s discreet and “doesn't scream wearable tech” (07:30).
  • Meta Ray-Bans set the product/brand standard: “The Wayfarer is just such an iconic...it's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced.” – John (13:18)
• Adoption Challenge: “Smart glasses are going to have product/market fit among people that need to wear glasses first…It’s going to be harder to get someone that doesn’t need glasses to add a new device.” – Jordy (10:31)
• Privacy & Design: Ongoing tension on stealthy cameras, privacy cues, and competing for user trust.
• Apple’s Strategy: Apple likely to tightly control design, not partner widely early on.

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Google’s AI Evolution & Developer Sentiment

(14:23–21:51)

• Product Dissonance: Google’s new AI (Gemini Flash 3.5) described as “incremental progress,” failing developer expectations.
  • "Generally a pretty disappointing I/O." – John (17:25)
• Product Confusion: Too many overlapping offerings: “Gemini, Spark, Omni, Pro, Ultra, API...the typical meme.” – John (11:45)
• Benchmarks: Gemini 3.5 ranked below competitors; more expensive but underperforming vs. new entrants like Composer 2 (19:11–20:11).
• Strategic Shift: Google increasingly relies on outside labs (Anthropic); placing massive capital/resources into third parties.
  • “Starting to make more and more sense why Google has put so much capital behind Anthropic.” – Jordy (20:11)
• Feature Fatigue: Real risk of “AI fatigue” stuffing every product surface.

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Google’s Real-World Data Troves & AI Use Cases

(14:22–16:06, 21:54–24:08)

• Street View as AI Fuel: Google’s Street View imagery is undervalued as training data, enabling realistic simulation/games.
• Slide into AR/VR: Optimism (and impatience) for practical, immersive AR from Meta, Apple, and Google, with field-of-view and hardware trade-offs discussed.

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IPO Wave: SpaceX, Anthropic, and The Mag 7

(21:54–28:10, 77:27–79:41)

• SpaceX Eyes Public Markets:
  • Prospectus imminent; Goldman Sachs leads over Morgan Stanley—a surprise based on Elon’s history.
  • “Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than $60B in gains on the SpaceX IPO.” – John quoting Katie Roof (26:22)
• Venture Returns: Venture giants Sequoia, Founders Fund, Valor face “era-defining” windfalls.
• Valuation Skepticism:
  • “I’m just hesitant at those extreme valuations. That’s less upside for a retail investor.” – Tae Kim (79:04)
• Market Implications:
  • SpaceX set to outsize all tech IPOs of recent years, potentially shifting Mag 7 composition and making AI unicorns (Anthropic, OpenAI) look cheap by comparison.

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Figma's AI Design Agent & Evolving Product Philosophy

Guest: Dylan Field
(28:21–48:14)

• Staying Sane in AI Hype Cycles:
  • “In the age of AI, those who stay sane win.” – Dylan Field (29:00)
  • Social media = not reality.
• AI Slop vs. Real Designer Craft:
  • “We’re already in a period now where if I go to a startup’s website and it’s clear it was just a one shot prompt, that says something about the company.” – Jordy (31:40)
• Figma Design Agent:
  • Focused on automating rote, context-specific design tasks (e.g., design system maintenance, translations).
  • Intent: Elevate designers’ creative focus, push past “AI slop” and clichés.
  • “Getting these models to speak design well has been non-trivial and very cool.” – Dylan (33:56)
• Guardrails & Quality:
  • Design file exploration is useful, but tool must avoid introducing structural bloat—Figma investing heavily in evals and feedback to maintain rigor (35:38).
  • “With AI, the outputs of the models are like clay you can mold.” – Dylan (36:10)
• Brand and Creative Superpowers:
  • AI unlocks: spend more time on creative concepts, automate scaling brand assets across surfaces.
  • “More people are starting to use Figma in the organization…the breadth of usage expanding.” – Dylan (40:16)
• Figma As "Front Door":
  • Should non-technical teams start with design, not just code? “Design is increasingly the battleground…where everyone is going to really duke it out.” – Dylan (47:09)
• Summary: Figma is positioning itself as the collaborative, context-aware creative agent, not just a design generator.

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Security in the Age of AI: Socket’s Sizzling Growth

Guest: Feross Aboukhadijeh (Socket.io)
(48:32–58:47)

• Series C Raise: $60M led by Thrive Capital; “overnight success that took four years.” (49:28)
• Security Landscape: AI and coding agents are accelerating code (and risk) volume; “perfect storm” of vulnerabilities, open source maintenance strain, and increasing exploits.
• Certified Patches:
  • Socket’s deterministic, AI-powered “certified patches” offer automated, near-instant “make your vulnerabilities go away” experience (54:15–55:21).
  • “We're giving away all the critical patches to the community for free.”
• Universal Priority:
  • Security has gone from niche to board-level concern: “It’s literally like, you know, every day.” (56:27)
• Open Source Burden: Automation offers help but adds review/maintenance load for under-resourced maintainers.

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Markets, Nvidia, and AI Infrastructure: Tae Kim’s Investor POV

Guest: Tae Kim (Key Context)
(59:01–85:45, 61:15–71:24)

• Memory Boom:
  • AI GPUs need 25x more memory/GPU—"Don’t make fun of the Koreans [buying SK Hynix]. They’re right.” – Tae (61:15)
• Nvidia’s Relentless Growth:
  • AI demand “far exceeding supply…Numbers are mind blowing…Stock is trading below the S&P 500 while growing 80%.” (63:35–64:26)
  • Skeptics fail to see continued 50–70% growth and “locked up all capacity for lasers and optical [components].”
• Market Skepticism:
  • Nvidia’s low multiple = “AI skeptics believe the peak year is near" + overestimation of TPU/Trainium competition.
  • Buybacks as “re-rating” trigger.
• TSMC CapEx:
  • Wafers/memory set to unlock next phase of supply restraint—but “10x is not going to happen, but 50–75% the next three years, I think that can happen.” (71:45–71:59)
• China Exposure:
  • “I’ve given up on China… temper your expectations. Not going to happen.” (72:17–72:44)
• Meta’s Position:
  • “Their core advertising business is more durable than Google search right now…the ad business is durable, I wouldn’t count Meta out.” (80:38)
• Google I/O Reaction:
  • “I’m actually pretty negative on Google right now…basically non-existent in coding agents.” (73:35)
  • Warns: strategic risk in propping up competitors (Anthropic, OpenAI): “Once the value accrues to Anthropic and OpenAI, they’re going to be the power players 4–5 years from now.” (75:42)

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Mercury’s Hypergrowth: Embedded Fintech in the AI Era

Guest: Ahmad Akhund (Mercury)
(87:04–98:23)

• $200M Raise Led by TCB: Record Q1, 2.5x applications YoY; surge in organic demand, "LLM recommendations" now a key customer source.
• LLMs as Distribution:
  • “Most of our growth is organic…but even the percentage organic has been growing for us.”
  • “LLM recommends Mercury when you ask 'which bank should I use for my startup?'” (88:16–89:50)
• Product Expansion:
  • Entering payroll through acquisition; vision to be the finance hub for startups (“multi-product strategy”).
  • “Number one, I don’t know exactly where the world’s going to go…maybe everyone’s going to be using AI assistants to do everything.” (91:00)
  • Launching “Command”—AI-driven business operations.
• AI Decluttering:
  • “AI has a decluttering effect…people are not trying to do a specific thing, but just talk about a problem.” (95:13)
• Pace of Deployment: Cautious angel investing—opportunity best after the hype subsides.

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Minted NY: Building a Modern, Community-Led Apparel Brand

Guest: Marcus Milioni (Minted NY)
(124:26–148:45)

• Origin Story:
  • Began as social media “rep scheme” (3 TikToks/day for 365 days), grew a loyal audience by sharing fitness/fashion journey openly.
• Founder-Led DTC:
  • “You're building your personal brand as well as the company. People are following, building the company also like your own journey as an athlete…never been done at this cadence.” – Jordy (128:32)
• Key Growth Moments:
  • First big Christmas (“all inventory in my parents’ garage”), then rapid scale to major drops, including collabs with Saucony.
  • “Every single drop, I was just run the bank account to $0 on production and hope that it went well.” (131:08)
• Drop Culture, Scalping & Bots:
  • To thwart bots, added “decoy listings”: fake, heavy products or hidden keywords; manual orders prioritized (139:41–141:14).
• Bootstrapping as Strength:
  • “We're bootstrapped now in year five…going slow and building a really strong foundation is not a bad thing.” (137:29)
  • 99.5% organic growth, minimal paid ads.
• Community First:
  • “Having way more demand than supply is a blessing—but getting the product into the hands of actual fans is key."

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Airbnb as “Concierge for the World”

Guest: Brian Chesky
(104:27–123:54)

• New Features:
  • Grocery delivery, airport pickups, car rentals, boutique & independent hotel bookings, price match guarantees.
  • “Now, you can have groceries waiting for you in an Airbnb…finally, car rentals…independent hotels.” (104:45)
• Platformization:
  • Re-architected Airbnb from “one story” to “four-story house”—can now launch new verticals/experiences in weeks, not years.
  • “It took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes…now we can launch services in a couple weeks to a month.” (106:13)
• Expansive Vision:
  • “I think you’ll see a couple dozen other categories coming…” – Expanding into time, homes, cars, other assets (“anything that’s empty could be further monetized”).
• Service Distribution & Business Model:
  • Geographic power-laws: only 3 of 10 new services break out (photography, chefs, massage most popular).
  • “We don’t need to monetize every experience…just really want people to love our service.” (115:09)
• Personalization Without “Creepy”:
  • Move from inferring preferences to asking directly; future “preferences library” for privacy control.
  • “Your concierge for the world should ask you questions…If you go to a travel concierge and they don’t ask you a question, that’d be weird.” (120:12)
• Event-Driven Growth:
  • “You can look at a heatmap of all our bookings and see…the Taylor Swift Eras tour, the Olympics.” (118:38)
  • Big events spur influx of first-time hosts, many of whom convert long-term.
• Health/Fitness Sidebar:
  • “If you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, take up to 20 grams of creatine, and you’re nearly as alert as if you got a full night’s sleep.” – Brian Chesky (122:28)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Dylan Field (Figma):
  • “In the age of AI, those who stay sane win.” – (29:00)
  • “With AI, the outputs...are like clay you can mold.” – (36:10)
• Jordy (Host):
  • “Smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first.” – (10:31)
• Tae Kim:
  • “Don’t make fun of the Koreans—they’re right.” (61:15)
  • “Their core advertising business [Meta] is more durable than Google search right now.” (80:38)
• Brian Chesky:
  • “I think you’ll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next year or two on Airbnb.” (111:24)
  • “Your concierge for the world should ask you questions.” (120:12)
• Notable Humor:
  • Resting on your laurels vs. sleeping at the wheel extended metaphor (99:54–102:13)
  • Live-action role play (LARP) video tangents with mock seriousness (144:24–145:08)
• Interactive Gimmicks:
  • Use of sound effects, comedic voice changers, live reactions to chat and earnings.

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Timestamps—Key Segments

| Segment | Start | End | |-------------------------------------------------|---------|---------| | Google I/O Eyewear & AI | 04:00 | 14:20 | | Google Product Fatigue/Developer Reaction | 17:24 | 21:51 | | SpaceX IPO, Venture Returns | 21:54 | 28:10 | | Figma AI Design Agent & Founder Mindset | 28:21 | 48:14 | | Socket Security/Perfect Storm | 48:32 | 58:47 | | Nvidia/Markets AI Infra (Tae Kim) | 59:01 | 85:45 | | Mercury—AI-native fintech, funding | 87:04 | 98:23 | | Minted NY—Modern founder-led DTC | 124:26 | 148:45 | | Airbnb’s Ecosystem Expansion (Brian Chesky) | 104:27 | 123:54 |

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Final Thoughts

This episode illustrates the speed and complexity of today’s tech–how AI is remaking everything from product launches (Figma, Google) to finance (Mercury) to offline experiences (Airbnb), and how leaders are reacting to seismic growth, hype cycles, and the risks of “AI slop” and “feature fatigue.” The human side—founder stamina, security vigilance, community focus, playful irreverence—remains TBPN’s throughline even as “agentic AI” takes center stage.

Required Listening for: Tech builders, founders, investors, and anyone trying to keep pace with the intersection of AI hype, mass consumer platforms, and creative, disciplined company building.

Transcript

[Jordy]

You're watching TVPN.

[John]

Little preview there for you. It's Wednesday, May 20, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradom Temple of technology, the fortress of finance,

[Jordy]

the capital of capital.

[John]

We're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. People, they can't tell us apart. Is that what you're saying?

[Brian Chesky]

That.

[Jordy]

Okay, anyway, but people have been saying I need something like a swear jar when I don't wear a suit.

[John]

Oh, okay. I'd like that.

[Jordy]

So, yeah, something to consider. Yeah, it should probably be a pretty big jar.

[John]

20 bucks to the OpenAI nonprofit. That's what you gotta do. No, we were in Unherd. I mean, we can pull up the full post later in the show, but. Funny, I mean, it's a good analysis of what we've taken from espn. What works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key. My latest for Unherd is on why tech shows like TVPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by espn and why it's working. And they said, where is it? They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, but we don't always have matching suits. Usually Jordy's the casual one, but yesterday we were both casual. Today we're both in suits.

[Jordy]

We do still get the brother thing

[John]

a lot, but I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, we have to react to Google I O. Of course. There's a whole bunch of announcements. Some really exciting stuff. Some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all, but first we need to watch this video about humanoid robot ramp. Why is ramp.

[Jordy]

No, I'm kidding.

[John]

No. Songdripwoo says I'm crying. Watch this video.

[Jordy]

Let's get some stuff.

[John]

You gotta go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You gotta go to the beginning. Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. Little bit of a. Oh. Catches itself. Catches itself. Not bad. Not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. Another one. I'm liking it. Yeah.

[Tae Kim]

And then.

[John]

Not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking because you would think that there would be music.

[Jordy]

They gotta keep the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your boy's down.

[John]

He just gets carried off like this. It's so crazy to just carry it off like this. Like this seems solvable. This seems solvable. Kinda doing the moonwalk do teleoperation takeover in that case or even just have like a if on the ground reset yourself by like doing a push up. Like you could sort of hard code that I would think like that was a weird. I understand that he can't dance and walk upstairs. Like that is tricky. I understand why it's fell down, but I don't understand why it couldn't get back up after it fell down anyway. Singularity delayed.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's possible that the robot died from embarrassment.

[John]

Yeah. Or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that as it hit the ground it was just actually taken out. But I'm fascinated by this. I wonder how many like this video was taken clearly in like the third row of an auditorium. Are people going to see robot dance shows? Was this an introduction to a tech conference? I need so much more context here to really understand what's going on. Aaron Chen posted the full the first video Aaron Chen AI they had the chance to stop this when the robot almost fell. But then it really fell. But the show must go on. So who will dance on the floor in the round? Beware. Well, certainly solvable with enough time, but not quite there yet. If you're thinking of shelling out big dollars for a robot dance show, maybe make sure there's refund policy in case the robot absolutely collapses. That would not be good. Anyway. Google I o Bunch of different announcements. Brandon Grell on our team posted on the TVPN newsletter some reactions sort of bucketed it into four key areas. Intelligent Eyewear. This is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni. We talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemin. Those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that and then Anti Gravity, which is an interesting place with an interesting history. So let's start with Intelligent Eyewear. If you had to pick Warby Parker, Gentle Monster. Have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I'm a fan of the business story.

[Jordy]

Super familiar.

[John]

I haven't worn glasses in a very long time so I'm not really in the market. But the Warby Parker's. I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand and I've also been impressed by the way they built that business. They were early to the D2C boom and then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's. Is that the same team or is

[Jordy]

that a different I'm thinking of maybe. They were certainly When I think of D2C I think of Warby, I think of Allbirds, I think of Everlane.

[John]

Yes, but when you think of the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub 100 million. Allbirds was trading at what, 20 million or something and then spiked because of the AI thing. But Allbirds, Everlane, not really sustainable businesses. Warby Parker on the other hand current

[Jordy]

market Hubbards has imagined sitting at three and a half billion has pretty much been down. Only down only since the pump. The AI pump on there Neocloud. No surprises there.

[John]

Well have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going building their NEO cloud? Did they get allocation? Are they racking Cerebras? Are they racking GB2 hundreds? What are they racking and how fast are they getting power?

[Jordy]

Would be. It would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about Allbirds on the earnings call today. There's a new.

[John]

Yeah. Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? It was going to be like bird AI or all AI.

[Jordy]

Like they were moving. All birds still exists.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

But they basically kept the public and entity and that's what they're building the NEO cloud there.

[John]

Fun.

[Jordy]

Well, lots of fun.

[John]

Warby Parker resilient. I mean in 2021 it was a $6 billion company. Now it's a $3 billion company. Not the best scenario, but surprisingly resilient. I think in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct to consumer, it was like either get rolled into a bigger company or go or face the fate of the public markets. But Warry Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung. Google says we're partnering with Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections and people are. I like Futuronomics from Sam. Kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite Mag 7 on your face now you can. The Gentle Monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera. I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance also meta Ray Bans have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see Ray Bans and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking oh, should I be looking for a camera lens? Am I being recorded? But the Gentle Monster design, that silhouette doesn't scream technology, it doesn't scream wearable face Camera. And so these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parkers look nice, but the camera pump on this, on the Warby Parker.

[Jordy]

You know, it makes a lot of sense that Googles and the metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

My expectation, my uninformed expectation, is that Apple will just make Apple glasses. Right. They will probably. It's hard to see them taking the route, at least early on of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language. But it makes a lot of sense that meta would partner with luxottica.

[John]

Okay, first look at the camera bump on this. If you zoom in as far as you can. I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in. In. In the real world. Is that true about Apple? I thought that they had a partnership. I thought someone. I saw this on the timeline that Apple would be partnering with someone on frames. Maybe that was just a rumor. I don't know where it went. Okay. So yes. Oh, Apple has Carl Zeiss, which I guess is like a glass manufacturer. I don't know. Do they make glasses? Glasses?

[Jordy]

Carl Zeiss ag, German manufacturer of optical systems.

[John]

Oh, they make eyewear.

[Jordy]

They have an eyewear collection founded in Germany in 1846.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

By optician Carl Zeiss.

[John]

The Zeiss eyewear collection. I don't know, but this was all from a joke from Abdouf says. Okay, so Apple has Carl Zeiss. Meta has Ray Bans in Oakley. Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. Boring. Which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses? Would you rock these, Jordy? I like these 3M safety glasses.

[Jordy]

You know what I'm talking about, right?

[John]

You're working with a buzzsaw.

[Jordy]

I do know dust in your eyes. But these look cool. These are sporty. I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit.

[John]

Just go full cyberpunk.

[Jordy]

Full clank.

[John]

Yeah, full. You'd clank out full cyberpunk. I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that. Maybe friend or. Anyway, what else? So Warby Parker traded down on the news, which Sheil Monot was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14%? They announced a partnership at Google I O that's been in the works for a While is it because they aren't available yet and our friend Rat King Mike Isaac says, okay, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for meta ray bans. Google also said it would bring Gemini two glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which work similarly to Meta Ray Ban smart glasses, come with a camera, microphone.

[Jordy]

Yeah. At what point does Google just buy Warby Parker? Right. It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well over the last. Over the last six months. It's up 43% last six months, although it's been almost flat this year, I would say. I expect that smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first. Right. If you already have to wear glasses all day for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there? It's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation. Right.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And so, you know, Warby Parker's, you know, done quite well and has been surprisingly resilient, but they have, you know, incredible distribution, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point.

[John]

I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like, workflow. A lot of the Google I O we'll get into this, but was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant. And when I think about.

[Jordy]

It's in Spark. It's an A.I.

[John]

i know.

[Jordy]

Oh, just look in Omni.

[John]

Yeah. There's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products you're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's in Gemini just created an AI studio. Oh, it's for your personal Google account for Workspace. You need Gemini Business. No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro. Now, unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents. You do that in Spark? Actually, no, not Gemini. API manages it. And it's the typical meme. But the interesting thing is that I do think meta Ray Bans, it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp. You have a deep integration with Instagram DMs, maybe Facebook messenger. Some people are still using that. But in terms of wiring into your life, there are way more people that see Google Docs, Gmail as, like, the central node in their personal life. Like, people think of, like, all the stuff I have saved on the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think, okay, for the important stuff, I'll Put it in Google Docs or Google Drive and then most things flow through Gmail. Most things flow through iMessage. There are some people that just are like, yeah, WhatsApp is the number one and screen time for me, that's where I really organize things. But Meta doesn't really have this knock on effect of like, oh yes, it's not necessarily an enterprise level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail imessage. I save my files in Apple Files, the cloud storage. I use my camera roll. Super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable and an AI agent running through the Google ecosystem can be valuable. The Meta Smart glasses, it's a little bit trickier to go and do anything because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these meta Ray Bans. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse. I don't know. Ray Bans are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good. So we'll see, we'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground. On the flip side, the Wayfarer is just such an iconic. It's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced. And that's just sort of the reality of brand building. Over a decade versus a century or something like that. However long Ray Ban has been around. Long time.

[Tae Kim]

Right.

[John]

Anyway, Genie 3, you can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with street View imagery. Google is sitting on a motherload of real world data. I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4. Maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data pilled. He seems a lot of the MAG7 CEOs seem very data pilled. There's that story about Mark Zuckerberg screen recording or logging all the computer use from all the Meta employees. These important troves of data are increasing in value and Street View certainly seems like it's one of them. This is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be, how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take to build games?

[Jordy]

Yeah. Or do they allow people to build games on top of this?

[John]

Yeah. I just think about. I don't Know, I mean, Demis has a background in games and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point or at least be able to scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. Very fun story. But again, when I think about Rollercoaster Tycoon, which was not, I think, I don't think he was actually working on that game. It was a similar theme park simulator, but we are moving back into the simulator world. But the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers. Often when I think about the games that I've spent a long time with, some of them have incredible graphics, AAA graphics, some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so that is what gets me to the legend.

[Jordy]

Bobby Chipman in the X chat says, can't wait for smart glasses to fully replace my monitors.

[John]

Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta Ray Ban display. Certainly going that direction. The Orion, I've been surprised wasn't the first episode we ever did. We were talking about Orion and they still haven't shipped it. Right. I mean they shipped a smaller version, the Meta Ray Ban displays, which have sort of the Call of Duty hud. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting. I was expecting. We've demoed the Orion headset and it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that everyone was saying it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for primetime. But look at how fast things are going. In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next Meta Connect. Maybe this summer we'll see it, but haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI Capex might have taken a back seat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. I like AR and VR. I think we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro, Apple Vision Air. Something just lighter, that's all I want. Cheaper maybe, but lighter and same screen. Screen was great anyway.

[Jordy]

We know john.

[John]

Gemini Flash 3.5 looks pretty neat according to Tenebris and extremely fast, but still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google generally a pretty disappointing I o Now what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre train felt like it had some of that big model smell. Felt like it was really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here. And also, yeah, we're still waiting for Pro. Yeah, Pro isn't out, but people are speculating that 3.5 Pro won't necessarily be a new pre train. And so it seems like it's a. There's a little bit of research being at odds with the product cadence. Google I O is scheduled probably two years in advance and whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the OpenAI Anthropic, the other labs Xai, they're launching models very much like when they're done. And then they will instantiate something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post, a model card. But if you're grinding towards a specific date and the specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really, really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January of 2025. Right. Was that the date or was it December of 2025? Either way, yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much cutoff time, cutoff dates matter because, you know, all these models, you know, can query the web and, and get updates seeing.

[Jordy]

But yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good. Not good. Yeah. Prakash here underwhelming cursor ranked it on cursor bench. It is below composer 2.

[John]

Is that a fair thing? I mean, I'd like to see you rank another livestream on TVPN bench. It doesn't match up. It's like.

[Jordy]

No, I mean they have all the

[John]

other frontier and some of them are ahead of cursor zone models.

[Jordy]

On cursor, it's just one data point.

[John]

But yeah, here's the other thing.

[Jordy]

It's four times it costs four times it underperforms Composer two even though it's roughly four times more expensive.

[John]

Interesting, interesting. Yeah. I feel like for a long time Google's positioning was, you know, frontier or near frontier, but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy perhaps.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Overall starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic.

[John]

Prakash seems to indicate that DeepMind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do. Hence the TPU sales rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit and there was some context on like we were asking the question like will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area? Allie K. Miller shares one of the loudest approaches pauses in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the gentle Monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini. An all in one prompt said take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google IO 2026. And within seconds the preview of the edited photo from Nanabanana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Very cool demo, impressive technology. But Greg's gadget says these companies truly have no idea what regular people want. Because yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case. You need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that. Because this is a very. It's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that like creative spark of like yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time. Like if you're not doing a demo. I don't think his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature anyway. You want to move on to something

[Jordy]

where you want to go, what next?

[John]

IPOs, SpaceX, IPO. We're getting more details by the day.

[Jordy]

The other thing that was going pretty viral, the last thing on IO, was that the Google antigravity team flashed a Codex folder in their actual demo video. Gurgley says, I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for Anti Gravity. You can see people use Codex on the Anti Gravity team. Did no one double check the launch video? At the very least, not a huge surprise. Obviously Anti Gravity looks, a lot of people were saying looks quite, quite like Codec. So clearly more than Windsword.

[John]

I feel like it would be like they would have just rebuilt Windsurf. I don't know, we'll have to see.

[Jordy]

No. So but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly they're using a ton of different models and products internally.

[John]

What was that drama with Steve Yegi going back and forth with Demis about what teams are using, what models and stuff. There was a big back and forth, big dust up on the timeline and a month ago about whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are. And Demis chimed in and said, this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know. Goes back and forth. There's also people are benchmarking Omni Flash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There were a few little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it was missing two cylinders.

[John]

It was missing two cylinders, but it looked good to me. I don't know. But now people are actually comping it to CDance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions because I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China. I'm not exactly sure how that works because Cdance seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe.

[Jordy]

Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to U.S. copyright law for a very, very, very long time.

[John]

And it also might just take like years to file a lawsuit. Do discovery actually go through and litigate?

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah, you can just go like there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And Nike has nothing to do with it. And yet all the products, they've been

[John]

selling Swatch APs over there for decades.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. Just ask just as Rolex and Patek how they're.

[John]

Sure, sure. Yeah. I've heard fake cars too. Like you can get a full replica of like a G wagon that's just made in a factory and then you could buy it, bring it over here and you take it to a Mercedes dealership and they're just like, this is not a Mercedes, but it looks like one. Like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside, but internally it's just frauding. Anyway. Sea Dance 2.0 looks great. Omniflash looks great as well. These are both like super useful. We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, at what point it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right. The last 90, we're at 99% fidelity. But when you click in, you start noticing little details. When will we be in a paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video? Six minutes, ten minutes like you would on YouTube. Very computationally expensive, Very difficult to maintain the logic. Like, what is the deep research report of OMNI Flash? These 8 second, 10 second, 20 second videos are impressive, but not perfectly substitutable for a 20 minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into. Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes and so that's the next benchmark. We got to move the goalposts anyway. SpaceX IPO, the prospectus is incoming. According to Zero Hedge, as soon as May 20, that's today, we will see Goldman lead left. This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth. He went back to Morgan Stanley. There's a question about whether or not there would even be a lead left because there's such a big ipo. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously they're all going to make a ton of money off of this. So good news from start to finish. But it is interesting that Goldman was selected. Do you have a soundboard cue? You want to play?

[Jordy]

I'm always ready, John.

[John]

Katie Roof has a scoop. The scoop Athlete of the century, Katie Roof has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever. Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than 60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia have more than 20 billion.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Was this somewhat of a reaction to D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week? Right. They're set to generate roughly 20 billion in returns. And maybe some of these other funds thought to put their hand up and

[John]

say, I think that at this scale there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates and they've known the numbers for a long time. They've known the ownership, the holdings. And you do some back of the envelope and you get some pretty huge numbers will be very interesting. Huge for Sean McGuire, huge for Luke Nosek and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund and Antonio Gracias at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks. Really?

[Jordy]

Yeah, Look, Sequoia Founders Fund, they needed a win.

[John]

They needed a win. I mean, you go back, these investments were made like 2004, 2010. It was not obvious. Certainly there was no Starlink narrative when these. There was no space data center narrative. This was a rocket company that was blowing up rockets left and right and not quite getting to massive business. So you really had to be a believer. And they were.

[Jordy]

Packy was having some fun on the timeline.

[Tae Kim]

He said mega funds are too big to generate returns. They're basically just collectors.

[Jordy]

And of course they're printing.

[John]

Yes, they are printing. Well, we Have a very special guest joining us today, the CEO, the founder of figma, Dylan Field in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP on. Dylan, great to see you.

[Dylan Field]

Hey, great to see you.

[Jordy]

Thanks for having me back too long. Great to see you.

[John]

First question, are you alive or are you dead?

[Dylan Field]

Ah, very alive, Very alive.

[John]

Yes. It is such a white pill. I mean, how have you processed all this? I guess we can go into the business and the product and the financials, but I'm more interested in just the mindset, the emotional journey. How do you stay sane? Is it an advantage to have been building this business for so long that you can draw on other experiences? What has the process of going through all of this been like for you?

[Tae Kim]

You?

[Dylan Field]

I mean, what's the quote? When in the age of AI, those who stay sane win.

[John]

Oh, I like that.

[Dylan Field]

I think that that's pretty accurate. And yeah, you should, you should, you should own that.

[John]

Yeah, I'm going to attribute that to you.

[Jordy]

We're going to attribute that to you.

[Dylan Field]

Not mine. But, but, but really, I think it's super important. You have to have a, even mind about it. And you know, I, I know that you guys know this, but social media, not reality.

[John]

It is, it is not reality. We see this all the time. Yeah, all the time.

[Jordy]

But yeah. And the thing that I've been thinking about this week is how AI generated design is seemingly becoming as easy to clock as AI text.

[John]

It's not this, it's that, this then

[Jordy]

that I feel like people kind of like right now, I mean, the entire market is just going through like rolling stages of AI psychosis and everyone's having it in different ways. Right. So like, if you do like equity research, you're obviously going to go through a period of AI psychosis because you can just type in a few words and get what looks like days, weeks of really, really great work. And sometimes it is great work. And if you're a designer, web designer, and you can type in a few words and get what looks like a great website instantly, you're also going to go through that period and you can just see these sort of like pockets of AI psychosis all around the industry broadly, but it does sort of fade at some point. And then if you're able to stay sane through those periods and not let yourself succumb to it, you can get excited about the potential and benefit from it, but not lose your mind in the process. And I think like, we were seeing that with, you know, early on with ChatGPT and like writing right before it was super obvious to clock. And then we were seeing that with design specifically where, yeah, when you can just go and just generate stuff, design that looks like good design. I'm not saying it is good design. And I think we're kind of coming out of that now where you can just instantly clock when something was generated. And sometimes for a specific type of asset or use case, it's totally the right move to just generate something quickly. But I think we're already in a period right now where if I go to a startup's website and it's clear that it was just like a one shot prompt, like that says something about the company. Could be good, could be bad, we don't know.

[Dylan Field]

Jordy, I think you're absolutely right. But seriously, I mean, it's just the balance. Oh, thank you. I think it's the balance we had to strike with the Figma's design agent launch today. And what we tried to do was make it so that we can really help you bring the context from your file into the agent's context window. And with that, two things that maybe are what will be most helpful for the designer in the moment. Spawn agents to do explorations, variations, do the sort of rote tasks that are more boring. So things like design system maintenance, for example. How do we make it so that you're able to do that way faster with figma's Design Agent than you would if you're just manually clicking on all these variable names or manually change a bunch of components or text translation or any number of things. And so it's been really fun to kind of explore how does the design agent work and where can we make it better? Because there's so much more we can do to handle more of these tasks that, you know, designers are able to elevate themselves and work at a greater level to actually push aesthetic past AI slob, to actually push past, you know, the cliches and get to real innovation, solve real UX problems for users rather than making it so that you just have to go do this boring, these boring tasks to just get through and unblock people or unblock your team. And I think that the design agent will really help there and bring more of it into the canvas where then you can share and collaborate with your team or with other agents. So I'm excited for where it goes and I think today's really big and kudos to the team because they've been working really hard making so that we're able to take all the advances with models and LLMs and apply them to design. You know, getting these models to speak design well has been non trivial and very cool.

[John]

That's awesome. I feel like a lot of software engineers who are interacting with coding agents are experiencing incredible amounts of bloat in the code and there's questions about

[Marcus Milioni]

are

[John]

you laying really shoddy foundation that will come back to bite you later. And a lot of people say the answer to slop is just more slop. But in the design context, are you feeling pain from figma users where design systems, or are you at least designing the agentic design tool in a way that is aware of that potential pitfall in advance? Because there is a world where, oh, the drudgery is taking my website and doing design iterations for every single possible viewport or device. And, and if that gets out of sync, that can be very complex. At the same time, if you wind up instantiating all that and then it doesn't tie together, you could wind up with some sort of misalignment and it could be very difficult to manage in the long term and you could wind up with bloat.

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that it's different context for sure. When you're in a sort of code base and you're using cod and it's over claiming and making stuff up or you're using, you know, OpenAI's ChatGPT models 5.5 is amazing but like definitely over complexifies things and you know, these, these teams will deal with the sort of problems that are being identified and they'll fix them and figure them out.

[Marcus Milioni]

But

[Dylan Field]

overall I think it's a different sort of class of problem than like when you're in a design file and really part of your mode is exploration. If we can help you with that, exploration that can be useful for the user. And in terms of semantics, I mean the way that you represent a component or the way you apply auto layout even, these are all examples of things that we've had to get more rigorous around. How do we build evals for this to make sure that we're doing things in a way that is both clear and opinionated, but also doesn't get in the way of the user. And I think the worthy year for us has been evals and probably for the industry. And so there's so much on the eval side that we have to always be improving on. And part of the feedback that we'll get from this beta will be towards where have we missed the mark and what do we need to do Better and I think there's lots of room to grow there. Also to say that I think that when you look at products like weave, there's so much potential to not have necessarily this pile on effect, but rather to explore more. With AI, the outputs of the models are like clay you can mold and you know, it's like, how do you take stuff? I mean, that might be a one shot slop that's generated, but then actually apply it across multiple models in a pipeline in order to actually figure out a way to make it into what you want. And sometimes the best way to do that is to get on a canvas and use your hands. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a workflow you define. Other times it's by going back and forth with an agent. I think you have to be very smart about what you do when, and it's our responsibility as a tool creator to give you all the options.

[Jordy]

Jordan, what are you excited about in terms of using AI to help augment the creative process? Because when I think of part of what I think is exciting about this moment is I don't right now it's hard. Like a human still has to have the fundamental kind of idea, right? And we know that because you have to type it into a box, right. You need to do the typing still. So we're still necessary there. But when I think about iconic startup brands, I think of linear. I think of some of what like Cursor has done over the last couple years. I think of like Figma's brand where there's so much work that went into just like coming up with that, coming up with like the concept and the look and feel of the brand and then like way, way, way more work in terms of like instantiating that brand across every possible surface area. And part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like we're potentially entering into a world where you can spend more time just doing that heavy creative work, coming up with a concept that can stand out. And then once you create a system, then you can much more rapidly scale it across again all these different surface areas, whether it's digital products, web email, ads, et cetera. How are you thinking about augmenting and giving creative superpowers on that brand building process when you're coming up with coming up with like the idea?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, I think there's so much we can explore and do there. And using design systems effectively is hard. We certainly have not perfectly nailed that. I think we've done much more on the maintenance side and we have A lot more coming on the execution side of how do you put the design system you've created together so you can fully productionize that? And it's one of the things that, you know, we are looking at from so many angles and it is critical context to be able to figure out across code, across design, how do you use this effectively? But brand, I think is where on the weave side we see even more exploration with these workflows and people be able to define workflows that are more canonical and then branch out from them. And I think we'll see the same with Assistant and with the figma's design agent as well. And the. I also think that this idea bank, content bank can be established and added to over time and by more people. And what we're seeing with the last quarter results that we announced is that more people are starting to use Figma in the organization. Thank you.

[John]

They're fantastic results.

[Dylan Field]

Thank you. But the breadth I think, of the usage expanding is a huge part of that and, and the more that you can get it to the point where people can come in with their ideas, contribute to the conversation on a canvas, collaborate with others to refine, doesn't mean that these sort of non designers who don't know all the conversations that are being had about the UX or the brand are going to be the ones that are bringing the idea. That's the idea you're going to ship to the table right away. But, but I do think that bringing more voices into that conversation, more viewpoints, only helps.

[John]

How do you think about the concept of Gelman amnesia in the context of staying sane in the age of AI? Because there's probably non designers who use Genai tool and are like, oh wow, designers are cooked. And then there's real designers who use a Genai tool and say, oh, there's. Yes, it's maybe 99% of the way there, but the battle is to get to 99.999, maybe 100% of what you can do. And it feels like in staying sane, all outputs.

[Jordy]

Right. If you ask AI to generate you something around a topic, you know really, really well.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It's a different feeling than a topic that you're just learning about.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, I think that basically folks are in a place where they learn by comparative cases and the more that they see great examples next to sort of output that's not as good and they can learn why, that's ultimately where you see folks then push further and you know, they can then take it on to do more in an area and evolve their skills and their judgment, their sort of taste or not. But I do think it's really important to have those conversational loops going and also get your arms around as a design leader what is happening in your organization. Because what we're seeing is more people prototype things and then there's like this latent fear of oh no, what are we going to ship? And is it the thing that is sort of like a random exploration that someone thought was real or is it something that is like gone through our cycle and is ready to go and is like very well thought out? And in general, the other thing that I'd mention is it feels like there's a lot of tunnel vision right now. You know, I think that there's certain models that kind of went, oh, let's learn from 4.0 and you know, are sort of sycophantic and doing that in especially for engineers and get very latched onto an idea and then it's kind of like the AI psychosis sets in and you're like this is the best idea ever and you're fully tunnel visioned towards creating it and you can show massive progress, but are you going the right direction? And I think it's really important to steer into actually be building what you need to build and to think, not just wear a thinking cap. So that is something that I think is critical right now.

[John]

Yeah, and I completely agree. Yeah, there's been a bunch of great takes about that help me if I meet someone and they have the next great app idea and help me pitch them. Starting with Figma as the front door to the experience. If they're a non designer, but they're also non technical and they're hearing about codecs and Claude code and those code gen tools versus starting with a design. Starting and having the design be the place where the idea person sort of instantiates their app or their product and then yes, there are agents and they might use different tools for spinning up backends and doing other things. Why should Figma be the front door to building?

[Dylan Field]

Yeah, I think that as you're exploring an idea, part of it is thinking it through and actually understanding what is it that I want to build. And you should not just start in Figma, you should go talk to users, you should go think about what is it that I'm trying to build, what are my goals and the problems I'm trying to solve. So that might look like starting a sketchbook or a doc or in live conversation.

[John]

I think There's a lot of people that have not asked that question to the LLMs and jump straight to oh, I spent spend seven nights staying up all night. I'm cutting this thing and are in

[Dylan Field]

for a world of addictive. It's funner's box effect of like will it right this time or not?

[John]

Variable reward. Yeah, variable reward.

[Dylan Field]

But then I think going from there to being intentional about, okay, I know what problems I'm trying to solve. Let me think through the solution. Figma provides an excellent spot to do that with in conjunction with brainstorming tools like figjam or document editing, spec editing. And from there I think when you've got your direction, you know what you want to build. It's a great time to use our mcp. Go bring into code or go bring into make and make itself. You'll see a ton of evolution on Surface ahead. We've already had a lot that we've improved and you'll see even more in the weeks and months coming. And then I think that's a great spot where you can go back and forth because sometimes as you build it out, you realize that actually there's more to explore and define on the design side. So use the best tool for the job. But I think don't be tunnel vision about there's one direction and that's the only thing that can work. That's where you'll fall into traps.

[John]

Yeah. Last question for me. Huge revenue growth, massive success on the financial side. I'm interested in going a click deeper and trying to understand what is working the most because it seems like there's great retention among big clients and customers that are using figma at scale across a huge organization. There's also new entrepreneurs that are a team of one and they might be using figma.

[Jordy]

It's notable that the heaviest users of coding agents are heavily using figma because they're making more software and they need

[John]

to add stuff to it. I mean, I look at some of the stuff we've coded and I'm like, okay, it's time to level up and have FIGMA in the flow if it's not already because you don't want some even like the dashboards. Like these things need to be designed at some point as they grow and scale. The first, most basic thing, it could just be a CLI, but as soon as we start building UIs and multiple users, it gets more complicated. But what is driving the growth is it both is one more of an opportunity for you over the next few years? What are you most excited about.

[Dylan Field]

I mean, I think we're seeing growth kind of across the board right now and we're very thankful for that. But our eyes are always in the future. And the same things that I've said when I've been here in the past and I think have become their own memes around design being the differentiator and design as the layer above code, as code commoditizes more and more. Design is I think increasingly the battleground. This is where everyone is going to really duke it out to figure out what the direction is that they should explore and what they should go build. And we need to build for that world. A world where design representations, code representations can live together and a world where you don't have to make these false trade offs between direct manipulation and AI or you know, being able to explore broadly or make fast progress like both is the answer. And so that's what we're really building for right now.

[John]

Exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great rest of your week. Great to see you.

[Dylan Field]

Good to see you all. Thanks again.

[John]

We'll talk to you again soon. Goodbye.

[Dylan Field]

See ya.

[John]

Up next, we have Faras from Socket back on the show to discuss us. And Series C by none other than Thrive Capital will bring in Faras from Socket from the waiting room to the TVP and Ultra Dome.

[Jordy]

Get that gong ready.

[John]

Welcome to the show. How you doing?

[Jordy]

What's up?

[John]

Good to see you.

[Faras]

How's it going guys? Thanks for having me back on.

[John]

I think last time you were on. We'll see you soon. And here you are. Give us the news first. What happened?

[Faras]

Yeah. So socket announced its $60 million Series

[Tae Kim]

C at a billion dollar valuation.

[Jordy]

Hit it again, Hit it again.

[John]

Led by Thrive Capital. Congrats.

[Faras]

And it's a big day for us.

[John]

Absolutely massive.

[Jordy]

Is what you do important right now?

[Faras]

Yeah. You couldn't have really asked for a better perfect storm. You have just the confluence of AI, cybersecurity and all the different attacks we've been seeing and we built the perfect product for this moment. And it's been something that we've been building towards for. It seems like it's okay, we have the right thing right now, but the reality is we've been building towards this for four years plus. And so it's an overnight success that took four years.

[Ahmad]

Right?

[John]

Overnight success. There we go. I love it. What was the key unlock for the new round? Growth needed the capital for specific expansion. Just the broad tailwinds of the industry. People Looking forward to more demand. What's changed in the business?

[Faras]

So the business is just inflecting every year. I feel like, okay, this is great, certainly we're going to get a regression to the mean or something, but it just keeps accelerating. So over the last While we've had 500% plus ARR growth over the last 12 month period and it keeps going. So I think it's kind of, we're seeing kind of three forces converging all at once. Here we have this kind of like perfect storm between AI generating more code than ever before. You got developers, and increasingly non developers too, that are pulling in open source dependencies and third party code at unprecedented velocity. And you have more code being written than ever before, both by humans and AI agents. The kind of maybe counterintuitive thing is it actually brings in a lot of third party code and that code is really vetted less than it's ever been before. And, and that's kind of like the first thing. The other thing is you got the frontier AI models like Mythos that are finding thousands of high severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and open source library. And so the total volume of vulnerabilities in code is exploding right now. And it's going to keep going as we start to throw these models against this backlog of code that's been out there for a long time and has a lot of vulnerabilities. And then the third piece is that the, the attackers have really started kind of realizing that they can exploit the software supply chain to get into companies. So they're not really like coming in through, you know, finding vulnerabilities, but they're actually kind of realizing if we go into an open source component, that's actually an easy way to get into an organization, and not just one, but usually thousands of organizations that all use that same component. So it's this like perfect storm of all these factors right now.

[John]

So walk me through how your business model interacts with the open source community, because when we see things like Mythos, finding a bunch of bugs in open source repos, we hope that everyone will just submit bug reports early for the good of the world. But I'm interested in the economics of patching open source. If there's a really important package out there that maybe doesn't have a Linux foundation behind it, how at some point, at the very least, there's inference costs. Who's paying to patch all of the open source software that so many different companies rely on? If you go to a big company, they pay you, they might patch their dependencies. But how does this all flow together into an actually safer Internet?

[Faras]

Yeah, well, I've been in open source for I think over 15 years now and I maintain a bunch of open source packages and you know, have a real soft spot for the open source community. And so let me tell you, they were suffering under an enormous burden even before the current AI trends have kind of made it even worse. You know, they don't get much support, whether financial or just in terms of, you know, the number of people working on this really critical infrastructure is super low for how critical it is. And so we started seeing a lot of AI tools being used to create these slop PRs, slop issues. And that was already kind of causing a burden. And then now you have the various Frontier labs that are finding with their models, they're finding a lot of vulnerabilities that were always there but the community didn't know about. I will say they're doing a good job of providing a patch along with the bug that they've identified. So they're doing a lot of the work for the maintainer, but it still takes effort to review the pr. And the thing that people don't realize is when you accept a pull request as a maintainer, you're not just kind of, it's not this one time cost. You're actually accepting the burden kind of indefinitely into the future to maintain that code and make sure that that code is secure and is kept up to date with all the other changes. And so I think what we're going to see, and we're already starting to see, is despite the kind of best efforts of the Frontier Labs, and they are making a good effort, maintainers are going to fail to actually accept these patches. And so we're going to see a lot of libraries that may have a vulnerability in them that literally have effectively code sitting on GitHub that anyone can look at and use to generate an exploit against that vulnerability. And there's not going to be an easy path for companies and, and for developer teams to go and actually patch their libraries because there's no version they can upgrade to because the maintainer is just sort of sitting there on that patch and hasn't accepted it. So it's creating this real risk where there's more vulns than ever before and there's not really easy paths. And so this is actually something we try to solve. So we built a solution to this called certified patches. And what this is is basically kind of a deterministic way to in kind of one click, make your vulnerabilities and your open source code go away. So we use a whole bunch of AI and kind of produce these patches that make the vuln go away without any work on the part of the developer. There's no kind of burden of upgrading packages. You just sort of, in a click, the vuln is gone from your dependencies and you can kind of keep the rest of your code in your application the same. And so it's really a kind of a quick fix to the problem that we hope you know is going to be part of the solution. And by the way, we're giving away all the critical, the critical patches to the community for free. So we can, we can try to disseminate this widely to as many people as possible.

[Jordy]

Are there, Are you able, Are you finding any companies that are completely asleep at the wheel or is everyone like giving this, who should I hack today? No, I just want like, I imagine like part of why the business is growing so quickly is this is like a hair on fire problem concern. Every single day, right? You're seeing these like vulnerabilities or issues pop up. And so I would have to imagine that every, every software company online where the technical leadership there uses the Internet, which I would imagine is all software companies are like pretty like leaning into this problem. But do you ever, do you ever, like, I'm curious even from like an outbound sales marketing standpoint, are there people that are like, oh, this is not that important for us right now, or would like a no be like, we have a solution with someone else?

[Faras]

Okay, so we've met one company that has literally no software. They produce toilet paper and they didn't have anything.

[John]

Just to hear no one of business, no smartphone.

[Faras]

I think, yeah, I think that it's become a universal problem. When we started, it was kind of this like maybe more niche problem where people said, okay, you know, I got a lot of other problems that are more important than this. And we initially had a really good uptake of the product in the cryptocurrency community because they have a lot of software supply chain risk. And when these hacks happen, it's kind of an irreversible thing for them where they like lose all their funds. And then I would say kind of the AI labs were the next to pick it up and sort of, you know, SF tech companies realize that the kind of people that are ahead of the curve and now it's become, I mean, it's like a top. I'd Say top one or top two concern. At like nearly every company we talk to, it's a board level concern a lot of the Times now and CISOs and heads of engineering are being asked to figure out like, what is our solution to make sure the next time one of these things happens were protected. And the next time is probably going to be like, you know, tomorrow. It's become so it's literally like, you know, every day. Yeah, literally our end of quarter was, you know, the end of last month. We, you know, we already were super busy and then there were three major software supply chain attacks that happened that same day. It's wild. It's like more than we've ever seen and it's totally unprecedented.

[John]

Was the GitHub issue that I saw a supply chain attack or was that something else? I saw like a couple posts but I didn't get get to dig into it.

[Faras]

So I don't think they've released that information yet. Yeah, there's definitely been some speculation. I mean the timing right now, every time a company gets popped or their source code leaks, it's the first question that people think of now. And the group I believe that claimed responsibility is this team PCP group that has been responsible for a lot of the attacks. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we learned. But I don't think that's something that we know right now and I wouldn't want to speculate.

[John]

Yeah, I wonder if there will be movements to find the compute infrastructure for Team PCP at some point or like the hackers. Because at a certain point you would imagine that they're.

[Jordy]

Well, they don't. I mean some of this, a lot of this is still social engineering. Right. So they don't necessarily need a country of geniuses data center, a couple dudes

[John]

with phones, who knows? Well, congratulations on the progress. Yeah, incredible progress coming on the show.

[Jordy]

Thanks for keeping us us all safe.

[John]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Faras]

Cool, thanks guys.

[John]

Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next we have Tae Kim from Key Context, the hottest substack on the Internet. We have Tae Kim in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV Ultram Tae, how are you doing?

[Tae Kim]

Hey guys. Awesome.

[John]

Here we go. Kicking it off strong. Oh good. Good fit that. You know what we need to do? We need to figure out how to do a real time recognition of the face tracking and then land the glasses on the correct face for next appearance.

[Jordy]

For next.

[John]

Yes, maybe before we get into AI and different companies, I'd love to Just know how key context is going, what it's been like since we last checked in. How is life?

[Tae Kim]

It's much better. It's going great. I think the last time we talked was March 30th and the market was right at the bottom.

[John]

Yeah, that's right.

[Tae Kim]

Everything was going terrible.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

You never worried though.

[Tae Kim]

I did not. Tripled, quadrupled down on here. And that's CPU shortage. Five CPU stops, five memory stops. All those ideas are up 50 to 150%.

[Jordy]

That's pretty good.

[Tae Kim]

I said I think 13 out of our 14 ideas are solidly in the green. I joke that like Shohei Ohtani numbers with like 3, 4 grand, it's not going to last. But it worked out. I mean we trusted in the actual.

[Jordy]

Shohei would love memory stocks. Yeah, right.

[Tae Kim]

I think he would. I'm sure he, his. His financial advisors. Long HBM stocks.

[Marcus Milioni]

I'm sure.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. I read some report that in South Korea there's folks who are liquidating insurance plans to go long. SK Hynix. It's a huge, huge moment over there

[Tae Kim]

in South Korea and everyone's making fun of these Koreans for being long memory stocks. But I mean, we're talking single digit P E multiples, probably lots. Two to three more years, triple digit growth. I mean, I quoted this Michael Dell thing where he spoke to a Wall street conference. He says 25. 25. That's the thing you need to know about memory stocks. AI accelerators can have 25 times more like AI GPUs from Nvidia two years from now going to have 25 times more memory per GPU and there's going to be a need for 25 times more GPUs.

[John]

Wow.

[Tae Kim]

So he said, multiply 25 by 25, you get 625 more revenue, et cetera. And you layer on to the fact that four years ago all these memory companies saw their revenue get cut in half so they didn't expand capacity. It takes three to four years to expand capacity. So we're going to see like mega pricing power. We haven't seen anything yet. These stocks are going to keep going higher and the revenue rates are going to be astronomical. So everyone makes fun of these Koreans for piling into single digit P E stocks growing at triple digits. And this cycle is different because there are only three companies that can make the HBM memory. Don't make fun of the Koreans. They're right.

[John]

Don't. Is the pullback that you pushed that you mentioned when they were beaten up was that the Post crypto slump, when semiconductor equipment and GPUs were being used to mine crypto. And then there was a pullback there. Is that what you were referring to? What is the prehistory? Why were these stocks beaten up?

[Tae Kim]

So in 2022, like we had a kind of a tech recession. Like everyone's. All these tech companies were laying off people. Even intel and Nvidia had these 50% drawdowns.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tae Kim]

The whole, you know, everything was. It's almost like the post Covid kind of overhang where people bought too many digital computers, electronics.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tae Kim]

And there was too much over.

[John]

And so what was different? What was Nvidia doing during that 50% drawdown? Were they buying the stock back?

[Tae Kim]

Not really Nvidia. They buy a little bit of stock back, but not really. And back then this is a different Nvidia where Data center is 10% of the revenue and gaming is 80, 90%. Now it's split where data centers, nearly everything. What happened with Nvidia back then is everyone's mind, their GPUs to mine Ethereum. And then Ethereum did the whole proof of stake, proof of work thing. So demand for GPUs collapsed and Nvidia had like a terrible quarter where they missed by like 2 billion, which was a big number back then.

[John]

Now that's a rounding error.

[Tae Kim]

Back then it was 20% of their revenue and the stock got hit hard.

[John]

Yeah. So what are you looking forward to from Nvidia this quarter this year? What are you watching?

[Tae Kim]

So we had like two unbelievable quarters the last two quarters. And I expect another great, amazing quarter. I mean Jensen is out there saying GPU consumption is through the roof on Monday he said AI demand is far exceeding supply and capacity. So I think the numbers are going to be great. And this is without even China. So I mean the absolute scale of these numbers are mind blowing. We're talking like 80% growth on $80 billion. Number 79 or 80 billion. Just think about it. In three months. Right. So the absolute scale and the stock is like almost as cheap as it's ever been. Like it's trading at 19 times forward below the S&P 500, which is growing at like 10%. Nvidia scoring at 80%. So this, this dichotomy where Nvidia is becoming more and more undervalued and we could talk about why.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, I'd love to know. Is that just because they're the largest company. 5 trillion. It's hard to wrap your mind around a $10 trillion company.

[Tae Kim]

Every year we go through this cycle, the last three years, during this whole upswing up, everyone says peak is here, right? Nvidia can't grow anymore. And Nvidia keeps growing at some ridiculous growth rate. So the skepticism, the only reason why it's trading at below market multiple is that the AI skeptics believe that the peak year is near. Right? There's going to be a no.

[Jordy]

Is it AI skeptics or is it TPU and Trainium enjoyers?

[Ahmad]

That too.

[Tae Kim]

They believe competition is coming and they're going to gain market share. I kind of laugh at that. And the numbers that people put out there for the competition, it's like a rounding error. It's like a small, low single digit number compared to what Nvidia is going to grow the next few years. And what people keep forgetting is if you actually look at the numbers, Nvidia has a trillion dollars in orders. They're the ones that have locked down all the memory. Like I met someone, a guy at gtc, he's the optical startup. And Nvidia locked up all the capacity for lasers and optical. Right? So Nvidia has the supply components with memory wafers, optical. So they're pretty much the only game in town if you want to actually buy AI GPU capacity like TPU gets headlines, but I mean $5 billion is nothing when you're comparing it to a trillion dollars. Right. So they have the volume, they have the great power per watt, numbers and metrics that basically if you're doing inference, Nvidia GPUs, even though they cost a lot more upfront when you actually do the inference, performance per watt is excellent when these are.

[John]

Yeah. How did you grapple with the question of whether or not Nvidia is a car? There are competitors. You said low single digit percentage of the market. But AMD is getting its act together. Intel's maybe back in the game in a few years. You have Trainium and tpu. Competition is rarely a good thing. Is Nvidia a car or not?

[Tae Kim]

Okay, obviously it's not a car.

[Jordy]

I would have loved to, I would have loved to be in the room with you while you saw that segment. You just like taking your computer smashing.

[Tae Kim]

I think I was tweeting about it. I think I wrote a piece on it. I wrote like four or five hundred words about that. I don't know if we want to go into that, but they're going to be 80, 90% of the market. Maybe they'll lose 10% of the market share in two, three years, but 80, 90% of a market that is growing 50, 70% a year. The hyperscaler Capex numbers went up huge. There's like 780 billion going a trillion dollars next year. Like the market believes within videos valuation that Nvidia is going to stop growing within the next year or two. But the overall market I think is going to keep growing at 50% at least. If it grows 50% in next two or three years, India is going to grow. Even if they like maintain market or, and I don't believe that's true, I think that they're actually going to maintain or even increase market share. But even if market share goes down 10%, I mean the numbers are just insane. And I don't think Nvidia is going to trade at like 10, 12 times earnings when they're growing at 50%. I mean that doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's going to rerate higher. And the key thing here is the stock stock buybacks because that's like if you guys remember during the whole iPhone, like when the iPhone 5 and 6 came out, when they actually had the large screen iPhone, Apple was trading at PE7 like X cash. Like people thought Android was almost like the same thing. Like Android's come in and destroy the iPhone market share when iPhone went on this generational run with the large screen iPhones. Right. But a big thing that Apple did was they started buying back stock and that's when their multiple started going from single digits to 15 to 20 to 30 times. And I think what, and they already kind of hinted at it, but I think Nvidia is going to start buying stock buyback in size. They said 50% of their free cash flow in the next 12 months. They're a little bit cryptic on if that was after or before prepaid the prepayments they have for the inventory and suppliers. But I think we're going to get some more clarity tonight. And if they, if they actually put numbers, maybe it's this quarter and next quarter if they actually put the actual we're going to buy X hundreds of billions of stock, you know, in the next 12 months, I think the PE is going to re rate much higher. So you know, as soon as we get visibility that next year is going to Keep growing at 40, 50% or higher, I think it's going to be higher. And the year after that, you know, stock, that stock should go on top of the rerating from the capital returns.

[Jordy]

Gavin Baker was on our friend Patrick show this morning. He was making the point that it's possible that tsmc, TSMC could prevent a bubble just given that they are not investing in capex as aggressively as, as let's say Jensen might want them to. He said, you know, basically said what you're saying, which is Nvidia could sell a trillion dollars of GPUs, you know, pretty much immediately if they, if they had the supply. What's your, what's your read on that? Do you think that TSMC is competing?

[Tae Kim]

Well, so I think I've been, I mean I've been following chip the industry for you know, 30, 40 years. So I'm very good at reading, I'm very good at reading the tea leaves and I've noticed that JENSEN and what TSMC, what the CEOs have been kind of hinting at, their tone has changed in the last two, three months. So TSMC just reported their Q1 earnings and you know, if you read the transit, it's pretty obvious that they're just going to raise capex on a different order of magnitude for the next year. And the year after they said their capex is going to be much higher over the next three years than it was the last three years. And basically and all the stuff they're saying, you know, they're saying, and Jensen's been going out there during these speeches and Q and A's, he's confidently saying the supply issues in two, three years are going to be on a different level. Like even with memory, he's saying all these component issues that we have now in two, three years. I think he even said that on the Dworkesh podcast interview. Two, three years, this all will be like left. So I'm confident that TSMC memory might be a little problematic, but TSMC wafer wise it's going to be dramatically higher over the next two, three years.

[John]

But even if they raise CapEx, it feels like there might be like a, I don't know, a speed bump essentially because if they triple capacity and that takes two years, but everyone's sort of pricing in or expecting 10x a year or half an OOM a year. There's a mismatch there.

[Tae Kim]

What I'm saying is right now the Nvidia valuation is trading like it's growing at 10, it's going to grow at 10% the next year or two, they grow at 50% the next two years. I mean that's definitely TSFC is going to raise our CapEx. So it's like the numbers are way off.

[John]

I'm more just thinking from a broader market perspective.

[Tae Kim]

The 10X is not going to happen but 50 to 75% the next three years. I think that can happen and stocks will go much higher if that happens.

[John]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Tae Kim]

10x is, it's not software, you have to actually move physical atoms.

[John]

Yeah, that makes sense. How do you think Nvidia will be positioning China Exposure, China opportunity. That was an interesting point of debate on the door cash.

[Tae Kim]

Yeah, I've given up on China. I mean at gtc Jensen said, you know, he got approvals on both sides and then weeks later like that, you know, fell through again. Like it's, forget China, it's probably isn't going to happen. There's also another report that gaming GPUs were incrementally banned in China. Like I, I just think like you can't rely temper your expectations. I don't think China is going to happen.

[John]

Not relevant to the business case or the valuation but potentially important to like the geopolitical story.

[Tae Kim]

I think it's just going to be the status quo where Nvidia is not going to be able to sell to China and anything that happens is incremental upside. But it's not going to be a huge number anymore. Even the stuff that is allowed is a limited number. The way the US has approved the licenses. China is the one that's saying no, we're not going to let you sell right now it's been going back and forth between China and the us that's who bans what and whatever. But even the incremental numbers, even if China starts improving, it's not a huge number the way it was in the past. So I would temper expectations on China. It's just, it's been so back and forth and unreliable the last last couple years.

[Jordy]

What was your reaction to Google? I o

[Tae Kim]

I'm actually pretty negative on Google right now and they're, you know, they're basically non existent in the whole coding agent stuff, which is like the one that's growing exponentially right now in terms of coding agents and everyone's paying tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic and Now Codex for OpenAI. They're adding a million users every few weeks. Google Anti Gravity is nowhere to be found. No one's talking about Twitter. Anyone that talks about it says they don't like it. So the hardest thing which is coding agents that's going to automate things and do actual work for an enterprise is the biggest market that's taking off like a rocket. Google isn't there. So I mean Google Cloud is doing Great.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Did seeing yesterday, did it start to make more sense to you why Google had been committing so many resources to Anthropic? Like do you felt, do you feel like.

[Tae Kim]

Yeah, so, so I think because at

[Jordy]

the time, at a lot of, you know, at the time, everyone was like, wow, I wonder how, you know, Demis feels, feels about this. Of course, Demis is an angel and Anthropic and, and obviously, you know, thinks they're a great company and they have a good relationship. But at the time it was like, wow, what? Like they have this new model incoming. They have this massive compute advantage, they have this massive distribution advantage, they have massive data advantage. Like they have every single advantage. They had this huge head start vend it in everywhere on all these platforms from Google Workspace, which is like a massively underrated distribution point to the Google Docs and sheets and basically everywhere, like every single possible advantage and an incredibly talented team and exponential demand for tokens. And it was still somewhat surprising to see them invest that much in a competitive lab.

[Tae Kim]

And they are benefiting with Google cloud getting that business. But I think long term, strategically, I think Google has to be very careful and I think Microsoft exactly is experiencing this with OpenAI is once the value accrues to anthropic and OpenAI, they're going to be the power players four or five years from now and be able to push people around. I mean, we saw that when Yahoo literally used Google as their search engine, right? Google was nobody. And Yahoo put it on their homepage and powered their search engine and then Google became the power player in a few years. Same thing with Netscape and Yahoo. I mean, this is like history repeating itself. Netscape was. Everyone used Netscape. I don't know if you guys were around then, but Netscape was the browser, right? And the reason Yahoo became powerful is because you clicked on that little thing on the. Right on the homepage and it drove people to Yahoo.

[John]

The portal.

[Tae Kim]

Then Google took off because they started using the Google search engine inside Yahoo.com. so I think all these companies have to be careful. Like if you, if you help OpenAI anthropic become super powerful and they have the best models and this thing is all a flywheel, right? The more people that use it, the more people that use cloud code, Anthropic is going to get smarter and make the better version of cloud code. Same thing with ChatGPT. And if you let Gemini kind of lose the market right now and Anthropic gets all the business and all the revenue, like Google starts losing power in the whole tech ecosystem.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It's almost like the whole industry is on a merry go round. But they're, you know, it's like a spider man meme with like, you know, guns. Everyone's kind of just like going around. Yeah, very.

[John]

What are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? What does that do to the market? They sort of jump straight into the Mag 7 in terms of valuation. Are they going to suck up liquidity?

[Tae Kim]

It's really tough to tell without the S1. We'll see. Version all we have is these spot leaks and darlink. And now with selling the AI Compute A classes to Anthropic. I mean, the valuation is extremely, extremely high. Even the D1 capital guy, who's up. Yeah. He was interviewed on Oshanoshi's show and you could tell if you just read his body language. He's like, wow, this is a really high multiple. I mean, go back and listen to it. Even though he's going to benefit from it, he's like, wow, this is really high.

[John]

Yeah. A lot of SpaceX investors were happy with investing at 60 billion, but it was doing 10 billion in revenue and had great margin. And it's a completely different business. Both on the valuation side goes to them.

[Tae Kim]

They saw stuff that. No, I mean like the launch costs going down and Starlink coming out of nowhere and adding billions of unbelievable telecom business. Total market.

[Faras]

Great.

[Tae Kim]

But like 1.5, 1.75 trillion off those Starlink revenue.

[John]

What was this from Gavin Baker? He was saying like, Elon has just always delivered for shareholders and that means that he can marshal unlimited capital at all times. And it just continues.

[Tae Kim]

I'm just hesitant at those extreme valuations. That's less upside for a retail investor.

[John]

Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. Hard to imagine the Tesla scenario.

[Tae Kim]

Yeah. The passive indexes, if they go in at that price, that valuation on the next downturn. It's just. I just wish Anthropic went out first. Right. Because the numbers are dramatically real. I mean, OpenAI probably is accelerating right now with codecs too and that will help things a lot better than SpaceX.

[John]

Oh, sure.

[Jordy]

Interesting thing right now, looking at valuations of the Mag 7 and then you add SpaceX in there and then you add anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX will look, potentially make anthropic and OpenAI look cheap on just like revenue multiple potential. But then it still looks very expensive versus, let's say like a meta. Right. Sitting at one and a half trillion with one of the best businesses of all time. I did want to ask you about Meta, your kind of updated mental model. They obviously had a big painful round of. Of layoffs today to be able to forward their inference bill. I'm joking there, but it does seem like, you know, they're effectively whatever they're saving on comp, they're just sort of reinvesting into AI. AI, both CapEx, but also their. Their inference bills. How are you thinking?

[Tae Kim]

Yes, asked me the same question, you know, six, seven weeks ago. And, you know, I think they reported an unbelievable quarter. I mean, they're growing at 33%, like crazy amounts of profits. Like, there's market skepticism that they could do well in AI models, but, you know, there's also the plan B. Like, you could say the same thing about what happened with Elon and Xai. They were able to. There's so much demand in this megatrend hypercycle that even if they falter a bit, they could sell compute capacity to the highest bidder that's out there. So I wouldn't count Meta out. I actually think, like I said, their core advertising. Advertising business is more durable than the Google search engine right now, which, if you go, it's filled with ads everywhere. It's not a great experience. And a lot of that traffic is going to shift over to AI chatbots. So if you actually look at the numbers, Meta is their core business, is very durable, has competitive advantage. It's growing, still growing like a weed. I just wouldn't count them out.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Basically, as soon as they either have an AI breakthrough or they pull back on AI, the stock has to rewrite.

[Tae Kim]

I mean, that's the same thing happened with, with the Metaverse stuff. As they start cutting back spending, you rerate higher because all those losses don't hit the income statement.

[John]

They look tiny now.

[Jordy]

Yeah. It'd be so wild to think about what Meta's stock would be doing right now if the Metaverse debacle had never happened. Because the Metaverse was like this high conviction bet on a category that was just way too early. And yet AI doesn't.

[Tae Kim]

I think you're right.

[Jordy]

And yet they feel like late on AI. I think Mark felt late, or at least clearly felt behind enough to sort of 10x the seriousness. So I think it would be.

[Tae Kim]

Yeah, I think they're a little more skeptical because of what happened with the Metaverse, where they spent tens of billions of dollars. That has pretty much gone.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Becoming a Neo cloud is a weird outcome for Hyperscaler that. That could totally have a cloud platform. But has not historically. And you would imagine that there's a whole bunch of hard won lessons that Azure GCP AWS went through. Organizational decisions, structures, just key people in place. It feels hard to spin up immediately. At the same time there's neo clouds that are scaling revenue extremely quickly every day. So I agree with you that it is a possibility, but a whole set of new challenges.

[Tae Kim]

If that's the direction, that's the worst case scenario, right? Like they want to use the AI computing to make their internal businesses better with all the ad personalization and monetization and create this stuff and actually I've been playing, playing around with openclaw for the first time a few weeks ago and yeah, I've been using WhatsApp and that's the future. Everyone's going to have a digital assistant. It's like so amazing. I ask it to give me the Top 20 Stories is powered by the latest version of Codex. It goes out there, searches every day for me and emails me the top 20 stories I should read. And it's really smart. You guys should try. It's actually amazing. And the thing I'm thinking is like, why can't Meta do this? I mean they have this meta AI that's not powerful, but having this little channel for my little tabot, I call it tbot and, and all you do is WhatsApp it and say do this, do this, find this for me, find this. Everyone's going to have this basic thing and I'm using WhatsApp.

[John]

The big headline token number from Google was that they 7x token production across all of their services. That actually seemed a little low to me given how broad the surfaces are and how crazy the models have gotten in the last year. But I would expect to start seeing that out of Meta because now when you go to Instagram and you search, it gives you a little AI overview and obviously they have the Meta AI app and I would imagine that there's more AI hydration happening across the ecosystem

[Tae Kim]

and this digital assistant thing is going to be like open call. Like I was skeptical until I tried. I'm like, oh my gosh. So Meta should be all over this because it's on there and probably with

[John]

the Ray Bans, they'll do it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great hanging out.

[Jordy]

Great to see you. Tay, what do you do for Nvidia earnings? Do you do you just like turn off all the lights in the room and and like just like sit case

[John]

of beer, nachos, big screen TV Is

[Jordy]

it more like a Super bowl or. Like, I. I wish.

[Tae Kim]

Like, we should bring back those bar crawls. Like, they did it once and then it stopped. Like, we should bring that back.

[Jordy]

Too much of a top signal.

[Tae Kim]

It's gonna be the number one most valuable company for a long time. Yeah, like, sorry, Alphabet, it's not gonna happen.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tae Kim]

So we should bring those bar earnings parties back.

[John]

That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day.

[Faras]

All right, thanks, guys.

[Tae Kim]

Good to see you again.

[John]

Before we bring in our next guest, I want to actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article, see how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a Beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see the first graph. These are IPOs over the last seven years, ranging from $0 billion raised, probably $10 million, $100 million, all the way up to $2 billion. Continue to scroll down and you'll see what happens as the blockbuster IPO starts stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of just in a few minutes, arm, Cerebras, Uber and Porsche. And then, as you keep going, Saudi Aramco comes in at $25 billion. If you keep scrolling down. And then eventually SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at 80 billion to make everything else look like a flat line on the chart. Absolutely. Blockbuster ipo and should make for a ton of great takes and analysis. And it'll be a fun, fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes public soon. We're getting the S1 any day now. Well, our next guest, Ahmad from Mercury is here with a big funding announcement. So we'll bring him in from the waiting room into the TVP and ultradama mod. How are you doing?

[Jordy]

There he is.

[Ahmad]

Yeah, great to be here. Am I not gonna get the dong?

[John]

Oh, you'll get the gong, but you gotta give us the news. Tell us what happened.

[Jordy]

You gotta give us what happened.

[Ahmad]

All right. Jumping John. There we go.

[John]

How much did you raise?

[Ahmad]

Yeah, we just raised 200 million. There we go.

[Jordy]

TCB is leading.

[Ahmad]

So excited about that answer today.

[John]

That's fantastic. What was the traction that unlocks this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst?

[Ahmad]

You know, we've just been kind of grinding away for the last, what is it, seven years since we launched success. Seen a lot of growth in Q1, especially about 2.5x Q1 last year in terms of applications. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there's been a lot of new business formation, a lot of companies being built using AI. So obviously we hear about like the these big startups in AI, but there's also just like normal businesses being built with AI being a big catalyst. And we saw yeah, big increase 2.5x over last year which. And last year was a big year for us.

[John]

How are you reaching those customers? Like what are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? It's hard to reach out to them before you have to be very aware.

[Ahmad]

The other crazy thing for us is most of our growth is organic, but that even the percentage organic has been growing for us. So even though we're growing, we're getting more and more organic, which is unexpected. And the other big channel for us is LLM recommendations. So if you go into your favorite LLM and you say, what bank should I use for my startup? Mercury is often the recommendation. So we try to deliver the best customer experience possible. And because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it and that's for us.

[Jordy]

What is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LLMs is just because people recommend Mercury so highly. Like I can't be like, I'm just trying to get at. Is it like your team was like, hey, we should really optimize this? Or it was just.

[Ahmad]

Yeah, I think it's really hard. Like there's a whole thing called GEO which is like all about optimizing for LLMs, but at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X. Like if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feature into the algorithm.

[John]

Yeah, it helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business seven years, not so long that the articles are about the downfall or like how you're a dinosaur. All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out and so that surfaces. How are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations? And sort of like the agentic commerce of actually opening an account, Is that something that's on your horizon to integrate?

[Ahmad]

It's kind of interesting thinking about the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI, that was a month or so ago and we launched an MCP actually in December. And our growth on those is through the roof. So tons of people are using Claude code OR cowork or ChatGPT to connect to Mercury. And then I think not for everyone, but for a lot of people they're kind of running their whole business and their life and in AI now. And, you know, if you can pull in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your and existing workflows, that's really powerful. And I think if you, there's a flywheel between, like, if you build great tools that AI can use, it actually recommends those tools even more. I mean, that's partly why, like, you know, people like Supabase and like those kind of tools.

[John]

Yeah. Then, then how do you, how do you deal with the tension of like, you could build a dashboard visualizing payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it. There's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane?

[Ahmad]

I think for us it's like do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI and we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and those, those services. But we also have another team that's working on. And we just launched Mercury Insights, which summarizes your transactions, gives you like kind of AI insights on end, lets you talk to your transactions. And then later this year we're launching Mercury Command, where you can do kind of complex workflows like, hey, I just hired someone, set them up in payroll and create a card and do all of that without me having to kind of click around all of the kind of Mercury surfaces. And I think, number one, I don't know exactly where the world's going to go. Right. Like, maybe everyone's going to be using AI assistance to do everything or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. And B, if you think about the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, even whether it's like a mobile app or searching for all your transactions, whatever, Mercury's been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and the, the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that. And that's going to increase the spread between what people get from Mercury versus what they get from the incumbents.

[John]

Yeah. I was reading an article in the Economist a couple weeks ago about stablecoins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or maybe just stable volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stablecoin related features in fintech broadly.

[Ahmad]

Yeah, I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. I think if you're in the US and you're sending money to a US business or you can US consumer, you know, wires, ach, all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. If you're paying money internationally or you know, you know in the US and you want to have like a stable currency, that's where USDC and these other stablecoins are doing really well. So you know, we don't currently support it natively but lots of our customers use, you know, some of these kind of stablecoin services and we'll probably have kind of at least payment features that are based on stablecoin especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for the U.S. banking system in the U.S. i think it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer is.

[John]

Oh, sorry.

[Jordy]

Why was this year the right time to get into payroll?

[Ahmad]

You know, we've been expanding our services. Obviously we're known best for banking but we've had a corporate credit card for three years and that's going really fast. We have a bill pay and invoicing solution and over time I really want Mercury to be the place that you'd most of your business finances. Right. It's kind of annoying like if, if the money's here and your users are here and your finance team is here, you know, you want to have all of that kind of in, in one place. So yeah, we made an acquisition in payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running, you know, we're continuing to run them and we're going to kind of over time make it more like a fully integrated Mercury payroll solution. But yeah, payroll is like a big category. You know, it's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider you have to send money. It's kind of sits around for four days before it shows up on your employees. And Central has done a really good job with kind of AI first. Like they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack and we're kind of taking some of that learning and putting in our own kind of command launch.

[John]

Yeah. Is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink product roadmap extension expansion differently than a few years ago? When I think about NEO banks, fintech, modern technology enabled banks, I think you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer, you could do all sorts of the insurance. There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time there's this foundational unlock block in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension?

[Ahmad]

You know, I think number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't, I don't want to like invent things that they might want kind of thing. It's definitely accelerating. You know, I think the two vectors are like a. It accelerates software development. It doesn't necessarily make like kind of the more financial. Like it doesn't make lending that much better, faster or whatever. Maybe you could underwrite a little better, but there's still kind of limitations. But you can build software, especially new software, much quicker. So definitely thinking about that. And we're already seeing an acceleration in kind of new software launches. We're doing. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is interfaces tend to get cluttered over time. But AI has a decluttering effect. Like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need. And I really think the future is people are not trying to do a specific thing, but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like, hey, I just need to make payroll, help me think it through kind of thing. So you can go like a level above, solve the problem rather than be a feature which I think has a decluttering effect to interfaces.

[John]

That's good.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's so amazing. I just think back to ten years ago at this point, starting to build companies and just seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees because like the function of a bank is to like hold money and let you do things with it. And yet obviously, you know, it took some time for you guys to enter payroll and then all these other things, like just, just the concept of getting, getting an invoice, wanting to pay it, like you really should be as simple as like dragging it it somewhere and then that's it. Right. And so there's all these things that like, right in this moment there's going to be an entire generation of entrepreneurs that like only knows this completely frictionless business finance. And I'm very happy for them and I'm happy for, I'm happy for all of us that had to go through do it the hard way for so long.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah.

[Ahmad]

When I Started Mercury. That's actually what got me excited, that like after you build a bank account, there's, there's so much more to do after that. I really didn't want to. This is my fourth company, so I really didn't want to do this thing where you build the thing and then all you do is incrementally improve it a little bit over a decade. I really wanted to do something where the start is just the start and it's a platform to build a lot. So I'm excited that we're finally getting to build that kind of multi product strategy.

[John]

Last question. Deployment pace for angel investing. Are you accelerating it? Are you decelerating? What are you doing on the side?

[Ahmad]

Maybe I'm a little old school, but like when I think when the valuations are the highest and the hype is the highest, you should like not accelerate. You should like, you know, we saw 2021. Like, I'm trying to keep like a continuous pace. Like, I think it's total.

[Jordy]

Don't you know this time is different.

[Ahmad]

Yeah, I think that, like, there's a reason for the hype and there's really exciting companies being built, but I think it's going to be even more fun when the valuations come down after the hype dies down and you can then deploy. You know, it was crazy. No one was deploying in 2022 and 2023 when, like it's the same companies at like a massive discount.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean the smart funds were. And a lot of great companies made it through, grew even bigger and are bigger than they've ever been as you are. So congratulations on all the progress. Thank you for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. There have been a number of AI images hitting the tide timeline. One was of Peter Thiel eating ice cream in Buenos Aires. He has been spotted at a chess match. I think that Image was not AI. This one is AI generated by Kat McGee. But it still sparked a bunch of funny reactions. One of them, the question you need to be asking is what delicious ice cream is almost nobody eating?

[Jordy]

Question is minship properly rated or underrated?

[John]

Mint chip might be underrated. I think it gets thrown in with the chocolate category. It's sort of a second fiddle to the vanilla strawberry chocolate.

[Jordy]

I was always a mint chip kid.

[John]

I like mint chip. I was always strawberry. I like strawberry ice cream.

[Jordy]

Mint chip's good.

[John]

But I think as you zoom in on this AI image, you can tell that it's AI, it's just too crystal clear, too well lit for someone to snap a picture unnoticed in Buenos Aires at an ice cream parlor. This would require professional lighting to get something like this out of a camera on the fly. If you saw someone. 0 to yum is what they say. Anyway.

[Jordy]

Question, John, that I was asking you this morning. Do you think it's better to rest on your laurels or sleep at the wheel? I think I have my answer, but I want to hear yours.

[John]

I think in the modern era, sleeping at the wheel is increasingly safe because of self driving cars. You can be sleeping in a Waymo. You can be sitting in the front seat. I don't know. Do they let you sit in the front seat of a Waymo?

[Jordy]

I don't think so. Maybe if there's a fourth. Can you.

[John]

Not behind the wheel. Not behind the wheel. But what if I'm in the back and I wiggle my body through, through the front two seats. Sit in the front. It'll stop the car. They're going to come on the phone, they're going to stop. Okay. Well then it seems like it's increasingly difficult to sleep at the wheel. And so perhaps resting on your laurels would be the better option.

[Jordy]

I think so. Because it allows you to one. It's obviously comfortable, quite relaxing.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

But just because you're resting doesn't mean you can't get back in the game.

[John]

Yeah. Also, resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to begin with. Whereas sleeping at the wheel, you just have a car.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

It could be.

[Jordy]

It might not even be your car. It's also very lindy. Right. People have been doing this for thousands of years.

[John]

Imagine a Roman emperor resting on laurels.

[Jordy]

Resting on their laurels.

[John]

But they weren't sleeping at the wheel. They hadn't invented the wheel. They barely invented the wheel.

[Jordy]

I think they had the wheel.

[John]

Well, they would ride on top of wheels.

[Jordy]

They were planning to reinvent the wheel.

[John]

But no one had a wagon that had a wheel that would steer the wagon. That's true. You had reins. They would take the horse by the reins. Isn't that the phrase? Take the bull by the horns. What's the reins idiom? There's some sort of reins idiom anyway.

[Jordy]

Yeah. No, I think personally resting on your

[John]

laurels implies that you have laurels to rest on. Sleeping on the wheel means that you just got behind the wheel.

[Jordy]

You could be in a sudden death situation.

[John]

Yes. Much riskier.

[Jordy]

High risk, low reward. Yeah, almost. Very, very.

[John]

Plenty of people rest on their laurels. And just fade into obscurity. They aren't met with true downfall if they're resting on their laurels.

[Jordy]

But sometimes you just rest, recharge, get back in the game.

[John]

But ideally, you avoid both. Ideally, you avoid both. Sleeping at the wheel and resting on your laurels.

[Jordy]

Imagine just a bunch of laurels in your driver's seat. And you're just sitting.

[John]

You could be doing both at the same time.

[Jordy]

You could be doing both. That is the riskiest possible scenario. Because you're going to be the most relaxed.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Highest likelihood of, you know, careening off the road.

[John]

You want to avoid both. You want to avoid both. What do you think of this desk? Herman Miller launched a gaming desk. People are saying it's tasteful, a tasteful gaming setup. For once, they thought it was impossible.

[Jordy]

You personally find pretty much all gaming setups tasteful.

[John]

Extremely tasteful.

[Jordy]

It's a big part of your culture.

[John]

I love. I love a gaming desk.

[Faras]

I don't know.

[John]

The thing is that I don't know. Watching this video of the coil gaming desk, it doesn't scream that tasteful to me. It seems like a minor upgrade. Probably the best gaming desk out there. Seems very functional. I also. I don't know why there's a back panel there. I don't know what that's for. Is that for passing wires through? Perhaps. But how would you rate this gaming desk? Is it tasteful?

[Jordy]

I like it. I like the red coil. I like a pop of color.

[John]

Okay. Little color in there.

[Jordy]

I love. That's that. That color. Red is one of my favorite colors.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

I think I have a.

[John]

What is the coil for? Oh, it takes the cable down so you can plug it in. Because it's adjustable, almost certainly power. I feel like they could just thread that through the leg and it wouldn't even be there. But I guess it adds a pop of color.

[Jordy]

Chad is saying, over designed.

[John]

Over designed. We'll see. Herman Miller has a whole gaming division. I suppose. Anyway, you gotta remember this is from Will Depew. You gotta remember that there's some guy out there who's the Michael Jordan of steel processing. He's on a generational run right now. Everyone sees their niche as the center of the world. So many greats. You'll never hear of the Michael Jordan of steel processing. We gotta find him, dig him up, get him on the show. We've had the Michael Jordan of acquiring rare parcels of land in Montana on the show.

[Jordy]

You gotta have him back. He's gotta be pretty excited for this upcoming round of iPodOS data center buildouts.

[John]

I don't know.

[Jordy]

Anyway, a lot of those ipo, we

[John]

can come back to the land. The land Strategies, because we have our next guest here, Brian Chesky from Airbnb

[Tae Kim]

back on the show.

[John]

Only a few weeks since we talked to you last. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

[Brian Chesky]

Hey, guys, how you doing? Good to be here again.

[Jordy]

Great to see you. We're not in. I'd be better if we were in a blimp right now.

[John]

It'd be better if we were in a blimp. Coming soon. Closer to hanging out on a blimp together. Give us the update. What's going on in Airbnb world?

[Brian Chesky]

So we announced a few things. The first thing we announced is a whole bunch of new services, probably starting with grocery delivery. A lot of people love that Airbnbs have kitchens. So now when you book an Airbnb, you can have groceries waiting for you in Airbnb. A number of people tell us that if you get to Rome, it's hard to get an Uber. So now there's going to be somebody that can welcome you at the airport and pick you up and take you to Airbnb. We also announced finally, car rentals, a long time coming. And so now you can get a car rental on Airbnb. And we also announced that we have now boutique and independent hotels. If you book a boutique or independent hotel, we are creating a price match guarantee. So you see a lower price anywhere else, we will give you the difference back and be credit and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. So those are just a few of the things that we announce. Really. The basic idea is just continually listening to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our hosts, and just keep expanding and perfecting the service and trying to make Airbnb a bit of an ecosystem of other developers and other apps.

[John]

Yeah, this feels like the, the fruition, coming to reality of a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. What was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas. A lot of these feel like they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel or button in the app.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, I mean, it's a good, good question, guys. The app that most people see is maybe something like, call it 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app, but again, most of the work about Airbnb is what happens in the real world. And I think I said last time that we spent a lot of time, imagine like you're living in a one story house and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor. But you didn't build the foundation for a four story building. And so we had to do over the last few years was kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things. Amazon had this problem in the late 90s. They were built on ISBNs for books and they had to basically take their website and turn into a bunch of primitives. So we basically already done that work. To give you an example, it took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us two years to develop service experiences. It took us eight months to develop groceries, and it took us only two months to develop help, luggage storage, airport pickups, and car rentals. So basically looking at the time to launch, from conception to launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market sometimes within like a couple of weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing one or two things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year.

[Jordy]

Yeah, cars. Why? Obviously a hard thing to do, but I'm sure people have been asking this for, you know, decade now. Why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you making those? Why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere. Give me one click to add a car. Obviously there's more that needs to happen on the back end, but why?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, another great question. And I asked myself that, why didn't we do certain things sooner? And if I could, I would have. You know, I remember that one of my early investors said starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down. I never realized, when I started a company that I never realized, I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you'd have all these extra people to do all these extra things. But when you're. When we were in hypergrowth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in the 2000s during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work. Tried in 2016, didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019. And then suddenly, the pandemic hit. We lost 80% of our business. Eight weeks, and we said, oh, man, we don't have time to do this right now. We got to go back to our core business. So we've kind of had three different starts and we tried it before. We just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So, yeah, people have been asking, Asking for this for more than a decade. In fact, 15 years, 2011, we began thinking about it. And now, I hope. I'm happy to say that hopefully going forward, we won't have to wait 15 years for another service. So we'll be. They'll be coming really fast now.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

And how. How is it working under the hood? Are you partnering? Like, is this a. Also kind of like, sharing economy player? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you want to.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, it's going to be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers, so we're going to be working with a number of different partners that be able. That can fulfill this. Some of the services, like Bounce, like, we don't do luggage storage. They have 15,000 locations, almost as many that are Starbucks. So that's more like an app store integration. And then sometimes we have to build services first party with their own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. No one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more countries than Coca Cola, so you have to patch a bunch of things together. I think over time, we'll probably.

[Jordy]

You guys are in more countries than Coca Cola.

[Brian Chesky]

I think that, like, we were at least last time we checked.

[John]

What is.

[Jordy]

What is.

[John]

What is Coca Cola doing?

[Jordy]

They're asleep at the wheel.

[Brian Chesky]

I know.

[Ahmad]

Come on.

[Brian Chesky]

I think we're in every country but North Korea.

[John]

Yeah.

[Brian Chesky]

Iran, Syria, Russia, Belarus, maybe there's one other. So we're just about every other country.

[Jordy]

Yeah. The other thing with cars that. And as I was just, like, thinking about that as kind of Turo came on the map, the. One of the. And I love cars. So as always, I thought very briefly of maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like and maybe turn it into a little business. Quickly realized that, like, it's like, fundamentally a wildly different business. Because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it 365 days a year, if I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate cars are the exact opposite. And it's just like a wildly different financial equation. And so that always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like, incurring some, like, heavy, heavy costs associated with actually, like, supplying, you know, providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side, again, you can get a bunch of rental income and not occur any significant losses associated with the asset.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. Usually people's second biggest asset after their home is their car. I think now we have people's time, we have their homes, we have their cars. We would like to move to a lot of different other categories over time. I think you'll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next next year or two on Airbnb, essentially building this entire ecosystem of services. But you're right. I mean, I think maybe one way to think of Airbnb is like just getting more capacity utilization out of assets. You know, anything that's empty could be further monetized and the world could be a bit more efficient. It could be cheaper to own a car. It could be cheaper to own a house if you could defer the cost by sharing with other people. That was basically how it started. I couldn't afford to pay rent, but that doesn't limit it itself to homes. As you mentioned, it could be anything. Cars, it could be boats, it could be equipment you have laying around. It could be kind of anything.

[John]

How do you think about the previous services that have tied into Airbnb? Was there ever a power law distribution in those? Any few services we've talked about, Fitness trainers, when you're in a town, or private chefs, or anything that can add to an experience. A kayaking tour, a hiking tour. Was there a power law distribution in those? Are you seeing breakout successes in those? Like what. What's the shape of that side of the business these days?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah. So basically, we learned two things. These services. I'll talk about service and experiences.

[John]

Yeah.

[Brian Chesky]

There are three services. We launch a 10, three breakout hits. The three breakout hits are photography. A lot of people want photos on their vacation. And obviously, if you're a family of four, like one of you is not in the photo, or you're giving your camera to someone else, and you want to remember these trips. So having a professional photographer take your photos for 30 minutes, it's a pretty reasonable cost. That's very popular. Chefs. Chefs are not as popular in very urban areas. But like, let's say you go to Lake Tahoe you have a big kitchen, maybe you have groceries, maybe you don't want to cook. A chef could come over. There's not a lot of restaurants there. And then the third one's massage. Especially again, in vacation rental or villa, destination massage is very popular. Other than that, it's really geography by geography. So we see like in Salulita, it's a different kind of experience than say in like the Caribbean. So it really depends geography by geography. With regards to experiences, we're seeing a couple things. Number one, no surprise, landmarks, people. The first time you go to a city, you want to see a landmark. But the thing we learned is the second time you go to a city, you don't want to see a landmark, you want to experience food. And the third time you experience the city, now you want to get inside access. So a big thing we learned is is this your first, second or third time to city or do you live there? And depending upon the answer to the question, depends on the type of experience we offer you. This is a nuance that we didn't really appreciate the first time around and now we do. And I think my prediction is the thing that will make service experiences really big is people will start booking them in their own city. That's when the TAM goes by, you know, by a factor of 10. Not to say it'll be every day, but it just makes it a lot bigger. Tam.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. Just, just clicked for me that, you know, one of the challenges of all the marketplaces, like photography, chef marketplaces, massage, all of them, we don't, I can't even really think of their names, even though there was like venture funded companies in those categories. Because the second you hire a chef, they're literally preparing you food. You immediately develop like trust and a relationship. And so in if you book, find a chef in your hometown, you're talking about disintermediation. You're gonna have this massive disintermediation.

[John]

And also economies of scale. If you're just the private chef booking company, very hard to support the entire operation, the back office. But Airbnb is big company. This can be one of many features in the

[Jordy]

travel. It's like, yeah, I want a photographer here, I want a chef here.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, yeah, you bring up two points. I'll ramp both points. So one thing is most services, there's not even one app in the world. So if you want to get a massage in United States, you might use an app like Zeel. But if you want to get a massage in Korea, I don't even Know, the app, it's probably a Korean company and if you want to go to Brazil, it's going to be a different company. So it's not even possible for most people to know which app to use in which country. And so being able to aggregate all that demand is great. And these apps, these developers love it because we basically are their international expansion strategy. Another much of these companies, the hardest challenge they have is growing internationally and we say, well, we can introduce your brand to a global audience. Well, now let's talk about locals. Yes. I don't. If you're going to do a repeat service, we don't want to charge 15, 20%. We're going to have to decide a business model and maybe there is no commission or it's a very, very low commission and maybe the value there is this, we make your life easier year. And I don't, I think this brings up a larger point which is we don't need to monetize every experience on Airbnb. The best thing is have a great relationship, add value and know that there's enough high value assets we can make money on and we don't need to try to get every last dollar. We just really want people to love our service. And as you know, you know, we generate quite a bit of free cash flow. So, you know, we're one of the more profitable companies as a free. Thank you. As a free cash cash flow standpoint. So we are able to pass a lot of value on to customers.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think, I think, you know that, that framing as like a concierge for the world, where like if you're staying, if you're staying at a hotel, like the concierge is not always thinking like, okay, this person wants something to do today. How do I get the maximum amount of value out of them in this moment? Right. Because then you'd always send them to, well, why don't you eat at this restaurant on the property? Or why don't you do this thing on the property? But just like actually taking a positive sum view and just know that like you want to be core to someone's experience wherever they are in the world. I think is.

[Brian Chesky]

I like concierge for the world, by the way. That's like a very good slogan actually.

[John]

Coinage. I love it.

[Jordy]

It's all yours.

[John]

Maybe this is a random pivot, but the total solar Eclipse is happening August 12, 2026. I want to know. It feels like it's driving a lot of travel broadly. And I want to know, like, do these special events first of all, like,

[Jordy]

I feel like every time there's like one of these things, it's like this will never happen again for 600 years. And then it happens in like two years.

[John]

No, no, no, no.

[Brian Chesky]

It's a very specific thing that happens every 200 years.

[John]

But there's a lot of things. Yeah. So a couple years ago it happened in Texas, and this time it's happening in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and Spain. And so there is a lot of travel in. And I've heard stats from other companies and I'm just wondering about these big events. First, how much do they show up in the data? How much do you see them? And then second, what are you doing to amplify and get the most out of these? Let your customers know, because you frame this as. Sometimes the best experience is when you know it's the first time, visiting a place, second time, third time. But at the same time, as a user, there's this tension between. I love it when a company knows something about me before I have to fill out a form. But also it gets a little creepy if they know too much about me. And this, like, this weird tension where I want you to know, but I don't want you to tell me that you know, and I don't want to fill out the form, but I don't want you to spy on me. But I sort of do want you to spy on me. So walk me through all of that.

[Brian Chesky]

Okay, so, yeah, two parts. I'll do the solar eclipse and then we'll talk about essentially personalization without being creepy maybe is the point.

[John]

Yeah.

[Brian Chesky]

Okay. So on the solar eclipse in 2024, I think it was the spring or I don't know when it was in 2024, we were able to see a heat map. So, yes, you saw in the data, and we were able to see a heat map of the exact path of the solar eclipse. And you can look at a heat map of all of our bookings and anyone that was in that line of the eclipse. You saw a massive increase in bookings when the Taylor Swift eras tour came out. You can literally follow the tour from the data on Airbnb. When the World cup came in Paris. Sorry, the Olympics came in Paris. 700,000 people stayed in Airbnb. That's like eight, nine Olympic stadiums worth of people in Milan, 200,000 people stayed in Milan and Cortino for the Olympics earlier this year. The World Cup's coming up in Mexico, U.S. canada. We're expecting that to be the biggest event in Airbnb history. You're actually hitting on a really key point. The only. Maybe the reason Airbnb exists is this weird phenomenon where people list their homes for an event. Most people have only intention of listing one time, but about 50% of the people continue hosting. And so it's kind of a hook. And a lot of people, like, I don't want to host, but they do it once. They make a bunch of money, they realize it's not weird and they keep doing it. If it wasn't for this phenomenon, there may not have been an Airbnb. We used events to grow, so that is basically a core part of our

[Jordy]

strategy, whether it's a financial or Laplooza Airbnb future. I should be able to go buy. I should be able to go see events that I know are going to happen, Olympics, World cup, and basically buy and then resell. I'm kidding.

[Brian Chesky]

And then I want to answer the second part of I think, John's question, which is personalization without being creepy. So right now, I think most websites and most apps don't really ask you questions. They infer things, right? They think that if you ask somebody a question, that's friction. And so for 25 years, this is Amazon, this is Instagram, this is basically every app, including Airbnb. We're mostly just looking at what you click on, what you book, your prior behavior, and we try to infer based on that, what you want in the future. I think going forward, we're going to go beyond that. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to ask you questions. That's what an agent does. An agent asks you questions. So your concierge for the world should ask you questions. You went to a travel concierge, but they didn't ask you a question. That'd be pretty weird. So I think that's the social contract of the app is more conversational. We're going to get more information. But the other thing is designing preferences. We found that people are fine giving us their information if they know why, where it's going, that it's vaulted and what we're going to do with it. So we're going to develop a preferences panel like we announced today. One of the things I'm most proud of is the design of our privacy page. Most people, they either don't care about the privacy page and like the people that it's like their entry level work, or they make it sometimes maybe make it purposely hard, but then ultimately that erodes Trust. So we're making preferences. I want to basically build a preferences library where we show you. Here's all the stuff we know about you. Do you want to edit anything? Do you want to add it? And here's what we're going to show to whom. And you can say, show this to the host. This is only available to an agent. This no human can see. It's vaulted, but the app can see it. And eventually maybe it's encrypted. So that's kind of where we want to go.

[John]

2034, total solar eclipse in Egypt. You can stand at the pyramids and watch it. Book your Airbnb futures.

[Jordy]

I'm going to go. I'm going to go and offer cash today.

[John]

You should start buying property all over Egypt.

[Jordy]

And last question. What's the last major fitness or health unlock that you've had? And then we'll let you go.

[Brian Chesky]

Oh, very good question. Fitness or health unlock.

[Jordy]

Could be a habit, could be a supplement, could be anything.

[Brian Chesky]

Great question.

[Jordy]

Sleep protocol, actually.

[Brian Chesky]

Okay. If you're sleep dep. I've been taking creatine, 5 grams, since I was like, 17. But I read that they did some studies that if you didn't get a good night's sleep, you can take up to 20 grams of creatine and you are nearly as alert as if you got a full night's sleep. And I don't know, seems to work. And so if you don't get a good night's sleep, instead of taking a normal dose of creatine, take a much higher dose. The only other thing I'd say is for those listening, I'm a big fan of compound movements. I think the most important exercise, if you only do one, is a squat. And I.

[Jordy]

Sorry, Brian, I don't mean to laugh at you.

[Brian Chesky]

You.

[Jordy]

We have these sound effects, so. John, talk.

[John]

It makes it sound like this. Can you push? It makes my voice sound like this. And Jordy was doing it to you during that last bit and it sounds ridiculous.

[Tae Kim]

Yeah, I really like compound lips.

[John]

Compound lips.

[Brian Chesky]

That's. That's good. That's exactly how I'd want to be able to say it when I'm talking about Spot. By the way, before we go, I just want to tell you something.

[John]

Please.

[Brian Chesky]

Are you guys still interested in doing the Olympics?

[John]

Absolutely. Yes. 100.

[Jordy]

We're ready. We packed our building.

[Brian Chesky]

We've been talking to brands, we've been talking to people. And I want you to know that we're going to make this happen.

[John]

I. I'm very excited. We're going to make it happen. The team is pumped up right now. Everyone's fired up.

[Jordy]

We're fired up. Congrats to the whole team on the on. On all the new releases.

[Brian Chesky]

Thank you very much, guys.

[Jordy]

Great progress. Always fun.

[John]

Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Goodbye.

[Jordy]

First Chad guess, the first chat guest. Very fitting.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

So unfortunately, the chat effect, the guests cannot hear it. Only. Only you can. And the two of us. But we're gonna keep using it strategically.

[John]

It's a really good effect. I was so skeptical when you launched these buttons. I was like, can we get the comedic timing to war?

[Tae Kim]

Turns out we can.

[John]

Yes. It's working beautifully. Well, our next guest, get that button ready because I think we're using it again. It's Marcus Malone from Minted New York. Did I say your last name correctly or did I mispronounce that botched?

[Marcus Milioni]

It's Milioni.

[John]

Bodged Milioni.

[Jordy]

I'm sorry.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, I've been getting Malone my whole life, so it's fine. I'm used to it.

[John]

It was written sort of tiny on

[Jordy]

my sheet, but dude, it's incredible to find me on the show. Way, way overdue. I've been following your. Thanks for having me for a long time now. You've been absolutely on a terror and yeah, we're excited to have you since it's your first time.

[John]

Yeah, zoom out for us.

[Jordy]

Zoom out. You know, all that stuff.

[Marcus Milioni]

All right, so I don't know how far back you want me to go.

[Jordy]

All the way to the LAX days at least.

[Marcus Milioni]

All right, so I played lacrosse in college. I played at St. Joe's University in Philly

[Dylan Field]

there.

[Marcus Milioni]

Moved to New York after I graduated. I was working at a smaller regional bank doing commercial real estate debt until like a year or a few months into Covid. As Covid started Minted kind of spawned after I was posting on social media, Instagram, TikTok.

[John]

Were you just doing your own accounts first or. Or were you thinking, like, I'm going to build something or was it experimental? Like, what was the actual flow? Well, I was a little bored during

[Marcus Milioni]

COVID I was at my parents house.

[Tae Kim]

I thought I was going to be.

[Jordy]

You didn't love regional banking? We love regional banking here.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah. So I thought I was taking a long weekend at my parents house and Covid would blow over. A long weekend. And then so I just started posting about things I liked mainly around like fashion and fitness on Instagram and TikTok and then the brand kind of spawned out of that.

[John]

Yeah. What Was the first format direct to camera, like scripted, unscripted. Yeah, like yapping.

[Marcus Milioni]

Get ready with phone in front of my face, yapping. I guess that was mainly TikTok and then Instagram was more just like outfit photos.

[John]

Okay.

[Marcus Milioni]

Like I liked putting outfits together.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. And then was growth like linear? Was there, was there a key turning point? A lot of times, like with my YouTube, I started a YouTube channel during COVID very similar story. And for the first year it was like a thousand views. And then I cracked the code on one video, correct structure. And it started, it went, I think it got 60,000 views, which was like an insane takeoff by comparison to the thousand views that I was averaging. And I credit that a lot to. I had the editing dialed, I had the script out, but I really got like the structure and the title and the thumbnail all packaged up so it could fly. And I'm wondering what the process was like for growing on TikTok and Instagram.

[Marcus Milioni]

I mean I kind of viewed it as a rep scheme. I told myself, at least on the short form video stuff, since I had no background in, I was like, I'll just do three videos a day for 365 straight days. And by that point, you know, you start to see, you get feedback from like the analytics. And so after a certain point you're like, okay, well this did well. Here, let me like, you know, try some variation of this next time. But really, yeah, it was just like a reps game. I would try any sort of video style, but a lot of it was just talking. And I think at that time there was a lot of like it was still a dancing app, right? Like people were just doing dances. And I wasn't doing dances. I was trying to just provide some form of value to the viewer. And you see it a lot more now. But at that time it was kind of like not as prevalent.

[Jordy]

So I think, yeah, I think of you, I mean I think of you as like the, a new generation of like founder led company which there was like, you know, great companies have almost always been. Well, every company started by found but. But you're like the first generation that was this like hyper online. You're in public, you're.

[Tae Kim]

You're building your personal brand.

[Jordy]

You're building your personal brand as well as like, you know, people are following along, building the company also like your own journey as like an athlete and doing those things together and just having this like hyper presence where historically a founder, even if they were pretty online, they might pop up and do like an Interview every few months and people would be able to tune in there. They might post like, post a little, you know, somewhat actively on Instagram. But it wasn't like three video, three like medium form videos a day for a year kind of thing. And I just feel like that built so much momentum because there was like multiple things to latch on people could latch on to, like, how are you? How's your, how's your actual running going? Like I remember video after video where you're like pushing yourself super, super hard. And then there's also like some people can latch onto the business side which like giving people behind the scenes and really making people feel like a part of building that, which has ultimately led to where you're at right now. You had this drop this week that I hit you up yesterday. Must have been extremely chaotic. You guys sold out so quickly that you were, you were going back through, like trying to identify like bot, like people that were botting it to resell. Yeah, yeah, take us through, take us through. But like before we get there, like kind of the key moments along the journey, you start out, you're just making videos. At what point were you like, oh, I can quit. Like, when did you quit your job?

[John]

I got to make some money off this.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah. So it was like month eight of, kind of after we started, started January of 2021. And then by month eight, we had kind of had four large releases under, under my belt. And it was starting to become too much to try to juggle between real work and not like letting anything like slack there because obviously that paid the bills. But I remember talking to my dad and trying to figure out, okay, what's a good exit plan? And so we came up with a revenue number that we would hit over the next three months. And if we hit that, then you know what, we're going to take the jump and quit our job. And so the very next release, we hit it in like five minutes. I remember being at home and being like, well, I guess we're just going to.

[Jordy]

Well, that was part of what must have been nerve wracking, quitting. Right. Because it was a drops based approach. And so you have super spiky revenue. So it was, it's, you know, you're thinking like, okay, well if this drop goes well and this drop goes well and this drop goes well, then feel

[John]

like a paycheck every two years.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it doesn't, yeah, it doesn't feel like it's streaming in.

[Marcus Milioni]

No, I mean, and you're also, you're betting the farm like, the entire time, every single drop, I was just run the bank account to $0 on production and hope that it went well. I guess at any point, like, it could have blown up in my face and gone to zero.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So that, that happens. When you're looking back, what was the next significant moment? You're like, okay, this seems like a real business. People like what we're doing.

[Marcus Milioni]

I would say that following Christmas, like that December, so 12 months in, we had the largest release of the company's history. It was going into Christmas season and holiday season and we released. And I remember being so blown away by the number on the screen, but then also realizing, like, okay, all this inventory is in my parents garage and we have to ship all this out as fast as. Yeah. So I need all hands on deck. I've got like, I've got my. My brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Like, everybody is there packing, and I'm like, this is gonna take us two days. It's like, no problem. And it took us like six days of packing every day, like, through Christmas. Might have ruined Christmas, I'm not even sure.

[John]

But it was so new.

[Marcus Milioni]

Everyone was so excited. Like, I mean, obviously toward the end, we were definitely getting on each other, but it was so new and exciting for everybody that, yeah, it kind of just. It was a blur.

[Jordy]

And then. And then this whole time, like, running is blowing up. Running got. Running got cool. You, You. You clearly thought it was cool before you started the brand, but I think a lot of people realized that maybe it was cool, you know, around 20, 22. Is that, like, when it. When you felt like it was really becoming part of popular culture in a bigger way?

[Marcus Milioni]

It was. I mean, yeah, it was really becoming part of my life then too. I think I probably started in 21 and then really picked up and wanted to start racing.

[Jordy]

What were you running from?

[Marcus Milioni]

Honestly, a lot of different things probably, now that I think about it. But yeah, I mean, like, it started like everybody else. You sign up for half marathon, you're like, okay, I gotta train and I'm gonna give myself a time goal. And then like anything else, it's a sickness. And then it just gets worse and worse.

[Jordy]

Did you start? Do you still feel pressured? Were you feeling pressure to be the best runner out of your customer base? Like, I mean, like, I feel like you're. You're kind of running two races, you're building a business, and then I can imagine it really gets in your head because you start sharing some times that you're running, and then you're competitive and you want to improve. Walk us through that.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, I mean, the beauty of posting on the Internet is that you get to hear commentary from everybody on the Internet. So I always approached it as if we're going to make a performance running apparel, I better have some half respectable times. I'll never be elite. I may never be sub elite, but I at least put in the time and effort and try to run fast. Yes.

[Jordy]

And then at what point did you start getting approached to do, you know, big partnerships like this drop this week? Because these type of things are typically, you know, brands need to like, meet in the middle. The best partnership. Right. Is like a win for, you know, it sort of like legitimizes the rising brand and then makes the. Maybe the more legacy brand, like, you know, cooler and more relevant. But timing matters a lot for these things.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, I think it was toward the end of 2022, so we coming to the end of our second year. I got an email from Jason over at Saucony who kind of heads there. It's called energy but partnerships, and it was really cool. I mean, the email started out just lifestyle because at this point the brand wasn't as heavily focused on the performance running piece. And it was a lot more menswear and jewelry and stuff like that. So he wanted us to work on a lifestyle shoe that kind of fit into that world. And then when they brought us up to Boston, I kind of pitched the idea of, well, we should do a running shoe too, because we run and we're also making performance apparel. And so it was lifestyle first. Then the running shoe came, and then now we've had two running shoes.

[John]

And then.

[Jordy]

And then how are you thinking about beyond. Beyond running? Like, what, Are there other. Are there other categories that you're particularly excited about or do you want it to be a brand that can exist anywhere, that you're kind of like idealized? Customer goes, yeah, I look at.

[Marcus Milioni]

I mean, an athlete spends a lot of time outside of sport. And so I think that being able to provide products like, as I call them off court, is important. Important, but from like a performance sporting side of things. I think we're really focused on running right now, but I'm interested in a lot of the endurance sports. Cycling is very interesting, but for right now, just the running piece.

[John]

How are you thinking about growing the business? It's such an interesting origin story because it's not okay. I was in business school, I raised money, I ran, went to a design firm and set up an EDTC website. That era existed and there were a couple companies that made it through. A lot of companies that we've talked about that didn't quite make it or wound up selling off at a discount. And it feels like at some point, if you're not already there, there might be like a crossroads of like, are you going to take a run at being the next Nike? Raise as much money as possible, Retail footprint all over the world, like go crazy or more family business compound. Slowly grow, grow, grow. Do things tastefully and there's obviously like a whole gradient of pathways in between. But what feels natural to you?

[Marcus Milioni]

It's hard to say. I mean, we're bootstrapped now in year five and obviously take it all the way.

[Jordy]

Take it all the way. We're hitting the gong for that.

[John]

They're going for the anti fundraiser. You love to see it.

[Marcus Milioni]

So obviously like, you know, it caps what you can do and how big you can do certain things. But, I mean, in my mind, I want the brand to be as big as possible on like a global scale. I don't think when you're trying to build something like that, going slow and building a really strong foundation is a bad thing. You know, I don't think us being almost handicapped in the bootstrap way from a money standpoint, is it?

[Jordy]

Yeah, look at the last month you had Airbnb pivot to being, or, sorry, Allbirds pivot to a Neo cloud. You have Everlane sell to sheen examples of high growth. If you're doing anything cool in apparel and you're executing well, you're going to grow quickly. But high growth appears to be entirely at odds with building a lasting consumer lifestyle brand.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, I think there's a playbook where you just turn on the Meta Ads faucet and just throw money at it. But we do very, very, very little advertising at all. I mean, we're really just, I would say, 99.5% organic. And that feels like a really nice, strong foundation where if we want to turn on the paid advertising, it just makes our life a little bit easier because we're building a brand that people know and you're not just like getting fed ads all the time and then you end up buying it and you have no real affiliation with the brand.

[John]

Yeah, and the worst CPMs you'll ever have are when you're, you know, there's no brand awareness. Like every year you delay that, it gets. The economics probably get stronger and the TAM gets even bigger. How are you thinking about bots? What is a do not buy Decoy listing. Explain to me how all this fits together in the modern era.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, so, I mean, when their shoe is anticipated in that way, like we saw it with the speed 4, which was the first shoe we released. We got slammed with the bots and you know, it's people submitting orders for 30 pairs. They want to resell them a lot of the time. And so this time I took to Twitter before the release and, and called upon people who have either like, bought it in the past or current botters to try to get a little focus group together to figure out how I could jam up the bots. So I'll give you the sauce on what I did. I had those two decoy listings on there because I guess, you know, the bots don't look at the screen, they're just going right to check out. And so I had those be the correct listing, naming, structure, everything. And then the real listing, the one with the green border, had none of the real terminology associated with the shoe on the listing or in the kind of like the metadata. And it seemed to work. I would say like 99% of the orders were manual. Some people, people did bought it, but it was very easy to catch and then go ahead and cancel those orders.

[Jordy]

So wait, what was on the decoy pages, though? You should have sold like sand for like a thousand, you know, like $200.

[Dylan Field]

We had it so that the, the

[Marcus Milioni]

shoes were like £10,000. You couldn't get a shipping rate because they were so heavy. So you would get to check out and then the whole thing would break.

[Jordy]

Oh, that is brilliant.

[John]

That's really clever. I feel like this cat and mouse game is going to go on forever.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's such a, it's such a. Yeah. Having. Having like hype and, and way more demand than supply is like the, you know, it is, is a, is a blessing for, for a brand. But it is such a, it's such an interesting challenge because you want to get your product. You don't benefit at all from shoes sec. Selling it two, three times, whatever it is in the secondary market. And so like, your entire focus has to be on like, how do you get the shoes to the actual people that are a part of building this brand with you. And it's, there's probably like a. Has anybody built like, software to help with this? It's a pretty niche problem because most brands are like, we'd be happy to sell out with bots immediately, but it feels like there's like a software product there.

[Marcus Milioni]

You can go the raffle route where like you know you can collect entries and like pre charge cards a dollar and then if they win the raffle and I think people like the idea of first come first serve and if you get in there, you enter your card information, you get past the age captcha you are rewarded with the shoe and the raffles. In talking to a bunch of people who buy sneakers and are a part of that stuff, it just takes a lot of the fun away from releases like that. So try to keep it as pure as possible.

[Jordy]

How are you thinking about Nvidia earnings? John, you're laughing but Marcus has a dedicated account where he just talks about markets.

[John]

Yeah but he's been live with us while the earnings dropped. I know.

[Marcus Milioni]

Does anyone have any numbers?

[John]

Yes and bottom line EPS of 187 revenue came in at 81.6 billion double B and the stocks down 2.4%. No, it's popped back up maybe, I don't know. It's jumping around.

[Jordy]

Just take him Predicted plantruster over there.

[John]

Nvidia earnings live. Are there any IRL events that are small right now that you think have the seeds or are showing promise of becoming the next run club. We went through the padel and pickleball booms and I'm wondering if you're tracking anything that feels like could be a source of communities and cities, something outdoors or I don't know anything in that realm that's like run club shaped, that's really small right now but shows like oh there's some deep interest there that might go somewhere. I don't know where but it's at least popping up on your radar now

[Marcus Milioni]

I don't know if I'm the best to answer that question. I'm not too sure. Stick to running. Yeah, I see people go on group bike rides. They seem like a lot of fun. You know you go on a 50 mile ride, you stop halfway, get a coffee and like a donut with your friends and then you bike back and it's like you know, you're exercising, you're out in nature that I don't have a bike so I can't participate. But if I were to do another group activity outside it would probably be

[John]

that Jordy's been getting really into the LARPing, the live action role playing where you dress up and go to the park suit of armor and you just throw each other with.

[Jordy]

I haven't been getting into it personally but I've been sending you videos of there's some I'll send, I'll Send you after this. There's, there's a. Yeah. John has a helmet. He's ready to LARP. There's this account where they have like LARPing, like pretty high, pretty high skill larping going on where they're hitting each other legitimately so hard. I'm like, you're gonna give each other concussions. But it seems like it's fair play

[John]

now with this helmet on, I'm good to go.

[Marcus Milioni]

I think I've seen some of that stuff that might be a good. Maybe we get like a little tech version of that going.

[Jordy]

How big's the team these days?

[Marcus Milioni]

Three people. And then my sister's part time. She does the customer service and she's the goat. But yeah, three full time.

[John]

That's amazing.

[Jordy]

Three full time and all in house, like in office in New York. How, like, what is, how are you thinking about supply chain? Like, you're making a lot. You're making some stuff in New York from what I recall. But imagine you're making it all over.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, a lot of the performance stuff is made over in China. You know, the shoes were Indonesia. That's a saucony factory. So that's not US Jewelry Italy. I mean, we're kind of spread out, but we have a lot of good manufacturing partners. I would like to bring some more of those pieces here to the US I think it's just we're not super agile as a company, so switching a factory overnight isn't really possible. And there's a whole like, resampling and reproducing process that would need to go into that. So we're focused on like catching up to, to the fashion calendar right now. Because right now we've been behind since day one. We've been behind and we kind of release when we can, but we're this year we will catch up to the calendar and be, you know, releasing products in the proper weather.

[John]

Is that a double edged sword?

[Jordy]

It's like, hey, we have a winter coat.

[Marcus Milioni]

Oh, we've done it. I've done hoodies in the middle of August.

[John]

Yeah. Wait, but is that a double edged sword where, like if you're the only hoodie that's going on sale in the summer, like, at least it's like not a noisy time and you're not getting crowded out and so maybe there's a benefit or silver lining.

[Marcus Milioni]

No, it feels bad.

[John]

It feels bad.

[Marcus Milioni]

It feels bad.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. That's funny when you say like the calendar. Are you just talking about the seasons or are there specific, specific moments where all the brands, you know, sort of coalesce around, like, this is the day or this is the week when, like, fall collections go on sale or, like, how precise are we being? Because I know that there's a whole fashion Runway show circuit, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if there's a real cycle to it or a logic.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah, I don't think it's that crazy for, like, the performance stuff. I think you want to hit, like, spring, summer, fall, winter, and even that is a little more relaxed. Like, you can kind of do it based off when people start training for certain things or how the weather is shifting. But, you know, there are times if you want to do stuff around the world, marathon majors, then you kind of have to, like, prep for that. And a lot of those start, you know, November, October, November. So, yeah, I mean, depending on what you want to hit from like an event standpoint, that kind of shifts. Shifts stuff, because it does get cooler then, but you're still relaxing, releasing, you know, obviously, tanks and stuff that you're running in to stay cool. But yeah, I mean, spring, summer, fall, winter, for the most part is good enough.

[John]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Jordy]

Are you a nominative determinism guy?

[John]

The chat thinks you're basically a millionaire.

[Jordy]

Marcus.

[Tae Kim]

Millionaire.

[Jordy]

Marcus. Millionaire.

[John]

Yeah.

[Marcus Milioni]

I don't know. I guess on paper. Yeah. The company would be worth.

[John]

Worth.

[Marcus Milioni]

Yeah.

[John]

That's fantastic. Well, congratulations. All the progress.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Great to finally have you on the show. And yeah, just congrats to your. To your team of three on accomplishing what. What, what would be difficult for. For even a team of 300. It's super impressive.

[John]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Marcus Milioni]

I appreciate both of you. Thanks for having me on.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Great to see you.

[John]

Thanks for hopping on.

[Jordy]

Talk soon, dude. Yeah.

[John]

Jensen Wong talked about the quarter that Nvidia just had. He said the build out of AI factories.

[Tae Kim]

Boo.

[John]

The largest infrastructure expansion in human history. Yay. Is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay. Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that there is progress being made. Agentic AI has arrived, he says. Doing productive work. True. Generating real value. True. And scaling rapidly across companies and industries. Also true. Lots of good stuff. Nvidia net income, it rose to 42.96 billion. They almost hit 43 billion. Not too bad. A year earlier, they were doing just 18.8 billion in net income. Huge, huge increase.

[Jordy]

Really wild.

[John]

Really wild.

[Jordy]

Printing. Definition of printing.

[John]

All good news. The stock. Stock is sort of up and down, basically flat. But Nvidia revenue jumped 85% to 81.62 billion from 44 billion last year, the company said.

[Jordy]

Shocking.

[John]

Yeah, Great stuff in the timeline. You know who I mean. Steve Wozniak crushed his commencement speech. We have to debate this to see was he actually a good communicator. Is he setting the tone correctly? But we should still play the clip of Steve Wozniak, the co founder of Apple at Grand Valley State University, because he talked about AI, and unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get booed off stage. He actually got cheered for his comments.

[Jordy]

Wait, this was. Who was it, Tyler? Steve Wozniak. No, no, no shots.

[John]

I'm a big fan of Steve Woznia. I love the.

[Jordy]

Was shots fired.

[John]

Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State University on Instagram here. Can we play this from the beginning?

[Brian Chesky]

Months.

[John]

It might loop back, but he's doing bits. He's getting laughs. You all have AI.

[Brian Chesky]

You all have AI. Actual intelligence.

[John]

Oh, Mic drop, Knee slap for. Hey. Playing to the crowd.

[Jordy]

We're going to need a big.

[John]

He knows the audience. He knows the audience. We're trying to figure out how to make a brain.

[Brian Chesky]

Software hardware, synapse chips, and I was

[John]

at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain.

[Brian Chesky]

Takes nine months.

[John]

Yeah, knee slapper. But he knows the audience. He's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI pilled? Is he super intelligent? Legends build. Probably not, but it is regardless. I think it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience. And that is a way to bridge to a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post AGI world. I don't know. We'll have to go watch the full.

[Jordy]

Let's close it out with this video from Tyler that we can pull up.

[John]

Okay. What is this?

[Jordy]

This is the video I was referencing with. With Marcus. I'm very concerned about these gentlemen.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

And what they're doing. Pull it up, Pull it up.

[John]

What's happening?

[Jordy]

Let's get like. This is. This is insane. Contact. I mean, the helmet is getting dented. I think this is breaking.

[John]

Not an issue. Skill issue. They really hitting that, aren't they?

[Jordy]

Run it. Run it back one more time.

[John]

One more time.

[Jordy]

He just. This is just wrong. They're taking it too far. I don't. I don't see how you leave this without a concussion. But we'll try it out after we.

[John]

We have the gong.

[Tae Kim]

Mallet.

[Jordy]

Yeah,

[John]

that seems like it would do some damage.

[Jordy]

Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. It has been an honor of our lifetimes to podcast with you today. We hope you have an incredible evening

[John]

and leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter tbpn.com we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye dears.