Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Guests: Eric Newcomer (Newcomer), Carter Merrill (ex-Graphite/Cursor/SpaceX), Merrill Lutsky (M13), Swami Sivasubramanian (AWS), Thomas Suarez (Raven Resonance), Mark Gurman (Bloomberg), Ryan Daniels (Crosby), Isaiah Granet (Bland AI)
Date: June 17, 2026

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Overview

This episode of TBPN dives into the intersection of AI and hardware with a focus on Snap's new AR Spectacles, shifting tech aesthetics (“taste”), Midjourney’s unexpectedly secretive hardware launch, and the state of generative AI tools and wearables. Along the way, a parade of top founders, VCs, journalists, and builders unpack the impact of new products, industry trends, and venture dynamics. Notably, the episode captures the candid pulse of Silicon Valley around hardware bets, developer ecosystems, and what makes a tech product truly desirable in the era of AI and utility—or “taste.”

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Key Segments & Insights

1. The Snap Spectacles Debate: Hype vs. Usefulness

Timestamps: 01:46–15:46

• Hosts open with frank commentary on Snap’s latest AR glasses, showing off various product images and dissecting reactions.
• Initial feedback on the $2,200 glasses is “painful to wear, blocky” (Cooper, 02:42), raising questions about both style and utility.
• Comparison to Startups: If a startup released this, “they would be able to raise at… a billion” (Ben, 02:51), but Snap—a public company—faces harsher scrutiny due to burn and past investment.
• Killer Use Case Lacking: “Are any of them killer use cases?” (Ben, 08:56). Hosts and guests agree: cool tech, but none may be enough to justify a $2,000+ price for most consumers.
• Developer Cold Start: “You face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don’t make anything because there aren’t that many users” (Cooper, 15:46).
• Notable Quote: “[Snap] needs to replace a very regular, everyday interaction, like a screen” (Cooper, 11:22).
• Comparison: Cheaper alternatives like xreal ($300+) and Meta Ray-Bans ($799) get more traction due to price and utility.

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2. “Taste” in AI: The Taste Labs Viral Launch

Timestamps: 18:56–26:39

• Taste Labs introduces its mission: ending “AI slop” by making aesthetics measurable in generative AI outputs.
• Community Reaction: The term “taste” became saturated and divisive, with many arguing “you can’t program taste” (Ben, 20:35).
• Hosts question whether “taste” is even valued or associated with tech people, given the utilitarian, “athleisure” culture of SF.
• Steelman Argument: There’s strong short-term demand for better labelling and improved design output, even if long-term it may commoditize.
• Notable Example: Linear and Squarespace—once “tasteful,” but easily (and quickly) copied, becoming generic over time.

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3. Hardware & AI: From Midjourney to Snap, AR to Dev Tools

Timestamps: 07:06–19:09; 96:32–127:05

• Midjourney Hardware Hype: Cloaked secrecy has the panel buzzing. Founder David Holz’s previous work (Magic Leap, hand tracking) cited as evidence for his hardware chops.
• Ambient Computing: Thomas Suarez (Raven Resonance) demos “Raven Prism”—lightweight AR glasses for everyday micro-interactions, aiming for the “iPod of AR” before the “iPhone of AR.” (Tom Suarez, 113:04)
• Engineering for Use Cases: Maximizing all-day wear, privacy (physical camera cover), and local compute. “We’ve done it with under eight figures,” bucking the trend of 9-figure+ hardware burns. (Tom Suarez, 117:24)
• Meta Ray-Bans & Market Timing: Meta’s AR lineup is structured in three tiers, with the most basic (no display) actually selling best due to price and design, per Mark Gurman (152:59).

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4. Venture Shake-up: Funds, Founder-Friendly Firms, and SpaceX

Timestamps: 29:25–59:23; 77:28–96:30

• Eric Newcomer Interview: The acclaimed journalist unpacks his “contrarian optimism,” move from Bloomberg to Substack, and how reporting on VC, AI, and hardware is shifting as consumer products become less prominent and funding logic evolves.
• VC Tiering & Founder Choice: Conversation about how “Tier 1” VCs have rotated, with founders preferring “founders of the firms”—e.g., Thrive, Green Oaks—over legacy shops. (Ben, 53:25)
• SpaceX Wealth Effect: Major discussion about cascading economic impact from a potential SpaceX IPO—centimillionaires at car clubs, real estate, “this much value return… literally 80% in SPVs” (Room, M13, 94:40).
• M13’s Room recounts 10 years as a consumer/infra investor: “The skill of a VC is to understand where to get the best risk and probability-adjusted outcome.” (Room, 81:59)
• L.A. Startup Scene: Still not home to the next $100B company, but “$10–$20B companies” could come from apps/media built off AI.

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5. AWS Agentic AI: Swami Sivasubramanian

Timestamps: 96:32–110:11

• New Product: Launch of autonomous/continuous “agentic AI” for cross-tool productivity and novel use cases. Removing “walled gardens” between tools, AWS as “Switzerland of AI” with support for all major models. (Swami, 98:47; 104:23)
• Best Practice: AWS internally moves teams from “familiarize with AI tools” to “cost breakdown/ROI maximizing” via granular cost explorer insights. (Swami, 107:09)
• Future: Enterprises shifting from “cute prototypes” to “production, real value.”

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6. Apple, Siri AI, & Wearables — With Mark Gurman

Timestamps: 127:05–150:48

• Siri AI Rollout: New context-rich features—auto email summaries, contextual info—are “the only features that matter,” but Apple delayed them (Mark Gurman, 128:53).
• “95% of people… are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre-installed” (Mark Gurman, 129:34), but power users will still need advanced models.
• Upcoming hardware: iPhone Air 2 with improved battery, two rear cameras, new “foldable” iPhone Ultra.
• Apple Vision Pro: Next-generation lightweight model isn’t due until 2028/2029. Meanwhile, Apple’s smart home “lamp” is set for late 2028.
• Gurman on AR: “The industry is converging on daily-wear ambient computing, not just full-on AR.” (Tom Suarez, 111:20)

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7. Law & Voice AI: Crosby and Bland

Timestamps: 159:27–176:44

• Ryan Daniels (Crosby): First benchmark of AI-agents negotiating contracts; found that “models are really likely to just say yes and accept some term, because you want to keep the deal going. That’s not good lawyering” (George, 163:47).
• Token Maxing: Crosby and law firms like Kirkland are happy to spend lavishly on tokens when each AI hour is cheaper than law firm billables (165:50).
• Isaiah Granet (Bland): Just raised $50M to automate complex/high-risk customer service calls (“where if something goes wrong someone sues or dies”). Focused on hospital, airline, even 911 calls—building own models, not just wrapper on OpenAI. (Isaiah, 167:33)
• Product-market fit: “We want to do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies” (Isaiah, 167:34), emphasizing early stage and huge TAM for voice AI beyond basic phone trees.

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8. Closing & Industry News

Timestamps: 176:44–end

• Market news: Fed hints at rate hike, markets dip, G7 leaders (incl. Trump, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis) meet on AI export controls.
• Tragedy: Tribute to Joshua Baer (Capital Factory) after a fatal plane crash.
• SpaceX Valuation: Bill Ackman’s “tautological” logic (“valuable because it’s valuable”); speculation about acquisitions using high share price as currency.

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Memorable Quotes

• “If a startup launched this product… [it would] raise at a billion [valuation]… evaluated a lot differently than a public company.” — Ben (02:51)
• “Are any of them killer use cases?” — Ben (08:56)
• “Taste is something that people curate themselves, but as soon as it’s copied… it ceases to be tasteful.” — Ben (22:21)
• “No single model will rule the world.” — Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS (104:23)
• “Siri AI… 95% of people are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI preinstalled.” — Mark Gurman (129:34)
• “We want to do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies.” — Isaiah, Bland (167:34)
• “We’ve done it with under eight figures.” — Tom Suarez (117:24) re: hardware manufacturing

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Notable Timestamps

• 02:51 — Snap’s hardware would raise huge as a startup, not a stale public company
• 08:56 — “Are any of them killer use cases?”
• 15:46 — Cold start for AR hardware dev ecosystem
• 18:56 — Taste Labs: Can taste be programmed in AI?
• 29:55 — Eric Newcomer on new media, subscriptions, event-driven journalism
• 53:25 — Tier 1 VCs shifting, preference for firm “founders”
• 81:59 — VC as “risk and probability-adjusted outcomes”
• 104:23 — Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS: “no single model will rule the world”
• 113:04 — Suarez on “micro interactions” as the first mass AR use case
• 127:05 — Mark Gurman on Apple’s Siri, iPhone, and Vision Pro roadmap
• 167:33 — Bland: $50M funding to replace high-stakes human calls with AI

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Episode Tone & Style

Witty, rapid-fire, and frank. Hosts and guests blend hard-edged skepticism (especially toward hardware hype) with contagious excitement about technical progress and the creative chaos of generational platform shifts. There’s a strong undercurrent of “show me the use case or the revenue—otherwise, it’s slop.” Banter, in-jokes, and playful ribbing pervade, but major topics are given a thoughtful, sometimes philosophical treatment—especially when it comes to what’s actually valuable in a future shaped by AI.

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For the Listener: Why This Matters

This episode functions as a real-time group diagnosis of where the hype is outpacing value (Snap Specs), how AI trains both our tools and our tastes (Taste Labs), and whether Silicon Valley’s bets on hardware and agentic software will shape daily life—or fade into the R&D heap. If you missed the show, this summary guides you through the biggest debates and inside jokes animating tech’s current wave of disruption.

Transcript

[Carter Merrill]

You're watching.

[Ben]

You're watching TVPA.

[Cooper]

Today's Wednesday, June 17, 2026. We are live from the TV panel. Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

[Ben]

Big show today.

[Cooper]

Big show today. Lots of guests coming on. We got newcomer coming on. Mark Gurman's coming on.

[Ben]

Carter Merrill. I am super excited for Eric to join. Yeah, I don't have time to listen to that many podcasts, but I love listening to Eric.

[Cooper]

He's been on an absolute tear. His Ker Swisher interview is very good. His Ed Zittran interview was very good.

[Ben]

He throws on the gloves.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And he's almost like a matador. He's almost like a matador, right? Yeah.

[Cooper]

And it's interesting because, yeah, he. I don't know, he just has a very balanced view and keeps the conversation going and pushes people and gets things going back and forth. So very excited to chop it up with him. Anyway.

[Ben]

And then we have Merrill from Graphite, who made one of the plays, the absolute greatest plays of the year, truly selling to Cursor, which of course, shortly after that sold to SpaceX and is now up even further.

[Cooper]

The TPP on effect, really. Graphite was a sponsor, of course.

[Ben]

We did as much as we could. Then we have Carter, 90% of the hard work. Then we have Carter from M13 jumping on. We have Dr. Swami from AWS joining and then the Germinator of course, and a number of other founders.

[Cooper]

So, yeah, big show. Anyway, Snap. Snap Spectacles. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. Feedback has been mixed. Not good. People don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Cows. Glasses. What glasses? Not this one, the next one.

[Ben]

It's really this one. It's really tough because if, if a startup shipped these, everyone like they would, they would, they would be able to

[Cooper]

raise the photo after you're seeing this one. Go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

[Ben]

There you go.

[Cooper]

Honestly, there you go. The funny, big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool. Now that. Not those. That's too much. But you flip back. I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the. Oh, they're big. Because I saw a bigger version and I like these. They're a little bit blocky.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

But it's like a style choice. I don't know. I'm getting. I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.

[Ben]

Here's the thing, might pick up a couple pair. If a startup launched this product.

[Cooper]

Yes.

[Ben]

And was able to do the demos that they can do. We've tried this product. We've done, we've done a number of the demos that startup would would be able to raise at I would say easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But they're. A startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three and a half billion dollars building this product. So yeah, the feedback from the market has not been great. From activists has not been great.

[Cooper]

Down 2% over the last five years and just in the last five days, down another 8.5%. And Evan Spiegels has been having to defend his decisions, his investment. Here we'll see where all this goes. The question's like, how expensive is this effort? How core to the business is it? How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect should be an AI winner. You know, just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era, clearly a lot of these investments were green lit in the early days when the stock was up, when the, when the market was booming. And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the AI era, not the wearables era.

[Ben]

But Tyler in the chat says snap down 92% since peak. So you can imagine a lot of the, a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company.

[Cooper]

Yeah. But to be fair, Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. I know I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap, it must have been 10 years ago and they bought a couple of companies and been working on this. And then of course they did have the first version of Spectacles which were like the Meta Ray Ban displays or the Meta Ray Bans. No screen but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received, but never quite got to Escape Velocity where it really moved the needle for the business, but very clear, interesting R and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gorell, because Brandon Rail came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll read through your piece. We'll steel man it. I'll steel man it. No problem. But first, I'm gonna steel man Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

[Ben]

I think it can steel man itself.

[Cooper]

It can steel man itself, honestly. So let's read through. Brandon's.

[Ben]

Hit it.

[Cooper]

So Snapchat showed off specs its new augmented reality glasses at augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver, pair of glasses that you'd have on all the time. Everywhere, maps, hud, review of restaurants in your visual field. Prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards, and more general AI powered assistance stuff like measuring distances for you so you don't have to use a tape measure. The broad mix of features combined with the fact that specs are fairly pricey. $2,200, basically, and that they look painful to wear. So Brandon Gorell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs. The. What do they call that? The bar. What's that thing on the glasses?

[Eric Newcomer]

The.

[Cooper]

That goes in the back? I don't know. Whatever that thing is, it's a little thick. It's a little heavy. There's a battery back there. Probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. You imagine wearing that for four hours. Maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how other scenario.

[Ben]

He's getting some cauliflower ear. He's training. He sees Zach is gotten into mma. He doesn't want to be left behind. So we don't know.

[Cooper]

So Brandon asked.

[Ben]

Tyler says it is the arm. The arm of the sunglasses. Where is Tyler, by the way? Oh, Tyler's. Tyler's going to.

[Cooper]

Yeah, Tyler's going to the midjourney event, which will also be interesting. There's a whole bunch of interesting hardware stuff happening in the midst of the AI boom. Midjourney's launching a hardware device tonight. No one knows exactly what it is. Surprising it hasn't leaked.

[Ben]

They got it locked down over there.

[Cooper]

They got it locked down. It's great. Also, I think maybe journalists don't think it's like the hottest scoop to go after, but still really impressive. I'm on the edge of my seat to figure out what they launched because. Incredibly talented team, incredible business, incredible founder. And David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, started Magic Leap, an augmented reality or virtual reality company that would track your hand over this little device that was sort of the size of a stick of gum, basically. And you could strap it to the front of a Oculus Rift and it would track your hands while you were in VR. That company at one point sold to Apple almost and then got rolled back and then sold to another company and raised a bunch of money. And then David ran it all up again with Mid Journey. It's a great story anyway. I love the Midjourney story, but very excited about that.

[Ben]

Back to specs.

[Cooper]

Back to specs. Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over 2k so they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin? I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a. Is this a. Is this something that has, like, badge value? If you pull out, like a nice range finder, like a Titleist bag or something with a. With a great brand, it feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA Tour. The heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really put together.

[Ben]

Yeah. And so many cool use cases. But are any of them killer use cases? No, I'm just saying. I'm saying, like, that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is gonna fit into your room. I don't. Yeah, I do that mentally when I'm doing.

[Cooper]

You do it in your.

[Ben]

Like, if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that. But that's like a specific moment in time maybe once every couple years at most for a lot of people. I feel like, you know, some people are kind of constantly adding furniture here and there, but a lot of people, it's kind of you set it and forget it. So, yeah, very. Like, again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time.

[Cooper]

Glasses. I'm Googling Robert De Niro's casino glasses. Yeah, these are pretty bulky here. We can share this in the chat here. Boom. Pull those up. Let's continue. So you can buy rangefinders for around 150 bucks. They're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf heads, they're out there for More than the battery life. They're out there for more than three, three and a half hours. Three and a half hours might be enough for nine On a busy course, they're doing six hours out there. Sometimes you don't want to be out there with your going to reality glasses and they die on you. Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects. Our startup is going to be willing to drop 2k for every employee who wants to come collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's Spec's page as things you can do with the glasses. And the features do seem super cool. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2k price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone. Like, people were already carrying phones and the iPhone was like, we debated this before, but it had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone. And then the fact that it also was an ipod was an extra feature. And then the fact that it was an Internet browser was another feature, but it replaced like very, very basic things.

[Ben]

And my thing is, I don't think as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.

[Cooper]

Yeah, well, I think it needs to replace a very regular, everyday interaction, like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80 inch TV. But 80 inch TVs are like 500 bucks now. And so you got to get it to be better and you got to have enough for everyone in your household to have one. And it's got to be a better experience. But in that world, the other challenge

[Ben]

is like, a lot of these, I mean, like, a lot of these use cases I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base. And that's like the biggest business. Like a $2,000 device doesn't really align to their. What I believe is their core demo.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

And so Bugle Capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this Again, I don't think they look that bad. But there is this question of, you know, is this a serious product? The Fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap. If you're enough of a dork to have these on your face and you won't even get the chance to say, may I meet you? Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit. That's ridiculous. They're gonna sell a few to people that want to demo them. There's fans that buy every product. Palmer Lucky has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them.

[Ben]

Let's pull up this post from a capital. Because this might be a killer.

[Cooper]

Yeah, we can watch this. This actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs you just unveiled.

[Eric Newcomer]

They cost $2,195.

[Cooper]

The stock's down more than 5%. The sound effect, the sound mix is really good. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new. The sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset. So, so funny.

[Ben]

The smile. I, I feel. I feel really bad for the Snap team. I. I think this. I, I think like the. I want them to win, but I don't. I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're going to need to justify further investment. Is my current view. Unless Spiegel just doesn't care and continues to double or triple down, which is totally possible. But I think at a normal company, this would kind of be the last shot.

[Cooper]

It's tough. You're competing with these hyper efficient Chinese companies. There's this company, Xreal, we demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler, took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple hundred dollars and you get a screen that's not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen inside, but then it projects like a 200 inch TV in front of you. And these are actually sort of. It's more chopping at the daily use cases and less doing. Like Frontier, you can play video games on them because you just plug the HDMI from the Xbox into the device and then you just have a big screen in front of you. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming, there's a whole bunch of different things. You can watch movies on it, do the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that xreal is on a path to commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's.

[Ben]

Not to mention meta Ray ban displays are 799.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And I'm sure, I do believe that these have more, quite a bit like more features functionality. They have a bigger developer network.

[Cooper]

But a lot of the, A lot of the killer features of like on demand AI instantiating a generative ui, answering a question for you, that can be done with a Call of Duty hud,

[Ben]

that can be done like all this. Like again, it's, it's cool. But I don't know anyone that would do this.

[Cooper]

And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users. We were talking about this with YC yesterday. It is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being free, we're not seeing breakout. Apple Vision Pro development like the Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scott, he wants to demo. It comes with a really, really impressive demo where it finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal and through the wall you see this like dinosaur land. You'd love it as a dinosaur expert. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your. It's like a velociraptor type thing.

[Ben]

Let's double check.

[Cooper]

And a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels like you almost feel it because it's so. It's like tracking your hand and lands. Very cool. It's like a five minute demo that the Apple team clearly worked very hard on. That feels like something that could be expanded on very cheaply in the age of vibe coding. And yet no one sees it as an economic opportunity. Developers are just, they'd rather build an app for the iOS app store and so no one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, where's the ecosystem going to come from if they're not selling millions and millions of units and people are ready to purchase games or see ads or do anything that could monetize a business built on the back of this platform? It's a very, very tricky proposition to get a platform like this up and running. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and with AI agents. And Harley had some big news today. We can play video from Shopify later in the show. But David Holes is saying you'll want to see this. They're announcing their first hardware project tomorrow, which is today at 6pm I believe Tyler from our team will be in attendance. Checking it out, reporting back. Stay tuned for a live stream of our in person launch event in San Francisco. If you're in town and want invite reply below, there's a few slots left, so go check it out if you're in ss.

[Ben]

Yeah, it's interesting, you know, this hardware project I guess in some ways is probably funded by Meta and the licensing deal they have. The other thing about midjourney privately held company, right. They don't have like tens of thousands of shareholders that have lost money on the business and so it's almost like pure upside. Whereas I think like part of the reaction to the negative reaction to Snap is like looking at all the comments, looking at all the people sharing negative things. I can imagine like 90% of those people have owned the stock at some point or another have lost money on it and so they're just already inclined to have kind of a negative view on anything the company does and not give the leadership the benefit of the doubt really in any way at all. But very, very excited for this. And hardware is hard, but I think the more, the more shots on goal the better.

[Cooper]

Yeah, well the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil. People going back and forth. So yesterday a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup, Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop. Quote, this requires turning a fuzzy subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design, her post says. More specifically, Taste is says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of Vibe coded projects. They all sort of look the same. Of course there are examples of really cool projects, but people were starting to say, oh this has like the Vibe code look to it or this model's not good at front end, et cetera. Her goal is to fix that. Ty's post, her post was immediately immediately went viral, generating tons of opinions on X and getting over a million views in 24 hours. People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the Steel man is that the AI aesthetic, AI's aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I want to talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me, take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you, and then I have a take about where the business goes.

[Ben]

So I think the main thing is. Main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore. Yeah, I don't want to hear that

[Cooper]

word for the last six months, maybe last year, it's been like the code word, like, what will we do in the AI can do all the technical stuff. Well, we'll have the taste.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, even the conversation. We've never even weighted that deeply into the conversation. And I'd like to keep it that way.

[Cooper]

That being said, just to set the table on the critique. Like, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important. And the outsiders don't see San Francisco tech as being tasteful people, as being particularly tasteful people. From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or curation perspective. It's sort of known as the T shirts and athleisure community. And that's. It's sort of. It's optimized, it's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste.

[Ben]

Yeah. And then, and then I'll say one more thing, and then, and then I'll steal Man taste labs. Yeah, but so the main thing is, like, when I think of, when I think of, like, taste, like, product taste, like, I think of, like, linear, Right? Like, linear has, like, always been very opinionated, very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is. Like, you know, very, very design driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste. Right. The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you.

[Cooper]

Right.

[Ben]

So then there's an entire generation of companies that just look, like, linear, right. From their website to the actual product. And so taste is something that people curate themselves. But then the, the as soon as it's copied, then it's like, fundamentally, like, not tasteful in my view. Right. Then it's not original. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality to be able to combine. Combine, you know, do 1 plus 1 equals 2. And another example is, like, isn't 1

[Cooper]

plus 1 equals 3?

[Ben]

Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 plus 1 equals 1 plus 1

[Cooper]

equals 3 equals 11.

[Ben]

1 plus 1 equals 2. That's the ad. Oh, yeah, that fake startup ad. No. So another example is like Squarespace.

[Cooper]

Sure.

[Ben]

Like, Squarespace took like high end website design and then just democratized it, monetized it.

[Cooper]

Right.

[Ben]

Anybody could have a pretty website and then you started to just, I would just look like, okay, is this a squarespace website or did this person make it? Okay, it's a squarespace website website. Like, and not, it's not really that much of a knock, but like it wasn't like the company's own taste that led to that output or the people that they worked with. So it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs create better looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to get to build, at least temporarily, a pretty big business. Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about. Right. And so I think that while Taste Labs, you know, got a lot of flak over the last 24 hours, they probably, their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And very unclear what, what this business looks like in, you know, five years. Like a lot of the other companies in the category, but I bet they, I bet they print in the short term.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling.

[Ben]

So the name, the name is like

[Cooper]

kind of perfect Rage, baby.

[Ben]

Taste Labs. We're building Taste. Yeah, Taste in a lab. We built it, we made it.

[Cooper]

Yeah. It is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful and the end product would be exactly the same because that's just your negative data set and everything else is positive by that design. But a lot of the data labeling projects have just been, does the button work? Does this render properly? Is this functional? And some of that's been able to be looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded just tagging. Okay, does the photo have six fingers or five fingers? That was a useful piece of data labeling that happened probably two years ago. Now there's a bigger question about what actually looks good. And then how do you represent a diversity of tasteful designs such that everything just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor? Like the. It's not this, it's that. But for design would Be the bad.

[Ben]

Yeah. Which is like already extremely easy to clock right now. And I got a deck last night, friend of mine, his company, and my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design? Because it's totally possible. The answer is yes, but at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is going to know that you're slopping it up. Tried to one shot this, which again for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine, but it's going to turn some people off.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, people are going all back and forth on this. This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed. Even if you make AI imitate taste, whatever that means, it still won't mean anything. Taste emerges from craft context, meaning subjectivity and genuine care. That's sort of true, but just increasing the quality of design is valuable. But yes, it's a tall order when you use the word taste because so much baggage has been assigned to that. Well, you know what the most tasteful database is? It's MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market your business on Mongo DB? Don't just build. I own the data platform that powers it. You know what else is tasteful? Chris Larson from Ripple has been buying an absolute absurd amount of cars recently. He got an F1 GTR, a 918 Spider, a P1, a T50, an Enzo Assessedo Elemento has probably spent like 50 million on cars in the past year. I think it's more than 50 million if you total all those up.

[Ben]

The P1 he has is insane.

[Cooper]

Where is that? Is that in the comments?

[Ben]

It's a green on tan. P1.

[Cooper]

Green on tan. Looking good. Post them all. They're on the Cesario collection on Instagram. Wow. Yeah, the dark green is a good, good, good image. This is quite the collection that's emerging. Well, very tasteful. You can go check it out on Instagram because we love that.

[Ben]

Speaking of, I mean, taste in Silicon Valley could be a Mansory body kit on a Model 3 because that says kind of like this high, low approach. It says like I'm practical. I want a car that gets me to point A to point B. Yeah, but I want to look, I want to look good.

[Cooper]

Yeah, it's sort of like, it's a metaphor for taking like a sort of slop filled base model and then stuffing taste down it with a bunch of fine tuning.

[Ben]

Because everyone, when they think of Mansory, they Think of, like, really high taste, maybe.

[Cooper]

Depends who will be doing the labeling. Will it be Mansory people? There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate, potentially. Sources familiar with the matter disputed semaphores reporting. There was a back. There was a whole bunch of back and forth about is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for Roku and they're taking shots at each other. Semaphore, what you got? Ben Smith says congrats on helping with the cleanup. They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this tweet means. Sharon. Cleanup on aisle semaphore. My dear Ben, all I'm saying is they are now saying on the record that they're not interested in Lionsgate. Never were. Would have been happy to amplify your scoop, too. They're fighting. They're fighting the timelines in turmoil. Anyway, we have the perfect person to discuss journalistic timeline and turmoil back and forth.

[Tom Suarez]

I don't know.

[Cooper]

We have Eric Newcomer from Newcomer. He's the founder and writer. Welcome to the show. How are you doing there?

[Ben]

Finally.

[Carter Merrill]

Finally.

[Cooper]

I'm so sorry. First. First. Apologies. It's been way too long. You know, I've been a cat. I'm not kidding. I've listened to every episode, and you've been on an absolute terror. And I'm sorry that we went back and forth to. We both barely live in Twitter DMs. And so every. Our chats are just like, yeah, let's do it. And then, like, five days later, oh, sorry, I dropped it. Oh, sorry I dropped it. But anyway, I'm glad you're here. How you doing? Here we are.

[Eric Newcomer]

And I tweeted, this is a big moment for me, and literally, I'm having Ben Smith record on my podcast tomorrow. So it couldn't have been a better.

[Cooper]

You can get to the bottom of it.

[Eric Newcomer]

I haven't even dug into this, so it's like you're giving me notes material. Ask him about.

[Cooper]

You got to ask him the hard questions. What happened with the minor scoop around?

[Ben]

I. You have. I. I really. We were saying that when the show kicked off.

[Cooper]

Generational run.

[Ben]

Generational run With.

[Room (M13)]

And.

[Ben]

And I. When I listen to your show, I. I'm, like, taking notes. It's like, you. You actually have a really. I was calling you, like, matador.

[Mark Gurman]

Oh, yeah.

[Ben]

You're with, like, you're with, like, a bull, and you're trying to get them to, like, kind of run at you, but then they run at you and you sidestep.

[Cooper]

It's really good.

[Ben]

It's really good.

[Cooper]

And it's just, I don't know. Do you feel like you, you occupy like an interesting space? Because I feel like you're not some like tech optimist, pumper, insider, right? Like you have, you know what, six years in Bloomberg, serious journalistic chops, but then you interact with people who come at you with like crazy anti tech takes and you're able to sort of like play the pro tech guy in some ways. Like, what is going on?

[Eric Newcomer]

Sometimes, you know, I'm someone who came up through journalism. You know, I was working the last guy in through the normal. Like I was in my hometown paper, the Macon Telegraph, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, New York Times, just like interning my way up, just doing the journalism thing. Thank God Jessica Lesson brought me to work for the information. I was the first employee. So it was like, oh, very interesting. Yeah, yeah. And so I was working out of her like, apartment in Dolores park. And then I, yeah, I worked at Bloomberg for six years and, you know, started to really get Silicon Valley. And so when I launched Newcomer, I did write that I wanted contrarian optimism. You know, I felt like I started my time as a tech reporter being more negative than most because that was the era of, you know, sort of the gadget blogger. And then by the end of my time at Bloomberg, we had sort of the infiltration of, you know, the political reporter who was really gunning for Facebook or whatever. And so it went from everybody's too soft, everyone's too negative. And I really just wanted to write for like your audience, you know, people in Silicon Valley. People got it. Didn't want to have to explain who Marc Andreessen and Ben, you know, Bill Gurley were and just sort of write for the people. And sometimes that's positive, sometimes that's negative. Puts me in a sort of weird situation.

[Cooper]

So I feel like I'm also having trouble putting you in a bucket as like commentary interviewer, scoop master, scoop athlete. You get some scoops, but it's not the only thing that you do. Like, we talk to a lot of people who are just great yappers and they've never gotten a scoop and that's fine. And they have great commentary and they can talk about anything that's amazing. And then there's other people who are just great interviewers and they every week they're delivering like the best guest. And then there's other people who are the scoop athletes. And you never really hear Them give a take or their opinion, but they're like pestering everyone in Signal all day long. I suppose. But is that by design? Is that something you see, like fragmenting over time as you build the organization? Like what? Is there a method to the madness? Or is it just like you enjoy all three things? So you've been down, you know, you

[Eric Newcomer]

do best what you enjoy. I've never heard anyone call me an athlete before. A scoop athlete, the scoop doggy dog, future, future, hall of fame, you know, we're essential reading. I think the best takes are ones where, you know, you go talk to people who know and then you're like, it's not just like, I made this up. It's like, yeah, I talk to people, it's going to be right. You know, I want my predictions to come true. I think the best coverage, you know, doesn't just sound smart today. You know, you look back and you're like, oh, we were saying Google was undervalued when the stock, you know, wasn't getting the credit. You know, you want to feel like we were right, like look back and read the record. And that's how you build a record.

[Ben]

So when you say you get financial

[Eric Newcomer]

advice, I want people to make money. I want it to. I thought, you know, that's not the goal, but I want people to read it and they make more money. And so it feels like it's worth subscribing. But yeah, we do, we do whatever we want. You know, it's newcomer.

[Cooper]

It's diversity in the content from a personality driven. But you do have other folks on staff and then also diversity of revenue streams. Right. Ads, subscriptions and events. Like, was that deliberate on day one? I feel like a lot of people focus, like, I don't know, it's interesting, it's worked, but it's like it feels contrarian in the new media sense because most people will just be like, oh, I want to be like Ben Thompson only subscriptions or tvpns only ads. Or someone's like, really in the conference business. Or they do that like way later. It feels like you were able to land three planes simultaneously pretty quickly.

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah. I mean, today event sponsorship is our main revenue stream, with newsletter subscriptions being our second largest. I mean, I did the substack thing in 2020 in the pandemic and it was like, this seems like fun. Finally something in startup world applies to me. I'll jump on that. And I was one of the Top Tech substacks 2023. I had not jumped on crypto right. Like I'm sort of a crypto hater. But 2023, I'm like, I don't know. ChatGPT, this seems real, you know, this is actually the tech trend that people have been waiting for and not something that was like getting ginned up. So I had access to a beautiful office in Hayes Valley. My friends now their company is Weekend. We put on the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. It was just sort of like this worked. People were enthusiastic, you know, Ali Goetzee connected with Naveen Route Mosaic Amel acquired the company for $1.3 billion. You don't get better press than that. You know, Business Insider put in a beautiful headline, you know, and so we were off to the races. We're literally doing our mid year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London next week. So ramping up for that. So yeah, it's events, subscriptions, trying to. I'm out, I'm out hustling. Trying to follow your sponsorship playbook. So if you want to put in a good word for people, the newcomer all around, I'd love it.

[Cooper]

Or the pre roll or the mid roll host Red ad in your podcast I think would do very well. And I mean I like that there's no ads when you're sparring with somebody. But you did have the mic drop at the end of the Ed Zitron episode, which I very much enjoyed. And yeah, if you'd snuck an ad in there, I would have been like, you earned it, you know, Would have been good.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

Anyway, talk about, about how you're thinking about covering some of the big stories right now. Like SpaceX is, is dominating the news. But it's an interesting company to cover because Elon's like one of the first like go direct CEOs. He doesn't do a lot of like management interviews. You don't really like do interviews with other people. Like we have somebody from, we have a VP of agentic AI from us coming on the show. They're happy to talk up and down the stack. You don't get that SpaceX necessarily. How do you think about what your audience wants to hear from you on SpaceX?

[Eric Newcomer]

I mean, yeah, they control their own social media network. They can publish directly.

[Cooper]

Apparently they're not doing SEC filings or something. Do you see? Because they're not doing conference calls, the filings, but they'll just put it on X. It's hilarious.

[Eric Newcomer]

I mean, for the most part the newsletter really covers, you know, earlier stage startups on our sort of Friday is like a step back and so we cover Space X a lot there. I mean, all this money is about to flow into Silicon Valley. So just everybody getting rich and that being great for the startup ecosystem is definitely one theme. And who's getting rich and who got in early is certainly important to us. And then, yeah, we can't help ourselves but say this is like madness. I feel like even people buying the shares.

[Cooper]

Oh yeah.

[Eric Newcomer]

You know, know that it's sort of a part psychological stock where it's like, well, is there other money that's going to come in that's going to boost this thing up? And it, you know, as someone who's fairly bullish on anthropic and open air to some degree, like Space X just feels like total lunacy given the sort of insane TAM story that you have to believe. So, yeah, you're getting some of our commentary that it feels, it feels somewhat ludicrous. But trying to root it in the S1 and just keeping it in the numbers.

[Ben]

Yes, it seems valuable on where, where the SpaceX employees are going to be doing their, you know, upcoming purchasing activities. There's variety. No, there's like, there's, there's, there's like a variety of like communities where you're

[Cooper]

gonna say the one you're thinking of

[Ben]

if you look at them, there's only a few homes listed. And I'm like, I knowing, like I, I was. There's like a, there's a car club, this, this, this. Oh yeah, racetrack and it's called Willow Springs. It's an old racetrack. They're putting a car club there. I know for a fact that a bunch of them are signing. I'm a little bit nervous that there's, that I share too many interests with the SpaceX team. One less, I guess. Serious question. Do you think mocking VCs should be illegal because there's been a little bit of some drama on the timeline or

[Cooper]

do you think in, if you major in venture capital in college, they should teach you about the Streisand effect? Yeah, yeah, that might be another one.

[Ben]

No, but there's been some drama on the timeline this week with, with VC Braggs, and I'm just, I'm wondering, you know, Silicon Valley has a lot of power in Washington right now and I'm wondering if now's the time to push to make it just straight up illegal.

[Eric Newcomer]

And the scourge, like, it's just. Yeah, you know, I, you know, we tweak, we tweak venture capitals. I get venture capitalists. I guess I'm humoralist.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

List.

[Eric Newcomer]

Humorless on this. Yeah. I don't know. VC always needs to be better at taking. Taking criticism. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. It's, like, better to be in the mix. In some ways, the sass, you know, gets. Helps you clean up your message a little bit. So I'm. I'm always sorry.

[Cooper]

Sass, not SaaS. It's like, I mean, that does get to something else, which is like, do you get AI fatigue like we do sometimes where we're like, oh, like the snap spectacles thing we spent 20 minutes on at the top of the show and, like, is it the most consequential story, consequential technology? It's an $8 billion company. It's a new consumer product, but it's something that's, like, tangible that at least you can, like, dig into. How do you. How do you. How do you balance, like, what is tangible and interesting to the. To the reader with where the market cap is actually moving, which might be at the Frontier Labs or the databricks of the.

[Room (M13)]

The world?

[Cooper]

That's a little more abstract.

[Eric Newcomer]

I feel so lucky to cover venture capital because you get to cover interesting stuff that makes a lot of money. Right? Like, I could. I could write about oil and gas, and it's like, you'd fall in dollars. But it's, like, super boring. So, yeah, to me, venture is already pretty exciting. Like, writing about AI you get to talk about artificial general intelligence and, like, whether it's sentient. And these have, like. It has real, like, business consequences. So I don't really get tired of the AI story. I mean, certainly AI is dominating, you know, basically all the investment activities, so it becomes a huge focus of ours. So, no, I'm less likely to get dragged into the snap spectacle stuff. I mean, it's always fun to watch for new hardware, but just this. This question of, you know, are workers getting totally disrupted will, you know, change the course of American business? We have these enormous IPOs. So it's one of the more enjoyable times to be a business reporter where the stuff you want to write about, which is a new intelligence being birthed by Silicon Valley, matches, you know, the market caps and what's interesting. And so following the money for the most part, has been, you know, super gratifying story. And so we tend. We tend to stay pretty focused on that.

[Cooper]

How are you answering that question of, like, job displacement? Obviously, there's, like, economic numbers. There's also just sort of reverting back to, like, your own personal experience. Like, are you seeing competition on Substack from like slop farms? Like, definitely.

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

I think Tim Ferriss just wrote about this.

[Eric Newcomer]

At least one guy clearly ranked above me who's using AI to write the stuff, which is just fascinating.

[Cooper]

And where does that leave? Have you grappled with what the response is? Because it feels like the scoops are very, very protected, AI resistant. But maybe history or breaking down or analyzing, taking a press release that's already out there, synthesizing some data in history that's maybe a little bit more commoditized. But how are you grappling with it?

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah, I mean, I think coming from a perspective, being a person so transcending just a writing style, but it is literally someone in a publication is accountable, is defensible. But certainly as the sort of writing quality of AI gets better and better, I'm not ruling out the possibility that it's super disruptive. Yeah, like you said, scoops, I think the sense that, you know, the information is coming from real humans that are like, I'm in the business of knowing what other humans are thinking is fairly defensible. But, you know, we're using AI to build, you know, like our ticketing platform for our events.

[Cooper]

Sure.

[Eric Newcomer]

One of my reporters was talking about using it just to build his own, like, story tracker. I think we're trying to be creative. Like, I'm. I don't want sort of AI written stuff in our stories, but I do sort of have existential questions about, you know, like the fifth sentence in the third paragraph. Yeah, I put out a better version than you were going to spend the time to do. Is it really a disservice to readers that you went in and like punch that up? And I think it's probably good for readers. So it's hard to have this super hard line of all human written stuff because we certainly want it for. It's a great copy editor. I pay a human copy editor, but still I run stuff through Claude and it's amazing how much it's catching both. It'll catch million billion type errors, math and obviously all sorts of minor typos.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I'm imagining that. Like, I feel no, like, sadness about you never writing the line. They declined to comment ever again. Like, it is fine if that is. It can be a Python script. It doesn't even need to be genai. It can just be like an if statement. Because that line is in so many news articles.

[Eric Newcomer]

We can have ones that like, take out all the perfunctory lines of stories that they feel inclined to put.

[Cooper]

And you could, you know, I would like that version. A lot of times when you think

[Ben]

about disruption for, for like a newsletter media business, however, however you want to describe it, the only person that I think would actually be able to compete, like you weirdly need like a network. You need like trust. You need like, you need. There's so much like information that I would say informs your work and other. Other journalists that, that run similar businesses that's just like not anywhere online. Like it truly only exists in you know, a small like group chat or places like that. And so the question is like, I don't think a fully. I don't think AI can like actually just like somebody with AI that is able to build up the trust in the network and the kind of understanding of the space. Yeah, that person is like, if they're willing to just use more AI than you and like they don't care about like the slop allegations or whatever, then maybe they have some type of advantage. But I still feel like more than, more than ever, there's so much information that, that you need to run a great media business that is not anywhere on the Internet. It's not in podcasts, it's not on X. It's. You just have to go actually talk to people.

[Eric Newcomer]

We play nice with ARFA Rock, but honestly it's, you know, people in the industry giving it away for free. You know, the desperation for basically content marketing, meaning that some people do a good job of taking sort of their data and using it to get attention. Like you think about, I don't know, I don't know, ramps, AI spend data or something. Yeah, like that stuff, you know, used to be sort of the fodder of like a Wall Street Journal type story. And so to some degree I think everyone being smarter that they need to have actually like great content to get people to pay attention. Is one of the vectors of attack. Not attack on media, but just competitive.

[Cooper]

Yeah, like walk me through the ramp. AI spend is like an example of like going direct in the sense that they publish it themselves, they tweet about it, they go on podcasts about it. The ADP jobs data just gets released on a news wire and then contextualized by the wire Wall Street Journal. But if ADP all of a sudden hired some really charismatic employee to go on podcasts, that would be like the same effect.

[Eric Newcomer]

And a lot of, you know, the old way of doing it would be you try to embargo it to a couple outlets and so they felt like they were really getting something so then their readers feel that this is a differentiated thing that they're receiving and incrementally more reason. Reason to subscribe to that publication. And so. So it used to be a dance that you'd basically be giving the media sort of favor and sort of unique access that we sort of lose over time.

[Tom Suarez]

Do you.

[Ben]

Ten years from now, would you. Can you imagine having, you know, 10, 20 journalists on staff, joining forces, you know, sort of rebundling? Or do you like being unbundled?

[Eric Newcomer]

I mean, you know, I have, you know, Madeline Renbarger, Tom Doton, Jonathan Weber writing for me now. And they're sort of a core part of what Newcomer is today. And certainly, you know, with unlimited resources, part of what I want to spend the money on is great journalism, good reporting. It's sort of. It's amazing that, you know, most cynically, like our content marketing for events is profitable, generates subscription revenue. People demonstrate real value. You know, it's like you. The journalism provides sort of a great way to remind people about the amazing events we're putting on. And so I think it's super synergistic. So, yeah, I'd love to keep building up a newsroom, but I don't really believe in a sort of rebundling of subsequents. Like part of it. We're all building separate brands. You know, Newcomer has its own brand proposition. And a lot of the other subsequents people like, just are sort of. You know, I love Lenny is like crushing it. Right. But it's a very different thing focused on product managers. And so if you even look at tech and business substacks, we're so different that I've never really been a believer that there's going to be a rebundling in that sense. But some publications, like the Free Press or the Ankler myself, get to a level of scale where we become. Start to look more like publications.

[Cooper]

Yeah, it certainly didn't really happen on YouTube. Like, there are a whole bunch of different creators and Mr. Beast has a whole team and offshoot channels. But with the Mr. Beast brand and the promise and the editing and the. But it was Never like, oh, MrBeast is gonna roll up other creators. Cause that's not the way the setup is working. Talk to me about Mafia. I think we agree that we don't need other venture capital firms with game

[Eric Newcomer]

shows, but don't copy tvpn. Do a new thing. Exactly.

[Cooper]

I love that for that reason. But do we need a game show with just journalist competitors, like an American Ninja Warrior with just substackers what do

[Ben]

you think about that pitch or Nitro Circus?

[Cooper]

Nitro Circus would be good.

[Eric Newcomer]

I'm not building my business around it. I'm happy to go on.

[Cooper]

You participate as.

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah, yeah, sign me up. But as you guys know the challenge of media is sustaining it.

[Tom Suarez]

Right.

[Eric Newcomer]

Like I mean and kudos to Mike Solana Power wires obviously he's delivering day in and day out he gets it. But I do think for like show concepts it's fun to get excited about the idea but the business is in the long term. Like is there variety? Do you have something great day in and day out? So some of these things it's like yeah. When you have, you know the top people you'd want for a Mafia show, it's exciting. But is there like fifth episode with you know, the C tier founders as much of a sort of much what must watch.

[Cooper]

But that's what's interesting about Mafia is that it's not a new company. It's not an enterprise that needs to sustain. It can be just a fun thing. A fun thing that goes as long as it needs to, doesn't overstay its welcome because it's not this self perpetual because they have 60 billion in space X coming to to hire some camera crews that they need. You know like that, that is the nature of like what's unique about action.

[Eric Newcomer]

I haven't watched, I have not watched the full thing. Tom Doton on my team wrote the piece.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Eric Newcomer]

But I do think you know the traders is so exaggerated and there's a reason for it. I still, I, I'm not saying that I could host it that way but there is a reason that Hollywood and the TV business is so exaggerated and I think they still need to up it even more the sort of drama of it all.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah. I saw some people like chirping at the fact like it only had 100,000 views on YouTube and I'm like that is insane for tech. That's insane.

[Room (M13)]

And

[Cooper]

the guests like who knows these people? There's only a couple in tech world right now. There's only like a couple thousand founders that matter to a top tier venture capital firm. There's only a couple founders that couple thousand founders that even know who these people are. Of course like some of the contestants were bigger names but. But by and large these are insiders around the table. It worked.

[Eric Newcomer]

Founders, funds, money. But now that Trey is great.

[Cooper]

Yeah, they're in. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe.

[Ben]

How, how are you thinking about the evolution of the Tier 1? It feels the Tier 1 VC it feels like the Tier 1. The Tier 1 VCs of, of, you know, when you started newcomer are not the same. The same today. They're just constantly spicy.

[Eric Newcomer]

This is the question of all questions. I mean, I want to say first of all, I mean, I would always. I'd put Sequoia, I guess number one to, to answer the question. I think I wrote a piece.

[Ben]

Well, I'm not even telling you. I'm, I'm not even telling you like to, to give me.

[Eric Newcomer]

Name them all.

[Ben]

Name them. But, but you're welcome. You're welcome to this. This will be a scoop for us.

[Cooper]

This will be a scoop for us.

[Eric Newcomer]

Who do I think are the top?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Top.

[Ben]

No, no, I just mean like to me, to me there's been a very like a very, very material shift and no one has like really said it out loud. Like there hasn't been. I think you'd be in a position to actually do this because you have to go talk to the top undred founders under $10 billion market cap or below and say like at series A, you basically like make them choose who they would pick every single round.

[Cooper]

Done this, right?

[Ben]

And, and there's been, there's been some like, random. There's been some like random kind of like surveys and like games that you can play to try to get at it. But like, I think if you actually had it like you were.

[Eric Newcomer]

I've seen this idea on Twitter, like, and people. Who is the firm or who. Where's the real switch or who do you think the swaps would be?

[Ben]

I just, I think that there's a very like, at least when I talk to founders, like, founders want to work with not necessarily like other founders, as in like a founder who had an ipo, but they want to work with the founders of the firms. And so there's like a new generation of like, you know, the Thrives and the, and the Green Oaks and things like that. Where I see them as like really, really dominating.

[Eric Newcomer]

They would certainly coming up soon on my list.

[Ben]

Yeah. And like, and, and you know, when you get in a situation like hyper competitive, like Series A, Series B, like those guys are like really sharks, right? And like, where do they, where do they. Where do they, you know, fit in?

[Cooper]

So the fall off of Arthur Rock, not our Fur Rock, but the original Arthur Rock needs to be studied. The guy funded Apple intel, absolutely insane portfolio. Goes out investing with Bernie Madoff. He gets outed for that in 2009. There's a firm that really fell off from the top 25.

[Ben]

Wait, did he just get screwed by Bernie or he was.

[Cooper]

He got screwed. It's not even that bad, but I don't know.

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah, I mean, how much do you think returns are going to drive this? Right? In the cool venture story, like getting in Anthropic right now or obviously making much money on SpaceX. It's like you look at Spark doing the round that people underestimated that that's clearly been really good for them. I mean Lightspeed dumped a ton of money and Menlo, you know, I think it was key, key to them. So there are firms where I think it's had a big impact on their reputation, but I don't know if that matches.

[Ben]

I think that's helpful. I think that's helpful with LPs, but like, the reason that it's an interesting question is like, okay, who has the best overall brands, right? Who has like the most like halo? Which firms do founders actually want to work with? Right? Who has like the most access to capital? Like all these things factor in who did like, who did the ELO between these two firms.

[Cooper]

Which one are you picking?

[Ben]

Yeah, like people that bet on Anthropic.

[Cooper]

That's a completely different thing from actually measuring the quality of the venture capital business that is being built. And people still conflate two different goals. One is the, the sexy seed round to multibillion dollar exit in a very short amount of time. Cursor is a great example of like, it's just classic venture capital. You got in some billion, you were out at 60 within three years. It's just incredible venture capital.

[Eric Newcomer]

Auto.

[Cooper]

Right, Incredible venture capital. But then, but then there's a different game where that investment returns 3 billion in three years. And then there's a different one where you put 10 billion in a lab at 500 billion and it doubled and so you made more money. And in the, at the end of the game, these venture capital firms are businesses. The job is to return cash flow, like to create cash. And so, yeah, oh, this fund had to raise more money. That's not really a critique. That's a critique of like, like what's the definition of venture capital? Should we conclude growth stage investing in that? Should we include your public business in there? But like, as a financier, as an entrepreneur of a financial company, all you care about is how much cash are you returning to your investors and to your gps. And so there's two very different games that are being played. One is for clout and credibility and the other is just how much raw cash is this business Throwing off what's the value of the firm.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And I look at it like when I. When I. In the. In the most simple view, I think about a series A or a series B, and a founder gets 10 term sheets, hypothetically. And then you run that and you ask, you know, a hundred founders that, like, who comes out in the top three. That. That to me is like the most interesting because that's like a. Generally going to be a leading indicator for, like, who. Who has the most aura, you know,

[Cooper]

kind of the oralist, the newcomer.

[Ben]

The newcomer Oralist, the newcomer. Or we've done.

[Eric Newcomer]

We did Founder's Choice a while ago, which was these guys.

[Cooper]

Elo.

[George (Crosby)]

Right.

[Eric Newcomer]

That was more like, you know, it was a little more like founder friendly.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

Who do you want to work with?

[Room (M13)]

Experience.

[Eric Newcomer]

We've published, you know, an lp, did a survey of manager. So we try to. There's so many different ways to slice it.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Eric Newcomer]

And, yeah, I mean, getting great returns. I think it has some impact on, you know, you know, your heft with founders. Founders, like winners. People are making a bunch of money. But I agree that you can't just look at returns and say, those are the ones that are going to get picked by.

[Cooper]

There's also an interesting dynamic, particularly with Sequoia, where for a long time they had a reputation as being, like, not particularly founder friendly. I mean, it is the genesis of Founders Fund is like the whole PayPal drama around Sequoia.

[George (Crosby)]

Right.

[Cooper]

And it's like, what if there was a firm that was founder friendly and then that went off and happened and now, you know, obviously there's a. An entirely new team there. It's a new strategy. But I talk to founders who are like, yeah, they're not friendly. And I'm getting in the gladiatorial arena with them. Like, it's a lion and I'm going to ride it. And they're excited about that and they're like, yeah, if I don't put up insane returns, they're going to fire me. That's encouraging. Like, I need that. I need to grind harder. And so there's this weird thing where if you're measuring just on, like, who will have your back unconditionally, there could be some really terrible venture capitalist out there who's not going to help, but also never gonna fire you. And they're just kind of like, yeah, I gave you their dumb money, but so there's a lot more to the shape of, like, the thing. But that adds aura too, because, like, you can be, I mean, we had Andrew Reed on the show and he said, sequoia won't stab you in the back, will stab you in the front. I was like, that is high aura from their lips. And like, I mean, I'm not in a position to raise money from Sequoia right now, but like, I was like, I kind of want to work with Andrew like after that. That's great. I like that. And that is a good defining line there. Anyway, I don't know.

[Eric Newcomer]

Yeah, I think, you know, good founders like tough investors. Yeah. But yeah, I agree. You know, competition and capitalism forced all these venture funds to realize that founders were their main customer and therefore they needed to say they were super founder friendly. And, you know, I think benchmark's doing a good job with the rebuild, but having Emil running around being like, they screw founders over. Like, I don't think it's like Ev

[Cooper]

Randall was drinking beers in college when that happened. Okay, let's back off of that truck for a little bit. Let's not visit the son. The sins of the father on the son. Right in the Bible on, on this list. I, you know, the competing with the Midas list or doing some other list or like, how valuable are lists in terms of like actual moving the needle for your business? Like early on at tbvn, we did the, the Metis list, which was like a list of AI researchers, and it converted a decent amount of email subscribers because we had like an email capture flow. We weren't like directly monetizing it, but it was an interesting experience. We did a couple of those like, sort of stunts. But I'm interested to know from your perspective, is that less of a priority? I always hear that like scoops get people to pay. They jump the paywall after a scoop. They gotta read it, whereas an opinion piece might not. Even if it's going viral, people might just summarize.

[Eric Newcomer]

We, we did a survey with wing of top venture capitalists to rank up and coming companies. And that does really well. It's like great marketing for us. You know, everybody on the list tweets it out. Yeah, but we don't really put much behind a paywall because it's sort of meant to be read. And so then it's not a very good like subscription driver. It's more just like brand building, awareness, influence. And so. So really the challenge of any list is are you going to put it behind the paywall? And for the most, most of the time you wouldn't because you want it to get shared. And so I think they're good for Brand and like list building but not great for subscriptions. Whereas putting like documents or behind the paywall, you're going to get this resource of companies that you might invest in or whatever, you know, behind a paywall you know what you're paying for. And so people are just much more likely to convert. So you know, when that LP I mentioned earlier did a survey about venture firms, you know, we put that behind the paywall. I think that did very well. So if we're willing to put it behind the paywall, they can do well. But for the most part, the list you're talking about, you know, we keep in front of the paywall.

[Cooper]

I feel like there's still, I feel like a lot of people ascribe the value in the Midas list and what Forbes does to just the fact that it's a list and everyone wants to be on it. And it has like legacy and brand and that's real. But underrated is how incredible the photography is. In a Forbes feature, you can hire a great photographer and still not hit that level of like magazine cover look. And if you offer that to someone who's gonna win the list if they understand media and the power of like a really high quality photograph and a photo that will live on and sort of a more immortalize them for like maybe a decade, you see a lot of people and their top Google result is still that cover that they did when their company hit unicorn status or something. And you're like, wow, they look great there. And then you meet them in person, like, oh, that was a decade ago. You got some gray hairs now. But, but offering that as like a trade is a, is an interesting, interesting proposition.

[Eric Newcomer]

We literally had like two photographers running around our last Cerebral Valley event. So I couldn't agree with you more that like getting great photos of these people out of these events.

[Cooper]

Something that looks different than just the LinkedIn profile photo against the wall, something that has action, background, texture like these things are harder to recreate than people think. They take it for granted because they show up everywhere, but they're usually because of a special thing. Nothing's higher status than. The only thing higher status than the Midas list is the Alamy stock photo watermarked Getty Images watermark at Sun Valley. That is the highest status symbol in Silicon Valley in my opinion. You can't buy it.

[Ben]

I just have one more question. Are you going to voluntarily switch to API based billing for your AI usage? Because you were getting some.

[Eric Newcomer]

You were getting. Because I'm corrupt.

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said AI was useful.

[Eric Newcomer]

You said call out. And Citron has this view that journalists shouldn't be getting monthly subscriptions because they're falsely subsidized.

[Ben]

And we're under rules.

[Eric Newcomer]

We're not really paying what it costs

[Cooper]

to be paid $8,000 a. Claude, I

[Eric Newcomer]

don't think I'm that hyper. Like, I think Plod and OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenAI are getting a better deal out of me probably than I'm using. I'm not sure I'm getting this arbitrage.

[Cooper]

Totally.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

You can run those prompts of, like, estimate the number of tokens that I've used over the time. And, like, a lot of people run that and they're like, wow, I've been paying $200 for like, 20 bucks worth of tokens like, they're printing off of me.

[Eric Newcomer]

Right. I think I'm getting had, not the other way around right now.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

Is AI useful? We'll figure it out eventually.

[Ben]

We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out together.

[Cooper]

Thank you so much for taking the time. This is a ton of fun. Let's do it again. Amazing.

[Eric Newcomer]

So happy to do it.

[Room (M13)]

Well, long.

[Cooper]

I'm glad we saved those for today. It's been really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.

[Ben]

Later.

[Cooper]

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex since we're talking about it. Codex is the most tasteful workspace for powerful works mix for getting work done tastefully with AI agents. Whether you're tastefully writing code, tastefully analyzing data, creating tasteful content, or automating tasteful business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to tasteful.

[Ben]

Usually.

[Cooper]

Usually.

[Ben]

Up next, we have Merrill.

[Cooper]

This is a Scoop. Getting a SpaceX employee on the show is difficult. Not many people can do it, but we can because we got Merrill. How you doing, Rocket Man? Doing great, Rocket Man.

[Ben]

It's good to be back.

[Cooper]

Dweet. I want to go way back in time. Did you ever have the I want to work for a rocket company as a kid. I want to be an astronaut. Because you sort of wound up pretty close to it.

[Carter Merrill]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was. I don't know. I remember watching like that. Like, do you ever watch that movie October Sky?

[Cooper]

Oh, yeah, I love that shit.

[Carter Merrill]

That was like, one of my favorite movies growing up. I definitely had like, a NASA phase and. Yeah. So it's kind of crazy. Somebody on Hacker News the other day commented, like, it's funny how trying to add stackdiffs to GitHub has resulted in the Graphite team now building rockets. So here we are.

[Cooper]

Yeah, it's remarkable. It's almost like a side quest in the long arc of history you'll be deploying on the moon and Mars beyond. How has it been? What has the last couple of weeks been like? Has it been sleepless? Are you able to continue growing the product, building the product, or has all the news been infiltrating you? Like, what's the, what's the psyche been like over the last couple weeks?

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah, I mean it's been, it's honestly been really exciting on, on the ground at Cursor. Like everybody is. Everybody's fired up about, about like the compute partnership and what that's unlocking for us on the model training side. We also just had our first big conference compile at Fort Mason yesterday. So the marketing team was, was really working hard to get everything together for, for that, that and make that a great event. And yeah, it all kind of led up to yesterday being a crazy news day of the SpaceX announcement and then the three big feature releases that compile yesterday, including Origin, the agentic gitforge that we're working on. So yeah, it's been a frenetic past few weeks, but everybody's really fired up.

[Ben]

Did you guys expect the announce the sort of second part of the announcement, the deal between Cursor and SpaceX, to get as much attention as it did? Because I was seeing people that seemingly hadn't seen the announcement of the first part of the deal and a lot of people felt like they were processing it for the first time, which kind of makes sense in hindsight, but in our little bubble, I was like, great, obviously they were going to do this deal.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I sort of had the. I guess I had it in my mind that you already had a SpaceX badge, but that was not the case because this was a partnership and now the deal has been announced, is that correct?

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah, exactly. There was the announcement of the option to acquire and then the announcement yesterday was the exercising of that option. And now, I mean, I still don't have a SpaceX badge where we have to wait for the deal to close, then we can actually start working together. But now it's just antitrust and all the other pieces.

[Cooper]

That makes sense. Well, congratulations. I do want to talk about Origin. Walk me through the thesis there. I mean, there's been plenty of gripes about how much code is getting pushed to the Internet generally, how teams are working together, agents are working together, we are in a CPU Crutch. Now, how much of this is just taking a developer workflow that already exists, speeding it up versus reimagining it from first principles? Like walk me through through the thesis for this product.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah, I think the origin really started from a simple realization, which is that every single piece of the software development life cycle that we have today, every tool, every piece of infrastructure was all designed for a world where humans write every line of code. We've tried to scale that as best we can over the past year or so, but we're really seeing many of those pieces just crumbling under the pressure. And first and foremost just having from first principles designing something that can handle the scale of agent encoding, that's the most important thing is is it scalable, is it reliable, is it performant? Like, can it handle hundreds of agents working in parallel at once? And that's really what we've, what we've designed Origin to be is like the first example of Git infrastructure that is really built for the agentic era. And the other piece of this is that then building, kind of building on that. If we own the infrastructure, we can start to build it with agents in mind. So it's not just. It doesn't have to be just like the git objects, it can be. You can start to store agent traces, you can see the whole history of every action the agent has taken, everything it referenced and you don't have to have. It's kind of silly today that you'll use one agent to write the pr, but then as soon as the PR is opened, that agent just goes away. It's like, why does that not carry through and help you then address, review comments, resolve CI failures, fix merge conflicts. And really we want to get to this vision of more full self driving PRs that can really bring themselves out to production in many cases without human intervention.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I have a bunch of different things there. I guess the question is how important is speed in this context? How important is actually the volume of code? You see a lot of these, someone will post like, okay, I just vibe coded this, I push this change. Whatever model they're using did really well. They got the job done. And then somebody will go in and look at the PR and be like 100,000 lines of code to change the color of the button. This is evidence of slop. Or this is evidence of poor computer science happening. Do you have a stance on the. Is the answer to slop more slop? Are we going to get less sloppy, more terse in the Writing. Is that something that's coming or do you need to design a system where the new normal is. Yeah, changing the button of the color might be 10,000 lines of code change. That's fine. Let's also store the reasoning trace and the whole back and forth and everything that the agent was doing so that, yeah, it was 10 years of development time for one small change. It's fine because hard drives are cheap.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah. I certainly don't think that the future is 10,000 lines to change a button color. But I do think that the volume, fundamentally just the volume of code and the throughput that we're seeing all pieces of infrastructure have to handle now is just growing exponentially. And we've seen now a lot of teams are now doing thousands of pushes per hour and previously they were doing, you know, tens or hundreds. And that's a lot of what we've been. Been trying to make sure Origin is able to handle is, is that scale. So we've run some simulations recently where we're doing like, you know, 80 clones and 22 pushes per second with no downtime. And you know, it's obviously just. This is just like us testing internally, but it shows that like the architecture holds up and it's scalable and it's not yet the. When your agents are ready to work at that speed, Origin is not going to be the bottleneck for them. But I do think that we'll then need to. The other thing I think this will enable though is more agentic review, more back and forth, more autonomy and more thinning out of changes and refining of them before a human ever has to look at them. So hopefully we can avoid the case where you have a 10,000 line PR that's doing a meaningless change.

[Cooper]

Yeah. How is growth? I feel like a lot of people watch an acquisition happen or a series of acquisitions happen and they're sort of like, okay, like that's the end of the story. Or they. I mean, it's really easy with Elon Musk to look at it and be like, okay, well like this is incredibly talented team, but, you know, this is data centers in space stuff. This is mass driver on the moon project. Like the main mission is now, you know, not relevant and so it's less, less focused. But I imagine that you're just seeing growth in the core business still because teams are still getting up to speed on pushing code and using all these tools. What has growth been like post acquisition? What have been the big drivers? What does that tell us about the way just the broad software Development market is evolving.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah. I mean we've seen since the acquisition, we've seen continued growth in the graphite business itself. But really I think the most exciting thing for us has been seeing the level of interest from companies of all sizes in what we're doing with origin. So we set a goal for end of July for waitlist signups that we wanted to hit and we hit that in the last 24 hours since we announced the product.

[Room (M13)]

It's

[Cooper]

that gong is also for the acquisition closing, which is maybe a bigger deal than wait list, but honestly like traction on an actual product is probably more relevant than any financial milestone because it means that people are actually interested in this stuff, which is good.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah, it's. Every time we've talked about it at compile yesterday on customer calls, it's like Compiler got a huge round of applause. Applause. Like it's just, it's so obvious. This is a problem that every single company is facing right now and it's solving this, this burning need. And that's why we're, we're so excited about what we're doing and you know, really thinking to your point around acquisitions, like thinking back to, to the graphite days, like, one of the hardest lessons that we learned from building graphite was that your product is only as good as the infrastructure that it's built on fundamentally. And it might seem obvious, but it's a really hard lesson to learn. And we are always limited by latency, availability, even just UI extensibility. Our customers felt those limits when our infrastructure was down. We were down two. And it's funny, now there's this whole wave of companies that are going to their favorite agents and saying copy graphite's pull request page, make no mistakes and shipping something out there. And they're really quickly finding out why it's so hard to do what we did. And even then I think we were never really able to create the level of experience of just totally seamless, high performance interface that we wanted to because we were limited by the platform that we built on. So with Origin, now with in the backing of Cursor and the combined team, we're finally, we're now able to truly realize and accelerate the vision that we had from the beginning of the graphite days.

[Cooper]

Let's talk about AI doom job losses. Is there any risk that AI puts DJing out of businesses? Are DJs going away in our AI future or will the DJ, the humble DJ always have a place in our society? What do you think?

[Carter Merrill]

I think there's always you know, it's always been about more than you've actually

[Cooper]

always been able to just press play on a pre mixed.

[Ben]

And yet we still unironically like a really good white belt white pill for just jobs overall.

[Cooper]

Yeah, like, yeah, you want to see a human up there.

[Ben]

And even the most. Yeah, even the most. The most well known DJs, like they have like a set that they could just go up there and play and dance around. And of course some of them have

[Cooper]

been accused of that. But anyway, great to catch up. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for being here.

[Ben]

Really happy for you and the whole team.

[Cooper]

What an inspiring story. A true overnight success.

[Ben]

That's right.

[Cooper]

2020, baby.

[Carter Merrill]

Overnight success of six years.

[Cooper]

Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights. But thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

[Ben]

Great to see you. Congrats so much.

[Cooper]

Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TVPN UltraDome. We have room from M13. How you doing?

[Room (M13)]

What's happening, guys? How you doing?

[Cooper]

Welcome to the show.

[Ben]

We're doing great. Give us your review of the World cup so far.

[Room (M13)]

That was definitely the best game in U.S. soccer history. You know, historically, the U.S. has always been competitive, but just could never find the back of the net. So to find the back of the net that many times, that was nothing short of spectacular.

[Ben]

I had a. I had a. My. I turned it on. I'm watching for like, not like really focused on the game. I think I was like in the middle of something, but I was like, wow, we cannot get the ball on Paraguay's side, like for the life of us. And I realized, like, I had the. I had the Paraguay's flag look like our jerseys. So we were actually playing quite well. We were pressing them the whole time, but I didn't know. And I was like, oh, wow, this is amazing. We're doing great.

[Room (M13)]

Yeah. Hopefully the US Gets excited. Like, we hosted the opening night of the World cup the night before at our house. And I was texting people going, hey, we're hosting this event for U.S. soccer. They're like, what's coming? I was like, the World Cup? The last time I was in the US was only 32 years ago. But yeah, we'll see.

[Ben]

Come a long way.

[Cooper]

Do you track like, economic impact from World Cup? Are you reading into it some people are saying like that's the reason why we're seeing unemployment so low in a time of AI disruption. It's like there's a lot of hospitality hiring. Do you read into this stuff?

[Room (M13)]

I don't do a whole lot. I mean it's interesting. Both between the World cup and the Olympics, right? They always put out these studies and the question is, are you losing a shit ton of money or who's making the money? Yeah, yeah, I can't tell you. The car service in Seattle, they're definitely making money. The company is going to be $2,500 for a 30 minute trip when I land for Friday's games. So there are definitely people who make money.

[Ben]

Whoa, whoa. Surge pricing.

[Room (M13)]

Exactly, surge pricing.

[Ben]

$2,500.

[Room (M13)]

But it's a great economic lesson that

[Cooper]

was happening in Vegas for F1. It was the same thing. It's a couple thousand bucks just to have a car take you from your hotel to the event. It was crazy. Anytime there's huge demand. So you're thinking more long term? Take us through the basic thesis for the fund. Some of your historical investments. Obviously seems like you're not thinking quarter to quarter based on, you know, unemployment rate data this month and whether or not the World cup is causing unemployment or to decline or spike. But what is the thesis for the fund? How long have you been doing this?

[Room (M13)]

I mean, we started M13 10 years ago. We just celebrated our 10 year anniversary.

[Cooper]

Congratulations. Congratulations. Where's the name come from?

[Room (M13)]

Everyone thinks we're El Salvadorian gangster. Sadly I'm not that gangster. But brightest cluster of stars brighter than all the stars that comprise it. It's always been our philosophy we can connect the dots and create more value.

[Cooper]

Got it.

[Room (M13)]

But yeah, fast forward 10 years later. We've been the Cedar Series a investor in 17 unicorn. So sometimes better to be lucky than good.

[Cooper]

Incredible.

[Room (M13)]

On days like last Friday when we Invest invested in SpaceX at 15 billion and banged out, you know, 150x. You know, we all need more days like that. Thank you for the sound effects. That was well deserved, I think. Yeah, yeah. And you know, I think, you know, even as we, at some point we'll start talking about AI, everyone thinks like we haven't seen this before. And I think the key is as a vc, you have to learn how to invest in cycles. Right? Like we felt like the world was white hot in 2020 and 2021. Turns out it's even hotter now. Right? You think about a lot of us like M13 and 3s and all of us, we are investing in consumer software, social media, things like ride sharing. That was the implication of the technological breakthrough which was the iPhone, right. And so there's always kind of these ripples. And so yeah, now you know, we got 35 people, offices, New York, San Francisco, L.A. always trying to think what is that next ripple? What is that implication of that technology? How do we invest where the world is bending? And I think Space X is a great example. You invest in outlier people who could create outlier companies and you hope you take enough shots on goal that sometimes you get those big outcomes.

[Cooper]

SpaceX, Ring, Matterport, you're not afraid of hardware. Where'd that come from? What's your thesis on hardware enabled technology companies going forward?

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, I mean like take AI today, right? Like my housekeeper knows it's going to change the world, right? That is not. That takes no skill. The skill of a VC is to understand where to get the best risk and probability adjusted outcome. Right. And to do that you got to find the right value layers. Right? So yes, foundational models are enormous. They also come at high prices with a lot of competition. The thing I talk about all the time these days is if you think about the last cycle around consumer software social networks, it was innovators competing with innovators, right? Zuck competing with Evan, John Zimmer competing with Travis. I would argue in this cycle it's innovators competing with innovators who are now competing with the most well funded innovators

[Cooper]

on the planet, Google, Microsoft.

[Room (M13)]

Well, even before then you got OpenAI and I thought then you have the 10 biggest tech companies in the world. And I would argue for the first time in history, they actually have the advantage, right? They got the tech, the talent, the data, the capital and the technical.

[Cooper]

Google entering AI feels very different than Google entering social networking for sure.

[Room (M13)]

Right. And so, and so when you think about this market, you really got to think long and hard about where do you get that exposure to AI? Where are the value layers? Right. We invested in a company called Prepared, you know, in the very early days. It sold earlier this year for about $900 million. It was using AI and technology to disrupt 91 1. Thank you. 911 call centers, right. They had no competition all the time.

[Ben]

Hopefully not disrupt. Oh, disrupt the call centers, not disrupt the actual practice.

[Room (M13)]

It turns out 911 was still using landlines. The rest of us just weren't calling using a landline. So, you know, simple stuff like that. So in this market, right, it's all about like where. And I think in venture, right, the multi stage funds play a different game than someone like us, right? We invest out of a $400 million early stage fund, one we're playing for alpha, right? And so we're pure play seed series A specialist. And so you got to be disciplined about how you enter, what the competition is, things like that.

[Cooper]

So where does the capital come for doing SpaceX at 15 billion, obviously a fantastic investment, but not in that sweet spot of seed series A, right?

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, yeah. Our first fund, to be fair, was kind of stage agnostic, but I think a lot of it is, look, all the letters are fungible. The way we think about it, EB13 is, is there's only two types of companies in this market. Those trying to find product, market fit, and those who found it, who are hyperscalers, right? And so at the end of the day, you're looking for venture scale returns. And then, you know, the thing that we talk about all the time is everyone just says venture is risky and they kind of throw up their arms. That's like, kind of true. But if you're trying to colonize Mars, that is riskier than if you're trying to get someone to order a black car on an app. So there are different spectrums of risk. And so it's always trying to figure out is the risk worth the reward. And that's the game of venture.

[Ben]

Have you been disappointed in the growth of the LA ecosystem?

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, I mean, I laugh because I remember people telling me that San Francisco was dead three years ago. Turns out it's a little less dead than expected. The way I describe LA is right now a, it's having a siesta, right? Take a little nap. Kind of like in Spain between 1 and 3pm we can't forget, you know, about $450 billion of enterprise value was created outside of some of the big ones like Space X in the last cycle, right? And so you think about this cycle right now, we're still talking about the technology AI. There's no doubt that's going to come from the technology sitting in San Francisco. But you know, you guys know other industries. When you think about the second and the third wave, there's no doubt in my mind some of that will come from la, right? Nobody understands media content creators. It's why you guys are sitting in la. You're the best in the game at that, right? And so I think it's too early to count out la, just like it was too early three years ago to count out San Francisco, yes. There were a lot of needles on the street and it was pretty. Right. Everybody was leaving, but like, yeah, it came roaring back. So I think as you think about what are the new business models we're not even thinking about because of AI what are those ripples? There's no doubt some of them will be coming.

[Ben]

Yeah, it's interesting. I am bullish on the South Bay. El Segundo, South Bay, broadly continue to be bearish on like LA, actually, LA, the city. Like, it's hard for me to imagine. I can't imagine $100 billion company coming out of Venice, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, places like that, which is. It's painful to me, but I think it's the reality. Would love to be proven wrong. Hopefully I haven't passed on that company yet. But yeah, it's interesting that it feels like the South Bay is really working. El Segundo is really working. SpaceX starting in an El Segundo warehouse. That's all working. But I feel like the original LA startup made movement can't even claim Silicon Beach. Yeah, can't. Can't claim that.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah.

[Room (M13)]

I don't think you'll find a $100 billion company coming out of L. A. I think you might find some 10 to $20 billion companies. And the reason I say that is, you know, the $100 billion company, the trillion dollar companies are going to be foundational models and things like that.

[Cooper]

Concentration of talent.

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, I think the. You'll find that the applications, layers, like there's a reason Snap is here and there's a reason Tinder was founded here and stuff like that.

[Ben]

I know, but it's painful that like Suno. Suno should have been in la, right. Like, and it's. And it's what? Like Boston, New York, maybe they have an SF office. I forget what.

[Room (M13)]

But I think like the dream works of AI, like it has to happen in LA maybe, but it won't be.

[Ben]

Yeah, maybe. But yeah, it's hard to imagine it

[Cooper]

as like from la. Like New York is the home of like the. On the street. What do you do for a living? TikTok or like the person that's playing the drums and streaming that like so many of the, like the Internet democratizing content and then the competition from Atlanta, Toronto and you know, international. There's the big. We were just reading about the director of the Avengers, hugely successful, successful filmmaker, obviously in the Disney portfolio, is moving to London because they're doing the next round of Marvel films out there. And so, yeah, we just Lost like a whole pool of talent here.

[Room (M13)]

By the way, Jordan, I was gonna tell you, I'm very jealous that you live in Malibu. Since my house burned down in Malibu.

[Ben]

Oh, sorry about that ocean breeze in last year or 2018.

[Room (M13)]

Last year. Yeah.

[Ben]

Brutal.

[Room (M13)]

I told my wife the night before we went to bed, she was really panicked. I was like, sweetie, we literally, literally live across the street from the firehouse and like, not far from Nobu. Trust me, our house isn't burning down. Obviously, we were wrong and we're still the lucky ones. A lot of people were way less lucky. But, man, I missed that, that beach breeze.

[Ben]

Are you gonna rebuild?

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, I gotta start this fall.

[Cooper]

Okay.

[Room (M13)]

Yeah.

[Ben]

So I'll see you in 10 years.

[Room (M13)]

Exactly.

[Cooper]

Yeah. Hopefully the permitting goes faster or something.

[Mark Gurman]

I don't know.

[Cooper]

It seems like a rough, rough go. Also in the Palestine.

[Ben]

How are you thinking about consumer investing? Like consumer products?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah.

[Room (M13)]

You know, like two and a half years ago at our LP day, we talked about how we thought for the first time in probably four or five, six years that we thought I would make the application layer more interesting because we've been doing a lot of the underpinnings.

[Mark Gurman]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

We invested the future of money, work, health, commerce. So that is a pretty high swath. But we are doing mostly infrastructure stuff. I think we've been right on that. It's hard to get the application layer around AI. Just things are so frothy and moving so quickly. I do think, I don't know if it will be for us anymore, just given the size of our funds. I do believe the next billion dollar D2C brands will be built as AI companies that happen to sell a product. Right. The reason guys like us did so many D2C things and then stopped doing it was at one point the math made sense.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

You could create unicorns of the math as the cost of Facebook acquisition increase.

[Tom Suarez]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

The math no longer made sense. I think for the first time in history, the math will make sense here for the next two to three years. The reality for M13 is we need generational companies. When you operate out of a $400 million fund. So I don't know if it will.

[Ben]

Yeah, it's tough. Even if you're. Even if you're doing a true seed and you can do 2, 1, 10 and then it's billion dollar exit. You're like, okay, it doesn't actually can't return the fund.

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, that's the problem. Like most people just don't think about the math adventure. It's great to say, oh, I had this X or that. But yeah, you need. At M13 we always say every check in the base case has to return half the fund. So we need three to five billion dollars companies in the base case and we have to hope we have companies like, like Open FX doing stablecoins or we need to find that next SpaceX and you need to find those decacorns. That's the only way the math works.

[Cooper]

Sure. What's the team structure like? 2 billion under management now, $400 million fund. That feels like enough room for some principals, some VPs around the table. But what's your philosophy to growing the firm?

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, so my brother and I founded the firm. Obviously, the way we talk about it is we wanted to build the venture firm that a founder would have built for themselves. So every single person is an operator by background. In fact, we only have one person that's ever worked at a VC that's either crazy or that's by design. Right. In our model, you know, basically some of those operators now invest for a living. Right. And so that's the typical venture model. We say they're accountable for company picking. Right. Obviously we've historically been good with 17 unicorns at that, but they're trying to find where's the tam, where's these great founders. We have a large a team called our propulsion team. They are former operators who actually don't invest for a living. They actually stay as operators.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

But now instead of operating over a single company, they operate over a portfolio. And you know, we've backed, I think 11 previous unicorn founders in the last two funds. These aren't people that need help, but where we invest at the early stages, a Cedar Series A, they're not going to have a head of data and a head of talent and a head of product. And so we can use these very experienced operators. Like we have guys like Carl Alomar who is, you know, built DigitalOcean from pre revenue to a $5 billion IPO. He now reminds me, I think it's 19 billion today. So he tells me, stop talking about 5. But you know, having a guy like that be able to fill in the gaps, look around corners for you at that Series A is incredibly valuable. So, yeah, so we have about 12 people that deploy the capital, you know, a handful of partners like you said, some, you know, I think for us we obsess about our junior talent because those are our rising stars. You know, too many VC firms are a bunch of usually males that have had success and kind of hold on. I think you need the best 22 year old kid from Stanford, Hungary compsai. I think you need to the best 32 year old. You know, I'm going to find the next unicorn founder because I probably had dinner with him last week, but I'm probably not going to find the 22 year old kid who just dropped out of Stanford and did that. It's probably going to come from one of the junior people on the team. And so in everything we do, we always say we didn't want to create a better vc. We kind of wanted to create a different type of vc. And so we take cues from the best of the best and then think about again, if we were a founder building a vc, how would we build it?

[Ben]

How do you think the SpaceX IPO is going to impact the luxury real estate market?

[Room (M13)]

I am so fascinated by this. Your thoughts, man?

[Ben]

I mean, I'm just looking, I'm thinking about yc.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah.

[Ben]

How there's like, there's a lot of new centimillionaires and there's not a lot of inventory over there. And knowing why, knowing SpaceX people, they like to be outdoors. A lot of them probably like to ski a little bit. And I'm. I think there might be supply demand mismatch at least at yc.

[Room (M13)]

But yeah, maybe we should. We should. Your house in Malibu, my house in yc. We try to get a premium for it, get some anthropic or OpenAI stock, you know.

[Cooper]

Oh yeah, you can sell your house for stock now.

[Room (M13)]

Yeah, seriously. But I mean, I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating, right? Because you think about when OpenAI an anthropic IPO, a bunch of VCs are going to make a ton of money, but those people's investors are endowment, institutional pensions, things like that. When you think about Space X.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

It is every guy in ypo. It is every guy at the country club. It is every guy at Burning Man.

[Cooper]

Oh, right.

[Room (M13)]

Even if they did 150x like we did, they tend x they five.

[Carter Merrill]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

So they got in some SP, right.

[Room (M13)]

You think about it like there has never been this much value return that was literally 80% in SPVs.

[Ben]

Right.

[Room (M13)]

And so I think it's fascinating because some guy just made 3 million, some guy just made 100 million, some guy just made a billion.

[Ben]

And so, yeah, not to mention, you know, the team specifically.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah.

[Room (M13)]

And the team. So when you think about it, when

[Cooper]

you fast Forward family with SpaceX IPO shirts and I was like, I don't know that they're like bankers. I don't know that they were at the IPO on the inside. I think they just, like, got in early, maybe some money, and now they're really proud and they're part of, like, the retail army, essentially.

[Room (M13)]

But I think it will be good for venture. I mean, I think there's no doubt planes, houses, private schools, country clubs, all of those things. Right. And we should talk about coupling our houses together. We could get a premium. You get two for one. I mean, that's an efficient starter.

[Ben]

The starter. Starter. Their starter.

[Room (M13)]

Centillionaire pack. You got Malibu and YC all in one transaction. But I do think it's just good for ventures in general. Right. Because people have realized these things just take a long time. Right. Like, we invested at 15 billion and still took 10 years to return capital. So I do think it shows people in success. Right. Although these things take a long time, that is a lot of money coming back to the system.

[Cooper]

Yeah. Any last questions? We gotta hop on with AWS and just.

[Ben]

Let's do it again soon.

[Cooper]

This is great.

[Ben]

And yeah, well, feel free to call in from a World cup game or something. Something like that.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

All right.

[Room (M13)]

You guys going to any of them?

[Cooper]

I don't have anything scheduled.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Nothing?

[Ben]

Nothing scheduled yet.

[Cooper]

We may get FOMO at the last second and try and get in. Is it as crazy as the knicks tickets? Is $100,000 to go, or is it more reasonable if you just want to see the game?

[Room (M13)]

More reasonable. More reasonable.

[Cooper]

Okay, it can get crazy. I mean, I'm sure if it's like,

[Ben]

you know, well, you're telling everybody about it now. The prices are going to go crazy.

[Room (M13)]

Right. During the next commercial break.

[Cooper]

Anyway, thank you. Thank you so much for watching.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Appreciate it.

[Cooper]

This is fantastic.

[Room (M13)]

Thanks.

[Cooper]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Ben]

Talk soon.

[Cooper]

And we will tell everyone about figma Agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design system context. Very excited to be partnered with Figma. And we are also excited to have Dr. Swami Siva Subramanian from AWS. He is the VP of Agentic AI and he is here with us in the TVP and Ultradome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

I'm great. Hey, thanks for having me.

[Cooper]

Thanks for hopping on. Why don't we start with a little bit of an introduction? Since it is the first time you're on the show, tell us a little bit about how you fit into the AWS organization, what you're working on, and then we can go into Agentic AI?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Yeah, I mean I'm the Vice President of Agentic AI. I've been with AWS now for like 20 years. Created various things, overnight success from like our database. Wait, hold on.

[Cooper]

What was it like 20 years ago? I feel like AWS is barely 20 years old. Were you like the first person on the team? You and Andy were hanging out and racking servers?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Kind of. Actually literally AWS was. Would fit in a single conference room, if you can believe it. And I mean I joined as an intern. My internship project was there, build a database called Dynamo. That turned out to be a bit of a success, so they gave me a job back.

[Cooper]

That's great.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Then I started the database, joined the database team, started a bunch of databases, then moved on to analytics and started AI for aws. Now that you see all the things with Bedrock and SageMaker, all the AI tools, now as the world is moving more agent tech, I kind of spine myself out of what I was doing to focus all in on AI agents. So that makes sense. That's kind of my background.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I imagine that the typical database business, the analytics business, all of that is growing, but it's being driven by more agentic AI use. Talk about the new releases, the new launches, and I want to know how do we compare and contrast, continue them from context? How do companies use the right tool for the job here?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Yeah, I mean first of all, we live in some amazing times with agents because the art of possible has fundamentally changed. But when you look at it, even value. See actually enterprises are struggling today, first of all on putting agents to work. They are still stuck in this world of, I call it the walled gardens, where they are stuck into bottlenecks where if I go on vacation or even when I go to sleep and wake up, I get signals from like my Outlook to Slack to various other messaging tools. So the time I spent even catch up used to be like crazy, like at least an hour before I know I get to my job. So why, why was it that case? It's not like we didn't have AI assistance in every one of these tools. But what was missing was it didn't have the context to fill in the spaces between these various tools. So that's why today actually we launched something called autonomous agent. It actually works on your behalf. It gathers all the context across tools. So there is no more walled gardens. But it still has something enterprises love. It has built in governance and security. That's why the likes of GoDaddy to NBA to everybody is using it. You are showing it live today and, and the art of possible. Even when we demoed it live, people couldn't believe it because now you can actually catch up and generate a PowerPoint deck in a matter of minute to a detailed dashboard. When you talk to your data lake and generate insights, all these things are changing. That is one example of bottleneck we are removing. A second one I talked about was in the world of security, security is a big area where intersection of how software is getting built and security is changing in a big way because yes, the rate of change in how you can generate code is becoming very, very cheap. But also the response security is also becoming big. So speed and security are almost at a trade off in every organization. So what we launched today is a service called Continuum.

[George (Crosby)]

Yeah.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

In many ways the approach behind it is made security not a discrete thing companies do. It's like how antibodies actually fight viruses. Always on, continuously fighting is the way we thought about it as well. As an example.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I want to dig deeper into those like continuously running AI agents. I think when people think agentic AI, they go to coding agents because everyone's had the magical experience with those and seen the impact and the spend and the token maxing that happens when you deploy AI agents across a huge workforce of knowledge workers, heavily software engineers. But I'm more interested in the less understood agentic workflows that are happening maybe deeper and autonomously in a business. And I'm trying to get to a world where I have that case study at the tip of my tongue for every time I book a flight, it runs an agentic workflow to make sure that my seat on the plane is correct or I don't know, I don't know how to contextualize it, but I know it's happening and I know you're seeing it. So walk me through some of the agentic workflows or agentic AI work that's happening even if no one shows up to the office is. It's a, it's a company holiday and there's still tokens being spent. What does that look like? What is the shape of that work actually?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

I mean that is one of the key things that we are going to start seeing explosion of agents in a big way. Even today. For instance, you, in your summit, the CIO Southwest Islands talked about how they are building agents on top of actually agent core, which is our core agent platform service. And, and they were able to build these amazing new capabilities to do things like crew planning and various others. These are not like very Humans are just generating codes, but how that's where they are going. 3M for instance, are using agents to now be able to do more efficient sales call planning. GoDaddy is able to actually leverage some of our quick agents to automatically reduce something like 15,000 hours of manual work that they are able to do. These are like examples of agents again not created just for purely creating software, but these are agents running under the hood and they are able to produce value. And this is going to be where the next big agent workload is going to happen in many ways. And that's what we are excited.

[Cooper]

What is demand like for model routing these days? AWS is fascinating because you've sort of maybe it's brilliant by design, but sort of the Switzerland of AI in the sense that there's partnerships with anthropic OpenAI. There's a whole bunch of other foundation models that are available on aws. What is demand like? Obviously different teams have different preferences and cost trade offs and they might say I want to be with with this particular CLAUDE model or this particular GPT model. Other companies might just say I never want to be caught using a frontier model for something that doesn't need frontier spend, so optimize it for me. Is that something that you're seeing demand for already?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Yeah, I mean first of all, I think for the industry itself, when I started Bedrock, one of the things we were different compared to everybody else's. We always had this belief no single model will rule the world. This was not a popular belief at that time but. But now it seems so obvious. But then amazing thing is now that you are the Switzerland as you actually speak in Q1 alone, the adoption for our bedrock generated platform, what we are starting to see is in Q1 alone and the amount of workload, that request rate that we are seeing is greater than all of the previous years combined. That is the amount of growth we are seeing. It seems to have no signs of slowing down. It's because the rate of actually adoption, especially as people are moving from proof of concepts to production, is just accelerating because they are seeing real outcomes. And that is one of the reason why so much of innovation is going into things like bedrock and agent core. Not just on the model front, but also how we are supporting the things like disaggregated inference and all the agent capabilities such as launching new context. So these are the capabilities that's going to make actually enterprises move from just cute prototypes that are sitting in where they demo to their execs to actually production to see real Value. And this is why I do think there is so much upside in the future.

[Cooper]

How do you think about AWS as a sort of like a thought leader for enterprises rolling these features out? I'm just thinking about like we're going through this transition of like there's a new technology, you need to use it effectively. I feel like a big piece of why AWS was so successful was because it powered Amazon.com and if it's good enough for Amazon.com it's good enough for my business or whatever I'm doing. And it feels like now there's an opportunity for AWS to sort of set the agenda on what. It's not token maxing, it's not token minimizing, it's token optimizing, it's ROI maxing or something like that. But how are you communicating to your team, to the teams within in AWS about how to use AI effectively? Sometimes you just want to get everyone up to speed, just go and test everything. And then sometimes you want to be setting a tone that a company that says, hey look, we don't have a lot of free cash flow here to throw at this new hot technology. If we're going to use something, it has to deliver ROI almost immediately. How are you carrying that through your organization and into the companies that partner with aws?

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

I mean it's a great question because if you look at the industry and this is true even in Amazon, we first started with everyone should get familiar with these tools. So we were trying to get everyone to adopt so that they know how to use these tools. Now that they have become so familiar, we are now making all the tools available between like Hero agent code coding solution to cloud code to Qwik as our business user productivity solution within Amazon itself. Tools like Quick is used by hundreds of thousands of people, let alone key road to many others equally on the software development. Now we have come to a point where we internally and this is true for our external customers such as Delta and Southwest and many others as well. As we give organizational breakdown within Amazon we say hey every VP and under that team how much usage is happening, what is their cost breakdown and then we roll it out. This is true for Kiro, I'm pretty sure it'll be true for Quick and within Bedrock which is our gen platform service, we actually integrated with the AWS cost explorer so that we can actually have people spare. I mean monitor the spend in terms of per user level, per model level, on a per organization level too. The moment you have visibility then you Know where people are spending, then you can understand roi. In fact, the interesting thing what we saw was that my teams, and there are a few teams in Amazon, I call them frontier teams. These are teams that don't see 50% productivity improvement. They see 10x to 20x productivity improvement. And when you see their bill on token, it's not actually like $100,000 a month. It's actually even in the keynote credits, it's something like around 2000 to $3000 a month. That's not that much for 10x to 20x productivity. But I do think this is going to keep going as the world becomes more and more agent tech. Because once they move to coding to be just launched, our release agent, because you increase code velocity. Everyone talks about coding, but this is the message. Suddenly then everything gets stuck because you need to deploy it to real world. And deploying it to real world is a bigger challenge because you can't just increase the volume by 10x here and the deployment is going at 1x. That means everything becomes a technical death. So we made that agent and then we made pen testing agent tech. So I almost jokingly call it saying like, hey, you need to write it correct, ship it fast and constantly keep it modern. And the only way to do it is you need to have all of it be done by agents. And that's exactly how we are now moving towards.

[Cooper]

Makes sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launches and talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, of course.

[Ben]

Great to have you.

[Carter Merrill]

Goodbye.

[Cooper]

Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless reality, real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room, so we'll bring in Thomas Suarez from Raven Renaissance. He's the founder, CEO and cto.

[Ben]

Boom.

[Cooper]

What you got on your face? Introduce yourself, tell us about what you're building. I'm very excited for this.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Cool.

[Tom Suarez]

Hey guys. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah. So I'm Tom, the founder of Raven Resonance. We're a team of engineers and designers who have been building and wearing customized AR devices for years to decades. So we're working on Raven Prism, which is the first ambient computer in the form of glasses.

[Cooper]

Okay.

[Ben]

Did you launch this on Monday knowing that the specs announcement was happening? Was that somewhat intentional or just kind of random?

[Tom Suarez]

So it was actually more of a preview. So we are doing our full launch later this year, but we were going to be at the conference Anyway, and we figured we would show some of our hardware and software.

[Cooper]

Yeah. Because it's augmented world. It's a conference for augmented reality generally. Do you like that term or is that term getting stale at this point?

[Tom Suarez]

I think it's interesting. Augmented reality is kind of a loaded term in some ways because there have been so many devices over the years. But I think for us, the term ambient computing feels really right because it's about technology being there when you need it and gone out of the way when you don't. And I think that's kind of what this device is for. I wore Google Glass for many years, and of course there's a lot of baggage that comes with that, but there are lots of wearable computers that have tried these sorts of things over years. And I think finally the industry is starting to converge on something that makes a lot of sense for daily wear.

[Cooper]

Yeah. How are you positioning the product? What are the key stats that you're particularly proud of? Everyone talks about price, weight.

[Ben]

Well, maybe even before that, like, I want to know about your product, but like, in your view, over the last few years, as you've been using these products, developing them, like, what is. What is the ideal product? What does it do? What are. Is like, should we be thinking. We were debating earlier, just like, do we need to be thinking about, like, killer use cases, like specific things that. That people do every day, or do a lot of the specs demos. There were some of the things that were being demoed. I was like, okay, that would be cool. I'd maybe do that once a year, measuring how a piece of furniture would fit in. That alone is. Even if it's 10 times better than using a measuring tape or something like that. That's not gonna get me to be a daily user of something like this. So how have you been thinking about what is the ideal product? Because I assume that's. That's what you're building towards.

[Tom Suarez]

Exactly, yeah. So as someone who wore this for over 12 years, I can say that or not this particular product, but of course, wearables in general.

[Cooper]

Time Traveler invented a window.

[Tom Suarez]

I wish. There are two main categories of use cases that I think are really relevant. The first is micro interactions. So this is something where you're in and out of the display within 5 to 10 seconds. So this is things like next navigation direction, a notification that comes in, which sounds really distracting, but it's actually really nice to not have to pull your phone out of your pocket, you know, changing your music, all that sort of stuff. Even next Cooking instruction, whatever those are micro interactions in and out in five, 10 seconds or less. The other one is reference material. And so this is where you can, you know, airplay your phone screen up, you can pin up reference, you know, contextually relevant information. So if you're, if you have some, something that you're working on hands free with your hands, you want something that is hands free that's going to give you that information. And ideally you can ask an LLM or ask an AI to help you with that task. So those are the two categories of experience that we think about as being really necessary. There's also kind of a third one which is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from specs. And I think certainly there's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now it's kind of like you want to build toward what is the ipod of AR before you build the iPhone. And we really need to get something out that is a nice form factor, that's lightweight, that people are going to actually want to wear.

[Cooper]

How do you think about field of view? I'm sort of split on it. I used to be FOV maxer. I used the Hololens and was like, this is unacceptable. Tried the Apple Vision Pro, it's much better. But then when I think about the Call of Duty duty hud, the Meta Ray Ban displays, I'm like actually for a lot of those micro interactions, next turn direction, next cooking instructions, something like that, just put the information right there. It's fine, it's hands free. I'm actually maybe fine with a smaller FOV if everything's designed around that constraint from. And it's not trying to be omnipresent.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah. So field of view is an interesting one because there's a couple different ways to think of field of view. One is in absolute number of degrees diagonal on your vision. And typically these devices are if you go to the really big VR headsets, you're gonna be closer to 100 degrees. Something like this, this is actually 30 degrees, but that's actually a lot of space that is equivalent to a 16 inch MacBook at arm's length, which is a lot of space, especially if you have a high ppd. So we find that it's actually field of view and pixels per degree. And if you have a high pixels per degree, you have high res resolution, which means that you have a high pixels per degree but a low fov. Then you actually end up with something that is akin to laptop in front of you. And so when we think about like this device is Linux based, it allows you to SSH in. You can run pretty much any application that will run on arm 64, which is of course the same architecture as Mac. And so you can run properly as a computer.

[Cooper]

Okay, world locked versus headlocked. I feel like one of the problems the whole HoloLens was that everything was world locked and you turn your head and the narrow FOV would clip the sphere that you put there and all of a sudden you're looking at a half sphere and it draws your attention as opposed to if it's just headlocked. The screen stays where it's put and it leans in. It does the best that it can with a limited fov.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah. So it also depends on, I think the world lock makes sense for those spatial experiences. Again, you need the large field of view for something like a head up display. I don't think world lock makes much sense. You really just need something that there's all sorts of tricks that you can do in the human computer interaction. For example, if you have edges on the screen, then it's obvious that you're clipping. But if you allow some padding, any pixels that are black are actually rendered as transparent. So any black pixels around your icons and things like that are going to appear in screen space as transparent. Which is the way we think about it.

[Ben]

How much is capital? A constraint is you're competing with companies that are willing to throw billions of dollars at this problem. And so far I don't necessarily think it's getting them that much closer.

[Cooper]

It used to be for any hardware company was like, oh, you'll need $5 million to do that. And now it's like, oh yeah, no problem. All the tooling is cheap and stuff and you can out outsource the whole supply chain if you need.

[Ben]

Also, it's never been easier to raise 5 million.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like even a big number, oh, we're going to get 100 million. It's like, yeah, there's going to be 20 of those raises this month.

[Tom Suarez]

So it's interesting, when we started this company, a lot of investors told us that it was going to cost, you know, it's going to be over $100 million to bring this product from idea to design, you know, early design, ebt, dvt, pvt, whatever, all the validation stages and up to mass production. We're going to be shipping later this summer to the first batches and then we're launching later this year, officially but yeah, we've done it with under eight figures and a lot of the. And actually there are a lot of smart glasses. We consider it that's kind of a different category, the ambient computing. But there are a lot of smart glass companies that will go to kind of an odm, you know, typically in China or somewhere else, and they'll take a reference design. That's not what we've done. We've actually, we're manufacturing in the us we do source components from all over, of course, but we do all design in our lab in San Francisco. We build the batches. This unit was actually built in our lab in San Francisco, assembled. And we think that's really important, especially for rapid iteration. That is one of the ways that we've been able to the very small team, iterate quickly and get to a product that we're really proud of.

[Cooper]

How are you thinking of marketing messaging sort of to bring it back to that idea of like the killer use case? It feels like a lot of these pitches that we see for VR, xr, AR headsets, like they get a little scattered and all of a sudden they're trying to be 25 different things. A lot of the demos don't. If you're not a golfer, do you care about the golf thing? But I imagine that you get some of that flexibility for free by layering on top of, top of AI. Because if you're a front door to AI and everyone knows, oh yeah, AI can do knowledge retrieval, it can also write code, can also generate images, then you're like, oh, you don't need to explain that. You can just say this is a better way to interface with any AI front door or any AI system. But how are you thinking about like the marketing messaging, focusing that in. Or, or is it. Or is it more valuable to pitch like broad developer platform, like who. Who is the core customer?

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah, so I think there have been plenty of devices that have tried pitching the developer like this is dev kit, dev kit. And that's not really that useful because you get developers who get it and they play with it. They might go on a shelf for the next few years. And really, in order for a device like this, even a dev kit to be useful, there has to be something in it like some killer app. And so people ask us all the time, what's the killer app of architecture? You know, there's an interesting question because what was the killer app of the iPhone?

[Cooper]

The phone?

[Tom Suarez]

It actually is dependent on the beer app. True, but it's dependent on.

[Cooper]

Yeah, well, my Take on the iPhone is that when Steve Jobs introduced it, it was a phone, an ipod and an Internet communicator, basically a web browser. And that was the killer app. And then the app Store came in the future revisions and then you got Uber and DoorDash and all the games and stuff. But it was enough on day one that you were like, well, I've been carrying a phone. This is a sleeker looking phone, I'll replace it. And so whenever I go to VR, Arkansas I'm always like, this should be a replacement for my 24 inch monitor that I plug my laptop into. Or it should be a replacement for a home theater or a 65 inch TV or another screen because in many ways it is just another screen. So are you replacing the smartwatch? Are you replacing the phone? Are you replacing the iPad? Like you gotta sort of laser in. Instead of just trying to be something that's like entirely net new, it's hard. Like the AirPods were headphones first.

[Ben]

You know the other thing with glasses that's interesting is just how many, how many hundreds of millions or billions of people like already rely on glasses to see. So that's a market where, yeah, it's much less of a, you're not actually selling them a new device, you're selling them the same thing that they rely on, plus a computer built into it.

[Cooper]

I think a lot of people like the Meta Ray Ban display specifically to use for phone calls and for just music. Like they're just, oh yeah, I'm going for a walk in the park and I'll just take these and play music on these instead of headphones. And it's like then you can get into the Meta Ray Ban displays and interface with AI and all that other stuff. But I would imagine the majority of the time is spent like taking a couple photos. Pretty basic, everyone has a phone, but this is a little bit easier. And listening to calls and, and listening to music.

[Tom Suarez]

But yeah, yeah, there's, there's certainly, I mean there's, there's a lot of use cases tech for, particularly for technical creatives. So certainly developers, engineers, but also musicians and filmmakers and there's, there's that kind of niche is what we're going after at first. And then of course it kind of became a more mass market consumer after that. We also have enterprises that are interested and we have some enterprise customers as well because we design for a very strict set of design constraints on consumer and then you know, translates to enterprise. But one of the, there is a couple other things that we you know, we care really deeply about, you know, not only Linux architecture, which, you know, we're, to our knowledge, the only ones kind of have with this type of device doing that, but also all day power. So we have these, these, these guys on the back. This is called Raven Prism and then these are the raven wings. Is the raven wings just come off? And this is actually an expansion port not only for the hot swap of the battery system where you can take both batteries off and you can get all day power, but also for future modules. So we're going to release an HDK later this year so people can actually start building their own hardware modules on it. And then the other thing is privacy. I think one of the, one of the challenges that this industry has faced is particularly around the camera, but also with just user data in general. I think it's easier, easy for us, you know, we're in San Francisco to remember, oh yeah, you know, everyone's gonna be okay with this, but people are often not okay with all of the, you know, privacy implications of this. And we're seeing a lot of backlash on certain devices. So a couple of things that we do is we actually have a physical camera cover on here. So you have to, you know, kind of take that off in order to use the camera. And it allows you to have this, you know, basically to allow to alert other people, people around you when the camera is in use. And then there's a lot of advanced cryptography that we do kind of at the lowest levels of the stack as well and make sure that user data is protected. And we've had a pretty positive response to that so far.

[Cooper]

That's great.

[Ben]

How many years until a billion AR or augment, what did you call it? What was that?

[Cooper]

Billion daus of glasses.

[Carter Merrill]

Smart glasses.

[Ben]

Smart glasses.

[Tom Suarez]

It's hard to predict. There's an industry saying that ar has been two years away every year for the past 30 years. And it's kind of true. So I don't think I could fully predict it. I think it's reasonable. I mean, Meta has been shipping a ton of devices. It's kind of growing the industry, which is really nice. I think it's reasonable to say that will at least be in the kind of millions per year, or we are in millions per year, but I think we'll be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions per year in about four or five years. And then a billion daily active users could be 10 years away. It could be less. It's hard to say.

[Ben]

Yeah, but I can tell that you're running just from the short conversation that you're running the company to make sure that you are in business with a fantastic product. Like when that moment happens, like I was looking at the, the, you know, the specs, just looking at the reaction to the specs launch and like Spiegel and Snapchat are in a unique position and that they can kind of just ignore what shareholders, you know, think about their, their, where they invest. But that being said, like, it's hard to think about them spending another three and a half billion dollars, you know, on this effort or just, just given how I expect the product to be received in its current form. So I think if you're set up to like, you know, keep, keep burn low, really, really keep iterating, actually using the product all day long, which like, you must be, you must have used the product, you must have used like AR glasses more than anyone else on the planet, I imagine. Like, I don't know anyone. We know a lot of people that love technology. I don't know anyone that's been like a sort of like dau for, for this long. Yeah. But I think that's like what it's going to take to make a product that people actually use every day.

[Tom Suarez]

For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need the firsthand experience because there's a lot of design decisions that happen for mobile that are not clear for this type of device. And so there's no replacement for just using it every day. And there's. Yeah, it's very important.

[Cooper]

How on earth can you do eye tracking in those? You really do eye tracking in those.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah. So actually, so this, this device that I'm wearing, this is, this is, these are the same kind of form factors. It's just kind of final materials.

[Room (M13)]

Right.

[Tom Suarez]

But there's actually two little cameras in there. There's one there and there's one there. And those are hooked up to a separate kind of CO processor which is on the other side, which is also for privacy. So that the main SOC never sees the RAW camera images, but that CO processor takes in the data from the eyes. And then we have some models that give a gaze vector over to the SoC.

[Cooper]

That's remarkable. I was convinced that anything with internal eye tracking like that was going to weigh 600 grams, 1000 grams for a really long time. Not anymore.

[Ben]

Not anymore.

[Cooper]

Well, congrats.

[Tom Suarez]

We're doubling down on it.

[Cooper]

I love it.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah, we're pretty excited for people to try it because it's quite a magical experience.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, we're very Excited for you.

[Ben]

Really great to meet you and come back on whenever you want to, whenever you have stuff to talk about.

[Cooper]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Tom Suarez]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We're going to be doing a launch in San Francisco next few months, so Amazing.

[Cooper]

Congrats. We'll talk to you soon.

[Ben]

The progress.

[Cooper]

Have a good one.

[Tom Suarez]

Thanks.

[Cooper]

Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.com Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of it, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got the Germinator in the rest in the waiting room. Mark Gurman, how are you doing?

[Ben]

I miss you.

[Mark Gurman]

What's going on, guys?

[Cooper]

We miss you. We miss you so much.

[Ben]

Especially when the news is like it's been. And every. Everything, everything I read reminds me of you.

[Mark Gurman]

Oh yeah, Indeed.

[Room (M13)]

That's funny.

[Ben]

I see Siri, I see Apple, I see Apple foundation model, I see everything. I see. I just think the Germinator.

[Cooper]

Okay. Have you recovered? Was last week exhausting? How are you feeling?

[Mark Gurman]

No, last week was good.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Mark Gurman]

It was an interesting conference. I'm glad they were able to keep the keynote time down to under an hour and a half. It was one of the shorter WWDCs. It actually felt that they had taken that five minute section from WWDC 2024 where they introduced all those new Siri features and then took it and spread it out and milked it for an hour, basically redoing it and you know, for those not familiar, basically this year's WWDC was all about new Siri features, the big one being personal context. So you could ask Siri. I'll give you an example. Someone asked me for my calendar info for June, July earlier today. So I said send an email to so and so with my calendar availability for the next two months. And it was able to do that. Other ones could be like, take the note that I wrote about XYZ and text it over to that person. Right. These are real world workflow features that I've been using all day for the last week or so. Which makes it a all the more ridiculous that Apple had to delay that stuff two years ago and it took two years to ship. But the most insane part about it is that Apple's responses to these delays all downplayed the features. They said, oh, we spent 180 minutes talking about Apple Intelligence and only five out of the 180 minutes were delayed and not shipped. They basically positioned these as, oh, when it was a delay, it's not a big deal. Now that I'M using it. These are actually the only features that matter that they announced two years ago.

[Cooper]

They could have delayed Genmoji. They shouldn't have delayed. Look up your calendar because that's a functional use that people are going to do.

[Room (M13)]

Yes.

[Mark Gurman]

And just to be clear, the new Siri is really Good.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Mark Gurman]

And 95% of the people, sorry to say this, are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre installed. The way I look at it is that ChatGPT does a bunch of amazing things that Siri AI can't do. But Siri AI also does a lot of amazing things that you'd go to for ChatGPT. So if you're 95% of the population using AI chatbots and you're using it for looking things up, it's basically the new age Google. It's going to be able to do that. It's going to be able to answer questions for you, it's going to be able to do edits for you. But there's a ton of pro level things that ChatGPT does that Siri AI can't do. So I made a list the other day of things that ChatGPT can't do. Big time research, big time analysis of multiple different documents and PDFs and comparisons. People use it for tax preparation, people use it for in depth health things. So there's a lot you're going to want to use it for. So I could see people having both Siri on the pre installed and then you're going to subscribe to a ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini or what have you for some of that extra oomph on top of it. But Siri is going to be useful for a lot of people. And you know, one easy way to say it.

[Cooper]

Yeah, we just hold on, look at

[Mark Gurman]

it as like imovie and final cut.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we debated this. Like have you ever googled anything? And I still Google things pretty regularly and then I go to LLMs for more pro stuff and then I go to agentic AI for other things and like there's like using a right tool for the job that I think people are processing and absorbing. What do you think in hindsight actually delayed these features because it does feel like the technology was there a year or two ago. Was it the negotiation, the deal with Google? Was this a technology problem or a business problem?

[Mark Gurman]

It was a mix of both. One was the underlying stack and the underlying foundation models that Apple had two years ago were not Very good. And so they needed to go back to the drawing board because they couldn't roll these features out only for them to fail, which is ironic given they rolled out the rest of the Apple intelligence and new Siri features that hardly worked well and were not impressive. If you've used the new betas, you can tell what has happened here. The under the hood models are so much better. Based on what I have heard internally, Apple believes that they're basically six months behind OpenAI and ChatGPT in terms of the use cases that they have right now. So Siri works great, search works great. Image Playground, which is their image generation tool. The same underlying tech stack that powers genmoji. It's like close to what you're getting from Gemini and close to what you're getting from ChatGPT. So everything basically just works now. It's a great experience. I mean, the first beta is sloppy and it's buggy as you would expect, but they've taken something that was

[Room (M13)]

way

[Mark Gurman]

less than mediocre and they're giving people a baseline now that's actually functional. I would look at it as this way. When you take the iPhone out of the box, it has all these pre installed apps. They're not great, but they work. And you could use your phone based on what comes out of the box. What Apple had with AI was not that the pre install stuff just didn't work, but then you can go to the app Store and you can get a much better messaging app and much better Browser, email app, 10 times better versions of all the pre installed apps. That's the case with AI. Whereas now the pre installed stuff is baseline and it works great. But you can go out and get even better stuff if you want.

[Cooper]

Yeah. How high are the walls of the walled garden? Like you gave that example of look up your calendar. I use Google Calendar, send an email, I use Gmail. I'm not in the. Even though I'm an iPhone Mac user, I'm not fully in the Apple ecosystem. Is this gonna work for me or am I gonna bump up against different walled gardens as I try and go around?

[Ben]

Yeah. Another example is like I don't use Apple Music, I use Spotify. Can I tell?

[Cooper]

And the shortcut path, I might be

[Ben]

able to tell Siri, like make me a playlist with these three artists and make a Spotify playlist. I'm guessing no, but it is too early to tell.

[Mark Gurman]

It really is going to depend on how broad Apple's developer tools for the new Siri are going to become. Over time, the first set of tools are there. They're a bit limited. It depends on how closely Spotify and Google and all those other companies are going to want to work with Apple. I would say it's going to be a slow burn. I would say that if it was Google, I would want my applications to work better with Android and Google Pixel so I can get these cool AI features and bring people more into my ecosystem. So I would say even if they opened up the tools to the degree that you guys are explaining those scenarios for, I would say it's not going to work as well as it would if you're tapped into the Apple Mail ecosystem and the other Apple services, which is a shame. But I think over time Apple will get there. And let's not forget Google is doing very similar stuff right now with Android 17. And a lot of these scenarios I've explained on the iOS side of things are completely available to what you're seeing on the Android side of the world as well with this new Android hub. So if you're deep in the Google ecosystem with Gmail and Chrome, you get a good experience on iOS, but my Pixel friends, they get a great experience, especially with the new Android stuff rolling out.

[Cooper]

How are you thinking? Wait, first off, were there any surprises? Did anything surprise you?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Nothing.

[Ben]

Surprised.

[Mark Gurman]

Did anything surprise me?

[Cooper]

Were there any signs?

[Mark Gurman]

I think I was a little surprised that there wasn't a little bit more. It seemed like, you know, well, that's it. Like I knew, you know, everything that was coming in the keynote and, you know, beyond. I actually just put a story out about how there's a new iPhone air coming out in spring just a few minutes ago. So. Happy to talk about that.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Mark Gurman]

But next spring I would have spring 27, so I would have expected more out of this dev conference.

[Cooper]

Okay, yeah, let's switch gears to iPhone air. Seemed like there were some good reviews. I've seen a couple people carry them, but it felt like it wasn't selling as well as people expected. And so it might just have been a one off, but there is another one coming. What is the correct story or framing around the iPhone air?

[Mark Gurman]

So Apple's engineering data and this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. The two biggest complaints for the first generation phone are the battery life and the camera. And Apple knows this because they came out with that battery attachment on the back, which is crazy. And then they tried to market the single camera on the back of the iPhone air as being four lenses, whatever that means. So for this second version they're upping the battery life and I don't necessarily think that's because of a bigger battery pack, but I think it's the efficiency gains you're going to get from 2 nanometer in this new A20 Pro chip. And then the other big addition will be the second rear camera for ultra wide angle photography, which a lot of people really like on the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models. And so it's going to be a really nice upgrade. And I think at $999, a little bit less expensive than the iPhone pros, having a little bit better battery life with having that second camera, that's going to be a really compelling offering. And so I would say, you know, 30,000 foot view. What they're doing to the iPhone over the last year past, in the next few years, what they've got like this three to four year period of the iPhone, incredibly impressive. They're knocking it out of the park. I mean the iPhone last year that launch the 17 Pro and Pro Max, extremely strong. And the next few years are remarkable as well. This fall, the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the first foldable phone, which I'm calling the iPhone ultra. I believe that will be the name. But let's see, you know, still a little early. And then next spring you'll have the regular iPhone 18 and the iPhone Air 2. We'll see if they call it the 18 Air or the Air 2. And then next fall you'll have the iPhone 20 and iPhone 20 Pro Max. Those being the 20th anniversary models, complete redesign, curved glass, slimmer bezels, smaller dynamic island and all that.

[Ben]

Lighter, faster.

[Cooper]

I like how you said cleaner.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, it's gonna be nice.

[Cooper]

Day by day leaks of like exactly what happened I was going to do.

[Mark Gurman]

It's funny, it's incredible. And then the second foldable phone. So it's a jam packed 2027. 2027 is going to be Apple's biggest product year in its history.

[Tom Suarez]

That's great.

[Mark Gurman]

I'm pumped as the consumer.

[Ben]

Will they. Do you think they will ever try to create the conditions to get somebody to own a everyday consumer to try to have multiple phones? Like will they create, will they create a product like set of features? It's like a digital twin where you have like your iPhone ultra and your iPhone air and you just.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, that feels like I don't know what I'm gonna do. As someone who lives and breathes this stuff, I don't know what I'm gonna do because I can already tell you right now I want the new iPhone air. I want the iPhone foldable and I want the iPhone 20. So it's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. What a first world problem to have. We're talking about not even two phones, but now I want three phones. So you can.

[Ben]

But it feels like for them, it feels like for them, I don't think you're gonna be the only one. And it's always been interesting to me. You know, people complain about iPhone pricing, but there are not that many products in the world that are as like, that have as much utility as an iPhone that you use as much as the iPhone. Like, if the iPhone was $10,000, there'd be a big market for them. Right. And so I feel like Apple, over

[Mark Gurman]

time, don't give them any ideas.

[Ben]

Well, yeah, but I just feel like over time it's like, how do we make more money? It's like, well, you make a feature so that you have like, you can have like, yeah, this is the iPhone I use on the weekend. This is the iPhone that I use during the work week or whatever.

[Mark Gurman]

They should do that. They'll probably get a lot of. They'll probably get a lot of heat for that depending on how they articulate it. Hopefully they don't hire you as the marketing person for that because they're just going to come across.

[Ben]

Well, I'm just giving them business ideas. I think I'm giving them whatever it is, 1500 a year for iPhones. I don't even know the pricing, but they could probably get more.

[Mark Gurman]

They will. I mean, I would expect the prices to go up on all of these things. The foldable phone, obviously is going to be two grand plus. The other thing to note is in iOS27 they actually have a feature where

[Ben]

you think they can price the ultra higher than specs. They're out of their mind.

[Mark Gurman]

I think they'll be. I think they'll be higher than specs, but they added a new feature.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Who?

[Mark Gurman]

Snap?

[Ben]

No, I'm.

[Cooper]

No, he's joking.

[Mark Gurman]

We can get to that.

[Cooper]

Specs are very highly priced.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, but iPhone or iOS 27 has a feature where you can synchronize a single phone number and carrier account between two iPhones. So it does have that on the phone number side of things. But you're not going to be able to pick up a. Make a feature to have the weekend stuff during the week stuff and the night stuff. That'd be cool though. I don't know. Screw it. Maybe I'll get the foldable 2 and the 20 at the same time in a year from now. So we'll see. You're welcome. Apple.

[Cooper]

Does the Foldable eat into iPad or is it purely additive?

[Mark Gurman]

I think it's purely additive. I think that Apple has positioned the iPad itself at this point as a companion device to the iPhone and the Mac. I think they've done a great job at that. So I don't think the Foldable is going to take away iPad sales, particularly because of the price Delta is so high. There will be a new OLED iPad mini coming out soon, which I think a lot of the iPad mini fanboys are going to be pretty pumped about.

[Tom Suarez]

That's great.

[Cooper]

What you got for the Apple Vision Pro fanboys like myself? What are we doing in AR VR glasses? We just talked to the founder of Raven Renaissance. He's making augmented reality glasses. Obviously specs launched as well. Is there any movement there or anything from WWDC on the software side that might actually hint at or translate into wearables?

[Mark Gurman]

The Vision Pro added this new feature where it uses the external cameras to give you a sense of your external environment and object identification. That's going to be a feature at the heart of new AirPods coming out at the end of next year. It's a project called B798 where they have cameras on the AirPods that can help you with navigation and seeing the world around you, cloud processing, feeding that data into Siri AI. Same functionality will come to the smart glasses from Apple. Non ar right. No displays. Those will be rolled out at the very end of 2027, hopefully in time for the holiday season. But they're a little behind on those augmented reality glasses from Apple I would expect much later in the decade. New Vision Pro. So the Vision Pro is on ice. You're not going to see another new Vision Pro redesign. But what you are going to see is a completely rethought revamped from ground up mixed reality headset from Apple. So.

[Cooper]

Okay, I'm listening.

[Mark Gurman]

Okay, I'm thinking 2029, maybe end 2028, but it's going to be a long time.

[Cooper]

It's going to be a long time. Vision Air. We got the Vision Pro. Just make it lighter.

[Mark Gurman]

They killed it. Well, this is going to be a lighter. This is going to be a much lighter end to end retooling revamping of the headset. It's not a Vision Pro 2, it's a start from scratch type of product.

[Cooper]

Give me the vision, make it £25 on my face.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, it's going to be. You know, it's interesting when the Vision Pro launched and they were looking for different ways to take this product and, you know, give it a market. This is going to sound surprising to you, but obviously on one hand they were looking at how do we make this thing cheaper and lighter.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Mark Gurman]

One of the directions they were actually also looking at how do you make this thing even higher end, how do you make this thing even more expensive, how do you make this thing even better from a technical chop standpoint, how do you reduce the latency? Should we do a model that's specific for medical grade, for enterprise, for these high value targets that maybe would be willing to pay $5,000 for this machine, a business class version of the Vision Pro? Ultimately they're not moving in this direction right now. It's all about that end to end retool.

[Cooper]

Where does Apple sit on enterprise versions of their products like the Mac Pro? Is that the last time they had something dedicated like Mac Studio? Do they think of that as like an enterprise?

[Ben]

The MacBook Pro is an enterprise product.

[Cooper]

I feel like MacBook Pro is extremely consumer, but I don't know, like how did they think about like actually segment out that market?

[Mark Gurman]

It's been a while. They had the Xserve servers 15 years ago. You can make the argument like the Mac Pro, Max Studio, what have you. But the thinking in Apple is make these baseline products for consumers that consumers love and make them so enjoyable that you're going to want to use them at work too and then provide the software tools that allow you to do that. And if you remember, you know, 2008, the iPhone Renaissance starting then, a lot of credit goes to the price, cutting the price down to 189. A lot of credit goes to the App Store. Some of the credit goes to 3G, some of the credit goes to geographic distribution. But the one thing that people leave off when they talk about where did the how did the iPhone go from here to here is 2008 is when Apple added enterprise support for the iPhone. And so getting these things in businesses is really, really important for the Vision Pro. Just like HoloLens, Magic Leap and other AR VR companies before them, they had no choice but to go all in on the enterprise or not go all in, go a little bit deeper into the enterprise than they normally would like with their products because that was their biggest market today. All of Apple's other products, watches, phones, iPads, Macs, they have really big footprints in the enterprise, but the enterprise is still Only a sliver of the overall market. 90% of their sales are Consumer Vision Pro. You know, the split is a lot bigger in favor of enterprise.

[Cooper]

Any update on the lamp?

[Mark Gurman]

The lamp? Oh, the tabletop robot. I still expect that to come 2028. We're going to see the smart home display. I know, I know, I know. Smart home display. Probably as early as the end of this year. That's going to be an amazing product, and I think it's going to be a blockbuster, and I think it's going to be a gigantic seller. Just imagine having this thing on your desk, your wall counter. You can walk up to it, it can recognize you. It could pull up the stuff for, you know, you. And let's pretend Jordi and John live together. Jordy walks up to it, all Jordy stuff comes up. John walks up to it, all of John's stuff comes up. It has this personalized Siri, and he can grab all that stuff from the Device. It has FaceTime. It has Intercom. It has smart home control. Control your music. You can watch video on it. I think it's going to be really, really great holiday gift. When this thing finally comes out, how

[Cooper]

will it control the music? Like, are they gonna finally make a run of matching Sonos, which is in a very, very tough spot as a $1.7 billion company, are they going to try and make a run?

[Tom Suarez]

Is that it?

[Mark Gurman]

1.7 billion.

[Cooper]

7 billion down.

[Mark Gurman]

What's Peloton?

[Cooper]

Peloton, let's see. Peloton market cap, 2.4. So bigger. It's crazy because, like, Aura is like

[Mark Gurman]

a $10 billion valuation.

[George (Crosby)]

Right?

[Mark Gurman]

I mean, it's amazing.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Mark Gurman]

But I mean, Sonos.

[Cooper]

Sonos has frustrated a lot of people with the software. They rolled a bunch of stuff back, but in terms of actually all offering a consumer prosumer level experience with Wi Fi connected speakers that are available in more than just one SKU or two SKUs. Yes. You can go all in on the Apple speakers, but then you just have a ton of really small speakers around.

[Ben]

Yeah. I found out I have speakers built inside of my walls. And it gave me insane. They're not Sonos, thankfully. But I was like, it gave me insane Sonos ptsd because I'm like, imagine you have an issue.

[Cooper]

Well, you take the AUX from that and you plug that into whatever you want, some sort of receiver. But Apple doesn't make that receiver right now.

[Mark Gurman]

You know, Apple had such an opportunity with the home pod in speakers, and they completely blew it because of AI, because they didn't create an app ecosystem around it because they made it exclusive to their customer base. No Android support. The list goes on. Pretty disappointing. They haven't given the HomePod a meaningful update in the. In six years since the HomePod mini launched. They did a little minor refresh to the HomePod in 23, but I thought when the first HomePod launched in 2018 that they were going to be able to really go all in on speakers. Different form factors, different versions. But Smart home is one of two pillars for Apple right now. AI wearables and then AI smart home devices. And so you'll see the Smart Home Hub. You'll see one other thing in home security. You'll see that lamp, as you call it. You'll see refresh the home, the lamp

[Ben]

and the home security combined and you have killer lamps.

[Mark Gurman]

Sounds like a nightmare. And you combine it with AI.

[Cooper]

Wait, are there any Apple products with motors in them that I'm not.

[Mark Gurman]

No, this will be. This will be the first one with a artificial arm and it's a motorized Apple product that can move around in space. And so if you think about it, this is a piece of the legacy of the Apple car because this project was part of the Apple car AI and mechanics and part of that division, and it was one of the things that got left over. In fact, the person who ran the entire Apple car project when it shut down, Kevin lynch, this was the guy who ran software for the Apple Watch for a very long time and helped build that product from the ground up. His project now is the lamp.

[Cooper]

The lamp.

[Ben]

Lamp, man.

[Cooper]

It's not quite a lamp.

[Mark Gurman]

It's a big deal going from running the Apple Watch to the Apple car to the Apple Lamp.

[Cooper]

Do you believe the conspiracy theories that suggest that the Ferrari Lucche is. Is just a rebadged Apple car?

[Mark Gurman]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Apple car looks like a new age VW bus. You know, I think the Luci would have been successful as $150,000 Apple Car, but as a $700,000 Ferrari, I think they missed the mark.

[Cooper]

You might need to buy one to get access to other cars. Like, Ferrari is very complicated business model. You never know how it'll.

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, no, it's fun. It's funny. I saw people go like on ChatGPT after the Lucci was announced, they typed in make me an electric Ferrari and they're like, I made a better design in 15 seconds.

[Ben]

Not hard to do any predictions with for specs. It feels like at a normal company would launch this product and Then probably shutter the program, I expect. I wouldn't be surprised if Spiegel triples down, but it just feels like I cannot see the market for $2,000 pair of smart glasses that still feel like they're not going to add a tremendous amount of value to my daily life.

[Mark Gurman]

I like Evan Spiegel. I like some of the stuff Snap is doing. I think the design of the glasses actually looks pretty cool. I haven't tried the latest prototype yet, but I think they're well designed and a nice product. The question is if there's going to be a killer out for it. And right now it doesn't seem to be the case. I think the price actually isn't terrible. You know, the vision when we started talking about these things half a decade ago was they need to get to smartphone prices. Smartphone prices are now $2,000. But if you can get this thing down to a grand, which I don't know how that's ever going to happen, you're talking about something fairly compelling.

[Ben]

Meta Ray Ban displays are at 800 bucks. You think they're losing a bunch of money on that?

[Mark Gurman]

I think they're losing money on them. I don't think people are buying them. I think basically Meta, what they've done is they've created a three tier system. Tier A is the non display glasses that look exactly like normal glasses and don't have a display. And those have been extraordinarily popular because of the luxottica brands pushing those. Tier B has been the Meta display, which is this little hud, a little heads up display you have in there and you use the WristBand controller. The third tier is the true AR glasses. I don't think that mid tier with the HUD is going to last. The price is relatively solid, but I just don't see that as something people are going to be compelled by. You want dual display, you want binocular displays, you want immersiveness. Then on the other hand, if you tried the Vision Pro, you're spoiled. And so it's like, really, do you want to use any of these things? Did I see a photo of you on a plane wearing a Vision Pro the other day?

[Cooper]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I watch whole movies.

[Mark Gurman]

Which one of it? It was one of you two?

[Cooper]

Yeah, it was me.

[Mark Gurman]

It was you.

[Cooper]

I'll watch the entire Lawrence Arabia from start to finish in a Vision Pro.

[Mark Gurman]

Your hair is so similar. I can't tell who's who anymore. But that's me on a plane. Like I love that thing for movie watching. If You've installed Vision OS 27. Have you installed it yet? No, better the new series, pretty good on there. And then they have this new environment, I don't remember which. Where it is in the world might be Iceland. It's really remarkable. And then you can set any of your panoramas now, the good ones at least as your environment. So a few little bells and whistles. Tweaks in vision OS27 I don't think it's the. Yeah, it's not the softer light.

[Cooper]

On Sunday I'll take a panel of the Ultra Dome and then when I'm on the plane will be able to sit here, rewatch our interview on that screen there.

[Mark Gurman]

That's funny.

[Ben]

In full immersion mid journey hardware release. Any predictions? Have you followed it at all?

[Mark Gurman]

Yeah, I've been looking at this closely. We're going to be covering it tonight. I believe the launch is 6pm the head of hardware engineering is someone who came from the Vision Pro team. He was a manager on the Vision Pro hardware team. It seems like they've been working on this for a couple years. I would file this immediately in the category of products that may never launch or may never be bought by anyone. I wonder what we'll sell more. Yeah, experimental. The specs for this product, probably the specs. To be quite honest with you. I think the last thing someone sent me before I came on with you guys was that the product is going to be large in size. So I don't know what that necessarily means and I guess that would rule out a headset of some sort.

[Cooper]

Smart keg, who knows.

[Ben]

Yeah, I just thought like some. My head went to like local compute something that something for like prosumer creators type of thing.

[Mark Gurman]

I don't think that's interesting. I think you need something image based, something visual, not another Mac studio.

[Cooper]

Yeah, last question about wwdc. The parental controls, the focus on it feels like Apple solving some of the like societal anxiety around like our phones bad for kids? Are phones bad for people? All this?

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Cooper]

Is it existential? Like what do you think they were driving there? Was that message received? Because obviously AI is everything everyone talks about. But how important are those features? Like what were your takeaways from how. Like why they chose to focus on that so much. How important are those features? And then will that actually move the needle on like young device adoption?

[Mark Gurman]

Couple things. Regulators around the world are going absolutely nuts about this stuff. Smartphone addiction, social media, etc. And Apple needs to address all this stuff before it becomes their next EU related problem or EU like problem. The other thing is AI. And not that Apple has had great AI on the phone, but obviously the fears of AI taking over things. And then the other thing I would say is they launched screen time, I believe in 2018, which is their parental control, the name of their parental control system. It's just been an unmitigated disaster that hasn't worked properly for like five or six years. So they really needed to revamp it.

[Cooper]

But it was driven because I've noticed sometimes I'll go into screen time and it'll be like the Washington Post.com is 23 hours and 59 minutes. And I'm like, I had one tab open and it was just like churning and sending something super buggy.

[Mark Gurman]

Kids being able to just do whatever the hell they want on their phones, even if they're not supposed to. Just a bunch of issues. And so they needed to do an end to end revamp. And it's smart timing given they predict they finally got the AI in place. And then you've got a lot of people who are like, I don't want digital devices anymore. I want an MP3 player. Bring the ipod back, right? Get this screen.

[Cooper]

Palmer Lucky is out there. You banging the gong about retro futuristic devices.

[Mark Gurman]

The game, it's a real thing.

[Ben]

Would Apple ever do a re release of the like an ipod?

[Mark Gurman]

I don't think so, no.

[Cooper]

That's not their style. That's Palmer Lucky's domain. I think this is.

[Mark Gurman]

Well, you guys know how this feature works, right? Like you turn it on and then over time you can expand the feature set who people can contact, applications you have. So you can really, you know, turn the iPhone into a dumb phone now and then let it get smart over time. It's actually a remarkable concept and I think if executed well, it's pretty compelling. And all the other phone makers are going to copy it.

[Cooper]

Interesting. Happy birthday, son. You're 17. You get to unlock the calculator app now. Enjoy it. Don't go too crazy with those numbers. Who knows? Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to you.

[Mark Gurman]

Thank you guys. See you next time.

[Cooper]

Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it, folks. Stop making do it.

[Ben]

Every founder that we talk to that raises capital at Nicee loves it said they say it's incredible.

[Cooper]

Yeah, NPS through the roof.

[Ben]

Just go do it.

[Cooper]

NPS is legitimately through the roof.

[Ben]

When you're Raising that series D or F. Why not just do it? Head over New York stock, the New York Stock Exchange.

[Cooper]

We got Ryan Daniels from Crosby, the co founder and CEO in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Ryan, how you doing? Good to see you again. What's the latest?

[Tom Suarez]

Good to see you guys.

[Cooper]

Welcome back. Benchmaxing. You're benchmaxing.

[Ben]

Benchmax.

[Room (M13)]

Always got a benchmax.

[Cooper]

Tell us about benchmarks. What are you launching? Why is it important? Break it down for us.

[George (Crosby)]

So today we published a benchmark. It's the first benchmark that we know of that just looks at. It's. It's simple in theory, but a negotiation between two lawyers, like as far as we can get to completion. And I think the main takeaway is there's a lot of art to negotiating. And the way that lawyers negotiate contracts is really complex because there's so many moving variables. And this is what we do at Crosby. We try to get deals close faster. And so for the first time we can actually measure, you know, how do agents do on the first red line? That's fine. We kind of know that already. But how do they go over and over through the process where the judgment of a lawyer really takes hold and they just try to figure out who is their counterparty and how can they get them to. Yes.

[Cooper]

Next step, you got to train a voice model to be able to yell on the phone at the other client at the counterparty, let them know that you're not doing another turn of the forms. The battle of the forms is over. No, obviously there's a lot that goes into this talk about the data. Are you getting good redline data, ground truth data from firms? Are they happy to partner with you on this? Like, what is the value prop to actually get the correct data? Are you doing it yourself through a data firm? Like, what's the strategy to get the ground truth here? Because it's not the same as like a math problem that you can just verify with Lean.

[George (Crosby)]

Yeah, that's the key point of it. And you're totally right. So we worked with Micro One really closely on this, with Ali and his team. They've been amazing. They have a really great legal focus that they're building out. And you know, we have our own captive law firm here. That's been our kind of shtick from the beginning, was in order to get the full benefits of what agents can do in law, start your own law firm, sell end to end legal work. And as agents get better, our margins get better. And we were. And the hard thing is, like, there is no right answer. And we basically had large groups of real lawyers negotiating, all with the same positions for the same parties. And seeing, like, how much did those lawyers agree with one another on the right way to respond to those other lawyers? And so we could just see the overlap. And as the negotiation went longer and longer, we saw a ton of deviation between those lawyers, which is fascinating. Like, they're all very senior, they're all very experienced. This is a real negotiation. But at the beginning, the lawyers kind of more or less did the same thing. And we just saw the way the agents. We then built a rubric based on how those lawyers actually worked and tried to create some sort of, like, ground truth for the best way to negotiate. But, like, to your point, like, I don't know, maybe if we just did everything in all caps, the canopy party

[Tom Suarez]

would just accept it and we could

[George (Crosby)]

yell through the margin. So you have to try it.

[Cooper]

That's why you get paid the big bucks if you got big lungs and can scream. It seems like all the models did very similarly. 50%, 50.5 for GPT, 5.5. Weird numerology there. 5.5 gets a 50.5. Gemini 3.5. Flash got a 45.1. Opus 4.8 got 40. 44.4. And Fable 5 got 47.3. That seems surprising. I mean, it seems like the window for testing was low. Or is that something like Fable is more tuned to cybersecurity bio? Those sort of reinforce learnings, those feedback loops. And maybe it hasn't been applied to legal yet, but what was your interpretation?

[George (Crosby)]

We put a big asterisk on Fable because we got one testing run through, and then we lost access.

[Cooper]

Wow.

[George (Crosby)]

So we still would want to do a few more if and when. Yeah, we get. We get access back. You know, I think it's not surprising. I think what was most interesting to us were a few things. One, in the first red line, like, the first read of a document thing, and agents, like, really did poorly. They scored. They scored poorly there because they couldn't service those risk issues. As the. As the new issue went on, we knew the issues models did quite a bit better. But the biggest thing was models are really likely to just say yes and accept some term because you want to keep the deal going. And that was part of the instruction. And that's just not good lawyering.

[Swami Siva Subramanian]

Right.

[George (Crosby)]

Like, a great lawyer knows how to kind of make you feel like you're getting your side, but. But still push the deal. Forward and protect the client. And that's where the real judgment came in. And so, you know, in our mind we have a lot of work to do because we want our agents to be able to take the work off our lawyer's hands, to be able to think through something and say, hey, like we pushed back on this for this reason and really get the counterparty there. So, you know, I think the models did better than we thought they would, but there's a lot of work to do.

[Cooper]

We're having a little bit of interference. I have one more question, George. Anything you need to get in? I just want to know about the value of the harness because it seems like all of these models are sort of neck and neck, you know, within a few percentage. What happens if you wrap them in a very bespoke harness that your team builds? Can you get to 70%, 90%? Like where do you think the upper bound is on this benchmark?

[George (Crosby)]

Yeah, that's a great question. And like everything's published, it's all open source. So like the harness that we use, everything can all be replicated. There's a lot of ways to push. I think we've invested a lot in the harness that we wrote specifically that's really good at editing word documents that turns out to be a really hard thing. And so there's ways to push there. You know, I think ultimately, you know, more and more bespoke models that are like really post trained on just like making judgment calls stating their reasoning will be an area. So like both of those things help. But at the end of the day, like there's a ton of intelligence in like just the close models and I think it's not being fully exploited. So yeah, all areas to explore. That's the right questions.

[Ben]

How has your team experimented with token maxing? Like I met you guys are heavily funded. You're building an AI law firm. I imagine you're not telling the team, be conservative with tokens, especially because you can just learn faster and it's kind of the whole point of the business. But where does token maxing make sense with legal? Have you already found an equilibrium? What is your overall kind of like ethos around it?

[George (Crosby)]

I feel like as a company we're not successful enough to be worried about token costs yet. We're still in a place where we can just be like putting as much money. And I think more and more law firms like Kirkland just allocated half a billion dollars to building their own AI stuff are just trying to figure out they're charging huge amounts of money for the labor spend of legal. So they have a lot of room to throw money at tokens. And so long as you're basically spending less than the equivalent of $1,000 an hour on tokens, which is even for this, still hard to do. Like, you're still coming out with a good margin. So like, we, you know, we're spending a ton. You know, we did a lot of work with Fable. We got early access to it, and we spent a lot of money with it. And like, you know, and so I think there's still room to go because ultimately it's either the model or the human. And the models are still cheaper than, you know, hiring expensive lawyers for some of the tasks that we don't think we need lawyers for.

[Cooper]

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk.

[Ben]

Yeah, sorry for the technical difficulties, but yeah, great, great to get the update

[Cooper]

and we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of you gentlemen. Goodbye.

[Ben]

See you. Ryan.

[Cooper]

Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest, Isaiah from Bland, is the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? How you doing?

[Ben]

What's up, dude?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

I'm doing good. This is like the coolest thing I get to do for this fundraiser is announcement.

[Cooper]

Fantastic. Kick it off.

[Ben]

I know, I know. Way too fundraising.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

How much did you raise?

[Ben]

This is way overdue.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

We. We raised 50 million.

[Eric Newcomer]

Hit it again.

[Ben]

Hit it again. Because it should have happened.

[Cooper]

There we go. Congratulations. Now tell her what do you do?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah.

[Room (M13)]

So you guys know when you.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

You call basically any big company in the US and you have to deal with one of those really annoying bots, we replace that with AI. But our specialty, we like to say, is like, we want to do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies. So we do the really complex, hard to handle calls, and then we do that without OpenAI. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here. Anyone else?

[Ben]

So you're training your. You're training your own model?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah, correct.

[Ben]

And okay, so more specifically, like, are you working like 911 calls? Is that. I imagine that's not your focus, right? Or maybe it is, but I know there's some companies that just focus on that. Are you thinking like, hospitals? Like what kind of. Give us some more maybe concrete examples.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Hospitals, airlines, and yes, 911 calls eventually. So we're actually working on A product offering for that right now, I can't say too much about that, but I do have this weird feeling that, like, poetically, I'm going to die by a botched AI911 call one day. And that's kind of my.

[Ben]

Don't, man. It don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got it. You're a time traveler going back in time.

[Cooper]

I got to warm myself.

[Ben]

Yeah, you gotta. You gotta save yourself.

[Cooper]

What?

[Ben]

What?

[Room (M13)]

How?

[Ben]

Describe this market. Like, describe voice. Describe the voice AI market. Right. Like you guys have some competition from the Frontier labs, but it seems like less competition than maybe one would think or maybe it's like almost certainly has to be less competitive than coding agents.

[Carter Merrill]

Right.

[Ben]

Where you have thousands of companies and the labs and the hyperscalers all competing.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah. And you'd be surprised. So like two years ago we were one of the first companies to do this. This was like well before the labs. And I have a little binder of screenshots of different VCs that I'm sure talk about their voice AI thesis today. Who said no one will be talking to AI two years from today. And by the way, very unpopular. If you go into a fundraiser reminding them that they said that, they don't like that. I don't recommend that

[Cooper]

for sure. On that point of like, like no one will be talking to AI, it seems like. Are you actually increasing the length of phone calls? Like I'm seeing like the typical call last 30 to 45 minutes. That feels like too long. Honestly, that feels like a long time. Are people asking your models to write Python for them or something? And they're transcribing it one, one character at a time, like what's going on?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

A little roundabout. But yeah, we do calls with like 90 year old patients doing 45 minute long remote patient monitoring calls.

[Tom Suarez]

Okay.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

So if you want them to. To put on the blood pressure device, right. And you want to figure out if they're having heart attack, you have to hear about their grandchild first.

[Cooper]

Yeah.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

That is an immovable object you have to get through.

[Cooper]

Sure. Okay.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

These are lonely. Lonely.

[Cooper]

Oh, that's interesting. Actually have to somewhat like put guardrails on, obviously, but not the guardrails. Can't be too narrow to the point where you're a phone tree because you actually do have to open up the customer, open up the user on the other end of the line and start actually having a conversation before you can do a more complex interaction. Interesting.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Oh yeah.

[Cooper]

Do companies have specific ideas about that? Preconceived notions Whether they should or shouldn't, whether that's table stakes, like what does that look like?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

So we work with a couple of really big banks and one of them had a minute and a half long disclosure.

[Tom Suarez]

We had to leave at the start of every call.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

I know, thank you. I worked that in there. So if you're a big bank watching this, please disregard everything else I said

[Tom Suarez]

and just reach out.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

But we had to have a minute and a half long disclosure. So if you wanted to have a human being talk to our AI, you had to sit through a minute and a half of straight reading out different things to them. And then they would get on, you know, we get on calls them and they'd say like, it's varying.

[George (Crosby)]

Right?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Like not every bank's like this. We've worked with some really big ones that are less painful, but they're like, yeah, how do we know the AI is not going to say something racist?

[Cooper]

Sure.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Pretty sure that it won't. And you have to go through this really intensive testing process. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that these call centers and these really big ones that we're dealing with, every business has tried to get rid of them every possible way they can. They only exist because there's a gap between what the business wants to offer and what it can offer. And so when you hear about like AI receptionists or you hear about E commerce, where's my order calls? That's not what we're doing. We're doing the hard part of the $250 billion a year spend in the US and that is really early. That is like astoundingly early. I don't think people realize how early it is.

[Cooper]

Makes sense. What is. I mean, you're talking to big banks. Like what is the actual go to market motion funnel? Is it all sales driven or are there inbound? Do you have an inbound team or is there any like, sort of like self serve option at this point we

[Isaiah (Bland)]

have 350,000 self serve users, but most of it is actually inbound leads. So we do viral marketing every once in a while. You guys might have seen this, but we had a billboard. This was back before it was like cool to do billboards that said still hiring humans, question mark. And it had a phone number on it. Okay, not stop hiring humans. That is a different company that ripped that off. We're not happy with that.

[Ben]

You guys were the first.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

We were the first. And I actually got a chance while the founder of that other company was getting a haircut to go up to him and tell him what I thought, because I found out what was haircut.

[Ben]

Haircuts are crazy.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

It's sort of a captive audience. Right. The poor people did not know what was going on and why we were so upset at each other.

[Ben]

Yeah, because you invented billboards. So for him to come in and not only run a billboard, but to use similar language, it's just, you know,

[Isaiah (Bland)]

same graphics, name everything. I was like. He's like, oh, a big fan of your billboards.

[Tom Suarez]

I'm like, yeah, I know

[Cooper]

Ted Turner.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

But, yeah, so we. We bought the rights to Soulja Boy's voice, for example. You all know Soulja Boy. Like, crank that, Right? Kiss me through the phone. So we've done a lot of viral marketing, and we've managed to get CIOs, great people to come in and actually come to us. We do a lot of Outbound, too.

[Ben]

But Soldier Boy. Yeah, Soldier Boy help you win in the enterprise.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Like, you would not believe, because he was really popular around the time that Most of the CIOs were like, high school.

[George (Crosby)]

Yeah.

[Tom Suarez]

Or, you know, young adults.

[Cooper]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He probably crushes it like, aws Reinvent in Vegas.

[Ben]

Are there any of your customers actively using Soulja Boy's voice for their customer service? Or is that just like.

[Cooper]

I'm going to need to read a disclosure to you for a minute and a half, but I'm bringing in Soldier Boy to do it. I think that's a win.

[Ben]

That would be the retention there would probably be really quite good.

[Cooper]

Why not?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yes, actually, there's a lot of. Mostly there's a lot of restaurants because apparently people really love it. But we have his name published under a different name on the platform. So we have Soldier Boy's official voice, and then we have a name that's hidden for the other one. The other voice is very popular. So there are a few enterprises that if you stumble upon it and you call, you might not realize it, but

[Ben]

you're actually talking to Soldier Boy. The one and only. Talk about working with Paul Lieberstein, the actor behind Toby on the Office.

[Cooper]

Oh, yeah.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

I never get to meet the celebrities. It's always the marketing team. He was incredibly nice to work with. Very pleasant. Ramp had Kevin or Brian, and. And I have to be very careful about the names and not mixing them up. But we were like, who's the most boring person that we could possibly think of? Because the company's name is bland, so it kind of comes with the territory. And everyone was like, well, Toby from The office. Paul, I think, was humored by that, took it very graciously and we ended up having a lot of really great interaction with that and sort of goes along with our marketing, which is fun and engaging, but not maybe disruptive to the brand. Where you're like these guys. I wouldn't trust them to handle my 911 calls.

[Ben]

Imagine calling 911 and Soulja Boy. That. That would be worrisome. I gotta, I gotta say. But good lead, Gen. Yeah.

[Cooper]

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Ben]

Congrats. Who did the round?

[Isaiah (Bland)]

So it was our insiders plus Dell and HubSpot. So we actually went very corporate on this round and we were excited to have them.

[George (Crosby)]

And.

[Isaiah (Bland)]

Yeah. So you guys will be hearing more

[Mark Gurman]

from us on some new models and stuff.

[Cooper]

Amazing.

[Ben]

Great to finally meet you and thank you so much.

[Mark Gurman]

Thank you for having me.

[Cooper]

We'll talk to you soon.

[Ben]

Cheers.

[Cooper]

Have a good one. In market news, more Fed officials have signaled a rate increase as the next move. The central bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Warsh's first meeting its chairman, but nine of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase by year's end, up from none in March. And so the market is selling off, down about a percent today based on that. There's also a G7 meeting that's happening, happening between AI leaders. Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and Demis hassabis from Google's DeepMind at a summit in France on Wednesday discussing AI export controls and all things AI. The AI leaders are huddling at lunch with the G7 in France, and I'm sure there'll be more things to come out of that. There's still more back and forth on export controls. Fable 5 is still embargoed in some way, and they're working through that. There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also US has held off on blacklisting China's Deep seq more than 100 firms that are deemed security risks. That was part of the Fable 5 rollout was that there was a South Korean telecom company, according to the reporting, that had access to, to one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. And that firm, that South Korean telecom company, had potentially ties to China in some way. And so the US Government was skeptical of that South Korean telecom company. And so there was a debate over that and whether or not that crossed a bright line. And so from the Washington Post, Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned. The list of companies that would be getting the most advanced models had ballooned and roughly 50 additional entities had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify new recipients for days. When Anthropic finally turned over names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company the administration suspected alleged of having ties to China, officials said. And so that is the key of the dust up there, but we'll be continuing to follow that.

[Ben]

In other news, much more tragically, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, was in a plane crash. Plane crash in Laredo, I guess early, early this morning coming back from Mexico to Austin. I unfortunately never got to meet Joshua, but only heard tremendous things about him and he really was an important figure in the Austin startup community. So sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends and yeah, really, really tragic. Rest in peace.

[Cooper]

Well, we should close on a positive note. In some way there's a whole discussion over SpaceX potentially using the high share price, the incredible valuation to acquire more companies. Create a roll up. There's a piece in the Financial Times we can run through another day, but Bill Ackman shares a hall of fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable valuable is how valuable it is a tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the cursor I acquisition closing or being announced that the option has been exercised. But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there going to be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll up? Will SpaceX buy neo cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets like Terrafab has been talking what's involved in that? I mean, they're trading at what, 10 times intel at this point or something? I don't know what is intel market cap, but there's so much that they could do. It's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600 billion company, so that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain, there's a lot in the AI world and the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they want to go, but it would be a very different direction. And so everyone will be watching it very, very closely. Anyway, thank you for tuning in into TVPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our [e-mail] and we will see you.

[Ben]

And hello to Keith, who seemingly just joined in the chat. Hey, Keith. Couple hours late, but few hours later, three hours late. But we're happy to have you here.

[Cooper]

Come back tomorrow.

[Ben]

Hope you all have a tremendous afternoon. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close as well. It I appreciate it every day and have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Cooper]

Goodbye.