America's Tech Wishlist, Comcast Splits in Two, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome | Zach Laberge, Gavin Uberti, Eren Bali, Larsen Jensen, Ricky Rosa, Andrew Rea, Michael Anderson, Tristan Thompson, Grant Gregory & Ian Rountree

12:58Ricky Rosa:So, Dave, what shares?

12:59Eren Bali:They just used the explosion as sort of like a demo. They demoed the old setup.

13:04Ricky Rosa:Demolition? Yeah. But good news from Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, that they're going to get New Glenn flying again sooner than people thought. So good news there. What else is in the news today? I have a pitch for you. I have a business idea. I want to give you feedback. Let's hear it. So what's the biggest problem with being a doctor? You make a lot of money as a doctor, right? What's the biggest problem?

13:33Eren Bali:The odd hours.

13:34Ricky Rosa:No, taxes. You make so much money, you get taxed on normal income, ordinary income. Even if you're a doctor, you're saving people's lives. You're doing the most important job in our economy. You have a doctor buddy that also runs a hedge fund, though. And when he runs the hedge fund, he's making capital gains. But when he does an operation, he makes ordinary income.

13:55Eren Bali:Which to me is personally very concerning. I don't know if I'd want to go to see a doctor that does surgery.

14:01Ricky Rosa:To be fair, he's building a new clinic and he has time off. Well, he's not up and running.

14:06Eren Bali:But when I heard that a surgeon was also running a hedge fund, I got a little bit worried. Just, you know, if I was under the knife and the market was open, I'd be a little nervous.

14:20Ricky Rosa:Only on off hours for sure. But the doctor makes a ton of money, saves people's lives, does all sorts of good things, gets taxed at ordinary income, not capital gains. So you're taxing doctors who are saving lives at a higher rate. So my business idea is with the power of agentic AI, we create thousands and thousands of Delaware C-Corps for every doctor. So every time that there's a doctor's appointment and you have to pay the doctor, you acquire one of their Delaware C Corps. And within that C Corp, there is on the balance sheet of that company, basically an IOU for the services the doctor must render you.

15:05Eren Bali:Sitting on the balance sheet.

15:06Ricky Rosa:Sitting on the balance sheet.

15:07Eren Bali:Yeah, it's an asset.

15:07Ricky Rosa:It's an asset. And so you can then depreciate that asset since you've acquired it. the doctor reaps capital gains and then you cash in your yeah and they can have a sort of a farm

15:21Eren Bali:of c-corps so there's you know they've had them yeah the shares for over a year exactly

15:26Ricky Rosa:exactly long-term capital gains and then and then the the patient on their way out they sign one form agentic ai does its thing winds down the c-corp and and cashes in the asset uh and then uh the doctor can reap capital gains what do you think you think we got a business there

15:43Eren Bali:I think you just created vertical AI agents for tax fraud.

15:48Ricky Rosa:I asked JGBT and it said, this is almost certainly dead on arrival. Not clever tax optimization, more like abusive tax shelter with healthcare law side quests. The core problem is the economic substance is obvious. The patient is paying for medical care. The doctor is being paid for performing medical services. IRC-61 includes compensation for services and fees and gross income. and the IRS says you generally include everything received in payment for personal services. Wrapping the bill in a newly minted C Corp does not change the income character. Well, I think we'll have to take that one to the Supreme Court.

16:25Ricky Rosa:All the way, take it all the way. I think if we take it to the Supreme Court, there's a chance.

16:29Eren Bali:I think you can wrap it in a prediction market, right? So every single time you go to the doctor, you say, okay, there's like 0 % chance the doctor's gonna do well, and then he bets yes. He bets yes. And then we'll see what happens, but if it's a good doctor, then he'll be paid out in full.

16:43Ricky Rosa:It adds insurance to it as well because you don't pay if the doctor doesn't do a good job.

16:47Eren Bali:Yeah, it's like insurance is built in.

16:48Ricky Rosa:Built in. That's genius. So I think this is actually – But are winnings on prediction markets capital gains?

16:54Eren Bali:I think it's still mostly unclear. So for the next few years, I think this will definitely be a good strategy.

16:59Ricky Rosa:Okay. I like it. I like it. You have to imagine because they say – they don't use the word bet. They use the word trade. Trade.

17:07Eren Bali:Yeah. Predict. So capital gains. Trading.

17:09Ricky Rosa:Capital gains treatment maybe? I don't know.

17:11Eren Bali:The post last year where someone was saying, like, prediction markets will replace everything. If I want blueberries delivered to my house, I go to the market for blueberries being delivered to my house, and I bet$15, and I bet no. Someone else, they bet yes. They deliver me blueberries. They get the$15.

17:32Ricky Rosa:Works every time. Works every single time. We keep debating this meta question of will they launch a financially incentivized prediction market or will it purely be for social clout? You're still in the camp of there's going to be real dollars. It just feels like the first time meta will ever have.

17:54Eren Bali:The reason I believe that is because I believe they had meta, like, was reaching out to the various prediction market providers to try to be potential, like, partners and or vendors.

18:09Ricky Rosa:But, I mean, partnership can mean so many different things, right? Partnership with prediction market can mean we'll give you ad reads or discounted ads or we'll vend your data so that if someone is on Instagram and hits the search box acting for something and Llama 5 or Muse Spark wants to answer it and surface data from a prediction market, we have the rights to do that without infringing on your copyright or something like that. Like it could be a data licensing partnership. It could be an acquisition funnel. It could be something where Meta's funneling people to the prediction markets or back.

18:48Ricky Rosa:Like that whole, I read the same article that you read and it doesn't make any sense to say, oh yeah, I want to create a competitor. So I'm going to reach out to my direct competitors and see if they want to give me their customers. Like why would they ever do that? That makes no sense. You see what I'm saying?

19:04Eren Bali:The only thing is like the prediction markets have a history of partnering with other applications and basically being the infrastructure providers. Yeah. To actually place real dollar predictions.

19:17Ricky Rosa:But if you go to any partner, whether it's, you know, there was that whole suite of like. No, I agree with you.

19:25Eren Bali:I generally agree that there is a possibility that there's no dollars. CNN, CNBC. But I just don't. New York Stock Exchange.

19:34Ricky Rosa:They all have partnerships with prediction markets. None of them have like, oh, go in the CNBC app and upload your credit card information. Like Meta has been on this path of like, maybe we'd like a financial relationship with our customers for decades. And like, it's never really matured. There was always this idea that you would be able to like save your payment information. And then when you see a t-shirt, you could just click and one click check out in the Instagram app or in the Facebook app. And that never really took off for a variety of reasons.

20:05Eren Bali:So, John, in this case, it'd be like you see an ad and then it's like I place a bet that there won't be a T-shirt delivered to my house.

20:11Ricky Rosa:Yes, yes.

20:12Eren Bali:And then it'll get fulfilled.

20:13Ricky Rosa:This is the final boss.

20:14Eren Bali:Hopefully. Hopefully. You place a big enough bet.

20:18Ricky Rosa:The answer to your question on can doctors reap capital gains by using prediction markets instead. Prediction market profits are taxable, but the character is unsettled at the moment. CFTC regulated event contracts like Kalshi style contracts. There is a decent argument that they are financial derivatives rather than gambling. The CFTC describes event contracts as derivative contracts whose payoff depends on the specified event. It also granted Kalshi status as a designated contract market. So best case, some contracts might be treated as 1256 contracts. That means marked to market annually and gains and losses split across 60 % long-term capital, 40 % short-term capital, regardless of holding period.

21:05Ricky Rosa:So there's a chance that that's the solution. I think we might have solved it, but we'll have to use every tool in the modern financialization and technology box. The Wall Street Journal asked their readers what innovations they want to see in the next 20 years. and the answers are sort of all over the place.

21:25Eren Bali:Number five will shock you.

21:27Ricky Rosa:Number five might shock you. What innovation do you want to see in the next 20 years? Tyler, think of something. Jordy, think of something. I'll read some of what the Wall Street Journal readers wrote in. Mary Gillespie from Irving, Texas said, solar on wheels. She says, why can't cars be manufactured with solar panels integrated into the top of the vehicle? Then it could recharge the car's battery as you travel and when you park. So this is not actually a new idea. There are cars that have solar panels on the roof, but solar panels are extremely weak. And so you'd have to leave the car outside for like five months to charge a full electric car.

22:06Ricky Rosa:Now, there have been DARPA Grand Challenge cars and specific almost science experiments vehicles where they have a huge surface area. And it's this massive wing of solar panels. And I think there's a plane that's also potentially able to ply indefinitely by having solar panels that recharge a motor and it spins. But for a normal car, a single solar panel on the roof doesn't get you much in the way of charging. But she's basically asking for a stronger solar density, stronger energy density. And I'm in. I'm in. In 20 years, totally feasible. Mary from Irving, Texas. I think it's going to happen.

22:47Ricky Rosa:I think it's possible. 20 years anyway traffic jam plan i would love to see an autopilot feature i would love i would love to see autopilot features on cars talk to each other saying so cars can move nuclear cars just get a nuclear car that's very uh very fallout i i like the what is that nuclear punk or something what was that was that there's like this alternate history of like the 1960s if it was powered by nuclear uh not solar punk atom punk atom punk is the term uh and it has all these really cool things that could be powered by nuclear. Maybe we'll get there. Fusion is sort of promising that.

23:21Ricky Rosa:We've talked to a couple companies that do smaller fusion reactors. And they tend, Avalanche is one up in Seattle or maybe Washington, where it's basically the nuclear reactor, but it's fusion, not fission. And it's about the size of a large battery. And so you could potentially put it in a car, Put it in a drone. Put it in a space vehicle. Keep it up there for a long time. Accordion traffic jams would be a thing of the past. What is an accordion traffic jam?

23:53Eren Bali:I think that's when the traffic's like.

23:55Ricky Rosa:Oh, going in and out.

23:57Eren Bali:In and out. Yeah. People are stopping and going. And there's that slight delay when theoretically if everyone was like moving at the perfect. Yeah. You know. So Morgan Clayton from Birmingham, Alabama wants autopilot features on all the cars to talk to each other.

24:10Ricky Rosa:So they never do that. So they know, okay, I got to speed up. I got to slow down. And then they're all perfectly in sync. Probably doable. You need some standard or something. What are you thinking? Musical vision. This is a good one. These people are thinking outside the box. This is not like, oh, I want inference at one-tenth of the cost. Silicon Valley is unimaginative by comparison. But Mary Stickner Gifford from Alpine, Utah says she wants musical vision. I'd like to see the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. There are many ways to help the sight impaired read the printed word, but pianists and others need to read music at the piano.

24:54Ricky Rosa:My father's sight was so bad that he had to look at the music about two inches away, memorize one or two phrases, then practice what he memorized. He gave his last recital from memory at age 94. What a legend. Let's give it up for Mary Schickner Giffords' father, grandfather. Powerful. Crazy idea. Can't you just print it bigger? If you're having trouble seeing it.

25:22Eren Bali:You just invented the semi-truck size printer.

25:26Ricky Rosa:Yeah. I mean, you could just print like a poster board and then you could see it at the piano. Also, glasses, potentially? Solution here?

25:38Eren Bali:yeah I wonder I mean it might be a small might be a small market of people whose vision is so impaired that even with glasses it needs to be up close up

25:47Ricky Rosa:close I'm just confused by why this the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music why are we focused on reading music wouldn't this be wouldn't any technology that allows you to read music with your hard of sight allow you to read anything? Yeah.

26:07Eren Bali:You could also general technology.

26:09Ricky Rosa:I mean,

26:09Eren Bali:couldn't you have, uh, couldn't you learn individual notes and then learn the order of that? Yeah. Have it spoken to you?

26:17Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

26:18Eren Bali:And I do think maybe iPad app,

26:21Ricky Rosa:iPads often sit at the, at the piano and you could have an iPad app that shows like sort of like one note or two.

26:27Eren Bali:What about a humanoid robot that grabs your hand and bend? puppeteers you like a marionette and you know slams your hands yeah totally possible battery

26:37Ricky Rosa:swaps we've seen these in china where they eject them with great force uh joseph magnati from sarasota florida has a different idea he says in probably less than 20 years the technology of all solid state batteries will reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle i like this because he's phrasing it more as like a pull up this video we have swaps we have joseph We got the technology. We just need to make it less violent. We'll reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle will be able to drive into a service station, buy a pack of batteries, each the size of an old phone book.

27:11Ricky Rosa:Okay, this is a very different technology. Yep, that one's very dangerous. Let's not do that.

27:16Eren Bali:Okay, every time I call Nick on our team, he's like on some crazy quest to charge his car. Every time. So this... He doesn't have a car. hour of the day I call him he's like oh I'm I'm trying to find a charger like you know the the

27:33Ricky Rosa:the map was wrong launching my battery like a broadside canyon at the moron next to me that cut me off just committing seppuku with your car just I abandon the battery but you take out your rival it's a crazy thing because like if you eject that battery like you're not getting it back it's going to be at very least damaged. There's no way that's going back in the car. But this, of course, is a fire mitigation strategy. Electric vehicle batteries can burn for days on end. If you can eject them, you save the car, you save the surroundings potentially and create a much more safe environment. Totally reasonable.

28:13Ricky Rosa:Looks hilarious in the video.

28:15Eren Bali:Anyway. Nick just texted me, bro, the chargers in Malibu are all fake.

28:19Ricky Rosa:They are. I don't know what that means. I don't even too long the imminent technology will also herald that's probably the news that's probably the new

28:28Eren Bali:like uh i'm going to the dentist yeah you know when you know someone's like interviewing at other places i got a dentist appointment you're like again yeah um but uh but but nick is just like oh i'm just charging my car i'm just charging my car it's a good excuse i don't i don't buy it nick I don't buy that the chargers are fake.

28:48Ricky Rosa:Here's one. Ethan Glasby from South Kingston, Kingstown, Rhode Island, wants a trash economy. He says, push, put trash to work. I would love to see an at-home generator powered by bacteria that eat trash. We already have bacteria that produce ethanol as well as bacteria that break down plastic. So both in one doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Much like solar energy, the ethanol could be used to offset heating costs and keep the fridge running when the power goes out. He's basically asking to burn the trash, but I guess in a more clean fashion, all while being fueled by household waste.

29:27Ricky Rosa:Just maybe don't tell your dinner guests that you are growing bacteria in the next room over. Good piece of advice from Ethan. Beam me up. This is a great one. Harold Lewis is truly living in the year 2060 or 2 ,600, something like that.

29:44Eren Bali:Or 3060.

29:45Ricky Rosa:Because Harold Lewis from Tarrytown, New York says, beam me up. I want human teleportation in the next 20 years. It should work a lot like email in which data composed of bits and bytes. It's email for humans. As a whole in one place are disassembled, then electronically transmitted to another place where they are reassembled. What is DNA? if not bits and bytes of human beings. Do you believe that if you were teleported in this fashion, you would remain? Would you be teleported? Or is it a prestige situation not to spoil Ruby Evans?

30:19Eren Bali:I would almost certainly have Tyler go first and just give it a spin. The whole point is that you wouldn't be able to tell, but I would actually die and there's a clone of me.

30:29Ricky Rosa:Yeah, that you would die.

30:30Eren Bali:You would have no way of knowing if it was me or not because in every way, it's all the same data.

30:35Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

30:36Eren Bali:Yeah, you might be in the pocket of big teleportation. No, I'm still me.

30:42Ricky Rosa:New Tyler would be like, it worked great. And then the corpse of old Tyler, who got disassembled molecule by molecule, would be no longer with us and disappeared. And that is the question in the Prestige. You've got to go watch the movie.

30:55Eren Bali:Well, Paul Blanco wants something else. He wants a smart spatula.

30:58Ricky Rosa:This is so much more attainable.

31:00Eren Bali:I'd love a cooking spatula. Human teleportation. That can tell without penetration what temperature or how thoroughly cooked a hamburger or steak is. I like that. Do we not have like a... No. Like we literally have things. No, no, no. He wants without penetration.

31:17Ricky Rosa:You just rest the spatula on top of the steak and it tells you inside the steak what temperature it is, which is very difficult because if you're searing or doing a reverse sear or something, the outside could be a wildly different temperature than what's going on inside. So how do you detect the temperature? without penetrating the steak with a thermometer.

31:36Eren Bali:A powerful x-ray. Imagine it's as big as that brain scanner thing.

31:40Ricky Rosa:It's just like, yeah, here's your smart spatula. Load it up. It's like MRI-ing the entire steak. That'd be a good time. Robot chefs. Oh, this is related. I want a robot that can work as an executive chef in my own kitchen, says Ray Lohr from Lacey, Washington. It could call a grocer, order ingredients, insisting on it all being upscale and have those ingredients delivered, unpack, load the fridge, and then use my appliances to make dinner. 20 years? I think that's possible. I like that. That's right on the right level of sci-fi. It seems doable. Not impossible. For what it's worth, some of these ideas...

32:17Ricky Rosa:But also not something we could whip up in a weekend with an Arduino, like the smarts.

32:20Eren Bali:Some of these ideas are silly, but I'm viewing it as a very literal request for startups. Yeah.

32:26Ricky Rosa:Yeah. No, I like it. Quiet Inside. Cheryl Franklin from West Grove. Pennsylvania says, given the negative effects of excessive noise, such as elevated blood pressure, cardiac stress, and lower real estate values, I'd love to see improvements in building materials. For example, drywall with built-in soundproofing capabilities. Love that. Perhaps a lightweight soundblocking film. It's called lead paint, Cheryl. Bring it back. It's not lead paint. That doesn't do anything to sound. Perhaps a lightweight soundblocking film could also be developed for use in existing buildings and homes. I had a startup idea a while back.

33:00Ricky Rosa:So, you know when you have a young baby, a child, and every time you go to change the diaper, very noisy? One of my friends put up sound panels like a podcast studio, full slat wall in the nursery. Dual-use technology. Dual-use technology, for sure. And it dampens the cries so you're not so echoey because sometimes if a kid's crying in a very echoey room, it really reverberates and it can be kind of crazy.

33:28Eren Bali:And lead paint is dense. So in theory, any added mass can reduce sound transmission. So maybe add a little bit of lead paint to your nursery.

33:38Ricky Rosa:Lead plates. Whole lead plates, maybe. Whole Faraday cage. But here was the idea. No one wants a slat wall in their nursery, in their baby's room. I don't know. Maybe if you're trying to breed the super podcaster. But most people don't want that. They want animals. They want a pastoral nature vibe, some warm pastel. some nice warm tones, something welcoming for the new child who's just been brought into this world. And so the idea was a typical sound panel, square, flat, you know, you might see the egg crate, the black material. But you paint on it an animal. You paint on it childlike, you know, paintings that you would hang on the wall.

34:19Ricky Rosa:It looks appropriate. It fits the decor of the room. But it also has the added effect of sound treating the room so that it's less noisy when everyone's yelling. good business banger banger there we go banger better than c corps on demand for doctors for

34:38Eren Bali:doctors to do taxes um maybe certainly simpler jennifer smith we have made so many advancements in so many areas but what i want most is a way to control outside noise this is the superpower she wants it would be so nice to be able to sit on my screened in porch and enjoy listening to the birds without having to hear nearby traffic, which sounds like drag racing these days. Well, that's because it is drag racing, Jennifer. We're drag racing in your neighborhood. If sounds are waves, can't we block some? How have we not invented an open-air type of noise-canceling headphones to shield noise waves and give us some quiet spaces outdoors?

35:18Ricky Rosa:I mean, the simple solution here is just more electric vehicles. They're quieter. You don't sound like drag racing. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of emission standards that also reduce noise from internal combustion engines, at least until you chop the exhaust and straight pipe that thing. But if you're not doing that.

35:38Eren Bali:Or your engine swap.

35:40Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

35:40Eren Bali:Your Model 3.

35:41Ricky Rosa:Yeah. V12. But, yeah, I don't know. Is this possible? Could you just put out a big speaker that selectively noise cancels car noise but not bird noise? That seems possible.

35:57Eren Bali:I personally, I would take my home. I'd get really thick windows, ideally lead paint in the whole home.

36:07Ricky Rosa:You had the lead paint. I just loved the lead paint.

36:10Eren Bali:And I'd bring the birds inside. I got an alternative there.

36:13Ricky Rosa:If you got drag racers racing down your quiet, bird-infested street, you got to go Wile E. Coyote mode. You got to put out a fake tunnel out of bricks, paint it with some lead paint maybe. The fake tunnel, the drag racer smashes into the bricks. They'll never be racing down your street again.

36:35Eren Bali:Drop an anvil on their head.

36:37Ricky Rosa:Yeah, dropping an anvil on the car, that works too.

36:39Eren Bali:Well, you're going to like this one. Okay, tell me.

36:42Ricky Rosa:What do we got?

36:43Eren Bali:Daniel Hansen says, first, I'd like to see a dishwasher with racks that can be raised, making it easier for tall people to load and unload them.

36:51Ricky Rosa:Literally a thing that exists. My dishwasher has that functionality.

36:56Eren Bali:Can you get it? Can you get it to 6.8, though? No, it doesn't go up that high, but you can adjust it up. Wouldn't that be nicer if it was at eye level for you and you could just?

37:04Ricky Rosa:I guess for the bottom rack, if it elevated. Yeah, this is a contraption. This is an invention. I agree. I like this. And then glare, smart glass for windshields that will tint itself in the spot where the sun or reflection hits it at high intensity. That's very cool, very niche. I like this. Seems very difficult to do. There are some electrochromatic windows. Have you seen, is it Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini that has it? Where you can twist a knob and it will progressively shade and tint certain sections of the glass. The Rivian, which the Rivian team sent me to demo this week, which has been a lot of fun, has an electrochromatic sun or moonroof, I guess, because it doesn't open.

37:51Ricky Rosa:So it's a moonroof. And you can change the tint, but only for the whole thing, not selectively. There are now cars that allow you to do basically stripes. like every other one if you want half chrome half tint I suppose seems I have a funny dynamic with my

38:08Eren Bali:daily where the the the material like to my right like down into the right from the steering wheel is like very like glossy plastic and so anywhere between like 2 and 4 p.m. the light just hits it and just goes into your eyes. Yeah. And I just, every time I think I'll put, I'll have to like take like a shirt and just cover it. Sure. I'm thinking like, Yeah, if you had like millions of nanomachines

38:38Ricky Rosa:that could reconfigure the structure of the armrest at a particular time to bounce the light slightly differently, that would be the easy solution. Yes, exactly. That would be the simple solution. Nanobots.

38:52Eren Bali:I love, I love. Wait, we have to talk about the Rivian team because they sent you this demo unit to try. R1X. And they said. It's a demo unit, so drive it as fast as you want. You can roll it if you want. It's no big deal. Just really enjoy the car to the fullest. I was pretty surprised that they said that.

39:09Ricky Rosa:That was great. It's actually an amazing car. I like it. The self-driving feature, deeply underrated. My latest hot take is that self-driving technology is commoditizing as fast as LLM technology and that companies that take it seriously and actually prioritize it, It is not some insane tech breakthrough that cannot be implemented in other vehicles. It, in fact, can be implemented in other vehicles. Just like we've seen Chipotle get a chatbot, we will see every car be autonomous. It will not be the domain of a single company. Funniest thing about this, you got someone who's asking for just a dishwasher that's a little bit taller.

39:49Ricky Rosa:You got somebody who's asking for a smart spatula. and then you have Nolan Williams who says, I would like to see significant developments in cancer and longevity drugs. You're sitting there, you're going around with the Wall Street Journal and you're like, oh, like what did you ask for?

40:08Eren Bali:Smart spatula.

40:09Ricky Rosa:Smart spatula, I was like, what did you ask for? Life extension. Curing cancer, you're like, what? I didn't know, I didn't know it was that type of question. He says, longer lives mean longer runway for brilliant people to bring forth their own innovations and pass on their knowledge. Wow, Nolan Williams, really great answer. Early detection. In the next 20 years, I would like to see how new tech and AI-driven diagnostics will improve cancer detection. This is definitely happening. Clement Lee from Atlanta. We are on the right track. A focus on seniors. I would like to see something address the risk of falls.

40:42Ricky Rosa:I've seen a couple of things like this. Different devices that you can put in your home that detect falls, either while you're wearing the device, it detects the motion. I think the Apple Watch has a device as a feature for this. But I saw another, I think it was a YC company that had essentially a smart speaker that could detect a fall in a house. Very, very cool. Robotic home aids, robots that are capable of performing home health care, very similar to the chef. But obviously for someone who has multiple disabilities, Matthew Weed here from Colorado Springs.

41:14Eren Bali:It's got to be, if, for anyone that's older and has been seeing, like, the humanoid form factor for decades now, and then now there's actually, like, a bunch of startups, like, you know, that are investing billions of dollars into doing it, they're still probably like, yeah, it's just never going to happen.

41:32Ricky Rosa:I like these. Michelle from Canton, Ohio says, what do I wish for? A house that never needs dusting. I know. Ain't going to happen. And then there's someone else who says, Donna Helper, True Doomer here, says, What tech innovations would I like to see? None. We have too much tech. Keep it real. Very good. Anyway, there's a whole bunch more, but you can go and read them. Let's move on to other stories in the news. We have our next guest joining in just a minute, but there's a narrative violation on the timeline. We got a narrative violation, folks. David Sachs is breaking it down. This is from Ara Karazian over at RAMP, chief economist.

42:13Ricky Rosa:It says, a new study of 21 ,559 firms in the United States finds that companies that adopt AI tend to grow faster following adoption. Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10 % following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change. Entry-level headcount rises 12 % for high-intensity adopters. Wow, that is a lot considering that the whole narrative was this will be the end of entry-level jobs. And that doesn't seem to be the case, at least with this study. The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss.

42:52Ricky Rosa:The study is based on observed AI spending from RAMP, card and bill pay data linked to Revelio Labs workforce records. And what's interesting here is that it's clear, especially from that Wall Street Journal article, people want more things. They want more stuff. People want more output from companies. They want cheaper things. They want more of those things, whether it's movies or entertainment or cars or smart spatulas. People want more. They want more specific things. They want more niche things. They want more mass market things. They want more affordable things. And all of that requires a lot of AI and a lot of people.

43:30Ricky Rosa:And so you put them all together and you start growing your business and that's what's happening, at least in this data. Well, congrats to the folks over at Ramp on a banger article that made it into the Financial Times. You'd love to see whenever something breaks loose of the Ramp Economics blog, but you can go sign up for our sub stack and subscribe to the Ramp blog. But without further ado, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

44:00Ricky Rosa:And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Zach LaBerge from Omen AI, the founder and CEO. Zach, how are you doing?

44:07Eren Bali:What's going on? How are you guys doing?

44:10Ricky Rosa:Did I get your last name even remotely correct?

44:12Eren Bali:No, that was perfect.

44:14Ricky Rosa:Perfect.

44:14Eren Bali:Wow. Let's go.

44:16Ricky Rosa:Yes. Thank you. Anyway, please introduce yourself.

44:21Zach Laberge:Yeah, I'm Zach, founder of Omen AI. We do blood monitoring for mission critical machines.

44:28Ricky Rosa:Okay. Mission critical machines. I'm thinking data centers. What do you think?

44:32Zach Laberge:Yes, sir. You'd be right. We got our start in big mining machines, you know, like the big machines you see on site. That's where it's been a long time working there. Where does the name come from? It's a forecast of something to happen, whether good or bad. You know, we obviously don't want our customers' machines to break. And so, yeah, we'd like to go good on this.

44:53Ricky Rosa:So the lifeblood of the modern data center, there's water, there's liquid that's cooling the data center. sometimes in a closed loop flowing around getting cooled outside the data center being brought in removing the heat from the chips what's actually in that liquid is it just water is it water in something else and then what happens like how does it get dirty if it's in a closed loop why doesn't it just stay clean and fresh forever why do you have a job why do you have a business yeah that's

45:22Zach Laberge:a great question um so it you know it depends the type of fluid normally it's a water-based fluid with some sort of mixture of either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. You're seeing a big shift recently towards more like safer fluid. So propylene glycol is more preferred since it's less toxic. Can you drink it? Could you have a sip?

45:44Ricky Rosa:You can definitely vape it. Both of those are heavily used in the cigarette industry. Yeah, no joke. The whole VGPG ratio is a big thing in the e-cigarette world. But good that we found a good use for it.

45:57Eren Bali:You're basically smoking data center when you hit a vape.

46:00Ricky Rosa:That's one way to put it. The other way is that this is the solution to the vape crisis, is that drive up the price of propylene glycol so that everyone's like, I got to quit vaping. I got to save it for the data centers.

46:14Eren Bali:I'm going to use that now. Every time I see someone hit an e-cigarette, it's like, oh, really? You're smoking a data center?

46:21Ricky Rosa:Yeah. Anyway, so what happens? How does a liquid cooling system actually degrade over time? How long does it take and what's actually going on?

46:30Zach Laberge:Yeah, so a bunch of different things can happen in the system. You know, you see a lot of, you know, basic infrastructure wear. So, you know, when your pumps wear, your seals wear, all of that stuff starts to contaminate the liquid itself. And so whether it's like copper or chromium from the pipes or we're starting to see something get in. What also happens is like the more heat that happens, you know, and the more wear that happens to your fluid, the more it starts to break down. So you go from this very nice, like high concentration of, you know, glycol to water to then that starts to degrade.

46:57Zach Laberge:And then you start to get bio growth and other crap that gets in there and, you know, start to eat your chips and, you know, sit on your in your pipes.

47:05Ricky Rosa:Has anyone tried using beef tallow to cool a data center? I think that might be the solution. That's a real meat in the middle compromise policy position, maybe. Now, what is the go to market like?

47:17Eren Bali:Most niche joke of all time.

47:21Ricky Rosa:what is the go-to-market like? $31 million raised. There's some hyperscaler mega data centers. Do they pick up the phone for you? Can you sell into them? Or are you working your way up with smaller data center providers, sort of a walk-for-a-one approach? Like what's working?

47:38Zach Laberge:Yeah, I mean, we've just, we've been working with almost every, you know, kind of neocloud that's out there and some more violent deployment. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, you think about like nine months ago, folks were just starting to get these, you know, systems online and clusters online for liquid cooling. And now you start to see folks who are running dozens, maybe a hundred, hundreds of megawatts worth of, you know, liquid cool compute and they're starting to see failures. And so we kind of went from, Hey, we're selling and folks don't really know what the problems are to now everybody's like, shit, we've had failures or we're starting to see failures.

48:09Zach Laberge:Our competitors are seeing failures. You know, we need to adopt something.

48:12Ricky Rosa:Yeah. And it's probably pretty easy to underwrite because every hour that the data center is not functioning is leaving. hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table. What is the actual installation process? Can you just cut the pipe and then insert your device into the flow? How long does it take to install? How big is your solution?

48:35Zach Laberge:Yeah, so our solution just fits across the rack manifold. So we're kind of plugging in those OCP quick disconnects, mounting it if we were a GPU. So it only takes a couple minutes to install. What's great about a cabinet is that we get power, we get network, and the fluids right there. Again, coming from industrials, that was not fun, where you have every machine that has completely different integration. So, you know, we get to eat a lot less pain over on this side of things.

49:00Ricky Rosa:Sure, sure. Who did the round? What are you actually going to be spending it on? Is it just staff up? What is the cash conversion cycle like for the business? Because I imagine there's a lot of cash flowing around, and they might be able to just pay you up front. How much did you raise first? Tell us. We want to hit the gong. Jordy's warmed up.

49:19Zach Laberge:Raise$31 million in Series A.

49:26Ricky Rosa:We got a bigger mallet.

49:28Eren Bali:Yeah, we got a bigger mallet. One of the first rounds with this mallet.

49:33Ricky Rosa:$31 million. Is that hiring scientists to iterate on the product? Is it just scale up manufacturing? What are you actually putting the money to work for?

49:45Zach Laberge:Yeah, I mean, it's really just growing up the team and growing up manufacturing. you know when we raised our seed like eight months ago it was basically just me you know working on this problem you know putting sensors on on excavators and so we've kind of gone through this interesting process going from one to 20 and now you know we're going to go from 20 to 40 folks by the end of the year and the round was mostly like just really smart data center experts and so it was led by a fund called nova ventures um really a lot of strategic value from the data center space a big lp and their fund is cheryl samberg who is also now an investor in us and so So we're really happy to have her on board.

50:20Zach Laberge:And then we also have like CRV and a few other awesome like kind of C-Suite folks from CoreWeave, SensorWave, and one of the smart places.

50:28Ricky Rosa:Oh sorry, Jordy you have something? I got another question. So detection is only one piece of the puzzle. If you detect something earlier, you detect microbial buildup or copper leaking into the liquid cooling cycle. What does that actually, what happens downstream of that? Is it that you swap all the water out or you go fix the root issue? Like what is the technician side doing with the information that you give them?

51:00Zach Laberge:Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the problem right now is like you have these monster labs that like they pull a sample from every major data center you can think of. They ship it off to their lab and now it's like, let me wait a couple of weeks to get a result back. And normally it's pretty binary. It's like we either flush it, which, you know, is millions of dollars in downtime. I mean, you think about a loop that's like, call it a thousand GPUs. It takes four to five hours to flush a rack. And so now that's 5 ,000 GPU hours that just went down just to flush one rack. And so, by laundering it every day, you can say, okay, what are smaller chemistry changes we can make?

51:32Zach Laberge:Whether it's bio-shocking, whether it's adjusting the propylene glycol to water ratio. Those are all things that the CDU can do. We just can't do it right now because we have these silly lab tests.

51:41Ricky Rosa:That's very cool.

51:42Zach Laberge:Very cool.

51:43Ricky Rosa:Is the business 100 % U.S. right now? What is the state of the data center build out internationally?

51:52Zach Laberge:We work with only U.S. like neoclouds to date. You know, some of these folks have projects all around the world. So we're looking at some projects in Europe that are run by a few of our partners. But it's been primarily U.S. based. We're based in San Francisco and we have an office in Orange County right now.

52:09Ricky Rosa:Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great progress. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon.

52:14Eren Bali:Come back on soon. Have a good one. Cheers, Zach.

52:17Ricky Rosa:Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Derek Thompson has a new newsletter out. He's breaking it down. He says, there's never been a better time to get rich working alone.

52:34Eren Bali:Is he saying the goose is not valued?

52:37Ricky Rosa:I think he's saying the goose is not valued.

52:40Eren Bali:Is he saying the goose is not valued?

52:41Ricky Rosa:He says, the debate about AI and jobs often breaks down into two extreme groups, both of which have an evidence problem. On the one hand are the doomers who say AI will take everyone's job, even though unemployment remains low, and the unemployment rate for prime age Americans is still very high. On the other hand are the deniers whose insistence that AI is a worthless scam prevents them from seeing the many ways it's changing work and the economy broadly. If you want a strong and evidence-based take about AI and jobs, I have one for you. Quote from Derek Thompson. There's never been a better time for workers to get rich by going independent.

53:24Ricky Rosa:This is the golden age for tiny startups with big revenue. The evidence, charts one and two, the number of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups is taking off. Great news. Chart three, there is rising evidence that these small firms are more likely to use AI and sell AI-related products, whether it's software consulting or design. Chart four…

53:44Eren Bali:Is he saying that the matter is not the eggs, it's the goose itself? Is the true value is the power to keep buying eggs?

53:50Ricky Rosa:Yes, yes.

53:51Eren Bali:Okay, continue. I just want to make sure I understood.

53:54Ricky Rosa:Today's micro-startups are becoming multi-million dollar firms faster and more frequently than any generation of firms that Stripe has measured. Today's article is about the rise of the solo act in the US labor force and its implications for the future of business, social life, more solo entrepreneurs, even more aloneness, and in America's fiscal crisis, more pass-through firms, even less tax revenue for a revenue starved government. Interesting. So if you have a bunch of talented people that would be earning money as doctors, but then they go in and they wind up starting a business, then yeah, maybe that's lower tax.

54:27Ricky Rosa:That feels like that's further off. when I looked at cap gains rates. Even if you brought cap gains in line with ordinary income, it doesn't close the deficit gap whatsoever. It's such a small portion of the tax revenue base. But interesting that he's calling that out. Would love to know more about where that trend line actually converges. The interesting thing, is this a bull case for -

54:50Eren Bali:Yeah, but I don't really get the pass-through firm's point. You still end up paying -

54:55Ricky Rosa:It wouldn't be. I don't know if it's pass-through. It might be so I guess in a mature C Corp, the company is paying taxes and then also the the employees are paying taxes. And so this is why most people don't set up a C Corp if they're just a solo entrepreneur, because they don't want to pay corporate taxes and then also personal and personal taxes on their on their income.

55:21Eren Bali:Yeah, but like one way or another, you're going to have to.

55:24Ricky Rosa:No, no, it's actually like double taxation. That's why you use an LLC, because you pass it through and the income that you distribute is not taxable at the corporate level.

55:34Eren Bali:I know, but I'm saying like overall, overall, the money is being taxed one way or another. They're flowing to individual.

55:44Ricky Rosa:Currently, like just a meta employee, meta pays their taxes and then the meta employee pays income taxes. if that meta employee spins out, starts in LLC, and then is making the same amount of money that they were making at meta, the overall number of dollars that's going to the government is lower. That's what he's identifying. Now, do I think this is a crisis just yet? It would need to go a lot further, I think, to get there. But I understand the math that he's laying out. It is a risk factor. But is this a bull case for co-working spaces? And the rise of solo entrepreneurship.

56:22Eren Bali:Nothing is bullish for co-working spaces to me.

56:27Ricky Rosa:It's rough. Why is it bad? Why has no one been able to make a good co-working space?

56:32Eren Bali:Because I think it's just nice to have your own space. It's the same. I mean, the same logic would be like, why don't they make it? You know, why don't they make an apartment building where you get a tiny little. I mean, they do do this. why don't they have a pod yeah yeah i'm basically i mean it's basically like imagine if you rented your apartment it was actually like as big as like one why don't they make like a smaller version of

56:57Ricky Rosa:a house that you can rent that's like in a building with other other like of these mini houses i'm

57:03Eren Bali:just saying like a 20 a 10 foot by 10 foot room that you rent and then all the amenities are you would happily live in the unabomber shed you were saying that it's the chemical of lifestyle I did think the picture of it in storage looked cool.

57:20Ricky Rosa:But it needed a slight massage.

57:23Eren Bali:But the difference there is like that shed on the right property would be very cool.

57:28Ricky Rosa:That's true. That's true.

57:29Eren Bali:But the property is sort of an amenity.

57:33Ricky Rosa:Yes. But people don't feel that way about going into the office. They don't feel like, oh, this is a co-worker. People feel worse about a co-working space than they do. Your sentiment is correct. Many people feel this way about co-working spaces, that they are unproductive or annoying. But people don't feel that way about going to a campus with a bunch of buildings and a bunch of even like cubicles or like desks that are pretty close. Shared effort. But it's everyone's on the same team. Shared culture. Yeah. So you need to create a caretzu of every company in the co-working space potentially. I don't know.

58:09Ricky Rosa:We'll figure it out. But fortunately, we have our next guest from Etched in the waiting room. We're very excited for the launch of this company. I did an interview with Gavin. What was that, two years ago or something like that? You were laying out the idea for this company very early on. You made a ton of progress. Take us through the story. Begin at the beginning. Introduce yourself first.

58:36Michael Anderson:Well, I'm Gavin. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders at Etched. We are building rack-scale inference hardware. And what that means is that we're building the full system. That is chips, boards, platforms, racks, and clusters, as well as, of course, software, and importantly, the production lines, to build those things at scale.

58:57Ricky Rosa:So the original viral sound bite that got so much attention around your company was the idea that you were going to bake the—you were all in on the transformer. You said, AI will advance, but the transformer is here to stay. That architecture will be here to stay. And so we are going to fully commit to the transformer, and we're going to sort of etch that into the chip. How real is that today? That thesis feels like it's been borne out very well, but it feels like you've added a lot of new strategies to the portfolio. How are you thinking about the bet that you made two years ago?

59:38Michael Anderson:We looked at a lot of early research directions, and we realized the key things that models need are way more compute and way faster memory. If you think about inference, there's two key parts, pre-fill and decode. Or pre-fill, it's a compute-bound problem. You need to have more flops, more operations per second on each of your chips. And on our GPU, the bottleneck's actually thermals. You can't really run our GPU more than around 50 % of what it could theoretically do, or it'll melt. So we're using a new technology today called low-voltage inference to try to solve this problem. And what that is is you bring the voltage of the chip down dramatically, which allows us to have way, way better efficiency in terms of how much power is drawn per unit of math and thus fit way, way more flops onto the chip.

1:00:33Ricky Rosa:Pausing there, why can't you super cool the chips? Liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something to make it colder so that you can run it at 100 % power?

1:00:44Michael Anderson:It's a great question. If you look on the internet, there's some videos of folks trying to super overclock CPUs by using these things on them. The problem is you actually can't go a whole lot above where they're meant to operate. For example, visual CPUs can go ahead and do four, four and a half gigahertz. I think the world record is on the order of eight, nine gigahertz with the liquid cryogenic helium. And the problem is you have to get the heat actually out of the chip. That you can't physically go touch the resistors with your liquid nitrogen. You have to go ahead and go through the silicon itself.

1:01:17Michael Anderson:And that by itself has a good deal of thermal resistance. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. You have to solve the power problem if you want to run inference.

1:01:25Ricky Rosa:So low voltage and then the other side of the equation. Take us through that. Well, for decode, it's all about bandwidth.

1:01:33Michael Anderson:And it's not just bandwidth on a chip, but bandwidth across your cluster. And that's why we have this technology that we call cluster scale memory. It reduces the amount of time it takes to communicate from one chip to another dramatically. And as a result, we can go use all of our HBM and HBM bandwidth and SRAM and SRAM bandwidth and our scale-up domain as a single coherent pool. And that means if you're a user, you can go get much faster tokens per second speed while still keeping your costs low.

1:02:07Eren Bali:How are you and the team dealing with various bottlenecks across the supply chain?

1:02:13Ricky Rosa:How did you get TSMC to work with you as a startup?

1:02:18Michael Anderson:TSBC has been a fantastic partner to us. We are so, so grateful. And one of the great things about them is they're very technical. You can just sit down and say, hey, we believe this will be a big market for these reasons. And we need your help to figure out how to go co-design transistors that can run at a much lower voltage. And that was a particularly challenging piece. As you bring the voltage down, manufacturing gets way, way tougher. We would not have been able to do it without a great fab partner.

1:02:48Ricky Rosa:Where else are there bottlenecks right now that you're experiencing?

1:02:53Michael Anderson:I think all across the chip supply chain, there has to be much more build-out. People don't realize how big of a market interference is going to be. Right now, only a couple million people have access to the frontier models. And those are going to have to get deployed to 8 billion people across the globe. And that's not even counting AI agents that exist already and will exist in the future. There need to be way, way more tokens produced. And that requires both much bigger assembly lines, many more factories, and some new technology.

1:03:25Ricky Rosa:Two years ago, you predicted that AI would not kill everyone within two years. You were correct about your prediction. how are you feeling about the the general prospect of doom i mean i don't understand it

1:03:45Michael Anderson:i think right now is an incredibly exciting time to see all the breakthroughs that are getting made

1:03:51Ricky Rosa:and it's like the unique distance conjecture stuff i learned about in college and to see

1:03:55Michael Anderson:that now get cracked by an ai model man what a time to be alive and we are still so early models will keep getting smarter. And like, man, I could not be more excited for the moment right now. Yeah.

1:04:11Ricky Rosa:So what is the...

1:04:13Eren Bali:Why was like now the time to come out of stealth? You clearly have had no issues getting customers. Sounds like there's a billion dollar pipeline that you're working through. But what made you decide to talk about the business today and what are you hoping to get out of this little media tour? It's all about talent.

1:04:41Michael Anderson:I really strongly believe that our company's best asset is the people we've been able to hire. And I'll give a couple of examples. Look at our platform team. Around half of them are from NVIDIA. Or if you look at the VP responsible for designing that thing behind me that used to go run NVIDIA's HDX and DGX programs that made up most of their revenue for a hopper in Blackwell. And people like that just move the needle so much for business, especially in a hard space like semiconductors. And not to mention, we're not working on a roadmap. Finally, I have Gen 1. If you want to go do multiple generations in parallel and take really big, ambitious tech bets, you need the best of the best.

1:05:26Ricky Rosa:Are you a car?

1:05:31A car?

1:05:33Ricky Rosa:Are you a car? There's a debate around whether modern large chip companies are interchangeable with one another. Whether the moats around the software...

1:05:45Eren Bali:Like if you have a logistics business, you can buy trucks from multiple vendors and have a similar experience.

1:05:53Ricky Rosa:In fact, I am demoing a new car right now. I got in it, I connected my phone over the Bluetooth, and it works just like any other commodity product. That has not been the pitch in semiconductors for years. For years, we've been told about moats, about how complex the software is, how hard it is to write efficient software that runs on a particular chipset that you had to be all in on one ecosystem. And with the advent of agentic coding and insanely high rewards for figuring out how to run on other ASICs or other chipsets, it feels like chip companies are becoming more car-like. How do you think about your moat as you go into the future?

1:06:38Michael Anderson:Well, I would say a Toyota and a Ferrari are not the same thing. You look at the speed gap there, you see what? A 2X. and I think chips similarly is very very meritocratic if you're able to go up and be faster you can go command a huge premium just like the fastest cars can the difference here the way cars work under the hood is very similar there are no more 10x to be had in cars I think in chips over the next couple of years there's going to be a lot more technical innovation And I'm very excited to go ahead and show the world, not just the current gen, what the roadmap for these things looks like.

1:07:19Michael Anderson:We believe we can go push local to change for us, cluster scale memory much further, and get even bigger unlocks here.

1:07:25Eren Bali:So next time you get that question, say, I'm not a car, I'm a Ferrari.

1:07:30Ricky Rosa:It doesn't make any sense. So is the source of… It makes perfect sense, John. sense is the is the source of of strength is the reason that you will have positive margins in the future uh intellectual property trade secrets patents like what is the shape of owning that technology and not just being copied and commoditized by other chip companies i think it

1:07:57Michael Anderson:just comes down to those things matter we of course do trade secrets and patents but you need to build a lot of products, and you have to go out and have really great economics as well. Being faster isn't enough. You have to go be able to do that at a price people can afford. You see folks stretched thin today, and that's why when we think about doing the thing, we want to go do the whole hard thing. That means building not just the chip, but the board, the platform, the rack, the cluster, and especially the production.

1:08:28Ricky Rosa:What is the last AI innovation or product development that has updated you on your strategy? If anything, I'm thinking about the transformer-based LLM, obviously a huge moment. But then we got diffusion models and image models. We got agentic software that requires CPUs and other memory constraints. You got reasoning models. Has there been any development where you've either said, I'm glad we're on the path we're on and we need to double down on that, or we need to slightly adjust our strategy to deliver the best performance for the latest and greatest use case?

1:09:10Michael Anderson:Well, the thing that's been the most exciting for me has been seeing the models get so big. Get so big and demand be so large. When you think about economies of scale, it always comes down to how much is there to go serve. And the market's relatively small and justified small factory, but not some gigantic mega cluster. And with what we're seeing right now, with these many, many trillion parameter models, with these quadrillion token demands that we're seeing that are increasing every month, So there has never been a better time to go ahead and invest in those economies of scale.

1:09:49Ricky Rosa:That's great news. Last question. The customer, are you focused on serving hyperscalers, the frontier models, neoclouds, open source models, all of the above? How do you think about that?

1:10:03Michael Anderson:All of the above. What we want to go out and do is build tech that you can go ahead and see. They'll make your tokens faster and your tokens cheaper. And that is working with the full stack.

1:10:15Ricky Rosa:Well, congratulations.

1:10:16Eren Bali:Talk about the round. Who participated? We have a gong, and it would be an honor to hit it on your behalf.

1:10:22Michael Anderson:Well, I am blown away at the quality of them after we've been able to get on the cap table. Folks like Jane Street. Folks like... Folks like MN Tech Alliance. Yes, indeed.

1:10:42Ricky Rosa:It is a very interesting group. I mean, obviously a lot of traditional venture capital firms that focus on technology.

1:10:49Eren Bali:I was ready to do one hit for Jane Street, one for HRT, one chip for Two Sigma, one for Jump, one for Scott Wu, one for Peter Thiel, one for Hinton. Scott Wu, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Zach Dell.

1:11:05Ricky Rosa:Absolutely. Scott Belsky.

1:11:07Eren Bali:Fantastic.

1:11:09Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

1:11:09Eren Bali:Lockie, Kareem. Wow. This is the best party round of the year. You really put together a good list.

1:11:16Ricky Rosa:It's a Coachella poster. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, so great to meet you.

1:11:21Eren Bali:And congratulations to the whole team on the launch. Looking forward to the next conversation.

1:11:25Ricky Rosa:We'll talk to you soon. My pleasure, guys.

1:11:26Eren Bali:See you later, Gavin. Goodbye. Great. Cheers.

1:11:29Ricky Rosa:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You know who won't be raising capital at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon? These fly-by-night peptide companies. Because the peptide battle has commenced, says Jessica Adams, FDA recommends against adding all seven peptides under review to the 503A bulks list. Is that for bulking up? Is that a list of things that get you bulky? No. I think it's things that cannot be produced in bulk. But the FDA has effectively delivered a blow to BPC-157 for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB-500 for wound healing, MOTS-C for obesity and osteoporosis, imidiltide and DSIP for opioid withdrawal, C-Max and epitalion.

1:12:27Ricky Rosa:You can tell I do not know my peptides, by the way I'm pronouncing these. Anyway, a lot of people are fans of this stuff. Sorry if this is a dark day for you. A lot of people are in the camp that the FDA serves a functional purpose here to review these things and make sure that they are effective and safe for public health. And it's a blow for them.

1:12:52Eren Bali:Ben texted, we're just about to take all of these. uh no yeah um a lot of people are going to be upset here i think a lot of people would also say that this is like maybe good if um uh you know there's could be some very real downsides with with any of these uh i was texting with a friend uh in health care this morning i said what does this mean for peptides he said done so uh and i said can't sell anymore He says, unless RFK overrides the FDA, not legally. Then I said, but they were already in a gray area. Now they are explicitly banned. Question mark. He said, they've been banned other than research use and haven't been enforced for human use.

1:13:38Eren Bali:So they've been banned, but there hasn't been enforcement. Justification for taking them off the ban list was to kill the gray market. A lot of people have been taking peptides from random websites online. They either don't even have active ingredients or they're contaminated. Or, yeah, they're effectively just nothing. And he says, I think the real companies that are, were moving into the space net new in anticipation of this changing are in a real pickle. So, yeah, so we'll see. They now face a newly constituted pharmacy compounding advisory committee making the July meeting one to watch. That will be July 23rd to 24.

1:14:23Ricky Rosa:so we will keep following well in other good fda news uh nicotine pouches finally got mrtp which is modified risk tobacco product zin is the first one to go and zin can now market and put on the label and advertise that it is better for you than cigarettes which is such a mild claim but But it's huge for the industry. If you know what this means, it's an extremely high bar. They have to run a bunch of tests and whatnot. Every product in the category currently says this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but the products forever have not been able to say this is better for you than smoking, which is the obvious benefit that every company wants to make.

1:15:11Ricky Rosa:They want to make that claim. There's a ton of literature out there. A lot of it's from Sweden. A lot of it's international. The FDA has to review it on a per-product basis to make sure that your particular product maps to the data because the Sweden data that everyone points to is about SNOOS, which is a tobacco product. It's not exactly the same as white nicotine pouches that actually don't have tobacco in them. But anyway, the FDA has to review each one. They reviewed ZIN and they gave them the MRTP approval. It's huge news for the industry. It's very good news. It's good news for everyone, I think.

1:15:44Ricky Rosa:Anyway, the other news is that NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are building an AI lab, $1 billion lab for drug discovery in San Francisco. Eli Lilly's CEO, Dave Ricks, talks about their data advantage. Some scale biotech bioplayers are just training on public data, but there's only 4 ,000 ever-approved drugs. Lilly alone has 3 million failed drugs. We're learning from failure, which is interesting. So a lot of big talk about the next biotech boom. There's acquisitions going on. Anthropic bought a company. There's all sorts of predictions about the impact that AI will have on bio, whether that will accrue to the labs or the biotech companies.

1:16:28Ricky Rosa:Who knows? We'll figure it out. Maybe both. Maybe everyone. Hopefully lots of consumer surplus. But we have Aaron Bali from Monogram in the room. Let's bring him in to the team again. I'll turn it down. Aaron, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thanks, guys. It's great to be here with you guys. Finally. Good to have you. Finally. Long overdue. Talk about the launch today. Talk about the fundraise. Introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about Monogram.

1:16:54Ian Rountree:Okay. So I'll try to do it in a different order. Whatever you want. I guess most people know me from the two other companies I started. Udemy, the online education platform. Went public. Hopefully most people know it by name. I started carbon health.

1:17:10Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

1:17:11Ian Rountree:Being taken over the healthcare company. And now the new company, Monogram, we have been very stealthy about it intentionally. Yeah, yeah. Essentially, like Monogram, which we launched today, just like I asked me five minutes ago. Congratulations. Thank you. It's a general purpose.

1:17:34Ricky Rosa:So loud. Congratulations.

1:17:38Eren Bali:Sorry, now we can continue.

1:17:40Ricky Rosa:Okay, so. I'm sure he's on one day. Yes, continue.

1:17:45Ian Rountree:Yeah, it's a general purpose AI application for everyday use. Yes. But what makes a difference is with other AI applications, you usually have a chat-based interface. Yes. You ask a question. Yes. You write some text. You get some text back. Yes. With Monogram, you ask something, and then you get a complete visual interface back.

1:18:06Ricky Rosa:Yes.

1:18:07Ian Rountree:It's essentially like when you think about computers had command line interfaces back in the 80s, and then we switched to graphical user interfaces where everything became visual, interactive. We will be the first company to do this in AI.

1:18:24Ricky Rosa:I love it. I've been seeing glimpses of this with ChatGPT images. So I wanted to know the rate of air conditioning in every European country because there's this whole debate over France. They don't have air conditioning there. I wanted to know how France stacks up. And instead of asking for a text output, I just said, go get the data and then generate me an image, a graphic of that. Of course, it's not interactive. It's not HTML based. It could be so much richer. And people are seeing glimpses of this with vibe coding, but it hasn't come to the consumer. So I'm interested to know, have you found a beachhead?

1:18:59Ricky Rosa:Have you found a killer use case? Like, I feel like there's probably...

1:19:02Eren Bali:Yeah, I guess assuming every single person listening uses AI 20 times a day, you know, even if it's just casual asking questions, et cetera, what are the kind of prompts that you would traditionally take to a normal language model that people should try with monogram?

1:19:21Ian Rountree:Yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, if I explain, this is one of the things that when you see it, it becomes very obvious, but it's hard to sometimes describe. But the big difference is we generate a visual interface response in roughly one and a half seconds. You ask a question and you immediately start seeing something. So it is not a do this work, make some research and get me back with a dashboard or report. It is, I ask a question, I lift my finger from the audio button, and then in a second, you start seeing everything. That's really cool. So to be honest, we didn't know what use cases would really work with the technology best.

1:20:04Ian Rountree:But what we realized as testing the application ourselves is it works best for the very simple day-to-day use cases. Like I, for example, say, okay, the Oscars are live. So which movies were nominated for Oscars this year? Can I find something to watch? And maybe something from a South American director. Just really open-ended questions. Like where do I eat? Is there an in and out on my way to the airport from here? So all these day-to-day questions. And then what you realize is like, yes, if you ask the same question to Chachip Bt, it will also answer. Behind the scenes, we are using OpenAI's model, but we do quite a bit on top of it to make this response very interactive.

1:20:53Ian Rountree:You get information architecture, right? You get a lot of interesting visuals, and then you tap on something, you get even more information. So it's really just a day-to-day search, discovery, basic questions. That's where we actually start seeing the most enjoyments ourselves.

1:21:11Eren Bali:So it's voice first.

1:21:14Ian Rountree:Yes. And talk about that.

1:21:17Eren Bali:I mean, John is such a power user of voice. I was a laggard, but now I don't even like to prompt without voice because I can get a much better result if I just talk for 20 seconds and then give it a bunch of context and then it'll give me back closer to work.

1:21:36Ian Rountree:So I'll answer this from first principles, right? So I'm a first principles person. So talking is a lot faster than typing. Roughly four or five times more information can be converted to audio per second. But the problem with voice is when you do voice mode, you have to listen. Listening is very slow. Listening is maybe four times slower than reading. That's interesting. But if you think about them, there's something even faster than reading. There's such a scene. so if you can the fastest the most like I would say frictionless experience for me with AI is voice in and then visual output back except when you have visual output sometimes you can tap on things tapping on a card is a lot faster than saying can you get me more details about this so we support a reform factor but we design everything around audio as the primary input, camera a little bit the secondary and keyboard with an attorney input.

1:22:36Ian Rountree:They all work well. We really like, in the output, we do have some audio output, like we have a short answer, but maybe 90 % of the information is conveyed through the visual interface. And you're getting a short answer with the text-to-speech spec.

1:22:52Eren Bali:Yeah, so cool. I wish I could bet on how quickly Apple tries to buy you. Because I'd be like, term sheet by end of week.

1:23:02Ricky Rosa:So, yeah, I mean, this is your third huge company. Like, do you have, I mean, I guess it's like, where do you want to go with this? What are your aspirations? Because you've checked a lot of the boxes on the entrepreneurship journey. But then I'm also interested in like, it's not, you're not building the same business three times in a row. There are certain founders that do that very successfully and it's impressive. but between Udemy, Carbon, and now this, very different companies. So what lessons, what strategies are you actually taking through the three companies that you feel like, oh yeah, I'm running, you might not think it, but I'm running the Carbon playbook in this particular area or I'm running the Udemy playbook here a little bit.

1:23:49Ian Rountree:So the common thing between those three companies was that like what my brain gets obsessed on is how do I make something that is complicated and has high entry barrier and make that accessible to more people? With Udemy, when everybody was focused on higher education, online degrees, we focused on how do I learn Photoshop in a week. So it was the most mainstream of the education companies and that's how we got a ton of success and the difficult part was not being overly caught up with what was hot in Silicon Valley at that time. With Carbon Health, when everybody was going after premium QCH healthcare, we were more focused on how do we make the healthcare that everybody can access better.

1:24:36Ian Rountree:And I think here right now, all the focus on AI has been the coding agents and how to make really complex enterprise workflows work. But what I'm really obsessed on is if I make AI a little bit easier to use, it will just benefit more people. So it's just like, again, there's not a ton overlapping, as you said, like I also do like a new challenge for myself. So I do like rotating things over and I would say healthcare was difficult. So it's nice to do software only.

1:25:06Eren Bali:Pure play consumer app. This is expert mode. Yeah, it is.

1:25:12Ricky Rosa:How are you thinking about image models, diffusion models? I saw a really cool demo for something that looked like a website, but in fact was real-time diffusion, you probably know the one I'm talking about, it looked like sort of a beige cityscape and you could sort of zoom in and it was all being rendered in real time. Is that something you see yourself implementing in the future or is it a distinct different arc of the technology tree?

1:25:40Ian Rountree:So the answer is yes and no. So I don't believe AI output in pixels as the primary form factor. that. That sounds cool. Maybe 10, 20 years later it might be the reality, but in the near term, you'll want something that's more of a representation of the user interface as a layer. So I think pixels is probably not the form right output like medium. But diffusion models, I'm obsessed with. So every time a new diffusion model comes in, we say, oh, is this the day we switch from LLMs to diffusion-based models? Because that sounds like the running architecture for what we are doing, but they haven't been realistic enough.

1:26:23Ian Rountree:We have been trying everything. So essentially the way Monogram works is there's one major model because when you ask a question, there is language in the interface. So you just need a language model or some model that can do language. But then there's a lot of maybe 20, 30 parallel things that are happening at the same time. So we have a different agent architecture. So we do have some of our own models, some fine-tuned models, but one big one. So I think eventually the main model will be diffusion-based, not LAM, like transformer-based, but not today. I think their tag is still not good enough to be able to handle this.

1:27:04Ricky Rosa:Yeah, maybe in the future. Super cool. In the App Store now, iOS exclusive, Android as well? What are you thinking?

1:27:13Ian Rountree:It's Iris exclusive. We'll be working on web application, desktop, Android. But part of the idea here is because the entire interface is built by AI, we are just building clients. This will become the most cross-platform.

1:27:28Ricky Rosa:I imagine it has to be so fast, especially in the age of vibe coding. Porting has to be so simple now. Instagram took like five years to get to Android. I imagine you have a shorter timeline. So good luck for the... Tell us about the round. Yeah. Tell us about the round.

1:27:44Ian Rountree:So the round was led by DST and Lux. That was a$40 million seed round. Woo!

1:27:52Ricky Rosa:You already hit it. You hit the gong for the launch, and you hit the gong for the round as well. It's a double gong day. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic. Very cool. I'm super excited to play around with it. I'd love to have you back on the show and chat more soon. Have a good one. Yeah, great to see you. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. If you're designing the next banger app, get in Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Larson Jensen from Harpoon Ventures.

1:28:28Ricky Rosa:He's the founder and general partner. How are you doing?

1:28:32Grant Gregory:What's up, boys? Good to see you. Thanks for having me. What's happening?

1:28:34Ricky Rosa:Good to see you. I'm obsessed with the portfolio. We can go into that, but introduce yourself first and get us up to speed on what the fund is doing and what the news is today.

1:28:45Grant Gregory:Sure. Jordy, John, great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Larson Jensen. I'm the founder and GP at Harpoon Ventures, early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology in the national interest of the United States and our allies when appropriate. Today, we're announcing that we raised$155 million fund for. So, fired up. There we go. For the gong. I wish I was there.

1:29:06Eren Bali:to see it in person. We wish you were here. This new mallet setup we have, it really, like, you just feel the full force of the gong coming right back at you. That's sick. I felt it on my end. Thanks, guys. I'm glad. Good, good. Harpoon Ventures, great name. Great name. Thank you. Would you... Take us back. If it was necessary, would you invest in a company that you was using whale blubber to power data centers? Is this even a question?

1:29:35Grant Gregory:Of course I do that. If it's necessary, it might be necessary. We need all the energy we can get. So let's go. We do. No, it's a great name. This is the show I'm on.

1:29:45Ricky Rosa:Take us back in time. Give me a little bit of the journey to venture capital because you have a fascinating – you actually have the nontraditional background that so many VCs wish they had when they say, I went to Stanford and then I worked at Google before becoming a venture capitalist.

1:29:59Grant Gregory:Well, lots of guys say they're an operator. in the background of what operator meant. It was special operator in the career that I came from. Insane stolen valor. It's interesting to hear. When I showed up to Silicon Valley, it was like, oh, I'm an operator. I'm an operator. I'm like, I don't know. It was the same kind of operator that I was used to, but I guess different ecosystems have different terms, which is fine. So take us through it. Sure, sure. The real operator should start saying,

1:30:24Eren Bali:yeah, I was an employee. I was an employee.

1:30:28Grant Gregory:Yeah, basically. That's cool, too. Just trade. trade. Exactly. So yeah, grew up in the Central Valley of California. My parents are almond farmers. Went down to USC. Fortunately, I was pretty good at swimming and worked pretty hard at that. Brought me to two Olympic Games, 04 and 08. I got a silver in 04, bronze in 08. 08 is where Phelps got his eight gold. So if there's anything that's common about my trajectory, I'm sort of like a nothing compared to the people that work in the industry or in the careers that I'm in. Had to compete against guys like Phelps and Lochte and that whole generation when I was swimming.

1:31:01Grant Gregory:And then similarly, you know, moved into the SEAL teams thereafter, wanted to serve my country in a different way than just serving on the playing field, but do so on the battlefield. Felt like I had the, you know, hopefully the courage, I guess we would see some of the determination and the hard work to make it through SEAL training, which fortunately did. And then deployed in combat to Afghanistan, had the opportunity to be an early adopter to Palantir. They told us we were an early customer, but you never really know what the government, what the truth is across history. But they said we're early adopters to Palantir, and I was just mind-blown by the capability.

1:31:36Grant Gregory:And that gave me the tech bug. So decided to apply to Stanford, and if I got in, I'd move up to the Valley. And if I didn't, I'd do another rotation in the SEAL teams. Fortunately got in. So you did go to Stanford. Yeah. Traditional background. I did. Traditional background. Very traditional. Traditional background.

1:31:53Eren Bali:Wait, I got to ask, how was – I was a DEI hire up at Stanford at the time. How was Bud's as an Olympic medalist swimmer? Dude, it was fucking hard. It was really hard. Was there any points where you're like, oh, it's kind of easy? I feel like I'm just kind of as good as you can do it.

1:32:13Grant Gregory:Well, yeah, the swimming was a piece of cake, as you can imagine. I was literally the fastest, I mean, still the fastest American of all time in the 400-meter freestyle. So if it wasn't easy for me, we'd have a real problem. So it was easy. I don't say that to brag. I'm just saying you ask the question, was it easier or harder? But I got my ass kicked in everything else.

1:32:33Ricky Rosa:So what was the hardest part then?

1:32:35Grant Gregory:For me it was boats on heads, which if you've seen the videos, you're carrying these inflatable boat rafts and running around and stuff like that. It looks like they'd be in a backyard pool. Trust me, they're not. These things are a couple hundred pounds and you're carrying those on your head for weeks on end. In the case of Hell Week, you pretty much always have them on your head. And so that was brutal. So anything that was impact-oriented, I'm still feeling today. I think a lot of guys are. I mean, when you're loaded up and rucking around the mountains, I mean, you're doing so in full kit, wearing 200 pounds almost of gear on top of whatever your existing body weight is.

1:33:11Grant Gregory:So it's brutal. And I was definitely not the best at it. Wasn't the best swimmer. Wasn't the best SEAL, but was fortunate to be part of the community. That's awesome.

1:33:20Ricky Rosa:So take us from Stanford to Venture. What were some of the first investments? What was the strategy back then? Where'd the money come from?

1:33:26Grant Gregory:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, my venture career sort of started pre-Stanford. I got lucky and got an internship at Andreessen Horowitz, which was awesome. Great learning opportunity to go there pre-GSB. Similarly did between years over at Lightspeed of the GSB. And then after the GSB had the opportunity to go to Lightspeed for about a year. And I just really had this, like any crazy founder might have, like this harebrained idea or a gap in the market, It's something you're so passionate about that you can't sleep without. And that was me in terms of investing in technology for the national interest. And at the time, there really wasn't a fever for this.

1:34:00Grant Gregory:Now there certainly is, thank God. But at the time, there really wasn't. And I sort of had this idea that's maybe not that novel. But I effectively said, hey, what if we could create a private sector in Qtel? Wouldn't that be pretty cool? And that's what I set out to do. So fortunately, pitched the GPs and the team over at my former two employers at Andreessen and Lightspeed. And they're our first LPs ever in Harpoon to sort of go out there and start taking that mission to the market. So that's what we've been doing. Back in 2018 when we started, the market was obviously very, very different. Most of what we did was very much known as dual use.

1:34:36Grant Gregory:At the time, that meant very much enterprise technology. And we would try to work with them to help them break into a government market that these founders didn't really know existed. But we and our team knew existed from our lived experience, I guess you could say. for cybersecurity tools or next generation data infrastructure, what have you, for autonomy platforms, all the things that people sort of like know today are applicable to the government market. But back then, it was super faux pas, man. It was crazy. I felt like I was going to get laughed out of town. It almost was. So now we're doing much more defense-focused things because I think the founder ecosystem provides for it.

1:35:14Grant Gregory:I think that we've evolved along with the ecosystem. At the time, there really wasn't very much national security or government focused companies or engineers or talent. Now there's a ton. I jokingly say that I... Go ahead. Go for it. Go for it. No, I was going to say, I used to go to these conferences that the government would put on in and around the Pentagon and Crystal City and all these places as a venture guy. And there'd be nobody there. There'd be no high horsepower entrepreneurs. There'd be no other venture firms. Man, what am I doing going to these places? There's nothing for me to invest in.

1:35:50Grant Gregory:Ultimately, now that's all changed, and I'm so happy about that. We're celebrating our nation's 250th birthday this coming weekend. Hopefully all of you are celebrating the fourth in traditional good fashion. I think that now to see the ecosystem, what it is, is just tremendous. I'm super fired up about it.

1:36:07Eren Bali:How are you thinking about early-stage defense? And are there still pockets of white space and opportunity?

1:36:17Ricky Rosa:It feels like the boom of defense.

1:36:19Eren Bali:Or do you really need to be doing hardcore R &D? It seems like the last five years there was an opportunity to do hardcore R &D, like actually new technology, or just deliver a capability that's necessary and kind of leverage existing technologies and just deliver a great product for a need, whereas it feels like there's less and less like, you know, we have a bunch of great maritime-focused companies now doing kind of every major category. So does a new company need to do like, you know, real R &D and come up with something totally novel or compete with existing or is there still like pockets where you're like there needs to be?

1:37:03Grant Gregory:I think both are true. Like, one, you know, I want the discombobulator. I want to invest in that. I don't know exactly what it is, but Trump came out with the discombobulator and said that that's what helped in Venezuela. And, like, I want to find the next version of that, and I want to back that technology. Similarly, I have a buddy of mine that we might need some R &D on that. Also, I have a buddy of mine who I went to OCS with. I'll keep his name off the tape here. But he testified to Congress on the UAP phenomenon, which I know you guys are deep in as well. And I texted him not too long ago, and I'm like, hey, man, we got some alien tech.

1:37:34Grant Gregory:I'm ready to go. All the rest of this stuff is like, I don't know, not really doing it for me. And so we had a quick call, but it didn't end up going anywhere. So if you've got any founders out there that are reverse engineer. Listen, I've got a signed poster of Bob Lazar in my office. I'm super fired up. I go deep on this. Are you a Jesse Michaels guy? Listen, I dive into anything you'll give me. There we go. So send me some books. Send me whatever you've got. I'm ready. But ultimately, I think that there's plenty of meat on the bone for other novel capabilities to come up and get funded. I think for us as a venture firm, I used to superimpose my view of what should be created on the ecosystem.

1:38:11Grant Gregory:And we've effectively stopped doing that and just tried to be good judges of founders that are high octane and have a huge vision. And when we're surprised and we believe them, we want to back them as early as possible, which is another evolution of the firm. When we started, I don't think we had the brand, the reputation, the credibility to credibly lead some of these rounds. Now I think we do. And we launched our Black Flag Accelerator, which is helping us go earlier, creep into doing more pre-seeds and seed stage investments where we've led a lot through that. And so I think the future is bright for entrepreneurs chipping away at a variety of different problems.

1:38:46Ricky Rosa:You're wearing a flag on your hat. It's the stars and stripes, beautiful American patriotic flag. Black Flag, I associate with pirates. They're not on my team. Why Black Flag?

1:38:56Grant Gregory:Well, I should have wore my other hat. So I got the Jolly Roger over the red, white, and blue. I should have wore that one for you guys, figuring that you'd bring that up. Are they on our team?

1:39:06Ricky Rosa:Have we recruited the pirates? How does it work? Yeah, we've recruited them.

1:39:10Grant Gregory:They're on our team now. Okay, I got it.

1:39:12Eren Bali:This is an American pirate. I like it. Patriot pirate hybrid.

1:39:17Grant Gregory:I mean, if you look, we thought about this for a while. And if you look at all the squadron patches that are out there for aircraft squadrons, various SEAL teams, special operations, et cetera, They all have some pirate-themed insignia, so it's actually not all that. Believe it or not, we were pretty thoughtful about the name Harpoon and the name Black Flag, and we actually thought about the pros and cons, and some people might not like it, but you can't win over everybody.

1:39:41Eren Bali:Tell us, what is your overall take as an Olympian on the enhanced games? How did you process it? if this was before your venture career and you were done with the Olympics, would you have considered going in there? I want your whole take.

1:39:59Grant Gregory:You know, I should have tracked it more closely. You guys are probably much better read on this than I am. But on the swimming, I believe somebody entered that wasn't enhanced at all and still won and did a best time, I believe, in the backstroke, which is interesting. And I saw some jokes on Twitter about people saying, like, oh, these guys are already enhanced. You know, they don't need to be even more enhanced. I think that's just a lot of BS. Like, you know, we get drug tested so much. It's insane. We could go a whole offline segment on, you know, what it's like to have the drug testers show up and, you know, watch you go to the restroom, take your blood and all of this stuff unannounced.

1:40:33Grant Gregory:You have to fill out where you're going to be for literally a quarter in advance down to the day. And if you miss three tests in a row, it's the same as being, you know, being a positive test. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you might not be attracting to the enhanced games the right athletes right now. I don't know how else to put it. I don't know if they're the gold medalists, silver medalists, bronze medalists that are showing up.

1:40:58Eren Bali:Yeah, so it's basically like a gold medalist is still going to outperform the, like, number eight guy who's taken every drug in the world. I would have whooped those guys' asses, like, for sure. Like, I mean, it's just not just me. It's like anybody who meddles,

1:41:12Grant Gregory:anybody who meddles, there's a big drop-off between meddling and finaling and then not finaling. And so I would have welcomed it. I think an interesting aspect of the Enhanced Games would be like, let's load these guys up and put them head-to-head with whoever the modern day. They might do that. Like Katie Ledecky. Let's see if they can beat Katie Ledecky.

1:41:30Ricky Rosa:I mean, that was part of the interesting production of the Enhanced Games was that it did tell you something about the real games and that there is a gap there. And that was, if you look at it as like a science experiment, it was a cool experiment that we got to run. And I think we all learned a little bit from it. Even if it wasn't this, oh, yeah, obviously with the drug regimens, they just blow everyone out of the water, which is sort of what some people expected. But that wasn't really the message of that campaign.

1:41:57Grant Gregory:I know. It was a really cool experiment and great to see.

1:41:59Ricky Rosa:Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. Where are you based?

1:42:03Grant Gregory:San Diego, California. But I'm on the road. I'm actually in New York right now. But, you know, I'm back in San Diego quite frequently. All right, Fund 5. Come on. Come on live. Hang out.

1:42:12Ricky Rosa:We'll come back, boys.

1:42:14Grant Gregory:Thank you so much for having me. Great to hang out. We'll talk to you soon.

1:42:16Ricky Rosa:Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Ricky Rosa from Oasis Devices. Ricky, how you doing? Welcome to the show. How you doing? I'm busy. Can you hear us? Introduce yourself. I can. Can you hear me? Yeah, all good.

1:42:41Eren Bali:Can you hear us over the drumming and the air horn?

1:42:45Ricky Rosa:It's a very chaotic entrance. You get hot dropped in here. You're trying to drink your coffee in peace. And all of a sudden, it's welcome to the Ultradome. But welcome to the Ultradome. Introduce yourself.

1:42:55Larsen Jensen:Awesome. Thank you, guys. So I'm Ricky Rosa. I'm the founder and CEO of Oasis Devices. And we make smart ring to try to replace the keyboard. What we're interested in is the next platform of computing. are our smartphones the final form i don't know i mean i don't think anybody knows but once you take that as your baseline i'm i'm praying every day i want to throw it in the ocean yeah yeah you and me brother so so once you take that as your baseline you can start to explore yeah but what we noticed is that you can only ask people to take one step from current and it is very easy to get tangled in crazy new platforms and devices and that sort of thing.

1:43:41Larsen Jensen:But you can only ask people to change things so much. You cannot ask them to change the entire workflow overnight. We've spent years in the idea maze trying to figure out what would be good use cases for smart rings and different things. And what we landed is private dictation because what rings are really useful for is uh bringing them very close to your mouth and whispering and it just so happens that we also have a tripod in our ring that allows you to edit we spent a lot of time uh making sure that it has it had the resolution for navigation for smart glasses but smart glasses are you know a little bit slower to take off so we we channel all of that development into editing what you see on screen and so we made it work with whisper flow um the founder tonight is an angel uh investor in our company and so um that's what we're launching today amazing very cool what what does

1:44:45Ricky Rosa:good look like in terms of churn and retention for a new device because i imagine that the product looks great i imagine it will work and i imagine people will keep it on for a long time and use it But the baseline is so low. I mean, we had an Apple Vision Pro in the studio this morning and the team was trying it out and like laughing and enjoying the demo. But that product has to have like 99 percent churn. And same thing with most VR headsets. A lot of hardware companies. is if you can just find that smiling curve of the conversion rate of a few people that come on, how are you thinking about actually getting people over that honeymoon period where they try something?

1:45:30Eren Bali:Well, I'll tell you why I like this approach. One, utilizing a device that is already a daily product in the workspace. Utilizing audio transcription, which like Whisperflow. I was at dinner with a buddy last night and he's showing us like his whole whisper flow setup. He's obsessed, obsessed with it. And then you're utilizing the ring, which is also a form factor that people are used to by now. The aura ring is proven. And so you'd like take that combination of like people want to be transcribing more. They're using their computers all day long. You deliver it in a form factor that is like, you know, nor, you know, understood already that people are comfortable with.

1:46:08And I think that's a recipe for potentially a hit. But again, yes, the sort of median new consumer electronic device has like 0 % retention.

1:46:19Eren Bali:So it's still very hard.

1:46:20Larsen Jensen:Well, I will say I use the Vision Pro every night. I don't know if that helps or hurts my credibility. I'm the only one.

1:46:25Ricky Rosa:Yeah, no, I love new hardware. But I admit that it's always hard to get people on. But yes, is it important that this is both effectively a peripheral for a daily driven device and then also a fashion accessory. Is that important that it's both?

1:46:45Larsen Jensen:Yes. So the way that we think about retention is, and this is why we struggled so much in years past, is we really needed to find a use case that was a must-have, not a next-have, right? And so with Whisperflow, you can speak loudly to your computer, but it just so happens that in crowded offices, coffee shops, those sort of public environments, you can't speak out loud. And so it really helps to have a peripheral that you can speak quietly to. Once we move to other platforms like iOS and glasses eventually, then the fashion accessory or the fashion point starts to become more important.

1:47:35Ricky Rosa:Does that make sense? It also feels like I don't know because you can wear AirPods and you can talk to them can you not whisper to AirPods because even if you can even if it's the same functional device it's way different aesthetics talking into a ring and having earbuds in that feel like okay this person's like out in their own world but I imagine with the microphone a lot closer the ring allows you to speak at even a lower level and produce a higher fidelity transcript. Is that correct?

1:48:09Larsen Jensen:Correct.

1:48:09Ricky Rosa:Yes.

1:48:10Larsen Jensen:Yes.

1:48:10Ricky Rosa:Okay. That's cool.

1:48:12Larsen Jensen:The ring outperforms AirPods, but also it has the modality of touch.

1:48:16Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

1:48:17Larsen Jensen:Which is awesome. Which allows you to do more. Yeah. It allows you to do, to edit the things that you see on screen. It allows you to navigate. It allows you to completely interact with AI and your computer and your workflows without over touching the keyboard. Yeah. And this point is important because what we think is that if we can, it's a big if, but if we can get people to interact with laptops without touching them, then the output piece of it becomes a little bit more fluid. Now it's a smaller ask to ask people to put the display in glasses or display in another device. Right. But you really need to solve the input part first.

1:48:57Larsen Jensen:And that's kind of what we're going after at the moment.

1:48:59Ricky Rosa:The demo is someone using basically a word document is that intentional why not a code editor why not an llm inner interaction back and forth why why why text specifically well we we had we do have a demo of

1:49:16Larsen Jensen:uh the person using uh gpt and you know code and that sort of thing in the launch video yeah but for the b-roll it's just like more aesthetic to have the text okay okay okay i was just wondering

1:49:28Ricky Rosa:if there was a hint at like where you see the first killer feature uh with with writers or with someone who's doing more like word document based knowledge work as opposed to something who more of a programmer but i i don't know maybe i'm reading into it remember remember whisper flow is

1:49:45Larsen Jensen:like yeah like a platform agnostic tool they see retention across emails word documents you know coding tools and the rest. And so we are an extension of that. So we kind of sit in the same plane as them. You know what I mean?

1:50:00Ricky Rosa:What's the status of the company? How big is the company? Have you raised money? Where do you see all this going?

1:50:07Larsen Jensen:So we're pretty small. We're like a five-person team. We're scattered across the globe. We have people in Australia, Abu Dhabi, China. We're an eclectic bunch. we've raised a few angel rounds and we shipped our beta this January

1:50:26Ricky Rosa:that's great when do you want to go into public release where can people sign up to learn more

1:50:32Larsen Jensen:we launched our pre-order campaign for the microphone and trackpad version today and that's going to be shipping in small batches from two weeks from now until Christmas

1:50:43Ricky Rosa:so we're going to roll it out that's great, a testament to the modern

1:50:49Eren Bali:I love it we'll order one, Tyler if you go order one and then try to put us you know should I ask to be put at the front of the list or near the front of the list

1:51:00Ricky Rosa:it'd be nice to get in the next

1:51:03Eren Bali:month would be awesome

1:51:04Ricky Rosa:well thank you so much for coming on the show congratulations on the progress, very cool device, I love these hardware things have a good one, we'll talk to you soon Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Andrew Rea from Tax Wire. Andrew, how are you doing?

1:51:33Zach Laberge:Good, guys. Thank you for having me.

1:51:35Ricky Rosa:What's going on, dude? Great to see you. Welcome. Jordan, great to see you. I know you guys know each other, but for the audience members that don't, maybe introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

1:51:48Zach Laberge:Yes, Jordy. Good to see you. I did not have it on my bingo card three, four years ago, whenever it was. I worked for you, with you at Party Around Slash Capital that we would be talking about taxes on your podcast. We're back. We're so back. Congrats to both of you on all the success. but I'm Andrew Ray. I'm one of the co-founders of Taxwire. We are a full managed solution for global self-sex compliance and we just raised$25 million because death and taxes are forever. And I think that probably our bet is that those Brian Johnson will solve death first. So we're here to solve taxes. I got the hat for it.

1:52:31Zach Laberge:I see that.

1:52:32Eren Bali:You're actually hoping that he solves that to just have more customers. bigger TAM.

1:52:39Zach Laberge:Exactly, because the TAM just keeps growing. We just have more consumption in the economy. GDP goes up. There's more taxes. Hopefully, we can improve the subway system in New York with some of those tax dollars, and we just have a good time to keep rolling.

1:52:53Ricky Rosa:Why business-to-business taxes? Why not go after TurboTax?

1:52:59Zach Laberge:Yes. It's a great question. My immediate initial reaction is because Intuit has a hell of a lot of distribution. And so that's probably one. But no, no, more for me specifically, I had this problem in a really big way. At a company I was out before thus, I very much felt the pain of managing indirect tax compliance. And I think it's a market that's dominated by a bunch of companies that are very old. I think about$5 trillion in taxes remitted in sales tax and VAT by enterprises around the world. It's a very big problem. There's a bunch of very not so customer obsessed software companies and services firms like the Big Four, Avalara, etc.

1:53:40Zach Laberge:that dominate this market. It's a pain point that I had before this. It's a mix of market opportunity and our customers are finance people. They're super smart, but they do not have the expertise or time to be managing their taxes. We deliver that outcome for them.

1:53:57Ricky Rosa:Reality check me on this. I would assume that sales tax enforcement is increasing significantly in the early days of the internet. There were all these crazy loopholes where if Amazon's based in Seattle and you buy something in Florida, they don't pay tax. And I think a lot of those loopholes have been closed. So more and more e-commerce companies have flourished on the back of Shopify and other platforms, Stripe. so there's more people selling products all nationally and so they have a much higher sales tax burden. Is that roughly correct for the secular trend?

1:54:38Zach Laberge:Roughly correct. The secular trend is kind of like a few things. One is regulation so that regulation's been rolling out and what we're seeing now is that a lot of states are now actually starting to roll out taxes of not only more enforcement they're using AI to do audits. A lot of states are increasing sales tax as well and trying to increase audits of companies that have been complying now because they're getting squeezed on income tax. They're getting squeezed on property tax. Gavin Newsom in California is trying to start taxing the software industry. And then very similarly in VAT or around the world, there's a lot of enforcement of real-time reporting and e-invoicing that's coming down the pipeline.

1:55:15Zach Laberge:So nobody gets voted out of office for raising sales tax or raising VAT, whereas income tax or property tax can hit you. So you're seeing big enforcement. That's like just a, I'd say a secular tailwind And then the incumbents in the industry are not incredibly AI native or customer friendly. And so you've also kind of got this general customer frustration that gives a new player like us a lot of tailwinds as well.

1:55:39Eren Bali:So you raised this money during the SaaSpocalypse. You overpowered the SaaSpocalypse. But I'm sure you were getting asked, how did you answer the SaaSpocalypse question? because now, right, I'm sure when you kind of close around or at least you had a term sheet signed, the SaaSpocalypse was over. Everyone was like, you know, we're back. Yeah, we were super back.

1:56:05Zach Laberge:Super back. The SaaSpocalypse is over. But no, I think being super honest, it's like we the benefit, we're benefiting a little bit from the fact that a lot of the people we compete with are services as much as they are software companies. And so there's like more spend to eat which lets you kind of lean into, we are categorized as like AI native SaaS or AI native services software. And some of that is that we genuinely are actually delivering an outcome. And so our customers don't think of us as software or services. Like we have tax experts in the house. We do literally everything that goes into indirect tax compliance.

1:56:40Zach Laberge:We ripped and replaced something for a consulting firm literally this week for one of our customers. And so some of it is that we are benefiting from AI versus being someone who's being displaced maybe by AI. And so it's mostly a tail end. I think - You're doing the displacement.

1:56:57Eren Bali:You're coming after the hundreds of thousands. I am the apocalypse. Exactly.

1:57:04Zach Laberge:We are the apocalypse and our category probably benefits from it, which is something that maybe I can't take much credit for. I think it's probably still painful out there for some folks in a way that maybe it's not bad for us.

1:57:17Eren Bali:Well, good luck.

1:57:18Ricky Rosa:Thank you so much for taking the time. Amazing progress.

1:57:20Eren Bali:It's been awesome to see the journey. And yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone. I'm sure he'll be back soon.

1:57:25Ricky Rosa:We'll talk to you soon. Of course. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. Cheers, Andrew. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? It's a question everyone's been asking. It's your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform. Just do it. That's how it is. Why not? Just do it. Why not? Our next guest is Michael Anderson from Framework Ventures, raising a huge force fund. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TV can also dump. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing well.

1:57:56Eren Bali:How are you guys?

1:57:56Ricky Rosa:We're doing fantastically.

1:57:58Eren Bali:Honestly, the view here is not the view there.

1:58:01Ricky Rosa:Yeah, this view. Where are you?

1:58:02Eren Bali:Your view-mogging us. We don't even have any windows in this studio. There's a boat back there. And you're sitting here like thousands of feet in the air. Yeah, hanging in the castle.

1:58:14Ricky Rosa:Hanging in the castle. Looking good. Where are you calling in from?

1:58:19Larsen Jensen:San Francisco. The Transamerica building. Oh, that's a good one. The pyramid.

1:58:25Ricky Rosa:I like that one.

1:58:26Eren Bali:Awesome.

1:58:27Ricky Rosa:Enough about the view. Let's talk about you. Please introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about the fund. Give us the news.

1:58:35Larsen Jensen:Yeah. So, Michael, one of the two co-founders of Framework. The quick history is my co-founder, Vance, and I started it seven years ago. We're both working for tech companies. I was at Snapchat. He was at Netflix. Quit our jobs. We were obsessed with crypto, moved into my parents' house and started the fund. Now we've raised our fourth fund and managed a couple billion dollars.

1:58:58Ricky Rosa:Did you have any outside capital in the first fund? Like what was the, because I imagine with crypto, like you can just invest in tokens. And like if you're good at trading and you're early, like you don't necessarily need institutional capital to get started. But what was the early day? What were the early days like?

1:59:15Larsen Jensen:Yeah, we had an institution as our first backer. and it was a small$15 million fund. And we started a framework really with a thesis. A lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt that nobody was going after the early seed stage of venture investing in the crypto Web3 space in 2019. And so that's what we started with. So it's always been a venture thesis. And I think our second fund,$100 million, was kind of like the first institutional fund with multiple institutions. And now we've got Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds and off to the races.

1:59:52Ricky Rosa:That's great. What was it like in the early days? Was the crypto community really geographically distributed or were you focused on investing in America or California or San Francisco specifically if you're going after those early stage crypto founders?

2:00:08Larsen Jensen:Yeah, good question. I mean, we moved back to San Francisco. We were actually in, Vance and I were in Los Angeles. We moved back to San Francisco thinking, okay, well, that's the hub of tech. And we found ourselves basically traveling to all the entrepreneurs at the early days because crypto was a global phenomenon. You had pockets in Asia, Australia, UK. I'd say largely now it's still pretty geographically distributed, but most of the tech is happening in the hubs that you would expect. So San Francisco is definitely one of the top places these days. But yeah, it was a lot of travel those early couple of years.

2:00:41Eren Bali:So what's the conference strategy now? I feel like there's debate on like, you know, how many, how many conference, what's the perfect amount of conferences to go to in a year as a crypto investor?

2:00:54Larsen Jensen:That is the topic of conversation. That's like a million dollar question. I don't want to travel that much. Come on. No, you got to do an Asia trip. You got to do a Europe trip. Make some travel out of it. They're always in fun destinations. I think a couple of years ago we went to the blockchain week in Singapore and then stayed for the F1 race. That's good.

2:01:17Eren Bali:It's always a good time. uh what what uh what are you kind of forecasting in in uh crypto right now like what what uh you you guys have done well by predicting i just you know it's a balance of like having some idea of of the future uh and just backing great entrepreneurs but like what are you what are you excited about with this new fund to invest in yeah so i i think when we started in 2019

2:01:47Larsen Jensen:we saw crypto as sort of the next frontier where the smartest entrepreneurs that we were meeting with, you know, the whiz kids popping out of the Stanford, Harvard's are, you know, working on crypto, working on cryptography technologies. And I think that that's still the case. But I think what a lot of what we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas, different industries who are saying, help me do the crypto. I think this should be decentralized, whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or hard infrastructure. They're coming to us and saying, hey, I know how to do energy trading.

2:02:21Larsen Jensen:I've been doing it for the last decade. Help me build a distributed decentralized utility so that we can go disintermediate the utilities. And I think that that is kind of the new thing. It's not crypto just for crypto's sake. It's crypto getting imbued within really hard tech industries. so it's not really like its own thing anymore I think now it's just kind of become pervasive in everything

2:02:46Ricky Rosa:so the funds grown the apertures probably widened in terms of the industries that you look at what stayed the same throughout all four funds?

2:02:58Eren Bali:I'll take a crack just remaining bullish on crypto when everyone's calling you an idiot loser is like a really good way to make money I think and I feel like you guys have done that.

2:03:10Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

2:03:10Eren Bali:Just like, you know, it seems like it's about having a tolerance for looking silly. Sure. And that can look like remaining bullish during like moments where everyone's like, honey, you're still doing that crypto thing, you know, at Thanksgiving.

2:03:25Larsen Jensen:Oh, so many years of that. You know, it's just going to be another one of those. When it's a good time to buy, it's a bad time to sell. When it's a bad time to sell, it's a good time to buy. So I think riding the waves for sure. And we hold digital assets in the fund, each one of them. But I think the thing that has been consistent is really just a venture thesis and then following the founders. And the founders who we are seeing, like we have an investment in a company called Mecca. We got to know them because they were previous entrepreneurs that sold their company to Coinbase. They are not doing anything in crypto currently.

2:04:02Larsen Jensen:They could eventually, but it's, you know, how we got to know them was through crypto and they are building, you know, a data platform for robotics AI. So those types of investments, I think, are just a consistent thread for us. And when we find world class founders, we're going to back them multiple times.

2:04:16Eren Bali:Interesting. Awesome. Cool. I haven't been following the Mike strategy, Michael Saylor. We have not been following the story closely. Can you get me up to speed in just like 20 seconds? What's going on over there? I mostly just see the deranged AI images that he puts out where he's on a lifeboat. It's like, why are you putting that image in my head? That's a funny one. You're literally escaping the Titanic.

2:04:45Ricky Rosa:Wait, am I on the lifeboat with you or am I on the Titanic?

2:04:48Eren Bali:Wait, is this inspiration?

2:04:50Larsen Jensen:I think the quick story is that whenever you mix financial engineering and crypto, something bad usually has happened. And I think that that overfitting of the narrative is kind of what's going on with him right now. But he's building this entity that has multiple layers to it, whether it's convertibles, whether it's preferred, whether it's common. And he's financing it in different ways. And the question is, can he continue to deal with all of the legs of the stool or is one of the legs going to fall out? And I think the narratives of him blowing up are overblown. I think he's got smart people around.

2:05:27Larsen Jensen:I think it's tough when crypto is down this much, but this is exactly what happens in all of these cycles. If we go back to the calluses on our hands over the last nearly decade of doing this, this is exactly what plays out all four years. So I think we're just in the middle of that right now. And I think he will be proven right eventually. It may just take him years. And talk about somebody who's been willing to just stand in the face of all of the negative publicity. He's the best at it.

2:05:54Eren Bali:That's a good point. Awesome, dude. Well, great to meet you. Congrats on the new fund. And yeah, looking forward to meeting more of your founders. Appreciate it. Great to meet you, guys.

2:06:04Ricky Rosa:We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

2:06:21Eren Bali:It's kind of the goose itself.

2:06:23Ricky Rosa:It is the goose itself. Have you ever heard of a hectocorn, Jordy? No. I'd never heard of this either, but apparently it refers to a company worth more than$100 billion. You got a unicorn worth$1 billion, a decacorn worth$10 billion, and a hectocorn, which I'd never heard before. But, you know, somebody wrote it in a...

2:06:45Eren Bali:Learn something new every day.

2:06:46Ricky Rosa:Learn something new every single day, especially on this show. Well, our next guest is investor and NBA champion Tristan Thompson. We're very lucky to be joined by him here in the TVP and Ultradone.

2:07:03Eren Bali:John, stand up next to me. Hey, guys. High check. High check. Whoa.

2:07:10Zach Laberge:It's like Wally Zerbiak in here. Wow. You guys are pretty easy.

2:07:14Andrew Rea:Yeah, I'm like, same way. I'm serious. Hey, yes, you are. Let's go. You are all of it. You are a tall drink of milk. Holy shnikes. What's up, fellas? What's going on, brother? How are you? We're doing great. We're hanging out. Yeah, why don't you stand up? Not even close.

2:07:32Eren Bali:No, I'm happy to let you guys do your thing. I just wanted the audience to understand that John is an NBA-sized man. It's true. He is.

2:07:40Ricky Rosa:And on the camera, everyone thinks I'm 5 '10".

2:07:42Andrew Rea:And John, you guys made my seat the shortest one right now. Like, seriously. You're like, this guy's a bitch. He was a center for 14 years at this. Hey, how do you do it? What's going on?

2:07:54Eren Bali:It's great to have you. It's great to have you.

2:07:56Andrew Rea:Glad to be here. By the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Congrats. We're landing you. No, no, no. For all you guys' success and acquisition and all that. Come on now. Let's big time. Thank you. Thank you.

2:08:05Ricky Rosa:Yeah. I mean, I want to start with, I mean, tech and investing. I mean, we can go through your career, but I'm interested in sort of how you first caught the bug, how you first got interested in technology, investing, just your journey to financial management, understanding more of your strategy, and sort of like, often times there's like mentors or books and resources along the way. Like, what was your journey?

2:08:28Andrew Rea:I mean, I think for me, and I won't give like the cliche, like, you know, I think other guys are like, you know, I think I didn't start really investing into things outside of the traditional, you know, state treasury bonds and the S &P 500, the stuff that Fidelity and Wells Fargo tell you the money markets. I waited until my second deal. Let's be real. Like, you know, and you know, I tell the young guys is, you know, your first deal might be a loss.

2:08:52Eren Bali:you got to just be focused on being really good at basketball so that you get the second deal. Yeah,

2:08:56Andrew Rea:when you get the second deal, when I got my, my, my second deal, 82 million, you know, I switched financial advisors because of the one I was with. Bang, bang, bang. There you go. Wow. Wow. This is high energy. I love this. Wow. But no, You got two deals. You got the one. No, I started getting into alternative assets and getting into tech and investing in companies, whether it's consumer or tech. Were you getting pitched VC funds?

2:09:27Ricky Rosa:Yeah. Investing the VC funds?

2:09:28Andrew Rea:Yeah, you know, like Carlisle Group and all those guys. Back then, I was with Morgan Stanley, so they would give us those opportunities because they had them as a client. Yeah, yeah. So that was kind of like my early kind of like get my feet wet. But obviously, as I got older and wanted to dive into more, but obviously having the capital to have that exposure, you know I started to you know look into more and start to talk to founders and you know get ahead of the curve yeah that's probably good probably good to start uh it's

2:09:54Eren Bali:probably good to start like taking deals from Morgan Stanley because obviously or or or a partner like that because not every deal is going to really hit or be that great but better than just looking at whatever's coming through because I think when people start investing especially in private markets, everything looks great in a pitch deck, right? It's like, oh, I'm looking at the forecast. It's like, they're going to 100 million in like three years. And then you realize like, okay, well, that's in most decks. And it's about being able to pick out, okay, what's actually going to do well versus what's going to flop.

2:10:27Ricky Rosa:Yeah, I feel like one of the hardest things is you see one deck and you're like, this is a great idea, great team. And you don't realize that there's three other teams that are doing the exact same thing. They started two years earlier and they're better. Do you think about trying to, when you identify a trend that you're interested in, you want exposure to, are you trying to pick the one winner, get a huge stake in one winner? Or do you want to have some sort of diversification across the market?

2:10:52Andrew Rea:I think for me, it's, first of all, I always bet on the founder. Yeah. Right? It's betting on the horse, right? I think that's the most important thing. And you know, these pitch decks, before they're 100 million. Now they always tell you they're a billion dollars. And now they always look so good. But I think for myself, I try to lean on what my peers are doing as well and I've been so fortunate to have some guys that have you know have early ICOs in Ethereum or the guys that have done great exits and whether it is a family office or is the guys that are in funds you know that have had that experience because for me the reality is I am still one of the younger guys that are in the space right so I try to lean on other people and honestly people have been so good to me and kind of like kind of helped steer me the right way because they're like Tristan we want to see you win we don't want I want to see you come in and just give money to everybody.

2:11:36Eren Bali:And not get much back. And not get much back.

2:11:38Andrew Rea:You know, I remember Olaf, a buddy of mine, who's one of the early Coinbase employees. Carson Lee, yeah. Yeah, you know, he said, Tristan, you also got to be prepared that you're going to invest in 10 things and eight are going to fail. But the two that do well, he said, don't worry, it's going to cover all your capital that you put in. So I also had that mindset as well, but I always like to bet on the founder, bet on the horse, it's like a horse race. That's what I'm the most bullish on.

2:11:58Eren Bali:Was there any athlete, entrepreneur, investors that you look up to maybe from the previous generation or people that were, or maybe underrated investors that people don't know about? Because I feel like people know about the Shacks of the world, the guys that are super commercial, but anybody that's maybe more underrated?

2:12:15Andrew Rea:I mean, I look at Shack and Magic because I think they were able to use their NIL to pivot to chapter two and leverage that to great opportunities, right? Like at the end of the day, the fact that Magic Johnson can open up movie theaters at Affordable and get acquired by AMC, that's big time, right? That's like, that's creating a movement. But I think, you know, guys have done a good job. Of course, like the staff career, Andre Iguodala, he's done a good job. But, you know, the reality of us athletes, if we make good investments, we're going to tell all you guys. All the guys that are doing very well.

2:12:49Andrew Rea:Yeah, you know. There's no one under the radar. Yeah, if I'm doing a 25X, I'm not just going to hide in Indiana and not tell you about it. I'm going to do a press tour about it. Yeah.

2:12:57Ricky Rosa:Do you think that there's a fork in the road between NIL sponsorship, just get the cash, but put your name everywhere there it makes sense, tons of brand deals, but not a lot of equity ownership versus more behind the scenes equity ownership, just investing. Is that a fork in the road or can you do both reliably? How do you think about that trade-off if there is one?

2:13:18Andrew Rea:I think for us as athletes, and anytime I go into the meetings and I'm on calls all the time, I'm going to whether it's Milken or I'm at Medici or I'm at Tolkien, And, you know, we only get one chance of this, right? And I think for us, because when we come in, everyone always, we're always playing down by five points, down by 10, because they're like, all right, another athlete in here that's going to write a check, and, you know, he's going to, like, I don't know if we can curse in here, but we're always going to, like, HOE ourself out, right? Okay. And that's what we, I want to be very selective.

2:13:48Andrew Rea:Because at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy that's for everybody. I want to make sure if I'm going down one lane, If I'm going to invest in a robotics company, I'm going to invest in tech, drones, I want to try to find one or two. Yeah. Not just be with 10 guys. Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy. But in terms of the NIL, I think it's very important as well because if you look at it right now, who's the biggest influencer on planet Earth? Elon Musk. Ooh. You would probably say Kim Kardashian, but we might say Elon Musk. Yeah. But, like, he's realized that, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you know, these guys back in the day in the 90s and other 2000s, right?

2:14:24Andrew Rea:they would never put themselves out there and sit on Squatbox and go on CNBC and talk about their product. But now you realize that the great founders, you are going to do a press run. You're like Drake and you're going to do an album rollout because you want to create the FOMO for retail for when you IPO. Yeah, I mean, you see his Palmer Luckey, too.

2:14:43Ricky Rosa:And you got the look.

2:14:44Andrew Rea:Michael Saylor's got like the Arquette look. The look. And Elon's got the like doesn't look human. And then you got Larry Ellison. It looks like he's like he's like look maxing and everything. Yeah, Larry Allison does look really young. You do the look back. So like, I get that. And I think that's why I think.

2:14:59Eren Bali:Allison really is the OG looks, Max. He is.

2:15:01Andrew Rea:He's got the chiseled and everything. No, it's remarkable. Yeah. It's remarkable. And he's 80 or something. And then there's no son in SF like that.

2:15:08Ricky Rosa:So that's a good point. But he sails. He sails all the time. Yeah, he's a sailer. He's a big boat guy. Okay. So maybe he's getting the sun there. Yeah. Who needs to be around the table when you're negotiating with a company? Because Olaf, fantastic investor. I imagine that if he's writing a check not many people are being like hey we'd also like to put you in our Super Bowl ad But with you I imagine every founder comes to you and they say well We'd like an Instagram post and we'd also like you to be in an ad and all of that is a separate negotiation Are there agencies that you work with are there are there is this something that you can puzzle out?

2:15:43Ricky Rosa:Is it is it all just one big bucket or do you just say hey? Let's table that and let's just do the equity deal here and then let's talk about partnership later

2:15:50Andrew Rea:So the way I approach it is like this, right? So obviously you have the initial call and the conversation and you figure out what this marriage is going to look like. And if I'm just capital, if I'm just capital, then I'm going to be more behind the scenes. But if I really believe in it and I feel like I can help your GTM and create the narrative and story to show what you guys are building, and if I believe in it as well, we are going to strategize. And I've been very fortunate to have people that come from the venture, people that have, you know, from Multicoin and around those guys. you know, they've been very helpful with like Tristan.

2:16:23Andrew Rea:Like if you look at Kyle Sumon, he's like, Tristan, you got to be very delicate on how you do things. And for me, it all depends. There's definitely been a lot of investments that no one knows that I'm invested in. Yeah. Right?

2:16:34Eren Bali:Yeah, some of the best opportunities.

2:16:36Ricky Rosa:Well, you're waiting until it's a 25X and then you'll go on the tour. Yeah. Because it might be a zero and you're not going to talk about that. Oh, no, but you know what?

2:16:44Andrew Rea:Sometimes you got to get your hit lift. I was down 3-1 before. So it all really depends, but I love being part of if I really feel bullshit about something I love being part of the journey. Yeah, yeah because for me now I Still have the hunger and drive of winning again. I love winning championships.

2:17:00Ricky Rosa:Yep

2:17:00Andrew Rea:And this is the next form of doing it But instead of wearing a jersey, I'm wearing a Tom Ford suit and tie or I got this nice I don't know what color you guys call this, but I think it's very like TV PN Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:17:11Eren Bali:It's on brand. Yeah, it is. Green head to toe.

2:17:16Ricky Rosa:Taking the NBA to the next level, is there anything that could make the NBA bigger? It's at the top of the mountain, but is there an even higher mountain? Is there a drive to survive play? What would make the NBA even bigger if you could do anything?

2:17:32Andrew Rea:I don't know if this is legal, but imagine if you... I like where you're starting. I don't know if the NBA could do this. But imagine if like, so we have something called the player post career income plan, right? And I'm going to give some tea and I don't need to say this. It'll be real, right? So the player post career income plan is where basically we take a portion of our capital and we put it into, let's say it's like the VOIA or the principal, right? We give them our money. We give them a percentage of our biweekly check and they hold on to it. It's good if you have, you know, bad spending problems and whatnot.

2:18:07Andrew Rea:And that is what it is. But you get nothing out of it. You don't make no yield, no interest, right? But imagine if we were able to kind of create like an MBPA fund. But we're not going to be doing the money market four and a half. Sure.

2:18:21Eren Bali:You want to be YOLOing. Yeah, a little bit.

2:18:24Ricky Rosa:But like a college endowment. Yeah, a college endowment. Where they allocate 10, 20 % alternatives. Wait, wait, wait. Tell me.

2:18:29Eren Bali:So we follow the sport of business, as you know. So I don't know really anything about this kind of program that you're talking about. You give them money, you don't get any yield on it, and then they just give it back to you at a certain point?

2:18:45Andrew Rea:Yeah, so the reason why they created this is, you guys remember the ESPN 30 for 30 broke?

2:18:48Eren Bali:Yeah.

2:18:48Andrew Rea:Right? There was a lot of high-profile athletes that unfortunately, and it happens, right? Listen, at the end of the day, we come from, especially myself, I've come from nothing. You give us millions of dollars, and we can't rely on people back home to help us. It's like the blind leading by.

2:19:03Ricky Rosa:And you just get a ton up front, and you think, oh, this is never going to stop. Yeah, so this is something that the NBA,

2:19:07Andrew Rea:and I appreciate Adam Silver, and David Stern, taking an interest to say, hey, we don't want our players to pull out of their 401k at 35, 45, because, you know, you get heavily penalized, the tax, everything. So we're going to create a player post-career income plan. The day you're done playing, we are going to give you a check monthly to get you to 55, 60 years old. Sure. Right? Which I love, and I think that's so smart. Yeah. But imagine if now we're able to take some of that capital and get some exposure to some of these great, you know, investments, Like imagine if think about this back when SpaceX back in 2022, right?

2:19:44If I came here and said the MBA PA Association is going to give endowment of 500 million, 100 million dollars to get into some allocation space.

2:19:54Andrew Rea:That's a pretty good one to get into. Right. I'm not saying go in and buy a bunch of Sally beauty supplies. We're saying something a little bit more protective. Right. A little bit more that.

2:20:00Eren Bali:Well, yeah, I just don't understand why. So if there's capital that's been put aside coming out of your paycheck and it's sitting there, somebody's getting yield on it.

2:20:10Andrew Rea:Oh, yeah.

2:20:11Eren Bali:Who's getting the yield? Not me. That's crazy. That's crazy.

2:20:15Andrew Rea:But I will say this, though. I will say this, too. Because then everyone's going to be like.

2:20:17Eren Bali:So they're like, yeah, we're taking care of the players. Meanwhile, they just have this huge pool of capital that they're. Well, I will say. That seems a little bit. I think you might be honest.

2:20:26Andrew Rea:But I will say the NBA's done a great job with the 401k. What they've done that no one else does is that they will match whatever you put in the 401k 120 percent. Wow. Wow. That's great. Which is great. That's fantastic. So the NBA does a really good job protecting the players and trying to put the players in the best position to be successful, which I appreciate. So that's, you know, you got to give a little bit. It's a start. It's a start. And it's like, you know, no one's ever finished product. Every business can get better. That's why AI, robotics, that's a big thing, right? Especially in the workforce.

2:20:57Eren Bali:What guidance do you give to young players that are real prospects? Maybe they're about to become a teenager, they're on the path to college, hopefully the NBA. What advice do you give them around navigating the Internet? I imagine the same way for any endeavor, people that have some type of following or notoriety or aura, they can get better deals done. but what advice are you giving? Because, you know, I imagine like that wasn't even something that you had to deal with at the time, but then you obviously leverage social media now.

2:21:35Andrew Rea:Yeah, I mean, I wish there was NIL when I was playing, you know, back then when I was playing, I was getting the money through the back door. Now you get it through the front door. So I wish I was getting that$11 million direct deposit or that wire to my account back in the day. But what I tell these young guys is that, you know, just be careful. Like, protect what you've built, right? Because everyone's going to want a piece of you. And the reality is that we are not going to be the smartest in the room. We are going to be basically the squirming fish in the cesspool, and people are going to want to eat us up.

2:22:04Andrew Rea:Right? So you've got to really lean. And I tell guys, lean. I know. I'm sorry, guys. I'm just very honest. Yeah, this is part of being a big man, a center in the NBA. We're not pretty. We're very ugly with it, and we get down and dirty. That's amazing. But no, but I think it's like lean on your peers and older guys. I've always been the one, whether it's LeBron, whether it's Kevin Love, whether it's Antoine James, Anderson, Vergeov, I've always went to my older and my vets to ask questions. And don't be afraid to, you know, be vulnerable. I think that's the one thing for us as athletes. We fear the same, like, man, my shit might be screwed up.

2:22:41Andrew Rea:I might be in some bad deals or I might have a bad financial advisor. That's the one area where athletes become small. And that's not something we should do.

2:22:48Eren Bali:Yeah.

2:22:48Andrew Rea:That's interesting.

2:22:49Eren Bali:What about AI and sports? I'm sure you get pitches all the time. You seem to like to invest in really big categories because you're going for the 100X, the 1 ,000X. But what's exciting to you at the intersection of AI and basketball?

2:23:08Andrew Rea:Well, I think nothing would make me more happy if we had a fourth referee. And my friends think I'm crazy. if that referee was, you know, we used AI.

2:23:20Ricky Rosa:It's worked in tests.

2:23:20Andrew Rea:Yes, it's worked in tests. And it's even in soccer or football. Yeah, yeah, in World Cup right now.

2:23:24Eren Bali:I think they have this band or something like that.

2:23:27Andrew Rea:They're canceling goals on Paraguay or canceling goals on Catamaran. I remember I'm Canadian. So we scored. They're like, nope, bring it back, VR. But I remember, like, being a kid watching the World Cup. I said, that never used to happen. Yeah. But now they're using AI technology to try to make the game more efficient. But especially in the NBA and the playoffs, when it's a one-possession game And, you know, when they're saying it's a charge or block or I mean, we were we were a victim of it. Game one against Golden State when LeBron took took the charge on Kevin Durant and then they called it a blocking foul and they switched.

2:23:56Andrew Rea:And I think we lost that game and I think we got swept there. But that was a turning point in the series, among other things. But, yeah, I think like that was like I feel like that's the next step for sports and AI. And I think, you know, AI is taking over so many different sectors in the world. I think sports is like the one area that it's been like the most, like it's like the slowest one. It's like the last one to the party. Yeah, of course. And it's like. People on the court. Yeah, but in reality it's like guys.

2:24:18Eren Bali:Yeah, I just mean outside of that, like performance. What about like recovery? Recovery.

2:24:22Andrew Rea:Well, think about this. Think about last year in the playoffs, you had Jason Tatum, Ty Luce Hallenberg, and Damian Lillard all tear their Achilles. And Adam Silver said, we got to start using AI technology to protect our players, right? Because don't get me wrong. Sports science is great, but there's another level to this. Of course. You can have your best players in the faces of your league. Yeah. go down to the most important time where it's the moneymaker time, which is the playoffs. So hopefully that answers your question. I think that's the next step. It's more for sports medicine and science.

2:24:51Andrew Rea:And I wouldn't mind a little fourth referee just to clean up some stuff.

2:24:55Eren Bali:Yeah, that makes sense. How are you? What's your personal biohacking stack? Are you doing anything? How long do you want to live? Are you thinking like 90, I'm good? We clearly got the height extension surgery.

2:25:06Ricky Rosa:Yeah, right. I literally put it in my legs now.

2:25:08Andrew Rea:No, but for me, I'm very big on peptides. I want to look good for a long time, guys. All right? Yeah, yeah. Let's show you guys. I want to look good for a long time. I'm 35. I want to look 25. Yeah. I want to keep this skin good. Sure. I want to keep this jaw chisel. I want to stay in shape. So I will do, listen, I'm very, when I look in the mirror, I look in the mirror myself a lot. I want to look good every day. Let's go. So whatever I need to do, I'm about it. So, yes, I do a little, you know, little doop-doop for the hair. Yeah. Doop-doop-doop. So, you know, I got to make sure I'm right.

2:25:35Ricky Rosa:I love it. I'm sure you've traveled all over the world. If there's one city where you could put a new NBA team, where would you put it? Anywhere in the world. Oh, in the world? Anywhere in the world. NBA team. NBA team.

2:25:47Eren Bali:That's like, is that not kind of a dumb question? No, no, this is a really dumb question.

2:25:52Ricky Rosa:What do you think I'm going to pick? That's the point. Just like, it would be exotic. It would be interesting to go play there. I don't know. I would say Ameriqesh. Ameriqesh. In Morocco.

2:26:02Andrew Rea:Or I would say I mean Dubai has a team right now, but Dubai is so beautiful. Yeah, that's a magical place

2:26:08Ricky Rosa:See dumb question interesting answer.

2:26:10Eren Bali:Yeah, how much time you spend in Morocco? You know, I'll be honest never been there yet

2:26:20Andrew Rea:Every year he calls me he's like Titi you have to come He's like Titi you have to come and then one of the agents that work for our sports agency at clutch sports He's more wrong. He's like TT. You have to go you have to go. It's beautiful. It's magical So that's why I say America's but up the Dubai spends a lot of time there that place is magical They're forward-thinking they love entrepreneurs. They're about what we're about. Yeah, they're all about that's what I rock is great

2:26:42Eren Bali:Marcus you've been a surf trip. Oh, wow probably Nine years ago now. I see it in the hair. Yeah, you go. You spent a lot of time Laguna Malibu.

2:26:51Andrew Rea:Ooh They're closer clutter.

2:26:53Eren Bali:Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:26:55Andrew Rea:That's amazing.

2:26:56Eren Bali:What, like, do you think you'll ever get bored with investing?

2:27:01Andrew Rea:No, you know, I'm actually so excited.

2:27:04Eren Bali:That actually does happen. Like there's some like generational investors, specifically angel investors that are doing it for the love of the game, and then they just get a little bit tired chasing the next deal. The issue is if you're good, you just get, you get too rich and then you're like, what's the point?

2:27:18Ricky Rosa:It's the boat, it's the boat. If you get the boat, you'll just be on the boat.

2:27:21Andrew Rea:Yeah, you know, it's not about the invest. you know, I love talking to people and like these meetings and the calls that I have, you learn so much. Like for instance, like I have a call with a gentleman that's creating a nuclear energy company. I just want to learn, learn about what he's thinking, his thesis, why, what he thinks, where he thinks the world's going. I just love the education, right? It's almost like classes in session. So of course, yes. Do I like investing? Do I like winning? Of course. Like when I did a hype short, everyone thought I was crazy, but now I'm laughing to the bank when I, when I pulled out my hyper liquid trade.

2:27:53Andrew Rea:So that's what I was happy about. So I like being right. But I like I like the storytelling because I think I Bring everything back to team. Yeah, and and everything's a team. You guys are a team the guy the gentleman's you guys back here They got they love you guys at dad. You got a squad here, right? Yeah, everything is team or a team sports team sports So I love to always hear how this team is trying to operate and what they're trying to accomplish And if I can come and whether it's capital or whether it's leveraging my resources or intros I want to do that, especially if I believe in who you are.

2:28:23Eren Bali:Would you ever raise outside capital from other players? Say, hey, I don't want you to invest 100 % of your money, but give me 2 % of your next deal. I'll deploy it. And so they can kind of like, you know, get the benefit of everything you've learned.

2:28:41Andrew Rea:Well, you know, I've been running a lot of SPVs the last two years. And I've had some great success. I mean, I just, you know, one thing I'm very bullish on is Prometheus. and I just invested in, you know, their last round.

2:28:53Eren Bali:You got the Prometheus allocation.

2:28:54Andrew Rea:Yeah, I got the Prometheus allocation, the friends and family. Shout out the family. You know, shout out mom for the, you know, the 17th birthday at Jeff's house. Shout out mom and I love you. So, you know, I definitely, you know, allocated Jeff. You're a insane allocation. Yeah, it's beautiful and God is good to me. And I want to give, you know what I really want to do? I want to give guys a save opportunity. That's also why I'm interested. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

2:29:12Eren Bali:Because, like, you work to get to the point where you get that slug, but. Yeah.

2:29:16Andrew Rea:Yeah. So I think it's like now instead of keep SPV, maybe at some point I might want to, you know, around Q4, maybe start a fund for me and my people. And, you know, give guys the opportunity that I have. And it's globally. It's not just in America. You know, it's, you know, yesterday I was sitting with some gentlemen that work with the QIA. And they've been really good. And they've been very open doors to me. And they showed me nothing but love and respect. And I love the people of Doha and Qatar. So I want to give the people the opportunity that I have. Because I think it's about paying it forward.

2:29:41Andrew Rea:And that's about being a real team player. And me being a center, I didn't score 20 points a game. I did if you need me. If Kevin Love was out the game. But, you know, for me, I'm getting the low double. I'm getting the rebounds. Be a star in your role. Yeah. And now my role now is pivoting to be, you know, helping my guys that have still got the jerseys on or the young guys or the guys that are retiring, give them the access opportunity to make their money make money.

2:30:01Ricky Rosa:Yeah. Yeah, to have my head start.

2:30:02Andrew Rea:Yeah.

2:30:03Ricky Rosa:Robotics. You're excited about robotics. What specifically? Humanoids? Non-humanoids? Wheeled stuff? No, I think, you know.

2:30:10Eren Bali:What's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you one-on-one?

2:30:15Ricky Rosa:this is the real

2:30:16Eren Bali:it might legit be 20 years

2:30:21Ricky Rosa:we got the Turing test

2:30:22Andrew Rea:the day that I go one on one versus a robot and if I lose I better make sure I have so much peptides in my shoulders and biceps where I can rip it apart I better have so much allocation in the robot that beats me

2:30:35Eren Bali:I better be out if you're not making money on the robot that's whooping you then it's over

2:30:41Andrew Rea:Yeah, but no, my thesis on robotics right now, and Jensen Wong said this two years ago, it's about physical AI. And I think robotics is physical AI. Humanoids, we're not there yet. I'm not going to sit here and say I would want a robot taking care of my 9, 8, and 3-year-old. I'm not saying that. But what I'm saying for the physical AI, it's more so whether it's in health care, whether it's in one area like health care, agricultural, construction, landscaping. All those areas, robots and robotics can help. It's making the owners be more efficient on the business aspect. And especially one area I like to touch on is agriculture, the farmers, right?

2:31:18Andrew Rea:Because back in the day, a lot of the tractors right now are autonomous. They're doing it on their own. But back in the day, you had people, labor workers doing it. And a lot of these farmers were spending so much time on the labor and missing out on the business growth and opportunity, which was killing their margins. So now us using more autonomous, you know, machines and robotics, even like what Jeff's doing with now the packaging, what he's going to have in Amazon with Prometheus. Right. It's not just, you know, the drive, the car, the Amazon. No, it's more like the packaging, the arm. So it's more efficient, which that's what I'm super bullish on, because I want people to find ways to improve their business and less relying on the manpower.

2:31:59Andrew Rea:Let's have us focus on building the business side. And I think one area that I that I'm very excited about is like the agricultural space and how we can improve that Yeah, cuz those farms are important to us people voice forget like we're talking about like AI and energy and crops are important Yeah, yeah, and there's a labor shortage.

2:32:16Eren Bali:Yeah, we're starting company whatever started go through YC run it up

2:32:20Andrew Rea:Oh like like I mean listen those guys have man You know what that will stay on this guys III am I am a capital allocator So I do believe in a lot of people and when I don't mind writing checks. So if there's the right opportunity, maybe one day that create my own accelerator. I've thought about it as well. You know, especially.

2:32:38Ricky Rosa:Yeah.

2:32:38Eren Bali:Go head to head with Gary Tan.

2:32:40Andrew Rea:Yeah.

2:32:40Ricky Rosa:But but but founding the fund is the entrepreneur.

2:32:44Andrew Rea:Or, you know, doing doing a multi. You know how they do multifamily offices?

2:32:49Eren Bali:Yeah.

2:32:49Andrew Rea:I do like a multifamily accelerator. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you could both put it like 100 in because I know like why come to use put 250 and then they want like 10 % back. Gary, we busted in half.

2:32:58Eren Bali:Okay.

2:32:58Andrew Rea:10 and 10.

2:32:59Eren Bali:Yeah, that'd be good. 10 and 10.

2:33:00Andrew Rea:Yeah, 10 and 10. And when I put the 100, you put the 150.

2:33:05Ricky Rosa:Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is so much fun. No, no, guys, thank you guys so much. Let's make it a regular thing. Yes, no, I love it, man. And we're all in the same place.

2:33:10Andrew Rea:Thank you guys so much. Fantastic. Super fun. Listen, I'm a big fan, huge fan. Watch you guys daily. I'm so glad we're able to make this work. This is awesome. Welcome anytime. I would love to come back again. Yeah, this is electric. I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. We'll talk to you soon. Yes, sir. Tell me.

2:33:22Ricky Rosa:Thank you guys. See you. Much love, everybody. Thank you. Yes. Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we are back to back with two guests in the TBP and Ultra Dome. The men. Made it in. 11. We got shirts. Oh, I like this embroidering here. Follow.

2:33:50Tristan Thompson:I like it.

2:33:51Ricky Rosa:Very nice. Walk me through the logo design. First, introduce yourselves.

2:33:55Tristan Thompson:Tristan just gave our pitch, by the way. You guys must be co-investors.

2:34:00Eren Bali:You guys must be co-investors. Welcome to the show, I'm sure. Is that a Castilian shirt? We got a Castilian shirt. We have companies on a Terraneros as well.

2:34:09Ricky Rosa:I like the Neuros orange. I didn't realize that they were verticalizing orange. It's a good color. Anyway, sorry. Quick introduction. names, titles, everything quickly and then we'll go into it.

2:34:20Tristan Thompson:Ian Roundtree founder and general partner at Kantos. Yeah. Glad to be joined by

2:34:25Eren Bali:Grant, a partner at Kantos.

2:34:27Ricky Rosa:Fantastic. When did you guys get started investing? Ten years ago. Ten years. Almost exactly. A decade. Overnight success. And the latest. The newest fund. Take us through it.

2:34:37Tristan Thompson:New fund we just announced is $70 million. Last fund was$50. We kept it. Come on.

2:34:47Eren Bali:It's even louder. It feels even better than I expected it to. You feel it in your bones. You feel it in your bones. First of all, did you ever consider Roundtree Capital? Because you got Sequoia, you got the Green Oaks. There's already a long lineage of iconic firms that are sort of tree-related or themed. Not for a second, no.

2:35:10Ricky Rosa:Where's the name come from? Where's the logo come from? I want to know.

2:35:13Tristan Thompson:So I named the term Kantos because the chapters of an epic poem are Kantos.

2:35:21Ricky Rosa:Oh, okay.

2:35:22Tristan Thompson:And I always thought we're drawn to startups, these missions that are greater than ourselves, because we want to be part of some grander story. And I think of founders as a modern-day hero and the startup as the epic. and I had these delusions of associated grandeur that I might partner with people who like change the world in a way that's remembered in story and song.

2:35:45Ricky Rosa:What was the strategy early on? Like were you trying to lead rounds? Were you going very early stages? Whatever would work? What strategy?

2:35:54Tristan Thompson:The strategy was write checks into startups. Okay, just get allocation in good companies.

2:35:59Ricky Rosa:Got it, okay.

2:36:00Tristan Thompson:Yeah, I wish I called fund one, fund zero because it really was just like lessons. Yeah. Cobbled together 4 million. Yeah. Writing tiny checks. Sure. Sure. Sure. Just trying to learn.

2:36:08Ricky Rosa:4 million. Wow. What a start. That's amazing. Yeah. I feel like the, yeah, the lessons there probably, uh, there's some people that should be, would probably be better off if they started with 4 million because it really is a constraint, but that breeds ingenuity. I'm sure.

2:36:22Tristan Thompson:Well, I also was like, you know, I was early at SoFi. Crazy to go to the U.S. men's opener at SoFi Stadium, by the way. That's surreal because I joined them and they were like 20 people. And just started writing checks.

2:36:33Eren Bali:Yeah, and that deal, I think it's like$20 million a year for 20 years. So$400 million to just get the naming rights. I think they bought it. What person was their market cap? Aren't they on a rip? You probably sold a long time ago. I did, unfortunately. Paperhead. Paperhead. Paperhead. It's only$23 billion stock.

2:36:55Ricky Rosa:Yeah, but I mean, that's a perk of being in the private markets.

2:36:59Tristan Thompson:I sold secondary to Silver Lake, I think in the Series D, maybe. But that helped me get those off the ground. So fund zero, fund one, whatever the right tool for the job is, whatever the right deal is, you'll get in as long as it's a good company.

2:37:17Ricky Rosa:How rigid are you today? Do you want to be a specific first money in seed Series A? Do you want to take a certain ownership percentage? Like what guardrails do you have, if any? We feel like the constraints breed creativity in a way.

2:37:39Tristan Thompson:You want to be focused enough that you signal to the market what you do. And we kept the fund relatively small because we want to be able to look a founder in the eye when we write a$1.5 million check, and me and Grant and me, our principal, can look a founder in the eye and say, your company at this stage is a meaningful percentage of my network. Is important to you. And if you get too big, you can't really say that. Of course.

2:37:58Eren Bali:Yeah, when I think about the names like Nero, Castilian, there's a bunch of others, the$70 million feels very intentional about we want to actually just keep doing what we're doing. Totally.

2:38:11Tristan Thompson:That said, a lot of the best investments look like exceptions. you need to know when to bend. And Grant led Kostnellian's seed round when he was at End Reason. And the first thing he said when he joined Cantos was, hey, I know they're going to raise a big Series A, but...

2:38:29Ricky Rosa:Let's do it. That makes sense. The logo, the new logo. What's the etymology?

2:38:35Tristan Thompson:So this is a quill. We also like that it implies a vector. We talk a lot about tempo, speed velocity really matter for a startup because time compounds sure just like money sure and um i like that it looks like a diving peregrine falcon or something yeah dude i was just watching

2:38:57Eren Bali:videos about a peregrine falcon this is what you do in your free time my four years okay that's creature yeah fastest creature on earth and they are and they may incredibly incredibly violent like they just go after other birds like literally they're like a missile yeah sounds like some of the founders yeah yeah yeah yeah peregrine falcons uh state of defense tech we were talking about

2:39:19Ricky Rosa:this are we are we past peak defense tech um in terms of not in terms of the size of the companies but in terms of the the rate of formation it feels like post anderal awareness there was a boom there There were a lot of founders that came into the category from other areas, experience from SpaceX, et cetera. But is it picking up still?

2:39:44Eren Bali:You guys have the blessing of like you're in Neros, you're in Castilian. You're not like, oh, we need our drone. We need to find more.

2:39:51Ricky Rosa:Yeah, and a lot of founders, a lot of would-be founders, if they're at like Boeing and they're bored and they want to do something more exciting, they could go work at Neros. So, you know, like there are so many options now if you want to go have an impact at the early stage broadly that you might not need to start a company. But what are you seeing on the ground?

2:40:09Eren Bali:One of the ways we look at these like the cinematic universe here broadly is go down like the top, you know, 100 companies by market cap. And as soon as you start to not recognize the names, it turns out that those industries are super big and massive. Defense was one of the ones that now there's enough people like Anderol,

2:40:27Michael Anderson:volunteer that paved the way and people are realizing that the venture scale

2:40:31Eren Bali:outcomes for, but one of the amazing things about Cantos when I was at Andreessen was just observing how Ian and the team were able to find these categories that people still didn't feel comfortable about. I mean, Tristan's talking about ag, right? Like 10 years ago, people were like, people were like, Oh, let's do ag tech. And everyone's like, it's a horrible place. You're never going to make money. And then, you know, we turn around a few years later and cantos is leading the seed round for shinke yeah and it's like fish killing robots that's really weird yeah i think it was the pre-seed weren't you guys in the pre-seed or what are you it was a small seed

2:41:08Ricky Rosa:yeah there's some crazy ag tech thing we had the founder of the laser weeder on oh yeah no i yeah there's a bunch of cool things have you heard about this It's a tractor, but everyone's worried about pesticides. Very obvious solution is just fire a laser at the exact weeds. You just burn it. No one has a problem with like having a burnt weed next to your tomato. So it's fully no pesticides free. And it's just something that's obviously like you can back of the envelope how that's built very quickly. But it's enabled by computer vision and, you know, small actuators that can adjust where the laser is going.

2:41:44Ricky Rosa:and there's a whole bunch of like somewhat commodity technologies that are just put together in this very interesting way, creates a great product.

2:41:51Tristan Thompson:Yeah, but it's how you package it. Exactly, exactly. It's one of the lessons when I got into deep tech. Technology is not inherently valuable in and of itself. It's valuable insofar as it solves a problem and creates value in the world. And if you're better at packaging things that are off the shelf in a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money, that's a lot more interesting than like, oh I did my PhD in this crazy thing and it sounds really cool how do I sell this by the way

2:42:20Ricky Rosa:where do you see yourself uh punching the hardest in terms of value add like you're you're making investments in a way that uh you are an important voice around the table to the founders that's clear but are they coming to you with go-to-market consultation or hiring or strategy or marketing Like, where do you feel like you're, if a founder calls you about a particular problem, you're excited to talk about it as opposed to saying like, oh, this is kind of new. I can help as much as I can.

2:42:52Tristan Thompson:Yeah, I mean, there's all the like when I'm fundraising next. Oh, sure, sure, sure. In-house bank or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have a very high hit rate there. Yeah. Like, you know, over 90 % success rate and getting your next round.

2:43:04Ricky Rosa:And that's actually a, that's an advantage of being a$70 million fund is that there's no signal to like, yeah, I'm actually not doing the$100 million. million round it's like yeah the other i think the other thing that's different about cantos

2:43:16Eren Bali:and maybe we talk about like you know joining from injuries and going here like i think one of the things is really clear about ian and the team was they're so concentrated yeah and so yes we don't have the follow-on signaling dynamic here but we also when we go to another firm and say we think this company's amazing they're going to take it that much more seriously and also because we're concentrated we can just devote more time to our relationships here so we have a lot more context on any company in our portfolio probably than the rest of the entire cap table. And there are times when founders don't want us to be involved because they're busy and they're crushing.

2:43:52Eren Bali:But most often, early on, you need a lot of help. And that's where I think we've just, they've been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing a good amount of time too. We have enough pattern matching. And I think the other thing too is for these categories, I'm fired up that everyone's coming in to the cinematic universe here but also not a lot of people I think have like as strong opinions for how to build a company or what types of founders you need you need to have and I think with the lessons here we can package a lot of that and have this cross pollination between the portfolio companies that's pretty distinguished and helps out a lot but a

2:44:26Tristan Thompson:lot of times the founder they they have the intuition they know what they need to do deep down they kind of just need to hear from someone they trust that like yep like when we when we invested in shinkai right they were still licensing robots to fish farms that's right and they kind of dabbled in in selling fish having their own brand um but they weren't capitalized well enough to go do that sure and so we stepped in we were like hey why aren't you doing that thing anymore and safe was like honestly because everyone's saying no yeah um we were like that's absolutely what we should do and it was like we had given water to a man in the desert.

2:45:01Tristan Thompson:Like he wanted to do it. He knew he needed to do it. The other investors were being more coy about it. And we were like, no, let's go direct man. Like use your own robots. Don't sell them. Just sell better fish with another super vertically integrated.

2:45:13Ricky Rosa:It's great. Uh, where's the office? Do you have an office here?

2:45:16Tristan Thompson:Uh, San Francisco. I'm in San Francisco. I'm in LA. Yeah.

2:45:19Ricky Rosa:If you could open an office anywhere in the world, where would it be? What? Uh, no, uh, post LA. And then maybe there's a boom in Austin. Where's the next, next boom. For entrepreneurial talent, hard tech, defense tech. Where's interest?

2:45:34Tristan Thompson:Texas has been good to us. Texas? We're investors in Solugen and Venus Aerospace in Houston, resurgent industries in Austin more recently. There's a couple of CEOs that live there as well in the portfolio.

2:45:46Eren Bali:We're going to see a bunch of these states, though, start to be really compelling. Like LA is so strong in many ways because Tesla and SpaceX. Austin's starting to get that with a bunch of other companies there. what we're also seeing though is that so many companies were started in the gundo they kind of graduate to torrents or hawthorne but then eventually castellian for example they're not going to be able to test their missiles in la obviously that'd be terrifying and so a lot of these companies graduate radiant same thing for new how many times you meet a gundo founder and you're like don't test your product don't do it here you can do it somewhere nearby we're we're not too we're not far enough away for me to feel comfortable you start somewhere else you move to

2:46:26Tristan Thompson:The Gundo. Series A, you move to Torrance. And then you start building a factory. In Texas. In Texas.

2:46:31Ricky Rosa:Tennessee. Tennessee is becoming. New Mexico.

2:46:34Tristan Thompson:I think you'll probably see, we've seen a number of companies out of Seattle because a lot of the Starlink team is there. Oh, interesting. And like within SpaceX, that's a crack team.

2:46:43Ricky Rosa:Yeah, that's right.

2:46:44Tristan Thompson:So you'll see people that probably want to stay.

2:46:46Ricky Rosa:Yeah, I know Avalanche, the fusion companies up there. And there's been a few others that we've talked about. The lumber manufacturers.

2:46:51Eren Bali:What is great luck from an R &D cycle or an execution standpoint? because like it really just feels like there's such a like on tvpn we're 90 percent of the time we're having founders 95 percent of the time we're having founders on that are like actually like shipping and making like really meaningful progress and then there's like the five percent of hard tech founders some of them raise a lot of money and we're sort of curious but are not really shipping and that's like kind of like that's people people a lot of people have been burned by companies like that over the years where it's like cool idea, deep tech, and then they just don't, they keep raising money, but don't ever make anything.

2:47:33Eren Bali:Don't ever get like real contact with the market. Um, maybe like quantum, uh, related companies. There's different types. There's different classes of companies. Like we have some that like we, we put out a deck last year on what we're calling like the state of adventure capital. Yeah, there we go. Delayed, delayed but it's it's like 286 slides and there's a chunk in there that talks about like how deep is the deep tech company sure and you know if you're doing quantum or like fusion that's gonna take a long time the time to revenue is long capex whatever i think the companies that we like are higher up in that score where the the time to iteration is really fast you want to build break and iterate and i think what a lot of people got wrong in prior hardware eras is they just assumed Yes, like you only get a few shots on goal.

2:48:20Eren Bali:You have to be really deliberate. Sniper shot it out. You can't spray and pray your way to greatness here. But that doesn't mean that you can still not like test quickly. If you look at Niros, if you look at Shinke, Castellian, all of them are like constantly in the field, fielding their systems, seeing what's working, what isn't. And they know early on that those are not going to be the best ways. But the most expensive part in building in hardware by far are the people. It's not the hardware. And you hear Elon talk about this all the time. The cost of Starship and Starship and all these systems there in the grand scheme isn't a lot.

2:48:54Eren Bali:It's the hours of labor that go into it. And so the sooner that you test out and see what breaks and refine it, I think the better off. I think we're seeing a bunch more founders that have appreciated this, that have learned it at SpaceX or in other places now. And they're coming out and doing a lot more. But, you know, I think there's like the other challenge here is a lot of people that are coming in and are excited to make a bet in defense or energy or what have you. They, I think, are missing that way of evaluating companies and their ability to test quickly.

2:49:26Tristan Thompson:You have to get on the learning curve as quickly as possible. You can't sit in the lab. You need to feel technology. And we find that getting back to tempo, vector, speed, like we find that if we're diligencing a company in like a week, I used to think, oh, that's not a lot of time. Of course, they won't have made progress. But we've started we've backed so many people now that like a week to them is like a month to everybody else. And they'll just blow your mind with how quickly they move. And if you don't again, that compounds, if you don't get that feeling in a week, you're not going to get it in a month, a quarter, a year, all of a sudden, a decade.

2:50:01Tristan Thompson:is a lot shorter than it used to be.

2:50:04Ricky Rosa:Are you feeling the pull of the AI vortex? It feels like we're seeing like...

2:50:09Eren Bali:Like, no, not at all. I didn't notice it.

2:50:11Ricky Rosa:No, it feels like we've seen a number of hard tech companies sort of pivot or expand into AI-related projects. Boom, supersonic. Like, Castilian, I can imagine that somebody's going to try and figure out how to bolt that thing to the ground. Yeah, I'm sure. Nero is going to wind up being like security for AI data centers or something. Obviously, they have fantastic businesses. But are there examples or how do you negotiate or what do you say to a founder who's saying, yeah, we have a six out of 10 market right now. It's going to be a couple of years. But I got an interesting call from a neocloud.

2:50:48Ricky Rosa:And they think that they could put our thing to work.

2:50:51Tristan Thompson:We were having this conversation recently. We've made a general robotics investment. that's still in stealth. We're really excited about it. Um, and it will be general, but again, we want to get on the learning curve. Ideally we want to commercialize as quickly as possible. And we're thinking about where do you start? And we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And one of the ideas was like, should we start a car wash? You know, have these like robot arms, wash your car for you. And then we're like, but you're sneaky good businesses. No, no. Also extremely fragmented.

2:51:20Ricky Rosa:I don't think they've been rolled up and with self-driving cars the way most they'll need to go somewhere why not match it but you know who has a lot more

2:51:27Tristan Thompson:money maybe data centers could use some of the two it seems like a pretty obvious answer i think there will be a lot of technologies that can ride that wave when i first invested in radiant we were we were talking about military applications totally yeah and the behind the meter application for data centers is so much not even really on the radar yeah yeah that way i interviewed doug a

2:51:45Ricky Rosa:couple years ago and i was like so like you're gonna get calls and he's like uh we really like the idea of going to Mars and stuff. And I'm like, you'll get there. Yeah. But you're going to power some AI stuff first.

2:51:59Tristan Thompson:Well, we got handed, all the energy companies got handed a huge gift. It's great. We had no growth in the grid. Yeah, nothing. 30 years. Yeah. And there's these niche applications,

2:52:08Ricky Rosa:like oil and gas exploration, stranded energy and stuff. And now it's just like, yeah, there's obvious, obvious demand. It's going to be so much easier for these folks. And then all the technology will get commoditized and it'll go everywhere and it'll be great. And you'll still get that.

2:52:19Eren Bali:What's the state of IP coming out of, like, universities today? Is that a pipeline of... Granted, we have no PhD policy at Cantos.

2:52:32Tristan Thompson:I learned this the hard way. Really? Like, I mean, there are some PhDs that are, like the salt agent guys, like John Gedmark, an astronist, who are very business-minded.

2:52:41Larsen Jensen:Yeah.

2:52:42Tristan Thompson:But if you find someone who's, like, trying to commercialize their doctoral thesis, you've got this hammer, you're looking for nails. that hardly ever works. You're also trained exactly the wrong way when you're defending your thesis. It's all caveats and what could go wrong. You get dinged if you overpromise.

2:53:01Eren Bali:It's like the old school way of thinking about hardware. It's like East Coast mindset of we're going to sit in an ivory tower, think about all the ways that this could make a lot of impact as opposed to just say, we're just going to put the robot on a fishing boat and see what breaks. And it turns out a lot of stuff is going to break. Put the robot on the boat, bro. Yeah, let's do it.

2:53:19Tristan Thompson:You'll find like the you know the space put the gun on the truck

2:53:26Eren Bali:This is John's like bit on a Allen control. Yeah, yeah Oh the gun on the truck company, but they failed to consider that there's a YC company.

2:53:34Ricky Rosa:This is gone on the ground Oh, yeah, nine mothers.

2:53:37Eren Bali:Yeah, nine months. It's just gone Multiple use cases. Yeah, yeah gun on everything.

2:53:43Ricky Rosa:I suppose anyway congratulations on the fund congratulations on it

2:53:46Eren Bali:Yeah, I think you guys, yeah, decade in, decades to go. That's the idea.

2:53:52Tristan Thompson:You know, if you look at our website, cantos.vc, we have these plaques and sort of our version of Trajan's column because we aspire to back people whose companies will be engraved in stone and metal in a thousand years. And if that's not you, don't email us.

2:54:08Eren Bali:I love it. I love it. Know who your customers are. Hit the gong for us. I want you to take it for a spin.

2:54:16Ricky Rosa:Yeah, take this. This guy's big. Whack that thing. Backhand.

2:54:24Ricky Rosa:Thank you for watching TVPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

2:54:27Eren Bali:Hang out with us. We'll close it out. Give us five stars on our podcast and Spotify.

2:54:31Ricky Rosa:Sign up for our new.