Bridgit Mendler, Aravind Srinivas, Ted Feldmann, Karol Hausman & Lachy Groom, Sam Lessin, Kevin Systrom Says Meta Denied Instagram Resources

36:58Now it's all one single model. That's great. That means you have to read, you have to throw away lines of code and rewrite it. But we've been doing this since the beginning. People think perplexes remain a stagnant code base or something. It's always changed as soon as models became more capable. But the interesting thing about the native tool call models is that if we want a sonar version of the product that runs on our own setup, we also need to start doing post-training beyond just training for instruction following and summarization, but also tool calls and completing tasks using RO. And we hope to collect all this interesting data through the browser platform where people are giving tasks on our browser.

37:44And then obviously some of the agents will fail there, but we'll collect all the data and try to create positive trajectories, create eval suites, and then do RL post-training on that. And so the nice thing is a lot of open source code bases exist on how to replicate GRPO or PPO and post-training these models. and we've been doing that work already. So that's where we plan to invest more resources into for this year. How are you thinking about advertising in the context of search? It's historically been an ad-driven business, but we're seeing a lot of AI product companies just charge$20 a month, $200 a month,$2 ,000 a month, who knows?

38:25Is there a future where if you search for what's the best corporate card, Ramp is going to show up at the top if they bid on that? uh hopefully not i think that's that's the main reason why people like using the ais they think it's giving them something that google doesn't offer uh and and um so i think the subscription revenue is very healthy and positive like opening as making 10 billion a year or something like that right or 7 billion something like that so definitely uh that's only going to grow uh and and if ai start doing things not just answering questions or writing code uh people will pay even more because they kind of think about it as hiring somebody uh if you look at the amount of people people pay for personal assistants chiefs of chief of staffs personal chief of staff estate managers nannies like you know it's a lot of money and there are like a lot of people who can afford all that and we're talking about uh doing something 100x cheaper and also economically 10 to 100x more valuable in terms of end output so uh i i think the subscription uh tam is way bigger than what it is today um i i believe like you can do a lot of interesting things with memory where once you understand the user deeply enough uh the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content as long as it's super uh personalized and hyper optimized for that user uh instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on their platform reduces if uh they remove the ads because that's the level of personalization of the ads.

39:56So if any of the AI companies can do that, I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there. So that's yet to be explored, but in order to crack that, you need to crack memory properly. That's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser is like we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It's not like that personal. On the other hand, like what are the things you're buying? Which hotels are you going? Where are you? Which restaurants are you going to?

40:33What are you spending time browsing? Those are so much more about you that we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile. And maybe, you know, through our Discover feed, we could show some ads there. Makes no sense. How quickly do you want to launch Comet? Do you have a launch data? It was supposed to be long already. Yeah, it was supposed to be out by now. We got delayed, I think, partly because we underestimated the difficulty of the project and partly because we tried to do multiple things. And so we've tried to scope it down and we're aiming to get it out by mid-May. Awesome.

41:10Good luck. Last question I have. You posted ByteDance of America is worth building. I'm assuming you're building the ByteDance of America. I hope to be able to, but we need to earn the right to do that. So let's first, like, you know, I want to succeed with the Comet browser. I think that'll be like the real second product of WorkPlexity. Everything else we launched, like the assistant or the like apps, platforms, is all like just different versions of the same thing. The Comet will be the first really, truly different product. And I think if we can do that a second time, I believe like we can, and discover that's the other product we're trying though it's within the app right now but you could imagine spinning it out as a separate app too uh you could imagine us like earning the right to do that i think there's a lot like i've spoken to the founder of by dance and one thing he told me is they're they're structured in a very different way it's not like uh like cap cuts or tiktok have like different growth teams uh they they do have their own growth teams but there's one team by dance that takes care of infrastructure for all their companies one team that takes care of growth for all their companies one team that takes care of front-end mobile development for all their apps and so they share knowledge across apps very quickly uh it's insane so that sort of structure doesn't exist in uh in in the u.s like take google is actually the closest to bite dance of america if you think about it they have so many different apps in one umbrella but they they don't share lessons like the youtube team is so different from the gmail team sort of from the chrome team and that's why it takes so much time to collaborate so you need a very different leadership structure and a culture to make it happen in america yeah that makes sense uh every time i ask you one more question i get one more question and this i promise is the last uh without people use perplexity yeah yeah um without uh violating any ndas what what's going on with with tiktok speaking of ByteDance.

43:09There was a big flurry. Everybody was submitting bids and then it's been quiet. Do you have any insight that is not necessarily confidential? I really don't. We've submitted our bid. We never expected to be the leading candidate or anything. We're a very small company compared to them. Our bid was more interesting in the sense that everybody else who bid for them did not want to do anything to do with the algorithm. but I felt like the core problem is the fact that the algorithm is controlled by China in some form or the other even if they say the Chinese app is separate apps running outside the US and outside China like European countries are all sharing the same code and so they can get to use that data and influence what feeds people in America see so I think that's where we wanted to do some real work and the search bar is another place where we want to do some real work.

44:08We thought our proposal was pretty interesting. But we're not a data center company. We cannot guarantee them security and all that. Oracle can. So we'll see what happens. I think they've delayed the decision and it's probably going to be coupled with the tariff situation too. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for wearing a suit as well. Yeah, you look fantastic. Thanks. You guys are killing it. Thank you. Technology brothers. I like the name. That's awesome. Well, it's great to have you on, fellow technology brother. And come back on anytime when you have news.

44:42Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Bye. On Polymarket, who will acquire TikTok? AppLovin has shot to the top of the charts. But on low vol, they have about$10 ,000 in a$2 million market in terms of volume. But AppLovin is at 20%. Oracle, Larry Ellison combined, if you consider them one entity, 21%. 21 percent oracle's at 12 larry ellison's at nine microsoft's at eight amazon's at eight tim stokely at eight frank mccourt at eight alexis ohanian at six uh perplexity is down at four percent right there next to mr beast at four percent as well walmart at three percent who we discussed earlier uh would actually be the the ben thompson choice we should get ourselves in the mix and uh i don't Submit a fake bid just to go viral for a day.

45:30We're not allowed to bid on anything on Polymarket. No. But we should bid on TikTok. Yeah. We should just bid on TikTok. It's just going to be, we're going to, no more slop content. It's just TBPN clips the entire time. We considered doing a press release around it. Yes. It never hit the wire. It played out pretty quickly. Anyway, let's do some timeline while we wait for our next guest. Tyler says, Scoop, I found TBPN's hidden warehouse. Nice try. and he finds a picture of the brother's supply. I wonder where this is. But we always love when fans share fun photos. You found us, Tyler. You caught us.

46:06We are in the market for a new studio, hopefully moving into one soon. And this brick building looks like it's fireproof. It's Lindy. It's been around for a long time. Probably safe. Probably great to record a show there. We love a fireproof. Luffy says, there was this news yesterday in TechCrunch. ex-meta engineer raises$14 million for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup. And this was shaking up the timeline. Everyone was quote tweeting this. Luffy says, hey, Lace, make 100 million ARR software for me. Do not make any mistakes. Fantastic prompt, by the way. Use it. Use it on any of your preferred model.

46:44It'll work every time. Why don't more people do this? I don't know. It seems like one of those. It seems obvious. Tealian sort of secrets. Secrets, I suppose. Yeah. No, but LACE, I guess, is focused on maximizing revenue for your call center with zero extra investment. It's more just like the TechCrunch headline went weird. But again, TechCrunch is so back. And I think people wanted to joke, yeah, a lot of startups don't generate much revenue. Yes, yes. So they're like, hey, our business is revenue generation. But yeah, TechCrunch is back. I don't know if this is accidental, but I feel like again and again, we're seeing more TechCrunch headlines post-acquisition.

47:20So they're doing well. It's great to see. Great to see. uh patty i just wanted to give patty a shout out because he's a friend of the show uh he says he's proud to announce he's starting a profitable startup vcs my dms are open uh so yeah if you want to get in touch with patty he's a free agent could be picked up at any moment live streaming could be picked up by a venture capitalist or company but uh we love patty on this stream so this post from east village guy is 30 too late for me to lock in my brother ray Kroc was a 52-year-old traveling salesman when he met the McDonald brothers. Get a grip.

47:55That's awesome. And I thought this was worth highlighting. There's so many great stories of this. Enzo, Ferrari is another. He was 45 when he started Ferrari. Granted, he had spent a couple decades in automotive racing. Founder of Zoom, founder of Workday, both 60s, 50s, when they started their company. Red Bull founder, too, right? Yeah. Dietrich. Yep. I think he was pretty old. Founder of Monster. Very old. which was very funny because it's a very young brand. Estee Lauder. There's tons of these examples. Never too late to start doing your life's work and start a generational company. Just do it.

48:30Why not? Estee Lauder was 38 years old. Why not just start a power law company? More people should do that for sure. Anyway, we have this bizarre TikTok or YouTube video. It's the third most viewed video on YouTube this week. It's an AI generated short of a pug that saves a baby from a plane crash and then they try surviving on an island. Can we play this?

48:57It's in the future, folks. This is entertainment now. It's great. It does have a compelling narrative. Inciting element, inciting action. Turn of events. Will he save the baby? The sound effects are brutal. It's really well designed. It's so optimized. It's got 400 million views. 400 million views. Yes. 400 million views. Feeds the baby. Starts cooking over the coconut. Cooks fish over the coconut. That is adorable. Feeds the baby some sort of fish stew. And then writes SOS in the sand. Wow, they're boys. And then, for some reason, the military shows up. And they have, like, guns and stuff. Overnight success.

49:45And they've, uh, overnight success. us and they rescue the baby and the pug and then it just ends and it's like the ultimate like you don't expect it to end so you watch it fine art it's the future it's future again uh you know clearly some some human element in there figuring out what's viral about it but uh pretty sloppy pretty sloppy a little sloppy well you know what's not slop ai grant batch one that's absolutely insane uh jeff huber who had on the show shared this so i didn't realize this was a throwback Yeah, so going off the initial batch. This is crazy. Complexity was in there. Cursor.

50:21I know Chroma. Wombo. Wombo. Who else do we know in here? Pretty cool. Pixel cut, dust, forefront. Just so early. I wonder when AI grant batch one was. This is the Nat Friedman project, correct? Yeah. Very, very cool. Little like under the radar. I guess, was it structured as a grant? It wasn't even YC style? or was it, did they take it? No, it's an investment via no cap, no discount MFN safe. Okay, yeah, pretty standard. So pretty standard investment. And you can imagine they've done pretty well. Yeah, I think some other, I'm almost sure Julius went through a later batch. I saw some other folks go through.

51:01Pretty, pretty cool. Yeah, Julius was in batch two. We have our next guest here. Let's bring him in. You guys told us you yearned for the mines. So we brought the man himself. How you doing, Ted? What's going on? Doing great. How are you, John Jordan? Fantastic. What's happening? You're looking great in that suit. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's Technology Brothers. You need to dress up. There we go. I love the map too. That's the only market map that I care about personally. Yes. This is our target market. That is the market map. What's actually going on with that map? What are the different colors represent?

51:36Yeah, this is a geological map showing kind of the common rock types in a given area. And you can see the central and eastern U.S. are not quite as exciting as the western U.S. And that's where all the minerals are. Interesting. Can you give us a brief overview of you and your company just to kick us off? Yeah, absolutely. So Ted Feldman, founder of Durin, started the company about a year ago. We are building and operating automated diamond drill rigs used in mineral exploration. So I'll start out kind of high level. How does mineral exploration work and kind of get into what is the actual problem we're solving?

52:06So basically building a mine is in many cases a billion dollar endeavor, incredibly expensive. In order to justify this capping, you have a really good understanding of what's actually going on underground. And so you have this kind of decade long exploration process where you'll start out, you'll be geologists walking around, they're seeing some interesting rocks. You can do geophysics, look for a magnetic anomaly, a gravity anomaly, or do some seismic surveys. You can do soil sampling, kind of pick up some kind of tiny holes, see if there's kind of trace elements of what you're looking for. But really, in order to understand what's underground, you've got to drill.

52:37And the main type of drilling use of neural exploration is called diamond drilling or core drilling. This is basically where you're collecting cylindrical core samples of the rock anywhere from a few hundred meters to a kilometer or more underground, generally a few inches wide. You pull it up in three-meter intervals. But really, once you collect these core samples, you send them off to the lab. The lab will tell you exactly what the composition is. You do that every foot or every meter across hundreds of holes. You plug all this data into a 3D model. And you have a 3D model of the subsurface.

53:04You can visualize where is the mineral deposit, see how large is the resource, what's the grade, the kind of percent of the metal you're looking for within that deposit, and then make a determination of whether it's economic demand or whether you need to collect more data in order to make that determination. And so the problem here, go ahead. Before you go into the next segment, can you talk about the value chain? Is there different groups that are doing the core research? And then do they sell the rights, basically say like, hey, this is worth spending a billion dollars, but we're not going to spend a billion dollars.

53:34You should do it. And they sort of sell access to it effectively. So the way this will normally work is you have an exploration company or junior explorer, junior miner. They either own the land outright. They have rights to lease the land or they have some claim on federal land, but they have the rights to to mine in a given area. And they basically have a hypothesis in geology that there is some valuable deposit underground. And they raise capital primarily from public markets. Many of these companies go public extremely early on on the TSXV or the ASX. And they raise capital and spend most of that capital on drilling to actually collect more data.

54:09And so then this constant cycle of raising capital, spending most of it on drilling, analyzing those drill results, updating the geological model until they can either raise enough capital, raise a billion dollars, equine debt to actually build the mine. Or what happens more often is sell the mine or sell the deposit to a larger miner that will actually have the money on the balance sheet in order to develop the asset. Why public markets versus private? Is it just because you need to raise so much money? You need to be able to basically effectively market? It sounds like biotech. What happens with biotech companies going earlier out?

54:43Are these typically like penny stocks where they're just trading? Exactly. Mining is historically a penny stock industry. We used to have kind of small exchanges in Denver or Phoenix in the US, but in North America, it's just dominated by Vancouver and Toronto where a lot of these exploration companies are based. Canada has a lot more capital flowing into mining than the United States does today. And it's really just how it's been done historically. These investors, largely kind of smaller retail investors, historically, they want liquidity and they can't just be called up for a private placement if you're Joe with a hundred bucks to throw into a gold project.

55:18Did you ever, speaking of mining, did you ever join a call with a VC early and have them be like, sorry, I thought this was like crypto mining. that has happened a lot it has happened less now than a year or 18 months ago which i think is a very promising trend got it that's good uh how much of the business is kind of just you need to take off the shelf technology and just go do the thing uh versus you need to build new technology and and is that more in like the hardware world or the software world or are you just like going and doing the actual exploring? Like, can you concretize what you're doing?

55:54Yeah, so I'll get into what is Durin actually doing. So we're a drilling contractor. We are building rigs from scratch and operating them for exploration companies. We're starting our first pilot with the Gold Explorer in Nevada in a little over a week. We'll be out in the field for that. We started building this rig about four months ago. And so we get paid basically per meter that we drill for our clients. And so we're not taking on the geology risk. Let's just focus on the tech. Yeah. And why are you building the rig yourself? I imagine that is that just built, you're buying different pieces of equipment and then piecing them together.

56:27I mean, you've raised money, but not that much. Like I imagine you're not reinventing the wheel. Plus it's probably, there's good drills out there. I imagine you don't need to build a new drill or do you? Yeah. So the initial idea was let's retrofit a rig that maybe save us a lot of money. And this is the avenue I was pursuing for about six months. And we really had two options. We could buy a Chinese rig for less than a hundred grand. We need to add a whole bunch of sensors. I talked to a lot of the operators, these things fall apart. They are not high quality. So we rolled that out. Or you could buy a Western rig for half a million bucks and you need to hack into the firmware and probably put a warranty, which you do not want to do on a half million dollar piece of equipment or partner with a manufacturer and figure out how to actually pull data from it.

57:02We tried that with a couple of manufacturers. They were incredibly slow and all the manufacturers, they sort of have their own half-hearted efforts on autonomy. And so they didn't seem particularly eager to partner up to partner with us. And so almost out of necessity, we had to design our own. And now the way this rig operates, it's really similar to every other sort of rig. All these drill rigs are basically two hydraulic rams pushing what is called the drill head, which is what provides the rotary motion to the drill rods into the ground. So all drilling is really, so you have a bunch of pipes that you screw together and then push and twist into the ground and you have a bit on the end to make sure you get a clean cut.

57:35And so we are, the off the shelf parts that we're buying is with the drill head, that's what grips onto the rods and rotates them. The other part called the foot clamp, which just clamps down onto the bottom part of the drill strength to make it easy to load a new rod in and then rams to push it into the ground. And then the structure is ours. And then in order to actually retrieve the core sample from the bottom of the hole, think about it like this. You have your drill bit, which is a cylinder. That's what our logo is actually. And then you have drill rods coming up from that. But inside of that bottom rod, you have another tube called the inner tube.

58:05There's a latch on the top of that. So basically Once the inner tube fills up with rock, when you've gone down five feet, you can grab a tool called the overshot, lower it down on a wire line. It latches into place. You could pull up the inner tube, get in the core sample. And that's what you send to the lab to be analyzed. How mature is the venture-backed mining market? Like, are there market maps that exist? There's a few. And when you're surprised, everybody wants to go to space. Nobody wants to look beneath our feet and go down. Has it been surprising how little investment has gone into the actual technology side of the industry?

58:44It's there's been very little surface area between mining and particularly Silicon Valley historically. Australia has a bit of a more mature mining technology ecosystem, but not nearly as much as much as we have over here. And so there's been a few kind of billion dollar, multi-hundred billion dollar mining tech companies over the last decade or so, but just a few. And like mining overall is a two to three trillion dollar industry, kind of overall market size. Mining tech is a small portion of that. But it's a difficult industry to sell into. It's really why it's difficult to start a tech company here.

59:15Building a mine is incredibly CapEx intensive. And you're basically making a bet on technology early and then utilizing that equipment or software system for a decade plus. And so these companies are risk-averse. They don't want to bet the farm on a new technology. Where I think we come in, there's a few other companies with a similar model, is as a contractor. So we're just replacing a separate service provider. And any sort of innovation that we're creating is done internally. So we are more efficient, safer, and more cost-effective to a contractor because of the autonomy that we're building.

59:45But it's really no risk to the customer. We get paid just like any other contractor to them. what's been the industry's reaction to the trade war china very early uh came out and said that they were restricting access to various rare earths is that yeah um you know what's been your read on the situation how are how are u.s players kind of reacting yeah uh rare earths are very close to my heart prior to starting juran i worked for empty materials which operates the only rare earths mine in the united states for about a year and a half their mind is in california about three hours away from where we are right now in LA.

1:00:20MP produces about 15 % of the global rare earth supply. They refine about half of it domestically right now. They announced last week that they're seizing shipments to China, so keeping it all domestic. We're going to Japan or Korea, which they have some offtake with through Sumitomo. I think it's certainly a tailwind for the Western producers, but there is fear because we don't have everything in the United States. rare earths we would be almost self-sufficient on but we really need to ramp up the the processing the problem is that within this group of rare earths about 15 different elements you have some rare earths that we have a good chunk of at mountain pass like neodymium and prasiodemium but then you have heavy rare earths like terbium or dysprosium um which we do not have enough of and uh heavy materials it's very heavily weighted towards these light rare earths and it's very little of these heavy rare earths and so we really need to partner with countries like brazil or vietnam or the two that i point to for rare earths that are potentially um allies and maybe we'll get closer to them over the next few years um we're going to need to import there are no other decent rare earth deposits in the united states that we can just spin up production at that we know of you never know we could find us as a long history i see a bunch of gaps in that map in ohio we'll find rare earths there i'm sure that's that's that's where we come in is that in order to find that under deposit, you got to spend a million dollars.

1:01:37Yeah, you got to drill everything, every suburban neighborhood, just drop a Duren miner in the back of my backyard and start finding stuff. What we'll do first is fly planes over to do some sort of magnetic survey. That USGS is a pretty cool program called Earth MRI, where they're mapping a lot of the country with tighter spacing than they have previously, these geophysical surveys. But we need to be doing a lot more on that, because that's really the top of funnel that narrows down the potentially mineable sites. Can you talk a little bit more about autonomy? I'm seeing the first prototype rig can core 300 meters, around 1 ,000 feet deep, two and a half inch diameter.

1:02:14And these rigs can run unattended for something like two to three years. So what is the math on that? Is the rig moving around or does it just take that long to get a single core sample out? Yeah. So basically, I'll tell you kind of how it's done today, what we have now, and then where we're going to be in 12 months. so today you have a rig these things way 10 tons you're normally track mounted so basically on tank treads you put them on a truck as close to the side as you can then you have a guy with a remote control driving it in the rest of the way you generally have three operators on a rig you have the driller he's the guy listening to it and looking at a bunch of gauges and he's really sort of interpreting what is the kind of rock that we're going through that through um at that time and from that adjusting rpm the amount of weight applied to the drill bit the pressure of a fluid that you're pumping down hole to clear the cuttings and keep the bit cool.

1:03:00So you're kind of constantly adjusting these parameters. Then you have another one or two guys called helpers, and they're doing a lot of the manual work. They're loading the rods into place because you're normally either using five or 10-foot rods. They're grabbing the overshot, lowering it down to pull up the inner tube, tapping on the inner tube with a hammer to actually take the core out, putting it in boxes for the customer, threasing the rods, adding additives to the mud mixture because you've got to adjust the viscosity of the fluid that you're pumping down hole. And so you really have this sensing problem, this controls problem of adjusting these drilling parameters.

1:03:26Then you have this more so robotics problem of just grabbing the rods, putting them into place, grabbing the core samples, et cetera. So on this first rig, we have basically the ability to collect a whole bunch of data, but everything that's going on on the rig at any given time, we're going to use that data and build a sort of V1 autopilot system, deterministic at the start, move to machine learning when we get enough data. We really are not data sets available for this online. And so we've got to do a whole lot of drilling before we can actually get to full autonomy. So follow up. How long does it actually take to drill 1 ,000 feet deep?

1:03:56Yes. So a good shift is about 50 feet in a day. And so 12 hours, 50 feet, a thousand foot hole, 20 shifts, 10 days. And that's traditional, like, you know, human operated. So that's like a month of work, right? Yeah, exactly. Like a month on one hole. Right. Wow. Yeah. And you're looking at about$100 a foot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a lot. Interesting. How are you so grounded? really what what we're trying to do is we're we've built this first rig manually operate at the start we'll have some automation in terms of rod handling and kind of a v1 of this chilling parameter adjustment system but then on the next version which we're going to start building in just a couple months we'll kind of add on add on to the rod handling system to actually be able to cover the core sample design our own mud mixer that can dump in the additives separately and then you get most of the way there in terms of kind of removing these jobs on site and it's really it's it's yes I think we can save a lot of money because labor is incredibly expensive here, but it's more so about availability.

1:04:52We are in a workforce crisis in the mining industry right now. I heard someone say, oh, I like that. We don't have an autonomy problem in the mining industry, but labor problem. We just don't have enough people. And so is Minecraft not providing the pipeline that one would? No, I think the problem here is you play Minecraft when you're like eight to 14 or something or maybe later. And then you have this kind of eight-year gap between start of high school and finishing college to where you're not involved in the mining industry. We need Minecraft for adults. Okay, I have to ask, how are you so goaded at marketing?

1:05:24You have one of the most unique sort of hard tech brands every time. It's very common for people to copy what Anderle does. And it's very hard to do something that feels new and fresh and super opinionated. and I've loved your out-of-home ads. And this segment is brought to you by AdQuick. But I think you've been extremely strategic. I saw this hiring billboard that you had that you can't have rocket science without rock science and sort of like placing these strategically in Hawthorne. Where does that come from? When did you figure out that you had a knack for this? Because I'm assuming your team helps, but oftentimes marketing this good typically is very founder-led.

1:06:13We've got an incredible team. My head of operations has really helped a lot with the marketing. We have a few incredible designers that help us out part-time with all this as well. Hiring is the lifeblood of any company, particularly a company with as full division as what we're trying to accomplish. And so we need to get the word out and have kind of this massive funnel of people that have heard of us. Some of them will be interested, and some of them we are going to want to hire. And so I think we need a cool brand for people to hear about us, both in kind of the build board across from SpaceX, because you want to pull incredible talent from SpaceX.

1:06:47But also, like, there are very few companies in the mining industry that really care about – I think they all care about their brand. There are very few that are particularly good about creating a cool brand. And so, like, we get great engineers in L.A. reaching out to us because they like our stuff, but even more so drillers and geologists in the mining industry who are like, you're the only cool company in the mining industry. I mean, we've hardly put anything out yet. And so both of those sides, the engineering and the mining customer and talent acquisition, we want to be very intentional about it.

1:07:16And there is much more to come. Once we get this first rig in the field in about a week or so, there'll be some really cool videos of us actually drilling and showing some hardware in the field. Love it. Can you talk us through the path to full autonomy? I imagine it's like a walk, crawl or crawl, roll, walk, run situation. Yeah. Is teleoperation a big deal here as you get towards a fully autonomous autopilot system? Yeah. So we need a whole lot of data for this. And so it's mainly controlled with the start. You can have a driller there with an iPad or laptop. The infrastructure is there, but it's really like a Tesla full self-driving sort of system.

1:07:52You build the software to actually control it. A drill-by-wire system is what we're calling it. And then you need data. And so we're going to have a driller on site operating it initially collect this data. We need them there to actually test the robotics side of this in case anything goes wrong. And I think rod handling we should have down over the next few months in the extraction system by the end of the year. There's a bunch of little stuff like how are you going to grease the rods? We need to figure that out. We'll drop the additives into the mud mixer. And so we're going about this incrementally.

1:08:21We'll have three guys at the rig initially, go down to two, then hopefully have one can operate it from a safe distance. And if something goes wrong, bring another guy in. But we're never going to get to a point where you don't need at least someone on site, at least not over the next five years, because you need a flat surface to drill on. So you have guys out there with dozers clearing these drill pads. You need to dig a sump pit to put the water into after you use it. You need to deliver your consumables, your water, your fuel. You need to pick up the core samples to deliver to your customer, the exploration company.

1:08:51And so there's always going to be things to do. Like you need someone to get the rig there and then maintain it. But the point is, like, we don't need someone there listening to the rig and loading rods into place like their time operating a fleet of rigs. Two weeks ago, it came out that that China was limiting rare earth exports. Chamath chimed in. He said, this may be a good moment to let everyone know that I control one of, if not the largest rare earth supplies outside of China. at full capacity, it could be 25 % of what the world needs, all located within countries allied with the US and the US itself.

1:09:29A lot of people pushed back on this. They said, okay, what's the company? He said it was in stealth. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and say, you know, it sounds almost unbelievable that a stealth company could control 25 % of the world's rare earth uh supplies is that is that possible could could there have been some sort of like roll up behind the scenes what was your reaction to that exchange perhaps i haven't heard anything about shemath's involvement in any rare earth project beyond he helps back camping materials five or so years ago um i haven't heard anything maybe he does i hope he does that would be great he does some massive rare earth mine that uh that yeah myself and my friends with rare earth analysts haven't heard of.

1:10:14And so I wanted to surprise us, but I haven't heard anything. Sure. Cool. Can you talk about the challenges of putting a sensor a thousand feet underground? Like I just imagine if there's like dirt and grime and crust and whatever else is down there, plus like a diamond tip drilled churning everything up, like even putting like a thermometer down there is going to be difficult. How are you actually collecting data? Does this exist off the shelf? Is this something like oil explorers do? I imagine that's mature. So the short answer is we're not collecting any data underground at this point. Everything we are measuring, you can measure from the surface.

1:10:52Just like the human does, right? Because the human's listening to everything and collecting that data from above. Exactly. Got it. Okay. And so it's like vibration. We're not even using vibration right now. So you can measure your weight on bit, basically how much force are you pushing into the ground with, your RPM, how fast are you spinning, the pressure going into the hole, your rate of penetration, just how quickly you're moving to the ground your torque um you can do that um through a secondary pressure reading um that there are you can't put sensors down hole there's a whole kind of field of study um within the gas industry primarily called mwd or lwd measurement while drilling logging while drilling but you can put sensors down hole it's something we're going to be looking into one of the the things that you'll do when you're doing this sort of drilling mineral exploration is you can send on a survey tool that can tell you just sort of exact position because your whole you want to drill it straight it's not always going to go straight might give deviated degree degree or two every hundred meters and if you're trying to hit a 50 foot wide target 500 feet underground um you might miss and so making sure you know exactly where the tip of the drill is at all times is paramount so you can lower a tool down either every run or every 50 meters really whenever you want um and that'll tell your exact position makes you get a gyro probe and so if we can integrate that into our four barrel down hole that would be cool not doing that yet um or or doing some sort of em survey or xrf to scan the core um or the sides of the walls as you're actually drilling that'd be great we're not doing it yet it's going to be done soon are cave-ins a problem like as you dig down yes you get you know you have a two-inch hole that you're digging and then if you pull up the rods to send something else down and then all of a sudden it collapses on itself that seems like a problem you're you're thinking like a driller That is a huge problem in this space.

1:12:32Basically what you do as you're drilling through the first, call it 100 feet of unconsolidated sediment or looser rock to the surface. What you'll do is you'll drive casing. And so casing is basically a wider diameter pipe that you'll drill down with and then drill through that hole. And that basically prevents that there's some sort of collapse near the surface. It goes around the casing. Maybe your casing gets stuck, but at least it's not around your drill string. And that can continue drilling through that. The problem is what if you don't try the casing deep enough or there's some sort of fracture down hole like 500 feet down or whatever that does collapse in.

1:13:04And you'll basically what you're trying to do then is try a whole bunch of different RPMs, pull up with maximum force. But sometimes you get stuck. There's really two options. You can try to guess where the cabin is. You can actually use tools to cut the steel above that and just recover everything above that. You lose some steel in the ground. Oh, well, you're out 10, 20 grand at least. or you can kind of say you're stuck but you can actually drill through it so there are tools that you can literally drill through your previous tools that were down hole at a smaller diameter and should get some steel in the steel in the inner tube which is pretty cool to see um let you continue the hole you don't have to abandon it you're decreasing the diameter not as valuable data and you are still going to lose some equipment and so you basically don't want to don't want to push it too hard to uh to avoid uh risking you cave in uh last question on my side I'm just curious, I'm assuming throughout history, the sort of drill bits, diamond drill bits, were just actual diamonds that people pulled out of the earth, and then at some point they were lab-grown, or were they always?

1:14:06What's the history there? Yeah, so the way these drill bits work is it's primarily iron. It's a soft iron matrix with diamond particles that were impregnated into it. And so you can kind of see, I should have brought a drill bit over here to show you all. That would have been cool. You can see the tiny diamond particles. It looks like glitter on it. And then as it cuts the diamonds, the hardest material on earth, but they do wear, they dull. And so the bits are designed such that as the diamonds dull, the iron wears at approximately the same rate to reveal new sharp diamonds. Very cool. Very cool.

1:14:40Last question for me, Armageddon. In the plot of Armageddon, they say it's too hard to teach drilling to an astronaut. They got to teach going to space to the drillers, to the miners. Realistic or unrealistic, based on what you know about how complex mining is, would you have trained the drillers to go to space or would you have trained the astronauts to drill? I think we're doing both here. We are teaching space extras how to drill and drillers how to participate in a high-functioning engineering organization. And so I think you've got to do both. If you're trying to build a large organization and manufacture thousands of these rigs over the next five, six years, become a leading drilling contractor.

1:15:27Yeah, they really didn't bring any space, any astronauts on that trip. It's all drillers. No. That movie. I know Jordy hasn't seen it. I don't think that's realistic. Okay. Anyway, this was a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for joining. Ted, I'm very excited for you and the team. It's been awesome watching you guys over the last few months. And congratulations on all the progress in the new round. We're excited to be on. Just a quick message for everyone. We are hiring jobs.durin.com. Brilliant engineers. Please apply or reach out to me. Thank you all for having me. Have a great rest of your day.

1:16:00Talk soon. Talk soon. Bye. Let's go back to the timeline. Durin did run a great out-of-home ad brought to you by Adquick. There's also news on the timeline about Series A that was announced by Artisan, apparently a white combinator company. They announced their Series A with a massive billboard. And if we can pull this billboard up, it's the previous slide, I believe. Celine is just commenting on it. But Tiege says, what's going on here? And it's the two founders there. Are those the actual founders? Those are the founders. Those are the founders. The founders are Jasper Carmichael Jack and his co-founder Sam Stallings, a former IBM product manager.

1:16:44But the way they're looking at each other in this photo makes me look like they're in love or something. It's possible. Maybe they're married. But I don't know. We often look at each other like that longingly and fondly during photo shoots. So it's understandable. but very funny to put out a billboard about your series a but your own face with your own face on it but i guess you know no information about what i guess they have the whole team there or are those the ai sdrs because i think you don't know i so it's funny representative yeah i thought these were just two avatars they're not those are the founders those are the founders they're stoked uh yeah i uh this you know every once in a while the timeline starts talking about taste.

1:17:29This is a very specific kind of taste. I mean, also, look. Founder? Absolutely jacked. The guy's diced. We love it. Yeah, he's diced. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Jasper. Guy is looking peeled. Activate gold-gold in retriever mode. TechCrunch, Y Combinator Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung Fellows Fund participated as well. They closed a$12 million round in September and now they got a$25 million Series A. They're running a marketing campaign, Stop Hiring Humans. Very viral. I think they just get it. They get it. I think they get it. I think they're playing 5D chess. Yep, they're going to frustrate a lot of people.

1:18:09And they knew this billboard would get Celine to post about it. Yeah, look at this. Celine, CEO of Loyal, says, I cannot believe a startup bought a billboard on the 101 to advertise their dot, dot, dot, Series A. And 671 likes. And so, yeah, out-of-home advertising. consistently underrated. We've said this. Go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy. And measurable. Yeah, and measurable. And go viral. Just do it. As long as you can come up with something that's going to infuriate enough people on the timeline, you will get attention. Andrew McCallop says, I think company towns are going to make a comeback.

1:18:50We've been exploring this. We've been exploring a town. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this. So I think if things go really, really well for TVPN, what we're doing here in Los Angeles. A lot of people say, oh, why are you building in Los Angeles? Like you should be in Silicon Valley. And I think that we could potentially make Los Angeles like the Silicon Valley of media, like a Silicon Valley of television almost. And we could create a whole boom. And I think in a number of years, you could see, you know, some massive media companies. Entire film and television kind of industry. It's totally possible, right?

1:19:24It's I'll start right here. And so what I would say to folks is like, let's check back in five or 10 years, see the market cap of all the media companies that are built in Los Angeles. And maybe it's in the hundreds of billions if we add it all up. It could very well become possible. It could become possible. Yeah, we are in the company town. I think John's onto something here. Yeah, we are in a company town. Los Angeles, I call it the Silicon Valley of news. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it actually is very, I think the experience of living in Los Angeles has become worse as the entertainment industry has struggled.

1:20:04I agree. Yeah. There's, you know, the number of restaurants that can be supported has just gone down. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this post is that he's saying specifically company towns. So there's obviously industry towns. You know, New York is a finance hub. uh silicon valley is a tech hub la is a media hub not miami is like a nft hub but uh company towns for foster city they are remember oh i didn't know that yeah yeah yeah yeah that's right they left sf they went to foster city they were like we're gonna focus it's nicer to live here meta and facebook were kind of doing that in palo alto to some degree they were like building housing for employees and stuff uh but i think i think what he's getting at is that uh things like star base where a company can't just be in the hub of a main city.

1:20:52So they go somewhere really bizarre and off grid. And then the infrastructure builds up around that. We were talking about like the Stargate facility. Like if$500 billion really does pour into one data center, there's going to be infrastructure around that. Welcome to Abilene, Texas. Abilene, Texas is going to have, there's going to be people that are like, yes, it's going to be low head count because it's just data centers, but like you're talking about so many data centers, there's going to be people that are working on the air conditioning, working on the power. They're going to need an air one for sure.

1:21:24They're definitely going to need an air one. Um, and so, yeah, I was, I was talking to a real estate guy. I was like, maybe you should just go to Abilene, Texas and then just start doing deals because they're like the construction is going to be going on for a decade. There's going to be a lot of people that, that settle there after the fact, they're going to need an air one. You could sell them the property for the air one. They're going to need gas stations and and all sorts of different, there's going to need to be a hardware store, right? They're going to need hammers, all these different things.

1:21:50So it'll be interesting to see if this happens. I think it'll be a long, long journey to get to new company towns, but I love that. We have a post from Adam Rosenblum. This is my nomination for the next TBPN AI Deep Dive. Live from the forge of fine tuning, the MCP monastery, the eye of AGI. The weights are sacred. The context is cash. The vibes are auto-regressive. Tune in now. I messaged Adam. I think he's over at Cal. I said, maybe you should write for TBPN. Seriously. So open invite, Adam. You absolutely cooked. And we love being live from the eye of AGI. I like it. I like it. Yeah, we need to spice up the intros, keep iterating on them.

1:22:38I think people enjoyed the Institute of Iron, the Palace of Pump, the Hall of Hypertrophy. But there will be more. We're doing a crypto day. We'll have to come up with some new jingles for that. That'll be fun. Anyway, Google co-founder Sergey Brin pulled up in downtown Miami in his$450 million.

1:23:03$450 million, 465-foot yacht. That's less than a million dollars a foot. Yeah. At that price, it's a steal. They're giving these yachts away, to be honest. I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of yacht. It is a lot of yacht. And you can't sell a house or a mid-sized Series B company. That's right. Mike, Solana says, I honestly can't figure out why everyone is attacking him for this. Sorry. Yachts are awesome. Pirate Wires will absolutely have one in a few years. I completely agree with that. Yes, I will be laughing there, champagne in hand, before the waving flags when you come for us. Yes.

1:23:36Enjoy your bike ride. One of the greatest posters of all time. He cooked him, John. Generational poster, for sure. Fantastic. Good friend of the show. Yeah, I love it. Beautiful yacht, and why not? I mean, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has generated probably a trillion dollars of value for the economy, right? So enjoy your little yacht. I support big tech. I love big tech. I would defend. I would take a bullet for big tech. In theory, I would take a bullet for big tech. I would scale a castle wall. That's right. Yeah. I would fight in a trench war. I would dig a tunnel under a castle with a spoon for big tech.

1:24:17I would work years in the mines for big tech. Yes. I would fight a decades-long trench war. I would re-enlist in the hundreds-year war. The hundred years war. We got our next guest. Ready to join us. Welcome to the studio. How are you doing? We are doing well. What's going on? Hey, we got both of you. That's fantastic. What's happening? I'm so happy. Welcome to the show. You can ask him about how it was. Yes, yes. I mean, maybe that's a great way to start. We're huge fans. We were just singing Big Tech's praises, saying that we would do anything to support big technology. And yet, you left Big Tech.

1:24:56Why did you leave and what are you building now? We're building physical intelligence. We want to build a model that can control any robot to do any task. This is something I did explore in big tech before. It's just much more fun to do it in a startup. Way more fun. Also a little quicker, a little quicker. A little faster paced. Yeah, I mean, the pace has been crazy. If anything's become clear in the last few weeks, we need the robots now. Yes. We can't really wait 20 years. And big tech was fully responsible. We probably would have to wait something like that. Yeah, for sure. So can you walk me through the most recent announcement?

1:25:35uh i i saw the video uh fantastic but how would you break it down in terms of like what the milestone represents yeah so the biggest challenge in robotics so far hasn't really been agility or dexterity what the robots can do yep but then generalization yep kind of similar to what we've seen in language before um where it was really really hard to get it to to do tasks where you just ask it to do something and see if it can work. And what we tried to do for the past six months or so is to get to the next level of generalization for these models for robots. So the challenge we set for ourselves is to take a robot to a completely new home it's never seen before and ask it to do a complex long horizon task like clean a bedroom or clean a kitchen.

1:26:23And there is so many details that go into cleaning a kitchen that you need to understand when you're in a new home and you only start appreciating it when you try to do it with a robot where you know everything is different like the countertop looks very differently you don't know where the drawers are you don't know how to open them you don't know where the objects are you don't know i don't even when i try to wash dishes in my house i'm always i'm like i can't where's this where's the spot i don't know where the soap is where do i put this It's a mess. So not even easy for me. Yeah, I guess.

1:26:54It's really, really hard. And on top of like knowing all of those things, then you also need to connect it to motion. You actually need to get the robot to do the right thing. And it turns out that with Py05, which we just released yesterday, we can do that. And it doesn't work all the time. It's not that I can just give it to you and it will work in your kitchen every single time. but it works quite often quite well. So we bring it to a new home and it can do those things maybe like 50 % of the time, sometimes 80 % of the time. Big increase from 0 % of the time. But yeah, big increase from what we've seen before where the previous state of the art was basically if you want to show a robotic demo, you need to collect data in that specific environment for those specific tasks and that's where you show it.

1:27:42But now we can for the first time bring it somewhere else and that kind of works. that understands what it means to do. Do you think that consumers will generally be more patient around reliability with robotics? Because if I, you know, let's say I have some type of robot in my home and I say, hey, do the dishes, right? And 50 % of the time it does it perfectly. And like, you know, the other 50 % of the time I have to kind of interject. Whereas if I'm like booking a flight and only 50 % of the time it like books the flight, it's like, well, I'm just going to do it myself, right? Because like, it's only going to take me a minute, whereas like the dishes could take 20 minutes, right?

1:28:16So how do you think about kind of the sort of threshold of reliability in order to like really deliver value for consumers? Yeah, I think that like we don't think right now about delivering value for consumers. And it's kind of why we structured the company the way we did. We're a research lab. We're trying to solve this problem of physical intelligence. We really like these consumer oriented tasks. And I think people tend to as well, like when they think about laundry being folded for them. I think there'll be a point at which it gets good enough that we We can deploy it to consumers, but it's not going to be like 50 percent.

1:28:46It's going to be closer to 98, 99 percent. And there I think we can harp on self-driving cars where there will be a period of of interventions. Right. Like if it doesn't work, it's not that it just will stop and do nothing for a while. We have a human teleoperator intervene and finish the task. But I think the other cool thing about the home and consumer use case is there's so much that could also just happen overnight. Um, there's like while you're sleeping, your laundry is folded, your, your, your meals are cooked for like the, you know, they're prepped for the week ahead. Um, your house is tidied.

1:29:17Uh, so consumer is still a little far away, but making a lot of progress. Can you talk about the, uh, just the path in terms of the underlying technology to go from a Roomba? We're pulling up the video here on the stream of, uh, what you've actually built. What were the foundational turning points in terms of the different models and different breakthroughs? I imagine the transformer was really important, but there's probably a ton of other developments that excited you. Now is the time. We're ready to go. Yeah, there's been a lot of things that we are building on top of. Things like transformers, things like vision language models, the concept of pre-training and post-training.

1:30:03A lot of those things transfer to the robotics world, but they're not as well understood. We are still in the process of figuring out what that recipe should be like. We kind of have to rediscover some of the steps that language people had to do initially and see how we can map them onto the robotics world. We don't have the privilege of having an open internet full of data. We need to collect the data ourselves, which on one hand is a big challenge. The data isn't there. You can't iterate nearly as fast. On the other hand, it also gives you more freedom in figuring out what kind of data is the most important and what data to collect.

1:30:41For this particular Pi-05 advancement, what we had to do is, one, collect very diverse data set, large diverse data set that involves not only model manipulators in homes, but also static robots in the office or data of the internet. And it turns out if you collect very diverse data across many different tasks from many different form factors, they all contribute to each other. And they contribute to a better understanding for them all of what actually is happening and how to utilize all of the data to figure out what to do. So that was a really, really big component. And then there's also a lot of architectural things, a lot of details that we need to get right to make sure that we take full advantage of that data.

1:31:26interestingly most of the data is actually not the the model manipulators in many different homes it's a very very small percentage of it so it gives us also a lot of hope that we can leverage the data off from the internet or from other platforms where it's easier to collect it to to get to that kind of generalization can you talk a little bit about uh simulation uh like data generation through simulation i imagine it's very easy to procedurally generate like a million different floor plans or a trillion different floor plans to try and navigate those in, you know, kind of two-dimensional space.

1:31:59But at the same time, when you get into the manipulating of a sheet, all of a sudden that's a physics calculation. It's probably harder to simulate. It's not like with self-driving cars, there's, you know, Grand Theft Auto you can train on. I haven't, maybe there's a game where you clean up your house, but I certainly haven't played it. How effective has simulation been in generating data? and is it useful? Is that a viable path here? Yeah, it's been so far really, really useful for locomotion, for robots walking around. And the reason for this is that for that kind of problem, the main difficulty is modeling your own body.

1:32:34Like how do you place your foot? How do you walk? And that you can do once when you model your robot really, really well. And then it works. It works across many different terrains. You can easily randomize that and figure out the gate that is robust. It hasn't worked nearly as well for manipulating objects or working with your hands. And I think the reason for that is then the difficulty isn't about how do you move your hands. It's more about the world that you're manipulating. And that is much harder to simulate. You don't just do it once. Every object you interact with is different and you have to model each one of those.

1:33:13and it's really really hard to to figure out all the different physical parameters to make it to make it good um so and and this is kind of the data that is the most important the data of physical interactions because this is the data that is not on the internet this is the data that is not even describing language this is something that comes really natural to you you just you just know how to do it you don't even sometimes know how to describe it in words so i think it's kind of like a really bad combination where it's the hardest thing to do for sim and is the data that we need to sim the most for.

1:33:46And what we discovered so far is that basically looking at the past successes of machine learning, of AI, it seems that the best successes are where you take real world data and large diversity of that data and learn directly on that. You don't try to find in some kind of proxy or some kind of simulated environment that reflects what you actually want to do. You just go after the problem head on. And that's what we're doing here. So we're collecting a ton of data ourselves in the real world. We can collect very diverse data this way. It's also very easy to collect it across many different scenes, many different objects.

1:34:23We don't need to create them in sim. We can just buy them and bring them in and start interacting with them. And that so far has been actually easier than we had initially thought. Yeah. I mean, you say you're collecting a lot of data, but I imagine like there's only so many of those robots in that demo video that you can manufacture. There's only so many houses that are like, yeah, come try your 50 % robot in my house. Is that a key? Is that scaling as you'd like? Or is this more like you're going to build a physical, you know, demonstration unit and then be manipulating it in a warehouse? or is the plan to be more like, let's roll this out and just have beta testers kind of dog food it for us?

1:35:10All of the above. Basically, where we find there's benefits to scale at this stage, we'll scale it. We'll figure out a way. And whether that's producing more robots, giving them to people, whether it's scaling up our operations team and the folks that teleoperate these robots ourselves, whether it's going out and commercially deploying these into environments where they're doing economically useful or viable tasks. The training data set collection will do it. We also think there's so much, though, to do on just the algorithmic development that can make the data far more useful, that can reduce the necessities of scale, but we're structured such that we can go and pursue every avenue.

1:35:49That's awesome. I would mention there is, that was one of the big questions before PIO5, where it kind of was unclear. Do we have to visit a million homes? We have to visit hundreds of thousands. And at some point it becomes kind of not feasible or really, really hard. And maybe we need to find a different path. But so far we've been quite surprised by how few different environments you need to see to be able to generalize to a new one. That's awesome. We actually got really reassured that this path could really work. Would you guys like to see way more early stage robotics companies? It feels like there's, you know, the optimist, the one X you've got, you know, figure making noise.

1:36:30But it feels like, you know, we just covered this, I think, Monday, the Chinese humanoid marathon. I'm sure you guys know that they've got a lot of people working on this problem. It seems like there's a tendency in venture to think that, OK, there's a bunch of heavily funded players now. I shouldn't go build in that space. But at the same time, when you look at some of these TAMs, maybe we should have 10 times the amount of early stage robotics companies getting started. It's extremely early. We work with, I'd say, probably most of the new robotics companies starting in the U.S. and abroad. If you're starting a robotics company, reach out to us.

1:37:10We'd love to work with you. You can build the body. We'll build the brain. But yeah, we need to see a lot more robotics companies, particularly in the U.S. That's awesome. I want to talk. Did you ever interact with the Google Arm Farm? Yes. Yeah. One of my co-founders actually started that project. I have a feeling. Do you have your own version of an Arm Farm? Or can you describe for people that might not know what was the genesis of the Arm Farm? What was the purpose? What was the takeaway? And is that, does every robotics company need an Arm Farm or is it just you? and what will that look like in the context of what you're building specifically?

1:37:50Yeah, so back then, that was a few years ago. The idea was that for robots to learn, to acquire those kind of skills, to manipulate the world around them, you can't really prescribe it. You can't just code it all up. The world is too diverse. You can't have a lot of if statements describing what you should do in every single situation. They need to learn it the same way as we do. and the idea of the farm arm farm was to set up many different stations where you have static robots static robotic arms where they just practice and they learn from experience so in that particular case they were trying to learn how to grasp objects so they just had a bin in front of them with lots of different objects that are very diverse and the arm was just going down and trying to figure out how to grasp it and over a long period of time it gathered enough experience to actually learn from it and become really, really good at grasping objects.

1:38:42Like remarkably, remarkably good. And way better than any kind of prescribed systems that people design by hand. And on one hand, it was a big success because of that, because it was clear that this learning approach is something that can truly work and understand the nature of grasping and truly nail that skill. On the other hand, it was also disappointing in that it took really long time. It needed a lot of data, and especially a lot of data at the beginning was kind of just like the arm wandering around and not knowing what to do. So it seemed like a lot of that time was just kind of wasted with the arm figuring out the simplest things.

1:39:21And one thing with Py05 that we are really excited about is that we are now at the stage where the robots kind of get the sense of what they should be doing in that environment. so they are no longer in this space where you know you just like arrive in a new home and you start with just like moving your arms around not knowing what to do and hoping that you you do something that is useful and then you learn from that you start at a point where you kind of know more or less what you can do it works some of the time you just now need to get it to work every time and really, really well. Can you talk about the path to, or the importance of end-to-end learning in the context of robotics?

1:40:06My understanding is that teleoperation is great, and as long as it's economical, we should do it. And then having a deterministic code, like, you know, control system that's written in C++, that's also great, as long as it works. It's sometimes more debuggable. But the reason that we want to get to end-to-end AI systems is that then you're on the scaling law. Then you're just data bound. And the more you can manufacture, the more you can produce the actual robots. You're on this flywheel and you're now bound by actual productive, you know, like getting the cars on the roads, getting the robots into the world.

1:40:45That will naturally create a flywheel. That's what everyone's hoping for in self-driving. but what does that path look like now and how ridiculous is it to claim that end-to-end robotics will be here by the end of the year or something like that? So end-to-end robotics is already here. Everything we've shown so far is fully end-to-end where you take camera input in and view other sensors and output actions directly. Wow. I think there's another reason to do end-to-end learning which is this is I think the only thing that has a chance of working. If there was a way to just pre-program your robot and write a really good C++ code to get it to do all kinds of different things, like folding laundry, we would have done it a long time ago.

1:41:33That's not for the lack of trying. Many people have tried it for a very, very long time. The world is too complex. There's too many things that you will never see, you will never predict, and you can't really write that code. And I think the only way to get there is for AI to figure it out from experience. This is similar to what we've seen in language or in vision, where people have tried to write chatbots with writing different instructions and prescribing logical steps of how you should proceed. But it turned out that the intelligence you need is much more messy. It's just like you give it a lot of text and you let it figure out all the different patterns and analogies.

1:42:13And there is many, many more of them than the ones that we can express in code or in language. I think something very, very analogous is going to happen here. And that's what we start seeing. Demonstrations that we've shown so far here at Physical Intelligence are of tasks that were not possible before. Things like folding laundry. There is no program that I've ever seen that could do that. The same with arriving in a new home and making the bed. There's just too many variables there to do it any other way. Can you talk about some of the experiences that you both have had in your careers? Google and Stripe, in some ways big companies that maybe move slower than a small startup, but at the same time, both of those organizations, I feel like the time from, hey, we're starting the company to we have a product that it wasn't a research organization for years.

1:43:04What have you learned from those organizations? What are you taking into this experience? It's great. It really taught me everything I need to know about building a robotics research lab. It's just lessons galore.

1:43:18I'd never worked in a research environment. So I don't have priors. I don't know what a research environment actually looks like. I just know what our research environment looks like. I feel like we, whatever it looks like, maybe it operates exactly like startups, like maybe grad programs are exactly like startups. But we feel like every other company I've worked with that moves extremely quickly and has a clear set of goals and direction and just has a bunch of people that work behind it and work extremely hard to solve whatever it is that we're setting our minds towards. And there's so much I learned from Stripe that informed that, but a lot of it's just the obvious stuff, right?

1:43:54It's like hire exceptional people, set a really high bar for it, don't compromise, set a very clear set of goals for everyone, really align people. Actually, I think that's one thing I really took from Stripe is you want an extremely aligned set of people. And I've never seen more alignment than I've seen at Pi. We talk about the alignment tax, like when we're bringing someone on, how much work is there to align them around our mission, our way of seeing the world. And almost everyone that joins, there's like basically nothing. Most of the people that work here have dedicated their lives towards robotics or robotic learning or AI in some form or another, hardware, whatever it might be.

1:44:28And that just allows us to move so much quicker. It's like we need to communicate a fraction of what the average company needs to communicate to someone. We don't really need to inspire people or motivate them because they're so inspired and so self-motivated. I think that's probably one of the things that's worked best for us today. Right. How have you seen your customers react to all the news and chaos around the tariffs? I think a lot of these companies are not in full commercial production yet. So it's not like, hey, we're no longer making money. But how are they thinking kind of like long term, just given how much of the supply chain is based in Asia?

1:45:05And are there opportunities for, you know, you know, new U.S. kind of like subcontractors and manufacturing companies to sort of service this new industry? Yeah, the good thing is, I mean, good and bad. It's also subscale right now. Like most of the money is being spent on R &D rather than scaled production. And so it's not as if there's 100 ,000 robots that everyone's buying and it's now just twice as expensive. I think the good thing is that given it's subscale, there's a lot of time to build out US supply chains and it's putting a lot of focus on figuring out, can we get US actuators? Can we start to create companies that are developing those?

1:45:42and all the other critical supply elements of the supply chain. So it's actually just getting people into gear and maybe it's the right time for it. Can you talk a little bit about what you're excited about on the data center side? Is there a moment where you're like really pulling for Stargate to come together and we need the 100 gigawatt data center to crunch, you know, all of the data that you've collected in, you know, kind of a GPT-5 class training run? or is that something that's like so far out that you'll always be able to just, you know, tag along on the residual capability from the large language model labs?

1:46:24Yeah, we are not there yet in terms of like having a full scaling law the same way as we've seen for LLM companies where you can just translate compute to progress or compute to capability. We are searching really, really, really heavily for that. We are trying to figure out what is the recipe that would scale like this, but we are not there yet. We do at the same time generate a ton of data. I think that's one thing that I realized since starting the company is that robots generate a ton of data and you don't need that many to generate data that is close to the levels that LLM companies use for their models.

1:47:04And there is no ceiling to it. Right. Not that we run out of the data that robots can collect. It's not like the Internet. So I think over time, it's quite likely that that the places are going to switch a little bit where most of the models, including, you know, LLMs and VLMs are going to be using real world data collected through robots because that's the data that has no ceiling. And it's very active as opposed to just passive observations of what people wrote on the Internet. and I think at that point probably the question about data centers and compute is gonna is gonna be a big one but for our models we are not there yet we are not bottlenecked by you know if only we had 100 times more compute everything would have worked so much better yeah how do you guys think about uh demos long term we joked on the show recently after seeing the the Chinese uh humanoid marathon like I want to see humanoids doing like big wave surfing cliff jumping you know at what point is that like worth even doing or exploring just because of the amount of attention that it would bring to the industry what do you think we should demo i think i'd like to see a uh one of your robots surf jaws i think that's that's i was saying i want to see i want to see a robot do the 900 on a half pipe tony hawk style that was a foundational moment in you know my childhood and american skateboarding like really life or death stuff exactly it's got to be high stakes yeah what about with with hands what about manipulation uh juggling for sure rubik's cube for sure uh juggling rubik's cubes you can do that i can do the rubik's cube jordy can juggle we need to learn each other's skills so we can do both at the same time um but yeah i mean these stunts uh when they're done right they can draw a bunch of attention although you guys have plenty of attention i don't know if that's really what what's no but it's an interesting thing where it's like you have the the intention of the entire industry but then at some point you know to basically inspire the next, you know, however many thousand robotics companies.

1:49:01I would love to know about, obviously with any AI project, there's always the public perception of like job displacement, dystopia, AI doom, et cetera. But when I look at the demo that you just posted, I'm like, that thing is going to be fighting on my team in the singularity. Like this is a friendly robot that will be defending me. But how do you think about the like tuning the language interaction so that do you see a world where, yes, it's doing my laundry or making my bed. But if I happen to just also ask it, tell me about the news. I can just have a chat with it. Is that something that's even in your mind in terms of like human computer interaction?

1:49:42It's not a big focus of ours right now. We're so focused on manipulation and economically valuable tasks, and more so than that, the fundamental building blocks that we think gets us from here to physical intelligence. I think it's inevitable that everyone has robots in their homes, their workplaces, just like in their lives. And I think they'll want robots that are more useful than just doing things, whether it's companionship or like the best Amazon Alexa that can actually then go like cook the recipe that you ask it for. It's a place we focus around the interaction. But right now it's more understanding the intent of clean my kitchen and then breaking that down into tasks.

1:50:20But it's pretty straightforward to go from do the thing to tell me about the thing. Let's have a conversation about the thing. And so it's on the horizon, but not the greatest priority. And then one thing there I would say is with the models we've been releasing, they're actually built on top of vision language models. So these are the models that are truly what they call multi-model, where you can talk to it. You can ask it what they see in the image. and every now and then you can ask it to perform actions too. That's cool. And what we start to realize is that all of these different data sources contribute to each other.

1:50:53They give you just like a bigger picture of what the world is like and better understanding. And it just turns out that robot actions is just like yet another language that these models can speak. And they just need to learn it and see enough examples of it. So the model that we have already is the model that you can talk to and it works just as well as open source BLMs. But on top of that, it can also have that understanding be very embodied. And it understands what it sees in front of it. And it's a much deeper understanding when it knows how to move its arm to actually accomplish a task. We were kind of joking before the show about the obvious comparison between robotics and self-driving cars.

1:51:35But can you explain to me, like I'm a five-year-old or like a venture capitalist, Like, why is that a bad analogy? Why don't you love that analogy? I feel like it's not that you don't love it. It's just that it can put you down a bunch of wrong directions. There's a lot of parallels, but I mean, even like the Waymo Tesla thing, right? Like Tesla has this incredible advantage with how much data they're collecting and passively. Yet Waymo is so much better so far, and it has so many fewer cars on the roads. There's useful things about it, but there's also aspects that don't transfer in the analogy.

1:52:12And I think the reason why we were joking about it is it's the number one question. We don't talk to many five-year-olds, but investors and VCs ask us. And so we have to go down this rabbit hole where we're breaking down all of the assumptions and correcting some of them and validating some of them. I mean, is that – so should VCs, if they're looking at the robotics market, just throw out that analogy entirely? entirely? Or should they be saying, there are a set of robotics companies that are in the Waymo category, and there's a set of robotics companies that are in the Tesla category, and those are reasonable, like an ontology to map to?

1:52:47Yeah, no, there's a lot of very useful stuff in the analogy. I think one thing that's interesting is that there are all these self-driving companies that have died over the past 15 years. And one thing that we actually like to remind people is that this is not coming tomorrow. You log on to Twitter and you'll see all of these crazy robotics demos, most of them teleoperated, or most of them being like robots doing backflips, which is a much easier problem than actually a robot folding laundry. And the thing we really try and remind everyone that looks at investing in us or is thinking about investing in us is this is not a problem we're going to solve tomorrow.

1:53:28There's fundamental research, breakthroughs that we need to make. And much like self-driving had a, it's what, like a 15-year arc at this point, there is a very high likelihood that robotics is the same way. We think our greatest competition is science itself. It's not like this company or that company. It's just maybe we can't pull it off in our lifetimes. We think we'll be able to. It's looking more and more likely, but it's not a tomorrow thing. I have one last question. I know you enjoy food and cooking. what is the final eval, the Mount Rushmore, the Mount Everest of cooking that you expect will be the last, the last dish that a robot will be able to cook?

1:54:06What's the hardest dish for a robot to cook? The Don Angie lasagna. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. It'll be very difficult. So, so when, when, when they cook that, AGI achieved. It's game over. It's game over. That's amazing. Amazing. there was actually a recent AGI benchmark someone shared a screenshot and it was a very old definition of AGI it said it'll be able to describe a sheep tell you three things that are larger than a lobster and AGI is here by that definition but one of the things that it can't do is bake you a cake and we just thought it was funny that was the last thing that the computer can't do but maybe soon, maybe future but thank you so much for coming on the show this was a fantastic conversation best of luck to you and thank you so much for building this.

1:54:51This is really important technology. Yeah, we're excited. Put a robot in the studio when you're ready. Send it over. It's a mess. I have clothes all over here that need to be folded. So we'd love to have one. Awesome. Bye. Next up, we got Sam Wesson coming in the studio. Venture capitalist yapping about venture capital. We will bring him in when he's ready. In the meantime, I will do some ads. We'll talk to you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

1:55:26We can also tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. You heard me slip it into the perplexity interview. I'm going to try and slip more ads in. We've been hearing a lot of feedback that there aren't enough ads on the show. We are working hard to remedy that. But we have Sam Lesson here in the studio. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. We just had a fantastic conversation with Carol Hussman and Lockie Groom over at Physical Intelligence. Did you see the demo of their cleaner robot? No, I love Lockie. I haven't seen him in a bit.

1:55:58I know. Is this the folding robot? It can fold your laundry. They've been folding shit in like a warehouse for a while. Yep. Well, they're doing the real world now. The demo was they sent the robot out into the field. It cleans someone's house. They say it's about 50 % accurate. They're getting ready to deploy it once it gets to 99 % accurate. What does a 50 % accurate cleaning robot do? I would imagine it can fold half of your shirts properly and half of your shirts improperly. Look, in fairness, that's probably better than I could do. I'm not much of a folder myself. I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible at it.

1:56:31I would be a terrible laundry robot personally. Yes. Great to see you, Sam. Always fun. You guys are crushing it. I'm loving the vibe. You're both full-time now. We are full-time. You've got ads. Yeah, ads. Yeah, we can do some ads right now. Never side hustle. Yeah. Never side hustle. Always full hustle. Yeah. What's going on in your world? You know, I don't know. I've been traveling a bunch, but I'm back. Traveling? As a venture capitalist? How does that work? Oh, just for fun. Guys, not for work. Please. Yeah. No, I just sit in the pool house for work. But I would imagine such a prestigious career path is so demanding that you would never be able to take a day off.

1:57:12Never. No, I am a slave to Zoom. I just sit here and Zoom back to back. You seem to have cracked the code. What's your stance on Zoom? Do you invest much purely over Zoom or are you just meeting everybody at this point? You know, it's a really interesting question. I personally think Zoom's had a really interesting impact, I think, on venture capital. Because initially, people were all bowled up on how Zoom and no meetings in person was going to open the funnel. And people would invest all over the country. And we'd break down walls because all of a sudden, physicality. There was this kind of euphoric, Zoom will be democratizing type thing going on.

1:57:53And it's interesting. I do think that Zoom means that people like me and venture capitalists are willing to take more meetings than we otherwise would be on like interesting topics with people that, again, like it's just like the barrier is lower. You'll meet with more people. Now, does that actually result in more investments? Unclear. I think it might invest in like broader sets of first meetings just because the barrier is lower. And like if the meeting gets boring after 15 minutes, I can just do my email and say, aha. Right. So it's like there is some breakdown in access, but it's not clear to me how much that resolves to actually broader access means.

1:58:31In fact, I think that's one of the big things that's interesting about AI broadly right now is there's this narrative with auto scripting. The number of pitches I get that are half written by AI or written by AI is out of control. I don't know what people think they're doing with those because they're all just going to get deleted. right and if anything the irony is the fact that the barrier now is so low to those emails means that even the ones that actually are legitimate just get archived because like on the margin they're probably spam and so there's this interesting thing where ai is actually leading making venture capital i would argue more insular right than it was before not less insular right so there's all these like unintended consequences going on of zoom of ai of all this type of stuff in VC.

1:59:14Yeah. Email, you just got to use it like text messaging. Just no, no subject, no body at all. Just whatever you have to say, just put it in the subject and send. Yeah. I actually, I'm like, I'm like probably, I'm old. I'm like 41. Right. So I'm like a huge, I love email. Like I think it's great. And I'm an inbox zero guy. I'm like, but I also like run aggressive filters on my email and like, I'm fine not responding. Like I don't consider email a contract that because you sent me something i'm required to send you something back i think you just have to treat it differently um what about on text are you an inbox uh zero on text text i take pretty seriously um actually so that is like i i kind of have a pretty quick sla on text and i i tried to make sure that not everyone knows my actual phone number um yeah let's put sam's phone number up on the screen for everyone uh so you can text him if you have to get another well i'll give you my plug which is, you know, one of our companies is called OpenPhone, which is a great company.

2:00:12And that I use an OpenPhone phone number for a lot of things where you want to put it up on screen. And it's great. It's like a second text inbox. That's not really the purpose of the company. It's more sophisticated than that. But I like it for that. That's great. We should we should set an open phone. Yeah, we should. Yeah. Yeah. For me, I like to think of the hierarchy of like, you know, inboxes, right? Email. But then now it's like, OK, you have XDMs, iMessage, WhatsApp, signal if you want to get in touch with me show up it's basically like by the collar yes basically until i hear what you have to say i mean i i so i have like my stack is text is incredibly important and serious that's like a one hour sla but it's limited email i take very seriously like i really care about email um but then people are like you should be in my discord server or like slack i'm like absolutely not like i think those things are disasters i refuse to engage with them I hate everything about them.

2:01:08Despite the fact Slow was one of the seed investors in Slack. And so I have to thank Stuart for making us some money. But I just can't deal. I refuse to deal. Should we talk about venture capital? I actually want to start and go back to your 2023 piece, which is on the timeline. You called out, this is October 16th, 2023, Three, the shutdown of the VC factory line and the death of the factory farm unicorn narrative. The awkward crowd into seed investing by multi-stage firms. The mirage of AI and LLM startup investing. The post-pandemic fundamental cultural change impacting startups. Which one of those?

2:01:55Would you grade yourself? Yeah, how would you grade your predictions? I obviously grade myself excellently. No, I mean, I think like, look, I try to pull up every few years. and just especially in times of uncertainty, just be like, what is going on? Like, where should we be spending time and attention? I think, you know, two years ago, you know, those were the big themes for me is one, we were very used to for 10 years as a fund, effectively operating on this factory line. We take in companies at a certain stage. We know what metrics they have to hit. We give them the money. We then package them and send them on to our friends at Series A, who then send them on to B and da-da-da-da.

2:02:28And the whole thing works beautifully because at the end, we pop them out into the public markets and retail investors buy them and life is good. And I was just saying like after the pandemic, you know, people wanted that to come back. And I was like, this is not coming back. Like this whole, the market is, it's a mixed up market. You know, we've basically produced a bunch of these things which are on paper unicorns, but like they're not fundamentally important businesses. And more importantly, there's been this huge release, which is the biggest platforms in the world can just keep getting bigger.

2:02:54Like I remember a time when like$100 billion company was a huge company, right? People thought there was a limit to how big the biggest could get. And so there was this constant hunger in the public market for what's the next$3 billion company that's going to grow really fast. And there was coverage for that. People cared about it. And now the obvious answer is just like put more money into Amazon, put more money into Meta. Like there is no upper bound. And so I just think the markets have shifted. Demand from consumers has shifted at the market. It's kind of rippled back to the ecosystem. You know, what we have now, and I have this in the 2025 version, is what I'm calling zombie corns, right?

2:03:28So there's all, you know, people thought, people, friends of mine were like, oh, we're going to see this mass extinction of these unicorns. They're all going to die because, you know, they're going to run out of money. No one's going to fund them. The liquidation preferences are huge. They can't go public. They actually mostly didn't die. Right. What they did do is they basically sacrificed growth. They cut their burn a lot. They kind of got marginally profitable. They can kind of exist. And they're kind of zombies. They're just they're out there. They're not going anywhere, but they're also not going public.

2:03:58there's no market for them no one knows how to buy them the liquidation preferences are set up so that no one wants to deal with them and they're just going to kind of exist so the the factory line is broken at the late stage because there's no off-ramp but in many ways in many ways this sort of early stage precede to seed to series a is still accelerating as though there's an off-ramp i don't think i don't think it is actually i think this is like one of the i think the part of the 2025 deck or trying to think about what's going on i actually think what we now have weirdly is effectively several markets for companies that are pretty decoupled from each other and kind of have their own logic and exist in their own vacuums.

2:04:35So like there is a public market, like the public market exists is the biggest, right? There is a private market. Now there are companies that are private and will like probably never go public or never for various reasons. The way that companies are valued by the late stage private and the public market are actually just different. Like what's valued is different. How people think about them is different. Large LPs actually invest in both, so they don't care. But there's basically running two parallel universes that don't have a lot of operability. Now, at the early stage, I actually think the same thing is going on, right?

2:05:07Which is like there is a kind of seed to pre-seed-esque market that exists. And people compete and people get excited. And there's kind of a market-cleaning price for startups and invest. Sure. But then when you say, well, what does it take to hop from an early stage, call it like pre-seed, seed, maybe sneaking into A, to like a legitimate B and beyond growth round. There's no more like magic numbers you hit and like a valuation framework that's consistent. It's actually much more about belief. You know, I say in the deck, it's a lot about this kind of new math of people want downside protection and then an option on infinity.

2:05:43Right. And so like what's the average of infinity and zero? It's infinity. Right. And so the way people are backing and devaluate. So the entire factor is predicated on$1 million in ARR equals series A at price, blah, blah, with 30%, you know, 30 % growth and$10 million in AR, like triple, triple, double, double, you can come with all these frameworks. Everyone kind of agreed on shit. And there was just like market clearing action in prices. And now I actually think there's just like distinct markets of belief that are really hard to move between. Yeah. Does this necessitate like a different model around growth?

2:06:20We kind of saw this, like the crossover investors like Tiger, but a lot of growth funds have this downside protection mandate, no zeros, but let's underwrite to a 3X. And yes, I mean, I hear your infinity thing that does happen every once in a while, but I think in general, a lot of growth investors are saying no zeros and let's triple our money over this deal. But should you have more later stage growth investors that are thinking more like portfolio construction at the seed stage? Look, I think that the answer to that basically is i don't even know when they talk about we're underwriting to a 3x yeah who's buying right like everything is about the marginal buyer right there is no value on anything right it's all about like a dcf i mean you could you could justify the cash flows right you could comp to the public market the problem but the problem with the first of all comping to the basically nothing at late stage is trading comp to the public market really right and we can get we can get into like why yeah I think that, look, the DCF comp to the public market, that is the factory model, right?

2:07:21It's basically saying like, hey, I have a late stage thing. I put money in. It's going to triple. The DCF looks like this. It has this much profit margin. Like, this is the story package sell to the public market. The public market buys on that same story. Like, that was the mentality that persisted for a long time. And it was a great system for money making for a lot of people, right? I actually think that, again, the public market now is like, well, if I kind of just want those types of metrics, why don't I just buy more of the Mag7? I don't even want to dick around with your subscale offering.

2:07:53I don't care. And there's reasons for that. It's because the big LPs are bigger. It's because of meme stocks. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on there that kind of makes that happen. But the net outcome is there is no off-ramp. So then the question is, when you're underwriting at a late stage, you also have to underwrite to someone buying from you. Right. And like the question is, what are they buying and why are they buying it? Right. And I think this is where it gets a little bit squirrely, because I do think, you know, I'm not the only one saying this, but like private to private transactions are going to happen way more.

2:08:23Right. Like you're going to look just as it happened in private equity, like funds will sell the funds. Then the question is, well, what is the buying fund paying? Right. They're going to pay. They need some margin. They need to have a framework in their heads about how they're going to sell. Right. So then they're going to you're going to be paid. You as an early stage fund are no longer underwriting to some late stage to some dcf to the public market you're really underwriting to who's going to buy from you what's their narrative on buying like why do they want to hold this right like what's their time horizon what's their purpose and like the irony of the whole thing is like honestly those prices are going to probably be much lower than what the dcf might otherwise imply right how do you think about how do you think about funds you know selling an entire fund and i'm talking about venture funds may be selling to other, you know, kind of like not continuation vehicles, but just other secondary buyers versus trying to sell off and kind of like prune the portfolio and say like, well, in the end of the day, look, I think, look, the fun sign of the funds, you're just going to take some massive discounts on that shit, right?

2:09:26Because in the end of the day, like if someone's buying a fund from you, they're really only buying the winners and the rest is bullshit, right? And like, so in an ideal world, they just carve out the pieces they want, Like I want this position and this position and this position because I care about these companies or I have an infinity thesis on them. Like everyone has to have, I actually think the infinity thesis really matters in terms of how people are thinking about how big things can get and whether they matter or not in the world. And then everything else, it's like, it's basically worth zero, right?

2:09:54You know, we were joking at our firm about like, we were joking about sharding right off Co, right? Because that's the other funny thing that happens, right? Is you just kind of give up on positions and you sell them for a dollar to take the tax, the tax advantage right on it every once in a while the hilarious part is you sell something for a dollar because you give up on it and it turns out being worth something right so like there's a whole business we love a comeback story hoovering up you know irrelevant positions but yeah i don't know i like it doesn't happen yes do gps sell piece of the gp yes but that's complicated because the reality is at least the public market only really values the fees Right.

2:10:30Which means like this was basically I've been having trouble because I wrote this 2023 thing that I was pretty proud of and I think was honestly pretty accurate about what was going on. Understandably, it's been two years. I wanted to update it and be like, well, where are we now? And like, there are things I think I got mostly right. There are things that I think are wrong. But I think the real story is end of factory model. The factory's over. What the yada, yada, yada on is we're now I think entering this period where like you You don't even think about it as one integrated capital system. They're just like different parallel universes.

2:11:02Like everything in the world is regionalizing and fractionalizing. This is happening with globalization. We're having a de-globalization moment. This is happening with all sorts of things. I think it's happening with capital too. There are just literally distinct ecosystems and people play in multiple of them, right? But they have their own valuation logic, et cetera. And then I think like the way people value companies as a result has changed. What you should be looking for has changed. The types of CEOs you want to back has changed. It's just a new world. Did you dabble much internationally?

2:11:29This was a very 2021, 2022 thing with funds thinking that they'd win a deal 10 ,000 miles away. And then in hindsight, you have to think, why did you win this deal? Why are you so lucky to have the opportunity to back this company? And then a lot of them just are derivative. and and the only yeah the only plan we've always invested in israel um when it made sense i think the the u.s israel relationship is strong i think there's a lot of good technology there's a lot of reasons that make sense and so that's always been a thing we've done we know it well enough to like be confident investing there i again i think that's the thing for us historically is yes in a zoom world you'll take the meeting in europe right because like it's interesting and like you know no one's accounting for your time as a venture capitalist so if you're interested in something in Europe and they really want to talk, like, sure, he'll do it.

2:12:24But we're so lazy, right? That like, I don't want to deal with like, there's always an exception. Like we have done a handful of deals that are kind of outside the wheelhouse, but it's a look at, but I kind of believe that there's really something to, you know, be New York, be San Francisco focused, pick a few GOs, understand them, understand how they fit into the global capital world, et cetera. so no we didn't get drawn in too much Europe what is your interpretation of the rumor around OpenAI potentially buying Windsurf for 3 billion it's the it's not an AI cherry on top business it's a wrapper is it bull market for wrappers now are we going to see tons more acquisitions yeah slow is going to FOMO into a bunch of wrapper yeah FOMO into every wrapper because they're just going to get hoovered up I mean my take was maybe you know OpenAI buys one then Anthropic needs one then amazon needs one then google needs one and all of a sudden you have like seven unicorns getting bought everyone's making money everyone's generationally wealthy that's the good ending right i don't look i really am pretty cynical slash don't think that we're gonna see a lot of aqua hire ai type stuff in this era i think there's a few reasons that one is like what are you really buying right in some of these things like you could are you buying talent that is not unreasonable.

2:13:44But, you know, and we've seen that we've seen people like effectively quote unquote, buy companies that are literally just for like the one person they want to pay$200 million to because they really think they're special because they need an exit. Look, some people are going to get massively overcomped. That will happen. I don't think it's an investment thesis. It is what it is. And I think it won't happen that much. But we'll see. I think there's going to be are you buying technology? It's like, the thing about AI and a lot of where we're going is like, why? right? Like software is getting commoditized.

2:14:14Like what is it? Like if you're buying technology, you got to be buying some really important technology. Right. And I think that's like an, the third thing you in theory can buy is just distribution. Right. Which is like, if someone really has, you know, for whatever reason, got their hooks into a few key contracts or like, you know, they have a tailwind, fine, you buy distribution and that, that can be worth something. But look, honestly, it just seems like all very squirrely to me at this moment. you know, the thing I'd say in venture capital is there will be random walks, some random stuff will happen.

2:14:44Right. And like, I think you can't get too, you know, twisted around that you certainly shouldn't be chasing random walk. But no, I don't, I don't personally see it. And if anything, I'd say like, look, I was part of this, you know, my first company was acquired by Facebook in the era of aqua hires. Right. And I think, and I say this with some humility, but also perspective is like, I think when you go back and look at like what was really bought there, and was that a good use of capital by most of the actual hiring company? I think the answer is probably not, you know, like that era is kind of over.

2:15:16People aren't that special. You know, the big companies, just because they have such incredible access to capital and distribution at this point, they can kind of just build whatever they need anyway, right? So anything that does happen will be highly bespoke as opposed to like some industry-wide trend is my personal of you. How do you think right now about the dynamic between 30 to$50 million early stage funds versus, you know, 30 plus billion dollar AUM funds in some ways they, uh, the, the, the, the tiny, you know, uh, upstart funds benefit from these big platform funds coming in and sort of marking up deals, right?

2:15:54The returns are good, but maybe I just think they're completely like, they're two completely different business models, right? Like I think is the thing, this goes back to my poll about like rationalization and fragmentation of what capital even is right if you're running a 50 billion dollar venture fund you can't possibly be deploying that well early right and actually you're paid to move gross dollars the problem you're solving for lps is you have some massive fucking lps they're like i want exposure to private markets it's really hard for me to go find how to do that i would love you to deploy as much capital as possible and like Effectively, the way you get paid is on fees.

2:16:32You're not getting paid on carry. If you have a$50 billion fund, making 3x on that, so you're making money on carry, is extremely difficult to impossible. The numbers just don't add up. You're getting paid to deploy. That means your business model is attracting more capital. You have to return enough to justify it, but you're not actually shooting for maximum DPI or actual returns. You're just shooting for that. By the way, just go a step further. I just see this all the time where I have friends with funds that are maybe sub$50 million funds and they're investing into, like even if the big platform is just periodically dipping down into seed when they have, you know, really like the founder or whatever.

2:17:11And then suddenly the round is like, you know, six on 40. And then the tiny fund is like, you could get a bunch of bangers and you just do the math and you realize like they're not making, they're not going to be making DPI either. And they're not getting... The late stage, what happened in 2023 era, which I wrote about then, is like the late stage capital allocators who are again are paid fees to deploy gross they're like they're weight deployers they're mass capital deployers they got they couldn't deploy so a bunch of their junior people in particular like well i need to do something to justify my paycheck so they started dipping into seed right because like they're bored right and they're like we can't deploy big checks so we might as well deploy small ones and by the way no one cares right like it's such small amounts of money it's irrelevant either way that completely messed up the seed markets because it got super undisciplined, right?

2:18:00And like it did, because it's candidly, we do the same thing at Slow to like the angel market, right? Whereas it's a recursive problem. Like we will write$100 ,000 checks off a meeting because it's kind of irrelevant to us and it's just relationship building and like whatever. But there's some poor angel is out there trying to price it properly and we don't care and then we fuck it up for them. So like it's a recursive problem. That did happen. I think mostly, honestly, the late stage guys with AI I have a narrative where they can put billions of dollars to work and do their actual jobs. So they've mostly pulled out of fucking up the early stage markets because they have better things to do with their time.

2:18:36That's actually what they get paid for. Right. And just to make a finer point on that, you know, a lot of these late stage public platforms, they really are like setting themselves up to go public. Here's the thing about that. When they go public, the actual way like the public markets value these funds has absolutely nothing to do with returns. It is 100 % the fee base, right? And so their structure and their incentive structure is 1000 % about earning fees and just making enough returns to justify the fees they charge and raise more money. Like that's what they do. Then there's the early stage market.

2:19:09Here's the thing about those$50 million funds, right? Ultimately, you got to eat, you got to actually deliver DPI, not just marks, right? And so marks are nice, like they're fine. But I think what we're going to find in a lot of ways is the gulf between I have on paper made a bunch of money or these deals look good versus like, oh, no, I actually returned capital. I made you money. You should give me more money. And I made myself money doing it. That's a pretty big gulf. And I think what we're going to find is that, A, the market, most of those funds are going away because they don't have that and they're not going to.

2:19:46B, there could be a world where late stage funds start saying, okay, at some discount to the last round, I'll buy out the seed funds effectively and give them some DPI, et cetera. But then the problem for the seed funds is that mark they were using to be like, look how smart I am. That's not what they're getting paid, right? That's like the high watermark some investor invested later for primary. And when you come around and say, hey, by the way, would you like to buy my shares? And they're like, well, we'll take more to lower our average cost base. They're not paying what they paid for the primary, right?

2:20:19And they're looking at their portfolio and they're like, I need to do this for 80 % of my bets, basically, in order to actually. Yeah. And then it's like, you know. Yeah. And so, look, I mean, the upshot, the really simple way to think about it is if you're an early stage investor, you have to make money. That is actually what you are paid for. And people are saying, hey, I'm going to allocate a small amount of money to you. By the way, it's not efficient, right? Because if you're even a medium-sized LP, someone's running a$50 million fund, what are you going to give them, like a few million bucks?

2:20:47you don't care unless they make you a shit ton of money right and so like if you make them a shit ton of money you're doing your job you get to keep playing if you don't forget it and that's just in a completely different game than what it means to be a late stage capital allocator in the private markets yeah i have a kind of a random topic but there's there's two early stage kind of publicity stunts going on this week one is by roy lee he launched cluey clue lee uh cheat on everything. I'm not sure if you saw this, but it was very controversial. And he's kind of like a troll, almost like a Nathan Fielder type, really kicking the bear.

2:21:24And then there's also this, uh, artisan, uh, company announcing their$25 million series a with a billboard on the one. I love billboards as you know, we love billboards here. We're sponsored by ad quick. We love billboards. Um, but, uh, you know, the, the, the, the positive take on this is that, Hey, like they're breaking through, they're getting attention. Attention's valuable. Distribution's important. The counter to that is, uh, should they even need to do that? Shouldn't they just be heads down building? Uh, where do you sit on that continuum? I guess the question I would ask is what percent, what is the track record of companies that started with marketing stunts that ultimately were important or successful?

2:22:04Right. My sense is the track record off the top my head is zero, right? Well, I mean, Facebook started with that or not. That was very viral. No, no, no. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. So the challenge with going super viral early, and I had this with Party Round, is that people get a fixed idea. A lot of people get a very fixed idea of what your business does. And then you run into this product marketing challenge, which people are aware of your business, but they're aware of it for something that you may not even do anymore. And that's why I was talking with a Cluely founder yesterday of like, you need to be committed to like iterating and basically burning the whole brand down because you might find in two months that the real opportunity is something else.

2:22:47I think that's a really good point. And like, I'll do a step further, which is in my experience, really successful things. You actually want fairly high barriers to entry so that the people who show up as your early customers are like deeply in need of it and true believers. Right. Because if they're deeply in need of it, they're going to put up with a lot of crap to get what it is you're offering out of it because they're deep because they really care. Like they showed up first and they like have a real stake in it. And then they become true believers in that cult that advocates. I think if you have too much attention too quickly from a not fervent enough audience, you get distracted.

2:23:24You have to deal with a bunch of the wrong stuff. People are flighty. Like, so I think there's this irony, which is like it all how you get your first 100 ,000, 10 ,000 people and the barriers to entry there are like, I'll give you a kind of counter example, which actually kind of is a marketing stunt if you get into it, which is quite by accident. You know, Ikram and I kind of started this Jelly Jelly meme coin, which blew way the hell up and went crazy, but was supposed to be like a component of this app, Jelly Jelly, we've been working on. The app's super cool, but like the app was not ready.

2:23:57Yeah. Right. Like, and what's been really interesting to watch is because the app wasn't ready, you got a bunch of people in most of them balanced. They're like, this isn't ready. This is weird, whatever. But you did attract a kernel of like crazy true believers that are really engaged with it. And then it's kind of like a fire, like you kind of blow on the coals of that. Right. And you kind of keep iterating and working. So I guess that's a long winded way of saying, I think the history of companies that start with a marketing stunt and blow up big is pretty poor there probably is a way to like be very inefficient and like blow up something big or say something funnel out 99 of the noise yeah somehow find that kernel one percent work with that one percent and like treat it like kind of the embers of a fire right and grow up it's like that's kind of the mental model it's like how you handle it got it uh last question how cooked is Tesla.

2:24:52I mean, look, I've been in the camp of like Tesla's a meme stock for a long time. Right. And I think Tesla's a meme stock. Right. You know, and so I. Yeah, you posted maybe it was yesterday. No, it was this morning. If Elon can move Tesla stock up by seven and a half percent by saying he is stepping back from Doge against the backdrop of profits and revenue they just reported, then yes, he probably deserves the$56 billion difference as a pay package. That is what the market says his attention is worth. I thought that was pretty on the nose. Yeah, look, Elon is the greatest marketer of our generation.

2:25:33He's the greatest capital raiser of our generation. He is the greatest, I think, storyteller. I mean, there's a lot that he's really, really, really good at, right? And I think he's the ultimate cult influencer in a lot of ways, right? And he's built a lot of cool companies doing that, but it is so belief driven. And I think this is kind of the thing where it's like, you know, what does Tesla work from a DCF perspective? We talked about public markets and how you value these things. Not a fraction of what it's traded at, right? But it is absolutely, he is great at the infinity story, right? The infinity story is so big and infinity, you know, plus zero equals big number.

2:26:11Everything's about the marginal buyer. and it's incredibly loved because retail investors want something to believe in like they want something they can like they can go to infinity it's the same thing with the mars thing it's like look i again i find the whole mars thing in spacex so frustrating i love spacex it's like you know i think it's an amazing company like what they do is incredible right and there's a lot i love in the whole nine yards the mars narrative is so frustrating because it's so disingenuous on one hand right like it's just like the the predictions are out of control like it doesn't make any sense from like a fundamentals perspective but my god people need something to believe in right and so believe in something well i think tesla is coming back i think they're going to put a naturally aspirated v12 with a gated manual in a new car and they're going to sell 700 million cars in a single quarter i would fucking love that if tesla did that i would be even i would buy tesla stock just because that would be awesome there we go we cracked it we cracked it it's gonna to happen you heard it here first uh thanks for stopping by sam this is fantastic sam we will talk to you guys next up we have bridget mendler of northwood space coming into the studio very exciting i believe 30 million dollar series a uh from adres and horowitz in partnership uh i think founders fund and a bunch of other folks got in the round so we'll talk to her about that bridget Welcome to the show.

2:27:32How are you doing? Hey, what's going on? What's up? I haven't been on podcasts before, so am I on? You're not only on a podcast, but you're also live. Whoa. There's no post editing, but hopefully we got the facts right, but you can break it down for us. Tell us what does Northridge Space do and tell us about the$30 million funding round that just was announced. Yeah. We're building the ground network for the industrialized space economy. We view it kind of as the third critical pillar of infrastructure for space where you need to get things into space on rockets. You need to have things to put into space, which are satellites, and then you need a way to actually communicate with them and use them once they're up and operational.

2:28:15And so we're focused on that last third part and building the shared infrastructure that the whole industry can take advantage of, really drawing parallels to the cellular industry and to the internet where shared infrastructure is just a big enabler for being able to push technology forward. Yeah. Talk about what companies have had to do historically. You know, we've heard a lot about satellite companies that send a satellite up and they're like, it's working, but we don't know where it is. So it's like, you know, kind of critical aspect of, you know, you know, maintaining. What was the status quo prior to you starting the company?

2:28:50Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not just prior to starting the company. It's like ongoing. You know, we talked to companies, I think like last week, that are just not getting enough coverage. And so they're endeavoring to build their own ground stations themselves. And, you know, our co-founder, Char, it was actually interesting during our first fundraise, he was still working at his old company, and he was woken up two times in the middle of the night, there were a total of four ground failures, just in the course of one evening, while he was manning their operations. at all different locations, all different ground networks.

2:29:28One was a site that had already been down and just like not even notified the company that they weren't going to be able to make their contact. Talked to another company last week that had been out of contact with their satellite for 28 hours. It's like, you know, you're not just tossing like a$50 piece of equipment up there. It's like tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's very stressful. and we're excited to pursue setting a new standard there. Yeah, people get stressed out when Slack's down for like five minutes. And imagine having like this$100 million, billion dollar device that you don't have contact with.

2:30:05I'm curious, what does scale look like for Northwood? How many different ground stations do you hope to kind of get to within the next, call it decade? Ooh, decade, that's a long horizon, but that's fun. We are looking at scale both from like a network level and a site level. So when you think about like, why do you need to have a global network to begin with, with space? Like the reason why you need to have a global network is because satellites orbit the earth. And so maintaining contact with them requires having, you know, locations all over the earth to make sure that you can be in contact all the time.

2:30:43So think of it kind of like when you're using a cell phone and you're driving on the freeway and you're passing different cell towers, you need to maintain contact with cell towers in order to maintain connection. Same with space. And so for us, there's like two verticals. One is coverage. So you want to have enough coverage. So basically like a cell tower, you're always in contact no matter where you are. And then the other one is throughput. That's like density. And so kind of gold standard for this is SpaceX, where they have hundreds of ground stations to not just have global coverage, but to be able to serve millions of users in different regions.

2:31:16So when they're wanting to like service a region that has a lot of customers, they need to put a lot of ground stations in that region in order to support that much capacity. And so we want to be able to offer that to other folks so that they can have like that kind of gold standard of connectivity through space. So we're going to be putting, you know, ground stations in different regions, as well as ground stations densifying in the same regions. And one of the things that we think about with scale is really like, how can we put as many ground stations to support as much capacity as possible at a single region?

2:31:50So our kind of, you know, sub near term goal is 500 sites. Can you take me through some of the history of these ground stations, maybe explain it in really, really simple terms, like maybe like I'm a venture capitalist or something, something like, how do we communicate with the Hubble telescope? Is this like a big satellite dish, like what I saw in contact with Jodie Foster? Is that how we communicate with the Hubble? Or is there a different network of ground stations? What was kind of the gold standard 10, 20 years ago? Yeah. I have to just say like us ground nerds in space, we do not often get asked these questions.

2:32:26So thank you very much. Like the ground is just generally like the not sexy part of space. um so it's very fun so yeah i mean what you're doing is uh you know generally using rf to contact a satellite that is like hundreds of kilometers away um you need to concentrate enough power to be able to do that so that's why you see like the big parabolic dishes it's concentrating power um and so when you're you know further away that requires more tower more power so actually um if you're you know in the palo alto area you go by the um the stanford dish is kind of a well-known one. I imagine like some folks, if they're watching might know of that.

2:33:02It's massive, a giant dish that's used to make that contact. And so it's interesting because like the legacy of space, it's more exploratory. It's more research-based where like booking an antenna was kind of more like booking a telescope, you know, where it's like an individual piece of equipment where, you know, they're located at these different locations around the world. you book the time, you're kind of in control of how that functions and how it operates. But as the space industry has been scaling, it's not really a sustainable model to think of like, as you're needing to coordinate, you know, tens or hundreds of different sites to think about that individual booking and coordination.

2:33:40And with that, we kind of like to analogize to network routing for the internet, where it's like, you're not thinking of every single, you know, router and network switch, you kind of trust in a network that can reliably deliver that data. And so that's something that we're starting to think about, about, you know, how the space industry is going to evolve in terms of communication, going from booking an antenna, like you book a science telescope, to having the outcomes through a global network where you can, you can have a lot of observability and control into that network, but it's much more like software defined and controlled kind of like modern internet infrastructure.

2:34:21Question. For now, I think there's an obvious opportunity to serve existing space companies. What kind of companies do you think are potentially enabled by your technology and network that may not have been smart to start five years ago if you didn't have kind of the resources of SpaceX? Yeah, there's a company that we were recently talking to that I get really excited about. You know, in L.A., we had the wildfires a couple of months ago and absolutely devastating, you know, really difficult to figure out where to route resources with a really fast moving fire. If you're trying to get a sense of like the scale and the direction of that fire with a helicopter, it's often like not safe or not even permitted to go into those regions because there's just so much debris.

2:35:09And so satellites are a really interesting application where if you're able to have enough revisit rate, which is what, you know, in the space industry, you call like being able to go over a region again, if you're like a low Earth orbit satellite, where you basically just need to have like a bunch of satellites that pass over and take turns because it takes time to orbit the Earth. Um, so having enough revisit rate to where you can actually like regularly track the movement of a fire is pretty revolutionary. Like you can, you could stop fires much more rapidly and be able to detect the movement.

2:35:40Um, the challenge with that is if you don't have, um, your, your latency down low enough to, um, to be able to give the information, it's pretty much useless, right? Like if you deliver information like an hour later, then you can't, um, you can't deliver anything actionable and helpful towards firefighters on the ground. Like they're going to go into the wrong. Lives are on the line. I remember John and I, I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena. I remember the watch, the watch fire, watch duty, watch duty went down for like an hour. And I was like, I was looking, I was looking at the mountain behind my house, just like being like, if the fire comes over the hill, I just want to have eyes on it quickly.

2:36:17And that was like, you know, very brief that it was down. I have a follow-up question. Again, Again, maybe a stupid question, but what is going on in the various different orbits? We talked to Albedo about VLEO. Obviously, LEO is kind of the hot one with Starlink. But do you need different ground station technology or scale to hit something in high Earth orbit? We talked to Astronus, which is maybe partnering with Impulse to kind of boost to higher orbits. What are the challenges or benefits to different orbits when you're thinking about it from a ground communication perspective? Yeah, that's a great question.

2:36:59You know, VLEO, like you're getting closer to Earth, so you're able to get more like high fidelity imagery or like sensor, things like that. If you go up to Leo, like that's useful both from that perspective, but also from like a latency perspective when you're talking about like trying to hit internet similar kind of latency timelines, just the time it takes to go with those altitudes. There's also operators in like MEO, which is, you know, middle or thoroughbred that are supporting internet use cases. And then if you go out to Geo, the benefit of that is like it's geostationary. That's what the name means.

2:37:32You're fixed at a certain location and you're able to have really continuous coverage over a wider area because it can see so much of the globe. This is a super interesting area and an area that we're actually like really enthusiastic to be working in is servicing multiple orbits. And yeah, I think it's both of interest on the commercial side and also on the government side. They have a lot of assets that stretch up into higher orbits, and they're looking to have more capacity, more coverage, more resiliency. There's really a shortfall of ground assets in the higher orbits, actually. And so that's something that we didn't enter into the business planning on, but that's something that has been a very large driver of activity in our business over the past 18 months of existence.

2:38:21um and yeah i think like the more dynamic movement is also a really interesting point where it's not like you're just hanging out in one orbit right like that's kind of impulse impulse is really exciting uh proposition with prop um is that they're able to uh you know maneuver between orbits in um in new ways and uh you know in space economy rendezvous proximity operations like that's that's something that's definitely going to be picking up and very significant in the coming years. I feel like Middle Earth Orbit is like super ripe for a Tolkien named startup. I mean, I would love to hear where the name Northwood came from.

2:39:01Tell me where the name come from. And then I do have a follow up question that's more serious. Yes, that's a very serious question. The name came from the lake house where we first did our prototyping of antennas during pandemic pandemic and it was the very origin of becoming a ground nerd. Um, and so, yeah, that's, that's kind of the history of the name. I mean that, that Lake house, my great grandparents got it in 1945. It's just a little shack in New Hampshire. And, uh, it's been, uh, kind of the, all, all the companies that I've had, have had some affiliation to it. Got it. Uh, so on the business side, um, can you walk me through where you're playing in kind of the value chain, I imagine that there's a fair amount of equipment that's available off the shelf.

2:39:49You might, or correct me if I'm wrong, but do you need to build the equipment from scratch? Is this a project where you're going to be building like a gigafactory, like what we've seen for the Starlink units at some point? Or is it more about assembling different components and then being really strategic about placing them and then building a network on top of that and really like the services side of the business? Great question. Something that our head of manufacturing, Thomas, thinks about a lot. We're definitely going to be leveraging outsourcing in early days. We are a vertically integrated company.

2:40:23We design all of the different components. We have those outsourced and then brought in. We're not making our own circuit boards at this point in time. There's certain things that are more efficient to insource versus outsource. so largely leveraging outsourcing initially I think you know we're really focusing on modular units and making our units designed for manufacturing so making sure that we can parallelize development making sure that we can have things ready to be integrated at like kind of the final hour is is the thought process just to accelerate our manufacturing capability and then gradually over time when we figure out like what is actually cost efficient and time efficient we bring it in house entirely.

2:41:10I want to know more about actually the mechanics of setting up a ground station somewhere. I imagine you could do it. We've been looking. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're thinking about doing this. My backyard, you know, I have some extra space. There's a lot of ham radio amateur folks that do that. I have a, I have a friend, a family friend who their family has some land in Napa and I think they monetize it by selling a cell phone tower right on top of it. Is that, is that, is that the the one of the folks that you'd buy land from or um or is it on federal land like how do you think about placing these do we need them to be equidistant across the united states and beyond uh are there other countries are you placing them in allied countries like how do you think about the the coverage map the ver I want to see the verizon map with all the different coverage points right how does that grow over time yeah no it's it's real uh we do that modeling in house so um yeah we we think in terms of like the coverage mapping and um the metrics that we're prioritizing hitting for customers.

2:42:08Also shout out to Christian at Astronus who has his own amateur radios. We had a fun time talking about that. Yeah. But in terms of where you put sites, it's a great question. Basically comes down to three things, land, fiber, power. So you just need to optimally be able to make your sites. We prioritize making our sites as generic as possible really so that like we have the most optionality possible um we are also prioritizing like really high throughput backhaul so um data centers honestly become like a good spot to to put them at because they have the power in the backhaul um already uh set up um and you know generally try to just make sure that the land is like easy to deploy uh one advantage of the way that we're building our systems is we don't need to lay like a concrete pad which can add weeks to months to your time frame, especially when you need to like do permitting and all that.

2:43:05So our goal is to make it so that, you know, the, uh, the tech bros of the world can just, you know, have one in their, in their backyard, very, uh, easily deployed easily. Um, and yes, it is, it is a global effort that we're doing right now. I remember Anderil did something similar with the, uh, with the sensor tower. They didn't want to pour the concrete pad because of permitting. So it's on wheels and And Paul was saying it's completely unnecessary. You could just drill it in the ground, but then it's way more complicated. How do your timelines work? I'm assuming a lot of your customers are kind of planning around launches, and that means those are kind of busy moments for you guys, I imagine.

2:43:47But at the same time, you can serve a lot of existing companies that have assets in orbit already. How do you think about kind of the advantages that you guys have of like being on the ground and not needing to plan your entire business around SpaceX? Oh, yeah. It's very convenient. We can work on our own schedule. I mean, we have different challenges because, you know, you're going to different countries and they have their own local regulatory regimes and all that. But we are not constrained by launch schedules, which is great. And then the first part of your question was, what was the first?

2:44:21No, you answered it. You answered it already. I have another somewhat random question. We ask a lot of artificial intelligence founders about their P-Doom. We ask a lot of space founders about their P-Moon. What is the probability that you will visit the moon in the next 30 years, let's call it? Would you go if the capability was there? Let's say there's been 100 people or 1 ,000 people or 10 ,000 people up. Are you going? And then what's the likelihood that you think the space economy and the flywheel that gets us to the moon happens based on your insider knowledge of the industry? I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity.

2:44:59I did hear from like an astronaut one time just how life changing that experience was. And yeah, I mean, I feel like that would be definitely a thing for the bucket list. As a mom now, I think that's honestly like the only thing that holds me back from saying. You got to bring the kids. You got to bring the kids. It's going to be Disneyland on the moon. That's the first economic use case. We talked about this too. like do we go to do we go on a blue origin flight it's 250k do we just go and podcast in space john was all in i was like my wife will absolutely kill me uh i don't know if it's worth it um so it's definitely part of the calculus yeah i know to be to be young and wild and free um and like the the lunar economy i'm very bullish on it i think um yeah i think we'll hopefully see that within our lifetime.

2:45:46Somewhat related to space tourism, the Blue Origin flight did just happen last week. I want to know specifically, what are the challenges with, again, connectivity? Because it seemed like we lost the video feed while they were at the apex of their kind of trajectory. It was only three miles or three kilometers up or something. It wasn't that high, and yet we still lost the live video feed. Is that something, it's a moving object, but satellites move too. What does it take from a ground station perspective to be able to watch Netflix on your Blue Origin flight consistently? Yeah, that was actually something that we talked about in the very early days, like pre-forming Northwood was like being able to watch Netflix in space and we're like, oh, wouldn't that be such a cool future?

2:46:33I mean, to accomplish that, there's multiple different kinds of the communication going on. There's like, how do you actually make sure that the rocket is going where it's supposed to go and it's safe. And like, you know, we talked to someone the other day who was concerned about like a rocket trajectory, not going the direction it was supposed to and winding up like landing on another country and needing to deal with kind of like the catastrophe that falls out of that and managing that. So like you really need to know where your spacecraft is going because yeah, the consequences that fall out of that are serious.

2:47:07But then, yeah, having actual, you know, humans on board needing to have some kind of communications on board. Yeah, it's going in a different trajectory than a satellite that is just kind of conventionally like orbiting. And that's something that we're excited about with our technology as well is being able to vary our beam width. So if you think about like, you know, the signal as you get further away is kind of like if you were to shine a flashlight on a table and like the area that the flashlight spotlight covers changes depending on how far away the flashlight is. It's the same thing with an object going up in space.

2:47:44Like it's changing the actual signal propagation depending on how far away the spacecraft is. And so you need to be able to have some way of tracking that. And we're excited through the tech that we're developing to be able to track the beam with us as it changes for more dynamic trajectories. Can you talk a little bit about the long-term mix of customers? I mean, we've all been following Delian's trajectory with Varda. He was talking about ZBLAN at one point, then it was Pharma. Now there's some DOD mixed in there, some government contracting. it feels like a lot of these companies that are doing stuff in space or doing stuff in hard tech, it's dual use.

2:48:25Is there a government angle here at some point? Or is that just something you're thinking about in the future? No, it's very near term. It's very real term. Very real term. Very, very real. Yeah, across a number of different applications. I mean, they're dealing with the same challenges, like if not even more so, where like they have aging assets that are kind of infrequent. There's certain networks that just don't have a lot of assets and they're old and they're vulnerable to outages, whether it's an intentional outage by somebody targeting that site or not. And so there's been a lot of interest in how that they can leverage commercial to get sites deployed quickly.

2:49:09For us in the conversations we're having, we're really emphasizing like we can deploy capability quickly and we can serve up capability that's like quite scalable. So if one of those outages happens, you'll have that backup and that resiliency. And so as, you know, government use cases, like so much of our world runs on space in a way that I think people don't really realize. And so it was, you know, that's been a refrain that you're hearing more and more through government stakeholders where there's this concern on, If anything goes down in space or through the ground connectivity, it has ripple effects through a lot of our critical infrastructure.

2:49:46And so for us to be able to deploy capability that can enable resilience there is something that's definitely resonating. This might be a silly question. Are you guys already making hardware that's actually on satellites? And if not, is that something you would do at some point? because I imagine when it comes to, you know, reliable communication, you're somewhat reliant on the technology that's actually on the craft. Yeah, that's a, it's a great question. I think like so far we've been pursuing partnership there, but like if the need presented itself to stretch onto that side, we have amazing engineers that would be very capable of doing something like that.

2:50:24But yeah, for now. Yeah, there's kind of a decomposition happening right now where there's there's one company that just makes the satellite buses. And so you could imagine that there's a different company that makes, oh, just downlink connectivity. And then you kind of vend all that together. And then you do the important thing and you can focus your company a little bit more. Exactly, exactly. That makes a ton of sense. That's the vision where, you know, in the same way that a developer doesn't need to think about like their, you know, cloud resources or networking or any of it. It's just like, you just focus on building and yeah, the rest is kind of - Yeah, focus on that key value creation.

2:50:57uh when did you initially start researching or like catch the space bug when did you get into this i mean honestly it was around that that time of the um you know prototypes that we were making uh my husband griffin is our cto and so you know we were just uh working on those prototypes during the pandemic and um i feel like i don't pursue things as one does some people were you know baking some people were podcasting sourdough bread but you know a lot of like new founders coming out of the pandemic too it's just like yeah too much time on your hands um we were fortunate to be in that position but yeah just can't do something casually i was just like all right and then after we did that we kind of like you know wrote a white paper with commercial folks and then we did another one with uh some government stakeholders and um like damn like this is a really critical vulnerability in the space industry um it kind of took off from there So five years of work to get here.

2:51:51Can we play the overnight success sound? Overnight success. But congratulations on the funding round. Really, really, really great milestone. And congrats to you and the whole team. Come on next time. What are you guys drinking over there? Is that a Yerba Mate? That's a Yerba Mate. I am. I am. Big Yerba Mate guy. I have a Celsius. But John's, you know, we have both sides of the table. I'm having the third. Wait, this is like endorsement or something. But yeah, we have the trifecta. The Holy Trinity of energy drinks. What are you drinking? Red Bull. Oh, Red Bull. A classic. Very Lindy. Lindy. The Holy Trinity of energy drinks.

2:52:29Anyway, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And we'd love to have you back when there's more news. Thank you so much. Cheers. Bye. All right. Have a good one. Bye. Let's close out with some timeline. What else we got? Oh, Mike Newt, former guest on the show, has released the results from OpenAI's O3 model, which everyone's raving about, on Arc AGI. And so his takeaway is that O3 Medium, because there's a million different varieties now for how intense and how long-running these reasoning models can run for, But O3 Medium is the industry-leading AI reasoning system by a large margin, 2x the score and 1 20th the cost compared to the next leading chain of thought system as measured by Arc V1 semi-private set scoring, 57 % for $1.50 per task.

2:53:20And that's interesting because we talked to Sean Swix about how Google was dominating in this Pareto frontier of model capability versus cost. And we talked about this with Logan, too, how Google has been dominating in these benchmarks and then cost. But Arc AGI is this completely separate benchmark from MMLU and LM Arena and Humanity's Last Exam and all these other things that are – Arc AGI, it's so simple. it's these puzzles, but it's in some ways harder to game or harder to optimize for apparently. And so he says his key question for released 03, is it more like 01, slightly better than pure LLM on novel tasks or more like 03 preview?

2:54:05I love opening eyes, naming scheme. Keep it, keep it simple guys. It makes us really hard to do my job. Qualitatively new capability to solve problems outside training data. And so we are going to be following the Arc AGI development very closely. He closes by saying Arc V2, which is the latest puzzle eval that he released, Arc V2 still has a long way to go. Even with the great reasoning efficiency of O3, new ideas are still needed. He called this when he came on the show. He said, we haven't evaluated the new OpenAI models yet. We've heard rumors about them. We think they're great, obviously very economically valuable, obviously amazing tools.

2:54:46We love them. But in terms of Arc V2, they're not solving that fundamental problem. And it raises questions about, is it AGI? Is it 10-minute AGI? It's AGI that can do IMO-level math, but it can't solve a puzzle that a kid can solve. It's a different type of intelligence. And I think that's great. I think it's amazing for the economic impact, but we still got our edge. Still got it. We still got it. Humanity's not done yet. But anyway, let's move on to some news. The United States banned artificial dyes from all food products effective yesterday. Yeah, this is big. We got to get Callie, Jess Amara's co-founder on to come break this down.

2:55:29I don't have full context. It seems like it's going to be incredibly disruptive to big CPG. Can you imagine trying to reformulate M &Ms? like M &Ms they've been making this for we're gonna have a hundred years get ready to have some gray M &Ms folks they're still gonna taste the same uh actually we'll see if they taste the same if they're not you know the color of the rainbow yeah uh but I I think this is good there's plenty of evidence that these different dyes like have really terrible impacts on health and especially considering that kids consume these and they don't have the same ability to reason I have a different to take, I think, natural immunity of the human body.

2:56:09It's incredibly resilient. And so as long as you build up a tolerance to the poison, you're going to do fine. So I would say just start slowly, microdose the M &Ms, build up your tolerance, and then you can take a ton of artificial dye. No amount of artificial dye could do anything to me at this point. I have consumed so much Celsius and so many processed foods that I am invincible. Some people say hubris. Yes, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Yes, I'm unkillable by the American food industry. Let's end the show there. We got to get on with Taipei. We do. But we will see you guys tomorrow.

2:56:52See you tomorrow. It was a great show. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. And thank you to the incredible corporations that make this show possible. Thank you.