Bezos AI Play, Future of Airports, CAA Fund | David Reger, Mike Wior, Ariel Cohen, Jeff Tatarchuk, Matt Joseph, Ade Ajao, Jeremy Fraenkel

13:37Ade Ajao:Isn't Prometheus like the third time an AI company has done this? Because there was the Prometheus data center at Meta. There was a company called Icarus, too. Icarus, yeah. I got in trouble for that one because I was talking to a New Yorker reporter about that and sort of overstepped a little bit. Because I was like, they have a great team. I'm rooting for them.

13:56Ariel Cohen:So I think we need another company named Hercules, right? Because Hercules saves Prometheus. He frees him from the chains. Okay. But then Hercules.

14:05Ade Ajao:Is there a company called Hercules? That's a good company name. I like that one. Yeah, that's free from the chat. But yeah, so if raised, it would be the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins. We've seen a couple of these funds roll out, the AI roll-ups, AI modernization, private equity firms. Obviously, private equity firms themselves are doing this. But no one's come in with$100 billion. You're in a completely different tier from all the other companies that are doing this. We've had many of them on the show. AI's advances have paved the way for, quote, a multitude of golden ages, not just one.

14:42Ade Ajao:Happening simultaneously, Bezos said. He said, this is the best time to start a company. I love the optimism.

14:48Ariel Cohen:Wow, it's crazy. You can buy strategy, MicroStrategy, and Prometheus are roughly the same, value the same, as well as Coin.

14:59Ade Ajao:MicroStrategy is in sort of a rough spot, right? Isn't Bitcoin down?

15:02Ariel Cohen:No, it's a good, I mean, it's an interesting bet, right? What do you want to buy? What do you want to own at$41 billion?

15:09Ade Ajao:Yeah.

15:09Ariel Cohen:MicroStrategy is at$42, technically.

15:11Ade Ajao:Yeah, you can buy Reddit. That's$33 billion. Anyway, the next story we got to talk about is gamers are rising up. Gamers are rising up. You heard that the government was trying to put gyms in airports. Well, the gamers had something to say. They're pushing back. Airport lounges are catering to gamers. The airport lounges where video games are more important than drinks. Travelers can kill time, play everything from Mario Kart to Minecraft before their flight. We got to do this. Get a little rust going next time we're flying. Let's do it. But the first thing David Lee and Casey Yang noticed.

15:45Ariel Cohen:Before we dive into this, has TSA gotten better, more consistent?

15:53Ade Ajao:I have a hot take on this. I think TSA might be goaded.

15:55Ariel Cohen:I think they're pretty dialed.

15:57Ade Ajao:I think it's good. Out of the last maybe 30 flights, I have not waited more than 30 minutes in a security line. Yeah.

16:07Ariel Cohen:And that makes, like, commercial is obviously still torture. Torture.

16:15Ade Ajao:It's sort of a Promethean punishment.

16:18Ariel Cohen:Humiliation ritual. But that being said, being able to plan on a 30-minute security line makes commercial travel pretty, you know, a lot better.

16:30Ade Ajao:I mean, it was the butt of every comedian's joke because it's so universal. Everyone's been through TSA. It's very slow. Take your shoes off. There's a million little places for comedy gold that's highly relatable.

16:40Ariel Cohen:Don't have to take your shoes off. Don't have to even take your laptop out.

16:44Ade Ajao:No, it's getting back. And there's like, I mean, I guess it's getting more surveillance-y because they take a photo of you like 17 times on the way through.

16:51Ariel Cohen:You can refuse that, though.

16:52Ade Ajao:You can? You can just say no?

16:54Ariel Cohen:Nick does that. You can just say no.

16:56Ade Ajao:But then don't they pat you down and stuff? Yeah, you can just say no.

16:58Ariel Cohen:They don't. They used to about, I will say, about two years ago, they would tell you more frequently, like, it's optional.

17:06Ade Ajao:Yeah.

17:06Ariel Cohen:It's optional. Now they're just like, photo now. And you can read the text and it says you can opt out.

17:12Ade Ajao:Okay, can you opt out of the whole thing? Is it all just like a high agency test? You can just be like, actually, I just want to go around. I don't even want to go through the metal detector. And they're like, yeah, right this way, sir. No one's ever thought to break out of the matrix, but you reached the final level. You reached based reality. Good job. Continue.

17:26Ariel Cohen:Yeah, but truly being able to plan on, it's going to take me like 30 minutes to get through. You can like comfortably show up 45 minutes before your flight. Yeah, reliable. Make it every time.

17:36Ade Ajao:Every time, every time.

17:38Ariel Cohen:Which means that you're pushing it even more to the line. Oh, yeah. Oftentimes, I will be getting through security, and John will text and be like, just got my car. I'll be there. I'll be parking in 45 minutes. And I'm like, I thought I was cutting it a little bit close. But mandate of heaven, you always make it.

17:57Ade Ajao:I always make it. And if you're not missing flights at least like 10 % of the time, you're actually setting your, you're not, you're not cutting it close enough. No. You have to be taking some level of risk or else you're just wasting time.

18:11Ariel Cohen:No.

18:12Ade Ajao:Yes.

18:13Ariel Cohen:No, because often, oftentimes the thing that you were doing.

18:16Ade Ajao:And you were like, your goal is to never invest in a company that goes down. Oh, you're a VC. But you're, but you're, but if you get a single zero in your portfolio, you can never invest ever again. Would you do that? No way. No way. No way.

18:29Ariel Cohen:I'm not engaging.

18:31Ade Ajao:No way. So you're going to have some zeros in your portfolio. You're going to miss some flights. But on average, your DPI is going to be quite good.

18:40Ariel Cohen:Would you? No, but the expected like pilot. Yeah, yeah, comparing that to something with like 100. This is where the argument goes.

18:44Ade Ajao:I can just have as much fun at the airport. So I don't mind showing up five hours early. No, no.

18:50Ariel Cohen:But OK, if you miss your flight and then the next flight is like three hours.

18:53Ade Ajao:Yeah, yeah.

18:54Ariel Cohen:Then like. Yes. it doesn't it doesn't math out because like if you just get your flight 10 minutes or like a little bit earlier yeah then it'll like match like i don't think it makes sense so so basically like

19:05Ade Ajao:like let's say i fly once a week and i save an hour with my strategy that's 50 hours a year and i only miss one flight i save i save three hours and you're not you're not like saving the time i

19:18Ariel Cohen:am i am you were probably you were probably at your just like having another coffee at the hotel and or like doing something, having a conversation that you could just have. No, I was literally, before I go to the airport,

19:33Ade Ajao:I am literally locked in at the clock factory, okay? I'm locked in at the clock factory. I'm being the most productive I've ever been. Making clocks. I'm making clocks, clock by clock. And you think that that time's useless.

19:48Ariel Cohen:Okay, now you can be gaming at the airport.

19:50Ade Ajao:You should be getting there way earlier. I should get there. I should get, if I want a prestige on COD, I should get there maybe like 72 hours early.

19:59Ariel Cohen:Yeah, John, you're just like, yeah, I got to get up at 2 a.m. this morning. Like, I got like a, I got a super early flight. They're like, oh, what time is your flight? Like 11 a.m. 11 a.m. Like, yeah.

20:09Ade Ajao:Is this a coincidence? GTA 6 dropped and you're going to the airport 10 hours early? Well, now you can because airport lounges are starting to cater to gamers. Gamers are the most important constituency. We're going to have a gamer president one day. Uh, so the first thing that David Lee and Cassie Yang noticed when they popped into the new lounge in Terminal One at Minneapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul International Airport on Friday, wasn't a robot bartender, which they have apparently. I believe Ben will be traveling through Minneapolis, St. Paul. We should give him a little gaming challenge. See if he can see if he can get to prestige on COD before he hits his flight.

20:48Ade Ajao:It was something only parents in this digital device era could appreciate, unfettered access to their phones. Their kids, 8 and 12, were busy playing Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot at the lounge's video game stations to commandeer their phones for some pre-flight screen time. The Portal Lounge is, by design, not your grandfather's airport lounge. Yes, there is a small buffet and bartenders, robot and reel, that pour that lounge libation staple an old fashioned. But the focus is on entertainment, their gaming. It's the latest concept from a husband and wife team on a mission to amp up airport downtime.

21:27Ade Ajao:Emma and Jordan Walbridge, with backgrounds in hotels and medical device sales respectively, opened their first airport video game lounge at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2018 called Gameway. There are now 11 of them at airports across the country and two more due to open this year. Portal in Minneapolis is the latest iteration of concept with a few more bells and whistles. They zeroed in on video games after regularly visiting lounges on business trips and finding them to stay. I always felt like I was in a library, Emma says, with some guests slushing others and throwing shushing others and throwing side dots.

22:00Ariel Cohen:I'm not going to lie, this picture makes me feel like I'm a television screen.

22:03Ade Ajao:What do you mean? Oh, because they're looking at you like you're With a controller Yeah, interesting She's played Mario Kart for years Jordan has played Halo Which is getting a refresh soon With Campaign Evolved

22:16Ariel Cohen:I think this is going to be more successful Than the whole airport gyms movement I think so Every once in a while Somebody will post online Why don't airports have gyms And

22:33Ariel Cohen:And there's been a few moments where it would have been nice to have a gym. But imagine a world where, you know, even just 5 % of your flight had just gotten off of an hour on the treadmill. Yeah. And was getting on the flight. Pretty brutal. Pretty heavy.

22:47Ade Ajao:Some heavy breathing going on. I don't know.

22:51Ariel Cohen:Golf simulators in airports. That could be fun. Done that before.

22:54Ade Ajao:Yeah. You've actually done that. You've actually played simulated golf. Interesting. uh racer martin what a crazy name for a 19 year old chef from arizona r-a-y-c-e-r that's a cool name racer he plays apex legends at the gameway lounge at chicago's midway airport i plunked down at the gaming station and embarrassed myself playing mario kart over a lunch of diet coke and ruffles cheddar and sour cream chips the patient gameway manager who used to work at gamestop assured me that he that it just takes practice encouraged me to play at home another employee did her best to introduce me to Minecraft even though I gave up after five minutes.

23:32Ade Ajao:This Wall Street Journal reporter is clearly learning the ropes of these games. Video gaming is the main attraction at the much bigger portal lounge in Minneapolis which opened over Memorial Day weekend in the D-Con course but it's just one attraction. The food is more lounge-like with build your own bowls, buffalo cauliflower salad fix and a couple dessert adding to the futuristic feel a robot bartender takes the center stage pouring drinks. It's from the same company as the makers of the Bionic Bar on some Royal Caribbean ships at almost 4 ,000 square feet. Portal isn't on par with, say, an American Express Centurion Lounge.

24:07Ade Ajao:It's more like one of those smaller escape lounges. RC Cola is on tap. There's music, outlets galore, and plenty of seating, but no dedicated bathroom. The gaming lounge is in the back and bright game way. Anyway, you can go check it out.

24:20Ariel Cohen:if we let John keep going here he would just talk about airport gaming no no I would talk

24:26Ade Ajao:about Railway because Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers and databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of I would like a Railway lounge in every airport you joke but a vibe coding lounge is coming like these gaming PCs they can do local inference you can fire up your agents you can be doing all sorts of stuff

24:47Ariel Cohen:I like it I'm surprised

24:49Ade Ajao:Yeah, I wonder what the cybersecurity stack is like there. It's got to be sort of tricky to have someone give them free access to a powerful PC. They're going to install some weird stuff.

24:58Ariel Cohen:Unfortunately, the lovable airport lounge is coming. It's like have five minutes, build an app. Back on a website. Build the next hit app.

25:06Ade Ajao:Yes, yes. Well, I think the next hit app might be Halo. Campaign evolved. Let's watch this video from Blue Thunder. What do you think? Are you a Halo guy? Do you ever play Halo?

25:17Ariel Cohen:Not really. I never played Halo.

25:19Ade Ajao:I never captured my heart. But I never got into the whole hardcore multiplayer scenario. But it does look good. Doesn't it look like fully refreshed? It looks very modern AAA. Blue Thunder says this is one of the best FPS games he's ever seen.

25:34Ariel Cohen:What if they made an airport-sized lounge, sort of like a facility just for 1v1ing on Rust?

25:41Ade Ajao:That'd be great.

25:43Ariel Cohen:You could potentially get 100 ,000 people all in the same place. LAN party matched up. This could have been like a one-shot output of an LLM.

25:56Ade Ajao:Yeah, when I saw this, I wasn't sure if it was AI video or vibe-coded version of Halo. Did you see that thing where someone was trying to build GTA 6? Like, vibe-code GTA 6? You saw this? It's such a funny demo. I mean, you don't want to hate on it because the tools are very powerful and you do imagine that over time you'll be able to, but the first effort video was very funny. We got an X Halo

26:24Ariel Cohen:3 Pro in the chat. Alex, he says will be a conservative pickup of nostalgic non-PVP gamers. Don't expect it to do.

26:32Ade Ajao:Interesting. X Halo 3 Pro, what was that like? Interesting. Yeah. Day one of building GTA 6 still feels fake. Typing that out loud. upgraded to Claude Pro Max 20x just for this spent a couple hours getting the whole project structured and pushed to the repo sandbox is up and running I mean this is actually where you'd start like it's not that unreasonable but it's just like it's funny because it doesn't look anything like any GTA game wait what? you haven't even seen this? you haven't seen this? so Matt Schumer former guest of the show and creator of the viral essay Something Big is Coming where he predicted something big is happening where he predicted that ai would cause 10 unemployment by april um and compared likened it to covid wait that was just yeah he said that it was going to be like a covid like takeoff in the economy uh he didn't map the the uh the economic numbers directly but we did we were like okay like what was covid actually like in 2020 and we went from february which is when he wrote his essay February of 2026 saying AI is real.

27:45Ade Ajao:It's going to change things. It's big, which a lot of people have been saying for a long time. And I was like, I agree, but I don't think in April, May, like the NBA is going to be shutting down because of AI. Or I don't think that the unemployment rate is going to spike to 10 % overnight. Like there might be little pockets of layoffs related to AI, and there might be some gyrations.

28:07Ariel Cohen:if uh if anybody wanted to make ai less popular shutting down the nba finals because of how good the models have gotten just telling everyone all the nplaya players like we got to invest we got

28:18Ade Ajao:we don't have to not even invest they got to invest they got to invest their time oh they got a vibe code the tool yeah maybe they don't want to get left behind no i don't think they'll be left behind but uh matt schumer said uh someone should set up a community funded fable run with a prompt like slash loop until you've created a GTA 6 caliber open world game with a quality and scope surpassing what is shown in the initial trailers. And he says, happy to write the prompt if someone organizes this, which some people were making fun of. But it started. Zee Wen is doing this. He's 25. He likes Claude and Codex, tech, AI, startups.

28:55Ade Ajao:I'm rooting for this. I think this is going to be very educational for Z-Wend. Although, yes, this video is very funny because it doesn't look like GTA yet. But if you can get to anything that's at all playable or interesting, even in a month, even in a year, take as long as you want. If you can do it, if you can get a million people to pay 10 bucks for this and it only cost you 5 million in inference and you did it as a solo dev, that's a$5 million profit. That's a great outcome. Like I love indie devs. I love the I love that world. And I like that these tools are opening up more opportunity for people to go mess around and build cool things.

29:35Ade Ajao:It's got to be really entertaining to just think about building like a vibe coded game. Some of the games look really good already. Of course, like even if Strauss is going to be pretty worried. Now, did you did you hear him talking? The Primeagian had a good reaction video to David Senra talking to Strauss Zelnick. and is finally a normal AI CEO, because he basically says, we have a mobile games division, we make billions of dollars from it, we make a lot of money from mobile games, and there are direct clones of our games that launch every day. The software has been good enough that you can clone our games, they launch every day, the business is much more complicated than that, the IP matters, the distribution matters, The functionality of the game matters.

30:24Ade Ajao:There's so much more to it than just a carbon copy. So he says, yes, you could just go vibe code GTA 6. People are still gonna play our game because of all the other strengths of the take two business. And I agree, I thought it was a very good take. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Some big IPOs happening this week, next week. It is IPO season. But it's also trucking season. The four-year U.S. trucking slump is officially over, says the Wall Street Journal. It's over at last. Truckers who held on through almost four years of slumping freight rates finally have something to celebrate.

31:10Ade Ajao:It feels like a breath of air for an industry that maybe felt like they were running out of air, said Webb Estes, President and Chief Operating Officer of Estes Express Lines, a Richmond, Virginia-based carrier with revenue of about$6 billion. Freight rates are finally climbing. Good news for them. Trucking executives are calling an end to one of the longest freight downturns in carriers' memory. They say rates have risen to more sustainable levels after a period of low earnings, coupled with Trump administration crackdowns on immigrant drivers, pushed many carriers out of the market. Logistic managers' index, a monthly survey of supply chain managers, showed transportation prices increased in May at the fastest rate for any metric in the report's 10-year history.

31:55Ade Ajao:So if you scroll down, yeah, that chart is crazy. So good news for the truckers. Of course, this is gonna push up prices and inflation potentially, but it is good to have a healthy trucking industry, a healthy dry van spot rate, which I'm sure you've been following intently. Dry van spot rates for the week of June were up 5 ,200 basis points.

32:18Ariel Cohen:Let's go.

32:18Ade Ajao:52 % year over year, excluding fuel surcharges, according to a report. So the fuel prices get passed through, but the economy is doing well. And so prices for dry van spot rates are increasing. As he said, it has a stronger freight market over the last few months. The nationwide company is increasing its fleet of more than 10 ,500 trucks and expanding its pool of about 11 ,000 drivers.

32:46Ariel Cohen:What is driving this?

32:49Ade Ajao:This has been a supply-driven freight recovery as opposed to a demand-driven freight recovery. Turnaround comes after four years in which carriers have been squeezed by a combination of too many trucks on the road and not enough loads. Drivers rushed into the industry during the pandemic. So there was a boom in online ordering, shipping, all the different things that happened during COVID. Consumer demand drove freight rates to record highs. As rates plummeted in 2022, forcing hundreds of thousands of smaller carriers out of business, many truckers held on, even as costs for drivers' equipment and insurance rose.

33:23The exodus accelerated over the past year, and trucking specialists say the industry

33:28Ade Ajao:has finally found an equilibrium where the supply of trucks is low enough to lift rates, which will of course bring more trucks into the market, and rates will adjust of course, but higher fuel prices due to the war have pushed up trucking companies' expenses, but operators are largely passing along those costs to their customers. So anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

33:57Ariel Cohen:We have some breaking news. What's the breaking news? Ty Morris says on Saturday, we finished construction of set number two.

34:04Ade Ajao:Set number two.

34:06Ariel Cohen:So Ty had built a set for his interview with Elon Musk.

34:10Ade Ajao:Yes.

34:11Ariel Cohen:It sounds like they built it in a place that they were only able to occupy for this week.

34:18Ade Ajao:Seven days. So they're shifting. Next seven days is a one-hour notice. And that was on June 6th.

34:22Ariel Cohen:That was on June 6th. This is gripping.

34:23Ade Ajao:This is a trending story on X. He says, for the past three months, I've been asking myself the simple question, what would Elon do? Elon would build the rocket and put it on the launch stand before he got approval. He would ask, what's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my mission? And then go about systematically undoing the bottlenecks until he and his team had made the impossible happen. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And so he has built yet another set that I think can last a full month. And hopefully he lands the interview. He's incredibly pumped up for this. and the meta story of him building this set has done better than most podcasts.

35:07Ade Ajao:There's more views on...

35:10Ariel Cohen:I want to read, John, I want to read the summary of the book about the story of Time Wars getting Elon on his podcast.

35:19Ade Ajao:Like 7 ,500 people, 2 million people watched the video about the set. And so you do have this, a dynamic where the meta story is more interesting or it's by default more interesting because the interview hasn't actually happened. But there are plenty of Elon interviews at this point, like he does a lot of interviews, that don't go super viral. Like he did this interview with Jamie Dimon and I think that's fully recorded. I think you can just search it and watch it. But I don't know that that's something that like everyone in tech saw and everyone in tech talked about. But this is a story people are talking about, the meta story.

35:55Ade Ajao:And people love to see bold moves. People love to see building and all these crazy things and risk-taking. And all of that is on display. And so Ty Morse is getting a lot of attention. So good luck to him.

36:09Ariel Cohen:Godspeed, Ty. It is a beautiful set.

36:12Ade Ajao:It is. It is. Texas is America's new center of gravity, says the economist Exxon's reincorporation. They were in Texas. They left Texas. They went back to Texas. is one more feather in the state's cowboy hat, says the economist, just when I thought I got him to, this is a hilarious song lyric. Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee, I should have known better than to take him back to Abilene, Abilene, Texas. They were singing about data centers in Ella Langley's Choosing Texas, a song that has ranked near the top of America's music charts throughout 2026. Some of those listens may be coming from policy makers elsewhere in the country.

36:57Ade Ajao:Much like Miss Langley, they are losing to Texas. On May 27th, Exxon Mobil shareholders approved a plan to cut the oil giant's ties with New Jersey and reincorporate in Texas where it has long had its headquarters. It's not a loan. According to CBRE, a property firm, at least 184 companies shifted their headquarters to Austin, Dallas, or Houston between 2020 and 2025. Among them Tesla, a car company, and Caterpillar, a maker of construction equipment. Texas is steadily establishing itself as America's America Inc.'s new center of gravity. No state receives more business investment or is adding more people to its population.

37:38Ade Ajao:From 2020 to 2025, it created roughly a fifth of all net new jobs in the country. In the early 2020s, Texas was luring remote workers, fleeing high taxes, exorbitant house prices, and bad policies in America's coastal metropolises while benefiting from the Biden administration's subsidies for green energy and chip-making facilities. Now, the state's dominance in energy has made it a major beneficiary of the data center boom. Meanwhile, its technology and finance ecosystems have been deepening. This summer, it will ring its first standalone burst, the Texas Stock Exchange, joining outposts of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ already operating in the state.

38:17Ade Ajao:Donald Trump has called the New York Stock Exchange's new branch an unbelievably bad thing for his hometown of New York, even if his social media venture was the first business to list on it. So that's a very funny thing. But he was obviously giving that in the context of like New York is defined by its exchanges and in the context of just New York, the city losing out to Texas or New York state losing out to Texas in any way is bad for that state, I suppose. The state's appeal is to yuppies. To yuppies is growing with every stream of a country song. I've been listening to a lot of country songs.

38:54Ade Ajao:Joe Wiesenthal plays in a country band, blues band. Who knows? Maybe he'll move to Texas one

39:00Ariel Cohen:People ask dream guest. Yeah. And I tell them dream performance.

39:05Ade Ajao:Oh, yeah.

39:06Ariel Cohen:Joe Weisenthal. Yeah. Acoustic set. Unplugged. Unplugged. Tiny desk. The tiny. Tiny desk. What if we set him up with a slat wall set?

39:16Ade Ajao:We got to get Roger from Condé Nast. He can jam.

39:19Ariel Cohen:Yeah, but a little slat wall set. Yeah. And he can just play.

39:23Ade Ajao:And an SM7B podcast microphone on the guitar. That might be the trick. Might be the trick. To understand its ascendancy start in Houston, heart of the Texan energy industry. Its oil and gas barons have been raking in profits as a result of the Iran war. But over the past years, the state has also become a hub for green energy. This year, it's expected to build two-fifths of all utility-scale solar in America, a technology for which its wide-open flatlands are ideal. Interesting. We've got to talk about the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. We've got to get to that before our first guest arrives. Let's scroll down and find the latest the latest and greatest from Porsche and the Pixar company They're teaming up for the launch of a custom GT3 RS Porsche CEO first he said the company will not produce an electric 911 But they will produce the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS.

40:19Ade Ajao:Can we play sound?

40:21Jeremy Fraenkel:It also says Space Ranger, Lightyear, my vents are gonna be purple and Porsche even commissioned Goodyear to make the tires say light year just like they do in the movie cars.

40:30Mike Wior:I get more painted graphics here on my roof. My roof fins are going to be painted. My intakes are going to be painted. My entire wing is painted and it even has a Space Ranger logo painted on the back. As soon as you walk into the car, I get a plaque that says to infinity and beyond. I have a light year branded floor mats. I get carbon bucket seats, but this time the carbon is actually purple. I get a Space Ranger logo on my headrest, another one here on my roof, suede on my steering wheel, more on my dash, a one-of-one plaque and even my key has the space ranger logo there's also a woody version that's based on the 911 carrera t they made the paint look like actual denim i get what do you kind of got mocked before this car and you can get woody's horse bullseye buzz gets a rs and woody gets a t yeah these gorgeous denim and leather boots on the headrest i get a 101 plaque what on my dash a leather steering wheel and they should have made it thest with the pixar missed opportunity That's the piggy bank.

41:26Mike Wior:They'll do the piggy bank. Instead of saying Targa, it says Jesse. In Jesse's car, you get a plaque that says, I get cow print floor mats, these denim and red leather seats. Do they do one for the T-Rex?

41:38Ade Ajao:You know the Rex, the T-Rex? You gotta do the off-road Cayenne Turbo. So which one would you take?

41:45Ariel Cohen:This guy's video, like his format, really, really exposes my ADHD. oh really because of the editing or yeah i'm like wow this video they really this video could be like a 10 minute video yeah he's condensed it down it's crazy how much he's condensed it he

42:02Ade Ajao:goes through everything and i think every line is like written and then and then he says it

42:06Ariel Cohen:multiple times so seo optimized because you search any car like this is the most efficient way to figure out like is this interesting no forest auto reviews is really cool i'd love to have him on the

42:17Ade Ajao:show uh he also has like incredible access to chinese vehicles i'm not exactly sure how that happens i think he just has good relationships with the chinese automakers so if you want to learn about the new zeeker and stuff like he'd get yeah he's the one he's how i found out about that crazy uh chinese suv that has a gas motor range extender for an otherwise electric car so So the range is like 900 miles. And I think he can actually get over there and tour the cars. He does fantastic work. Would you pick up a regular GT3 RS or the Toy Story GT3 RS if they were the same price? Which one are you going with?

43:00Ariel Cohen:I tried to watch Toy Story with my little guy. Tried? No, no. I was watching it with my little guy and it was too scary. No, it was too scary. Oh, okay, okay. We had to turn it off.

43:11Ade Ajao:Yeah.

43:11Ariel Cohen:So right now, there are some scary parts.

43:14Ade Ajao:That child's head with the pins in it. Yeah, with the little rough.

43:18Ariel Cohen:Parental guidance. This is not the right car for my household yet. Too scary. But I could see it in the future.

43:24Ade Ajao:The GZ3 RS, too scary, yeah. Wild. We've got to go back to the Ferrari Luce. Luce?

43:33Ariel Cohen:The fact that Images 2 has just fully democratized car designs is pretty incredible.

43:42Ade Ajao:So what are we looking at here with this post? They had just one job. This is someone that took the basic design of the Luce.

43:49Ariel Cohen:Basically, they're like, ignore the fact that the Luce was meant to be a daily with more seats. And just said, what would an electric Ferrari look like?

43:58Ade Ajao:This is not an electric Ferrari. It has four tailpipes.

44:00Ariel Cohen:This is a naturally aspirated rear mid-engine V8. Oh, maybe that's the point of the post. They said they just had one job to do, and it would just make another.

44:11Ade Ajao:Okay. Yeah, I get it. You like V8s. You like gas cars. You like things that are designed differently. Like Ferrari will sell you one of those. They have them. Like they have the 296. They have the Testarossa. They have the SF90. They have the California, and there's a new one. They have plenty of options in that category. They don't have an EV. They want to do something different. I don't know.

44:35Ariel Cohen:This does look cool.

44:37Ade Ajao:It looks cool, but it's like that also already exists. That's not something that's necessarily new.

44:46Ariel Cohen:He says, Johnny, yikes.

44:48Ade Ajao:I don't know. I think it's, I mean, I agree. This one looks aesthetic. It looks cool. But like it doesn't check the box that they wanted to check, which is like a five, the first five seater, first electric car, first something with like, you know, this battery set up and all this other stuff. Like they wanted something experimental. Again, like it does seem risky and the response has been really negative. But like clearly it wasn't like, oh, they were trying to go for this and they wound up in some crazy place. Oops, we put an electric drive train in it.

45:23Ariel Cohen:This guy's still posting that after driving through Cupertino a year from now. Just wall-to-wall traffic, just sitting in a field of Luches.

45:32Ade Ajao:Yep.

45:32Ariel Cohen:Just moving one inch every minute.

45:35Ade Ajao:Well, they did the Buzz Lightyear GT3 RS. Should they do the Shrek Luche for get some DreamWorks collabs going? Pull it up in the Shrek Green Luche. Images 2. Get it working right now, Jordy. the Shrek the Shrek Luce would go unreasonably hard that might swing you Shrek's not too scary you could do Shrek that would be acceptable in your household I think

46:03Ariel Cohen:what about a what about a wow that's pulling up yeah make a donkey

46:10Ade Ajao:look at this 944 the legendary 944 from Porsche made this grand return in 2026 this is a cool design

46:19Ariel Cohen:I love the 944

46:20Ade Ajao:Looks great. Yeah, that would be interesting, especially given that the CEO of Porsche has said that they will not produce an electric 911. They got to do other things. Maybe the 944 is the trick. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experience is a new value with Cisco. And we have our next guest in the waiting room. David from Neuro Robotics here with a fantastic fundraise. Welcome to the show, David. How are you doing?

46:50Ariel Cohen:What's going on? Hi. I'm doing great. I made it to your show. It's awesome. Incredible.

46:55Ade Ajao:With this fundraise.

46:56Ariel Cohen:Incredible. We're honored to have you.

46:57Ade Ajao:It's crazy we missed you earlier. But it is your first time on the show. So please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about the company. We'll go through the fundraise. And I have a bunch of questions about robotics because it's always a fascinating topic. But I'll let you kick it off.

47:10Ariel Cohen:What a day to be announcing a massive round in physical AI. Oh, yeah. Because there's only one person in the world that could raise probably a bigger. AI meets the physical world round, and that's Jeff Bezos. But we're happy to have you here today and excited to hear what you're working on.

47:29David Reger:Great honor. Yeah, so a little bit about me. I'm David, founder and CEO of Neuro Robotics, a company out of Germany, so in the southern part. Yeah, my goal is actually making robots cognitive and bring them actually in all areas of our lives. And I do think that robotics will actually take over any physical task in the future. And I think that's also what we're seeing today, like big progress, having, let's say, physically I combined basically with a robot body and doing great things, mainly focused right now industrial, but looking also into all other sectors.

48:08Ade Ajao:There's this big trend right now in just the LLM, the frontier AI market, where companies will use the most versatile tool for the job, the frontier model. They'll token max. It'll be really expensive. And then pretty quickly, they'll figure out, OK, for this workflow, we can actually use an open source model on commodity hardware. We can use the legacy model. We can cut the cost by 85 % pretty quickly. And I have this suspicion that that will be the case for humanoid robots. You'll have the humanoid go and put the windshield on the car and then pretty quickly realize, like, wait, for one-tenth the cost, we could have a KUKA robot arm do that.

48:55Ade Ajao:And there will be this gradation of what is economically productive for each robot. and you will only use the most expensive humanoid for the really, really unwieldy task. And we won't see a world where everything will be humanoids. But what's your thesis long term?

49:13David Reger:So first of all, I think that's also one of the biggest differentiators from us to others is that we do believe in different embodiments. And what we have today is like what we are using mainly today is like mobile manipulators, but always combined with a physical AI brain. and I think this is also going but going forward we do we will see more humanoids and I think we will see them in all all areas of our lives and the reason for that is it's more like that that they're having the form factor of a human and I think the whole body like the whole world is basically created around the human and ergonomically let's say made for humans and this is basically also the main reasoning so we're I think the biggest breakthrough we see right now is actually connected to your brain and with more sensing capabilities.

50:02David Reger:So until now, we're seeing mainly all these companies coming up with the vision language action models. But here I need to say that it is not enough to bring robots into our fields. It's a little bit like learning how to swim. You can learn swimming by just watching a video. So it's about a nervous system.

50:20Ariel Cohen:You've got to learn it from the Reddit data. just read enough comments you can learn how to swim um yeah it is it is interesting there's something to uh like visual yeah learning to do physical things by just watching videos does work to some degree it's not it's not full it's not enough but i remember growing up uh surfing

50:43Ade Ajao:snowboarding skating all these things i learned to tie a tie a video but i was practicing the whole time while i was watching the video so i was getting the the input and the reaction you're

50:52David Reger:combining that yeah what i mean actually by that is like you can't just learn things just with your brain yeah in this dynamic world so it means actually there is more than brain as a nervous system and the reflexes and this is especially needed in the like if you're looking into all kind of tasks humans do today it's mainly like the biggest advantage we have is the flexibility of adjusting things like on the environments on different areas and and this is also what we are doing. This is one video. Awesome. It's actually the Neura Gym. It's a place we're building up right now all over the planet.

51:27David Reger:And in every major city, you will find them soon. So it's actually a place where you can train robots doing all kinds of tasks in the physical world. And then more than just the brain, basically also the nervous system.

51:40Ade Ajao:Interesting. What other sources of data?

51:44Ariel Cohen:Wait, why all over the world? Why can't you centralize something like that?

51:49David Reger:Yeah. So because we want to give everyone access to actually not just buy a robot to have one and then figure out you need to train it. So you have a central place and you can actually build first trust. In the second, actually, you can train them already and use the data with one click. You can transfer it to any other robots in your factory or wherever you need them. And for us, it's right now important because the gap we're having right now and the difference actually to large language models, as we know, like JGPT or others, is that this data is not existing. So we do need to build first, let's say, the infrastructure for it so that we can actually create the right data to train actually the physical AI brain behind that.

52:31David Reger:And the most easiest way is letting everyone or enabling others to train the robot or to fine tune the foundation model we built.

52:42Ariel Cohen:What are the biggest opportunities that you guys are working on in Germany? I imagine hopefully helping make some of my favorite cars. But what do you have going on?

52:53David Reger:Yeah, that's a good one. I'm also a car lover, so I could have also have a lot of input on your talk before. So it's like, yeah.

53:04Ade Ajao:Would you go GT3 RS Buzz Lightyear Edition or Ferrari Luce Shrek Edition? That's a good one.

53:13David Reger:Are you a Shrek guy? I think it's too easy. Yeah, for sure.

53:16Ade Ajao:Because you might like Shrek and you might like a GT3 RS. you might like Buzz Lightyear and a Luce but that's not the option, you've got to pick one or the other

53:27David Reger:No, I'm still the engine guy Okay

53:36David Reger:So yeah, but yes there is a lot of projects especially in the automotive industries and also especially on the supplier side where they have to reduce costs, they have to find let's say, ways to be efficient as the others are in Asia or somewhere else on the planet. And the only way for that is finding, let's say, some more autonomy or bring more autonomy in their fields. And especially because, like, here in Europe, if you're looking, let's say, into 2030, you will see that we have, like, about seven million less human labor. So we do need to have, like, we need a solution for that. The only way is embodied AI.

54:16David Reger:something which can do things fully autonomously and as capable as human can do.

54:20Ade Ajao:How are you thinking about your supply chain? A lot of robotics companies in America are saying we want an American supply chain. Other companies are saying, hey, we got to move as fast as possible. Realistically, is there going to be spyware in a bolt that we buy from China? Like, let's not worry about that. It is maybe a supply chain risk if they cut you off, if you're thinking about supply chain resiliency. But what's your approach been? Do you want to source entirely from German supply chains or European supply chains, Western supply chains or global supply chains?

54:55David Reger:So at this time, we're focusing right now on the, let's say, European supply chain. So I still believe in the global world, but I do see right now the biggest advantage of converting them still because most of the components are there, but they need to be still, let's say, modified to use them for robots. here I'm simply talking about even lifetime I mean through the regulations the lifetime of the sensors for cars are regulated basically so they break so we have like a renewing process going on and for robots they're made for 6 ,000 hours and the robot takes sensors for 40 ,000 hours and this is still a difference and gap between and that's also I think for us the most important topic working with the suppliers around us We are based in Stuttgart where all the good stuff comes from, like the stuff you talked before about.

55:47David Reger:And so there is the Bosch, the Porsche, the Audi, the Mercedes, everything here around us. And we are using this supply chain, converting it right now into robotics.

55:58Jeremy Fraenkel:Very cool.

55:59David Reger:Going further, I do think it will not matter so much. It will come again wherever you produce. We will have productions also in the US and at the same time also probably in Asia.

56:11Ade Ajao:Yeah.

56:12Ariel Cohen:Tell us about the round. Odd, before we get into the round, the silliest question you'll ever get. Can you ever imagine a robotic use case that would require an internal combustion engine? Let's say like a V6 humanoid.

56:28David Reger:I hope you're awesome, but not required yet. But I think the Boston Dynamic guys, they did an awesome thing. I don't know if you saw the quadruped they built some years ago, like in the beginning. It was actually with a combustion engine, as I saw. But yes, no, at this time, fully electrified. But the cars I'm still loving, like with the V12 or V10, I think. There you go.

56:57Ade Ajao:There you go.

56:58David Reger:One of us. Tell us about the round.

57:00Ade Ajao:Hit that gong, Jordy. How much did you raise?

57:04David Reger:So we raised a 1.4 billion US dollar.

57:14I'm not doing it.

57:18Ade Ajao:Well done. Jordy's red in the face. You guys are awesome. Jordy's red in the face. Thank you for taking the time.

57:29Ariel Cohen:Great stuff. Are you setting up a, you have a U.S. office already? Are you setting one up?

57:34David Reger:Yeah. Yes, we have one and we are setting further. So like, as you might have seen also the investors on this round, there are a lot of American players and very important players. And I think it's also a sign to where we go. Yes.

57:51Ade Ajao:Great stuff.

57:53David Reger:Yeah, because I mean, I think it's important. I think something like that was never built. After Automotive, there was nothing really great coming out of Germany. And I think we have to change that also. And for that, we need partners which are, I'd say, knowing how to scale that, how to do it in this time we're living in. And here I do believe in our partnerships also out of U.S. and Germany.

58:17Ade Ajao:Very cool. Fantastic. Congratulations. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

58:22Ariel Cohen:We'll have you back on soon. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day. It was awesome to be on the show.

58:26Ade Ajao:Let me tell you about Codex. Great to meet you. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Did you see at the NBA game last night a little person, somebody you might know, born in Tennessee, showing up on the camera as they pan around to the crowd, finding famous people, finding iconic people, unmistakable people. We got a picture here of a celebrity at the game. You know who that is?

59:04Ariel Cohen:Yep, Paul Tudor Jones.

59:05Ade Ajao:Paul Tudor Jones, baby, born in Tennessee. They didn't even have to give him a name tag because everyone knows Paul Tudor Jones. They already know. Of course, hedge fund manager,$8 billion net worth. Let's zoom in a little bit more because I don't know what else is really going on in the photo, but let's get to the good. I mean, everyone knows Tudor Investment Management, Tudor Investment Corporation. They know the investment like the best episode, obviously. The Robin Hood Foundation, undoubtedly. He predicted Black Monday. I mean, yeah, he's a pretty big deal. Born in Tennessee. But there was someone who people weren't sure who it was, and so they had to give this woman a name tag.

59:45Ade Ajao:So if we scroll down, we'll actually be able to learn who this is. It's Taylor Swift. So you can take that name, type it into anything, look her up and learn all about her. And maybe one day you'll know as much about her.

59:59Ariel Cohen:Maybe Patrick was watching last night.

1:00:03Ade Ajao:That's like the best crossover episode.

1:00:06Ariel Cohen:Could be. I'd like it. What if they did a joint interview?

1:00:09Ade Ajao:That'd be great.

1:00:11Ariel Cohen:PGT.

1:00:12Ade Ajao:Yeah.

1:00:13Ariel Cohen:PJT. ptj all t ptj yeah meets paul tudor jones taylor swift yes i like it be good anyway our next guest

1:00:22Ade Ajao:is in the waiting room let's bring in mike for now in control systems how you doing mike i'm doing all right guys how you doing seems like you're doing more than all right got some big news

1:00:33Jeff Tatarchuk:all right we're having a fantastic fantastic month around here amazing good good time to be in the

1:00:39Ade Ajao:gun on a truck business. Is that the accurate description? Is this all for scaling up bullfrog? Take us through the product portfolio, reintroduce the company, reintroduce yourself, and then tell us where you're going.

1:00:53Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, sure. Allen Control Systems, we are a company that specializes in the application of robotics for defense. Think of the Boston Dynamics of defense, essentially. We are building an extreme competency in robotics.

1:01:07Ade Ajao:Oh, yeah. But you guys ship.

1:01:09Ariel Cohen:You

1:01:09Ade Ajao:guys ship yeah boston they shipped but it took a long time not as much took like 15 not as much yeah yeah um so we are uh we have our flagship product is bullfrog bullfrog is essentially a

1:01:23Jeff Tatarchuk:robotic gimbal uh driven by computer vision and machine learning that solves kind of an age-old mechanical problem which is that you can usually only have a system that is very fast but relatively inaccurate or very accurate but relatively slow in order to shoot down fast maneuvering drones especially tiny ones like group one group twos uh you need to be both fast and accurate and so by using and applying ai to our control system we're able to create a robot that can be both fast and accurate and that's what we do that nobody else in the world has been able to achieve so far

1:02:00Ariel Cohen:Yeah, talk about the progress over the last year. What kind of led up to this round and then where you're going from here.

1:02:08Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, I mean, you know, we have been obviously kind of working on this robot for about 18 months now. Since we kind of first brought it out to the field, actually a little closer to two years. Bullfrog has been kind of slowly achieving more and more, getting closer and closer to battlefield speeds. in november of of last year we achieved kind of 100 kill rate against 13 red army flown drones so drones that are flown by a team of the army that are not telling us where they're coming from

1:02:37Ade Ajao:or what they're supposed to do or how many they have coming interesting wow very cool uh was there already a program of record for this like you hear a lot about how hard it is to get a new technology fielded because the government often knows that they want more planes or more weapons of a certain kind. And most companies that we talk to are usually saying, well, we fit neatly in this box. So it was easy for them to procure us. This feels both old and new. It's like innovative in all the correct ways and maybe leaning on the shoulders of like what the army can already feel like a truck and a gun.

1:03:18Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, so we are not currently a program of record. Our technology kind of lays in a class that you usually call ahead of me. So requirements that are being built right now will start to address what this system is capable of doing now, but also what it's going to be capable of doing in the future, which is much, much more. Where we are very fortunate, this company is really sitting at just a perfect storm of tailwinds between the war and the size of the threat and the lack of other solutions that can solve it. The president and the secretary of war created Joint Task Force 401, which is specifically meant for selecting counter-UAS technologies for all services, both domestically and abroad.

1:04:05Jeff Tatarchuk:And so we were selected by them to get sent forward after the war started. That is basically a blanket approval for all services, including the Coast Guard and Secret Service, to buy our technology and put it to use.

1:04:22Ade Ajao:Is this, I imagine the sweet spot is like the DJI size quad rotor drone. We're not talking about shooting down something like a Shahid drone. Is that correct? Is that the focus long term? Do you want to be counter UAS in all classes over time? Or do you just want to be the best at this small scale counter UAS? Because they're all problems and maybe there's some other solution for taking out the enemy's version of like a predator drone. That might be a completely different job to be done, a completely different technology.

1:05:01Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. we are we are currently very focused on being the best at shooting down group one group two drones which are absolutely the hardest rooms yeah to engage right now i mean like you know lasers are pretty good at shooting down group three drones but you have to keep your laser on target for five to 15 seconds in order to do damage to to the airframe so we are we are perfectly positioned for the group one group two threat now that said we can shoot down group one drones very very far away and so if i can hit a seven inch target on a group one drone very very far away i can hit very vulnerable parts of a shahed at the same distances so while we're not the ideal solution for engaging those those larger targets you know you have road runners and other things that can go out a little bit farther you're going to want to hit them 20 to 15 kilometers away but when they get closer and you need that last line of defense, we are absolutely a great solution for taking those out of the air.

1:06:02Ade Ajao:Talk about scaling manufacturing. It doesn't look like you manufacture the truck. It doesn't look like you manufacture the actual gun, but there's a whole system that creates the bullfrog product. What's actually going on that you can share in the manufacturing process? Is it milling different parts to fit things together, just integration of different systems? How are you thinking about scaling manufacturing?

1:06:30Jeff Tatarchuk:When we built Bullfrog, the hardware was not the exquisite part of the system. We built Bullfrog incredibly well. We built it so it could be easily maintained. And we built it so it would be easily manufactured and scaled very quickly. And that's one of the other differentiators that we have against the other counter UAS solutions that are out there, is we can get to thousands of units really, really fast. And the way we do that is 90 % of Bullfrog is made from basically commercial off-the-shelf components. Standard things that you see in a robust supply chain with multiple vendors that can quickly get us to the amount of inventory that we need to start pumping out 1 ,000 of these every single month.

1:07:13Ade Ajao:Talk a little bit about the compute. I mean, you're doing image recognition. It seems like there's a camera there. Is that all done on device? Is there a need for edge compute, a need for cloud computing? Because I imagine this is designed to operate in off-grid scenarios effectively, right?

1:07:32Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, 100%. It has to be a completely self-contained compute system. In order to do something autonomously, think about an unmanned ground vehicle or an unmanned surface vessel. If you have to have an operator over a latent network manually controlling a gun to actually shoot a target in real life, you're never going to hit anything. So having a fully autonomous system like Bullfrog out on those platforms that can be asynchronously tracking targets and just waiting for an operator to say, engage that target is a huge advantage when you start talking about operationalizing unmanned payloads. And that is another kind of huge niche that we have that we're going after right now.

1:08:12Ariel Cohen:How big is the team these days?

1:08:15Jeff Tatarchuk:We are approaching 250 today. And I don't know where we started the year, but I think it was like 80. Last I heard, we were hiring about 50 people a month. You know, we are trying to drag in the absolute best engineering talent possible. One way we look at kind of differentiating ourselves in the industry is, you know, you have the Anderals. and they're doing a great job of finding companies and doing roll-ups, but I think they're losing a lot of their technical depth. And so we're really focused on building a really, really core engineering team that understands robotics. And robotics is an incredible symphony of detailed integration between hardware and software to do it well.

1:08:57Jeff Tatarchuk:And we think that we can really differentiate ourselves in the future as we talk about bringing on more products to solve defense needs with robotics. That makes sense.

1:09:07Ariel Cohen:Little shots fired there from the bullfrog chief himself.

1:09:10Ade Ajao:From the company that shoots shots.

1:09:12Ariel Cohen:Really, really impressive progress. Let's go to the round. Yeah.

1:09:17Ade Ajao:How much did you raise?

1:09:18Jeff Tatarchuk:We raised$200 million at a$2 billion pre-money valuation. Woo! Let's go. Hit that one. I just enjoy helping our students. of presentations.

1:09:36Ade Ajao:Thank you so much for coming on the show. We should share that presentation at some point.

1:09:40Ariel Cohen:Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's crazy. Right before, like pre-TBPN, I had the pleasure of helping you guys kind of position what you're working on. And you guys have executed the strategy to a T. So it's awesome to see.

1:09:56Jeff Tatarchuk:We're going to keep going. It's really exciting. We think you guys will see another big announcement in the next 12 to 18 months. So congratulations. Looking forward to seeing you again.

1:10:05Ariel Cohen:Cheers, Mike. Congrats to the team.

1:10:06Ade Ajao:Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. People are going, there's a new benchmark. I am a fish and I swim to the worm on a rope. Is it safe? People are asking different models. Gemini nailed it. Apple Foundation model said, yes, it's safe. Bad news if you're a fish. Can't recommend the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the fish in the audience. Okay, this is not Apple. This isn't? What is this? I thought it was Apple. What app is that? It's somewhat confusing.

1:10:44Ade Ajao:Locally AI by LM. So what I imagine this is doing is that it's an app that integrates with the iOS API that interfaces with the Apple Foundation model. But I don't know. I might have also in the chat said black suits who died this is a dark gray suit Okay, let's and that's your daily driver. I've been wearing this a lot. I don't know. I like it You're in a dark gray suit, too. We're matching. This is the same material and also it's not black It's dark gray.

1:11:13Ariel Cohen:I know what does that say about the the team's color grading that?

1:11:17Ade Ajao:Oh, yeah, maybe crush those Crush those shadows too much. We'll see shots bring them up. No, I don't fired Did you speaking of colors? Did you know that accountants used to wear green eye shades? Did you know this?

1:11:31Ariel Cohen:Well, I've seen like in cartoons.

1:11:32Ade Ajao:Yeah in cartoons. I had no idea where this came from There's a reel on Instagram that breaks it all down. This blew my mind I think we should watch it.

1:11:41Ariel Cohen:You want to learn about I'd love to green green eye shades

1:11:43Ade Ajao:This is important because I think you care about the quality of light that goes into your eyes and I could see you in the future Yeah, it's a lens. Look at this. We'll watch this video. It's 3UP from the Apple Foundation Model 1. And right here, it's the life professor. He breaks it down. Cartoons to show that stereotypically someone is an accountant.

1:12:05Mike Wior:Well, that is a green eyeshade that was stereotypically worn by office workers back in the early days of gas and electric lighting. It came in several versions, including this weird eye hood version that you see here. But the purpose was always the same, which was to reduce the glare from these harsh electric or glass lamps. and to improve contrast on the papers that you would be looking at up to eight to 10 hours a day. So this became a very common look for any paperwork heavy profession back in the day. As lighting became better in offices, the green visor look essentially became obsolete in the actual workforce.

1:12:35Mike Wior:However, just like how I talked about - This is locking in at the clock factor.

1:12:38Ade Ajao:You put on the green visor because you're a white collar worker. Like white collar workers these days don't really have like gear. They don't have accessories. There's nothing that's like, oh, yeah, that guy's vibe coding, and he has the obvious tells.

1:12:53Ariel Cohen:The new hot accessory is Technic.

1:12:55Mike Wior:From here, you usually occasionally hear politicians described as a green eye visored budget hawk.

1:13:00Ariel Cohen:There's a journalism award that still mentions the green eye shade. But yeah, so that's what's going on there with that. Yeah, so real grinders have the eye shade.

1:13:07Ade Ajao:Yeah, we've got to bring them back. There's a lot of LED lights. Do something to switch it up. Also, Toby Lutke from Shopify is competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans this year. Bucket list stuff. Wouldn't have gotten there without DHH's encouragement, guidance. Watch this week with this weekend. You can go watch the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

1:13:29Ariel Cohen:I love that he didn't just get into driving on the track every now and then. He thought, I'm going to go all the way.

1:13:35Ade Ajao:Also, this LMP car he's driving looks a little like a Buzz Lightyear mobile. There's some green or maybe Shrek. Maybe that may... We don't know. We don't know that Shopify didn't pick green because of Shrek. It's possible. When did Shopify found... When was Shopify founded? When did Shrek come out? That's the key question.

1:13:55Ariel Cohen:That is a good question.

1:13:57Ade Ajao:When was...

1:13:58Ariel Cohen:Shrek had to predate Shopify.

1:14:00Ade Ajao:I think so. When did Shrek come out? Okay. Shopify founded 2006. Shrek had been out for five years. They could have gone with green because of Shrek. Well, we have a green light on our next guest, Ariel Cohen from Navon. He's the co-founder and CEO. Let's bring him in from the waiting room and talk to him about how Navon is doing. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hi, how are you? Thank you so much.

1:14:24Ariel Cohen:Got to be feeling pretty good.

1:14:26Ade Ajao:Feeling great. Business is fantastic. Is it time to go do the 24-hour Le Mans? Are you going to get into racing?

1:14:33Mike Wior:No, this quarter was actually really, really good, and the business is doing really amazing.

1:14:37Ade Ajao:What's driving it? I mean, I feel like there's so much up and down, the SaaSpocalypse, and are people just going to be using AI for everything? Or is the economy going to collapse? Is travel going to go down because of gas prices? Like, what were all the factors of risk, and then how do you overcome them?

1:14:54Mike Wior:Yeah, first of all, what drives business travel is really, you know, the need of people to be there together, to meet face-to-face. We actually, that's our main belief. Our main belief is that people want to meet, close businesses, build teams, get to interviews, and to do it face-to-face. And this is what we are powering. And it's so important that you've mentioned gas prices. We are coming out of the quarter that you have TSA strikes, you had gas prices, you had major two storms in the U.S. in January. All of these things, and we had an amazing quarter. We grew our usage by 50%. So, yeah, it's huge.

1:15:33Mike Wior:It's our revenue went up by 40%, our usage by 50%. And this is in this quarter. So it tells you how much it is important for people to be there together, if they're willing to go through storms while doing that. And this is kind of what drives our business.

1:15:49Ade Ajao:Yeah. What else operationally is changing in the age of AI? Are you token maxing? Are you deploying AI agents all over the place? Are you launching AI features for folks? Or are you taking a more measured approach?

1:16:03Mike Wior:We don't use AI as a slogan. We always take an approach of, first of all, what our user needs, what our customer needs, and then what can we deliver to them. So even before AI became fashionable, in 2016, we were heavily using machine learning in the platform to heavily personalize the results that we are giving you, the way that we are saving money to companies when they book travel through us, companies are saving 15%, 1.5 % of their entire travel budget when they use us. Exactly. And then, you know, when Gen.AI came, we really took it to the next level. So today, the Novan platform, you can go to Novan Edge, which for you, it's kind of for a personal level if you're a business traveler, but your company, you either don't like the solution or your company is not really managing travel.

1:17:00Mike Wior:This is an AI platform. We chat there with Navantage. We know you. We connect to every loyalty club that you have. And then we are optimizing your entire trip booking. You're telling us you want to be in London and we'll book your flight, your hotel, your restaurant, events while you're on the trip, everything while you're on the go. And this is really driven by Gen AI. But even when you get support from us, you basically chat with Ava, and we completely orchestrated it when we use an AI agent, when we use a real-life agent, and completely orchestrating both. This is very, very unique. Nobody is doing that.

1:17:39Ade Ajao:Is anything on the go-to-market side changing? It's odd because so much of the pitch is like face-to-face meetings need to happen. I imagine a lot of that's not changed. Your sales force is probably having face-to-face meetings with companies that want the product and want to understand the business before they partner up. But is anything accelerating there? Because obviously when you look at a big 40 % jump in revenue, you have to ask, you know, unpack that.

1:18:07Mike Wior:Yeah, there are different drivers there. I would say that AI is actually a big part of this, but for a different reason. First of all, actually most of the AI companies are using us, right? including OpenAI and Anthropic and Carouser and so on. So that's definitely there. But really the AI driver is that right now in every enterprise, you have AI initiative coming from the top. And Navvan is one of the only B2B company on an enterprise level that can come and tell you, because of AI, I will save your employees, the most important employees in the company, the sales team, the C-level. I will save them a lot of time when they need to change their trip, when something is happening in the airport, how they are expensing.

1:18:49Mike Wior:We are completely, you know, we use our own credit card. You are expensing your entire T &E, including your meals. There is no such thing of itemizing your receipt from the hotel and itemizing the mini bar expense and whatever. So we save a lot of time and we save a lot of money and all of this is driven by AI. So we ride on the AI initiative in the market, in the organization. But also from a go-to-market perspective, we shared it yesterday, On the other side, we sell to the biggest enterprises in the world. But on the other side, PLG, we've more than doubled last year. And this is completely driven by AI because marketing is significantly more efficient when you're actually using AI.

1:19:30Ade Ajao:I remember years ago, almost in the pre-gen AI era, Google launched a feature that would let you, sort of almost agentically, but like programmatically call a restaurant and their robot or something would talk to the restaurant and try and book you a reservation. And I'm wondering about, obviously there's a ton of low-hanging fruit inside the platform where AI can speed up search and ranking and classification, itemizing the minibar, as you mentioned. There's so many different features for AI to run wild inside the platform, but are you experiencing opportunities to go outside of the platform?

1:20:13Ade Ajao:Okay, there's a company, there's a cool hotel, but their system is not integrated, not on any of the travel sites, but we'd love to bring it to that, and we can by autonomously going and writing an integration or even just making a phone call. There's so many times where a receipt didn't come. It was a glitch in their system. I have to call to get the receipt. It's a back and forth. An AI agent should be able to do that, but where is that on the roadmap?

1:20:38Mike Wior:First of all, you should do product management in Nervant because you just described a lot of Nervant features. I'll actually explain it. Everything that you described comes down to the connectivity to the physical world, and especially if it is complicated. Travel is super complicated. We have an infrastructure. we actually have by far the best travel infrastructure in the world. It means that we are connected globally to everything that is out there. Every airline through different ways, every hotel, buses, rail, globally, all over the world. So when you have that connectivity, there are so many things that you can do.

1:21:22Mike Wior:But to your point, sometimes there is no API. You cannot change a flight a day before, 24 hours before the flight by going to an API. You have to call the airline, right? But you kind of touched a use case that we love here. When you pay later, you basically pay in the hotel for the booking that you did. If you'll not show up on time, that's up to 11 p.m., they're going to cancel their reservation. So you need to call them and reconfirm the reservation. Oh, yeah, that's right. Give them a credit card and tell them, keep that thing. Now, think about it. You are on a flight, stuck on a flight. You know that you're going to be late.

1:22:02Mike Wior:The amount of pressure. Or you're just late. Or just nobody called on your behalf. We actually have our own AI bot that is calling the hotel, automatically having a discussion. Or the phone saying, hey, I will arrive. We take the name of the person that confirmed them. We are giving a virtual card to secure the transaction. It's automatic. And then we push to the app, to the travel app, to the van, we push the confirmation. And we are saying, we talked with that guy in the reception, because it's all manual. We talked with that guy in the reception and he secured your room. This is all AI. So no cost, but think about the amazing, amazing, amazing service that we just gave you.

1:22:45Mike Wior:And this is when I say, I don't see AI as kind of a fashion. I'm looking at, is there a use case that I can generate value to you, the user, the traveler, the executive assistant, the accountants? We do auto-reconciliation for the entire trips of all of the company. So we are saving tons of time for the really big reconciliation teams that big companies have. So that's kind of how we use the AI. We have our own platform. It's called Navant Cognition that orchestrates it all perfectly between the physical world and our AI capability. Sometimes we use our own model. We actually announced yesterday in the call that 30 % of our AI calls are now our own model and not the frontier models or open source.

1:23:33Mike Wior:So that actually pushes us farther. It makes us more accurate, faster, raises customer satisfaction, and obviously it's also cheaper. Very cool.

1:23:43Ariel Cohen:do you think now is the right time to start talking about Navon safety? Your models are getting more and more powerful, and maybe it's time for a national discussion about...

1:23:56Mike Wior:But you know, it's funny. We have something that's called, and we didn't release it yet, we announced it, we have something that's called Travel Club. And there, the agent, I'm sometimes joking, and I'm saying the agent will do whatever it takes to put me on this flight.

1:24:10Ariel Cohen:oh yeah i mean there's all those simulations like the vending machine benchmarks things like that where the models will start

1:24:18Ade Ajao:and it's like i just looked up your boss actually and i'm gonna i'm gonna leave you a negative

1:24:24Ariel Cohen:review i'm gonna i'm going to if i'm gonna short your stock i'm gonna short your stock to size

1:24:30Ade Ajao:don't issue me this refund right now help us uh help us uh out with this question we were talking

1:24:36Ariel Cohen:earlier on the show, it feels like TSA has gotten remarkably better over the last 10 years. I used to remember getting to the airport an hour before the flight and thinking, I might miss my flight, right? Or maybe I have to try to ask TSA, hey, can I get through a little faster? Now it seems like no more than 30 minutes every time. It's pretty good. What's your read?

1:25:00Mike Wior:So you know, I've mentioned the van edge earlier and you guys have to use it. I'm sure that you're traveling from time to time, so just use it. Just try it out. But the cool thing there, it will send you a day before the trip, but also during the trip proactively. It's actually different types of agents there that will tell you, hey, the TSA pre-line, that's how long it will take you. And that's how long it takes you right now. How long it will take you to get to the airport. Are there specific interruptions right now? All of these things. So we actually know what's going on with TSA, and it was actually interesting, because to your point, it's actually significantly better.

1:25:36Mike Wior:And obviously I have Clear, which is actually much better right now. And with the face aid and the identification, it's actually much easier. But if you think about us, we're going to really guide you and tell you what's in the airport right now. During the TSA shutdown, it was not as bad as the media described it. There were a lot of headlines. We actually were watching this and we were saying, yeah, there is some JFK issue right now. But by the way, JFK has issues all the time. and it's not as bad as they're describing it. So I would actually, that's why the platform is so strong because instead of taking the headlines, you can actually really see what's going on right now in the context of your trip.

1:26:16Ade Ajao:Yeah, talk about memory. All of the AI apps are building memory functionality. People are collecting markdown files for different skills. And I can imagine a future where I have some sort of memory around my preferences. I like to fly direct. I prefer Burbank to LAX if possible. I like to fly at these hours. Here's my calendar. And what I really want is just like, I'm going to San Francisco for two days. I have to hit this meeting and that meeting. And I would love to just be able to have the integration to Uber to book the car. And then the Waymo when I'm in SF because Waymo works in SF, and that's great.

1:26:59Ade Ajao:And then the hotel and everything just from start to finish booked in one flow automatically. How close are we to that? I imagine that's all that.

1:27:07Mike Wior:You notice I run products at Naval, and I really, really need to hire you. First of all, we have our own memory component. It's our own development as part of Naval Cognition. And everything that you described, we do already. But it's actually more...

1:27:25Ade Ajao:Well, then you don't need me.

1:27:30Mike Wior:But here's the thing. People really care about their loyalty clubs. So we found a way to automatically, when we onboard you to Novana Edge, we're automatically figuring out your number for every club. Also your level. So that's the first component on memory.

1:27:52Ade Ajao:jordy's the second to his loyalty club you're big it's amazing if the air one one you always

1:28:02Ade Ajao:he'll fly any he'll fly any airline but uh but most people do care i know i know i know it's a big deal i i i actually have never in my career uh been on the road enough to get any sort of status i think i got like i think i got like bronzed here on southwest once i told trey Stevens at Founders Fund, he laughed his head off.

1:28:21Mike Wior:You and I are the complete opposite. Maybe I should not hire you. I actually don't travel that much. We avoid travel at all costs.

1:28:29Ade Ajao:But weigh in on how many minutes should you get to the airport before? Because I was making the claim that if you don't miss a flight every once in a while, you're not cutting it close enough, and you're leaving time on the table. And Jordy's this guy, he gets to the airport five, sometimes six hours early for a domestic flight with no checked bags. And I just think 30 minutes before the boarding starts is fine. But who would you side with between me 30 minutes before boarding starts, Jordi, five, six, seven hours sometimes before?

1:29:02Mike Wior:Maybe in between. I think you owe too much for me. I don't want to be there five minutes before. I would hate that. But definitely I don't want to spend my entire... Of course, it's not fun.

1:29:14Ade Ajao:Well, you know that airport lounges are catering to gamers now. This is in the Wall Street Journal. They're setting up video game airports. This is bullish for you. John's a little bit of a video game addict.

1:29:25Ariel Cohen:Yeah.

1:29:27Ade Ajao:Navon Cognition preload my Call of Duty account onto the local computer. So when I get there, I'm already cued. I want to be in the lobby on the rest. Here's another one for you.

1:29:38Ariel Cohen:What do you think about vibe coding lounges in airports? Do you think we can see, like, you know, you got five minutes before your flight, build the next hit app.

1:29:48Mike Wior:Yeah.

1:29:48Ariel Cohen:Could we see something like that?

1:29:50Mike Wior:Well, I think that people went so far with vibe coding. And, you know, and the reality is that when you want to develop the real thing, you are definitely more efficient today. But you cannot vibe code your way to everything. It's like, so, yeah, maybe you cannot vibe everything, you know, on the lounge at the airport. But I do see sometimes people vibe coding stuff while they're on a flight. I do see that.

1:30:12Ade Ajao:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a big one. And then they carry their MacBook Pros with the lid open off the plane. I have friends who have been in that situation many, many times. Yeah, you do see that.

1:30:22Ariel Cohen:I usually travel with anywhere from like 8 to 16 Mac minis, and I storm above my seat. I just keep running the whole time.

1:30:30Ade Ajao:Yeah, yeah. And what's weird is that you don't bring battery packs. You run it off a gas diesel generator, right? With a little camping stove and propane. You got propane there. I thought that they didn't allow you to get through TSA, but I guess you just go around.

1:30:45Ariel Cohen:Yeah, they really make it hard to be running 20 open claw instances.

1:30:51Ade Ajao:It's rough. It's rough, but hopefully in the future.

1:30:53Ariel Cohen:Anyways, great to hang with you. Congratulations on an awesome quarter. Love seeing the progress. Congratulations. Thank you so much. This is Travel Super Intelligence. You're doing it.

1:31:05Ade Ajao:We love it. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

1:31:18Ariel Cohen:A console lounge at the airport. A console lounge. That would be cool. Pull up this Shrek Luce.

1:31:24Ade Ajao:Shrek Luce. Oh, it has the head.

1:31:27Ariel Cohen:It's got a tail.

1:31:28Ade Ajao:Why is it so much more aggressive? No, no, no, no. This is a terrible AI image because Shrek is notably round. Like, he is very round. It needs to be more round, not sharp and all angular like this. I don't like this Shrek Luce at all. I won't be buying it. I won't be buying this. Looks like a Mansory Shrek Luce. Give me the ultra-rounded ogre in the swamp. Ideally, put the whole car in a swamp.

1:31:56Ariel Cohen:All right.

1:31:56Ade Ajao:Anyway, we're working on that. We're cranking on that.

1:31:59Ariel Cohen:The new TBPN meta is just generating images with chat and then doing an interview and then coming back.

1:32:05Ade Ajao:Coming back to the image. Yeah, we do have our next guest, Jeff from Tensorwave, hopping on in about three minutes. So we will chat with him in just a few minutes. There is an update on the Anthropic Fable 5 safeguards for Frontier LLM development. Quote, they told Wired, we're changing Fable 5 safeguards for Frontier LLM development to make them visible. We made the wrong trade-off, and we apologize for not getting the balance right. So that was a very surprising thing a lot of people were asking like how did this happen? Like it's such an odd decision to secretly degrade the IQ semi-analysis who is obviously

1:32:44Ariel Cohen:I'm laughing at the latest output Yeah, so most notably it still is not gonna allow you to use

1:32:51Ade Ajao:Yes, but it will at least tell you like hey, this is off-limits You got a contact support or something so it it Dean Ball says it resolves the central concern I had with the fable release That said, I suspect the residual broken trust and resentment this created will linger and have a blast radius wider than anthropic. The next time I advocate for any policy justified by AI risk concerns, I almost guarantee you that this incident will be used in rebuttal. And so people are going back and forth on that. But there's plenty of other news. I want to see this next output. So let's pull that up. Pull it up.

1:33:28Ariel Cohen:I can't wait for you to see this.

1:33:29Ade Ajao:says, imagine building a computer and not allowing its use in CS research. That's very dystopian. And that's a good point. Yeah, if you're a young LLM researcher, AI researcher, you want to get on that path, that's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm looking for.

1:33:46Ariel Cohen:It looks like Brabus came, took the Luce and said, we're doing the official Shrek collab.

1:33:53Ade Ajao:It's still a little too sharp for me. I don't know. It's still got some, like the fact that there's even one clean line on that car, not going to be purchasing the Shrek Luce. The SpaceX IPO. The SpaceX IPO is, SpaceX IPO day is going to be lit. Soldier Boy said this in 2015. What did he know?

1:34:15Ariel Cohen:What did he know?

1:34:16Ade Ajao:What did he know? Okay. It doesn't exist. This is fake news. This is fake news. No. According to this proposed note. the depicted 2015 tweet from Soldier Boy does not exist.

1:34:27Ariel Cohen:If you were going to fake this, why would you not say SpaceX will price at$135 a share in June of 2026?

1:34:38Ade Ajao:But we got to apologize to Matt Zeitlin because he said that retail demand for SpaceX shares would be incredibly high. What he said was the idea that SpaceX is being, quote, dumped on retail is a little silly. retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10x of whatever is available. And I was going back and forth. I was like, okay, like$70 billion. The retail location might be like$7 billion or something for this raise. Like, are they really going to have$70 billion of demand for retail? And that's exactly what they have. No, no, it's more. It's more now. But Reuters said SpaceX IPO draws more than$70 billion in retail orders.

1:35:15Ade Ajao:And so, yes, this is not getting dumped on retail. Retail wants SpaceX stock very clearly. And what is it at now, Tyler?

1:35:21Ariel Cohen:The latest sell was$100 billion.

1:35:23Ade Ajao:$100 billion of retail demand. They're said to increase capital.

1:35:28Ariel Cohen:So crazy. Really?

1:35:31Ade Ajao:Nick Frost over at Cohere is taking the other side. He doesn't like it. He says, if you think data centers are...

1:35:36Ariel Cohen:While we're on the Matt Zeitlin topic, Matt Zeitlin has a new... The apology for it. ...great new article about all the different spinoff businesses from SpaceX over the years and how many other kind of like clean energy.

1:35:51Ade Ajao:Are you talking about the SpaceX alumni, like the mafia?

1:35:55Ariel Cohen:Full deep dive on all the different spinoff companies. There's actually a website for this. Go check it out on Heatmap.

1:36:01Ade Ajao:So obviously go check it out on Heatmap, but also alumnifounders.com has a website for companies that were founded by SpaceX alums. When I first went to this website, it was like a little logo block of like 10 companies. There's now 152 companies founded by SpaceX alumni. $13.5 billion raised. They've created 8 ,280 jobs. And ranking them, Relativity's raised 1.8 billion. Base Power has raised 1.3 billion. Impulse Space has raised a billion. Firefly has raised 800 million in the IPO, public company now. Apex, Hermes, Radiant, Castilian. Wow, it's like every company. Synthego, K2 Space, Ursa Major, Varda, obviously, Reliable Robotics, StarCloud, Revel, so many others.

1:36:57Ade Ajao:What a fantastic feeder for a mafia. The SpaceX mafia is something we're going to be hearing a lot about in the coming years, especially post-IPO, which happens tomorrow. So tune in. Our next guest is Jeff from Tensorwaves, co-founder and CGO. How are you doing, Jeff? Welcome to the show.

1:37:15Jeremy Fraenkel:Hey, doing good, John. How are you?

1:37:17Ade Ajao:Doing well. Great to have you. Thank you so much. Since it is your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the company.

1:37:24Jeremy Fraenkel:Yeah, I'm Jeff Datarchuk, co-founder and chief growth officer, I'd like to say chief GPU officer here at Tensorwave. Our focus is on building out AI infrastructure exclusively with AMD.

1:37:36Ade Ajao:Okay, so I mean chief growth officer that feels like a sales revenue goal chief GPU officer feels like an operations construction Manufacturing racking buying like the other side of the business. Do you touch both? How deeply integrated are those more GPUs?

1:37:54Ariel Cohen:Empowered shells more revenue. That's right.

1:37:56Jeremy Fraenkel:Everybody needs GPUs and powered shells and Getting access to them and I'm the gatekeeper.

1:38:02Ade Ajao:Okay, so lay down the AMD thesis We can go in that. But let's just start with how you became interested in AMD. Why now? What's the traction? What's the evidence that you're seeing that this is the right choice for your business? Yeah.

1:38:17Jeremy Fraenkel:So when AI took off back in 2022, 2023, and there was the big supply constraint around getting access to NVIDIA chips, the company that we had started previously, we were deploying FPGAs at scale. And so we're working with Xilinx and Altera chips and primarily Xilinx. And when Xilinx got acquired by AMD, our previous company was working very closely with AMD. They would send us all of the latest and greatest chips and we'd get them deployed and debugged for them at scale. And so that's how we forged this relationship early on with AMD. And we saw as soon as there was the supply constraint on the NVIDIA side, the opportunity when AMD announced their GPUs back in 2023 for us to be the first to go to market with their chips at scale.

1:39:02Ade Ajao:And how are you talking to your customers about what AMD can offer? Like we've seen Semi-Analysis has Inference X, formerly Inference Max, and had some really unique data showing that for certain models, they haven't been able to benchmark everything, especially the proprietary models, but for certain open source architectures, AMD is actually maybe more cost effective on a token per dollar basis. But what data are you leaning on? What questions are people asking you? And then I'm super interested to understand how companies are thinking about where the integration, if they do want to migrate from CUDA over to AMD, like what goes into that?

1:39:48Ade Ajao:How costly is that? It was seen as impenetrable, impossible. Now it's looking more and more feasible. But what are companies saying about the trade-offs involved in being on AMD? Yeah.

1:40:00Jeremy Fraenkel:So in the very beginning, when the supply constraint issues happened, people were just looking for more options. And AMD was the only option that was available. And so at the very beginning, people wanted to just try it and see if it worked. And so AMD, when they first launched, launched with the emphasis on scaling out inference at scale. And so being able to support inference and support some of the hyperscalers was their first focus. And then as more labs started getting on and testing it, they realized that there were some gaps in the software. You know, it seemed like the hardware story had gotten out ahead of the software story.

1:40:34Jeremy Fraenkel:And so that's where we were able to help lean in with AMD to help fill some of those gaps by getting them access and helping debug things along the way. And so, yeah, the frustration that customers had around, you know, not wanting to be locked into one vendor, not giving all of their margin to Jensen forced them. And they were willing to look at other options that were available on the market. And so we were there, you know, every step of the way to help fill some of those gaps as customers were considering what is that leap going from CUDA to Rockham on AMD.

1:41:08Ade Ajao:And the big public story that played out around that time, you're probably referring to George Hotz flagging some bugs, eventually getting on the phone with Lisa Su, going full founder mode in the CEO seat, and watching Rock M develop and actually crush a lot of those bugs. Obviously, some people have flawless experiences. Some people probably still run into problems every once in a while. That's going to happen. But a really good turning of the tide, really good different way to interact with the developer community. I'm interested to know, like, how big do you have to be to go multi-platform now?

1:41:46Ade Ajao:Do you have to be one of the, you know, trillion-dollar labs? Or are there smaller companies that say, hey, we have this, you know, this model that we're fine-tuning. It's pretty good. It's built on some open-source architecture. And we'd like the flexibility to not be locked into one chip, but is that a million dollar endeavor, like a year of 10 researchers time? How are we bucketing this idea of diversifying the options for a company?

1:42:18Jeremy Fraenkel:Yeah, that was a question that a lot of companies had. What is the switching cost of going from Huda going to Rockham? And we were able to show, I mean, in the early days, right? Back in 2023, Databricks was able to show that you can go from NVIDIA and switch to AMD and it works out of the box in the early days. And so being able to showcase that and focus on the most important use cases that the majority of AI companies are using and optimizing those things over time was AMD's focus. And Lisa did a great job, like you mentioned. She did go into founder mode. she lit a fire over there to make sure that her team was emphasizing building the developer community, building out the resources necessary.

1:42:59Jeremy Fraenkel:And as Anoush over there, who's the CVP of AI, yeah, I love what he says. He says, speed has become the moat and they've been able to move even faster now. And with all these coding, cogen tools that are available, they're able to even move even faster to help fill and close the gap on that supposed coup de moat.

1:43:19Ade Ajao:Yeah. A lot of times people sort of put AI as like a monolith. And I mean, we were talking yesterday about how just in the customer support, we're talking about Brett Taylor at Sierra, just in the customer support world, you know, speed might not matter for agentically going and solving a problem in the back end after a customer support ticket closed. But if you're on the phone with someone and you need a real-time voice model, it might actually make sense to co-locate that or distribute that. We talked to Matthew Prince from Cloudflare about this, that there are certain models that need to be in certain places.

1:43:57Ade Ajao:Speed might be more important. Others, it's just raw horsepower. It's going to take an hour anyway. Send it off to the big data center. But I'm interested in the other pockets. It's like, where is AMD poised already in the lead or poised to take the lead in images or video or voice or real time or agentic work or integration between the GPU and the CPU? Like, is there something where you're particularly excited? I mean, I noticed Luma AI is a customer. They obviously do creative work. And I'm just wondering if there's something where you're like, oh yeah, like they've nailed, like this particular architecture is great.

1:44:34Ade Ajao:And like, obviously there's other work to be done. There's more cost on certain workflows because those were developed at DeepMind on TPU or at some other company on NVIDIA. But is there any place where you're like, ah, AMD's really nail it in this subcategory of AI?

1:44:50Jeremy Fraenkel:Yeah, well, they started off great on the hardware side and focusing on adding more HVM than what you can find on the comparable NVIDIA chip. And so having more HVM allows for workloads that are running larger models to run on fewer GPUs and to do it faster.

1:45:07Ade Ajao:Yeah. So you have the CUDA moat, as you put it. Is there like a who's building the bridge? Like you need a bridge to go over a moat. Like, I imagine that there's companies, you're probably among them, that are specifically building software that can just translate any architecture from NVIDIA to AMD. Like, how close are we to just that being one click of a button? Yeah.

1:45:35Jeremy Fraenkel:Well, one of the things that I found is we were digging into, you know, understanding more about what NVIDIA was doing, understanding what that CUDA mode actually was, and talking to a lot of the original engineers that helped build CUDA from the ground up. Yeah. One of the guys that's on our team, Greg Diamos, was there in the very beginning building CUDA at NVIDIA. And he had always said that CUDA was always built to go beyond CUDA and to scale out infrastructure. And so one of the things that we've, as we've talked to people, they said that CUDA is not the moat at NVIDIA. Their ecosystem is the moat.

1:46:07Jeremy Fraenkel:And the resources and developers and libraries that they have poured into over the last 10, 15 years is the moat. and that's the maturity that exists today. And so as AMD is building that out and as we are supporting them, we find the important thing is to focus on building out an ecosystem to support AMD. We don't focus on software ourselves, but we have a lot of other companies that are trying to solve that problem to create a heterogeneous stack to be able to switch between chips. And so bringing together those people, showcasing all the different layers that are existing beyond the NVIDIA ecosystem is what my current focus is on today.

1:46:48Ariel Cohen:Where are you setting up your supercomputers? Some people call them data centers. We call them supercomputers.

1:46:55Jeremy Fraenkel:Yeah, we have supercomputers all over. We have Arizona, Florida, Pittsburgh, and have data centers going up all over North America currently. Amazing.

1:47:03Ade Ajao:Awesome. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise?

1:47:06Jeremy Fraenkel:Yeah, we raised$350 million Series B. Here we go.

1:47:11Ade Ajao:Congratulations. And thank you. So much for taking the time to come chat with us.

1:47:16Ariel Cohen:Yeah. Great to meet you Jeff Great to meet you. Thanks to the team on the program. Thanks everyone.

1:47:19Ade Ajao:Have a good one Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches Do you have another AI image for me? Or are we moving on to our next guest Matthew Joseph from Minerva? He's a co-founder and CEO and he's in the waiting room We'll get back to the next version of the Luce After we talk to Minerva founder Matthew Joseph. How are you doing Matthew? Good to meet you. Good, how are you guys? We're doing fantastically. Thanks so much for hopping on. Please, introduce yourself and the company.

1:47:52Mike Wior:Yeah, so I'm MJ. I'm the CTO of founder Minerva, as you guys said before. Minerva is an AI platform for consumer marketing. So basically, we help consumer brands unify their first-party data, which sits in like 20 different data systems, like Klaviyo, Shopify, whatever. We standardize it, we resolve it, we create kind of a golden record, and then we optimize sales marketing on top of that. Using a bunch of other agents that we developed.

1:48:14Ade Ajao:Do you, how much of this is like data for like the CFO of a consumer brand to understand return on ad spend versus like actually taking it through to a creative tool, closing the loop and integrating with like generative content, writing, marketing briefs, maybe even generating copy, probably not in your models directly, but you know, throughout that and harnessing everything together.

1:48:39Mike Wior:Yeah, it's actually more data on the consumer. So we have a really, really expansive data set

1:48:44Ade Ajao:on 270 million Americans, including an identity graph, which

1:48:48Mike Wior:is also pretty expansive. We have about 10 billion pieces of PII. And so we help the CMO and the performance marketer understand their consumer base better. So when you're looking at the funnel and seeing where people are dropping off or you're looking at the email copy that you're creating, you need to understand who you're actually sending that message to. We understand that, so we can do it both ways. We can be generative and say, hey, you're marketing to this kind of person, so you should say this. And then we can do the opposite, where we can kind of diagnose inefficiencies based off of demographics.

1:49:19Ade Ajao:Give us sort of a case study from the NBA. NBA is in the news, obviously. Seems like people show up with plenty of money. I don't know that you need any. What questions do you need other than what's your credit card number? Because I got a$100 ,000 ticket here for you, and you'll pay whatever it takes to get to this game.

1:49:39Mike Wior:Yeah, with the NBA, we're part of their fan graph. So we power a lot of their consumer analytics that they end up selling to all their downstream teams. But even at the team level, there's a ton of different case studies that we are starting to prop up right now where, you know, if you have super expensive seating, but you're in Oklahoma City, you might need to find people that are out of town from a road game that might want to buy that seat, right? Oh, sure. So case studies like that are what we're gunning for. But with the NBA in general, it's mostly powering the consumer analytics platform.

1:50:08Ariel Cohen:How do you guys actually interact with different ad platforms, let's say Meta or AdWords, TikTok, etc.?

1:50:18Mike Wior:Yeah, so with Meta, we'll find audiences that we know convert at a very, very high rate for specific products because we have an understanding of the right demographic to market to. And so we'll create lookalike audiences that are seeds on Meta, and they'll generally outperform broad targeting by a pretty fair margin. We've seen in luxury travel, luxury goods, our ROAS improvements are around like 3 to 5x broad targeting.

1:50:42Ariel Cohen:Wow. How quickly can you prove to companies that the product works?

1:50:48Mike Wior:Yeah, it depends on kind of the case study. For data, you can immediately identify inefficiencies in your pipeline. So people in a day will be like, oh, you guys are like absolutely changing where we're allocating spend. for things like meta, things like direct mail campaigns. It takes a little bit longer to get stat sig, but you can get an idea of how well you're actually going to be performing pretty quickly. So we generally see within a week that our data and our audiences perform better.

1:51:18Ade Ajao:Yeah, what are the biggest, broadest meta trends in consumer marketing these days? I mean, we went through the Facebook direct targeting, direct response boom. We went through the influencer by YouTube ads boom. But in the age of AI, I think everyone's expecting just like AI generated ads. But is there some other trend where like you can target a smaller audience so you can go on a more niche platform? So you might see more uplift from a platform that previously wasn't ROI positive. Like what else are you seeing in terms of just broad marketing trends?

1:51:54Mike Wior:Yeah, I think a pretty interesting one right now is retargeting on AI driven traffic. Okay. So a person who comes in through like a chat GVT platform or like Claude or whatever will behave very differently than a person who came in through direct. And so being able to understand that funnel is super, super important. So retargeting on top of that is something that's pretty interesting and kind of booming right now.

1:52:14Ade Ajao:Do you have a thesis on like how or why they behave differently? Like if I, it seems like it's higher conversion. Like if I'm landing on a webpage after doing a deep research report on a product, I've learned so much. So I'm probably not going to need to scroll the product detail page. I'm probably either just want to jump to checkout or I want to do something else to verify something that I learned in the chat app.

1:52:38Mike Wior:Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these trends are happening kind of in the last year. I still think the average user of AI, especially for kind of deep research, is probably a little bit more advanced than the 65-year-old in Oklahoma City. I keep thinking in Oklahoma City, so I'm sorry about that. But I think it does boil down to demographics. In three years, this can totally change, right? Like when AI is truly commonplace in every single household, which is getting there. But over time, this will definitely change. Yeah.

1:53:10Ariel Cohen:What percentage of the creative that your customers are running do you think is heavily generated with AI or influenced by AI or created in process?

1:53:25Mike Wior:Yeah, I'm seeing a huge trend towards AI generated creative. creative, there's a lot of like weird little things that you need to keep in mind when you're using a generated creative, like where you're placing text relative to the rest of the creative. I mean, it's really hard to execute well. This is something that we are looking into right now as we have, you know, very good read on the actual demographics. And so creative is kind of the next logical piece there. Right.

1:53:52Ariel Cohen:Like if you're going to create a lookalike audience for somebody and then you're telling them like, hey, you should put spend behind this. you're also in a pretty good position to theoretically as models get better say like here's you know a hundred pieces of content that you can run against them and then they can select okay what fits our brand what doesn't.

1:54:11Mike Wior:Yeah that's exactly right it's like the next logical step right just automating the entire process from you know product to cohort fit to creative fit we're in a position to do all of that and I'm happy to be part of kind of like the rise in creative generated by AI.

1:54:28Ade Ajao:I wonder if you find a lookalike audience of people that just love AI slop and you just feed them the sloppiest ads and then people that, because a lot of people don't like the AI slop, but there's probably some niche audience out there that's like I'm buying if there are six fingers. Matt, you'll

1:54:44Ariel Cohen:appreciate this. We obviously love ads, firm supporters of ads, all this stuff, but somehow I ended up in a holdout Don't say this.

1:54:55Ade Ajao:They're going to take you on.

1:54:56Ariel Cohen:I ended up in a holdout on Meta where I do not get any ads. Like I'm in the probably like 0.05 % of people that they're like testing engagement with. And I'm like, I'm the wrong guy to test on. But I just realized one day I was like, wait, I have not gotten an ad on Instagram in months. And still to this day, absolutely nothing.

1:55:17Ade Ajao:Imagine they run this experiment, whole, whole group, no ads. And they just find like massive depression. just massive rates of depression maybe the most mental health maybe you know consumerism

1:55:31Ariel Cohen:talk about the round

1:55:32Ade Ajao:chop therapy or whatever

1:55:34Mike Wior:yeah so we raised so we raised 20 mil between the C and A from EPC from the general partnership many other investors I'm probably very very stoked for all their support. We love all the teams we work with.

1:55:54Ade Ajao:Fantastic.

1:55:55Ariel Cohen:Very cool. I got some brands to connect you to. Yeah. Send me an email. Send me an email. I'll, with the quick pitch, I'll CC you in with some.

1:56:05Ade Ajao:That'd be great. Will do.

1:56:06Ariel Cohen:Awesome. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Mixing five. Let's go.

1:56:09Ade Ajao:Let's go.

1:56:13Ade Ajao:Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bond, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. What were we saying?

1:56:21Ariel Cohen:Or San Antonio. I feel like everyone, like I feel like it's relatively easy to rally these people in our world around New York City.

1:56:30Ade Ajao:Yeah. Oh, sure, sure, sure. It's easy to be a bandwagon fan for the Knicks because in New York you visited, you've been there. Yeah, Big Apple.

1:56:37Ariel Cohen:Hard to really rally around San Antonio. Have you been to San Antonio?

1:56:40Ade Ajao:No.

1:56:41Ariel Cohen:Would you like to go to San Antonio?

1:56:44Ade Ajao:Sure.

1:56:46Ariel Cohen:Sure.

1:56:47Ade Ajao:Where is San Antonio?

1:56:49Ariel Cohen:TBPN San Antonio. It's in Texas. We're doing it.

1:56:52Ade Ajao:But I always think Houston, Dallas, is San Antonio the third in that in that tri-state metro, the three cities that connect?

1:57:01Ariel Cohen:We're sending Tyler to San Antonio to figure out what's going on. What's in the water?

1:57:06Ade Ajao:Get to the bottom of it. I don't know. Well, Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's biggest talent representative and our agent, is starting a new company to invest in YouTube stars and podcasters who want to be the next Oprah Winfrey or Reese Witherspoon. CAA and the Integrated Media Company, an investment arm of private equity firm TPG, that's Texas Pacific Group, formerly, have pledged$250 million to compound Creative Holdings. is a new company that will acquire and invest in businesses founded by entertainers who got their start online. Compound will be led by Tucker Brown, an investment banker who has already helped raise money for the YouTube trickshot masters at Dude Perfect and the liberal podcasters at the Midas Touch Network.

1:57:55Ade Ajao:Interesting. Are you familiar with Midas Touch with the M-E-I-D-A-S? At one point, this podcast was bigger than Joe Rogan. It jumped to the top. I did not realize that it was a political show. The network describes itself as doing pro-democracy journalism. Is this? I'm so confused because the YouTube, yeah, this is definitely it. I don't know. I thought it was something else. I thought it was more in like the Alex Ramosi category because Midas Touch, of course, the golden touch, Midas Touch. I thought it was more about like wealth creation. Interesting. CIA represents many -

1:58:32Ariel Cohen:I'm very interested to see what deals they do here. and we're working on getting the team on the show. Talk about it.

1:58:37Ade Ajao:It turned to Spotter like outlets. Outlets like Spotter to raise money by trading a share of their future earnings on YouTube. Yeah, if you have a YouTube video and it's doing really well and it's getting views, bringing in ad revenue every month, there's a company called Spotter where you can go and sell the future revenue stream for cash today to finance your operation or just take some chips off the table, much like selling the rights to your record collection, essentially. There's a lot of capital in the market generally and a lot of interest in creator businesses, but there aren't many educated capital platforms dedicated to invest in the category specifically.

1:59:15Ade Ajao:I agree with that. There's only a few that do these types of deals. Obviously, Barstool raised money at multiple times, and there's been others that have been successful, but it is a thin crowd. Compound will focus on creators who have built media businesses generating at least tens of millions of dollars in sales and could use capital to expand their operations. The company isn't interested in just buying a share of revenue from YouTube or Instagram and tying their fate to an algorithm. They want to buy a piece of the whole holding company, the media company. Brown estimates there are hundreds of creators that fit their initial investment strategy.

1:59:47Ade Ajao:That talent can be born on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, or Substack. That's interesting. We haven't really seen a Substack raise money. I guess the free press was on Substack for a long time. I think they still might be, and did raise money and scale up and hire a bunch of journalists and writers. Interesting. Leaders from CIA and IMC, including CIA co-chairman Kevin, President Jim, said, will sit on an executive committee that oversees compound. Celebrities of all stripes have embraced entrepreneurship of online creators, starting businesses in entertainment, fashion, food, retail. Reese Witherspoon sold her company, Hello Sunshine, in a deal that valued the firm at as much as$900 million, while George Clooney and other clients sold his tequila company, Cosamigos, for I think also around that number, a huge, huge outcome.

2:00:38Ade Ajao:We've been looking for ways as an agency to double down on our efforts outside of core representation. And Paki McCormick gives Tucker a shout out. He says, Tucker has been one of my best friends since high school. I didn't realize they went back so far. He's the single best person in the world to be doing this. Agree with that. He's going to crush it 100%. People always called him the less hot version of me. That's very funny if you know them both. Anyway, Lionsgate has taken an equity interest in Runway, and they will be launching a new joint venture program to develop and produce new intellectual property.

2:01:15Ade Ajao:This is going to be wildly popular amongst film fans and cinephiles, I'm sure. Lionsgate and leading generative AI company. I love Runway, Crystal Ball, former guest of the show. Runway announced an expansion of their strategic collaboration, deepening the company's shared commitment to a future where AI and entertainment grow together. That's good. The preferred partnership with Runway is part of Liongate's multifaceted AI strategy under the leadership of Chief AI Officer Kathleen Grace and the studio's AI Steering Committee. so it will be interesting to see what Lionsgate does. Lionsgate films.

2:01:57Ade Ajao:Can you name one? I don't think I can name one. They did Saw. That's interesting. What else did they do? American Psycho? That's a meme. The Punisher, Hostel, Rambo, The Expendable, Sicario. It'd be interesting to rank movies

2:02:12Ariel Cohen:by how many... John Wick?

2:02:14Ade Ajao:They did the whole John Wick series.

2:02:15Ariel Cohen:Listen to this, John. John Wick. ranking movies by how many memes they've created, right? Because like American Psycho. Tons. Tons. John Wick has a meme. What's that?

2:02:29Ade Ajao:It's the, I'm thinking I'm back. Yeah, I'm thinking I'm back. That's the name. Anyway, Sicario, Hitman's Bodyguard, Den of Thieves, Greenland. Good stuff. Will be interesting to see what they're doing. Maybe just background replacement. Maybe John Wick 6 will be entirely AI generated, one-shotted by the next model. You never know. Lionsgate's going all in.

2:02:51Ariel Cohen:Keanu Reeves cannot be AI generated. I think every other actor.

2:02:56Ade Ajao:The corridor crew would like to differ. They hired a Keanu Reeves impersonator to do a, basically the whole shtick was like, they're gonna try and create a viral video and someone's robbing a corner store, like a 7-Eleven. And the impersonator, the Keanu Reeves impersonator stops the assailant. And then they used a deep fake to change the face of the impersonator to Keanu Reeves to make a very convincing Keanu Reeves saves the day video that I think went viral and confused a lot of people, but was a lot of fun. They did a whole bunch of back, like behind the scenes content. Anyway, we have our next guest, Adek Ajay, from Base 10, who's the managing partner.

2:03:46Ade Ajao:How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Good morning, guys. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

2:03:51Ariel Cohen:Let's get right to it. How much did you raise? And John, give me the hardest gong hit of your life. Amp it up a little bit. $850 million. Boom.

2:04:04Ariel Cohen:Congratulations. Great to have you on the show.

2:04:07Ade Ajao:$2.6 billion in assets. But it is your first time on the show. So why don't we go back in time a little bit and give us some of your background and how you got into investing, how you scaled up this fund.

2:04:20Matt Joseph:Yeah, so the accent is Spanish. The name is Nigerian. Early childhood in Nigeria, then southern Spain. And like you guys, I was a founder. So I went to college in Madrid. I started my first company when I was in college in Madrid, which was not very popular occupation in Spain at the time.

2:04:42Ariel Cohen:I thought you were saying that the company wasn't very popular, like you got into some hot water.

2:04:46Matt Joseph:uh maybe you're the company the the being a founder was not very popular um the company became very popular so we we were 20 we became the equivalent of facebook in spain um and to give you a sense we started in 05 uh we sold to telefonica in 2010 and when we sold we were about 60 percent of daily internet traffic in spain whoa so that was what was it called sorry that I'm not already 20 20 20 because it was for 20 years old but the Hispanic phonetic pronunciation

2:05:23Ariel Cohen:t-u-e-n-t-i I remember I remember now it's all coming back it's all coming back because I have some very good family friends in Spain I've spent a decent amount of time there including a summer in Madrid at one point and yeah I remember it a very very cool product so talk about the strategy

2:05:45Ade Ajao:$850 million, that's a lot of capital for seed Series A, Series B. Jeff Bezos raised a$12 billion Series B today. And there's this odd K-shaped dynamic in venture where the letters don't really mean anything anymore because you can raise a$2 million,$10 million Series B, a$10 billion Series B. Where are you seeing opportunity? What is the early medium stage market? What are you looking for in the companies that you fund?

2:06:15Matt Joseph:Yeah, so we say that we invest in automation for the real economy. And to give you a sense, when we launched the fund in 2018, we actually said, hey, we're going to invest in applied AI for the real economy. And the feedback from the LPs was like, hey, applied AI is not a thing. So it sounds niche. So why don't you do something real? We call it automation. We're like, okay, well we just think that people are going to use a lot more ai like logistics and restaurants and transportation um so it's no longer niche yeah and now as you were saying we have this crazy dynamic where like you know we we sold 20 for 100 million and that was a big deal yeah now that is

2:07:04Ariel Cohen:like there's some yc companies that raise that right not just raise at a hundred million dollar

2:07:10Matt Joseph:valuation but just raise a hundred million yeah exactly so it's a completely new world um which is fun like that that that's fantastic and what i tell the founders we invest in today is like man i'm so happy i don't have to compete with you because you guys are so good and there is so much happening uh so i would say apply to the real economy which these days means a lot

2:07:37Ade Ajao:How are you thinking about services as software, that whole trend? It does feel like there's an opportunity to not train a foundation model, not build a robot, be very capital light, go apply the tools that are already well beyond what's actually implemented in the real world. Close the capability overhang. Make a bunch of money in the process. Maybe you build some software. where maybe you get some customers on long contracts and the business works, profitable, that sounds great. At the same time, you sort of veer into, like are you just a consulting firm? How are you talking to founders? What are you seeing?

2:08:14Ade Ajao:What models are working?

2:08:16Matt Joseph:Yeah, great question. So there are a lot of labels, like AI enabled services, AI first applications. I like to spend a lot of time talking to clients, like calling the logistic companies, the transportation companies and they don't really care what the label is they just want it done right it's like hey at the end of the day i need to move this package from here to here yeah i need to like get this cash from this client what can you offer me that works that i can trust and that is fast and that is not terribly expensive uh so we try to like avoid a little bit of the labels and then go to what does a client want and need at the end.

2:09:04Matt Joseph:And I think there are going to be many business models that are successful. It's changing very fast.

2:09:11Ade Ajao:Yeah.

2:09:13Ariel Cohen:For my own curiosity, how is Spain thinking about AI? Do they have a sovereign AI strategy? I don't know how closely you follow it. It must be at least something interesting.

2:09:26Matt Joseph:We could be here all day. Look, we are a little bit more technology forward than when we started 20, but not quite San Francisco yet. I will say that I get a lot of text messages from my friends back in my hometown who are running restaurants and hotels being like, hey, have you heard of this thing called Claude? And that fills me with joy. as a country honestly we still need to get our strategy together and although the culture is changing and actually one thing that makes me very proud is that in the last year we have founded four different Spanish teams here in San Francisco that have moved to San Francisco to start companies and they are crushing it back home we still talk a little bit more about the World Cup than about AI to change that.

2:10:25Ade Ajao:Yeah.

2:10:25Ariel Cohen:Well, that's, I guess, fair for this next month. Talk to us about... Yeah, then after that.

2:10:31Ade Ajao:Yeah. Talk to us about coffee. How does that fit into a portfolio? I mean, is there a linkage? Is it just a good business by itself? Is it just a passion of yours? What's the coffee thesis?

2:10:43Matt Joseph:Yeah. So look, we are a research first fan, and we're always like, hey, what is going to happen to the construction market or the logistics market with robots. And as you guys know, all that's well and good. And then really early stage investor is all about the people. So when we met the Blank Street Coffee guys, they were like, look, coffee's big. And we're like, okay, we can agree on that. We don't need a lot of research with that. But honestly, it's one of the best pitches I have ever heard in my life. They were just like, look, we're both like sons of immigrants and immigrants ourselves. And like, did you know that 80 percent of coffee carts in New York are like rollover by immigrants?

2:11:30Matt Joseph:And it's a great path to like building wealth for the family and staying in the country. And like, that's what we want to power. And we're like, OK. And the automation. And they were like, well, the coffee cart is going to be great and like completely automated. And we're like, okay, we don't exactly know what that means right now, but these guys are awesome. So we should write the best check. And that turned out to go great. Yeah.

2:11:57Ade Ajao:It's funny because there are examples of similar stories and then it not going that great. So, yeah, it's so difficult to square all of that when you see opportunity. but ultimately you find the alignment and then everything works out. Do you think in deployment pacing? Do you think in two-year deployment, 10-year horizon? Is that changing in the modern era with so much uncertainty? I mean, we talked to Matthew Prince from Cloudflare about, and we talked to a number of people about, it's hard to plan two years, three years in advance if you're a public company CEO. also hard to plan ahead if you're a venture capitalist, but that's sort of what you're paid to do.

2:12:46Matt Joseph:Yeah, I know. Look, we have stayed remarkably consistent on that. Like all our funds have been like two and a half years to three years deployed. And we are going to do the same thing with this set of funds. It is more tempting than ever to deploy very fast. And I'm an optimist. So we're currently in the, this is Y Combinator week, right? So I want to back like 50 % of founders that I make or more. And my team is like, stop. We can't do that. And you're like, you're right, you're right. It's just, ah, there's so much to be, and these founders are so good. but we have built systems internally to make sure that we have that discipline because to your point, although it's very tempting and a lot of things are growing very fast, there is so much change that we want to get a little bit of feedback loop, a little bit of data of, hey, okay, we are three and a half years into AI or whatnot.

2:13:54Matt Joseph:What happens in year five? And we want exposure to that as well.

2:13:59Ade Ajao:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Appreciate you taking the time. Congratulations on the fundraise. Let's do it again soon. Anyways. Have a good one. Goodbye. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Jerry. 60 % of internet traffic on a company built in college. Insane.

2:14:17Ariel Cohen:Crazy.

2:14:17Ade Ajao:Insane. Yeah, that's such an impactful company. So good. Spain was locked in doom scrolling. He invented the Spanish group doom scroll. No, I'm sure it was probably messaging-driven, probably more post-driven. But that is remarkable. Anyway, we have our next guest, Jeremy Frankel, from Fundamental Co-founder and CEO. In the way, let's bring him in. What's going on? How are you doing, Jeremy? Good to be here. Good to be here, guys. Thank you for having me on. I want to get straight into World Cup predictions, wagers, all of this. But first, introduce yourself and the company a little bit. What are you working on?

2:14:55Ade Ajao:and then let's go through the broader news and applications.

2:15:01Jeff Tatarchuk:Awesome. Yeah, I'm Jeremy. I'm the CEO and co-founder at Fundamental. Fundamental built a foundation model for tabular data. So when most people think about the AI boom, they think about LLMs, you know, like chat, GPT, cloud. But what's less appreciated is that LLMs work well with unstructured data. So they might text, audio, video. but the global economy and enterprises really run on structural data on tables such as spreadsheets, databases, CRMs. And that's the part of the enterprise that really never had a CharGPT moment. And that's a market opportunity that we're focusing on. And so what we're doing for tables is what CharGPT did for language.

2:15:41Jeff Tatarchuk:We pre-trained the model on millions of tables to understand how the world works in rows and columns. And so we created one model that generalizes across industries and use cases to allow companies to make better predictions and decisions on their data.

2:15:59Ade Ajao:Yep. Okay. So everyone is going to say, oh, the frontier models, like they can spin up a spreadsheet. They can speak CSV. They can write Python that generates and manages tables and tabular data. And the frontier is the frontier. It's always the best. but you're going to effectively be benchmarking your product against the frontier models around the World Cup. Walk us through the strategy, the wager, what's actually at stake there. Yeah.

2:16:29Jeff Tatarchuk:So, you know, I grew up in Belgium and I'm a huge soccer fan. And a lot of us at the company are also big soccer fans. And so what we realized is that, you know, his total team performances in games can be structured in rows and columns. And so we started thinking around the office, is like, can we actually use our model Nexus to make predictions on the World Cup? And we said, like, you know, maybe betting markets are off and we are right. So like, we wanted to see how good our model was. And the funny thing is that at the core of our model, you know, our company is focused on enterprises. So we're not really a consumer-focused company, but we, you know, thought we could have some fun with it.

2:17:04Jeff Tatarchuk:And so before doing anything, we wanted to see how good our model was historically. And so what we did is we trained our model to win data up until the 2022 World Cup. And so data such as who won in different international games, the quality of the teams, whether games were home or abroad. And we ran more than 20 ,000 simulations. And what our model Nexus predicted or identified is that Argentina would be the eventual winner way before bookmarkers did. So if you look at what the market actually predicted, the market predicted that Brazil was going to win the 2022 World Cup up until the quarterfinals when Brazil got knocked out.

2:17:43Jeff Tatarchuk:And our model was much more accurate than that. And so we said, you know what? Let's apply the same thing for the 2026 World Cup. And our model already differs meaningfully from what betting markets are predicting. So I'm excited to see what next to me. So America's going to win, right? Yeah, I wish.

2:18:03Jeff Tatarchuk:America has a 0.5 % chance of winning the World Cup according to our model.

2:18:09Ade Ajao:There's a chance. I like those odds. I'll take those odds any day.

2:18:14Ariel Cohen:John loves betting on himself. Yes. How's Belgium fair?

2:18:21Jeff Tatarchuk:Belgium is at slightly less than 2%, but I honestly have faith.

2:18:27Ariel Cohen:Okay. And then Belgium. What's the population of Belgium, roughly?

2:18:31Jeff Tatarchuk:11 million. How many?

2:18:34Ariel Cohen:11 million? 11 million. So population of 11 million, absolutely mogging population.

2:18:41Ade Ajao:So are you also benchmarking the other frontier models, just going to the different models, open source models, and just asking them the same questions? Who do you predict will win, build a probability table, and then benchmark those as well? Because I think you're going to want to not just say that you're better than the sports books, but you're also going to want to say you're better than the frontier models, correct?

2:19:05Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, but the frontier models themselves don't really work well with predictions, right?

2:19:11Ade Ajao:But they can predict the next token. So they can take a wild guess, and then if you smoke them, it looks good, right?

2:19:16Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah. We could try that. We've not done that. We could definitely try it. But it's funny because the frontier models, especially for predictions, they sound right. They are not actually correct, though. Yeah.

2:19:28Ade Ajao:And with ChatGPT, it was the personalization. And in the personalization, I said, like, never bet against America. So I'm sure it would just say like 100%. So yeah, you probably smoke it.

2:19:39Ariel Cohen:Who are you projecting to win? What are kind of like the kind of key predictions that we should be tracking as a World Cup kicks off?

2:19:49Jeff Tatarchuk:The betting markets have Spain and France neck and neck. And we heavily favor Spain over France. The market also predicts that Argentina, I think, has like the fifth largest chance of winning according to the market. and we predict them as strong run of ups.

2:20:05Ade Ajao:Oh, interesting. Okay, so Spain, Argentina, Spain winning would look really good for you relative to the sports book.

2:20:13Jeff Tatarchuk:Correct. But I would be happy if Messi wins his second World Cup.

2:20:17Ariel Cohen:Sure. Tell us about the company. You recently raised some money.

2:20:22Jeff Tatarchuk:Yeah, so we raised$275 million. That's fantastic. Oh, who did you raise it from?

2:20:33Jeff Tatarchuk:We raise it from Oak, Valor, Battery Ventures, Salesforce, and then a bunch of big angels like Alvin Screenvass from Perplexity, Asabra Purpose from Wiz, and a few others.

2:20:50Ariel Cohen:That's fantastic. Very strong. Keep us posted as the World Cup progresses. I'm not even rooting for any team. I'm just rooting for your predictions. I want you to know that.

2:21:04Jeff Tatarchuk:I appreciate it. And everyone can go and see them on soccer.fundamental.tech.

2:21:10Ariel Cohen:Soccer.fundamental.tech. Very cool. Great to meet you, Jeremy. It'll be fun to follow along.

2:21:15Ade Ajao:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. In other fundraising news, Thrive is out with$10 billion. Got a little mogged by Bezos with the$12 billion raise, but not bad. Not bad. Thrive 10, and it's exceeding$10 billion. The largest ever, nearly double the size of the last fund for Thrive. $1 billion for early stage,$9 billion for growth. Biggest bets, just to remind you, OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, Anduril, Cursor are all in the Thrive portfolio. And a bunch of other companies. And so those have become the defining private companies of the current cycle. The strategy's concentrated, founder loyal, allergic to indexing the market.

2:21:57Ade Ajao:The Fifth Avenue strategy, as discussed on Invest Like the Best. and Patrick O'Shaughnessy is chiming in. Josh Kushner says, in markets, to go long on something is to bet. It grows more valuable over time. Much of the conversation today is short on humans wagering that AI makes people redundant. We believe the opposite is true for industries Thrive Holdings operates in, and Patrick O'Shaughnessy shares a transcript from Invest Like the Best. They said, the North Star for the next decade of Thrive is, if we are a company and we have a product, What are the products that we can create that make us look more like the businesses that we ultimately invest in?

2:22:36Ade Ajao:The second part of the story is after we invested in OpenAI, the business had$50 million in API revenue. And several of us went around New York City and started pitching a bunch of the private equity firms on this idea that they could use the API to create greater efficiency within their businesses. We were somewhat surprised by the fact that we did not get meaningful traction around these ideas. So Kareem, to his credit, said, let's just start doing this ourselves. We've always looked at the world that we've lived in as one that needed to disrupt from an outside-in perspective. If you were to think about the paradigm shift of reinforcement learning, the things that you need are both data that is proprietary to the company, but also the experts that exist at the company to fine-tune the model.

2:23:21Ade Ajao:We believe that going forward, disruption will happen from the inside out. We set up this permanent capital vehicle that enables us to buy these businesses and hold them in perpetuity. Because if you actually have a differentiated unique lens and cost of capital around these businesses, and you're able to transform them in ways in which you ultimately want to hold on to them forever. So congrats to Thrive on the new round.

2:23:46Ariel Cohen:Congrats to the whole team. Yeah, fantastic. Great stuff. The new fund.

2:23:49Ade Ajao:Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpi.com, and we will see you tomorrow for the SpaceX IPO.

2:23:57Ariel Cohen:We're going to just be hanging out. We're hanging out. No guests. We're going to have the stock price on the big board.

2:24:01Ade Ajao:It'll be fun. We'll see you tomorrow. It'll be a great time. Goodbye. Throwing flashbang.