← This Week in Startups
This Week in Startups
Venture Roundtable: SpaceX IPO, AI's PR Crisis, and the Defense Tech Bubble | E2270
01:28:07
Loading summary
Transcript262 lines
- [00:00]
A
All right everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is April 1, 2026. This is not an April Fool's joke.
- [00:11]
B
This week in startups is brought to you by Paper os. Building an empire. Paper OS offers the largest library of AI driven workflows for both founders and fund managers. Whether you're raising capital, launching a fund or waiting through diligence, Paper OS unlocks simplicity and scale for your ever growing empire. Claim your $10,000 credit@paperos.com northwest registered agent. Get more when you start your business with northwest, in 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more@northwestregisteredagent.com twist and every for all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back office administration needs, visit every IO
- [01:00]
A
Delian is back on the program. It's going to be based folks, with me, my co host and who will be the world's second greatest moderator today, Alex Wilhelm. Alex, let's get started here. But before we do, I always like to applaud. Plod. And I take my plot pin. Oh, you use it on the wrist and I press the button. Here we go. Deli. And I'm now recording everything. And I have all my action items. Action item. Buy secondary. Buy more secondary in Delian's company. What is Varda trading for on the secondary market? I need to increase my ownership.
- [01:38]
C
2050 a share, baby.
- [01:39]
A
2050 a share. Okay, I'm coming in at 1925. I'm coming in at 1925 with my bid. Applaud. I applaud you. Is there an offer?
- [01:49]
B
There is an offer. If you go to Plaud, AI Twist, P, L, A, U, D, A, I, slash twist. Use the code twist, save 10% and then you won't forget everything you're supposed to do. And then Jason won't send you late night slacks asking where the thing is that you promised him you'd do, which everyone absolutely loves.
- [02:06]
A
Yeah, well, you took the job, Alex. It was your choice to come work for me.
- [02:10]
B
Look, everyone. Everyone gets to make a mistake in their life. I've seen several. You know. Here we are. We also have more guests than just Delian from Founders Fund and Varda. We also have Sal Churi here. He is the man over at Trust Ventures, general partner there. Think regulated industries, companies like Basepower, Jason. Firms that we absolutely love. Sal, thanks for being here.
- [02:28]
D
Thanks for having me, Sol.
- [02:29]
A
I love Base Power.
- [02:31]
D
Best company.
- [02:33]
A
Yum yum on that one. Just tell us in one sentence or two why you made that bet.
- [02:37]
D
Grid's broken. We need to fix it. You look at US versus China energy generation, they've 10x in the past 25 years. We're flat. If we don't fix it, we are in big trouble. Everything we want to do requires power. So BASE has taken a pretty novel approach to solving that problem. They're putting batteries on people's homes. So you get a battery to back up your house. Instead of spending, you know, 40, 50,000 bucks on a Tesla Powerwall or a generator, you get a battery for 500 bucks, which is more like the cost of a plane ticket. BASE puts a battery on your house. They back you up when the, when the grid goes down. But lots of benefits to the grid. And then BASE has basically a distributed arbitrage machine sitting at your house. So all day it's taking all those intermittent sort of solar, wind, all these incredibly cheap renewables that are amazing. We just don't use them and using them. So poles and wires move energy through space, batteries move energy through time. So basically just carpet bombing the grid with batteries to lower energy costs and, and kind of help us use some of those renewables that today are really cheap, but mostly underutilized.
- [03:41]
A
So genius. Love the product, love the entire concept.
- [03:45]
B
If you want more about Basepower, we did have the Founder on episode 2190 from October 2025. And Jason, we're joined by yet another guest. We have Larson Jensen from Harpoon Ventures, former seal, now backing companies like Robust Intelligence and Merlin Labs. Larson, glad you're here.
- [04:01]
E
Happy to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.
- [04:02]
B
All right, so the, the thing that happened right before we jumped on air, everybody, is that Bloomberg reported that SpaceX has filed confidentially to go public. This means they're targeting probably a June ipo. Lots to come on the story, Jason, but finally we're here. We're making steps towards what could be the biggest IPO of all time. No inside information, but were you surprised by the timing?
- [04:22]
A
No, I have. I don't want to say I have inside information, but everybody in the valley is buzzing about this. There's been tons of secondary and all kinds of transactions for the last three years where people were either parrying their position or building their position in the name. And I think the bigger, most interesting part of this is Elon Inc. Again, no inside information. I've met Elon a couple of times. It's quite possible that this is, you know, the flop and then the turn in the river are to come. And if this is the flop and the turn in the river to Come the next discussion is going to be merging with Tesla and then you're going to be able to buy the stock dollar sign E L O N and you know, maybe boring company neuralink come in next and you can just buy a 10 trillion dollar company that's solving the hardest problems on the planet, led by, let's call it what it is. Elon is the, the greatest entrepreneur of this generation and you know, top easily top five of all time. Some people would argue number one, two, three, and I'll leave it up to other people to make that decision. But Certainly he's got 20 years left in him and the best is probably yet to come.
- [05:42]
B
Sal, $1.75 trillion theoretically is what the company is targeting. We're also going to possibly see OpenAI and Anthropic list this year. So we could have essentially three, you know, several hundred billion or trillion dollar IPOs this year. Is this a net positive for startup exits or is this an entirely different conversation than what we'll be talking about when we Discuss Smaller company IPOs?
- [06:03]
D
I mean, look, it's sort of like testing the limits of the term startup, right? The private markets have really developed over the past couple of years and is able to support a company like SpaceX to this point is kind of wild. When it lists, it'll be one of the largest companies in the world. And as Jason points out, you might end up getting a company that is kind of an amalgam of all of Elon's industries, which looks almost like a parallel economy in itself. It's kind of an insane, it's an insane thing. I think it's gonna be great. I mean there's so much liquidity tied up in this company. There's so many people who are so convicted on it. But I think it'll be one of the greatest wealth creation events in history. You think about folks who live in Austin, we're all like, oh my goodness, buy a house now because it's about to get ugly. But I think the same is true for all the folks who have been invested in SpaceX for a decade now. And even more recent folks like we're investors in xai. I think we're all looking at this and sort of thinking about the FL flop in the river as Jason says.
- [07:03]
B
All right, so Dellion, you're the founders fund kid on the show today. If you go to the portfolio page, the first entry, the first thing is SpaceX. So tell us what the firm is thinking, what are you shooting for and what will your return be on a net IRR basis from your SpaceX checks?
- [07:17]
C
Yeah. Do you think it's probably going to be one of the greatest venture investments of all time? Yeah, I think we originally got involved with somewhere around like 2009 or so. We were one of the first big external checks. And then along the way continue to double down across a variety of our funds, including of our sort of latest growth funds. What are we expecting? Look, I think SpaceX has basically built up the best telecommunications business ever made through Starlink, and they're obviously using that advantage to tackle some even broader markets. They also are probably the only people that have the ability to really take us to the moon and Mars in a super meaningful. Who knows what the sort of uncapped potential upside of that is. See, what are we expecting? Yeah, it's obviously going to be huge wealth creation for basically all our early LPs. And I think we've also proven that we're willing to have extremely long hold periods. I think from our very first investments today, it's been something like 18 years of hold. And so we are happy to be very patient.
- [08:25]
B
Capital Larson, you guys are in Astranis, so you're in the satellite game. Do you think that there's going to be real competition on the space Internet question in the couple of years? Because I know Amazon's getting involved, China has the thing going on. I'm just curious if you think that they're going to run away with it.
- [08:39]
E
They might run away with it, but I also think there's a lot of form factors that are going to make a lot of sense here. Like, you know, I think one thing that Astronis is doing that SpaceX isn't, to date at least, is servicing, you know, specific countries, specific companies. And so if you want your own dedicated Bron bad access, you can get that through Astronis and not necessarily through SpaceX. But SpaceX is certainly much larger, especially right now. I think there's a lot of other things that are really exciting about SpaceX. So obviously LP liquidity is something that's been top of mind for every single LP across the board. Now, given how many of them have, you know, interest in SpaceX right now, priming the pump, getting some liquidity back to LPs to redeploy it into the venture ecosystem, I think is going to be a net positive. Also, when you think about the early employees of SpaceX, you know, every early founder I think can be more aggressive if they have some cushion in their bank account, they can buy a house, they can do these things, they're not pressured to exit early. So founders that we backed their former SpaceX or the new ones that are going to be starting new companies, I think this is a net positive for them to be more risk seeking. And I also think that by virtue of SpaceX going to retail now we have the opportunity for young kids to have access to this in their sort of like, you know, in their brokerage accounts. Effectively, like we have our kids in these brokerage accounts. My kids who are 9 and 7 don't stop asking about when they can buy SpaceX. And I think this is a net positive for the future generation to also be a part of the most ambitious country or excuse me, company probably in world history and all the things that Elon's building. So I think there's a lot of positives that are coming from this IPO that are more than just meets the eye. Super happy for the founders fund guys. You guys are the goat. You guys crush it. But I also think there's a lot of other beneficiaries out there in the ecosystem that could lead for entrepreneurship to be even better in the decades ahead because of SpaceX.
- [10:16]
B
Jason, you're always talking about, you know, getting more people to start companies and so forth. What do you think the liquidity effect will be on founder formation, if you will, in the next, I don't know, couple of years.
- [10:25]
A
I've been doing this job for decades now. Not a lot of people have worked with more startups than me over 6, 600 investments. But honestly, every IO might be the exception because every IO is working with every new startup. It's the all in one finance, banking and HR app. They understand startups and they're now at over 1,000 startups. And that means first time founders working on their pre seed rounds, but also veteran teams who've raised a series A or beyond. They can partner with every. And they are. And why are they partnering with them? Just to scale up their business, build out their teams, take care of things that are not core to your product or your service. That means banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance. Everything you need to run your company is done in one place by one trusted partner. And they're going to give you 3% cash back on all company purchases sent directly to your bank account. So it's time to visit every IO and get back to focusing on what really matters for your business. Every IO is going to help you do that. E V E R Y IO well, you know, one of the great things about America is the founders are so Based and all bought in. When it comes to entrepreneurship that the first thing founders do, much to the chagrin of their wealth managers who are dweebs and dorks who get paid 1 point X percent of your 4 or 5% net after taxes returns. They try to stop them from investing in other startups, but that's kind of the way reason why America is so great is because entrepreneurs the second they get any money in their pocket are like how can I, how can I blow this money? How can I 10x how can I a thousand exit let's go to Vegas. Maybe I'll buy a car. For me, it was buying like, you know, a Corvette and a One Touch espresso machine. When I saw Weblogs Inc. In 2005, like two big, you know, $70,000 Corvette and a $3,000 espresso machine were my big purchases. But I was then like, hey, I wonder if I can angel invest in companies now. You take other countries like Europe, Epcot center and when a family gets money in Epcot Center, Italy, France, all they do is try to protect it. I have to protect this. I have to protect this. We have to buy castles and build moats and they never recirculate that money. The reason why Australia is doing particularly well is because the founders of Atlassian and the founders of Canva all started venture firms and started to re circulate that. That's what I suspect will happen here. You'll have a bunch of people retire from venture capital. Brian Singerman led founders fund for a bunch and I think he gave over the reins. So you'll have people who are impacted I think. I'm sure the SpaceX thing probably had something to do with that, you know, and they'll call in rich or whatever, but then they'll be like, you know what? Doug Leone came back to Sequoia yesterday and it was like the day before April Fools. And I'm like, I was always saying Doug is retired, but every time I go to the office and hang out with the Sequoia boys and gals there, Doug's there walking around. So I don't understand like this retirement, I think it's going to be a massive amount of recirculation and I think it's going to save these IPOs. If Stripe goes out, Discord goes out, SpaceX and then these two wild cards, OpenAI and Anthropic. This is going to reinvigorate venture capital which under Biden's four years of the wrath of Lena Khan was considered the worst asset Class. Now we're going to go back to it being the best asset class. And everybody's going to want to slice after the last five years of this is a complete, utter disaster. What fool would ever put their money into venture capital? So if you're going to be in the startup game, you need to have like actual true resilience. And man, I got to tell you, that was, that was trying for the four years during Lina Khan to be like, is this even worth it? I heard so many VCs, is it worth it to be in this? Like, none of these companies are ever going to go public. None can ever merge. And here we are. It's happening, folks. Venture capital is back on the menu.
- [14:28]
B
That kind of brings us into the first thing I wanted to dig into today, which is the difference between how we talk about AI and technology today here on the show and in similar places in and around the text scene. And some public polling data that just dropped. I'm a little bit worried about that. What we're seeing is a lot of technologists building the future and a lot of the public being kind of left behind, in a sense, concerned, worried about job loss. There's a Quinnipac poll that shows Americans are using more and more AI, but numbers on trust and so forth are going down. Now Sal, you wrote a book called the Trust Revolution, literally all about this type of thing. I'm curious. One, how big is the gap between the public and the technology space today? And is it a, a bridgeable chasm before something bad happens out the election box that leads to onerous regulation crimping everyone's fun?
- [15:16]
D
Yeah. So I spend all day helping solve regulatory complexity. I'm a recovering law professor. This is like what I focus on all day. I think there's a couple of things to be thinking about with respect to AI at data centers. 80% of people in both parties, this is not a partisan thing, are skeptical of or negative on AI and or data centers. Right. If you look at the first industrial revolution as an analog, like, you know, there were, you had the Pinkertons firing shots alongside Frick right At, you know, Carnegie Steel production facility. So we've got trillions of dollars in capex sitting behind chain link fences effectively undefended. Like, you know, it's a real concern. And then there's another dynamic where you've got folks like Sam and Dario, like they're out there raising like billions and billions of dollars by saying we're just going to replace people. And you know, in many ways it doesn't make them the best spokespeople because the average person hears that and actually thinks things are much further along than they are. And then you've got some CEOs are actually starting to let people go and using AI as an excuse. Now, I actually don't even think that that's really so true yet, but it will become true. And so you're already seeing this kind of preemptive backlash. Now. At the same time, you've got things like robotics that are really starting to take off the embodied AI stuff. One of the companies that we're most excited about is physical intelligence. It's a visual language action model. So it's sort of bringing that LLM concept into the physical world. Can pilot a drone, can run a surgery robot, can run an autonomous vehicle. These things are starting to reach into the world of atoms and not just the world of bits. And I think it's going to start touching a lot more people. So I think we're headed into the World War three of regulatory fights. We've, we've already kind of engaged on a lot of these across the States, but there's going to be, there's going to be significant political backlash to this.
- [17:07]
B
There's this guy named Jason and he recently had a tweet all about how we've reached AGI. Millions of jobs are being lost as we speak. Retirement of entire careers, people getting kind of locked out of the economy. Jason, are you to blame for the public sentiment crisis here?
- [17:21]
C
Put it.
- [17:22]
A
Putting myself aside, I have my own feelings, but our industry has a terrible communication problem. You know, you have on one side, Dario, who is like, it's over, all jobs are over. AGI is almost here. Skynet's going to be revealed. We're blowing everything up. And then you have on the other side, Jensen, who is like, don't worry, every cab driver is going to be a chauffeur and just carry your bags. Which is also kind of a little bit too lovey dovey. Obviously, you know, there's no drivers in Waymos. And his position was the other week. Yeah, you'll, you'll still have a driver in a Waymo. They'll be serving you coffee or whatever. Like that's not happening. You know who's done a great job? Michael Dell. You know why Michael Dell's done a great job is because he put $6 billion of his own money, which is a fraction of his net worth. Forget about this stupid giving pledge. If you just say to Americans, hey, we're going to get the other 40% of people who are not participating in the equity holding of these great companies. If you just change that and everybody's going to feel differently. And you know how you know this? Anybody who's on this call who has exposure to a venture firm in SpaceX, in quad or any of these companies, we feel great about the economy. Any of our family members who have exposure to our venture firms or, you know, who have a 401k with Google in it or Nvidia in it, they feel great. People who don't feel great, they don't own equities, they don't own a piece of the prize. What we really need to do in my mind is be honest with people. There are going to be entire jobs retired. Just like phone operators and receptionists are gone, the typing pool is gone, the mail room's gone. Society went on. It's not a big deal. Bad jobs that can be automated always get retired. And it may happen a little faster this time. At the same time, by the way, all of these great entrepreneurs, all of these great philanthropists, instead of putting money into non profits which take 60 cents on the dollar and they pay these, you know, overpriced mids to, you know, be in $110 office space, which is better than all of our collective office space, and they sit there and, you know, yenta it up and you know, decide they're going to try to save the world while 70 cents on the dollar goes to their comp and their office space. Just give people directly some goddamn shares of SpaceX and Anthropic and the entire problem is solved. And then America will be unstoppable. Every American has $10,000 in the market. They're going to look at it totally different. They're going to watch their net worth go up. So I would say we should start a new giving pledge and it should be based on Michael Dell's Trump accounts in America. What do they call them? What were they called before Trump accounts?
- [19:51]
C
Save America or something.
- [19:53]
A
Invest America.
- [19:54]
C
Invest America. Invest America.
- [19:55]
A
Here's an idea. It's easier than ever to build a great new product. And launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier. But as my experienced founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware C corp that's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition and you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. Just a few clicks. They're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise. A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done, and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes. Plus, you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step to step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized even as your business grows. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C Corp, regardless of where in the US you're operating out of. Northwestregisteredagent.com twist everybody on everybody working in Silicon Valley gives 5% of their shares that they make. They get some great tax benefit and they give it to Invest America. If you told me, hey, Jcal, will you pledge 5% of all the Uber and Robinhood shares to Invest America? I'd be like, sure. If it keeps us from having a revolution in socialism, why not make it opt in and see if you can get a thousand shareholders in these great companies to join. It solves the entire problem. Because then if there is job displacement and somebody needs to take two years off, they can tap that Invest America account if they're destitute and need to be retrained. Or at least they're not going to be scared about retirement. Anyway, that's my TED Talk. Thanks for coming.
- [21:37]
B
I want to get Dillion in here because Founders Fund is relatively outspoken. I was just reading Trey's post in the Free post the press, sorry about industrialization and the need for public private partnership and so forth. Do you guys think about the political issues regarding AI and market sentiment? Because I think if anyone would have a strident opinion, it might be Founders Fund.
- [21:56]
C
Think that, you know, we obviously come from a, you know, sort of more, you know, sort of libertarian sort of point of view where it's, you know, sort of, you know, sort of like technology accelerate and, you know, sort of deal with the saddle implications, you know, sort of later. But there was this, you know, sort of famous email between Peter and Zuckerberg that, you know, sort of got leaked out from back in sort of 2020 that basically articulated this point of, you know, if more of the population doesn't get to, you know, participate in the, you know, sort of, you know, growing sort of economy, you are going to start to see this type of more sort of socialist revolution. And it was a discussion about that, plus Zuckerberg being one of the more prominent millennials in his generation to try and sort of figure out how to sort of fight back against it. Last week I got to be sort of on stage at the Helen Valley Forum, which is this event that I've been organizing for a couple of years. And we do our best to sort of highlight sort of both sides of the aisle. And so I highlighted an argument that I'm not saying I necessarily agree with, but was kind of interesting to hear from, which is from this panel with Vinod Khosla and Senator Cantwell. Vinod's sort of idea was as a mechanism to start to sort of lift up the sort of bottom of the economic totem pole, was to basically make it so there's a singular tax that is the equivalent tax rate for whether it's capital gains basically or income. And if you do that, you actually can then eliminate the bottom 125 million from the tax basis. Anybody that basically makes anything below 100, 125K. And so I do think you do need to start to think about how do you make it so that with these AI productivity gains you have a much broader portion of the population that gets to particip in this upside. Some of it may come from things like Invest America, where you're getting to participate in the upside. Some of it is remove some of the economic drag of the lower part of the population, for example, taxes.
- [23:43]
B
Yeah. Just really quickly, here's the email in question. And Thiel wrote, when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, the one will have negative capital for a long time, find it hard, start accumulating capital, one form of real estate. And if no one has a stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it. I guess we're operationalizing that, Jason, and try to put it into, into practice. So Larson, are you going to follow Jason and put 5% of your net worth into other people's accounts so they don't vote for.
- [24:07]
E
You know, I'll, I'll disagree with Jason on some of this. And I think this is actually coming. I don't live in Silicon Valley, I don't think many people actually do on the call here today, but some of my friends that I go and see at my kids birthday parties, like own car dealerships and they're the ones telling me that they're using Claude code and they're replacing workers at their own car dealership. And so I think it's actually happening. And I think the other thing, it's one thing to sort of redistribute wealth through whatever the mechanism is, like universal basic income. Some of this, like letting people participate is one thing, but I think, you know, most of us here, and I think most people in life put a lot of their identity behind what they do. And it's easy for Silicon Valley to trivialize that. You know, some jobs aren't important and you get to go do something else, but these jobs are important to those people. And so I think we're walking our way right into a bear trap. And part of the reason why Trump got elected is because he wanted to reshore jobs that are offshore to China. And so China became the boogeyman, and I think rightfully so. And a large part of his base supported Trump because of that. What I'm concerned about now is that the tech industry is walking to the same trap again. That is a Bernie narrative, is an AOC narrative, is an Elizabeth Warren narrative. And tech has aligned itself, like it or not, with the Trump administration. And so here we are where we're gonna walk ourselves into a trap. I think again, that if we don't do things right and we don't actually think through the consequences of this as a society, we could walk ourselves into a position where AI is taking jobs the same way that China took our jobs. And we have a huge disenfranchised worker base that isn't like upset about the fact that they're doing a job, isn't upset the fact that they're being a cabbie and now all of a sudden they get to carry luggage. They might like it, they're providing for their family. Like, I can't speak for them, but I think everybody that has a job that is providing for their families takes some, at least on the. Being a male, you take some pride in that and you want to do that. And so I think we're walking our way into that sort of like blindly.
- [25:54]
A
Yeah.
- [25:55]
E
And I think it's just too, too, too simple for Silicon Valley to say, hey, we're going to pay you and everything's going to be fine. I don't think that's going to happen, to be clear.
- [26:01]
A
Larson, I am with you. I am not a fan of UBI because it takes away purpose, but I am for taking a look at the disparity in wealth, which is incredibly real. And it's going to get, we all
- [26:12]
E
know it's going to get worse.
- [26:13]
A
It's going to get, going to get.
- [26:14]
E
It's like we're going to have the first time founder who's like a billionaire, Outcome one dude with sort of like AI agents, his company. That's inevitable, that's going to happen. And then it feeds into the Elizabeth Warren AOC stuff again, where the wealth disparity is there. And so I think, especially, I think this is already playing into the Democrats favor if, you know, the right somehow can get its act together and put some policies in place and some ideas in place and at least have the conversation.
- [26:37]
A
I don't even look at it.
- [26:37]
E
I think we are.
- [26:38]
A
I don't even look at it as a political issue. I look at it as being a thoughtful member of the elite, the 1%, the 2%, the creators. If you're a thoughtful person, you probably give a bigger tip than a person who's, you know, part of the 99% or the 90%. You probably give huge tips. I give absurdly large tips because I'm like, well, I got lucky in life. I think we need to explain to Americans that we're all in this together a little more esprit de corpse. And the problem is entrepreneurs look at the nonprofit sector and they're like, the nonprofit industrial complex is a bunch of who are maxing, who are wasting all this money. And they just think, well, I don't want to do that. And then they're like, the government's corrupt and they're doing fraud. So why would I want to pay more taxes or have my seize my wealth seized? So there's got to be a third way to give back. All of us want to give back. Like, who on this call, raise your hand if you're going to give away at least 5% of your net worth. It's like, everybody.
- [27:40]
E
Like, everybody is.
- [27:41]
A
Everybody is. So why don't we just get ahead of it and say, listen, if we all get lucky and we hit these home runs, we're going to give away at least 5%, 10%. And this is how I'm choosing to do it. And I'm going to chose. Choose to do it when I'm a little bit younger and choosing to do it now before the pitchforks come off and before we get 20 mandamis in office and before AOC becomes president. I'm thinking very pragmatically, Larson, like, and if you have a better suggestion, I don't know, Sal, you want to get in on this?
- [28:07]
E
I think you got great points there. Yeah. Curious to yourself.
- [28:10]
D
It's not just about redistributing the wealth, though, I think is Larson's point. It's not just about, hey, like, you're getting crushed by this big tsunami. I Do think it's really important here though to, to bring a bit of a dose of historical humility to these things, at least on the side of the equation of like knowing what's going to happen at the, at the outset of the Industrial revolution when the steam engine was created, people thought no one would ever work in factories again. And of course then the Industrial revolution happened. Right. It's like, I think we're just like very bad at predicting how these things happen. What I think is, is obvious here is that the world's going to look really different and so that that rate of change is going to be greater than it ever has been in the past. But I think it's, it's hard to like when, when you start to say hey let's, let's, let's let someone on a marble dais in Washington just write a law that's going to fix this problem. It's like, I don't know if you're going to like the results of that. It's, it's very hard to predict how these things play themselves out. You don't want to constrain people from being able to build.
- [29:05]
A
The world greatest moderator and the world's greatest angel investor needs the world's greatest solution for managing his funds. So I want to tell you about Paper OS and why we use it here at our own companies launch and the syndicate. Paper OS has helped over 10,000 founders and investors, including me, automate their workflows. Their tools will help take you through handling the operational details. I don't want to worry about because I'm busy meeting founders and looking for great companies. Paperos has made the onboarding process process so seamless for limited partners. Their investor intake forms automated subscriptions. It just takes all the busy work out of managing our syndicate and it automates capital calls investor accreditation, tax filings. These are the chores of running a fund or a syndicate and they have saved me and my team hundreds actually. Now it's probably thousands of hours. Our friends at Paper OS want to give you a complimentary $10,000 credit. Just go to paperos.com twist and if you prefer price discrimination you can go to paperos.com disgrazian I want to bring
- [30:06]
B
up some data, just kind of put this into context. Here's a poly market we're tracking that goes into the chances of an AI data center moratorium being passed. Bringing this up because I believe AOC and Bernie have both endorsed the idea. Kind of a small market, not a ton of volume yet, but what's really interesting to me is this number isn't zero because to me the chance of this actually happening is zero. But the market's pricing it much higher than that.
- [30:28]
A
How does it reconcile? I got to know how they reconcile this. Is it a moratorium like in Maine or Vermont where there's no data centers, or is it.
- [30:35]
B
No, it's anywhere in the United States. Okay, so this is a federal ban on.
- [30:39]
A
Wait, wait, it's a federal law or it could be a local ban.
- [30:44]
B
No, this particular market resolves to. Yes, if it's a federal ban.
- [30:48]
A
National ban. It has to be a national ban. Okay. Because that's important because the chances of it being a local ban I think are 100%.
- [30:53]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [30:54]
A
Somebody is going to do something dumb there. What do you think, Dalian?
- [30:56]
C
Yeah, I think the likelihood of a federal band at least obviously in the current administration feels like, you know, sort of 0% chance, but I think it was AOC plus Bernie actually did put forth a, you know, sort of bill to try and, you know, sort of, you know, put a, you know, entire federal ban in place. I think there's something like eight or nine states now that have, you know, sort of bills, you know, currently, you know, sort of in work. I think it's like New York, Illinois, Washington, sort of a few others. I do think almost certainly we'll see, you know, probably 15 plus states that have a moratorium on it within the next like 18 years or two months. I think the likelihood that like a Texas or Florida ever put a moratorium on this, you know, sort of zero. And I think it's one of these like self immolating, more left, you know, sort of state habits where it's like, yeah, we're not going to have this like economic opportunity. We're not going to like, you know, you know, you know, advance our grid. It just seems like a sort of insane, insane outcome. The one place where this has a benefit, it is. You know, I admit that like I may not always be the most sort of bullish on space based data centers, but if you can't build them on earth, then if space is the only option, definitely good place to do it.
- [31:57]
B
Shout out Shout out Star Cloud One of my favorite companies in the entire Larson.
- [32:00]
A
Is this free money? Is this free money? This 26% on polymarket?
- [32:04]
E
I don't think it's free money. I'd have to read through it a little bit more. I don't know.
- [32:08]
A
You think there's a chance of a federal ban?
- [32:10]
E
I don't think that's what this poly market says. I was looking at it very briefly. I think it's like a ban anywhere in the United States, not at a federal level.
- [32:16]
D
Everywhere in the United States in a democracy where 80%. So in that case, both parties are negative on it. Like, I don't think it's a zero. It's hard to conclude that what, what other thing that 80% of people across the aisle agree about would you put at a zero percent chance of happening?
- [32:30]
A
One more time, Alex, let's read because the devil's in the details here. I'm thinking about wagering here because if it is 24% chance, people think it's 24 chance of a federal ban, I'm putting 100 dimes on this. I'm going to collect my 24K.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah. So let's just see if my reading comprehension holds up here live. So here is the actual market rules. This market will resolve to. Yes. If a bill erecting a qualifying moratorium that prohibits or suspends approvals for new data center construction or major expansions anywhere in the US is passed into law by December 31, 2026. So my read of that was it is a ban across the entire nation. And I think someone else read that as if there's any ban any place. But that's just not how I think the whole thing here reads.
- [33:15]
E
Okay, anywhere versus everywhere. I think that's our arbitrage there. So if we can understand that, we could place a bet.
- [33:19]
A
All right.
- [33:20]
B
It's no markets.
- [33:22]
A
I mean, I don't mean to hijack the program here, Alex, but I think we should comment as five white men. Delian, are you a white guy? I don't know. I think so. Kind of somewhere.
- [33:35]
C
Somewhere like that, you know, than your average white man.
- [33:38]
A
Okay, so as five white men, what do we think of in Mark Andreessen's comments on retard maxing and that self reflection for entrepreneurs is a terrible idea? I think we have to discuss this. Do we have the clip of him? I mean, it's.
- [33:53]
B
I'm going to pull up the Mark Andreessen introspection quote right now from the David Cerna podcast presented by Ramp.
- [33:58]
A
Okay. Or not to ramp. You don't have any levels of introspection?
- [34:02]
C
Yes. Zero. As little as possible.
- [34:04]
E
Why?
- [34:05]
C
Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't know. I just. I find people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem. And it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.
- [34:13]
A
So I've read obviously 400, I think
- [34:15]
C
now, 10 biographies of 50 space entrepreneurs. And that was one of the most surprising things. Like, what's the most surprising thing that you've learned from this?
- [34:20]
A
Like, oh, they have little or zero introspection. Like, Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up, he's like, I like building Walmart.
- [34:27]
D
I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts.
- [34:29]
C
And just kept doing it over and over again. And you probably know if you go back 400 years ago, it never, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, the whole idea of, I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspective and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.
- [34:43]
A
Say more about that.
- [34:44]
C
Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff at any prior point. Right. It's all, it's, it's, it's all construct.
- [34:50]
A
Who, who wants to take the first shot at this? I'm going to back clean up on this one. Let me. Okay, Larson, get in there.
- [34:54]
E
My buddy actually sent him the YouTube channels on maxing, actually somebody who works with me here at Harpoon. And so that's how Mark found out about Maxing. He's like, hey, what you're trying to say is actually this. And it actually took off from there. Obviously, my buddy didn't coin maxi, neither did Mark. But ultimately that's what, you know, Mark's been running with in recent, in recent interviews. And I think that, you know, it's, it's an interesting point. I mean, I'd be curious, is Elon being introspective or is he just going and building and waking up and, you know, moving forward? So I think it's an interesting way to think about things.
- [35:22]
A
I think Elon's been pretty clear about this move forward. Yeah, rumination is like very, it turns out, rumination, which he mentions. I thought the key quote here, Delian, was it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. And that was the tell for me. Rumination is a very unique way and dwelling on the past is a really unique way to make your life miserable. And what I've always found is people who have, like, obsessed about the problems in the past and who are fearful of the future and can't live in the present and, you know, have some purpose in the present, they don't. They just don't accomplish a lot. So if you're talking about this extreme pursuit Delian, if you're going to sit there and be like, I made seven mistakes in my startup and my career. I made 14 more and there's 21 mistakes. And then I went home and my spouse told me I had these other five things that I'm a fuck up on. And then, you know what, if I have another 28 mistakes I make in the future, you're just going to be paralyzed. And there's something magical about just having a purpose and executing. That's I think, what Mark is talking about. And it's for elite folks. You need only watch Michael Jordan. In a recent interview, they that famous interviewer from Good Morning Good Morning America interviewed him about his NASCAR team and he talks about competition and it's like, yeah, no, no, I'm a miserable person because I'm so competitive.
- [36:56]
B
Gayle King.
- [36:57]
A
Gayle King. It's, it's awesome. Interview anytime. Michael Jordan's interview. Watch it. If you haven't seen that incredible documentary Last Dance, like, that's who Mark Andreessen is talking about. Extreme pursuit Dalian requires. Do not overthink this. Because if you overthink it, you're going to be like, well, what's the point of bouncing a ball and putting it in the basket more times than the other person? That's meaningful, meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Your thoughts on retired maxing and rumination Dellium.
- [37:25]
C
I literally had this prominent investor last week in D.C. come up to me and be like, you know, I regret not having invested in the C round Nevada and I think we just thought ourselves out because it was just like if you sat there and thought about it, there's so many ways that you could have like thought yourself to like the failure case. But like, I should have just bet on the fact that you guys would just figure it out day by day and eventually figure out how to turn into a business. It's like, yeah, I just like had this strong instinct that you like, wanted to start the business. If you look at our like seed round pitch deck, it looks nothing like, you know what it is today. If you look at the like, early days of space, it's not like they were talking about Starlink in like the very early days. It was like Elon Klein went on this like, exploration trip to like, you know, Russia to like go buy some engines. They sort of spat in his face. He's like, f that he kind of did it a little bit out of vengeance. He had a chip on his shoulder he liked, you know, sort of space things, but, like, step by step, you know, sort of figured out how to turn into, like, the behemoth of a business that it is today. But it has very little to do with, like, the original chip on his shoulder that he had from that. And I think a lot of, like, the best businesses in the world look like this. And so, yeah, I do think the greatest entrepreneurs look like that. And I think the people that are probably happiest at home, you know, sort of look like that too, where it's like, yeah, just don't overthink, you know, follow your instincts and just like, you know, go through what you got to do. And I think partially why I feel a gidget in my, you know, sort of bio on Twitter. It's like, you know, I like, originally got called that way back in the day by one of my sort of colleagues is like, you know, sort of branding of like, you know, what I do on Twitter. And I was like, yeah, it's actually like a thing that I'm somewhat proud of. Like, yes, I think I'm like, you know, sort of smart, etc. But like, I, you know, I think I, you know, sort of trust my instincts and go forward.
- [38:45]
B
All right, before Sal jumps in, I'm just going to read a definition of introspection. So I feel like we're talking about several different concepts under one umbrella here. Introspection, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is examination of and attention to your own ideas, thoughts and feelings. It does not demand rumination. It does not really demand backwards looking or overthinking. So are we actually talking about the right thing here, Sal?
- [39:06]
D
This was exactly what I thought when I saw the video. I think Mark's great and he's brilliant. I would take the other side of this where it was just like he talks about, like, never looking backwards and only looking forwards. And then he goes on this long historical exposition about Napoleon, which is like, hilarious, right? I think, I think there's an important distinction here between, like, therapy culture and like, you know, forced self doubt and historical kind of, you know, looking back over the last 10 years of your business. You look at the founding fathers obsessing about the Greeks and the Romans. Like, I don't think it's bad to look back. I think like, looking back grounds us in our past and our heritage and I think is kind of essential to moving forward towards the future. But I also think just sort of like whiny, self help therapy culture is a deleterious thing. So, yeah, I think both of those can be true.
- [39:52]
B
I think that's absolutely right. I think, like, I'm an anxious person by nature, so I have to actively go against my brain spinning its wheels and doing what the investors who missed out on Varda did. But I don't think that is, you know, antithetical to also knowing how I'm doing or thinking about why I'm doing something, because I think that just helps me be more accurate, James, and just more. More direct and less frazzled and more focused. So, to me, it's a. It's a positive in the direction you're describing, if that makes sense.
- [40:15]
A
Yeah. The context here, Larson, is all about execution for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, their partners, who are placing the bets for that group of people. What we've learned over time is making a decision quickly, living with the results of that decision, and not, dare I say, overthinking it too much is a much better strategy than spending all your time ruminating and debating and having decision paralysis. So, you know, the reason this one hit a nerve is because it was a bit ambiguous. You know, is this. Is he dunking on the therapy, or is he talking about what's the best practice? The truth is, the best practice is the person who moves the fastest, who is the shark, who is the most cutthroat, who makes quick decisions, iterates fastest, fires anybody who is a ruminator and promotes, anybody who's an executor wins in the game we play. This is a rule set for the game we play. Just like Michael Jordan's advice is a rule set for competitive sports at the highest level. This is not how to have a great life as a parent who's retired and who works to live. This is the advice for 0.1% of the population. That's how I took it. What did you take it as, Larson?
- [41:29]
E
To tie things into what you're saying. We had a saying in the SEAL teams that effectively says that an average plan executed swiftly and aggressively is better than a great plan, you know? You know, executed in the opposite manner.
- [41:40]
A
Wait, you're a seal, Larson?
- [41:42]
E
I was. You know, I'm the only one that hasn't written a book yet, so I'll get on. I'll get on the train, or.
- [41:46]
A
Thank you for your service, bro.
- [41:49]
E
Congress is the new.
- [41:50]
D
Is the new book.
- [41:51]
E
So I guess I'm behind, but.
- [41:53]
D
Yeah.
- [41:53]
E
So I think that. I think that that actually puts a bow on it for me. And how I think about it is like, listen, we can overthink this or at some point you just got to, you know, one more time, give me,
- [42:01]
A
give us that quote again when you first heard it and when you first implemented it. Tell us the quote.
- [42:07]
E
First, first heard it in training. So, you know, every, every is a common, you know, quote that I'm probably butchering slightly because it's been a while. But effectively the quote is that, hey, an aggressive plan, or excuse me, a average plan executed violently and aggressively is better than a perfect plan. You're executed in the opposite manner. So I think that actually works for startups. I think it works for life, I think it works for everything basically. And there's certain situations where you can be, you know, longer term thinkers, but when you have, when you have a target objective and you have a mission you need to go on and it actually is important, you need to go out there and overwhelm the enemy with overwhelming fire superiority. And it's the same thing in business. I mean, Delian's doing the same thing in his industry. He's overwhelming the industry with overwhelming fire superiority against any competitor, anybody else out there. And that's why I respect him so much. And the other founders that are out there doing building audacious things with that mentality.
- [42:56]
A
Here's that quote. A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. General George S. Patton. I've heard of it.
- [43:05]
B
We go, excellent movie if you haven't seen it.
- [43:07]
E
So with some introspection, we would have known that it was patent. So I guess we're maybe wrong in terms of like, you know, not doing.
- [43:13]
A
No, you violently executed the quote.
- [43:15]
E
Yeah, violently executed. Listen, I'm not worrying to look this shit up. I'm retard Max.
- [43:21]
A
Do you know the maxing guy? He's my favorite on YouTube. Pull up Max from YouTube for a second. Delian. Have you seen him?
- [43:29]
C
I have only just heard about it from Larson.
- [43:31]
A
Yeah, so what I love about this guy is he shares my love of having a stogie at the end of the day. Sometimes go for a hike on the ranch. He's got like his little mini backyard ranch. And sometimes at the end of the day I'm like, I don't need to ruminate, just go for a walk with my bulldogs. I, I get out of stogie, I smoke a cigar and I'm like, I got a great life. So he sits there with his cigar with his Weber grill, he hits the cigar.
- [44:00]
D
Friday, Friday is one of those days.
- [44:05]
B
I don't know, I, I feel, dude,
- [44:07]
D
do you feel it?
- [44:08]
C
Look at the sun kind of shine.
- [44:10]
D
You feel.
- [44:11]
C
It's like a sundress. There's like a.
- [44:15]
D
You can smell the sweat of a. Like a sundress.
- [44:21]
B
Wait, people watch this?
- [44:22]
A
Yeah. It doesn't matter what he's saying. It's how he's saying it. He's just like, Friday, Friday good.
- [44:30]
B
I also have friends that smoke a lot of weed and sound like that, and they don't even have a YouTube channel.
- [44:35]
A
I don't know why it makes sense to me, but I don't know. He's like, Friday's good. It's like a sundress. I'm like, sure, I'm in. Fuck it. Friday.
- [44:45]
B
Okay, I got it. All right.
- [44:48]
A
This, by the way, people are losing their mind on threads and blue sky is falling right now. If you go on blue sky right now, literally, it's like there's. There's two bizarro universes, X and blue sky. And you put them together and the same story is like, on X, it's like a manifesto. It's a. It's a call to arms. And on blue sky, it's a. With the greatest philosophers of our time, we're saying self reflection, and here's the definition. And, oh, my God, it's amazing. Like, we should all be like. And I got so much out of therapy, and I went to group therapy, and I went to this therapy and changed my life, and I had a positive experience. It's so great. I recommend that every X user, for every 10 hours you spend on X, you should be required to spend 10 minutes on blue sky and. And vice versa. The two serve as a tax. It should be. It should be the bubble tax. It's a bubble tax, Sal. Perfectly stated.
- [45:45]
D
If you want.
- [45:48]
A
It's a 14. We're seizing 5% of your bubble.
- [45:53]
B
All right.
- [45:53]
A
Ro Khanna and AOC and Tucker Carlson all agree. Megyn Kelly. Five percent asset seizure of your. Of your maxing slash virtual signaling.
- [46:04]
B
While we're on this very important topic because you guys don't talk to a commercial. Don't drop. No, no, I'm not. We're done. All the ads are done. All the ads are done. I blasted through them because your face was the time for.
- [46:14]
A
If you're maxing at eight sleep. That's a new. There's a new metric. Dellied, how were you during sleep.
- [46:21]
C
During sleep last night?
- [46:23]
A
Yes. Brought to you by Woohp Woop has also got a new looks. Maxi didn't whoop.
- [46:29]
B
Just raise an enormous round.
- [46:30]
C
Yeah. $10 billion. Yeah, dude, they're Rocking and rolling.
- [46:33]
B
I was blown away by this. So because Aura Ring also raised an enormous round, they're both looking at like what, billion dollar years in revenue terms. It really feels like hardware is is back with such a wild vengeance as the value of software goes down, it feels like hardware is just skyrocketing. But we are seeing some people like Michael Eisenberg from Aleph or Aleph, I'm not quite sure to pronounce that. I'm talking about kind of a defense tech hardware bubble. I'm curious what you guys think about the.
- [47:00]
A
Let's stop on your previous question, which we should let the guys answer, which is in a world of no moats, suddenly having a hardware device tied to your software has made your company 10 times more appealing to investors. Whereas 10 years ago hardware is hard. I don't invest in hardware. Now it's the opposite. It's like there's no moats in software. You better add a hardware component to this product. So do you know what this Whoop cost a year? I mean I'm paying for it. I think it's 20, 30 bucks a month. Can somebody look it up? I think I'm paying 300 a year for this, which is a big number. If there's a million people with this and there's got to be hundreds of thousand, they must have a million subs by now, right? Two million. Three million. How many subs do these services have? Aura and Woo. If they have 3 million at 300 a year, this is a big number.
- [47:54]
B
What the frick is this pricing page? You think they make this easier to find?
- [47:57]
A
I mean, this is what Claude's for.
- [47:59]
B
Yeah, yeah. Why. Why did I even do it the old fashioned way.
- [48:03]
E
They don't want it easy to find.
- [48:04]
A
There's three recharge maxing.
- [48:06]
E
Yeah, dude.
- [48:07]
B
No, I'm just.
- [48:08]
A
Don't overthink it. Why would you. There's a difference.
- [48:10]
B
There's three main annual tiers. One which is 199 a year or peak 239 or life 359. So I presume, Jason, you're on the life plan.
- [48:19]
A
I don't know. I don't know, man.
- [48:21]
B
And Whoop has more than two and a half million members worldwide as of early 26 into its IPO. 2.5 million at 200.
- [48:30]
A
500 million in revenue. 20 times revenue. 10 billion. That makes sense actually.
- [48:33]
B
And they're going to do a billion in revenue this year. That's. That's their target. So yeah, no, the numbers make perfectly fine sense. I have no beef with the whoop or arounds. I just think it's interesting to see how the hardware companies really seem to be just crushing the world right now while we watch software stocks just collapse on the public markets. It's terrifying. Jellian, you're nodding your head. You guys were early on the hardware front with all your Android investments.
- [48:54]
C
Yeah, we also originally did the series B of 8 sleep back in the day, although at 100 posts, so today that would be a seed round I guess. But yeah, I feel like we've always had hardware and the portfolio pretty broadly. Right. SpaceX early on and early on I think in my set of venture investments that I've done, I think probably something like 85% of them basically have material hardware sort of component, both like consumer and enterprise. And so it's been interesting. Like I remember back in the day my former colleague, now you know, general partner at Benchmark, Everett Randall, used to literally always poke fun at me. He was like whenever there's like high margin, high growth software, like I'll do that. If there's ever like super low margin capex intensive like hardware businesses that are negative gross margin, send those to Dellian. And now it's kind of funny because I feel like, you know, Benchmark literally just did like a spite investment, you know, into star cloud, you know, in order to, you know, you know, poke back at the bear. So yeah, yeah, I'm definitely, you know been been long hardware and it's fun to see the Vidali come around to it.
- [49:51]
B
Larson, you guys at Harpoon and founders of are both in Northwood, right?
- [49:57]
C
Oh yeah. Bridget.
- [49:59]
B
Yeah. Talk to me about, about why, what, what attracted you guys to that company in particular? Cause it kind of crosses both the space American resilience and industrialization things.
- [50:07]
E
I think first of all Bridget's a force of nature. So I think you know, any, any great startup needs to have a force of nature founder and I think she's absolutely one but u Ultimately when you think about access to space and all the data aspects we're talking about, whether it be data centers in space or just eoir satellites, we are at a huge gap in the market in terms of bringing that data down to earth and doing it in an effective modern way, there's legacy incumbents in the space that just are not modernizing in a way that we need to do, whether it be from a national security or commercially applicable way. And I think she's really hitting a very nice niche in the market that is going to grow to be Very large. And if she hits her milestones, I think it's going to be a very big company very quickly.
- [50:47]
B
Same idea?
- [50:48]
C
Yeah. I mean I think what's underappreciated is as much as we're all seeing like Starlink blanket, sort of the sort of planet with Internet, if you're operating satellites up in space, you actually do not have that same Internet access. So at Varda for example, we get to talk to our satellites once every two to three hours roughly for sort of 15, 20 minutes. And so think of a satellite effectively in some ways as like a backend server rack that you have access to that you are sh. Ing into you and communicating with, but you don't get to talk to it 24 7. And so that requires a lot of autonomy. It's pretty frustrating and it makes operations sort of relatively difficult. If you're like space exercise, sure you can go invest into building out a whole ground station network yourself and they've obviously done that. But if you're even Varda, which even other companies that have sort of multi billion dollar valuations, you're still dependent on some of these super old school providers. The biggest one is this company called ksat which is a Norwegian state owned basic entity I think got founded in like 1982. It's like they're like software interface is literally like Fortran and FTPing. It's like it's not like they're like a modern API based system. And so yeah, when we like, you know, sort of met Northwood it was just like this thesis that I've been thinking about for a long time but there just wasn't really like a great entrepreneur going after it. And she has like the best, you know, latest, you know she just had her latest round led by Mina at Washington harbor who like deeply understands how to think about like these like project financings. Capex intensive. How do you layer in like public funds, debt capital alongside venture equity. Because it's the type of thing that's going to have to go and build out a lot of basically physical infrastructure here on the ground, but on the other side hopefully I'll be able to talk to my varda satellites basically 247 rather than very intermittently.
- [52:23]
B
Right now I'm confused by your lack of connectivity and I presume it's just ignorance but I know that AWS and Azure run ground control communications setup so
- [52:32]
C
they announced it and never did anything like AWS basically like bailed on their whole like AWS like ground station thing. So yeah, nobody, nobody's Done it. It's kind of crazy. So, you know, maybe some of those companies may or may not be future
- [52:44]
B
future north when they're now watching Amazon and Blue Origin Chase SpaceX. It really feels like an extra mistake because now they know base to stand on. What a fuck up.
- [52:52]
C
Yeah, yeah, obviously like Amazon's trying to roll out Amazon. Leo, they just announced that, you know, sort of deal with Delta, which like, again, I think, you know, Elon tweeted about it earlier today. It's like, yeah, Delta's gonna really take a hit on it. Like United at the end of the year, I think has something like 80% of their, like you air, you know, you know airplanes are going to have Starlink on it. Yeah. At some point. Like I think a lot of us on this call almost certainly would prefer to fly United even. It's like slightly more expensive or inconvenient timing if you know they're gonna have StarLink Internet on 100.
- [53:17]
A
I'm making my decision on what, who to fly based on this, like 1,000%. And United said they're going to be 100%. I think JetBlue also said they're going to be 100 percent. And I think Delta just announced they're going to use the Amazon Starlink competitor. So I have a thesis that business travel is going to 2x 2x because of this technology. I know it sounds crazy and I think people would pay. I know they're making it free. I think people would pay for a Starlink subscription even if they didn't have Starlink at home. This is how it should be deployed. If you get on a plane, you get a low bandwidth for free, like no video, like whatever you get one megabyte in. But if you pay for a starLink subscription of 20 bucks a month, 40 bucks a month, or you have Starlink at home, you have those 60 to 120 version, then you get the high speed on the plane. This would take Starlink subscriptions to the moon. I mean, I guess they don't need to because United's picking it up. But I will only fly United or especially on international where you're four hours over the ocean and they're like, oh, by the way, you can't work for four hours. We're going to just dribble in your texts randomly. It's. It's nuts.
- [54:31]
B
Sal, can you put Starlink on your jet, your private jet?
- [54:35]
D
I don't have a private jet, so
- [54:37]
C
I can't answer questions.
- [54:38]
A
Didn't fall for the classic journalistic technique. You know, fall.
- [54:41]
B
I don't, I don't talk to poor people.
- [54:43]
A
Delian, go ahead. You were going to say something.
- [54:44]
C
Oh, I was going to say just like, you know, we're not that far away, I think, from, you know, Apple eventually just putting in a phase ray antenna on one of these things. And now you have Starlink coverage basically on your phone, literally no matter where you are. So you could be on your, you know, sort of PJ that has Starlink installed or there's a world. You know, I haven't done the exact physics on this, but like, you know, I think if you, like, have a window seat, basically, and you have, you know, a face ray antenna on one of these, even if the jet doesn't have it, your phone still basically has access to, you know, basically Starlink. And that is true whether or not you're on a jet or you're like, I don't know, middle of the Mediterranean.
- [55:13]
A
What are they going to charge, like three bucks a month to a carrier for this? Two bucks a month? That's the rumor I'm hearing is it's
- [55:21]
C
a little bit of a cabal, like the first carrier to drop in some ways, like they're, you know, it's always, it's kind of bad for T Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, ET cetera, because their sort of moat is their physical infrastructure here on the ground. And so the moment that one of them starts to offer this, in some ways they kind of break their entire moat and valuation. And so I think it's more likely than not that if you add up all of the carriers in the United States and their valuations today, I think that all gets transferred to SpaceX over the course of the next basically 10 years. But it's a question of how long can they hold off until then.
- [55:48]
D
Oh, sorry, go ahead. If you look at the broader infrastructure picture, the ultimate moat is infrastructure, right? So like all these, all these cell towers are just being leapfrogged by things like Starlink. You're seeing this kind of happen throughout the economy. So I think base power is sort of like a modern take on how you distribute power. You've got all these nuclear companies, we were an early Oklo investor, for example, that are, that are out there kind of generating energy. All these pieces of infrastructure are kind of being rethought. And to your point, I think we're in this moment where hardware is in vogue, but I think it's also like we're coming back into contact with reality in a lot of ways. All Of a sudden, it matters that we need to be able to generate a lot of energy really quickly. And so all of a sudden people are thinking about generation and distribution of energy in a way they haven't in 100 years. I think, to your, to your kind of point, your question, Alex, around military, all of a sudden we're thinking an awful lot more about this after Russia, Ukraine, after Iran, like, all these, all these kind of old, old realities are coming back up to the surface. And I think we're, we're moving back towards reconsidering these, these kind of critical industries, which are actually the biggest industries. So, like, energy is the largest market in the world. Right, but, but largely very, very little innovation. And so I think it's a huge opportunity for us to, you know, reopen all these, all these sectors that we have kind of ceded to inertia for the last, you know, several decades. Even among the tech industry, have we
- [57:10]
B
improved the government procurement process enough to support a rapid enough purchase cycle for defense tech companies so they don't get stuck somewhere in like, delay hell? Because that's my concern with companies like Saronic. Like, I love what they're building, I love that they raise capital, but they're selling, no offense, Larson, to the Navy, which is an enormous bureaucracy, which is part of a larger bureaucracy which is run by Congress. And so that just scares me from a customer profile point.
- [57:32]
E
I think that we are. And everyone throws barbs at, you know, the acquisition process, but the fact of the matter is, is that companies have been doing it for the longest time, like, you know, forever, effectively. A lot of our companies that we actually take for granted now, whether it be AWS started as, you know, GovCloud with the CIA and other things like that. These things have happened. And it's part of the reason why we started our firm is that we didn't think that modernization in the public sector was necessarily required acquisition reform. That said, we definitely need acquisition reform. We definitely need to get through the Valley of Death. But I think that the people that criticize the Valley of the Death probably aren't the founders that are maxing and finding a way to get through to it in the first place. And so I think that we do need it. It is a good thing. We do need to solve for it. But that said, I think there's always been an opportunity here. And that was one of the confounding things to me when I first moved to the Valley, first started working in venture is like, this budget exists, there is a playbook to do it. It is ugly, it requires lobbyists, it takes all these things that are difficult and a different muscle movement from a go to market versus PLG and things like that that everyone got spoiled with in the dot com boom coming out of Silicon Valley. And I think there is some ways to go out there and get big lumpy contractual opportunities and you have to inform these requirements and build technologies and make sure the government knows about it before you know, it's, it's pre wired for somebody else out there. And so it does take more capital, it does take more patience. But I think it's always been an opportunity and hopefully it's becoming even more an addressable opportunity for our young founders to go out there and achieve more efficiently.
- [58:54]
B
Yeah, I want to, I want to get answer to this question though, Larson, because I'm really curious about the harpoon perspective. People were talking about how Android shares were the hardest things to get in the world. They were like the number one thing people wanted to find secondary markets. Valuations are getting pretty hot. We've seen a number of multibillion dollar rounds go into American defense tech companies essentially. Are we seeing too much capital going too quickly now that I'm opposed to them? I'm just curious if we're in a bit of a defense tech bubble.
- [59:16]
E
I think that we are and I think that it's, you know, but to frame it, I think that we are always in a pseudo bubble anytime anything gets topical and hot in Silicon Valley or in the, in the venture capital or tech community. I don't think this is any different than, you know, the dot com wave, the mobile wave, you know, sas, crypto, so on and so forth. I think there's people that were early to it, like Founders Fund and others, and there's people that are sort of like later to it. And I think that price is what you pay, value is what you get. And I think that right now there is an oversupply of capital going in here and paying very, very high prices for things that may not pencil at the end of the day. But that said, we are going to see more winners coming out of this space is my belief. I think we're not only going to see the anurils, we're going to see other solutions that are going to be large as well. Maybe not the same scale, but I think it depends on your fund size as well. If you have strong ownership at an early stage and you have a reasonable, you know, fund size, I think you'd be very successful. If you're a multi Billion dollar fund and plowing a lot more money. The upside must be much, much, much higher. So I think that we are sort of like in this competitive pressure and I think venture capital and startups are sort of like real estate. Everyone wants to be have the nice home and the nice neighborhood in a great location. And I think that that's how everyone is infatuated with AI and defense slash hardware right now. And capital is moving that direction and prices are just going up.
- [60:31]
B
Yeah, we need more for the military than just drones, be they in the sky, on the water or underwater. Larson. So where, where in defense tech do you think there's not enough attention paid where there's a lot of opportunity today?
- [60:41]
E
I think something that we're looking at is the supply chain for a lot of these critical components that go into all of these, these systems. So there's subsystems, there's critical components, many of which go all the way back to rare earths that are, you know, in China, at Hill and Valley that Delian put on, we talked a lot about the pharmaceuticals industry, pharmaceutical precursors and going through trials and all that stuff is just done much more efficiently and better at scale in China with automations. And so ultimately I, I think that we're looking at really investors a lot are looking at the application layer. Which application layer? The things that gets the bazooka contracts. It's the surronics, et cetera of the world. That's the application layer products. But ultimately I'd be really curious to see how people are reconciling domestic supply chain. If we really are decoupling from China. We don't have the domestic supply chain to fit into, you know, more recent NDAA and legislative aspects. I'd be curious to get Saul's you know, take on this in terms of like how, how we sort of like, you know, you know, rebuild that, how we re industrialize, all of that. Because I think that is sort of like the next, the next frontier of where we got to solve those problems. Whether the venture backable or not, I'm not sure yet. But we got to solve that problem.
- [61:42]
B
Sal, you're up.
- [61:43]
D
There are alternatives on a lot of these things. So we, we invested in a company called Whetstone, which is an undersea mining company. And it turns out you, we have known how to mine the bottom of the ocean for a long time. Just about everyone signed something called the International Seabed Treaty. You know, permit me a little bit of like a law professor digression here. The United States never signed this thing and the admin earlier this year issued an executive order saying we're going to go do this because G just nuked the global supply chain for rare earths. And it turns out there's tons of neodymium sitting there on the bottom of the ocean. You don't even have to drill for it, you just dredge. So I think there are a lot of options that are being sort of considered now that wouldn't have been considered in previous eras. You've got companies like Vulcan, MP Materials and a lot of other folks who are out there saying, hey, we just as a sort of national priority need to make sure that we have access to these things. And when those supply chains are stress tested and interrupted, that's when you start to see both innovation and people starting to spend more time on it. So. So I'm actually optimistic about our ability to get ourselves back onto solid footing here. But it's encouraging to see the quality entrepreneurs taking these problems on. You didn't see that 10 years ago. So I think that's been something that's been as an investor, really exciting for us.
- [63:04]
C
I think the important thing though is these companies do need to stand on their own two feet in the commercial market with their unit economics. It cannot be that the only way that you compete against China is, is with you know, sort of significant and you know, sort of like indefinite government support. Like, you know, there's definitely, you know, sort of certain ecosystems in China where like, you know, this day propped them up for some period of time, but they eventually got to like phenomenal unit economics. I think my fear with some of these like re industrialization projects that United States has actually funded even over the past like year, year and a half is some of them I think are just like going down the total wrong tech tree. That is just like trying to copy what China did 20 years ago in some ways just reshoring it back to the United States versus I think there are certain other projects that I think are leapfrogging ahead of China in a way that allows them to, even without government support, ultimately actually be the best commercial player. And so yeah, similar to both Larson and Sal, has been an area that we've been pretty actively investing into across the board. And that panel with Alicia Jackson and Zach Kornberg, et cetera for Hill and Valley was basically my sort of pet project. It was probably the one that I spent the most time making sure to put together because I was like, it's just a topic that is not talked about enough. Senator Young is Really phenomenal on it. Alicia Jackson's phenomenal on it. Zach's phenomenal on it. There's actually a whole white paper that we put out, you know, sort of same day of the forum on how to reshort this stuff back to the United States.
- [64:17]
B
Where are we going down the wrong tech tree from, from a governmental perspective? Because I'm really curious about where we're making these missteps. Delian, not a gotcha question. I'm just legitimately curious. You were so confident when you said that. I, I'm curious where we're making errors so we can correct them. We can't make improvements until we know what we're doing wrong.
- [64:37]
C
I like, I'm gonna, I think plead the fifth on that one. I don't want to, you know, sort of name slash. I think some of these things will end up, you know, turning into huge lawsuits and people get hauled in front of Congress and go to jail.
- [64:46]
B
So it's all, it's all retard max, until the questions.
- [64:49]
C
I'm going to plead the Fifth.
- [64:50]
A
Well, no, no, give me, give me the question here. Like more specifically.
- [64:55]
B
Yeah, one of, one of the friends of the program says that the government and its industrial policy regarding reshoring and re industrializing America is taking things down the wrong path. So Jason, how would you define a positive industrial policy for the government that would accelerate resiliency while also not falling prey to regulatory capture and waste?
- [65:18]
A
So give me like three examples of this. We were talking about the CHIPS Act.
- [65:22]
B
Let's do rare earths, silicon production and New Pharma.
- [65:27]
A
So rare earths is the simplest one possible if you can figure out a way for the federal government, you know, to work with local states. And we believe in states rights. It's the United States of America. We have a system of, you know, 50 different competing regions and they get to have some level of sovereignty. I think the best thing to do is for the executive branch to work with the senators and the representatives from the local ones and say which five states would like to be the beneficiary of this large low interest loan. That it's a low interest loan with an equity kicker that makes Americans profitable like they could have been with the Tesla loans back in the day. Remember Solyndra, Tesla and Fisker. And one of the companies paid it back. We got paid back with interest from that Obama era incentive. But we didn't get options or warrants in Tesla. And they could have very easily because remember, Tesla was on the brink. So very simple process. Hey, you're a railroads company. We've got a billion dollars here. You can ask for 10 million to 100 million loan. The states can get involved. If your state, you know, doesn't want to, you know, damage 100 acres in the middle of the forest and you're Maine or Vermont or California and you're precious about it or it's like very dense, by all means opt out. But if you're Texas, Nevada, you know, Utah and you want this commerce and you want this tax, that's the way to do it is just give it, give a loan and then give upside. And then the American Populace would own 5% of a, you have 5% warrants in a company that becomes worth $10 billion. It's very simple. Incentives matter. And states get to opt in and states get to opt out. I don't mind this fact. I have come to the conclusion after Roe v. Wade becoming a state issue that there is something incredibly important that the founding fathers figured out about keeping a, a nation from becoming controlled by a king, which is states getting to opt out. And this I think leads to the discussion of do states have any rights with AI and of course like California is going to go wild and they're going to regulate AI. I understand that that doesn't fly with our industry, whatever. But living in Texas now and watching people in Nevada and Florida crush it and run the tables on California, it's kind of like the system works really well. It's a better system to have states competing with each other and the federal government saying, yeah, it's an open competition and here's some money. And yeah, then, then you don't have to complain. If you're California and you're like, we don't want you ripping up this beautiful state. It's going to be perfect and prestigious. Great. That's what your populace wants. Awesome. Nevada, how do you feel? Texas, do you want data centers? Texas, like hell yes, we want data centers. Everything west of Austin is like, there's nobody there, it's empty. Go for it. Rip it apart. Build data centers. We're already ripping the oil out. Who gives a shit? Go for it. We want the tax revenue, we want the jobs. Awesome competition, great for humanity.
- [68:34]
B
But under your model, Jason, the states get warrants when they participate. So you would end up with some public ownership of private companies.
- [68:41]
C
Companies.
- [68:41]
A
Yeah, non voting. Okay, yeah. Just like they, they own the note, they own the loan.
- [68:49]
B
Yeah.
- [68:49]
A
So they own the loan. So what's the difference between owning a loan that gets paid back at 1% or 4% and owning a loan as well as you get a million warrants for a dollar each and if that goes public at 100 you make 99 and you.
- [69:03]
B
Oh, because I think the government will screw it up and I think the government, when they have an interest in a company is going to basically turn it into the state operation in that case and squeeze out other things. I'm going to pull the Founders Fund libertarian card here and say I don't like that idea. It's too much intermingling of public and private money. But, but I like where your head's at and we don't have to solve this today. But this goes back to the top of the show. You had said how do we build an economy?
- [69:25]
D
It's just, you know, we can't both be in a bubble for like hard tech re industrialization companies and need the government to be kind of, kind of like subsidizing it. I think the way that you sort of get more of this, more of the innovation that you want is by you know, pulling restrictions out of the way of these entrepreneurs who have incredible capital markets available to them. There are, there are people who will fund these things that did not exist in the past. So I think I'm incredibly bullish on this sort of reindustrialism, reindustrialization and I think the way you get it to go faster is not to just kind of throw government money at it because so often when you throw government money at something you create a subsidy but then there's just so much regulation. It's like you give.
- [70:05]
A
Yeah, both things have to happen shrunk and first is regulation, right? First is regulation. 100% yeah. After regulation if you still don't have like if it's still not economically viable sal to build chips in America and we know Taiwan's getting picked up by China in 27 or 29 or whatever it is and the investment community is like yeah, I don't, I don't want to pay for a money loosing fab that can never compete with what's coming out of China, Taiwan and China. Then what do you do? So if you've gotten the regulation done and you still don't have an economic model, then I think I'm going to
- [70:41]
D
fight both sides of your hypo. One we have not removed nearly enough regulation.
- [70:46]
A
100% agree. 102.
- [70:48]
D
Saronic just raised a couple billion dollars to do exactly what you just said. Like you know, it's, the money does exist to do this and we there, there are sort of a lot of investors who are not only patriotic and care deeply about the future of our country and our ability to defend ourselves and project force. It's also that, you know, we think these things are really valuable. Right. Which is why I think, you see,
- [71:08]
A
can we think of another example like, I don't know, making commodity drugs or something? Like, is there some other example?
- [71:18]
D
Oh, you're just, you're just saying whatever is the least economic thing.
- [71:21]
C
I think.
- [71:22]
A
Yeah, I'm just trying to think out loud.
- [71:23]
D
The hard case you're, you're speaking to, I think is places where, you know, there's extreme subsidy in the Chinese government and it forestalls US Investment.
- [71:32]
A
Right, correct.
- [71:33]
D
Our capital markets won't do it because just like Delian saying, we're looking at and saying there's no way to make money because they're artificially keeping prices low, either because they're incredibly good at it and have a 20 year head start or because they subsidize it or both. And so those are tougher calls.
- [71:47]
A
Yeah, okay.
- [71:48]
C
Yeah. I think sometimes I don't totally buy that argument where I think people think that the reason that sort of Shanghai is such a great place to do consumer electronics is because of state funding. It's like, no, at this point they've just built by far the best ecosystem for that type of talent, for that type of sort of production. I think in relation to sort of bio, sort of the best attempt, at least in the past couple years was the ABC sort of incubation resilience which was trying to reshore and create the Wuxi biologics, Wuxi small molecules, which is like a generic drug producer in China and bring that basically back to America. But I think a lot of why they ultimately didn't end up working out the way they wanted was like both didn't really figure out how to pair public and private dollars. But again, there was no actually studying China and looking at how do you actually get ahead of that. A bit of why Wuxi works in China is they just have infinite low cost labor, basically. Chemists.
- [72:42]
E
Yeah, I think there's just some things here that are uneconomical and private venture capital or PE or private debt markets are just not going to finance. And I think that's where Uncle Sam needs to step in and say this is imperative to our national prosperity and security. We need to invest in this because it's sort of like during TARP buyer of last resort thing. Whether or not that was a good policy. I think we have a similar type of thing that's happening right now, we need to be a funder of last resort to get things on step to validate the unit economics and then let the private markets take over.
- [73:11]
B
What mechanism would you use for that and what are some target areas to Jason's point where you think that would apply?
- [73:17]
E
I go back to the pharmaceutical industry, I think is a great one. I think it's like not talked a lot enough about. I think it's extremely important to the health and of our entire populace. We went through a pandemic. All of these things are really important and I think that's something that we need to invigorate here. Obviously, you know, semis and TSMC and all that stuff is already talked about a lot and I think that we're making good progress towards that. But I think thinking about the health and security of our populace, that's one that's not talked about enough.
- [73:41]
B
Jason, who should lead the nation in getting that done, do you think? Should that be governors or do you think that's a federal question?
- [73:47]
A
If only we had a business focused chief executive in the White House who wasn't starting endless foreign wars and who was a great negotiator and had all the technology community and business community willing to come to the White House anytime he snapped his fingers. We have like half of that right now. Unfortunately, the entire administration has been distracted by a forever war. If that ends like Trump is on his way to doing this, you know, and it's I think Michael Bloomberg, Trump, you know, Mike, you know, Jamie Dimon Eisner, pick your CEO Schultz CEO, former CEO who becomes president, who can explain this to politicians in a very deft way and explain to the American public that this is not grift. That's really the only reason why people get upset about this is they think, oh, they're just giving Intel $10 billion because Intel's a up and they can't make a real business. So they're giving their maxing tax dollars to the most maxed company when you really just need to make small incentives remove, obviously removing, you know, the regulations. Great. And then this is what I liked about the loan program is people opted into it, they paid it back, and if you just put a little warrant coverage in there, then it makes up for all the losses. I'm not saying it should be like the purpose of our government, but in the case of we don't have pharmaceuticals, you want a private public partnership, you don't want the government doing anything except maybe protecting citizens. You know, they Suck at whatever they do. Look at the education system. Look at our health care system. We pay more than we pay two or three times any other country for healthcare and for education, and we get half the results.
- [75:36]
D
When people propose a government policy, they're always imagining like a philosopher king administering it. But actually you get the dmv. Like, that's the important thing to remember.
- [75:45]
A
This is why Singapore is so interesting to me. Have you guys been to Singapore before? One you haven't. It's. It's worth going. And just in that country, the way it was set up by Lee Kwon, you, You, Lee Kuan Yew, who is like, that's my government warrior CEO, like war mode CEO, they have this perfect balance of anybody who works for the government. That is the most elite job you can have. If you were the equivalent of a Harvard mba, you came out of Stanford. You go work for the government there. You get paid twice the private sector. So they'll pay 400,000 for somebody to work. And they're like, we want the government here to be the highest functioning in the world, not the place. People who are looking to work 20 hours a week, take a ton of vacation and, you know, get some pension. It's literally the elites, the elite performers. Not elites, like, in the way we use it here in America. The most elite performers consider working for the government. This incredible thing. It's kind of like the Navy Seals, Larson, where it's like you say you're a Navy seal. We're all like, whoa, that's legit.
- [76:53]
E
We need all government to have that. You need to have like 80 of the people that try out for any role in government don't make it because you're not good enough. And, like, there needs to be that level of prestige and like, those types of people that are in the seat and, you know, as opposed to government
- [77:07]
A
being the place where people who, you
- [77:10]
E
know, can't get another job. Yeah. Like, yeah.
- [77:12]
A
And that's. That's the turnaround we need. I mean, this is why you can say what you want about Doge, but. Or just making the government smaller. If we're sitting here and our industry is like, you know what? We can do this with 10% less people. Like, our government for the last 50 years, under all types of, you know, Republicans, Democrats, and everybody in between, moderates, etcetera, has been like, you know what the solution here is? Let's build the size of the government. Like, that's never the solution. More of adding more to what's not working is almost never the solution, it's like hitting the accelerator while you're spinning, you know, on ice, coming out of a turn, you're like, that's not what you do. Just hold the steering wheel straight and just ride it out. Like, just adding more speed never helps a rocket that's off course, right, Delian?
- [78:01]
C
No. And then, you know, so speaking of, we are now sort of L minus exactly four hours to when, you know, humans go back to the. Go back to the moon for the first time in three years.
- [78:10]
B
I'm so excited.
- [78:11]
A
Tell us about this, Delian. What is the story here? Why is this happening? Why is our government doing it? What exactly? They're going to go around the moon for 10 days with humans on the top of this Artemis rocket. That's what I know. Why. And what are we going to prove by doing this?
- [78:28]
C
Yeah, I thought there's this really phenomenal article I don't know if it makes sense to, you know, sort of bring up, written by this guy Eric Berger last night at Ars Technica, talking about, like, why for the first time he's excited about either sort of this mission versus he hasn't been for the past couple. Artemis is, I would say, post like the space shuttle era, right? Which you sort of shut down, you know, during, you know, the Obama era. NASA just got really lost. Like, it was just like a very confusing architecture that they were saying for coming back, like the moon and Mars. They're talking about basically putting like a space station in low Earth orbit, sorry, in moon orbit, as like a way station on the way down to the surface of the moon. But they didn't really have a plan to get down to the surface. So we're gonna put a bunch of astronauts orbiting the moon. But what's the point? Because, like, the whole point is the moon has resources. You can mine it, you can build things there, but if you're in orbit around it, you can't do that. And he was like, this time it finally feels different and a part of it. Jared has just done some phenomenal work in the past. I think he's been nominated or confirmed for the past three months. He shut down all the nonsense, all the things that just felt very confusing and vague and had no clear plan at NASA for the past 15 years. He basically shut down. This is the third time that this vehicle is launched, but it's the first time where it makes sense in a technical tech tree roadmap where we're basically repeating effectively the Apollo 9, 10 missions, which were basically missions that went to the moon. And got close to the moon, but came back. But we're basically testing the system end to end. We're basically doing that sort of same thing. This vehicle has basically flown basically three times. The first was, I want to say, in 2014, the second time, and that was really so low Earth orbit mission coming back. The second time was in 2022. There the spacecraft went much further and higher up and we practiced basically re entering at a faster speed. And this time we're basically going around the moon. The change that he's also made is for the next mission, Artemis 3, what we're going to do is rather than going back to the moon again, we're actually going to practice docking with either starship lunar lander or the Blue Origin lunar lander, which is a good practice test for eventually that docking basically happening by the moon. And then Artemis 4 would be ideally the first year, basically boots on the moon. And that's currently planned for, I believe, so late 2028. I, you know, the rocket and the spacecraft honestly may or may not be the ones that we actually use to go back to the moon. So a bit of this is Jared sort of inheriting the historical architecture. But what he has pushed is like, we are going to start launching this rocket way more frequently. We're going to be flying the spacecraft way more frequently. And I think that gives him the political air cover for like, if in a year, 18 months. This rocket, which right now has flown like, you know, three times in the last 15 years, so not particularly high cadence. If they don't get to Jared's new cadence, he'll probably just shut that program and then pivot fully to some like starship, dragon, blue origin, blue lander, et cetera type of architecture. So I think today is super, super exciting again. We're going very, very close to the moon and doing a really good practice basically for a lunar landing run. And as far as humans have been away from Earth in 53 years. But also, I don't think we have a super obvious. Here's how we're going to get back to the moon and put boots on it immediately.
- [81:27]
B
Yeah, but we're freaking trying. And that makes me so happy. Like this entire Artemis thing, the fact that we're doing it just brings joy to my heart. Jillian. I want to go to the moon myself. So the faster we go there, the faster I have a small chance. Jason, are you excited you're gonna watch show to the Girls?
- [81:41]
A
I mean, I'm. I guess I'm excited. I think I've become A bit numb to the excitement of launches since Elon has. Is doing one every three days. And they're so predictable now, which I think says something. It's kind of like, are you impressed when, I don't know, like the, I mean, people. Are people in Japan impressed when they get on a 200 mile per hour bullet train? No. Like Americans impressed when you get on one? Yes. You know, like. But this has become the new normal. Like we're able to go to space every day. I mean, what is the cadence right now of hopping on a, on a, A Falcon? Like the Falcon is the one that goes up every two or three days now. What is the number of fouls?
- [82:30]
B
160.
- [82:31]
C
And what you'll love, Jason, is in November of last year, for the first time in American history, we had more rocket launches that month than days in the month. And that was the first time that's ever happened in American history. That was Falcon 9 and everybody else. But basically daily now.
- [82:44]
A
So basically, basically, it's like the trains, it's like getting the B train or something. Like, it's like, yeah, you can get the bus. You can just show up at Starbase or in Cape Canaveral and hop a flight to space. I mean, that is mind blowing. Where were we 20 years ago? It was like there were 10 a year, 20 a year. I don't. Who knows, it was a couple of months.
- [83:08]
D
So we've now. More time has now elapsed from the first moon landing to today than time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk and the moon landing. So, like, in another way.
- [83:19]
C
Not quite. Not quite. It was six years.
- [83:20]
D
Close.
- [83:21]
C
Yeah, it's very close. It's very close. Six years from Kitty Hawk. Hawk. Yeah, yeah.
- [83:26]
A
I mean, the Concord, like, you know, this is like one of my big regrets is I remember I didn't have enough money to take a $5,000 Concord flight. But I remember the Concord because I live, you know, I lived in Brooklyn and it was, it would leave out of jfk and like, you would hear it sometimes and you would, you know, people, you knew people who took it in New York and you could get to London in three hours. Like, come on, folks. And then poor. What's the boom is like now? Boom's on a side quest, not a pivot. I incorrectly called it a pivot. But they're on a side quest to make, you know, energy at data centers. And I'm like, for the love of God, why don't we have the ability to get to Japan in five hours, man? Come on.
- [84:10]
B
Because then you would always be in Japan. Jason.
- [84:12]
A
Yes. Okay.
- [84:14]
E
Am I, I'm the blocker now.
- [84:16]
A
Like, why can't we drive 120 miles an hour on the roads in America? Like, why there are safe enough cars to have the Autobahn? Why can't we just say the left hand lane is for cars that have been built in the last 36 months that have these feature sets and go 100 miles an hour? You know, if you're, if you're driving with FSD at 100 miles an hour in the left hand lane and you don't have junkers and like, vans from 1974 in there, it would be completely safe. Like, we just need to be a little more aggressive in terms of like, or, like, raise the bar in terms of transportation. It's like, it's. We're optimizing for the cheapest possible ticket and the worst possible experience. Like, I just want to have inspiring transportation.
- [85:00]
B
Well, after this conversation, I'm pretty excited about the future in terms of compute and improving America's industrial capacity and going back to space. So I'm pretty optimistic. Jason. I think we're making good progress. All right, don't be so. Don't be so down.
- [85:11]
A
No, I'm just. There's some things that feel like I need right now. My personal. I need to be able to get to Japan faster or I want to drive faster on the roads. And we're just. Come on. I just. The future's got to get here just a little bit faster. If you had to put your money on, if you had to bet on Anthropic or OpenAI at this point, at the same valuation. Because they're the same revenue now, Alex. Am I, Are they?
- [85:37]
B
It depends on how you count. OpenAI is about a $25 billion run rate. The last anthropic number was 19 or 20 billion. But there's a lot of questions about how they're doing hyperscaler cuts and if they're counting gross or net revenue. So it's a little bit tricky.
- [85:48]
A
Okay. Entire net worth minus your primary residence has to go into one. Your entire fund has to go into one bet. Anthropic or open.
- [85:59]
B
I go, who's first?
- [86:01]
E
I'm going anthropic. And probably stuff that I'm going anthropic because, like, all the founders I know are using cloud code. I think it's really sort of like, taken off. I think that, you know, the excitement of OpenAI also had a lot of, you know, tumult with it right with, you know, with Sam almost, you know, being gone. Now he's back. The spat with Elon. I don't want to underestimate Sam Altman, but I also think that Anthropic seems to. You have captured lightning in a bottle right now. But they have their own issues, Department of so on and so forth. So who knows?
- [86:29]
A
Entire net worth has to be, except for your primary residence has to be put in anthropic or open AI. Three, two, go.
- [86:37]
D
I think it depends what matters next. And so, you know, force me. I'll say anthropic. Anthropic. Sexy.
- [86:45]
C
This week.
- [86:45]
D
Last week it was OpenAI. I think it's like, what. I think what matters, though, as between those two is sort of the business model, like, what's more defensible and what's more scalable? You know, what consumer versus enterprise look like.
- [86:58]
A
Delian, I don't know if you've got a bet here.
- [87:02]
C
We're over a billion at cost in both businesses, so I am not allowed to say which is my favorite trial.
- [87:07]
A
Okay. If your friend Alien was asked this question, what would he say?
- [87:15]
C
Your friend, A little bias towards, let's say. Okay, how about this? Pavel Esperahov, my little brother who's the CTO of a really cool company in New York, definitely spends a lot more on Anthropic than he does. OpenAI. And what is his.
- [87:25]
A
What's your little bro? What's your baby bro's company? Give him a shout out here.
- [87:28]
C
Cylinder Health, they basically make this AI that helps clinicians with prior authorizations. So basically, back in the day, you used to, like, you know, give care to your patient, and then you'd submit that treatment plan, you know, back to your insurer, and then they would, you know, basically either, you know, accept or deny it. Now they've sort of switched around the, you know, sort of work, you know, you know, process where before you give care to the patient, you're supposed to do a prior authorization and make sure that the insurance will pay for it ahead of time. And so they help out with that newly mandated process and get you paid more accurately and on time. Go, Pavel.
- [87:57]
A
All right, this has been an amazing episode of Twist April 1st. Well done. Sal Larson, Delian and Alex, great job. We'll see you next time. Bye.
- [88:07]
C
Bye.