Jordy (2:43)

chips for America, stronger US economic engineering, massive chip shortage. Right now you see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched, which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here.

John (2:58)

And plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers specifically. I mean, even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the 2 nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs. But they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So In November of 2022, I was writing about this and I said on a YouTube video, in the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean, even the tiniest earthquake, they

Jordy (3:55)

have to track the weather.

John (3:56)

Yes.

Jordy (3:57)

Outside of the facility.

John (3:58)

Exactly.

Jordy (3:58)

If the weather outside of the facilities

John (4:00)

is fluctuating at all, it's inside earthquakes. Taiwan is famous, or TSMC is famous, where they don't even need apparently a, like a, like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know, because that's the level of sensitivity over at the TSMC fab. So if you want to keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war. And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans that you'd create an increased risk of geopolitical conflict. And in 2022, the Russia Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously we've been tracking the Iran war and America's military is potentially stretched thin. So the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever. And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained, a chip shortage through least 2030 and the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically their full time job is to advocate for a particular position. I was talking to a friend who is interfaced with a lot of the different groups in Washington and there are like huge think tanks, huge lobbying organizations on both sides because there's so many different interests going on.

Jordy (5:43)

Yeah, not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts Nvidia actually makes holding

John (5:48)

up the world economy. Right, that's the meme and that's certainly true. So there are good arguments on both sides. One that keeps getting trotted out is, you know, it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab. But there is, there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here. We'll be able to transfer that research and development that happens over there very quickly. But the much more important thing is just that the more the economies are interlinked the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of tsmc, Arizona, Samsung, intel broadly as well as startup Fabs products, Startup Fab projects like the Terafab. And there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing that are at least talking about tool making, talking about getting a fab up and running. Nothing that's really taken off. I mean even Samsung is not fabbing any of the leading edge Nvidia chips at this point. But you know, there's incredible economic incentive and people have known that this is an important sort of cash cow business for a few years now at the very least. And so there's certainly been a lot of incentive to put plans in motion that might play out before 2030 because there's such a, such a shortage. And so in general we're traveling this long and narrow road. But I'm coming around to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with the first order, the first order logic of just we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy, so we should have them. But going forward it'll be really interesting to track how China's indigenous indigenization project or their domestic supply chain evolves. They of course have.

Jordy (7:52)

Yeah, my take has always been even if they are getting chips, it's not like the party is going to say, actually our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a drip of H2 hundreds. Yes, they're still going to keep the momentum that they have. Just wouldn't be like them.

John (8:12)

There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from.

Jordy (8:15)

Yeah, you can take some of the wind out of the sails, but they can just spend more.

John (8:21)

You can slow the momentum potentially. That's the argument. Is that buy limiting demand? Like there's a local, local fab in China that just says a chip maker that, that says, okay, well you know, our demand is half as much, so we're going to. So like we can't afford to scale. Sure, we have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer. So you don't get the process level of like execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business. It becomes more of like NASA than SpaceX. That's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Before we move back to the Wall Street Journal, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma cloud code or Codex or sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products. Ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So Nvidia and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20, a processor Nvidia designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models. But it was reported that the high flyer team behind Deepseek sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200 or close to it or closer? Well, it's sort of a moot question now because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version. So the company's fortunes turned again in December when the U.S. said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series of GPUs. So this is not the B200, not the Blackwell, this is the Hopper. But it's still very advanced in China as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the US government. So there's basically an export tariff. GPUs, or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in AI training. AI models. I think everyone knows this. In late January, after Wang visited China, officials there signaled they would approve H200 sales as well. So there was a big debate over whether or not Beijing would block the imports of H2 hundreds in order to stimulate the indigenization of the domestic semiconductor supply chain. It seems like these will be going

Jordy (10:56)

through and they will be purchased, inspire local industry to grind harder, basically.

John (11:01)

But you have a whole bunch of AI labs that are not in the fab industry, that are not involved in the verticalization process, and they just want to train great models because they have real businesses like, they're running. They're running Alibaba or Baidu or any. Any number of companies. And ByteDance wants good AI, and they want the best chips. And they're not really interested in getting into the supply chain at a deep level, at least in the short term, so. But until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In Nvidia's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China, to date, we have not generated any revenue from those sales. Speaking at the company's GTC event Tuesday, Huang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China. We've received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up. Nvidia didn't comment on how much it expected to earn from H200 sales in China, but in the past, the company has said that the Chinese market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year. That makes perfect sense.

Jordy (12:15)

And Christina over at CNBC got the original scoop near the bathroom line at gtc.

Matt Wong (12:22)

Really?

Jordy (12:22)

Huang happened to walk by Security.

John (12:24)

No.

Jordy (12:25)

And asked if he'd answered her earlier question. She said she had one more. You said you got China purchase orders. That means you got the green light from both sides. He said yes. Wow, that is a scoop outlet there. As a scoop athlete, you never know where your next scoop is going to come. From seriously, you got to be ready.

John (12:44)

The sticking a microphone in someone's face as they're walking by really does make

Jordy (12:48)

sense with the camera flashes going yes, yes.

John (12:51)

Jensen loves answering some questions on a microphone line. Chinese authorities approve Nvidia's H200 chip sales source says and to your taxes says Xi Jinping has given up the situation with the H200 sale in China summarized and it's everyone jumping off and Xi Jinping saying stop. Domestic chips can work maybe. And everyone at the lab saying must get cuda, dude. Nvidia is the future falling into the moat and they're falling into the cuda dependency moat. Will be interesting to see the evolution of the of the cuda mote as other chips come online. I mean we've seen TPU become functional. So there are questions about the cuda mote long term, but it certainly seems like not a stopper to demand right now as labs place orders from Nvidia.

Jordy (13:49)

In other news, JRR Tolkien used Gen Z brainrot slang over 70 years ago. That's how ahead no way he was. And the quote maggots jeered the end. Cigars. You're cooked.

John (14:03)

You're cooked.

Jordy (14:04)

White skins will catch you and eat you. They're coming.

John (14:06)

Oh, he's like using it literally like you will be cooked by the some, I don't know, villain. I suppose. A cry from the Grishnakh showed that this was not mere jest. Horsemen riding very slowly had this is really hard to read with these hyphens had indeed been sighted, still far behind but gaining on the orcs. So the orcs will cook you if you fall behind, I suppose. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta. And let me also tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that cerebras solved six years ago, says Andrew Feldman, the CEO and founder of Cerebras.

Jordy (15:02)

Shots fired.

John (15:02)

Shots fired indeed, he says. Their next gen inference chip, not available yet, has 140 times less memory and less memory bandwidth than Cerebras. To run a single 2 trillion parameter model, you need 2,000 Grok chips on cerebras. That's just over 20 wafers even paired with GPUs. Grox maxes out at 1,000 tokens per second. We run at thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production. Now why when you connect 2,000 chips together, every Internet connect has latency, every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper, if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny chips. We solved this with wafer scale, one integrated system, little interconnect tax. Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebras. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebras versus Ruben plus Grok together on one system and he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a 2 trillion parameter model. I don't know how relevant, I don't know is there. I wonder how this scales relative to, well, what if you're not running a 2 trillion dollar, a 2 trillion parameter model? If you're 5x lower, does this number get much more manageable? It does feel like he, I mean, he's talking his book here, but I

Jordy (16:38)

don't know there probably, but it's a big book. It is lots to talk about. It's a big chip.

John (16:43)

I don't know. I mean, have you, Tyler, have you ever run into any Grok chips in the wild? I remember the original demo was inferencing Llama that was pretty fast. And everyone was like, yeah, this is amazing. I fit the API a few times

Jordy (16:56)

because, yeah, you can like, there's just

John (16:57)

like consumer API where you can run like local smaller models. I had heard you need a lot of chips, but that's not on its face like a huge problem necessarily. But it did seem like they had made some, some design decisions that maybe painted them into some particular corners. But those corners might be still economically advantageous in certain cases. But yeah, I mean, it was definitely still slower than there was like the Chat Jimmy thing. Right? Because that's very much like it's literally the model bait.

Jordy (17:27)

No one can beat Chat Jimmy.

John (17:28)

I mean, do we know that that's what happening with the Chat Jimmy AI demo? Because like the Grok demo was very much like, we have a chip, here's a demo. And it was actually 2000 chips behind the scene or a bunch of chips together behind the scene, behind the scenes. And so it's possible that the Chat Jimmy AI is doing something similar where in order to speed Things up.

Georgios (17:54)

Sure.

John (17:54)

Yeah. We don't know how to think about.

Jordy (17:56)

I just asked Chat Jimmy, what's your favorite thing about Tyler Cosgrove from tvpn? It couldn't find any information about a person named Tyler, especially in the context of tbtn, which might refer to the Big Bang Theory, a popular TV show or maybe the Bachelor Paradise, a reality TV tbp. Tvp.

John (18:16)

The Bachelor Paradise Network. Okay, yeah, that works.

Jordy (18:21)

It's fast though.

John (18:22)

It's fast, but it doesn't. I don't think ChatGPT AI has search.

Jordy (18:26)

Yeah, that would slow trying to memorize things down.

John (18:33)

Let's play this video of. I want to play this video of Jensen back in September 2009. Bubble Boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player. And so someone, someone stood up and asked, hey, why'd you invest 4 billion in these companies? I mean, that's reasonable.

Jordy (19:03)

Well, let's take a walk through history. I make content for investors so they

John (19:08)

can have the average American and people around the world have a stake. Let's play this. This Jensen clip from 2009. September 2009. Jensen walks onto a small stage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. About 1500 people in the room. In computer science, if Dave Patterson, John Hennessey and I know that Pat Anaheim is sitting here watching me, you guys are going to go nuts. You need to put a mic on him. This is called CEO Map. This is not computer architect Map. This is called CEO man. But it illustrates the point that stage so much smaller. Why could it makes a lot of sense. This is an illustration of co processing.

Jordy (19:49)

Carlos says no Jack.

John (19:51)

I realize there's a lot of words no Jack yet he is looking pretty Jack here to do. There'll be a strong test at the end of this presentation. So this is simple math. The first section on top is an example of a program that is parallel tensile.

Georgios (20:07)

And on the bottom is an example

John (20:08)

of a program

Andy Fang (20:12)

and the way that

John (20:12)

I simply made it is the serial code part of the intense parallel intensive program takes about one second to run

Georgios (20:21)

whereas the parallel parallelizable part of the

John (20:24)

code takes 199 seconds to run. Which makes sense. This is an enormous amount of data. Nvidia was a $7 billion company when this happened. Very long time to last. Jensen kept saying the GPU Wasn't just a gaming chip, it was a computing platform. Kept saying parallel processing would reshape every industry from medicine.

Jordy (20:44)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just put the video games in the bag.

John (20:47)

Seriously. Yeah, this was. Yeah. Before training neural networks. Wow. Pretty. Pretty remarkable. 17,000 people are at GTC 2026 now packing a hockey stadium, watching the same guy explain what comes next. Very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

Jordy (21:15)

LinkedIn semianlysis is over there slopping it up. They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll and it will get tons of engagement.

John (21:26)

We need to do this.

Jordy (21:27)

Wow. They're just really throwing shots. I give LinkedIn a chance on a long enough timeline, they will all come to X. Yeah. It might take 30, 40 years. They'll make it over to the dive bar eventually.

John (21:42)

Maybe. And so I like that semianalysis leans into the particular, like rough edges of every platform. Like, I follow them on Instagram and they actually post just like hilarious vibe reels and brain rot. It's just like brain rot. Yeah, yeah. But often it's completely. I'm the only one that's liking them.

Jordy (21:58)

I comment on a lot of the videos.

John (22:00)

Yeah, I comment too. It's amazing. Like, they are not having broad success. But as far as like, what Instagram?

Jordy (22:08)

Well, it's like, you know, the fine details of, you know, inference max or something.

John (22:11)

Yeah, yeah. And then it's like Minecraft Parkour.

Jordy (22:14)

Yeah, yeah.

John (22:16)

I was in a few of them because they. They clipped our interview with Dylan Patel from Cisco AI Summit and put some videos on there. But there's a hilarious one where it's like, it leads in with some text about semiconductor analyst explains this thing and then there's just no audio while he's explaining it. And then it just cuts to me and I'm like. And then it cuts back because we were editing the footage and so I don't even know if it was like a mistake upload or it's like intentional, but it's all very, very funny.

Jordy (22:51)

Apple cracks down on Vibe coding apps. It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as Vibe coding apps help people create apps.

John (22:59)

Vibe coding apps, not Vibe coded apps.

Jordy (23:02)

I know. It's over for him times two.

John (23:04)

No, because he doesn't vibe code on a phone.

Jordy (23:07)

I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

John (23:08)

He doesn't Vibe Code on a phone.

Jordy (23:09)

I'm kidding. Apple's move comes as Vibe coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store. Let's get into Stephanie and Aaron's reporting from the information Apple has quietly prevented AI vive coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications, from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications. Company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe coding capabilities violate long standing App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when Vibe Coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company by helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple. Some of these Vibe coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown in approval process in some cases, developers say. An Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to Vibe Coding apps. Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believed Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and Vibe Code. Those app makers had agreed to either tweak their apps the way their apps showed customer previews of Vibe coded apps, or get rid of certain Vibe coding capabilities entirely, like making apps for Apple devices. So it sounds like you're able to basically generate an app with Repl dot and then like use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing repl.the app to do things that Apple didn't approve of.

John (24:51)

So yeah, the App Store never heard of Vibe Code. That's what I was looking up. The App Store is always so fascinating. So if you search Vibe code you get an ad for repl.it as the first response. Replit is number three in dev tools, has 14,000 five star reviews or reviews. Then Vibe Code is listed as Vibe Code. Website builder has 3.3k pretty solid. It doesn't look like it's charting, but it says learn how to Vibe Code. No experience needed. Build websites with professional designs. Much more focused, I think on static content. But there's been a number of these website builders in the App Store for a very long time. Then Repl it ranks number two when you search for Vibe code because it Says Repl it Vibe code apps. Then you get sticky. An AI game maker, vibe coder, AI app creator, anything. The AI app builder, vibe code, Claude Codex, AI with 21 stars. There's a lot of people that are like just. Just jumping in.

Jordy (25:55)

There's one that's a Replit argument. Replit's argument is that they're helping the user generate an app that's just opening it up in a web view. So it's effectively just a mobile. An app built for mobile web. And Apple's arguing that. No, that's effectively in the Repl Dot app.

John (26:13)

Would you download this app, Jordy? I don't know.

Jordy (26:17)

Insane. I don't know. You can see, but it's definitely Vibe coded, the app store preview.

John (26:21)

It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the Gigachad using the computer. It's very funny. But, man, there is so much IP infringement. Love a code not from lovable.

Jordy (26:37)

Love a code build with Vibe code,

John (26:39)

they're like, I wonder who they're trying to SEO against.

Jordy (26:43)

Clearly there's a whole who doesn't love

John (26:44)

the code that are just trying to steal market share from incumbents that have name recognition. Do you remember that company that was doing Vibe coding on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app? We talked to them at YC Demo Day last year and there's a number of these companies that are trying to be the AI game Store. Sort of like the meta simulator, like build a simulator and create a harness that's really good at Vibe coding a game. It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it. But you are going to be bumping up against the App Store all the time.

Jordy (27:25)

You just have to compete with Sam Altman, Dario Amade.

John (27:31)

Yeah, maybe Amjad. I do wonder if there will be some sort of. I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one, maybe, or does it come out of Codex and Claude code instead? I wonder what the barrier and how much distribution matters there for that audience of people that want to Vibe code a game.

Jordy (27:52)

Yeah, for gaming. I just think Roblox is just going to continue to be like Roblox is the Roblox of Vibe coding.

John (27:58)

And yet we did not build our simulators in Roblox.

Jordy (28:01)

Yeah, but they're not like massive multiplayer

John (28:05)

games and we want people to be able to click a link and use it on their phone immediately.

Jordy (28:11)

We have a new simulator coming, by the way. We're addicted to simulation.

John (28:16)

We do love simulators.

Jordy (28:17)

This one we're Putting a little bit more effort into and John's already addicted.

John (28:23)

I would say this one is like just actually fun. Jeremy Giffon simulator was more just like a different way to experience. It was educational. It was educational.

Jordy (28:31)

Yeah, yeah. It was. For people that didn't just listen to his episode on Invest Psychology.

John (28:36)

They sat down, simulated it. Yeah. But the actual interaction pattern of like guessing and whatnot, like it was like, oh, this is novel. And then it was like, okay, this is a chore. And then it was like, okay, how many questions are there? 200. There were what, like 60 questions or 40, 48. That's a lot.

Jordy (28:55)

This is this, this new simulation. You're not going to be able to put it down.

John (28:58)

You're not gonna be able to put it down.

Jordy (29:00)

And it can effectively solve some industry wide issues that are happening right now potentially. But we're going for impact, we're going for fun.

John (29:09)

But you know, Apple's had this long standing policy around do not, do not. Like they want to review the software. And so you can't create an app that rewrites its software.

Jordy (29:22)

But yeah, I wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer, like a mini, like sort of peer to peer experience. Because I remember I made, I was like learning how to build iOS apps when I was like an early teenager and I was so frustrated that I had built Pong but I couldn't just like share it with my dad and say like, hey, you can play this. Like, it just wasn't. It was.

John (29:47)

You can do test flight, right?

Jordy (29:48)

Yeah, test flight. But test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for. It's not like social peer to peer experience.

John (29:56)

Like you still have to opt into the test flight network, do all these jumps like it would be. And for some reason it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem when I get a test flight.

Jordy (30:08)

Old Rock says high key. Tyler could make better Siri and repl it with a thousand dollar budget.

John (30:13)

Better Siri and replit two massive things.

Jordy (30:17)

No, better Siri in replit.

John (30:19)

Oh, better. Oh, okay. Yes.

Jordy (30:21)

For his last thousand dollars in replit, he's down to his last thousand bucks.

John (30:26)

That's a good challenge. Yeah. Maybe that should be the new constraint on. Hackathons. Instead of it being like two days, it's like 20 grand is the max budget. And what can you do with that budget for, for the token allocation?

Jordy (30:43)

I mean he has a big budget for hackathon.

John (30:46)

Yeah. I mean maybe the $200 plan or something like exhaust that. You can't use multiple or something like that.

Jordy (30:53)

The question is, how much is Apple itself vibe coding? Because the software quality in the apps that I use.

John (31:00)

Mark Gurman said they're using cloud all the time. Right?

Jordy (31:02)

Yeah. But to me, I'm saying so far, my experience recently I've had. I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone, which is.

John (31:15)

You were complaining about the photos app. The.

Jordy (31:17)

That was just poor design.

John (31:18)

The phone app has gotten a lot.

Jordy (31:21)

Yeah. John finally came around because the phone app is like, you're like, okay, I'm going to hit this button. I might be calling this person out of the blue, even though I just want to.

John (31:29)

And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number, but I still have a lot of people. This is blowing your mind, Tyler. But back in the day, like a home phone, back in the day, people used to have multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. It's true. I'm so unk. But yes. Like a work phone. Yeah, like a work phone. I mean, when I was at ff, I had two phones, but. Two phones, two phones. That's right. But a lot of people will have a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a long time. And the problem with the new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone if I have it saved. So I need to maybe go delete those numbers or put them in a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone. Because I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones. But anyway.

Jordy (32:21)

Well, the good news, we have our first ever Apple employee coming on the show.

John (32:27)

Really? Oh, yes, we do. We do.

Jordy (32:29)

I'm very first. First ever.

John (32:30)

That's going to be exciting.

Jordy (32:31)

Apple employee, the Technology Business Programming Network.

John (32:34)

That's not. I mean, current Apple employee. We've had ex Apple.

Jordy (32:38)

Yes, of course. But live players before.

John (32:42)

Let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to FIN AI. And let me also tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests, password resets. So Martin Shkreli.

Jordy (32:59)

We gotta go over to SF with Martin Shkreli.

John (33:01)

Yeah. Wait. Oh, okay. This is part two. We're just jumping straight into this.

Jordy (33:04)

We're going straight into part two.

John (33:05)

Okay. We're going Straight into part two. Take it.

Jordy (33:06)

He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing that's happening now with peptides. Holy S H I T. I don't know where to start. Pharma basics. Most people obsessed with peptides don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s. Overnight a peptide is just a small protein. Peptides 1950 so that's have extremely short half lives.

John (33:31)

Yesterday 1950, that's like 10 minutes before 8pm yesterday.

Jordy (33:37)

Yes, correct. Peptides have extremely short half lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So if you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals. But only drugs with very weak pharma.

John (33:50)

Pharmacokinetics.

Jordy (33:52)

Pharmacokinetics. That's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target. Typically, but far from always the receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion. Next. Drugs are rigorously tested. Rigorously. Not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmakinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body.

John (34:21)

Pharmacokinetics.

Jordy (34:22)

Pharmacokinetics. It's a collab between pharmacological. They're linking and building. Exactly is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half life? Without this basic information you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans. But you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. Hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea considered a priority. As to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays.

John (34:56)

Assays.

Jordy (34:56)

Assays.

John (34:57)

This is gonna be a rough one.

Jordy (34:58)

This is a rough one also. I guess I didn't think priori.

John (35:02)

Not a priori brutal, a priori exposed.

Jordy (35:08)

What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis. And you can continue. John.

John (35:18)

Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab. Were done a priori et cetera.

Jordy (35:31)

There we go.

John (35:32)

Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind, placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear. But I know dozens of people. One more time, exclamation point I. Exclamation point, exclamation point. Screw the FDA and pharma.

Jordy (35:46)

Really?

Andy Fang (35:46)

Really?

John (35:47)

Coming from Martin Shkreli. He is saying, maybe don't screw the FDA in pharma. When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking, and this is gonna be a hard one for me, Octreotide. They're thinking some random stuff that's been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softy. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it. But I'm also not stupid and spent 20 years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a clinical trial from a university if your drug has never been tested. There is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed. The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it was bp, that it wasn't bpc, BS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument. But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes, there are plenty. That is how I made a living, says Martin Shkreli. But it is not for you world traveler to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. It's not that you're not smart. I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, et cetera. But Martin, I want to optimize my health.

Jordy (37:37)

You could fly a 747.

John (37:39)

Then I could. That is the take. I agree.

Jordy (37:43)

We don't need studies to know that

John (37:45)

you could land the 747 if I needed to.

Jordy (37:49)

If it was asked of you.

John (37:50)

Yeah, 100%. But Martin, I want to optimize my health to. No, stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma I have zero doubt you'll change your mind. There are no health care professionals that I know of who give an shit about these unapproved research chemicals. But wah. There are actual people. There are actual dying people in the world. Duquesne muscular dystrophy, Pecan lafora. Go fix those diseases. You'll make someone and their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine. This has to end. Interesting, lots of debate.

Jordy (38:33)

Yeah. So we are going to have a debate. We have a debate. Max Marchioni from Superpower will be coming on Monday at 12 to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor himself. So we're going to have a little debate. Superpower I believe cells, these small proteins and so it'll be an interesting conversation. So Monday at 12 Pacific we can look forward to the great debate.

John (39:05)

So there's some conversation in the comments here. Michael Drougan says when people talk about peptides they mostly mean things like retatrutide retta which is in stage 3 clinical trials and looking extremely good. Or BPC157 which has tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using. So he's saying look, most people aren't using this stuff. That's crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the pharmacist.

Jordy (39:41)

Just another pod guys. This great post would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of Reta.

John (39:49)

Martin does not think he doesn't like BPC 157. He says BPC 157 has no evidence lmao. Retatrutide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly Pyrite.

Jordy (40:00)

Yeah, I mean the concern with BPC157 has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth.

John (40:05)

Yes.

Jordy (40:06)

It's not creating stimulates growth.

John (40:08)

Yes.

Jordy (40:09)

And so because it hasn't been studied.

John (40:12)

Yes.

Jordy (40:13)

Well enough in humans that is a risk that people I think should be aware of.

John (40:18)

How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines. Like, is there a real overlap in San Francisco between like, yes, it might give me cancer in 20 years, but I think we will cure cancer in 10. So if it makes me look good in the next five.

Jordy (40:33)

But I think it's all about people just want some type of edge. They want to alter their states. It's somewhat. Basically human nature.

John (40:41)

Yeah.

Jordy (40:42)

You can make the same argument for why you should wait though.

John (40:44)

Because then in 10 years AGI will

Jordy (40:47)

create like a super drug that would

John (40:49)

just instantly make me jacked.

Jordy (40:50)

Oh, right.

John (40:51)

It's like you can do it, but

Jordy (40:53)

no one has a decade to wait to be.

John (40:55)

You want to be jacked now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40.

Jordy (41:06)

How much? How much would we have to pay you a day day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper?

Matt Wong (41:13)

There's no amount of money you can pay.

Jordy (41:15)

That's right.

John (41:16)

Exactly.

Jordy (41:16)

You can't wait 10 years. Ridiculous.

John (41:19)

Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless real time experiences. New value are unlocked every day with Cisco. Pretty iconic. Someone hire this kid. Robin Smith is sharing a poster warning.

Jordy (41:42)

This man has been known to increase shareholder value with a QR code out to his LinkedIn.

John (41:49)

I love this.

Jordy (41:49)

And his name is Lachlan von Eggman.

John (41:52)

Eggman, That's a great name. And he's looking for a job as a summer 2026 electrical engineering intern. And I cannot recommend this gentleman enough. He has the correct mindset to go into a summer internship. Optimizing.

Jordy (42:08)

Lachlan von Egman. You should get a job as an electrical engineering intern. But if you don't hit us up.

John (42:15)

Yes, this is good marketing.

Jordy (42:17)

Maybe we could hire Ben. Maybe we could hire this guy to work on our little electrical engineering problem back here. We got a lot of cords just doing cable management.

John (42:26)

I think he has bigger cable. But whatever increases shareholder value the most, you might go for it.

Jordy (42:33)

If you can handle cable management in the ultra dome, you can go far.

John (42:38)

Dependable thermonuclear work ethic. That's a good phrase. Thermonuclear work ethic. He says he's smart with a capital S and he shares his email. So if you're looking for an electrical engineering intern this summer, give Lachlan A call or shoot him a quick email.

Jordy (42:55)

Head over to to Eric Suford.

John (42:58)

Okay.

Jordy (42:59)

At Mobile Dev Memo he writes private credit and the AI value reallocation starts with a quote. The essence of technology is in a lofty sense, ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing that is of truth. Martin Heidegger I like it says a familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty, which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perception perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the G

John (43:48)

and yesterday carried no interest was giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals. But he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis.

Jordy (44:02)

Correct.

John (44:02)

He was just saying that some of these deals are underwater. Some of these investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities. Sort of the bull case for special situations. Right?

Jordy (44:16)

Yeah, yeah. Leaving the firm and be like, I didn't really work on it. I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018-2022. I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, I don't think we should do this deal. I guess the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds that are being deployed, that have been deployed on different time horizons, that have longer time horizons in general. Right. And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus versus versus Like a run on the bank where you have like one day where everyone realizes it's kind of like the worm. Like you were doing the worm yesterday. Yeah, it's kind of like a. Like that.

John (45:05)

Yeah. That does not seem great. It's like a weight.

Jordy (45:08)

Like when you start. Yeah.

John (45:10)

When you start to small and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Jordy (45:13)

Right? Yeah. No, so you're. You're six, eight. So you're starting the worm and you're really tall and you're kind of coming

John (45:19)

down fall like a tree falling, but

Jordy (45:21)

then you bounce back up like this and you're steadily kind of like losing.

John (45:27)

I hope that's not where this goes. Let's continue. This framing is incomplete, says Eric Seufer in Mobile Dev Memo. It isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate. And where value ultimately accrues. In this piece, he makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. I also argue, he says, that any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there, but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit. That's very exciting. The private credit market. He gives a little history on the private credit market. The private credit market has grown precipitously since the 2020 era. COVID pandemic in a note from the Federal Reserve, you're just like, there will be a rolling collapse, but also I'm excited to grow.

Jordy (46:27)

You got to hit the air horn for growth.

John (46:30)

In a note from the Federal Reserve, the authors remark that private is funny

Jordy (46:34)

that if you go back to the to our early bits. Yes, we were joking about praying for bubbles, encouraging leverage.

John (46:42)

People were listening. I'm not saying encouraging ads.

Jordy (46:46)

Encouraging ads.

John (46:48)

Yeah, a lot of things came true.

Jordy (46:49)

Obviously we were joking. They were bits. I guess some people may have taken it a little too seriously.

John (46:55)

Isn't there some humor in every joke? Isn't that the point of humor?

Jordy (46:58)

You mean some truth?

John (46:59)

Some truth. Some truth in every. What do they say? Some jokes?

Jordy (47:02)

There is some humor in every joke.

John (47:03)

Yeah, some truth in every joke.

Jordy (47:04)

As John Coogan once said, there's humor in every joke.

John (47:08)

I'm only on my second Diet Coke, okay, Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me until I've had my tenth energy drink. Cheers. Anyway, this is what the Fed had to say. Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of non bank financial intermediaries, NBFIs over the past 15 years or so, reaching a total asset asset class size of 1.34 trillion in the US alone by the middle of 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley published in October of 2025 estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025 at 3 trillion. A report from Vanguard said it was 1.8. So people are sort of all over the place. Private credit is an asset class that functions as a parallel banking system. Don't call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness.

Jordy (47:57)

Look, I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be concerned. Here's what I'm going to be concerned. And you have leaders at these private credit firms that say you know, look, private credit's amazing.

John (48:08)

Yeah.

Jordy (48:08)

But yeah, it's, it's unfair that we're keeping all these gains private and we need to make them public.

John (48:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordy (48:17)

So some type of like federal kind of involvement.

John (48:20)

Yeah.

Jordy (48:21)

That in the private credit sector could make sense.

John (48:24)

It would also be really, really bad if like one of the most respected leaders of one of the biggest banks in the world was to compare the industry to cockroach. Yes. Like some really, like, you know, some bug that would be, that would be a problem.

Jordy (48:39)

You don't want to be compared to, to a scuttling creature.

John (48:43)

No, no, no. Maybe a soaring eagle instead. There are some soaring eagles in this, in this, in this portfolio of private credit assets. So while it predates the global financial crisis of 2008, the scale of assets under management for private credit began growing precipitously following the global financial crisis to fill a funding gap. As the regulatory standards for lending and capital requirements applied to banks, such as those introduced by Basel III intensified in the wake of the gfc, non banks such as private credit lenders became a key source of funding for companies, especially those who operating unprofitably, as many software companies might be earlier in their life cycles. Chernenko specifically attributes an increase in non bank lending to regulatory rigor. So the banks become more regulated after the financial crisis. And so non bank lending that is not subject to the same regulations increases many, many such cases. Another note from the Federal Reserve identifies private credit as a significant vehicle through which private private credit is or identifies private equity as a significant vehicle through which private credit is deployed. Because private equity acquisitions are often funded with debt through leverage buyouts, they used to go to banks for that, for those lines of debt. Now they're going to private credit firms.

Jordy (49:59)

Okay. And I think we should fast forward to down further private credit and the AI Bull case because this article is very long and you should go subscribe to mobile dev memo and read it in the entirely. But let's Skip to the AI bull case.

John (50:12)

Okay, so last month, Blue Owl sold $1.4 billion in private loans across three of its funds and announced that it would end regular quarterly liquid liquidity payments in one of its funds, OBDC2, opting instead for payouts tied to asset sales and other liquidity events. This month, Blackstone experienced a record number of redemption requests.

Jordy (50:34)

And this is. They wanted to inspire their LPs to grind harder.

John (50:36)

Yes, the company indicated that it would honor all requests.

Jordy (50:40)

If we give you too much mailbox money.

John (50:42)

Mailbox money.

Jordy (50:43)

I've never heard that term mailbox money. It's just money that, you know, shows up, you have some apartment somewhere and they just send you the check.

John (50:49)

Okay, no, I've never heard that before. Wait, do you know that Tyler? Mailbox money?

Jordy (50:53)

No.

John (50:53)

Okay.

Jordy (50:54)

Am I crazy?

John (50:55)

I don't know.

Jordy (50:57)

Mailbox money refers to passive income, arrives regularly with minimum active effort, commonly in the form of real estate.

John (51:04)

Learn something new.

Jordy (51:05)

Oil and gas royalties or dividends.

John (51:07)

That's why you listen to tvpn.

Jordy (51:09)

It also is a mixtape by Nipsey Hussle.

John (51:12)

Nice. That's what you know. Also this month JP Morgan marked down the value of loans the bank holds as collateral from private credit funds related to software businesses, reducing those funds ability to borrow. Some of this negative sentiment is attributed to recent bankruptcies from firms to which private credit facilities were exposed. First Brands and Tricolor are among the headline cases. But the substance of the current negative outlook might be traced to fears that AI will render the vertical SaaS products into which PE funds invested in the 2020-2022 vintage irrelevant. So this is the SaaS apocalypse narrative, but playing out in the private markets. In A recent note, JP Morgan said states private credit has 21% exposure to software. Driven by the attractiveness of SaaS, recurring revenue models and the fact that 96% of software companies are privately held. Exposure rises to 40% when including broader tech and business services, the highest among extended credit markets. We see software volatility as a sector led reset rather than a start of a macro default cycle cycle. Similarly, last week in an analyst memo, UBS proposed that investors increasingly want to talk about AI disruption and our tail risk scenario, a rapid, severe AI disruption. This is not our, this, this 20,

Jordy (52:34)

this 21% exposure thing is important because when John Zito was talking to the Journal or he thought he was talking off the record and was being a little candid, he was saying, you know, you, I would expect, you know, some of these loans to record only recover 30 to 40% of the overall loan value. And that just says to me like, okay, if you have 21% exposure, but

John (53:00)

you can get 30 cents on that.

Jordy (53:02)

Yeah.

John (53:02)

Still recover, you're down 15% overall.

Jordy (53:05)

Yeah, it's not.

John (53:06)

But the goal is not to be down at all.

Jordy (53:08)

Yeah, but you're also getting. A lot of. These companies have been getting interest. You've been getting some amount of interest back on the loans. So. But again, it doesn't feel like you're getting anything close to a GFC style systemic risk yet, especially when you account for the fund kind of time horizons and the fact they can just say sorry, you can't get any money out right now.

John (53:36)

So here's what the Swiss bankers over at UBS had to say. What is new is a clearer catalyst Rapid Success Severe AI disruption Assuming contagion impacts not modeled in our earlier Note, we anticipate U.S. h, Y ll and PC high yield leverage Loan and private credit defaults could rise to 3 to 6%, 8 to 10% and 14% to 15% for private credit, respectively. Blue Owl's updated redemption policy has been compared to BNP paribus suspension of redemptions for three funds exposed to US subprime MBS in August of 2007, roughly one year before Lehman Brothers failed. For reasons I've stated above, I think that comparison is flawed. The GFC was a systemic crisis driven by leverage, opacity and reliance on short term funding. Mortgage credit risk was embedded throughout the financial system and amplified by opaque securitized products like cdo, CDO Squared and CDO cubed securities which established tight interdependencies between institutions. Furthermore, the deep interconnectedness of the US financial system rendered the GFC inherently systemic. Home prices were tethered to a mortgage derivatives market that was amplified in value by complex instruments that couldn't easily be valued or understood. The same isn't true of the private credit market, writes Eric Suefert, which comprises relatively straightforward bilateral loans and is largely concentrated within within private equity backed companies and dedicated credit funds. While pockets of stress have emerged, the system is less dependent on short term funding and less tightly interconnected with core financial infrastructure. While the total value of the private credit market is vastly larger than the high yield energy debt market of the 2014-2016 period, my belief is that distress will remain similarly localized and not spill over into the broader economy since there are limited direct risk conduits into the core banking system or short term funding markets. So further valuation multiples for PE backed software companies and especially vertical SaaS companies are compressing for two reasons. One rising interest rates have increased their debt burden as a result of their floating rate loans. So a lot of these companies were sitting at a fed funds rate of 3%. Now it's at 6 or I don't know what the Fed fund rate is, but interest rates have been basically doubled since the ZIRP era and so their debt burden has also increased. And then two AI and AI enabling AI enabled coding tools more specifically jeopardize the defensibility of their businesses. So viewing the composite impact of these two effects is a potential threat to the broader economy ignores the productivity gains posed by AI that imperil vertical SaaS software solutions in the first place. If a company can replace a SaaS vendor with a homemade solution because new AI enabled engineering tools reduce the time to deployment of a narrow task specific piece of software to days, from months or even years, that's exactly what we've done here. We have a number of point solutions that didn't really exist before, but previously we might have gone to some sort of some sort of software company and said oh well, can you do a

Jordy (56:44)

special version for us or can you changes the economics. It changes the economics, reduces. Basically like moats.

John (56:51)

Yeah. So that same company is not only saving money by no longer paying for that specific point solution, but they are also likely accomplishing more across a number of other software development related vectors like clipping in our example. What might be critical here is the hurdle rate in terms of labor to accomplish any task. If one person can build software now with with assistance from AI enabled development tools that previously would have required a team, then building software becomes more accessible generally throughout the economy. For small companies, there is no build versus buy tension. The base cost of SaaS solutions may have simply priced them out of the market completely. Since hiring a software development team is likewise unattainable with AI enabled tools, the cost of building a point solution is reduced dramatically. Certain companies may now benefit from those sales solutions where before the economics were prohibitive across either building or buying. As security notes. In a rebuttal, it published to a recent macro short thesis that was something big is happening or no, that was the Trini prediction. Job postings for software developer roles have increased with the availability of AI enabled development tools. Critically, AI reduces not just the cost of building software, but the cost of attempting it. Expanding the set of economically viable solutions across the long tail of firms. Not just more software, but more bespoke solutions to commercial problems that should result theoretically in better firm level. Outcomes that aggregate to greater levels of economic productivity.

Jordy (58:21)

Let's give it up for better firm level.

John (58:24)

Philippe Aguiong, who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year, speaks to the expansionary effects of technology in his book the Power of Creative Disruption, co authored with two other authors. Automation is thus not in itself an enemy of employment. Automation is not an enemy of employment. By modernizing the production process, automation makes firms more competitive, which enables them to win new markets and therefore to hire more employees. This is what we call a productivity effect. This same productivity effect was at work in prior industrial revolutions, those induced by the steam engine and then by electricity, and explains why neither of these revolutions produced the mass unemployment that some had predicted. How can we reconcile this optimistic conclusion with the more pessimistic finding mentioned earlier that automation has a negative effect on employment at the level of commuting zones? One response is to invoke the difficulty of measuring automation and robotization at the commuting zone level. As we discussed earlier. A second possible explanation is that firms do not automate sufficiently, that do not automate sufficiently end up downsizing their employment, outsourcing their production, or simply going under. This would reflect an eviction minds, an eviction effect of automation on employment. Firms that invest significantly in new industrial equipment substantially lower their likelihood of going out of business over the following 10 years compared to firms that do not make such an investment. It is thus not automation or manufacturing processes that causes firms to eliminate jobs, but rather missing the critical juncture of automation and consequently finding themselves forced to reduce the scope of their activities or even exit the market. In other words, it is through the process of creative disruption that automation can lead to job losses. In that Sense, the vertical SaaS companies acquired by PE firms under low interest rate conditions face headwinds not just from rising rates, but also because it's simply more costly as a result of institutional momentum for them for them to rebuild their workflows and internal development processes around AI than it is for a company to establish those workflows and development processes in the first place. In other words, established companies face higher costs in adapting to the AI era than do new entrants or companies that are internalizing these tools de novo and PE backed firms are fundamentally averse to cost increases.

Jordy (60:40)

All right, go subscribe to mobile Dev Memo. And before we get to our first guest of the show, we got to check in with Jeans, the restaurant in New York. They are weighing in private credit. They say if you think private credit is a problem, wait until you find out about the annuity businesses they all bought.

John (61:01)

I love that this story has gone so broad that it is now being posted to the Instagram stories of New York restaurants. But that's where we are in this cycle. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Fang, the co founder of Doordash who is waiting for us in Christian waiting room. Let's bring him into this show. Andy, how are you doing?

Andy Fang (61:21)

Hey, what's up guys?

Jordy (61:23)

What's happening?

John (61:23)

Good to see you again. Welcome back to the show. Wait, actually we did not have you on the show.

Andy Fang (61:28)

No, it was on your Show.

John (61:29)

I'm sorry?

Andy Fang (61:31)

Stanley and Tony were both on the show.

John (61:32)

That's right.

Jordy (61:33)

The boys. Is it just the three? It's just the three of you guys, right? Or is there a fourth?

Andy Fang (61:37)

Yeah, there's the three musketeers.

John (61:39)

Yeah, three musketeers. How's life these days? How's 2026 going?

Andy Fang (61:43)

2026 is good. I mean, lots going on, I guess, for us. I think AI is a big focus of mine personally at the company. So, yeah, I mean, recently we just

John (61:56)

announced maybe start with some background on your role, how it's changed over the period of building DoorDash and growing the company. I'm sure it's been a wild ride, but I'd love to hear it from your perspective and then we can go into the acquisition.

Andy Fang (62:11)

Yeah, totally. I mean, let's see, 13 years in the making, I guess. I mean, so I've been always involved on the tech side, so really focused on product and technology. At DoorDash, I helped scaled up our product engineering teams for, I don't know, like, eight, nine years. First eight, nine years of company, more after that. We brought on more senior leadership to kind of manage the growing organization. And I've been more focused on how do we help DoorDash find the next big bets to help us keep growing. I think whether it's our international businesses, our DashPass subscription program, more recently with the AI stuff. And so I think really just like sinking my teeth into various technology and business problems and figuring out how we can continue to grow the business and find those next seeds.

Jordy (63:05)

So talk about how the news today ties into your focus.

Andy Fang (63:10)

Absolutely. So, yeah, I was just briefly mentioning AI is something that we're really trying to figure out. DoorDash, how we can incorporate it into our business. And so earlier today, we just announced that we acquired a company called Metis. They're an applied AI research lab. They went through yc and we met with them, I want to say, like six or seven months ago. And I think we were thinking about how to.

Jordy (63:37)

Was that intentional? Be honest. Six seven.

John (63:41)

Six seven's viral, man.

Jordy (63:42)

Seven.

Andy Fang (63:42)

I don't know.

John (63:43)

I was like, it really just pops into your brain. It's such a weird.

Andy Fang (63:48)

Oh, my gosh, I'm such an old head.

John (63:49)

No, I was reading through some Wall Street Journal article and I was. I kept saying the two numbers that shall not be named together. And Jordy was like, are you doing this intentionally?

Jordy (63:59)

September, September, September.

John (64:02)

You meet them?

Chris (64:02)

Absolutely.

Andy Fang (64:04)

So then September is when we first started talking to them and we were trying to figure out how to productionize AI use cases at DoorDash. And so really we kind of spread in terms of talking to a bunch of different startups. There's a lot of startups trying to figure out how to deploy AI for the enterprise use case and we just decided to be really open minded about it and partner with a bunch of them. But Metis really stuck out to us. We were working with them since September. There are some really cool use cases around agit commerce and physical intelligence that I can talk about a bit that we're working with them on that we're super excited to accelerate with them joining the company. Yeah, I mean they're like a bunch of cracked 22 year old AI pilled people and they're like super high hustle, very knowledgeable about what's going on in the space and we just want to inject a lot of the energy into how we're trying to innovate here.

John (65:05)

Yeah, maybe take you through some of the history of AI at DoorDash, because I imagine you were doing recommendation systems very early matching. Yeah, all sorts of stuff. And then when the LLM revolution happens, like the obvious bolt on chat box went into a lot of apps, like did that happen? And then everyone starts using coding agents and IDEs. So what have been the key turning points just internally at DoorDash in AI adoption?

Andy Fang (65:40)

Yeah, I think to your point, I think there's two themes in terms of how we're trying to think about it. I think one is employee enablement or productivity. I think obviously you guys are very well aware of since November. Basically I think there's been an explosion, especially on the coding side in terms of people being much more productive. I'd say, I think at DoorDash our evolution in terms of AI on the product facing side has been a longer journey in the sense that I think we've been trying to figure out how this all fits into our marketplace and how this would benefit our customers. Like, to your point, I think a lot of people, ourselves included, we're just trying to bolt on some sort of chat box just to see how it would play in. And I think one, when we did that a couple years ago, the LLMs were not nearly as smart. But two, I think we just need to be more thoughtful, like how do we integrate this into the experience? And I think agentic commerce is something that a lot of people have been talking about and trying to figure out. And for us I would say agentic commerce is basically figuring out how we can leverage this technology to make it actually easier for restaurants to run their business and for customers to find what they want on DoorDash. I think one of the big problems that we've had on DoorDash is, and what people tell me all the time when I talk to them is like, look, Andy, you guys got a ton of selection. I have no idea what to order. It's like there's so much, so many different restaurants and all these different cuisines. I'm having decision paralysis right now. And so I think that's a very interesting problem where we feel like AI can be beneficial in helping you find what you want and give you confidence in that as a customer.

Jordy (67:14)

One of the greatest luxuries or first world problems in life is decision paralysis on what to eat. Comes for everyone.

John (67:26)

Yeah. Have you been seeing folks like Vibe code, sort of like plugins or add ons or features that then you can potentially use to adopt or roll into the actual roadmap? I swear I saw someone post something about this where they Vibe coded basically a Chrome plugin that would filter DoorDash for vegetarian options. And it was like a pretty mature functionality. And they just went through like a series of prompts and got to like something that they were very satisfied with, but that feels like they're sort of doing the R and D on their end. And then once it's working, you can actually bring that back. I'm wondering about this like primordial explosion of people building custom software and then the pipeline to actually bring that into the business as new features.

Andy Fang (68:18)

That's interesting because I think I haven't heard of that one specifically, to be honest, but I think there has been a lot of interest as like, hey, can you figure out a way to enable whatever my agent or whatever software I'm building to integrate into the DoorDash ecosystem? I've gotten some pings from founders and be like, yo, when's the DoorDash CLI coming out? And I'm like, hold on, we need to figure out what that means. And I think I would say, and we also did something with OpenAI in terms of being an early partner with our apps ecosystem and stuff. So we're trying to figure out how we want to play in this space, to be honest.

John (68:55)

So just walk me actually through that OpenAI partnership, because wouldn't that be the CLI if I have codex, that's a CLI. And then if you have a partnership with OpenAI, can't Codex CLI talk to DoorDash then? Or is there some break in the chain that needs to be resolved.

Andy Fang (69:11)

I think it's more like in ChatGPT, it's not really accessible through Codex.

John (69:16)

I don't think so. I have to tell Codex to go use ChatGPT. Open a web browser, click on the ChatGPT box. It is weird. Like these unhobblings are so like intuitive and then you realize that, okay, there's actually some sort of business reason or whatnot.

Jordy (69:29)

Yeah, yeah.

Andy Fang (69:30)

I mean, I think a lot of people are just trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So I think one thing that we've been finding really like getting a lot of traction, especially with like what we're working with metas on is I think there's some actual agentic workflows, like customer facing workflows that we're working on that like just like us playing around with it the past couple weeks, like we legitimately think this is going to be something that's going to be beneficial to customers and help you find what you want and help you order.

Jordy (69:54)

Okay, so how do you think about even positioning these products? Because obviously broad public opinion on AI is not great. Is this the kind of thing, I'm assuming you're just trying to deliver a great experience and not slap like DoorDash AI the thing you've been waiting for?

Andy Fang (70:11)

Yeah, exactly. I think we want to introduce it in a way that's actually beneficial to like conversion or like you finding what you want and being satisfied with it. So that's why we've taken our time in some ways in terms of like rolling something out that we want to launch more broadly. But I think some of the challenges we've had historically is like these agents are not very smart at like finding you what you want. This was like a while ago, right? Obviously things have gone a lot smarter. The question is how do we get leverage the intelligence that, you know, a lot of like harness building, context engineering type stuff. But it's also like, how do you build a great experience around it? Like, you know, there's like obviously LLMs, if they're super smart, sometimes they like are slower with their reasoning. But we're just trying to find that balance. And like, I think to your point, it's like, how do we create an interesting experience that doesn't just feel like we're slapping something AI on?

John (71:04)

Yeah.

Jordy (71:04)

Are you going to do anything with, with voice at all? Like I can imagine somebody in the doordash app saying like, hey, I want Chinese food, I want to avoid tells

John (71:15)

you that they integrated with Siri a Decade ago.

Jordy (71:18)

Yeah, yeah.

Andy Fang (71:20)

We do have some voice modality stuff, but I think I would say that's a little bit more like just a modality in terms of how you place your order. And like, I guess if it's more natural language with the AI technology, like that's.

Jordy (71:32)

Yeah, I'm saying, like, yeah, it's natural language. You're kind of searching over all the offerings in your area and then it's like potentially putting together like a cart for you or in order. You can check it out. Couple more things. How does Metis tie into the physical AI autonomy? You mentioned something about that earlier.

Andy Fang (71:50)

Yeah, so, I mean, I think Doordash wants to play the frontier of physical intelligence. I think that's something we talked about for a while.

Jordy (71:56)

Obviously our guys have your cute little robots.

Cameron (72:00)

Exactly.

Andy Fang (72:00)

The DOT delivery robots. My co founder, Stanley, who has been working on that full time, we're super excited to deploy those more broadly. But we have a large courier network, we have a large support network where we're collecting billions of data points in the physical world every day. And it's like, how can we leverage that to actually push forward what's possible with robotics and physical intelligence? I think there's some interesting conversations we've had with various startups and labs on how we collaborate to push forward the frontier together. I think Metis has some great experience doing that type of stuff in the expert data space. I mean, Arian, the CEO, is former Mercur, so I think there's some really interesting stuff there that we're interested to explore. And yeah, we're excited to accelerate some of that together with them.

Jordy (72:52)

Awesome. Matt from Tempo coming on later today. Tempo is launching today. I know you guys were an early design partner. Talk about kind of that decision to get involved.

Andy Fang (73:03)

It's funny you bring that up because Matt literally texted me before. They said, hey, we're going to be on the show together.

Cameron (73:07)

I was like, six.

Andy Fang (73:09)

So, yeah, we're excited. I mean, I'll let Matt talk more about that, but I think some of actually what Matt's working on is going to be synergistic with the agent of commerce stuff we're working on potentially. But essentially we are very excited to just partner with companies like Tempo to see how stablecoins can be disruptive and innovative in our space. More to come in terms of what exactly our pilot use case is going to be. But yeah, we've really enjoyed working with them and Matt's been great. We've known Matt for a while.

Jordy (73:40)

Awesome.

John (73:42)

I want to ask one more about agentic commerce. I'm trying to think about the product that I might actually want. I understand like when most people say agenda commerce, it's like open up ChatGPT and fire off a query, say order me a burrito and it goes through DoorDash and you handle the rails. But I'm thinking more about like the next version of that and maybe it's something like, okay, I want lunch every day, but I need you to check my calendar because the show ends sometimes at 2, sometimes at 2:30, that information's on my calendar. But also sometimes I'm leaving to go to the airport and I'm flying so I'm not available. And I could potentially encode all these preferences. I have favorite things at different restaurants. I'd like some variety but some consistency. Maybe you should fire off a text message to me and let me know that I can opt out of today's order. And I feel like that's like the system that someone would vibe code if you gave them the CLI, but that should probably just live within DoorDash. So how do you think about that sort of, that sort of like operating at a higher level, like encoding all of your preferences and then putting your doordash experience like basically on autopilot.

Andy Fang (74:59)

Totally. I mean, I think one thing we say to ourselves is like if someone's building DoorDash today, it would not look like DoorDash. It would be, I think. And when we think about agents versus just like outlines agents in an ideal world, they're not just telling you stuff, they're actually doing stuff for you. And I think I would say from a consumer facing use case perspective, in my opinion, I think besides the chatbots, I think OpenClaw is kind of the closest thing we've seen to something that is where agentic commerce is heading towards. And so we're very inspired by that type of, I don't know, use case is the right word. But that model and that paradigm of agents doing stuff on behalf of you. And I think your example like kind of hit it on the head is like, I don't want to just like you tell me stuff, like do stuff for me. And I think we have a ton of information on your preferences. We have a ton of information, real time information on what's going on logistics wise in your neighborhood and your city, like real time inventory information and restaurants and retailers. And so like we can create some magical experiences there. And again for us it's not just about slapping this technology on just for the sake of it, but it's like, actually stuff that's, like, restaurants would really appreciate because we can help them run their business better. Like a concrete example on the restaurant side, just. And I'll get back to your use case in a second. But on the restaurant side, it's like, I don't know how to price my pad Thai in my neighborhood, you know, like. Or, like, what deals or promotions should I be running right now? You know, because, like, I just want to figure out how to grow my sales. Or, like, help me figure out how to, you know, the lulls between lunch and dinner help me figure out, like, you know, get more demand there. And then on the customer side, I think to your example, it's like, you know, like, I don't want to think about, like, ordering my lunch to the office every day or, like, my weekly groceries, the grocery use case.

John (76:40)

Which is a crazy thing to say because, like, you basically invented the I'm hungry button on your phone. And it's literally like, two clicks for me when I use DoorDash.

Jordy (76:48)

And I'm like, we still.

John (76:49)

I'm in the past. I don't want the horse anymore. Give me the car. Yesterday, I didn't have lunch yesterday. We actually messed up somehow.

Jordy (76:56)

We at the office forgot to order.

John (76:58)

Yeah, we forgot to order. Actually, no, I did have a salad, but it was, like, hours later. And I figured it out.

Jordy (77:04)

How. How rare. How rare is it to be 13 years into a business that has been as successful as DoorDash to still have three founders in the business? Yeah, it feels like crazy. I was trying to come up with an example. Narrative violation of a business. At this. Yeah, at this.

Andy Fang (77:23)

That's interesting. I did not expect that. But I. I don't take that for granted at all. I mean, in fact, Tony, they secretly

John (77:28)

hate each other, Right? But there's, like, some weird contract. There's some weird contract where if any of you leave, the whole company shuts down. So you're locked to each other, handcuffed on the Titanic together. No, I'm messing with you.

Andy Fang (77:41)

I think I'm very grateful for the dynamic and the relationship we have. I mean, I think Tony is, like, you know, one of one CEO, and I think, like, we have a really good dynamic together and we put a lot of trust in each other to, like, just do the right thing.

John (77:57)

We've always had the same roles, basically, and sort of known. Okay, I'm not going to step on this person's toes in this particular region, because then there's mutual trust as opposed to, like, a lot of founding teams. They get in trouble when it's like there's three people that want to be CEO and they're like, fighting over a cost. I mean, that's usually what happens.

Jordy (78:13)

No, it's true.

Andy Fang (78:14)

I mean, I would say we delineated our responsibilities pretty early on, and I think Tony's role has stayed consistent. I mean, CEO is CEO, but I think Stanley and I, our roles have evolved around both how to stay on the forefront of innovation, but also just making sure, like, we're thinking about, like, what are the important problems to solve. But no, I think we have a really good relationship. I think it's high trust. I mean, we're getting dinner tonight. We try to catch up every so often, but yeah, doordashing dinner tonight? No, we're gonna go out. I don't know where we're going out, but we'll pick a spot. But fun. Yeah, it's a special relationship. I did not expect that. But yeah, it's right.

Jordy (78:56)

It's cool. Last. Last question. After the. The very silly Citrini piece, did you guys have you thought about doing a hackathon and getting your best engineers to be like, hey, just vibe code doordash. Make the agent native doordash. Because I think it would actually be really interesting to just actually try to do it.

Andy Fang (79:17)

You know, it's funny you bring that up because there's. That's a trinity report, like, blew up out of nowhere. And I don't know. I mean, honestly, we didn't react too much to it. I mean, I tweeted something response to it just in terms of my own thoughts there. But I would say, like, in general,

Jordy (79:32)

like two words, network effects.

Andy Fang (79:35)

Yeah, I mean, I would say in general, like, we just try to focus on growing our business and focus on customers, but I don't know, we try to get people to vibe code a bunch of different use cases, but not try to vibe code doordash.

John (79:49)

There's more to it. More to it. A bits and atoms company.

Jordy (79:53)

Well, awesome. Great to meet you, Andy. Next time, bring all three.

John (79:58)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'd love to have you.

Andy Fang (80:00)

All three of us.

John (80:00)

Yeah, we'll do a roundtable. Yeah, we have a round table, chairs and mics. We'll do the whole history.

Jordy (80:05)

Awesome. Well, yeah, congrats. Give our best of the Metis team.

John (80:08)

Team.

Jordy (80:08)

Congrats on partnering up.

John (80:11)

It's very cool. We'll talk to you soon.

Cameron (80:13)

Cheers.

John (80:13)

Have a good one. Speaking of agenta commerce, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about voice mode. You want voice mode? Why not sign up for 11 labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And without further ado, we will bring in Matt Jason from Multiply. How you doing, Matt?

Jordy (80:42)

What's going on?

Chris (80:43)

Hey, guys. Nice to see you.

John (80:45)

We're talking about my favorite topic. What are we talking about? Introduce yourself in the company.

Matt Jason (80:49)

Right on. So my name is Matt Jason. I am the founder and CEO of Multiply. And we are the first ever hybrid AI media agency for BB company.

John (80:58)

So we're making ads.

Jordy (81:00)

You're speaking my language.

Matt Jason (81:01)

We run some ads.

John (81:02)

Okay.

Matt Jason (81:03)

Do you guys like ads?

John (81:04)

We love ads.

Matt Jason (81:05)

Ads make you guys some money.

John (81:07)

Yes. The entire business is ads. And we, we refuse to have any

Jordy (81:12)

revenue that isn't ad.

John (81:13)

And, and just to be clear, we would run ads even if we weren't being paid. And we have run ads that we didn't get paid for because we have. Early on.

Jordy (81:23)

Game. Early on we had this bit where we would just be talking and then we'd be changing the subject and John would go, before we talk about xyz, I need to tell you about Gulfstream.

John (81:35)

And it would sound like a podcast ad, but I didn't say that we were sponsored by them. I just said, I gotta tell you about this company because it's really cool and I gotta run it out.

Jordy (81:43)

And we would put in the description, like, this show wouldn't be possible without

John (81:48)

we weren't being paid. It's just like they. It wouldn't be possible without them. Cause they're awesome. I love this company. Anyway, break it down a little bit lower. Who are your customers? How are they actually using Multiply? What pieces of the funnel are you touching in the B2B advertising space?

Matt Jason (82:06)

Definitely. All right, so first, just the big news of today is we came out of stealth.

Chris (82:11)

Today.

Matt Jason (82:11)

We raised $9.5 million.

John (82:14)

Oh, yes.

Matt Jason (82:15)

Thank you.

Andy Fang (82:15)

Thank

John (82:19)

you. Congratulations.

Matt Jason (82:21)

And sourcing capital. Instacart co founder Max Mullen leads Gemini at Google. And lots, lots more great people. And the reason we're all huddled in this advertising space, this is an old world in advertising. Google has built massive business. LinkedIn and Twitter, but massive advertising businesses. But ads feel the same way they did 5, 10, 15 years ago, despite the crazy rise in AI. And we work for B2B companies we work for. So I came from Brex before this we work for high growth B2B companies who have these crazy goals in their head. They have to go 5x their sales pipeline. And that's a lot of, I want to say your sponsors here too. And it's pretty impossible of a task today. You've got to go figure out across all your channels how can you go grow faster and advertising is just stuck in the old world.

John (83:11)

Yeah.

Matt Jason (83:11)

So what we found a way to do is say, hey, the big problem in advertising is stuff goes stale right away. You launch a new ad, your audience is tuned out in two, three days, a week tops. And your message is still, so what we've done, we've said, great, let's go combine AI agents with the best humans in the world at media buying. And we built this combination AI plus human media agency. And what we do together is we build self learning apps. So really what that means is you put out initial campaigns, we're connected into your sales call recordings so we see why your customers actually say to your sales team, hey, we love what you do. Here's why. We want to buy from you versus competitor. We read your customer emails, we get the same thing every time there's a new quote or pain point. We ingest this and we can actually go create tens or hundreds of new ads dynamically learning based upon why people love just what you do. Yeah. So that's our world. We're already partnering with companies like Vanta, like Listen Labs and Superhuman Power. Thank you. Thank you. And the growth is insane. And for a lot of these companies, they're hitting 300 to 500% or more growth on these ad channels. Just from changing from static old world ads to new world self funding ads.

Jordy (84:27)

Basically there's all this like knowledge that has been trapped in sales and you're basically just like bringing it over and helping.

John (84:34)

And it's different from just going to an off the shelf LLM provider and saying like, come up with some taglines for my business. Because you're ingesting proprietary data that happen on a phone call between the top salesperson and an interesting client that surfaced something interesting. And then you can actually pipeline that through to the creative. That makes sense.

Matt Jason (84:55)

That's it.

John (84:56)

It's spot on.

Matt Jason (84:57)

It's grabbing this hydro data for your business. Like yeah, we see why people love like what you do. Not like some generic company might like it.

John (85:04)

Yeah.

Matt Jason (85:04)

Like specifically your product, what you have.

John (85:06)

Yeah.

Matt Jason (85:06)

And then we help you grow based on it, which we love. Like renovation help companies get discovered.

John (85:11)

And a lot of that stuff isn't it's just not available on the open web. Like that's probably true for consumer people do post about their, the clothes that they purchase and the food that they eat. But a lot of people aren't actually sharing how a particular piece of B2B software is making their business more efficient just organically. So even if you have, even if you have an LLM that can scrape the web and is very good at searching, it's not going to have access to that data set.

Jordy (85:40)

With a kind of thesis I've had for a while now, which is historically ads had very like limited targeting. You'd be, you know, let's say running like a TV ad on a specific channel, like very limited targeting. You're creating creative that's going to be seen by tons and tons of people and you can't really control who those people are. It's just like the most general ad. And then with social, you could create an ad that was like effectively for 100,000 people and you run it and it gets stale quickly and you have to create more creative. And it feels like we're on a trajectory towards at some point and people that hate commerce and ads and the economic engine of the Internet won't like this. But it feels like we'll get to a point where like every ad is basically created in real time for a specific individual. Do you see that? Do you see us kind of headed in that direction? And part of that is just like the right message at the right time for the right like one specific person. And there's obviously kind of like layers to that stack. Maybe you need to multiply. That's also working with like a, you know, meta platforms, et cetera. But headed towards like targeting that's so extreme. It's like one ad for one or

John (86:52)

potentially a Vibe Co where DC brands, B2B startups, AI companies, advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales. Just like on meta, you could deploy for your customers. You could potentially be a big partner to Vibe Co, our partner.

Matt Jason (87:07)

So I look, I love that vision. We're seeing companies are demanding the same thing. We're running these personalized ads where we see, hey, a similar set of customers decided by for this reason. Hey, actually, let me step back. When we're seeing financial services companies with a certain sector buy from a certain reason, we're already running different ads to them than manufacturing customers with certain revenue ranges. So it's already we're actually ingesting CRM data where we can do a version of what you're talking about and saying, hey, don't advertise to these folks and for these folks, give them this specific messaging based on why they buy from you. So we're going there, we're having companies ask us all the time for more personalized. So we're building more for one to one as well. I think the question and the thing that I think is so interesting about the space, even if you can go do one to one advertising for everyone, how do you know it's the right message when it's predictive? And really one of the things that we focus on is not saying that we know the right answer. A lot of traditional media agencies have like a playbook. They'll say, hey, we know the best way to break through. And we fundamentally disagree with that. We think the best approach is always on obsessive testing. So when we talk to growth marketers, like the way we frame a lot of our AI, we frame it as we built the world's most insatiable AI agents. And just like a good growth marketer, there's no such thing as enough pipeline. And the reason I say that here is we're running hundreds of experiments every week. For a lot of companies, it's thousands over time. And when you see all of that, you're actually learning by doing. You can't just say one to one, here's the right message. It might be one to one. Let's try 10, 20, 30 things until we crack. This is what really isn't speaking the language of that person or that customer that speaks to them. And you want to speak their language. Even though it's your value, you're bringing life.

Jordy (88:57)

All right, here's a challenge. Sell me a pen in the next 24 hours.

John (89:04)

Actually, sell me a. What would be the B2B equivalent? Like, I want an ad for a co packer that can make me custom pens by the billions. If I want TBPN branded pens, this could be our next merch drop. Thank you so much.

Jordy (89:20)

Great to meet you, Matt. Congratulations on the round.

John (89:24)

Congratulations on the raise. Very exciting company. We'll talk to you soon. Matt, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And we have Cameron here in the studio. Are you a doctor? Should I be calling you doctor?

Cameron (89:49)

You don't need to call me doctor, but I am a licensed clinical psychologist.

John (89:52)

Wow. Congratulations. Give a little bit of your background, explain the company, and then obviously I want to dive into the current thing, which is the peptide debate.

Cameron (89:59)

Of course.

Jordy (90:00)

Yeah.

Cameron (90:00)

So I'm Dr. Cameron Sipa. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I served as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine for over a decade.

John (90:09)

That's a good school, right?

Cameron (90:10)

It's the number three medical school in the country. And since 2012, I've become a serial healthcare entrepreneur. So I was on the founding team of Amada Health, which is a unicorn that went public last year that creates online weight loss programs, helped a million people lose 10 million pounds and cut their risk of diabetes and heart disease in half.

Jordy (90:27)

That's a great KPI.

Cameron (90:29)

The thing I'm much more proud of than the financial outcome. Spent a year at Trinity Ventures on the VC side of the business and now I'm currently the founder and CEO of Maximus, where we are pioneering performance medicine.

John (90:40)

And what's the core focus of Maximus? Obviously, we're going to talk about peptides. But you've been in the business since before the peptide boom, correct?

Cameron (90:47)

For sure.

John (90:48)

Okay.

Jordy (90:48)

Yeah.

Cameron (90:48)

And peptides is really, you know, almost like a meaningless term. It just really means like drugs. It's a particular chain of amino acids that are getting hyped right now. But performance medicine spans hormones, peptides and other small molecules.

John (91:01)

Yeah, it does.

Jordy (91:02)

You'll appreciate that we were at a conference in 2024 and it was like we had, we had just started doing the show and we were asked to give a talk. Kind of last seconds, we were like, oh, what should we talk about? And it was, it was meant to be like somewhat of a provocative subject. And we were making the case that basically founders should be on like a performance drug stack. Right? Yep.

John (91:26)

And that venture capital firms, platform teams

Jordy (91:30)

should be like, helping.

John (91:31)

They have their go to market team, they have their brand team, they have their hiring, they'll help you optimize your performance tech. But how important is performance these days outside of bodybuilding competitions?

Cameron (91:43)

Yeah, I think a lot of, in fact, the trend that we're seeing, this huge consumer wave, whether in peptides or sort of performance enhancement, really trickles down from professional athletes and bodybuilders. One kind of hack I describe is you can look at the Wadalist, the World Anti Doping association, and that gives you a pretty good indication.

Jordy (92:02)

That was our point is like, there's no banned substance. I mean, there are like actual Legal drugs. But there's not like there's no governing body in business that says you cannot take these because they actually, they work too well. Exactly right.

Cameron (92:16)

And I have a private practice on the side. I work with the top Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs and I can tell you without naming names, a lot of the folks that you interview are taking essentially doctor prescribed but performance enhancing substances in order to be more effective at their jobs with less stress.

John (92:33)

And, and what does that mean, effective? Because just being in shape and being able to walk around and not be too tired during the day, that's valuable. But then there's also focus. If you're working on a spreadsheet or programming, there's so many different levers to pull on performance broadly. How do you narrow it down? Is it case by case?

Jordy (92:54)

Yeah.

Cameron (92:54)

So the way I describe it, I think there's sort of five foundational health behaviors. So diet, exercise, sleep, stress management and intimacy are the five things that are critical for health span and lifespan. And let me make a little bit of an analogy that I think really captures the field of performance medicine. So Steve Jobs used to love to tell a story about how there's an article in Scientific American that would track how effective various animals of the world are at locomotion. So who can travel a kilometer with the least amount of calories? Right now the condor, a bird, was the most efficient animal. And human beings, human beings, despite being the crown jewel of creation, were like a third of the way down the list. It was pretty unimpressive showing, but someone had the bright idea and they said if you give a human being a bicycle, they skyrocket to the top of the list. And so Steve would make that analogy that the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind. Right. And really revolutionized the world with that idea. I'd argue. Now we're seeing the precipice of two new revolutions in that AI is the motorcycle for the mind. It's not only as smart as APHD, but it has all of the PhDs and can work 24, 7. And similarly, we're seeing a revolution in biology in this shift towards performance medicine. So if you take the five foundational health behaviors that I described and you want to enhance your ability to do these things because they're critical to your health, you probably have a supplement stack like you're saying, Right? So let's just walk down those five things. So if you're trying to enhance your exercise and the main goal of exercise is to build muscle mass, you're probably gonna take the most studied ergogenic supplement, which is creatine. Right? Now, creatine, if you just sit on your couch all day, is not gonna do much for you except make you bloated. But if you combine it with strength training, it will increase slightly the amount of your lean mass. Now, what happens if you introduce testosterone? Now, testosterone. There's a great study that was done.

Jordy (94:43)

Don't get John started. Don't tempt him.

Cameron (94:46)

There was a great study that was done that gave guys testosterone and told them not to exercise. They gave another group, they told them to exercise without testosterone. And then obviously the combination. Now, the combination obviously grew the most amount of muscle and that testosterone and strength training are obviously synergistic. But the fascinating thing is the guys who took testosterone and sat on their butt all day grew far more muscles than the guys who were lifting weight five days a week without testosterone.

Jordy (95:11)

Right.

Cameron (95:12)

It is literally a cheat code. And so it literally mogs creatine, if you will, in that it is fluid, far more performance enhancing, which is bad. And so really, if you want to grow muscle in the most efficient way possible, testosterone is clearly the best way of doing it. Now, what about diet?

John (95:31)

Wait, quickly, on creatine, I have a question. So I heard a theory that creatine has benefits outside of muscle building. And the basic effect was that it helps with hydration. It's good to be hydrated. It's good to. It's helping your cells retain water, which is why some people complain about creatine. Oh, it's just water weight. But water in your muscles makes your muscles look bigger. So people are happy with that. But that creatine could potentially be beneficial outside of a bodybuilding context.

Cameron (95:59)

Yeah. So there's some recent studies that show that it can help with sleep deprivation. Oh, yeah. So there's some brain absorption effects.

John (96:04)

Don't you have to take a ton of it for that, though?

Cameron (96:06)

I think it's a little overwhelming.

Jordy (96:08)

I've tried doing that on some. I'm like, I don't know, boss. I don't know if I can have the 50th gummy today.

Cameron (96:16)

Well, that's the irony, right? People are megadosing creatine in order to eke out some very slight performance enhancing benefits when they could be taking testosterone and having very clear performance enhancing benefits.

John (96:27)

Right, yeah.

Cameron (96:27)

So the other health behavior diet, obviously critical for minimizing body fat. So the most common supplement that you can take to try to regulate your appetite is fiber. Right. Almost everyone takes fiber in some form or Another, whether through whole foods or a supplement, you might lose 1, maybe 2% of your body fat if you're consuming a fiber supplement. Now, with these prescription GLP1s semaglutide, tirzepatide, its clinical studies are showing 14.7% weight loss, 22% weight loss. So it absolutely trumps anything that you can take in terms of a supplement. And it's obviously literally bending the obesity curve in America. If you look at sleep, the most common over the counter supplement for sleep is melatonin.

Jordy (97:08)

Right.

Cameron (97:09)

Melatonin mildly works. It can particularly help if you have jet lag. But what if you take a growth hormone peptide? So when you.

John (97:17)

It sounds really aggressive.

Georgios (97:18)

It is.

Cameron (97:19)

But think about this. Your growth hormone peaks at puberty and it actually declines throughout your lifespan.

John (97:25)

What if you stub your toe? Have you considered Tren?

Cameron (97:28)

Well, Tren is an anabolic steroid that I would not recommend for most people

Jordy (97:33)

or a sub toe.

Cameron (97:34)

There's a lot of interesting John's like,

Jordy (97:35)

all right, you force my hand, I'll take it.

Cameron (97:38)

Yeah, for sure. But the fascinating thing is, because growth hormone declines across the lifespan, you can take a growth hormone peptide and just restore yourself back to youthful levels.

John (97:48)

And that's what a lot of the scientific consensus is about. Not the super physiological levels, not getting your testosterone 10,000 times bigger than what it would be naturally. But if you are truly at a deficit, bringing you back in line, that's. That's sort of the. Sort of the medical consensus.

Jordy (98:04)

Exactly.

Cameron (98:04)

Okay, so there are growth hormone peptides now, Cimorelin and Tessamorelin, that enhance sleep. They enhance recovery, allow people to sleep back till they're towards that seven to eight to nine hours of sleep. That's critical for physiological restoration. If you think about stress management, the other kind of fourth health behavior, the most common supplement that people take is magnesium. It helps you kind of be calm and kind of not be too stressed. It works mildly as well. But now you can take oxytocin. So oxytocin, you probably know, is sort of the love connection hormone. Right. We've actually developed a topical formulation of it. So you can actually apply it. I'll show you what it looks like. This is a little container. You can apply it intranasally or on thin skin, such as the scrotum or the perineum. It absorbs and it reduces cortisol, the stress hormone. And it helps people feel more connected, far more than, you know, a magnesium.

Jordy (98:54)

This is what the kick streamers need. If they get frame mogs.

John (98:57)

Oh, that's true. The cortisol spikes. Yeah.

Jordy (99:01)

EpiPen.

John (99:01)

Yeah.

Cameron (99:01)

It will prevent actually a cortisol.

Jordy (99:03)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're getting frame mogged.

John (99:06)

Yes.

Jordy (99:06)

There you go.

Cameron (99:07)

Yeah. You don't need to stab it, you don't apply it, I would say. And then finally, intimacy, I think, is the most underrated health behavior. Zinc is the most common supplement that people take in terms of enhancing sort of sexual function. But the ED drugs, Tadalafil, Viagra, Verdenafil,

John (99:24)

there's been a big boom with hims and hers and Roman companies.

Cameron (99:28)

So people are taking that because it not only enhances sexual function in terms of erectile strength, ability to last longer, enhancing the enjoyment of sex, but it actually increases blood flow to all of your body and into your muscles, to your brain. People take it as a pre workout. There's interesting associational research showing that it reduces the incidence of Alzheimer's and dementia. There needs to be further studies that needs to be done to substantiate that. But that's the future that I see is that almost everyone right now has sort of that supplement stack. But I predict, this is my kind of bold prediction, is that the top founders and VCs in the next five years will be taking at least three of those five things that I mentioned. So testosterone to build muscle, Tiraspatide to drop fat, Tessa Morellin to increase growth hormone and recovery, Tadalafil to increase intimacy and blood flow, and oxytocin to reduce their stress.

John (100:19)

Okay, so those five, so you have the five supplements and then the five drugs that need prescriptions.

Jordy (100:25)

Right.

John (100:25)

Is your prediction that the FDA will approve non prescription versions of those exact chemicals or that everyone will sort of elevate to working with a doctor that can actually write prescriptions?

Cameron (100:39)

Yeah, it's a great question. All of these prescription drugs that I mentioned are already FDA approved.

John (100:44)

Yes.

Cameron (100:45)

But a physician has the right to prescribe any of these off label.

Jordy (100:48)

Right.

Cameron (100:48)

So Tadalafil is a great example. It's FDA approved for erectile dysfunction, but we actually prescribe it as a blood flow enhancer. So some people literally take it as a prescription pre workout for non sexual reasons, or they are taking it as an anti aging sort of drug because that's sort of the vision of performance medicine is it's not just treating a deficit or a medical problem, but it's enhancing your health, your aesthetics or your performance.

John (101:13)

Sure. And so like between those two, you would expect like many more doctors visits, many more consultations with medical professionals to get access to that tier of prescription only medicines.

Jordy (101:26)

Yeah, well, and I feel like that fits into this like, you know, put differently, you're positioning this as like much more proactive approach, approach to medicine. Not just trying to survive when something bad happens or experiencing some sort of disease, but like proactively trying to take yourself from the baseline to the best you can possibly.

Cameron (101:49)

Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. The problem is right now in America we don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. Right. And it's run by an oligopoly of insurance companies that are not in the business of providing healthcare, they're in the business of denying healthcare. Very sadly and tragically when the uh,

Jordy (102:05)

there's some issues where like various health tech companies will, you know, be talking to VCs and they'll say like, oh, like we're going to be able to get access to insurance dollars or, and, and the issue with that is that insurance companies don't care if something will make you healthy in 10 years because you're most likely going to be on a new insurance plan. They're just wasting money. Right. They expect you. The average American stays at their job like you know, low single digit years I think. And so that just means like they're like, that's great, you're going to be healthier later, but I'm not going to pay for the benefit of some other insurance carrier.

Cameron (102:40)

Yeah, that was what we learned at Omada because we sold through employers that if the employer didn't retain their employees for more than three years, there's no point of selling into it because they're like, it's not my problem, someone else is going to have to pay for it. So really the antidote to that is performance medicine in that it bypasses the insurance system altogether. And within basically we're a cash pay private practice that operates in all 50 states. And our belief is that the only person that should be making a decision is you and your doctor. And that every drug of course has risks, but it's up to you and your doctor to decide whether the cost benefit is worth it for you in making that decision, not the insurance companies who are really in the business of minimizing the amount of care. I'll give you a really great example of this. If anyone measures their testosterone levels, unless you're below the second and a half percentile, the insurance company will deem you're not sick enough essentially to be warranted

Jordy (103:32)

to be in the bottom two and a half percentile.

Cameron (103:35)

Two and a half percentile. So the Question is, naturally, what happens to the other 97.5% of Americans? Obviously the lower half of that would probably feel better in terms of their energy, their motivation, their drive, their sexual function, their ability to build muscle, muscle mass. But even folks who are, let's say low normal would probably benefit from a higher level of testosterone. In terms of the performance enhancement that we're talking about, insurance will never pay for that. And so there's been a proliferation of the rise of sort of private practices like Maximus in order to really meet the needs. Because I think there's this huge consumer trend which includes peptides and hormones of people who want to enhance their health, enhance their performance and enhance the quality of their life.

Jordy (104:13)

What are you, how are you advising clients and just people broadly around the risks associated with peptides? There's a debate raging right now. Is BPC overall just like efficacy but also the potential risk? Because we don't necessarily have for some of them. We have plenty of data if we don't have full on studies. But how are you kind of guiding people?

Cameron (104:40)

Yeah, really the question is which peptides and which drugs? Because we can't sort of.

John (104:44)

Because some are fully approved.

Cameron (104:46)

Yeah, Exactly. So the GLPs are really, these are peptides as well, oxytocin that I mentioned. Those are also peptides that have literally been FDA approved. Some of them for decades, have a very substantial body of literature on them. And so comparing that to let's say a BPC which is not FDA approved is a very different ball game. So responsible clinics, I would say like ours, are only prescribing FDA approved drugs that have a very substantial body of human literature in addition to a lot of clinical experience. Right. So some of the, like, we're actually the largest prescriber, for instance, in clomiphene in the United States. We publish studies with ends in the thousands on the safety and efficacy of these things. And so with the body of literature then I think you can evaluate each drug on their own merits and decide, okay, is this something that's worth prescribing? Prescribing as a clinic. And then obviously each person between them and their doctor make a decision of whether that cost benefit is worth it for them. Now I think individuals can always make a choice in taking something that's a little bit more experimental. That's up to them. But really, I really recommend that people are getting it through a doctor and it's fulfilled by an FDA inspected compounding pharmacy.

Jordy (105:57)

That's kind of. Have you heard any horror stories around these kind of like offshore or compounders. Just people getting.

Cameron (106:05)

Those aren't compounders, those are just. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are just literally buying black market illegal drugs directly from manufacturers or from resellers in the United States. And yeah, I mean, there's literally labs that are. The problem is you can't ensure what you're getting is pure. It's even the compound, like Peptide Sciences, which just shut down. People were testing it, they're buying a non FDA approved GLP that's soon to be on the market. And literally it didn't Retta. Yeah, it didn't contain any of Reta in the vial. Or what's a common thing is it might contain it, but the dose might be off by 50%. And so what you're seeing is people having side effects. Because Retta is a glucagon agonist, it has effects on the heart, increases heart rate, reduces heart rate variability. If you're not able to dose it probably properly, you're more likely to have side effects as a result. So it's a wild west. Any responsible clinician would say, don't buy things on the black market. Now, obviously individuals can make their own libertarian choices about what they do, but the difference is that there are good alternatives on the market. For instance, tirzepatide is generally efficacious for weight loss. There's no reason for most people to be taking Reta and also to be

John (107:17)

dealing with one that's FDA approved.

Cameron (107:18)

We have one that's FDA approved, two, actually, you know that it's pure. You know that it's relatively safe because there's a wide body of literature and it doesn't have the cardiac effects.

Jordy (107:28)

Do you think Hollywood is going to be somewhat of a model for Silicon Valley in the sense that like actors have historically been like, how did this actor have this insane transformation? And they're like chicken broccoli, a lot of water. And it's like, I don't know about that, but basically it's like bodybuilders lead the charge. Hollywood kind of picks up on that. But is Hollywood kind of somewhat of the model?

Cameron (107:55)

Yeah, I think so. And I think increasingly Silicon Valley investors and founders are gonna increasingly become the model. The problem with Hollywood is until maybe recently, a lot of people literally had to lie and say they weren't on trt, despite the fact I have friends who are personal trainers to these guys who prep them for the movies. They're clearly on performance enhancing drugs.

Jordy (108:13)

Nobody bills like, well, yeah, it is irresponsible for like, you know, Zac Efron, to be like, yeah, I'm on trt, because a bunch of young people see that I want to look like that.

Cameron (108:24)

Exactly. But this is a really great point that you mentioned about sort of young people in trt, and this is actually one of the whole founding genesis of maximus, right? So testosterone is a really interesting compound. The gold standard is injectable testosterone. So if you inject exogenous testosterone from outside of your body, your body realizes it's getting enough, and so your testicles will shut down, shrinking, and you become infertile. So nobody under the age of 50 or nobody who wants to still have children should really be injecting testosterone. Now, you can take something called hcg, which is a replacement for lh, and it can help you get off of it and restore your fertility, but it's not perfect, and there's some risks involved. However, there are alternatives nowadays. So we actually prescribe oral and topical testosterone. So you don't need to inject it. And it's native testosterone. It's the same testosterone that your body makes. The problem with injectable testosterone is we made sort of an interesting devil's bargain, is we took testosterone and we added a molecule to it called an ester. So you probably have heard of testosterone cypionate. The benefit of the ester is that because it's annoying to inject every single day, you only need to inject it once a week, so it becomes more convenient. The downside is it redlines your testosterone for 24, 7, for a whole week. And so it shuts down and suppresses your endogenous production. So you basically become dependent on it. And if you come off of it, you're gonna go through withdrawal symptoms. The benefit of oral testosterone is that it peaks within two to four hours, lasts about six to eight, and topical testosterone peaks at about two and a half hours, lasts about 12 to six. And so they're shorter half life, shorter duration, and they're less suppressive. The interesting thing that we found in our research is that if you take oral testosterone, it's actually not very suppressive for most people. And if you combine it with enclomiphene, which is a selective estrogen receptor modulator, it basically blocks. Blocks estrogen in a particular part of the brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, it prevents that suppression from happening. And so you can kind of have your cake and eat it, too, for the first time in that somewhat of

Jordy (110:17)

like a free lunch, a little.

Cameron (110:18)

There's no such thing as completely a biological free lunch. But you can maintain your natural testosterone production and then supplement it with oral testosterone and enclomiphene. And then the really revolutionary thing that we found is topical testosterone, which has been used for over half a century. You apply it to your scrotum, it can increase your testosterone by several fold. It's normally suppressive, but when you add enclomiphene to it, you can maintain your natural testosterone production and enhance it to high normal levels. In fact, we have two patents on the combination of oral and topical testosterone plus enclomiphene. And so actually, men as young as 18 can take these without suppressing their fertility markers. So it's really a revolution and it allows us to really fulfill the vision of performance medicine because there are safer alternatives. The injectable testosterone is still great for the guys who are over 50 and they don't mind being on it for the rest of their lives. But they're now essentially safer alternatives for younger guys or guys who want to maintain their fertility. And we're actively doing this research, publishing it, patenting these protocols and disseminating them so we can democratize performance medicine.

John (111:21)

How do you think about the personalization of medicine? We talked to Paul Cunningham on Monday. He was the fellow who used AI to process some DNA data around his dog who was suffering from cancer, and was able to work with a lab to synthesize a custom MRNA vaccine that was targeting the specific cancer that his dog had. Sort of looking at the delta between the healthy dog's DNA and the cancerous DNA in the same animal, and then was able to create sort of a one of one medicine for that dog. I could imagine that coming to. Well, there's these peptides, they work broadly on populations, but in the future, is there a world where you're getting a tirzepatide that's designed specifically for you and would there actually be a benefit of that or is that where we're going?

Cameron (112:12)

Absolutely, it's already here. In fact, with tirzepatide, we have microdoses. So this is like.

John (112:17)

So that's modulating the amount of product, but not the actual molecular construction.

Cameron (112:24)

In this particular case it's not. But the benefit of doing a microdose, for instance, it's for people who are not overweight. So BMI under 25.

John (112:33)

Why would you.

Cameron (112:33)

They may not even want to lose weight, but they might want to take it to reduce their Inflammaging is sort of the term that's used. It reduces impulsivity and just Help reduce some of the food noise. And maybe there's some folks who are not necessarily overweight, but they want to maintain a six pack without having to constantly fight this willpower battle for the rest of their life. That's obviously a little bit more aesthetic and performance enhancing. But that custom dose, people can kind of find the right dose that fits for them. So yes, there's going to be both personalized medicines in terms of the type of medicine. But also I think the dosing is really critical because it allows flexibility. So enclomifene is a really good example. When enclomiphene first was introduced to the market, literally the only dosage that was available, 25 milligrams. And it's like him.

John (113:15)

That's what they studied.

Cameron (113:16)

You get 25 milligrams of Viagra no matter who you are.

Jordy (113:19)

Right.

Cameron (113:19)

We offer eight different dosages all the way from 3.125 milligrams to 25 milligrams. And the way we titrate it is actually through lab testing. So we have an at home blood test.

John (113:28)

Okay.

Cameron (113:29)

You don't have to go to a quest. You can just stick it on your shoulder, you press a button and you can take out about half a pinky full of blood. And we can not measure 100 markers like at quest, but we can measure about a dozen of them, including you

John (113:40)

take it to a lab.

Cameron (113:41)

Exactly. Mails next day air to a lab. So you can take your baseline levels, you know where you stand. And then we can put you on let's say topical testosterone plus enclomiphene. You'll probably notice your total testosterone goes over 1000, your free testosterone goes over 200. And then we can titrate you to the just the right amount by retesting you after 30 days and usually after one or two iterations, we can get you to make sure that your lab numbers are ideal, but also that your feeling and functioning your best. So this is really the promise of personalized medicine that you're talking about that will be personalized to every single person.

Jordy (114:13)

How much do you care about wearable data when working with clients?

Cameron (114:17)

I would say in my private practice I look a little bit more at that at Maximus. I honestly think most wearables are a little bit overhyped.

Jordy (114:25)

Yeah, I noticed. I don't think you're wearing one yet. You have a nice watch. Thank you.

Cameron (114:29)

And it has no battery or technology. My anti tech watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting thing. As a psychologist, I think it actually causes of a lot anxiety in A lot of people, right? A lot of these sleep wearables because they look at it and you're like, oh, my whoop score is not 100. Now I'm going to be sleep deprived.

John (114:45)

I have sake trend

Jordy (114:49)

to John. His entire life is just signaling like fake trend.

John (114:54)

I got a 98 on 8 sleep and I immediately googled like D ball plus Anavar plus trench plus massive needle this big.

Jordy (115:04)

There you go.

John (115:05)

That's what I want.

Cameron (115:06)

Your sleep score's gotta go to about 20.

John (115:07)

I know, do not do any of this.

Cameron (115:10)

But yeah, I mean, look, it can be helpful. We use tracking really when we want to see if an intervention is making a difference. So a lot of our clients actually when they're using oxytocin, because we've published a study showing that it enhances sleep quality, extends sleep by about 25 minutes sleep duration on average. They'll look at their aura or their whoop scores and then they'll notice an improvement in, let's say, REM or deep sleep. And this is kind of, I think, beyond sort of randomized control trials. The top of the evidence based hierarchy is running really a randomized control trial of one. And so you can look at your own data. And then if you see, if you do sort of an ABA test where you don't do the intervention, you add oxytocin and then you come off of it. And during that period of time, that B portion when you were taking the intervention, you're clearly sleeping better, your sleep duration's better, your deep sleep, REM are better. It gives you a pretty positive personal indication that this treatment is working for you.

John (115:59)

You, you didn't mention across any of those five categories, like the ADHD meds that I feel like have been popular in Silicon Valley for decades across Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse and Modafinil. There's a few others that people take occasionally. Some of them are prescribed. What is your overall thesis on that? That one feels, it's always felt like a Faustian bargain.

Cameron (116:22)

But what's your take exactly? And I think it is. And especially as a former psychiatry professor, I'm incredibly conservative about things that are psychoact and specifically work on the neurotransmitters.

John (116:34)

Sure. It doesn't come from a biomarker. It's not like I get a blood test and it says, oh yeah, you're low in.

Cameron (116:41)

There's no great blood marker for dopamine, for instance.

John (116:44)

Sure. Okay.

Cameron (116:45)

And the diagnosis of ADHD is problematic. Most people aren't doing a Full neuropsychological examination to get a true diagnosis. It's a little over diagnosed these days.

John (116:55)

One of the questions in the survey was like, did you lose things as a kid? And I was like, who has never lost anything as a child? Everyone loses their sweatshirt when they go to school in the morning and then it gets hot, you take the sweatshirt off, you lose it. Like, this is not like I never did. You never did.

Jordy (117:09)

Okay, well then fair enough.

Cameron (117:11)

Yeah. And there's a lot of folks who may have. There's kind of a notion that people outgrow ADHD in adulthood. Really what may be happening is they're learning to behaviorally compensate through genes and patterns. But anyway, obviously if you have true, clinically diagnosed, properly diagnosed adhd, prescription stimulants can be like Ritalin, Adderall, the various amphetamines can be life changing in that despite the risks and trade offs, obviously if it lets you function and keep a job that cost benefit, it's gonna be beneficial from a performance enhancement perspective. I've been very public in companies like Cerebral. We're doing the wrong thing by shilling Adderall on TikTok. We won't prescribe it because it's addictive and we don't prescribe things that are addictive because I think to your point, it is a Faustian bargain and there's significant trade offs in doing so. So I didn't mention focus as part of those five. I do think there are things.

John (118:03)

Well, it feels like your philosophy is that focus comes from the other. The other areas. Yeah, if you're balanced everywhere else.

Cameron (118:11)

Well, in 2019, I popularized dopamine fasting as a behavioral way of improving focus. The main thing that's actually messing with people's focus for the majority of people is not adhd, but digital distraction.

Jordy (118:21)

Right.

Cameron (118:22)

So everyone's distracted by social media, gaming, gambling, shopping.

John (118:26)

I do adopting fast every single day, like at least six hours.

Cameron (118:29)

Yeah, that's.

Matt Wong (118:30)

That's fantastic.

John (118:31)

For usually from like 11pm to 5am so.

Cameron (118:34)

Yeah, I mean, you know, you know, in China, actually literally from 11pm I think to like, you just can't access it.

John (118:39)

Right.

Cameron (118:40)

You cannot act. Computer game manufacturers are legally required to

John (118:44)

take the servers to do it.

Cameron (118:45)

And so there's something there. Right. That's like institutionalized dopamine fasting.

John (118:49)

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

Jordy (118:51)

How often do you do full blood panels? And by 2035, how often do you think the average kind of American will be doing a blood panel? Yeah, I mean, assuming right now the average person does it if they're sick and they are having an issue, that's starting to change. But what's your protocol now?

Cameron (119:12)

Yeah, it's a great question. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't even have a primary care physician. I mean, I think the standard recommendation, and one that I will continue to espouse, is everyone should get an annual physical every year and have a relationship with a doctor. Ideally, you know, a good primary care physician. Unfortunately, because of the health insurance situation that we have as tied to employers, a lot of people are freelancers, they don't have health insurance, or if they do, it's like a minimal amount through the open market, they don't have that. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is the blood test that you get through your primary care is very sparse. So I'll tell you a funny story. So, you know, being at Omada and literally being in the diabetes industry, I never had my blood sugar level check. And when I brought it up with my doctor, they're like, you're young and healthy, you don't need to check your blood sugar. And I was like, my dad has type 2 diabetes. I wanna check and just make sure I don't develop it. But that's the mentality. Similarly, it's not routine to measure your testosterone levels or get a hormone panel unless you are incredibly low energy and symptomatic and your doctor would be concerned, they don't think it's sort of necessary. And so the unfortunate thing is going through the traditional healthcare system because they really want to minimize the cost associated with the panel. You're not going to get a good, comprehensive blood test done, Right. So through Maximus, we have a comprehensive test. It costs $199.99. You can get 110 biomarkers measured. True, unique biomarkers. There's a couple of companies out there that repeat tests every six months, and they're not unique biomarkers. So that will give you an assessment of, you know, standard cbc, cmp, your lipids, your hormones, your thyroid, all the things that you need to know. And obviously now with AI, you can throw that into an AI and identify areas that are problematic. And obviously, if you have a clinic or a good PCP that can work with you, it can help optimize it. A good example of this is almost everyone is vitamin D deficient because we just don't get enough sunlight. It's the easiest thing to fix. You can take a multivitamin, like the building blocks that we produce, and we do before and after lab testing so that after a couple months you can get into an optimal range and it's going to enhance your mood, your sleep. 100 different biological functions.

John (121:12)

We got to pop the top on this ultra dome, let the sun get the vitamin D going.

Jordy (121:17)

We actually want to eventually get to natural light.

John (121:20)

It would be so good. We got to make it happen. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon. And I will tell everyone about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I will tell you also about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we will kick off our Lightning round, the Lambda Lightning Round. We will go to the cloud. Hopefully we'll see the Lambda Lightning round begins now with Chris from AD Quick. One of our favorite people, TBPN royalty is the the chat likes to say let's bring Chris in to the TVP ultra. Dom, Chris, how are you doing? Great to see you.

Jordy (122:04)

There he is. Is that a TVPN green suit?

John (122:07)

Beautiful jacket. That is a fantastic jacket. I like the liner too.

Chris (Adquik) (122:12)

Anyway, picked it up in London at Charles Turret.

John (122:15)

No way. Very cool.

Chris (Adquik) (122:17)

Couldn't miss out on the opportunity to get dripped out with my fellow technology brothers.

John (122:22)

I love it. I love it. Reintroduce the company and sort of explain the shape of the business these days and then take us into the news.

Jordy (122:30)

For anyone that hasn't heard, I know 1000adquick, I think we did 250 last

John (122:35)

year or something like that. Probably more. Yeah.

Chris (Adquik) (122:39)

So Adquik's building the infrastructure for real world advertising. So out of home. So when you think about it, over the last 30 years, every dollar, every of every ad spend has gone to doing one thing, reaching human beings with a message. And that's primarily been done through digital channels. Cookies, pixels, real time bidding, programmatic.

John (123:03)

It's all digital.

Chris (Adquik) (123:05)

But what they did forget is that people are outside. People are constantly getting exposed to an advertising medium. And this one hasn't been optimized, it hasn't been architected with technology. And so the big players like Google, Amazon, the trade desk, none of them have cracked the nut that is out of home advertising. And we're building the pipes and the plumbing for it.

John (123:32)

Yeah. So there's a lot of interaction with the physical world. At a certain point. Someone has to physically print the billboard, put it up like tape it down, tie it down, do Whatever. And you are able to abstract that and then serve a company with a thing that looks like a more traditional digital platform, right?

Chris (Adquik) (123:52)

Yeah, absolutely. And most importantly is proving that the medium works. So we now live in an age where you don't get investment in advertising unless you could prove that it works. So we pioneered the measurement and the analytics. So if you get exposed to an out of home ad and then to subsequently do something online in an app, go into a store, we can attribute that to the exposure and then model it out with all the rest of your channels.

John (124:21)

So it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable. That's what I'm getting from this. That's right. But take us through the more recent news. What's going on with the business?

Chris (Adquik) (124:30)

Yeah. So there's three big players in the space. In the United states, it's a $10 billion market. Two billion roughly is is sold by out front media. And you'll see their billboards and their transit in New York, Los Angeles and all the major metros.

John (124:49)

And to be clear, they own the physical real estate. They own the physical like the structure that the billboard goes on that's part

Jordy (124:56)

of their business or just the rights or the rights?

Chris (Adquik) (125:00)

The rights and the structures.

John (125:01)

Got it. Okay.

Jordy (125:03)

Yeah.

Chris (Adquik) (125:03)

And so this is an organization that's like 2,000 employees, a thousand sellers, all regionally distributed. And they've been selling this medium very much like real estate agents have prior to like your open door, your Zillow, so on and so forth. And for the first time ever, they're going to have world class technology to support their sales efforts across these thousand sellers. And then they'll be also using our audiences to find the best fit for their inventory against an audience and then also measure the success for their clients.

John (125:42)

Yeah, walk me through the measurement problem because on my drive to work every day I drive through Hollywood, I see so many billboard ads for movies. And whenever I buy tickets I wind up going on Fandango and there's a huge disconnect there. I don't know that I've gotten a survey, but with the right data you could probably see that I was in this area or I purchased something on a credit card panel in this area and I might have been exposed to that billboard. I could imagine how you could piece that together, that I went to this particular movie because I saw this billboard. I've been seeing billboards for the project Hail Mary and we are actually going. And the billboards should get some of that attribution. But other than hearing Me say it right now. I don't know how you would possibly puzzle that together. So what is the process these days?

Chris (Adquik) (126:32)

Sure. So your weather app doesn't make money by telling you it's going to rain. We buy up all the highest quality mobile traffic data. We pipe 7 billion pings into our platform every single day. So we know where you are, what time you're at, what direction you're heading at, what speed you're heading at and all these things. And then we use that to basically identify when the mobile device is inside of a geofence that we have geofenced all of the inventory in the platform.

John (127:04)

Got it.

Chris (Adquik) (127:05)

And then we count that as an exposure.

John (127:07)

Sure.

Chris (Adquik) (127:07)

We then map the exposure to a pixel on the website and an SDK in an app. Or we also, in the case of brick and mortar will actually geofence the store location.

Jordy (127:18)

Yeah.

Chris (Adquik) (127:18)

And so we can kind of connect the dots that way.

John (127:21)

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Jordy (127:22)

Breakdown kind of trends in the SF out of home market. Like how, how is kind of all that the AI funding boom.

John (127:31)

Yeah. Does a billboard up in SF cost like 10 times as much as anywhere else? Like what's the ratio at least?

Chris (Adquik) (127:38)

Yeah, I mean it's after, you know, we had that 2023, we had the software recession 2024, we started to see things come pick back up. And in the last 12 months it's gone gangbusters for the AI companies. To answer your question, yeah, the prices are some of the most expensive in the market, but some of our customers are some of the leading AI companies, Fin being one of them. Eleven labs we've done campaigns for. And so yeah, you're starting to see AI companies use this channel to break through the clutter of digital.

Jordy (128:17)

What's the most underrated out of home form factor in your view?

Chris (Adquik) (128:24)

If you're B2B, I really like account based marketing or account based. So basically you take all of your HQs for your target accounts, you put them in the map and then you buy up all the inventory surrounding.

Jordy (128:39)

It's like bus stops, you know, basically like just flood the street zone in a, in a like two block radius kind of thing. Yeah, exactly.

Chris (Adquik) (128:48)

And I don't know if you recall but say like maybe like five or six years ago the founders of Brex took over all of San Francisco, most of San Francisco being their target market. And I think they spent like half a million bucks and you know, customer acquisition.

Jordy (129:04)

I think people haven't fully processed that like there seems to be like increasing like returns as you spend more on out of home, which is that, like, you know, if you spend 50 grand on a campaign somewhere around LA, you're going to have, you know, some effect. But if you, if you spend, you know, dramatically more than that, like an order of magnitude, it seems like you really, like, break through in a different way. It's funny. Sam, Sam Blonde, who did that original campaign, he's back with a new company and taking the same approach. You know, heavy, heavy, heavy. Out of home spend.

Chris (Adquik) (129:47)

Yeah. So some of our teammates in San Francisco were saying that Monaco's up and down the 101. I think they bought like 60. 60 or 70 billboards, so they're making their presence felt.

John (129:58)

Yeah, he told me about that before we had him on the show. And I was like, that is such a bold way to, to introduce your company. But it really does break through. I've seen photos of it. And if you're there, you'll. You'll see.

Jordy (130:09)

What about on the. On the supply side? How, how heavy are the restrictions on bringing on new out of home supply is. I'm assuming, obviously you're thinking for your house, city by city. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to put like, you know, a massive billboard on my, on my house. But no, I just think in general,

John (130:29)

hey, honey, I sold the front yard,

Jordy (130:31)

I sold the roof.

John (130:32)

Hey, our mortgage is going to be half the price now. That's amazing.

Chris (Adquik) (130:37)

Yeah. So in terms of limitations, in 1965, the Highway Beautification act was passed, so that kind of restricts how many.

Jordy (130:46)

Required every highway to have beautiful billboards. Yeah.

Chris (Adquik) (130:50)

So basically there's only a certain subset of that you could put near highways. But you're starting to see all these other formats kind of come about. There's folks putting ads on trucks, there's folks wrapping Ubers. They're putting ads inside of Ubers. They're putting. Pulling planes in the sky, which is kind of old school, but skywriting and then drone shows are the new big thing, and expect to see a lot more of those in the future.

Jordy (131:18)

I know. I'm surprised that it hasn't been utilized. The only other thing is, can you, can you put a blimp on ad quick? Like, I've given this advice to enough companies now and they haven't done it. I feel like just like flying a blimp, like a Goodyear blimp over SF

John (131:36)

for Goodyear's just cornered the market. I think that they wouldn't. I don't think Goodyear would sell their blimp for A billion dollars. I think there's just their greatest capital asset they have because you could monetize that thing so well flying around San Francisco.

Chris (Adquik) (131:49)

You know, we do have 2000 media owners on the platform and I'm pretty sure that might fly.

Georgios (131:54)

Fit the bill.

John (131:55)

That'd be amazing. Love it.

Jordy (131:57)

Well, congratulations on the partnership and thank you again. You had been the second day one, the second advertiser right after Ramp to back us. And we'll never forget your support.

John (132:12)

We appreciate you, Chris.

Jordy (132:13)

Thanks to the whole team. Great to see you.

John (132:15)

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also tell you about Label Box, RL Environments, Voice Robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

Jordy (132:35)

Expecting our next guest to be duct taped to his chair.

John (132:38)

Oh, oh, is he, Is he. He was duct taped.

Jordy (132:41)

Oh, he's free.

John (132:42)

He got free.

Chris (132:43)

I'm alive.

John (132:43)

Okay, okay. Introduce yourself, introduce the company and then explain the duct tape stunt.

Chris (132:49)

I love it. Co founder, CEO of Hanover Park. Think about us as financial infrastructure to power investment firms, private equity venture funds, the most unsexy industry in the planet. We're now making sexy.

John (133:02)

Thank you for your.

Chris (133:03)

Yeah, yeah. So I was duct taped to a chair and I announced a blooper that I tagged Jordan. You guys in? I was like, okay, how can we make the most boring industry in the world sexy? And that was obviously replacing human duct tape. And so, yeah, pumped to do it. We launched our announcer series data.

John (133:19)

Okay, so the metaphor is there's a lot of human duct tape inside these funds, piecing different puzzle pieces together to manage the financial assets and LP relationships. And you make all of that go away, correct?

Chris (133:31)

100%. And also, like, I don't know, I've been saying this for two years, like B2B SaaS is dead. We want to sell outcomes, not tools. And so tools are things that are a bunch of duct tape around with humans and software. And we're like, we're going to replace the human heavy services business out there too.

John (133:45)

Sure, sure, sure.

Jordy (133:49)

What is the key moment for an allocator using the platform that really wows them or clicks when you want to

Chris (133:59)

make $100 million follow on decision and you have to ping your CFO and say, hey, can you pull together the data that we haven't had in real time for the past two months? Can you figure this out. AI agents solve the problem by getting you real time data and then help you make those decisions. And so we're pulling in data from granola notes, we're pulling in data from emails and board decks, we're pulling in data from all the boring accounting data on those positions. People are like, oh my God, I can finally make a decision in real time without waiting a bunch of days.

John (134:28)

Okay, so there might be a whole bunch of decks from all the different investments and all the different companies that have various ARR figures and growth rates, but they're sort of buried. Hanover can go in there, get that data, put it in some sort of centralized database and then visualize that or maybe even help with marks. Is that something you do or is there still a human in the loop for that? Yeah.

Chris (134:51)

Even more importantly, we think there's a world where you don't even need to log into Hanover Park. We're going to expose all the data via MCP server. And so we launched that where people are accessing it via Claude, cowork and via GPT, et cetera. And so that's been a key piece, I would say, for GPS, whereas CFOs are going to use us for things like capital calls, distributions, financial reports, according to LPs, et cetera.

John (135:12)

Got it, got it. So interesting. So if somebody's on the Enterprise OpenAI plan or something, do they have to integrate this themselves or is that just like an off the shelf plug in? And then if they want to actually get this into a deck, what's the current stack? To get that information, they would be exporting it, transforming it over in their LLM tool of choice and then taking it to the LPs.

Chris (135:42)

It's actually even worse. You would have to email some human called your fund admin and say, hey, can you pull that data that's locked in some random tool you don't give me access to? You then get a spreadsheet, you then put that into another tool, you then put that into Claude or GPT, et cetera. And so a lot of the value prop here is you're going to pay a fund admin anyway to do this boring financial reporting. LPs demand this from a third party party. And so instead of having that data locked away, we can at least give you access to it and then you can put it into cloud and other things.

John (136:12)

Got it.

Jordy (136:12)

How big is the market? This is a market that like, you know, compared to like SMB.

John (136:19)

There will never be too much venture capital.

Jordy (136:21)

I know, I know, I know. And we're trying to, we're trying to get more people to be.

John (136:27)

There's $100 billion raised this month.

Jordy (136:29)

Okay, yes, but yeah, so I'm assuming with, you know, venture funds, private equity, all this stuff, you know, you have to kind of ignore like individual SPVs and entities. But, but I'm assuming you can kind of clock pretty precisely like what the, how big the market is and then you got to go and try to get as much of it as you can.

Chris (136:50)

Yes. There's 100 trillion of global assets and there's a $20 billion public.

Jordy (136:54)

I know, but isn't that, isn't that, isn't that like somewhat of a.

John (136:57)

Are you going to get Pimco at some point?

Chris (137:00)

Right, like it's, yeah, it's like hedge funds, right? You have like private equity funds, real estate, private equity, venture, etc. Like SSNC is a public company today. They have like 5 billion of revenue. Citco has 5 billion of revenue.

Matt Jason (137:11)

Right.

Chris (137:12)

So there's a bunch of like these massive dinosaur companies that exist and it's really like venture and private equity is just the start.

John (137:19)

Okay, okay. And so within, I mean venture also scales from $15 million fund to $15 billion fund. Like I imagine that there's some trade offs where the bigger you go, the bigger the dollars, but also the bigger integration, the more requests versus somebody who's just starting a new fund. They don't have any software, so it's super easy to get off the ground. Have you been picking one or the other as like a beachhead market or have you just been doing whoever you know?

Chris (137:49)

Yeah, you'd be surprised. The bigger it is, the easier it is to differentiate actually.

Matt Wong (137:54)

Okay.

Chris (137:54)

And so a lot of these bigger fundamentals funds, they've been like running around with players like ssnc, which I call like the evil empire, which is basically like you're using them and all of your data is kind of trapped. Whereas like an early stage venture fund that's just getting off the ground. Things are pretty clean and pretty easy. And so we've actually focused on like mid market enterprise. So think like 250 million plus in assets. Venture and private equity start at least.

John (138:19)

Do you do any work on the. On, is it all equity or are you starting to do stuff in private credit or private or like public debt or any of the other asset classes or are you just purely in alternatives?

Chris (138:32)

Purely in alternatives today, I would say like six to 12 months from now, obviously focus on expanding into things like private credit. Obviously big opportunity being here in New York. I've been saying this for a long time. Favorite sponsor, Ramp. It's like stripe for payments, Ramp for expenses, Hanover park for investments. And so that's kind of the.

Jordy (138:48)

Have you had any customers just ask you to just handle just all the investment decision making? They're like, I'll just put money in a box and then you deploy it. Let me know how it goes. Talk to my lp.

Chris (139:00)

Not yet.

Jordy (139:01)

I don't want to talk. I don't want to talk to them anymore.

John (139:03)

Talk to founders or LPs.

Chris (139:08)

I think it's been funny. It's like a lot of LPs that we talk to are like my venture funds are investing in AI, but their back in middle office is run by the anti AI. And so this idea of like we're investing in it, we might as well move to it as well has been pretty exciting for people. But I think long term it's like unlocking alpha for the investment firm based on all the unsexy financial data that we have could be interesting, but we got a lot of work to do to get there.

John (139:32)

Unpack a little bit of more of like the dream unsexy proprietary data set. Does that look like PitchBook or Crunch based data? There's a lot of different data sources that venture capitalists go to throughout diligence. Do you want to be a conduit to those sources or do you imagine that the LLM tools that venture capitalists are using will interface with those separately and just do the joins in whatever work session is happening?

Chris (139:59)

Yeah, it's actually not really crunch based pitchbook. It's really like the unsexy financial cash flow data. So like give me the cash flows from every LP through history and how that flows into our next cap call or our next distribution or our next, you know, financial statements. So it's actually that data, which is the data that's mostly trapped in these fund admins. I think Crunchbase and PitchBook Access will get commoditized. Those will go into the underlying models and I don't think we want to play that game.

John (140:24)

Yeah, talk about the overall health of the venture capital market. I feel like you're in a unique position. There's been these like sort of warring narratives. We joked earlier like $110 billion raised, but that was OpenAI. There's a lot of, there's like sort of a crunch in K shaped recovery maybe in venture capital there's a variety of mega funds that are scaling up. What are you seeing when someone just asks you from the outside Maybe they're a public markets investor and they say how is venture capital doing these days?

Chris (140:56)

We're actually seeing a lot of haves and have nots. It's a very stark bifurcation because when you start a fund you basically sign a lawyer and a fund admin. And so we see from and perception of how your raise is going. And so literally there's people that are raising in 3, 6, 9, 10 weeks for a first fund which is crazy fast versus 6 to 12 months. And then there are people who are never raising. And so I think it's the people that are spinning out of a lot of the major funds that are targeting, call it 100 to $200 million fund ones are having an actually an easier time from some of the emerging managers that are focused on like $25 million fund ones. And so it's a pretty big bifurcation there.

John (141:32)

How are you processing this new holding company roll up firm? It looks like a private equity firm, but it also sort of looks like a startup. We've had a couple of these founders

Jordy (141:44)

on where yeah, those probably aren't clients because they just get a bunch of money.

John (141:48)

Yeah. Would they be or could they be in the future? How do you think about that?

Chris (141:52)

It's actually funny, we've had a lot of these folks reach out because fund admin and like accounting services more broadly.

Jordy (141:57)

Right.

Chris (141:57)

Think about us is a subset of that because we're doing financial accounting reporting for investment firms. That is a ripe industry for roll up. And so people have been like, oh my God, should this be a fund admin roll up as an idea in terms of vertical buyout, what we've realized is like if you just toss agents, the word agents on top of any accounting data, it doesn't really do anything. Having like the core ERP for the fund and the system of record that we had to build from day zero is actually like way more important than just saying like AI solves all our problems. Which I don't think does quite yet.

John (142:28)

Yeah. Have you had to do any fine tuning on your own data or your system or are the agents sort of able to find their way around your system pretty quickly? Did you need to build your own MCP servers or your own clis for these things? We were just talking about this with DoorDash. There's demand for DoorDash CLI now and it's funny but it makes a lot of sense in the context of agentic engineering.

Chris (142:53)

Yeah, we've actually to build our own little AI fund account and I call it which is doing simple things like AI cash reconciliation. When you get an email from someone to make a decision. How does a human do that? It's actually client specific. Different clients have different preferences. And so almost how do you build that? Like AI fund accountant. So we're using a bunch of the models off the shelf.

John (143:11)

Sure.

Chris (143:12)

To do that as well. And then we're doing some fine tuning on top.

John (143:14)

Yeah. Does that look like like an M. Like a MD file, like a skill, or is this more of like a full harness? That's actually, you know, like a whole bunch of code that you've written. Like how do you see that system growing as you develop more core capabilities?

Chris (143:32)

Yeah, I think one. So there's a bunch of different ways that we sliced it. But like for something like migration, which is how do I get the most complex financial data in the entire world from one system to another? That's a lot about building harnesses and building skills in and around the core underlying model providers to say this is the weird, messy financial data from. Pick your massive investment firm. Here's how we need to think about this. And then for things like doc processing a little bit differently. So depends on the workflow.

John (143:56)

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the progress of the company. Like where are you based? How big is the firm? How are you growing? Where do you see this going over the next couple of years?

Jordy (144:04)

Yep.

Chris (144:04)

So two years old, raised 31 million. Obviously. Today we're announcing a $27 million Series A LED by emergence.

Matt Jason (144:11)

We went, oh, up, up.

Chris (144:14)

There we go. We did it.

Jordy (144:18)

We're just getting started though.

Chris (144:19)

We're just getting started.

John (144:20)

Oh, there we go.

Chris (144:21)

We're just getting started. What are you talking about?

John (144:24)

I love it. I love it.

Chris (144:25)

We went 1 to 15 billion in assets in the past 12 months. We 15 XED. We've had a lot of excitement from folks. I actually, I was joking with the team. I said, guys, this is a top point one percent problem. Having unlimited demand and people excited. Now let's go make them raving fans, which is our goal for 26. And so not cursor, but we're focused on, you know, keeping our heads down and executing.

John (144:47)

That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Jordy (144:50)

I love it. Dude. It's awesome to see your. Your progress. Yeah. Just absolutely thread grinder from the 2021 era. Just ran it up and you're just.

John (145:02)

And so I'm sure you angel invested, right?

Jordy (145:04)

I did, I did. Miss.

Chris (145:05)

Yeah. What happened, guys? Saw one, got in. You didn't get in.

John (145:09)

This is the nature of the show. This is why we're podcasting, because we see people like you all the time and we just miss everything. So back to the show. I know. Yeah, Jordy makes a lot of good investments. I just don't. I just don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

Jordy (145:23)

Great to see you, Chris.

John (145:24)

We'll talk to you soon.

Jordy (145:25)

Congrats.

John (145:26)

Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. And our next guest is in the Restream waiting room.

Jordy (145:45)

Georgios, what's going on?

John (145:46)

How are you doing?

Georgios (145:48)

Good afternoon. Thank you for having me.

Jordy (145:50)

Good afternoon.

John (145:50)

Good to see you.

Jordy (145:51)

Great to see you.

John (145:52)

Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

Georgios (145:55)

I'm Georgios. I drive the engineering team at the Tempo project. Tempo is a payments first blockchain that we started developing in August. Today we just launched the Tempo mainnet Live in production. Alongside it, we also launched the Machine Payments Protocol, which is our answer to how agents should pay. If you think about it, agents are great at searching the web. We use agents all the time in our development process, amp, cloud code, codex, whatever it is for developing. But we find it very hard to make them pay. So we developed a solution for it and I'm excited to talk about both.

John (146:31)

So you have mcp. A lot of people were saying, like, why does an MCP have payment, a payment spec already baked into it? There's this whole debate about HTTP maybe having payments back in it 20 years ago or something. MPP solves that. But is MPP like a subset or a superset of mcp, or is it a completely different spec? Is there any relationship between the two technologies?

Georgios (146:57)

They're complementary. You should think of MCP as a way to talk to an API that has been designed to be baked into the agent harnesses. And MPP is a way that you can payment gate an mcp. Imagine that you have your service, you have written an MCP for it, but you actually want to make that a paid service. Maybe, for example, on tbpn, you guys do great prep for all the people that you work with. Well, what if you just added a paid API to that? Sometimes.

Jordy (147:28)

Awesome. So, yeah, I think anybody that hasn't been living under a data center has heard of the potential for Agents to use stablecoins and blockchain technology generally for various services. You guys are working with a bunch of really cool companies. What kind of use cases are you trying to guide your design partners towards enabling?

Georgios (147:57)

I think the most exciting use case that they have do around commerce. Basically there's a lot of very interesting work around. Hey, I'm on ChatGPT. My ChatGPT is browsing around, but hey, it wants to buy things for me. I think that's one of the things that is unlocking. The other thing to think about is that your ChatGPT is again browsing the web, but it hits a paywall. You wanted to be able to, instead of saying, hey, I can access this information, you wanted to instead be able to say actually pay 30 cents and you can actually access this wonderful article that would have been paywalled, which might improve your research queries by say 30% or something.

Jordy (148:38)

In that case you'd be going to. So is there a plan to go to publishers, people that do have paywalled content and try to get them to enable mpp? Is that the idea?

Georgios (148:50)

Totally. I think that would be awesome. And the other thing that I think is just happening already is that again, envision that people these days don't have an attention span and people these days also don't want to click buttons around. They just want to tell again their AI app to do things for them. I think what we've been seeing ourselves as developers is instead of me going to say cloudflare, Vercel and saying hey, login, add billing information, get API key, pull it back to my terminal, or go to 11 labs and say, hey, do me this text to speech thing or any kind of like API gated service that exists today. Instead I can just say, hey agent, here's five bucks, go and figure it out for me. And actually he doesn't just do it in one service, it does it on many services. Waterfall of queries can tell it, hey, go search the web, pull all this data, translate it with this API, then text to speech it with some other API and then upload it onto a website and email me that link of the website. All one shot.

Jordy (149:56)

Yeah, I was going to ask more. On the technical side, there's been a lot of protocols created blockchains over the last decade. You've seen pretty much all of them. I'm assuming this is your Mona Lisa taking all the different learnings from the different blockchains and trying to build the perfect product experience this time around. What kind of technical decisions did you and the team make for this kind of use case.

Georgios (150:27)

Yeah. So the Tempo blockchain is itself optimized for payments, which means that it's really fast, it has very high throughput and very low latency. Our block times are less than a second, which means that you hit and before the spinner even finishes spinning, you have a confirmation back, which is what any normal person would expect from a payments experience. But in addition to these, the innovation that we've done on the MPP side is a feature called Sessions, where normally you would need to, let's say you're talking to, I don't know, let's say again, the OpenAI API. And if you were to do payments, if you were to pay for every query that you're doing, you will need to wait for the blockchain to confirm your transaction. You will need to pay a fee anytime you do your transaction. And that these days maybe you can do 10,000 transactions per second or something, but really for the agentic web, and it does seem that everyone will be making a lot more API calls than they were doing before. We need to scale up to hundreds of thousands, millions, if not billions of payments per second. Just to put it the analogy would be that instead of thinking of financial transactions, we should be thinking about API calls per second. So we developed this feature called Sessions, which let you really go at API scale by bypassing the blockchain and thinking about it like going to opening a tab where you say, hey, I'm opening my tab. And then every time on your notebook on the side, you write what are the updates? And then only at the end when you want to settle, do you pay, which amortizes the cost of a very expensive otherwise operation. If you want to do 1,000 or a million API requests, just two, the opening and the closing.

John (152:09)

Yeah, very, very good. Makes sense. How are you dealing with the just general perception that there's always a risk that AIs hallucinate and so maybe you don't want to give an agent the ability to go spend an unlimited amount of money. Maybe you want a transaction to be reversible. There's this joke about like giving OpenClaw your credit card. That seems irresponsible, but in some ways I would maybe rather give credit card to an agent than, you know, a crypto wallet that if it sends it to the wrong address is gone forever. It's not really reversible. How are you thinking about handling those like long tail errors that are, that can be catastrophic?

Georgios (153:01)

That's an awesome question because I absolutely have in the past lost money using systems that, you know, others had built where, where you just give your agent money and then the agent goes and spends it without realizing how much access it has. We developed a feature called Access Keys which basically is your standard card permissions. It's a bit more programmable, but you should think of it as limits, spend limits. And you can program that. So whenever you open a Tempo session, you can just authorize the agent and say you can only spend up to 10 bucks or you can tell it, hey, you can only spend up to 10 bucks an hour or $1 a second. So it lets you have any kind of granularity on the assets that you're accessing, the functions that you can call or the API calls you can make, and also on the frequency that these budgets can be applied.

John (153:54)

Yeah. How do you think about getting the long tail of publishers onto some sort of agentic payment rail?

Jordy (154:03)

Because hopefully they're already on Stripe, otherwise they would living under a data center.

John (154:09)

Yes. I'm just thinking about like the actual.

Jordy (154:13)

That's like why when I saw the launch and heard about the project previously, I was like, okay, Stripe already has a long tail of merchants. If they can easily enable mpp, then you're kind of able to kind of bootstrap a network.

John (154:28)

Yeah. I'm just thinking like if you have a blog and you put AdWords on it, you got a stream of payments from Google. Whenever you would show page, they'd show an ad, they'd auction that ad, they would send you maybe 50% of what they made on that ad and that would be paid monthly and they were able to onboard sort of the long tail. It feels like the opportunity here is like this many to many relationship. But I'm wondering about like, is that onboarding going to happen on Tempo directly, is that going to be decentralized or would we expect the big labs like OpenAI Anthropic to say, okay, now we have opt in for anyone who wants to get paid when one of our LLMs, one of our agents hits your website and we will use Tempo as the payment rail.

Georgios (155:20)

So there's a few questions here. So I think what you just said is true and will happen. It's already happening. Right. So Anthropic or OpenAI or both already have a service where you plug in only the OpenAI and then you can just have a building relationship with all of the integrated partners that they have.

John (155:37)

Sure.

Georgios (155:37)

So that will happen for sure. On the Tempo side, the machine payments protocol, mpp, which is what we launched this morning. It is co built with Stripe, we co authored it and it's payments method agnostic. So every merchant but is on Stripe. And if you go to the Stripe docs, MPP is already there and it's already an option you can enable. Every merchant could turn that on and their API and their website could become MPP enabled, which would cover a part of that tail, if not that part that you just said.

John (156:10)

Sure. So is this a bet on model commoditization and local compute? Because if there's consolidation and the vast majority of LLM traffic is coming from like a single lab or two labs or three labs.

Jordy (156:25)

Yeah. Winner take most.

John (156:26)

The Wall Street Journal does get scraped by OpenAI, but they have a deal between OpenAI, the corporation and News Corp the corporation. And they sat down in a boardroom and they said, hey, this is the value, like send me the check and pay, you know, via invoice. And it's a very different relationship, but for these long tail. If the long tail with Google can pay a ton of small bloggers who set up their own websites on whatever, they can go to their own blog. But is this maybe a solution to. If models commoditize and you're seeing LLM traffic come from all different sources, then you need your agent to go and make the payment.

Georgios (157:07)

I think for the publisher use case, I think that totally could be the case. The thing that we're the most excited about, the machine machine payments world and developers right now. There's just a tailwind right now where with AI, more and more people are building things. Everybody wants to make paid APIs or everybody wants to monetize their knowledge base, their API. And these are just not things that. It just means that the tail is just going to be so long that it's not something that I expect will be realistically captured by the labs in that way. Just because any random dev can spin up an API that could be very, very, very valuable. And I think that the lowest friction way to access and monetize that API will be via MPP on Tempo.

John (157:50)

Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I've run into this issue where I've gone to a particular LLM and said, I want you to take this video, convert it to an MP3, then transcribe it, then transform that and it can do. And it's like, oh, I need a tool for that. Why don't you download the file? It literally told me, like, open up QuickTime and turn it into an MV3. I was like, no, no, no, I want you to do that. And if you Google it, like, you know, MP4 or M4A to transcript, like there's a tool out there that does it. It's. I don't know if it has an API. It probably should. It probably is an API out there for a lot of these things.

Georgios (158:24)

It might have malware in it.

Cameron (158:25)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John (158:26)

A lot of them are like websites that have a million ads and stuff. It's way better if it just came back to me and be and was like, hey, that's going to be 15 cents and I've already approved that. Or hey, it's going to be 50 bucks to do what you want because you asked me to go generate a whole bunch of AI video and crazy stuff. And you know, that was a big request. Is this in budget? And I can be like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Georgios (158:47)

And this is right now supported. There's the MPP Services registry, where if you literally go tell your agent, hey, build me an image, convert this to whatever you want. There are APIs already integrated which let you do all of these things without ever leaving your agent without getting this. Install your own API tool.

Jordy (159:06)

Totally explain. If I'm a developer and I'm using something like Codex and I want to effectively enable the agent to buy different services with mpp, what is the process for? What is the recommended process for actually giving it funds? Everything on that side.

Georgios (159:31)

So this is the use case that we've been optimizing for. It is the exact use case because we're developers and we actually dog food this experience every day. The process is extremely simple. You tell it install the Tempo Skill. The Tempo Skill is available on Tempo website. You just paste the link in your agent. Then once you tell it to install the Tempo Skill, the Tempo Skill bootstraps the whole process and says, install the Tempo command line interface from your codecs and then onboard the user. The user's browser opens the user face IDs or touch IDs if you're on your MacBook and then the user just gets onboarded via Apple Pay if they have Apple Pay if they have an Apple Card, or via another crypto if they have stablecoins or right now we provide some referral codes to make onboarding easier for people.

Jordy (160:15)

Very cool.

Georgios (160:16)

And then you're in. Then you're logged in and you can go crazy.

Jordy (160:19)

And then you could ask the agent, like, add more funds. I need to add more funds.

Georgios (160:23)

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Jordy (160:25)

So if you had some type of paywalled experience or paywalled API. It'll just tell you I need access to more funds and then you just enable it. That's very cool.

John (160:34)

Absolutely amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Jordy (160:38)

Yeah, very well.

John (160:39)

Congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

Jordy (160:41)

Great to meet you.

John (160:42)

Have a good day. Have a good one. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Matt Wong from Paradigm in the TV Queen Eltrim. How are you doing, Matt?

Jordy (161:06)

What's going on?

Matt Wong (161:07)

What's up guys? How's it going?

Jordy (161:08)

Great to finally have you on the show.

John (161:10)

Yeah, fantastic.

Matt Wong (161:11)

Longtime listener, big fan.

John (161:13)

Appreciate that. Where should we start, Jordyn? Can we do a little biographical stuff? Can we go back in time a little bit, get to how we got.

Jordy (161:21)

Let's touch on Tempo, since we've been talking about Tempo and then there's a bunch of other stuff we can talk about, but glad to see you're drinking a virtual Diet Coke with John.

John (161:32)

Yeah, I mean, I guess my view on Tempo is it feels like a big project. It feels like it launched very fast. Is this faster than expected? Like, what were the keys to. To actually getting to this point as quickly as you did?

Matt Wong (161:46)

I think it's perhaps one of the fastest project start to mainnet launch in crypto and it certainly was top of mind for us to move really fast. I think the genesis of the project was around noticing the problems that existing infrastructure had serving all these stablecoin use cases. And we didn't want to wait around for many years.

Jordy (162:06)

But certainly you would have seen the opportunity before August of last year. Right? Like, it's not like you weren't thinking about AI or stablecoins or anything. So. So was that like somewhat of an intentional strategy of like, hey, we need to build a really strong thesis of, of how this market is going to evolve and we shouldn't just like rush in, launch something and then go through kind of wandering in the wilderness to then get to the point where you could launch something to mainnet?

Matt Wong (162:31)

You know, you're ascribing a lot of foresight. Candidly. I mean, obviously we've been paying attention and investing and building in the crypto space for a long time. Candidly, it was kind of two sides coming together. On the Paradigm side, we were noticing the slowness of existing infrastructure. And then on the Stripe side, they've been doing a bunch of great work in stablecoins and were themselves experiencing a lot of the infrastructure challenges that existing chains had. So we had a conversation in April about maybe we should actually get together to build something. And then a week later the entity was formed.

John (163:10)

Are there any other big distribution nodes that need to fall into place besides having the network up and running and then the partnership with Stripe? Because it feels like that solves everything. But I'm curious to know what are the other next steps in the rollout?

Matt Wong (163:28)

Broadly, yeah, I think there's probably two layers to think about, right? There's Tempo, the chain, which all the crypto infrastructure and exchange infrastructure needs to support, and we have a bunch of great infrastructure partners there. Then I think there's just the broader trend of stablecoins. Like if you think about payments, I like to think about it as like a thousand or ten thousand different markets. It's not a single market. There's what country does it originate from, where does it go, the size of payment, whether it's a business, consumer, etc. And so some of those are much better served by existing infrastructure and some of it's much worse served. And so stablecoins are actually particularly good at certain segments of that kind of big matrix. And that's where it's being adopted first. Cross border remittances, payouts. And so part of the goal around Tempo is to kind of promote stablecoins more broadly, not just offer another chain.

Jordy (164:31)

How, how predictable has stablecoin adoption been to date? Like if you go back five years ago, were you pretty confident that you'd see it more in emerging markets and then, and then it would go, you know, eventually to business use cases for, you know, businesses that were operating, are operating internationally, like then obviously trading use case, which has been dominant since the beginning.

Matt Wong (164:57)

Yeah, stablecoins have been around for 10 years, mostly dominated by trading. And I think the emerging market use case is definitely expected. I mean the monetary rails and monetary units are much worse there. I will say we were probably surprised the last 18 months by how much it's taken off. I think even the most bullish people inside of crypto, maybe some predicted it, but all of us have been surprised by how much stablecoins are being used outside of crypto. And that's really the bullishness that drove us to get excited about launching something

John (165:35)

like template and is the big, is the big driver. I mean I've heard about the scale AI use case. I think SpaceX has mentioned a use case for stablecoins. There's a lot of like cross border deal. Is that the current narrative or are there other little offshoots popping up around adoption?

Matt Wong (165:56)

There are probably three big buckets. The first is the cross border.

John (165:59)

Okay.

Matt Wong (166:00)

And so that's where you have Deal, which serves so many different countries and Shopify is thinking about similar things and. And then you have the instant nature of stablecoins. So I mean when you think about it, it's kind of crazy that the financial system shuts off during nights and weekends. Like the Internet is on 24 7. The financial system is off more than it's on. And so I think stablecoin potential is just to bring that into the 21st century where it's on all the time.

Jordy (166:35)

Yeah. And the US dollar has insane network effects, obvious product market fit and then you're taking a product that works that's pretty great and then it has some of its issues and then you just wrap it in something that unlocks all this additional airtime.

John (166:52)

That's right.

Matt Wong (166:53)

And there is a Trend in the 70s and 80s called EuroDollars which is sort of the offline tradfi equivalent of this of dollar deposits outside the US and that also started kind of illegal and frowned upon pretty small and has now grown to north of 10 trillion in offshore deposits and fully legitimized by the US system. I think stablecoins are probably on that track as well. But back to your question, like the instant payouts, instant payments I think is underrated too. So it's not a cost advantage, it's more getting the money immediately and being able to spend it immediately. And if you think about a lot of these labor marketplaces, that's something that the supply side of those labor marketplaces really values.

Jordy (167:39)

How, how do you think the shape of the kind of issuer market evolves? You think it's, you know, right now it seems to be like a winner, winner take most market. But it's certainly a number of companies are kind of promoting this idea of like there should be millions of different stablecoins. What's your, what's your view? So

Matt Wong (168:04)

I think there's probably, there's the. How many stablecoins will there be that are generally have some usage and like what will the distribution of volume and deposits look like? Yeah, and I think the distribution is going to be very top heavy just because network effects around a single unit of account and how liquidity works in defi and exchanges. On the other hand, I think a lot of enterprises that we're talking to own the interface that people are going to be using these stablecoins through. And you can think of them in that context maybe a little more like stored balances or gift cards where like Starbucks has a massive gift card program and it's essentially bank like if you think about it in some ways. And so I think a lot of those types of financial services that are kind of hiding inside these consumer businesses will end up considering launching their own stable.

Jordy (168:59)

Yeah, that makes sense.

John (169:00)

How are you feeling about the regulatory environment? It felt like 2025 was a great year for just getting clarity around where crypto was going from a regulatory perspective. Has that trend continued in your mind? Are you happy with where things are? Are you optimistic for new regulation or less regulation or any changes? Just what's your read on the regulatory environment right now?

Matt Wong (169:29)

I'd say we're in the top 1% of universes that we could have hoped for. So things are going well. The Genius act passed. That's been huge for stablecoin adoption. Obviously stablecoins were growing even before that. But a lot of the enterprises we talked to, they weren't really comfortable participating in stablecoins until the regulatory clarity, the next stage. Hopefully we get market structure. The Clarity bill passed as well. There's some kind of last details to work through between the banking industry and crypto, but I'm feeling optimistic that we can hopefully sort through that.

John (170:06)

Are you a believer in stablecoins to the degree that you'd put your own fund capital in stablecoins?

Matt Wong (170:14)

Well, yeah.

Georgios (170:15)

Tempo.

Matt Wong (170:16)

Tempo would not be the best place to hold stablecoins if we weren't comfortable.

John (170:20)

Yeah. Is there actually a future where stablecoins wind up showing up in venture capital?

Matt Wong (170:31)

Well, stablecoins I think will be like as a. As a cash instrument, I think for sure.

John (170:37)

Yeah.

Matt Jason (170:38)

Yeah.

Matt Wong (170:38)

Then you don't have to. I mean you can do instant capital calls when you sign the term sheet at 9pm at night. You don't have to wait till the

John (170:45)

next that actually pretty bullish. Take us back through some of the previous investment experience you've had. There was someone in the chat asking about your early Fund 1 investments, very heavy on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can you tell that story of what that was like from a risk perspective? What actually played out there?

Andy Fang (171:09)

Yeah.

Matt Wong (171:09)

When we launched Paradigm in 2018, I mean a lot of our thesis was we knew that crypto would expand massively. And then there was this open question. Should you invest in the core protocols like Bitcoin? Etherium or invest in startups. And obviously in hindsight, the answer was both. Like, you could own Coinbase and Bitcoin, but I think it's a lot like the landscape now of this question of do you own the model companies or do you own layer on top?

John (171:39)

Yeah.

Matt Wong (171:40)

So in 2018, like, Bitcoin and Ethereum were like OpenAI and anthropic and those are the things to own. And we sort of were thinking much more bottoms up about what we wanted to own for five to 10 years, rather than like, is this too much in one investment or it happens to be a publicly traded thing. Those are all details.

Jordy (172:01)

That's such an interesting comp, because I feel like you can Almost think of L2s and comp those cheaper, smaller, open source models today where L2s have been great in some ways, but also kind of threaten the revenue stream of the underlying protocols at that point.

John (172:23)

Take me back to the ByteDance investment. Was there a similar thesis around should you own ByteDance or Facebook or something? And in reality, the bet was to own both. What went into your initial investment. Take me through the thought process for that one.

Matt Wong (172:42)

I wish I was that thoughtful back then and could claim some kind of genius, but I was just very lucky to meet the entrepreneur on a trip. And, you know, he's just one of those people you meet that jumps off the page. And I'm sure you guys have had this experience and I was going to give him money even if he was building a hot dog stand.

John (173:05)

Sure, sure. What was it that stuck out? Just the conversation. The level of detail, the technical side, the EQ iq. Like, how were you evaluating him at that time?

Matt Wong (173:17)

Well, it was a weird conversation because he was. I don't really speak good Chinese. I can kind of stumble through ordering dim sum.

John (173:25)

I don't speak good Chinese either.

Andy Fang (173:28)

And.

Matt Wong (173:28)

And he didn't really speak good English, so. Through a translator. Yeah, but you know, he's one of those entrepreneurs that, like, seems very thoughtful, academic, highly technical, but then in the revealed nature of his actions, is just like extremely hyper aggressive. And I think a lot of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs look like that too, in a great way.

John (173:52)

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm thinking of a number of CEOs. We talked to founders. Patrick at Stripe, I was gonna say. Yeah, exactly. Where they have one demeanor, one level of. They can communicate about the technical side of the business very thoughtfully, high eq, but the level of ambition is just unlimited. And that seems like such a rare combination. But when you find it, you got

Jordy (174:20)

to go all in how should people think about Paradigm today?

John (174:24)

That's a good question.

Matt Wong (174:28)

So, you know, we've spent a lot of time in the crypto space, and increasingly, as crypto goes mainstream, we're finding that distinction to be a little less meaningful. And there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world.

Jordy (174:43)

Yeah, it was entirely right to be entirely focused on crypto in 2018. And then as the technology diffuses, you realize, like, hey, there's a lot of other businesses, and then you also have to follow your own personal interests. And I feel like if you're logging off and then thinking about biotech or AI at a certain point, I think the best investors follow their obsession.

John (175:14)

Yeah.

Matt Wong (175:15)

And don't get me wrong, I think crypto is still one of the most interesting frontiers. It's finally winning. It's getting mainstream, it's getting integrated everywhere. But AI and many other areas are also super interesting. And I think a paradigm today is a lot of the team we've assembled. I mean, you just spoke to our CTO and, you know, he found out, like, what a balance sheet was somewhat recently, and, like, is not a typical GP or investor at a fund, but everyone at the fund knows how to code and is in kind of some kind of CLI tool all day. And the team really embodies this hacker ethos that lives at the frontier, and we want to be spending time anywhere that is interesting at the frontier.

Jordy (175:59)

Is this the best time in history to be that hacker archetype?

Matt Wong (176:06)

I think so. It's like the joke that there's a billion dollars stuck in your laptop.

John (176:10)

You just need to press the right

Matt Wong (176:11)

keys to extract it out. And I think that's never been more true. With the leverage of intelligence kind of on tap.

John (176:19)

Yeah, no, I completely agree. What a time to be alive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Jordy (176:26)

Yeah, great to finally have you on.

John (176:27)

Have a great rest of your day.

Jordy (176:28)

Yeah. Excited to watch the rollout.

John (176:30)

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. See you, guys. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jordi, what else is in the timeline? Trevor Milton is out raising money for a new company. Trevor Milton, of course, was convicted, and then Pardoned for defrauding investors in his truck company, Nikola. Now he's raising funds for a new jet that he claims will transform flying.

Jordy (177:12)

And the quote, there's a quote in the Journal here that we can pull out, he said from the Journal. Now Milton has joined an exclusive group of post pardon business people seemingly anointed by Trump's favor. I hope they've got a group chat for the post pardon mafia. I walk into, Trevor says, I walk into meetings now and I'll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world. He said, they're like, welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire, we can trust you now.

John (177:42)

Wow, that is a wild quote. Feldman has wasted little time embarking on a second act. He's now CEO of cyberjet and he's

Jordy (177:50)

unveiling plans for a new small jet that he says will have the highest speed and range and largest lavatory in the light jet category.

Cameron (177:59)

Okay.

Jordy (178:00)

Yeah, it's important. It's important.

Matt Wong (178:02)

Yeah.

John (178:02)

I guess we want to be able to take a full shower.

Jordy (178:04)

Investor documents reviewed by the Journal said the goal is for the plane to be the first light jet to focus on AI flight. To get to market, cyberjet plans to create an entirely new avionics system, likening the effort to to Tesla's approach designing its infotainment and vehicle control system. The company also needs to secure more funding and suppliers and overcome regulatory hurdles. Yes, it's interesting. I mean, the concept of the jet is cool. This was an existing business that he acquired with an investor group and then they're raising more money after that. The kind of interesting thing is I feel like Trevor made a name for himself for being a great showman, but not exactly the most competent and sort of engineering led CEO. Right. Everyone stuck in their mind. You have the video of truck rolling down the hill. Truck rolling down the hill. And I don't want to buy a jet from that kind of archetype of CEO. Right. You kind of want to buy a jet from like a hacker, like a

John (179:17)

hackathon guy who just like whips it up.

Jordy (179:19)

A vibe coder.

John (179:19)

A vibe coder.

Jordy (179:20)

No, no, no. You know, you want to buy a

John (179:23)

jet from someone with decades of experience.

Jordy (179:25)

Ideally, yeah. A company with ideally with decades and decades of experience, you know, millions of flight hours. Because reliability is more important than anything when you're thousands of feet in the air.

John (179:41)

Well, we'll make Tyler demo it first.

Jordy (179:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think step aboard. Yeah. And then the AI component is interesting. I mean, I think there's A number of light jets and even I think the Pilates PC12. I think the PC12 has like an. A lot of the planes have the auto land functionality. They still require pilots. Yeah, I'm sure big pilot will figure out a way to make sure that like legally, well, you just get a

John (180:11)

normal, a normal jet with no autopilot and then you put a Tesla Optimus in the front seat.

Jordy (180:16)

Yeah, we got a pilot drops the plane. Gro. Take the wheel.

John (180:20)

Take the wheel. Kaushi has a market here. Tesla Optimus released this year, 25.2% chance right now. Obviously it's declining a little bit as the year goes on because every day that it's not released there's a lower chance. It was up at. Where was it? It was up at like 50, above 50% last April. But it's since declined and the market resolves to yes. If Tesla Optimus or another humanoid robot is on sale to the general public before December 31, that feels tough because I have to imagine that what is on sale to the general public like this, the demand is going to be so high. You would think that you would go with business consumers or someone that's at least. Hey, why don't you come in and let's talk about your use case and let's see how we'll be pricing this because it's more.

Jordy (181:13)

Let's talk about the security use case.

John (181:15)

Oh yeah, go for it. Oh, I was just going to tell everyone about Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi stream, go to restream.com.

Jordy (181:22)

sorry, we got to talk about the security use case. Tech companies are now using robot dogs costing up to 300,000 apiece to guard AI data centers. Remember I was saying I just want to put a humanoid in my backyard, let them patrol around. I think it'll be a good deterrent. It's working for dogs. Let's pull up this video.

John (181:40)

Yeah.

Jordy (181:42)

All right. That's freaky.

John (181:44)

It can open a door.

Jordy (181:46)

This is the last thing you want to see when you're.

John (181:48)

They're sort of mixing footage here, right? Because you wouldn't have a robot dog walking on two feet in axle business attack mode. Yeah, it seems like it. Yeah. I guess that's just the news that the robot dogs are being deployed guarding some of those data centers. I don't know, seems. Seems relevant.

Jordy (182:08)

You're not impressed because you think you could take it?

John (182:11)

Yeah, totally.

Jordy (182:12)

You kind of know you can take it.

John (182:15)

Yeah, yeah, dropkick that thing. No problem. I still Got it.

Jordy (182:19)

Taylor Lorenz highlighting from this Vanity Fair profile, which we'll get into tomorrow. But in the profile, Dario Amade never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning. So I created a version of Dario Amade using his own machine. I fed Claude several published interviews, including everything Amede said at Davos, plus the contents of his two books of essays and told, which I'm sure Claude already has access to. Yeah, he told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler's the Big Sleep. It took Claude less than three minutes. You probably couldn't tell the difference, and maybe there isn't one.

Matt Wong (182:55)

Okay.

John (182:56)

There was. There was like, some hot mic moment. Is that real? If everything's.

Jordy (183:03)

I still have to read through it.

John (183:05)

Yeah, yeah. We got to properly read through. Through this. I'm sure there's some interesting stuff. It does seem like there's a few interviews. I saw some quotes about Tren saying that he doesn't wear sunscreen anymore, which I've been advocating for getting on the Tren and D Ball Anavar, because AI will cure all the downsides, potentially. It's sort of a twist on that. But at this point, now that I've seen the screenshot, I'm kind of wondering, okay, what in here is real? Is it all going to be revealed at the end? It's a very long piece, but we'll give it a read.

Jordy (183:35)

And last but not least, we can briefly cover introspection. Gait.

John (183:42)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jordy (183:43)

Mark Henderson shared something from Marcus Aurelius Meditations. Stop talking about what the good man is like and just be one. And Rune says an entire book where the guy is introspecting.

John (183:57)

I think that's the joke, right? Yeah.

Jordy (183:59)

Mark Henderson's like, yeah, I think I. You know, seeing through. I think we saw. We got what Mark was saying, even though a lot of people have. He's, you know, leaned into the chaos and seems to just be having a good time.

John (184:16)

But he was basically saying, just joking about it.

Jordy (184:19)

Stop ruminating.

John (184:21)

Stop ruminating.

Jordy (184:22)

Just.

John (184:23)

I mean, it's a transposition of the you can just do things idea. It's like actually go and do the thing, you know? Jeremy Gaffon has another post about this where it's like people are rehearsing for the fight that never comes. And that is a different formulation of the don't. It's like, don't spend your entire life just thinking about what you're meant to do with your life. Go do something get some real experiences. There's probably room for introspection. And then go back and forth and watch the game, tape, monitor your KPIs. But also just think about what brings you joy and what you you can do in the world that's beneficial. What's your ikigai? What are you good at? What does the market want from you? What can you make money doing that type of stuff? These are reasonable, but should that be 99% of your time spent? Probably not.

Jordy (185:13)

Never ruminate.

John (185:14)

Never ruminate.

Jordy (185:16)

Always spec. Never ruminate.

John (185:18)

Always spec'd.

Jordy (185:19)

Okay, spec'd Max.

John (185:21)

Well, let me tell you about plaid Applied powers of apps you use to spend, say, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending.

Jordy (185:30)

Now with AI, Bill Gurley says, I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized slop emails slipped through the spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form. Great use of the word cooked.

John (185:45)

Interesting.

Jordy (185:46)

Nikita was saying 2-11- Prediction in less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. Imessage phone calls, Gmail, email inbox certainly feels that way. Nikita says spam laws will need to be rewritten soon. Machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted. So this will actually make your job just actually just hitting, like, the button. Because, like, no, a machine didn't send that. A human did. The human hit the button and you're gonna have to press a button like, you know, 10,000 times a day if you're BDR sending sales emails. So anyways, it has been an honor to do the show. We have one last gong today.

John (186:29)

Kendra Barnett was just served her first OpenAI ad impression for the Wall Street

Jordy (186:36)

Journal, the benchmark in business coverage since 1889.

John (186:41)

I can't imagine a better ad to get served. We love the Wall Street Journal here and we love ads. So congratulations to Kendra for being served that first OpenAI ad impression.

Jordy (186:52)

We hope you all have the best afternoon evening of your entire life, and we look forward to being back with you tomorrow.

John (187:01)

We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.