Apple Unveils iPhone 17 Lineup, OpenAI & Oracle's $300B Cloud Pact | Nico Rosberg, Josh Machiz, Nir Zicherman, Amjad Masad, Alex Mashrabov, Stefan Cohen, Rohan Kodialam, Timothy Luchini, Marc Boroditsky, Michael Tannenbaum

28:47That's a great quote from Steve Jobs. Setting aside the wisdom of using that quote when the company is about to launch a controversial new user interface design, that's iOS 18, is that what it's called? Yeah, which one did we have you updated? That was iOS 26. 26, they're on the year release now. But they haven't updated the iPhones to be on the annual release. I can't wait. I can't wait for iOS 4000. They really should just move to the year on the iPhone too then. It's like, yeah, I have the iPhone 26. Oh, because you bought that in the year 2025 like a car. I know. It would make sense. Match it all up.

29:27Maybe they'll do that. Maybe they'll do that next year. They'll just skip five. Because they wound up doing that for the iPhone 10. I believe there was never an iPhone 9, right? They went from 8 to 10. And then for 10, they called it the X. and they were like really dancing around with the names for a while it was like iphone 6 and then max pro they were like testing all these different things and they finally kind of like defined the the the no like i like modeling it after just cars it's just the year i i think that's the future here for sure uh so that wasn't the steve jobs quote this presentation and and apple's general state of affairs made me think of says ben thompson what i was thinking of was the question jobs posed to then PepsiCo president John Sculley when he was recruiting him to be the CEO of Apple in the early 1980s.

30:16Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world? This is what Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, then PepsiCo president, trying to recruit him, said, hey, you're selling sugar water. Come over here and actually build something that matters that changes the world. So Ben Thompson says iPhones are a great business. One of the best businesses ever, in fact, because Apple managed to marry the malleability of software with the tangibility and monetization potential of hardware. Indeed, the fact that we will always need hardware to access software, including AI, speaks to not just the profitability, but also the durability of Apple's model.

30:53The problem, however, is simply staying in their lane. Content to be a hardware provider for the delivery of others' innovations feels a lot more like Scully than Jobs. Jobs told Walter Isaacson for his biography, my passion has been building an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, this is Steve Jobs talking to Walter Isaacson. Sure, it was great to make a profit, but that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money.

31:33It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. So Ben Thompson goes on, he says, Apple, to be fair, isn't selling the same sugar water year after year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. No one's talking about the Pepsi 2026 edition. It's the same thing every year. Apple is making improvements. The sugar water is getting better. And I think this year's seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. It's great. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products, the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

32:18That's somewhat true. I mean, they did take a big shot on Vision Pro. They're probably going to continue there. Maybe they'll... But, yeah, I mean, until they launch the iCane or... Scott in the chat says the Xbox naming convention is in an abstract liminal space. That was a wild one. Are you familiar with the Xbox naming convention? The X, the S, the 360. Yeah, well, it was the 360, and then they should have just done 720, 1080, obviously. That's a no-brainer. But then they wound up doing the Xbox Series X, and then they did the Series S, and then they did Xbox. It wasn't the Xbox Edition. I think it was Xbox 360 and then Xbox One, and then there was X, S, and then now there's like...

33:01You got to keep them on their toes. Yeah, going back to one is always a crazy, crazy move. But people love doing that. Anyway, that didn't matter for a long time. Smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. And now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and Ben Thompson thinks that more than anything, that's what bums people out. No, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world. Well, if you are trying to change the world, you need to be compliant. You need to be on Vanta.

33:35Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. This is Vanta country. So other reactions to the iPhone news. We'll run through these. Andrew Clare had a bunch of funny observations. Yeah, yeah. I was just pulling this up. So you go through this and then all. Yeah, so Andrew Clare says, things I've learned since the iPhone 17 series was announced. Everyone hates the color orange.

34:07I don't think so. I think this is going to be - You said on the day, you were like, I'm getting orange. And I would get orange too. I like orange. But I feel like if you have orange and then I have orange, it's like a little bit too much. Did I say I would get orange? That's what you said to me. You were like, I'm getting the orange. If you don't get it, if you're passing on the orange, I'm doing it. I mean, I think there's just not many options. There's only room in this town for one orange iPhone Pro. Well, we actually already have the same color phone, and we only get it mixed up like twice a day.

34:32That's true. The display or the background does a lot of heavy lifting there. So Samsung Mobile US Twitter was going off. Yeah, love it. Responding. They're boys. 48 MP times 3 still doesn't equal 200 MP. Hashtag, I can't. and then was quoting MKBHD saying, actual innovation is greater than hype. Hashtag, I can't again. Wow. Then they said, hashtag, I can't believe some people had to wait five years for sleep score. What? Is this from the Apple Watch? Then they said, Apple just announced live translation at the ZZZ note, like sleep. it's calling oh wait so yeah samsung is is is taking shots of taking shots at apple on every on every single so they put some you know probably zoomer social media person on on it it's not a zoomer though because they're using hashtags oh interesting okay and and samsung had posted in 2022 let us know when it folds with like one of these emojis okay okay and then uh they said hashtag i can't believe this is still relevant so they really were going for this the juggling it's like I hashtag I can't campaign rough rough is interesting well uh the other observations iPhone pro is for pro tiktokers Mr.

36:00Beast will now solely be using iPhones on his channel that's super interesting um is this this is because of paid partnership or I think he just is realize you can achieve yeah so if you tour Mr. Beast's facility you'll see that he has like closets with like hundreds of cameras because they all need to they need to record so they like gopros and and you know fx3s and all sorts of different cameras but a lot of the reality tv is just like random stuff's gonna happen you have to have a camera on it and your budget for that camera it can't be a hundred thousand dollars for like a pro cinema rig you need just like oh yeah throw a two thousand dollar phone there it's super light plugs in every usbc how cool would it save Save everything to the cloud.

36:45Save everything locally. Ooh, yeah. I mean, this is what Apple should be doing. I mean, they should be just constantly going up against DJI and just really keeping the screws to DJI. Yeah, it's tough because the gimbal might be like a billion dollar a year product line. DJI has one. And that unlocked the gimbal that goes on the drone, which is also the gimbal that goes into Hollywood, which is also the gimbal that goes on the RC car. And like the DJI, they now own Hasselblad. So they have lenses and cameras all the way down to the drones. And then they have vlogging gear and DJI has great microphones now.

37:23And so they've realized DJI has really leaned into this trend of like the prosumer content creator who wants like just one notch above but can't afford a steadicam operator. So they just need the Ronin or the Osmo to have a gimbal. and a lot of people put iPhones on those. But that would be a fun challenge for Apple to go and take the fight to DJI. But oh well. The conclusion of this post is Tim can still cook. Hopefully he is putting his team on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Also, Trunkfan said Apple, after spending$100 billion on R &D over the past five years.

38:09Nothing really changed in the design language from the 11 Pro Max to the 16 Pro Max. But Sebastian comes in with a quote post and says, True zone. During these six years, Apple managed to develop the best CPU architecture in the world, outpacing both AMD and Intel. Also, their GPU is nowadays state-of-the-art, which we talked about, beating NVIDIA in some areas. NVIDIA is a$3 trillion GPU company. I'd say Apple spent their 100 billion lives. So Mr. Beast was at the Apple event. Yeah, he was at the Apple event, but I don't know if it's a direct partnership. Like I think he might just be like, I'm all in on iPhone, I'm buying them.

38:41But maybe there's some sort of deal, but he was at it. And that's where he announced this, that he was like, I'm in the other thing. And the big one is that there's Genlock, so you can have one time code across a whole bunch of different iPhones. Again, very valuable. So if you're filming Beast Games and it's like American Ninja Warrior and a bunch of people are gonna be running around, you're gonna have 25 different angles. It's like, oh, well like, we need a telephoto lens for this shot. just put on the 24, the 48 megapixel 4K telephoto, put on the wide angle and then sync it all. So when you bring it in the timeline, you can be like, let's cut from this angle to this closeup to this one, to this handheld.

39:19And they're all in perfect sync. So I'm sure there's gonna be a ton of really creative stuff. Unfortunately, I don't know if we'll ever be allowed at Apple considering I posted the iPhone 4 ,000 meme. Might've got us banned for life, but we love Apple. We'll see, we'll figure it out. Love Apple. Also, the new iPhone, when you throw it in, the orange iPhone, when you throw it in a green case, it looks like Master Chief from Halo. Very cool. Also, got a little Michelangelo from Ninja Turtles vibe to it. I think it'll be popular with the kids. Blake Scholl says, everything's battery, and shows that the entire iPhone Air is just up top.

39:58Very cool to just see the miniaturization of electronics just flow through so completely. and of course Duolingo traded down on the news that Apple is bringing live translation to AirPods Pro 3. Morning, morning Bruce saying that Al is going to break into Tim Cook's house tonight. Well, if you're looking for not quite Duolingo but AI for data analysis, go to Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. loved by 2 million plus users and trusted by individuals at Zapier, BCG, and Princeton University. Legends. In other news, Larry Ellison got the number one spot as the world's richest man with a$70 billion gain after Oracle reported quarterly results after the market closed.

40:51Oracle surged 40 % and he made$100 billion. There's a funny post in here. Well, he didn't make it. He's not selling. Yeah, he's not selling. And you pointed out a couple other things that this is the biggest gain since 1999. What happened after 1999? A trillion dollar company is trading like a penny stock. There's this circle of money going on in AI where NVIDIA sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle uses it to power its data centers. Oracle builds cloud on those GPUs. NVIDIA rents compute back the assigned deals from Oracle. And so if the economy needs external, the economy cannot be entirely self-sustaining just on a few companies.

41:31The actual top story is people were wondering, like, how did they get this backlog so huge? And the answer is OpenAI. So OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to buy$300 billion in computing power over roughly five years. People familiar with the matter said the deal is one of the largest ever cloud contracts signed, reflecting how spending on artificial intelligence data centers is hitting new heights despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble. And the Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by not one, but two Hoover dams, or the amount consumed by four million homes.

42:12Oracle shares surged 36%. When they revealed it had added$317 billion in future contract revenue during its latest quarter. So Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are clearly in cahoots working together to build a next generation hyperscaler. They're teaming up. And so the question that I had was, everyone thinks this is crazy. like this is somewhat like a revision on the stargate story like the stargate story was at a high level the people in the room with donald trump that day wanted to do a 500 billion dollar project together it wasn't like the money had been wired and it's in the company it was like it's a variety of companies it was like a vibe let's go big but but but the vibes were let's go And so this feels like just one notch more clarity into how Stargate and the other projects might kind of come together.

43:11I don't think you should look at this as like its own thing. It's a piece of the overall story that we're getting around Stargate and just big data center investment around OpenAI. so my reminded me of the um you remember that exchange between uh elizabeth holmes and and sunny balwani yes when they said this is our year tiger that was kind of the original stargate meeting they were just kind of getting together yeah this is our year so it was masayoshi son larry ellison sam altman and donald trump saying that the the plan was for those four loosely plus a couple other people to invest roughly$500 billion over a series of years.

43:57And they were early to use in the half a trillion dollar number. Now you've got Mark throwing it around. You've got Tim throwing it around. Everybody's throwing it around. Everyone's throwing it around. And so I guess I'm in the steel man category today, figuring out how crazy is that number? Like, how should we be thinking about that number? How can we put it in other context? And so one context that I thought would be interesting is if you assume that ChatGPT, like as a consumer product, as an internet company, is going to be roughly the same scale as Google, Amazon.com, and Facebook.com, and like the Facebook apps.

44:44Like it will have similar revenue, similar scale, similar user adoption, similar monetization. Like you get like one ultra compounding trillion dollar like consumer style website at the end of the day. It's like an internet company, right? You have to support that with data centers. Not just like be a hyperscaler and then build a cloud business. Like you need servers to run Instagram. You need servers to run Gmail. You need servers to run YouTube. You need servers to run AWS. Not just AWS, but Amazon.com needs servers. That's why AWS grew out of Amazon.com, was because they were investing so much, so many servers in just supporting Amazon.com.

45:30Also Prime, Prime Video, Twitch, all of their internet properties, aside from their resale business in AWS and aside from Google's resale business, GCP. Yeah. You need a ton of servers. So my question is like, Sam Allman saying, I'm gonna be one of those. Like think of OpenAI as the next Google, the next Amazon.com, the next Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, right? How much did those companies spend to support their trillion dollar businesses? They have a trillion dollar internet business. How much did they invest? And so I tried to pull all the capex that they've spent roughly that doesn't go into their cloud business.

46:13And the numbers are big. Amazon, retail, X, AWS. This includes fulfillment transportation, so it's very significant. But$250 billion. Meta's core apps, so X new AI, X gen AI, so not counting the llama stuff, that's$130 billion in CapEx. And we've seen that these hyperscalers are all spending$60,$70 billion a year, and they've been ramping. So if you work back from that ramp, you're spending$60,$50,$40. You add all that up, you're in the$200 billion range. Google's core services, ex-GCP, and this is probably the best comp because they don't have warehouses for fulfillment. Google's core services, not including Google Cloud Platform,$210 billion is like the reasonable estimate for how much they've spent on the servers just to serve YouTube, Google search, databases, all that stuff, Gmail, all that stuff.

47:13And so when I think about OpenAI, what they're trying to do, become in the conversation with as many user minutes, as big a penetration as Facebook, as Google, as Amazon.com, that feels like a couple hundred billion in CapEx. And so you project it forward and the CapEx is way more expensive because you're doing AI inference instead of just pull the search results out of the database, put the search results in the bag. 300 billion seems like it could, if OpenAI succeeds and if in five years we're talking about it as like yeah amazon.com google.com facebook.com chat.com like these are all these are the new mag 4 mag 7 or mag 8 mag 9 whatever like if they're in the same conversation as like dominant internet companies that are used by everyone all the time for everything not a niche not a pinterest like outcome not a snapchat like outcome but a face yeah and and you factor in and Amazon-like outcome.

48:13Inferencing language models today and various, all the models, it's just extremely compute intensive in a way that serving Gmail is not. Exactly, and this was the story of YouTube. I believe that the compute, like the CapEx that went into supporting YouTube was way more than Google search. Because Google search needed, it's just like text results. I was just thinking this yesterday, there was a number of, Hassan Piker was streaming on Twitch and had 200 ,000 live viewers, which probably is costing Twitch multiple dollars a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody ran the numbers just on the Apple stream because the Apple stream on YouTube had like millions and millions of views and they were talking about the data, just the data transfer cost.

49:01And so the economics of scaling a consumer AI company like ChatGPT is different. And so it is going to be more costly. Well, and the reason that, so Oracle and OpenAI are now incredibly linked. They're betting on each other. Yep. And both have to execute pretty much perfectly. Yeah. Otherwise, there's going to be absolute chaos. And so on the absolute chaos, the bear thesis, it's this feels like 1999. So, yeah, the concern is like, okay, so Oracle just had a double miss on earnings, right? and we'll see how they do this next quarter if they come out and blow out earnings. I'm assuming, you know, like if they can get sort of like back on track, it'll be, everybody will be very excited.

49:49But the question is like, everybody is struggling to get the infrastructure, you know, the various like components necessary to build data centers right now, right? Elon's talking about making his own transformers, right? Everybody needs - Wait, electrical transformers? He said that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoa, I missed that. Another thing we missed. That's crazy. Okay. And, and so you have to assume that Oracle can develop this capacity on a reasonable time horizon in a heavily supply constrained environment where they're competing with, you know, five or so other heavily, heavily funded players.

50:24You have to assume they can execute perfectly. And then you have to assume that open AI is going to be able to scale revenue to the where they can actually sort of pay for this$300 billion of compute, right? It has to come from somewhere. I don't think, I don't know. You have to wonder, can Sam Altman raise$300 billion? Sounds way. Has anyone ever raised$300 billion? I was talking to Brandon about this. Like, you sort of need to - What is the - What's the most money ever raised? i don't know you get into crazy crazy comps how much did uh because even a lot of the best and biggest companies end up getting to the point where they're like oh we got enough cash i mean google was cash flow positive at ipo right so they were not yeah i mean the single biggest uh is open ai's 40 billion dollar raise but even that again was didn't they only draw down like tranches and it's contingent on the for-profit conversion yep yeah yeah that's right yeah uh Wild.

51:31It is unprecedented territory, but it's an unprecedented technology. You use it and you're like, yeah, this is magical. This is going to be around. Larry prayed for one more bubble like this. Then he hit hard. Just one more. Yeah. I mean, it will be interesting to see. The Oracle Street, the investor should be looking at Oracle and saying, okay, you have this backlog, how quickly can you draw down from it? Next quarter, can you convert that backlog into serious revenue and profit? If not, and it's just staying out in the backlog, it needs to be discounted a lot. Anyway, if you're looking to scale your generative media strategy, go to FALL, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place.

52:28Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Trusted by over a million developers. And Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Quora, Perplexity, and many more. There we go. Really enjoyed having Founder on the other day. Chris Bakke, who somehow hasn't been on the show yet. I feel like we would have overlapped at some point, but we've reacted to a ton of his posts. He says, my son's preschool teacher asked me to read to his class next week and bring three books that the kids will enjoy. These four-year-olds are in for a treat, and he has Zero to One by Peter Thiel, High Growth Handbook by Elad Gill, and Titan by Ron Chernow.

53:12I love it. The kids might enjoy some of those books, but some of them are a little bit dry for the kiddos. Robin Hood has launched a social app. This was in the journal. Robinhood's for you, says near cyan. Robinhood's for you will let you tweet positions with your real profit loss, supporting both options and crypto. Vlad has been in the trenches, grinding, launching new products all the time. Dalton Caldwell announced a new fund, or I don't know, maybe he announced it prior. He was at Y Combinator. But he's come out with Standard Capital, standardcap.com, the AI Native Series A firm. The reason I thought this was particularly interesting is they're doing it effectively like seasons.

54:03So they're basically doing batches, right? And so they say Standard Capital operates on quarterly funding cycles. Applications are now open for Standard Capital's fall 2025 funding cycle. So interesting to take this sort of like, you know, systematic model of funding and apply it to Series A. They're differentiating as well by they're only looking for 10%. Obviously plenty of Series A firms will happily take 10%, but this might be particularly interesting to founders that are generating a lot of revenue already want to get a Series A done, but just don't want to be peer pressured by the current capital and the new entrance to the cap table to just raise closer 15%, 20%.

54:56Yeah, who else is running standard capital? I feel like he got someone else on the team. Paul. Paul Buchheit? Yep. I love Paul. We got to have both of them or one of them on at some point. I'm interested to know how the fund is structured if each, does an LP get exposure to a fund that's a specific season cycle? I actually don't remember. I think it's pretty straightforward. It's like, hey, we're going to fund, I don't know how many they're actually doing. Let me try to find it. They're doing five, so they're going to do five companies per cycle, four times a year, so 20 companies a year. They can, I imagine they're planning to write like five to$10 million checks.

55:40depending how overheated the rounds get. But it's pretty easy to plan out. You can go to your LPs and say, look, we're going to fund this many companies over the next two years. Obviously, there'll be edge cases, and they'll end up doing off-cycle investments here and there. But it's pretty cool to see some experimentation with the model. And leaving Y Combinator, this becomes a net positive asset to Y Combinator to provide downstream funding. Yes, and there was always this dynamic of, is YC going to cherry pick the best companies? Is it like a counter signal if you get to demo day and none of the partners have been like, yeah, I want to invest in the next round?

56:23And YC Continuity was a thing for a while. And there was this odd dynamic of like, well, like if YC Continuity, YC Continuity was a fantastic fund, but people were always asking questions about like, what does it mean? Do they have like extra insights? So it's an extra good signal. or is it a bad signal because you couldn't do it with somebody else? And this sort of solves that potentially, which is good. Somebody else posted today, at YC Demo Day, I ran into a multi-stage firm that has invested in 600 YC companies over the last five years. Of those, one has raised a Series A. They still invested in 10 companies.

56:57That seemed like a low hit rate, but how young are the companies? I mean, it's been over many years. Incredibly low. Incredibly low hit rate. I mean, I don't know. I feel like Gary has shared other stats where like way more. Yeah, you would have to study this firm and understand like how to figure out and do basically the opposite. Yeah, because you could just do random and be at the rent. Yeah, just like don't meet the founder. Just like have a database and just like offer money. Maybe they're printing. Maybe they're only investing. Maybe they're really good at going in and finding the company.

57:35that never need to raise again. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, none of them raised a Series A, but they have 12 IPOs. Maybe they're fine to just make it all back in one trade. They have 75. Yeah, maybe that one company is like, it's Coinbase or something. It's like, yeah. Yeah, so apparently they only picked consumer companies. Okay, that's right. Consumer is like extremely power law. Y Combinator, consumer. But very hit or miss. Consumer AI. Yeah, very power law. Sorry, sorry, not Y Combinator. Open AI. I guess they weren't a consumer company when they were going through YC. Nope. The pivoted. Classic.

58:09Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast. 10x cheaper. And extremely scalable. We got to have Simon on from Turbo Puffer ASAP. He's so fun. Should we be investing in Turkish bonds? Did you see this? turkey just cut the interest rate from 43 down to 40 and uh main says did bro say 40 so like i mean i don't know but like if you go over to turkey and you put your money in like their equivalent of t-bills you just earn 40 gains like is this not inflation adjusted i assume i assume they have like really high inflation whatever it's denominated in but uh DC Investor says, we need to be farming this.

58:59Yeah, that was my first turkey, too. Put your bonds on chain. Let Hyperliquid go wild. Let the trenches decide the fair value of your bonds. Let the trenches decide. Andrew McCallop answered our TVPN question that we were asking at YCDEMODAY. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? He says, mine was at 13 years old. I was contracting CNC shops to produce parts for my online RC car business, Cold Fusion Racing. Good name. The Traxxas crowd will remember me as the steel differential guy. Made thousands of upgraded steel planetary differentials after the brushless motors hit the market and were shredding the OEM plastic ring gears.

59:41I literally rode my bike to the gas station for money orders. What a fun time that was. Wow. Amazing. Amazing. It makes a ton of sense why he's doing what he's doing now. He, of course, works at Varda and is building drone shots. We've got to have him on to come on and talk. Yeah, I want to hear about the project. Andrew, come on the show. You're welcome. It's time to bob. And if you want to get Project Bob mentioned on ChatGPT, go to Profound Andrew. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Hunter shared this interesting fact.

1:00:12If you become a billionaire and then you lose it all, Forbes still keeps you on their real-time net worth tracker as some sort of dark humiliation ritual. And so Elizabeth Holmes, Rene Benko, who I'm not familiar with. They just throw you at the bottom. And Sam Bankman-Fried is at$0.0 billion. I want to put that in the truth zone on SBF. He might have$100 million tucked away somewhere in crypto. I think Elizabeth Holmes is seriously zeroed, but SBF, it would have been so easy for him to have some random Solana on a USB stick somewhere, one of those offline drives, and just have it waiting for him because he buried it.

1:00:54You have to imagine. I'm not saying it's 100%, but 20%. You have to imagine that he is like… Tinfoil hat? You have to imagine that he's like placing, like he's getting printouts of charts. And he's like basically figuring out a way to day trade behind bars. Probably. anyways that's an interesting do you think we'll do you think back in the chat says sbf might have a bill i think wouldn't be surprised possible i would put i would put uh him having a billion at like two percent or five percent and him having a hundred mil at like 20 maybe so i would still probably put him at point one b on the forbes tracker but i don't know um yeah not that hard to just remember a passphrase Just memorize the seed phrase and go to jail.

1:01:47And when you come out, some unusual whales account will see, oh, a bunch of stuff's moving that hasn't moved since the day SBF got locked up. And now it's moving. And it's grown a ton because it's just been sitting there. Potentially the underweighted way to diamond hands is to go in the clink where diamond handsing is the only option. Anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez says, part of Facebook's baked-in advantage was, slash is, having the same user ID across devices and apps, from browser cookies to mobile devices. Why Apple leaned into privacy was nuking everybody else's ability to identify the same user across apps on the same phone.

1:02:28Identity is king, he says. Interesting. Well, if you're building something that's built on top of identity, do it on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, project, and product remaps. We are going to be talking to the new CEO of Open today and going deeper into the Open door story. Martin Screlly says, the new CEO is a big win for Open. Not sure how you turn around this business, which seems fundamentally broken, but that's what good managements do. And it'll be interesting to see. The stock has been way up.

1:03:05The retail army is marshalling. Up 70 % today. Keith Rebois back on the board. We had him on the show when there was rumbling on the timeline about what might happen with Open Door. He is getting back involved, but not in a day-to-day capacity. But anyway. Such an interest. I mean, such a wild story. Yeah. I mean, interest rates are high. That should be a reduction to liquidity and transaction volume. Probably a headwind, but they might come down, which is a potential tailwind. But they picked up an absolute dock. They did. Kaz is the man. I've talked to him before. He's great. Hello, 2.6 million.

1:03:44Welcome to the stream. Tech Sales says, imagine being the sales rep who closed the OpenAI Oracle$300 billion computing deal. What's your next move? Obviously, this is done between Sam and Larry Ellison directly. But it's funny to imagine that you're just some SDR. And you're like, yeah, today I'm going to call up Oracle. Like, can I? Or vice versa. You're at Oracle and you're just like, you know who needs computers? Open AI. My brother-in-law was telling me about this new app. I'm going to see if Sam wants to grab a dinner tonight. Yeah, yeah. Just calculating. Maybe invite him to some sort of sports game.

1:04:25We've got a box. Get the Warriors. Get the Warriors. Yeah, that's probably how it happened. That's what Sam will want to do. Yeah, that's how it went down. And then all of a sudden, the rest is history. well Eliezer Yudkowsky has a new book did you read it yet John? I have not read it I was thinking about reading it it seems like he distilled his thesis Nirit Weissblatt says posts some highlights from a review in New Scientist no AI isn't going to kill us all despite what this new book says Yudkowsky has a number of policy prescriptions all of them basically nonsense. Wow, putting Newtikowski in the truth zone.

1:05:07First is that GPUs, computer chips that have powered the current AI revolution, should be heavily restricted. They say it should be illegal to own more than eight of the top 2024-era GPUs without submitting to nuclear-style monitoring by an international body. By comparison, Meta has 350 ,000 of these chips. Once this is in place, they say nations must be prepared to enforce these restrictions by bombing unregistered. Do you see what the title of the book? What is it called? If anyone builds it, everyone dies. Why superhuman AI would kill us all.

1:05:49I don't know. I like the real thesis. Yeah, like bait. But Perry Metzger had a good take on it, he said. It's starting to look like the worst thing Eliezer Yudkowsky ever did for his cause was actually write down all of his arguments in a form compact enough that a normal person could read them in a few days. Before, the arguments were scattered all over tens of thousands of pages of really wordy blog posts, and only extremely dedicated people could bother to go through them. You get nerd sniped by them. In truth, the whole thing could be summarized in a few pages. now that he's at least condensed it down to 256 pages.

1:06:27Good number of pages. I like that. He's using a factor of two, which normies might consider reading. If they read it, though, they will learn that the argument isn't at all persuasive. You get people like the New York Times reviewer saying, the book reads like a Scientology manual, the text interspersed with weird, unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR code. So that's very cool. Tyler, what's your take on Yudkowsky? I think he's like people hate on him too much I think also like there is already a book about AI safety that's like very famous that's like readable. Bostrom? Yeah, Super Intelligence Nick Bostrom which is like a good book I think there's a good actually young macro post I thought you were going to say Fang Pneumonia Young Macro there's a good young macro post he says Bay Area Rationalists continuously getting spat on for warning us about their very rigorously researched and thought out eschatology must be one of the most flagrant cases of unfair maligning they should be treated more like christian missionaries worried about hell which i agree yeah yeah i think it's like people just like dunk on them constantly which like i've read a fair amount of like less wrong posts i don't i'm not like a crazy doomer but it's like you can understand the the trade-offs yeah it's a valuable It's a valuable public service to just spend your time for at least some people in the world to think about what if this goes incredibly wrong.

1:07:56Yeah. Like I'm very great that most people are thinking about how do we make this go right. But it's not necessarily it's like it's not net negative for the world to have to have. Of course, unless like, you know, you figure out that the ideas catch on to such a degree that it makes it so that humanity can't. And, you know, again, it's like a fine line between, you know, some of the policies that have been proposed like around the U.S. at the state level have been like crazy so far this year. Right. Yeah. Like people in Anthropik who are like doing safety research is that's like obviously a good thing.

1:08:32Yep. There's like, you know, they publish it openly. It's like open source. I think that's like good. Obviously, I'm not in favor of bombing data centers. Yeah. But I think it's reasonable to like. Yeah. People I think people dunk on him way too much. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that when the dunking on the Doomer, when the Doomer dunks were at an all-time high, there was probably a group of, I don't know, 80 % of tech that was like, let's dunk on this. This is not good. This is nonsense. but I feel like over the past two years, you've slowly picked off like 20 % chunks of that group and said, well, actually I'm interested in safety in this context.

1:09:16And so the examples I'll give are like, there's a lot of people that are like, yeah, I don't think I'm gonna get paper clipped anytime soon, but I love AI safety research if it can tell me if DeepSeek is trying to, you know, poison the American population against capitalism and it's like a geopolitical weapon. Or I'm worried about people getting one-shotted and going crazy from chatting with 4.0 for days and days and days. That's a safety research problem. Are people using it just to go and, like the classic example is like, oh, like someone develops a chemical weapon or biological weapon. But what about just like an actual weapon?

1:09:55What about just like a normal, and we just saw this with the terrible Charlie Kirk story. like if you're sending into any LLM sketchy questions that highlight like you're planning something, there is, we do need to have a discussion about like, when does it call the cops on you? When does it flag this? Like how anonymous is this? Like if someone's blaring and obviously going to Google and saying like, I'm trying to do a bad thing, like should that flag things? There's a whole discussion to be had there, But I put that within the broad context of AI safety and AI doom. And I don't think it's unreasonable to have those discussions at all.

1:10:38So I don't know. Yeah. I think also, like, even if you're, like, an accelerationist, you, like, think doomers, safety is, like, completely useless. You can probably make the case that Eliezer, like, writing about AI in, like, early 2000s accelerated AI in general. Totally. So, like, yeah. Totally. I mean, it's certainly like Marshall capital to be like, oh, well, like if this is the final innovation, like if it's if it's going to be able to do that, like then we got to get into this deal. Anti it has a anti like it has the opposite effect that he wants, which is totally this is the most dangerous technology ever.

1:11:10And people are like, I got to find a way to make money on this. Yeah. I mean, that was that was the story of just nuclear power. It was like the bomb went off at Trinity. The bomb went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And people were like, wait, like this is a terrible like disaster. Like so like awful. And like there's a true doom scenario, which is we all bomb each other and nuclear holocaust happens and everyone dies. But very quickly people were like, wait, there is a positive way to use this. And that's with a nuclear reactor. And that's with positive energy. The interesting doom scenario that I think you could get from Yudkowsky's fears like really running wild is just a stagnation where if we actually say as a society we agree with this and we say, yeah, we're never going past one gigawatt for a data center ever and we will bomb them and we all agree.

1:12:03Like, well, then, yeah, you do wind up in the nuclear energy scenario where we stop building them. And basically the amount of nuclear power just kind of stagnated. and we had the technology, but we didn't really ramp it. We were just like, yeah, we'll find other ways to do things. And we found other ways to generate electricity with oil and gas, but also solar and wind. And we stayed away from nuclear for decades. Now we're getting back into nuclear. We could find other ways to generate images and deep research reports. We could say, hey, we're not going any further as a society. If everyone agrees, now there's geopolitical considerations.

1:12:37There's a lot of things where I don't think that's going to happen, but it is something that could happen. P-stagnation is also a key metric to be tracking alongside P-doom. The response to P-doom is P-stagnation. Anyway, I believe we have our first guest of the show in the Restream waiting room. Josh. Oh, look at this. Look at this background. Wow. Impressive. Thank you for the production. How you doing? Long-time listener, first-time caller. Hey, guys. Great to have you on. And congrats on the new gig. I'm thrilled to be at Lightspeed. It is a very exciting moment for my career, for Lightspeed.

1:13:17We're going to be doing a lot of fun things. You know, Lightspeed's AI, like we're Anthropic, we're Mistral, we're XAI, we're Glean, we're Pika, Abridged. Diversified. We've got the AI hits. Love it. Got the hits. Talk about your journey. What were you doing before? yeah i was at red point for the last four years uh building the platform team wow poached trade deal oh we love our logan bartlett yeah he's fantastic that's two and one all the content we built there that is exceptional they're going to continue to absolutely crush um but this was just an incredible opportunity i think when i was younger i was chief digital officer at nasdaq and i worked on, you named the IPO, I worked on it.

1:14:06And Lightspeed had just always been that kind of aspirational venture firm for me. I got to work on the Nutanix IPO. I did AppDynamics. And then the night before AppDynamics was going to go public, they got acquired by Cisco and I had to take things made. This was the firm that I wanted to work at when I was that age. And it's just such an honor to even have been considered for their CMO role. And I'm just very, very thankful to Robbie and Bajal and Ramon and the whole Lightspeed team for giving the trust in me to shepherd this incredible brand into the future. Give us the master plan. Tell all.

1:14:48And we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, no, no, tell it. Exactly the same stuff we did at Redpoint. because that wouldn't be any fun. But look, I wouldn't be here on TBPN if it wasn't a new media landscape. You guys have changed the game, like created a way for founders to tell their story in an authentic way without like shock journalism of being asked about like crazy news that doesn't apply to what they do and actually having deep questions of people that understand venture-backed businesses and how they grow. I think we're in a new landscape of just finding ways for founders to tell their story in a compelling way.

1:15:28And that's the same kind of stuff we're going to be building at Lightspeed. We'll obviously not be copycatting TPPN, but we've got a lot of stuff. We'll be really forward on TikTok and Instagram, as you could imagine. But yeah, we'll be everywhere. So Redpoint, I mean, you guys must have been getting millions of views on Instagram on your account there for like a long time. Like how valuable has that been as a channel? Because I feel like X is like especially noisy with like venture, right? You have tech Twitter. It's like, you know, every single day there's funds and companies piling in to try to get the word out on what they're doing and their strategy and thesis and all that stuff.

1:16:13But Instagram is like relatively, it's not an area that we've focused a huge amount on. But how important do you think that is as a platform for investors? Yeah, I mean, Instagram was really the tip of our sphere at Redpoint, right? Like when I joined, of course, they didn't have an Instagram. And then I had to get the keys to it from the Instagram team and start building. But I think, you know, when I started it, people thought I was kind of crazy. And they're like, this is going to be good for the Redpoint brand. And then, you know, it very quickly changed when you go to a pitch meeting and the founder goes, love your TikTok guy or that video is so relatable.

1:16:53Like it just creates a brand affinity that you just can't buy. And I felt like a lot of firms were a little scared to dip their toe into Instagram. But, you know, quite a few have followed us there and and very proud of what the team will continue to build there. But it really is an important channel. And I think that the great news is that's where founders are in this decade, right? Like today's founders are on Instagram and TikTok. Like, yes, X is still the place to share the clips, but that's where people consume their content. And so I felt like while it was an unlikely channel for success for a VC firm, I think it's actually really important because it's like the place that everybody actually goes to just have a good time.

1:17:39Do you see venture funds eventually following the same path as other financial institutions in terms of advertising and, let's say, like print media, right? You can imagine like BlackRock will run, you know, a print advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, right? Do you ever see, do you think that's an interesting way to potentially build the brand with, I don't know, that many founders that read the journal, at least as religiously as us, but certainly there has to be, in the role of CMO, you have to be marketing to founders, but also LPs, right? yeah well actually interestingly my gig at nasdaq when i was pitching ipos for a living that was something we would put in every single proposal you get like a full page ad in the wall street journal but i think today's founders that that resonates as much i think honestly they're better off buying a piece of your hat on tbp than they are like buying a page in the journal like spend that money on on instagram advertising and tiktok ads and well i meant i meant more i meant more for for you at light speed like i think it would be iconic for light speed to have a page in the journal that says like look at all like we are in all the ai winners like that light speed is ai with just like the list of companies that we're in yeah get ready we're uh we will be on every media platform legacy media still has a very special place in my heart it's like you know i i spent a decade on the floor of that exchange working with every media outlet to help get companies as much noise as we can make them around an IPO.

1:19:18How is, how, how do you think, like, how is the, the, how is like IPO marketing changed over the last decade since you were at NASDAQ? I mean, we have so much activity this week. We were at, we were at the Klarna IPO yesterday, which honestly felt incredibly quiet in comparison to Figma, which, which was actually, we figured out it was intentional. the founder was like really celebrating back in Sweden right so he just came in he didn't even bring his family he just handled business and got out of there and then you had Figma which very much was like a celebration of of of they have an office in New York they have an office in New York but it was a celebration of like the entire community it was really like an event it felt like a festival just in Manhattan probably tons of Figma but uh but yeah like broadly yeah how do you think that that landscape has shifted well that was the fun thing about that gig I got to work with every great CEO, CFO and CMO, and you kind of get to see them almost in like, what is their Super Bowl for the company and how they perform at the top of their game.

1:20:21Sometimes people are looking for that more muted response that I think you saw with Klarna, which I just think is like stylistically that company. But I think if you're looking for IPO excellence, what Figma did and what they pulled off, what, you know, some of the VC firms that helped them behind the scenes on their comms. It was a massive win for noise making. And I think it was kind of the gold standard for what you expect from an IPO. I think the thing is, is a lot of companies don't realize that this is your one day to make the noise because you've got the quiet period before and you've got it afterwards.

1:21:01And so really you have to squeeze as much juice out of the fruit that you can. And what I would always advise companies to do is spend every dollar you can across the, you know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, promoting the fact that you went public, because this is your opportunity to tell those enterprise customers who weren't necessarily ready to sign on to you when you were a private company, no matter the size, that you're ready for that. It's the best branding ever to be like, yeah, we're a public company. We're public. It's on par with a great.com. Probably more significant. A great ticker.

1:21:47Works well. How are you thinking about positioning Lightspeed in the venture ecosystem? I feel like there's a couple funds that have carved out like kind of just very clear definitions of like, okay, we're a crossover hedge fund, we have Publix, and then we have a growth fund. But like, we're not even trying to be known for early stage, maybe we write some seed check. And like, just getting that clear message of like, when to call what fund, I feel like is the first job to do of a VC marketing arm, maybe. How are you thinking about either narrowing or expanding or like defining the definition of like, what is Lightspeed?

1:22:32How does it fit in? How is it different? That's a great question. Look, I think actually it was one of the things that drew me to Lightspeed. When I was on the floor of the exchange as a young guy, like companies were going public in like seven years. And then while I was working there, it became 10 years and I'm chasing companies for, you know, from series B for like seven years before they would go public with us. And now it's 15. And I think honestly, Lightspeed strategy is what attracted me to it because literally we support companies from seed through IPO and beyond. And I think that focus of saying, we are going to be great early stage investors, and then we're going to take the ones that are really winning, apply our full muscle to giving them all the tools that we can give them for an unfair advantage as they, you know, go up against the Goliaths in their industry, and then bring them through IPO and provide them that added lift that they need.

1:23:40in those later growth rounds, I think it's a really unique offer that is quite differentiated in the venture space. And actually that multi-stage thing is why I'm here, right? Like I get to give early stage companies the noise making. I get to help the late stage companies with their IPO prep. It's truly like a dream job to go in and take this into the future. And we're going to be doing a lot of branding about why that model is so different than everybody else. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is great. Congratulations on the new gig. I'm looking forward to my TBPN traded card.

1:24:21Can I get that? Oh yeah, for sure. We'll work on it. We'll work on it. Logan, Logan, we might have to use it. I don't know if we want to upset Jeff Brody. I mean, he did go to my high school, so yeah, I got to keep things friendly over there. I know you've got some other Lightspeed people coming up too. Yeah, yeah. We'll get buddies with Bucky. We'll have him on soon. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Josh. Congrats. Thanks, guys. Bye. See ya. Quickly, let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. It's super intelligence for sales tax. They said if they build it, everyone will spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

1:25:02Anyway, I think we have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room, Nico Rosberg. We will bring you back to the studio. Nico, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Can you hear us? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We got a bit of lag. Oh, we got some backgrounds. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Hello. Testing, testing. One, two, three. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Let's try and get him on the call. In the meantime, let me tell you about fin.ai. the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive, number one ranking on G2.

1:25:44Also, people having fun memeing the AirPods 3 live translation. It immediately became a meme format. I was disappointed that I couldn't workshop one in time to get a banger up, but people were having a lot of fun with it. I just like this picture, this picture being like, hola, and it just says, hello. What does hola mean? Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this. So hola is a Spanish word for hello. Okay. So if I pay$300, put in my headphones, you would translate that. You would be able to do that. Yeah. It is incredible technology. I mean, the whole, you know, I have no idea how to kind of judge Duolingo as a public company and what the fair market value of Duolingo is.

1:26:28But I do think there is like, studying language has never been about. um yeah i mean i shouldn't say it never but it's like for 90 percent of people is not about the like practicality it's about stimulating your mind and and yeah new things and and um yeah even if this existed i still would have done years of wikipedia exists and like founders podcast exists and they're very different products like they can both tell me what what what was larry ellison up to in the 90s. And when the Oracle news broke, I actually went to both. I looked at the Oracle wiki, and I also listened to the Founders podcast on Larry Ellison.

1:27:12And they're very different. And I feel like Duolingo plays this fun game thing. Tyler, what's your take on Duolingo versus the AirPods 3? Well, so about the AirPods, unless both parties have them, then it's not that useful, right? Because if you only speak Spanish, I only speak English, you're talking to me. I can't reply. There are a variety of ways to use it with one person. So if I'm going around, you speak to me. And then when I speak, it can go into an app on my phone and I can just hit play and it will play the audio from my phone or it will show you words. So if you're speaking Spanish, I'm hearing English and my phone as I'm talking is displaying Spanish text.

1:27:50And so I can actually hand you my phone and you can read what I'm saying in English in Spanish. So they've thought of some of the stuff. It still does seem like there's a little bit of a technological handshake going on where I need to say, hola, would you like to use AirPods Pro 3? See if you can translate this. Let's put... See if you can translate this Mandarin. Well, hun shiwan, pijo. Of course. I would like a beer, please. Close. I really enjoy beer. I really enjoy beer generally, of course. Yes, this will be huge for ordering a night brewski. Noah Smith called it the universal translator from Star Trek.

1:28:30Yeah, it's very cool. Vitalik said it can't translate arbitrary alien languages it hears for the first time with only a tiny sample, though. Although maybe what happened in Star Trek is that every species realized that it's a good idea to expose a clean API that blurts out like one terabyte of all your historical cultural works. And that is enough to generate the embeddings for their language. I've seen AI work before that suggests that if you have the embeddings for two languages, you only need a very small amount of translated word pairs to find the mapping between the two. Not sure if this holds for languages that evolved in totally separate worlds, but maybe it still does for convergent evolution reasons, and that gets you a translator.

1:29:12And so it ships, and so ships just always scan for, give me a terabyte of your culture API, and always end up finding it. That's very funny. uh speaking of uh alien languages tyler you were mentioning that we discovered alien life on mars or it was fake what was your take on that uh you were saying that the moon landing's fake and you don't believe in the moon landing right you don't believe in space you said that off mic and you didn't want me to talk more about space is fake yeah space is fake going up high is fake planes when you get in a plane rocket why do they always have the windows down it's because they're changing out the set decoration around you that's right just get on the plane you sit there for six hours while they rebuild the city around you you get off and then you're in the new york oh i'm in new york city oh really oh i traveled just thousands of miles i moved thousands of miles put the boards up yeah okay i'll believe what i see yeah right uh anyway uh what was the news nasa got a photo i thought i how is there a new photo on on mars the rover's just going around yeah okay so the rover's going around looking for stuff wait can we pull up the found we pull up It's in the deck.

1:30:18It's later in the deck. So who took the photo? The rover. The rover of itself, like kind of like selfie stick. Yeah, the rover has like a 360 cam on the end of an arm. And there's someone who gives instructions, I think like once a day, because there's such a delay to get the message there, that they say the rover's kind of semi-autonomous. Then they say, hey, go look around over here. The chat just to defend Tyler's honor. He is not a flatterer. Tyler is not a flatterer. We're just joking around. We're just joking around. Anyway, we believe we have our next guest, Nico Rosberg. How are you doing, Nico?

1:30:52Hey. How's it going, guys? Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. How are you doing? Thanks a lot. Pleasure to be here. I'm doing good, thank you. You're catching me in Monaco. Monaco, man. I've grown up here. Fantastic. Classic. How is it this time of year? Actually, it's lovely because it's kind of still summer. Still really warm, and we're still enjoying the outside, going to the promenade, going to the pool with the kids, because I have two kids. They're seven and nine. Wow. And they just started school again after the summer, but still really warm here.

1:31:22So it's lovely. South of France is beautiful. That's fantastic. What about you guys? We've been traveling a lot. We were in New York City yesterday, San Francisco, the day before for the Klarna IPO and then Y Combinator Demo Day and then back to LA. So a little bit too much travel, a little frazzled. Yeah, I don't know how you, I don't know how drivers actually do this, right? Just because when we go on the road for 48 hours with that kind of pace, it really throws everything off. But we're here.

1:31:55Anyway, can you give us a little bit of backstory on your path to venture from your racing career? Yeah, sure. So obviously it's not the most natural switch, yeah? And racing career, yeah, I was at it for 20 years. You start when you're 10 years old. And then I ended up winning the Formula One World Championship at the age of 31 with the Mercedes team. Thank you very much. Lovely to hear that. And I did the pretty extreme thing of retiring like five days after I won the championship. Because it just felt like my dream was complete. I achieved what I set out to do. And it's an insane, I mean, all the founders listening, it's an insane lifestyle.

1:32:42to pursue relentlessly your goal, just like for founders, but it's the same for athletes. It's really, really madly intense. And so I was quite happy that it was all achieved and I just wanted to move on to the next life. But then I had no clue what to do. So I was really searching a lot of things. And now it's nine years after. Before you dive into that, do you have any idea what percentage of drivers that end up as a Formula One driver actually even podium at any point in their career? Isn't it extremely low? Yeah, I'm sure it is. I don't know the exact numbers, obviously, but if I had to guess, it would probably be less than 10%, around 10%, if I had to guess now.

1:33:28That's just a wild guess now. And then, of course, in terms of world champions, There's 30, 34 or 35 world champions in the 70 year history of the sport. And there's been there's been thousands of F1 racers. You know, so it's a it's an extremely small percentage. So, yeah. Talk about the transition to investing. I've heard a little bit of the path and it is unconventional. But when I heard it explained, it made perfect sense. But I'd love to hear it from you. No, it's just, I mean, I've always appreciated the startup world a lot. When I retired, mobility was just going through this extreme transition.

1:34:09Suddenly there was like autonomous driving, there was connectivity, shared mobility, and it was all kicking off exactly when I retired. And I was the mobility world champion. So it's kind of natural for me. You're good at getting around. Yeah, it was kind of natural to take a first look there. And Mercedes also helped me out because they were investing in startups. So I got going that way, really loved it, was fascinated. And it's been a journey ever since. It's been up and down. And now finally, I kind of found my venture capital North Star. And I'm building Rosberg Ventures now, which is a venture capital asset manager.

1:34:47And we have multiple products, strategies, but very much focused on the U.S. So it's kind of bridging Europe with U.S. That's really our big focus. And, yeah, I'm really excited. And so that means sort of like European LP base, but investing in America. Yeah, that's exactly, yeah. That's one facet of it. But also then the European corporates, connecting them with the breakout generational startups in the U.S. Makes sense. Because there's a great connectivity between the startups in the US and the corporates in the US. But sometimes that link to the European and German corporates is quite weak.

1:35:30And also, surprisingly, like the German large caps, they don't have a very deep understanding of what's going on in the US venture capital landscape. So there's a great opportunity for us to add value in creating those connections. And as you know, to win... What's the openness to partnering with, like, if you're a German, you know, multi-billion dollar company, what's the openness to even using products from startups? Is it high, low? So it really depends. I mean, one of our most famous car manufacturers, I'm not going to say the name, but the likes of BMW, Mercedes, etc. We're working with them and we're introducing startups.

1:36:15And then the other day they said, sorry, we have no more budget to explore. And you're like, OK, but you guys are facing insane, like insane threats from Tesla, China. And you're telling us here that you don't have budget to explore transformational solutions from the startup landscape. Yeah, the point of enterprise software for the most part is help people save money or help people make money. Ideally do both. Exactly. So actually, we brought them a tool that is going to analyze their whole procurement contracts and everything. and they actually, their revenues are only, they are part of the cost savings that they generate.

1:37:07Yeah, and then this car manufacturer, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, whatever, they're like, oh, okay, so we don't need to invest anything up front here. They just take a cut from the savings that they generate for us on procurement. And then they're like, okay, this is great. This we'll definitely have a look at. So it depends. But anyways, in general, there's a great readiness, which is reassuring nonetheless, but they're not really like very in depth at the moment in understanding what's coming in terms of transformation. AI, you know, it's a big, big challenge, as you know, for enterprises to adopt that.

1:37:43Outside of the corporates, what is the family office or ultra high net worth individual landscape look like out in Europe? Are they more risk on now? Are these the type of folks that you met through your F1 career that became LPs eventually? Yeah, sure. It's many of the families that I got to know in racing that were like big sponsors or even the car manufacturers. So that's kind of the link back to my racing, which is nice for me as well. And in general, it's very risk-off in Europe compared to America, which is a real weakness. Because risk doesn't even necessarily have to be risk. If you have a long-term time horizon, even something like the NASDAQ becomes low risk, even though on a three-month horizon, it's a high-risk investment.

1:38:31And that's the one thing, that's the thing that the Europeans, yeah, I don't know, they don't really get that right. They're very conservative, but in a bad way. So very often, they hardly, like the endowments, they hardly beat inflation. But there was the high inflation, they were hardly beating, or not even beating inflation. It was pretty shocking. But for me, it's awesome also because I can take all my learnings now from sports into this venture capital business that I'm building. And one of the main things, like us athletes, I think we're pretty good at this relentless pursuit of our goals.

1:39:05Like second place just does not exist. Giving up does not exist. It's like absolutely, it's pretty insane. And I think that's one really big strength of ours, which is really appreciated in the venture capital ecosystem. Because, of course, the best founders are exactly the same. Yeah. Talk to me about some of those best founders, the relentless, the risk takers, the ones who don't accept second place. Who do you look up to in the American entrepreneurship world or see someone where maybe they didn't, maybe they weren't built for F1. but you think they could have done well if they were a racer?

1:39:46Well, that's a hard question now. I have no idea. I mean, the racing skill is hand-eye coordination. Okay, sure. But what about at a more abstract level? The foundation of everything. Then, of course, in terms of being relentless in the pursuit of winning, there's many, many examples. And I'm personally involved with the likes, for example, I'm a personal investor in Applied Intuition. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was fantastic. he's fantastic there is a is a like he's a he's a machine as well you know i mean it's like unbelievable the energy and the determination and grit um or or some european companies examples are like 11 labs oh yeah which i'm personally invested in or or lovable yeah um and like lovable anton is also a pretty extreme pretty extreme in terms of the level of commitment but but i'm also excited you know by now i really have really cool portfolio also in terms of my personal investing.

1:40:42And yeah, it's just, it's, it's great to see how, how these companies are, are growing and unfolding. Yep. Uh, how have you, um, what, it feels like over the last few years, uh, founders have started to sort of adopt the, the health practices or the approach to health that, that athletes do. Um, there's been a bunch of viral stuff recently people joking around about this what uh has there been uh what was sort of most most impactful for for your performance during your driving career that you still apply to building like a venture firm from a health standpoint yeah i mean so i was really quite a perfectionist when it came to preparing myself in the best possible way so i've been through everything i had a psychologist working with me i did two hours of psychology and philosophy every two days like i was absolutely flat out on this because i could feel and it was obvious that i had more i had capacity to improve mentally as an athlete i was under pressure you know scared worried distracted and all these all these things um so there was a lot of capacity there for me to improve and and i found incredible incredible progress mentally um and so i did a lot of meditation.

1:42:03I simplified my life. I removed all emailing, news, everything was gone. Instagram, social media, there was nothing on my telephone on my pursuit to become a world champion. So it was really quite extreme. Would you do caffeine or any stimulants or does that just throw you off in terms of, you know, we've seen like Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do caffeine. And I could imagine in a driving setting, you're just like a slightly more twitchy or nervous because of caffeine and you crash the car and your race is over. Yeah, no. So I didn't do caffeine also because the problem I have is when I take caffeine, I can't sleep at night.

1:42:43So that would be counterproductive. then even like for example when it came to jet lag i have i had a harvard sleep professor working with me who actually now has created an app based on what we had been pursuing at the time which is called time shifter and it actually was app store app of the day it has like a million subscribers by now it's like becoming quite a success um and this this harvard sleep professor was was supporting me at the time and i did a whole year with no jet lag you were saying before earlier how traveling is destroying you and you don't know you don't know how the athletes do it i think um so and i did a whole year no jet lag so it was all about like one and a half hour steps per day maximum in time zone shift even before you start traveling the last five days you leave home one and a half hour steps blackout glasses 10 000 blocks like brian johnson in the morning first thing all these tools and it was incredible it was incredible to do a whole year traveling continents, no jet lag.

1:43:44So it's really all these things that it's just really, essentially what it is, it's putting together all the little details, incremental gains and focusing on them. Because you all know that many incremental gains are a huge progress. And sometimes we kind of neglect them and are lazy and don't focus on the small steps as well. And that was probably strength of mind, which I'm now taking into venture capital as well. Just all the details, putting them together. It comes back to being relentless again. What's your read on the state of F1 broadly? It feels like from an American perspective, Drive to Survive was a big moment.

1:44:28Cadillac has an F1 team joining next year. There's a few other milestones and key storylines but uh what's captured your attention over the past few years in the story of f1 broadly my attention has been how f1 has managed to conquer america yeah and 40 of the new fans are women so it's almost like 50 50 male women uh male female yeah which is uh which is so cool and yeah and this is a big change and it's all it's thanks to netflix it's thanks to social media they've opened up social media in my time social media wasn't even allowed 9 years ago because it was taking eyeballs off the television product but actually it's a multiplier so that was a bit short sighted and it's Liberty Media who owns F1 who's done such a great job and Netflix has been so powerful because they actually managed to capture the humans behind F1 and it's like a reality TV show rather than a documentary And that's what we love.

1:45:30We love to see emotions. We love to identify with the connect with the humans behind the sport. And they just managed to do such a great job. So that's really what I'm what I'm finding so cool is how our sport is growing, developing. The excitement is growing. Super, super thrilling. How are you thinking about the rollout of autonomous vehicles over the next 5 to 10 to 20 years, even over the long term? Is it something you spend a lot of time trying to invest against, any type of thesis? So I invested in a remote control driving solution, so teledriving. And at one point we were like, oh, this is going to go wrong because we're going to full autonomy now.

1:46:15but it looks like someone like Tesla is actually having much more troubles than they perhaps expected two or three years ago. And especially in the edge cases, they're still having too many issues. So, and, you know, they had to launch their robotaxis with safety drivers in their cars, etc., etc. And the question is still there. Is their camera-only solution actually ever going to be good enough? yes they're learning on millions of miles every year but can the camera solution only deal with all these edge cases of fog and rain and and snow and etc etc so there's there's still a very very big question mark and and no one really knows then on the then you have the waymo which certainly is better tech but of course unit economics i mean it's super expensive hardware per car so how scalable is that also difficult still to judge at this point even though they seem to be going strong at the moment but uh yeah so it's really not clear yet uh who's gonna be the eventual winner there but it's um yeah again fascinating time but it will take some some more time for us to finally know who wins and then the worry though is um like europe europe for example unfortunately is almost missing out completely on this value creation um because they don't have they they don't they're going to end up like the mobile phones that just became hardware.

1:47:40So the system was done by Android or Apple and then they just became hardware suppliers. That's a threat for the European car manufacturers because they won't have the autonomy. I wonder if they'll even have the connectivity to their customers. But isn't applied intuition could potentially save them? In terms of that interface connecting to the customer who's riding on board, etc. So a very tough moment for European car manufacturers, and also, honestly, many of the American car manufacturers. They're pretty much in the same situation, yeah. We have Formula One. We have Formula E, which showcases electric vehicles.

1:48:30Do you think we'll ever see Formula A to showcase autonomous vehicles? So we had that already. That was Robo Race, I think it was called. They're still somewhat slower than us, like 15 seconds a lap or something, 10 seconds a lap. So it's going to take some more time there, too. I don't know if that's because we love the gladiators, the humans in the sport. And if it's just tech racing each other, I don't know if that. Of course, it will confine its niche, but I don't think it's going to be a huge, fascinating global success story. Who are you guys rooting for in F1? Well, I'm super interested in this.

1:49:09We've seen the benchmarks of human versus AI in so many different categories. And I want to know when an autonomous vehicle will put up like a sub-seven-minute Nürburgring time. And it seems like it might be years. It might be a long time, actually. Especially if it was a manual. Yes, especially if it's a manual, and it has to be driven by a humanoid. So you can't just plug in like you do with a Waymo. You have to actually put the physical robot in the seat. The robot has to buckle itself in. Very dexterous, very difficult to slide into a cockpit properly. Do you have any favorite? I'm impressed you know your Nürburgring times.

1:49:50I'm very impressed. So Nürburgring, for all the viewers, it's the greatest racetrack in the world. And it's this crazy 15-kilometer roller coaster through the forest in the middle of Germany. And it's called the Green Hell and all car manufacturers set benchmark lap times there. And if you manage to break the record, you've got global news and everything. So it's a very, very important racetrack. I haven't driven it myself. Is it, but I did the last time I was really, I mean, obviously we'll watch when the manufacturers are doing lap times, but the last time I saw footage from, I saw a GT3 RS get just absolutely destroyed on the track.

1:50:33Is it safe to go out and just do public laps or would you stay away from something like that? I'm sure when you want to race. I wouldn't do it. I would be scared. It's the craziest racetrack in the world. And you have a bunch of people from all over the world coming and just like they want to go fast. They want to go fast. Yeah, of course. But it's very, very dangerous. So I'll be careful with that. Yeah. What else are you tracking in the automotive world broadly?

1:51:04Have you been tracking what's happening in China? Are there any other interesting dynamics with any of the upstarts? I feel like most of these companies are post startup rounds at this point with Rivian and being public at this point. But have you have you been tracking any just future next generation OEMs? So I was in China recently and shocking. You know how Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, I can't remember how you're supposed to say it. They have they have the Porsche Taycan. Yeah. Yeah. The electric, their electric superstar. Yeah. And then you go to China and there's Xiaomi who has this, I don't even know what Xiaomi is called.

1:51:45I think it's the Su7 is the one you're thinking of. The Su7 looks exactly like the Cayenne. And I rode in this car. So first of all, the Taycan is$120 ,000 or$130 ,000. This thing is$40 ,000. And it looks the same. So they just copy the look of it. And I get in and like five years ago, seven years ago, the interior quality then was rubbish. Everything was cracking. Felt like it was going to fall apart. and then you start driving and the drive that the handling also then feels rubbish and now i'm in this the interior quality is perfection it's just beautiful it drives awesomely has more power than the porsche ticcan has more range than the porsche ticcan um so it was proper scary i was like oh my god like what this is this is like this shocking and then let me just finish you would say okay but Porsche still has their brand.

1:52:35But even that is gone because the Xiaomi founder is a rock star in China. He's like the Elon Musk of China. He has a huge social media following. So even the brand moat is gone in China. So it feels like it's just complete game over there. And it's happening, but they're coming to Europe too, which is so scary. Now BYD just overtook Tesla as the best selling electric car in Europe. So it's a really watershed moment and super critical moment for the automotive sector. And then in terms of startups, I think I'm not seeing much at the moment really. Yeah, it's really capex intensive and a lot of those businesses have...

1:53:20I mean, even BYD, for example. So if you look at BYD and NIO, I believe, they got 10 billion in government subsidies in order for them to get to where they are now in terms of taking on the world. But that is never going to happen in Europe. You're never going to have the European government supporting a startup with 10 billion in order to become global electric vehicle manufacturing leaders. So yeah, tough to compete against that, isn't it? Last question from my side. Did you have a reaction? Did you see the F1 movie? Did you have a reaction to Apple's F1 movie? what do you think if you saw it?

1:54:00Yeah, so the honest answer is I haven't seen it yet because I was holding out to see it with my wife and that didn't work out for some reason, whatever. Yeah, you have kids. It's natural. We're still holding out and we're probably going to do a cinema night at our house here in Monaco with any friends left that have not yet seen it. Maybe we'll do a cinema night next week or something. But I hear great things. Of course, it's Hollywood, it's fake, but I hear great things. And it was amazing. I was at the racetrack and Brad Pitt was on the real grid just before the race starts with his race car.

1:54:33And he had a real garage in the pit lane with his race car, like at the real race, like the race start. And he's there. Like, it's so crazy how they put that together. And then with augmented virtual reality, they overlaid his car onto one of the real racing cars in the race. It's pretty impressive. So anyways, I hear good things and I think it's a great, great step again for, for F1. Yeah. Total American F1 dominance. What are you, what are you guys most excited about in the startup world? What's the last thing that you've seen, which, which you're raving about? Ooh, that's really hard to put on the spot.

1:55:12In the startup world at the earliest stages, I mean, we've been seeing a lot of folks work on new AI hardware devices. And there was one that just put out a video about where it looks like headphones, but it measures the electrical signals in your jaw. And so you're just whispering. you're not even making any noise, but you're talking like making mouth movements and it can transcribe that into an app. Or so I can be talking to you across a crowded room and you can hear me and I can hear you, but no one else can hear us. And if you imagine about voice interfaces in the future where you're talking to ChatGPT or any LLM all day long, being able to do that in a public place or randomly that feels like that could be the next like big thing there's a rumor that sam altman's working on that with johnny ives so that was something where it's like there's going to be a new wave of some sort of input technology pre-neuralink but yeah on my side uh this has been such an insane year on so many levels you have geopolitical chaos you have warfare you have assassinations tragedies uh there's so much uncertainty there's so much negativity in the world and from our point of view we get to interview talented builders every single day we've interviewed hundreds of of founders this year and that is like the bright spot to me is like across every industry and and any sector that's important to the world there are bright uh bright optimistic people that are dedicating their lives to solving problems from logistics to autonomous vehicles to new consumer hardware.

1:57:06Like any category, there are bright people that are dedicating their lives. And so I think that's like the white pill for me is when I think about how chaotic and crazy the world. And there's a lot of, like John said, tragedy. but at the same time, there's people at an individual level are committed to changing the world. And so I think it's much easier to be incredibly optimistic about the future and not give in to the doom when you have our job. And I know it's the same for you as well in terms of meeting talented people that are dedicating their lives to solving real problems in the world. Yeah, I mean, it's lovely.

1:57:48There's so much hope in the startup world. so much ambition um it's really really impressive by the way i met the founder that you were talking about with that uh device uh on the year i know him yeah i know him very well and uh kleiner perkins which is like perhaps one of the i mean the best uh vc firm at the moment or one of the best yeah uh they're backing him fantastic so i i know i know him well i think you i wonder if you just uh but that's that's amazing yeah i mean uh yeah how often do you visit come on we don't know you didn't mention any names or anything we're all yeah yeah we know nothing it's uh just a rumor um how often do you come to the u.s so i have to i mean of course uh yeah it's important for me to be there so i'm there about uh once every two three months so quite a lot coming there quite a lot yeah well next time you're in la i love hosting at f1 races also so I'm constantly hosting all your friends from the Bay Area and New York also at the races so I host everybody in Miami hosting everybody again now at Vegas which is lovely it's very cool that's amazing well thank you so much for taking the time on a late evening to chat with us we had a lot of fun talking to you come back on anytime yeah we'd love to talk to you I just got an email in my top right corner where I'm going to find out if I get accepted to one of the very best funds in the US and now I'm going to click on it.

1:59:14Amazing. It's been a five-day fight with all-nighters and everything because of technical complications, whatever. Yes. Because it's so hard. They're like, everybody's like 2x oversubscribed. It's like crazy times in the US. Do you want to open it live? Open the email. Give us the reaction. If I get a negative, if I get a negative. Thanks for your patience. Can you still? Oh, man. We are going ahead. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yes. Can you still see me, actually? Yes, yes, we can. We did it. We did it. We did it. Hit the golf. Congratulations. We got a fund allocation for Rosberg Ventures. Let's go. Congratulations.

2:00:01We were going to end the show. Yeah, we were going to give them a call. And we were going to drive to Sand Hill and say, correct this right now. This is an injustice. That is fantastic news. Congratulations. Let me narrow it down for you as well who it was. Come on, at least for some fun. It's between something like Thrive, Axel, Green Oaks, or Elad Field. Oh, these are great firms. It's one of those four. Okay, those are great firms. Let's go. Shout out to all the absolute boys. Amazing. Well, you should get the other three too. Yeah, get the full stack. We'll make some calls. Maybe we have all of them already.

2:00:37Thank you so much for hopping on the show. This is fantastic. Yeah, great to hang back on. Have a good one. Talk soon. Bye. High stakes. High stakes. He lives his life on the edge. That's a real F1 driver move to open a potential rejection email. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Really quickly. Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI day of CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. we have our next guest two-timer we got Michael with the TBPN hat great sign of respect I gotta do my part guys I didn't have one of the hats we will get you one one day near we were oversubscribed actually I think we made a couple hundred of them and not nearly enough but thank you so much for hopping on the stream let's just kick it off with some intros for those who are listening Nir, take it away.

2:01:39Take it away, Nir. I'm Nir Zickerman. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Oboe. And the other co-founder is my good friend, Mike, here. What's up, guys? Great to be back. Obviously, we've spoken a number of times. I'm one of the co-founders of Oboe and also a partner at Lightspeed. And Nir and I had previously co-founded Anchor, which we sold to Spotify. No way. Putting the gang back together. 200. I love it. anyways let's get let's get into the news so you guys launched uh are you guys uh what's the product how are you positioning is it a bit yeah is it a beta is it is it is it GA what's going on yeah so we're out there oboe is uh is live to the world and it is the easiest way to learn anything so you come to our website oboe.fyi single prompt we will magically create a course to teach anyone anything when i say anything i really mean anything mike and i were talking earlier what was the example we had we had uh you could learn about how to cook pasta and you could learn about the quantum physics of why of how cooking pasta works if you wanted to so truly a broad range of of topics um and with oboe courses we learn in a variety of different ways right so you come in again we magically create a course and it is made up of everything from the ability to read about the topic, short form, long form, to listen to a podcast about it, two hosts like yourselves talking about whatever the topic, completely personalized to the user.

2:03:09We have games, we have quizzes, a totally immersive experience to let you learn. Yeah. I saw a screenshot from none other than Martin Screlly saying this was very cool. And it showed, I mean, it felt like a lot of the Anchor DNA was in there in the sense of, When I think about Anchor, it's like you have an MP3 and you need it on a lot of different, and you need to instantiate it in many different ways. Distribution is multi-platform. And you have essentially like some sort of deep research project going on under collecting information, organizing with LLMs, I'm sure, but then instantiating it in a summary, a deep dive, an audio product.

2:03:48So talk about the multimodality, where you see that going in the near term. when are we gonna get video in here at some point? I could imagine with VO3 and some of the advances there, eventually you'll be able to just like sit in on a one hour generated video lecture, if that's what you want. I don't know if anyone wants that long-term, but where do you see all the different multi-modalities going? I actually think a lot of people do want video. It's in the works, we are working on it. And to me, I mean, people spend hours on YouTube constantly trying to learn and explore curiosities. The reality is people are online learning constantly.

2:04:23You just don't think about it as learning. You're on tons of different websites, tons of different apps, trying to figure out, understanding things in the news, understanding what you read, you're curious about things and you want to dig in. People do not learn in one path and they don't learn with one format. So a core philosophy of ours is if you're going to build a learning platform, you have to learn it the way that people actually learn. and the way that people actually learn is multimodal, right? It's immersive. Mike, what do you want to add? Yeah, I mean, look, I think the beauty of the multimodality is it lets people learn on their terms.

2:04:58One of the reasons we started this company is we sort of looked at education and we looked at learning and we realized that the way people learn right now is too rigid. It's too one size fits all, right? You have higher education and traditional education teaching every single person on the planet the same thing in the same exact way. And that's just not how we all learn. We all learn in different ways. Some of us like to read, some of us like to listen, some of us like to watch TikTok. And so what we realized is we have this technology now that can personalize learning for anyone on the planet.

2:05:29And so it would be a shame to not actually do that and make the most personalized form of education ever before. How are you thinking about gamification. I seem to remember you guys had badges in the first app and to kind of help someone get over the curve of actually distributing a show. We're seeing both resilience and the stocks all over the place with Duolingo, but it feels like Duolingo has done a great job of taking an education product and making it fun and repetitive and maybe even a little addictive. And it seems like that is a piece of the goal, but how do you think about the various trade-offs there?

2:06:06Look, I think gamification is key. I think the main reason gamification is key and accessibility and making it fun is key is because learning is intimidating. Yeah. Most people who want to learn something new, they look at how you do it and they just get intimidated and they turn away. And that's why so much of what we've built and what we'll continue to build is around making it really digestible, really piecemeal. Like Mike said, putting it in the control of the user so that they could decide how they want to navigate things. I think any course on Oboe should be presented to a user today and in the future as you can do this.

2:06:37We're going to help guide you through it. Right. But we're going to put enough tools in your hands so that you could be the one to guide the system and let it know how to effectively teach you. How do you how are you guys thinking about solving for hallucinations? If if if I if you know, if you can remember a teacher that taught you something and it was wrong, it's like it just completely destroys the trust. like it's hard to you're like you said that this event happened in 1970 and it actually happened in 1950 yeah yeah i mean what would what would we be as a 2025 ai startup without a multi-agent architecture right near let's give it up explain our multi-agent architecture let me let me tell you about our multi-agent architecture uh look the big challenge and a lot of what we spent resources is on over the last year of building this thing was on how do you present to the user really high quality engaging content that is accurate extremely quickly because for this content to be lightweight and accessible it has to happen fast right so the way that this works under the hood is like this I think the honestly the toughest challenge is an orchestration challenge it's how do you simultaneously have an agent generating you know the skeleton of the course and the references that it's going to pull in and the script for the audio and fact check all this stuff agents correcting other agents and all that happens within seconds of you generating a course, and it's going to continue to get better.

2:07:57Uh, what hallucinations I think are, uh, reality is I think right now people primarily learn through resources that are completely unchecked. And so, uh, I think one of the biggest advantage that advantages that we want to invest in is making sure that when people come here, they feel confident that they're getting the highest quality and the most accurate. Well, congratulations on the launch. I'm excited to try it out. My challenge for you. I don't know if either of you play the oboe. You need to use oboe to learn to play the oboe. You need to dog food your own product. Next time we have you on the show, I expect a solo on the oboe.

2:08:30Oboe solo. Oboe solo. Let's make it happen. I think it's a great idea. You should. Guys, let me just say one more thing, if you don't mind. I know you got another guest coming on. We are investing a lot of money in AI. We've invested like what, a trillion dollars at this point or something. It seems crazy to us that we have invested so much money into a technology that's going to make an alien life form that's actually smarter than us. And so the whole purpose of this company is to actually use the artificial intelligence to make the humans smarter. That's what we're trying to do here. It's actually let's pour that investment back into human intelligence.

2:09:03All right? We're bringing human intelligence back. Organic intelligence. Farm to table. That's right. Farm to table intelligence. I'm excited to check it out. We cover hundreds of topics a show. There's often times where we're coming into a show and we have like 10 minutes to prep on something that we know nothing about. And I have a feeling that Oboe is going to be a great solution for it. So thank you guys for joining and congrats on the launch. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up, we have Amjad Repplet coming in. While he's coming in from the restroom rating room, I'll tell you about 8sleep.com.

2:09:37Get a pod five ultra, five-year warranty, 30-night wrist-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Having you heard Nico Rosberg talk about the importance of sleep, you need an 8 sleep. Anyway, we have Amjad from Replit in the Restream waiting room, bringing him in. He has some fantastic news for us. Break it down. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you. Thanks for having me here, guys. Good to see you again. You look fantastic. You look, yeah, just great lighting. You look healthy. You look like you're dead left there more than ever. I feel like there's been a PR in the recent history. I won't hold you to it.

2:10:11I've done a bit of PR on just getting healthier in general. Actually, weightlifting is really bad for you, powerlifting especially. Because once you start chasing weights, you're fine with getting fat and you're fine with anything. You're willing to die to add that extra pound on your lift, and it's just a bad sport in general. Yeah, John and I go back and forth here. John's very fixated on constant improvement in the gym. I'm more so like, you know, I want to be strong and healthy. But anyways, what did Delian say the other week? It's like you're always either like adding to your one rep max or losing.

2:10:57So it's one way or the other. Did you see what Grown Daniel said about powerlifting? What did he say? It's like, if you want to look ugly and feel shit, take up powerlifting. Yeah, it's not for the aesthetics, for sure. Anyway, PR on fundraising. So congrats on that. What's the news? Thank you. Yeah, we raised$250 million. Congratulations. Let's go. Let's go. At a$3 billion valuation led by Prism Capital with Amex and Google joining the round. And a bunch of our lovely investors, such as Andreessen, YC, and others kind of doubling down. Fantastic. Massive takeoff, fast takeoff in revenue and users.

2:11:48The Vibe Coding Air is definitely a narrative that's on a tear right now, correct? Yeah, but we're actually trying to change the game a little bit. I think Vibe Coding is awesome. But ultimately, what Replit is and what I've been trying to do for a long time is make it so that anyone can make software. Vibe Coding is still somewhat coding. You're still sitting in front of an IDE. And most people don't want to do that. A lot of people like it. But people just want to solve problems, start startups. That's why they do coding. And so Repl.Agent 3, our target is for it to feel like a human developer, for it to work on your behalf.

2:12:31And so the main target we set from a research perspective is can we make it run for 200 minutes? So when we went from agent 1 to agent 2, went from 2 minutes to 20 minutes. So now from 20 minutes to 200 minutes. And actually, I'm seeing people show me apps they've built that it's taking four hours on its own. It can boot up a browser window, test the app for you. It can run unit tests. It can review its code. And we have this adversarial relationship between like Claude and GPT-5 and Gemini arguing and fighting. And so it's like this multi-agent system. And it's really the state-of-the-art autonomous coding agent.

2:13:12And so the idea is not to Vibe code. The idea is to build things. And oftentimes, you don't even have to be in front of the computer for that to happen. How big of an opportunity is mobile? Mobile is huge. So a lot of our customers are actually executives. So I was at the Olin Summit. We hosted the AI dinner brought down from Seattle, Lloyd Frank, the co-founder of Zillow. And he is Replit's champion at the firm, right? This is executive chairman of the board. and a lot of his times in between meetings and things like that. So he can boot up Replit on his phone and we have a lot of other CEOs.

2:13:53I've heard the story secondhand that Vlad from Robinhood would prototype applications on Replit on his phone in meetings to kind of show engineers what they should go and build. And so I think it really changes the game. It's no longer about being a computer nerd sitting in front of a computer. It's about making things, whether it's on your phone, on your, you know, hopefully in the future, even, you know, you can just talk to Rap-Lit via your headphones and it just goes and does the thing. Yep. No, I think that there's that meme of like where you sit in the org is correlated to how many monitors you have, right?

2:14:33And it's like the person who's like keeping the entire app online, like the genius systems engineer has three monitors. then like the product manager has like you know one extra monitor and a laptop that they take to meetings and then the ceo is just on their phone all the time and giving the ceo or executive who's just on their phone the the ability to express themselves in software is extremely powerful uh i'm interested oh sorry how do you think about uh projecting and forecasting market size of code generation broadly because replet was early to the to this space but it's heavily competitive with via you know there was even uh now that i think about it at demo day there was a the other day there was a company that i was kind of thinking when i heard the pitch like this feels like um basically like a feature of replet right um so it's just like hyper competitive space but at the same time the world wants test flight specifically is that the one yeah yeah yeah but but the world just wants more and more and more code.

2:15:34And the cheaper you make it to make code, the more the world wants it. But I'm curious how you think about kind of the overall market opportunity. First of all, super vindicated, right? Like I've been talking about this since I was a teenager. I was working at Code Academy and we were saying, anyone can learn to code. Everyone wants to make software. And everyone's like, well, you should learn to be a plumber because everyone needs plumbing. I was like, no, it's different. Like we need an abundance of code. You don't need an abundance of plumbing. And yeah.

2:16:09And so it's awesome. Like, I think we lit a fire and now the forest is on fire. Right. But and that's that's always, I think, good. I think the look, there's a zero sum market and there's a positive sum market. The zero sum market is a professional engineering market. You see the co-pilot versus cursor chart. And as as as cursor is rising, Copala is going in market share. That's a zero sum market. Now you see it with codex and plot code. And so there's only so many tools that software engineers can use. But like I said, we're bringing, we're, you know, executives are making software, salespeople, marketing people, doctors, nurses, everyone.

2:16:47I haven't, like at this point, over the past year, I've heard every profession under the sun has used Replit in some use case. And so I think the market size is probably the market size of software, the market size of computers, right? And by the way, this is the original vision of computing when the original creators of computers, that's what they envisioned. They envisioned that you buy a computer and you program it. That's how you use it. They didn't envision the software industry. And I think that's the true essence of how computing could be really, really powerful is the ability for anyone to program it.

2:17:27So that's one. Another sort of, we did it like a one more thing as part of our Agent 3 announcement. And it's sort of this low-key launch that I think will transform our business over time. And it's the ability for Replit Agent to make other agents. So we've gotten really good at making agents, and now we're imbuing that knowledge into the agent itself. And what we're finding in the enterprise is that a lot of people want to solve problems. Software is a means of solving problems. You create an app, and then you use that app to take an action, right? But a lot of times, an agent can take an action on your behalf.

2:18:08And so you can create an HR agent, a sales agent. There's so many things that could be automated. And there's an entire industry that's going to emerge around vertical agents, and that's fine. But a lot of times you need a very domain-specific HR onboarding agent for the idiosyncratic, bespoke way we do onboarding in our company. And the only person who knows how to do it is one HR ops person at our company. And so now agents can make other agents. And that market size is also disingenuous because that starts to displace white-collar labor in many ways. On the topic of just more and more code endlessly, I'm interested to know how you think instantiation of code will live in the consumer world over time.

2:19:00And I'll give you an example. So I've fired off deeper research reports in OpenAI's chat GPT. I've also once gone to Claude Code and said, with the same prompt, do all the deep research, but then instantiate it as an HTML site that is mobile responsive and can use all different HTML tables. And you can tell that when deep research fills in from ChatGPT, it has the ability to use Markdown and create a table. But it can't just pull a random JavaScript library and create an interactive bar chart. It can't randomly throw images in and add all these different divs that you could possibly do on HTML.

2:19:39And so I was thinking about, you know, are we going to get to a world where you open up your favorite LLM chat app? And in order to answer the problem, it's building a widget, building a piece of software the same way when you go to Google and you ask for 2 plus 2. It just gives you a calculator, an actual HTML calculator. You can instantiate that calculator in code. And so I'm wondering how you think the market will look in like five, I don't know, 10 years or something. Yeah, I think you hit on something super important. I think it is easy to look at this and say this is the market for cogen.

2:20:14No, it's a market for software. Again, if you go back to history, when Turing wrote his 1936 paper that invented the computer, the Turing machine, it's about universal computation is that you know computers can be these dynamic systems right and we know initially computers were these fancy calculators you couldn't program them in software you had to kind of you know rewire them and then von Neumann in the you know 50s 40s 50s created the stored program computer and the idea is that you can suddenly program them and you know every computer we have right now is a von Neumann machine and I think this moment is as big as that moment you went from static computers to programmable computers.

2:20:59Now we're going from static software to dynamic and malleable software. So every piece of software application you're going to be working with will be generating software on the fly, pulling packages on the fly and creating bespoke software for your use case. So, you know, instead of like going and buying tableau to do this one exact thing you can go to replet or or manis or even chadgift will do it in the future and all that and depending on how depth of the power is i think replet is going to be the most powerful sure but but of course you can use any of the other tools and they're going to generate the bespoke software that you need for that exact use case and i think that's a very exciting future yeah there will be sort of when you see when you see um complexity when you see some of these insane cloud backlogs where you have like Google and Microsoft and Oracle and everybody's reporting like we have backlogs in the hundreds of billions and I think Wall Street looks at that and they say okay, where is this revenue really going to how is this revenue going to I mean, sorry, but that's not what Wall Street's reaction was.

2:22:07Wall Street's reaction was like, oh, the money's in the bank. Let's drive the stock higher. I'm saying so to more critical investors There's a thing like that's a lot of money being thrown around a lot of numbers. How do you make it? But on your side, as you see the entire market of software shifting from we make software and we sell a lot of times, do we make software continuously for the needs of our business? Do those kind of backlogs start to make sense to you? I think so. Look, I'm not an investor. We might be in a bubble in the short term, but I am confident that the long-term value of this technology, especially as it pertains to LLMs making software, is massive.

2:22:54In some sense, it's going to displace existing value. So that's in the vertical point solution SaaS space. I think it'll start doing some jobs that otherwise humans have been doing. So the existing value capture from the existing market. but it's also going to fundamentally change how we use computers, how we run our businesses. Businesses can be a lot more efficient. And I think that an economist or philosopher need to start thinking about what the future of work would look like when everyone has a fully autonomous programmer in their pocket. Every company is bottlenecked by software. every company in the world from one person company to a hundred thousand person company so when your finance team um needed this like data to be pipelined from like stripe and other places they can run certain analysis they're bottlenecked by data engineering but if i can like let loose you know replet or clock code whatever and just say like go figure out these data sources and plumb them in so i can run sql queries on them and then three or four hours later you have that ready, then you unblocked yourself, you create massive improvements to your processes.

2:24:13And also you don't need the engineers to go work on this side quest and they can focus on the core software that the company is building. Fantastic. We went viral last time asking you advice for young people. Let's get your updated thinking. Should you learn to code in 2025? what do you want to do i would say like do you want to start a startup go fucking start a startup like go to repli put your idea in and you know in 20 minutes you'll get a prototype and then once you have a better idea of what you want to build you can put in a larger prompt and have it run for three hours and then come back to you with a product that maybe you can release even in the first day is that what you want to do now you want to be a specialist you want to go work on writing provable C software for the next Apollo program, yeah, go get a PhD in computer science.

2:25:10But it really comes down to what you want to do. I think the future is entrepreneurship. And not just entrepreneurship in building businesses, but also what we're seeing is there's a lot of entrepreneurs within companies that are creating tremendous value. We hear of companies all the time, employees using Replit, creating millions of dollars of revenue for their company. And they're not engineers. They're operations people, product managers, and all sorts of people are now empowered to do that. But I think the main skill, the main set of skills is going to be resourcefulness. I think the worst thing you could do is be, do what you're told today.

2:25:49The worst thing you could do is perhaps listen to your parents. And here you go. Maybe that goes wild. There we go. That was a great answer. Because, you know, look, I think that, you know, all the advice is outdated. And I think we're entering a very dynamic era. And I think, you know, especially young people need to think for themselves. They'll know much better than their teachers, their parents, everyone else, what they need to focus on, what kind of skills they need to learn. Thank you so much for taking the time. The robots will do all of the process. Yep. You just need to ideate and create things.

2:26:22Yeah, that's true to the human spirit. We're never going to lose that. That's the human spirit. I agree. Thank you so much for taking the time. Congrats on the new round. Always a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon. Always good to see you, guys. All right. Talk soon. Bye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and trusted by millions. Up next, we have Alex from Higgs Field AI in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBP on UltraDumb. Welcome to the stream, Alex. Great to see you. How are you doing?

2:26:56Doing great. Thank you for having me. Fantastic. Give us the news. Do you have anything to share on the fundraising side? Yeah, for sure. Guys, happy to announce that we raised$50 million and we purposefully picked you guys. Oh, what? Yeah, you represent a new media. Yes. Sorry to interrupt. Thank you so much. I got a little excited. Continue. I think you were saying something very nice about how we're neatly organized. We're just like banging gongs and stuff. Anyway, I'll let you talk. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, we're just excited to support this new wave of creators who are social media native. Yeah.

2:27:43And I think CBPN is a great example of what it means to be social media native and don't be the gatekeeper. Yeah. So that's for us. We also are excited to share some stats today. In just five months after the launch, we probably crossed over 1.3 billion views on social media. All the content generated with Hicksfield crossed over a billion views on social media. That was crazy. Congratulations. What kind of power law is there in that? Because if you had the Pope wearing the puffy jacket, that could be like 200 million views. Or is it more, yeah, what does the power law look like? What's the most interesting image you've seen?

2:28:28Look, I think what matters today is consistency. You guys go out every day, right? Yeah. Higgs will release this every day. And successful creators, they have to post like five times a day on social media, some short snippets. I think frequency and relevancy is what matters. What are the most interesting use cases that you're seeing? The Nano, there was obviously the Studio Ghibli launch where we got the ability to create cartoons. Nano Banana, I saw a lot of people just like swapping clothing. Has there been kind of a killer use case that you've seen where you've gone to maybe friends who aren't, you know, reading the deep dive how to prompt all these threads?

2:29:13and just said, hey, we got this specific thing covered. You're going to have a great experience if you use HiggsField in this way. For sure. Primarily, HiggsField stands behind creators, and really supporting creators is the primary goal. And we integrate all the best tooling, including the Nana Banana, which you mentioned. One of the most surprising use cases where we see a lot of traction is actually product placements. And we are excited to see Higgsfield being adopted by Fortune 500 companies to really put their products to work, to get traction on social media. And this is where Higgsfield proprietary models like Higgsfield Soul come into the play.

2:29:59As those large brands, they create own AI digital spokespersons to really promote the brands. Talk about Higgsfield Ventures. pretty uncommon for companies to launch venture funds so early, but obviously Slack had a fund, Stripes invested a ton. What's the thinking there? First and foremost, we just received a lot of inbounds. How can we get the access to Higgs field models? Sure. How we can grow the same way as Higgs field. And we thought that there is a need to explain to developers to support the next wave of AI startups. And that's why we launched Kicks of Ventures. So really, the program is not focused on just on a traditional venture investing.

2:30:53It is around sharing the growth playbooks and providing unique access to the technology. Are you worried if you give people the playbooks and the models that they'll come and compete with you? Or are you a positive sum? We have contrarian view on that, to be honest. Look, I think that there is a traditional way to build a company, and that's very often in the technology space before. It really required to raise a lot of funding and burn money. And we have seen that recently Andreessen and Martin Casado, they pushed this consensus-driven investing narrative a lot, which obviously benefits them as they probably have the largest fund in the world.

2:31:41In the same time today, what we are observing is that there is a new next generation of AI lean startups like Hicksfield, which are actually profitable. Profitable almost from the day one. Wow. And we believe that this next wave is probably going to be as large as VC-backed startups. And I think we can support the creation of these next generation startups.

2:32:11How did you pitch this latest round? You know, if somebody is giving you$50 million, I presume they would like you to at least be a billion-dollar company someday. What is Higgs field as a, you know, multi-billion dollar company look like? And what's your kind of, if you had a crystal ball, what would paint us a picture? For sure. I think this is quite simple. A lot of people got super power with self-expression thanks to social media and mobile phones. A lot of people are probably still shy to do that. and Gen.AI is just going to propel self-expression. And essentially, we believe that in three years, every second video is going to be AI generated and it's going to be AI generated with Higgs field.

2:33:02So the impact is going to be way bigger than just, let's say, building video version of Canva. I think this is going to be a transformative movement in the social media space. and that's and that's because uh today every piece of content that's produced has some sort of cost and as more and more content is produced with AI you guys can effectively capture some of that some of the costs that would have been spent on on on traditional video production whether it's just somebody with the phone and their time in their hand or it's sort of a more produced shoot is that am I hearing that right yeah for sure the cost is is an important factor but it's not just that um like look i mean for a live show you guys clearly kill this but you bring the best people in the industry like you see the lineup today no one else can bring that i'm not talking about myself obviously right but there are other people whom you bring and they they didn't they did they do not typically show up in the live shows um but many people cannot really do the same stuff which you do but people have ideas like how they can make shows uh like let's say cartoons for kids how they can make fantasy content um and so on and before that before gen ai it was impossible for those creators to really um to really create content for social media and all the content which we have which we are seeing today is primarily um is primarily just live content like people just recording themselves.

2:34:42So Gen.E.I. is just going to, I think we should expect that amount of number of different genres or types of the content is just going to 10x from what we have today. Totally. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Great to get the update. You guys have been crushing it. The round. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Cheers, Alex. Thank you. Our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:35:17Our next guest is from Bain Capital, Stephan Cohen. Welcome to CDP on Ultradone. Here he is. What's happening? Great to meet you. Welcome to the show. Good to meet you guys, too. Thanks for having me. Give us a quick backstory on yourself, and then there's a bunch of stuff to talk about. Yeah, quick background on me. So I've been at Bain for 10 years now. I joined from one of our portfolio companies in the data center software space called Turbonomic. I was an early employee there post-Series A. We sold that business to IBM for a couple billion. And I joined BCV as a partner focused on early stage investing.

2:35:58And about five years ago, we decided to spin off a dedicated crypto business, being Capital Crypto, which I'm one of the co-leads on. It's been a really fun and interesting run. We've been investing in the space for about a decade now. Awesome. What is the crypto strategy? Is it a mix of privates and active trading? What's the actual strategy? Yeah. Yeah, so the setup is kind of the core premise when we launched the firm was that we thought that a lot of value would accrue to protocols. And so we felt like we needed a flexible mandate to be able to buy liquid crypto and also invest in early stage projects.

2:36:44So the fund is very flexible in that manner. We have liquid tokens that we purchase on the open market. And then we also have seed through series, CD investments that we've done. Yeah, we try to not be active traders. We don't think that's the most productive use of our time. We think of these as like kind of long hold positions that we'll build real concentration in. How has it felt like for so, you know, when you think about the, you know, not deep history in crypto, but let's say like 2020 to 2024, it felt like the technology was just being handicapped by the regulatory environment. you had this mix of, you know, as an investor, you'd be investing in, you'd invest, let's say, on a SAFT or a SAFE plus a warrant.

2:37:34And then there's these sort of like two assets, you have a token that's trading, and then you have like the actual equity in the company. And that always felt like there were some key areas that it made sense. But then a lot of points here, like, what do I actually own here? Where's the value going to accrue? With the updated regulatory environment, meaning that kind of feels like you can do almost anything now. Where is value going to accrue? Are we going to see crypto projects really try to tie the equity value to the token? Or are we still going to see these kind of like dual approaches? Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on what folks are building.

2:38:21You know, my sort of like early premises of investing in crypto protocols, which are these like decentralized apps or blockchains themselves, was that the tokens kind of are like equity looking instruments where based on the usage of the protocol, they accrue fees through usage and then they have a cash flow profile and you can kind of fundamentally value them. and they're not owned by any single party. They have governance rights where they can vote on code contributions to the application or the blockchain that they're tied to. And I think that core principle hasn't changed. And so for those types of protocols, that's very true.

2:39:02I think structurally things have shifted. We had to do a lot of sort of heroics pre this administration to ensure that we were protected from a regulatory standpoint when we were doing token launches And so a lot of these teams would basically have like an equity company. You'd be issued token warrants. And then at the point of issuing the token, you would have an offshore foundation that would actually issue the token itself. And the investors would have rights to that. We have, I think most projects right now kind of have that legacy model. I don't know that many are actually trying new and different models for.

2:39:39Yeah, I guess what I was trying to get at is like, how do you, what's, what's after this sort of foundation model? Is there enough regulatory clarity that you could establish kind of a new model? Or is it now been workshopped enough and trialed enough that it actually is the right model for the future? I think the model works fine. I mean, I suspect people will try other different structures. But, you know, the fundamental problem with the model is you end up with this, like, equity company that oftentimes doesn't have any real value associated with it. And we've had to deal with some things with legacy portfolio companies where they either need to shut those down or sort of allocate their balance sheet over to the foundation.

2:40:23But that seems to not be the fundamental shift from a regulatory standpoint right now. I think the fundamental shift is that founders are now emboldened to be able to go build again, which is really exciting. Tell me about the hyperstition investing thesis. I've never heard any VC put that in such, you know, stark terms before. Yeah, I think there's sort of this like consistent pattern that we've recognized with the most outstanding founders and companies that we've had a chance to work with, which is that their ideas are initially disgusting and really hard to believe. You know, it's sort of a, if you think of this like, you know, this bell curve of companies at the beginning, it's like offensive.

2:41:06And then once you get closer to mass market adoption, everyone's kind of like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then usually there's like a trough of illusionment where everyone's lost faith in it. And maybe that was like, you know, post 2021 crypto in a way. But there's been this consistent theme with founders, which is that many that are starting out that have sort of these views of what the world should look like and how the world should be sort of shaped around their values and principles in the beginning seem kind of unreal. And we increasingly have learned that the real art to this is to investing with these sort of long tail outcomes is to work with those founders and believe in them and believe them with capital, not just with our belief as a group, but we're really in search of those types of ideas.

2:41:59And I think the two examples that we really point to, one was Crusoe when they were raising their seed financing. It was kind of an unbelievable idea, which was like, we're going to go off into the oil fields and build data centers that are capturing flared natural gas, and we'll scale those to eventually handle AI-level compute. I mean, it was so crazy that at the time, they actually had to go and build a box. At the time, it was in Colorado to show that the model actually worked. And more recently, we've had the privilege of being involved with WorldCoin, which outside in is this sort of decentralized identity network.

2:42:39But the real notion is that in the future, and I think we're starting to feel this more and more now, it's very hard to tell what's real and what's not on the Internet. And we sort of view this model of trust in the Internet is breaking right now. And one of the core premises of trust is like, are you even talking to me right now? Did I tweet the thing that I tweeted earlier? And so this notion that proof of humanness and proof of identity in a sort of globally distributed Internet-native way is very important. So we're on the hunt for those types of ideas, and that's part of what makes the job really fun.

2:43:17Do you believe in the Landian idea that capitalism is a time-traveling artificial intelligence? I don't know that I've heard this idea. You'll have to explain it to me. The idea is that artificial intelligence existed in the future at some point and built a time machine and came back and invented capitalism because capital acceleration will, by nature, create artificial intelligence. And that is the Landian acceleration path that we're on. I don't know. I'm getting too deep in the weeds. I like it. I mean, I like it. You know, one of the things that I'm always kind of struck by is how, like, innovation breeds solutions.

2:44:00Sure. And, you know, AI is, like, obviously a manifestation of that. But, you know, even in the crypto world, like stable coins weren't really invented to solve the US debt issue. But like a byproduct of inventing these like digital dollars. The debt across the entire world. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm sort of like I continue to just be like hit in the face with these moments where like, man, it's almost too perfect. And so maybe maybe that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Stable coins are now regulated in the U.S. or have a framework, which is wild thinking about the stable coin businesses that were started when there just was no real clarity.

2:44:39So, you know, obviously credit to them for having faith. How do you think foreign governments will respond over time to USDC and USDT and other stable coins gaining adoption in there? Because, like, as an American, the idea of sort of like outsourcing our debt problem or spreading it around the world sounds great. but if you're a foreign government, you know, you want people like Turkey's paying 40%, you know, on their bonds right now. And, you know, if everybody in the country can get access to, I mean, I guess that's a mechanism for them to get people to keep their capital in the Turkish system.

2:45:27But yeah, how do you expect foreign governments to respond? Yeah, it's an interesting one because on the one hand, they already were doing it, they were buying our debt all over the place. It's more recent than not that other governments have been moving out of US treasuries. But what I view is happening right now is really we're transitioning from sovereign governments owning our debt to other people holding our debt. If you think about what's happening with stable coins is that businesses and individuals outside of the US, particularly right now, I mean, I think over time, the US will become more of a center of adoption here.

2:46:07But really, the$250 billion of issuance is just people and businesses offshore that want a more stable access to dollars. And I think some governments, obviously, will try to do capital controls and prevent that from happening. I think many view it as if they can plug into the system well. Like Brazil in particular is, I don't know if you guys have tracked what's happening with Nubank and PIX and stablecoins, but there's quite streamlined interoperability there. And if users have to transact in local currency in that economy, then they're forced to go back and forth. But certainly some governments will take an adversarial view of it.

2:46:49Yeah, but some governments have more gain than lose, so they'll take it, which is great. Yeah, yeah. Play that eagle sound, Jordy. There we go. America. Thank you so much for hopping on. Thanks for joining us, Stefan. We will talk to you soon. Good to see you guys. Thanks so much. Bye. Yes, good to see you. Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome and continue today's show. Here we go. From Sphinx AI, I believe. What's happening?

2:47:24Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us a breakdown. Introduce yourself. What are you building? What's the news? Yeah, so I'm Rohan. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Sphinx. Sphinx is a company that is solving AI for data. And specifically, we're razor focused on the idea that large language models and AI today are really good at text. They're good at code, which is just the type of text, good at images. What they're not good at is the type of tabular, semi-structured time series information that makes most of the world work.

2:47:53everything from supply chains to high finance to manufacturing. We're bridging that gap and delivering co-pilots that can think about data natively and help people get from piles of raw information to valuable business ideas, what we call alphas in finance, but can be extended to almost any industry. Interesting. Who's the first customer in finance then? Yeah. First customer in finance, don't know if I have the rights to name them, but we do have the architecture. No, I mean like the architecture, private equity, hedge fund, high frequency. So yeah, so someone who's like analyzing a stock on a quarter by quarter basis almost.

2:48:28That's right. Yep. That makes a quarter by quarter. Well, faster than quarter by quarter, really. We're working with a lot of quants. So people who are maybe day by day or even faster than that. Sure. But yeah, the hedge funds are the target market. Initially, they are able to solve these problems where they find a single insight that can make billions in a year. That's interesting. Yeah, and then I imagine that if you go any faster, the customer wants to write their own OCaml, if we're talking about Jane Street. And so it's for a specific quant that's looking for, yeah, day-by-day analysis. Interesting.

2:48:59So what is the go-to-market like? I imagine that maybe it's more of like an enterprise software deal. You're actually going outbound, meeting with folks, steak dinners, signing deals. Or is this kind of like general sign-up on the website? Both, right? So we are going to people, maybe not steak dinners yet, don't know if we have that budget, but we certainly are talking to a lot of different companies across industries. But it also is a bottoms up motion. There are a lot of people, myself included in my past role. I used to be at Citadel. I ran a quant team. So I was very frustrated at the lack of tools like this to help me get from idea to value.

2:49:36So we do have quite a robust set of data scientists, quantitative researchers who are just using the product off the shelf. But we're also making those enterprise sales as well. That's awesome. What is, give us your read on the talent wars between the Citadels of the world and the Frontier Labs and now Sphinx, of course, because I'm sure you're competing for it. Yeah. No, we've gotten people from hedge funds, not from Citadel. I do have a non-solicit, but we have gotten people from other hedge funds and we have gotten people to take our offer over say Anthropic or OpenAI. Look, it comes down to what you're optimizing for.

2:50:09I think if you're going to these foundation labs, you're betting on AGI and if you win, good for you. That's a great bet. Hedge funds are betting on almost nothing. I think if the AI bubble pops tomorrow, so it'll make a hell of a lot of money and that's great for them. And really for us, we're focused on our specific application. So it comes down to what you're passionate about. is it money, is it AGI, or is it just like razor sharp focus on solving one problem? And that's who we hire. What's your take on Microsoft co-pilot in Excel? We've talked to probably four different companies that are building Excel add-ons.

2:50:41There's that world. How does that fit into your strategy? Are you doing something different or do you see that on the roadmap? How do you think about that? Look, I think Excel has been the tool for data for however it's been out there but we don't see that as being the transformative layer. It's kind of serious data work, the kind of data work that makes people billions of dollars is done on a slightly different stack, a stack that can scale a little bit more that translates more naturally to production and we really want to target that and you know Excel is easy to use but what's easier than Excel is writing prompts.

2:51:14So over time I'm not saying I'm killing Excel today right but over time I see that as kind of becoming a less relevant layer almost just the interpretability layer on top of something like Sphinx, actually getting work done in Excel, I feel is going to become a thing of the past. We're going to be able to build much more serious models with a lot more financial impact. How do you charge for Sphinx? Because it feels like, you know, the best companies create a lot more value than they capture. Percent of AUM. Just 2 % of AUM. Just give me 2 % of your AUM Citadel. We're good. Yeah, your entire management fee.

2:51:46Yeah, I'd love that. uh no but it's like you know if you help if you help somebody make if you help people make money they're happy to pay you uh a lot for that yeah look we don't only work in finance we're already quite horizontal and it's very hard for us to tell the exact nature of the value we're delivering but some of our customers of course are open with others like hedge funds they're not going to tell us like what they found uh so the kind of a way of like capturing that value you know it's hard it's hard for us but really for us the focus is on building something transformative and you know this is step one as we're able to get more and more autonomous and we're able to eventually say you know we can solve large-scale data problems in a couple seconds fully autonomously i think the value becomes enormously clear so we're not overly focused on that right now really right now we just charge our usage we want to deliver people something that they use when they use it they have to pay us to get that service that makes sense uh well thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to come talk to us yeah it's great to meet you congratulations We'll talk to you soon.

2:52:43Thanks a lot for your meeting. Have a great rest of your day. And I will tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with aspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room, Timothy. Welcome to TVPN. Fantastic background. How are you doing? What is behind you? Break it down. Introduce yourself. What are we looking at? Yeah, guys. Good to be on the show. excited to share what we're doing here at Intromotive. We're building a battery electric autonomous rail car.

2:53:16So when you think of trains going across the country in two or three mile long strings, we make every single one drive themselves. No way. Crazy. Train maxi. That's amazing. I've been waiting for this. This is the, I think this is the first we've interviewed hundreds of founders. I'm blown away. This, this doesn't seem like something that like, Give me the why now. Why didn't this happen 10 years ago? You don't have the same problem as Waymo where you have to steer as much, or do you? Why is this just happening now? No, it's a great question, and it's a great natural place to start from. And really, rail's out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, especially when you think about our tech workforce and the people that are trying to solve really hard problems out there.

2:53:58And that's exactly why there's so much opportunity here in rail to do exactly that. take the technologies that have been pushed forward maybe for a decade on the perception models, the control systems, the electrifications that happen in the industry, and bring that to rail and to build a team of tech workers around it. That's really what we're doing here. It naturally makes sense. You do have fixed infrastructure. You've got track. You've got points of rail that go across the country. You've got 160 ,000 miles of track generally utilized at 3 % utilization factor. And all that stuff just stacks up to make this a very logical place to implement these types of technologies first.

2:54:35And we're excited that we're in production. We've got vehicles out in service running for customers every single day. We're going to move over 3 ,500 carloads in production this year. And really just focused on getting America's rail system back on track where it's forefront and the front part of people's minds. And let people know this is an exciting place to come put technology in. It's important for the U.S. economy. It's important for our customer stakeholders in agriculture, energy, mining, any of those places, and just get that supply chain right with rail. It's fantastic. When did the idea click for you?

2:55:13Yeah. Well, I'm an engineer by training. I did my undergrad in South Dakota, did a PhD in Michigan State, and then I went to work in the defense industry. So I went to go work on cruise missiles, fighter jet platforms a bunch of unmanned systems and uh that's really uh an industry that's been doing some of these things since the 70s in a lot of ways building systems that can fly themselves um and then 2017 came and everybody was going to fly to work so i got to build a flying car and a package delivery drone and helped build a team of 40 engineers behind that and then as many founders know you've got a the right co-founder in in the team that uh gets you to go look at something different.

2:55:49And he was doing his MBA at USC, studying supply chain logistics and looking at rail in 2019 and looking at competitive threats of autonomous trucks, electric trucks, and then came to me and said, what do you think happens if we bring these technologies to rail? And that's really what got us off and running. So we built a system that's backwards compatible with the existing strengths of rail. So if you think of a two mile long train running across the country from the Port of Long Beach to Chicago, we can fit in that train. We can hybridize the train and ride along with a large diesel locomotive unit.

2:56:22But really, that two miles of stuff isn't consumed in Chicago. You got to break it down and get it to Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peoria, Illinois. And that's really where we can make short trains with unit economics of those two mile long trains. So you can now say, I need five cars in Gary. I'm going to cut those five cars off, use Intromotive's products and get it there. And I need 10 cars up in Milwaukee. I'm going to go feed a brewery somewhere. I can cut 10 more cars off and just send them on the unit economics of a short train. And that's really a game-changing paradigm shift for speed and flexibility on rail.

2:56:54And it already has a cost advantage. So that's really how we think about it. And where we build out and where we started is in some places like mining and plant railroads and facilities just like this one in St. Louis where we're headquartered and continue to build it out and utilize that infrastructure better. So you guys have track that runs into your facility? Yeah, this car is sitting on track. We've got two parallel production lines here in St. Louis. And honestly, St. Louis is the right type of place to be for this because we can access all the railroads in the entire country from here. And it's a hub and spoke model.

2:57:27And we're at one of those hubs in St. Louis, and we can get to all the spokes from here. Talk about the electrical systems. How do you charge this? Do you swap the battery? Or does I imagine it takes a ton of time to charge the actual train? Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Break it down. Yeah, that's the beauty of the system. So when you think about rail, you think about where it came from, came from a steam engine in the 1800s where the smallest power system that they could make was this giant steam locomotive. But maybe it pulled 10 cars with it at that point. And that necessitated steel track and steel wheels because of how heavy that system is.

2:58:00It also drove the infrastructure the way it is. So that's why we have these tracks across the country. Get one, two, three percent better every year for the last 200 years. And now you look at a system where you have a two or three mile long train. but what happened there is that you have the right of ways at all the crossings you don't start and stop a lot you go through mountains and sit around them and all that energy efficiency that goes into that then just makes a battery system actually work pretty well we granulize it so we get down to the single car size where we can make a battery pack the size of a tesla car battery or i drive a electric truck so the size of my electric truck battery and we can actually move 100 tons of freight several hundred miles with that system.

2:58:41And if you want to go further, you just add more of our units and you get really granular. But that leads to us to be able to use level two charging infrastructure and a lot of the investments that the automotive industry has done to get those standards up to par and also not try to recharge what a locomotive would be, which is 50 to 200 megawatts of power on that unit plus. This is fascinating. What's the state of the company? How big are you guys? Have you raised money? How big is the business? us yeah we're we're uh inst louis here we've got a 67 000 square foot uh production facility yeah we've raised uh up to a series a at this point to fully deploy these assets congrats generally we're around 50 employees uh at the moment uh with largely engineering coming from automotive aerospace and rail kind of this perfect mix where you can guarantee something cool is going to come out the other side yeah and about five years old at this point fantastic Fantastic progress.

2:59:36Remarkable. Last question from my side. Is there anything that you're, I mean, this is obviously like an American re-industrialization project in many ways, but are there any top of mind asks for DC or American lawmakers, like if you had to make rail great again agenda, like what would you change? What are you asking for? What do we high level, what else would help that's maybe just outside of your control? Yeah. No, I think really we just need to talk about it a little bit more. So people talk about highways. They talk about autonomous trucks. They talk about autonomous cars. It's in the news every single day.

3:00:17We're getting people to talk about rail and talk about that infrastructure because in reality, to make rail better, all it is is making stuff move more frequently. You don't need a hyperloop type of technology where you fire packages in a tube. You just need to keep the stuff on the rails moving more frequently. We don't really need to rebuild anything. We just need to unlock that massive network and uncongest it, and we can make this extremely competitive. And our technology positions us to do exactly that. And then from the regulatory perspective, we've been very open to these types of technologies in a really positive way.

3:00:50And we've proven it out in a whole section of the market that's unregulated. So we can just go out there and use those use cases, collect the data that's necessary to get to the regulated use cases from there, and then generate that data that then goes directly to how we would certify these products in a regular use case. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy day to come talk to us. Thank you for train maxing. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to do it. We will talk to you soon. It'll look obvious in hindsight, I think. Have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Talk to you soon.

3:01:19See you, man. Thanks. Cheers. Up next, we have Nebius, which was in the news just yesterday or the day before. The chief revenue officer, Mark. Mark. Oh, he's the guy that did the deal. Who certainly would have played a part in this new deal with. We're very excited to bring in Mark from the restream waiting room. Let's. How are you doing? Mark. Hey, Johnny, Jordy. Fantastic to be here today. Thanks so much. Great to have you. You look like you're in a pretty good mood. Is any, any reason, any good news happened recently? Man, it's been an exciting week. And I think you already called it out in the wind up to my showing up.

3:01:57It's extraordinary. what's going on at Nebius today. Give us the high level, a couple of bullet points on the deal this week. Well, we announced a landmark partnership with Microsoft, one of the leading AI labs that is out there to support them with AI infrastructure under a five-year agreement valued at at least$17.4 billion with the potential to get back and a$19.4 billion. That's fantastic. Do you think you could get a deal like that done when you join? I mean, I have to imagine that you joined roughly six months ago, was it? I joined a little over three months ago. So maybe the deal was in the works, but it sounds like.

3:02:41Yeah. Did they see Satya Nadella on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast say, I'm happy to be a leaser? And you said, oh, well, we'll lease you. Is that exactly how it played out? I think it's a little more subtle than that. Because he really did hold up his hand and say, hey, come pitch me. And people did. And you got the deal done. Congrats. It's extraordinary to have them as a partner. I mean, Microsoft is by itself an amazing company. And for us to be winning the honor is a landmark for the company. And it's helping us to accelerate all of our plans. Fantastic. Talk about the collection behind you. The chat's calling it out.

3:03:17Crazy, technical. Those are Legos, man. Legos. that's a ferrari lamborghini and a mclaren and uh holy trinity almost that's the trinity over there there's another trinity over there of uh land rover and g g wagon i love it i love making the lego cars those are fantastic uh give us give us the state of the the company we've we've covered we've covered nebius on the show before we know we know kind of the the backstory but uh yeah talk Talk about kind of the kind of more recent history. And, you know, I'm sure you got up to speed as you joined and first learned about the company. Well, the company is very laser focused on building the AI infrastructure of choice for startups all the way through enterprises.

3:04:07And we are making big strides against that vision. We continue to support the most innovative startups. As a matter of fact, one of our customers was on your podcast today, Higgsfield, which is an amazing company, amazing company and very privileged to have them as a customer. Likewise, all the way up to major enterprises like Cloudflare and Shopify. Wow. And in all cases, we're helping them to not only service the near term model creation or early development works that they have, but also helping them to scale their applications and deliver the inference that they need. So it's a it's a very exciting time.

3:04:49That's fantastic. What? Yeah. Going forward, you set the bar pretty high here with this recent deal with Microsoft. what's kind of the focus over the next, you know, like how, I guess I'm curious to understand, you know, with the news around Oracle and OpenAI this week, a lot of people are, a lot of people were just kind of questioning like, okay, you're going to build something that's like AWS scale in a very short amount of time here. That seems pretty challenging. How much is a lot of the effort at Nebius really around I'm just like scaling infrastructure and knowing that the demand is there, but it's just like you have to build that capacity.

3:05:33Well, we've always had the vision, and Arkadi, our CEO, has said it for a long time, that we would do some of these super lab deals. Today's market, it happens to be a fantastic opportunity, but we believe in the fullness of time. The real opportunity is more along the lines of what you described, which is delivering the AWS equivalent for AI. And that's where the priority is right now focused. So continuing to build out our software stack, being able to cater to that single engineer that's trying to build something from scratch that signs up with our self-service experience, and then being there with them as they scale and their needs expand.

3:06:11And at the same time, we're pursuing all of the other high-scale AI consuming customers out there. And we think that the next several years are going to be a crazy time as capacity supply is being chased by a lot of different people. But ultimately, the long term, you know, the hundred billion dollar plus business opportunity is servicing the equivalent of a hyperscaler requirements for the new class of AI customer. Friend of the show, Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis gave you guys a gold medal in the ClusterMax ranking of GPU clouds. Give us one layer deeper in terms of how you frame what Nebius does best uniquely among the competitive landscape.

3:07:07You know, some analysis called you gold, but I'm sure there's a lot more details of how you stand out. Well, we're delivering the software tier that's giving the AI engineer the tools for them to operate a small or large cluster or multiple clusters as they see fit. And we're seeing more and more of that. We give the AI engineer the tooling to create a model and optimize a model. And we put at their fingertips all the open source models. We give the AI engineer the ability to conduct their training and retraining capabilities. and through our AI Studio solutions, we also give them the ability to deliver inference.

3:07:47So you can think of it as a full spectrum set of AI capabilities for the AI engineer. We're gonna continue to innovate and add to those capabilities so you can think about all the adjacent spaces that the AI engineer is likely to need to tap from data pipelines to repositories to who knows what comes next. But our intention is to be fully catering to that AI engineer and being able to serve them, whether they're in a small company or a large organization. Yeah. How does the future of the actual inference API business look? Is that more of a focus for growth versus going more of the construction and real estate route and building mega projects versus creating a fantastic API?

3:08:41Do you want to do both? What does the next couple of years look like? I mean, the simple answer is we're going to do both. And the reality is at the foundation is we're chasing demand. Yeah. So today there is a fair amount of construction taking place. So being there for all of these new model development and retraining requirements is critical. As those projects and customers move into, you know, real production, inference is picking up and we're seeing it. The redistribution as people succeed is very real. and the fullness of time we should all want. And this is thinking about it from the standpoint is end customers or investors is we want to see all of these projects turn into inference driven because that means that they're actually in production being utilized by hopefully commercially paying customers somewhere.

3:09:29Makes sense. Real value. Well, congratulations on the deal. Thanks so much for stopping by. Yeah, great to catch up, Mark. Congrats on - Pleasure to be here today. Thank you both. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. We got to get more Legos around the studio. We do. I was envious there. I mean, Tyler's over there just waiting to put them together. That's right. He just needs a time trial. Assembly line over here. Yeah. Well, without further ado, we have Michael from Figure. From Figure. Coming in from the Restroom Rating Room. Michael, how you doing? Good to meet you.

3:10:00Hi, how are you? We're great. We're great. How are you doing? Yeah. Big day. I'm good. Big day. I'm good. Just another day at the office? Yeah, no, look, big day for Figure. Big day for all the employees. super proud of what we were able to accomplish. So it's been awesome. Take us through the story. What happened? So today was our IPO. Fantastic. We rang the bell. Didn't ring the bell. Yep, rang the bell. So actually when you do that NASDAQ, you don't ring the bell, you push the button to open the market. All digital. It's digital. But, you know, we're blockchain, so we like that. Yeah, it makes sense.

3:10:36And yeah. No, so it's been about a six-month process, getting ready. You do a bunch of meetings, testing the water, as they call it now. So from my understanding, IBOs have changed a bit since COVID, and now more is virtual, more is done up front. And there's actually a little bit less pressure on the roadshow itself, which was kind of a learning for me. But let's talk a bit about figure. Yeah, please. What was the story about the position of the company? the why now of the IPO? Take us through kind of the roadshow narrative. Yeah, I think folks were focused on probably three things. One is rare combination of growth and profitability.

3:11:19And we have both of those, which is awesome. I think number two is just huge market. So we're in a$185 billion TAM. Basically, we are standardizing all the private credit, starting with mortgage. We also do crypto back loan, a few other things like that. And we're standardizing those rails on blockchain. And then I think, lastly, we are one of the few companies that adds value with blockchain into the real world. So we were in kind of the real world asset space, which also is called tokenization. We're the market leader in debt for that. We're about 75 % market share. And so what we do is we partner with about 170 really well-recognized brands that work with us to originate or tokenize assets, put them on a capital market that's all based on blockchain.

3:12:11And what it does is it ultimately saves a ton of cost and time and just improves both the investor experience and the consumer experience. Yeah, take us through a case study of one of those brands that you work with and walk me through some of the value or the differentiated benefits of being in the crypto world? Is it just access to international capital, speed of transactions? You can move money around on the weekends, nights and weekends. Is it regulatory hurdles or being able to access certain markets? Walk me through all that. Yeah, no, happy to. I think to start, I'd take something like Houzz, just given the audience, I feel like people are probably familiar with them.

3:12:51They are a kind of housing and home design marketplace. And normally somebody like Houzz would not really want to get involved in the loan origination process or really be comfortable with like mortgage or anything of that nature. But because Figure is so simple to embed, you know, in Houzz's case, we work with an API, we can kind of integrate with them and help their end customers take equity out of their homes for things like home improvement and financing contractors and pools and those types of things. And so what we actually do in the process is we take the attributes of the loan that, you know, HAUS is coordinating, and those are hashed on a blockchain at once up front.

3:13:39And then as the loans move throughout the capital markets, there's way less checking and confirming of those details because people can just verify it on blockchain. And so what we actually do in doing so is we save about$11 ,000 of cost out of the production process out of 12. So it's a really big savings. And we can do it in five days versus industry average of 45. So it's a pretty material difference. It's so funny because the very popular anti-crypto take is like, oh, well, you could just do this in a database with Python. and high frequency trading doesn't need a blockchain to trade stocks really fast during the market open.

3:14:20But I just paid off a car loan and I'm waiting on the title and I have to go to an app and text with somebody. It's going to take me weeks to just get that. And it's like, okay, yeah, that other path is not happening. And it's been years of like, we would like to speed up the normal rails and it just hasn't happened. But so yeah, what, I mean, raised a ton of money in the IPO. What does that do? What does that change about the company now that there's more cash on the balance sheet? What was the structure of the deal and the rationale for that amount? Yeah, it's interesting. So one thing to point out is at Figure, I'm working alongside Mike Cagney, who also worked with me when I was at SoFi.

3:15:07So he was the CEO there. I was chief revenue officer. Here, I'm CEO. He's chairman. And together back at SoFi, we actually raised the largest capital, private capital raise at that time in 2015. It was a billion dollars from SoftBank. Yeah. And what it did was it really catalyzed SoFi's growth over the years. And if you look back, that was one of the big differentiators. And I think it's one of the reasons why SoFi is such a big company today. It really stood out amongst its fintech peers. And so I think from that background, you know, this IPO is similar. It's going to be a major catalyst for Figures growth.

3:15:43It's a big opportunity for us to really raise a lot of capital, come out as a market leader, use that to seed out the marketplaces that we've been doing, right? Figure actually started direct to consumer, then went embedded B2B, then went pure marketplace. And you need capital to do that to show leadership position and to keep adding to that 170 partner base that we have and we're really proud of. What are your lessons from the kind of the SPAC era, the 2021 era? So far is like one of the examples that we keep coming back to as a company that has performed really well. Stocks trading at $26 today, obviously went out at 10.

3:16:24I think it's at all-time highs, doing very well. $30 billion company. It's no joke. Yeah, I joined with 75 people. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. But I mean, And obviously, there were a lot of different decisions that were made at that time. What lessons are you looking at 2021, seeing anything now, and deciding any structure of the business or decision-making currently based on what you learned during the last cycle? I'm glad you asked because it's actually something I've been thinking about a lot. I feel that post-21 and what happened with SPACs, a lot of people became very negative on going public.

3:17:02And I don't have it all figured out. this is our first day. But that said, I do think from going through the process that going public is something that companies should consider. I found the markets to be receptive. I thought there's a big premium on growth. And I think in the tech world that we all live in, everyone's used to growth, but you meet these kind of investors and the pantheon of investments they can make, you know, when you're growing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60%, that's just so impressive and unusual. And so there's a lot of excitement. And I do feel that in the case of, and in the wake of what happened with 21 and that hangover, people soured on the public market and everyone thought, you know, let's not do it.

3:17:50And of course there's obviously drawbacks and there's definitely going to be days where I'm going to think, you know, this is a challenge. But at the same time, I found the capital market to be very receptive. And I also found it to be a great branding exercise and really a great way to kind of get liquidity for shareholders. So I do think that ultimately, it's something that people should consider and not necessarily be afraid of what happened in 21, because there are cycles. And I think that's just part of the US capital markets. And it's frankly, one of the reasons why we're excited about blockchain and its ability to continue to add value and disrupt in some ways.

3:18:24Yeah, what's the what's the what's the 10 year vision? Yeah. So right now we are just about 35 basis points of private credit in terms of our market share. So even though we're a big, rapidly growing company, we do see, you know, we've started by standardizing the mortgage process on blockchain, in particular, using our integration between the origination system and the capital market, which really has never existed before, Right. Everyone's doing their own thing. I see Ramp, for example, sponsoring this podcast. I have background at Brex. You know, those are two companies that are both building separate capital markets and separate underwriting processes.

3:19:05Whereas if figure had existed when both started, they could both be on figure just as an example. And so for us, we started in mortgage. We started standardizing and homogenizing those assets and making them tradable on a blockchain. We can do the same across every single private credit asset class and beyond. So we're really in the early innings. Makes a ton of sense. It's exciting. Very cool. Congratulations. Thank you for making time. Yeah, we appreciate you taking the time. On the big day for you and the team. And a little celebration is in order. Feel free to take back to work tomorrow. Got it.

3:19:43Well, I'm a big fan of you guys. So really appreciate it. Thanks so much. And it's an honor to be here. So thanks so much for having me. Come back on whenever you want. We'll talk to you soon. After that, I guess, when does your quiet period start? Well, not until the rings. Yeah, okay. Okay. Well, fantastic. We'll coordinate. We'll talk to you soon. Awesome. All right. Thanks, gentlemen. Really appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Bye. And that concludes the guest section of TVPN Thursday, September 11, 2025, live back from the TV. Gary Marcus hit the timeline with the article. Peak bubble. Peak bubble.

3:20:20It's hard to see how this won't end badly.

3:20:25He starts the post by sharing the Tulip Mania Wikipedia. Famously, so the deep learning is hitting a wall now. Yeah. He said, I don't know when the Gen AI bubble will end, but this has got to be peak bubble. And he's highlighting the Oracle OpenAI signed$300 billion cloud deal. And he said, in short, OpenAI doesn't have$300 billion. They don't have anywhere near$300 billion by their own. That's not how that works. Optimistic projection, they won't turn a profit. Yeah, well, obviously we can steel man for OpenAI and Oracle. But by their own presumably optimistic rejection, they won't turn a profit until 2030.

3:21:05And all of this is from a company that thought or claimed that GPT-5 was going to be close to AGI. For good measure, Oracle doesn't have the chips. They would need to fulfill the contracts or even the cash to buy them. I won't say this is all make believe, but well, you do the math. He says, if Oracle actually collects its 300 billion, I will be truly astounded. And Martin Shkreli commented on the original post and said, do you want a short open AI at a 500 billion dollar market cap? Which I think is the expression interesting question. But that's not even necessarily the take that we've been debating, which is not necessarily open AI.

3:21:50It's Oracle. Is Oracle overheated because of this deal? Like Gary Marcus's claim is that Oracle will not draw all that$300 billion down on schedule. and if they fail to pull that backlog through, then that would be a cause for concern, potentially. Anyway, I wonder what Warren Buffett has to say about all this. Did you see that he was at the 30th birthday party for Squawk Box yesterday? No way. He was hanging out with Jim Cramer, yeah. We were hanging out with Jim Cramer yesterday. I know. I didn't realize it was the 30th birthday. It's the 30th anniversary of Squawk on CNBC. That's amazing. Happy birthday to everyone over there.

3:22:31We got to briefly hang with Jim yesterday. He is incredibly fun to talk to. Yes. Exactly like he is on air. Encyclopedic knowledge of stock prices can just go back, oh, yeah, in 2015, Broadcom was at this price, and just rattles it off to the cents. It's remarkable. He knows his stuff. Such a legend. and i'm honestly jealous of of his engagement hack which is by people by people believing that he always gets trades wrong yes which is just like fundamentally not yeah it's not true at all not true um they they constantly engage with his post no matter what he said so it's like a way to get a bunch of real accounts to drive like real engagement yes and and you can imagine he gets an incremental five ten times the impressions because people are just like quoting it commenting things like that but um a master at what he does and uh and a great entertainer tyler what was your reaction to either this or gary marcus's post well i think for this i think maybe a good segment we should start doing is right after founder comes on you just immediately say long short oh yeah that'll make everyone super happy they will love that uh and then also uh regarding the gary marcus thing i think um there's that joke about michael burry where it's like he's predicted eight of the last two like market crashes totally i think there's something you know something there yep yep yeah you're saying this time is different i think gary marcus has said many times like oh this is the end yeah i mean it's kind of like you know uh just look at the fund returns i guess um if you but he doesn't have a fund so you just kind of have to like um like the the the nature of investing puts your thesis in extremely concrete terms.

3:24:22Like you are short to what degree? Are you going long with leverage right now? Maybe you're 60 % long and 40 % bonds. You can be a variety of risk levels. You don't need to be purely I'm bullish or bearish. You can be anywhere in between that. You can be 100X levered long to 100X levered short. You can take wild swings in either direction. So you can express like, I'm not feeling great about this particular evaluation in a bunch of different ways. And as a pundit, I mean, someone in the chat was asking about the inverse Kramer. It is a meme. It's an ETF. It's done somewhat well in various times.

3:25:03I've seen a whole bunch of different reports where someone tried to take every single one of Kramer's calls, put it into a spreadsheet and see how it would perform. But it's very hard because if he says, I'm bullish on this company, he doesn't necessarily revisit that company every day to tell you when he would sell. So he could say, like, we watched that Apple interview and he says, I love Apple. It's a stock you own. You don't trade it. And so like, how much credit are we giving him for his Apple call? Like at some point five years later, he might've seen earnings and been like, oh, Apple's in trouble.

3:25:41And then they quantize that as like, he's flipped bearish. When really it's like, he didn't necessarily say sell Apple. He just said like, this data point is negative. And so there's a bunch of ways that it becomes difficult to actually understand like, if the mind of Jim Cramer was actually running a fund actively, what would the return profile be? The other interesting thing is that there was one analysis that did look at all of his buy and sell ratings, they tried to get as close as possible to like what it would look like to just take every recommendation and put it in a portfolio. And they found that it did actually outperform the market, but it outperformed the market when the market was going up and it underperformed the market when the market was going down because it was effectively like beta on, it wasn't producing alpha, it was producing beta.

3:26:28And that sort of makes sense in terms of the content creator world because when things are going up, it lends itself to enthusiasm. And when things are going down, it lends itself to misery. And so, I don't know. Overall, nice guy and hard to

3:26:48perfectly quantize the value of a call on live TV. Anyway, Jordy, anything else we should talk about before we get off? Nepal. Yes. The Gen Z of Nepal overthrew the government and have chosen their new leader via poll on a Discord server. That is wild. They overthrew the government? That is crazy. Yeah, it's been crazy over there. I don't know anything about Nepal, really. Crazy, crazy, crazy time in the world. Interesting. Well, we will keep monitoring the situation. Hopefully, you can monitor the situation and we will see you tomorrow. Why? Cannot wait. Have a great day. Cheers, folks. Love you.