Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

Summary

TBPN Podcast, March 13, 2026

Episode: Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Episode Overview:
This episode is a jam-packed, fast-paced, nearly three-hour live tech talk show featuring exclusive conversations with major tech leaders including Travis Kalanick (CloudKitchens/Uber), Gustav Söderström (Spotify), Tim Cadogan (GoFundMe), and Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks). The hosts dive deep into the dynamics of tech culture, tall poppy syndrome, new AI launches and internal drama (especially at xAI and Apple), massive market moves in compute and chips, and the changing landscape of company building, fundraising, and digital infrastructure.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• Examining Tech Culture: Especially the phenomenon of “tall poppy syndrome”—why American tech is so drama-driven, and how it contrasts with other startup cultures.
• Major Company Updates: Travis Kalanick’s post-Uber stealth company coming out of hiding, Spotify at 20 years and embracing AI, and Palo Alto Networks' AI-driven evolution.
• AI and Competition: xAI’s radical rebuild, Apple’s “slop” allegations, major chip acquisitions, and new “neolab” formation from departing Anthropic researchers.
• Live Pivots: Fresh reactions to breaking news—AI labs, Apple comms, chip deals, and more.

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Key Segments & Discussion Points

1. Tech’s Palace Intrigue, Tall Poppy Syndrome, and Media Narratives

[00:00–12:09]

• John and Jordi riff on Stripe’s “lack of drama” and Patrick Collison’s post about why some companies generate endless intrigue while others fly under the radar.

• Discussion of “tall poppy syndrome”—societies cutting down high achievers—and how this curtails risk-taking in other markets but not the U.S.

• Quote:

  “You wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies… and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain.” —John, [04:36]

• Discussion of why only a handful of Tesla/SpaceX execs are widely recognized, and why academic, open-source adjacent industries (e.g., AI) produce more public drama.

• Commentary on why the tech internet rewards “dunks” at the biggest companies (“punch up, not down”) and is skeptical of success, but America’s fundamental growth and abundance defangs these attacks.

• Quote:

  “In the short run, the market is a vibe war but in the long run it’s a weighing machine.” —John, [10:45]

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2. Travis Kalanick’s Stealth Decade and “Adams”, the New Physical AI Robo-Empire

[49:20–107:39]

Travis’s Post-Uber Stealth Era

• Kalanick discusses operating City Storage Systems/CloudKitchens in stealth for 8 years—no employees even put it on LinkedIn.
• Motivation for stealth: Burnout from media firestorms, desire to “just build.”
• Quote:

  “I wanted to put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle, and build.” —Travis, [51:16]

The Reveal & Launch of Adams

• Now rebranded as Adams, integrating real estate, robotics, and food automation.
• Simultaneously acquiring Anthony Levandowski’s Pronto for mining/industrial AV (autonomous vehicle) software.
• Focus: Creating the “wheelbase for robots” across food, mining, and heavy industry—pushing the boundary on “physical AI.”

Lessons in Building, Recruiting, and Moats

• Running fully outbound recruiting/sales—no inbound, no hype, only doers.
• Strategic advantage in owning real estate and network effects (especially in delivery & automation).
• Capital wars—how Uber won by systematizing fundraising:

  “...Storytelling that my team could tell, not just me... we’d aggregate demand, create auction dynamics. That was our advantage.” —Travis, [70:30]

Navigating Tech Cycles

• Reflections on the first dotcom era, the 2008 crisis, and how tech narratives always swing from “it’s over” to massive new booms.
• Advice to founders today:

  “If raising money is super easy… you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further.” —Travis, [101:00]

The Value of Grit and Empowerment

• Uber’s signature move: empower young, gritty talent to own city launches—problem-solving and direct simulation in interviews.
• Philosophy on AI and jobs: humans—as “the long pole in the tent”—are still critically valuable until full automation/AGI.
• Quote:

  “Until humans are fully replaced… plumbers are going to be like LeBron.” —Travis, [75:10]

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3. Gustav Söderström on Spotify at 20, AI, and the “No Regret” Platform

[108:17–135:43]

• Gustav joins from Austin at SXSW, reflecting on Spotify’s 20-year journey.
• Vision: “The world’s first truly intelligent agentic media system.” Users will interact with Spotify in plain English; the platform will curate music, podcasts, and audiobooks in new ways.
• Quote:

  “If you want a playlist that goes out and looks at TikTok and what’s trending, then takes that, filters it, and updates daily, you can literally do that today.” —Gustav, [110:03]

AI and Artist Collaboration

• Prediction: Artists will start opting in for fans to create AI remixes/covers (with revenue shares).
• Spotify’s payout model demystified: they pay per user, not per stream, and return more to artists than any time in music history.
• Quote:

  “We’ve paid out over $70 billion to the music industry... more than anyone ever.” —Gustav, [124:03]

Social and “Anti-Slop” Philosophy

• Social features (“Jams”, collaborative playlists) are growing rapidly.
• Spotify uniquely minimizes “regret time” vs. other platforms driven by engagement.
• Gustav on competition:

  “You guys are the anti-slop company; there really aren’t any of them left.” —Jordi, [119:09]

• No-regret content, user control, and low algorithmic manipulation: “You pay for what you want to be, something aspirational.”

Live Events and Future Moves

• Spotify is selling over $1.5 billion in concert tickets and using data for superfans and artists.
• Continuing to expand in video podcasts, supporting multi-platform creators, and betting on durability over short-term engagement.

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4. Tim Cadogan on GoFundMe – Crisis Fundraising and AI as an Empathy Tool

[136:22–152:36]

• Tim discusses joining GoFundMe at the very start of COVID, overseeing the platform that saw surges in donations to individuals, restaurants, and disaster relief.
• Tech as empathy: new AI-powered fundraising coach helps users set up emotionally resonant and effective campaigns—even at scale.
• On AI for donors: Most giving still happens through direct social relationships, not discovery, so trust networks matter.
• GoFundMe’s branding: staying focused on helping individuals and nonprofits, not expanding into generic crowdfunding/Kickstarter territory yet.

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5. Nikesh Arora on Palo Alto Networks’ AI Transformation and Security

[153:43–191:07]

• Nikesh shares his epic journey: rejection by 400 companies post-business school, early Google executive, SoftBank, now leading Palo Alto Networks.

• Rebuilding Palo Alto’s culture with his now-mandatory “belief document.”

  “As a leader…write down your principles. Debate them. Make them mandatory reading for your teams.” —Nikesh, [170:39]

• Cybersecurity is now a platform play: moving to integrate all “swim lanes” (not just one aspect of security) via aggressive M&A and leveraging acquired founders.

• AI’s role: 90% of threats are “solved" problems; Palo Alto is in the “1% business” of catching the unseen.

  “Generative AI solves 90% problems. We solve 1% problems.” —Nikesh, [180:32]

• Current security landscape: AI has compressed attack timelines down to 28 minutes to exfil data; Palo Alto bringing it down to one minute response.

• Advice for applicants: “We’ve stopped looking at your CV; you need to be a vibe coder, AI user.”

• Epic anecdote: Getting jobs (and rejections) through physical letters and the value of resilience and adaptability.

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6. Hot Takes & Viral Moments

On Apple & “Slop” Allegations

[20:15–23:45]

• Viral news: Apple’s 50th-anniversary newsroom post allegedly “AI written.”
• Hosts defend Apple: its comms have always been formulaic, leading AI detectors to falsely flag it.
• Quote:

  “If you ask an LLM to write in Apple’s style, it’ll nail it—because every Apple comm is in the corpus.” —John, [21:45]

xAI Rebuild and Lab War Dynamics

[14:40–18:51]

• xAI, led by Elon Musk, is undergoing a radical “rebuild from the foundations up.”
• Questions about valuation ($200B), team departures, swaps from Cursor, and Musk’s use of SpaceX stock to incentivize talent.

Notable Quotes

• “If raising money is super easy… you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further.” —Travis Kalanick, [101:00]
• “If you’re getting money easy… you should have gone harder.” —Travis, [101:22]
• “Generative AI solves 90% problems. We solve 1% problems.” —Nikesh Arora, [180:32]
• “Tall poppy syndrome leads to fewer truly scaled companies… and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain.” —John, [04:36]
• “You pay for what you want to be—something aspirational.” —Gustav (Spotify), [120:44]

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7. Memorable Lighthearted Segments

• The “physical paywall” prop segment for reading The Information’s Travis Kalanick scoop. [13:03]
• Fish tanks as a status symbol in tech mansions and funny debates about home amenities. [29:06–34:02]
• Tokyo/Japan shout-out for TBPN’s surprising fanbase. [26:36]

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Episode Timeline Highlights

• 00:00–12:09 — Tech intrigue, tall poppy syndrome
• 12:47–18:42 — Breaking news: Travis Kalanick’s new venture, xAI drama
• 20:15–23:45 — Apple “AI slop” allegation and media discourse
• 49:20–107:39 — Travis Kalanick deep-dive: stealth era, Adams, robotics, capital wars, young operator strategy, physical AI
• 108:17–135:43 — Gustav Söderström (Spotify): 20 years, future of AI music, “no regret” platform, empowering artists and users
• 136:22–152:36 — Tim Cadogan (GoFundMe): Building empathy at scale, AI for fundraising
• 153:43–191:07 — Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks): Platform security, AI moats, culture playbook for public cos

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Summary in a Nutshell

This episode exemplifies why TBPN is “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession”—all killer, no filler. You’ll hear how tech giants and entrepreneurs are navigating a boom-and-bust, AI-infused, hyper-competitive era with new strategies for scale, resilience, and even kindness. If you want to understand the soul and speed of 2026’s tech landscape—from AI culture wars to gritty comeback stories—this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

[A]

you're watching tbpn today is friday march thirteenth twenty twenty six we are live from the tvpn ultradome the temple of technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital let me tell you about ramp dot com time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place boy is it good to be back it's great to be back but it's friday the thirteenth so you know what you got to do salt over the left shoulder oh yeah you know about this it didn't yeah throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck it counteracts bad luck friday the thirteenth that's great obviously bad luck but not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder good hack i was very interested in patrick hollison's post we talked about this a little bit he says there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations as far as i can tell this is substantially a matter of path dependency we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not the others creating self reinforcing lock in effects how much does one hear about the power struggles at chevron or the department of agriculture there's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors we get it you want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about stripe we get it patrick just kidding no stripe has not ever really been in the tumultuous drama oh horse race there's been investors who have talked about various valuations but overall the company's been sort of smooth sailing for almost two decades but i wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries startup ecosystems and also yeah

[B]

the closest they ever got to drama was around the bolt fast dynamic that's right because they backed fast yeah you're right there was a little bit seemingly because they felt like some competitive pressure there they wanted the fast checkout provider to be on stripe bolt was famously not they had built their own payment

[A]

rails but i mean the collison brothers are just so class they're such class acts that they don't really wade around in the mud they don't roll around in the slob farm and it's like it's a b two b company so there's less just general viral intrigue around

[B]

it and even in that even in that whole saga you never saw a single comp no no no and they

[A]

weren't taking shots at anyone they were very classy what do you think i

[B]

mean there was some controversy when the cheeky pint elon interview came out and john collison how many guinnesses were they

[A]

drinking okay okay that was a bit of palace intrigue how many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace i

[B]

mean john did come out on top

[A]

of that right he did he did yeah he explained he explained so years ago i was talking to an american vc about new zealand and i asked him about the startup community the country was beautiful here he said highly developed democratic it consistently ranks among the world's most stable wealthy and well governed societies and he was spent a lot of time there i was like there's gotta be some company that can break out and become a power law company if you're gonna be there spending a lot of time you'll probably meet cool people interesting people maybe there will be a great new zealand company that comes out of this and he was like i'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome so what is tall poppy syndrome put simply individuals who achieve visible success are criticized attacked or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd the metaphor should be obvious when you cut the tallest flowers in a field the surface appears even let's pull up tyler for a second why what is that there we go he's a tall poppy he's getting cut so anthropologists often call this leveling behavior and it goes back to hunter gatherer societies good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration and there's nothing bad about a preference for humility america has long been suspicious and americans have long been suspicious of the lamborghini driving self promotional instagram course hustlers and for good reason those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food basically but the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation if you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society you don't actually go out and hunt you actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting the bacon yeah you don't bring home the bacon in the first place you don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society so you wind up with lower startup formation fewer truly scaled companies less like aggressive growth plans and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain and that's what's happened in a lot of developed wealthy stable countries that haven't created amazing new products really bold entrepreneurship efforts a lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome so america's never had this problem and i don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon but it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech so there's this unevenness that patrick collison identifies around internal drama attention it does not seem correlated with market cap at stake or even how well known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic so i was thinking back to elon musk and tesla he's like perhaps the most household name entrepreneur in history certainly right now tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake if someone leaves tesla to start a competitor that should be incredibly dramatic do you know who i'm talking

[B]

about i do who is because i took a pass oh you took a pass okay on your essay but i

[A]

don't remember his name it's peter rawlinson he designed he was the chief engineer of the model s at tesla they're super successful you know high end sedan the thing that really ushered in the ev boom he's the guy that engineered it he leaves he goes to lucid motors eventually becomes the ceo and the face of the company develops a direct competitor to the tesla model s which is now discontinued the lucid air is fancier faster it has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment and it should be like this knockout drag out fight that's very interesting lucid hasn't put a dent in tesla largely but it's still such it is palace intrigue and yet no one really cares and most people in tech can't even name a second person at tesla after elon maybe jb straubel redwood materials but he's out now yeah karpathy karpathy yeah that would be one but it's like x who's active at spacex everyone knows gwynne shotwell but like beyond that kiko donchev who else like it gets really really hard and why is that well some industries some companies have different cultures so if you think about tesla chevron department of agriculture they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct they might actually be discouraging it they might have rules around what you can post

[B]

about publicly one x ai employee went

[A]

very direct he went very direct and it didn't last long at the company so like electric vehicles chevron oil and gas the department of agriculture these organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia which is very open source publish your research go to a conference put up slides what are you thinking about what are you researching share it all talk about it maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in the weeds research but you're very public about these things then and then also the blogosphere like in the ai world a lot of leading thinkers leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before and so it was like a continuation of that the idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts that just carried through to the ai era but in those other industries like tesla there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet the internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down when a company rises and falls you typically don't see serious people in tech really being like i called it victory lap like it's seen as uncouth the company has to

[B]

be doing some really egregious stuff totally

[A]

like a true violation of the social contract not just look everyone tried really hard they got beat and the investors sort of got fifty cents on the dollar back something like that no one's really cheering for that it's pretty rare but some anonymous accounts are

[C]

but in

[A]

general aiming for the top is the only option if you do wanna punch you don't wanna punch down but you still wanna punch where do you punch you punch up you punch at the top dog and the better a company is doing the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it and this is seen as like contrarian everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category we'll take a shot at it it's over they're dead and you're gonna get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take everyone else has the glazenator three thousand out you pull out the dunk and you go viral so and then also you add to the fact that anyone no matter how far away they are from silicon valley what their career history is what their background is how much they actually understand about what's going on in tech can just synthesize news and discourse into something that's more aggressive more more punchy and go viral and you have a recipe for a whole lot more dunks around whoever is on top and that is sort of the tall poppy syndrome so but the good news is that fortunately america is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent and the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall syndrome tall poppy syndrome type attacks you see someone saying it's over this company's cooked they're terrible and then i mean we just saw this with cursor everyone's like cursor's over it's dead and then you see okay well they just hit twenty two billion arr oh growing twenty five percent month over month and it's like actually things are fine and so those sorts of data points help push back against these like attacks on the tall poppy at the time and there's this benjamin graham line that everyone likes to quote that he actually did not agree with and is sort of misattributed him but i said in the short run the market is a vibe war but in the long run it's a weighing machine he of course is quoted as saying in the short term it's a popularity contest or a voting machine in the long term it's a weighing machine in the idea that in the short term prices are determined by people just voting based on popularity but in the long term you always realize the value of the company and you have to return to fundamentals and that's why he was so into fundamental analysis anyway lots of interesting things going on in the timeline around this thoughts on on tall poppy syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now the vibe war

[B]

yeah just i think i said classic is like it's way easier to take down to do a takedown of a company yeah to talk poorly about a company yep than get in anywhere close to anywhere close to actually accomplishing anything

[A]

remotely nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle but if it's david and goliath it's game yeah

[B]

anytime i see people that like every single post in their feed is just like a dunk it's like hey hating on other people is not gonna make you successful that's true and successful people see people that hate on other people just assume like okay this person is just not very successful themselves so can get you some momentary attention but positivity

[A]

haters gonna hate the chat understands this intuitively that positivity shall win the day shall reign let's pull up the linear lineup because we have an absolute banger of a show we got eric lyman from ramp coming on travis kalanak coming in person tim from gofundme gustav from spotify tony we have a lightning round

[B]

that's tony coming in with a billion

[A]

dollars funding and then nikesh arora from palo alto networks is coming on linear of course is the system for modern software development seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents now and

[B]

you too it's time it's time for a special segment a special segment so

[A]

there is news about travis kalanick he's coming on the show in person to discuss it but the news broke in none other than the information but it was paywalled so we have a plan we have printed out this exclusive report from the information and we placed it behind a physical paywall which tyler cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered from the information this morning take a swing at that break down the paywall wow with authority okay okay and what does he

[B]

get there he is he's got the

[A]

entire article we have the entire the paywall has been busted down thank you the information for reporting the news is travis kalanick plots new self driving venture with levandowski and uber kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by anthony lewandowski who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases the new venture would also represent a reunion of kalanick with the company he founded there's been this discussion of whether or not travis will be involved in uber in the future we will ask him about that at noon in about forty minutes let me tell you about turbopuffer serverless vector in full text search built from first principles and object storage fast ten x cheaper and extremely scalable let me also tell you about figma no matter where your idea starts figma may cloud code codex or sketch the figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape so other news and the information from amir cursor and xai news xai hired two senior leaders from cursor to catch up on coding there's a whole debate going on on what's going on at xai elon musk said xai was not built right the first time around so it's being rebuilt from the foundations up he said same thing happened with tesla so he is he's completely changing the strategy got to

[B]

wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got who knows it is interesting now elon has the advantage of being able to use spacex stock to recruit people which is you know the ipo shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade but elon's obviously doing everything he can to to get to make sure the ipo goes well yeah including putting some amount of pressure it sounds like on nasdaq s and p to get faster inclusion

[A]

so there's a big discussion over well xi is worth like two hundred billion dollars ostensibly like what does this mean if the team is completely new what's actually the value there what's the core asset there's some debate there we were going back and forth about it this

[B]

morning yeah and the only reason that i think he was able to pull that off is because one is elon but then to so many of the investors like had it was the same group of people on both cap tables

[A]

so the bear case is obvious like like a fourth tier you know lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point there's lots of folks who are at that level getting in the game of the rsi the frontier labs like you gotta be deepmind you gotta be openai anthropic and if you're not at that level your valuation's probably an order of magnitude lower you're looking at like you know the ex quinn team people were talking about msl like there's even if you just broke up meta is msl worth two hundred billion they have some great team they have a lot of compute but it's like they have two hundred million or two hundred billion did i say million yeah oops all the numbers are big the bull case of course is that xai is great at building data centers colossus tube was built really fast is that an enduring advantage can they be the best neo cloud at the very least is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than later sooner than people expect in which case you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on earth and you're in space there's still a bull case but it is tricky benjamin decracker shared a story from when he worked at xai he says when i was first hired low level by x ai i was extremely excited i greatly admired elon and what grok could be i have a pretty cool ai following here on x and big names see my stuff including elon himself at the time during the interview and onboarding they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box so basically what he did is he asked people on x how can we make grok awesome a bunch of people answered they got a ton of john carmack retweeted it there were lots of great ideas and he said he woke up the next day to a threatening email from his main supervisor at xai telling me i had messed up and i was never to ask for ideas to improve grok ever again that wasn't my job they suspended my x account so he was very upset and he says the manager's gone everyone he knew at xai is gone and he's sort of hoping for a new a

[B]

new era at xai simp for satoshi who consistently gives elon i think some pretty good advice oh yeah he's willing to say he seems to be willing to say the thing that it looks like many people on the xai team weren't able to get through but he said try this elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly tell them you really believe this is the path then fire everyone who agrees simple test basically weeding out the sycophants but yeah it's interesting now it feels really hard to catch up in codegen even if you have some great people from cursor it's just so so so competitive and there's there's i just i don't see it but they've got to try something because he's not certainly not back

[A]

to anthropic and a lot of that

[B]

was you mentioned the neolab opportunity but certainly we've seen no indication that he wants to just like rent out gpu's

[A]

yeah no it's more of like a bank shop where you build more data centers than anybody else you have the most compute and then because of that you're able to scale your training runs and that unlocks some new capability it is a stretch spore is saying if i was a spacex investor i'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening but john shahidi friend of the show says i'm not annoyed he's a spacex investor i imagine and there are other departures walter bloomberg is citing the ft and says elon musk has ordered another round of job cuts at xai and and one of the xai employees i left earlier this week it was a difficult decision the past two years have been intense fun deeply rewarding journey and i accomplished things i could not have imagined two years ago thank you to the entire omni imagine team there were also rumors that the macro hard project to sort of automate software development was behind schedule which elon obviously does not have a strong you know patience for anyway quickly let me tell you about vanta automate compliance and security vanta is the leading ai trust management platform and let me also tell you about cisco critical infrastructure for the ai era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with cisco so apple yeah i'm gonna fight you on this but read it apple

[B]

said fifty years of thinking different and then they wrote fifty years ago in a small garage a big idea was born apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal and and that belief m dash radical at the time m dash changed everything april first marks fifty years of apple from the first apple computer to the mac from ipod to iphone ipad to apple watch and airpods as well as the services we use every day m dash the app store apple music apple pay icloud and apple tv m dash we've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools in people's hands through every breakthrough one idea has guided us m dash that the world is moved forward by people who think different that's because progress always begins with someone em dash an inventor scientist a student or storyteller em dash who imagines a better way a new idea a different path that spirit has guided apple from the start but it has never belonged to us alone and i won't read through the whole thing so pangram lab says one hundred percent ai generated they used ai to detect the ai okay and

[A]

that's how so they got them dead to rights right oh apple's cooked they

[B]

sound like huge aura loss apple has already been committing aura seppuku but dang

[A]

okay let me read you and to

[B]

be clear the same account went and found other apple newsroom articles that show one hundred percent human written okay let's

[A]

turn back the clock let's go back in time to apple's mission statement from years ago before llms were even a thing this is their mission statement about apple apple revolutionized personalized technology with the introduction of the macintosh in nineteen eighty four today apple leads the world in innovation with iphone ipad mac apple watch and apple tv apple's five software platforms m dash ios ipados macos watchos and tvos m dash provide seamless experiences across all apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the app store apple music apple pay and icloud apple's more than one hundred thousand employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it they've always sounded like this like the llms trained on apple comms and if you go to an llm and you say write me something in the style of apple it's going to nail it because every apple communication is in the corpus and so of course whether or not they use ai it's going to detect as one hundred percent ai it's the same thing as as paul graham using the forbidden sentence structure ten years ago yeah that's my take do you disagree

[B]

i just think apple would use a bias i'm biased

[A]

through pangram that one if you run

[B]

paul graham's old essays they don't come up as ai even though like yeah there's a sentence that like maybe is you know in the same style but

[A]

let me see how do i scan for ai i need to create an account

[B]

let's see let's see john i'm

[A]

trying i'm trying let's see it's creating a cloud send me the link okay i got it i got it what's my role other personal use i was referred by a friend colleague now i

[B]

have to pay send the link to

[A]

tyler i got it here okay it says one hundred percent human written i got roasted wow wow okay tyler undefeated brutal fangrim truster trust the pangram trust the pangram ridiculous anyway let me tell you about fin ai the number one ai agent for customer service if you want ai to handle your customer support go to fin ai and let me also tell you about eleven labs build intelligent real time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with eleven labs china's bytedance got access to the top nvidia ai chips oh oh tiktok parent pushing global expansion plans to tap blackwell processors that are barred for export to china they're just flexing on us at this point how did this leak bytedance is working with a southeast asian company called alani cloud on plans to use some five hundred blackwell computing systems totaling around thirty six thousand b two hundred chips is that a lot of chips that's not as much as elon's talking about and i don't think that's at the scale of frontier stuff so not the most worrisome headline but we are in a knockout drag out fight right now how many b two hundreds would you provision if you were at a frontier lab right now tyler what's a good idea

[B]

i have no idea but in the next paragraph it says i mean this is like what a twenty five x increase from what they had before so i mean this is still pretty meaningful

[A]

pretty meaningful okay bytedance plans to use the computing power for ai research and development outside of china are they more it doesn't feel like they're gated on training if you look at that crazy video model cdance like that thing seems like it was trained on the bat it doesn't seem like it was hardware

[B]

contrary sure but i mean you know the expensive part of video models inference

[A]

is super expensive exactly like training is

[B]

actually i mean it costs insane amounts to train frontier models yeah like obviously

[A]

but it's not it's not game over if they train a model and they can't inference it it's like they got a genius but they only got five geniuses in the data center yeah i

[B]

mean you can distill these things like distilling it i think is probably much easier than training the thing in the

[A]

first place we should figure out about distilling video models i wonder how more inference efficient it is to distill cdance just to be a marvel yeah and obviously it's like a very different process

[B]

from distilling even you hear distilling as in chinese labs training on outputs versus

[A]

actually there's a bunch of ways you can do this i think you can do it bytedance has created more than a dozen ai apps out in china and parallel versions for oversea markets such as chatbot dola video creator dramina and homework helper gauth these are funny names anyway moving on what's going on let's

[B]

head over to japan let's check in

[A]

with japan japan okay what's going on

[B]

in japan jordy tell me this video we can pull it up oh yes yes yes and anyone in the chat if you could translate this for us that would be great we really should

[A]

download this transcribe it and then and then translate it but we we're big in japan now look at me

[D]

this

[A]

is from instagram

[B]

i think i get

[E]

it

[A]

they really did their i don't

[B]

even know where that video is yeah i've never seen that video put out

[A]

a full video of us that's cool they got the video of you driving the car we got our cards

[B]

that was one of my best hits

[A]

this is so cool i shared this jordan

[B]

says it's a great sign of respect

[A]

in japanese culture it does seem like

[E]

it

[A]

well should we head over to the mansion section let's do it first before you buy a mansion take your company public at the new york stock exchange want to change the world raise capital at the new york stock exchange and also make sure your home wi fi is secure in your mansion with crowdstrike your business is ai their business is securing it crowdstrike secures ai and stops breaches so small fish in a huge tank big budget fish tanks are taking over america's most expensive homes growing up eric moscow bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish he has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lucite tank moscow now sixty seven is enjoying the hobby with his own children but his setup looks quite different in their delray beach florida house the family has a two thousand two hundred gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars since the onset of the pandemic wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger fancier homes for their aquatic pets building elaborate custom made tanks that can cost up to seven

[B]

figures keith raboy is a wealthy fish

[A]

lover he's a fish enjoyer for sure for sure not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings but aquariums are seen as living three dimensional art pieces that some believe

[B]

may even have wells benefits i gotta

[A]

hear about these benefits quarter million dollar fish tank yeah i'll be putting that on true medium please i'll be paying with my hsa we have seen a

[B]

tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID said nick tiemanns of infinity aquarium design in la his aquariums start at about seventy five thousand and can cost as much as one million art budgets have now become aquarium budgets many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home ellers has designed and installed systems from twenty five thousand to a quarter million with unusual designs such as a sphere that held jellyfish in a wet bar with a built in aquarium there we go that's cool saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant in twenty twenty five forty three percent of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the american pet products association fish and reptile report we got data we got to get this report data is the new oil opted for custom made tanks i nineteen percent jump from

[A]

twenty twenty three lore drop i had a fish tank in college twenty five dollars fish tank with like one fish

[B]

in it did you how long did

[A]

you whoa whoa whoa what are you accusing me of i've never been accused of murder on a podcast before jesus

[B]

how long did you keep it alive

[A]

john i okay it technically wasn't my fish it was my roommate's fish and i don't remember how long we had

[B]

them around you kind of like somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of i don't recall the one fish i don't recall you

[A]

looked after i plead the fifth on the fish tank okay you plead the fish i plead the fish a ten foot by four foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish let's go turbo puffer baby a golden moray eel and an

[B]

epaulet shark the closest we got to getting a fish tank in the ultradome was to get a puffer fish yeah

[A]

we were thinking about it but it's a lot maintenance costs for this thing three thousand a month that's some people's mortgage the tank just makes me happy says moscow who enjoys the fish with his two year old daughter ruthie and son jonah who's one it's enormously educational for my daughter noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped ruthie learn about the slave cycle of life brutal look at this aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements nick kalana has a one hundred thousand dollars seven hundred fifty gallon custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in capistrano beach in the entry foyer of the room the six foot wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room i was walking down the beach and i was looking into random houses at one point i saw a few beautiful fish tank and i was like that's good that's not just a tv lights up it's interactive i don't know fish tanks i think are underrated i'm glad they're getting some finally getting some attention in the wall street journal

[B]

corona also you're going to optimize for a fish tank in your next house

[A]

i don't know it's low on the tier it's above pickleball court but it's probably below movie theater that's where i'd

[B]

put it what about you way below movie theater way below movie theater sky

[A]

you don't watch any movies you don't watch movies what are you doing and

[B]

still i'd rather have just watching podcasts

[A]

you're going to watch the new dwarkesh crossover episode you just throw that on the big screen on the big screens the way it's meant to be enjoyed

[B]

anytime they crack a joke standing up

[A]

and just feels like you're in the room with them so yeah what about sauna sauna is above fish tank right

[B]

yeah what about tennis court way

[A]

what is around the same as a fish

[B]

tank the twentieth spot in a covered

[A]

garage okay twentieth spot you give up twentieth spot okay which seems fair which

[B]

seems fair there's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd

[A]

want a fish tank jeff franklin who's a screenwriter director and producer who's primarily known for creating full house has five aquariums in his twenty one thousand square foot beverly hills mansion he says he's a scuba div and the ocean five aquariums baby one in every room the fifth aquarium versus the twentieth car slot what are you doing he's like yeah i have a one car garage but five aquariums but he's a scuba diver i'm a scuba diver i love scuba diving the ocean is my happy place

[B]

i feel i've never seen this guy scuba dive by the way he's like i'm a huge scuba diver you've never

[A]

been in the ocean and just come across him i find great peace and comfort underwater surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish so i wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water i like that his systems include two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom so you can do two aquariums in one room wait when we had andrew huberman on the show he had a bunch of aquariums right wasn't that what he had in the background he didn't have three aquariums okay he loves them three four five aquariums

[B]

but he keeps them in the basement

[A]

it keeps it in the basement what's

[B]

wrong with that i think no maybe not maybe not well what are the

[A]

health benefits we should get to the

[B]

health benefits because if you just say mental health then i'm sorry

[A]

let's see

[B]

homeowners gets he said it really is a form of meditation he finds it very relaxing to watch his fifty five fish including a trigger fish okay i could get i could i could get into triggerfish i don't want to be

[A]

triggered by anything and a large i don't want them becoming panicking i want a panik panikins i want a fish

[B]

that never gets triggered yeah somebody should name a fish a panikin

[A]

aquariums need heating and cooling system to maintain a consistent water temperature level he recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than twenty four hours without power aquarium specifications vary widely depending on the intended inhabitants sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish i think i would go shark over jellyfish what do you think jellyfish are beautiful but sharks are just so athletic and it's the apex predator you gotta have that in

[B]

your house i think moat with some sharks is the way to go what

[A]

about gators gators gators over sharks potentially

[B]

i think sharks are are probably the best option for moats for moats okay

[A]

well you won't have a moat in this seventy million dollars aspen compound because it would freeze but it has just hit the market frederick rick burke is the co founder of dooney and bourke accessories brand and he's putting his robert am stern design home in aspen colorado on the market for seventy million dollars completed around nineteen ninety three the roughly eleven thousand square foot seven bedroom house is built quite horizontally along a rock face on red mountain with tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base he's seventy nine and he met stern around nineteen seventy when burke became one of the architect's early clients hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in greenwich connecticut at the time burke said he never anticipated how well known stern would become he was young and dynamic stern one of the most recognizable names in architecture died last year at eighty six burke acquired the roughly three point five acre aspen property in the late eighties the lot sits high on red mountain about eight thousand feet above downtown he asked stern to design a family home there but they do have a pool heated outdoor swimming pool which seems like a rare amenity in aspen burke's neighbor in aspen was businessman victor cozeni in two thousand nine burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the foreign corrupt practices acts for engaging in escape with kozeni to bribe azerbaijan's government officials wow burke spent almost a year in prison starting in

[B]

twenty twenty three they made it illegal for guys to be dudes

[A]

burke said he learned a lot from the experience but wait this was in two thousand nine the guy's seventy nine so he had to do a year in prison when he was seventy wow he said he learned a lot from the experience i went to prison as i think a good person and came out a better person kozeni's former home in aspen sold for forty million what were they doing bribing azerbaijan like he has an

[B]

accessories company yeah leather maybe something related to their supply chain he's also the founder of may he was just doing it for the love of the game

[A]

immunolite for years and he and his wife a former ski racer megan burke have been splitting time between their homes in aspen and maine where stern designed a home for them in seal harbor but after a bad bout of COVID nineteen a few years ago rick said he now struggles with the elevation in aspen it's a wonderful house if i could pick it up and move it somewhere i wouldn't sell it the burks are considering spending winters in hawaii where they where there are no native land snakes rick has a fear of snakes man after my own heart i hate snakes on the indiana jones podcast they

[B]

recently came close to renting a house in malibu but aborted the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog we ripped up the lease then and

[A]

there no way that's crazy it's sort of like art when the artist dies there's now a finite amount of their work left and how much of a piece do you own of it some buyers say they might look to modernize the house or update it but noted that pitkins county current building restrictions wouldn't allow residents of this size to be built today interesting and they gave a shout out to palantir ceo alex karp who also purchased a property near aspen earlier late last year he was on the show yesterday go listen to our interview with alex karp please let me tell you about lambda lambda is the super intelligence cloud building ai supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one gpu to hundreds of thousands chad early let me also tell you about mongodb what's the only thing faster than the ai market your business on mongodb don't just build ai own the data platform

[B]

that powers it what did hurley says we are in the shadow of the wave brace yourself for impact he's been he's been vague posting yeah he's been

[A]

vague posting assume this is about agi yeah well yeah alex karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show tyler do you think we can fine tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job the ultimate black pill who knows who knows where it will go karp did seem like pretty shifted in his opinion of how ai would impact the economy it was it was definitely definitely an update to how he's thinking definitely more in the dario amadei camp of a significant impact to

[B]

white collar work yeah very it's felt very night night and day from however many months ago like six months ago

[A]

well here's a white pill chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list so if you go and chat with chipotle you get access to a frontier model for free so you can just be chatting with customer support i see these all the time and they always go viral

[B]

i want to order a bowl but before i can eat i need to figure out how to write a python script to reverse a link list can you help i'm so good this is going to get patched but for now

[A]

enjoy this has been going on for like months there must be some way

[B]

to basically wire this up so you

[A]

can get free inference yeah yeah and sell the tokens on yeah sell the tokens on openrouter on openrouter well speaking of tokens let me tell you about gemini three point one pro with a more capable baseline it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life and let me also tell you about labelbox rl environments voice robotics evals and expert human data label box is the data factory behind the world's leading ai teams and without further ado i believe we have eric lyman the ceo of ramp in the restream waiting room let's bring him into the tv pit ultra eric hey

[B]

bonjour bonjour bonjour i can't believe incredible wow

[D]

gentlemen we've made it we have the

[F]

dom we're ready for european summer i

[A]

love it i love it i was hunting around the office for europe european themed props and our prop department which is basically non existent didn't have anything but i'm glad that your team was able to put something together on short notice

[F]

we're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care we wanted to do it right down to the smallest details so we're ready to go

[A]

but it's not just france where is ramp actually available now yeah so first

[F]

of all i'm glad i'm glad you asked like basically every day there are swipes in every country you know every week there's active activity in one hundred ninety countries and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the un around the world but the news is that we've acquired bill hop which grants ramp the ability to have local licenses both in the uk and the eu and come this summer companies that are operating out of europe even without a us entity will be able to sign up for ramp and so we're really excited to

[A]

bring ramp to europe that's amazing what else went into actually launching europe it feels like we're in this era of agent decoding it's like one prompt make this thing work in europe but it's obviously more complicated than that like walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now

[F]

well first of all i think about sometimes like the companies that i'd heard of in the past they open an office with two people and they say we're in the middle of new york and we're expanding to the us and how silly that sounded we thought if we were going to go and actually serve europe we need to do it right it's an incredibly important region some of the fastest growing companies in the world are based out there i think of companies like eleven labs i think of stripe carlson's great founders who grew up in europe we wanted to approach this properly and so first part of operating in europe comes down to having the legal authority so barely

[B]

keeping it together watching you have this serious explanation

[A]

also i don't know if you've been through all of the problems on there but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table it's i was wondering what's

[B]

i don't know i

[D]

don't know if it's legal in this

[F]

building to light them up but

[G]

don't

[B]

do it don't do it but one and a half percent back on cigarettes

[A]

it's a boom for the french economy we'll see you there but but but

[F]

look i think in every country the legal authority to move funds to work with regulated entities and also to meet you know requirements as it relates to privacy is really important so we took the steps to do that we also took the time to to you know make sure we have the right leadership going in jacob wallenberg who's been a member of ramp since we were like twenty people is going to be leading the efforts grew up there on the board of equity and i think so many members of our team are focused on on not just going and selling things locally but being a part of the local fabric of how the economy works and doing it right so we're

[A]

quite excited so yeah more broadly how do you think about verticalization of the org horizontalization creating functional business units not duplicating work you're probably already wrestling with this as the ai wave changes the way ramp builds products but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs in different localities how are you thinking about building the next layer of management and just human capital at ramp yeah there's a few

[F]

pieces first just the highest level i think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are where you're operating it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less just as we help the average american business cut their expenses by five percent and it turns out last year the average business on ramp grew their revenue by sixteen percent which is multiple times faster than the us average we know businesses in europe want to do this too when you look at the base problems in europe and as well for most people in the us it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of a month where you have one system for cards another for expenses another for bill payments another free hour for procurement for approvals so on and so forth and what we're doing is collapsing that and so there's there's things which are very transportable but you're right to ai it makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster it makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively far easier and so there's a lot of local nuance in how businesses operate want to be sold to and even conventions about how they want to run their finances which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that we have a good head start you know we've been working with very global companies like shopify like in airbnb that already have folks around the world and we've localized this experience you know this next step is really just about serving companies that are scaling you know fully in europe or starting in europe and going to the rest of the

[A]

world the uk has a version of the office that show has a character named kevin and the actor who plays that character his name is kevin will there be a redux of the ramp ad campaign for the european audience who might be more familiar with the uk version of the office my jaw is

[F]

dropping this is the greatest idea guys

[A]

we gotta do this we gotta figure this out together kevin bing bishop he's an english comedian and actor born in nineteen eighty he was later known for the kevin bishop show his roles in british comedy and voice acting it was a small early career role but maybe we can you know make him the face of ramp europe that would be

[F]

very fun i would love that guys i feel like more and more you know no one turns down your calls

[D]

like i'd love your help let's call

[F]

kevin together and see what we can

[B]

do let's do it it let's do

[A]

it jordy anything else no this is

[B]

great congratulations anything else on your side before you go it's guys this is

[F]

great when you guys wrap up come over let's enjoy a glass of wine

[B]

well we now have a great reason to go to europe we do we

[A]

do that dom perignon looks fantastic i'm

[B]

looking forward to this summer have a

[A]

great rest of your day see you this summer we'll talk to you soon let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of ai graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster and let me tell you about plaid plaid powers the apps you use to spend save borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money fight fraud and improve lending now with ai and i believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the tdp and ultradom we have travis kalanick he is the ceo of cloud kitchens welcome to the show travis great to meet you appreciate you coming on down to our studio our humble boat great to meet you we are

[B]

truly an honor i'm just down the

[A]

street yeah that's right that's right yeah we we were actually we started the show in downtown la at the jonathan club on figueroa and so i think we were even closer then there you go not far how are things going

[D]

i mean i don't know how much you guys i mean i've just i've been in hiding so i've been i've been doing this i run a company called city up until today let's just say i was running a company called city storage systems which was basically about the future of food a conglomerate operating in about thirty countries the whole idea was can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store yep because if you do you do to the kitchen what uber did to the car so i've been doing that since twenty eighteen yeah and after just the intensity of uber from in terms of like being in the public sphere dealing with one hundred headlines every day deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the new york times is going to write i was like i would like to that's a

[B]

tough way to run a business it

[D]

is very tough so i was just like i gotta wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build so did you so i went under the radar did you think

[A]

of this as like stealth mode is that the right term we've been in

[D]

stealth mode for eight years okay and that's like till today employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their linkedin wow we have thousands of employees yeah that's crazy okay so today what happened was it's like for my company and i just got out of an all hands and then came right here is we went out of stealth yep now city storage systems is like a hilarious name it was

[B]

like it's like the most like let

[D]

me choose the most generic like the

[B]

most generic name that no one will

[A]

ever the business corporation of america it

[D]

was on purpose yeah okay and it worked it was like we had two choices when we when we launched yeah we had what my sort of normal instinct was remember it was only seven eight months after i left uber when i started this and it's let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food okay we have hardcore real estate assets we buy the assets we do construction we sell restaurant tours on a delivery only location i have a software stack that's like arrow arr life i've got a robotics company i have a marketplace for for corporate lunch like there's a ton of stuff going on we use it oh yeah that's right that's

[A]

right of course yeah it's great all

[D]

right okay so i forgot what i was saying so so it's just a

[A]

very different business from uber some people would leave that company and be like i'm gonna start the exact same thing i got the playbook this is what

[D]

this is what the uber guys when i left were were were like a little bit worried about this is we're talking about twenty seventeen eighteen they're paranoid so my instinct was okay i left it's seven months later i'm gonna name my company super you call it super i'm like giga i'm like you go from uber to super you're like no that cannot be a thing and so i did the opposite full underground full stealth put the toothpaste back in the tube the genie back in the bottle and build literally thousands of employees and it's like a vacuum of information full lockdown it's been great building but today we sort of came out and we renamed the company we renamed what we do we call it adams okay but we started a new company at the same time and so let's just say like physical ai and robotics action and movement through the physical world of course on the food side we already have all the things i just talked about but think of it as like i'm trying to get the mission like we're so i'm so riled up yeah it's so fresh but basically it's yeah so i'll leave it at that let's get we can get rolling here i'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep

[B]

so i love it i love it what how much harder in many ways i think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier right you're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come what are what are the ways in which it made it harder i imagine there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly i'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying hey i just want to come in with you build and i don't care about the hype and i don't want i don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my linkedin but what were the kind of key challenges and why was now the right time to come out and start

[A]

to get loud again so like first

[D]

i mean one hundred percent so imagine every recruiter has to be outbound every salesperson has to be outbound there's no inbound yeah that's where it starts you get good at your craft when that's what you have to do like i believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems now they leverage okay you're working with travis former you know founder of uber like there's leverage there but then you you have a name like city storage system and it's like so do you guys just have like these these like boxes sitting in parking lots like what is this and that's sort of like the reason it's different now is because look number one lots of time since the uber situ you know from having to live that life but two is the world is different like in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen the world of let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics but people didn't know it they're like if new york times says something everybody just treated it as the gospel like it just must be true and if they say something bad it must be true i believe everything i read on the internet as an example and so and by the way it's this sounds crazy but twenty seventeen the media world was actually more negative then than it is today and i think partly because of even shows like this it's like let's bring some optimism to the party sure can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built and that's the difference between today and then and so when you go ninety five percent of all press is negative you're like why engage when the world is used to business being politics let's just say and if i thought of my favorite journal sorry my favorite politician and say what does the internet say that's bad about them and it's like an insane amount what does the internet say that's neg or sorry untrue about them and it's a ton of stuff and you go well that's how they're going to think about our company too that's how it's going to play we're now we're desensitized to that stuff and now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about you know ninety five percent of the media just being negative sure yeah i

[B]

mean this is pre like whole trend of going direct totally like lulu i'm sure you've met it at some point basically coached a generation of ceo's on you know you just can't if you if you want to have any control over how people perceive you you need to you need to tell you have

[A]

to counteract with like a story not like a statement and the boilerplate official statement just doesn't it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read on

[D]

the read and it's also guys like elon owns twitter now it's x right pre post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there and again you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and and sort of yes you

[B]

talked about the initial idea of naming the next company super that would have in many ways i'm sure turned into a basically a spite company yeah where you're just in this case kind of taking the high road was i'm just going to be quiet i'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass building up this infrastructure getting to scale getting to thousands of employees getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again which i think is to any of your former critics that's to me that's taken the high road

[D]

basically yeah and what you get when you create a culture around that is you then build a culture of builders you build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it which basically means emotional intelligence now it's a human nature i want to be acknowledged for the things that i do i'd like the things i build to be seen and i'd like somebody to know that i did it and so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way and so we have a very high eq culture but like it is like you have to go the extra mile to recruit the extra mile in sales et cetera again the world's different lfg

[A]

are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different i'm just thinking about your career arc with like red swoosh is enterprise communications you're in a very particular industry uber's a consumer company now you're working on something that looks you probably run into real estate developers it's like a different industry different communities community has there been adjustments and what's different what's the same like what can you just be like a good business operator and power through and what do you actually have to learn about the

[D]

new industry look i think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to because i have a i mean when you go from consumer to b two b the number one mega challenge that you must master is called ltv to cac yes you can make that argument on consumer but when you have a sales funnel that starts with i'm going to talk to customers and i'm going i have to make ltv to cac work versus like my ltv to cac is the app store it's a whole different ball game and ltv to cac with a sales machine especially if you go small business this is like life in hard mode and talk to anybody who's crushed it on smb like those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the smb b two b world is no

[A]

joke yeah right so talk about moats i feel like uber's the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale

[G]

what

[A]

did moats look like at red swoosh what were you thinking then and then what does it look like now so

[D]

like nobody knows what red swoosh is yeah sorry it's all good so guys i started a company in two thousand one that was let's call it bittorrent meets akamai before bittorrent existed yeah okay that's crazy you click on a link and you can pull from other pcs that already have that file or that video stream but it looks like the internet that's basically what it was the first four years no salary wow

[B]

had

[D]

some famous investors famous investors you know like mark cuban was on the board of red swoosh so before that scour was ovitz and ron burkle that was

[B]

the company before oh so anyways i

[D]

was confusing the two yeah anyways so

[A]

there's a network effect there once you get the cdn up and running that

[D]

company wasn't meant to be and i willed it into being and i sold it to akamai for like i think it was like nineteen million bucks and probably to this day still the happiest day of my life it was crazy it was crazy like i cleared three million and i was like praise the

[A]

lord okay so then we're very obvious very obvious moats and scale economies what does this look like with adams what does this look like in both the food delivery kitchen model real estate model but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics look if you look at

[D]

where moats are and really you're looking for network effects in different places right so right now i have these facilities there's thirty restaurants in each of them picnic is like a perfect example of yes right you order from your office looks like uber eats or doordash you get one hundred options except all the meals are coming out of my facilities there's one courier that brings one hundred orders at a time but it's on demand and it's personalized for you and we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything and so who's going to who can play ball yeah like you got to have the real estate that's a frickin moat yeah you have the network effect now of like what if i sell every floor on every tower meaning every office floor is on this and i can see that in all of these floors that means that one courier can bring one hundred doors and by the way i'll have five couriers going to a single office with five hundred orders hitting every shelf and you get notified when it arrives if you even took one floor you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work so there's network effects of a building there's network effects on a on a facility with kitchens in it sure there's but then there's the moat of like we own real estate yeah okay so like if you want to

[B]

compete with us go buy a hundred

[A]

million so so very high billions of

[D]

dollars of real real estate in every major city in the world and then we're going to go head to head

[A]

yeah talk about capital yeah the other

[B]

the other the i don't know exactly what what bucket this falls in but just just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete

[A]

but people were people were like this is how i remember the uber versus lyft battle was uber was so well and then and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of vc's were like i want a piece of that and i didn't get uber so i'm

[B]

funding the but i'm saying in the context of cloud kitchens city storage like even though people generally figured out what you were up to right you did have to share some little things along the way or you buy this company

[D]

or so there you got to go to a website and say what are what what is it what is a delivery only location what the hell is that yeah yeah and so somebody had to know yeah yeah but even then we're like we're going to we're going to say the cross streets of the facility not the actual address like these are the little moves you do to be stealth you know

[B]

when i look at the new site and how everything's positioned a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in ai and in many ways like accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of of ai progress and progress in robotics but you're moving physical atoms around the world and in an era where you know you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly this this feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress sounds great dude i love

[D]

that i love it yeah dude it's all in the plan look i think it's always been the plan a meal that's efficient you know so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store a meal that's prepared and delivered to you that's real you must do automated production of food you must do automated delivery of the meal i call that autonomous burritos which is why i'm moving into this making this move on adams which is okay we're still doing the food thing but then we're adding mining and transportation okay mining being like more you know we like to say more efficient mines for earth's industries or on transport it's just robot wheelbase for robots okay okay because if you're going to do specialized robots not humanoids but specialized robots they need to have wheels okay right like to say like if you saw the beijing in beijing they had the humanoid olympics games or whatever and the the half marathon and you're watching wheels cruising i'm like dude could you imagine if that thing had wheels that'd be crazy so like humanoids have their place but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way which is sort of where we play

[C]

i

[A]

want to go back to capital wars lessons from capital wars when these play out because we're seeing this og og

[D]

and you yeah my final were you

[A]

the og because or or when this capital war kicked off were you looking to lessons from the nineties i mean

[D]

look you can always say there was the guy before yeah okay like like you know rockefeller was the og and then before him was it like the medicis i don't know but i was i was the goat for a period of time and now i'm a baby goat and that's okay and so then one day the baby goat will grow up again that's fine it's going to

[A]

be fine i just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect it's growing and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at the second place and there's this debate over catching up and like how do you what moats do you retreat to in that moment like i feel like that's the that's the lesson from the uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening and it played out very well for you and i'm wondering like what level of confidence you had what did you do strategically to set yourself up for success it's a super interesting

[D]

thing because of course all the ai guys are playing that game right now right which is the ability to attract capital the capital wars becomes a strategic weapon capital becomes a strategic weapon which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win and we realized that early on in the uber days of course that's happening times ten in the sort of let's call the digital air wars and look the last round of funding that i did at uber we were like a seventy million you know i know it's like a sixty seventy billion dollars pre let's see that yeah when that used to be a thing now like oh that's small stuff but we had four rooms this was our our how we'd fundraise we had four rooms in our new york office booked for a week with an hour and a half slot on each so like for twelve hours in a day four rooms going in parallel

[B]

i was in are you bouncing between

[D]

no i'm in the two hundred fifty million dollars and over club okay that's one room and it goes all there's all these other there's these other rooms to the fourth room is like twenty five million dollars checks okay okay there's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room yeah okay and then but we're oversubscribed so we started putting multiple investors in the same room we're like dude we're just out of slots dude like let's go but what it means is about the system it's about the system for sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently and what it means is that storytelling that we did anybody in my team could tell that story let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen and that was a big part it was the story that's just like of course like if i'm pitching it people are like holy shit let's go then there is making it scalable so that there are ten different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time and that's when you take it all the way and then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it we would basically once they said they were interested we would then give them a piece of paper it was like digital but it was like you need to fill out this table which is this valuation how much money you want to put in this valuation how much money this much money this this valuation how much money and then we would aggregate the demand ipo book yes but like done way better because you don't respect to the bankers but like yeah i was in charge of pricing sure sure and so and then you're like oh we're trying to clear five billion dollars that takes us to this price we would tell all these guys hey your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve and then they would move their price and then that would change the curve and you would do it

[A]

again do it again makes sense were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time i feel like if i go back to facebook i think they ipo'd around fifty billion you're doing a seventy billion dollars raise there's a lot of different it's a completely different shape of investor what were those conversations

[D]

like look in some ways i have to give some credit it was an era where this was happening you had the fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in i have to give credit to drew at dropbox he was like the first guy in that game and drew and i'd meet up and we'd be like flex i'm like dude what's up

[B]

you're like this is my arlo little safe space like

[D]

chesky at airbnb that was the crew that was doing it in the two thousand and tens and sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be like people didn't even know what private equity what is a private what is private equity yeah now we're just like yeah private equity that's vc it's the same thing but back then private equity is like i do leverage buyouts and so you're bringing private equity mutual funds those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before now

[B]

it's just old hat have you coached any of the ai founders culturally like

[A]

that crew that you just described most of them have been on the show it feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today

[B]

yeah but i'm sure chesky's pumping up sam i love

[A]

these guys i love them all that's

[D]

so interesting look the times when i get hit up are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan or it's actually hitting the fan they're like dude somebody needs to call travis immediately he'll know what to do so

[A]

i travis they're casting a movie about

[D]

me what do i do my phone's like what are the crazy wild wackiest things going down or like here because that's when i usually get the call and i'm so underground that's what happens but like i should you know i should give you know i know these guys i should give them a call and be like dude we should let's cook let's let's cook i still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today but obviously the check size much bigger is

[B]

that approach like systematizing fundraising productizing it do you apply that across the entire is that like everything that you do that is important you're creating like a ground up kind of solution for it

[D]

where else well like for instance i mean this will you know this is just crazy but like how about when you do construction you know how effed up construction is yeah i tell my guys that in the in the real estate department i'm like your entire department is the anti fraud department oh yeah

[B]

you know guys just are incentivized to

[D]

just run so how do you do epic high quality construction at an insanely efficient price there's a way not going to tell you but there's a way

[A]

do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially ai speeds up the rate of building broadly like solving the housing crisis through permitting permitting stuff

[D]

like that this is so one of the things is that and i think people are starting to come out of this now this whole like the jobs are gone like i know still people still say that but there is another side to this story and like i'll just make this because i'm the adams guy i'm like let's just talk about plumbers okay let's say the entire world everything in our world was automated except for plumbers okay okay you had machines making buildings you would basically have like a thousand buildings a day a thousand buildings being built at a single time in los angeles alone sure just machines doing yeah except plumbers okay how valuable would those plumbers be extremely valuable okay those guys each and every plumber would be like lebron okay why why because because because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress sure that you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber sure and by the way you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers yeah and then plumbing is like yeah what's up and so once you once you realize that then you're like until we get super agi yeah humans are valuable and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pull in the tent to progress and that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more you know more robust except if you're a plumber you're crushing and so until we get to humans are replaced like fully fully and by the way i have i think we have solutions for that i think elon's got that at neuralink it's going to be all good okay then people like oh god but until we get there we're going to i believe we're going to be super fine that's my white pill yeah

[B]

yeah yeah it does if you have plumbers that are getting paid like lebron it obviously increases the you know the prize pool of automating but again there's like these kind of windows but there's

[D]

going to be a bunch of things like plumbing and it's not just plumbing it's going to be all over the place and even when it comes to software so like for instance look at like autonomous cars they like waymo has people that oversee the rides yeah okay and it starts with like okay five rides for every person then it goes to twenty then it goes to one hundred but like if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere okay and let's just say it's one in a thousand and like nobody owns cars there's just ride sharing everywhere i mean some people own cars but it'd be the top of the top of the pyramid let's say okay so what do we replace billions of cars with ride sharing yeah if it was a thousand to one you still probably have i don't know twenty million jobs fifty million jobs i'm just riffing on just the concept of this you will see this everywhere is that until humans are fully replaced we become the long pull and the tent to progress and that progress by the way is to serve us robots yet don't yet have bank accounts so that plumber gets paid yeah

[A]

yeah anyways you get the idea you mentioned mining yeah have you been to a mine recently have you visited a mine like what's going on in mining i imagine that mines are fairly automated already like there's machinery there's thousands of

[D]

employees okay at a given mine and

[B]

that's work that and there's so many resources children children yearn for the minds of minecraft but it's not the best

[D]

not the best well like maybe that's actually how it gets you know maybe that's where it goes ender's game situation look the it's interesting you go a lot of times they're like oh oh well is labor really the issue is that really a thing but what it really comes down to is productivity so if a mine is automated then it can run all hours of the day and night it doesn't have off hours the way machines queue up doing that really efficiently like computer science style i call it digitizing the physical world you can make that mine substantially more productive what is the value of a more productive mine and by the way let's get to the real sort of the outcome here is does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come do we need more minerals do we need more materials look around us guys look around us in this studio or walk outside everything you see is grown or mined manufactured and moved so if you're not in the mining business let's just say the mine i shouldn't say that but it's a very critical part of the situation i can't wait till we're putting some machines on spacex's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever in the meantime lots of mines

[A]

on planet earth yeah what abstraction do you want to operate at do you want to go and find land and mine it because that's sort of on the table if i look at what you're doing in food you own real estate or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running up and running yeah like how do

[D]

you think i'm not i'm not buying land for mines anytime that's just not anytime soon but in the next three months he's like one hundred and twenty days out i just think it's super fascinating again it's just like i'm an atoms guy i'm like all about digitization of the physical world and i have this framework for it which is like cpu manipulates bits storage stores bits network moves bits from point a to point b i was a computer engineer at ucla i didn't graduate but but i loved it yeah those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one yeah but if you're treating atoms like bits digitizing the physical world cpu manipulates bits what manipulates atoms manufacturing storage stores bits what stores atoms real estate network moves bits from point a to point b what moves atoms transport logistics i didn't know it then or i didn't think about that way exactly but at uber we were building network for the physical world also known as digitized transportation city storage systems then make sense storage for the physical world that's real estate we are building atoms based computers with a real estate foundation storage right but now leveling up and saying okay we have a food computer what about a mining computer and what about a wheel based platform to serve

[A]

industry generally yeah if i look at the last two decades of your career you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces what is the secret i could never get behind the remote work thing everyone here works in one

[D]

studio but respect i'm all about it

[A]

but you you've had to do it basically because you had to have a presence in new york you had to have a presence in la and you can't be in ten places it's all good there's a difference how do you

[D]

do it there's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit okay versus we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in you're going to that office every day five days a week yes and sometimes six or

[A]

seven and that's it but satellite offices still feel like a headache how did you solve it because you can only

[D]

be in one place yeah i guess i just i cracked the code so thoroughly in uber times before i think maybe even before anybody else yeah it almost feels like normal yeah but like i basically have figured out sort of the the management and leadership structures where you the real the real thing is about empowerment okay is you must be able to empower teams but it's like i like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos sure and once you have those systems in place you know your imagination is only constrained by management capacity so once you figure out the management piece your imagination can go pretty damn far and so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing talk

[A]

about empowering young people we've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like yeah i was the gm of miami or so or he sent me to atlanta and i was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks and we had to open up this market so we had to do a stunt and hire some people and it just felt like startup within a start startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused but why why were you you know you weren't this wasn't your first company with uber why were you so heavy on leaning on young people empowering them pushing them it wasn't

[D]

on purpose it was just the right

[A]

answer okay why

[D]

yeah i mean once you have a city team and you're like okay i need to find people that can run this like old people aren't the answer like i need fresh i didn't think of it as like i gotta get youthful people or not i'm just like i need good talent that can go do x and who has no judgment on what it is we gotta get done and it was just like water flows downhill so what do you look it was a you know like the first driver ops guy that we brought in in san francisco in twenty ten we basically took two hundred cards and put names on them and we said alphabetize them click and we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize we would give them like crazy analytics tests and then we're like okay this is our guy you know what i mean free ai if you're on the marketing manager if you're on the marketing manager but even today you'd still want that guy yeah even today so like you can't use ai now alphabetize in the most efficient way now if you're if you know computer science sorting is like a big frickin deal sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain not in software is a thing that's what ops people do yeah yeah that makes sense so i don't know i don't know how to answer that question other than problem solving whether you're young or old executive or junior who can solve problems is number one when you interview simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two and you're already pumped because you saw them in action how are you

[B]

with adams how are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company you've been kind of holed up in la this is your kind of hideout yeah totally but i imagine like do you push back into sf go back to being the king well here so

[D]

first let's just be clear on december eighteenth i moved to texas sure i don't know what's so specific about december eighteenth but let's just say it's prior to january so i'm a primary resident of texas but the action for a lot of this adams type technology i'm talking about of course like the bay is a real thing my head of the advanced technology group at uber is running my robotics division at adams it's called lab thirty seven in pittsburgh no no that's eric meihofer okay eric meihofer so that's robotics on the food side yeah anthony levandowski was running pronto i was the largest investor in pronto and then we just were basically right in the final like we're checking off the list maybe closing today or tomorrow on

[B]

that deal so amazing let's talk about that deal yeah give us give us yeah give us like what's the kind of background on on pronto and then how it fits into the to the

[D]

empire well look i sort of broke out how mining fits yeah right so we got that look i bet i'm the largest investor in pronto and it's super inspiring work like like go to a mine right check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry when all mines are producing more where does that go and in some ways you could say low hanging fruit on the autonomy problem because yes there are different problems off road but they ain't like they're way more controlled than what's going on on road okay but then you get into the physical action like cars on the road the waymos on the road they're moving but they're not acting on atoms right so when you think about excavation and you think about crush like when you get the material and then you move it then you are basically crushing the material and then you process it you think about all of the automation through that stack it's fantastic and it's like it's hard right like somebody asked me like we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines and somebody came like hey like is ai going to help us design food machines we're like dude let me show you yeah like this thing has like an insane number of parts and let me show you just the design of a single part yeah like like that that i can't even do fricking math you know what i mean it's like this is not we're not there yet now could it get there yeah but then you're really an agi if you look at how much harder it is the physical world how much harder it is ai in the physical world versus in the digital world and i'm not demeaning it in any way i'm just saying it's like maybe let's call it a different problem set yeah we're just

[B]

far away from one shot there's just

[D]

way less training data yeah it's like one shotting on software one shotting on designing a machine or a robot we're just not there yet but that makes it more fun that's the point is like do the hard things if you are in the adams world you have decided i like hard things i like pain more than anybody else this is kind of what you got to be

[B]

about chewing the glass i love it so i can see how avs at adams fit into mining what other and just heavy industry broadly what other kind of categories of avs are exciting how do you see the space evolving yeah

[D]

look anything i mean the mission is wheelbase for robots so then you're just like okay what moves yeah right and you go okay where you have to find the businesses that make sense of course so we're like okay mining is a no brainer and how do you

[B]

how do you how do you think about sizing for a wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down like

[D]

crazy like i tell my team like dude there's like a ton of silver medals here and there's actually a few other gold medals just in the category so let's just go with delivery robots like food delivery which of course is near and dear to my heart you make a lot your twenty yeah your fifteen dollars bowl became thirty bucks yeah

[B]

okay and this is like i would put it up there as like one of the number one annoyances of the average american regardless of where they are in society food is just the cost of food delivery everybody wants food fast cheap hot et cetera and there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money you're making you're spending a lot on this category

[D]

isn't it interesting right remember i talked about the plumbers but you could take whole categories become the long plumbing in the tent food boring to a lot of people boring is that for me interesting let's go let's go look i did taxis i did taxis yeah when they're like people looking at me funny

[A]

it was a weird idea okay they're

[D]

looking at me super funny so jason calcanis the most famous investor in uber

[A]

of all time more famous than you

[D]

and so whenever i meet with them i'm like dude i'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors but he there was like an angel group that i pitched yeah yeah there were like thirty forty people in the room i think it was like three or four that invested it's crazy okay the ten grand check became like one hundred million bucks it was crazy but the boring places are the places yeah

[A]

you know less competitive but also just

[D]

weird and hard yeah why it's that

[B]

way the graveyard is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food which is why which is again like

[A]

go back to what they are and

[B]

you can go you can go compete in this category but you have to actually be insane and you have to have yeah and you have to attack at all at all in my so

[D]

my head of the robotics division yeah we're like yeah let's do this get the band back together let's go right this is eric meihofer and he's like okay we could make a food robot i'm like i got one there's one requirement though i got one hanging chatter one string attached he's like what i'm like you're gonna have to build a restaurant that the robot serves so my roboticist team in pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked we had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant and people don't understand but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility in fact if you look at the labor statistics etcetera restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons it just hasn't changed in

[B]

fifty years yeah anyways back to sorry i'm all over the place no i love it i love it firing on all cylinders yeah but but so so again are do you want to move people with avs do you are you do you care more about commercial look

[D]

the the industrial thing is sort of like probably our main jam but the bottom line is once you once you crack once you crack movement in the physical world there's lots of people who want access to that and in fact you need partners because you know you're going to be putting billions to billions of dollars to work to make it happen so there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that and i have no issues with that we're not like a you know this is ours and this thing it's more like hey there may be ways to work with others we're happy to do it we've got to pick our spots

[B]

but you get the idea what about manufacturing broadly you're doing it in food are there other categories that are interesting or are you happy to be kind of the transport rails look i think

[D]

once you are in physical ai you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack it just is and by the way energy is part of your tech stack land development real estate is part of your tech stack that's just what it's going to be people don't think about it like that but it's true of course they're you know tesla just crushes if you look at this list of things you're just like they got it all so good but there's just so much to do

[B]

yeah you know what i mean we

[D]

can see all the things we can see all the things tesla's doing that's cool i'm like there's a million other people i can still help you mine i can still get some food to some peeps you know what i mean

[B]

so you get the idea is that really when you're pitching investors around adams in this new vision is it basically like there's a lot of jobs do in the world we're going to do it with physical ai and you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time no you

[D]

got to be able to pick your spots if you are too broad people are like dude what's wrong with you now i think every entrepreneur always gets that i joke around in the nineties dude i'm an old guy what are you going to do in the nineties it's like dude microsoft's going to kill you why do you think then in the two thousands it was like why isn't google going to do this in the two thousand and tens it's like dude that looks like uber's thing and now it's like if you're talking about physical ai it's like that's tesla they are the incumbent they are and not just the incumbent they're also just doing great awesome stuff but find your spot know yourself know what you're good at be self aware and find the thing that is your business soulmate for sure but also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your

[A]

spot what was your experience like in dotcom and the the financial crisis broadly in two thousand eight

[D]

okay so basically i sold i sold my peer to peer cdn akamai meets bittorrent in two thousand seven to akamai okay so i was earning out yeah when that happened and i was i just started i think i didn't last very long in that earn out so i was the cxo i was like an advisor and a cxo okay little known fact i was a i was blogging okay i was like a tech influencer blogger there is a blog still out there called swooshing yeah okay crazy amazing ridiculous content

[B]

okay we're going to dedicate i was

[D]

in the click i was in the click economy guys i was in it okay but so i was an advisor and cxo for like five different companies at a time and so i'd help them on their deals or i would be their cto or i would you know help them sell or product or whatever but i could always just put the phone down and forget so somewhat

[A]

insulated from like the mortgage crash yeah

[D]

i mean my thing was i was trying to figure out i was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying okay do you have a mortgage with bank of america america i do too let's pool our thing i'm going to go to bank of america and say i will buy these mortgages off for forty cents on the dollar because you're selling them on the market for ten cents interesting could be fun and then they're like

[B]

get out of here

[A]

you're not a hedge fund it's wild what about dot com you're talking about the nineties yeah the nineties like late nineties i mean at that point you're sort of starting your career right but it's an interesting place to start a career in tech like a lot of people watched that and said so look

[D]

that was a we did peer to peer file sharing at a company called scour yeah okay so some people did napster some went to like you know all the ones that came after bittorrent all the way to like what was the one that zenstrom did kaza or some of these others right we were the og file sharing yeah okay michael ovitz was on the board ron burkle was on the board louisiana okay doing a tech doing tech in la was like being a finance guy in fresno they're like don't know what the hell is going on they're like who are

[A]

you

[D]

and you're a little bit sheltered from it in la every time you went to the silicon valley it was like wild and crazy and like every bar was like packed like after hours like happy hour thing like things were bubbling and the crazy part is not just what happened during the run up it was post i was raising money on this peer to peer cdn that i didn't have i didn't pay myself a salary for for four years i was raising money in two in late two thousand one for a networking software company are you freaking kidding me and so i remember going to one of these going to a bar to meet up with a vc and this is like two thousand two and it's empty like this thing that would be mega packed just two years earlier i mean we're talking dust bowl tumbleweeds empty and this vc i wish i remember who it was because it'd be amazing was like yeah travis dude i think it's all done it's over i told you it's over i'm like what do you mean he's like all the software that could be invented has been invented wow we're done and he meant it the

[A]

old man he's like it's been real

[D]

dude let's have a whiskey let's go

[B]

we're done that's incredible how have you processed the last two years when people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this entire process and they can just raise it literally without a deck often they can just pull it together

[D]

look it's all good i just have when you build a company the way i built it which is like my current one where you're literally under the radar it means that you are powered by you have an internal fulfillment you're not like caring what others think you get internally fulfilled with building and i don't look at somebody and go oh dude i had it so much harder uphill both ways to school whatever i don't think like that it's more about the excellence of the process so i'm like well how do you raise money and they're like oh yeah just throw a deck to the guy i'm like okay well then that's not a thing what is a thing is going all the way until it hurts if you're doing something and it's easy it's not valuable and i'll explain like let's just think of like a like a marathoner yeah world class marathoner on mile twenty one is that dude smiling no he's not smiling by the way if he is smiling you know what's about to happen he's about to get his ass whooped okay it's over because why because see somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him and so if you're getting money easy i'm like why didn't you go harder you could have done it better and more now you don't do things hard just cause maybe it's like it just doesn't matter dude i gotta go do something else that's hard but the key is like if money matters which i think we would say it does especially in certain categories you need to be the best in the world at it and it's not enough to say it was easy if anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy i'm like you messed up you could have been way better and gone way further more competitive advantage more differentiation get it together give me the update on that i feel like tony robbins right now i love it i

[B]

love it no i think people need

[A]

to hear this they do they do

[B]

and yeah the challenge is like if raising money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like whoa actually money doesn't money makes this possible but it doesn't make the work

[A]

easy yeah and it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers the critique is always like oh well they are raising too much money you look at elon sam all these crazy deals and people are like well like okay it's nice that you're good but like are you too good and look here's the

[D]

thing you know back in the day twenty ten's reference like there was a problem with getting masa money yeah there was a problem with that yeah because it was easy money sure and it was too loose yeah and so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from and so you had to be careful so if somebody got masa money i'd be like dude you gotta you got a grind it was maybe a little too easy and you still to this day so there's nothing wrong with money as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon it's okay like that's part of business it's necessary but treat it with respect last

[A]

question about texas for the californians that are thinking about making a trip out there austin dallas houston what do you

[D]

recommend well look i'm austin now i own a place in austin i've owned it for five years i'm a avid i would say almost professional water skier slalom skiing i'll send a video put

[A]

it up it's sick don't even get

[D]

me started so i've owned a place there for five years right on the lake lake austin twenty minutes from the city there you go lake life hell yeah go for it i get a little bit fomo on like these people going to florida i'm like dude so much florida action like come on homies

[B]

i know it's been a bloodbath for

[A]

it has been griffin out but like

[D]

yeah like every weekend this year i've had this year is in texas yep

[B]

you ever take calls while you're water skiing like airpods dude i should be

[D]

good i love it don't get me excited well i went to saronic which does the boats the autonomous boats and

[B]

i'm like build me a water skiing

[A]

water skiing boat ooh okay i just

[D]

want a water ski and like skiing

[A]

behind a boat is so funny i'm like autonomous water ski pretty viral who

[B]

should who should come you're poking your head up who should come work for you yeah sixty seconds who do you want not not any individual like one individual person but like i have a

[D]

message for this one guy who didn't take my offer look i think the thing is is like we're just getting the best this is so cliche and like whatever banal but look we are in the physical ai space so it's a mix of sort of let's call it sensors compute the software that sits on top of those things i mean it's just going to be great engineers and then you go through what i would call the physical ai stack and you would but it's a long project

[A]

it's someone for who wants a career

[D]

it's like infrastructure software guys because you've got to have epic ai on the back end and the way to use that sort of has to be epic you have to have physical ai model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world and there's some core research and some just like i know all the white papers and we're just going to we're building and going end to end or some version hybrid version of that you have just normal software because you've got applications that sit on top that then of course customers see in some fashion or another actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic side of things and mechanical engineers that build machines wow and then of course remember i've got construction real estate like i could go on it's lots of cool stuff go to the website there's lots of stuff go

[A]

to the website folks go to the

[D]

website adams co and by the way adams co vision i just threw down

[A]

oh i know read it i know

[D]

check it out well thank you it's

[B]

amazing

[A]

this is awesome thank you so much really quickly thank you so much get up yeah we will talk to you soon let me tell you about phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card and let me also tell you about restream one livestream thirty plus destinations if you want to multi stream go to restream dot com and we are shifting the schedule we will continue to talk to more guests we have gustav from spotify in the restream waiting room let's bring him into the tvpn ultradome gustav how are you doing what's going

[C]

on hey john hey jordy how's it

[A]

going thank you so much for taking the time to join us first tell us up where are you so it

[C]

looks like i'm in some teenager's bedroom from the eighties here yeah it's actually a small studio we have in austin i'm here for south by southwest you

[A]

know the first time i went to south by southwest the coolest party was the spotify house and i have a very fond memory of going i think this was in twenty thirteen or twenty twenty twenty twelve something like that so you've clearly been there a long time it's a good party yeah it's always a great time what's on the agenda what is the message that you're trying to send to the world at south

[C]

by southwest today well first of all i'm here because spotify is turning twenty wow it seems crazy you know most companies don't make it success five years yeah yeah an overnight success twenty years in the making for sure so that's why i'm here and then you know obviously i'm here talking about what it is that we're doing our thoughts and

[A]

plans for the future yeah so i mean i'm sure you're getting a million questions about ai how do you see ai fitting into the spotify ecosystem there's a whole bunch of super useful ways that i think people would be super excited about there's other people that are a little bit worried about ai and how it might play out in spotify's world what are you thinking good looks like over the next couple of years

[C]

yeah of course everyone is asking about ai and as you said there are a lot of you know hot takes and breathless takes on twitter all the time and there's a lot of dystopian takes yeah i'm very positive about the future and i think if we look at the consumer experience i think it's going to change completely and not just for spotify i think all consumer companies are going to have to change what they are and how they work because i think consumers are sitting over here with claude or with chatgpt or with gemini and they're getting freaking agi ish intelligence and then you go into media service over here and it's dumb as a rock that's not going to work it's going to need to get intelligent so what we've said what i've said said at our latest earnings call is that we're going to build the first the world's first truly intelligent agentic media system those are a lot of buzzwords but i'll tell you what i actually think they mean what i think is so interesting with generative ai versus kind of old school machine learning and personalization which spotify has done for a long time is that computers finally understand english what's the point of that well spotify for a long time when we developed the product we always had these user focus groups you invite ten people into a room you have deep english language discussions with them about what they actually feel and what they actually want and then you went and built this average product that could only measure skips and swipes and you tried to squint and approximate what the user was actually thinking the problems of generative ai is you just talk to us in english at a scale of seven hundred fifty million people so i kind of think of it as a seven hundred fifty million people use the research always ongoing interview that's what products are going to be in the future and i want spotify to lead that so we've been investing in some of these products the first one was ai dj where you can literally talk to spotify you can ask you can say i want to go for a run give me some edm playlists with big drops at one hundred sixty bpm for my running cadence then earlier this year we launched prompted playlists which takes it one step further where you can build your own playlist using english language you're literally writing your own algorithm so if you want a playlist that goes out and looks at tiktok and what's trending right now then takes that filters it to your taste on spotify then removes any track you've already heard you can literally do that today and you can schedule it to update daily or weekly so that's what we've done so far and then today what i talked about is sort of the next step which is taste profile yeah this is what user have been asking us for forever so like hidden in all these systems we have a view of who you are musically and podcast wise and audiobook wise but you could never actually see that you can see hints of it in wrapped but you can never actually see it so the idea is pretty simple we're just going to let you see who we think you are and then we're going to let you edit it in english and just say like no that's not true i'm not like that anymore i want to be like this yeah it makes

[A]

so much sense that excites me a lot yeah yeah it makes so much sense from a personalization standpoint i mean spotify has been doing machine learning for probably most of those twenty years certainly more than ten how do you see yourself integrating with what openai is doing with sora where there's a persona and a person an individual can kind of decide how their avatar is used it feels like there's a natural extension here where not all artists but some artists are going to want to go to you and say hey look i'm a rock musician but if people want to listen to my songs remixed with ai as country songs that's fine as long as i keep getting a check it's win win for everyone has there been demand from musicians for that type of experience that feels like maybe the next year or later this year yeah one

[C]

hundred percent so this is the other big topic we just talked about the consumer experience but what about generative content and of course everyone is asking me about that and specifically music and i think what's happening today is people can make net new songs using these services yeah and that's great i'm sure creators will i'm sure most creators are already using these tools whether they say so or not that's a big sorry to

[B]

interrupt but that's a big thing because you there's this massive in tech like traditional tech people will tell you they're using an ai tool even if they're not really they want to be constantly projecting like i'm using the best tools all the time i'm using them more than you i've got ten mac minis running they'll tell you but in music it's like the exact opposite where people are from my experience talking to musicians and people in the music industry they're like this is changing everything it's crazy it's magical it's an amazing tool but then they won't talk about it at all right it's like you know they'll

[C]

never talk about it that's exactly it and i understand that i have a lot of empathy for musicians and artists being scared because everything is changing and change is scary so you know i want to be clear that it's understandable that people have a lot of fear but the way we think about it is technology can cause a lot of chaos but if you can combine technology with a good business model it can be very good for the world what i'm excited about is today i think some artists that use these tools they get help with creating that new music but most of the existing artists they just get no benefit from ai i think that seems wrong to me i think what you mentioned john is if you're an existing artist what many of them do today is they work with other people to do remixes and covers right of their music it's like existing ip this is what you do in movies like existing ip is supposed to be the most valuable part not the least valuable part so i do think that many musicians this will be voluntary of course will be very interested in letting their super fans play around with their music if they could get compensated correctly it is the business model that needs to be figured out and this is what spotify did during piracy we took the long painful route of not going the illegal route and figuring it out it was hard and painful this is what we want to do here

[A]

as well yeah yeah it feels like i mean you hear these stories about breakout songs there was a song called old town road that sampled nine inch nails and i think the original artist that remixed that song didn't actually have the rights cause he just sort of whipped it up on a weekend but then once the song exploded the agencies came in and negotiated and i think they accepted award on stage together and everyone was happy but spotify feels like a unique place to actually unleash that level of collaboration in an economically like you know safe way that everyone feels happy at the end of the day exactly i'm also interested in hearing about how social features are evolving on spotify it feels like with a lot of the generative ai projects there's a lot of stuff that goes out broadly but there's also a lot of you're just having a new creative tool that allows you to tell express yourself to a smaller audience i find that a lot of the generative images that i put i don't put them on my instagram i text them to a group chat and i'm wondering how you see the social features changing on spotify or where they are how fast they're growing anything that you can tell me about social

[C]

on spotify these days so you're completely right we started investing we actually had a lot of social features when we started yeah the idea was to sort of approximate the experience of napster part bay on the content side but then sort of you know facebook and your friend graph because back then friends were your main tool of recommendation yeah and then your algorithms came and everyone got like an algorithmic friend and we didn't invest as much but since a few years back we started investing a lot because we think that today these media platforms they're single player experiences they're kind of lonely they're mostly passive you sit and swipe and swipe and swipe until you're falling asleep right we don't want services to be like that we would like you to lean in and we would like to turn spotify into an interactive multiplayer experience so that sounds like hyperbole what i mean with that i mean features like jam which is growing like crazy for us many many many tens of millions of users and still growing where you can join a queue and sort of have this shared music experience together in the same place or actually remotely and then you have something that's been around for a long time which is collaborative playlists which have insane retention and engagement where people collaborate around the playlist and they want to talk about that so we are investing quite a lot in turning spotify into this place where you are with your friends where you're not just by yourself so i'm one hundred percent with you i'm very excited about trying to create sort of a more positive future if that makes sense one thing i really love about having worked at spotify for twenty years is that we kind of lucked into music which almost everyone agrees that music is a good in the world there's very few people who think that music is bad but then we kept that you know we went into podcasts because we thought it was like long form discussions people spoke in full sentences it was very the perfect counter to the short vacation of media that was happening and then you know last year we went into into books in a big way so we try to do things that we think are good for the world internally we have some beliefs not all of which are public because we want to keep some secrets but one of them is no regrets we focus on content that has very little

[B]

regret yeah you guys to me you guys are the anti slop company platform and there really aren't any of them left you can go on linkedin now and you could spot spend twenty four hours straight scrolling through short form video and so talk to us about running a company where it feels like you're constantly making decisions to avoid doing things that would almost certainly get a lot of engagement and usage but aren't necessarily aligned with the kind of core values of the company because eventually companies get twenty twenty years in and they just start doing things that are just optimizing for all those metrics and a lot of that everyone has incredible values until you're a public company and you've got all these different incentives yeah that's so

[C]

true and that is a risk that's one of the benefits of me and the other co ceo alex nordstrom having been at this company for like seventeen eighteen years so those values are ingrained in us the way we think about it is i think it's both something that is very motivating for me as a person and for many of our employees but it has also to be aligned with their business model and it is because spotify in terms of revenue is majority of subscription service close to ninety percent of the revenue is from a subscription and if you think about what that means it means that a spotify user every month they're going to vote with their wallet and if you ask yourself the question when you vote what do you to pay for something what is it that you're going to pay for are you going to pay for time spent i don't think so when we survey users for the different services out there i won't say which one but many of the big services even young people regret seventy percent of the time they spent there on spotify they regret less than three percent right and i think if you're going to pay for something you're not going to pay for something you regret that's like a that's an oxymoron right so it's very aligned with our business model i actually think you pay for what you want to be something aspirational right so i think it's both a value that we have but it is actually very much aligned with the business model i think if we were ninety percent an advertising model the pressure to maximize for engagement would be very tricky so it's both a value and something that actually works for us so we're just leaning into that because we think it's a differentiated proposition and right now i feel like the need for low regret content

[B]

is increasing not decreasing yeah it's such a wildly different experience going into the spotify app for me where it's always intentional i'm coming in and i'm doing the thinking around what content do i want to consume and that is just completely opposite to every other app that i use which is deciding basically on the fly what is going to keep him in the app as much as possible and that's not necessarily that's why

[C]

i'm so excited about the user control because i think it's very aligned with that to give back control to the user now you control the algorithm it's tricky but that's the path we're going because it's very much aligned with no regrets if you can tell ahead of time what you want spotify to do you're not going to chances that you regret that are very low and we've seen this people saying when we test this internally the taste profile one of the people i spoke to said i used to be into classical music a lot when i was younger but then the spotify algorithm like it preferred popular music so i fell out of it i went into my taste profile and just said i want the classical shelf on my homepage every day and now they're back into it because now that's what they get fed with and i think that's very cool when you can like game yourself to what you actually

[A]

want to be yeah i wouldn't have predicted that spotify would be the first one to have that sort of like natural language control over your feed people have been demanding that across all different social media platforms threads launch something where you can say dear threads and then it will update dear algo dear algo that's it dear algo but yeah that makes a ton of sense i think

[C]

it's because of the advertising model for us the risk here is that the user takes control and says something that lowers engagement a bit for us it's fine because they pay per month we don't monetize the engagement directly for the most part that i think is the

[A]

key yeah what's the biggest misconception about spotify right now

[C]

oh the biggest misconception now okay you'll have to stop me i'll get up on my little soapbox here this is something that has hurt me so much for so many years because we got it wrong this is about artists payouts and the idea that we pay less to artists than other companies and for the longest time this has gone back a long time people talked about pristine payouts and so forth and the sort of advice at the time was you shouldn't engage because you only bring more attention to the matter and if we just keep paying more than anyone else the record is going to set itself straight that doesn't happen what happens when you leave a narrative like that forever is that it becomes truth right so i kind of want to set that straight so if you look at spotify we've paid out over seventy billion dollars to the music industry eleven billion of those just last year i want to be clear that's more than anyone has paid anyone ever in the music industry so like the music industry is bigger than it ever was people talk about the heydays of the eighties and the cd era but the music industry is bigger than that and not only that you know in the cd era the sort of distributor the record store we give about seventy percent of what we make back to the music industry if we bring in dollar one we get about seventy seventy cents to the music industry the record store if you wanted to be at the front of the record store could keep seventy percent or one hundred so the pie is bigger and the share of the pie that goes to the music industry is bigger than it ever was and so when i tell that to people they're like huh but i keep hearing that you guys pay less per stream right like you're evil somehow aren't you yeah and my point is like and this is not backed by public data no one in the industry pays per stream we all pay per user and we all pay roughly seventy percent per user apple amazon youtube all of them the thing is spotify has almost three to four times the amount of usage per user of our competitors which is crazy to me actually when i first saw it i couldn't believe it but now it's backed by public data so what happens if you take the same amount of money but we divide it by three three to four times more streams of course our per stream is going to be lower but that's because people use the product more and the solution to that isn't to make the product three four times worse to game the per stream metric or raise the price three four times because that would just be bad for the entire music industry so this is the misconception i want to set straight no one pays per stream we all pay per user and we happen to have much more engagement per user than the other platforms and they've actually sort of weaponized and used this against us to say like we pay more more than spotify per stream yeah yeah that's that's important

[A]

how are you thinking about the evolution of spotify's role with live events i feel like in the age of ai the recommendations get even better because i listen to a lot of different genres i don't go to a lot of different genres of concerts there's definitely bands that i listen to where i'm like i'm too old for that mosh pit i'm not going to the heavy metal concert but i would love to go to this you're not too old for the most part maybe maybe yeah we'll go to the sleep token concert together but it does feel like spotify will be in an increasingly more interesting role in actually surfacing awareness around live in person events which also might get more important in an age of ai in an age of unlimited content you might actually see this barbell effect where there's endless content and then very unique experiences in the real world what do you think about live events yeah i think

[C]

you're one hundred percent right and two things there i think are important you know if everything in the world is kind of a power law right yeah you have the endless the endless long tail but you also have a very big head people ask me like are netflix or youtube winning i'm like both the biggest netflix shows are bigger than ever monoculture and youtube is bigger than ever and the same is true in music right yeah so there are more indie artists than there has ever been but taylor swift is bigger than anyone has ever been and the eras tour is the biggest thing that ever happened so people want me to say it's one or the other and it's actually both and i think you're right because i think what's happening is and this would probably be exaggerated even more with generative content as people get more and more individual content which they like they also feel more and more lonely so the need for like shared experiences increases and this is just not me theorizing we're actually selling tickets on spotify since a few years back because we have such good data on who taylor swift's very biggest fan that is one person in the world in terms of streams

[A]

actually is right that is yes so

[C]

we've been selling tickets for a while and we've sold over one and a half billion dollars worth of tickets now and that is increasing quickly which proves your point like live events are becoming more popular than ever and bigger than ever and for many artists the fact that we're selling tickets is very important because for many artists especially both big ones and up and coming ones it can be more than fifty percent of their income so you have the royalties from us but touring is a very big part of most artists income is

[A]

spotify uniquely well equipped to enter the live ticketing market because you come from an origin where you had to do big deals with big organizations and it was not this permissionless company that some other platforms have engaged with you had to go to the table in hollywood and sit down with these folks and it feels like you sort of have to do that again if you want to sell ever more tickets yeah it's

[C]

funny that you say we've never been this permissionless company that is true and it's been painful watching other people just run with like you know whatever illegal content or something they're so fast but over time it catches up for us yeah yeah it has in many cases but you're right we are well positioned to work with that industry and right now we're actually selling for all of them you know we're an aggregator we're an aggregator of content and we're an aggregator of concert tickets so i think we're really well positioned we're already telling most artists where they should tour in which cities they have the most fans and which songs they love and now it's pretty natural for us to help them actually sell tickets obviously the scalping problem is enormous and that's something where we are really well positioned to help the analogy i like to make is that your stream count is like proof of work in crypto it's very hard to fake your stream count right so using that i think is very important and we want to work with with

[B]

the live music sound yes you're like oh you want to buy tickets to this artist that you've not streamed a single time i don't know about that

[C]

exactly and the artists they absolutely we've done some of our own events you know for smaller events for just a superfan sometime and you can tell the difference in the room when it's just like the stalker level fans in the room

[B]

i want to talk i want to get your kind of high level view on podcasting how it's how it's evolving i started doing some work with podcasts when i was in college back in twenty seventeen at that time it's it felt late to me it always does it always it always it always feels late of course i was totally wrong that the biggest deals and many of the biggest shows were still to come and you guys obviously made a splash with some of the larger acquisitions in the space but how are you processing industry today

[C]

so what happened that was very interesting for us is we looked at the podcasting industry actually the way we came about it was you know we found a lot of our best features looking at either our users what they do or the publishers start uploading like audiobooks in germany what is that and then we realized there's demand for audiobooks the podcast is a case of looking at our developers because they're this unique crowd that are often early adopters of trends and they have the power to just build what they want to see in the world and we saw them sort of hacking podcasts into the main spotify app again and again at hack weeks so we started looking at the podcast industry and we saw that it was amazing it was this amazing pool of fantastic long form content and very good creators but it was just sort of left for dead so we decided to go in there and bet that if we supported it it would grow and that worked out we grew like crazy for what was then called sort of traditional podcast audio podcast then what happened was and joe rogan was always the first with this many podcasts started doing video but for a long time it was just joe rogan and the interesting thing is because we had joe rogan on our platform we had to build video support it was partially thanks to him that we did it because he was like i can't be without video if you want to show it has to be video we're like oh shit are we going to build a full video stack for one podcast i guess we are and then we built it but that was very lucky for us because then we could see what video podcasts how they performed on the platform and we saw that people listen a lot in the background and they dip in and out and we're like huh this is probably where the whole thing is going so we started investing more and then all the creators started doing video yeah so what's interesting for us is that the audio podcast market was this like i don't know couple of billion dollar market it wasn't that big but because audio became video they kind of pushed us into a much bigger market which is video which is you know ten times bigger at least one two orders of magnitude so for us it was like a gift that the creators quote unquote forced us to get into this bigger market so we're very happy about it and what we find from creators like yourselves is they want to multi home they want distribution they want to be on all the platforms and that's always been our in music we were always all the artists were multi home all the book authors we have they're multi home so that's our strategy and then in terms of what we've done that really changed the trajectory for us is yes technically we could have video podcasts for a long time but as you guys know who are into the details details audio podcasts used to monetize in a certain way with audio ads and what happened was when you couldn't have your dynamic audio ads the dai when you went to video actually the weird thing is you put video on spotify and you would make less money which is completely wrong because the users loved it so your experience got better but you made less money so finally beginning of twenty twenty five we solved that because what we said was okay we're just going to pay out of the premium pool for video podcasts so now you don't have to stuff ads into the podcast as much so your user experience gets better your attention goes up but you don't have compromise in economics we're going to pay as much and that really that made all the video podcasts come on board spotify that's amazing well

[A]

thank you so much for taking the

[B]

time to chat with us we've been kind of beating the drum on we think there's a lot more shows for to make like tvpn basically look at any because in many ways we've done some interesting things on the formatting side

[C]

but you've done a lot of interesting

[B]

things but we just took what had worked in many ways traditional cable and i think that every single show on traditional cable is just sort of waiting to be rebuilt for the spotify platform and other platforms so i think that lots more to come this is such

[C]

an innovative format it's awesome i watch it every day and you know because you guys publish the whole thing to spotify catch up no it's amazing i

[A]

love when we get a spotify comment that is clearly someone who watched the video because they noticed something that you would only it wasn't really in the audio feed but they were clearly watching

[B]

in video you know you said you said graders want to be multi home yeah but i disagree i wish we lived in a world where there was just spotify we could just focus all

[G]

of our energy okay i'll take that

[A]

i'll take it so he's going to

[B]

you got more work to do well

[A]

thank you so much enjoy the rest of south by southwest say hello to everyone for us and we'll talk to you soon take care goodbye let me tell you about oops gusto dot com question mark that's the wrong one the unified platform for payroll and benefits and hr built for to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses and let me also tell you about public dot com investing for those who take it seriously they got stocks options bonds crypto treasuries and more with great customer service we are joined now by tim thank you so much for taking the time to come with us first time on the show please introduce yourself yeah tim

[E]

cadogan ceo of gofundme thank you very

[A]

much for having me tell me a little bit about your journey to gofundme

[E]

what was your backstory i started you know i came to stanford in the mid nineties got sucked into the internet really early non traditional background did some startup stuff ended up going to yahoo ran the ad business at yahoo then went to the another startup see this

[A]

oh man we're huge fans you know

[B]

that sound we love yachty not wearing

[E]

a lot of purple being a redhead that never worked yeah yeah yeah five great years there went to do my own startup in the ad space openx built that up that was great yeah but got to thinking hey i want to do something completely different i had i'd become a search and rescue volunteer around twenty ten up here in the mountains in san gabriel's i loved that and i was thinking hey could i kind of run a company that also was really useful and helpful to people yeah somehow got that gofundme job started march second twenty twenty amazing the pandemic i mean mayhem and just what a lesson in how valuable the platform is

[B]

wow you were joining right as i'm sure there was just a surge because of all the just dislocations it was

[E]

literally it was that week where i think the world realized that this was global i had four days to meet people on the friday i'm like we'd better go remote i thought it would be like three weeks and then it was a year or so and yes demand i mean the need of people on the platform and all the expected ways the medical stuff but also small businesses tens of thousands of restaurants bars music venues having a furlough employees and lots of fundraisers being created often by their patrons who are like we love this restaurant it's our favorite local restaurant

[B]

yeah that was actually that was the silver lining of that moment was how much excitement and willingness there was from people that were in a better situation during COVID or maybe they had chaos in their own life but they still wanted to go out of their way and the ingenuity of individuals and businesses to come up with ways to make these kind of exchanges it's actually you

[E]

bring up the silver lining point like the silver that's often the case that when something difficult happens in our lives or in a community or a natural disaster a silver lining and there really is not a lot of silver linings but one is people want to come together and help each other in the face of that situation and we see that again and again whether it be an individual situation or like what happened here in la i was about to

[A]

ask you about the fire i know watch duty was on there is that

[E]

correct oh my god i mean you know so many nonprofits were helping i live in altadena which is one of the towns i live in pasadena so you know like we lost six thousand homes we evacuated you know twenty minutes in and thousands of people personally exactly and we saw two hundred sixty million dollars raised for ten thousand families churches local businesses and for the nonprofits like watch duty salvation army world central kitchen so many people coming in and helping and it has been amazing to see in case of my town the community coming together and saying we care about each other and we're going to find

[A]

a way through this so what's the case study for a gofundme project that goes perfectly there's a lot of i'm sure there's a lot of rough edges around where does the money go and what conditions does the money get released all these different things that you have to grapple with what does your team look like and then how is technology making that easier i think you got

[E]

about seven questions in there but let's go to the first one what is a good fun i mean a really good campaign is you put together a story so good fund me is first and foremost a storytelling platform you tell a clear story of who you are what the situation is what you need in terms of the help that is the funds and what it's going to go to and then you put that on the internet and then you tell people about it and this is we actually launched yesterday this product called the smart fundraising coach yeah which we can talk about more but it helps with every single one of these steps and then you get attention and you start with the people you know your friends your family your neighbors people in your church in your sports team whatever it is and then you build support from there you build momentum you hopefully achieve what you're looking for maybe you exceed that and then throughout that process you set up to receive the money set up for transfers which could be you if it's for you let's say i set it up for you i'd set it up for you you would get an invitation to set up your account to be kyc'd to receive the funds all the funds go to our payment processes with adyen and stripe they sit there until you've been kyc'd then the money flows to you and you get the help it's what we call help delivered mm

[B]

yeah there's so much fear around ai right now and oftentimes that people end up overlooking all the incredible parts of it and that's a good example of anyone in the world being able to be like walked through and basically get their hand held through this process that is a deeply you know if you're going and setting up a raise it's usually not because of it could be some emergency or really stressful situation and so being able to give people that kind of just like one on one guidance it's exactly so i

[E]

had this sort of a couple of years ago we have a team that helps some clients we have a customer success team that can help some but we have ten thousand people a day setting up a gofundme we can't deliver that from everyone with everyone my point to the team is like look ai we could do that now we could give every single person who is considering asking for help and asking for help is tough like none of us like it we were just talking in the back like does any of us like asking for help no like we don't like it it's hard it's psychologically difficult can we give them the functional and the emotional help to go through that process so that's what we built a lot of trial and error actually like a lot of people think you plug the ai and it's better it's not like taken many months because we have to find not just the functional like hey it's time to pick your title and now it's time to share which is one of the most difficult things we also have to find the right tone to do that empathetically to help someone through those steps in the process so that they can get the help

[A]

they need what about ai on the donor side i'm thinking about if i show up and i'm like is this the the right geordie hayes is this his campaign tell me more that might not just be on the landing page already filled out by him are you looking at that for example so the

[E]

main way we're using ai on the donor side is to verify that the people who are paying in money are actually the right people doing all of those things to validate the pay ins and that's both a combination of us and the payment providers and the banks who are the back end of us so that's the main use what you're talking about is sort of more discovery which is still early days i mean most supporters of fundraisers know the person sure right they know either very close relationship or they know them through someone that's about eighty ninety percent of fundraising is it's really what we're doing is we're modernizing a timeless thing that we've done for each other which is if you used to live in a village and someone was in hard times you put some money in the hat boss the hat yep right yeah that's what we're doing now so mostly the sort of social proofing is through relationship networks

[A]

what's the tax treatment on a gofundme

[E]

campaign there are no goods or services though so there are no taxes there

[A]

are no taxes that's right it's a gift okay yeah well how has the actual team evolved post covid it sounds like you came in and you immediately made the team remote are you now in a hybrid yeah yeah how is that evolution i mean you know we

[E]

found our way through it i mean we were always quite a distributed company so we had la bay area san diego we got chicago we got folks

[A]

in and is that because of talent or because of the customer base like

[E]

why there's a bit of talent so the original gofundme was set up in san diego brad and andy set it up back in twenty ten then we needed great talent so we also needed to go to the bay area now for example we have a really amazing one hundred person engineering and data science team in buenos aires down in argentina which is just rushing it so we are inherently distributed sure so the work reflects that we figured our way through

[B]

it pretty well pretty well what's different about running a company like gofundme that's doing a lot of good in the world and good every silicon valley valley company can paint a picture of how like they're saving the world but you guys are actually you know providing a service that is making a meaningful impact

[A]

there's probably impact dozens of gofundmes that are like literally pay for my cancer medications literally cure my cancer and then there's a lot of ai companies that are saying well we'll cure cancer one

[B]

day yeah it's a very different vibe have other companies in the industry like software vendors or payment providers do they chip in on their side like are you able to negotiate like lower rates

[E]

you know hey if guy if luke's listening are you serious i mean they're selling their products and services i know

[B]

i know but you know we get

[E]

a little bit like people do like to talk about working with us because generally it's regarded as a good thing but that's at the margin honestly he's

[A]

a big fan of oligopolies and payment

[E]

processing apparently but we have great points partners so i understand they need to run their businesses and we appreciate them

[B]

what's different yeah no i would just think that if i was a crm provider i might not be trying to get the maximum amount of value out of a platform like gofundme well maybe

[E]

they're not getting the maximum but they're generally doing their thing what about the

[A]

surface area of gofundme i mean there's other platforms platforms that people use to raise money i mean i did a crowdfunding campaign for a food product at one point but people do i have a board game project i have a movie and there's this somewhat of a fuzzy line between a gofundme and something like a kickstarter have you thought about broadening out do you want to stay narrow how important is it to define what the brand is and is not

[E]

yeah you're right we do see people fundraising for local businesses quite a bit like you know local restaurant that people love maybe it's hit a rough patch or a bookshop or something like that but you're right kind of business startup

[A]

stuff yeah there was a time when crowdfunding was pre seed stage funding or like a signal that you could send to your investors like the original oculus vr headset was on kickstarter and then sold to meta for a billion dollars that's a very different thing yeah it

[E]

tends to be we saw one hundred thousand fundraisers fall small but really local

[A]

businesses but you have the platform have you thought about expanding you know we've

[E]

still got so much to work to do so we have expanded so back in twenty two we acquired a company called classy which does fundraising software for nonprofits oh okay interesting if you look at the industry tam in the us it's about two percent of gdp six hundred billion dollars is given the vast majority by consumers most of that is

[A]

given to nonprofit organizations the vast majority is by consumers not billionaires who are writing massive checks most of it is

[E]

given by consumers and most of that goes to nonprofit organizations gofundme obviously started and we are best known for helping individuals ask for help now those individuals generally ask for themselves or someone else but increasingly they're asking for a nonprofit that was our fastest growing category last year was individuals like i just did one for watch duty because i think what john and team are doing is amazing and he super supported us so that's a trend but our main focus has been making consumer fundraising ever better which is why we launched the coach yesterday and continue to innovate there and then helping nonprofits fundraise more successfully yeah

[B]

by building basically a network of other people who can fundraise well that's the

[E]

thing that's the cool thing is like this intersection between those two things because the average age of a nonprofit donor in america today is about sixty four and nonprofits want to get more young people interested and connected but a lot of young folks don't necessarily just want to donate they want to do something so we've given them the ability to organize sort of enlist an army of supporters who fundraise for them so i'll give you an example like american cancer society came to us and said hey we want to do something like this we've had like eighty eight thousand people organize a fundraiser whether swimming or walking or riding or walking the dog for the benefit of acs which raises money but even more importantly it spreads the word because if you're telling me i really care about acs it affected my family in this way i'm doing this run over this month would you support me i'm going to think hey i'm going to trust that because i know john and i know acs i call it the double trust yeah that makes

[B]

sense like spvs spvs for nonprofits yeah

[E]

it's kind of you know it's expanding the aperture of how you generate awareness

[A]

and support what about political fundraising how does that work today is it not

[E]

allowed on the platform very limited and it's country by country because we're in twenty countries and the rules are very very variable so it will depend some countries just not allowed some it is allowed in very specific ways but frankly it's not a significant thing for us at all we don't see much it

[A]

is not an area of interest it's

[E]

just a different not really i mean there are pretty well known and well used platforms that focus on that we don't see much of it we don't

[A]

honestly expect to what about the future of the company how is the company structured where do you want to see

[E]

it go well we think there's a lot more help to generate in the world i mean our mission is very simple help people help each other yeah and we think that it's interesting you had travis earlier because they're a good example uber airbnb is another one where it's a company that has taken a behavior that was frankly frowned upon like remember when you were a kid one of the things you were always told not to do don't get in a

[A]

car with a stranger get in a

[E]

stranger's car yeah and certainly don't ever go to a stranger's house yeah well

[A]

that's normal now you're taking your airbnb

[E]

so in our case you know it's not so asking for help and doing it in public is still not a comfortable and normal thing totally and so we're sort of expanding the aperture of

[A]

like no actually but gofundme does have a different aesthetic to it it's oh you're doing a gofundme this is a normal thing it feels much more normalizing yeah no you're still building through it but you're on the path we are

[E]

and every customer i've talked to i say every single one has said something like this was really hard for me

[A]

to do if someone just put on their instagram story like hey please send me money that's very different than like hey i'm doing a gofundme for this specific thing you can go here there's a lot of details you know that it's on legit payment rails exactly there's accountability but there's still a lot of

[E]

work to do in that journey so that we think we can do a lot more of that and as i mentioned we're in twenty countries some of those countries are still early in adopting and growing quick germany for example is taking off very quickly there's more countries and then nonprofits there's a lot more work to help nonprofits who are as needed now as ever and we only offer our nonprofit solutions in the us today got it so we got a lot more there and then we got

[B]

some other ideas yeah it's very cool i mean i can imagine it massively increasing the efficiency of nonprofits on the fundraising side because they have instead of having to build out you know all this you know they still have to hire their own staff to support fundraising but now they get all this kind of like off balance sheet kind of

[E]

effort we can help amplify we can help we do a lot of storytelling we do that on behalf of our regular consumer customers now we can help to tell the stories of our nonprofits in certain situations and that helps them get awareness and get more support well

[A]

tim thank you so much for taking

[E]

the time to come thank you thank

[A]

you very much hopefully i'll you see see you in soon are you still

[B]

doing your watch duty fundraiser you should

[E]

i'm still running okay

[B]

i love when i'm not a dmu of watch duty you never oh yeah you never know

[A]

when you're exactly so you never know

[B]

and i'm in malibu so we had a crazy time hope you guys are

[A]

doing okay yeah thank you so much take care guys let me tell you all about octa okta helps you assign every ai agent a trusted identity so you get the power of ai without the risk secure every agent secure any agent and let me also tell you about applovin profitable advertising made it easy with axon ai get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today and without further ado we are joined by nikesh arora from palo alto networks good to meet you welcome to the show thank you for those who might not be familiar with a little bit of your journey i'd love to kind of get everyone up to speed on what you were doing before and then i want to spend a lot of time talking about just the transformation if you can call it that of palo alto networks where the business is today but maybe take us back a little bit where do you

[G]

want to go how far back well

[A]

i know you handled business at google

[B]

but let's go even let's go back to the very beginning yeah that's far

[G]

no i grew up in india as you might know came here to go to business school it was a tough time you couldn't get a job in nineteen ninety two it was one of the recessions in the country yeah so i wrote four hundred plus letters and those times you guys are younger than

[A]

me cold letters cold letters

[G]

email you had to go i had to rent a map for three months no you

[A]

rented a computer i rented a computer

[G]

i found four hundred addresses of hiring people yeah and i would sit down write the letters type them out go print them out yeah put them in envelopes stuff envelopes and mail them it's

[B]

such a different dopamine loop doing a cold letter versus because cold email is amazing you send no no i know i know but i'm saying like today kids are used to like okay i got to write this email maybe they use ai but then like oftentimes like for me i either respond like like within like thirty seconds or thirty days but but like you know you quickly kind of get on get on that loop but sending an actual letter out and then just kind of praying and waiting for maybe every day i'd get

[G]

stacks of them back i got i still have them i have four hundred rejections from nineteen ninety two wait four

[A]

hundred letters all rejections yes they only

[G]

got one job right so many of the others said no so i ordered

[A]

rejections how many of the companies are

[B]

still around some of them are some

[G]

of them you wouldn't want to work for but i sometimes run into people and one guy who started private equity fund after i remembered his name at the bottom of the letter so i was sitting at meeting i said you do realize that he rejected me in nineteen ninety two that's great and i was an advisor to a company he'd bought a grudge i didn't hold a grudge i'm glad i have to say thank you to all of them right yeah of course god forbid i'd gone

[B]

to work for somebody okay where do you end up i ended up with

[G]

fidelity investments right out of business school and even there i got rejected from six people i wrote to in the company thankfully they had no common hr system or whatever the seventh guy hired me and he said oh her resume looks interesting we should talk to her he couldn't tell whether my name's male

[B]

or female oh sure sure i signed

[G]

up fidelity and when i was business school i was applying i'd get phone calls like i went to northeastern so i get a call hey we're just double checking you know how was your time in northwestern why did you say boston i'm like that's northeastern oh i'm so sorry i got another call i

[A]

got the exact same thing i went to northeastern yeah exactly i'm not going to correct you yeah keep going so

[G]

i had all kinds of stuff but one of the calls told me you don't have enough finance on your resume to get a job on wall street so i went back to school while i was working at fidelity i got a master's in finance i got a cf cfa and i was teaching a cfa class in nineteen ninety five ninety six actually ninety six october to do portfolio hedging and shit and this guy sitting in front of me said oh you work at fidelity i'm like yeah he's like hey do you know all these people no so they're on the fund management side i'm like oh i don't work there i'm a corporate finance dude he's like wait you're teaching me cfa level three and you work in corporate finance i said you want to pass the exam or you want to discuss my credentials and to his credit the next day i interviewed a partner there you go so i finally went to work in money management for two years and most interesting time was boring time i just couldn't sit mid nineties yeah ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine so we're we're in the internet boom

[A]

we're like henry blodgett telling us that

[G]

ao is going to be the biggest company in the world right yeah so i did that for two years did well there got bored left and i started one of the ceo's i just covered telecoms that time one of the ceo's was the ceo of deutsche telecom said come work with me so i took my bags flew to germany to bonn and worked with him for five years i started mobile data startup at

[A]

that point and the name of the company that you started there it's called

[G]

t motion t motion but that that was the time deutsche telekom i worked on the team that acquired voice stream which is now t mobile usa yeah so we did that i worked there for four or five years and then i quit i was tired of commuting from london to germany and back as my thirties and i was sitting in front of him walked up to me and said hey i just headhunter calling me there's a job it's a company from the us they just went public in some reverse dutch auction type scenario that job's too small for me do you want to go interview yeah the guy was the ceo of t mobile uk so that was i met that guy who became my house omid khurdistani he interviewed me i told him it's a really small office and he said well why don't you have an interview here then i'll take you to california and you can meet the founders i'm like okay and then he calls me a week later and said oh larry and sergey are in town they would love to see you so they made sure the interview was not in the small office so i met sergey in the british museum while walking around that's amazing that was when i got interviewed then i came to california and i met eric schmidt and eric's like it's interesting your cv is very interesting but we're looking for a head of europe and the job is sales i said so should i just go back and i have two days of interviews i don't i'm not done sales should i just go back he's like no no no we need smart people who can learn stuff and that was two thousand four so i was the first person hired after the ipo of any senior capacity and in sales i ran google europe yeah and slowly and steadily like we grew europe and europe was like

[A]

and what was the shape of that role were you talking to the largest companies in europe about just buying ad

[G]

space you want me to make it cool or you wanted to actually tell

[D]

you what i did

[G]

let's go with the role look it was companies just thinkers you're thinking december two thousand four the company's just gone public it's worth eighteen billion dollars there's two thousand employees and europe has like one hundred and eighty people every office is a rented regis office except for one in dublin so what you're doing is you're like blocking and tackling you're hiring people you're getting offices getting stature getting stuff and yeah forget selling ad space showing ceo showing companies this is what search does

[A]

oh this is just work deployment in

[G]

the five years i was there we went from being twenty five percent of google's revenue to forty six percent of google's revenue i think in history one of the few tech companies where europe and us had the same market share so you have all these people come through here you should ask them generally you spend a lot of time in the us you get a large market share here and then your share of europe or the rest of the world is smaller so we got there and that's when a whole bunch of movement happened sheryl sandberg went to facebook tim armstrong went to run aol that's kind of the last man stand so when my boss retired eric called me and says you think you should move here and become chief business officer yeah so i moved to california yeah that was

[B]

most underrated title should be the chief of business we joke we joke about this all the time it's like amazingly

[A]

vague but also incredibly important but you

[G]

know i remember my first meeting with larry when he became ceo and he said hey come spend some time with me me so i spent all this time put a beautiful presentation together i'm going to sit down with larry and explain everything we do so i go there and he's we're talking about hyperloops and vacuum control tubes on how you can get out of the car on every highway that will improve the traffic situation in california and i'm here like jumping at the bed wanting to get my presentation talk about hyperloops so in the end he says you know bill campbell who was a great guy mentor to many people in the valley says bill tells me you're doing a good job at what you're doing i got a lot of work to do and fix on product because tech companies die if product doesn't work no tech company became great because of sales and business he said so you keep doing what you're doing i'm sure if i had a few hours i'd help you get your efficiency up and do it better but i don't have the time so i stood up and said well let me know when you have a few hours that was that then tank to his credit we had a great relationship and his staff became ten product people the cfo the lawyer and me that was it no other function was representative you go take care of everything else i want these product guys because i want to tell them what i want to build and we can see what

[B]

resulted in at any point early on did you feel like google was significantly overvalued

[G]

you know i still think it's undervalued it's kind of the enormity of what the potential was sometimes when you're in it you don't see out of it sure it's hard to tell how big it's going to become but of course in hindsight it's wonderful you can all say that was bound to happen but the enormity of what what we were doing was not apparent to people there like we bought youtube i remember sitting with salar and chad hurley and saying let's go buy netflix there's a story about that but it's a different story salar's like no just give us twenty engineers and five million dollars to go builders every tech company has those kind of people and they tried but youtube's juggernaut big in its own right so we were there when all this stuff was happening and you can see i remember larry tell the story that he met steve jobs and steve said if i give you one piece of advice the word is focus and larry's like no we're going to try a lot of things and see how many of them work so there are many ways to get to great wayne yeah

[A]

the head in the clouds philosophy clearly did work for google's academic culture do you feel like that's the right characterization of google this academic the twenty percent time the lots of different projects primordial soup to some degree did you try and continue that or was that no

[G]

i think part of this is my opinion i'm sure a lot of people they do too but i think the secret sauce is the consistent focus on product greatness and that comes from the founders you see look travis here i saw him earlier companies take on the form of their leaders and it's apparent in every company and pretty much if you sat down did an experiment and i wrote down five objectives over here which are company cultural characteristics i wrote down five here which are founder characteristics and i said go match them i bet many people will be able to match them because you can see the similarities between how leaders lead and how companies adopt to the culture of the leader so i think that's where google's culture comes from from the founders and the founders were very product obsessed as you heard larry didn't want to spend time on business i remember him going to the first ad all hands and he walks up and says i got to tell you guys i hate ads that are intrusive and they're bad that's a great motivation everybody these guys wants

[E]

to run out and go work and

[G]

search because just told them what they do is not interesting but you look around like every product that they built they didn't look look at monetizing it for a very long time until they believe the product had become ubiquitous and the product had become interesting so i think that product obsession is part of the culture i think that's partly because of where their secret sauce comes from and now with the amount of resources they have they can afford to do that for a very long time but having said that we did it even then like gmail had no monetization for years or google maps had no monetization for years but it was growing like

[A]

wildfire yeah so coming into palo alto networks did you i did a little

[G]

stop in the middle of masa i know travis was talking about easy money i was part of the ethos yes i was but that was after google

[A]

but but coming into palo alto did

[B]

you guys ever did you guys ever pass on a company i passed an uber no way i did what round

[G]

what round it was a sixteen or twenty billion dollars round okay and then i left in masa did the i passed on adam newman there's a book i told my guy who's the analyst i said listen we're a tech investor anytime you bring me a business which is masquerading as a tech business which is a commercial real estate business you should go work there don't work in tech yep

[B]

good call there it's a

[G]

great start to get some right i've made a lot of bad ones too

[A]

so don't worry yeah so going into palo alto networks you know you have these five calls cultural tenants from the company five cultural tenants from the founder you're coming in as a new ceo how did you think about resetting the culture expanding the culture bringing what you value to bear across the company in a way that's not disruptive but gets you where you need to go well

[G]

there's no way to be not disruptive okay let's get out okay look you know life is about standard deviation yeah you want excess returns there are no excess returns with no standard deviation this has been proven in every facet of life right you want to date a good looking person you have to take the risk yeah you want to build a great business you have to take a risk you got to make money in investments you got to take a risk so i don't think there's a non disruptive way of creating transformation having said that as you probably know i knew nothing about cybersecurity i never run a public company had other than that i was a perfect candidate so let's find a guy i can only imagine the board deliberation like if you look at a board you know they write these long job descriptions brief a headhunter say hey go find us somebody so imagine that conversation find us somebody who know nothing about this job so i'm like either they were geniuses or you know they weren't paying attention to the headhunter anyway i got the job i show up there i'm trying to learn cyber security and i'm trying to understand the culture of the firm now my predecessor mark mclaughlin is a west point guy he was a very high integrity company my father's a lawyer we come from the same stock so i like the fact it's a high integrity company

[A]

it's important for a cybersecurity firm too

[G]

it's important yeah of course it is it's important every company that's skip especially yes especially so it was the best product in this category it's a good thing what i discovered was which happens in that industry people get caught up in the success of the current product and stop thinking about what comes next and what you have to look around the next corner i think leaders jobs are to think about what hits us in two three four five years and how do you prepare for that now because i have a firm belief it takes four to seven years to build a great product maybe it's become three to five or two to four with ai but you go back and think about it anybody you had through here

[B]

and how do you what's your personal definition for of what a great product is because there's a lot of products today that grow really fast that aren't necessarily great well i think there are

[G]

two aspects to this right there's a product when you're competing with somebody else in which case you have to build something better than that so much better that the customer is willing to switch because you have a much better experience we take google search right people are doing there were fourteen search engines before google search camera it took google seven years to get to compete with the other fourteen people where the users are willing to switch there are products in categories where there's no competition right there's nothing called uber i'm going to try it whatever it is but if you think about what made it a mass market experience where you can scale it around the world it took five to six years for uber as well take youtube so if you go down history it has taken four to seven years to make it a compelling product that people want to use and want to switch whatever they're doing switch behaviors and that's when you start seeing scale work now the current ai world all bets are off we'll see what happens openai pick a lot less but there had no competition that was the best thing going at that point in time

[C]

so

[G]

when i walked in i realized the thing the company wasn't doing was one they weren't innovating fast enough new products and for the first three months i felt like you know we're talking past each other so i took a weekend and i sat down and wrote all my business principles i'd learned in my entire life and in hindsight i would urge every leader to do that before i call it my belief document so i wrote it and i showed up and i printed eight copies and dropped it in front of everyone in my team saying read it let's debate like what is this i'm like this is my recipe this is why i act in certain ways this is why we have disagreements when i tell people no you can't hire that person they get really frustrated oh my god i've been looking for six months i'm like that's not a good person b's hire c's and a's hire a's and the more senior person you're gonna destroy the entire part of my organization that leader is not good oh i get it that's why you don't let me hire that person now maybe that's an a maybe that's b that's a different debate so it became so much easier when we were all singing from the same hymn book and now it's kind of mandatory reading and debating for every new senior person in our company they have to read my belief document which is kind of like sets the tone for how

[B]

we operate is it still one page

[G]

it's about eleven okay it's more like

[B]

a it's a little booklet but you

[G]

can summarize it with any ai engine but what happens like people wanted more clarification what does that mean well you want to read the long form you

[A]

can read the long form you want

[G]

to summarize it you can summarize it

[A]

what about product development did you come in with an idea around build versus buy a framework for evaluating those trade offs did that evolve once you got

[G]

into the actual role so look cybersecurity is the youngest subsector of technology it came about when we had connection the iphone suddenly everybody's on the iphone every firm every company is trying to get their applications on your phones which means we're all trying to take what used to be controlled access and make it accessible to every consumer so it came about twenty five years ago and every new piece of technology creates a whole series of new sets of risks a whole new set of product delivery now interestingly it's also one of the most innovative industries in the world because the bad guys aren't saying oh let's try the same thing we tried yesterday which got blocked every morning they wake up they're trying to find a new way to get into your business so you got highly innovative new set of market in cybersecurity and as a consequence the industry structure was extremely fragmented there were two thousand six hundred cybersecurity companies and the largest company had one point five percent share which was us so you have one and a half percent share of the market then you need to build a strategy how do i get from one and a half to ten to twenty yeah right because you look at every other piece of tech there are lots of people doubling their market share yeah yeah yeah so i think look this is a math problem the math problem is how do we get to ten twenty percent market share you reverse into that and say well you got to have a lot more stuff to sell to the same customer to have more market share and then we said okay great now where are the product categories where we can build products which are up and coming the good news is we live in a constantly evolving technology world so i sat down with the founder who was there then and chief product officer and we sat down and literally on a napkin wrote ai cloud and network cloud and ai were new and we had the right to win a network but we only did one out of six things in network so then we said how do we short circuit the four to seven

[B]

year problem only doing one thing in network when your name is networks it was in the name the whole time

[G]

that's right exactly but they got happy they got fat and happy eighteen billion dollar company you started at three when you went public this is great it's up six x what are we doing wrong nothing well i couldn't rest on that i had to go do my own six x thing so you sit there and you say okay we need to get to be number one in everything network security so it's going to take me forty seven years to build a great product that's not enough time so let's go find who we can buy and i know there's like this thing where i don't think many tech companies execute m and a well right

[A]

is that because of purchase price or post merger integration purchase price or just

[G]

identifying the wrong purchase price is an irrelevant artifact okay either it's going to work if it's going to work it's going to work phenomenally well or you're going to screw it up it's not what you paid it's what you're able to do with it right you could say that instagram was expensive or youtube

[A]

was working perfectly double click was expensive

[G]

they all work perfectly yeah right aol time one different story totally so it boils down as to how you execute past the price you pay for it so that's not that's not the relevant thing in tech when you buy a company you buy a team you buy an existing product and you buy a roadmap for the future the question is can you deliver on that roadmap can you execute accelerating that roadmap does it work so we wrote our little m and a manual we said because our product is best we gotta keep the founders there we gotta make sure we have the right people running the company and over time we've gotten really good at it we signed a term sheet and we asked the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap so we like it and they like it and if they don't agree on our expectations and we don't agree on theirs we don't buy the company makes sense we make them in charge my teams are having to work for them which makes them really unhappy and not many of them like it but i'm like look these guys went out there raised money kick their ass in your category and you want them to work too that makes no sense to me you're going to work for them learn from them some people get the hang of it some people move on which i'm fine with right so these people had less resources they struggled they hustled they built a product and they kicked our ass yeah that means so our job is to enable these people we look at them and say whatever business plan was when you were a small private company find me a business plan that's twice as assertive and bold than the one you had then so we buy them we pay the money but we also give them more than they would have gotten anywhere else because i'm sure we will slow them down a little bit i've got a bunch of people who try to ask questions

[A]

and get them to slow down but you're almost immediately expanding the tam on day one there's so many more you know what happened is we've built a

[G]

phenomenal system to take them to market yeah so we say we're going to take you to market i have three thousand people in the field you're going to find a way of catching their fascination making sure they're going to get excited and make money and three thousand people will go out there and see ten thousand customers some of them going to buy it yeah you're going to go with four resources and go meet twenty customers we're going to go to six thousand or ten thousand customers so that's where the secret sauce kicks in we've bought thirty four companies so far and we do this for our board i think our hit rate on things that have worked is over seventy percent it's amazing the last three are obviously new so we have to see and those are biggest ones but it has

[A]

worked out so far yeah do you find yourself ever going back to your mba your cfa for guidance on financial management of a public company or is it just so different that you can just pick it up because it feels like it feels like there's a whole

[B]

new set of tools one case study

[A]

that come into the toolbox when you're running a public company whether it's dividends large debt issuances buybacks there's m and a there's so many different things and just managing a stock price that a public company ceo has to do in some ways what do you think well

[G]

the mba is a social experience okay i think people go to business school and make a lot of friends and they get to know people so i have a classmate school with me and i can go got a deal with him i think it's not what you study in a case study it's a mindset it's a way of thinking it's kind of like learned behavior over time you get good at it you don't know why you do it but it becomes part of your sort of muscle memory and i think that's what happens i'm a huge student of business i spent a lot of time listening reading talking to people about this stuff and you just get muscle memory over time you just kind of get a sense of what the right thing to do is and i think the part which we sort of under appreciate people who do well are people who go back to first principles and try and abstract and say from a first principle basis is this important is not important for example i don't have to manage my stock price the stock price manages itself the stock price the market is sometimes smarter than individual ceo's we have to respect that there's a lot of players out there they're not all silly there's a reason your stock trades where it trades sometimes it trades because they don't trust you sometimes it trades there because they don't believe their prospects are as rosy as you believe they are sometimes it does well because anticipates the prospects are better than you think the market has a lot of different variables it assesses now to the extent that you're convinced this is the right direction to go you're convinced that you're executing well that's great if you believe there are some challenges or flaws in the way you're executing the market will give you a hint the market will tell you now look the market gets it wrong sometimes it gets it right many times it's just another variable you have to take into account but the idea of managing a stock price is about you

[A]

can but if the market gets it wrong you have a financial incentive to buy your stock yes we just did

[G]

the market said we hear this thing called ai is eating software we're going to dunk everybody because claude decided to put out some coding security product oh shit this is going to destroy a dollar three hundred industry because yeah daria

[A]

launched a product yeah i saw a chart that showed the mentions of moats on sec conference calls on public company earnings calls is going vertical have you been thinking about restating the moats to

[G]

you know what i did a few earnings call ago i put my earnings script into gemini and said assess my earnings script tell me honestly what do you think it's like turning into a psychologist says not sure what you're concerned about but you're trying to use the word momentum and exciting more times than you normally do calm down so no i'm not going to say modes yeah

[A]

yeah i'm okay with that i'm not

[G]

going to say modes we don't have to say modes but look you expect me to sit here and sort of speak my book but llms are phenomenal at the ninety percent problem ninety percent problem is make me a movie paint me a picture merge this photograph so ninety percent problem if you get it wrong it's not a big deal there's nothing destructive for the same reason you wouldn't want gemini driving there's also those

[B]

ninety percent problems there's so many of them where you will never know exactly if you did the best job or you just did an okay job like sometimes you get some signals but it's not as binary as let's say did we expose user data to a bunch of people that's a whole different that's

[G]

a whole different conversation but before you get to exposure data like you know you write a letter to respond to my emails okay fine it's eighty percent good enough much better than me having to go do each one of them so i think we're okay with the eighty ninety percent outcome but you would not let gemini drive your car or chatgpt drive your car and hallucinate for the same reason you don't want generative ai managing your cybersecurity because we're in the one percent business remember i'm trying to block that one guy who's going to get into your company and steal your data that's a one percent problem it's a zero point zero one percent problem so we rely on thousands of machine learning algorithms we rely on tons of pattern recognition domain specific data so we're trying to solve the one percent problem generative ai does not solve solved one percent problem it solves ninety percent problems we solve one percent problems so we're least threatened in this notion there are parts of our business where we could leverage generative ai to make it better yes and that you will see the code scanning thing is a perfect example cloud launches it people get petrified it's a three billion dollars industry we're a three hundred million dollars market and the market loses takes down three billion dollar market cap that day fantastic great now the market's getting it wrong let's go buy our stock so yeah the

[A]

market does get it wrong explain to me how the surface area of cybersecurity threats is changing i mean off the top of my head i could think of geopolitical risk more ai endpoints where vibe code is less secure and so you need more cybersecurity also just the hackers that are out there there are now ai enabled so their threats are getting more sophisticated what is this year looking like from just the scale of cybersecurity threats broadly so you know if

[G]

you go back to first principle what happens is every technologist who's positive and optimist builds software for the best use case for the best case they don't build it for the worst use case of it right you didn't build a knife and say oh let's not release a knife because people might stab each other you say well this is great you can do so many productive things with it right so we always build technology with an optimistic positive attitude and look at what ai is doing we're all building from positive ai attitude unless you start getting into debates about can we use for war or not but for the most part you're building it for the right reasons of positive attitude but it didn't build the first airport we took tsa in mind did we how are we going to make sure we could torture people and take them to line take their clothes off and shoes off so we didn't do it so we actually introduced security afterwards because we realized there are bad use cases unfortunately same thing happens with technology we build this stuff and say let's go use it people aren't going to do bad stuff and then you suddenly see an agent hacks somebody's business say oh shit we got to go figure out how to stop this agent from hacking this stuff our job in cybersecurity is to anticipate the bad use cases and try and throw a ring fence a series of guardrails or series of protection around technology to the extent technology evolves at a fast pace this is good for us because we have to constantly find antidotes to that then you have to make sure you're in the zeitgeist of what's happening so you want to be there so little flashback this industry before for the last eight years used to stay in their swim lanes there are five swim lanes in cybersecurity and say oh you do your thing i'll do my thing you do your thing i'll do my thing suddenly this is bullshit we should be in all five lanes so now we're in all five suddenly the whole industry has flipped over its head every time we do an acquisition we see five copycat acquisitions done in our industry around us because people say oh this guy must know something actually this guy knows nothing but thank you very much i just validated my t cell let's go so we're going doing that it is good for us when technology goes through a tremendous amount of evolution whether it's cloud whether it's ai whether it's people going back to coding it's funnily coding causes more activity to happen in a laptop it needs a whole different security in your laptop than you used to have put an mcp server there i need to protect it never we're putting any kinds of api access on your laptop so the constant evolution of technology demands more information innovation in our industry more innovation industry more deployment of technology around the world causes more demand for cybersecurity that's good of course we have a geopolitical set of issues like the more you go into war the more nation states are the most prolific cyber hackers in the world there are nation states out there who literally unofficially sponsor cyber activity because they need it revenue source it's also a training ground you keep doing it in peacetime so when i need it in wartime i can use it oh

[A]

sure right interesting yeah so there's this

[G]

tool cat and mouse game that's played in industry so geopolitical uncertainty economic uncertainty all these things are catalyst for activity and that's on one side on the other side if you look at it because the fact that we never designed it with security in mind and the base of the technology is evolving almost every enterprise there's behind the eight ball in the modernization they need and it's kind of like a hard decision to make right if you've never gotten hacked and you sit there and become complacent saying look i've been spending fifty million dollars a year and it's working and suddenly one day oh shit it's not working somebody just got into your business those are the best days for us by the way so somebody gets hits the fan i don't want to like get excited about people's tough times but no that's why we have a team which is our benevolence we have a team which you can call we don't charge you for that team to go help you and shit it's the fan because we know you're just about to get religion you're about to go transform everything in your infrastructure because you want to be at the bleeding edge and again security is kind of like this where you could spend too much or you could spend just right right now people generally the infrastructure is antiquated relative to where it needs to be there's a lot of transformation that needs to happen so i think this is going to be sort of a perpetual opportunity because combine that with the pace at which technology changes that's great that's kind of one part of it the other part of which was our insight three years ago if you take a look at what salesforce has done or workday has done you guys are young back then when i was working at fidelity we had twenty seven systems which combined made up customer relationship management because everybody had their own system you had keys you had like data references because you build your app at that time and cybersecurity security is kind of there like every customer has more cybersecurity vendors than technology vendors outside of cybersecurity because they're like oh i got eighty of them because i got everything solved like no dude you got to get them all together so we're in that phase where we're building the first sort of combined platform of cybersecurity and that's why we wanted to be in every swim lane and as the market converges we will be able to get people into less and less vendors where data can talk to each other because at the end

[E]

of the day

[G]

there's only two factors that go in our business one factor is if it's bad stop it if i know it's bad i'm pretty good at stopping it the problem cybersecurity is never known bad it's the one you don't know so all the money is in figuring out when you didn't find it at the door is something bad going on or somebody's trying to intrude into your business and that's where all the all the action in cyber security is so that requires data to be connected and this is the last fact leave it then you can go where you want but the average time to detect and remediate a cyber attack is four days in the united states now with ai the fastest time to attack a company and exfiltrate private data is twenty eight minutes wow i was shocked when i went to palo alto i heard that so in seven years we've gotten ourselves to one minute so we just got to get everybody else to one minute yeah yeah so a lot of lot of demand in the future

[A]

has anyone ever gotten a job working for you by saying sending you a physical letter

[G]

sending me a physical letter and gotten a job the times have

[B]

changed but you know that creates the

[A]

opportunity have they changed though it is a way to stand out you probably get a lot of cold email you

[G]

probably don't i get letters too letters i get pictures i get what advice

[A]

are you giving to young people who are entering the job job market or want to work at palo alto network

[G]

i think it's it's the wild west right now out there we have stopped looking at your cv okay we run hackathons every second weekend sure and anybody can vibe code and get ahead of people around them or hire them wow i don't care when you went to school that's awesome because i just think people have to learn this is something that has not been taught in schools yeah i'm glad if you go to school is good you can you have social skills you have friends this is good we want you know mentally balanced people yeah this is good but we want to make sure that you know where the world is going i'm a huge optimist on ai creating job opportunities i think we'll go through a transformation period but we're trying to find people who know how to i have to overwhelm my company with more people who know how to use ai than less people yeah right now more people don't know how to use ai in my business less people know how to use it i think if traditional company traditional include ourselves there's companies who've been around for ten years fifteen years want to get back and win in the next iteration of technology we have to transform as fast as we can that requires more people who can use ai than less people any ceo walks in here and tells me they have more people who know how to use ai than less they're going to win that's the biggest need of the hour so i'm out there trying to hire people so if anybody's listening to this and they think they are the best vibe coders the best user of creative ai write

[A]

me a letter amazing i hope you do i hope you send me a letter vive coded product well there is an api for sending physical letters there's also an api for sending what's called lumpy mail which is a letter have you ever gotten a letter that has like it looks like it has something inside of it so it's like it's

[G]

lumpy usually that goes into our mail room and goes into the bomb squad

[A]

yeah exactly you may find it the incinerator because people figured out there's an arbitrage there because you're more likely to open an envelope that looks like a package and you'll open that and then you just get the ad unfortunately some

[G]

of us have people who open them because they don't want us to have

[A]

the risk of course i imagine it's pretty important in your role well that

[G]

has to be has to pass the

[A]

regular physical filters as well well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us this is fantastic let's do this again soon all right and before we sign off let me tell you about vibe co where dtc brands b two b startups and ai companies advertise on streaming tv pick channels target audiences measure sales just like on meta and let me also tell you about console dot com comma console builds ai agents that automate seventy percent of it hr and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets and you heard you heard eric lyman mention shopify earlier shopify of course is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai agents jordi is there anything else in the timeline that we should close out with any breaking news that we need to get to and while you look that up let me tell everyone about sentry sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast that's why one hundred fifty thousand organizations use it to keep their apps working there's

[B]

some breaking news what is that anthropic researchers are departing to launch a neolab in talks to raise capital for a new startup at a one billion dollars valuation yeah what a crazy time to

[A]

launch a neolab weren't we just asking tyler about this is there going to be another neolab is the boom over

[B]

it's notable because we just haven't seen a lot of people leaving anthropic yeah

[A]

that's right but i'm very interested to see what they wind up launching i'm also very sad that we didn't get to our lightning round today we had a bunch of great people scheduled of course we ran long but we will have them back on the show soon to get all the updates there let me tell you about railway railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers databases and more while railway automatically takes care of scaling monitoring and security and finally let me tell you about cognition they're the makers of devon the ai software engineer crush your backlog with your personal ai engineering team and with that i think we can play

[B]

our credits what a fun show what a great show nikesh a legend gustav

[A]

tk whenever we travel everything kind of comes together and we and we have to do a catch up episode but this one was was one for the books tons of great conversations thank you

[B]

so much for listening you have a

[A]

leave us five stars on apple podcasts and spotify and we will see you monday tomorrow or monday we love you goodbye i

[B]

i'll face myself to cross

[E]

out what i become

[D]

era myself and

[A]

let go of what i