Dimon’s Take on Apple Card, Trump’s Greenland Play, VC Winter Deepens | Josh Wolfe, Delian Asparouhov, Arun Gupta, Julie Bush, Winston Weinberg, Yotam Segev

25:22Back to the article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than$9 billion across new funds in December. That was an organic soundboard. In one of the year's largest raises, while PT's Founders Fund closed$4.6 billion in April. New fund managers, by contrast, are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash-intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and hedge funds.

25:57Collectively, the venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing, Clarkson said, of the largest AI rounds. It must be coming from other sources as well. Yeah, and kind of left out the hyperscalers too out of this, which have been a key player in some of these later rounds. Funding for USAI startups reached a record$222 billion in 2025, more than double 2024 levels. So we have$66 billion in new funds raised, $222 billion actually going into startups. And of course, a lot of that, again, is non-venture capital firms. Yeah. Still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of - Always a good time.

26:41Always a good time. Should we talk about - There's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening, because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Obviously, we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of, it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75 % of fundraising, with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10 % of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of$100 million or more accounted for about 70 % of venture funding.

27:24So you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals, while the broader VC ecosystem, emerging managers, seed funds, Series A specialists are getting crushed. It's the best time for tech ever is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners. Well, speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive. They say Trump admin moles payments to sway Greenlanders to join the US. Greenland says they're not for sale. European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen, but Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days.

28:04US officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland. Stimmy time. Stimmy time. To Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials including White House aides have discussed figures ranging from$10 ,000 to$100 ,000 per person. Doing the math, even at$100 ,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57 ,000 residents. So we're talking about basically a seed round, 5.7 billion to... That's an AI, that's actually like... It's like three AI researchers.

28:45Three AI researchers in Greenland, for all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder what, I wonder how much this would actually sway them, because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to either vote, and then they get the payment because we promise or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote. I think just start planes with cash. Yeah. Just romping it out of the air. Because then wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong?

29:19There's going to be another plane. We want the second drop. Here's my thing. Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland or resident, I'm sitting there being like, okay, we know they're willing to – we have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around$6 billion. we think we're worth 60 let's let them keep the Paramount Skydance the Ellisons they'll just bid and then say well it's not our best and final offer and then what does Warner Brothers do they of course again they rejected another bid or recommended against it Greenland's Prime Minister Jens Frederick Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post Facebook let's go okay they are really a decade behind over there he says enough is enough no more fantasies about annexation.

30:05He's not a fan. You got to get on reels, buddy. You got to do a front-facing video. Use some AI. Get some vibreel music in there. You got to communicate. Yeah, get the Sigma male, you know, grind set. Yeah, it's just his statement. Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation and it just cuts to like the Joker and stuff. Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to green. their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain, particularly given that the U.S. and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement.

30:42On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain, and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations. So this is... Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you alone, on your own, decide to come over and hang out with us, we got some cash for you, apparently. It's wild. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Is he average in - Trump has long argued that the US needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications.

31:22He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's aides, since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatching grab operation, not an invasion apparently. According to sources familiar with internal deliberations, one source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other longstanding geopolitical goals.

31:57It feels like wildly different scenarios though. Like there's, they're not going to go and send in Delta force. I don't know. Maybe they will. I don't know. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and Denmark isn't going to be able to do it. So average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45 ,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100k saying i'm gonna retire a couple years early 100k is big yeah i don't know uh among the possibilities being floated by trump aids a white house official said on tuesday is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a compact free association compact of free association cofa uh the precise details which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau, Palau, interesting, vary depending on the signatory, but the U.S.

32:47government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection. Get an Amazon Prime from us. What else can we offer you? In exchange, the U.S. military operates freely in COFA countries and trade with the U.S. is largely duty-free, no tariffs. I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce Greenlanders to vote for their independence or to sign onto a COFA after such a vote.

33:24While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenland, Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland? I was just going to say, Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the Free Press. What do you say? Read it, Tyler. It's pretty long. I don't want to read the whole thing. Okay, then sing it. He's anti. He doesn't want us to actually buy it, right? It's bad. You need to convince them to come over. but he does like I think he wants Greenland to become in possession or the U.S.

34:07to become in possession of Greenland right maybe like a Puerto Rico situation yeah so it's like a little bit uh above Palau yeah it's above Palau it's not a state though it's not like you know and we're not yeah the military in yeah we were pitching so so it's it's such a tough I mean it's such a it is a tough sell as much as I love this great country. You mean to live in Greenland? Yeah, just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the U.S. with binoculars. I want that crazy stuff over here. Yeah, it's just massive, massive infighting. Chaos. Governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly, right?

34:45It is interesting. The U.S. is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics or our state-level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So I don't know. Maybe they get it on it. I have another idea for Greenland. You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to get in the age? Yeah. Get in the box. Get in the label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. Get in the label box. um so puerto rico famously has just a three percent tax rate on income so a lot of people go there and when uh and this is why when jake paul fights for 90 million dollars he's actually fighting i didn't think about that number wow he's a resident he has one of the few jobs that you can actually do very well from puerto rico which is just train and boxing yeah you know a team that you build yourself.

35:45So yeah, he, his, his, uh, Pete, like Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire fairly quickly simply because he's going to do a handful more fights. I imagine then he needs about a two X from there and he'll be able to go because he's like keeping, you know, 97 % of every day. So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, a hundred million dollars, is that to the winner who? No. And then Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua fight. I think Jake got 90 something and Anthony Joshua got just under that. Oh, around the same. But I think Jake was... A bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing.

36:22It's like starring in a movie almost. So your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that, I mean, obviously be very dedicated to the sport, but it's just crazy to me that you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one night event and draw that much economic opportunity. Not many ads and that many pay-per-view sales. That's a lot of money. That's remarkable. Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3 % tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97 % tax rate.

37:03Why would anyone go? You have to be grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico, the 3%. Yeah, for a long time, you could just go. But now I think it's closed. You need it to be there. I think they closed it. I'm sure it's still solid, but not what it was. But Puerto Rico, famously, people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3 % of your income. Greenland, 97 % taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold, and now you have high taxes. Well, but a lot of people desperately want to raise taxes. Basically, I mean, I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100%.

37:38and so if you could create you go there, you zero yourself and then you grind if you're in favor of ultra high taxes you could go to Greenland that's a good idea I like this idea you just land in the country and then you go and connect all your accounts with Plaid and just transfer out everything and then you zero it out and then Tyler, you had a different proposal what was it? the bull case for Just97 is that it's a flex, right? I can live in Greenland. I make so much money that I only have 3 % left and I'm still balling. It is hard. Every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like, who's really got money?

38:18Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97 % of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay, that guy's actually really rich. Yeah, but then if you're not Uber, Uber wealthy, it still makes sense if you basically just have the 97 % tax rate the first year. The first year. So then maybe it's, if you look at it in 10-year increments, right? So first year, you're basically zeroed out. Yeah. But then you've got a super low tax rate. Then you just grind. For five years. So you lock in. It's almost like you get dropped on an island, and you've got to fight your way out. Yeah, sort of Lord of Flies situation on Greenland.

38:52Do you see Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax? That's sick. Is it? I don't know. It's tough. He's low-browing, David Sachs. He's low-browing, everyone. It's funny. Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California breaking from a cadre of ultra wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply. So be it. This is this is I'm going to say it's kind of a pick me behavior for a billionaire.

39:25He says I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once. I guess. I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish on video? Are they going to 40 trillion? for sure. He's like, actually, definitely do this right now and then stop. Because he's like, I got another 10x in the bag. I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate now. Let's head into the comment section and put a hazmat suit. It's not really relevant what he thinks, according to Jeff. It's a question of what the policy effect impact is. All the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5 % of their wealth each year.

40:04or whatever nutso thing the state cooks up. The state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, etc. So Juan can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country, but that doesn't make it a wise policy. I agree. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You see Larry dumped his place in SF? He did. He's moving out. Well, I don't know if he's getting out entirely. $45 million. Definitely making moves.

40:36He still has plenty of homes in Malibu. In a somewhat related story, there's now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently, this is from President Trump. He said that, what was the actual quote from Trump? Because Palmer had a clip. Let's head over to Truth Social. I think you actually do. He said, I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about, okay. So also if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together.

41:19Our country comes first. And can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what,$5 million per year per executive at a defense company? He also said that, he said, I have determined for the good of our country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be$1 trillion, but rather$1.5 trillion. That is a huge increase, 50 % increase. But obviously, there's a question of where that money comes from. Okay, yes. Oh, I have the quote here. Yes. Okay. Well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable. So they should be limited to$5 million or less.

42:02Okay. Limited to$5 million or less. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Luckey on Bloomberg The Close. Digging into this. This is clips. They were at the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah. I think he was there for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology. So my motivation is to try and build in the biggest thing possible. I will say, people have fairly critiqued him. I said, but Palmer, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment, given you're competing with these companies? And I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me.

42:35I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants, if I'm not doing these new things. The other thing is, it's always tricky. I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems, right? It's actually the same thing with Mod Retro in the gaming space. Oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of like catch 22. Like, like if you're outside of it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then?

43:03And you do something like who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me. We also have posts that President Trump is thinking more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow. Anti-defense or anti-defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure. What's interesting is your company is, dare I say it, considering going public. Yes. Would your CEO, do you think the CEO that leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's going to be an issue?

43:34I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. And you're not asking whether it should be. You know, like, like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself five million dollars until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself one dollar until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that.

44:11When you are working on the when you are working on taxpayer nine, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base. But in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say this is the way it's going to be forever. You say this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager? Your parents say you're grounded until X, Y and Z.

44:40bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking to ground you for life. It's so funny. I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not necessarily a lifetime moment. That's great. Yeah. I mean, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective, right? Especially if it's temporary.

45:12You can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could over time be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the Prime had gotten like a multi-hundred million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they had signed up and were getting paid to make. They were being lazy bones. Lazy bones. Lazy bones behavior. And so, yeah, in that situation, if you have a management team that is just like printing, regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate.

46:02And so I think Palmer has a good time. Palmer is sort of wrestling with libertarian ideas, how much should private companies be able to do. And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company, if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with government, then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people, it's the democracy. And so that's what's happening. And Palmer in another clip was talking, they asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make$100 ,000 a year, right? That's my comp package. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company.

46:38Now, the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works with the government cannot make more than$5 million and you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make$10 million a year over here and we can only pay them$5 million. I mean, the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening, but it would be very tricky if Andrel could not compete against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, if they need a super talented AI researcher, and maybe they're not paying them a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah, like the market rate for this role is 15 mil, and like we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing, and that would be a little bit tricky.

47:28Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. Then we'll go to Tyler. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Tyler? I was just going to say, you can already see this phenomenon in some ways. Tim Cook. It's not a salary cap, right? It feels like there's a cap. It feels like something's going on. He should be paid way more. What does he make, 75? Barely scraping it. Imagine if he was only five. It'd be terrible. He would have no incentive to shoot any updates. One of the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls.

48:06Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think instead of a$5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it would be much better to do a team-based salary cap. Because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like, instead of$5 million per executive, how about$20 million for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room? Okay, we got an all-star. We're bringing in Brian Schimpf as the CEO. He's the CEO of Anderle right now. We're poaching him. We're getting him 18, but his team is going to be mostly interns. Or you go and you get, okay, we got four people.

48:44They're all making five. They're all decent operators. But you create much more of a sports-like dynamic. We can't get Brian Schimpf, but we can recreate him in the aggregate. In the aggregate, exactly. Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promise is to choose another vendor. I agree. You could fix a lot of this at the contract level. If you sign a contract with somebody and then a year in, year, two years, three years, et cetera, they're not delivering. Like making it so that the government can like more easily reallocate those funds and actually, you know, make these companies have some accountability.

49:16Yeah. More importantly, near. Before we move on, I think this whole thing is very interesting because you have this dynamic where very clearly it feels like Hegseth went and gave Trump some sort of update. And then he just posted on Truth Social and kind of crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? It's not even an executive order at this point. It's just like this entire news cycle around the new defense budget. This is all just Truth Social posts, just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically. But this stuff does actually have an impact on the economy.

49:50It is funny that you see a big, you see a long, true social post, and you just assume it's an executive order. It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay, this is law. But it's not. But it does have an impact, and it brings people to the table. And we saw this play out with Intel, where he was saying, like, LipBouton's got to go. And he's basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel. And then a few days later, he's like, LipBouton's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually going to invest. I own 10 % of the company now. And now the stock's... That's my boy.

50:18That's my boy. And so these things are like aggressive, but it's this whole like taco chickening out, but that's part of the plan, art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very weird, interesting new dynamic. And I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration, but we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in. That's right. uh near says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games you just need to find one good one founder good enough to carry your entire career that is fantastic this is a banger and it's it's it's a banger because it's so true like when i when i look at across you know 60 70 different investments at this point if you take out like two or three of these founders power law game it's just like much like being on rust with uh with an absolute killer with your absolute 360 no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work but you're getting carried you're like we won 2v2 on rust and you're just in a corner and the game's over yeah because you load into counter-strike on dust 2 and you one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups and you're just ready to rock you're getting carried you're carried to the top Did I ever tell the story of how I got my Overwatch account carried to the absolute top?

51:43My account was ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit. But it was very interesting. It was me. So I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack or some sort of leak from another, maybe some other company had my password leaked it. And I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because like what are you gonna do? You're just gonna like my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it You just play Overwatch but Overwatch was like a$60 game or something And so if you were hacking you didn't want to buy$60 every time you got banned So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was like a sniper I think he played Hanzo main and was like really, really good.

52:34And then years later, I got back in with my friends and I'm like, oh, let's play some Overwatch. And we queue up. Like, John, what are you up to? And I'm like, oh, I need to do placement matches. And so I do the placement matches and I'm just like losing because I'm playing with all these like incredible, like, you know, the top tier. And everyone's like, why are you guys, like, we know you're good. Why are you sandbagging? Like, why are you trying to derank your account? And I'm like, I'm not. I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. and they're like no we can see that you're like one of the greatest hanzo players ever like you're the greatest sniper in overwatch we've seen your account history you're amazing why are you playing poorly uh and i was like i i don't know and then i finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings and then and then the game like remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games so finally i had to make up a lie because whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, you're terrible and you're supposed to be good.

53:31And I'd have to say, oh, like I broke my hand. So I just, I'm not as good as I used to be. Like, please go easy on me. Like I'm relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on, Apple Oven, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jordy. One more thing that was funny about this true social saga from yesterday. So he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps. Lockheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff. Raytheon, et cetera. I think this was right after the close and after hours.

54:10But then immediately after that, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the one and a half trillion dollar announcement came after talking down on them. So then just a little bit later, Trump said, after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries and other political representatives, I've determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the one trillion, but rather one and a half trillion. This will allow us to build this will allow us to build the, quote, dream military that we have long been entitled to.

54:44And more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. and so anyways you can imagine what happened to prices after that if it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries and then and then keeps ranting talks about sleepy joe i think we i think it's time to retire sleepy joe just let him let him be just retired just joe uh anyways uh over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest$108.4 billion hostile bid and remain committed. I called it. Loyal. I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is going to run away with it, but we'll see.

55:29In the journal, Paramount defends its hostile bid for Warner. How high can they go? Can they go to$200 billion? It seems like Paramount has endless coffers. I don't know. Paramount continued pushing its$77.9 billion bid for Warner Brothers Thursday, a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix. The photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix team. On the lot. On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're ready to partner up. They're adding a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're having fun.

56:16And it feels like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something, it feels like it's in the bag. And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15 % in the past month. Interesting. Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Anthropic raising$10 billion at$350 billion. We talked about this a little bit yesterday.

56:55We'll get into it more. GIC, Singapore's Sovereign Wealth Fund, And Kotu planned to lead the new finance. Spencer, you absolute dog. Spencer, get in the UltraDome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the third mega deal in the past year follows a$13 billion investment in September that valued the company at$183 billion. So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. The round's expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025.

57:35We're going to the Axon.

57:43We're still warming up this new mallet. I'm getting kind of splintered. I don't know if you've noticed this yet. Maybe, you know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around it, like the baseball bat. Gloves, too. Batting gloves. I would like an even longer mallet. Like a full baseball. Like a staff. There's something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe bigger mallet, maybe some athletic tape on there, wrapping it. Like it's a baseball bat that's hit 1 ,000 home runs. Do you think they end up doing another round before the IPO? It's hard to imagine this is actually the actual pre-IPO round just because there's so much incentive to just raise again in a few months.

58:28I saw a couple people doing polls on would you rather own OpenAI at$1 trillion or Anthropic at$350 or XAI at$220 or whatever the valuations were. And at least a lot of the small polls that I saw, people were very excited about Anthropic's valuation relative to the magic that's happening in cloud code and all the glazing that's happening. Finally, we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans instead of vice versa. It's a triple glaze. But Cursor is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's bearish on Cursor, says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI. We'll have to talk to Michael Truel about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI-pilded he is.

59:17But this is from Bree Wolfson on Dialectic with Jackson Dahl. The context, Shaquille says, is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Cursor. And much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about Cursor's culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. All of this is very interesting, and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working, worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work.

59:53All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Bree. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy, total disruption story. And Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi and just be like, look, it's just autocomplete and it makes money and we sell tokens profitably? Or should you be like, it's going to cure cancer? Or should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all going to die. Like there's so many different narratives that you can tug on.

1:00:25And a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently and sometimes I can work, sometimes I can't. I'm kind of down with cursor. I like this. I like that Michael is just like, he's a builder and he tells a good story about that. And like, there are other AI leaders that are telling the Doom story or telling the Fast Takeoff story. I don't think that Cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story. But Shaquille disagrees, but we'll have to dig into this more. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because Anthropic, they make such an emphasis on coding.

1:00:58They're like, of the big labs, people think of them probably as the most AGI-pilled. But it's like Cursor, I mean, all they do is coding, and there's a very different, like, people see them very differently. Well, it's much more of a Centaur adoption and much more of a co-pilot much less of this drop-in replacement for labor. Yeah, that's true. But, I mean, you've definitely seen a lot of the recent cursor features are getting more and more agentic. Totally, totally. So, like, the actual product isn't, like, so completely different, at least, like, ideologically, right? No, no. No, I agree. I agree.

1:01:31Yeah, there's something... Cursor has an advantage, which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product. And so they have a data source on a lot of this that people that are just kind of speculating and on X and reading like science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. It's like there's something to just like playing the game as you see it on the field. and I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could look, you know, it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what the world's going to be like in one years, two years, five years, et cetera.

1:02:12But at the same time, if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more, like that doesn't, it's hard to just say, oh, I'm bearish on this company because they're not of this one podcast interview. Yeah. Well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs, the makers of our theme song. So Rehard Jark says, you can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%.

1:02:54Three months ago, it was at 12.9%. 12 months ago, it was at 5.7%. And I remember a year ago when it launched, it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including generative AI snippets in Google search, or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers, and it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app, really daily driving it. It was more demo, more testing. Well, this similar web data seems to show that Gemini has been growing and taking share. Yeah, it's also worth noting that this is just like site visits.

1:03:32And so not every visit is created equally, right? Somebody can land quickly on a site. That's very different from them being in the app multiple times a day. So this is not looking at app traffic at all. That's what I love about the semi-analysis chart that shows that you have users or accounts that are signed up, then you have the active users, and then you have how many interactions those users have, like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day, and then also how many interactions, how long are they spending time. And so ultimately, the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site, you know, attention at the end of the day.

1:04:16And so there is a little bit of a gap there where when they ran, when SemiAnalysis at least ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUs or MAUs in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths, OpenAI was really, really dominant. And so maybe the narrative is overstated, but it's still some interesting data. And it does show that the code red is real. And it shows that Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously. And they've gotten more traffic, which is good.

1:04:56Nir is back. Yes. LM Arena has raised an evaluation of$1.7 billion, coming in with a Michael Burry shot. We're going to have the founder of LM Arena on. Great. Hopefully in the next 24 hours. We'll have to respond to this viral – a thousand likes on this. Why do people not like LM Arena? It seems like it would be a fantastic business. I don't know. Well, yeah. How much revenue are they doing? Sure, sure, sure. What kind of products are they releasing? Can they get – if you're – I'll tell you this right now. You build up a huge reputation. The sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible.

1:05:36Can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the best arena, the best LLM award to the highest bidder for$10 billion. And you return all the money to shareholders after you do that. And you give them good vibes for one week. And then you burn your entire credibility. Priceless. No. Clearly, there's some model routing, some infrastructural level. I think we've talked about this before. but increasingly, I think the bull case is not just deciding which model is the best on LMArena. It's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike, and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process.

1:06:19How do they evaluate? How do they bring in those models? And then how do they measure uptime? How do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision? And if you can take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know. But we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do you have any take on LM Arena? Fan? I don't have a take on the business side. But as a product, it's very useful. It's always cool to look at. I mean, because they always get the new models before. So you can always see. Whenever a new image model comes out, it's always there first.

1:06:46So you can kind of see what are the vibes. But yeah, I enjoy the product a lot. In the vibe economy, it's potentially dramatically undervalued in the leaderboard economy. Yeah, I think the vibes. I think over the past few months, you've definitely started to see, like, okay, this XAnon is, like, likely being paid by a lab. I think you're starting to see that. Yeah, it definitely happens. Anyway, they probably, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind? Yes. Have you heard about the Tailwind drama, this whole thing? Tailwind laid off 75 % of their team. I read the post. Pretty rough, yeah, the post.

1:07:24The reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents. 75 million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings, resulting in a 40 % drop in traffic and an 80 % revenue loss. And people are really, really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like they need to pivot aggressively and figure out some other way to integrate. The founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for 30 minutes. I listened to about half of it this morning. sad story they have a small super talented team uh he had to lay off a number of their engineers so now it's the three owners in the business plus one uh one other engineer there's four of them now uh trying to maintain it he's optimistic but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month which means that it was a greater and greater percentage revenue and so he was like we're just going to be dead in less than a year because a lot of what they did, I think their paid offerings were like selling components pre-assembled code.

1:08:27And all of the chat, all of the LLMs can just one shot a component. If you need a pop-up or a modal or a button, you don't need to pay. It's all that you were saying. It'd be great if like a big lab just said like, Hey, these are a talented team. Oh, that's a good idea. You know, join an anthropic. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know much about the founder, but it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented. And I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front-end transformation of a massive surface area, that would be fantastic.

1:09:05Yeah, or going to a place like Lovable or Figma. That would be great too. But even just going inside of a Salesforce or some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it, but you have this new team that comes in and they - Yeah, but I'm sure they want to keep building - Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe inside. But yeah, the saying lays off 75 % of their team is dramatic. They did lay off - Oh, just three people. They laid off three people out of a four-person team that were not the owners of the business. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So sort of laws, small numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is.

1:09:40Yeah, but still, I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was, it was, uh, the founder was upset. He apparently people, uh, were just like commenting. Uh, yeah. People were really mean to him. Mean to him being like, being like, Hey, I, I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying. And they're like, you're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source. He's like, John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source. I like the open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these like incredible technologies that people can build on. Uh, but, uh, people also like freebies and they get very mad when you take them away and they get mad when they don't get them.

1:10:17Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch. And everyone loves Plaid because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI. Dylan. Wait, wait, really quickly. Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is? I do not. Well, guess what? He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario. Wait, he works for X? No. He's on X. No, no, he joined the platform.

1:10:55But he does. I read that as you recently. He's an incredible military hero. He has some fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. and he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions, but he's wearing what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a starched white button down with a pocket protector, and he has these big glasses. He's walking out of the Black Hawk. Yeah, exactly. So he's not wearing the normal military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to clean up. It's crazy. So he's a personal hero of mine.

1:11:38All-time or a farmer. All-time or a farmer. That is for sure true. Would love to have him on the show. He's done other shows, so it would be very interesting to hear from him. This company, Flip, said Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product growth, ops, designers, interns, and roles that do not yet have names. And then 24 hours later, they quoted their own post. You've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip. Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the lucky company? So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling.

1:12:16Of course. I actually... Yeah, so I think the product, what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free. Oh, it's that meme. I've seen people joke about that. And then I saw there's this poster that does these... gambling into credit cards. Yes, yes. I saw a poster who - Bringing gambling into debt. There's someone who like vibe codes different UX mockups for funny concepts. There's that famous one by Aiden of like the Google Maps with a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these.

1:12:57And one of them is like the double or nothing on your checkout, which is a crazy idea. I don't know. Um, on the topic of luck, I, at one point very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called five hour luck. And the whole concept would be like, it'd be a five hour energy shot, but the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky. It would make, it would increase your luck just because people, you know, energy is a stat. Why not increase luck? Uh, and I was going to formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck.

1:13:27Uh, was not thinking about the gambling applications. I mean, the placebo element, yeah, I mean, that product would crush in Vegas. Yeah, imagine just taking it and being like, okay, I have the stat boost. I'm lucky. I'm feeling good. Maybe you could put some snake oil in it. Yes, yes. Well, but Brian Johnson, he sells a product. It's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. It's sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind. With best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.

1:13:59So moving on to Citrini. Asking someone long memory. Oh, whose long memory. If they got any new ideas for 2026. It was already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear. Yeah, Bubble Boy over on X had some pretty great calls late last year. I'm going to try to pull one up. Well, you do. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We can also pull up, I want to watch this intro from This Week in Startups. Can we move on to this? Pull it up. Pull up the video of Jason Calacanis finally answering the question we all had.

1:14:45What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on This Week in Startups, Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase, and I clicked instantly. This is on This Week in Startups. His co-host asks him. And the best part about the show is that I was expecting it to be like, they tease it in an intro and then they make you listen to, and then they cut just short of him saying, oh, the one thing I want to buy is, and then boom, the start of the show. And then 20 minutes later, he gives you, no, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make, but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant?

1:15:21Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you, even Jason Calacanis, will not break out the checkbook for. It's definitely private aviation. I've been trying to hold off. You deserve it. You deserve it. Great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know,$50 ,000 going somewhere or$100 ,000 on a round trip. That seemed absurd to spend that. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car. Yes. He loves Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. barn dominium which is like a big open fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave but texas style do i buy this zrx1 for 250 000 or do i do it do it do it jay cowl 50 000 corvette collection a lot of these things become cognitive load this week in startups is brought to you shout out to their sponsors for making it possible i love that i love that he's a corvette guy jay Kyle deserves it.

1:16:18He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it, been in the media business for decades. My welcome to Silicon Valley - Was doing TBPN like in the early 2000s. And you know who his first guest was ever? David Sachs. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting. And my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival. His conference, heard a bunch of tech people talk, met a bunch of YC founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley.

1:16:53Went to some bar on Silicon Valley in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It was a lot of fun. He was very nice. Also in that era, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose. Oh, yeah. You were talking about this. Should we pull this clip up? Oh, do you have it ready to go? Yeah, it's on charlierose.com. It is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose, and I was like, we got to dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

1:17:33So do you have it? Let's pull this up. Where is it? I put it in the team chat. Okay. Well, while we pull that up, let's look for what's next. Um, unintended AI close. Do, do, do. Um, I can do another ad read while we do that. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Um, how are we doing? Also pulling it up. Uh, Nikita Beer finally met. Oh no. Charlie Rose. The video actually does not load. Oh, it doesn't load. Oh no. Uh, well, well, you know what we can do? We can export it, and we can play it tomorrow on the show. Let's make a note to do that.

1:18:18Let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell. Big. And I love this. So Michael Dell said, big news. The world's first 52-inch 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you. Jordy, did you ever have one of these elite multi-monitor setups, where you always sort of do business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy. Have you ever been? I've got an Apple monitor at home. I find it hard. I mean, as like a guy who has been building companies and investing, you're basically an email. Phone, email, Zoom. It's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations.

1:19:03You're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations, what you're saying. But I do enjoy, I have an Apple monitor at home. I enjoy it, but it's nothing like this. This is incredible. So it's much bigger than the Apple Pro Display XDR. Is it curved? It is curved. It has to be curved at that size because you're basically sitting right – your face is right up against the TV. 52 inches. And it's a very – it's funny in many, many ways because let's – so first, let's play the clip from Rob Moore where he says, Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode.

1:19:38After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm for new products has not dulled. Coming out of CES, the thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen. It's awesome. It's awesome. So let's play this. That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or photograph. But you were like, I was like, this is like a kid on Christmas. Like you're still - Cool product. Yeah, I'm very excited. I told you I'll buy one. I think it's cool too. I'm going to buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling.

1:20:10That obsession has not dulled. That's great. Heartwarming. Heartwarming. And what's really, really funny is that, so there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says, it's out here. You can just buy it. And then this poster, Ben Bajarin, the CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, says this monitor from Dell is amazing and I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used and even at 120 hertz, still capable to game on. So it's like, when did this thing release? Like it doesn't have the fanfare of like a normal product release cycle where there's like pre-orders, but it's very fun and it's been very hyped and I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly and it's not very aesthetic and you have the opportunity to simplify.

1:21:01You can actually display four different full computers, I think in fairly high res, just tiled on one screen so you can run four different displays separately. It's$2 ,900. Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. We have a major white pill. Oh, we do. Drew Tuma is reporting, for the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the U.S. drought monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought.

1:21:47So we are incredibly, incredibly back yes um we should talk about the title of the stream julia black's tbpn expose in vanity fair just dropped today if you go to vanity fair.com we're right there um and it's been a lot of fun working on this piece that we got to do a very fun to be clear there wasn't yeah it wasn't a lot of work for us but we got to hang out with her and uh i mean it was we we had to go dress up and get we did dress up it was it was definitely the most uh by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of two cameras medium format medium format film well i just i just mean more like the the team that actually went into it right oh yeah so many different people working on on i was extremely professional as you would expect out of vanity fair and i like that uh julia still called us the technology brothers she's not she's not uh fully not letting it die brand.

1:22:48No, it doesn't matter. Keeping it alive. Yeah, they call us the J-Team. John Coogan and Jordy Hayes had a pretty off-mic moment. A bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah, what'd you like? I like the, she said, they're no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have drawn... Not just any nicotine. What kind of nicotine is it? It's addictive nicotine. That I personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air. They try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use. Mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use, even though in the early days, the doubling, you know, the Dom.

1:23:26Yeah, we were doing the Dom episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, it made the show worse. It was funny, but I remember I'd be, I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a Dom day today. I got to go drink a bunch of champagne at 11 a.m. I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never going to promote Burning Man. I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes, were going to get written down and recorded and printed.

1:24:08So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you throw out. Yeah, I'm just riffing. I'm just doing bits. And then it gets written down, and it looks way different in that context, but it's good. It's real. It's the actual beliefs. There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an ex post. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. and Julie says as he watched the likes pour in he predicted they would top 10 ,000 or so when I checked the next morning there were over 70 ,000 and you were saying imagine if it flopped it would be in here it would be like he predicted it was 10 ,000 and only got 200 yeah but wow lucky day it was a good day to come see the show it sort of took us all over the place I think at the end of the show I sort of stood up and said what was that are we journalists Are we analysts?

1:25:09Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're going to figure it out, and we're not going anywhere over the next decades. It was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix You in the studio that morning, which is a fantastic song. It's a great song. Also, at that lunch, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food, and you put so much salt on it, you just kept shaking the salt shaker, and I was like, this is going to go in the piece. Oh, yeah. I've never noticed that you put salt. I love salt. I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time.

1:25:45So it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm going to make the kids hot chocolate. He makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it. He gives us a couple cups. And we're like, oh, grandpa, this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And it turns out all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salt. But his taste buds were so cooked that to him it just, he was just drinking like salt. Pure salt, hot chocolate. You mix up salt and sugar you notice immediately.

1:26:18So anyways, I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt. It's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us. And they asked us, bullish or bearish on a number of things. And one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, oh, we love blue skies. Like, it's a nice day. No clouds. Most of the days are blue skies in California. And they had to clarify, like, no, like blue sky, like the app. And we're like, oh, yeah, we don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X. But it really does give you a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot.

1:26:56So it was a fun problem. Yeah, also the outfits, of course. Yes. Unfortunately, we're not ours. They dressed us. They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff. But you got to get that suit. I do. That suit is... You got to get yours too. Unbelievable. The 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback. And it feels like a return to the early brand. Very much what we were doing. It feels like it captured. It might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into whatever we're doing next. Anyway, we have Delian Asperuha from Founders Fund and Varda in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP on Ultradam.

1:27:37Delian, how are you doing? Hello, brothers. Welcome back. Good to see you. First appearance. You did 18 last year. We're hoping to 10x this year. We got to keep on a venture trajectory. So 180 hits this year. Welcome to the show. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta commentary about New Year's resolutions? My goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year. And just lean into my new stylist's recommendations on just looking like a wise and venture capitalist that is ready to go ring a bunch of NASDAQ bells this year.

1:28:17There you go. Or New York Simon's Change. Yeah, that TB green is looking fantastic. It looks fantastic. Good props to your stylist. Okay. Okay. First question. We were reading in the Wall Street Journal today that you're cooked, that venture capital is cooked. Venture capital fundraising declined 35 % in 2025. Are you cooked? Is it over? Are you going to be leaving the industry after disaster has struck, according to the journal? What's your reaction? You're getting this sort of case-shaped nature to venture right now, which has been happening for a couple of years. So this VC is doing ketamine?

1:28:56Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're just k-holing, and we need to really focus in on one company. We just told Vanity Fair we don't promote drugs. Oh, we don't promote drugs. Sorry. We take ketamine, and we go to horses. That's for all the horses that we own. But this bifurcation has been happening. Do you have the riding jacket on? Oh, that's a good one. There we go. This is good merch. Rare Founders Fund merch. uh anyways uh we only you know use that stuff for our horses yes yes yes yes uh horses but yes so so so where did the k-shape split come from is this interest rate driven or just lps are realizing that it's better to pile into the big winners what give me more yeah you look at ff you have a big fund raised in 2025 but it could have been way bigger uh oversubscribed part of the issue is PTs hogging the whole fund.

1:29:54But there's instances where there's way more demand for a specific fund than there is actual allocations available. And then other cases more on the emerging manager side where they just can't even get going. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. What are you seeing, Dalian? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple different forces at play here. A part of it is if you actually even just study the old days of PE, for example, when you go from like the you know barbarians at the gate days to today p kind of went through like a similar dynamic and super cycle where you had like you know cottage industry to start then got super you know sort of scaled and there were a ton of different players and then steadily there was you know a bunch of aggregation basically over time um that you know led to you know some you know mega mega funds like the kkr is etc of the world um i think you're basically seeing you know basically venture go through the same thing and i think you started to see basically like that k shape really accelerate in 2021, and then has only basically continued since then.

1:30:49And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things, right? I think we've talked about this before, but if you look at it on a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021 in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe that are, I think, basically north of$5 million. It's just strictly going down in terms of number of companies, basically, per year that are looking like that. So company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default, you basically have obviously sort of fewer logos that you can chase. And so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company, you know, basically side of things.

1:31:27At the same time, you're seeing, you know, companies stay private for much longer. And so like the liquidity in the public markets is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies because like there's just a small set that are the mega ones that are raising these like, you know, sort of huge, huge rounds, right? I think it was something like if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, I think if you added up basically those four companies, it was something on the order of like 60 % of the total dollars deployed by VCs that year were scooped up basically by those four or five companies.

1:31:57and so I think that's like the dynamic that's been flowing through on like the VC you know basically side of things where if you're one of those companies and you need to right now raise like you know 10 billion dollars are you really trying to go out and do that with like a bunch of 10 billion dollar checks it's like no like you prefer to like you know find capital providers that can actually give you you know billion dollar checks at a time so you just like have fewer you know sort of mouths around the table you need to manage some of this regulatory right like I think you can't have more than like I think it's like 6 ,500 like you know institutions on your cap table before you're public and so you literally like have to make sure that these you know sort of things you know aggregate um and then there's a part of it that is like yeah just the like power law of venture and tech only continues to be like more and more true like you know you're dominated by the big it's like you know there's this like um i'm probably gonna butcher it a little bit like you know peter's had this you know sort of like you know thing that he said for sure privately i'm pretty sure publicly too so i don't think he'll mind me you know sort of saying it but he like his like biggest error you know that he says of like his 20 you know sort of times was you know his impression was just like, you know, there's not going to be that many, like, you know, you know, a hundred billion, let alone like trillion dollar companies.

1:32:59But it turns out basically like each individual 10X is actually like easier than the last one. It's like once you're a sort of, you know, trillion dollar, you know, once you're a hundred billion dollar company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from like 10 to a hundred. It's actually much easier to go to 10 to a hundred than it is from one to 10. And it's much easier to go from like 1 billion to 10 billion than it is to go from a hundred million to one billion, et cetera. And so, um, yeah, that's, you know, in some ways that like momentum have been getting momentum is just like making it so that these like you know companies get bigger faster they're scooping up capital faster and some of the venture firms are getting bigger faster i think the thing where this stuff starts to break is like i don't think that um the current default fee structure is going to be like where the industry is at you know sort of you know 10 years from today i won't like name names but like there's definitely a decent number of uh these multi-stage mega funds that um you know are doing you know some of their super late-stage investing through both like fee-less and carry-less, you know, basically SPVs.

1:33:51And so at some point, if you're doing like a fee-less and carry-less SPV where you're investing into a late stage startup, you basically just work as IR at the startup, right? Like, you know, you're like, you're not making money. Walk me through. I mean, SPVs are just notoriously, like they're incredible when they hit because it's deal by deal. And if you have one true banger, it's your, the GPs that are a part of that are retired. So like in theory, they're amazing in practice, like actually trying to go and convince a lot of people. And you're basically staking your reputation on that deal because you don't have the aggregate deals that typically go in a fund.

1:34:27You're saying like, if, you know, you kind of have to say like, this is going to work and do my other SPVs. So at least like you're diversified to some degree, but it's a ton of work. There's a ton of pressure. You have to promise the company that you're going to, or promise or imply that you can achieve some investment amount, and then you have to go do all this heavy lifting. So why is a multi-stage fund incentivized to do that? Is it just to gain favor with the company? What's the incentive? Yeah. I mean, I think the probably hidden secret of Silicon Valley is that there's just a much higher percentage of capital that is deployed via SPVs and co-invest vehicles than is probably publicly acknowledged or discussed.

1:35:10There are very top tier tier one you know sort of companies including some of the ones that i listed in those like top five that have had rounds come together based off of a significant chunk of the round basically being done by an spv um why do you do it as a company well at the end of the day if you're like the ceo of a company you're no i'm not saying i'm not saying why do it as a company i'm saying why do a fee-less carry-less spv as oh as a you know sort of venture investor it's just pure love pure love of the game i just love deploying capital i don't need i don't need to make money from it it's uh it's volunteer work yeah i mean i think it's you know a lot of funds the way that they end up like you know sort of growing in aum is you know they start off with an initial like fixed fund structure and then like you know for their best performing companies do co-invest vehicles you know or like opportunity funds to build that up and then eventually become you know sort of you know multi-stage and can actually like handle basically a growth fund once they've shown that some of those growth SPBs work.

1:36:06So in some ways, I guess in some ways, part of it is, is maybe they promise LPs, like if you back my fund in a big way, I will give you direct access. Or it's value add. Like if you have a stake in a company and you just want that company to succeed, you're like, look, it's value add. I'm just going to go work, get them more money on their balance sheet. Yeah. I'm not making more money off of that piece of the investment by, but my original investment is getting marked up and the company is more likely to succeed. Makes sense. Yeah, I'll pretend like this is hypothetical, even if it's not hypothetical.

1:36:36But imagine you're a company like OpenAI. You need to go raise billions of dollars, right? You as the CEO have a lot of things on your plate, right? You need to manage the government. You have customers. You have your internal team, et cetera. Can you really afford to literally fully, fully, fully only be focused on fundraising? No, it's really hard to do that basically as the CEO when you're operating in a company. versus if somebody comes to you and is like, hey, let me do a basically fee-less, carry-less, basically SPV that lets me go out and raise, it's effectively in some ways outsourced IR.

1:37:08It's somebody that's working on this basically entirely full-time and there's sort of a win-win on both sides. As the CEO, you don't need to do all the fundraising with the long tail of sovereign wealth funds, this, that, and the other. They can go do the first sets of meetings and then bring you in basically for the final close. For the venture investor, it basically ends up being a way where you now have a really great reputation basically with this company because you're basically helping them pull together a mega fundraise. For your sets of LPs and for future fixed fund vehicles that you're doing, you now get this reputation of like, hey, I'm close to this super hot company.

1:37:42Yeah, the optics too. Non-equity partner in the X chat says a lot of GPs want to lead a round but don't have the AUM. So just getting the optics of being like, I'm a size Chad, leading this massive round. And maybe they wouldn't have been able to put it together with a more aggressive fee structure. It's just interesting because on the other side, you see some of these really, really bad actors in the SPV space are like layered SPV, 10 % up front fixed fee. Oh, yeah, super high fees. Not beer, by the way, not beer. There you go. Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you?

1:38:21Or are you kind of licking your wounds? They're American. It's so good that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook, you know, seeded by Founders Fund. And now going around and acquiring great companies like Manus, right? You know, it's funny. I had probably like 30 people text me being like, when are you going to tweet about it? What are you going to say about it? I was just like sitting there and I was just like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father.

1:38:53You know what I mean? where it's just like, you know, I just can't believe that this is like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well, you know, my favorite meme about it was like, you know, there was somebody that had like a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang and Zuckerberg going like, hey, can you go buy Madness for me? And then Alex is like, sir, yes, sir. And then Zuckerberg goes, okay, cool, thank you. Did you get me like, you know, the like freemium or like the premium one? And Alex is like, no, I bought Madness for you. I bought the whole company. Yeah, of course.

1:39:20What do you think about the mega, I don't even know, mega corns going out at a trillion? Is that going to result in more recycling of LP dollars? Is it possible that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, a couple other names get out and LPs feel like, I'm going to go back and reallocate into venture. And this time around, I'm going to try smaller managers again. Or do you think it'll have a different dynamic? how does that play out in a in a post successful ipo year uh you know i sort of one line i forget if we joked about this in person when we were in la or if i've done this on tp online before but it's like it would be incredible if like the thing that props up the 2026 you know equity market is the spike ipo it's just like you know you're just like oh like um sam needs liquidity like you know what if i not not needs liquidity he needs like a couple hundred billion he's a lot yeah yeah he's a lot of liquidity like what if i just go ipo and i scoop up all the liquidity in the market and make sure that i do it like faster than he does but that's the thing that like props up the public markets because all of a sudden like the s &p 500 has like a you know trillion and a half added to it by like a single entity yeah um so yeah i mean like these you know yeah there's you know kind of my joke at the beginning of the show but it's like you know i do think that this you know upcoming year is poised to be at least right now and it feels like there's like the perfect market conditions for it where it's like relatively stable economy inflation's you know sort of relatively under control.

1:40:41It doesn't seem like China's going to be invading Taiwan over the course of the next year. Yes, things are geopolitically heated, but it doesn't seem like we just captured the president of Venezuela and nobody seems to blink. If anything, the markets are up on the news. It feels like you have this stable and growing economy that is poised to now basically absorb probably the largest sets of entry points in the public market and IPO market than it's ever seen before. That obviously feeding into liquidity into the entire Silicon Valley you know sort of ecosystem um what is that going to do i think it's only going to amplify some of these trends where it's like i think that you know it's going to be now more typical for companies you know right now it feels odd that there's a handful of companies that stay private past 100 billion i think now it's going to be the default that you know companies stay private basically past 100 billion like the size of these funds is going to like you know increase significantly because yeah your ability to deploy a 10 billion dollar fund much more viable when like you know your average entry point is at like 200 billion post yeah um and you're you know expected to still be able to make like a three to five X basically on top of that.

1:41:42Cause there's more, you know, sort of regular, you know, sort of paths like that. Um, do you think there's any, do you think there's any, uh, risk or potential for regulation as, as people realize that the returns, you know, from the private, you know, as, as these companies are staying private longer, if you're like excited about Anthropic and you can't invest until it's worth, you know, who knows what it goes out at like at some point i could imagine someone on the left saying like we need to ban companies from staying private this long because you're just letting the the wealthy kind of like suck up all the returns and uh i even saw vlad from from robin hood posting earlier saying like we can't you know basically coming out in defense of uh retail and saying like we can't you know these companies can't just stay private forever and obviously he has very very incentive all the incentives to like get these companies out so people can start, uh, you know, uh, doing whatever they want to do.

1:42:39Uh, but, uh, but I, I could see something like that happening, especially given that, um, it will be very interesting as like a chapter. Just, uh, I, I know someone who, who runs like a pure play AI fund, but they're not in XAI, open AI or anthropic. And so they're in some great names there. They, they, they, they, they got the trend right early, but they didn't like brand themselves and even some funds that don't have like major positions in one of them at least they've aligned with one of them built a position played the game and like participated in that and i think once they all go out everyone will see sort of the s1s and sort of know a little bit more about you know where the really elite firms landed in the ai boom i don't know part of part of the space spacex s1 potentially going out before some of these other names then also having you know if you if there's a world where xai gets rolled in and then it's like you have a a lab and a space company and a data center company that historically has been profitable, obviously not on the XAI side, but it's going to maybe get people to even be more aggressive in tearing apart some of these other S1s.

1:43:42We should do Jared Isaacman and the space update, but first, I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami. There is something a little surreal about like the sets of people right now tweeting about Miami where like the people probably like most strongly critiquing it in 2021. And so there's something surreal about being like, huh, like maybe I was like, you know, like right idea, slightly wrong time, just needed to wait for like California, not just to get hit with COVID, but become like, you know, communistic basically and start seizing property.

1:44:19And that's going to be the thing that convinces people. On the Miami thing, what do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sand Hill Road to Miami, like all the big GPs will be domiciled there. And yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco. A lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors, the academic institutions, you're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as an important tech hub.

1:44:56Yeah, I think if there's something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed to Miami the most, call it 21 through 24, I do think that it established itself as a fundraising destination, absolutely. Between everybody from Dan Sennheim at D1, Ken Griffin from Citadel, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, etc., has now very much so become a destination where, yeah, if you're raising a later stage round or you're even like a, you know, um, not Peter level GP, but like, you know, up and coming. I mean, also, also you have, you have Keith, Catherine, uh, Sacks, like there were, there, there were, it wasn't just FF that like, there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly.

1:45:36Uh, you know, obviously that evolved. Yeah. So I think it's just like, it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of where like now that you have this, like, you know, sort of second wave that's happening because it's like California sort of regulation. I think it's like clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself in it. And I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways, right? Like, you know, you know, Francis Suarez would always say like, look, ultimately what we're best at is like the capital of capital. And I think that is like, you know, that's one of our taglines we refer to.

1:46:04But he can use it. It's fine. Give us the update on Jared Isaacman. Take us through how you process the news and what you're excited for in 2026. Yeah. I mean, he's obviously, you know, early in, I think it's been like, you know, sort of two weeks since, you know, sort of confirmation. There hasn't been any like super broad policy announcement yet. But the place where he started to drop some news actually just been like via his Twitter profile, which has been a fun place to, you know, sort of follow along. Yeah. Or X profile. Yeah. Probably my favorite one is there's a program called Dragonfly that NASA has been working on for a while, which is basically this So the first time that we ever flew a helicopter on a non-Earth planet was on Mars with Ingenuity, I believe it was called, which is this helicopter we got on Mars.

1:46:50Sort of related to that, it's a different program, but it's a program called Dragonfly, where it's roughly like a small car-sized vehicle that is meant to fly on a Titan. Titan is one of the – oh, God, I should not mess it up, but it's one of the – what's it called? Moons of Saturn. Either Saturn or Jupiter. um you know i'm a big enough space geek that i should know but what's cool about it um is titan uh both has four times uh the density of atmosphere as earth does but also basically seven times less gravity um and so with the combination of the two you basically make it like 30 times easier to fly um and so you and i could literally just like be on the surface of titan and literally basically just like wear some wings and like if you just ran like relatively quickly like you don't even be usain bolt like even at our level of fitness basically just go and flap our wings and like we would basically start flying and with like a little bit of like exoskeleton or anything like that you could 100 like fly as much as you want um and so dragon flies is like small car sized like flying car basically with like a nuclear battery on board uh the program had been like you know definitely a little bit behind schedule behind budget etc but like you know jerry basically came out very publicly on twitter being like this is one of my favorite programs this is the type of like bleeding edge science that like nasa should be doing and so i do love that he's kind of leaning into like you know i don't know you know my dream job would absolutely like the one thing that would make me like upend my entire life and quit everything would be like if I was offered NASA administrator I think I would do that immediately and um if that was you know if I was in the job right now like yeah I think the thing that we should be doing is like NASA should be doing just like the crazy bleeding edge like stuff that just like no private company is going to do like a fucking like flying car on Titan is just like objectively like insane but like there's a world where they're going to be able to basically like live stream you know or like stream basically like video of this like car going around Titan and flying through dunes and stuff like that.

1:48:33It's so, so cool. And then on the flip side, they've figured out how to really focus on the commercial private market for the things that are much more near-term and what the commercial industry is capable of. So I don't know if you guys saw, but I tweeted this, that basically this year, we're going to have four separate, totally net-new commercial lunar landers, basically land on the moon this year. Intuitive Machines has one, Astrobotic has one, Blue Origin, um, has one and, uh, for, um, for, um, this year, um, Firefly, duh. Um, uh, and you know, for it's worth the like blue origin, you know, Mark one lander is like the size of like, it's like a two story house.

1:49:18It's like, it's going to be the biggest manmade object that we've like ever landed on the moon. And I will say like, um, you know, until a quarter ago, I was probably a little more skeptical that like, you know, blue origin was actually gonna like land this thing. Now it's like, you know you see that new glenn is actually like launching landing it's like man they maybe have like really turned a corner on like you know their engineering is in systems it's nine but the the cool thing is like even if blue origin f's it up there's also like three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it are getting like paid basically commercial revenues to go do this and to me it's just like this like breakout year that i still think is like i don't know underpaid attention to and under discussed like you know this is the analogy that i tried to provide is like this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just like you have like the you know basically a year before where it's like, I don't know if you know, but in February, we're going to be sending humans basically back to the moon for the first time, not on the surface, but to like orbit the moon.

1:50:03So like that's going to the moon, four different landers basically on the moon. It's like all in preparation for if that all goes well, there's like a really decent likelihood that like next year we both have like boots on the moon and like 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that, which is just like, I don't know, 15 year Dullian would just be like, so yeah, so excited. We got to sponsor the biggest moon landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They got to go up there. We got to just put them on the moon, settle it once and for all. Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on.

1:50:35He thinks that it's not going to happen. What kind of evidence would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally determine that it's real? I'm kidding. I put on the tinfoil hat for another thing. uh uh uh trump's been going pretty hard on fentanyl trying to stop it from coming into the country at the same time you've seen an explosion of chinese peptides do you have any concern that this is a this is all just a big psyop and we're trying to get a generation of people in the united states to just inject themselves they're putting tinfoil in the peptides random research chemicals people don't realize you were saying you've lost a bunch of weight just by being a chad no peptides needed i get a little concerned because every it feels like in the last two weeks you have everybody's like i guess i just gotta be doing peptides and it's like this like the the source and the purity of these things matters so much you're injecting these things into your blood this is not something that you just want to mess around and find some random chinese website and just hope that they're the test results that they have on the site are actually real.

1:51:40Yeah. Yeah, I will say, you know, I, you know, regret taking the, you know, sort of, you know, COVID vaccine. I'm not sure that like, you know, for my, you know, age and health, it was the right risk reward. I am definitely, you know, not yet ready to start injecting my body into a bunch of peptides who knows, you know, they've got some nanomarkers on there where the Chinese release a virus. It's like specific to those peptides and they've designed it. The, yeah, I'll provide kind of like an example of this about how paranoid the Chinese are so the tinfoil for like Xi Jinping. He had this meeting in 2023 with Biden in San Francisco.

1:52:14If you guys remember when like they came and like cleaned everything up for like the Xi Jinping visit and there's a bunch of like memes around that. Yeah. After a like sit down meeting that they had like I think it was like down in like Monterey or something like that a like Chinese official after the meeting came by and sprayed basically everything that like Xi Jinping had touched everything that like you know he put his lips on to like you know sort of drink and the like you know US official basically asked them like hey like you know what is the thing that you just used or sprayed reasonable question asked and it was a basically like a dna degrader uh because they were so worried about the idea of like somebody in america having xi jinping's dna and then potentially optimizing a virus that is like super specific and optimized for him and so the chinese are thinking about like you know dna specific viruses makes you think like you know they might be designing dna or like peptide basically you know viruses that are targeting you know sort of individuals or groups so That is, yeah, that's crazy.

1:53:07I was thinking he was worried about us cloning Xi Jinping, and then he's fighting himself, a younger version of himself. And he's, oh, no, the new U.S. president. I hate him, but he's my own flesh and blood. They go to a negotiation. It's just Xi, Trump, and then the younger Xi Jinping. Hundreds of Xi Jinping just storming the beaches. How did you process the true social posts about the potential salary cap? and the budgets. Just incredible to have him as the commander-in-chief, somebody that's actually willing to crack the whip on this stuff, where it's just like, yeah, why should these companies be optimized for shareholder returns and executive salaries rather than making sure that they're delivering for the warfighter?

1:53:50And it's crazy to me that it's not like he did the broad industry thing, and then I don't know if you saw it, but he specifically then started calling out Raytheon, where he was just like, they are not responding to feedback, they're not delivering enough, and went down to the individual logo. And so, yeah, I think it's like, you know, sort of, you know, yeah, incredible piece of policy and like, you know, bold commander in chief and like, you know. Well, I think right now it's an incredible post. Well, yeah, it's a policy. Yeah, but that's the nature of these things. Like we saw this with Intel.

1:54:18It doesn't have to be like congressional policy. It can just be like, you know, you know, subtle acquisition policy where it's just like, I mean, you know, Secretary Huxley can go implement, you know, who he wants to buy from without asking Congress for permission. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, OK. Okay. So even if it's just directional, it doesn't need to be new law. It doesn't need to be an executive order to have an effect, to have an effect on the stock price. But of course, the defense tech stocks actually mooned because the defense budget is potentially going up by 50%. Do you have a read on this, how big this will be for the industry?

1:54:46Is this a boon for startups in defense tech? Or do you think that the big primes of the world will just quickly get their act together and then go hoover up a lot of that new budget? Yeah. I mean, I think there are going to be a set, you know, that are like leaning in, like, um, you know, one of the examples, I think, uh, I think it's like BAE has like, you know, done a whole set of like startup collaborations where like, I think they have like a collaboration with like applied intuition on one of their ground vehicles. Like, you know, they have like a, something with Merlin, I want to say on like one of their, like, you know, basically like airplanes that they build and have to go back and look.

1:55:17But I remember like reading through one of their like, you know, quarterly earnings calls or like, you know, maybe there's like a tectonic, like the, you know, defense newsletter articulating like all the various partnerships they had. And it's like, yeah, they clearly are recognizing like they have things that they're good at. They're good at like making the ground vehicle and the frame around that and the wheels, etc. They just like have a whole manufacturing line, etc. They're not as good at like the avionics, the software, the automation, etc. And so like they're leaning in on startups. There's clearly primes like that that I think are like really leaning in and very forward.

1:55:43And then you have ones that like clearly seem to think like, oh, this is just like a total fad. Like, you know, the like, you know, Trump administration isn't going to really push on this. and so yeah i think it's like a huge opportunity for both the primes that are leaning in and appreciating that they need to like actually be much more aggressive you know invest more in r &d partner more with startups i think it's great for like obviously like the neo primes and it's just there's a huge opportunity where it's like i think if you add up basically like spacex and roll everybody all the neo primes basically found in the last you know basically like you know 15 years they still represent basically like less than like one percent of the total you know basically dow budget and so there's still a ton of upside from some of the big guys basically stumbling So, yeah, I think the Raytheons of the world are definitely not reacting as well, but it's not to say that every Prime is getting caught totally flat-footed.

1:56:26Some are definitely reacting to this new environment. Yeah. Well, it's 1 p.m. Jordi, anything else? This was great. Thank you so much for taking the time, as always. Great to see you. Only 179 more appearances to go. 179 more to go, baby. 99 beers on the wall. Let's go. Have a great rest of your day. Great to see you. Later, boys. Bye. See you. Up next, we have Arun Gupta, the founder and CEO. at Stickerbox, Happy Co. The creativity first AI product went viral over the break and I'm excited to talk to him. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra down in my room.

1:57:01How are you doing? Good to have you here. Great to be here. Could you please kick us off since this is the first time on the show with an introduction on yourself and the company and just some of the background here. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Arun. I'm the co-founder of Hapico along with my good friend Bob Whitney. um previously i was in y combinator back in 2009 uh same batch of strike wow amazing yeah i actually dropped out of yale um in the middle of my junior year um and six months later was lucky enough to get in talk to paul graham um a weekly basis it was amazing okay let's let's actually just dig in there since we have some time what were you building in 2009 what was the mood on the ground at YC in 2009?

1:57:49So we were actually one of the very first hardware startups. A lot of it was, you know, Reddit had just happened, Airbnb matched right before us. You know, there were a lot of B2B stuff, a lot of consumer things. We built a personal sleep tracker. So it was a wristband that you wore while you slept. And they used sleep science called actigraphy to track your sleep cycles and wake you up at the right time in the morning. So back when Fitbit and Drawbone when we're like doing that whole thing. Dude, you were so early. You were so early. So early. I mean, it must have been painful to see Aura and Whoop and basically have the right idea.

1:58:29Yeah, what was the blocker? Was it supply chain or distribution? I mean, I went through YC in 2012, or first company, first idea, same thing, where a lot of it wound up getting built by someone else years later. But what was your experience like if you were to do the post-mortem? Honestly, for us, it was big data. So back in 2009, everybody who worked on big data worked in biotech or worked on Wall Street. So you couldn't really hire them away unless you had a ton of money. And all the money is in data analysis, right? So like, or they're analyzing tons and tons of data points and giving you all this information about how you can live better, eat better, be more healthy.

1:59:07And we just didn't have that. So the business really flies when you have a subscription that works. But without being data analysis, it's really hard to build a subscription that works. Yeah, that's crazy. I remember 2009 was like the dawn of Hadoop and like distributed systems that you had to orchestrate. It was like doing a multi-training LLM AI infrastructure. Like you couldn't just be like put all the data in one database and like Google handles it or AWS handles it or MongoDB handles it. And like non-relational databases became a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, all these, we take them so much for granted now, but back then it was such a pain to orchestrate anything.

1:59:43You're running like true infrastructure just to do like basic stuff by now, by today's terms. Fascinating. Yeah. So what led you to start this company? When did you start this company? What were you doing in the interim? Yeah, so after my YC company gracefully shut down, I started another company called Grail.com. and Grailed was basically a fashion company. You started Grailed? Yeah. They're a fashion company. That's so cool. Okay, this is amazing. Wow. We do a lot of guests. We don't always have time to do research. But on your printout, Grailed didn't make it in. I've used Grailed for a decade now.

2:00:26That's amazing. Yeah, I started Grailed in 2013 in my bedroom in San Francisco. No way. Yeah. Were you a collector of fashion items? Yeah? Big time. Big time. What were you into back then? What was the first product? Did you ever wear Chrome hearts to an investor pitch? No, I never wore it to an investor pitch. When I went to see the investors, I was wearing more lower Piana. There we go. Valley, right? That's the vibe. And that's still like, what, five years before Chamath starts introducing it to the Valley via the All In podcast. That's fantastic. Yeah, exactly. No, back in the day, it was really about like workwear and like raw denim.

2:01:09And then it became really big through collabs. So there was like an H &M Balmain collab that was really big. There was the Yeezys that dropped. There was all the Nikes that dropped. And then Supreme obviously had their massive moment. But no, I was really into like all the OG Raph Simmons stuff. Actually, if you remember, A$AP Rocky did a video. I forget what the song was called, but like, Please Don't Touch My Raph. And in that video, there's like three of my personal collection pieces. in that video. That's crazy. What was the customer acquisition funnel at that time? And I'm interested to hear how I've heard a lot of founders talk about if they got started years ago, they were maybe doing Minecraft bots.

2:01:55A lot of people were doing sniping for sneaker drops, sneaker bots. Did that play a role? Was there an automated portion or was it mostly organic? Walk me through some of the trends that were happening at the time with Grailed. And then I promise we will get to Stickerbox. That's why I want to talk to you, but this is fascinating. It's the most exciting. Stickerbox is the most exciting part. But yeah, Grailed, really, it was all about community. Honestly, from day one, it was a community and all the way through until the end. Because we were very heavily focused on men's versus women's. So it was about 70, 30, men's versus women's and at the time in 2013 people were like do men even wear clothes and i'm like yes they're people obviously they're right they wear clothes um but men's fashion was like not a thing at all um so we were able to sort of like ride that wave um and see sort of riding the instagram wave in some in some ways like that had to be the biggest catalyst yeah yeah i talked i used to talk a lot about how people when you were like hey what are you into people will be like oh i'm into like nirvana or like radiohead and then when you're like what you into there i'm like i'm into noah or like supreme or like jill son something like that right so it's like your personal aesthetic became more defined by the clothes you wore because we became such a visual society through instagram rather than the music you listen to um which is more maybe of like a myspace um you know og uh type thing and there and and you guys had uh people building real businesses on the platform i i have uh my my uh oldest friend uh teamed up with a college buddy of mine unrelated to me and started selling on grailed ended up building uh their own brand called no maintenance that uh that that's now you know thriving uh but they got their start just reselling that's how they made generate the revenue that they needed to actually do their own inventory run so uh yeah made their own boutique a lot of fashion designers too uh i think reese cooper probably uh you know started out on love there's a there's a viewer in the chat that says I bought my first pair of Rick Owens dunks from Grail.

2:03:54This is so cool. Salute. That's awesome. That's amazing. Yeah, they're like seven grand. Probably. Yeah, hopefully still holding them. So then, yeah, take me through the idea to get back in the arena for the third time. When did you start the company? Was this post-Chat GPT moment? I mean, I feel like we've talked about this on the show. Like, there is such an opportunity for interesting businesses here in the age of AI. But doing - And I was always saying, Everybody wanted to build these AI hardware devices for adults. I'm like, I have a phone. It is an AI hardware device. They don't market it that way, but I mean, Apple kind of does.

2:04:30But I was like, I don't need another device that helps me order DoorDash, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't want my kids to have an iPad, but creating a product. I always thought if you made a product that just let kids ask questions. Well, the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit R1 came out and they used teenage engineering. It's this beautiful orange package. Very cool. But a lot of the reviewers who are adults were like, I'm comparing it to my iPhone. And I never got around to actually buying one and giving it to my four-year-old. But I was thinking that it feels like a great kid's toy. And then there is still the narrative of great technology, Stardust toys.

2:05:06So I always thought it was a great market to go after. But what was your inspiration? Yeah, so I can take zero credit for creating the sticker box. It was all my co-founder, Robert Whitney. He is the original inventor. along with his son who helped him basically co-develop the device. And basically the story is pretty classic. You know, son was like, hey, I want a coloring book of tigers eating ice cream. And he was like, oh, I don't have that, but I can just print it off, you know, an image generator and then you can color it. And then he's like, OK, great. I'm going to print that and then color it.

2:05:38And then he's like, now I want lizards riding skateboards. And then he prints lizards riding skateboards. And then you see this magic moment go off in the kid's head. And they're like, wait, I can say anything. And like, for us, like we're a little bit more jaded, I think, you know, we're like, oh yeah, AI, LLMs, it all works for a kid. They're like, I just came up with this idea and not only do I see it now I can hold it in my hand and color it. I was, I was, I was, uh, uh, with my three-year-old yesterday using an image model. And he said in his words, he was like, it's like magic. Yeah. No.

2:06:10And, and, and I think the physical aspect is, is just, uh, it's so important. when I use image generators with my son and I have air print and I will print the photo, even though I'm running out of ink left and right because the full page color photo, it just goes out really quickly. But it's amazing. And it's way different than just being like, oh, here's a Ghibli of your toys to be like, here's the thing that you can put on your wall. You can enjoy physical representation or color it in. Like it's a coloring book now. There's so many cool things you can do. Put it on your notebook, put it on your water bottle.

2:06:45But I think that's what my co-founder Bob really understood is that this physical representation, these physical stickers are just what's so powerful for children. And it really is such an imagination accelerant. You know, it's like these ideas, they're in my head. But then once they come out of my head onto paper, he was like, wow, this really transforms what they're able to do. And there's two sides to this. There's like the cynical, be a good parent, no screen time, print stuff out. That's better from like fighting the iPad cake thing. And that's true. There's a lot of evidence of that. That's a good thing.

2:07:17But you come to it with like a negativity of like I'm avoiding a bad outcome. So I feel like I'm taking my vegetables. But I just think that like there's like a Lindy, like a beautiful thing about texture and physical things. Yeah, we have like an old – like it's not a Polaroid camera, but it's this really bad digital camera that then will print out kind of pictures on it. So one thing I like about Stickerbox is it's not like these kind of products haven't existed. It's just like integrating the new technology into it and it's a form factor. And that's the genius, right? My co-founder brought the product to my house.

2:07:52He had already built it. He had it in a cardboard box. It looked awesome. And I look at it in one second and I'm like, it's all about how you put this together, right? It's not like these things didn't exist. It's all about your product sense and basically how you intuitively were like, this is the right kind of product for a kid. Autonomous, self-serve, stickers, lasting physical pieces. Pretty magical stuff. But we like to say that it's an AI product. And like you said, AI for kids and AI hardware for kids is amazing, more magical. But we like to say that the AI itself disappears behind the magic of the device because it's really not about the AI.

2:08:30It's about the idea. Like the idea is the hero. The sticker is the hero. It's not the device or the screen that are the hero. It's the kid's imagination that becomes the hero of the story. So talk about the prototype. It sounds like your co-founder did all the whole work. He's the workhorse. You're the show pony, apparently. We'll give him all the credit in the world. That's fair to say. But it seems like he was a tinkerer, a hacker, was able to whip something up pretty quickly. I imagine like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, like are there wires everywhere? And then do you go to a co-packer or a manufacturer?

2:09:02Is this something that's like pretty turnkey and there's a solid ecosystem around? Or was it a long multi-year process to actually get the first one made with high quality? It was difficult, you know, because like these things are thermal printers, right? So he came with like the idea fully formed and like a lot of it already baked. But to turn from a prototype to a production product that, you know, our Christmas load was insane. You know, just the amount of kids unboxing on Christmas and then hitting the servers like he was stressed. Like, you know, rightly so. But to get there, it's difficult because when you think about it, this thermal printer, it's meant to print receipts.

2:09:37It's meant to print text on receipts. It's not meant to print images. And if you look at the fidelity of the images that's being happening, it's like, I think something like 300 DPI, like on the image, it looks beautiful, you know? And like that is sort of like a little bit of our secret sauce is, hey, we're able to make these images look really great through a combination of many different things. But that's something that he was able to do really, really well and something that we had to work with custom, honestly, with the factories to try to get them to make it happen. And you're sold out.

2:10:06You're sold out. I just bought one while you were here with us. Thanks to Shopify. It makes it really easy to check out. But it's going to get delivered in February. It's been selling like crazy. You guys are just trying to keep this thing in stock? Yeah. So we had a ton of units available for Christmas shipping. Those went in like two weeks or less. And then we just kept selling. Like we had the December 28th ship date. Those sold out in like a few days. January 6th ship date sold out in a few days. Then we had a February 17th ship date. And I was like, February 17th. It's like not even, it's like a month and a half away.

2:10:42Those all sold out. Now we're in February 24th. So can't keep this thing in stock. But we're ramping up manufacturing. We're going to do our best so everybody can get one. So is the 2026 strategy really get solid on the supply chain so you can scale a ton? And then are you focused on like ruthless ramping of digital ads or are you more likely to go, let's get Walmart, let's get Target? Because I can imagine it's selling really well on both, but you probably don't want to do both as an early stage startup at the same time. You want to be really have your ducks in the row in a row. Right. Yeah. It's sort of a classic trap that startups get into where target is like, yeah, we'll buy a million units.

2:11:25We'll buy 2000 units. And then they sit on the shelves because you don't have the marketing support them. So you kind of have to wrap up appropriately. Um, so for us right now, really, it's like, we've got this core image to sticker generation loop down cold. Um, where do we go from there? You know, kids are making characters. Like some kids have this like stick man and Cappy Barrett character and they go on adventures over and over again. So like, let's let them name that character and then reuse it. Let's let them send that character to their friend's box. Let's let them upload their own likeness into the box and say, Hey, let me do me and my mom on a picnic in the moon or like me riding a dinosaur or what have you.

2:12:02And like, basically what these kids are doing is what we feel like is we're basically enabling the next generation of storytellers, right? So the next Spielberg, the next Ryan Kugler, the next Miyazaki, they're growing up with the sticker boxes they're like imagination accelerant and it's letting them tell these like little graphic novels or little stories where they're reusing these characters and they're basically developing their own ip um so leaning more into that and creating more features for them and honestly i think the other thing that we are just so happy about is how it brings families together because it's for kids obviously but like it's really fun to use you know and like the nice thing is is like when it's like i'm like at the thing at the table you know and like the dad is like in the background and like hovering and then he's like, you know, let me do one.

2:12:43And then like, you know, the uncle or the mom or the cousin are like all coming together and they're like, oh, you did that. Let me try to remix your dragon and make it like a metal dragon. Let me make your metal dragon breathe fire. Let me make it breathe fire in a volcano. So it really brings everybody together. So I think focusing more on these sort of like whole family experiences as well as the single player sort of like experience with the individual kid as well is something that we're my co-founder is really focused on. It's something he really believes passionately in. is using the advice to bring people together and as a really positive activity for parents and kids to do.

2:13:18What have you guys done on the actual material side? I know people are very afraid of receipts. I personally don't. Hugherman put out a post about you shouldn't touch receipts. I saw you guys have avoided BPA and BPS, but maybe talk about some of the decision-making there. This was another thing that was really difficult. So BPA and BPS are obviously a hot button topic. But if you produce paper, thermal paper, and you test it, often there are trace amounts of BPA and BPS in the paper. And for us, that wasn't good enough. I was like, just because it's below the California Proposition 65 limit doesn't mean that it's BPA or BPS completely free.

2:14:04Yeah, limits are not safety. Yeah, exactly. And for us, it's like it's a kid's product. It's safety from the ground up. everything from the images that are generated to everything that happens with the device. So you can touch all these stickers. There is no BPA, no BPS. We tested in batches from the factory. It was really difficult to do. It actually delayed our launch by a full four or five weeks. We could have launched four or five weeks earlier if we were willing to accept sort of like this trace element of BPA, BPS in the paper. But we were like, no, we like refuse to release this. That's going to be a good, that's going to be a good angle.

2:14:37Cause I imagine you guys are already getting copied by a bunch of different manufacturers knockoffs and it's like yeah you can use the knockoffs but you know there's you know the kids uh talk about safety with regard to image generation obviously some of these engineers i'm gonna try to jail break it just fair warning put that dragon in a bikini uh let's not have that happen uh we want the dragon breathing fire i want to know about what models you like how model agnostic you are because i imagine that if you even if you just change the model to something better. Even if the style looks better, you're like, well, that doesn't look like the dragon I'm used to generating.

2:15:12So there's some sort of like lock in there. At the same time, you might be optimizing for cost. How are you thinking about the software side? Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. And for us, it's like, it's really a product for kids, right? And I think chat GBT, when you do image generation, it wants to make everything look sexy. That's kind of a bias, right? You even upload your own photo. It's like, it wants to make you look super buff, like you're a superhero. Well, that's because I put that in my prompt by default. It has to or else it's – but, yes, it looks very, like, polished, refined, smooth skin.

2:15:43It looks – it's a glow-up filter. There's something going on there. And those system prompts matter. Safety is number one. So it's basically a multi-factor system. So we have a patent for the sticker box device itself, but we're actually also working on a patent right now for safety in the sticker box system. And it goes all the way through from the text all the way through to after the image is generated. So when you say the text, we analyze the text for safety. We remove bad words. We analyze the prompt for how likely it is to generate something safe or unsafe. Then we go through an enhancement process where the sticker is steered towards being something geared for a child.

2:16:22So it's actually rewritten in some different ways in order to do that. Then we generate the image, and I'm oversimplifying a little bit here. And then even after we generate the image, then there's post image generation checks. And those post image generation checks are on, I don't even know how many variables, right? There's, you know, all the sorts of bad things like hate speech and nudity and silence and, you know, all sorts of different things. And we basically have all these confidence intervals and scores that go into it. But it's this huge system. Like you think about airplanes, right? And airplanes are like this complicated system of like many, many, many checks overlapping with each other.

2:16:56And that's what creates like the robust safety system. It's a similar system here, right, where we have many, many, many checks at basically every area of the process because the last thing we want is for a kid to get something that's unsafe or for a parent to question it. Like for us, our big mission is what if AI were built for kids? And I think that the boogeyman in our heads is that social media was not built for kids. Social media was built for adults. Grok was not built for kids. Grok was not built for kids. I mean, AI is not built for kids. It's built for businesses, right? It's built for adults and it's built for businesses.

2:17:29But for us, we're like, what if we could just reimagine AI completely and just say, okay, what if this was built for kids? And that's why we didn't put a chatbot in a teddy bear. That's why we made a sticker image generator. It was a completely different direction. So talk about latency with all those checks. I imagine none of this is happening on the device. You're going to the Wi-Fi, to the cloud, to your servers, hydrating the text with an LLM. That's not super fast. then generating an image isn't super fast, then sending that back down to the box and printing it, that's not super fast. How fast do you think you can get this?

2:18:05Do you want to do it on device at some point? And then what user experience sort of tricks are you using to make the latency and the lag tolerable? Yeah, so great questions. It's actually really fast, mostly because of the work that my co-founder Bob and his great engineering team have done. So I think the time to sticker. Yeah, Bob is my co-founder. Bob Whitney, yeah. Bob the Builder? Let's go. Incredible nominative determinism. I was wondering where you're going with that. I mean, there's not a better moniker, honestly. That's great. He's a builder. I think time to sticker, I might be off by a couple of seconds here too, but I think time to sticker is like six to eight seconds.

2:18:48Yeah, it's so pretty quick. So you push the click, you have the sticker in like six to eight seconds, and that's with all of the content moderation, everything you do there. But one of the nice tricks that you mentioned, right? Oh, yeah. And because you're not doing like chat GPT level HD 4K, it's probably faster to actually generate the image. Exactly. Yeah. But I think the other thing that you said that's really interesting is once you say it, right, you say it and then it hears it and then it displays your text on the screen. And that's a nice moment. That's an intermediary moment that makes it feel not as slow, right?

2:19:19It makes it feel a lot faster because you're like, I just said this thing. Whoa, there it is on the screen. I'm reading it back. the words and then you're probably seeing the image. And then there's a pregnant pause basically. And then the image comes in. But that moment between saying what you have, seeing it on the screen and that like, like just slight delay to when the image comes out, cause it appears on the screen and then prints basically at the same time. It's like a lot of suspense and it's basically like relief that happens kind of in your head. Right. Like it's like when a joke lands, you know, it's like you have something happening, happening, happening.

2:19:51And then there's the punchline. So there's this sort of tension that's built up like in the process. And then it lands and it's just it feels really good because you're like, oh, my God, I said that. And now it's real. That's very cool. You have a background at Grailed. Can we expect any sticker box fashion partnerships? I want the Bottega weave version of the sticker box. I want the chrome hearts. I want the net full. That would be really good. I want something I can leave on the table. Yeah. Well, I mean, I am interested, like, do you see yourself more expanding vertically or horizontally? Do you think you might be like a multi-product toy company or more of like a camera and printer company that maybe winds up making a device that's delightful for an analog photographer who goes on photography trips and wants to print things quickly?

2:20:43Do you see yourself focusing on a particular demographic over time or expanding one way or the other? yeah i think right now we're really focused on ai for kids so like what does that look and in terms of like multi-devices we obviously have tons of ideas you know um a really fun space to be in but i think that there's just so much gold inside of this creation machine yeah right so it's like kids maybe not might not be the best illustrators they may not be able to be animators right they might be able to use photoshop or whatever super well but they can still bring their ideas to life with the AI, they can still print them.

2:21:16So I think focusing more on creativity and investing more in the sticker box is definitely where we're going for the time being. Imagine a 3D printer. Do a$2 billion training run for your own model. It's not going to cost that much. I've heard enough. Give them$2 billion. Do you think you'll wind up fine-tuning and running a custom model or some open source like fine-tuned on some optimized hardware? Or is the cost just doesn't matter? Definitely this year, my co-founder Bob is very interested in creating our own model. So definitely from the ground up on our own model with our own training data.

2:21:51Because when you talk about safety, that is the number one holy grail, you know, not to put a pun on it. You want the training data to be completely safe. And that way the model can't generate anything that's not. Totally. And that's what really matters. And then in terms of like the business model, obviously, it feels like razor and blade model because you're buying the box. But then you're also buying ink and paper. And that's how you make money? Do you have a subscription as well? So there's no ink. It's all thermal printing. So it's all just black and white. So there are the paper refills.

2:22:20But we want people to use the device. So we're kind of just pushing as much paper at people as possible. It's very, very cheap. We're not trying to make a lot of money off of it right now. We want people to use the device. So you get, let's see, 200 stickers for$6, which is pretty good. and free shipping on all of those stickers for everybody who's watching. So if you buy stickers off our site, it ships for free and you can buy as many as you want. And then, yeah, we're trying to put more features in. So like, let's say like you have a box and I have a box. I send you my tiger character, my tiger astronaut, and you use my tiger astronaut in your box.

2:22:58And maybe we make a story together and my tiger astronaut and your wizard go into the castle and then we go underwater or we do these things. So like basically creating more features for people to create together, for them to create more with each other and just do more sort of like more ideas and more intellectual property and more content basically creation. Ken in the X chat says, what about licensing deals? Would you ever do – We're joking about Supreme and Karl Marx, but Disney and stuff, that seems – Yeah, email me. Email you. Okay. Yeah, one year exclusive. Arun, A-R-U-N at Hapico.com. There we go.

2:23:35Yeah, I mean, the Yodo player has a bunch of cards that you can buy that have specific stories, licensed music, licensed short stories that are read aloud. And I could see some sort of partnership there being super lucrative where you can buy this pack and then be able to generate this type of character. That's exactly what we're thinking. Sticker packs, parent companion app, you unlock Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you unlock Hello Kitty. That's super cool. whatever you want. And then, honestly, let kids create their own stuff, right? If kids create their own dinosaur superhero, let them sell that sticker pack, right?

2:24:12And then their kids can download it as well. That's exciting. But yeah, licensing would be a huge play because it's super fun. I want to see sticker box millionaires, eight-year-olds that just have this. I mean, Grailed had this ecosystem too. Give us the fundraising news. I want to hit the gong. Give us the fundraising news. Oh, yeah. So we raised$7 million. Hit that gong. for the kids i'm so glad always for the kids we do it for the kids but yeah seven million dollars uh maveron who is behind love every which is another montessori kids product uh they were investor um and then beth ferreira sorry we got we had jerry lu from maveron um and jason silver and then we got beth ferreira from serena ventures serena williams for fun also put in a significant amount of money into our round uh do you have kids yet or is bob carrying all the weight there Yeah, Bob, for now, Bob is, but give me six months.

2:25:07Six months. Let's go. Let's go. Breaking news here. Let's go. Yeah, seriously, my wife. I'm sure my wife is watching. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for delighting everyone on this product. Yeah, so great to meet you. I'm excited. I can't wait to get mine. What a white pill. Yeah. And good luck with this year. It sounds like it's going to be a massive one. And please come back on the show when there's more news. We'd love to chat. I really appreciate that. We'll talk to you soon. We're trying to be a positive force for good. There's a lot of negativity around AI, and I think for good reasons in a lot of cases, but for us, it's really...

2:25:39Use as much water in the data center as you want. I'm happy with my electricity bill going up because of this one. For this, my electricity bill can go up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day, and have a nice 2026. Goodbye. Our next guest is Julie Bush, the co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises. They recently closed a massive series Julie, welcome to the show How are you doing? What's going on? Hey guys, it's so great to be here I feel like you've had a thousand of my friends on And it's good to finally make the show Well, we've literally had some of your friends on We've had Colin from Friends and Family On the show You've had Colin Founders Fund Delian was on earlier today I spent a decade at Palantir So I've had Eliana Yeah, we got all of them.

2:26:32But for those, since it is your first time on the show, please give us an introduction on yourself and Valinor. Yeah, so Julie Bush, co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises. And we're bringing a new business model to defense and national security. You guys know as well as I do that the barriers to entry in this market are so high. And so we've built something really unique. We're an operational holding company to service the long tail problems. the unsexy things that nobody is able to go after because the barriers of entry are so high. So you're really incentivized to go after the moonshots, like the next generation fighter jets and the golden domes.

2:27:09But there's basically 80 % of the market that's just untapped. So walk me through operational holding company. What are you adding to? What are you holding? How old are these companies? How big are they? What can I compare it to in other holding companies that I might be familiar with? Yeah. We're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech, right? And so for us, we're holding product companies. And that's usually software, software-defined hardware. We started a little over a year ago, and today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the works, so we're actively working on three more, and we likely will add two more before the end of 2026.

2:27:56So we're moving pretty quickly here, and we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned autonomous systems to combat casualty care. So think about parts of the market that are really, really critical, but again, there hasn't been innovation there in decades. decades. Yeah. So talk to you about... So this is an example of a company, like a company that maybe at scale, like could only ever be a$50 million revenue business if they get every key customer. And so it's hard to like raise a lot of money for an opportunity like that and build out some crazy go to market team. And so they can partner with you to get that distribution and basically get this platform to make it easier to sell into the government.

2:28:43Am I saying that right? Where am I wrong? Yes, exactly. Like we can both build and buy companies. We hold them. We're the majority owners of them. We run, we centralize all the go-to-market and all the operations. And that allows us to move really, really quickly. And then we decentralize engineering and we basically run them like product lines, but they're their own subsidiaries. So we have a ton of flexibility. We're their capital allocator. um so you know i i know you guys also were following defense tech hype but um we're able to get great outcomes for our dms and the engineering teams and these subsidiaries because you know they're not out there fundraising like they're focused on building a great product and um we're we're basically doing everything else and and as uh i imagine part of the thesis here is you have like hundreds of new defense tech companies and and and government contractors created, a lot of them will build great products, but maybe not get to the scale where they can, uh, uh, you know, IPO or anything like that.

2:29:44And you can come in and actually provide like an outcome and then the opportunity to actually continue to scale that business. And so maybe, maybe like a year or two years from now, they'll, they'll be even more opportunities on, on the buy side. That's right. That's right. I mean, I, when I think about the market, like, I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say, like, we want to be the most sustainable company in this market or platform of companies in this market. And yeah, I think earlier you said, so what about, like, is this like, are we looking at like a$50 million TAM here for this product?

2:30:21I mean, I like to think a lot of what we're working on, they're like hundreds of millions of dollars TAMs behind them. They just don't have to be 10 billion, right? Like they don't need to be Anderol. They don't need to be Palantir. Right now, everyone's getting pitched to be like, I'm the Anderil of X. I'm the Palantir of Y. And there's really only going to be a handful of those companies. Speaking of Anderil, are you Adam Porter Price's worst nightmare? Are you guys going up against each other to try and buy companies? Or do you target different market segments so you don't actually run into each other in back-to-back board meetings when a company is choosing to sell?

2:31:00No, I mean, I actually see him as a great partner for us. and Steckman, you know, sends me lists, things they need, right? So I think they could be buyers of our assets, just like I think the primes could be. Like the other large primes, they need more innovation than Anderil does, right? Just so happens APP is like brilliant at M &A for Anderil, right? And so I actually look to him as someone who is really important to us. um and so have you guys sold any any of the businesses yet or is that a is that a future no i would say we're we're a little early for that right um i do think you know it could be interesting in the next 18 months to see what happens and of course like each one of these is is their own individual strategy and like we can hold them too and we want to hold them we We want, I think we can make a lot of these companies profitable really quickly because we can drive down their operating costs.

2:32:01Yeah. How are you processing sort of the defense tech hype waves? You know, Ukraine happens. Everyone wants to talk counter UAS. Taiwan heats up. Everyone wants to talk about surface vehicles and rebuilding the Navy. And those are important projects, but you can get sort of whiplash. Are there real pockets of value when there's a lot of energy and maybe a lot of executive orders and truth social posts about a category? Or do you want to sort of zoom out and be looking for more opportunities that might become big narrative arcs in the next five years or something like that? How do you think about these defense waves?

2:32:38I love this question. I've been in this market 20 years. I was at Palantir 10 years, built out most of the government business there. I think when there is a crisis or there is a, you know, we, the pandemic was a great example of this. Like, it does create a different level of action within the government. I think this is part of why, you know, right now with Department of War, it's great to see them putting, like, sticks and carrots out there because it's creating action without a crisis. I don't think we want to wait until there's a crisis for, you know, us to be in a bad position. But I do think the hype comes in waves and, you know, you can seize it.

2:33:20I think Palantir does a really good job of seizing that. That's something I really learned there. And for us, you know, we are looking at things that are timely. There are things we are not going to build or buy right now just because we know where this administration's priorities are for the next three years. But I do think you want to be ahead of the curve. so we have a product called dispatch for example which is um essentially an autonomous power station for unmanned systems you know the drone market is like proliferating and drone dominance is a huge program in the department of war but you can't extend autonomy if you still have personnel in the way that are powering your systems and so this is like a docking station just like you would like charge your iphone from for anything on the blue uas list and like that's a little bit early But I think we're going to seize on that because it can be a first mover in that space.

2:34:08How do you think about dual-use technologies? When I look at the legacy primes, almost all of them have wound up, at least with some sort of commercial business. Palantir, obviously famous. Anduril, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around, maybe with a camera on it. They have general dynamics, they have Gulfstream. Yeah. And it sort of just, sometimes it just happens over time. Sometimes it feels deliberate and you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the company says, hey, we're going to do this military thing. But then eventually there's this obvious add on in commercial or oil and gas or something else.

2:34:45Do you think the dual use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How are you processing the dual use nature of some of these technologies? I love this question. I think it's I think it's a distraction, honestly, like for Palantir. Palantir, it was critical. And like, really, when you think about Foundry and those platforms, those are meant to be for like any use case in the world. Like, you know, so the fact that it is dual use makes sense for them. But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual use because that makes you that means your is so much greater.

2:35:23And again, this is why I think 80 % of the government market is like being left untapped because most of the use cases are single use. And like, honestly, that's really critical too. And I think if you, your products over time can become dual use, even if you are thinking that they have a single use focus initially. And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's incredibly difficult. You know, when you think about compliance, you have to like re-architect your entire platform for it to become FedRAMPi or to meet impact level accreditation status.

2:36:05So I'd much rather see our products if they, like, they don't have to become dual use. They can be single use. And I think the government needs single use products, but many of them are already dual use. You know, some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers and like, that's valuable too because it establishes commerciality, but it has to be focused. Like your first customers have to be in government in our ecosystem. And I just think dual use is way overhyped. Talk about the fundraising strategy to date. Yeah. So my seed round was myself, Trey Stevens at Founders Fund, Paul Kwan at General Catalyst, and grant for standing at red cell partners all of which i like deeply trusted or i never would have done this like i'm a little bit of a unique founder mom of two uh you don't see a lot of defense tech women founders um but um but you know i train and paul and grant were people i deeply trusted when we started this process and they've been incredibly supportive of this journey and I think they recognize the need for a new model in this space.

2:37:15And so as we've continued our kind of fundraising strategy, it was important to me at the A that we brought in Colin and kind of friends and family capital. You know, he's an OG, Palantir CFO, seen what it's like to build a generational defense tech company from the inside, someone I deeply trust. We were executives there together. And I also think they're brilliant capital allocators. And at the end of the day, we fund our companies. We are a capital allocation machine. And so they've been an awesome partner. Congratulations on all the partners we have. We got a gong. We got a hit for you.

2:37:53Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you. Thank you. I'll be back. Yeah, we'll see you soon. I'm sure there'll be plenty of news to discuss. Sounds great. Cheers, Julie. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Goodbye. Bye. Next up, we have our Lambda lightning round. We got Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey. Look at this thing. Oh, I like the sound effect. Oh. Good job. Whoa. We have Yotam from Sierra, and then we have Josh Wolfe to cap it off. So let's bring in Winston Weinberg, the CEO and co-founder of Harvey from the Restream Waiting Room into the TVP on Ultra Dome.

2:38:31Winston, good to see you. How are you doing? What's happening? Good. I like that cloud. Yes. It's crazy. It's powerful. It's all one of those. It's powerful. It's like Thor coming in. Yes, yes. I mean, you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough props. No thunder, no lightning. No horse. We have a cloud guy. This is a huge problem. Yeah, if you guys could hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd be great. We can. I know, a blimp guy. Yes, it's pulsating right now. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. So this was really well-timed because we just got our December legal bill.

2:39:07and I love our I genuinely our lawyer is a very good friend of mine I love him but he hand writes everything or he uses a typewriter he's being as efficient as he can but every company has a lot of work and interestingly I just feel like legal bills because they are variable and the work is important but I just feel like it's always a surprise the number is always bigger than you expect it to be and I'm excited to head into a world where that bill can be smaller for a lot of companies and get better work. So hopefully I know the work that you're doing. So yeah, kick us off with the State of the Union.

2:39:48Where is Harvey today? Yeah, so I started three and a half years ago. So I mean, God, I think it's felt like every day, it either feels like it was yesterday or it was like 50 years, something like that, probably. I'm just kind of oscillating back and forth. Started selling to kind of like very large law firms. Now we've expanded to selling to large corporations as well in mid-market. And what we're really trying to do is kind of have like an operating system that's in between. So it's for all lawyers and it helps them basically provide those services more cheaply and can do the work faster. I think, to be honest, to your legal bill, and I'm a little laggy.

2:40:30I don't know if that's on me or you. I think that's just the – you're watching the show. Maybe. You seem like you're in real time. Yeah, you look fine to us. Perfect. I'll take it. I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's going to not be as expensive. But there will be other type of legal work that you're going to need done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so your overall legal bill will probably be the same. But the line items will look different is my guess of how this goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More hours spent on the actual high leverage work versus, you know, just generating a documentary.

2:41:08What changed last year with Harvey? Like what were the big inflection points for the business last year? Because I just noticed this, you know, having friends that were lawyers. I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. just like they were kind of like one-shotted by Harvey at some point during the year, which is like if you're building an AI company, you want to build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like, whoa, okay, I really believe now. And you also want to start building it when it's a little rough around the edges and then let the models get better and then that moment hits and you're ready.

2:41:45Yeah, you basically like there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better And then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better, right? So I think of this as honestly like there's three type of employees or like folks that you work with, like colleagues. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context and every single piece of information to do the job and then they can do it. The second is you say, hey, man, the same way that we did XYZ last week, could you do it again? And then they do it. And then the third is folks just do it without even any of the context.

2:42:17And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is how do you make sure that for a specific task, all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform? And then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output, right? And it's actually like a very hard problem at scale because if you think of what you're doing, you're kind of building like a legal brain or like a partner brain. This is what they do. They get a task from one of you guys, and they break that task down into all these 10 subtasks, and then they give that to other associates, et cetera. It's a really hard thing to build.

2:42:50ChatGPT launched ChatGPT Health yesterday. How do you think the consumer, prosumer, legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to LLMs, consumer LLMs today. They're definitely going. And just ask, hey, write this thing. Is that an area that you guys don't have any? In-house counsel product or something? So in-house counsel, we definitely do. So we serve a lot of Fortune 500s. And that's actually growing, I think, last quarter. Let's give it up for all the Fortune 500s. Thanks. Give it up for them. Yeah, let's give it up for them. I think last quarter, it was like 41 % or something like that was actually corporates.

2:43:37So that's it. There we go. Oh, yeah. Give me one more, though. That's the cloud. Could you combine the cloud with that? We combine the cloud and the sound of it. Well, to be honest, I thought you said 41 % of the... I thought you were saying 41 % of the Fortune 500. But that'll be soon, I'm sure. Here, I'll come back on when that happens, hopefully soon. And we can do a blimp cloud and that sound all combined with some Thor lightning strikes. So we are interested in this and helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is... Actually, if you're a citizen of Singapore and you are filing a claim below 20 ,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim.

2:44:16And then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. It's just like Spider-Man meme. Well, so what we're actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages, both parties can decide. They have to both consent to this. But they say, hey, I'm going to submit these facts and Harvey is going to help me draft it, right? Because it's hard of the consumer to like know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the complaint and things like that. But both of us will agree that we're going to submit this into Harvey and then the outcome is going to be binding. And that's like eventually would be actually incredible because a huge problem in Singapore is, and it's an even bigger problem in the United States, is just access to justice in general, right?

2:45:04Where people actually can't get any of their claims met, one, because the average price of a lawyer is$353 an hour in the U.S., which is astronomically too high, right? And then the second reason is the courts are just like absolutely overburdened, right? And so any of those systems that you can do to help that really moves this along. And so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. And I think eventually we'll look into this, but it's not on our roadmap right now. What are your big predictions for 2026 just in terms of AI progress? Are you building the business that expects another jump in capabilities?

2:45:45It feels like a lot of people were talking about cloud code being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that? Or is it sort of just business as usual? No, I mean, you have to build everything, assuming that it's going to get better. And what you do is you actually just try to create a culture of trying to build really complex things. And we have a lot of, how we do this is we have a lot of like design partners. And so we'll work with like private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build like a really extreme use case.

2:46:21A lot of the times it fails. And that's actually okay because it fails. And then we realize, oh, if the models improve X, Y, Z, then it would actually probably work. And then we bucket that and we wait and then we try it with a new model. And eventually that stuff starts to work. Right. So a lot of it is like, how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks, get the feedback of what needs to improve to actually complete that? And then you have that set and ready to go as a use case. Yeah. How much how much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? Anybody that has had any, you know, experience a lawsuit will understand that, like, you know, something that that really should be a decision that hypothetically, if you got the right people in a room and everybody was like mature, you could just kind of like figure it out.

2:47:11And obviously people try to do that with settlements, but then you end up getting like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out. Hypothetically, if, you know, two different parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can, you can basically theoretically kind of like decide something almost instantaneously. Then in theory, you could then appeal it and Harvey basically run it again and then appeal it again. And so it just feels like there's going to be, you're kind of like fighting hundreds of years of like precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways, like even if we have the technology, maybe lawsuits are still these and any type of like legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases.

2:47:54Yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to like facilitate this. Like, I guess maybe a better way to think about this is like there's three categories. One is like the process and the system, right? And hopefully you move that along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks and then it has to change. The second is like all of the context that's relevant. So can you like collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just like the underlying technology, right? Like you need all three of those.

2:48:25I think there's going to be a lag. I think exactly right. But there are a lot of, you know, we just talked about what we do in Singapore. And there are a lot of kind of forward-looking folks that are looking at this. The other thing I'd say, too, is like we see more movement on the transactional side because at that point, it really is just up to the principles, right? So both sides of the deal want to do something. You can do it, right? And honestly, like a lot of the best lawyers on earth, they're dealmakers. Like that's what they're doing, right? They're actually like the reviewing of the documents.

2:48:57Yeah, that's kind of just like table stakes. It's actually they give massively, really valuable business judgment advice, right? And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually give you good advice. Yeah, you have the greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company once or they start another company and they sell it again. But that's nothing compared to the lawyer that's been through 200 transactions. Yeah, that makes sense. Tons, and they're in the room. And that's happening more and more.

2:49:29The lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are, actually, increasingly. Right? And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is going to change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services. I also think that's really good for lawyers. Because the reality is, like, people will go to law school because they see TV shows like Suits. And they want to be like the lawyer on that TV show, right? Or the Lincoln lawyer or whatever. I don't know. I love Matthew McConaughey. And so they want to be a lawyer like it is on TV, right? And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, your career is going to look closer to that.

2:50:05It's going to look closer to like working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals. So that's why I'm really excited about it. And we work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is going to look like. Yeah, what's happening like law school applications? or is that like local, like a local top, tons of people are deciding to go to law school. Some people are concerned by that because people are going to saddle themselves with debt or spend a lot of money. And I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How have you been processing that?

2:50:38Are some of these law schools, like I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe you have relationships with them? So we work with a lot of law schools. And so we announced our like program last year. And at this point, I'd have to give you the stats, but I think we're at like 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you. I would also – one thing I want to say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually like a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school.

2:51:10I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer, you can make a change in the world. I genuinely believe that, and you can. And I think actually what happens is when you're in tumultuous times, a lot of people say, hey, I actually want to change this. Especially when you're applying to law school, you're younger, right? You're in a younger generation. And I think that's actually a lot of the reason why these applications increase over time. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Yeah, very, very cool.

2:51:37We could talk for so much longer, but I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year. Yeah, congrats to the whole team on all the progress. And thank you for hopefully reducing our legal bills. We will talk to you soon. We're shifting around the budget. Thanks, guys. We're shifting around the budget. We'll see you soon. Our next guest is Yotam from Sayera with some fantastic news. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TDP and Ultradome. Yotam, how are you doing? Good to see you. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Since this is your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

2:52:12Gladly. I'm Yotam Seger. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sayera, based in New York City. Sayera is in the data and AI security business. We make sure that all of the data that goes into these AI systems remains private, remains secure, and we enable enterprises to adopt AI. That's amazing. How did you start the company? I started the company out of a friendship and a partnership. My co-founder, our CTO, and I go back 16 years at this point. We were standing in the same line to enlist when we were 18. and I had the pleasure of working side by side with him in the military service and I knew that I always want to work with him.

2:52:54So the moment he said, let's start a company, I said, okay, I'll go with you. What did you guys do first? What do you mean? We did the cybersecurity in the IDF, in the Israeli military. Sure. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so this is your first company? This is our first and last. I don't think we did anything. First and last. There we go. Love that. One shot it. Well, what's the key to getting large enterprises on board as a first-time entrepreneur? It seems like that's like, you know, a lot of people vibe code something, get some ground-up adoption. It seems like you've gone to the top of the market.

2:53:28What informed that strategy? What's been the key to success? I think for us, it's been a combination of listening, using our two ears to really, really, really listen to the customers and understand that they know very well what they need to fix, why things are not working, what hurts, why things failed in the past, combined with the ability to engineer at a super, super high velocity and really solve complex problems in super complex ecosystems. I think that the combination of these two things together has been our secret to success with the large enterprise. Yeah. What scares you the most about how AI is being adopted in the enterprise today?

2:54:10Like, when are you talking with a customer and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that's a good question. Wow. Where do I start? I think that there's so much pressure being put on the security risk and compliance teams to get out of the way and let the AI be rolled out. I think that the level of security capabilities that's being bundled with the AI from the AI providers themselves is very, very insufficient. And I think that in many, many regards with the gap, the exposure that is being created is quite meaningful. And we're going to see the results of that in the coming years. What's the key to creating differentiation in the cybersecurity category?

2:55:01It feels like there's a A lot of companies that are established, they're not asleep at the wheel, and yet you've grown very quickly, gotten very big. How are you positioning and creating white space? So the first thing that is really unique about cybersecurity is that in most of what we do in our lives, we get measured on how well we do on average. In cybersecurity, we get measured on our weakest link. It doesn't matter if you're an eight on average. If you still have a two or a three, something bad is coming your way. And because we're not defending a static target, we're defending a very dynamic target, the threat vectors are changing, the IT landscape is changing, the regulatory landscape is changing.

2:55:43There's always going to be exposures, there's always going to be soft spots. I think for us, our focus on data, the ability to understand and differentiate between the 1 % of data that really matters to an organization. If that data was leaked, breached, exposed, that would create a bad year for them, not just a bad weekend. And the 99 % of data that clutters, which is so much of the data they have. Based on the ability to do that across the enterprise, at the enterprise scale, we've really been able to build a holistic data security and AI security platform that helps the organization achieve so many outcomes.

2:56:22Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the latest fundraising news. We've got to hit the gong for you. Is this like a friends, friends and family round? Yeah, I happen to have friends with$400 million. There you go. Good friends to have. Yeah, great vote of confidence to get Blackstone in. It's Series F. You're going to run out of letters soon. So hopefully we'll see you at the New York Stock Exchange soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. And up next, the moment you've been waiting for, Josh Wolf, the co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital.

2:57:04He'll be joining us in just a second. We will go back to the timeline in the meantime while we wait for him to join. Did you know that the founders of Home Depot were 49 and 36? And they both, each of them had three children each when they started the company. And they'd both just been fired from their jobs when they started Home Depot. Where were they fired from? Same company? I'll read from this. Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus, and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with$2 million raised from 40 friends. They had to put the ultimate friends and family round together, none of whom were wealthy by your standards.

2:57:46The average investment was$50 ,000. After Bernie, age 49, and Arthur, age 36, had been fired from their previous jobs and with three children each, no health insurance, that's a nightmare, no savings, heavily mortgaged homes. They were effectively broke. The rest is history. From nothing, Home Depot has grown into an empire with an enterprise market capitalization of over$250 billion that provides employment to more than 400 ,000 workers, thousands of whom became millionaires investing in the company's stock, while the founders have given away in excess of$1 billion in charitable donations. Incredible.

2:58:25And still counting. Wow, what a run for the Home Depot founders. What a run for Josh Wolfe. The moment you've been waiting for, we have Josh Wolfe in the Restream waiting room. And here he is in the TVP and Ultron. Josh, how are you doing? Look at this setup. Look at this background. You look fantastic. How are you doing? Did you have a good break? Are you off to a good new year? Seems like it. It's a great new year. I'm excited. And what's the news? It seems like you're kicking off 2026 with the bang. We raised a new fund. We're excited. How much crazy raised a billion five and

2:59:04It's crazy I remember this 20 years ago 20 plus years ago we raised our first fund and it was a hundred million and I struggled to hit it We got ninety two point one. I'll tell you to this day. I remember literally Yes or no. Yeah, every single person everybody How many of them are still along for the ride? Do you go back to them? I think we have 12 people who are OG Lux investors that are part of our family that I love. They must be at this point. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Okay. Yeah, there's been... We covered... Narrative violation. The Wall Street Journal today is saying that you're cooked.

2:59:38They're saying US venture capital fundraising declined 35 % in 2025. How did you get it done? What are the markets like? Is this... Yeah, what are the big LPs looking for? When you see a headline like this, 35 % down, and yet you're doing well, what's the secret to success? I think it's right. I think the headline is right. We all spoke, I want to say, back at Hill and Valley. And we were talking about the minnows and the megas. And I had made this thing that maybe was like a sort of prediction, but an anticipation that basically you were going to have this bifurcation where you had to have a long tail of the small funds that were going to basically disappear.

3:00:12And I know you guys hit on that earlier. But I was with one of my large LPs, and I was like, I think you're going to see 30 % to 50 % extinction rate, sort of involuntary exit. Yeah, that's the idea of a lot of people are on their last fund, they just don't know it yet. People have never been through a cycle, they have inadequate reserves, they haven't invested in succession planning, they're in the wrong sectors, they are in sectors that have too much capital, they don't have enough, and they were basically in a market where everything was going up and to the right, and they looked really smart, and they're not idiots, but usually in up markets, people look smarter than they are, in down markets, they look And in this particular case, the prophecy was like 30 % to 50 % would end up disappearing and going extinct.

3:00:50And this LP laughed at me, and he's like, Josh, it's going to be 90%. So he was even more aggressive. And I think that's going to happen. Some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed, and you're seeing that. GC bought a group out of Europe, and you'll see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms. Those are the minnows. At the other end, you've got the megas. And the megas, there's probably five or six firms that are basically like 8 to 100 billion AUM today and growing. And I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs probably from Andreessen, GC, GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi-asset platforms.

3:01:23And they're amazing investors. They're great people. But it's just changing the game. So you've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers. A few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered and grew. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think, to go public. So it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms in the middle that are between$1 and$3 billion They can do like early 100K checks and late 150 to$200 million checks. And I think for the next few years, that's going to be the place to be. It's a good place to be. More positively, how excited are you for this moment to have this amount of capital to deploy?

3:01:56I've read your letters as long as I've been in the industry. And it feels like Lux as a fund was really built for this moment. everything from hardware to bio to AI, all these things that you've been writing about forever feel like they're having such a moment. It is. And I got to be honest, as much as the team is out on the edge scouting it is really about the founders that we back. So you look at, you know, Brian and Palmer and Trey and Matt at Anderle, like they have just absolutely crushed it. You know, this was at a time when nobody wanted to fund defense seven years ago, being able to be founding investors in Anderle, seeing the success that they're having, the success that I anticipate from here is just incredible.

3:02:34You look at Kasser and Applied Intuition, I got to say amongst 350, 400 companies that we've funded over the past 20 years, it is one of our only cashflow positive businesses. And they're just also crushing it. Let's give it up for cashflow. They will get a gong, you know. Many times, many times. You know, cognition and hugging face. And we've got an amazing team. I mean, you know, Brandon Reeves and Grace Isford and Peter Hebert and Shaheen Farshi and Lan Zhang and Dina Shaker, like Shaq Veda, like they're just all out crushing it. And I'm very grateful. I feel like we've got the best team on the field.

3:03:08And more importantly, I feel like we've got the best founders, Eric at Modal and the team at Ramp. And I just feel extremely fortunate that we get to partner with these guys. And it's like the gift that keeps on giving. So my biggest thing to my team right now is don't screw it up. We've got a good thing going. Be humble. You are only as good as your last deal. And serve our entrepreneurs and make them successful, and they will make us successful. And I feel very grateful. How are you thinking about this year? What are you focused on and most excited about personally from an investing standpoint?

3:03:41Most important investment that we've made as a firm internally has been our young team that is just, again, kicking ass now. But in terms of sectors, I'd say generally about a third of what we do is aerospace and defense. So we're doing that globally. You know, we're air, land, sea, space, cyber, and beyond, and now subsea and subterranean, which is wild. That was something that Palmer himself was talking about years ago. And I thought it was crazy. But, of course, we've seen that in everything from the southern border to Gaza and Israel. It's a real thing. And so we're now in the U.S. We're in the U.K.

3:04:10We're in Israel. We're in Bulgaria. Us and Delhi and… Oh, yeah. And Duracea, right? Exactly. We're in Japan. Don't they have some cash flow? I thought Enduro had some cash flow. I don't know if it's cash flow, but just like remarkable economics. Yeah, yeah. It is a great founder, great business. I'd love to do something in India in defense. And I'm very bullish, as you may have heard about this IMEC corridor between India, Mideast, and Saudi and UAE, and Israel and Jordan and Mediterranean and Europe. And so I just think that whole thing in the aerospace and defense segment, U.S. and allies, is going to be a big deal.

3:04:42You see Trump putting out a trillion five on the defense budget, an enormous amount of spend. You had the clip from Palmer earlier today, which was awesome, and the incentive alignment so that the bloated bureaucratic beltway bandits are starting to realize it's not just about hyping your pipeline as a defense company, but actually delivering real material and weapon systems to the warfighters. So that's pretty critical. So that's one sector. Biotech has been in the doldrums for the past, I don't know, two years. XBI is up 50 % in the past six months and I think you're going to see an enormous resurgence in cutting edge biotech particularly at the intersection between AI we were founding investors in this company Evolutionary Scale that we took out of Meta and then CZI ironically ended up buying them just a few weeks ago so I think you're going to see more and more of that and then everything in embodied intelligence the next wave of AI and computer infrastructure is not just going to be two dimensional AI it's going to be 3D so some of that is bio, some of that is robotics Some of that is automation, industrial.

3:05:41But I think that you're going to see some huge deals, some really big dollar deals around this idea of embodied intelligence, where physical intelligence and Lockheed Groom and the team are just incredible. But you'll probably see two or three other things that are adjacent areas, not specifically robotics, of how do you take some of the great inspirations of our low-power brains and embody that so that we're not having hundreds of thousands of GPUs and NVIDIA clusters, but instead doing both edge inference and really interesting biological inspired ways of having AI into the 3D world, which is going to be wild.

3:06:13So excited about all that. That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start to become a venture capitalist. We are seeing this K-shaped dynamic, a lot of small funds. Well, not necessarily a bad time to be maybe not the best time to start your own fund. But I want some advice for someone who is who can't be talked down from it. maybe the person who's going out join a great fund. Join a great fund. Is that your advice? Or what if someone says I want to start a fund? When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the dot-com boom bust. And I was like, let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing.

3:06:49They're going to be brilliant people. I mean, I got to be honest, like, you know, whether personally some of the partners or the firm in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are going to be launching funds. And they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell. You know, you have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they are out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs. And I would never count those people out. Now they're going to need capital over time and there'll be people that we partner with, but over time they will go from a small fund to a big mega fund.

3:07:18So I'm actually, I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund. It is one of the great entrepreneurial things to do. Totally. But yeah, if you go back to 2021, where the numbers that we're referencing and that the journals referencing, it's like if you knew founders, people would be like, well, here's 20 mil, You know, and it's like, I don't think we need that many more funds like that. It's like you want the life's work allocator who has a differentiated view, network, et cetera. Look, if somebody was saying in 2020, 3, 4, 5, that you're going to start a media business that is going to become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to a younger generation and be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like, what?

3:07:58But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche. You've got a vibe. It's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do an adventure? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture firm as long as they're thinking about how do I do this in a really distinguished, differentiated way, and I can be so good that they can't ignore me. Yeah. What are your LPs thinking about the IPO window this year, next year? It feels like there might be trillions of liquidity coming to the tech industry. Is that going to have an effect at the early stage, at the next stage of scale-ups?

3:08:33Will that affect VC dynamics, or is that kind of just a foregone conclusion at this point? No, I think that you're going to have a big set of IPOs. I mean, everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue, but probably six to 10 companies, I think, this year have such high demand. They've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think, and you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir, and Alex and the team are amazing. But to me, it is less about Palantir and more about a huge amount of pent-up demand for next-generation defense tech.

3:09:07I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Anduril, no idea on the timing, size, all that kind of stuff. But the demand is going to be really high. And you see it in the private markets now. Just as a proxy, we used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies, either sort of at last round price or maybe at a discount to NAV, you know, to the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly the ones that could be or will be going public, are at premiums. And so I think the demand is really high. It will usher in a next generation of companies, and it will happen in AI compute.

3:09:38You'll see it in some of the big foundation labs. You'll see it in biotech. I think you're going to see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs. And it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation. And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense. This arc from Google having its employees protest, working on Project Maven, to seeing the rise of Anduril, to seeing Trump's lashing the existing bureaucratic primes. And then you see mega IPOs and these next-gen companies that didn't exist 10 years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes.

3:10:13I think it is going to be a bellwether for the industry. And it is great to be American. It is great to have American capital markets. capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well treated and it is here so super bullish yeah well said what uh what does an object need to what qualifies an object to get on your shelf here yeah you got to be part totem of my like nostalgic childhood you know i've got uh i don't know you know this is the the cyclone which is uh the scariest roller coaster oh yeah that's where i grew up in coney island brooklyn i will never forget my scrappy roots um it's a It's a wooden roller coaster, right?

3:10:50It is a wooden roller coaster. I'll tell you, it is the scariest roller coaster in the world, not by virtue of speed or descent, but it is so old, your ride may be the last. And the thrill of that is, like, you know, mind-blowing. I've got my first Game Boy, you know, if you had Palmer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rocking the new Mod Retro. I've got my first Nintendo Donkey Kong. Oh, nice. You know, flip. It's like when I was. So this is my childhood, you know. and it's the things that inspire me. We're all just big kids. From science fiction to science fact, it's all the little totems that have made me.

3:11:27I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for giving us the update. I'm sure you'll be back on many more times this year. It's going to be a massive year and I look forward to it. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Guys, congrats on what you built. Thank you for having me. Congrats to your whole team. Multiple times last year we got to hang out and it was really, really fun. So thank you so much. Awesome. I look forward to it. Peace. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. The last thing I want to talk about is this new Fujifilm camera. There's a very interesting feature that allows you to take photos from any period in time.

3:12:01So instead of baking in filters or lenses or anything that you could change, you hold it like an old Fujifilm camera, but there is a dial on the side that will let you select a decade. So you can say, I want the photo. I want this particular photo, the next photo that I take, I want it to look like it was taken in the 1930s. I want it to look like it was taken in the 1970s. I want it to look like it was taken in 2010. And it will emulate that directly on the device, bake that into the file that it gives you. Is it film only or does it actually give you a digital? I believe it's digital. Let's read from this.

3:12:43It says, At the Fujifilm New Product Experience event, I tried out the Generation Cheki Instamax Mini Evo Cinema that can shoot, oh, it can also shoot videos, a design that evokes 8mm film cameras. It comes equipped with a dial called the Jedi Dial that lets you enjoy effects inspired by the 1930s and 1920s. Of course, it offers the fun of Cheki, and it's a model that also lets you enjoy that analog-like operation feel. So I believe it's a video camera that will spit out an MP4 on a memory card that you can upload to whatever you want. Maybe we should get one around the studio. We should get one that's connected over HDMI into the stream and we can use that like we've used the VHS camera in the past that you may have seen here on TVPN.

3:13:33Anyway, anything else we Apparently Trump just ordered the U.S. government to buy 200 billion in mortgage bonds to drive mortgage rates down. Says he's bringing back the American dream. More debt for the American taxpayer. Interesting. More debt for America to bring down the rates for Americans. That could be good, I guess. Could work. Yeah. Well, you will see. There's also a new Hyundai Waymo. Wait. Yeah. And CES, it's estimated to cost$42 ,000, which, if true, is like a 10x decrease in the price of the Waymos. Political reality being a little bit spicier says this is the end of the cyber cab before it's even born.

3:14:19And the ability to adapt the Waymo sensor tech to almost any vehicle means Waymo can pick and choose vehicles based on grade, market fit, and other variables. So you could be in a rougher environment with a lot of potholes. You build a Waymo out of a G-Wagon, I suppose. I like it. If you're on clean streets, you go with something a little cheaper. And what's up with this? Will.i.am has a car. It's a three-wheel singular. Also, really quickly, I need to clarify this because we have to issue a correction. This is completely fake news because apparently there's a community note on this that says this is actually a different company's Hyundai Ioniq 5 robo-taxi.

3:14:59It's not Waymo's. So we will see where this all goes. Completely fake news. Anyway. But apparently Will.i.am has a new Micro Mobility EV. It's three wheels. This thing looks absolutely insane. Greg Brockman was fired up on it. Looks straight out of Tron. I like the look. And we should get Will.i.am on the show to talk about Trinity. That would be great. It's going to be, they're selling this on Kickstarter. That's wild. I wonder, yeah, sort of a motorcycle that doesn't require as much balance. I wonder where this would be the most popular. It certainly looks cool. It seems like a fun thing to go for a drive-in.

3:15:37I wonder if it's more experiential or supposed to be something that you would actually commute in. Driving through Los Angeles, and that feels a little treacherous to me. I don't know that I would actually choose to do that, but maybe it was a replacement for the golf cart. Yeah, very curious on price point as well, on where this will land. But we'll work on getting Will.i.am on the show to talk about it. Thank you for tuning in today. Super fun show. So many great guests. Billions of dollars in fundraisers. And I can't wait for tomorrow. I can't wait for tomorrow either. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m.

3:16:14Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to TBPN's newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Thank you, folks. Good night. Have a great afternoon.

3:16:34Thank you.