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- [00:00]
Joe Lonsdale
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:02]
Brad Feld
Today is Wednesday, September 24, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. The Wall Street Journal has a post because they wrote an article about Peter Thiel's lecture circuit on the Antichrist. They write, peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data AI, defense and weapons development technologies, wants everyone to think more about the end of the world. And it got me thinking more about capital allocation. Honestly, this circuit, we've covered this a little bit. Thiel has been on a lecture series that's now four parts up in San Francisco. Tyler, do you know why Peter is doing this?
- [00:45]
Jordi
What do you mean?
- [00:46]
Brad Feld
Do you know why he's doing this lecture circuit? You're supposed to say why questions are over determined.
- [00:51]
Jordi
Oh, layup as a layup.
- [00:55]
Brad Feld
Always why questions are over to Tyler made this. Anyway, never ask why. Ask how to save time and money. Go to ramp.com. easy as corporate cards, bill payment accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. They are not live streaming this. They should be live streaming it on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. No, it is off the record and if you go and you get a ticket post about it, you get axed.
- [01:22]
Jordi
Yeah, somebody summarized first couple and just immediately got a comment from Ms. Stevens who said you're banned.
- [01:31]
Brad Feld
Yeah, they were running the Blake Masters. They were trying to run back the Blake Masters playbook. So if you're not familiar with the lore here, back in spring of 2012.
- [01:38]
Jordi
He was basically kind of making a run at I want to be the Blake Masters of the Antichrist.
- [01:44]
Brad Feld
Which is like a wild thing to play out because I mean, so let's give a little history here. Back in.
- [01:51]
Jordi
He wanted his name in the history books next to the section on the Antichrist.
- [01:55]
Brad Feld
Yeah, exactly. Which is very different than what happened last time Peter gave a set of lectures. It was at Stanford and it became the backbone of the best selling book 0 to 1. The talks were focused on entrepreneurship, but it could be seen as a history lesson or political treatise or referendum on American culture. There was a lot that came into that lecture series and there's a lot of facts in that book, a lot of stories in that book that aren't strictly directly applicable to just building a company. Even though the course was literally called how to start a startup. CS 183 and 0 to 1 kind of turned into a playbook. That founders fund ran for a long time and still runs and has produced a bunch of alpha the ideas of being founder friendly, the monopoly thesis, the definite optimist like these teal isms became real investment strategies for the following decade and are still holding true today. It was a bit shocking. It was always shocking to me that the be founder friendly, don't fire founders, stuck around as durable Alpha for as long as it did. But VCs just love firing founders like it's just nothing sweet.
- [02:59]
Jordi
They can't help.
- [03:00]
Brad Feld
Yeah, I've never done it personally, but.
- [03:03]
Jordi
You'Ve always wanted to.
- [03:04]
Brad Feld
I imagine the thrill must be electric.
- [03:05]
Jordi
Because even though helping somebody from their.
- [03:09]
Brad Feld
Creation, it must be because it clearly doesn't produce alpha. Because if you look at the companies that are founder led, they tend to outperform. So you're sacrificing a lot of financial gain when you fire a founder. But the rush, the rush must be incredible. It must be better than even returning billions of dollars to your LPs. So this new lecture circuit is about the Antichrist, and the series doesn't fit neatly into the previous Stanford course calendar. It's not listed as CS184 antichrist. No, it's not a computer science course at Stanford. It's being put on by Michelle Stevens at Acts 17 and is much more focused on religion, specifically in Christianity. So the Wall Street Journal characterized one of Thiel's core theses this way. Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic, but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power it needs to regulate the existential risks from science and technology. And there are lots of people that come to mind when you think about talking about doomerism. And Thiel cites Greta Thunberg. She said, our house is on fire. We must act like the house is on fire. She also we are in the beginning of a mass extinction. This is in September of 2019 and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. She told this too. I think this was reported by pbs, the UN Climate Action Summit. She's been very focused on this.
- [04:39]
Jordi
This is her campaign to increase human suffering.
- [04:43]
Brad Feld
It's been a mixed bag, but Eleazer Yudakowski said other doomer things. He has a new book out. He's on a book tour. He says if we go ahead on this, everyone will die. He's referring referring to AI, not climate change in this case including children who do not choose this and do not do anything wrong. Sam Altman has also said some stuff that's sort of apocalyptic. You know, he told the US Senate in his testimony in 2023, if I can't. If I can't automate enterprise workflows, if.
- [05:16]
Jordi
I can't get $500,000,000,999, I need $9999-999990-00000,000.
- [05:28]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Round numbers are out. You need to go to a VC and say for this round we're raising $999-999-9999 please.
- [05:36]
Jordi
Yes.
- [05:36]
Brad Feld
Yes.
- [05:38]
Jordi
Don't make me choose. Don't make me choose. Don't make me choose between curing cancer and free education.
- [05:45]
Brad Feld
Don't make me choose between.
- [05:45]
Jordi
I will do it.
- [05:46]
Brad Feld
Saving time and saving money.
- [05:48]
Jordi
Save both.
- [05:49]
Brad Feld
We can save both Ra anyway. No, but he did give a bit of a doomer take. He was talking about how this could go wrong. He said if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. Elon Musk also said something similar. He said with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. And the original SpaceX thesis was.
- [06:09]
Jordi
Did he say that, by the way?
- [06:10]
Brad Feld
He said that in October of 2014 at the MIT Centennial Symposium.
- [06:16]
Jordi
And what did he mean by that? Because now he's got a.
- [06:20]
Brad Feld
He's summoning a demon. I think he thinks that if you shape the demon portal in the right shape, the demon comes through and it's kind of friendly, maybe friendly demon, kind of nice. I don't know.
- [06:31]
Jordi
Friendly demon that increases enterprise value through business automation.
- [06:36]
Brad Feld
Hopefully.
- [06:36]
Jordi
Increased efficiency.
- [06:37]
Brad Feld
Hopefully. And vibe coding, three JS apps. That's the demon that I want. But even SpaceX you can view as a rebuttal to the apocalypse. What would be apocalyptic? Humanity remaining on the earth alone. An asteroid comes, hits the earth, we're all done. But if we become multi planetary, we are no longer a single point of failure. If there's humans on Mars and the moon and Earth, if something bad happens to Earth, humanity continues. The stakes that Elon framed SpaceX in were world consequential.
- [07:16]
Jordi
By the way, if you go to xai.com it's this random company called UNK AI.
- [07:23]
Brad Feld
What?
- [07:25]
Jordi
And they feature popular AI brands like Rock4ChatGPT, okay. Deep Seek and Xiaomi and Unitree. Weird seeming. Seemingly a Chinese company odd that's using it to promote a range of products. Yeah, it's very strange.
- [07:42]
Brad Feld
So my question was there's a lot of focus on. If you speak in millenarian terms, if you speak of apocalyptic consequences to not building your technology, you might be the Antichrist. It Might be bad, but at the same time, I'm just looking at history here and looking at these folks who have become popular and thought leaders on apocalyptic scenarios. Elon, Sam Utakowski. Greta, if you backed these folks as a basket, you would have done quite well. You're in SpaceX, you're in. You're in OpenAI, you've done quite well. And, and I'm wondering where the line is for, you know, using speaking about apocalyptic consequences to the lack of technology, to the lack of not solving a problem and then balancing that with delivering something that isn't authoritarian, but is actually just a really, really big, ambitious project. So if you read into, you know, we're summoning the demon, we need to go to Mars because humanity could be wiped out. Earth is cooked. Right. There's one world where it's like, that is apocalyptic thinking. There's another, which is just like, this is a reframing on the classic, like, I want to save the world. I want to change the world. We want to make the world a better place. All those terms have kind of fallen out of fashion as a lot of founders just kind of wound up, you know, building automating manual workflows. Right. And so they, they stopped saying we're going to change the world with a better database. But there's still something. If you're a VC and you want to back a moonshot, you want to back something that's either going to be zero or trillion dollars, that, where I feel like your ear gustus is, is.
- [09:24]
Jordi
A great example of this pitch, because everyday people experience rain all the time. They're not necessarily like, droughts are not something super tangible. Right. Because you just, you turn the faucet and the water runs regardless of if you're in a drought or not. Obviously farmers feel this much more intensely. But he's come out and said, you know, we need to be able to control the weather, we need to be able to increase precipitation, and you should fund me so that I can do this. Right?
- [09:55]
Brad Feld
Yeah, yeah. There's something about these bold missions that rally employees, they rally investors, they rally media attention. You look at like, what Augustus is doing is deeply controversial, but he's on podcasts that are so much bigger than what a normal. What is he at? Series A, like, a Series A founder typically is not on multiple million plus subscriber podcasts doing a tour.
- [10:25]
Jordi
We talk going and talking to people that are actively disagree with what he's doing.
- [10:30]
Brad Feld
Totally, totally. Yeah. I mean, we talk to founders all day long who come on and, oh, they raised at a billion dollar valuation or they raised a billion dollars. We had five Series E companies on Tuesday. Those folks are not getting calls from the biggest media platforms in the world on day one consistently on a regular basis. And I think it's because of that they're going after more tractable problems. They're going after things that are less controversial. But also there's just something interesting about actually refocusing on tackling those really, really big issues. And so there's something where I feel like the fear of like targeting the Antichrist turns into like, you know, Girardian scapegoat. You got to find someone to blame everything on. I'm worried about how all that shapes up. But I am optimistic about this idea of venture capitalists returning to the super high risk. It's either zero or a trillion dollars. It either is a completely useless company that doesn't get anything done, or they cure cancer, or they build a flying car, or they build the rocket that goes to space. And even if Elon hasn't gotten us to Mars, we're not multi planetary yet. He's still able to ship Starlink. It's great business. And then also keep everyone still motivated on how cool would it be if, if they actually got to Mars.
- [11:47]
Jordi
That's amazing.
- [11:48]
Brad Feld
Another 20 years.
- [11:49]
Jordi
We need AI to benefit humanity. Very oriented around, yes, safety. Right. This is a nonprofit. This is work that needs to be done that's not going to get funded through the capital markets and it turns into an Internet software.
- [12:04]
Brad Feld
And so, and so I don't know what, I don't know what your timeline is for SpaceX getting to Mars. It might be 20 years, maybe 30 years, but at least it keeps them focused on, you know, chopping wood and working hard to actually advance the underlying technology that we get a lot of value on through just satellites and stuff. And I think that the same thing could be true for the AI companies where, yeah, maybe we don't get the AGI God asi, you know, super soon, but there's just like a ton of value and you keep working at it because it's delivering value in the short to medium term, but you're able to keep the sites really, really, really high. And that drives just like, that's just what you need to actually marshal all the energy to go back something really huge. Anyway, Tyler, have you been following the Antichrist lecture series vibes at all? What's your take?
- [12:57]
Riley Walls
I read the first set of notes.
- [12:58]
Jordi
That came out by the person who.
- [12:59]
Brad Feld
I think untrue, banned notes. You got to them before they were taken down off the Internet. Oh, they were taken down, I believe so I couldn't find them.
- [13:05]
Jordi
I don't think people were really missing anything because most of that stuff was.
- [13:08]
Brad Feld
Like in other podcasts.
- [13:10]
Jordi
Yeah, most of it was in the Hoover Institution podcast with Peter Robinson.
- [13:14]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [13:16]
Riley Walls
So I mean the vibes are like.
- [13:17]
Jordi
Most of the stuff I've seen online.
- [13:18]
Brad Taylor
Were just like the protests outside of.
- [13:20]
Riley Walls
It, which I thought were like pretty funny.
- [13:22]
Brad Feld
Yeah. It does feel like this is definitely in the early stages of act. Like he's definitely working these bits out and figuring out how all the pieces fit together into some sort of narrative or conclusion or. But it's interesting and not many other venture capitalists are talking about it, so at least it's different and fresh. Anyway. Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
- [13:56]
Jordi
There we go.
- [13:57]
Brad Feld
We got a little bit of a bear take from Jerry Newman over in Colossus. AI will not make you rich. I feel like AI is already making tons of people rich. I wonder, I wonder what's going on. Let's read through some of this.
- [14:11]
Jordi
So kick it off.
- [14:12]
Brad Feld
Jerry writes in Colossus Mag, which you should subscribe to. Of course. Fortunes are made by entrepreneurs and investors when revolutionary technologies enable waves of innovative investable companies. Think of the railroad. The Bessemer process. I don't actually don't know what the Bessemer process is.
- [14:28]
Jordi
Tyler, what's the Bessemer process?
- [14:29]
Brad Feld
Electric power. The internal combustion engine.
- [14:32]
Jordi
Mass producing steel. Molten pig iron.
- [14:36]
Brad Feld
Were there lots of steel startups at the time? I suppose. Interesting. Each of which, like a stray spark in a fireworks factory, set off decades of follow on. Innovation permeated every part of society and catapulted a new set of inventions and investors into power, influence and wealth. Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth. Instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time when technological advancement was a red queen's race and inventors and investors were left no better off for nonstop running. Interesting. I didn't know that about the containerization story. Anyone who invests in the new new thing must answer two questions. First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it? Information and communication technology was a revolution whose value was captured by startups and led to thousands of Newly rich founders employees.
- [15:40]
Jordi
Also called high technology. Yes, high tech.
- [15:43]
Brad Feld
Yes, I am. I'm very excited to see where he takes this because I feel like there are already what, thousands of new millionaires in the AI boom just from secondary.
- [15:53]
Jordi
Sales, the prices of starter homes in San Francisco.
- [15:56]
Brad Feld
Yeah, like it's happening. Didn't OpenAI just do a $10 billion tender offer or something? Like there's liquidity flowing people.
- [16:03]
Jordi
Not to mention how many individual indie founders are making a lot of money totally building various apps and experience.
- [16:11]
Brad Feld
Also just people that went long Nvidia or have been buying calls on Nvidia at various times. Or Leopold Aschenbrenner. Like there's a bunch of people that have figured out different ways to make money. What do you think?
- [16:23]
Jordi
I mean, yeah, there's that set of the. Like, this was like maybe 3 years old or something, but about the Nvidia.
- [16:27]
Riley Walls
Employees, and it was like 75% of.
- [16:29]
Jordi
Them are worth over a million dollars.
- [16:30]
Brad Feld
That's right.
- [16:31]
Riley Walls
I'm sure that's like probably 90% now.
- [16:33]
Brad Feld
Yeah. And so I don't know, maybe he has to argue for like collapse of everything. We'll see where this goes. Is generative AI more like the former containerization or the latter? It revolution. Will it be the basis of many future industrial fortunes or a net loser for the investment community as a whole? With few. With a few zero sum winners here and there. There are ways to make money investing in the fruits of AI, but they will depend on, assuming the latter, that it is once again a less propitious time for investors and, and inventors, that AI model builders and application companies will eventually compete each other into an oligopoly. I believe that's true. And that the gains from AI will not accrue to its builders, but to customers. A lot of the money pouring into AI is therefore being invested in the wrong places. And aside from a couple lucky early investors, those who make money will be the ones with the foresight to get out early. What do you think, Jordi?
- [17:29]
Jordi
I mean, I mean, I mean, we got it. We gotta. I don't wanna, I don't wanna just start.
- [17:33]
Brad Feld
Okay, keep reading. The microprocessor.
- [17:36]
Jordi
Yeah, so the micro. But. But the main thing is in venture, it's really hard to get out early if you're investing with real size.
- [17:43]
Brad Feld
Yes, totally.
- [17:44]
Jordi
If you're writing a $200 million check, it's not like at the next round you're like, oh, nice, I got a 3x markup. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm sell 600 million in secondary. No, we're not. And this is, this is something you see on the timeline, people usually and on accounts saying like, oh, these multi stage funds are just dumping on you all this stuff. And it's like, yes, at times funds can exit some of their positions, smaller funds can exit entirely. But by and large, if you lead an early round, you're not able to.
- [18:17]
Brad Feld
Just fully exit and you might even be locked up post ipo. There's a bunch of ways it would be very funny if you know how everyone's like, let SBF out of jail. He, he got, he got a stake in Anthropic. And then there was something else he.
- [18:31]
Jordi
Was sharing this morning. I forgot about this, but he bought almost 7% of Robinhood.
- [18:36]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [18:36]
Jordi
Bottom.
- [18:37]
Brad Feld
And there's like two other companies that he got that he like nailed. He was like a fantastic trader. But did you see what Elon posted about Anthropic? He said winning was never in the set of possible options or possible outcomes. So he's like, did you say that he said that on X yesterday? I believe so. Elon is, Elon is a gigabear on Anthropic saying that Anthropics is zero. And if Elon's right, then SBF looks bad again because he looked bad because he lost all the customer money.
- [19:10]
Jordi
Then he looked great about.
- [19:13]
Brad Feld
No, no, no. Completely unrelated. Completely unrelated. Elon's just trash talking the other labs because he trash talks a bunch of labs. Right. But he was saying that, oh, Anthropic's not going to lose, he' going to win, it's going to be a zero or whatever. He wasn't exactly saying it was going to be a zero, but he was saying, he was saying, you know, winning was never in the, in the set of possible outcomes. And so it'd be very, it'd be very funny if we go, if we.
- [19:36]
Jordi
Round trip on everyone that preyed on my downfall. Pray harder.
- [19:40]
Brad Feld
Yeah, yeah, I think it's kind of a silly, silly.
- [19:43]
Jordi
I'll continue. The microprocessor was revolutionary, but the people who invented it at intel in 1971 did not see it that way. They just wanted to avoid designing desktop calculator chip sets from scratch every time. But outsiders realized they could use the microprocessor to build their own personal computers, and enthusiasts did. Thousands of tinkerers found configurations and uses that intel never dreamed of. This distributed and permissionless invention kicked off a great surge of development, as the economist Carlota Perez called it, triggered by technology but driven by economic and societal forces, there was no real demand for personal computers in the early 1970s. They were expensive toys, but the experimenters laid the technical groundwork and built a community. Then, around 1975, a step change in the cost of microprocessors made the personal computer market viable. The Intel 8080 had an initial list price of $360, which is 2,300 in today's dollars. MITS could barely turn a profit on its Altair at a bulk price of $75 each, which is 490.
- [20:48]
Brad Feld
Donald Boat would have gotten it done in 1975.
- [20:51]
Jordi
He would have gotten it done. He would have been Gordon Moore, send.
- [20:56]
Brad Feld
Me an Intel 8080. You're on notice.
- [20:59]
Jordi
Just be putting ads in the newspaper.
- [21:00]
Brad Feld
He'd be writing letters to Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, send me an Intel 8080.
- [21:07]
Jordi
But when MOS technology started selling at 66502 for $25, Steve Wozniak could afford to build a prototype. Apple 6502 and the similarly priced Zilog Z80 forced Intel's prices down. The nascent PC community started spawning entrepreneurs and a score of companies appeared, each with a slightly different product. You couldn't have known in the mid-1970s that the PC would revolutionize everything. While Steve Jobs was telling investors that every household would someday have a personal computer. A wild underestimate, as it turned out, the others questioned the need for personal computers at all. As late as 1979, Apple's ads didn't tell you what a personal computer could do. It asked what you would do with it. The established computer manufacturers had no interest in a product their customers weren't asking for. Nobody needed a computer. And so PCs weren't bought, they were sold. Flashy startups like Apple and Sinclair used hype to get notice, while companies with footholds in consumer electronics like Atari, Commodore and Tandy Radio Shack used strong retail connections to put their PCs.
- [22:08]
Brad Feld
Look at this controversial ad that they ran with a naked man, Adam, holding a an Apple computer. The original Cluley. Maybe Steve Jobs was onto something with the viral marketing being controversial.
- [22:23]
Jordi
Yeah, this is an insane.
- [22:24]
Brad Feld
We're looking for the most original use of an Apple since Adam. What in the name of Adam? What in the name of Adam do people do with Apple computers? You tell us in a thousand words or less. If your story is original and intriguing enough, you could win a one week all expense paid trip for two to Hawaii.
- [22:42]
Jordi
Giveaways, Giveaways.
- [22:44]
Brad Feld
This is wild, insane Apple lore. Steve Jobs is really on one.
- [22:50]
Jordi
The logo too with it with the apple stripes stripe.
- [22:54]
Brad Feld
Oh, so good.
- [22:55]
Jordi
So the market grew slowly at first, accelerating only as experiments led to practical applications like the spreadsheet. Let's give it up for the spreadsheet.
- [23:02]
Brad Feld
One of the best inventions of all time.
- [23:04]
Jordi
Hit that horn as use grow. Observation of use caused a reduction in uncertainty leading to more adoption in a self reinforcing cycle. This kind of gathering momentum takes time in every technological wave. It took almost 30 years for electricity to reach half of American households, for example. And it took about the same amount of time for personal computers. When a technological revolution changes everything, it takes a huge amount of innovation, investment, storytelling time and plain old work. It also sucks up all the money and talent available. Like Kuhn's paradigms in science, any technology not part of the wave's techno economic paradigm will seem like a sideshow.
- [23:42]
Brad Feld
Well, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team at your fingertips in your slack. Let's continue. The nascent growth of PCs attracted investors, venture capitalists who started making risky bets on new companies. This development incentivized more inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers. You don't hear enough about inventors anymore. Everyone wants to be a founder. No one wants to be an inventor. I want to show, I want to meet some folks who just are like, yeah, I'm just working on.
- [24:13]
Jordi
What about Riley Walls who's joined the show? He's kind of inventor coded.
- [24:18]
Brad Feld
I think he's an inventor. You called him a rascal, something like that.
- [24:21]
Jordi
Internet rascal.
- [24:22]
Brad Feld
Internet rascal, which is, I think fantastic. But I think of him as an inventor, which in turn. And all of this drew more speculative capital. Companies like IBM, the computing behemoth before the PC saw poor relative performance. They didn't believe the PC could survive long enough to become capable in their market and didn't care about new small markets that wanted a cheaper solution. Retroactively, we give the PC pioneers the power of profits. Wow, that's a lot of alliteration rather than visionaries. But at the time, nobody outside a small group of early adopters paid any attention. Establishment media like the New York Times didn't take the PC seriously until after IBM's was introduced in August of 1981. In the entire year of 1976, when Apple Computer was founded, the NYT mentioned PCs only four times. Apparently only the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers were paying attention. This is total mentions of personal computers in the New York Times over time and exponential growth from 1979 to 1984.
- [25:28]
Jordi
Crazy that it actually peaked in 1984.
- [25:31]
Brad Feld
84, sorry. It peaks in 80.
- [25:35]
Jordi
84, sorry. And then it was dropping throughout the 80s.
- [25:37]
Brad Feld
Well, it's old news.
- [25:38]
Jordi
It's over.
- [25:39]
Brad Feld
Yeah, everyone has a PC. I mean, how many articles are there about like social media today this year? Or like smartphones? Like, there just aren't as many as there were during the boom. That's the nature.
- [25:49]
Jordi
Still the full New York Times.
- [25:51]
Brad Feld
Yeah, but I mean, there's just so many times. And you can just like, you know, it just melts into the background of the story. But it's a good point. It's the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today. No one took note of personal computers in the 1970s. In 2025, AI is all we seem to talk about. Big companies hate surprises. You want to continue here?
- [26:16]
Jordi
Big companies hate surprises. That's why uncertainty makes a perfect moat for startups. Apple would Never have survived IBM entering the market in 1979 and only lived to compete another day. After raising 100 million in its 1980 IPO. It was the only remaining competitor after the IBM induced winnowing.
- [26:34]
Brad Feld
IBM and Apple, they're the only two survivors. All these other companies, the Altair, the Amiga, the Atari st all fell off, but the Mac and the IBM PC ripped onward.
- [26:47]
Jordi
Business machines, you'd love to see it. As the tech took hold and started to show promise, innovations in software, memory and peripherals like floppy disk drives and modems joined it. They reinforced one another with with each advance, putting pressure on the technologies adjacent to it. When any part of the system held back the other parts, investors rushed to fund that sector. As increases in PC memory allowed more complicated software, there became a need for more external storage, which caused VC Dave.
- [27:16]
Riley Walls
Mark.
- [27:18]
Jordi
To invest in disk drive manufacturer Seagate in 1980. Seagate gave a 40x return when it went public in 1981. Other investors noticed and some 270 million was plowed into the industry in the following three years. Seagate's been ripping, right, all the hard.
- [27:34]
Brad Feld
Drive makers because all the AI companies need to store a ton of training data, RL data. They're generating a huge amount of data. Images, videos, all sorts of stuff. And all of that needs more storage.
- [27:47]
Jordi
Up 109% in the past.
- [27:49]
Brad Feld
I remember, I think we read an article about the hard drive boom like a year ago, and it was, we're still early.
- [27:57]
Jordi
I know, but that's actually crazy. I remember it was like first like 10 episodes.
- [28:01]
Brad Feld
Yeah, we were like, oh, this is kind of a boring story, but it's kind of interesting and seems important. So we read about Seagate.
- [28:06]
Jordi
Let's check in with Western Western Digital 118.
- [28:08]
Brad Feld
Another hundred bagger. Little easy double yeah.
- [28:13]
Jordi
Money also poured into the underlying infrastructure. Fiber optic networks, chip making, etc. So that the capacity was never a bottleneck. Companies which use the new technological system to outperform incumbents began to take market share and even competitors realized they needed to adopt the new thing or die. The hype became a froth, which became an investment bubble. Let's give it up for bubbles. The dot com frenzy of the late 1990s. The ICT wave was therefore similar to the previous ones, like the investment mania of the 1830s and the roaring twenties which followed the infrastructure build out of canals and railways respectively, in which the human response to each stage predictably generated the next. When the dot com bubble popped, society found it disapproved of the excesses in the sector, and governments found they had the popular support to reserve authority over the tech companies and their investors. This put a brake on the madness. Instead of the reckless innovation of the bubble, companies started to expand into proven markets and financiers moved from speculating to investing. Entrepreneurs began to focus on finding applications rather than on innovating the underlying technologies. Technological improvements continued, but change became more evolutionary than revolutionary.
- [29:22]
Brad Feld
Look at this chart. Technological waves over time. The Industrial Revolution. The Canal Mania. I wasn't even familiar with this. Arkwright mill opens in 1771. The Great.
- [29:35]
Jordi
I would love to then watch a documentary or even a drama.
- [29:40]
Brad Feld
Canal Mania.
- [29:41]
Jordi
Canal Mania.
- [29:42]
Brad Feld
Yeah, this has the.
- [29:42]
Jordi
The underrated mania. People always talk about tulips.
- [29:46]
Brad Feld
Tulips? Yeah, tulips doesn't even count because it's not a real technology. So the actual technological waves that are highlighted here, the Industrial Revolution, steam and railways, steel, electricity and heavy engineering, then oil, the automobile, and mass production from 1908 to 1974 and then 1971 onward is information and telecommunication. And pretty pretty remarkable results from this 27% rise in real GDP through the 2010-2019 era. That's pretty good. In contrast, society did not need a bubble to pop to start excoriating AI. Given the backlash to tech that has been going on for a decade, this seems normal to us. But the AI backlash differs from the general high regard earlier in the cycle enjoyed by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and the others who built big tech businesses. The world hates change and only gave tech a pass in the 80s 90s because it all seemed reversible. It could be made to go away if it turned out badly. This gave the early computer innovators some leeway to experiment. Now that everyone knows computers are here to stay, AI is not allowed the same wait and see attitude. It is seen as part of the information technology revolution. Perez the Economist breaks each technological wave into four predictable phases. Eruption, frenzy, synergy and maturity. This is a new Gartner hype cycle. We need to know where are we on the curves?
- [31:07]
Jordi
The Perez tech wave.
- [31:08]
Brad Feld
I think we're right around frenzy. We're definitely past Eruption. Maybe going into synergy and maturity next. The middle two, Frenzy and synergy are the easy ones for investors. Frenzy is when everyone piles in and investors are rewarded for taking big risks on unproven ideas, culminating in the bubble when paper profits disappear. When rationality returns, the synergy phase begins as companies make their products usable and productive.
- [31:31]
Jordi
Everybody's scared of a crash. They're not eager for synergy.
- [31:36]
Brad Feld
Yeah. So investing in the maturity phase is even more difficult. In Eruption, it's hard to see what will happen. In maturity, nothing much happens at all. Nothing ever happens. The uncertainty about what will work and how customers and society will react is almost gone. Things are predictable. Everyone acts predictably. The lack of dynamism allows successful synergy companies to remain entrenched. See the Nifty 50 and Fang. But growth becomes harder. They all start to enter each other's markets, conglomerate, raise prices, cut costs. The era of the. It feels like Microsoft's in that. In that bucket. Certainly already companies frame this as a drive to win, but it's really a fear of losing. Should we read about the shipping container wave?
- [32:20]
Jordi
Yeah.
- [32:20]
Brad Feld
Shipping containerization was a late wave innovation that changed the world, kicked off our modern era of globalization, resulted in profound changes to society and the economy, and contributed to rapid growth. Growth in well being. But there were perhaps only one or two people who made real money investing in it. That is insane to hear if that's true.
- [32:40]
Jordi
Yeah, and key words here, investing specifically in that technology versus benefiting from it broadly. Because if you were in any type of business that required shipping and receiving goods from all over the world, you benefited directly from the technological change. Even if you weren't like investing in companies that were functionally creating it.
- [33:06]
Brad Feld
Yeah, I would certainly agree. So they mark the containerization wave. Starting the year is 1956. It was late in the previous wave but that year, the company, soon to be known as Sealand, revolutionized freight shipping with the launch of the first container ship. The Ideal X were the ideal 10. Sealand's founder, Malcolm McLean, had an epiphany that the job to be done by truckers, railroads and shipping lines was to move goods from shipper to destination, not to drive trucks, fill boxcars or laid boats. Sealand allowed freight to transfer seamlessly from one mode to another, saving time, making shipping more predictable and cutting costs both the cost of loading, unloading and reloading and the cost.
- [33:48]
Jordi
So prior to this you would just have like a wood crate that would just get thrown on a ship.
- [33:53]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [33:53]
Jordi
And then you'd.
- [33:54]
Brad Feld
So you have to stack it, unstack it, figure out how you have to do a puzzle every single time you want to load Tetris. Yeah. And now it's just stacking blocks. Jenga instead of Tetris. Much easier to play Jenga. Supposedly, the benefits of containerization, if it could be made to happen, were obvious. Everyone could see the efficiencies and customers don't care how something gets to when they can be where they can buy it as long as it does. But longshoremen would lose work. Politicians would lose the votes of those who lost work. Port authorities would lose the support of their politicians. Federal regulators would be blamed for adverse consequences. Railroads might lose freight to shipping lines, shipping lines might lose freight to new shipping lines, and it would all cost a mint. Most thought McLean would never be able to make it work. But he squeezed through the cracks of the opposition he faced. He bought and retrofitted war surplus ships, lowering costs. He went after the coastal shipping trade, a dying business in the age of new interstates. To avoid competition, he set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, rather than the shipping hub of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, to get buy in from the Port Authority and avoid Manhattan congestion. And he made a deal with the New York Longshoremen's Union, which was only possible because he was a small player whom they figured was not a threat. What's interesting is that, yeah, I think it's like the direct investment might be very concentrated, but when I think about the rise of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, like globalization. I'm thinking of Nike and I'm thinking of companies that were built on the back of globalization. Even the iPhone, Apple. These companies exist in part and are beneficiaries of containerization. And so it's not a direct investment in the fundamental technology, but it is enabled by it. I don't think so.
- [35:35]
Jordi
Yeah, we'll have to get through the article, but it already feels like it's somewhat. Somewhat clickbait. Not clickbait, but to say, like, no one's going to make money on AI or you're not going to make money on AI.
- [35:54]
Brad Feld
Yes. Let's skip to his conclusion about generative AI. He says, let's grant that generative AI is revolutionary, but also that as is becoming increasingly clear, this particular new tech is now already in an evolutionary stage. It's towards the end of its cycle. It will create a lot of value for the economy and investors hope to capture some of it.
- [36:17]
Jordi
This is the key point. I totally agree. When, who and how depends on whether AI is the end of the ICT wave or the beginning of a new one. Right?
- [36:29]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [36:29]
Jordi
Is it SaaS or is it God.
- [36:32]
Brad Feld
Is it the final SaaS production and then we're stuck? Or is it something entirely new and we're just going to start compounding?
- [36:40]
Jordi
Is it consumer software? Is it enterprise software? Is it something entirely new? Right.
- [36:46]
Brad Feld
I don't know. If AI had started a new wave, there would have been an extended period of uncertainty and experimentation. I feel like that's the last decade of OpenAI. I feel like 2015 to 2025 was.
- [37:00]
Jordi
That period of uncertainty, experimentation. You have to understand, is it people in 2015 that were trying to make chatbots? Right. With no hype?
- [37:08]
Brad Feld
Totally.
- [37:09]
Jordi
Really no user, Not a lot of users. Right, yeah. Or you just counting, like when OpenAI was like, okay, we can actually be a for profit company now and we can productize this. But even then there was like a pretty large gap between them deciding like, hey, let's actually raise traditional capital for this before they could get out the API, before they could get out ChatGPT.
- [37:31]
Brad Feld
Totally, yeah. And also, like, there was this in AI, the period of uncertainty and experimentation, that was the TikTok algorithm, the Netflix recommendation algorithm, Facebook's core AI investments, they have bought billions of dollars of GPUs. Not for generative AI, not for LLMs, but just to make better ad recommendations, better content recommendations. And so there's. I don't know, there's a lot there. We'll have to continue to dig in, but let's keep reading. He said when thousands or millions of tinkerers use the tech to solve problems in entirely new ways, its uses proliferate. But because they are using models owned by the big AI companies, their ability to fully experiment is limited to what's allowed by the incumbents who have no desire to permit an extended challenge to the status quo. This doesn't mean AI can't start the next technological revolution. It might if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed and permissionless. Like Wozniak cobbling together computers in his garage. Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen. And Trevcnik building his high pressure steam engine as soon as James Watts patents expired. When any would be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way their imagination dictates it might be the seed of the next big set of changes. Something revolutionary rather than evolutionary. But until and unless that happens, there can be no eruption. Tyler but like, don't you think it's possible to build and train an LLM on your laptop and use it in any way your imagination dictates?
- [39:03]
Jordi
Yeah, I mean I, I mean I don't know about training a whole new LLM, but like people are getting a lot of value out of open source ones that they run locally.
- [39:10]
Brad Feld
Llama Deepsea Obvious.
- [39:12]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:14]
Brad Feld
It doesn't, I mean I, I somewhat agree that we haven't seen that many totally new crazy like unprecedented uses of LLMs where it feels like it's an entirely new category. Like it's hard to point it. Like the Uber for AI where it's like this company would never have existed. It feels like a lot of the companies are kind of evolutionary. Like, you know, we have, we have site builders and then we have vibe coding platforms that put sites on top of them. Figma.com A lot of the Figma build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, get started for free. Use figma make if you want to develop a website.
- [39:55]
Jordi
Yeah. A lot of times Companies come on TVPN to talk about what they're building. They're building an AI application.
- [40:03]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [40:03]
Jordi
There is a company started 10 years ago basically doing the exact same thing. They just didn't position it in the same way. They weren't using prompts and weren't using reason reasoning and things like that. But still it looks, and it looks.
- [40:22]
Brad Feld
It looks like it's solving the same SaaS problem definition. It's like the problem was like organizing information for lawyers or answering the phone. And we had a phone tree that was just deterministic, like robotic press 2.
- [40:35]
Jordi
For customer support and oftentimes they can solve a problem. It's like a product can be twice as good, which is enough to, to kind of eat into existing market share, maybe create new markets. Right. I think the market for people that can create software is obviously exploded Right, which is why you see Vibe coding revenues just exploding. Billions of dollars collectively.
- [41:03]
Brad Feld
But it does seem like the video games are getting more realistic. Video games are getting more realistic. The software is getting better. The spreadsheets have more useful tools. There's just a little extra helper everywhere. It's a lot of copilots. It's not a lot of like entirely new plans.
- [41:19]
Jordi
And then you see ChatGPT and it's the usage looks a lot like the way that people use Google Search. It's better in many ways, but the core value that's being delivered is quite similar.
- [41:33]
Brad Feld
He actually talks about domain specific models. So first he says economists are predicting that AI will increase global GDP somewhere between 1 to more than 7% over the next decade, which is 1 to 7 trillion of new value created. The big question is where that money will stick as it flows through the value chain. Most AI market overviews have a score or more categories, breaking each of them into customers and industry served. But these will change dramatically over the next few years. You could instead just follow the money to simplify the taxonomy of companies. There are data infrastructure companies, there are model companies, user application companies, AI customers and consumers. But what the history of containerization suggests. If you aren't already an investor in a model company, you shouldn't bother. Sam Altman and a few other early movers may make a fortune, as McLean and Ludwig did, but the huge cost of building and running a model, coupled with the intense competition means there will in the end be only a few companies, each funded and owned by the largest tech companies. If you're already an investor, congratulations, there will be consolidation, so you might get an exit. Domain specific models like Cursor and Harvey will be part of the consolidation. These are probably the most valuable models, but fine tuning is relatively cheap and there are big economies of scope. On the other hand, just as Google had to buy Invite Media in 2010 to figure out how to sell to ad agencies, domain specific model companies that have earned the trust of their customers will be prime acquisition targets. That sounds like another group of people making money. When you say only OpenAI investors will make money, it's like, well, there are like 7,000 people on that cap table in one way or another. Like all the investors, all the LPs and the funds that are investors, all the employees, all the people that got in through SVVs, like it's not just two people. I feel like it's a lot of people that are, that are in the big winners. Like even if there's just a Few power law winners.
- [43:25]
Jordi
Yeah, there's, there's other, you know. Another way to look into this is like if you're investing in a Series a at a $300 million valuation, assuming just crazy explosive growth, it's very possible a company, even if it does well, would someday sell for a few hundred million dollars and you wouldn't have actually made any money, even though you got an exit.
- [43:46]
Brad Feld
Yeah, here's a good counter point to some of the companies that are potentially in a more precarious situation. So he says, while it's too late to invest in the model companies, the profusion of those using the models to solve specific problems is ongoing. Perplexity, inflection, AI writer, a bridge, and 100 others. But if any of these become very valuable, the model companies will take their earnings either through discriminatory pricing or vertical integration, launch their own competitors. Success, in other in other words, will mean defeat. Always a bad thesis. At some point, model companies and app companies will converge. There will be simply AI companies and only a few of them. There will be some winners, as always, but investments in the app layer as a whole will lose money. The same caveat applies, however. If an app company can build a customer base or an amazing team, it might be acquired. But these companies aren't really technology companies at all. They're building a market on spec and have to be priced as such. A further caveat is that there will be investors who make a killing, arbitraging fomo, panicked acquirers willing to massively overpay. But this isn't really investing, he says. And so again, it's another group of people that will get rich. But it's maybe not a durable source of alpha, which is an interesting thought. Where else? Let's keep going. This is a very long article. You should go read the full thing. So let's close this out by reading his conclusion. And of course, if you want to read the full piece, you can head over to Colossus Mag. There is nothing better than the beginning of a new wave when the opportunities to envision, invent and build world changing companies leads to money, fame and glory. But there is nothing more dangerous for investors and entrepreneurs than wishful thinking. The lesson learned from investing in tech over the last 50 years are not the right ones to apply now. The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient. To imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was. Now you have to bet on the opportunities it opens up. So Jerry Newman, he's a retired venture.
- [45:53]
Jordi
Investor, totally, totally agree with this conclusion. Right. Like, I think if you come in with a, with a $200 million venture fund right now and are just investing at crazy multiples, pre revenue investing in new foundation model labs, you're going to have a really tough time. But that doesn't mean, and I don't know, I think saying like the app layer as a whole will lose money at least when you look at private markets. Right. The whole point is that a lot of the companies can go to zero and like a handful of them will create enormous value. And that's okay. Right. So not that bearish. But I do think it's not a, you know, at this stage in the market, spraying and praying is going to lead to some bad outcomes.
- [46:46]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [46:46]
Jordi
Really understanding the opportunities, really understanding that, hey, maybe this is a lot of the winners here are going to look more like traditional software.
- [46:55]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [46:55]
Jordi
And that's okay, but it just means you have to be, you know, I think the company we had on yesterday, filevine, a good example of this, started as enterprise software for law firms.
- [47:06]
Brad Feld
Yep. Already has a ton of clients.
- [47:08]
Jordi
Now they have 100,000 lawyers actively using the product every day in a really good position to vend in a variety of different models. And they will, depending on how they execute, prove to be a big challenge for new AI native companies that will have to decide do we want to be sort of an ancillary product or do we want to own the workflows. And if we want to own the workflows, we have to rebuild all these different, different products that help a firm run and do that with maybe a 10 years behind other players in the category.
- [47:43]
Brad Feld
Yeah. I mean Venture's always been the game of pick the winner in the category. But it feels like it's more important than ever to actually define the category and understand is this particular category going to have one winner or three winners or two winners? Is it going to wind up being a duopoly or a oligopoly?
- [48:04]
Jordi
I'm excited to talk to Taylor about this. He's building, you know, he's the 800-800-pound gorilla in AI for customer engagement experience. Right. But it's a category that has act an active capital war going on. You have heavily funded new players like Sierra and decagon. You have the intercoms of the world.
- [48:28]
Brad Feld
Our partners Spin AI the number one AI agent for customer service. We're going to ask Brad Taylo about his performance benchmarks. His competitive bake offs is ranking on G2 because we are obviously supporters of Fin but interested in following the fight and I am very interested in how oligopolistic will that particular market be. There are certain markets that have just kind of run away. It certainly feels like just in terms of knowledge retrieval, we could be looking at a monopoly with OpenAI and ChatGPT or a duopoly with Gemini. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be 10 search engines and 10 default chat apps that people are going to certainly not.
- [49:11]
Jordi
Or ten deep research APIs.
- [49:14]
Brad Feld
Exactly right. Yeah. It feels like there's going to be one or two that kind of compound and people get comfortable with and they stick with.
- [49:19]
Jordi
Yeah. Well in other news, Emmett says I'm excited to share. Rora Water is the official partner of Huberman Lab for Water. Rora is of course company. I co founded a while ago and worked on this partnership with the Human Lab team, Rob and Andrew for a very, very long time. At this point we started talking about it probably. Well started talking about it maybe a couple years ago. Actually got them product over about a year ago. They used it a bunch, they tested it a bunch and finally launched this partnership earlier this week. So absolutely thrilled to get this across the line. And yeah, big vote of confidence from the Huberman team.
- [50:09]
Brad Feld
I love it. And in other Huberman world news, his network Scicom Media is working on a new show with none other than David Senra.
- [50:19]
Jordi
It's David Senra by David Senra.
- [50:22]
Brad Feld
Yeah, the show is called David Senra and interesting.
- [50:25]
Jordi
Hosted by David Senra.
- [50:26]
Brad Feld
Yeah, they picked David Senra as the host of the David Senra Show.
- [50:29]
Jordi
Yeah.
- [50:29]
Brad Feld
And so we will watch the launch video that he put out on X yesterday.
- [50:35]
Jordi
Pull it up.
- [50:36]
Brad Feld
Nine years ago I launched Founders. Today we're launching a new podcast called David Senra.
- [50:41]
Jordi
Nine years ago I launched the Founders podcast on founders.
- [50:44]
Brad Feld
I tell the stories of history's greatest.
- [50:46]
Jordi
Entrepreneurs and extreme winners.
- [50:47]
Brad Feld
This week I'm launching a new podcast called David Semra. On this show I sit down for.
- [50:51]
Jordi
Conversations with the best living founders in the world.
- [50:56]
Brad Feld
How many camp you have three cameras.
- [50:57]
Joe Lonsdale
People like Daniel Ek, Michael Dell, Brad.
- [50:59]
Jordi
Jacobs, Todd Graves, Michael Ovitz and many others.
- [51:03]
Brad Feld
My goal with everything I do is to obsessively study the greats and find.
- [51:08]
Jordi
Timeless ideas that you can use in your work.
- [51:11]
Brad Feld
We have to change or we're going to go out of business.
- [51:13]
Jordi
And now you can learn directly from these legendary founders.
- [51:17]
Riley Walls
You know what I see the most.
- [51:18]
Joe Lonsdale
Common core of all the people that.
- [51:20]
Riley Walls
Are successful for me is they're never satisfied. You said something interesting.
- [51:25]
Jordi
I like the pressure.
- [51:26]
Joe Lonsdale
I do thrive on it.
- [51:27]
Brad Feld
Founders will still come out every week, and this new show will now have episodes dropping every other Sunday on all.
- [51:33]
Joe Lonsdale
Platforms like Spotify, Apple, podcasts, YouTube X.
- [51:37]
Jordi
And everywhere else that you find your podcasts.
- [51:39]
Joe Lonsdale
There are parts of me that still live in the Valley.
- [51:42]
Brad Feld
When did you know you were good? I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different and I'm out there for this chicken finger dream.
- [51:48]
Joe Lonsdale
Failure's not an option.
- [51:49]
Riley Walls
Nothing was gonna stop me from doing it.
- [51:51]
Brad Feld
It's binary.
- [51:53]
Jordi
We need a wall that we can set up here and run through.
- [51:57]
Brad Feld
It's great.
- [51:59]
Jordi
Dan in the chat says the market is not ripping. What are the white suits for today? Bitcoin is up 1.5%. It's a bright spot.
- [52:13]
Brad Feld
It's a bull market in podcast. Lack of volatility. If you were short volatility, you've done very well today. Right. Because it's not a volatile market. There's always, there's always a bull market.
- [52:22]
Jordi
I mean, it's, it's a little rough out there.
- [52:24]
Brad Feld
It's just a, it's just a fun day to put on a white suit. We just feel like we're feeling some optimism.
- [52:29]
Jordi
We're, you know, we just had some good energy in the studio this morning. We wanted to, we thought maybe if we put on the white suits, the market, yeah.
- [52:37]
Brad Feld
We'd be able to materialize a bull market. Let's make it happen. You're trying to send it anyway. Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Vanta Automate compliance. Manage risk, Improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
- [52:57]
Jordi
Did you see this post from S.H.I.E.L.D. he said, Interesting. We might see in New York Stock Exchange ipo where the underlying asset is a bunch of of paintings. Billionaire Thomas Kaplan is exploring taking his Leiden collection, 17 Rembrandts of Vermeer, etc. Worth 1.5 to 3 billion public.
- [53:19]
Brad Feld
This is the next generation of the digital asset treasury, the DATs. You have the physical asset treasury, the PATs, and these will be able to invest in art. There's been a couple companies to invest in art. There was an art platform for a while was doing that.
- [53:35]
Jordi
Yeah, I mean, I, I in general taking art highly. I mean, art is liquid, but not at. At sort of like market prices. Right. So if you want to sell art quickly, you have to sell it at a. At a massive discount.
- [53:49]
Brad Taylor
Right.
- [53:49]
Jordi
You need to be super patient. If you have a big collection, you're holding it. Especially if you have the. A bunch of works from a single artist. If you bring 10 pieces online right, at the same time, you flood the market with supply, prices will come down. So it's a very weird thing, but this makes sense. If Thomas wants to be able to get out all at once or get out, get out partially, get some liquidity. This is probably more effective than. Than selling, you know, just selling it, selling it piece by piece. And he gets to hold onto the art, too. That's the other thing.
- [54:27]
Brad Feld
Oh, yeah. I mean, he gets stored.
- [54:28]
Jordi
Probably keep some in, you know, different properties, etc.
- [54:34]
Brad Feld
Well, we have our first guest of the show, Brad Taylor, coming into the Ultron from the Restream waiting room. Brad, how are you doing?
- [54:41]
Brad Taylor
I didn't get the wardrobe notice.
- [54:43]
Brad Feld
Yeah, we normally wear white suits when the market is ripping and we're celebrating, but Sierra's ripping. But Sierra's ripping. So we're celebrating.
- [54:51]
Jordi
We're wearing them for you.
- [54:52]
Brad Feld
We're wearing them for you.
- [54:53]
Brad Taylor
Thank you for celebrating our growth. I really appreciate, Appreciate it.
- [54:56]
Brad Feld
Yeah, it's been fantastic. Give us the brief history, the founding of the company to the news just last week.
- [55:04]
Brad Taylor
Yeah. So, Ciro, we help companies build AI agents for customer experience. So think maybe it's on a website, maybe it's answering the phone. No one likes to wait on hold. Now you can chat with an AI agent. We're helping do everything from originate mortgages to help you get a better rate on your Sirius XM plan to helping, you know, when your ADT home alarm system system doesn't work, you'll now chat with an AI agent to fix it. We're a couple years old. We're the leader in this space. We kind of uniquely have run towards, I would say, larger enterprise businesses. We're trying to help companies that, candidly, it's hard for them to deploy AI because they've got lots of legacy systems. Maybe they're in a regulated business like the health insurance market or banking with. The whole hypothesis is if we can help them be successful, there's just a ton of value and leverage in that. So as you mentioned, a couple weeks ago, we announced a recent round of financing, which is, we're proud of, just a milestone on the path, but I think kind of recognizes our leadership in this space.
- [56:03]
Brad Feld
You're the chairman of OpenAI, how should I think about application layer versus model layer? I'm sure you get this all the time. There was a meme for a long time about oh, OpenAI is going to go on stage at dev day and just steamroll a bunch of companies. You seem to have good information on what they're going to steamroll and not.
- [56:20]
Jordi
Yeah, and the other thing is there was so many, you know, two years ago, so many different companies that had thriving businesses doing customer, various customer service platforms.
- [56:32]
Brad Feld
Sure.
- [56:32]
Jordi
And you know, many people would have said these companies are just going to move quickly on AI. Get this, you know, they have the customer relationships. But you clearly saw it differently and have proven that that been necessarily the case.
- [56:46]
Brad Taylor
I'll answer both. I'll start with the foundation models. My, my theory of how the market plays out is that the foundation model market will look a little bit like the infrastructure as a service market where it, you know, primarily provides technology, low level technology to a lot of applications companies. And then there's all the adjacencies, you know, like if you look at Amazon Web Services, they've got some developer tools. If you're kind of in the area like Snowflake and Databricks, there's probably an Amazon product that competes with you. The farther you go towards serving a line of business like ERP systems or CRM systems, the less likely it is that you're going to run into an infrastructure provider competing with you. I think the same is roughly true in the AI market. If you think about what's required to make AGI, it's a lot of training stuff, but it's also maybe software engineering agents. So that's probably in the, the target of these foundation model companies. The closer you get to, you know, Harvey doing legal AI or Sierra doing customer service, AI probably doesn't seem in the core of these, you know, research labs, you know, primary functions. The reason I think that the applied market is exciting not just for Sierra, obviously I'm very loyal to my own company. I don't think most companies want to buy a bag of floating point numbers and then figure out what to do with it. You know, they want to buy a solution to their problem and if they can turn on Sierra and it will answer the phone and bring down their customer service costs by 50% overnight, they're going to do that, not try to take these models and try to do it from scratch. If they can buy Harvey and get an antitrust review for 1/10 the cost, they're going to do that. I think I was talking to Toby Lucky at Shopify one time and he was joking how many people come up to him and me and like, aren't you just a database in the cloud? And you're like, yeah, I guess so. But there's a lot more to it and it turns out these workflows are valuable. So I'm really banking our company that there's a lot of value in these agents. But going to the second question on the incumbent software providers in this space, it's very hard to disrupt your own business model if you're licensing customer service software per seat and you have to make an AI agent that will actually cannibalize your own business to realize the value of this new technology. That's not just a technology problem, that's a business model transition. And the history of technology is littered with companies that saw the slow motion car wreck of their business model being hurt by a technology trend and not really being able to respond to it fast enough. I have so much respect for people like Satya who navigated those transitions, but candidly, there's a lot more companies in history that didn't navigate transitions. And I think that's candidly just a simple reason why it's hard for a lot of the incumbent companies to respond to this new technology trend.
- [59:34]
Brad Feld
When you were thinking about starting this company, how methodical were you about mapping the market? Is there a whiteboard picture of you looking at, maybe I should do erp? Maybe I was this one of a few options that you narrowed down once you studied the market, or was it something that just came to you in a fugue state or something?
- [59:58]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, it's such an interesting. You said that we actually did call up some potential customers. We started those conversations just saying, hey, if you could put us on one problem, what would it be? And by the end, we had a pretty clear picture of the available markets. I don't think any of it was particularly surprising. In some ways it's like software engineering, customer service, content marketing, all these things that come up when you think about if you have a technology that can see and understand text and voice, that can reason, what are the direct applications? But kind of to the thing that we're most excited about is not where we are today, but where it might head. And our whole theory is that your AI agent will end up more important than your website or your mobile app in the future. And as a consequence, we think the addressable opportunity here isn't just customer service, which is really compelling and interesting, but saying, you know, how can you actually drive more sales? How can you actually create a personalized concierge for your brand? I mean, just to give the math of it, if you actually have a phone call with a human being, it probably will cost on the order of $20 at least. And it really depends whether it's onshore or offshore. If you think about running a large scale consumer brand with an ARPU of $20, you know, how do you afford that? And you can't. And as a consequence, it's almost impossible, possible to talk to most consumer brands. You bring down that cost to 20 cents or even 2 cents over time. You just think about the dynamics. Let's say you're a large mobile phone carrier and you're fighting for retaining your subscribers. You're not just going to recoup cost savings in customer service. You're going to say, how many phone calls can I have with my customers so that I retain this subscriber for five more years. Think about the impact on your lifetime value of your customer. So what's exciting about this, like so many new technologies, is like the first order effect is obvious, which is saying, hey, let's reduce the cost of customer service by, you know, 50%. The second order effects are almost more exciting, which is the companies that lean into this faster will actually grow their top line faster than their competitors. So that's what's so fun about technology disruption, right, Is that, you know, you can end up sort of upending, you know, sort of the incumbent versus insurgent dynamic. @ the same time, the value proposition to the companies using Sierra is more than just cost reduction. It's saying, like, how can we actually give you a competitive edge by moving faster in this new world of AI.
- [62:20]
Jordi
How are companies actually, you know, you're, you're going and landing some of the probably just crazy logos, right? And these are, you know, massive companies with, you know, operations all over the world. How are they actually rolling it out? Are they, are they giving you specific sort of segments, regions, you're proving it out at a smaller scale or what is the actual rollout look like?
- [62:46]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, so starting. You're right. One of the things I'm most proud of is the scale of some of the companies working with us. Over half of our customers have over a billion in revenue. Over 20% have 10 billion in revenue or more, which is pretty. I'm just really proud of that. I think it shows you do not need to be a small startup to deploy AI successfully. With Cira on the rollout, it's a very Kind of a variation of what you said. Some companies start with us on a use case or two. We're going live with one of the largest health care companies in the world and actually replacing their IVR system, you know, and it was just in a handful of months to do that. So, you know, it can really, I think it's really up to the customer how assertively or aggressively they want to roll out these new technologies. And the thing that I've been most pleasantly surprised is some of the largest more well regulated companies in the world actually want to move faster. I was having a conversation with my co founder, Clay, about one of our largest clients and kind of being awe inspired about how fast they're moving. And I said, now I know why they're big. Now I know why they're successful because they're moving faster than some of their smaller competitors that we also work with. And you kind of, you really learn to respect the, I say, intentionality, assertiveness of a lot of these, like, really well run companies.
- [63:59]
Brad Feld
What's the sales process for a huge company like that? Is that like you meet the CEO at a, you know, fancy conference and start pitching or I mean, like, it feels like an advantage of like having a career like yours and the Rolodex that like, that's sort of like the unfair advantage here.
- [64:15]
Jordi
Yeah. In many ways, Sierra, doing what you guys have done in two years is incredibly impressive, yet at the same time, it's what I would expect out of the team.
- [64:25]
Brad Taylor
Right.
- [64:25]
Brad Feld
I mean, we said this with Palantir and Karp, like, he's just so fun to talk to. He's in all these interesting places and it's like, yeah, I could imagine that some big Fortune 500 company just wants to hang out with Karp and like, talk to him and then they do a deal together. Is that how it works?
- [64:38]
Brad Taylor
Well, it's funny when you said, this is what I expected. This is like why it's hard to start multiple companies. Like, yeah, of course it's going to be successful. Have you ever started a fucking company? It's hard, but.
- [64:48]
Jordi
Yeah, but I mean, it's. And I, and I, and I say that as like a, as a compliment where it's like, it's, yeah. Going from zero to a $10 billion company having, you know, this crazy, you know, list of customers is incredibly difficult. But I like when people have a lot of advantages through what they've done in their career and their network, and then they just put on an absolute masterclass. Like, it's, it's very satisfying.
- [65:12]
Brad Taylor
Well, I appreciate you saying it does all have to start with the product though, because certainly I would say, my guess is the way I think of Sierra is we have the best product, but because we have a founding team that's been there and done that, we're not a hugely risky bet. We know how to work with large companies. We're not going to show up and be learning from first principles how to engage with a large bank or a large health insurance company. And that's a unique value proposition because right now most of the incumbent technology platforms, their products don't really work. And so you really want to use a best of breed product right now. And I think our value proposition is we are a best of breed, I believe the best of breed product in this space. But we also know how to work with complex companies. We're going to show up with as many people necessary to help you be successful as opposed to just throwing a product over the wall and saying good luck to you. And so that I think I, you know, certainly our reputation helps, but at the end of the day, it's the quality of the product that really matters here. And just, you know, think about it this way. If you have 400 million phone calls a year, the difference between having an AI answer 100 or 300 million of them is probably measured, you know, and you know, at least eight or nine figures, right, in terms of like the impact on your business. And so we always start with the product and as you said, take advantage of our unique, unique advantages as a company, which fundamentally means we know how to work with you. It's sort of interesting. Like it just turns out that, you know, there's lots of different stakeholders between a business team, a technology team, compliance, understanding, just like the constraints that a company is dealing with, we just try to show up with a ton of empathy and, you know, show up. Recognizing this isn't just a technology problem. You know, it's sort of a kind of bureaucratic word, but it's a change management problem. You know, how do you get from point A to point B when your auditor and your regulator is scrutinizing everything you do? Well, we understand that we're going to help you with that problem, not just the technology problem.
- [67:10]
Brad Feld
What do you think the steady state of commerce interactions look like? Because I imagine that companies will be using AI to interface with their customers, but then customers will be using AI agents to negotiate on their behalf and select products. And without leaking too much of the OpenAI roadmap, I think we're all pretty convinced that some sort of agentic commerce thing is going to happen. I'm already seeing pop ups for links to products. When I search for things, I'm going to be able to say hey, go get me the best option, the best price. Is the future voice agent talking to another voice agent or do they just interact at some lower level, API level at some point? How does that all play out when you get agent on agent warfare?
- [67:58]
Brad Taylor
I think you're right about your intuition, but it's also as you were sort of alluding to, the future is not perfectly clear even for people in the middle of it like me. But I think in general, I think a lot of intent has already gone from search towards chat GPT, especially for the more considered the purchases, the more you're likely to use something like AI. You know, when I was traveling this past summer, I use ChatGPT to plan the entire trip. If you think about something serious like purchasing a home or you know, I, I've talked to so many friends who are using ChatGPT to figure out how's the school district in this area, what neighborhoods are good, you know, and you think about that just from a commercial standpoint, that is extremely qualified intent at the very top of the funnel and so much research has already been done there. But as you alluded to, the thing that's not happening is you're not kicking off your agent to go fulfill that transaction. It sort of stands to reason to me that that will likely happen at some point. And then the question is for a lot of our customers are sort of on the other end of that is how do you want to show up in that new world? How do you ensure that your goods and services show up in the right way? When you're engaging with an agent, how much do you want to directly engage with consumers? How much will you be able to directly engage with consumers? I don't know all the answers, but step one is make an agent. Step one is make an agent so that whatever interagent protocols emerge, you can be present and do business in that new world. And that's one of the main value propositions Sierra provides its customers is like we don't know exactly where the world's going to go, but a prerequisite is to technically be able to interoperate in that new world. I think it's going to impact different industries differently.
- [69:38]
Jordi
Do you think the form will generally die where there's certain businesses out there that sell basically sell product, let's say like a, a company that Makes aircraft. Right. If you go to their website, you're not just like browsing inventory and checking out. It's like add to cart. Yeah, you're not adding to cart. Tesla's likes to do add to cart.
- [69:58]
Brad Feld
Buttons on you know, most many companies.
- [70:01]
Jordi
Out there, let's say somebody contact sales, Aviation enthusiast wants to buy a small plane, they've got to contact sales. And then like the second you get to the form, so much like so many leads just die at the form. And something I've been doing with LLMs is just ask talking to them about like the pricing of different products. Because I don't want to go to the form and like get a sales rep to call me. I don't want to be waiting or I'm, I don't want to just get a call back at a random time. I don't really want to go through that but, but I want to kind of understand. And so it feels like the form is something that fundamentally could just potentially go away. And it's you go to a website, you talk with an agent, maybe you give them your information because you do want to hear more, you do want to talk to somebody at some point, but feels like that could be going away.
- [70:46]
Brad Taylor
I agree. I mean if you just think about qualifying a lead, which is basically what those forms are, why not ask follow up questions, why not collect enough information so that when that great salesperson does follow up, 80% of the work is done. And it's just the human touch part of it. You know, agents are already doing outbound sales, debt collections for credit cards, processing payroll for small businesses. These agents are already doing sales. And I think that you know the best salespeople, the reason why they're the best paid people most companies, because they're worth their weight in gold. But what about the median salesperson? And my guess is you can make an AI agent that's actually quite a bit stronger than most. You know, just because you're standardizing the best practices really, really fast. You can run AB tests on AI agents. It's hard to run AB tests on people. And there's so many advantages, as you said to not only just forums, but really thinking about agents as not stuck in one part of your customer lifecycle, but really managing the whole thing. Let's just take I don't know much about airline buying an airplane for a hobby pilot, but imagine this AI agent, sort of the concierge to the whole experience. So you're browsing around airplanes, you set up an appointment, you know, what if it's collecting a bunch of information before you get on site. After you. I don't do test drive an airplane, but let's say you do that, you know, afterwards. It's asking you questions, maybe helping you with financing. I think that's the future of where these things are going, which is, yeah, there's something. Whether or not a person's involved, it's a concierge helping you through the whole process.
- [72:21]
Jordi
Yeah, there's something about, you know, the consumer being proactive, engaging for information. But then, yeah, using the airplane example, let's say they don't have something in stock. You know, the agent. At what point are you guys already thinking about agents being proactive and reaching out to a customer after they already engaged? Like, I imagine a lot of the core of what you're doing today is just reacting to customer needs, inbound questions, things like that, or problems with a product, whatever it is. But then at some point or another, the agent is going active and actually going outbound. But how do you think about that?
- [72:59]
Brad Taylor
That's exactly right. I almost think of it as like Maslow's hierarchy of needs of agents. Step one is answer the phone, you know, when your customers call. Step two is can you actually get in front of customer issues? I noticed the RAMP logo on the top right. They're one of our customers and like, they have the coolest implementation of our platform. It's not only doing service, but really I love their Ask AI function and their product. It's just one of the coolest experiences. And it's not service. It's basically a conversational experience around one of the best design technology products in the world. And I think Ramp is obviously one of the best engineering teams in the world. But can every brand do that? Can every brand make their agent proactive, offer a conversational experience? I look at if you've ever visited, like Brazil or India, and you look at the impact of WhatsApp, it's like, well, can you be present there in a way you weren't before? Well, yeah, you can. What an awesome opportunity for agents. It's new channels, it's proactive, and this is really where we're trying to guide our customers. And I think kind of represents the future of our platform in a lot of ways.
- [74:11]
Brad Feld
The latest round, I think it's 350 on 10 billion. That feels low on the dilution side. How did you think about the amount of money you needed to raise sizing that? I mean, you've been part of so many interesting financings throughout your career. How'd you land on that? And what does it say about the usage of that fund, how capital intensive your business is, the state of the markets right now? Just take me through the thesis for the round.
- [74:38]
Brad Taylor
Yeah. I always think of rounds in pretty simple ways, which is, what valuation are you raising at? What do you need to fill in that valuation? So that if you need to raise another round or if you're going public that you've, you know, more than filled out that valuation with fundamental business metrics like in your revenue and growth rate and. And then you start and then you say, okay, how much capital do you need to. To reach that milestone? And so that's kind of how we reached it. And that 350 number, it's. Obviously there's a lot of precision involved, but it is a bit of an art form because you're making a lot of assumptions about the future, which is what are the capital that we need to reach the revenue scale where we can reach the next milestone in our business. So that's how we think about it. I'm pretty methodical about it. I think a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of raising too little at too high of a valuation and they end up sort of walk in sort of a zombie company just because they don't have the capital they need to reach the next milestone. But they've. But their valuation is such that they've sort of priced themselves out of the market. So that's the main sort of thing I'm paranoid about and I feel really good about how much we've raised. But more than anything too, I feel great about the investors we have around the table. Benchmarks here. Green Oaks. Neil Meta at Green Oaks is just remarkable and so love our board. And in particular, I think about who do you want to be on the journey with to get to the next milestone? And really happy with the folks we have around the table.
- [76:12]
Jordi
How are you thinking about IPO timelines? Just generally, do you think Sierra is going to be another stripe or databricks, where you just stay private forever? Because you can and it probably allows you to, whatever, take more risks, think long term, et cetera, or given that you've done your tour of duty on the public side in the past, I'm curious how you think about it.
- [76:38]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, I don't think we're. Clay and I have talked a lot about this. I think our intention is to eventually go public. There's a lot of advantages to stay in private. I also think there's a lot of advantages to having Liquidity for your employees, that access to capital. You know, I really admire the way I know the stripe founders pretty well and you know, they're in a really unique position. I respect what they're doing. I think we'll probably take the more traditional path, though. It's far enough in our future. You know, that's just more our philosophy because I think that's where you're going. We don't have reticence to do it eventually and we'll probably more take the traditional path.
- [77:18]
Jordi
That makes sense.
- [77:19]
Brad Feld
How do you think about this year of fundraising process versus what's happening at OpenAI? Is it just so much simpler to underwriting?
- [77:29]
Brad Taylor
Add a few more zeros.
- [77:30]
Brad Feld
Have you learned it doesn't feel like it's just add a couple more zeros. Like the OpenAI stuff seems deeply complicated. Is it refreshing to have more of a simpler business to underwrite, or are there at least lessons that you've ported over? Have you Learned something from OpenAI that you brought back? I'm interested.
- [77:46]
Jordi
Like C Corp. Traditional equity financing. It's pretty, it works pretty well.
- [77:53]
Brad Taylor
OpenAI's are just a really. I mean, it's a one of one business, as you all know really well. The thing that's just so different about building the AGI versus Building Apply company, they're just so different from a capital standpoint. As Sam has articulated better than I could. AGI will fundamentally in some ways be driven by compute. And so much of the capital strategy that Sam has articulated is really how can we have the best compute infrastructure and the most resources available for both training and inference, especially with these reasoning models, and meet the scale of demand there. And when you have something that capital intensive, it just changes your approach to fundraising partnerships. And I really admire what the management team of OpenAI has sort of orchestrated there, just because I think it's the company that is best positioned to essentially build the best computer, the largest computer in the world, and have the best research team. Which I think, if you're saying what are the ingredients to winning in that market? I think they've checked both those boxes in some ways. The applied AI market, I'm not sure other founders in the space would agree. I don't think we're an AI company. We're using AI to solve business problems.
- [79:13]
Jordi
Well, and that's what I, what I love about kind of the whole approach is that, you know, we talk to a lot of companies that say we're an AI agent company or we're an AI company, and then you look, you Ask a few questions and you realize like, you're building enterprise software. There's a bunch of things, there's a bunch of things that there's no shame and there's nothing bad about that. We love, we love enterprise SaaS more than anyone. But you know, if you forget that and you get fixated on, you know, we're, we're building, you know, we're just building agents. It's like you're going to. Your customers will eventually ask you for a feature set that looks like traditional software, although maybe it's a different workflow.
- [79:50]
Brad Taylor
Or you might burn 20 million of capital training a model because it makes you cool at a San Francisco cocktail party and lose sight of why your customers are hiring you to do the job that you're doing. And so to some degree, as you said, we're unashamed of being an enterprise software company. And more than that. But you know, I think the way we invest our capital is very different. Thank you.
- [80:12]
Brad Feld
Thank you.
- [80:13]
Jordi
How do you, what's your framework for understanding SaaS companies in the public markets today? What percentage do you think will be. It feels like everybody will have to transition at some point from traditional seat based pricing to value based pricing. You guys have the benefit of starting out with value based pricing and saying how many phone calls do you get, how many individual reps do you have? What percentage of that can we augment or replace? But just feels like doing that transition on a quarterly reporting cadence feels completely miserable.
- [80:53]
Brad Taylor
Yeah. My high level premise is it's easier to transition your technology than it is to transition your business business model. And it's especially if you're public. Just because if you just think about, let's say you have your, I'll just pick an ERP company and you have an enterprise license agreement for some number of seats, you know, and, or you know, ITSM or something like that. And then you say, okay, we're going to make an agent to automate 70% of what this platform does. That's easy in theory, but what happens in the next renewal, like in six months? Maybe your AI agent platform isn't quite mature enough to actually make up for the difference in lost seats. So maybe your sales rep, who's incentivized on increasing the size of that contract goes and it says you should buy both, buy the same number of seats and an AI agent and all of a sudden the CFO of that company is like, wait, I thought this was supposed to reduce our costs. What's going on here? And so I think the I think all these incumbent SaaS companies have an opportunity to come out strong in this market, but they have to really transition their business model and their technology model at the same time. And anyone who says it's easy has never been a public company CEO because it's really hard, you know, because you end up having to tell a story to your investors, to your customers, to your employees. You have to go through a trough of despair probably. And if you look at Microsoft's transition to the cloud and it was really complicated to go from Windows revenue to Azure revenue, now Satya is a hero for having done it. But at the time there's a lot of people, including me, who wrote them off and then afterwards you're like, wow, props to them for making that transition and coming out so strongly. But for every Microsoft, there's a Siebel Systems who didn't make a transition. And for those of you online, you don't know Siebel. That was the company that Salesforce beat in the transition to the cloud. And now you probably don't know their name because they didn't sort of make it through that transition despite being the market leader in the on premises software era. So I think all these companies have an opportunity and I think that it really takes leadership. I think it's very hard to do as a public company just because it's very hard for investors to sort of see through the quarterly earnings to see because you can, it's just hard. It's just like, is this company mid transition to something great or are they just dying? You know, like it's easy. It's like, and a lot of it, a lot of it is ambition and storytelling. And so it's just a complicated time in software. I think it's really going to come down to leadership, both like stakeholder management and technology leadership for companies to make this transition.
- [83:39]
Jordi
Are you getting a bunch of calls yet from AI application companies that haven't found product market fit and need to find a soft landing? Or do you think that's a few more quarters out because those companies are still well capitalized.
- [83:55]
Brad Taylor
We are, there's definitely just given the amount of revenue growth for the ones that are working, it's pretty clear the ones that aren't. There's some good teams, some good technology there too. So we try to look if it makes sense at all of them, if there's a good team that could contribute.
- [84:14]
Jordi
When did that start?
- [84:17]
Brad Taylor
About six months ago.
- [84:19]
Jordi
Okay.
- [84:20]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, I assume it will accelerate.
- [84:23]
Brad Feld
Yeah. We're having Himan from General Catalyst on The show Friday. What's your reaction to his sort of hot take? I don't know how much it was taken out of context, but this idea that triple, triple, double, double, double is kind of dead. You need to be 10xing every day. You're not interested unless you're 10xing. Is there something there where the power law is getting steeper? There are more winner take all markets, more faster growth companies, but then also just some that are triple, triple, but then going to be nothing.
- [84:56]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, so I have a complicated opinion on this one. So first I'll say the faster you grow is sometimes correlated with a lack of a moat. Just because what enabled you to grow fast might enable your future competitors to grow there as well. You see this in some social services as well. You know, you'll have these social services grow from zero to whatever million users overnight based on a social mechanic. And very few of those have ended up durable. Some of them ended up incredibly valuable, like TikTok. But there's like, you know, the cloud.
- [85:30]
Jordi
Yeah, but TikTok also spent like billions of dollars on user access acquisition.
- [85:34]
Brad Taylor
Exactly, exactly. In enterprise, I do think that growth is greater in agents, in part just because there's more value in agents than there is in software. Because you're essentially doing things that people were doing before. So you're just achieving more valuable outcomes than just slight productivity enhancement. The reason I'm cautious on it is I think growth can sometimes be artificial. So you can basically juice the numbers. And, and the question is, are you creating a durable business? And we talk a lot about in our board meetings just about first mover matters. And there's definitely a green field right now, but what matters is where you are 10 years from now. So are you creating a machine to make happy customers at scale? And so many of these businesses can grow to 50 or maybe even 100 million in ARR and plateau. And you saw this with a lot of different businesses, actually. I mean it was. And so the question is, what is your addressable market? What are your product advantages? What are your go to market motion? And can you scale to add to the next zero? Can you grow to the next order of magnitude? And the only reason I think he's a smart, I thought it was a smart point that growth has definitely accelerated in this world of agents. But as an investor in particular, you're really worried about can they get a billion in revenue, can they get 10 billion in revenue? And it turns out that growing really fast to 20 million is loosely correlated with that. It certainly means there's product market fit, but the question is, was it with a very small niche of startups or.
- [87:08]
Jordi
Selling tokens at a loss and you're subsidizing it, right?
- [87:12]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [87:13]
Brad Taylor
So I'm a huge believer in quality annual recurring revenue and very happy customers. And my view is if you can do that quickly like we have that, that's great. If you had someone growing more slowly, but it was very high quality revenue from very happy customers, I'd probably bet on them over just the fast growth rate because to me that's a more durable business over time.
- [87:33]
Jordi
Do you think just raw execution can be a moat? Because some of those things you were saying earlier, it's not like you guys have access to different LLMs that someone else in your category might not, but it's just this kind of know how of selling into the enterprise and being able to do that just with pure excellence that feels like it's separated you guys from.
- [87:57]
Brad Taylor
I'll say it's a. I think it's all the above. You want the best technology, best product, best go to market. But I think right now, because the technology is changing so fast, execution compounds over time. So if you had a great product today but you weren't executing well, you will not have the best product a year from now. So that's where I think execution is maybe the main thing we focus on because it's basically the pace of innovation in your product and the pace of reaching and making new customers successful. And we want to have the best pace because I think what we want, if I come on this show a year from now, I want to be farther ahead of our competitors than we are now. And that is all a function of execution.
- [88:36]
Jordi
Last question I have. I know we're a few minutes over, so hopefully you don't have to jump, but how, how are you thinking about the evolution of the cloud market broadly? You have companies like Oracle waking up and getting extremely aggressive. You also have a bunch of neo clouds. I'm sure all of these different players are calling you every day, hopefully not sending you a chatgpt generated cold emails. But. But I'm curious like you know where you expect to be be and what kind of vendors you expect to be using on that side over the next five, ten years.
- [89:12]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, the Oracle story is pretty incredible, isn't it? I don't like who would have predicted that.
- [89:16]
Jordi
What's your backlog if you were going to.
- [89:20]
Brad Taylor
It's amazing. What's really impressive too just because it sort of shows you sort of like a founder Driven, big view of the market. It's super impressive and I'm just like kind of, I just, I love stories like that just because it's like just I mentioned the Microsoft story where so many of us had written them off and like it's just super impressive the level of execution and clarity that Larry brings to that business, you know, broadly. I think the things that chained in cloud is just the shortage of supply of GPUs and the demand for compute. And I think that is bringing a lot of, you know, there's a geopolitical angle too. Where are these data centers built, data sovereignty, all of that as well. So I think we're in this new era of cloud infrastructure where the capex is getting larger. You're seeing the market crediting boldness in a lot of ways because if there's truly a scarcity here and I think Sam has been articulating, it's like whoever has the best infrastructure will really contribute to this world of AI and different ways. And so I do think we're definitely in a new chapter there just because it's like, you know, different players are making different bold bets. And one of the things that's been really fun to be involved with OpenAI is just seeing sort of OpenAI's influence on that as we try to pursue our mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity. And a huge part of that is related to cloud. Right? It's if you don't have the right computer, you're not going to achieve that mission.
- [90:46]
Brad Feld
Makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much. Super fun conversation, congratulations and we'll talk to you soon.
- [90:53]
Brad Taylor
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [90:54]
Jordi
Cheers.
- [90:55]
Brad Feld
Enjoy the rest of your day. Let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We are joined by Joe Lonsdale. Next we are going to welcome him from the Restream waiting room into Ultradome. Joe, how are you doing?
- [91:14]
Jordi
Look at that audio video quality.
- [91:17]
Brad Feld
Fantastic.
- [91:18]
Joe Lonsdale
How you doing?
- [91:19]
Brad Feld
You look younger than ever. You're aging in reverse. The camera is helping as well.
- [91:23]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, the young, the six young kids, I guess keeping keeping me young, running around with them. My one and a half year old was your competition for this. He was angry I wouldn't drive him in the car.
- [91:32]
Jordi
Do you have the most kids of any capital Allocator, top gp. Anybody got you beat that? You know, six is.
- [91:40]
Joe Lonsdale
I'm sure, I'm sure some have more. I probably, you know, my wife and I are pretty Traditional. So they just with her, which makes it tougher to.
- [91:46]
Brad Feld
We're gonna get there event. I wanted to ask you about this Trey Stevens post. He said he found a Palantir branded ipod Touch Generation 2 that he had custom engraved back in 2009 while digging through a box at my house. Did you get one of these? Do you know the story of this? Is this a Trey Stevens?
- [92:05]
Joe Lonsdale
I have a touch from 2009 actually. I have a lot of early Palantir kind of gear. Mostly I have these giant things we used to carry around these big computers and whatever their cases are called. Usually, usually for guns, but use them for computers. Not sure about the ipod.
- [92:20]
Brad Feld
The Pelican case.
- [92:21]
Joe Lonsdale
You probably the Pelican. There's like the really serious ones. And I, the very first time I brought to DC, we had a rental car, it was like 2005. And I went to the address we were going to stay at. And then there's this very nice black man. He's like, you boys are on the wrong part of town. And I'm like, oh, what's this Northwest Southwest thing? You know, if you know dc.
- [92:41]
Brad Feld
What was it like early in the Palantir days? Gary Tan tells the story about you're not selling Holiday Inn software. You gotta stay at Four Seasons. I forget exactly what hotel chains he mentioned. Is that apocryphal? Is that true? When you traveled for business, would you stay at the top tier place?
- [92:59]
Joe Lonsdale
I think the very top of the company would stay at like relatively nice places. We weren't upgrading to the nice rooms, but there is probably like, like six, $700 versus $200 a night sort of thing. Which, you know, in retrospect, I think there's multiple ways of running a company. I do think when you're meeting important people, you had to make sure you're not meeting them at the holiday. And that would probably not be a good idea for trying to network with very top people in these. In these contexts. So I think that's. Listen, I think a lot of people waste too much money when they're starting companies. So I don't want to set a bad example. I was actually like a top trader at Peter's fund and I like brought on my friends to like start this with me because a lot of them I brought onto the, to the hedge fund and it turns out they didn't really like finance. And so we end building out this company and the fund part of our comp was you can basically spend whatever money you want if you're one of the top guys there. So it was like a very kind of bad place for me to start from in terms of being spoiled already. We have to be honest here.
- [93:52]
Brad Feld
Thank you for being honest.
- [93:55]
Jordi
Where should we start? There's a bunch of stuff.
- [93:57]
Brad Feld
I mean we were just talking to Brett Taylor about this. Hammond over at General Catalyst was saying that like the world has changed. Triple, triple, double, double, double for revenue growth is no longer interesting. The only thing that's interesting is 10xing revenue every year. Something crazy. The power law is getting steeper. I would love your take on just what it takes to be interesting as a startup in the era of AI, where if you are in the right market or you're indexed to the right thing or maybe you're selling tokens at a discount, you can get to a crazy revenue run rate very, very fast. What are you watching out for? What are you optimistic about? How does all that play out?
- [94:36]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean, listen, it's definitely a very different world right now because there's so many new possibilities. I think we were looking at something. I want to out the person because I'm not doing it, but I was looking at something that was like going 0 to 5 this year and I thought could easily have gone to at least 15 or 20, if not more next year. But I thought the team was kind of like a BB plus and it wasn't like the very, very best people. And that's just insane by the way that those two things combined. You can grow that fast with something that was like maybe not the very best people having trouble hiring. And I mean the bar is just a lot higher right now.
- [95:07]
Jordi
And by the way, and to be clear that that round will probably get done at. Oh yeah, like probably 100 million at least.
- [95:13]
Joe Lonsdale
Exactly. And, and I'm pretty sure it will. And it's like, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's like it also raises the bar for everything else. We were looking at this really cool thing in bioinfrastructure that could be very important for the future of humanity and for what it could do in the bio world. And it's just going to take three or four years and these things in bio as you know, are just hard. And, and it's like, you know what, even though this is so important, like we, we have to, on the, on the margin, you have to be in like the green fields right now with the very, very top AI teams are just so far ahead of everyone. So you know, I do think there's like, I mean what Hamas Says to me, it's not as much about, like, exactly the metrics, I think. I think some people, like, live in metrics, and they should. And my. One of my partners does too. And, you know, my view tends to be like, who are the very best talent in the world? Who has the very best cultures? I mean, you see something like cognition with, you know, 20 gold medal winners or whatever. Scott used to work for me to add a part after winning, you know, programming, you know, competition globally three times in a row. And like, like, like, obviously that's like the extreme. But the extreme works in AI, right? It's like. So I think for me, it's more about, like, what is the very best talent. And then let's build something that no one else can build. And of course, yes, if it works, it's gonna. It's gonna grow insane speeds.
- [96:21]
Brad Feld
Tell me the story of finding Scott, identifying him, recruiting him. It seems like one of the greatest talent acquisitions of all time. You've developed a business relationship over a long time now. How did you even think to back him early, work with him early, any of that?
- [96:40]
Joe Lonsdale
I mean, I mean, to be honest. To be honest, like, Scott is a really special and amazing person. But, you know, I hired most of the first 200 people at Palantir Addepar, had eight kind of gold medal winners along with Scott, who came in at the same time with my friend. Vlad Novikoski was helping me at the time. Amazing guy as well. Just give away all my secrets here. People are gonna go get his help now, but, you know, gotta hide some of these names from you guys. This is dangerous.
- [97:05]
Jordi
But.
- [97:05]
Joe Lonsdale
But, you know, you know, and then. But Scott was one of eight that year, and I think another one of them was Alex from Scale, and he was an intern there too. And. And, you know, it was actually very funny. I mean, both. Both amazing people, I think. I think Alex left in a way where we didn't stay as close in. Scott left way where he did stay a little bit closer. But even Scott, I think he was running around the world, and I'd been in touch. I actually invested in his new thing after that, which was not cognition, just a little bit, because I thought was a terrible idea. By the way, this is a very good idea. When you have the smartest people in the world, you should invest in their terrible ideas. Just as a sidebar, we went back to 2022, and we met these people who were doing something really dumb, and we kind of want to give money anyway, and we didn't. It was out of MIT and it ended up pivoting into cursor. There's other people. There's another one where it's like, I have this chain from yesterday where Coley, my partner, is, like, forwards it to me, and it's like, these guys are really good. They're raising 7 million, like, 40 posts. It's 2022. And I'm like, oh, God. It's just. We all think it's a dumb idea. I'm like, we can't. We can't keep doing dumb ideas, guys. And it turns out they pivoted and they're raising a 5 billion post right now. I'm like, oh, God. We just need to, like, I just need to give smart people money. It's just like. It's just like, what you have to do is so annoying.
- [98:11]
Jordi
But, yeah, there's. There's like the bell curve. Curve. It's like, you know, I'm one and just give smart people money on the other end. Give smart people money. And in the middle, it's like, oh, what's the idea?
- [98:22]
Brad Feld
What's the attraction? Yeah, exactly.
- [98:25]
Joe Lonsdale
Just like, even though it's, like, actually actively a bad idea, like, give them money. And by the way, even the thing that was a bad idea, like, let's be using the Vlad now. Or Vlad's in charge now that. And he's pivoted to something that's working. It's probably. It's also a unicorn, so it's like they figured it out. So it isn't the same. Like, it's just all about talent. And so I lost Austin touch with Scott a little bit, and I got back in touch with him. Unfortunately, I've been in the last three rounds of cognition. I wish. I wish I'd stayed as his best friend. It's hard to keep in touch with all the smart people you admire flying around when we're busy. But it's. He's someone I really enjoyed getting to know, and he's someone. He's really grown as a leader, more than I expected. Sometimes, you know, people when they're like, 18, 19, 20, 21, and. And you get one impression of them and you're so impressed. But. But, like, was not, like, the leader personality, and now he's just such a. Like a. A fierce leader personality. Plus, plus, you know, the global champion thing. So that's pretty amazing. He's doing. He's doing good work.
- [99:12]
Brad Feld
Yeah. We read a Wall Street Journal article about the latest IMO gold medalists, and I was surprised because I was texting with a GP at a big fund and they were not tracking it. They were not. Our joke on the show was like every single one of these kids mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article that beat both DeepMind and OpenAI and got the full score on the IMO, they're going to be getting term sheets but people weren't tracking it as closely.
- [99:37]
Jordi
Yeah, it seems like when you were hiring, you know, these IMO winning folks back with Add a Par and maybe a Palantir. The meta at the time was like, you want to invest in the kid who's like sleeping on a mattress on their floor? Like sleeping in a closet in San Francisco maybe was like somewhat of a different track back then, even though you can see it becoming consensus now because yeah, Scott has, you know, shown.
- [100:05]
Joe Lonsdale
No, it's, it's Scott and Alex and a few others. But listen, I don't think there's too much alpha left in that in the sense that like when you have all these people at OpenAI and Anthropic and they've raised infinite amounts of money, like, you know, it was a problem for me in Palantir in 2008, 2009 when Meta and Google doesn't even call met at the time, started giving like 100k bonuses to these kids out of the top schools because we had like a monopoly on, on just the playbook for the top 20 universities and they started just like giving like 100k bonus. That's insane. And like now it's literally like 100 times that for these other. I mean there's, there is some alpha. I'm not gonna tell you all my secrets in the show unless I require to you tell me. I don't know.
- [100:46]
Brad Feld
Oh, you are required.
- [100:47]
Joe Lonsdale
But it's like, but it's like, it's.
- [100:49]
Jordi
Like I don't think if you want to tell every investor, yeah.
- [100:54]
Brad Feld
You can text us after the fact the real secrets and we'll keep it private.
- [100:59]
Jordi
How are you thinking about. You've obviously had numerous plays in traditional enterprise software. It feels like a lot of public SaaS today has this challenge of transitioning from the traditional seat based model to something more like Palantir, the value based pricing. How are you thinking? Think you know? Or are you just bearish on public SaaS broadly? Do you think some of them are going to be able to transition? Brett Taylor just said it's easier to, you know, do a transition, your tech, your business model than your business model.
- [101:33]
Brad Feld
Especially in the public markets.
- [101:35]
Joe Lonsdale
It's, it's so funny to live in this world because it's like I woke up in opposite land where I was like, people just beat the out of me for like a decade for doing the wrong thing, the wrong model. And suddenly, suddenly how could everyone do that model? That's great. I guess I don't, I don't actually know if everyone needs to do a change in model overall. I guess I think the more interesting question is like which of these SaaS companies owns important infrastructure and workflows that are juxtaposed to other value they can capture with AI and then also still has a technical culture to do that. So this is like a motion add, a par I'm working on really hard. As an example, I started add a part 15 years ago. It has over $8 trillion in the platform. The core infrastructure business is still growing. Infrastructure SaaS business is still growing at like, you know, 25 plus percent, just that core. And there's all these things on top of it starting to grow because it just touches everything when it provides value for wealth managers. And so I think to get that business growing 40 or even 50% potentially it has to like build really strong AI teams and workflows that take advantage of where it is. And I think there's going to be a bunch of SaaS companies that do figure this out in the next few years and those are going to be really valuable companies. And then the ones that don't figure it out at all, there's probably some danger that they even lose the motive of their core thing to begin with because it's going to be too easy to copy or something if they're not, if they're not like scaling it. So, so, so I, I think, I again think it's like a power law thing where some of these are actually worth a lot more and then most of them don't have the talent to do it.
- [102:59]
Brad Feld
Yeah, it's been fascinating watching the, the narrative shift from the foundation model. Companies are going to eat everything to the foundation model is going to commoditize. There'll be a couple application layer companies to the idea that AI would be sustaining in enterprise SaaS because you actually, even if you have a semi technical culture, you don't need to train a foundation model. You can just Go grab an OpenAI API and implement that. But there's this business model tension now and if you're stuck in your business model, there's going to be a lot of startups that are counter positioning against you and you're going to be kind of screwed.
- [103:32]
Joe Lonsdale
It's interesting Because I do think if you own the customer really well, you could add these things much more easily. But you're going to have to go faster. The startups are going to eat it away. There's so many areas where we're kind of.
- [103:40]
Brad Feld
Or the system of record or something sort of database, some sort of relationship. Right.
- [103:44]
Joe Lonsdale
Like Socotra is a company I'm in. It's like a great system of record for the insurance space and it's. It took a long time to build a bunch of Palantir talent. They're really coming into their own system of record now, which is very slow. And then they're trying to add the AI in before all the new AI things that people are funding. And it's, it's. I think it's pretty interesting. I think the system of record has a very good chance of winning. But that's a question.
- [104:03]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [104:04]
Jordi
How are you thinking about macro broadly? I feel like everybody, I mean every asset, all time highs, gold, bitcoin.
- [104:14]
Joe Lonsdale
I like the meme. I like the meme that says printer is coming with. He's dressed up as Lord Stark of the North.
- [104:23]
Jordi
Yeah. But for your angle, it's probably generally better use of your time to think about the opportunities at the early stage today you could incubate a company, you could fund a company. What is the way?
- [104:34]
Joe Lonsdale
I'm incubating a lot. Listen, I started incubating a lot more in 2021 partially because I was just so annoyed that everything was like insanely unreasonably expensive.
- [104:42]
Jordi
And you kind of have a monopoly on the first couple rounds. Right? Is the.
- [104:46]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, we probably were too generous letting friends in. I'm always just like, I have these business friends who are just like much more hardcore than me and just like, just like very sharp elbows and kind of even a little bit nasty. And like I'm, I'm. I tend to like, just like to everyone around me to make money. So I probably should have taken just only myself the first two rounds. That's especially Saronic. I should have done that. But whatever. We still, we own plenty of it.
- [105:04]
Brad Feld
It.
- [105:05]
Joe Lonsdale
It's fun to start things that are important for the country and that win and we make enough money for everyone. But no, we, we do do the whole like big first round ourselves now just because that's the right thing to do for the fund and then like do a lot of the second round. And listen, I think building is still the. I mean even right now. Today you guys tell me I'm seeing AI rounds where like I'm really happy if I get 15% in a series A of a really hot AI company right now. I think I got 16% something the other day by overpaying and I think it was the right thing to do. And it's like, but, but I mean I've seen a lot of things where I get 5% and I'm or 6%.
- [105:36]
Brad Feld
We just talked to Brad Taylor. He raised 350 million. A 10 billion dollar valuation, like that's not a lot of dilution. It's going to be hard to build a huge position in that company and that's a one year old company like and these are happening all the time. I mean he's special but yeah, it's.
- [105:49]
Joe Lonsdale
Still a. Yeah, there's a special. The specialist ones, I mean I only have 2 or 3%. I'm really happy. Yeah, I think they could be 100 billion dollar companies.
- [105:56]
Brad Feld
Yeah, exactly.
- [105:56]
Joe Lonsdale
It's very weird. It's different than it was.
- [105:58]
Brad Feld
Talk to me about the early stage startup market in Texas. Obviously you were in San Francisco for a long time. Buddies with Gary Tan, coworkers. At some point Gary's leading a revitalization of Y Combinator. Is there something adjacent like if I wanted to go talk to 50 young people building startups the next up in Texas, where would I go? Who would I be talking to?
- [106:25]
Joe Lonsdale
To so, and, and I've been fighting for California to fix itself for a long time. Gary's an old friend obviously from fraternity days through Palantir and I think he's come more to my point of view on these things which I really appreciate. He's doing a good job. We used to argue a lot, you know it's, yeah, there's a lot of history there. Gary's, Gary's crushing it. The, the thing about Texas, there's a few things I, I'd say if you want to build like, like the very top AI startup in the cloud application layer model, whatever, like doing something really hard new there, you probably should be in San Francisco today like that. That's just where the talent is. It's a very strong network effect. I would love it if it wasn't but it is and it's there and that's it. So, so why, what do you do in Texas? Well, I think we have, we, like I mentioned Soronic earlier. I think if you're building in the land of atoms, if you're manufacturing, I think that's probably the most important company in the country for the US Navy as well as doing very hard things in Robotics very hard things in software around it as applies to defense. We do have like you know, 10 or 15 of the very best AI software people for that there. So I think what you're seeing in Texas is it's a really good place to manufacture. You have a lot of the best people like boring company, a lot of top SpaceX talent, others are coming out here. I think you have a lot of things that go really deep in healthcare here. Obviously MD Anderson in Texas is one of probably the best cancer center in the country alongside Memorial Sloan in New York. And you have just a lot of other really deep kind of healthcare research, healthcare services groups, healthcare services. There's multiple multi billion dollar new companies in healthcare here there. So and, and I do think like, like when I was talking Reid Hoffman I was trolling because we have different politics like where do you test your like self driving trucks? And of course he tests them in Texas. I mean if you're trying to like do things. Yeah, you know, if I'm trying to like automate. One of our companies that I'm really bullish on is a bunch of ex Waymo guys and they're automating construction with excavators and they're going to like automatically run all sorts of construction and quarries and other things. And of course they're doing it in Texas. So, so Texas is just like a great center for industry, for building things in the real world, for robotics talent, for defense talent, for healthcare talent. It's, it's, it has great AI talent but it's not going to compete with like the next new AI models in San Francisco. San Francisco right now is just, it's just obviously an awesome, awesome place for investing for that type of stuff.
- [108:40]
Brad Feld
My current understanding of the startup micro worlds is that you're still probably going to be doing a road show on Sandhill Road or in San Francisco when you're later stage you're going to be talking to crossover funds in New York. You're going to be in D.C. if there's a lobbying component. But then you're going to need to build your company wherever makes sense. And for certain industries Texas makes a ton of sense.
- [109:05]
Joe Lonsdale
And yeah for, for a lot of things in the real world, a lot of things in healthcare, Texas is by far the best place to do it. It's, it's, it's, it's. Listen, I love you can go to the government. It's not like they agree with me on everything but you can go to them and you can talk and they're reasonable and they respect you and you go back and forth and you don't have to be Republican or Democrat to do it by the way. Like they actually, it's like you can't. They actually care about business succeeding. It's very cool. It's like it's a new idea to me to have a government that has a groups like wow you, how do we help business succeed? It's really great. And then you can get things done and it's reasonable. So I definitely like building things here.
- [109:36]
Jordi
Jordy, without giving away too much alpha or feel people, feel free to put people down. What do you think is the most under, under hyped trend adventure right now? Obviously AI is just drowning everything out, but feels like could be at the, you know, beginnings of a new robotics wave. But how are you seeing, seeing it?
- [109:57]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, I'm really interested you say robotics. I'm really interested in the stuff going on in the real world using AI, which I think is like a whole new area that it's still early. But I think you're gonna. I think it's just like a much bigger part of the economy than people realize. So for example, if you can do a certain part of construction automated, with bedrock, like I think people don't understand, like that means you can run a quarry better and there's $100 billion of quarries and if you can make Corey's have higher cash flow, that's worth like, like it's worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean it's just like, and there's like, there's like so many things like this where the real like the real economy is like 85% of the capital and that's all about to be transformed. And I think people underestimate like how much we're going to need in credit to do that. How much just like, just like, just like how much big stuff's going to happen that you can create in the economy in the2030s there. So you know, even stuff like boring company and like, and like automating that and making it much, much, much better is obviously using modern AI and other modern technology as they iterate with engineers on it. And it's just really impressive how much cheaper you could do things, how much better you could do things. So, so I think that's underhyped and under misunderstood just because it's maybe takes a couple years longer to really get out there and start spreading quickly. But I think, I think it's just like much bigger than people realize and that's one of My favorite areas, I guess the other one, you know, I think in general people spend too much time on like the super giant companies, like people call them the infinity stories or the things that could be worth trillions. And I talked to some of my friends who are running very big funds and they're really only interested in something that could be worth trillions of dollars and have all the top talent. And it's, it's almost like I think, I think one of them is a good guy. But he said to me, I want to be in the room with the powerful people doing the most important things. And I think there's less like an instinct of a lot of our top investors right now. And actually I think there's going to be literally like a thousand like five to fifty billion dollars companies and like so many niche application areas that do need to build out the workflow. Do you need you to build out the operations and do you need to kind of go after the different services of the economy?
- [111:50]
Jordi
Yeah. What about it? It feels like, you know, when you look at like Palantir, Addepar, Open Gov, it feels like you've had a lot of success with companies that were very under, you know, not didn't have a ton of like crazy hype and, and did the kind of like behind the scenes heavy lifting to get to the point where you could have a massive outcome or be really critical to an industry. Are you, do you think there's not enough of that? Like, it feels like a lot of every company gets hyped, you know, incredibly quickly now if they're talent dense. And are you still like trying to find opportunities where you can just kind of quietly build in a category for four or five years?
- [112:30]
Joe Lonsdale
Yeah, I mean, I think I am building a bunch of stuff that's not really that hyped right now. That's using AI that, that's, that's going to change these different categories. And there's this like, when you look at the talent out of Palantir, it's a lot like the talent out of PayPal, except on a bigger scale in a lot of ways because Palantir had many more years to compound with very top talent. And so you have things like, and just like random things like, like candid is just like probably do. I don't know. They want me to give their numbers on public on this show, I guess. But it's like they're doing, they're doing healthy billing. They're growing really fast. They're going to do, you know, they're going to get into the billions of revenue like within the next few years probably. And, and, and it's just like, just like I guess, you know, it's a $280 billion space and there's not that much hype around it. And it's just like wow, this is like this could be absolutely, this could be like a hundred billion dollar company in the early 2000-30s and, and almost no one will have heard of it. And it's like there's just so much stuff like that right now, which is pretty fun. So I mean I, I, I, I think I'm pretty bad at hype. I think Palantir eventually got hyped like despite being us being bad at it.
- [113:27]
Jordi
Which is how people, well yeah, I'd say like surrounds an example of something that you know, got a ton of hype, ton of capital, a ton of attention really quickly.
- [113:35]
Joe Lonsdale
That, that, that, that, that did I, I, I think we did get a lot of the right talent and we're kind of the right place, right time where there's no one else who was doing this for the Navy and had like, and no one else who had like that density of, of talent and operation. Like Dino's just such an amazing and such a fast CEO and he brought in kind of other co founders who are also really top people. So I think like Andrew, they just had so many of the best people, right place, right time, going hard. So I guess that got hyped earlier and I would have expected that's fair but, but most of the things I'm doing are not like that.
- [114:03]
Jordi
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [114:04]
Brad Feld
Do you think there's any positive knock on effects of the insane capex that's going into the AI foundation model world? Like we saw Sam Allman say he's going to build 10 gigawatts, Mark Zuckerberg saying he's doing a gigawatt. Elon just did Colossus 2. It's a gigawatt. And the interesting thing to me is like, like this is in some ways like the, like you know, Saranic, Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, like those are American dynamism companies. But if we're talking about reindustrialization and just making big things in America, doing stuff that requires government approval, like Elon's like Colossus 2 across three different states, like that feels like that unblocks some crazy stuff and then it's gonna be easier to work on healthcare or work on automated trucking.
- [114:49]
Joe Lonsdale
This is a very, this is very, very Good. No, you're 100% right. Whether or not it's a bubble and whether or not they should be investing this much money, I'm not even going to comment on because I think it's just like, really good for America.
- [115:02]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [115:03]
Joe Lonsdale
That they are, like, practicing building these things at this scale. You're 100% right. They have to fix some of the permitting stuff. They have to create all this infrastructure we can use now for advanced manufacturing. We can use the advancements to make things cheaper to do at scale for building related things in America. We're going to build a ton of stuff on top of this. I mean, for me, I just love it because. Because, you know, I talk about the different levels of AI investing where it's like, zero is energy infrastructure, one is chips, two is data centers, three is the models four software infrastructure, five is apps and services. And like, I'm mostly doing things at five and some four. But by people doing all those stuff at the bottom with insane amounts of money, that makes my life very easy. It makes everyone else's life easy too. So this is great for America.
- [115:40]
Brad Feld
Yeah. For so long we've heard like, oh, America, we can't respond to DJI GoPro got roasted. Oh, we can't respond a unit tree. Maybe Elon will figure it out. And it's like, I feel like we're getting close to like, no, you can actually marshal $10 billion of capital, set up a massive facility in a couple months and get approvals and do the thing that you need to do to build a ton of stuff in America.
- [116:03]
Joe Lonsdale
I think. I think this is really, really good. I'd love to see a wave like this for bio totally decade as well. Because right now our bio regulatory apparatus is completely effed up. There's been some really strong hit pieces in the Journal recently or some huge messes there, but it's the same sort of thing where if you could, like, take this energy, apply it to that infrastructure and, you know, hopefully apply some breakthroughs we're going to see there to own it. Like, like, but the fact that America can still do this, these companies can still do this, it's. It's awesome and it makes us very bullish.
- [116:29]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [116:30]
Jordi
You had a pretty viral post yesterday responding to Nick Huber who was taking. Taking shots at the great citizens of Austin. He's going after Austin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And it turns out the photo was from like, after school ended, so very clearly.
- [116:47]
Joe Lonsdale
I see. I could totally tell it was a joke photo.
- [116:49]
Jordi
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. But I wanted to ask something you said sorry, Nick. Many, but many of these people relaxing in the nice weather in our hometown are the spouses, mistresses and children. Where did, where did you, where did.
- [117:00]
Brad Feld
You get number two?
- [117:01]
Jordi
Number two there. Where did that come from?
- [117:03]
Joe Lonsdale
He was trying to, his whole post was like, these people are lazy. I'm going to outsource them for $5 an hour jobs to the Philippines. And, and it was like an anti American kind of like negative post. And then so my clap back is actually our U. S. Employees are, are so wealthy and so successful and I built things so much bigger than anything you're doing that they can afford to have their families relaxing and, and mistresses. The joke, the joke of mistresses is they're so wealthy that maybe they have mistresses. They're just relaxing in the sun while they're working because they're creating so much wealth. We don't need to outsource. Forced to throw rolled slop. We can, we can have great wealth in this country and great success and don't make fun of my city. So it was, it was obviously a joke, but some people, some people got really sensitive about that.
- [117:45]
Brad Feld
So you're masterful poster.
- [117:47]
Jordi
Yeah. You used his own tricks against you.
- [117:49]
Brad Feld
Did you did I was a strong ratio.
- [117:52]
Joe Lonsdale
I appreciate was like this is so. It's, it's a Jewish new year and I was like stepping out of the synagogue service and I was just like, I probably should have stayed in synagogue.
- [118:02]
Jordi
And been on my phone and slipped it on my phone.
- [118:04]
Joe Lonsdale
So it's dangerous when you give me like, like a little bit too much free time on a day is dangerous.
- [118:08]
Brad Taylor
Oh yeah.
- [118:10]
Brad Feld
Well, never stop posting. Never log off. Joe, we enjoy your posting. We have enjoyed your appearance. Thank you.
- [118:16]
Jordi
Yeah, I would actually like, I think x would like it broadly if every time Nick Huber posted you just quoted it and dumped on him because he's always leaving something open.
- [118:25]
Brad Feld
Oh yeah.
- [118:26]
Joe Lonsdale
I worry I hurt him because he like has these really angry replies and I was, I, I thought it was kind of a joke slap back. But I think he was like pretty offended. So if he's listening, I, I didn't mean to be offensive. I appreciate his hustle porn even though I disagree with attacking America.
- [118:39]
Brad Feld
He knows what he's doing. He's getting in the arena. It's purely just he's rolling around in the mud. He's going to get a little dirty.
- [118:45]
Brad Taylor
It's going to happen.
- [118:46]
Brad Feld
But thank you so much for taking the time.
- [118:48]
Jordi
Come back on anytime.
- [118:50]
Brad Feld
Good. Have fun hanging with your kids. We'll talk to you soon, Joe. All right, have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Julius AI. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert at Level Insights, Insight. Loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton BCG. Zapier. I got the name right this time. Did you see the Carhartt jacket that Turner Novak says if a VC shows up to the meeting wearing this, you should sign the term sheet immediately? Is this a callback? Didn't Bain Capital do a Carhartt collab for Merch? And they got some backlash from them allegations VCs keep it in the. I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting on a suit. You saw Joe Lonsdale just came on the show in a beautiful suit. Nothing wrong with the suit. The, the. What's the. What's the Patagonia Vast? That's very iconic VC attire. You throw on the. This looks like Han Solo like this. This, this jacket looks like something Han Solo would wear. It looks good, though. Anyway, in other news, YouTube restored some, some suspended accounts. Ben Thompson has been breaking it down. He said that he gave kudos to the information for their headline, which is YouTube to reallow accounts banned over COVID 19 integrity election violations. And Ben says this stands in marked contrast to other headlines that characterize it as people who spread Covid misinformation. And he's quoting the Verge on that case. And he says it's true that there was some misinformation, but there's no question that not just legitimate, but in retrospect, true content was censored and its creators kicked off the platform. Google, in that letter to Jordan, who is a Republican legislator, said that they placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration. Google is saying the Biden administration twisted their arm. And so this obviously goes back to the discussion about what happening with Jimmy Kimmel. What is the role of the government in free speech? I think it's that the government shouldn't be involved at all, actually, and that no government should be involved in this stuff. There's been debate over what level of involved.
- [121:06]
Jordi
Find one person that didn't spread at least a little misinformation during that era. Right. Whether you're government, whether you're some schizos, conspiracy theorists.
- [121:16]
Brad Feld
Right.
- [121:16]
Jordi
Everybody was.
- [121:17]
Brad Feld
And that's what makes America great, is that during the COVID era, we were suffering through the same pandemic that China was suffering through, but we supposedly had free speech and so we could talk about it and throw out crazy ideas. And pitch all sorts of different solutions and debate them in the great online marketplace of ideas. And so this seems like a positive shift. You know, more, more speech is probably better. More free speech is probably better. Ben says his concern on strutechery is more narrow, and that is how tech companies should have approached challenges like these over the past years and how he hopes they approach them in the future. And so he says Google and YouTube were obviously not the only tech companies under pressure during the COVID era. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing a year ago. Another was Spotify and Joe Rogan, which Ben wrote about at the time. And he got a lot of angry responses to his take on how Spotify should have handled the Joe Rogan situation and the pressure on Joe Rogan during the COVID pandemic. And Ben says, but I think in the revelations of the intervening years, and I might add, a lot of those headlines I complained about above prove my point. And most disturbingly, we have just this month seen some of the most discouraging and devastating consequences of losing the cultural value of free speech. Still, that wasn't the part of that update. Rather, I was writing directly to Ek and other tech CEOs declaring an adherence to free speech was not a get out of jail free card in terms of avoiding criticism for content hosted on your platform. And in that light, today I don't have so much advice as I have an exhortation. Tech platforms need to lead the way in reestablishing the cultural mores around free speech, and not just to get their get out of jail free card back. Tech is dominant culturally in a way it wasn't when the cultural mores around free speech were established, of course, centuries ago. And the most generous interpretation of their actions over the last decade is that they were afraid to assert their power, bowing to the wishes of the loudest voices in the media and in their own companies. In fact, the best way to avoid partisanship is to be the natural arbiter of all the platforms say they want to be is to decline to take positions on all issues but one the importance of free expression. That is the key enabler of finding a path forward on all those other issues and is the foundation of a free society. That, in a nutshell, has been Stratecheri's approach to politics and it has served me well. I think it would scale just as well to the largest companies in the world, he says. Take a page out of my book. It's working for me.
- [123:56]
Jordi
Page out of the First Amendment, page.
- [123:58]
Brad Feld
Out of the First Amendment, potentially the first page, the first page of the, of the list of amendments.
- [124:03]
Jordi
Did you see this post from Lachlan Phillips? He said, I did break it down. This is. Coogan thought the most toxic trait is the belief that instead of jailing Elizabeth Holmes, she should have been placed. She should have. We should have placed her under YC arrest under the watchful supervision of Gary Tan and forced her to rebuild and rebuild her device over and over again like Iron man for the next 11 years or until she gets it working.
- [124:29]
Brad Feld
I love it.
- [124:30]
Jordi
And this is what you wanted to see instead of the kind of shitposting that she's doing. It'd be great if she was like, guys, I'm figuring out kind of what went wrong before. Here's a more narrow solution that we could kind of create.
- [124:46]
Brad Feld
Yes. I mean it doesn't even need to be. I mean, I understand that from prison you are not going to be able to build a device that tests your blood. Like she's just not gonna have the equipment for that. But she could be reading papers, she could be reading the analysis and giving thoughts that over time could look very good. Like, you see it today with the news of Donald Trump and RFK are talking about Tylenol. That's being hotly debated. The administration is taking one position. Different media figures and health experts are taking different positions. I'm sure Andrew Huberman will comment it on. Comment on it at some point. Right. But like she has the opportunity to read all the research, comment on it and then we will see in a year or two or maybe more how those predictions panned out. And that's what we've been seeing with Martin Shkreli, where he has made a bunch of bets on. He's very bearish on quantum computing right now. We'll see what happens. We just get to wait and we will remember, wow, he was correct about his bear call on quantum computing. And so that updates us to think that he is an interesting thinker on the valuation of new technology companies. Right. Whereas right now she's kind of just like leaning into this character of oh wow, she's posting from prison. I think that novelty will wear off. I think that novelty will wear off and we'll want to see something more meaningful.
- [126:08]
Jordi
I mean, it's definitely broadly changed people's like, general feelings towards her, for sure. So for sure.
- [126:14]
Brad Feld
Anyway. Fall generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
- [126:26]
Jordi
Head over to tvpn.com sounds which is.
- [126:30]
Brad Feld
Brought to you by Fall Printer is coming. Amit is investing rates from Besant. We are going into an easing cycle and we'll see a massive decrease in mortgage rates. Powell should have signaled 100 to 150 basis points of cuts, not just 75 points. We'll begin Fed candidate interviews next week. Looking for someone with an open mind.
- [126:52]
Jordi
Looking for someone with an open mind.
- [126:53]
Brad Feld
Open mind to low interest rates to what we want potentially. We'll see. I would love to see mortgage rates come down. I would love to see to see the cost of housing come down. I still feel like the opportunity is probably in just building more housing. Building a lot more.
- [127:07]
Jordi
But love when the rates are low, hate when they're high.
- [127:10]
Brad Feld
Certainly helps. But of course that tenure isn't really behaving. You got to whip it into shape.
- [127:18]
Jordi
Jim Cramer with that tenure better start behaving.
- [127:22]
Brad Feld
That's great. There is a fantastic profile on Jim Cramer in the news today. We should take a gander through this because it's a fun one. This was brought to my attention from let me find it from Joe Wiesenthal. He says great profiling Business insider of a guy who was on the Odd Lots podcast who wakes up at insane hours every day to cover the markets. Did you see this?
- [127:48]
Jordi
I did not.
- [127:49]
Brad Feld
Jim Cramer is a busy man. The Mad Money host known for his emphatic delivery and bold stock calls on the air gave a rundown of his hectic schedule when speaking on Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast last Monday. Here were the highlights of his routine and get ready to be mogged. Jordy. He wakes up. He kicks off his day at 3:15am 3:15am do you know what time he goes to bed?
- [128:12]
Jordi
6:11Pm What?
- [128:14]
Brad Feld
He gets four hours of sleep a night.
- [128:17]
Jordi
Just doesn't need to sleep, does he nap?
- [128:20]
Brad Feld
There's no competing with this guy. This is insane. I I, I like we try so hard. I feel like we do a really good job but we're putting up eight hours of sleep a night. How did you sleep last night? Go to 8sleep.com get a T. Get a pod 5 ultra 30 night risk free trial.
- [128:38]
Jordi
I wish that I could.
- [128:38]
Brad Feld
I got a 96 last night but I slept for seven hours and 41 minutes. That's about four hours more than Jim Cramer slept.
- [128:45]
Jordi
I got a 97 hours 23 minutes.
- [128:46]
Brad Feld
Oh, I win again.
- [128:48]
Jordi
You win again. Yeah, I just guess I gotta go to bed.
- [128:52]
Brad Feld
So Kramer wakes up at 3:15am the first 45 minutes of his day are on quote, a tight schedule due to his 4am workout. We're getting into the gym at 6:30 at best. He's getting in two and a half hours ahead of us and he's on east coast time. This man lives in the future compared to us. It's remarkable before the hour. He brushes up on the market by perusing the financial time, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and cnbc. I get two of those done. He's doing six. Okay, he's ahead of me there. Kramer also said he sifts through stock research in his inbox, combing through about 700 emails a day. That's remarkable. Amazing. I read everything I think is relevant. I'm looking for something to say. I have a memo that comes out 10 things I'm looking at. I do one thing, I'm looking at, he does 10. I try and just do the current thing and he's got 10 of them. He's an absolute beast. Kramer said referring to his weekday morning newsletter for CNBC's investing club. He said so that's my overlord. He referred to the newsletter as. I'm starting to feel that the newsletter's my overlord. I respect it. Go subscribe tbpn.com, throw your email in there. You will get the TBPN Run of Show every week. The current thing, my newsletter. Then Kramer appears on CNBC's Squawk on the street, begins writing Mad Money, his flagship show on the network in the mid morning. Throughout the Kramer spends a huge amount of time reading up on company news and earnings reports. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter to six. We saw him there doing that.
- [130:19]
Jordi
Zack Meyer in the chat says this guy does not go to the gym at 4am look at him.
- [130:23]
Brad Feld
You think he's lying?
- [130:24]
Jordi
I think it's more like he's not working out for physique. Right. He's, I mean we, we got to hang a couple weeks ago. We got to hang with Kramer for about 20 minutes. It's end of the day. He had a ton of energy. He was incredibly locked, did have a ton of energy. This was at like, like probably, yeah.
- [130:41]
Brad Feld
He'S probably doing something low impact but I like to imagine him benching three plates, squatting five, throwing up some, some 200 pound hang, cleans some clean PRs every day. Getting, getting a robot, getting athletic with.
- [130:55]
Jordi
It, throwing on a stringer.
- [130:57]
Brad Feld
He'll fit it. Yes, absolutely. We, yeah, we get, get a, get a gigachad Mass Monster Kramer photo up asap. I need to see that. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter to six and comes home. He'll go out to dinner around 10pm and then say goodnight to his wife before tucking in. Kramer acknowledged that the intensity of his schedule puts a strain on his marriage. I have a great marriage. I put that out first because I wreck it every day. I go to bed at 11. She goes to bed at like a normal time. So that's where I really when I really wrecked the marriage. That's not the plan. I didn't set out to do that, he said. Kramer's routine doesn't seem to have much changed in 2015. He told Business Insider that he followed a similar schedule. He's been saying that he's been waking up at 3am tweeting about stocks and puppies in the morning, making a pit stop at the headquarters of the street, which he co founded in 1996. What an absolute run for Jim Cramer. Anyway, Turbo Puffer search. Every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
- [131:53]
Jordi
This little turbopuffer is used by Notion, Linear Cursor and many more.
- [131:59]
Brad Feld
I want to go through VCs to AI startups. Please take our money in the in Bloomberg. This is from Kate Clark. She says private jets, box seats and big checks. Investors are doing whatever it takes to get into top AI deals. Jordi, would you mind reading the first few paragraphs of this article?
- [132:21]
Jordi
Catch up to this article.
- [132:22]
Brad Feld
It's page 90. Raising venture capital money has been a breeze for Decagon AI. We're all over the place with the customer service startups. It's a very hot industry. Decagon's doing well. Fin, our partner, is doing well. And Brett Taylor's doing well too. Decagon's two years old. They're developing artificial intelligence tools for customer service. All four of Decagon's funding rounds, totaling more than $230 million were preempted, meaning firms like Andreessen Horowitz offered to invest before the company started fundraising. Now, just three months after a round that valued at 1.5 billion, we had the founders on when they announced that round. Decagon is fielding unsolicited offers at valuations as high as 5 billion.
- [133:04]
Jordi
Give it up for unsolicited offers. They're some of the best offers.
- [133:07]
Brad Feld
For decagon and a few other AI startups, the fundraising script has flipped. Instead of pitching venture capitalists up and down Sandhill Road VCs are pitching them, hoovering them with gifts and favors in hopes of leading their next round. Can you catch us up on the.
- [133:24]
Jordi
Rest of the circle?
- [133:25]
Brad Feld
I want to go into some ideas because I think the VCs aren't thinking big enough.
- [133:29]
Jordi
Big enough. We'll get you back in a second. So Jesse Jang, the 28 year old co founder and chief executive officer of Decagon, says investors hoping to back him have offered him everything from tickets to Golden Gate warriors games to an autographed poster of MMA legend Khabive Nurmagomedov. John would not know who Khabib is, but I'm sure many of you do. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of decagon's logo and hand delivered it to the company's San Francisco office with a term sheet hidden inside. Decagon took the deal, so that's a good one. That works. Investors are emailing term sheets, they're giving verbal offers, they're inviting founders to sports games, they're inviting founders to race Ferrari, and they're inviting them on private jets, says Bennett Siegel, a co founder of investment firm A Star and an early investor in decagon. What you tend to see is the best companies are getting preempted every round, and the time between rounds is shrinking. The lavish VC overtures are part of a larger Silicon Valley frenzy for AI, driven by startups, astonishing revenue growth and investors belief that these companies can dethrone tech giants. US startups have raised around 200 billion this year, so far, according to to PitchBook data, but 41% of that went to just 10 companies, highlighting VC's relentless focus on a small group of AI frontrunners like OpenAI and Anthropic. Last year, the share of funding that went to the top 10 companies was less than 10%. A few smaller AI startups have also emerged as investor favorites, drawing outsized attention in capital. Among the rising group of hot companies legal startup Harvey, customer service firm Sierra, encoding company Cognition. All of which have drawn big offers from VC firms. Any sphere. The maker of AI coding tool Cursor has become a central example of the rush to fund newer AI companies. Kind of funny that I heard you talking trash.
- [135:22]
Brad Feld
By the way, I do know who Khabib is. He's an athlete.
- [135:25]
Jordi
There you go.
- [135:26]
Brad Feld
Nailed it. You know, what else is there to know?
- [135:28]
Jordi
What else is there to know? He. He punches and he.
- [135:32]
Brad Feld
He kicks. Does he do kicks?
- [135:34]
Jordi
He does kick.
- [135:35]
Brad Feld
He does kicks as well.
- [135:36]
Jordi
Yeah, he does kicks.
- [135:36]
Brad Feld
He's into kicking and wrestles.
- [135:40]
Jordi
Isn't it this trend of companies having like one name and then the product name being called something else? Yeah, Any Sphere and Cursor Windsurf had the same situation. Right?
- [135:53]
Brad Feld
Yeah. So there's this story about decagon. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Dec Decagon's logo. I saw a picture of this and I was confused because a decagon is just a ten sided shape and so it's actually like extremely easy to fold something into a decagon. But I guess they did cranes into the shape of a decagon or something because like imagine if you're like, oh, I really want to invest in square. I'm going to fold you a square. I'm going to take a piece of paper, I'm going to turn the term sheet into something square. It's like I want to see true origami mastery from a vc. If you're going to try and preempt around.
- [136:33]
Jordi
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think investors should be thinking of it as what is the right kind of effectively bribe at each stage. Right.
- [136:44]
Brad Feld
What's the budget? What's the math that you should be doing? How much should you put towards the bribe? Towards the tip? It's a tip.
- [136:51]
Jordi
It's a tip.
- [136:51]
Brad Feld
There's no tax on tip.
- [136:52]
Jordi
It's a tip. Yeah. I don't know, it depends on the round. But if it's really competitive, maybe thinking about putting 10% of the check size and then paying out of your own management fees for some type of experience. Right?
- [137:06]
Brad Taylor
Yeah.
- [137:06]
Brad Feld
I mean if you're just paying 10% over, if there's a $300 million round and it's between you and another firm and you just take just 10% over, that's not going to hurt your returns. If you win the round, it's going to be 10x and so go 10x on 300 as opposed to 330 making.
- [137:24]
Jordi
Just, just make insane assumptions.
- [137:27]
Brad Feld
Just take the 30 mil all math out, buy a McLaren F1 and be like, I see you as the next Elon. I see you as the next Sam Altman. They drove McLaren F1s. You should drive one. You should have this car, it's yours.
- [137:40]
Jordi
Or keep a, you know, a fleet of supercars at Sand Hill and say you can have this from between the A and the B. Right?
- [137:49]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [137:49]
Jordi
So it's. And you could have an adverse effect of founders being like, I like this P1. I'm going to. I don't really want to raise my bailing it. But in general, I think it should work out. So I think it should be like writing a 250k flyer. Why not get a founder a long weekend at an Amman property of their choice? You know, something, something straightforward.
- [138:12]
Brad Feld
Just a weekend. I feel like a long week. A couple weeks at least. You can.
- [138:17]
Jordi
I know, but you're getting, you're getting well beyond that. You know that 10% mark two days.
- [138:22]
Brad Feld
In Amman is two weeks at a Four Seasons.
- [138:25]
Jordi
Yeah. So I think you kind of going up the ladder.
- [138:29]
Brad Feld
Yeah. What's next? If I'm trying to win a $20 million Series A, what should I budget for the tip? For the bribe?
- [138:35]
Jordi
For the tip. Tip. Tip sounds better than bribe.
- [138:38]
Brad Feld
Okay. Yeah. Tip. We're sticking with tips.
- [138:40]
Jordi
Yeah, it is. You know, we are coming up into VCT tipping season. So founders got to be thinking about what kind of tip makes sense for sure each person on your cap table. We've, we've talked about this before, but. But yeah. How can you take it up, how can you take it up a notch? You know, racing Ferraris. Private. Private. But I, I think these like one time offerings are super weak. You know, it's like race Ferraris for a day.
- [139:04]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [139:04]
Jordi
That's not that interesting. Founders doing 996. They're like, I don't want to go to your racetrack.
- [139:08]
Brad Feld
Right.
- [139:09]
Jordi
So I think buy the racetrack.
- [139:13]
Brad Feld
I think the thermal club was up for sale or a lot of.
- [139:16]
Jordi
Or saying, you can use my jet one time. One time, One time. It should be. It should be.
- [139:23]
Brad Feld
Here's the full jet.
- [139:24]
Jordi
The jets should live with ipo. Toss them the keys until the ipo.
- [139:29]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Then you get your own jet.
- [139:31]
Jordi
Yeah. Yeah. Until you're in the position to be able to get your own.
- [139:36]
Brad Feld
Tyler, what would get you to sign a term sheet? What would stick out to you if a VC came to you and said, I gotta do this deal?
- [139:44]
Jordi
I think, look at this picture.
- [139:46]
Brad Feld
I like that. You're David Senra fan. You have a frame photo of him.
- [139:50]
Jordi
I think something compatible. Like if the founder is doing996.
- [139:53]
Brad Taylor
Right.
- [139:53]
Jordi
There's this thing, the current vibe is steaks. Right. So maybe you buy cattle farm with very high quality cows like Zuck's Island.
- [140:01]
Brad Feld
Zuck has that on his island. Yeah, for sure. Goldrock said, I had a VC try to take me hot air ballooning. That's a wild one.
- [140:11]
Jordi
Are you. Would you go in a hot air balloon?
- [140:14]
Brad Feld
I would absolutely go in a hot air balloon.
- [140:16]
Jordi
Okay.
- [140:16]
Brad Feld
It's extremely aristocratic. Yeah, it's fantastic.
- [140:20]
Jordi
I Saw a video of a hot air balloon crashing from somebody that took the video inside the hot air balloon.
- [140:27]
Brad Feld
That scared you.
- [140:28]
Jordi
It wasn't super appealing. Oh, we got Tyler on the big screen now. And we got Senra here on the big screen.
- [140:32]
Brad Feld
That's great.
- [140:33]
Jordi
There we go.
- [140:34]
Brad Feld
I feel like that's a skill issue.
- [140:35]
Jordi
Skill issue. Just.
- [140:36]
Brad Feld
Just hit chat GPT. How do I fly a hot air balloon? Get up to speed. Summarize that for me. Don't make mistakes. And then we got a little inception going here.
- [140:44]
Jordi
I like that. That's a good start.
- [140:46]
Brad Feld
Anyway. Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Maybe that's what the VC firm should do. Get on Profound. When founders type in who should I raise money from by building this? Show up and check.
- [141:03]
Jordi
I think founders should just ask. I don't want you to just join the board. I want you to actually become a BDR at my company for the next two years.
- [141:13]
Brad Feld
Yeah. I mean you're joking, but that's sort of. I've seen that happen with Elon companies. Where to win allocation you're going to not BDR but recruiting. So come in and import your entire network. Everyone you know who's an engineer who could work at this company. Come and work basically full time for like a month to like really do everything you possibly can. Because there's always. You write the check and then you're like. They hit you with like oh, like do you know any software? It's very different from being like I'm doing three full time weeks just actually racking my network, actually making calls, catching up with everyone who'd be relevant to most convenient. No, no, no. Going really deep into the actual. Into the Rolodex. Does the Hindenburg count as a hot air balloon? I don't think so. Is it dirigible? It was a blimp. But anyway. Numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
- [142:14]
Jordi
Let numeral.
- [142:16]
Brad Feld
Google just Dingboard. You saw this? Are you familiar with Dingboard Yak scenes project.
- [142:20]
Jordi
They just killed it. What do you mean?
- [142:22]
Brad Feld
Have you seen this?
- [142:23]
Brad Taylor
Of course I know Dingboard.
- [142:24]
Brad Feld
Were you a subscriber?
- [142:25]
Jordi
I was very early on. He gave me. I was like really? I DM'd him for some reason.
- [142:29]
Riley Walls
He gave me a code.
- [142:30]
Brad Feld
I loved the product. I thought the product was amazing. It didn't really work that well on mobile, but it was super cool. You could go in and with AI remove backgrounds Merge images, blend things together. It was a fantastic. He goes to work for.
- [142:44]
Jordi
How did they kill it?
- [142:45]
Brad Feld
Well, because Google Labs just launched Mixboard, an experimental AI powered concepting board designed to help you explore, visualize and refine your ideas. Powered by our latest image generation model, of course, nanobanana. And with nanobanana and you know, basically it's not that they killed dingboard, it's just that they launched a product that is clearly inspired or lives in the same kind of of work stream as Ding Board where you can remix images, bring things in. Very, very cool product. I would love to see this on an app for sure. I've always made. When I'm making images and memes on my phone, I'm always going back and forth between Photoshop Express and Image Flip and a few different sites. There's not a lot of stuff. This is a great product and I hope someone can take it across the finish line. Obviously X had to go work at X and now he's working on robots and stuff.
- [143:41]
Jordi
What do you think of Stillers Stillers Soda, Ben Stiller's soda company?
- [143:46]
Brad Feld
I have no idea. Does he have that type of audience that's like ready to rip soda from Walmart? Yeah, it's interesting. I guess we were talking to John Shahidi about this. Ben Stiller is the type of person that could probably call the CEO of Walmart and get a meeting. Right. Like he's so famous. If you're a CEO of a big retail chain and you hear Ben Stillers on the line, you're going to take that call. Right. So maybe it advances your distribution quickly. Stillers is also just a great name.
- [144:21]
Jordi
I do. That's the name.
- [144:23]
Brad Feld
And when I saw it I was like, oh, that's cool name. I'll take a Stillers. That's a great name. Is that related to Ben Stiller? And then I found out it was so I could see it working. I would love to do a taste test. We'll have to actually see is the product good because if he has great product sense, kind of doesn't matter. The distribution and the celebrity will take care of itself.
- [144:41]
Jordi
Is a little millennial coded.
- [144:43]
Brad Feld
Sure.
- [144:43]
Jordi
Says made by 100% real human celebrity people.
- [144:47]
Brad Feld
Okay. Yeah, that's a little.
- [144:48]
Jordi
And the copy on it says no fake stuff and crowded category. Yeah, just they, they. They're competing with, with Ollipop and what's the other one?
- [145:03]
Brad Feld
There's been a huge, there's been a huge lineage of trying to find, make a product that's free of. Free of Sugar free of fat.
- [145:12]
Jordi
Free of fat. I would say I would have been incredibly bullish on this company if it launched in 2019. But launching into a category that Pepsi is already going to buy their want. I'm sure Coke will eventually.
- [145:24]
Brad Feld
I mean, I believe Pepsi already has Poppy, which was a direct seller to Pepi.
- [145:29]
Jordi
Wait, there's Poppy, but then there's Pepsi bought Poppy. You could imagine Coke buying Olipop.
- [145:34]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [145:35]
Jordi
And then it's kind of over.
- [145:37]
Brad Feld
But then there's another company that's a seltzer, that's. It's Bubbly Bubbly. Do you know Bubbly Bubbly Sparkling Water. Who owns Bubly? Yeah.
- [145:49]
Jordi
Well, we should get Ben on the show to talk about Stillers and we should get Tyler order Bubbly was still.
- [145:57]
Brad Feld
Yeah, Bubbly was Incubated. Incubated by PepsiCo to compete with like the spindrifts of the world. And remember the big boom in seltzers. There were a whole bunch of Topo Chico and a bunch of other products that were really popular in offices in, you know, 2017 corporate offices. People would be drinking Lacroix all day long. Bubbly was like their answer to that. I don't know how it actually panned out, but that's kind of interesting. But in much more interesting news, OpenAI, SAP and Microsoft are launching OpenAI for Germany, a partnership to bring Frontier AI to Germans, Germany's public sector through a sovereign certified cloud environment. We haven't rung the Golf long enough on this show. Let's ring it for Open AI for Germany.
- [146:44]
Jordi
There we go. And we gotta hit it for Claude. Getting into the Microsoft ecosystem. That also happened.
- [146:54]
Brad Taylor
We love it.
- [146:55]
Jordi
Well, without further ado, I think we have our next guest. Riley Walls in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. He has been being a rascal the last 48 hours. Riley, welcome to the show.
- [147:11]
Brad Feld
How you doing?
- [147:12]
Riley Walls
Thank you for having me.
- [147:13]
Jordi
The most viral man on X. The current thing.
- [147:17]
Brad Feld
Yeah, take us through the current thing. The current project. What'd you build? What inspired it? What's the reception been? Are those GPUs on fire? Are the servers on fire? Is it staying up? Walk me through it all.
- [147:28]
Riley Walls
Yeah, we've got a project kind of going on. Yesterday's project was I figured out you could scrape the parking ticket system in San Francisco to reveal more or less the real time locations of parking officers as they wrote tickets.
- [147:43]
Brad Feld
Okay.
- [147:44]
Riley Walls
So I made a website called Find My Parking Cops. Looks very similar to Apple's Find My Friends. And yeah, you can see where the cops are. As a traveling around sf, take me.
- [147:57]
Brad Feld
A level deeper on technical.
- [147:58]
Jordi
What inspired this?
- [147:59]
Brad Feld
Oh yeah. Did you get a lot of tickets? Is that what inspired this?
- [148:02]
Riley Walls
I actually don't even have a car. My roommates, all my friends have cars. And yeah, you hear a lot about tickets. It's pretty notorious in the city.
- [148:10]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Yeah. Take me through one layer deeper of the technical side. Is this just a function of the SF parking ticket office integrating with some sort of IT or ERP system that basically as soon as the ticket's written, it gets loaded into a database and then is there a public API? Is this stuff that you can just look up on an actual website or are you finding an entirely private API?
- [148:38]
Riley Walls
Yeah, it's all public. The magic is right when they write the ticket, it goes up online and you have to enter the ID number to be able to see the ticket. There's a website you can pay your ticket and when you pay, you can see a copy of the ticket. I figured out that the ID numbers for all the tickets were predictable, meaning that there's a pattern to it. So I knew kind of the pattern and I could see, okay, this ticket just simplified a lot. Like if ticket number 83 was just written, I know 84 is going to be next, so I just keep checking for the next one. There's a little more technical than that, but it's pretty magical. When predictable ideas are a thing. There's so many cool ideas you can scrape. Knowing that.
- [149:19]
Brad Feld
Talk to me about your actual workflow. Is there. Are you using Vibe coding tools?
- [149:24]
Jordi
Well, before that, what's the current state of things sf? Obviously you could potentially really. If enough people in SF started using this, it would be. Could.
- [149:35]
Brad Feld
I would hope that the mayor would write you a letter of recommendation for this. You should win a medal for this.
- [149:41]
Jordi
Yeah, yeah, you should.
- [149:42]
Brad Feld
This is the highest calling. Yeah, you should get the key to the city for this. But what's the actual response from SF been, if anything?
- [149:48]
Riley Walls
Yeah, so I do websites like these that are provocative a lot and I think a lot about framing it and like how I want to present it to people. So I thought this would be maybe a little like, you know, mildly viral among people in sf, but it actually went pretty viral, like around the world. Yesterday, within four hours, the SF government mobilized and they changed their site to prevent me from getting the data. Like only four hours it took for them to prevent me from make the site useless. So, yeah, the site is not up anymore because they changed the way that.
- [150:15]
Jordi
Data, those four sweet Hours, though, were.
- [150:19]
Brad Feld
Everyone free of parking tickets?
- [150:22]
Jordi
It actually is. If it had gone less viral and not. And people hadn't, you know, if they hadn't noticed so quickly, I can imagine this being highly. Somebody's pulling up, they want to grab a coffee. You know, they look. They just check the map. They can run in and out. It's not a. Not a. Not a. I can see it actually being pretty valuable.
- [150:42]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Walk me through some of how you like to build these projects, how you like to host them, what problems you typically run through. Would love to know just a little bit about your stack these days.
- [150:53]
Riley Walls
Yeah. I mean, use AI a lot. It makes things so much faster. I have, like, a gazillion ideas. These are all sticky notes for different data ideas I want to make. So just kind of. We can all try to knock one off in my free time. You guys talked about. You saw the other one. I made Panama playlist.
- [151:08]
Brad Feld
Oh, yeah.
- [151:09]
Jordi
Oh, you did that?
- [151:11]
Brad Feld
We're on that. You scraped my data. I'm glad you. I was wondering, how did I make the cut on this? Like, these are some big people on. On there. Yeah. What was the secret to that? Because it only.
- [151:22]
Brad Taylor
Yeah.
- [151:23]
Jordi
Was there any. Was there any strange fallout? I mean, it's hilarious to read into people's music tastes. I. You wouldn't have noticed this, but my. That the playlist that I had public that you featured was, like, seven songs I found that had, like, obscure references to venture capital. So when I saw it, I was like, I don't listen to any of it. When did I make this playlist? I don't listen to any of these. In, like, 2021. I just started collecting.
- [151:46]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [151:47]
Jordi
Or whatever.
- [151:48]
Riley Walls
Yeah. I don't know. It was just kind of trying to highlight, like, how much data is out there on Spotify and, like, people just forget about it and. Yeah.
- [151:55]
Joe Lonsdale
Sorry.
- [151:55]
Riley Walls
You guys were part of it, but.
- [151:56]
Brad Taylor
No, it's fine.
- [151:57]
Jordi
I thought it was hilarious.
- [151:59]
Riley Walls
I think it was. It was pretty amusing. I think a lot of people had a kick looking at it.
- [152:03]
Brad Feld
Yeah. What was the reaction from either the people that were in it or Spotify directly? Has there been a change to the API? Because we saw this even during the last election, like the Venmo public records. People forget about this stuff all the time. There's kind of a question about how tech platforms deal with default privacy, because there was an era when everything was public and then people started closing things down, becoming a little bit more private. But a. It's a. It's a. It's an Interesting. Like user design problem for the big companies to shift.
- [152:31]
Jordi
Yeah, yeah.
- [152:32]
Riley Walls
In case your audience didn't see that, I. I scraped like the public playlist listening data of. Of notable figures on Spotify. And like, they're like, you guys were on it. Like, Sam Alton was on it. A bunch of politicians like Mike Johnson and J.D. vance. And like, so many people just have stuff open on there. They haven't changed stuff yet. I feel like Spotify probably will change like the default behavior of playlists because right now they're public by default, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, I mean, it was. A lot of people took their playlist down. Kind of was a. Yeah, interesting to see like, kind of a lot of people embrace, like Palmer Luckey. He was like, yeah, these are my songs and I love them.
- [153:10]
Brad Feld
So did you have to guess some sort of code or was. Did you just literally just search my profile and then it was there?
- [153:17]
Riley Walls
Yeah. For you guys, a lot of it was just like real names. Just search your name. And then I found a profile with your picture. Like, probably a sim, because then I can see you guys followed each other or something. Probably.
- [153:26]
Brad Feld
Yeah.
- [153:29]
Jordi
Walk us through some of the other stuff you've done recently. And then I want to talk about.
- [153:35]
Brad Feld
Specifically, what's the most underrated project or most underappreciated project you've worked on, where you love it, it's one of your dearest children, but you feel like it hasn't gotten enough love.
- [153:51]
Riley Walls
One interesting one a few months ago, this was also very much out there. But you guys know looks maxing. I made a cycle called Looks Mapping where I scraped the Google Maps reviews of restaurants in New York, SF and la. And then I ran the profile pictures of the reviewers through a very jank attractiveness model. And then I mean, aggregate map of like, all these restaurants. Like, okay, this restaurant is usually composed of like sixes or whatever out of 10. Very off on the idea and premise. But it was kind of funny.
- [154:26]
Jordi
That wouldn't make anybody mad.
- [154:28]
Riley Walls
Yeah, you can glean a lot of just information because I also had an age map. You could, you know, get their age from the profile picture, roughly, and gender too. So you could see which restaurants had like, the most men or women in a city.
- [154:40]
Jordi
Like, I don't know what kind of pattern. Like, how much did it track with just the general hype around restaurants. Like, what did you notice?
- [154:49]
Riley Walls
Yeah, I mean, like, the oldest restaurant in SF is on a country club. Like, the most, like, male restaurant is a gay bar. The most female one's Like a brunch spot. It all kind of fits when you look at it.
- [155:01]
Jordi
It's predictable.
- [155:02]
Brad Feld
That feels like a product that maybe it needs a little polish, but could just be something that would actually add value to the Google Maps experience. Has. Have big tech companies reached out to you and said, hey, come work for.
- [155:14]
Riley Walls
Us, not for that. There's been a couple smaller map startups that are like, oh, you should maybe add this. I think they should. Yeah. I think this would be cool to. I feel like it's too politically risky for Google, but definitely a smaller startup could do it and be useful.
- [155:26]
Brad Feld
Yeah. I feel like even if you dialed back some of the framing on what you're building, there's product insight there and there's novel features that would surprise and delight and I feel like that that's kind of what a lot of these projects like put on display.
- [155:42]
Jordi
What were you doing before all these experiments?
- [155:45]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Does this pay the bills? Do you have a full time job?
- [155:48]
Riley Walls
I did not. Yeah, I have a full time job doing like data stuff that's more commercially reliable. I also, I mean like, you guys talked to Gabe Whaley of Mischief.
- [155:57]
Jordi
Yeah, yeah.
- [155:58]
Riley Walls
I was an intern there in 2010.
- [156:00]
Jordi
There you go. Mafia.
- [156:02]
Riley Walls
Which was like, you guys can kind of see like all this is very inspirational. Very inspired by mischief.
- [156:07]
Brad Feld
Yeah, yeah. The chat is literally saying he's like, mischief for tech projects. Lol. People have clocked it for sure at first.
- [156:14]
Riley Walls
Santa. I got to see up close how they operate. They're like incredible people. Yeah.
- [156:19]
Jordi
So you were at Mischief and you said, I need to pursue data science.
- [156:25]
Riley Walls
Yeah, that was my calling. I think data is like really cool and it's cool that you can combine it with like mischief elements to make like, like weird things like this parking.
- [156:31]
Jordi
What are. Let's.
- [156:31]
Brad Taylor
Let's.
- [156:32]
Jordi
I don't, I don't. It feels like you could talk through some ideas you have without giving away too much alpha just because a lot of. I don't know if I doubt people would. Would steal your ideas since a lot of them are like, don't make. Are you're not doing this to make money, but you want to talk through any work workshop. Any with us.
- [156:49]
Riley Walls
Yeah. Let me see.
- [156:51]
Brad Feld
Oh, yeah. What you got on the board.
- [156:53]
Riley Walls
It's like one. One like terrible idea that I'll probably never build because.
- [156:55]
Joe Lonsdale
Because it's awful.
- [156:57]
Riley Walls
Is there's a OpenAI has like a API endpoint for how like a moderation endpoint for how bad a piece of text is. It will return back like a string of like, you know, is this harassment or is this like racism or whatever?
- [157:12]
Brad Feld
I don't know.
- [157:13]
Riley Walls
Yeah, the horrible idea is like, somebody should make a leaderboard where you like have to type in a string of text and you want to like actually hit every single one of these categories.
- [157:24]
Jordi
Say, the most offensive, as few characters as possible.
- [157:27]
Brad Feld
You have to create the most offensive string of text in history in as.
- [157:32]
Riley Walls
Few characters as possible, offend as many people as possible. Horrible, horrible.
- [157:37]
Brad Feld
But certainly I think you might not need to disclose what was actually said. You could have it be anonymous, but it would certainly spark creativity. I mean, Rune was talking about this, how there are certain strings of text that just go viral every time they're posted. No matter when they're posted, no matter who posts them. These little insights. We did this project Banger archive where we took the best posts by certain people, just screenshotted them and just said banger. And they would get another 10,000 likes every time.
- [158:06]
Jordi
Yeah, we had posts that would get 50, an order of magnitude more likes than the original post.
- [158:11]
Brad Feld
And it was like a naval post about, you should work like a lion. Like, you know, take rest and then work really hard. And it's just like these universal truths that like just continue to deliver value.
- [158:22]
Jordi
What else? What else you got? What else you got?
- [158:24]
Brad Feld
What else is on the board? Give us some other stuff.
- [158:29]
Jordi
Because I feel like 4chan would like one shot, your leaderboard. They'd figure out there's like, there's four words. You put these together and make every person on earth mad.
- [158:38]
Riley Walls
Yeah, no, it'd be terrible.
- [158:42]
Brad Feld
One idea.
- [158:43]
Riley Walls
This is something I asked you with parking tickets here. I also found out that like vandalism citations have like a similar setup in the city. So I was able to scrape like half a million pictures of graffiti that cops took.
- [158:56]
Brad Feld
Oh, interesting.
- [158:56]
Riley Walls
I think it'd be cool to make a website that shows graffiti art through the lens of a cop in San Francisco.
- [159:03]
Brad Feld
Yeah, that'd be cool.
- [159:04]
Riley Walls
They took on their phone themselves.
- [159:06]
Brad Feld
Yeah. It feels like a lot of your projects touch on like public works projects. Public, like cities, like data in cities. And I'm wondering if you have a view on like, should cities be more open to the hacker culture? Actually embrace some of this stuff? Like some of the stuff that you're building is like very close to just like a tool that would make life in a particular city easier. And yet cities are notorious for long lines of the DMV and not being the most tech forward organizations or entities. How do you think about actually how cities deliver tech Services.
- [159:51]
Riley Walls
Yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think the asset government actually has a pretty good handle on this. They have lots of data sets that they publish pretty frequently and there's a lot to work with there. Like they publish like 911 calls with like a 10 minute delay. You can see kind of like a anonymized data set of what people are calling 911 for, which is kind of cool. Like there's lots of things like that nobody really knows about, but there's things there.
- [160:14]
Jordi
Would you like in a perfect world, in a perfect world, would one of these you do it for fun and then, and then you discover some like enduring business or do you like just doing one idea after the next?
- [160:26]
Riley Walls
Yeah, I mean all these ideas are just things I find interesting to myself and you know, usually that means something I also find interesting too if I post online. I think it's just like an outlet to be creative and it's nice to have distinct like work work. And like this is more fun work. But yeah, no, definitely be cool if something like that happened.
- [160:43]
Jordi
Any, any ideas? Are you, are you capital constrained on anything? Like if you had 25 grand, you would, you would do. Because I feel like at this point there's enough people, ourselves included, we would, as long as it was not offensive, we would happily chip in to make possible.
- [161:02]
Riley Walls
There is. Yes. I need 33k for a project next May for a very fun stunt in San Francisco.
- [161:09]
Brad Feld
Okay.
- [161:10]
Riley Walls
If anyone likes to talk.
- [161:13]
Jordi
Yeah, all right, let's talk. We'll talk offline. We don't want to spoil it.
- [161:16]
Brad Feld
Last story I want to talk about. I didn't put it together until just now that you, you're the person behind New York's hottest steakhouse. That was fake. Tell me that story because I remember it happening and I didn't put it together until just now.
- [161:29]
Riley Walls
You talked to my co conspirator, Baron, the archaeology guy?
- [161:33]
Brad Feld
Yeah. Oh, no way.
- [161:35]
Jordi
Wow.
- [161:35]
Riley Walls
Yeah. No, that was an incredible like one of the best nights of my life. We had so many things go wrong, but like somehow it just happened to go right. Long story short, we lived in a house together in New York. Maran made steaks and then we made at Google Maps called Maran Steakhouse. And then all our friends started writing these bizarre five star reviews. Like, you know, I converted out of like Hinduism so that way I could try some of his beef. Or like he came in like drenched in blood from upstate, fresh with a fresh cow. Like, like really bizarre reviews. But people in New York thought It was real. Because the dining culture there is crazy.
- [162:05]
Brad Taylor
Yeah.
- [162:05]
Riley Walls
And we had this huge wait list over a couple years that we built it up. So we actually opened it for one night. We opened a real restaurant, fully permitted. I was like licensed by the government to actually open a restaurant. We had 120 guests come thinking it was real. It was like humongous operation, Legend of Six Wise. But it somehow ended up. Well, we did not get sued.
- [162:22]
Jordi
How did the guests. How did the guests take it?
- [162:24]
Brad Feld
Yeah. What were the words?
- [162:26]
Jordi
Realized it was a joke.
- [162:28]
Riley Walls
Most of them were pretty good. Like, I don't think people really realized it was fake. We wanted people to find out it was fake. In the Times when they read it about the article.
- [162:35]
Brad Feld
New York Times.
- [162:36]
Riley Walls
And a lot of people did. They got it, thought it was kind of a weird restaurant, but they thought it was like, okay, this is just how things are.
- [162:41]
Brad Feld
It's like cool and avant garde. Right. It's like edgy, new and different and pop up.
- [162:45]
Jordi
What did you guys break? Did you guys break even on it? Like, did you. Did you end up. Did you sell enough steak to.
- [162:52]
Riley Walls
No, no, we, we. We spent like 16k and then made like 13k. So we lost like 3k. But for the amount of. We got like. It was. It was viral everywhere.
- [163:04]
Jordi
That New York Times piece is forever.
- [163:07]
Brad Feld
It is. Yes.
- [163:08]
Brad Taylor
Yeah.
- [163:08]
Riley Walls
Yes.
- [163:10]
Jordi
Amazing. All right, well, we will message you. We'll figure out how to make this happen.
- [163:14]
Brad Feld
I would love to talk about SF stunt. That'd be fantastic.
- [163:16]
Jordi
Happen and keep up the great work.
- [163:18]
Brad Feld
Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Riley, thanks for joining.
- [163:21]
Jordi
Cheers.
- [163:22]
Brad Feld
Let me tell you about customer relationship Magic. ADEO is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started.
- [163:32]
Jordi
OpenAI says more compute in the making. Announcing five new Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank putting us ahead of schedule on the 10 gigawatt commitment we announced in January. Let's go ahead of schedule.
- [163:43]
Brad Feld
Massive. Stripe's also buying back shares from its VC backers at $106.7 billion valuation. Sequoia bought 861 million worth of shares in 2024 at a 70 billion valuation. So they're getting a markup and amend and pretend says live shot of a swap right now. He's talking about Aswath, the Modron who is obsessed with valuation, specifically liquidity premiums, illiquidity premiums. And it's just interesting that Stripe continues to find ways to stay private basically forever. They've been on a tear. The Collison Brothers. Well, we talked to Joe Lonsdale about being in the same fraternity at Stanford with Gary Tan. And you can zoom in on this photo and see a young Joe Lonsdale and a young Gary Tan hanging out at stanford back in 2003. Pretty remarkable piece of tech lore. I want to know what is everyone else up to? We got to go through this list because there's probably some interesting folks in here. I want to know what Michael Calhoun's up to or Justin Reynolds or Adam Rodriguez. Got to figure it out. Bunch of lads got to get on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions.
- [165:08]
Jordi
And we got anything else?
- [165:09]
Brad Feld
Tyler Cowen is talking about the potential for stagflation. Economic stagnation.
- [165:15]
Jordi
No one wants that. No one wants that.
- [165:17]
Brad Feld
Tyler says it seems increasingly likely that the American economy is sleepwalking towards stagflation. In case you're wondering, that is not a good thing. Stagflation means an economy experiences excess inflation and excess unemployment at the same time. This was one thought to be impossible, but the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered both high inflation and high unemployment and voila, we suddenly had a new unhappy economic phenomenon. If I had to guess, I think there's a decent chance that 18 months from now I might could well have an inflation rate of 4% up from last year's 2.5%.
- [165:53]
Jordi
We got some breaking news in the chat.
- [165:54]
Brad Feld
What do we have?
- [165:55]
Jordi
China agrees to terms of a U.S. tikTok deal.
- [165:58]
Brad Feld
Wow. Thank you Bobby Cosby for breaking the news. Thank you. Hello. Hello. Thank you everyone in the chat for keeping us up to speed.
- [166:05]
Jordi
Is this not a little worrisome that they are agreeing with.
- [166:11]
Brad Taylor
It Seems to.
- [166:12]
Jordi
Have pretty historically had a pretty hard line.
- [166:14]
Brad Feld
Well, pull up any more information while I talk about Adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I want to tell you how Steven Spielberg works. He says, Steven Spielberg says before he goes off to direct a movie, he always looks at four films. Can you guess what films he watches before he goes out and directs a film?
- [166:43]
Jordi
Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, Borat, Borat, Dark Knight.
- [166:48]
Brad Feld
Dark Knight, Mountainhead and Office Space. Right? Those are the movies you've seen? No.
- [166:55]
Jordi
He does Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Wonderful Life, and the Searchers.
- [167:00]
Brad Feld
Have you seen any of those Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia is a fantastic movie. Tyler, have you seen any of those?
- [167:07]
Jordi
I've seen all of them but the Searcher.
- [167:09]
Brad Feld
Same with me.
- [167:10]
Jordi
No, I have seen it.
- [167:11]
Brad Feld
You've seen the Searchers. You need to give us a review on that. I need to check that out this weekend. I've seen seven sims.
- [167:16]
Jordi
All right, since you've seen it, name every scene.
- [167:22]
Brad Feld
Is there a tech equivalent of this before you start a new company? Study the grades. Listen to these four Founders Podcast episodes. Who are you listening to? Pick four top four. I'm going Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, Gaston Glock and Charlie Rockefeller. You gotta throw Gaston Glock in there for sure.
- [167:44]
Jordi
Underrated.
- [167:45]
Brad Feld
And the Chicken Finger Dream. You gotta get up to speed on the Chicken Finger Dream before you start your next company. I think every founder should have should have four Founders Podcast episodes in the chamber before they go out to raise before pump up speeches or if they.
- [167:57]
Jordi
Need to run through a brick wall.
- [167:59]
Brad Feld
Yeah, if you need to run through a brick wall that you need to have your top four Founders Podcasts ready to go. So when you hit the road, when you check into the Rosewood for your Sand Hill tour of pitches, you're ready to go. And you're also wearing a fantastic timepiece on your wrist that you picked up from getbezel.com because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. In other news, Palmer Luckey says that Mod Retro has teamed up with Ubisoft to re release some of their greatest classics, starting with Rayman. It has some of the best graphics of any Game Boy color title like Late Cycle developers truly mastered the hardware chip months after the Game Away advance was announced. So congrats to Palmer Luckey on a new deal for Mod Retro. Company's been on a tear. Very excited.
- [168:41]
Jordi
Also hit the timeline yesterday quoting a Meta post that see how US national security agencies are using Meta's llama models to develop bespoke tools for America's military and intelligence professionals. It is crazy how much the vibe has shifted Meta. I would imagine if Meta posted something.
- [168:59]
Brad Feld
Like that in 2016 when Palmer was there for a couple months. Yeah, would have been crazy.
- [169:05]
Jordi
Palmer says added to the quote from the announcement. We are also supporting US national security through our work developing augmented and virtual reality technologies. Through our partnership with Anduril, we are developing a range of wearable products to help maintain America's technological edge.
- [169:20]
Brad Feld
You know what I've missed recently? Singing. There hasn't been enough singing on this show. So we gotta bring it back.
- [169:26]
Jordi
Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
- [169:30]
Brad Feld
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We gotta get Tyler to chime in when we're singing. We can close on this. On this post, Vinny Daniels says I'm seeing parallels between Nvidia and the Medici bank failure of the 1490s.
- [169:48]
Jordi
Who isn't?
- [169:49]
Brad Feld
People are having fun drawing comparisons. Lots to the dot com boom. Not so much to the 1490s, but fire up, open, crack open a history book.
- [170:00]
Jordi
Should we do a deep dive on the 1490s?
- [170:02]
Brad Feld
For sure. We should definitely read about the Medici bank failure. Tyler, you in? Get out. The red string.
- [170:08]
Jordi
I was gonna say, I see a parallel between Nvidia and the rise of the Roman Empire early on. Okay, okay.
- [170:14]
Riley Walls
Taking over everything.
- [170:15]
Jordi
Okay.
- [170:16]
Brad Feld
Who is Jensen? Is he Caesar?
- [170:18]
Jordi
The rise of Genghis Khan, The Mongols?
- [170:20]
Brad Feld
Maybe. Maybe.
- [170:22]
Jordi
Maybe. Anyways, that's a fun show, folks.
- [170:25]
Brad Feld
Thanks for tuning in.
- [170:26]
Jordi
Hope you have a great Wednesday, a fantastic rest of your day. We'll be back tomorrow and I cannot wait.
- [170:33]
Brad Feld
We will talk to you soon.
- [170:34]
Jordi
Cheers.
- [170:34]
Brad Feld
Goodbye.