Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1, Meme Stocks Make a Comeback, Amazon's New Wearable AI Device | Christina Cacioppo, Deena Shakir, Davide Asnaghi, Ylan Richard

28:58Short sellers bet against companies. If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade, a cycle that creates even more demand and can send shares soaring. The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 57%. And Krispy Kreme, which you mentioned, jumped 20 % despite no clear impetus to buy. GoPro, I mean, I love when they just pick an awesome company like GoPro. GoPro's a sweet company. Making cool cameras for doing cool stuff. How can you not love that? Yeah, it is interesting because AMC and GameStop were very much like nostalgia plays, whereas Open Door doesn't really fit that template of, I feel like a lot of the GameStop supporters were also supportive of the idea of getting back to a world where you can go and buy a video game from a local store, and that just being like a fond childhood memory.

29:50I remember as a kid riding my bike to GameStop to pick up a new N64 game. I love how there's somebody out there that's just like has that mentality of just buy the stocks of the companies you love. And they're like, well, I love Krispy Kreme. And I love GoPro because I love doing some cool stuff, filming it and treating myself with some donuts. And they think they're a genius investor not realizing that. And I mean, every once in a while, things do get oversold. There's plenty of examples of companies that have been trading like below cash for some reason. and it's a function of various lockups.

30:25And then the company kind of goes into wartime mode and rebuilds and does come out of it and builds back up. And that does happen, especially post the end of Zerp, post the SVV crisis. There were a lot of companies that were just truly oversold and they were able to come back, usually because they're founder-led and the founders stuck it out. So there's lots of options being traded on Opendoor, NVIDIA, Apple. and Opendoor has over three million option contracts that changed hands on Monday, almost as much as the S &P 500. Wow. With the market capitalization around two billion, Opendoor is a member of the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index.

31:03The fact that more Opendoor options traded Monday than contracts tied to Nvidia, the$4 trillion behemoth, was unusual. That's pretty much unheard of, Heisinger said, founder of options data platform QuantData. And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze. And so there's a very funny article in Bloomberg from Matt Levine. He's a fantastic columnist, a fantastic writer. This is taking it one step further. We're getting into meme stock treasuries at this point. Okay, so he says, well, the other day I wrote, and if you're not already subscribed to Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, You got to get on money stuff.

31:49It's a great newsletter that you can get in your email inbox if you subscribe to Bloomberg. Well, the other day I wrote that the crypto treasury strategy trade is very good, but saturated. The U.S. stock market will pay$2 for$1 worth of Bitcoin. So lots of companies have acquired Bitcoin to make their stock go up. But the returns are diminishing. Companies have moved on to other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, and BNB and Trumpcoin. but they are running out of space. And he wrote, if you want to do this trade now, you might want to try something else. Maybe the stock market will pay$2 for$1 worth of blank, you think, where what goes in the blank is, one, big and attention-getting, two, relatively liquid so you can buy it incrementally as money comes in and market to market as the price goes up, and three, somewhat crypto-adjacent in spirit, but four, not a big obvious crypto token.

32:44And so what would be exciting? One of one Ferraris? You know, classic. Ferrari Treasuries? Ferrari Treasury. There's something there. That sounds like something we would do as a joke. Yeah. And it will actually happen in the market in a few years. Maybe someone should buy that McLaren collection. There we go. That's a good treasury. There we go. You got an original F1. I'm trying to think what else is big and attention getting and relatively liquid. I don't know. Well, his example is micro strategy. So he says, I feel like someone should try a micro strategy treasury strategy. Like you take over a small public company and you announce that you're raising 200 million to buy micro strategy stock.

33:34Maybe that would be worth 400 million. And he says, I'm an idiot. But there's one obvious answer. And I'm ashamed that I missed it. Quantum Biopharma found it. Wow. A biopharmaceutical company dedicated to innovative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders today announced the purchase of 2 ,000 shares of GameStop to hold on the company's balance sheet as a strategic investment. This move aligns with Quantum Biopharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategies and advocacy against manipulative trade practices. Well, whatever your plan is, you're going to need to design a graphic for it.

34:12You're going to need to get on Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma Designs helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com. And speaking of Figma, they hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet. They do. I don't think that's because... It was more, I think it was more like prudent treasury management and wanting to be diversified. Dylan's been a big believer in crypto for a long time. But the mark when the S1 came out and people saw that, everybody was pretty excited. I actually held Bitcoin on the balance sheet of my first company when Bitcoin was trading.

34:48Oh, because you guys had to, you were accepting it. We were accepting it through Coinbase. We had an integration where you could pay, but it was complicated because customers would pay in Bitcoin. And then if the price of Bitcoin went down, they would ask for a refund. And if the price of Bitcoin, or if the price of Bitcoin went up, they would ask for a refund in the Bitcoin that they paid. So effectively use your refund policy as a hedge. And so if the price of Bitcoin went down, they could sell the product and then buy more Bitcoin. It was just very, very messy. But we wound up holding some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but we eventually sold it way too early, obviously.

35:23And we also paid out a bonus to people. I think everyone that Christmas got five Bitcoins. Crazy to think about now. It was like five grand back then. Yeah, brutal. Anyway, let's tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I wish I had graphite back in the day. You can go to graphite.dev. I had graphite back in the day. So Matt Levine goes on. 2 ,000 shares of GameStop is like$50 ,000, which isn't going to move the needle, even on a$72 million public company. The stock was down this morning. But good effort. Good effort.

36:02So he says, the simple way to think about exchange-traded funds is that an ETF— See, that would be—if they added$50 ,000 worth of GameStop to their balance sheet, and then the stock moved, that would be true mania in my book, right? Oh, totally, totally. You've got to have the day trader, the educator who's day trading options, quitting his job, and you've got to have adding$50 ,000 of GameStop triple your stock price. To me, that's so little. I mean, what? Yeah. What is the why did they do this? Like what? What is the is it just to get a press release just to get mentioned in Matt? Well, John, it obviously aligns with quantum biofarmers ongoing commitment to combating market corruption, enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategy and advocacy against manipulative trading practice.

36:52How does this combat market corruption? They're making a statement, John. They're making a statement, I suppose. Anyway, there's no better way to make a statement than getting on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform. Yeah. We're going to talk to the CEOs. Hitting the gong in just a little bit. Vanta raised some new money that was announced today, and we will have Christina on a little bit later to break it down. Yeah. Well, this newsletter from Matt Levine is fantastic, but I'll let you go and subscribe and to read it, we can move on to the Wall Street Journal talking about Amazon.

37:31Amazon has launched a new, or they bought an AI wearable that kind of flew under the radar. This is the B. Yeah. Had you ever heard of this company? I hadn't heard of it. I feel like I've heard of most of them, but only the ones that kind of went viral. So the Humane Pen I followed, the Rabbit R1 I followed, the Friend I followed, And then obviously the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive Project IO, which we don't know what it is, might be a wearable, might be a phone. I don't know. I feel like there's been a lot of conflicting reporting about what they're actually building. But there's a lot of stuff there and there's something coming.

38:07And then obviously we've talked to the founder of Whoop and other wearables. And I'm aware of Fitbit. That's kind of in the legacy space. Apple has the Apple Watch. Now Amazon has the BAI bracelet that listens to your conversations throughout the day and automatically adds action items from those chats to a to-do list. So it might suggest it'll create a suggested to-do for you on their website. It says go grocery shopping for the week as one. Two is actually on their site says send a Figma link of the work discussed to the team. And three, establish a routine to take a daily walk. And it gives you reflections and insights.

38:50And the example they give on the site is you're adapting your parenting approach during wife's absence by creating special moments around routine activities like swim class. Not a bad reminder. If you're a parent, turn that swim class into a special moment. Do they have a linear integration? The purpose built tool for planning and building products? You can make a system for modern software development. I would get a bee band if they had the linear integration. To help you streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. That'd be great. They should go to linear.app. Anyway, it's funny. After a decade of Amazon saying Alexa isn't listening to your every word, the company is buying a bracelet that can listen to your every word.

39:29Uh-oh. Let's go. The tinfoil hat's on. Bees wearable transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself. Then it uses artificial intelligence to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to-do lists based on your chatter. So interesting. Obviously, there's a big pushback on this from privacy perspective. Do you trust Amazon? I tend to trust Amazon on this stuff. The bigger question is like, if I see you wearing one, are you going to get the glass hole phenomenon? Do you remember that with the Google Glass thing? We seem to have blown past that.

40:05So Google launched Google Glass back in 2012-ish, something like that. And it was just a pair of glasses with the camera on it. And you could take pictures, very direct precursor to the Meta Ray-Bans, although it did have a heads up display. It was very small in the corner, you could kind of look up. And the basic use cases they were pitching were things like turn by turn directions. If you're on a bike, You don't need to pull out your phone. You can get Google Maps integrated. Google was working on this for a while. Then eventually it kind of got sunsetted. It was very, there's this famous picture of Marc Andreessen in the Google Glass and a lot of people were very excited about it.

40:46It seemed like the era of augmented reality was on the horizon. Didn't really pan out that way. They pivoted to B2B or enterprise and the idea was like, okay, maybe if you're on a factory line you could have instructions, work instructions pulled up there. that never really panned out either and they kind of sunset it and it kind of went the way of the microsoft hololens where there was some amazing r &d that was done some amazing engineering but they never crossed the chasm never got past the early adopters and so but during that time it was one of the first major backlashes against like the silicon valley tech bro so uh people were wearing these because they were yeah there's mark andreason wearing the google glass one of the prototype.

41:31Looking sharp. Yeah. And interestingly, kind of solves the problem of are these sunglasses or are these indoor glasses? Like they're just, it's not glasses. So you can wear it indoor or outdoor. And I guess you could put sunglasses over the top of that more or less, but never really got adoption. And there was, there was this, I think like some sort of instance where a tech person was wearing them in a bar and someone came up to them and was like, I don't want I don't want you taking pictures of me. I don't want you recording me in public. Get that off of here. And it caused this kind of culture war issue, and the portmanteau that became popular was glass hole.

42:08You can imagine what that means. And so people were very upset about this, and like, I don't want you taking pictures. Now we're kind of blown past that, where everyone has a phone on them that could be recording you, and everyone's taking out their phone all the time taking pictures, and there's just kind of, Emily Sundberg was talking about in the Hamptons how there's so many TikTokers around taking video of everything. You can't even leave with another man's wife, as she put it, right? And so the, it's such a funny phenomenon. But I mean, it was funny because she said that. And then a week later, the Coldplay concert happened.

42:41And that went mega viral. And that's, of course, the product of technology. That's a product of the fact that everyone is filming. There is going to be someone filming every screen at every moment. And so at a concert, it wasn't like something happened. and then the one person that has a camera and he's like, oh, I should take a video of that and post it. It's like, after a while, once it went viral, there were other camera angles that came out because other people were also filming at the same time. Now, not everyone was, but you put 100 ,000 people together, they're gonna be filming everything at all times, all the angles.

43:13Obviously, very beneficial when something disastrous happens. You have a lot of coverage to figure out what happened, but in other cases, it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy, all sorts of things. And so long story short, we kind of blew past that. There hasn't been a push back on the meta Ray-Bans. People wear them and there hasn't been any. Don't they have like a light? They do. That lets you know if it's recording. It's recording. Yes. I think it's good. Yes. And so that was kind of where the technology resolution landed. Now meta Ray-Bans aren't the most popular product, but there's certainly plenty of people that daily drive them and they're not getting aggressively yelled at for being like Meta Ray-Ban holes or whatever.

43:54Like that meme is dead. And people just kind of assume that if I'm out in public, someone might take a picture of me with their phone or their Meta Ray-Bans. It's just something that happens now. And we've just been normalized. Yeah. And anytime these wearable pendant bracelet things have popped up, people's immediate thought is, okay, so you're recording every conversation that you're having and that's being indexed. Maybe you're getting transcriptions. Is that suddenly if if if somebody sues you can can't do you have to provide that, you know, as part of a lawsuit that you can imagine the kind of problems that that would cause.

44:33We should have, so Avi from friend.com, he's starting, they're starting to ship their product on July 30th, so just a week from now. And I'm sure he has some way that he's addressing that. But B is interesting. The company was started just under three years ago by some former Twitter employees, actually, back when it was called Twitter. So the CEO, Maria, and -

45:03I'm seeing a trend here. I like this. Yeah, I can see it. Maria Delordes Zolo said the company which imagines a world where AI is truly personal is joining Amazon in a LinkedIn post. An Amazon spokeswoman said that while the deal is signed, the agreement isn't yet closed. For Amazon, it's a small move in a potentially huge future market. I saw the bracelet. Yeah, it was interesting. I think the pricing strategy here was smart. The device, they sold it for$49.99. So just clearly trying to sell these to as many people as possible. and then I'm sure there's a subscription component to it as well.

45:36Yeah. There is something about the price point. And even though when the iPhone was released, it was like$600. It was very expensive. Oh, and they actually haven't shipped any product yet. OB hasn't? So they're shipping in, we're shipping in February. Or sorry, September. So when they ship, will they have to pay sales tax? What should they use for that? Definitely. I would strongly recommend and numeral. NumeralHQ.com. They could put their sales tax on autopilot. They could spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That would be amazing. Anyway, so they did send a demo to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal.

46:16She was impressed with how useful the bracelet was, but she wasn't sold on the privacy trade-offs rather than saving audio. Bea only keeps a transcription, but still the creep factor is high, says the journal. We have long had listening devices in our pockets in our homes for many amazon's echo speaker was the first it is kind of funny somebody uh you know let's say somebody a friend comes over your house and uh you know they've got their b bracelet on and then they take it off at some point sitting on a table and you're like wait there's you know let's say you're having a pool party yep you're sitting at the table we're sitting like this so the the the person the bee owner is off doing something else but they actually get like a perfect transcription and they actually get recommendations.

47:02It's like, Hey, so-and-so was just talking behind your back for about 30 minutes. Yeah. The mangoes he brought to the pool party, totally rotten, totally rotten. Wow. Really lots of attention to detail. Uh, won't be invited to the next pool party. Yeah. And so your B is like, okay, so you really need to work on your mango selection going into the next party. Uh, this is really a weak point for you. Yeah. That's good. That could, that could be valuable. I think, uh, I think some people are gonna have to fill out the apology form to all the schizophrenics out there who've been like, everything's listening to me because like, well, yes, in fact, everything is listening to you.

47:37Um, I think if, if meta, if meta could, if meta could have bought a company like this and said, and said for$50 a month, we'll pay you$50 a month to listen to everything that you say and give you better ad targeting. I bet meta could make it back. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I do think the price point is like super, super key to getting the install base down. John Carmack was talking about with VR, what was he saying, like 100 grams,$100 for a VR headset, that's when you're gonna get everyone to buy them, and then there's gonna be such a big install base that everyone will wanna build on top of it. And that's when the iPhone came out at$600, it was so expensive, it was such a luxury good.

48:17But everyone had a phone at that time. The phones were just heavily subsidized by the phone plans, And the phone plans had started at like$10 a month,$30 a month, and kind of worked their way up to$100 a month. The phones were really only like a couple hundred dollars. So if you lost it, it wasn't that big of a deal. And like slowly it had worked its way up from the bottom. I mean, wireless phone, cell phones used to be a luxury. It took two decades probably from the 80s to go from the big Dynatac all the way down to the Motorola Razr V3, which was like pretty much, you know, affordable to many families.

48:52would give them to their high school kids, right? And then so when the iPhone came out, there was already this install base of people who expected to be able to make phone calls over the cellular network and then also text each other. And then the internet browsing was like kind of a nice to have extra feature. I remember someone had a really fancy, I think it was like a Nokia or something, or it was some sort of other phone that had a very primitive web browser on it about like two years before. And it was really expensive because you had to buy a data plan too. But I was like, oh man, like the ability to access the internet everywhere.

49:26Like that's such a killer feature. And so I definitely could imagine a world where, you know, you have to get these products just so cheap that everyone's buying them, wearing them. They're just baked into everything. And then you can scale up to something that's more premium. It just seems we're so far past the Siri, Alexa, personal assistant, shopping assistant rivalry. but it makes sense for Amazon to try to get back in the game. Yeah, I wonder, do you think OpenAI could kind of come out with an Alexa competitor that would do well? I mean, they arguably already have. Which is? It's just, I mean, ChatGPT.

50:07Yeah. I would say you use, specifically you use ChatGPT as like voice memo. Yes. Say like you kind of talk through what you're thinking and what you want to do and then it condenses it nicely. It's not taking a bunch of actions yet, Like being like, hey, I want to make, I can see in the future where you're like, hey, I want to make, I want to cook my wife a nice dinner in this theme. Can you put together an ingredient list and order all the ingredients and have it home by 5 p.m.? That's very, very gentick. I just imagine, I talked to somebody who said that they often leave or their wife leaves ChatGPT open in the conversational mode when they're just hanging out and then you can just like, it won't chime in unless you actually ask it a question and it will kind of know that, okay, now you're talking to me.

51:00But it doesn't have a specific wake word. So it's just like a third party in the conversation. It felt very sci-fi, very futuristic, I don't know. Anyway, so now Amazon is interested in a wearable device that's always listening, always listening, no wake word needed. So Amazon has reminded us for years that its voice activated speakers only start listening when they hear the wake word, even if you didn't necessarily utter it. But if you've had an Alexa in your home ever, it certainly will wake up when it'll hear something incorrectly and pop on all the time. Yeah, and so very interesting to see what they're thinking about here.

51:39B is one of a growing pack of AI gadgets out there. Google has Pixel earbuds that put Gemini AI in your ear. Meta Ray-Bans, of course, we talked about. Samsung recently showed off Gemini-infused Galaxy devices. Apple has been slower on the uptake. But remember we were hearing that reporting from Mark Gurman that Apple was working on a robotic arm or something like that? something that like would sit on your table or something i don't know they had some sort of like robotics device like in the far roadmap apple's always i mean i i do believe that apple works on a trim what what you see even leaks from apple is still like five percent oh yeah they're actually working on under the surface yeah meta had uh an announcement today uh for a wearable device um so i'll read their post they said imagine controlling your devices with a subtle hand or finger gesture our cutting-edge research turns intent and muscle signals into seamless computer control this breakthrough risk technology is redefining how we interact with computers intuitive precise and ready for the future and they I believe they released an entire study around this as well we actually got a chance to take a demo yeah of this it was very cool earlier this year.

52:58I'm not sure how much we can actually say on it for now. But yeah, so they did an entire study as well around a generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction. So it's basically, yeah, the team has it pulled up here. You can see like you can click by going like this. You can scroll in different ways. and when we used it, it was extremely intuitive. It took about 30 seconds to figure out how it works. Yeah, the scrolling motion was particularly cool. That was something I hadn't experienced with the Apple Vision Pro. And this is one of the ways in which Meta imagines integrating, making something like a pair of glasses as functional as a phone or a computer.

53:47Yeah. This was an acquisition too. So Meta bought Control Labs to bring this wristband into the company. That was a deal reportedly between$500 million and a billion dollars. It's been six years now. And now they're starting to test it even further. What's interesting is that the Apple Vision Pro was pretty good at hand detection. And I feel like this is maybe one of those Elon versus Waymo debates about you can do it with a camera. like you can see that I'm doing this. You can see that I'm giving you a thumbs up. If you can see, the computer should be able to see with a camera. And it's just a matter of getting the right training data, building the right model, and then rolling that out.

54:32So it should be doable from a pure software perspective. But it was nice when you put on the glasses and you put the control wristband behind your, you didn't have to have it in view. You could have your hand in your pocket and still be controlling. And that was a big part of the weight of the Apple Vision Pro was that it has cameras not just looking out this way, but also looking down to see your hands. So, but if your hands are behind your back, but it's such a weird niche use case. I feel like I could just get used to having my hands. The other challenge is getting people to adopt effectively two new devices is also not necessarily easy.

55:10Yeah. Putting on a wristband. I mean, if you put a watch on it, you put, you know, you make it part of the daily wear. The big question is like, Apple's getting so strong with the Apple Watch, like the ecosystem feels like if it really starts clicking, the Apple Vision Pro can key off the watch and it just gets so much better if you have the watch on and you're like, okay, well yeah, I'll get the watch then to throw that on. But obviously that's no substitute for a Patek Philippe or an Audemars Piguet, so you gotta head over to Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

55:44Seriously, any watch go to getbezel.com. But I don't know exactly how it will play out. It feels like you need maybe both. It's still like it adds cost. I feel like I'm still in the camp of make the headsets light and cheap and give people the ability to replace their TV. And then a few other things that they can do. but they have to replace their screens. Entertainment, not a daily driver coming with you everywhere. Yeah, there's so many people that build, you know, like, okay, I got three Apple Pro displays or three studio displays. I mean, look right there. We got six displays in the production suite.

56:29Like in theory, that could be replaced with VR headsets and you can have unlimited displays and reconfigure them as you need on the fly. Yeah. And for a lot of people, especially if you're traveling, college student, a smaller apartment, you know, instead of a big 60 inch TV and a bunch of monitors for your desk setup and this and that. You just have one headset, but it's got to be light. You got to be able to wear it for a really long time. Yeah. Well, let's go and check in with Europe. We have a post here from Kai. He says, normalize sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything.

57:04And superstar poster Jira tickets says, impressive. Very nice. now let's see the GDP good to flag uh there's a real cost to sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything seven days a week these guys look these guys look very retired though yeah and I feel like let them sit outside the cafe in peace but shouldn't be an invitation uh for you to do the same thing I don't know I I think you flip this around and you phrase it as you're holding court people come to you you set up set up shop holding court is underrated holding court is extremely underrated uh you got to just set up you know hey you want to come pitch me your startup i'll be outside this cafe all day long yeah we have a uh we have a friend of the show media mogul who holds court at a at a certain hotel in la and he doesn't have to um doesn't really have to leave all day long sure they just you know he's really a king there yeah that's great and they come to him it's a fantastic way of doing business yeah well if you're struggling with a bunch of inbound emails to your support team.

58:09Get fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks. World champion. Number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. Did you see this video? Yeah, pull up this video. So a company called Volanot. Volanot. Volanot says, we are excited to share this raw flight footage, including takeoff and landing, all with real sound. No special effects, no CGI, no AI, pure engineering. Enjoy the Future, a functional real-world speeder bike that so far only existed in sci-fi movies is finally here. this seems extremely dangerous yeah you just look uh it's tough yeah it's like we wanted yeah we wanted flying cars we got them and now i'm terrified of them and i don't necessarily want to go for a ride on this it seems really fun it seems like in the same territory as like wingsuiting like as a kid i was like i'm definitely going to become a pro wingsuiter no doubt put me in put me in like give me the red bull livery on my wingsuit i'm 100 doing it and then i looked at the actual stats of how dangerous wingsuiting is and was like, I will never be wingsuiting.

59:22I will be watching Red Bull videos of wingsuiting. Yeah, leave it to the Red Bull. How do you even make this safe? This is crazy. So they're calling it the air bike. Yep. It's very cool that they built this. Very, very, very cool. I wonder how it commercializes. I wonder, like, where does this go? What use case is it? I mean, who knows? It's also crazy. I have no idea who's building this on the LinkedIn. Yeah. It has one guy on it and Tomasz Patan. And it seems like, where is this? He's in Poland. He's apparently the only person working on this company. Solopreneur. Oh, okay. So he's also the founder of Jetson, which is the eVTOL company.

1:00:13Okay. So he built this on the side project. A little side project. project built a speeder bike he's in poland i wonder if there's a defense tech application there's off anytime you can put something in the air and make it move fast yeah usually i mean if you're worried about if you're worried about a minefield and you need to get from one place to another maybe this is a good way to get around and if you're really trained because you're in the military you're not just some casual person going for a flight like could be safer than trying trying to walk through a minefield. Of course, like you are a pretty big target up there.

1:00:47It looks like he's wearing some sort of hat. Yeah, I mean, the way to think about this is, this is a, you could also imagine this as a drone, right? There doesn't need to be a human on it. So it's powered by jet propulsion. It's designed to carry one person at speeds up to 124 miles an hour. That's so fast. And what makes it possible is they have the stabilization system, onboard flight computer, and um and anyways i mean this looks like a beautiful future it's just like how how safe does it need to get until i'll be ripping one of these from malibu into the into the studio every morning i don't even ride a motorcycle so i don't know i'm more likely to go to the moon i think than than rip around on one of these it seems like it you have very doomer pill john you don't think they can make it so so safe that it's that it's you know flyable by anyone certifiable by anyone it's it's just so easy to drive that you know there's no risk then yeah maybe i'd give it a try it looks rare very fun it does look very fun yeah one one solution is it is it becomes like fully autonomous and you don't have this sort of like human saying i'm gonna i'm gonna take this turn a little faster drone right yeah but still be cool that you're riding on it that you could ride on that would take you around to places then you're just back in e-vital territory right i don't know yeah i guess this is not e-vital because it's not electric motors jet propulsion but imagine when this thing gets to the point where you can just like fly it up a mountain that will be crazy you're gonna be able to take these skiing just everyone's waiting in line at everest and you're just bombing up to the top yeah you're just like taking it out in the mountains again it's like we kind of do have flying cars in the form of helicopters right just like not not evenly distributed.

1:02:32It's going to be fun when they start selling these things. They're going to get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You get started for free. Yeah, I have a feeling you're not going to be able to just order one of these on the website anytime soon. No, they're going to need a sales team for this. Let's check in with Tyler. How are you doing on the challenge? Okay, so I played all three games and then I don't know how the scoring works. So I can look at each of the three games there's like scorecards and then there's recordings i'm on site so i can see the number of actions if you add them up i'm at uh 576 oh you're pretty good wow so that's under 600 okay uh but i'm not on the leaderboard i don't know why okay maybe it needs some time to update that's the real challenge now yeah leaderboard so i'm not just trusting you he's like i won but but write a write a sequel injection to to have reach out to mike reach out to mike Sounds like you might be getting a bug bounty too and your iPhone.

1:03:30Maybe, maybe. But congratulations. That sounds like good work. How far are you away from number one now? I'm in 13th place. So I got 576. Okay. Number one is at 511. Do you think that's doable based on your experience? Yeah, definitely. I made a bunch of mistakes. Okay. So maybe give it another run. I could probably go. See if you go sub 500. That'll be good. Bang. There you go. Sub 500, you get upgraded to more storage. I will reach out to Mike because I think there might be a bug here and I don't want I don't want the reason that that you're not going to win your iPhone to do a bug. True, true, true, true.

1:04:02I feel I want. Yeah, it feels like you might have earned it. Yeah. You also don't want bed bugs either. You want a new bed. You want to go to eightsleep.com. That's right. Get a pod five. Five year warranty. 30 night risk free trial. Free returns. Free shipping. I am deathly ill. I'm trying to keep the energy up. I ate sleep. Let's hear it for Jordy. I think he's putting out a fantastic performance. to the production team. I didn't know this was possible. My HRV last night was at 32, which I thought would imply death. But I'm here, I'm doing the show, and it's scary to imagine what my night would have looked like without my sleep.

1:04:41I don't even want to imagine that world. Indeed. Well, there's one founder I know who's sleeping a lot better, sleeping well, Samir from Vize. his company just hit$22 billion in platform assets. Do you know the story of this company? All I know is they got marked up like back to back to back in the sort of 2021 era. It was a unicorn. And then they went through it. And they're young founders. And there was all this like, oh, like they're overvalued. And the guys apparently just kept sticking with it and chopping wood. And I'd love to see this. This is amazing. So he says, one learning to share with all future entrepreneurs.

1:05:19Great businesses take a long time to build, ignore the noise and keep going. It sounds like that's exactly what he did. They grew 1 ,275 % year over year. They're growing 40 % quarter over quarter, a record number of new firms. So what this company does is software for fund administration for asset managers, I believe. And so they're - Portfolio management. Portfolio management. So they're onboarding more managers and bringing those assets on the platform. I don't think it's fair to say like, oh,$22 billion is a revenue or they'd have some take rate. It's more like a GMV type of thing. And they probably take a small, small fraction of all that.

1:05:59But still, like growth is growth. And it seems like they're doing very well. So good to hear. Yeah, cool to see. I think he's been a huge beneficiary of Gen AI from what I can tell. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It is funny. I mean, looking at Lucy's been on an absolute tear this year and hearing like how many years that that were not super exciting that you were just chopping wood, just just trying to be better every single month. I had a buddy I had a buddy come to me last year and he was like, yeah, I think I want to create like a Zen competitor. Like, I think it'd be pretty, pretty simple to get it to like, you know, just like get it to like a 50 million dollar run rate, you know, nice little lifestyle business.

1:06:41thinking about your journey with Lucy being like, I don't know. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it just was the exact opposite of like a, of a fast growing, you know, for sure company at the beginning, you just had to like, just, just compound, compound, compound. It took so long to really unlock the growth. Yeah, no, it always grew. And the growth rate was always decent, but it just took a decade to get any meat on the bones. Just like, I always refer to that as like, once the company, like it, It has enough revenue and profit to sustain the operations out of the fundraising to survive mode.

1:07:18And it's actually like a player in the category, not just some wild bet. It takes a long time for the majority of companies. Some people, they're just built different. Maybe they're lucky, maybe they made their own luck. They rip from day one and we love to celebrate them here. We do. But yeah, sometimes if you have something, you know, the die has been cast, Aaliyah Okta, Iokta Est, the Mark Zuckerberg quote. You know, you release the arrow and it travels in whatever direction you released it for as long as possible. But hopefully that's at a compounding rate upwards for a long time. Anyway, if you're looking to compound, get on public.com, investing for those to take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions, public.com.

1:08:03Go check it out. Sonos has new CEO. News out of Sonos, out of Santa Barbara County. california uh tom conrad has been asked to be the next ceo of sonos he's grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these last six months while i was interim so excited for the road ahead so big pickup from sonos uh we've covered sonos before we've shared yep uh frustration over the years with sonos um uh but uh fundamentally uh the products are incredible when they're working. And it feels like it was always a software problem, right? Not necessarily maybe firmware. Which I'm still confused by because they haven't rolled back the app.

1:08:52And so I'm wondering what's going on because my Sonos app still takes a long time to open. Just opening it up is a full, at least 90 seconds to just adjust the volume, which is crazy bad experience. And the crazy thing is that the same hardware with the same phone used to be 10 seconds. And so there's something that changed when they added some new functionality that really bogged down the network or the app or something. They got to roll it back. It's very clear what they need to do. So hopefully he can do it. He's been interim CEO for six months. Hopefully he can turn things around. There's a lot that they need to do.

1:09:30It'll be interesting to see where service lands. He's got experience. He was the executive vice president of product at Pandora for 10 years. And then became the chief technology officer, then went over to Snapchat, was a VP of product there. Also had a brief stint at Quibi as the chief product officer. So excited to see what he does with Sonos. And considering I have a bunch of Sonos in my house still. Yeah. Do any Sonos speakers have microphones on them? Let's figure it out. Because yes, several Sonos speakers come equipped with built-in microphones. The Sonos One, Sonos Era 100. And so you should be able to talk to them.

1:10:14They work with voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistants, Sonos Voice Control. Open AI's got to buy this company, right? I can see it. That would be a wild deal. Because at 1.3 billion, current market cap, it's marginal. It's affordable, but then you just jump forward in the supply chain, you can start delivering all of these things and then you just have an Alexa competitor. You don't have to spin up. Millions of homes. And also in through like the actual distribution like chains like Best Buy and stuff. Like maybe you wanna start from scratch. Maybe you wanna greenfield it. I don't really know, but this feels like something that would be a no brainer.

1:10:53Yeah, so in 2024, Sonos shipped 5 million units globally. that was down from the year before. But still, that's a lot of devices out in the world in a single year that I could see it. What about perplexity? Are they at 18 billion? Perplexity by Sonos? They're working on a phone. They're working on a lot of different stuff. Solana's working on a phone. Lots of new phones coming. Everybody's working on a phone. But maybe the smart speaker market has languished enough that there's something interesting to be done there. I mean, just the voice transcription is so much better. We talked to the CEO of The Nothing Phone, and he was saying that he's integrated Whisper and Gemini and kind of beefed up the voice assistant.

1:11:39But maybe people aren't willing to jump from the iPhone ecosystem. But if you're like, oh, well I could offset the lack of a great Siri with a great ChatGPT-enabled smart home device, kind of interesting, I don't know. you put some AI researchers on the problem of getting the Sonos app to load in less than 90 seconds and I think you might solve it Tyler you have an update for us what's up yeah I'm on the leaderboard you're on the leaderboard let's go come over ring the gong ring the gong hit the gong hit the gong you are the proud owner of a new iPhone there we go well deserved give it a better hit than that give it a better hit than that I'm gonna kind of cover the mic but um bigger hit bigger hit.

1:12:25Still fairly gentle, but it's great contact. Great contact. Nice work. So what, yeah, yeah. Give me the position. Uh, what ranking are you now? I want to see you go for number one. Yeah. So I think I'm number 13 now. I think we can 13. I don't know if you already showed it, but yeah. Can we pull up the screen? I'm one of my 65 moves behind. Okay. And what was it? What was the total number of moves that you 576? 576. Not bad. You smoked 600. Yeah. Okay. And you You gotta do it to 5.11 is the number one, I believe. Okay. So you gotta cut down a little bit, be a little bit more efficient, but I think you can do it.

1:12:59Should be doable. Very cool. And then after that, we gotta get you working on the agent side of that leaderboard. You've seen that? So on the other side, yeah, on the other side, they actually have like a harness that you can use to get started and you can start trying to build your own AI agent that will go and try and solve it and rank on the leaderboard. Interesting. But, you know, that's enough about leaderboards. Let's talk about billboards. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable with adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe, folks.

1:13:36Meanwhile, on the timeline, Ryan Peterson is throwing out some bait. He said, rail is best used for freight while humans should fly through the sky at 500 miles per hour because they value their time. and he says just discovered that saying bad things about rail travel is an evergreen way to engagement bait plan accordingly people love love rail but it is very true america is very different than europe like the trans grand vitae the tgv that goes from paris to london that's i think that's like the equivalent of like boston to new york like europe is just so much smaller than the western side of the United States that even with a high-speed rail system, getting from LA to Chicago is still hours and hours and hours, just so much longer than on a plane.

1:14:26And so we actually do have a pretty robust rail system, but we just choose to use it for freight, and then we fly through the sky at 500 miles an hour. Meanwhile, Meta is investing in their own uh ai chip olympus zuck is really cornering uh a lot of these iconic uh olympus like words right um he says meta recently updated its asic roadmap adding a new project arc a supplementary of its asic product line which leverages tsmc's two nanometer technology and is targeted to enter mass production in the first half of 2027 we believe meta plans to make adjustments to the design of Olympus to compete with NVIDIA's Rubin GPUs, resulting in a delay from fourth quarter 2027 to first half of 2028.

1:15:18ARK will focus on post-training and inferencing purposes. The design service vendor selection will be complete in coming weeks, and we think MediaTek has a good chance of winning the project. Interesting. Semi-analysis says, Don't worry, H100s, H200s won't be worthless anytime soon. It will still be a valuable baseline that impressive AI accelerator upstarts like MATX, HDI, OpenAI, TitanChip, Meta, and Microsoft can use in their performance comparisons. This, of course, is when folks come out and say, we're buying H100 equivalents. And so they share a picture of Jensen here, chief revenue destroyer.

1:15:58after Blackwell, you can give away a hopper because Blackwell will be so performant. So interesting to see where this goes. It feels like NVIDIA is the one company in the Mag 7 that every other Mag 7 company is coming for and being like, I'm sick of paying them. Whereas all the other Mag 7s have kind of - Meanwhile, Elon's just saying, you want$100 billion, Jensen? That's true. Yeah, he isn't designing his own chip yet. I wonder if that'll change. But I do believe there was an XAI engineer yesterday that was saying that the key word and some of the things that XAI was putting out is they said H200 equivalent or something like that or Blackwell equivalent GPUs.

1:16:44So they're not necessarily fixed on it. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's interesting because Google and Amazon compete on shopping searches and LinkedIn competes with Facebook in some ways. But basically every hyperscaler kind of has their own corner and their own monopoly built out in search and social networking and in desktop or cloud or shopping. And then they all butt heads in little ways, like Google going up against Tesla with Waymo. And they kind of touch on each other's territory, but they don't often, it's very rare that all of them are going up against one, but it feels like that's the narrative around NVIDIA.

1:17:28Everyone's sick of paying the NVIDIA tax, maybe? I don't exactly, you know, but it seems like if you're trying to cut them out, if you're going to TSMC and fabbing your own chips, like that is straight up cutting out NVIDIA. And Google, it seems like, was successfully doing it with the TPU. Yeah. Signal has a post here. He says, meanwhile, on the App Store, and there is a new king of the App Store free charts. It is T, Dating Advice, Helping Women Date Safe. From my understanding, they basically productize the groups on Facebook, the Are We Dating the Same Guy groups. And so this acts as a layer over a bunch of different dating apps where women can effectively review, add comments, leave Yelp-style reviews for the men.

1:18:18that they are going on dates with um and the founder i think his name is steve cook let's see here uh sean cook he was a director of product management at salesforce for just under four years so really salesforce putting in the work at salesforce uh we love to see it and i said earlier this is just a massive moment for big tech pms it is never doubt them again never doubt them. A lot of people have been doubting the PMs. They'd say, oh, you're just changing the color of this button. The color of the button matters apparently because you have to imagine that this app category is highly competitive.

1:19:02I don't know. Maybe they're just the first one to think of doing it, but there has to be multiple. So I was looking and the third most popular app, I believe is the same exact concept. No way. It's called T-Born. Oh, wow. Dating advice. See the truth before you date. So they went with the same name. Okay. This is number three. It has very few ratings. So I do wonder. So T-Dating Advice has 56 ,000 ratings, but the number three app is T-Born dating advice. Yep. So, so strange. It only has 60 reviews, but clearly climbing up the charts. Well, here's some dating advice. Book a wander. Find your happy place.

1:19:44Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. That's right. And without further ado, I think we have our next guest. And I got to get this ready. Welcome to the studio. How are you? Massive day. Massive day.

1:20:06We're getting a little bit of feedback on the audio. Can we turn up the levels a little bit? Can you hear us okay? I can hear you as well. Okay. It's just a little bit muffled. Are you on headphones? Maybe take those out and we'll see if the computer audio is any better. Should be better. This better? That's way better. There we go. Welcome to the stream. No problem. Kick us off. Give us the news. What happened today? We at Vanta announced we raised$150 million. Series D,$4 billion pre, 415 post.

1:20:40Congratulations. Thank you. Been waiting to do that. Um, such a massive, such a massive, uh, milestone. Uh, can you catch us up to speed on, uh, you know, I think people know your story by now, but can you catch us up to speed on, on just like the last couple of years getting to this point? It was an overnight success, correct? Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Haven't been working on this for like eight to 10 years totally. But who's counting? Okay, so we started most known for like automating SOC 2, also putting up billboards on the 101. So we still do both of those things. But we also help our customers like build up their security programs, improve them in a bunch of different ways, and then take all that hard work and use it to build trust with their customers through audits, through trust reports, through security questionnaires, all sorts of things like that.

1:21:33Is the characterization of Vanta as like a point solution company, at least when you started the company, correct? Is point solution a pejorative? Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break that down. Why is it? Is it all because of Parker Conrad, who's a friend who's coined the compound startup and you have to do everything at once? what are the trade-offs of being point solution early on? And then how do you think about adding things on? Because there's probably some trade-off of you build trying too much territory, try and capture too much territory, you can't hold onto it. But at the same time, if you have great customers, you want to grow.

1:22:07Yeah, and there's an easy argument if Christina had started and said, we're a platform. That might've been rough. At the beginning, could have been a much, could have still been successful, but maybe a much smaller company. Yeah, so walk me through that journey. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we started, I mean, our word was wedge. It's a nicer word. Yeah, right. Like it sounds better than point solution, which sounds kind of like trivial. Well, wedges have points on them, right? Yeah, totally. They come to a point. They have really strong ones. Yeah, you need a pointy wedge. Yes, yes, yes. It's a critique.

1:22:35But we started with SOC 2 for startups. And because they like, you might remember this, but like 2017, like no startup got SOC 2. Now you get it when you're like two founders, which is a little wild. But they were like so valuable then we figured if we can do that customers will let us do a lot and give us a lot of access and we can help them with a lot of things and then we can use our pointy wedge to expand into like a platform over time. And I'm like joking but like that was a seed pitch. I posted one of the slides on it today. It's like truly the 2018 pitch and so it's kind of cool to be here you know a little bit later.

1:23:10Were you getting pushback on like market size at that point? were people saying like you're going to need an act two basically oh totally people weren't even like you need that too it's like you need a new idea like you just pitched me on sock doing all the startups and no startups get sock well so what were what were you uh what were you seeing then that other people were missing because it seems so obvious in hindsight that young startups would need sock two and and a variety of other things in order to sell into enterprise and do other things that they want to do but like what what were you seeing then uh that now looks obvious in hindsight i think it was this like if that's if you could make it easier like less time not necessarily less money less time for a startup to get a sock too they would 100 do one the problem was you like had to give your cto up for a year who would go talk to a bunch of accountants and like then become very sad and so like no one would do that um but if they didn't have to do that everyone would go sign up and press the like fast sock two button yeah yeah i don't think it's an obvious idea at all like when when you when you start a company most people know i need a laptop no no i'm saying it wasn't it was not obvious then that's what made it a great opportunity totally um but it was clearly obvious to christina yeah the team what what do you think of the uh it feels like you're one of the success stories of like uh selling to other startups early on and And there's been this like criticism people have bubbled up of like, it's this kind of like circular economy that happens in the startup world.

1:24:41We've seen a lot of people break out of it. What's the secret to breaking out of it? Is that still a good wedge? Is that still a good go to market? And just kind of what are your thoughts on that idea of like, you know, being a startup that sells to startups? Yeah, well, first, I appreciate the use of the word wedge. I still actually think it is like a good idea. There's definitely some circular Ouroboros thing, partially, because especially early stages, everyone cares about growth. They don't care about your costs. And so there can be some amount of trading that happens. We tried not to do that.

1:25:12And I think actually the couple of times when I did that, it just blew up later. It was a bad idea. But I think with that, you hopefully have startups that are growing. You have the cursors in your user base. You have the ramps. You have the Who members. and then those customers like push you up market whether you're ready or not and if you can hang on to them you can like start serving bigger customers but kind of you need that growth out of the startup base too yeah on on that note of like the like people care more about growth than costs like were people ignoring margins early on oh yeah you paying attention to margins early on though?

1:25:51Not at all. What are those? Never heard of them. Non-AI software. Then talk to me about, we were just talking to another entrepreneur who has kind of a wedge type of product and is expanding. And there's this trade-off between take what you have into new places, either upmarket or international versus add new products, new SKUs? And that's kind of an age old question. How have you worked through it through the past couple of years? And do you have any like frameworks for thinking through those types of processes? Yeah. So I think that what we do both, right? Both is sometimes hard to do at the same time.

1:26:36And so what we did was like, take the same thing if the go-to market's working and, you know, do it in Europe, do it in Australia, do it in Asia, right? And then, and at the same time, start to like build the muscle to build multiple products, because it is hard. Everyone talks about it's hard. And I remember being like, kind of why? And I don't know, I've lived through it. It's hard. It's, I don't have a great answer. It's just like the organization gets optimized around like doing the thing you're doing and you have customers and your revenue and it like all reinforces itself. And so when you want to go take a group of people and do something that has no customers and no revenue.

1:27:09You kind of can, but it's just weird. It is hard. Are you big on, is it Gresham's Law, the idea that you ship your org chart? Have you noticed that? No, no, Gresham's Law is bad money drives out good. I don't know the one I'm talking about. It's a different law, but it's this idea that you ship your org chart. So if you have an org chart that's heavily international, you're just going to wind up selling internationally. Do you think about it from that perspective? It's Conway's Law. Conway's Law. Have you been through the ringer of Conway's Law? Have you learned how to fight it? Have you learned how to deal with it?

1:27:44Oh, totally. I think I've learned you can't fight it, and so you just have to change your org chart sometimes. Okay. Yeah. Right? Because you're going to ship whatever your org chart is. So try to make your org chart the thing you actually want to ship. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that. What's the correct way to keep morale high while basically doing a reorg and telling someone like, hey, you're going to be working on something different, but you're talented and we like this, but it's just like, it makes more sense for the business to do this so you're over here. Like, I mean, beyond all the like, be honest, like actually say, or like, make sure you believe you're saying those things when you're saying them.

1:28:21I think we went through a phase where I went through a phase where like, we tried to like, we reorg kind of a lot and it was because you like, always did feel like you had a better structure and it's like that that was too much also like it doesn't matter let it like the order and hang out for six or nine months don't change it every quarter you're just gonna drive people crazy which sounds really obvious when i say it but yeah of course that one yeah what uh what what are some like any new technology like technology trends that that you're seeing across the customer base in terms of like challenges and ways that you guys are reacting.

1:28:54I can imagine social engineering, like, you know, hacks and challenges must be skyrocketing. But what are you guys seeing broadly? That's a good one, especially with like AI and deep fakes and, you know, the like text message gift card scams, but like ratcheted to 100, like really good versions of those. I think the other thing we see, especially for European customers is they just get a ton of pressure from European enterprises on AI. Some it's on AI in general, some it's on the American model providers, especially the ones you might guess. Right. And there's just like all this kind of default skepticism in Europe that then if European startups.

1:29:34That's around like data usage. Yeah, exactly. And just like, I don't trust open AI. And so don't send any, like, I don't even want to use something, use a tool that uses OpenAI. Yeah. Like a CTO or CIO saying that basically. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think, I want to know the thoughts on just general competition when you're selling a wedge product from bigger companies that might want to add this on as a feature. We've been talking to a bunch of founders about how to deal with competition from bigger companies. What have you been through? How'd you get through it? And then I want to talk about how that landscape is changing.

1:30:16Yeah. So we've been slightly different. It's like we never really had competition from big companies because people didn't build what we built before. They built vertical task track, task trackers, but no automation. What we had was in the COVID boom, lots of folks decided to start Vanta knockoffs. And so we had like a round of that and kind of went through the gauntlet. You know, like gone through that whole roller coaster and now we're on the other side of it. But sort of different. How did that manifest? Was that like pricing pressure or just like having the market slice up differently, needing to reprioritize or kind of double down on kind of territory that you kind of claimed and felt you were confident on and then had to retrench a little bit?

1:30:59Some of all of it. I mean, I think in the early days, we were kind of probably in retrospect, like too pleased with ourselves. sorry for like coming up with this category in this product and like the honest answer is like no customer care i mean they care you know or like they're very supportive but like they just want the best product for them and that might be the first one yeah they're not like oh you created the category great then i won't i won't look at my other options exactly like no said no one ever right and so i think it pushed us to be like okay we did whatever we did years ago cool what have we done lately for customers?

1:31:34Like, what have we done today? What have we shipped, you know, this week, this quarter, this month, what's day? So it's that piece, which I think we got a lot stronger because of that. And then pricing pressure for sure. Because in our space, because it's sales all the way through, like there's no self-serve trial. The dominant strategy for a competitor is to like copy the demo, do the same demo, and then say, hey, Prospect, these products are the same you're right you just saw the same thing but like we're 30 cheaper so like why would you go with vanta yeah and like we kind of learned what to do with that why why did you go international so early was it was it uh was it to defend against other people being like i'm gonna build the vanta for xyz country but it sounds like it was more customer driven yeah it was about like a 20 of our customer base i think at the time was outside the us and we hadn't done anything for that it's just like you know founders in london you know watch tbpn like it's not like just because they're in london doesn't mean they like don't listen to american podcasts well and they're selling to american companies sure yeah exactly yeah what uh what's up with all the colors i feel like vanta black is the darkest black you can possibly buy this like patented paint but then we're not named after that okay yeah oh yeah take me through that uh so yeah not not touching that um but we kind of coined a purple in the early days and so we have we've become the purple llama company purple llamas where the llama come from because yeah i mean yeah by the way by the way we called every llama owner in la we were trying to get llamas here in the studio to join us we have we have a third mic but it ended up being it ended up being a massive challenge and we were worried about we didn't have a carve out in the lease that said we could bring llamas in our studio so it ended up being uh but but i think you guys should actually uh it would be great to get to get some live llamas popular with the kids at the petting zoo yeah yeah we tried it in downtown san francisco downtown san francisco also not the most llama friendly place it's hard they're they're tough you can't even you can't even bring llamas wherever you want in this country anymore it's I really, what is it coming to?

1:33:51It's a disaster. On kind of the AI, like on the AI story, there's like this question of, that I've been noodling on with a lot of founders about like, is AI a reason to launch a new product that the customer feels? So an agent, a prompt box that they interact with versus just, hey, behind the scenes, we're going to use a ton of AI. You're not even going to know. It doesn't really matter. But the product's just going to get better, more efficient. Maybe our margins go up. Maybe we are delivering things that we want to deliver you faster, more reliably, more accurately, all these different things.

1:34:34Is there one area that's more exciting? I know you're probably doing both, but how do you think about what's most impactful? Yeah, I mean, I've seen a trend of companies that are basically clones of existing companies that were traditionally seen as SaaS platforms. And they come out and they're basically like, we're this, but it's an agent. And then if you look and try to understand the product, it ends up looking exactly like SaaS with maybe a slightly different workflow. But I don't know how much more valuable it is to customers or if it's actually a better experience. Yeah. Oh, totally. There's like, it's an agent, but actually it's a forward-deployed engineer, but actually it's like a founder pressing on the button.

1:35:11You know, and like, I did that. It's a crud app. Totally. It's a crud app with like the founder like pressing buttons at 11 p.m. at night. So like definitely that. And it'll get better over time. To the first question, like we do a bit of both. It's actually more AI in the background just doing stuff. And then sometimes when we're going to start like surfacing it more and we might call that, you know, oh, that's an agent or the agent did that. And like, yes, it is AI, but it's really just getting rid of workflows behind the scenes that no one really wanted to do or needs to do. Yeah. Yeah. I've been personally experiencing it in Gmail where it was very easy for them clearly to like add an extra panel with like now you can chat with your email inbox.

1:35:56But for me, the search still doesn't work. And so I would much rather that just every email that comes in gets condensed down, summarized, and then when I go to search, it really knows what I'm looking for, and it just gives me a better product behind the scenes. But that's probably like a harder technical challenge, or maybe just, it's just less experimental. So people are kind of debating. What about in terms of like internal productivity? we were talking to a friend earlier that said that he's seeing there are examples of 10x engineers going to 100x engineers because of tools like cursor and windsurf and devon cognition all that all the different tools that improve developer productivity but he was actually more excited about designers becoming 1x engineers and i thought that was a very interesting take and if you kind of do like a divide by zero maybe it's an infinity game i don't know but he was saying that like that has been more exciting to him and I don't know like what are you seeing internally?

1:36:54So some of that also PMs uh with like a v0 replit lovable like right because you like have this idea for a thing and then you can make a version of it and then go stick it in front of five customers and like it just and you can do that in 15 minutes like actually um you know it was before you'd have to like write the spec or draw the picture and get the designer to make the mocks and then animate the figma you know whatever like that loop went from jet like ideally two days to 15 minutes and that matters so much for like just testing new stuff yeah yeah um what about just this idea of like generally ai being like a reinvigorating force for founders who are in your position where like the business has worked the business like is big basically and like you have yeah the The valuation post product market fit.

1:37:48Yeah. The, the, the, the like series B, C, D just shows like a clear story of just execution. But then what John's getting at and we, um, uh, we've had own over intercom from the show who actually left his company, came back and then it was like fully ready to just like restart the company almost because there was so much net new. Even Ben Thompson was saying like, He was kind of getting bored of writing about tech and then AI happened and he's like, I can't wait to write the articles anymore. But what's your experience been? Like basically that, that there's all these like magical product experiences that we've thought about, but just couldn't build until now.

1:38:30My favorite like clear Vanta example was in 2017 when it wasn't clear if anyone wanted to talk to. It was clear people answered security questionnaires, like those long spreadsheets of questions. And so we wanted to automate those. and tried and weren't good enough ML engineers and libraries weren't good enough that we didn't and went down the SOC 2 path. Anyway, it's kind of working. But now Vanta has really good questionnaire automation. We thought of this building this in 2017. We just couldn't until now. And that is very fun. Yeah. Where next? You guys have just been chopping wood, seemingly just executing day over day.

1:39:08But where are you going from here? Hardware. Hardware. AI pendant from Vanta. It captures every, if you say a single word, if you say a single non-compliant word. It's not compliant, it just snitches on you. No way to say trust, like a constantly listening AI pendant. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, but what's next? You know, keep building stuff, cool stuff for our customers. We have a bunch of security products that are launching that I'm very excited about. So you like get customers in on the wedge, you know, but then over time after they get their sock too, they start growing, they start needing more things, they start thinking about building out different parts of their security program.

1:39:45So a couple of big launches, they're coming. And a couple more things that we have in store. Last question from my side, we'll let you go. Has the rise of defense tech, American dynamism, ITAR compliance been like, how have you been playing in that space? Oh, it's good. Yeah, we're actually working with the government. um so this administration is trying to make it easier for everyone to procure software um there's like a fed ramp there's a new fed ramp 20x pilot we're in and we're doing uh doing that for two reasons one so our customers can tell to the government and have a path there that is not you know years and consultants and like literally thousands of pages of long-form text law like can do a lot there and then also helping the government go procure software and so we are just like doing a ton there.

1:40:38Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It feels like it's incredibly cumbersome to the defense tech founders that have to get ITAR compliance, but then they kind of wear it as a badge of honor. It's a good moat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I have to use Teams, you know, because my work's so important. I'm like, yeah, like your work is important, but now it's become this badge of honor. But it's great. You know, they need to stay compliant. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations to you and the team. I love just the steady march, building momentum. And I'm sure you'll be back. If history repeats, you'll be back on here very soon with the next one.

1:41:21Knock on all the things. Thanks so much for having me. Fantastic. Great chatting, Christina. Talk soon. Up next, we have Dina from Lux Capital. I will take the intro, Jordy. and I will welcome Dina to the TVPN Ultra Dome when she's ready to hop on the stream. And in the meantime, I can give you some news. Check in with Tyler. How's Tyler doing over there? All right, I'm up to 10th place. 10th place? I'm at 550, so I dropped, I think, 26 moves. I still, I mean... Are there obvious low-hanging fruit for you? At this point, it's just a grind. Just a grind. Just a grind. I think I got to just basically write down my moves and then just try to optimize one by one.

1:42:00You need maybe like a screen recorder or something so you can watch some game tape. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hit the tapes. We need a coach. Yeah. Yeah. Who else could help? You need like a world champion like speed runner or something like that. Anyway. We have Dina in the Restream waiting room. We have Dina in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream, Dina. How are you doing? Hello. Hello. So good to see you guys. Thanks so much for joining. Sorry for the delay. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? And I'd love to know kind of how you fit into the Lux Capital structure, ecosystem, what you're focused on.

1:42:34And then we can go into a bunch of questions from there. Awesome. Well, I'm Dina. I'm a partner at Lux Capital. We're a multi-stage venture firm. We love turning science fiction into fact. I know you've had Josh on here before and heard all about that. We do everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO, so truly multi-stage. And I have a particular propensity for healthcare, which I know we're going to be talking about today. But we are all very much generalists. Okay. Let's just, we'll get into the other questions later. I already have completely new questions. Delian Asparuhov over at Founders Fund, buddy of ours, was saying that the seed ecosystem has just kind of been eroded by founders just skipping rounds.

1:43:16And it feels like that's a lot of kind of a, it's in large part because these like AI companies were able to justify, yeah, I need a billion dollars to train a foundation model. And so even if you're not training a foundation model, the multi-stage firms are like, yeah, we can do a hundred million dollar seed round. No problem. Like you have a good pedigree. Maybe there'll be a aqua high or something. Where is the pre-seed market? Where is the seed market still interesting? Or do you disagree with that entire take and you think it's never been better? You know, I think it's a tale of two worlds.

1:43:50And honestly, the nomenclature for rounds doesn't really mean much these days anyway. On the one hand, the advent of AI has made it more cost effective than ever to start a company. And you are no longer judged in terms of growth by how many people you're hiring or how much money you've raised, but actually how far you can get with the least amount possible. And that is only going to continue to happen as we see the advent of sort of AI software tooling and all of that. On the other hand, to your point, if you are raising for a company that is infrastructure intensive, that requires high amounts of compute, where you're building your own models.

1:44:26And let's be honest, how many of those do we need? Those types of companies can and will raise$100 million plus seed rounds. So, you know, I think yes is the answer. It's never been better, but also you will very much see a tale of two worlds. And, you know, on our end, we're funding, you know, tiny seed rounds and very large seed rounds. It really depends on the company and what's needed. Okay, related to that, give me your take on this post from Caitlin Bolnik-Rellos. You must be one of four things to raise right now. An AI high flyer, a seed company with the promise of being an AI high flying company.

1:45:01Extra points if you're young. An American dynamism re-industrialization company or biology enabled by AI. What do you think? Caitlin always has the great hot takes. I think that's accurate, although honestly, it's not the best time for companies that are raising in the biotech space. So I'm not even sure that I would necessarily include that in the list, but definitely every company right now needs to have an answer to what their AI play is for sure. That being said, you know, if you're seeing Groundhog Day of pitches that are, you know, AI note taker, AI agent, like, yes, we all use these companies and they're wonderful tools.

1:45:35But what we look for is sort of the operating system, right? The actual picks and shovels, the really generational companies. And where the innovation is not just the act of using AI, but something that's actually defensible and transformative. Yeah. Elad Gil had a post yesterday. He said, AI markets crystallize for a subset of AI markets. It is suddenly clear who the finalists or winners will be. And so he breaks down a few categories, LLMs, code, legal, medical scribing, customer service and search and IR. How are you how are you thinking about AI markets within health care? There's obviously a bunch of different subcategories, but at the same time, some of the biggest headline fundraisers have been around these sort of medical scribe products or at least products with that as kind of the core wedge.

1:46:26Yeah. We've actually invested with ELAD in a company in the health AI space, which I'll chat a bit about, called Bluno. But yes, AI scribes, I think, were the lowest hanging fruit in healthcare. One of the biggest pain points was with documentation and note-taking for physicians. These companies were not immediately up and to the right. Many of them have been around for quite some time. But of course, the advent of LLMs and really the openness to adoption, which has always been the biggest sticky point in health care, has made them particularly effective now. But there's still so much latency in health care.

1:47:01We are still talking about AI in the context of fax machines. So there's a lot of opportunity outside of that. And I get excited about the clinical research side of things, the opportunity in clinical trials. If you're talking outside of patient care, we're in a company called Trial Library, which is using AI and technology to rapidly accelerate getting patients into trials for lifesaving therapies. And frankly, this is where pharma companies are willing to spend a lot of money to find those hard to reach patients. Companies like BluNote, which we invested in with Elad, for example, are using generative AI to help get drugs to market.

1:47:39So to help with regulatory and medical writing, etc. There's a massive opportunity outside of scribes. And although scribes are very interesting, it is increasingly a very crowded market. Last count, I think it was over 100. And there's probably so many. I'm sure more are being formed. As we speak, people are reading the tech crunch headlines. And they're saying, maybe I should create. It seems like Stripe Atlas has gone down under all the pressure. Yeah. On the note, though, on the last company, I mean, I think one question that's come up on the show is can what will it take to actually reduce the cost to create and bring a new drug to market?

1:48:23And discovering the drug itself is one thing. But then is there any hope of reducing the cost of of of the next stages in terms of outside of the paperwork and things like that? But it seems like if you have this huge kind of variable cost of trials, is there any sort of hope of bringing that down over time? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the sort of drug discovery piece of it was really, you know, V1 of AI in this field. And we've invested in companies in that space. And there are new companies that are forming in that space. But outside of that, there's a lot. As you pointed out, clinical trials, right?

1:49:06Big area, there's, you know, there have been lots of companies trying to apply technology there, yet still a massive pain point, particularly if you think about where the bulk of the spend is in pharma and specialty drugs. These are tens of billions of dollars of market opportunity here to help get these drugs to market faster. And in order to do so, it often requires finding really difficult to reach patients. There's only so much right now that AI can do to make that happen. And so it requires really unique business models. And the company I mentioned, Trial Library, is a great example of a company that is using technology, but ultimately to find and match humans with one another.

1:49:45And those humans are patients and those humans are providers. I want to go Shark Tank mode for a second. I got a pitch for a hypothetical company. I'm not actually building this. But today there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon buying a bracelet for$50 a pop. You get transcription of everything you say throughout the day. It was about the company. They didn't just buy a bracelet. They didn't just buy a bracelet. They bought the company. Have any of the AI scribes in healthcare done something like, hey, the doctor wears a bracelet and then the scribe is, you know, there's a hardware play or there's a wearable play.

1:50:21Have you seen anything like that? Is there an opportunity? I don't know if I've seen a bracelet per se. There are over a hundred, so I wouldn't be surprised if one of them involves a bracelet. But yes, I have seen hardware plays, this sort of idea of ambient, you know, note-taking. I've seen that in the form of cameras that are sort of, you know, adding on the computer vision element. I've seen that, of course, in terms of, you know, different types of tabletop devices. There is an extra added concern with healthcare, which is, you know, the elephant in the room, and that is around PHI and privacy.

1:50:51And oftentimes that's over-engineering it. Really what you need is to understand what's happening in that encounter with the patient. And as it turns out, you don't necessarily need, you know, a ring, a bracelet, you know, a camera hanging over you, oftentimes audio. And in many cases, just, you know, AI enhancing text inputs is all you need to get to the outcome that's desired. And for that reason, you're out. How are you approaching this brain-computer interfaces as a category? Yeah, there's been Neuralink, Nudge announced in the round yesterday. But how are you thinking about the category broadly?

1:51:32It feels like something that right now it seems like a very small group of exceptionally connected and talented teams are sucking up the vast majority of capital, which I guess happens in every market, but maybe more pronounced in the BCI space. But do you expect that to be a category where a few years from now there's hundreds of players or more concentrated until people can really kind of de-risk the different approaches? Remember we talked to a Teal Fellowship company that was doing that, kind of the other side of the barbell there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think as a trend at Lux, we were investing in the space before it was obvious.

1:52:08We were early and proud investors in Control Labs, which you may be familiar with, which was a part of it. We just talked about them. Yeah. Yeah. Reardon, the founder, is actually now a venture partner at Lux, and it's fun to jam with him on these topics all the time. My father happens to be a neuropsychiatrist, so I have a particular interest in this space. He was really big on TMS, and I think that there's still so much opportunity there. We are actively looking and spending time with a lot of these companies. To your question, I don't know if there's going to be 100 of them in the future. These are still very capital intensive.

1:52:39There's still a lot of science that does need to happen. We're seeing companies at the earliest stages through our Lux Labs initiative, researchers who are rapidly accelerating on the kind of innovation side and ultimately to get to commercialization. That piece of it is the piece that I think is still still remains to be proven. But we are we're excited about what's to come. In healthcare broadly, I'm sure there's tons of opportunities for startups to build new companies that are kind of built on the back of the AI trend. Are there any places where you think that AI, in a narrow sense, would be a sustaining innovation for the existing large players?

1:53:21I'm thinking of like in the enterprise, it feels like Google might be facing disruption in search to some degree, but the Gemini API seems to be doing really, really well. And like they were set up well to serve, you know, a frontier class model as an API. And so they're leveraging that and they will continue. And Azure has seen a similar thing with Microsoft. They've been beneficiaries. And in many ways, it's been a sustaining innovation for them in terms of cloud. But what is the shape of like the big players in health care? Where are they going to like just completely win? So you probably want to stay away from it as a startup folk.

1:53:59I love this question. I don't know if you guys know this, but I actually got my start in healthcare at Google, helping to build what eventually became Google Health. Back then, one of the first products that I got to work on was this knowledge graph for health, which was taking symptoms and conditions, mapping them together. So if you search for itchy eyes, you'd have this graph pop up that explains to you, you might have conjunctivitis. Very novel at the time. We launched Google's first HIPAA compliant product. It ultimately led me to venture because it became abundantly clear to me that the real innovation in these really intractable industries was actually coming from early stage startups.

1:54:31This was before the advent of LLMs and all of that. I ultimately think that these big tech players are obviously going to be key distribution partners. Google is still the digital front door for a lot of healthcare. Increasingly, OpenAI and others are becoming that. But it is still where so many healthcare encounters begin before a patient even knows that they're a patient. That being said, do I think that the, you know, the top innovative companies in the healthcare space are going to emerge from these big tech companies? Unlikely, but I think that they will thrive and exist in partnership with them.

1:55:06And the hyperscalers, when it comes to AI, are always going to play critical roles. Yeah. What role are the, like, the big tech equivalents in healthcare playing? Like, this is the big insurance networks, big hospital networks. I mean, we've heard General Catalyst is buying a hospital. I don't fully understand the thesis there, haven't fully dug in. But what are the bigger players doing that might where they might just be just default beneficiaries of new tech? Yeah. I mean, I've spent a lot of time speaking with the leaders of some of these companies. Obviously, they're critical, important partners to our companies, and they are rapidly looking at solutions in AI.

1:55:49So they used to be bottlenecks. These are the distribution partners. You know, selling into health systems has always been a slog. Ask anyone who's done it. They've got the gray hairs to prove it. I was in a board meeting recently, actually, with a major executive from one of the biggest national payers out there who blew my mind talking about how they were thinking about adopting clinical AI. We're talking actual bots that are engaging with patients. in a way that was far more ambitious than even some of the most out there VCs that I had seen. If they're doing it that fast, like we need to get on this quickly.

1:56:23It is clear that, in healthcare, you want to meet patients where they are. And this is where patients are. They're using these tools constantly. Providers as well. There's a new generation of providers who expect more digitally. And as you can imagine, and you see this in pretty much every major earnings call from these payers. This is no longer just a nice to have. It's a mandate. Yeah. What about robotics in surgery rooms? We've seen. Striker. Yeah. I mean, Neuralink specifically has talked about building basically their own system in order to do these surgeries. That's like a very. Yeah, they built it.

1:57:03They're using it very kind of like narrow use case for something that they're doing, but how far out do you think we are from robots conducting kind of routine surgeries? Let's say you need to get an organ removed or something like that. Is that something that you'd bet on a human still doing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now? Or are we going to be at a point where a human is sort of kind of observing a robot, you know, working, but not necessarily like doing the actions themselves? I mean, it's already happening. So we're not talking about 10 years from now. It's already happening across the board.

1:57:39And robotic surgery is an area that we've invested quite a bit in. You may have heard of a company called Oris, which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, in which we were lead investors. It's happening in other procedures, in ultrasound, in IVF. We have a company that's on the software side, but enabling computer vision through IVF. If you've ever had, I don't know if any of you have had surgery, but many, many procedures that used to be highly invasive are now done laparoscopically through robotic surgery. So it's one of the areas in healthcare actually that has seen the most adoption and it's still human assisted in many cases.

1:58:13A lot of that ultimately comes down to, you know, to patient preference as well as liability. But I would not be surprised if we increasingly move more and more to a world with, you know, robots at the forefront of surgery. What was your take on Fiji Simo's post kind of outlining therapy potentially as one vector that OpenAI's ChatGPT core product could be impactful? That feels like an example of meeting. Health was the other big category that she laid out as well. Yeah, it feels like meeting customers where they are. And yet all of a sudden we're talking about, you know, a research nonprofit is now competing in the health care space.

1:58:53It feels like it's definitely like an unexpected turn of events if you were looking at OpenAI as a health investment a decade ago. Yeah, totally. Well, Fiji is amazing. She's become a friend and we actually met in the context of healthcare. So I know it's an area she's deeply passionate about. It's not surprising. It is wild, but it's not surprising. Again, meeting patients where they are and particularly for, you know, a chatbot that does tend to err toward, you know, sycophancy that's constantly telling you, great idea. Let's elaborate on that more, etc. etc. like chat GPT in an era with an epidemic of loneliness can become a very close friend.

1:59:29It can, in many cases, diagnose. And, you know, there have been some really interesting studies published in JAMA actually looking at the empathy factor, comparing AI to humans. And sometimes the AI actually does score better. Now, do I believe that therapists will be replaced by AI in the near future? No. But the fact of the matter is people are already using it. The numbers are staggering. They're using it for this case now. And so I think what we need to think about is what are the guardrails? How do we ensure that you don't end up with the types of situations that have made headlines, whether it's suicides and so on?

2:00:04And how do you ensure that this is done responsibly? And I'm excited that someone like Fiji is at the forefront of that because I believe that they are really thinking about not only the ethics, but the responsibility of having human lives in their hands. Yeah, it feels like something that's It's going to be like back and forth in the news cycle constantly, but ultimately, you know, top of mind and they have all the capabilities and teams in place to, you know, execute effectively in that category. But it's going to be a lot of PR back and forth, I'm sure. Jordy, anything else? No, this is great.

2:00:39This is great. Thanks so much for hopping on. Awesome. Great to chat with you guys. Take care. Have a good one. Talk soon. let's go to this post from nick carter do you hear this do you see this no you're gonna they're gonna own you oh wait no you're millennial too um he says millennial millennials will be slash are the peak iq generation zoomers are ipad kids lobotomized gen alpha will be largely incapable of learning anything due to ai tyler what do you think well tyler's you're gen z right you're not Yeah, I'm definitely Gen Z. Do you think you're an iPad kid? Do you think you're lobotomized?

2:01:17I think that's a little bit younger than me. But I think that's probably true. How do you avoid it? Just replace iPad with TikTok. Sure. If you talk to the average, I mean, I don't want to, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to throw your whole generation under the bus. I think there's a big power law. Yeah. And you'll see it grow more and more with Gen Alpha. What separates the high-performing Zoomers from the lobotomized, brain-rotted ones? i mean i think it's you can probably just like if you need like one thing it's just like do they use tiktok daily that's like you probably get like 90 of the yeah i wonder like is it a screen time thing you have to cut it off early i don't think it's necessarily screen time because you see a lot of kids who just like if you're like reading like less wrong or something yeah if you ever talk to someone who like obviously like read a lot of like online blogs like that they're like super cracked that's not necessarily screen time one thing is i feel like maybe the the kids that have it the worst are like 10 years old right now where i feel like parents today there's a general awareness that having your kid glued to an ipad is not great if you see i'll be at a restaurant and i'll see a kid just like drooling over their ipad for two and a half hours not engaging with the parents or whoever they're with uh i think that's like fairly frowned upon now like i i got an ipad uh for my three-year-old but he's only used it on flights yeah like he really just doesn't he only thinks of it as a flight device and that's purely because i don't want other people to be angry if he's gonna you know cry for four hours tyler's over there being like i'm not addicted to Apple products, but I'll do anything for an iPhone.

2:03:00Which one is it, Tyler? Yeah, you gotta pick. You gotta pick. Any more progress? I'm still working through. I'm going like very slowly. Okay, so yeah, because there's no time. So you're just really calculating. I can't see my score like until the end. Okay. So I think I'm doing better, but it's very slow. And are you like actively on a run in ArcGIV 3 right now? What do you mean? Like do you kick off a new test or can you optimize each one individually? I think you can do each game individually, but you can't do a specific level. You have to do one through eight. Oh, okay, okay, got it. Interesting.

2:03:37I still need to do all three because I've only done the first one. I actually haven't beaten it. Did you time yourself? Well, no, because I did it in parts, right? I did a couple minutes before the stream and then I did five minutes on the stream. And then I think I know enough at least to probably have an edge so it wouldn't be apples to apples. But maybe I got to check the number of moves. That's the move. Okay. Well, we have our next guest here in the studio. Let's bring them in. Good soundboard, Jordy. What's going on? Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Welcome.

2:04:12Awesome to meet you. Oh, thank you. Great to have you. I thought I was worried we had some audio issues. Turns out we don't. Can you give us an introduction? What are you building? Of course. I am building diode computers alongside with my co-founder, Lenny. And we use AI to automate the production of printed circuit boards. We design them and manufacture them. Very cool. What's the state of the art right now? Who are your competitors? So there's a bunch of companies that really try to build circuit boards. circuit boards are at the heart of every single electronic product that you have. You name it, like aerospace, robotics, medical devices.

2:04:52These are all industries that traditionally would take months to come up with designs and volume manufacturing of these boards. And so our goal is to help them and scale up to production right away. Our competitors are folks like Altium Cadence, but also current manufacturers that are building circuit boards right now. And what's the latest news? Do you have anything good for us? I'm very proud to announce that we raised a Series A by Andreessen Horwitz. There we go. $11.4 million.

2:05:24Fantastic. When did you start the company? I don't know. I think I missed that. Exactly a year ago. We hit the one-year anniversary three days ago. Am I looking at a virtual background, or is this actually your office? No, this is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We built circuit boards in Brooklyn, New York. Cool. What is the core value proposition? Speed, quality, time? How do you think about, like what are your customers asking for right now? So the real thing that was very interesting to me is that we have fewer and fewer people that can build circuit boards at the highest level of complexity. And these people are working at insanely good companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Meta.

2:06:08And they're very, very hard for other hardware companies to kind of like take away. And I used to be at one of these companies. I used to work at Apple. I used to work on custom silicon. So our goal is basically to democratize the way that we currently build circuit boards and allow from startups to large enterprises to take advantage of a very high-end type of workflow. And the only way we could think about how to do it is to teach large language models who actually generate schematics. And so the advantage and the difference is that we use code to build our circuit boards, which is something that usually is not done this way.

2:06:45Circuit boards are very visual. You can think about them almost as like Figma. What we do is more like web design, like CSS and code that then gets rendered into an actual circuit board. It's called artwork. Is it okay to take a circuit board schematic from an existing product? I remember we had this founder on, I think it was the Matic robot, and he had, was that right? We had some founder on who had printed on their circuit board, like, hi, Amazon, because they knew that Amazon was going to take it apart and, like, try and understand how they were doing what there was. I might be messing up the company names, but it seems like there's some proprietary information in the way, like, yes, there's amazing data and amazing engineers at these big companies.

2:07:32they're making these circuit boards, but they're probably not okay with you just taking that as training data, or maybe it's legal? I don't know, what's the deal there? You're absolutely right. I think that Matic is a fantastic company. They and Whoop both print on their circuit boards. Like don't bother copying us. Whoop, that's the one, yeah, Whoop. That's right. Fantastic detail, I really love it. Yeah, you can make that a feature. Yeah, yeah. We'll do it for every one of our circuit boards. data is actually like the most important part of this. So like there is no easily available data for this kind of problem.

2:08:11Like whereas on code, you can basically take GitHub and kind of like start training your models on very high end like data that you can use. Part of like what we are doing at Diode is we're rebuilding the data set from the ground up. And so there is a lot of like data annotation, data cleaning, like generating new types of data that we can use to improve the models. and we are about to announce like next week a partnership with like a very large like software open source project and our goal is basically to contribute back to the community generate this data that like we're going to use to train like better models without going and like touching on proprietary data like we own our own designs and so while we assign the IP of the board that we design for our customers to them we usually retain the rights to the individual components that we generate and those are like a competitive advantage for us we are basically building an internal data structure yeah why why do you even need uh real data i feel like you could generate all this in simulation like i i when i hear people talk about bio and saying oh we don't have a simulated cell i'm like okay well that makes sense like humans are really complicated biology is really complex but like we created circuit boards in the first place we should be able to simulate those like why can't you just simulate all possible circuit boards and then do some sort of search through that why do you need hard you're absolutely right we actually do do that um like we have reinforcement learning algorithms there's two types of simulation that you can do one is like an electrical simulation which you can absolutely uh like get right it's called spice um but then like the second order effects of like physics are quite complicated to model and so there's a really um like there's a good thing around like very talented electrical engineers which is like you never trust You can try simulating it, but then manufacturing something and making sure it works is the ultimate simulation test.

2:09:58The boards may be manufactured in a different way. The board house may not respect your specifications. And so we 100 % do simulation. That's how we bootstrap the process. You couldn't build the library of data that we've built just by hand. It's physically impossible. So we use simulation to bootstrap. But then the ability to manufacture the boards is really what creates differentiation and brings home the fact that these circuits are actually working. So what are you guys actually doing on the manufacturing side? Are you going to be scaling manufacturing? Are you just making prototypes for customers and then they take those elsewhere to scale?

2:10:40Excellent question. So our offer to the world is come to us, bring us what you want to design. We'll design it for you, optimize it for manufacturing, and then scale it with you. Today, we have only small batch assembly in-house. We actually have an electric lab right here that we use to assemble circuit boards like these. And then we partner with manufacturing houses for the largest, higher volume production. but the like eventual future is we are going to vertical integrate this manufacturing and like this is what we want to offer to company if you look at the current offer for printed circuit boards in the u.s it's very very hard to manufacture them uh like within the nation it's usually like anytime you want to scale you need to go to china and we think that the way to solve that is basically by making all of our design look the same from a manufacturability standpoint so we can generate volume and like bring it to all of our clients at the same time we also do things like automatically matching the parts and the ordering which is something that normally it's done manually and it's incredibly like long and annoying to do and so to like keep a very complicated process short we make ordering pcbs from the u.s as easy as ordering them from china not quite as inexpensive yet but we are going to go there where do you think you'll you'll set up your actual manufacturing hub.

2:12:05You're, you're said you're in the Brooklyn, uh, Navy yard right now. Uh, do you think you'll go elsewhere or do you want to keep it in the, in the great state of New York? So I'm a big believer in, uh, like decentralized approaches for prototype level. So we're actually opening an assembly shop in San Francisco for our clients there. And we're thinking about one in Austin where we have like some clients that I absolutely love alongside the one in New York. And I think that long term for scaling production, the best strategy will be to co-locate the warehouses for the components and the assembly.

2:12:40So we're probably going to open a larger facility in either Arizona or Ohio, most likely. Awesome. Last question for me. IMO gold medal. What was your reaction to the news? And is solving IMO level math useful to you? Do you think there will be transfer learning from that model into the circuit board design domain? Or are we in the era of spiky intelligence where until you RL on that particular problem, you're not getting generalizable results? I think even if you were in the era of like spiking intelligence on like RL on a specific problem, like circuit boards are an absolutely like good way of doing this.

2:13:24Like conceptually, a circuit board is orders of magnitude simpler than a silicon design. Like before like building circuit boards for a living, I used to do like custom silicon designs. And those have been like represented as code for years. This is 100 % an RL approachable problem. I do think that the IMO news is fantastic. Like clearly, there are incredible returns if you do train on like a very specific set of data. I think that the biggest mode will be in the data. What we consider to be our competitive advantage is not really training new foundation models. We actually rely on foundation model improvements in the wild.

2:14:03And our entire model is based upon feeding those models with better and better data and being able to fine-tune and reinforcement learning train very specific parts. One of them is the model that spots mistakes. That's how you tell a good generated design versus a bad generated design. and you can ground the model in reality and physics. That makes no sense. Thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the race. Congratulations on crossing the one-year milestone. Fantastic. Getting an A done as well. Great stuff. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Bye. And up next, we have Elan, who I met and Delian was mentioning was building a company in France.

2:14:43Now he's building a company in America. We're going to dig into the differences between the two countries. figure out which country is the best. Get to the bottom of it. Hey, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, I'm good. I'm good. And you guys? I'm good. We met at Miami Tech Week a few years ago, correct? Yes, yes. That's right. And I remember you telling me quite specifically, you didn't see yourself starting a venture-backed business, but you said media was something you were very interested in. So it looks like it turned out quite well. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are. But yes, give me the background on your journey.

2:15:18We'll get to the current company, but I want to talk more about building a company outside of America. Delian gave us a little bit of the background, but I wanted to just hear that journey and kind of tangle with it for a little bit. Yeah. So I started a company called Kala with two co-founders probably a bit more than eight years ago. The vision and the mission was to basically make real food more affordable by using robotics and AI to automate the back kitchen operations. and if you look at the typical pnl of a restaurant it's like 30 percent food cost 30 percent people cost and 30 percent overhead real estate kind of rent electricity those sort of things and like the 10 percent margin if you are performing well you most a lot of restaurants actually are losing money um so that's that was the vision we said okay we can actually build machines and robotic systems to bring down operating costs to bring down the required footprint of a restaurant to run which means we bring down overhead as well and hopefully we can reinvest part of those gains into better quality ingredients to make the product more affordable and higher value.

2:16:19And then we can also make the restaurant itself more profitable, thus more scalable. So that was the vision. We basically ran the company for eight years, did a bunch, like an ungodly amount of mistakes along the way. But in the end, managed to have five very, very, very profitable restaurants. Basically give you a few numbers, but like 60 % retention, customers coming more than once a week, 95 % customer satisfaction, can give you the profitability numbers, but much higher than what any other restaurants has achieved in the world thus far. And so the thinking from there was, okay, we have those great first results with the restaurants, let's start scaling.

2:16:57We had raised 10 million up to that point from VCs, and we got hung on a very structural problem of Europe, which is there's a big financing gap when you go when you get to like the series a slash series b kind of moment uh we are basically there's just a gigantic cliff of funding there um and so basically we didn't we did not understand that when we kind of created the business and structured the business and so we basically we're like starting to assemble the plane and get ready to take off and then we hit the wall like straight on straight on um and we just hadn't built we should have built like a much smaller plane or or whatever uh delta plane or something something that's more lean than what we had prepared to do because we had a much more ambitious vision that what was achievable in Europe.

2:17:43And the thing that's quite specific and that De Leon was referencing a few days ago in the show was restructuring the business to go from those handful of restaurants that were like very profitable and a very high kind of HQ cost, trying to restructure that to get to a profitable kind of break-even point at the business level was basically on paper possible. Like we could have cut down cost enough to make the business profitable, but just pure French regulation and prevented us from doing that. Just the severance cost, the idea I can put it quite well, like the purely the severance liability was higher than the cash on the hands we had at the time.

2:18:17And we had quite a lot of cash and still it was like a lot of money that we had to pay in severance and plus other liabilities around that. And so in the end, we basically tried to talk to the regulators, to the government, any structure that was around us to try and find a workaround. But we, in the end, we couldn't really go beyond what the laws and rules allowed. And so we ultimately, we had to shut down the business around a bit more than two months ago, which was quite a shame. I was very, very angry throughout the whole process, which obviously kind of pented up in the next year, in the past few weeks.

2:18:50And when I met Delian a few, yeah, actually a few days after the decision from the court came down, I was still kind of on the fence about what I wanted to do next. I was still thinking, should I, I'm still very angry about this. Yeah, one thing I would just highlight, the idea of using robotics to deliver better, cheaper food was not novel. What was novel was actually getting it to work, right? Like so many people have tried to do this in the United States. It's a graveyard. Yeah, it's an absolute graveyard of companies with super talented founders and teams that for some reason or another couldn't.

2:19:27Dave Friedberg started one, Itza. Yeah, and it's hard enough. It's hard enough. too interesting was the other way around like the automated the front of house not the back of house that's true but but a lot of a lot of businesses like i could kind of give you 20 30 different businesses that i've tried and i i think up to that point we are the only business that had and technically sweetgreen does as well but had kind of proven uh let's say kind of incrementally positive kind of a return investment on the whole investment of a restaurant meaning like if you actually uh invest the money it takes to build the machine and put it in the restaurant you actually end up with a higher ROI on the whole investment than if you are just launching with a normal team.

2:20:07I think Sweetgreen is the only restaurant that had this apart from us. And for them, it's not very clear exactly how they achieved that in terms of how transparent they are with the numbers. But yeah, other than that, I don't think anyone had even made, like, had even actually paid back a single installation of a robotic system in a restaurant. And so, yeah, we are very proud of that result that we got a few years ago. And then we managed to launch more stores, get more revenue. get stores doing very high kind of EBITDA margin. But yeah, in the end, couldn't really get there with Kala. And I think in the end, the biggest mistakes we made was definitely starting the business in Europe, in France specifically.

2:20:43There's just the market and the, let's say the whole ecosystem is just not made for ambitious plays. And like, if you want to build something ambitious, you can't really do it there. Yeah, do you think that the restrictions and the regulation that you ran into, are those broadly popular or are they kind of like legacy rules that if you put them up to a purely democratic vote, most people would say that doesn't make any sense. Because there's a lot of like, you know, legislative and regulatory cruft in America that isn't popular but hangs around and people just kind of deal with it. But what is like the mood in France around this?

2:21:20Like it sounded like there wasn't very much like public outcry, but it feels like a situation where kind of everyone loses because the customers were enjoying the food. the employees were enjoying their jobs, you were enjoying building this company, and now they all go, just go away. Yeah, so I don't, so this regulation specifically, I don't think it's known enough. Like, company going bankrupt is not something that makes national news, so it's not something that people have top of mind, but I think overall people would probably support it because what the regulation actually says is just that when an employee, when a company goes bankrupt, the employee gets pretty high severance, meaning they don't have to find a job straight away, or if they can't, they can take a few months to find it and it's fine.

2:21:57And so I think with the very socialist mental model that most French people have, I think this would probably be popular. But on top of the severance itself, the state puts in place a lot of other protections, even beyond what the severance cost is. You basically get your full salary for a year if your company goes bankrupt, paid by the state. So I mean, partially by the company, but the state puts a bit more on. And so there's a bunch of those rules that I think people would probably be in favor of if they thought about it. But it's just not something that's top of mind for anyone. Have you talked to any other founders in France who went through something similar or had like cautionary tales to share?

2:22:37Because it feels like if this was widespread, we'd be hearing about it a lot and people would be starting to lobby or anything or maybe just everyone leaves. I don't know. I think one of the reasons why it was so hard for us specifically is that the – So first we had our business and so the HQ cost component is kind of harder to scale down than a typical software business. I think that's probably one reason why it was hard. And also, I think a lot of businesses that fail, especially startups in France, just fail because they can't really find product market fit and they can't even get kind of commercial traction.

2:23:07And so in the end, you don't really mind the company going bankrupt because you just didn't have something that was worth working for. Versus for us, I think it's a bit different because we actually had the product that work and the economics were there. We just couldn't keep on scaling. And we should have understood that maybe two or three years earlier and been a lot more conservative on the structuring of the business. What's the strategy for the new company? How do you leverage what works and avoid what doesn't? Yeah, so I think the first one key lesson is definitely being a lot more lean on the HQ cost.

2:23:40I think one thing that I learned is that even though I think this business can be built with venture capital. I think you have to build a strategy around your financing that's both VC but also private equity that does retail and restaurants more naturally. You have to be able to tailor your business to all those guys because at some point you're going to need them. And so that means low HQ cost, more lean HQ operations. That means other structuring elements that you have to do differently. So that's definitely one big learning. The second one is also in terms of, let's say, structuring of the operations.

2:24:12We had built restaurants that were too small. And so even though they are very profitable, they didn't bring in as much EBITDA as we could have. If we had stores that were doing like, let's say, 3 million revenue per store, we'd have been bringing a lot more EBITDA per store than the revenue we had in our stores. So that's another kind of key learning. And the tech itself also, we are changing a bit the product. We are not taking any of the previous IP or tech that kind of developed. We are rebuilding everything from scratch. But we know overall, we have kind of rough good ideas of what are the prototypes we made what worked and didn't work and so we're also kind of approaching the tech a bit differently than what we did with Kala and thus we're also approaching the product differently we're not going to be serving the same the same food makes sense so what uh yeah can you what's the timeline for the new company uh and where what what kind of key markets are you looking at yeah so when I spoke with Delian a month and a half ago I was not really decided on it yet so barely basically incorporating the business now, already have basically, I talked to a bunch of Cala shareholders that when I announced that we had to shut down the business.

2:25:16And in the end, we are forced by the state to shut down. It's not even like we decided to do it. I talked to a bunch of them that basically said, whatever you guys do again, if it's the same business, we want to back you again. So right now, just thinking about how I want to think about financing in the first few months. It's very high level at the moment, not really into any details. So that's the first step in the next few months. The higher level roadmap is to launch the first store in New York, middle of next year, midpoint of next year, exactly when it's going to depend a bit on a few elements around funding and also timeline on regulation.

2:25:49But yeah, the first restaurant in New York and they launch a few restaurants there and then pretty highly considering franchising as kind of a path to scale a lot more aggressively and a lot more efficiently, capital efficiently than we did with Cali where we own every single restaurant. yeah i think most people don't understand just how if you if you have a hit restaurant you know concepts and you can scale with uh with franchises not only can franchisees you know change their lives through through that opportunity but you can have what ends up looking like a software or better than software margins and that like super lean hq and just printing cash off the top line.

2:26:31So. And imagine, imagine if the restaurant itself doesn't do 10 % a bid double multiple X around above that, the amount of money you get out of the top line of the restaurant is just so much higher that let's say you are a typical restaurant does 10 % a bid the margin as a franchisor, you're going to take 5%. That's not a lot of value you're taking for you basically not doing everything, but creating the whole value in the end. If you have a restaurant that does a lot more than that, you can get a much bigger chunk of the top line of that restaurant. And thus the gains into it by not operating is also much better.

2:27:01Very cool. Cool. Well, excited for you to come to the US and build here. I hope on Sunday I'm going to come to the restaurant. Amazing. Yeah, we'd love to try it. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye. Great stuff. Tyler, any more progress? How are you doing? I made it to fifth place. Fifth place? Yeah. Let's go. My moves are 525. 525. You're hot on the top up there. You might be a number one by the end of the day. Yeah, but it's pretty marginal. It's hard now. It's going to be hard from here on out. To squeeze out the last little bit of performance. Good job. It's all your mindset, Tyler. Yeah.

2:27:38Did Tyler win the iPhone? He did. He did. He did. I had a consolation prize ready. Oh, I did. Rubik's Cube. Oh, we got a Rubik's Cube now? Yeah. That's too easy for Tyler. That's a three by three. I got the nine by nine. Tyler can do the nine by nine. That's the next challenge. You say that you can do the nine by nine. That thing has not been solved yet. It'll be done by tomorrow. Yeah, I think that's the challenge. You should do it live. Okay, I can do it live. Give me like 20 minutes. Tomorrow. Do it live. Do it tomorrow on the stream. Okay. I can fully scramble it. Yeah, yeah, scramble it. You can scramble it.

2:28:07You can start. It looks pretty scrambled to me. It looks like the last, like the hardest part is ahead of you. No, the hardest part is done. Oh, almost done? Okay. Okay. Nice. Little timeline? Yeah. Brian Johnson is - Says, Blueprint has been a pain in his butt. It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I'm consumed with. How does the human race survive the rise of superintelligence? Every minute spent dealing with problems like why a supplier shipped us something out of spec is a minute not spent figuring out how to make don't die the fastest growing ideology in history, increasing our odds of survival and thriving.

2:28:40At the same time, Blueprint produces products, my body and mind that bring my body and my great joy. I rely upon them for my well-being. I trust it. So do tens of thousands of happy customers. After years of consuming, I am at a molecular level Blueprint. How big do you think the business is? Tens of thousands of customers. What do you think LTV is? I had thought or heard that it was at like a hundred million dollar run rate. That feels about right. I feel like if you go into the blueprint ecosystem, you go pretty hard. Yeah, you could end up consuming six products in a day. For everything. It's not just like, you know, one protein bar and that's it.

2:29:17It's like it has a whole variety of things to purchase. So supplement companies continue to be undefeated in terms of monetizing health audiences. Yeah. Especially if you have a big audience like he does. Yeah. He says Blueprint is the best longevity stack in the world. That's not an exaggeration. It's meticulously designed based on scientific evidence. Third party tested, comprehensive, easy to consume, delicious and priced to be accessible. And anyways, he'd go on to say that he's been basically attacked by people saying that he's grifting, that he, you know, is the whole kind of blueprint. Don't die ideology is meant to sell supplements.

2:29:55Netflix did a documentary. Wow, that's really, really big. But the news here is that he's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead the business day to day while he focuses on don't die. And so, you know, interesting opportunity here. There's a bunch of different product lines. They have Nourish, Biomarkers, Quantified, and I guess clinics are coming soon. I don't know that any exists yet, but they're raising money too. They need some hardcore builders. So I think this would be a great SPAC candidate, John. It's real revenue, charismatic, founder. Take it public, Brian. Take it public. Just do it. Buy some meme stock for your treasury.

2:30:39Yeah, keep some GameStop and some Bitcoin. In the corporate treasury. Just diversified memes. Yeah. Yeah. some fart coin in there in the in the corporate treasury that's the move i can see it what what a run he is such a master of earned media it's so crazy he's ba this is basically what like a hiring post he's saying like i'm hiring two people yeah amazing essay super viral and then also a business insider piece that he gets coverage from and can screenshot the master what a beast how does he do it putting up massive numbers his portfolio company just exited today and he got paid waters on me next time, folks, because he received a distribution.

2:31:17Better than nothing. $2.85. It's not a zero. What happened? It's so interesting that it wouldn't be a zero, but it also wouldn't be like a real number. It's like the smallest amount. That happens. Money has to go somewhere. I guess, I guess. Michael Kratzios has a video today to win the AI race and ensure global technological dominance. We need more power. So we have Michael be coming on the show tomorrow, correct? Yeah. and a lot of news here i'm sure we'll be digesting it the all-in podcast is also having a crossover event with hill and valley yep um with a bunch of hitters breaking this down there's a lot absolute dogs i don't know if there's been more absolute dogs under one roof in washington in in maybe since hill and valley it's pretty it's pretty wild uh the actual action plan is really really like huge.

2:32:10The basic summary is that they're trying to shift or they're shifting with this document AI policy at the federal level from safety first posture. We're worried about paper clipping. We're worried about, you know, like the doomer scenario. Should we, you know, have an FDA for that was something that was thrown around on podcasts a while ago. Should these models need to be approved by the federal government before they go into general release. Now there's a shift in posture to a growth in geopolitics posture, basically. So the immediate practical effect is the publication of priorities. Real world impact will depend on how quickly the 90 plus follow on actions, especially deregulation, fast track permitting, new export packages and procurement rules move from paper to binding regulations, guidance and contracts over the next few months.

2:33:02So there's a bunch of stuff in here. It's going to touch the OMB, NIST, all the cabinet agencies, commerce, energy, labor departments, treasury, department of energy, basically census, treat AI skill programs as tax-free educational assistance. There's a whole bunch of different ideas in here. They're bringing that golden retriever mode ideology to AI. There's going to be the creation of the department of defense, AI and autonomous systems virtual proving ground. I was talking to somebody yesterday about how big is AI on the battlefield, how big of an issue is having frontier AI in a military context.

2:33:46It's very unclear if you can just, hey, invade Taiwan, don't make mistakes, like one-shotting these problems. We don't think we're there. But even if you just think about if you're going up against an adversary and they have Microsoft Excel and you don't, well, their logistics are going to be smoother. And so even just having AI tools and systems in all the different little places within your military force, that could be advantageous. Even if we're not talking about the Terminator killer robot scenario, like the humanoids, all of that stuff feels a little bit further out. But just using AI to make standard processes a little bit more efficient seems like an important advantage to have in a conflict.

2:34:31They're also expanding the national AI research resource pilot and the creation of financial instruments, spot and forward markets to give startups on-demand access to GPU capacity, NSF, DO, Department of Energy, secure compute environments, and national secure data service portal for controlled access. So there's some open source and research efforts. There's a ton of stuff in here. I'm sure it'll all be trickling out. Yeah, the open source stuff was exciting to see. Yeah, we'll see how Mark Zuckerberg fits into that. Because if he stays with the new super, the super intelligence team is stacked.

2:35:03But there was always a question about how long will LLAMA stay open source? China seems to be beating us up on open source. We saw Quen doing really well, DeepSeek doing really well. And so if there's going to be an open source champion in America, it feels like that could come from Meta. And so it'll be interesting to see how badly he wants it, how badly he wants to stay there, and how valuable that is to stay in the open source, at the frontier of the open source. Speaking of that, there was an interesting debate back and forth, I forget who said this. Oh, Francois Cholet said, please note we are not able to produce the 41.8 % result from Arc AGI 1, that's the first Arc AGI test, claimed by the latest QEN3 release, neither on the public eval set nor on the semi-private set.

2:35:51The numbers we're seeing are in line with other recent base models. In general, only rely on scores verified by the ArcPrize Foundation on the semi-private set. That way, you can trust that the methodology was consistent and fair across all models verified. But then one of the team members, I think, says, hey, we used the JSON format for convenient parsing. I'll DM you for reproduction. Sounds good. Waiting for you to DM them. So we will have more news on whether or not Quinn three really did jump forward in Arc AGI. But again, you know, the goal should be 100 percent on Arc AGI, since these are these are tests that, you know, everyone from an intern to a, you know, I don't know, 10 year old can do.

2:36:34I don't know how low it goes. I don't know if a five year old can do it. I got to put it to the test. I got to have the kids try. Yeah. Definitely. Anyway. Martin Shkreli has a good post here responding to Caitlin Relis. She says, you must be one of four things to raise right now. AI high flyer Seedco with the promise of being an AI high flying company, American dynamism slash re-industrialization company. And Martin says, how about just growing revenue and profits really fast? That is a fantastic strategy. The Lindy way. But then if you're growing profits really fast, you might not need to raise and you might not be able to justify a big raise potentially.

2:37:08Just raise it 500x revenue. I guess, yeah. 10 ,000x EBITDA or something. Anyway, in other news, people are still memeing about the nuclear reactor breach by hackers via Microsoft SharePoint. Yeah, I was interested in the timeline there. I was getting into that story yesterday. The vulnerability was discovered in May at a hacking competition that Microsoft put on. they then patched it later which didn't work and then the major hacks happened over the weekend just a few days ago and so the timeline there's like kind of weird like did they not and people were pushing back and saying like very unlikely that there was a serious breach well no more so unlikely that super critical documents were shared in those systems but still any of any and all information related to the U.S.

2:38:07Nuclear Weapons Agency and just program broadly should be pretty secure. So yeah, anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about the kind of timeline that led to that over time. And some final words of advice from Sahil says, buy a.com domain, go into debt if You have to. I saw somebody quoted this and said, I actually did do this. I went into debt. The guy who got the domain Contra.com, which is a nice. Did it work out? Yeah, he raised a lot of money. Oh, that's great. It's a great domain. Great name. Fantastic. We got our domain from Snag.com. Yeah. Rob. Go check it out. Industry leading domain services.

2:38:55is he helped us get tbpn.com in 30 minutes. Wow. It was one of the fastest negotiations of all time. That's pretty awesome. And we are very grateful. It's also cool he started Rowe. Pharmaceutical Company. Yeah, Rowe.co. So he's been in the domain game for a while. Oh, yeah, fire domain. And last, I've got to do one more final part. One more, do it. From Will Brown, chat GPT should have a big green switch that says sicko mode. SICO mode. SICO mode. Like SICO fancy mode? Yeah. S-I-C-O mode. There you go. If you want to just turn it on and just get gassed up by the model, you should be able to really turn it up.

2:39:37Stay safe out there. Stay safe. Don't get lost in the sauce. Don't get lost in the sauce. And one more final post. Okay. Let's do it. One more. The CEO of BrewMarkets is highlighting the CEO of NVIDIA. Benson has a legendary LinkedIn profile. he was at Denny's for five years 1978 to 83 he was a dishwasher busboy and a waiter so just working his way up the org chart if he had stayed there he probably would have become CEO but he went and a decade later founded Nvidia and has been running it for 32 years and seven months so what a run biggest company in the world I think we low-key got to put him in the truth zone because he worked at amd yeah yeah yeah well that's that wait that that's the post oh oh yeah yeah sorry i didn't highlight leaving out the years that he worked at amd and lsi is a great example of how a lionizing narrative works creates the impression of superhuman genius which confers a valuable aura that has material impact on morale negotiations etc similar to singapore was a fishing village so i actually don't know that much about the sing the rumor that singapore was a fishing village i guess it wasn't i i don't know the story of Singapore.

2:40:45We got to do a deep dive. Incoming. Sounds interesting. But yeah, worked at AMD and LSI Logic and then started in video. So, but he took those off the LinkedIn cause he's like, ah, I got it. Why should I promote my competitors? Smart man. I'm not competing with Denny's. Apparently the first Denny's that he worked at or something has a plaque on the wall. Like Nvidia CEO worked here. Very cool. And he still does Denny's stunts. He did one with the acquired guys. He came by and like, I think he delivered them Denny's or something like that when they were doing some event at NVIDIA GTC? At this point, you should just buy Denny's.

2:41:16It's 237. It's trading at$270 million market cap right now. It's that cheap? Wow. I didn't realize it was pure play. Like, it was just one. I guess it's getting meme stocked. It's up 16 % in the past five days. Not financial advice. Not financial advice. Jensen should really pick it up quick before it runs too hard. Yeah. I mean, he's in the interest of keeping it alive because if it just goes away and no one remembers Denny's. every Denny's into a showroom for his latest chips you know just carve out a booth I feel like I read some article about Denny's or some sort of uh you know restaurant chain using AI to help the servers or something everyone has an AI play uh restaurant restaurant solutions or something they own IHOP I believe something like that yeah yeah headquartered in Pasadena very American episode today John you could not put that football down the whole time it's fun it's nice to just have like a little fidget the original fidgets something about john with a football that's great it's great uh yeah i tried to keep it like below the desk during the interview so i could be a little bit more serious but you know i think eventually we're gonna be tossing the pig tossing the pigskin while talking to some founder brother race on that note leave us a five-star review on apple podcast or spotify and see you tomorrow have a good one cheers Bye.