Ellison's Media Empire, Ken Burns Joins, Cursor Mic Drop | Matthew Belloni, Gokul Rajaram, Nik Seetharaman, Raj Rajamani, James Everingham, Dr. Felix Ejeckam

14:16Matthew Belloni:Not the non-IP infringing Batman?

14:19Nik Seetharaman:Literally describing Slotman.

14:21Matthew Belloni:Yeah, Slotman. You're going to dress up as the knockoff slot man. I don't think anyone's going to do that. I think Batman, Superman, Porky Pig.

14:28Nik Seetharaman:I think broadly media becomes like, every piece of media, the audience gets smaller and smaller. Everything becomes more and more personalized. I don't know. I think IP still has a fairly big role in that, but you want to be on the cutting edge. I just think this idea of shelling points

14:43Matthew Belloni:and things that, yes, I can have a video that's perfectly tailored to me, but I like talking about movies with Ken Burns. They're calling you Timu Batman. Yeah, Timu Batman over here. Get out of here, Timu Batman. I don't know. So maybe that's not your worldview, Tyler, but it's clearly the worldview of the Ellison family because they believe in this barbell effect. They believe in the value of IP.

15:08Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, another way to look at it is you could get this hyper-personalization, but it could be around existing IP. That's licensed. So you get to watch a personalized version of Batman content. That's targeted just for you individually, but the kids are still dressing up as Batman.

15:27Matthew Belloni:And we've already seen a glimpse of this with video games. There are video games that leverage existing intellectual property, but allow you to customize your character in some way. Put more skill points into intelligence and cast spells versus strength and use a sword, right? Like you can have your own experience if you play. Even like the Arkham Batman series, it's pretty linear, but you can play it more aggressively. you can play it more stealthily, and you can experience a Batman world that is more stealth focused or more fighting game focused, and that allows you to experience something that is unifying and we can discuss, okay, you played the same game as me, you understand the same character as me, but we had a different experience.

16:13Matthew Belloni:And I think AI accelerates that and makes it more valuable, not less. I don't know. I'm somewhat piled on this, but I respect your differing worldview that you will be enjoying Slotman. Enjoy. So by the loosest counts, this is the ninth or tenth time that Warner Brothers has changed hands since it became an independent movie studio in 1923. There's some of those acquisitions that have been like divestitures or reorganizations within in other companies, but just like a fascinating thing. And I do think that David Ellison is gonna go the long distance with this. I think with a little careful financial management and probably a few content licensing deals, like this might be the last one.

17:02Matthew Belloni:It might, he might be running this organization for his entire career. He's been working in Hollywood since he was a kid and has been very dedicated to this particular industry for a very long time. And so I don't think he's going anywhere. And so get ready for a whole bunch more content. Apparently, they're going to make like 30 movies a year, which is a dramatic step up. I think that they're going to try and actually ramp up the production.

17:26Nik Seetharaman:Are you sure that's not per day?

17:28Matthew Belloni:I hope so. With AI, it's totally possible. As long as Tyler over there is buying tickets to see Slotman number 17, Revenge of the Slotman, I think that there's money to be printed. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

17:48Nik Seetharaman:Slopman 2, Revenge of the Trough.

17:50Matthew Belloni:Revenge of the Trough is going to hit a ton of bricks for sure. Let me also tell you about Vibe.co where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

18:01Nik Seetharaman:And if you are inspired by the whole Netflix Warner Brothers saga, you should head over to the Goodwill in downtown Brooklyn. Tom from Vanity Fair says for$14.99, you can Zaslav Max this spring. They're selling a nice Port Authority puffer vest from Warner Brothers Discovery. That is a good pickup.

18:26Matthew Belloni:Zaslav is a deals guy, Hall of Famer for sure. he was involved in launching CNBC. He also helped create MSNBC, became the CEO of Discovery in 2006, and just a whole bunch of other crazy deals. Love to have him on the show once all this settles down. His full career is fascinating. He's been loved, he's been hated, he's been everything in between. Lots of people have opinions, but there's no way to be unhappy if you've been riding with him as a shareholder because he got every penny out of this thing.

19:02Nik Seetharaman:He certainly did. According to the Washington Post, there was a researcher skeptical of Havana syndrome. So he tested a secret weapon on himself. In 2024, a Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to human brains, built a device and tested it on himself. It didn't go well. So he built it, tested it.

19:25Matthew Belloni:Working in secrecy, working in strict secrecy, A government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy. And in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans in 2024, he tested on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of Favana syndrome. The unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world.

19:51Nik Seetharaman:We don't know how to make scientists like this anymore.

19:54Matthew Belloni:This is extremely bullish for the tinfoil hat. industry because I believe that the actual underlying basis for the idea of a tinfoil hat, of course, we use it somewhat sarcastically here when we're discussing hypothetical conspiracy theories, but the tinfoil hat is supposed to eliminate microwave radiation and various EMF pulses. And so if you're worried about getting Havana syndrome, maybe pick up an EMF proof tinfoil hat or maybe just some sort of other, there's probably a better way than just tinfoil around a ball cap but startup idea startup idea build a real tinfoil hat that actually protects you from Havana syndrome that's the real American

20:37Nik Seetharaman:dynamism startup Thomas Maxwell says we have to stop this I'm not eating a quote Jacob eat a Jacob I haven't seen this one before it's 20 grams of grass-fed protein no seed oils nothing artificial sweetened with organic honey this definitely resonated. 24 ,000 people agree. But I think there's... Tyler, you should do a taste test of all the different protein bars. All the bars named after guys. Just regular dudes. David Barr, the Jacob Barr, there's probably more. You gotta get on it.

21:14Matthew Belloni:There are a lot of these. The... Yeah, the name. I mean, Lucy named after a person. It was a whole trend for a while.

21:23Nik Seetharaman:It was. Cursor would like a word This was staggering This was great They came out yesterday They had heard The FUD on the timeline Around Cursor They came out yesterday And Bloomberg got some of their data Their annual revenue topped 2 billion In February According to a source A figure that underscores the fast growth Of the coding assistant uh sasha summed it up well he said cursor sees the timeline turning against them quietly give bloomberg a two billion ar press release no post from the company where founders haters squashed true comms master class and michael truel uh actually did come out this morning and says we believe cursor discovered a novel solution to problem six of the first proof challenge a set of math research problems that approximate the work of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley.

22:23Nik Seetharaman:Cursor solution yields stronger results than the official human-written solution. Notably, we used the same harness that we built a browser from scratch a few weeks ago. It ran fully autonomously without nudging or hints for four days. This suggests that our technique for scaling agent coordination might generalize beyond coding. So very, very cool to see the progress from them. and clearly doing something right in the enterprise, right? Just because everything that you see on the timeline is so many enthusiasts.

22:58Matthew Belloni:One of my buddies is Kyle Russell. I worked with him like a decade ago. He's at a company called Valen, and he posted – so Valen, they make SaaS for mortgage services. He says it's very boring, but we're basically getting them all to flip from legacy software and a rate limited by biz ops people being able to onboard them. So we're going to try instead to think about it in terms of what tokens do we need to extract from the org in order to deploy fast. So he's in this like AI deployment lead role. And he went, I think, pretty viral saying this morning, one person of his team said, hey, can you unsub me from cursor?

23:38Matthew Belloni:And somebody says, done. And then a bunch of people said, same, same. Like, I don't need it. I'm like, like I'm, I'm happy with another program. And Kyle said, today we announced we're removing 90 cursor seats, uh, because they haven't had any use in two weeks. And it is like, it's flipped from like the, the most cutting edge thing to, uh, like it's clearly very sticky because you see the, you see the ARR numbers that, uh, this like ultra frontier, coolest, hottest thing, is getting some like FUD. And then Sasha broke this down where he was like, the timeline's turning against them. So you have to provide some evidence that like you're not cooked because like the timeline is very much like, oh, well, like you're not the hottest thing anymore.

24:20You're not the coolest little thing

24:22Matthew Belloni:for like the people that are on the most frontier. And so no, you know, just squashing the haters with a 2 billion ARR number, which is fantastic.

24:30Nik Seetharaman:Up from 1 billion in Q4, which is just insane.

24:34Matthew Belloni:Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I think like there's just something about the, it goes back to diffusion. We were, I was debating this with Tyler last night about, you know, how much of, how much of AI adoption is just actually getting the forward deployed engineer and actually getting people to change their workflows onboarding. Like there are, there are certain people that will just bounce from the most frontier thing. Oh, this model is better. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude, back and forth. But for a lot of companies, they need a little bit more handholding. And so there's a whole massive chunk of the economy that can be transformed by developing great products and then actually getting them in the hands of businesses.

25:13Nik Seetharaman:R4Rock is hearing cursor maybe in the midst of a new raise at$50 billion. That's crazy. Which would be a meaningful markup from 30 where they were sitting again in Q4.

25:26Matthew Belloni:Yeah. What does Didi say? Everyone in the tech X bubble thinks they are wholesale ditching cursor, but enterprise diffusion is glacial. Most of the world just got a hold of it. It's a good point. It's a very good point. Well, in some good news, Mark Zuckerberg has purchased a mansion in Miami for$170 million. This was such big news that we had to pull it forward from the mansion section on Friday to talk about today. But there is a little bit of a black pill here. We can go into it. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

26:10Matthew Belloni:And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

26:18Nik Seetharaman:So, of course, Mark got this because of California's wealth tax, which if it goes through, he would still be subject to at least a one-time payment, payment, which would get litigated, of course. What we need now is a picture of him in his backyard recreating the Ben Affleck smoking meme. Wait, why? Because there's this new national wealth tax that Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are pushing. So he's like, he just moved. He just got this new place across the country, probably overpaid to a degree. People are just going to be like,

26:53Matthew Belloni:actually, I live in international waters full-time. I don't live in America. I don't live in any country, actually. I live in space. I live on the International Space Station or something. Very, very tricky. $170 million sounds staggering. Buy a 5 % tax on Mark Zuckerberg's wealth over$11 billion. That should have been his shopping budget. Because in dude math, if you save money, you just have a free license to spend it. So you're like, by moving to Florida, I'm effectively saving myself$11 billion. I can spend that, right? Isn't that how that works? Exactly. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have paid$170 million for an under-construction mansion on Miami sought-after Indian Creek Island.

27:36Matthew Belloni:The deal closed Monday. The purchase set a record in one of the country's most expensive to date. The current U.S. record is held by billionaire Ken Griffin. He spent$238 million for an apartment. That is a crazy amount of money for an apartment, but I guess it's in a good building.

27:54Nik Seetharaman:It's a lot of apartments.

27:55Matthew Belloni:The Florida record was set last year when a waterfront compound in Naples traded for$225 million. I feel like this isn't counting Ken Griffin's compound that he's building because he's building. Yeah, because it's multiple properties. He's bought multiple properties.

28:08Nik Seetharaman:Okay, here's where it gets crazy. Tell me. The sellers are Dr. Aaron Rollins, a cosmetic surgeon to the star, and his wife, real estate agent, Maureen Rollins. The Rollinses paid more than$30 million for the roughly two-acre site in 2020.

28:21Matthew Belloni:Wow. Flipping.

28:23Nik Seetharaman:Not bad. Real estate agent don't want to go up against them.

28:27Matthew Belloni:They know what they're doing.

28:28Nik Seetharaman:Plans called for a nine-bedroom home measuring about 30 ,000 square feet with a dock and a swimming pool. Amenities were to include gym, hair salon, and massage room, as well as a 1 ,500-gallon aquarium and library with a secret passageway.

28:40Matthew Belloni:Zuck does need a hair salon in his house because he's always changing his hairstyle. Sometimes he's got the Caesar going. Sometimes he's got the Fro going.

28:47Nik Seetharaman:He's got the Gen Z.

28:48Matthew Belloni:This is elite for him. Who knows what will go next? Maybe he'll have long-flowing locks like Fabio. That would be the good next move for him, I think. How many gallons is the aquarium? 1 ,500. Is that a lot? It doesn't seem like that much. What can you put in there? Can you put a shark in there? No way. Some fish? No way. How big is Keith's? Keith's aquarium is massive in Miami. You can scuba dive in it to clean it up. Anyway, congratulations to the Zuckerbergs on their new property. It looks beautiful. And without further ado, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike, your business's AI.

29:26Matthew Belloni:Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we have Matthew Bellini from Puck. How are you doing?

29:33Raj Rajamani:What's going on? Doing great. Thanks for having me.

29:35Matthew Belloni:Thanks for hopping on.

29:36Nik Seetharaman:Great to meet you.

29:37Matthew Belloni:I enjoyed your podcast with Dylan earlier today, and I wanted to dig further into the actual merger. I mean, it seems like we're sort of done now. But how has the process of covering this been for you? What were the key turning points? What was most exciting for you?

29:58Raj Rajamani:Well, I'm learning a lot. Certainly didn't know what a ticking fee was until covering this deal. Learning a lot about the debt market. Learning a lot about the contours of raising money in the Middle East. All sorts of fun things. Um, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's been a wild moment in Hollywood for the past five years, basically. It's, it's a time of tremendous change, tremendous disruption. A lot of people are really scared and don't know what's going to happen. So it's, I mean, it's been, it's been interesting for sure.

30:35Matthew Belloni:Is that, uh, is that just a combination of like COVID plus streaming plus consolidation plus AI? Or is there like one story that sticks out to you?

30:47Raj Rajamani:You can throw in a pretty crippling labor strike in the middle of that. And it's been one thing after another. About five years ago, the end of the peak TV era, the Netflix correction, where the market decided that Netflix had to make money, streaming subscribers was not the end-all, be-all, that created an absolute correction and pretty much, I would call it a content recession within Hollywood. And that's trickled down throughout the industry. Fewer jobs, fewer productions. You add that in with the flight of productions overseas, everything from the strike that happened in 2023, which gave these companies an excuse to really reevaluate the level of production, throw in the LA fires that disrupted so many different people.

31:39Raj Rajamani:And it's, you know, you guys are in LA. It's, it's, it's a really interesting and for many people, scary time.

31:46Matthew Belloni:Yeah. Explain the overseas thing, because I'm familiar with Atlanta and I believe Toronto, but are productions really moving to other continents now? Oh yeah.

31:58Raj Rajamani:I mean, the UK has been extremely aggressive. They have for many productions, a 40 % incentive, and they're willing to give you incentives on what's called above-the-line costs. Those are the actor, director, writer. Those are the main talents in the film. That is a huge incentive because it essentially subsidizes you for Tom Cruise's salary, Ryan Gosling's salary. And even in some of the more aggressive U.S. states, you won't get that in California. So it's a game changer. When they are doing the line, I just reported on this movie today, Project Hail Mary, an Amazon movie that's coming out in two weeks.

32:39Raj Rajamani:The gross budget for that movie is$248 million. The actual net budget is a little under$200.

32:47Matthew Belloni:Okay.

32:48Raj Rajamani:So you're saving 25 % by shooting this movie overseas. Interesting.

32:53Matthew Belloni:and uh and do those come as like tax credits up front or is it more like a tax deduction on profits where if the if the movie costs 250 to make and it makes 500 then i'm saving 25 percent or do i just get the money basically up front it's a rebate i'm actually not sure i think it

33:12Raj Rajamani:depends on when you actually receive it sure but it's a rebate for the qualified spend in the jurisdiction that is giving the incentive. So if you are going to get an incentive from the UK, you actually have to have the work done in the UK. And that means hiring local crews. It means

33:28Matthew Belloni:using a soundstage in the UK and having the production actually shoot there.

33:34Raj Rajamani:And you can have films with multiple incentives from multiple jurisdictions for multiple aspects of the production, everything from the post-production to visual effects, those that can be subject to incentives for doing the work in a particular jurisdiction.

33:52Matthew Belloni:Really quickly, I think we have the wrong mic selected. Would you mind adjusting it? Because I think we're on your laptop mic, and I'd love to get that Shure SM7B working, because I know it has higher audio quality if you can switch it. And while you look at that, I will tell the audience about 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.

34:18Nik Seetharaman:How are we doing? There. Is that better?

34:22Matthew Belloni:No. No? Almost better. It's okay. How about...

34:31Raj Rajamani:Let's see. Same as...

34:34Matthew Belloni:Any luck?

34:35Raj Rajamani:How about this? Is this better? Oh, that's much better. There we go. Thank you. There we go. I did a good job. Wow, you have sound effects. I'm very jealous. Yes, yes, yes. I wish I had an air horn sometimes.

34:45Matthew Belloni:Some of these are not sound effects on a soundboard. Some of these are real folks in the studio clapping with their hands. We have both.

34:52Raj Rajamani:I can't be trusted with an air horn.

34:54Matthew Belloni:Yeah, yeah, we had a lot of fun. So talk about the reaction. I know that we talked to Ashley Vance, who's a documentary filmmaker, and he was voicing a little bit of worry that if Netflix acquired Warner Brothers Discovery, that there would be one less buyer. and is this any better for the average filmmaker who wants to go out and get the best price for their product, for the film that they've been working on? Are we still telling the same consolidation narrative or is this somehow structurally a little bit different?

35:24Raj Rajamani:It depends who you talk to, but I would argue that this is actually worse for creatives because this is the actual smushing together of two legacy studios. When you talked about Netflix buying Warner Brothers, Netflix is not in the theatrical movie distribution business currently. They do not do movie theaters. So there was a certain class of movie that was going to remain a Warner Brothers movie. Now, Netflix makes a lot of movies on its own, but those are often smaller. They don't have as much ambition as the big theatrical movies. They do some of those too. But Netflix was at least positioning it as we are going to leave Warner Brothers alone.

36:06Raj Rajamani:They also were not in the production business in television for other buyers. Everything that Netflix made was for Netflix, whereas Warner Brothers makes shows for its own platform, HBO Max, but also for Apple and for Netflix and for many other different platforms. So they claim that that would be at least another opportunity for buyers. Here, with Paramount buying Warner Brothers, this is going to be the combination of two television studios, the combination of two film studios. And ultimately, down the line, that is going to mean fewer jobs. Now, if you talk to the Paramount people, they say they are committed to making 15 movies, four theaters for each Warner Brothers and Paramount.

36:49Raj Rajamani:That's 30 movies a year, which would be an escalation for both of those companies. So they're saying they're going to be more. But the history of the movie business has shown that when two studios merge, ultimately the output is reduced and that trickles down to creators.

37:05Matthew Belloni:What do you think about Netflix's future theatrical plans? Ted Sarandos was talking about the future of movie theaters, painting a more optimistic vision. Do you think any of that sticks?

37:19Nik Seetharaman:They got$2.8 billion burning a hole in the bucket.

37:21Matthew Belloni:Yeah, I mean.

37:23Raj Rajamani:I don't think Ted is going to use that$2.8 billion to all of a sudden make movies for theaters. Yeah. I just don't think so. I think it's going to be a continuation of their current model, which in many ways is designed to put the theaters out of business. It's designed to give you first run A-list filmmaker, A-list star movies at home. Even 10 years ago, a movie like The Rip with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. That would have had a nice, robust theatrical run before hitting home video. Not true with Netflix. Now, what Ted is saying is that they have had some constructive stunt experiences with theaters lately.

38:01Raj Rajamani:They put K-pop Demon Hunters in theaters. They've done a couple of other things. They did Stranger Things in theaters. And I could see Netflix doing more of that, using theaters essentially as a marketing device for Netflix. but I don't see Ted all of a sudden saying, oh, through this process of looking at Warner Brothers, we have determined that the theatrical model is a good one and we're going to all of a sudden give our movies a 45-day theatrical window. Don't think that's happening.

38:28Matthew Belloni:And do you think, how much of that do you think is Netflix just, well, if we have a crown jewel asset, we want people to go subscribe to Netflix and see it there first versus a lot of times they don't know what's actually going to work and the beauty of the Netflix model is they can stuff something like K-pop Demon Hunters on there. It can effectively go viral in their algorithm and they don't need to do the billboard campaign, the theatrical rollout and take all that risk. So focusing more on like downstream, we got something that's already working, let's make a musical sing-along version or a promotional version for theater.

39:04Raj Rajamani:That is absolutely the benefit. And Sarandos has said multiple times that the best marketing platform for Netflix content is Netflix. Now, I recently had the head of Sony Pictures on The Town, and he, I think, correctly said, you do not make stars on Netflix. You do not make franchises that last for decades on Netflix. And the way you do that is in movie theaters with a big, robust marketing campaign that tells the world about the product so that even if you don't see the movie, you're at least aware of it. So that when a sequel comes out in four years, maybe you see that one. But if a sequel to a Netflix movie comes out, nobody except the people on Netflix know about it.

39:49Matthew Belloni:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw Ryan Gosling on the Hail Mary billboard and I was like, oh, like we should go see that. And somebody was like, well, what is it? And I was like, it's a Ryan Gosling movie. Right.

40:00Raj Rajamani:And that's a perfect example. I mean, Amazon had the choice whether to make movies just for Prime Video or to do theaters. They are going big on theaters this year with a full slate of theatrical releases. And they and many others in town believe that the best way to create movie franchises and to create demand is to first put the movie in theater and then debut it on the service.

40:25Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, it's interesting. It reminds me of like an apparel brand doing pop-ups specifically, not as like a real revenue driver, but to just deepen relationship with their fans. Now, don't get me wrong.

40:38Raj Rajamani:These traditional studios, they need these movies to make money in theaters. That's their whole business. And the reason you are spending 50 to 100 million dollars on a marketing campaign globally is to generate profitability in theaters. and then you get the waterfall, we call it in Hollywood, the waterfall of revenue that first you go to premium video on demand, then you go to subscription video, then you go to TV, then you go to free TV, then all of a sudden you're syndicating the content all around the world and it's in your library forever. The reason why Warner Brothers is going for$111 billion is not because they had a nice run in theaters last year or because HBO has had some hits lately.

41:16Raj Rajamani:It's because they have a 100-year-old library of films that is incredibly valuable to exploit across all platforms. And because HBO has an amazing brand.

41:28Matthew Belloni:Yeah. So talk about content licensing at the new entity, the combined entity. It feels like with$79 billion of debt, cash flow is going to be important in the short term. What's the probability that we're watching Sopranos on Netflix or watching something from the catalog on Netflix in the next couple of years?

41:46Raj Rajamani:It's funny because Sopranos has been the one title that Netflix has not gotten. And HBO has kept that. Not the one, but the one big one that everyone's waiting for. And the debt issue is not new. The Warner Brothers Discovery transaction, putting those two companies together, that created 50-something billion dollars in debt. And they needed to make money fast. And the past three years have largely been about servicing that debt and bringing it down. So you've seen tons of Warner Brothers shows and movies on Netflix. And they do it because they have to. I mean, at one point last year, I looked on the Netflix top 10 and six, I believe, of the 10 movies in the top 10 were Warner Brothers titles.

42:30Raj Rajamani:And they do it because they need the money. I mean, we know Sony Pictures just did a re-up of their pay one deal. We call it pay one because it's the first pay platform for subscription viewing of these movies. They got$7 billion out of Netflix over a long period and globally. But that is for the first run pay one window for Sony Pictures movies to go to Netflix. Incredibly lucrative. That's what Netflix was buying when they wanted to buy Warner Brothers.

43:01Matthew Belloni:So Sony and Netflix already have this relationship. Is there any chance that Sarandos goes shopping with his$2.8 billion bonus and all the cash flow that he has? Has he sort of kicked the tires on one big deal? Is Sony Pictures in play at any point in time?

43:17Raj Rajamani:The Sony Corporation in Japan has said that they are not interested in selling Sony Pictures. It would seem to be the obvious choice because Sony is the one Hollywood studio, the traditional studio, that does not have a general interest streaming platform. They chose not to enter the streaming wars, and that would make it an attractive buy for Netflix because Netflix doesn't need a global streaming service. They already have one. They could pick off the Spider-Man franchise. They could pick off all the production and distribution capabilities that Sony has for theaters. Would seem to make sense for Netflix, but there has been no indication that Japan is willing to sell.

43:57Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. Yeah. Is any part of the Ellison's strategy, does AI kind of factor in at all? I've had this kind of like a loose theory that this IP, Warner Brothers IP could potentially be more valuable as AI gets better because you can create so many different variations on top of that IP. It's also unique. It's not replicable. That's it. That's it. It's like you have a monopoly on the IP. And if it becomes substantially less expensive to create new film and television, you know, TV shows, movies, etc. Maybe the IP is more valuable. But what's your take?

44:41Raj Rajamani:Yeah, I have always thought that one of the reasons why Netflix wanted Warners was because they saw what's going on with YouTube and the volume of content that YouTube is soon going to be able to host and eventually create themselves. and Netflix is saying themselves, okay, so if anything is possible in streaming and with AI, you can create AI generated shows, music, content, movie stars, whatever, what are we doing? What do we have that is defensible here? And they're looking at Warner's and they're saying, okay, we don't have a Batman. We don't have Harry Potter. We don't have this hundred year old library of known quantities that cannot be replicated by AI, at least not yet.

45:30Raj Rajamani:So we need that. And Netflix has had a hard time creating franchises. If you can count on one hand, the Netflix franchises, the things that they own that are meaningful in the world, Stranger Things, they own. Wednesday, they don't own. Amazon actually owns the Addams family because they bought MGM. There are not that many franchises. You guys probably don't even know what they are.

45:54Matthew Belloni:Yeah. Yeah.

45:56Raj Rajamani:Yeah.

45:56Matthew Belloni:Yeah. It's fascinating. Can you take us on a tour of who is actually involved financially in this deal? You mentioned that it was sort of like a whirlwind tour in the Middle East, a lot of different funds coming in. I imagine that it's some overlap with the tech investors that we typically talk about in this show, but Apollo is in this. Yeah.

46:16Raj Rajamani:I believe Blackstone is. I'm not 100%. There are three big PE firms that are providing a lot of the debt financing here. And then there's an interesting question of whether the Middle East money that was initially floated as being part of this deal is still in there. There was a Saudi fund. There were Qataris. There was one other fund. And they were not in the press release. So I actually need to ask Jerry Cardinale of Redbird whether they are still in this deal because Redbird has been kind of the big financial backer and consultant on raising this bid together. And obviously, Larry is backstopping the whole thing.

47:01Raj Rajamani:We would not be having this conversation about a company with a$15 billion market cap, which is Paramount Skydance, acquiring a company like Warner Discovery in a$111 billion deal, if not for the backstopping of Larry Ellison himself. And that was the key factor. He didn't want to personally backstop it. And then once he did, the levers started moving. Yeah.

47:26Matthew Belloni:What is Larry Ellison's history with investments in Hollywood? I know it's not just David that's been involved. He's invested before. Obviously, David has an almost multi-decade career at this point. What's been Larry's strategy? What can we learn from his past adventures in Hollywood?

47:46Raj Rajamani:It's a good question because people think this is out of nowhere. And it's all of a sudden Larry Ellison deciding to dip his toe into Hollywood. Although if you can call over$100 billion dipping your toe. It's a big toe.

47:58Matthew Belloni:He's dipping the big toe.

48:00Raj Rajamani:Right. But Megan Ellison, David's sister, she had a very artistically successful production company called Annapurna, which she still has. But there was a period in the 2010s when she was the dominant producer of so-called arthouse and independently financed, auteur-driven movies. And she actually got two Oscar nominations in the same year for herself for Best Picture when she had, I believe it was her and The Master in the same year. And she's done, I mean, she's done a ton of movies with big time, auteur driven filmmakers. And then the wheels came off. She just lost too much money. And Larry basically had an intervention with her and said, the money's not coming in anymore.

48:50Raj Rajamani:You're done. I'm not doing this anymore. And he had his people step in. They pulled way back. They downscaled the company. And Annapurna still exists. They had a big Sundance movie this year directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Seth Rogen. But they're not doing a whole lot. So if we learn from this, it's that Larry is happy to indulge his children, but there is a limit on what he's willing to do. And she hit that limit. We'll see what happens with David. Yeah.

49:23Matthew Belloni:Sorry, you can go. I'm curious if, I mean, it sounds like Annapurna had a very different just financial underwriting strategy in the sense that Warner Brothers is very much like this basket of assets that are so proven. Yes, it's high leverage. Yes, it's expensive, but it's this mortgage on land that if you pay the bills on time, you will get the value of because there's this catalog value that you can license, you can continue to merchandise these assets. So it feels like a different financial strategy.

49:59Raj Rajamani:Absolutely. I mean, there are not a lot of legacy studios with 100-year-old libraries sitting around. It is a pretty unique asset, whereas Annapurna was creating its library from the ground up, which is a much more difficult business. The corners of Hollywood are littered with the corpses of companies that try to take on the studios and do this on their own. Because you have to have that 100-year-old asset to float you when you have bombs. Because this is a portfolio business in the sense that if you release 20 movies, 10 of them are probably not going to make money if you're lucky. And you got to make a lot of money on the ones that do make money, and those will make money forever.

50:44Matthew Belloni:Can you bridge that to A24? We're more familiar with that because there's some tech investors involved. I personally like a lot of the movies, but what is the strategy of A24? How do they fit into the modern Hollywood landscape?

50:58Raj Rajamani:A24 has been incredibly successful on the low-budget model. They are one of the few film studios that have created a brand for themselves. I would argue that the A24 brand is more meaningful to moviegoers than the Warner Brothers brand. I mean, everybody knows what Warner Brothers is, but what does Warner Brothers stand for? What is that brand? You don't really know. And you never had to know because that was just the, it wasn't a direct-to-consumer business. They put their movies on other branded platforms, whether they are theaters or whether they were television or now streaming on HBO Max.

51:40Raj Rajamani:But A24 has created a brand. They sell, you know, branded candles and hats and things that are meaningful to their fans. But they succeeded. They succeeded on betting small on specific auteur filmmakers. And they had a nice run. They also raised a bunch of money, as you mentioned. And they have recapitalized a couple times now. And because they got what I believe it was a$3.5 billion valuation a couple of years ago, they have essentially now been forced to go bigger. And they are releasing movies. Marty Supreme cost$70 million. The Smashing Machine with The Rock, that also cost a lot more than their typical A24 movie.

52:28Raj Rajamani:And they're still buying the small movies at festivals and releasing smaller movies. But they now have more of a portfolio of bigger budgeted movies. And the jury's out on whether that model is going to be successful for them. Because, again, there's many companies that have had small level success in Hollywood. And when they try to scale up and compete more directly with the traditional studios, they've faltered. And we'll see if A24 is able to pull it off. They got really smart people there. So I would hope so.

52:59Nik Seetharaman:What is actually what is Hollywood actually doing with AI today? Not like what do they want to do? Not what are Silicon Valley companies pitching them on doing? But how is it actually being used today?

53:14Raj Rajamani:There's two answers to that question, because there's one in the general. What is AI doing for all businesses? And that is, you know, streamlining processes and, you know, creating faster workflows. That's all the boring aspect. What you're probably asking about is how is Hollywood using AI to create content? Instead of in place of a camera.

53:36Nik Seetharaman:Right, exactly.

53:37Raj Rajamani:And there it has been much more limited. The toe is in the water and each of these companies has an initiative to incorporate more AI specifically and more aggressively in the animation divisions. The goal is to bring down the cost of animated movies significantly. And you do that by using AI to automate a lot of different functions. And they're being coy about exactly how, but I have heard like the storyboarding process and the physical production of the animated images. Once the artists have done their work to create the character design and the movements they want, AI can be used to essentially effectuate a shot.

54:21Raj Rajamani:And you're seeing more and more of that. Where they're treading a little bit more cautiously is where the traditional labor unions are involved, where actors and directors and writers are involved. You're not seeing studios greenlighting scripts that are written by AI. You're just not. Screenwriters are using AI as a tool.

54:44Nik Seetharaman:That they know of. That they know of, sure.

54:46Raj Rajamani:But screenwriters are using AI as a tool, and they will freely admit that, much like they were very happy to use Google when it first came about. And they didn't have to have a researcher that would go to a library and tell them what the interior of the FBI looked like. They don't have to do that anymore. And with AI, they can create scenarios or create drafts or create things that will help them. And all that the guilds want is for their members to get paid. So the studios are not allowed to buy a script or greenlight a script without paying a human writer. And that's a big deal. It's the same for actors.

55:25Raj Rajamani:You can use AI to accentuate or to do a quick reshoot shot, but you have to pay the people involved. And we're headed into a new labor negotiation where the studios will try to chip away at that. And the guilds are going to try to be more aggressive and make sure that their members are getting paid for any use of AI here.

55:46Nik Seetharaman:uh where do you think a uh what kind of scenes do you think ai will end up coming for first is it the the animation is it the stunt well animation but then what what about stuntmen i feel like

55:59Matthew Belloni:there's a there there's a transformers level cgi where it's so expensive yeah visual effects

56:06Nik Seetharaman:visual effects do you think that the dynamic between the studios and the guilds could allow kind of like an entirely alternate kind of like industry to form that that is sort of broken away from from traditional Hollywood norms like you know you could imagine a group of people and you know some suburb of LA that that aren't a part of the guilds that have never never engaged with the unions in any capacity just decide we're going to start making movies ourselves and kind of just ignore the legacy process.

56:41Raj Rajamani:I think that's already happening, right? I mean, you see it, but the difference is, I mean, we all went nuts over that, that seed dance video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting. But that's because it was Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. If it was two dudes fighting, nobody would care. If it was two AI generated dudes that did not look like Brad Pitt and Tom cruise and that's the power stock footage the hollywood people have yeah yeah it's i mean there's going to be i think what's going to happen is there is going to be a class system of ai generated content that will live and have an audience and generate revenue at scale but it will be perceived as lesser than the more professional and union supported hollywood style work and i could be wrong about that.

57:31Raj Rajamani:It could just bowl over everything, but there's still value in Ryan Gosling's face. And for now the unions and the Hollywood studios have been able to protect that from AI. Yeah.

57:44Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. You can imagine, you know, the, the luxury houses versus fast fashion, like a similar dynamic playing out where like, yeah, you can get a jacket that like functions in the same way as something that Gucci made. Maybe it's the same even material, but it costs less and it has obviously much less prestige.

58:03Raj Rajamani:And I think that there will be a middle ground to where movies, the cost of movies are is brought down because of advances in AI where things can be done without outsourcing something to five artists to work on at a visual effects company for two months. It could be done in-house for less money with an AI tool. I think that's that that's already happening. And there are much lesser guild protections for that aspect of the business.

58:35Matthew Belloni:Post the OpenAI Disney deal, I was expecting to see another deal of the similar shape happen. It hasn't happened yet. Are you hearing rumors? Do you think other studios with big intellectual property and character libraries will take a similar approach?

58:54Raj Rajamani:I think that there are a lot of talks going on.

58:58Matthew Belloni:Yeah.

58:58Raj Rajamani:And they're trying to figure it out. Disney was in an interesting spot there because that deal with OpenAI was as much about putting pressure on Google to come to the table and to not go rogue as Google has been doing. Sure. As it was to do OpenAI. Got it. Also, there was a pre-existing relationship there. Bob Iger, the CEO, he worked for Thrive, which is a big investor in OpenAI. And Disney is, you know, if you're going to go after one company, that's the one to go after because they have the best characters. And if you know about that deal, that deal does not include any voices or any likenesses of real people.

59:38Raj Rajamani:Even the Luke Skywalker is the animated Luke Skywalker. So it's a lot less compelling for people to play around with. If you're playing around with Lightning McQueen or Yoda and they don't sound like Lightning McQueen or Yoda, it's a lot less compelling than if they did.

59:54Matthew Belloni:Interesting. Yeah, that'll be interesting to see how they roll that out. Maybe that happens down the road. Jordy, anything else? Yeah, this was great. Thank you so much for taking the time.

1:00:03Nik Seetharaman:Great to finally meet.

1:00:03Matthew Belloni:Great to finally meet. Come on anytime. Happy to do a fantastic report.

1:00:06Nik Seetharaman:And come in in person next time. Yeah, we'd love to have you here. Anytime.

1:00:09Matthew Belloni:We'll talk to you soon.

1:00:10Raj Rajamani:You can listen on the town or you can read me at Puck.

1:00:13Matthew Belloni:Yes.

1:00:14Raj Rajamani:Thanks, sir. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

1:00:16Matthew Belloni:We will talk to you soon. One more airlock. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? to raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid Power is the app you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And Chris and Kyle has a post here. Credit where credit is due. China really nailed the Bonneville in aesthetic with their Antarctic research base. Quinling? Chinling?

1:00:44Nik Seetharaman:Okay, these are just renders, though, correct? These are renders.

1:00:47Matthew Belloni:This is what they're thinking about building?

1:00:49Nik Seetharaman:Because if it was real, I'd be telling Tyler. to get a boat immediately. Tyler was in Arizona over the weekend and sent us a very cool picture of him out at TSMC. Yeah, give us a review.

1:01:02Matthew Belloni:Did you feel the power? Did it feel like visiting Arrakis?

1:01:05Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, it was like 91 degrees, extremely hot. It was massive, massive facility. They're still building. There were two kind of main sections. I couldn't actually tell what parts they were. There were signs. There were a bunch of fabs. I think I took a picture next to like Fab 21 or something. Wow. But there's like, there's so much building going on. And it's just like, it's basically north of Phoenix.

1:01:29Matthew Belloni:Yeah.

1:01:29Nik Seetharaman:And so there's like 10 mile radius where it's just like basically just empty land. They're flattening the desert. Whoa. But yeah, very, very cool. Gift shop? Really fun to walk.

1:01:39Matthew Belloni:Any gift shop?

1:01:41Nik Seetharaman:No, they didn't let us in. There's like a ton of security around. At every gate, I wanted to like go in and like take a tour or something.

1:01:47Matthew Belloni:I want to get a wafer that didn't make it through quality control and get some of the chip CEOs to sign those. I think a Lisa Su signed TSMC wafer would be amazing or Morris Chang signed wafer. That would go pretty hard. I would love that. Love it. Moving on. The what is it? The billionaire tax has gone national. has gone national. Bernie Sanders is proposing bringing it to the United States broadly at the federal level. Bad news for everyone who migrated to Miami or Florida, because it is going to follow you wherever you go. Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are proposing a national wealth tax on billionaires going even further than California.

1:02:34Matthew Belloni:They want 5 % unrealized wealth tax to be annual.

1:02:38Nik Seetharaman:Every year.

1:02:39Matthew Belloni:Every year. That would be serious.

1:02:41Nik Seetharaman:And I've seen some people running the numbers on like, oh, if this tax had been in place since 1999, Jeff Bezos would still be worth$61 billion and he could still afford his$500 million mega yacht, just like not actually like processing all the negative externalities of something like this. So, yeah, I just I just I would be like a like a P.E.

1:03:06Matthew Belloni:backed shell pretty quickly because you lose control. Right.

1:03:09Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, that or Amazon never even gets the level of investment that it got because of capital flight. I would be so much more sympathetic to Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders on this if they had like, here's five case studies where wealth taxes worked and like they can't come up with a single one. And so it just feels like...

1:03:32Matthew Belloni:50 % over 10 years. That is a lot. But the implementation of this tax would ultimately create wealth flights, says Chris Withens. The wealthy are wealthy because they fight to preserve their wealth. So in year one, the base is already decimated. Then every single year afterwards, the remaining billionaires leave or hide their assets. Meanwhile, the markets are all declining all this time because they see that America has been infiltrated by wealth-destroying communists. Chris is not a fan.

1:03:59Nik Seetharaman:uh bernie david friedberg has a bunch of kind of good good content around this talking about how uh there's something like eight trillion of uh billionaire wealth and 160 to 170 middle class wealth so that is the real prize pool yeah and uh and again hopefully hopefully our lawmakers and uh voters process how ridiculous this is find another way and reject it

1:04:29Matthew Belloni:and write the balance sheet of the U.S. government. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality data. Higher quality. Sorry.

1:04:48Nik Seetharaman:Clouseau Investment says, the market is only down 0.08 % year to date. Things must be really calm, right? This is actually crazy.

1:04:56Matthew Belloni:If you asked me where the market was and I hadn't looked, what is this from? What movie is this? Is this AI or something? This is a crazy scene. I really like this. This is a good meme template. I haven't used this before. Just RPGs flying around.

1:05:13Nik Seetharaman:All out war.

1:05:13Matthew Belloni:It is all out war. I mean, a lot of stocks are down like 50%. Other stuff's way up. Things are all over the place. And it has been absolute turmoil. A lot of red days in our favorite companies. Is it from Maze Runner? Oh, maybe Maze Runner. I don't know. Okay. GoPro is one of the stocks that is particularly far down. We did a deep dive on GoPro very early in the show's history. They are now at a$150 million market cap. Josh Wolfe has a quote here. GoPro's global market share of action cameras dropped to 18 % as of September 2025, compared with 84 % in 2022, according to Beijing-based consultancy Meritigo Services.

1:05:58Matthew Belloni:At the same time, DJI share rose to 66 % and Insta360 is up at 13%. It doesn't even count Meta Ray-Bans.

1:06:06Nik Seetharaman:Just out-executed on the product side. But cell phones are probably even a bigger factor here, kind of capping the overall TAM. Cell phones, at some point, just got really durable and the video quality got really good. I remember back in the day, skiing or snowboarding, I was a little bit more hesitant to be like, I'm going to take my iPhone out and use it while skiing. And just because it wasn't like waterproof and then they got waterproof, they got really durable. And most people aren't good enough at what they do to actually warrant needing like, you know, effectively bulletproof device.

1:06:44Matthew Belloni:The dust collection problem is very real with action cameras. you buy it thinking you're going to be doing, you're going to be shredding, going downhill, you're going to be surfing, and then you go for a hike once, the video's kind of underwhelming, and then it collects dust. Skiing this weekend, a friend of mine, I didn't see any GoPros among my friend group. One friend of mine was wearing the Meadow Ray-Band Vanguards and enjoyed taking videos and images with those. I've been seeing a lot of meta, meta Ray-Ban content on Reels. It feels like they're promoting that. They have a little tag and it feels like that's getting a little boost in the algorithm.

1:07:24Matthew Belloni:So if you're a Reels creator, maybe go pick up a pair and then post some stuff on the algorithm because you might get a little boost. But should meta buy GoPro? 150? That's like, what, one-tenth of an AI researcher and you get a whole suite of products and I just have no idea if they would get anything through approval. It just feels like this is a company that you can't do a zombie acquisition with because you need the assets, you need the IP, you need the supply chain, you need the products, the distribution. You need the whole company. And Meta can't acquire a VR fitness company without getting disapproved.

1:08:01Matthew Belloni:Granted, it's a different FTC, so who knows. But if you were Mark Zuckerberg and you were trying to get into the action camera market broadly with Meta Ray-Bans, would you buy GoPro for$150?

1:08:15Nik Seetharaman:Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You partner with Oakley.

1:08:19Matthew Belloni:Partner with Oakley.

1:08:20Nik Seetharaman:It's a better, it does exactly. It's just the future. Yeah, it's just they made a pair of Oakleys, the action sunglasses that function just as well as a GoPro for 99 % of people. Yeah. And it's integrated with your phone. Yep. And you can watch Instagram Reels while you're backflipping off in the terrain park. But the crazy thing, GoPro still did somewhere around$670 million of revenue last year. So trading at less than a quarter times revenue. But absolutely brutal out there. Some other people were suggesting like a foundation model lab should acquire the company for like, and that felt like a silly idea.

1:09:09Nik Seetharaman:Doomer says the past looks more like the future than the present does. Let's pull up this. What is this? PM's Phoenix, an expandable van you can build for$2 ,000. This is sick.

1:09:26Matthew Belloni:what company is this? PM's? How old is this? Is this AI generator or something? This looks like incredible. Most companies and most campers and vans these days that are roomy enough to live in are too large for comfortable driving. Conversely, the compact fun drivable rigs are usually too small to live in. And no matter what its size, the seller will probably want all the money you have now plus most of what you'll make in the next five years this is a good copy so this was in

1:09:57Nik Seetharaman:popular mechanics in 1978 this is a good daily someone should pick built on a volkswagen minibus

1:10:04Matthew Belloni:chassis i like that they restyled the the front cab as well um someone's someone's uh mentioning that this the cyber truck camper back end looks pretty similar um but it still feels odd to take an electric vehicle into the wilderness. I don't know why, because it's not like you're bringing a bunch of, not like there's a gas station out in the middle of nowhere, but this would give me range anxiety, even though I think that's deeply fake at this point.

1:10:34Nik Seetharaman:New model alert.

1:10:35Matthew Belloni:New model alert. What we got?

1:10:37Nik Seetharaman:Introducing Logan's, introducing Gemini 3.1 flashlight, a huge step forward on the boundary of intelligence, beating 2.5 flash on many tasks. Tyler you should try to do a speed check OpenAI also came out this morning with 5.3 instant

1:10:57Matthew Belloni:Okay

1:10:59Nik Seetharaman:Touting increased accuracy

1:11:02Matthew Belloni:Is this in chat GPT? Because I feel like I've had 5.3 in codex But not in But not Oh I got Yeah I have 5.3 instant in chat GPT.com now Interesting

1:11:15Nik Seetharaman:I do not yet. Very cool. And then they're also teasing 5.4. They say 5.4 sooner than you think.

1:11:26Matthew Belloni:Let's see. 5.3. It's designed for very, very low latency. It still feels slower than the Cerebris response that I got from 5.3 Spark, because I think that the Cerebris chips, although they are faster. They're probably in more limited supply, more relevant to the long-running coding agent models. And so they are still rolling that out, but I'm excited for Cerebris in Chachapiti as a product. And yeah, 5.4 sooner than you think with a capital T. Very fun. Interesting. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? at your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI.

1:12:12Matthew Belloni:Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may clog code, codex, or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape.

1:12:26Nik Seetharaman:Calci partnered with Bezel to allow people to trade price movements of iconic watches. So we can pull up this video here. this basically allows you to trade on what the on the prices of rolex is for the month month of march basically is price going to move up or down so quade over at bezel has been telling us about

1:12:53Matthew Belloni:this one so you could you could in theory buy a watch on bezel and then take out a short position on kalshi and have a market neutral submariner or something right because if the price goes up you own the watch. It's not just any sub.

1:13:07Nik Seetharaman:It's a market neutral sub.

1:13:08Matthew Belloni:It's market neutral. Because if the market crashes, you make money on Calci, but you lost money on the watch and you're neutral. So you can hedge yourself now. That's very bizarre. Yeah, I saw somebody pushing back

1:13:19Nik Seetharaman:and being like, oh, you can, this is silly. You could just buy the watches and actually trade them. But obviously, it's quite a bit more complicated.

1:13:30Matthew Belloni:Well, you can't sell one that you don't have. Now you can short watches, effectively. Let me tell you about app loving, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And I believe we have Ken Burns in the Restream waiting room. So we will bring him into the TV panel. Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. How are you doing?

1:13:55Dr. Felix Ejeckam:My pleasure.

1:13:55Matthew Belloni:I'm great. Great to be with you. I would love to start with the first project you worked on ever, because I'm fascinated. Your career has such clarity, but finding a life's work is often the hardest part of going on the type of journey that you've been on. And I'd love to understand who you were as a child, where you found a love for filmmaking, for documentary work, for history, and sort of go through from there?

1:14:28Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Well, I was born in tragedy. My mom had cancer almost all of my life and died when I was 11. And a few months later, when I was 12, my dad, who had a pretty strict curfew, would allow me to stay up late at night watching TV shows, even on a school night. And he started to cry at an old movie called Odd Man Out. And right then and there, I'd never seen him cry before, not when my mom was sick or not, you know, when she was, when she died and not at the terribly sad funeral. And all of a sudden I said, I want to be a filmmaker. That meant Hollywood. But I ended up going to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts of brand new and experimenting, still there, still experimenting school.

1:15:09Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And most of the teachers were social documentaries, still photographers and reminded me there is as much drama in what is and was was. And all of that sort of combined by age 22 to realize that I had a latent and untrained interest all of my life in American history. And 50 years later, I'm still doing the

1:15:27Matthew Belloni:same thing. Walk me through your process. Do you have a list? Has your filmography played out the way you would have predicted a decade ago? How many twists and turns have you run into in your career?

1:15:45Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Zero. I mean, obviously, life throws a lot of stuff at you. I live in rural New Hampshire. That's what I made a decision to leave New York City because I thought that becoming a documentary filmmaker strike one in American history strike two on PBS strike three meant I'd taken a vow of anonymity and poverty. And I moved up here, finished the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, got nominated for an Academy Award, and everybody said, you're coming back. They'd warned me that if I went up there, I'd die. If I stayed, I would die. And I listened to neither. And it's made all the difference. So I've been able to, working in public broadcasting, where I couldn't have made any other films, any of the films, any place but.

1:16:26Dr. Felix Ejeckam:One foot tentatively in the marketplace, the other very proudly out, that I've been able to have directors cut for the next 40 films, all of which have been broadcast first on PBS, streamed on PBS. So it's been good. So you might have a 10-year plan with lots of different projects. Sometimes you may, before you'd really gotten into something, switch one subject to another. But we've been hitting the marks for a pretty long time. The real struggles are within these, and you want to leave the kind of room to experiment, to be thrown a curve, and to figure out how to do it. The recent film on the American Revolution, which now has over 4 billion minutes of watching.

1:17:05Dr. Felix Ejeckam:The first time PBS ever entered the top 10 of streaming programs at the end of November with what I thought was a ridiculous number, 565 million minutes, is now over 4 billion. So there's some pent-up curiosity about who we are, where we've been, particularly what our origin story is. So it's been a long, interesting thing, but every single one of the films a director cut, And that's only possible because I've stayed in public broadcasting.

1:17:34Matthew Belloni:And then in public broadcasting, I imagine we were just talking about some of the changes that are happening in Hollywood and how there's often a pressure to go bigger. And that usually means bigger budgets. OK, you made a 20 million dollar film. Your next one's going to be 70 million. How have you thought about where where the business changes? What more money means? What more success? What more confidence means? Are there, how is the business side of your work evolved throughout your career?

1:18:05Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Well, we've tried not to let the technological tail wag the dog to pick up one aspect of your excellent question. You know, we waited 10 more years when many of my colleagues had already switched to digital editing around 1990. We waited until 2001. We didn't stop film until 2009 and then switch to digital stuff because we didn't want that tail to wag the dog. At the same time, our model is an interesting one. It's all grant funded. We don't have investors. So you write a budget. It pays for your salary. There's no profit margin. There's no contingency. And you empty that bucket. The film's either got to be done or you got to be raising more money.

1:18:46Dr. Felix Ejeckam:So they're very expensive. These are labor-intensive things, particularly when you take 10 years to do something like the Vietnam War or this American Revolution. So they're pushing$30 million. At the same time, I raise it all. So I retain that creative control. And I relieve PBS of the burden of having to fund more of it than they already do. And so it's a kind of a good situation to be in. And it's really outside of the pressures of the marketplace. So I don't think about increasing budgets. I can go from a$30 million budget to a$10 million. And I'm still, these budgets are high for my contemporaries.

1:19:25Dr. Felix Ejeckam:but they don't get to spend. And look, I could have gone, save myself all the trouble of raising, say,$30 million for the Vietnam series that came out in 2017, 10 and a half years. I spent 10 of those 10 and a half years raising money for it. I could have gone into a streaming service or a premium cable and gotten all that money in one pitch, but they wouldn't have given me 10 and a half years. And that's the point. I can't tell the story that I want to tell with the depth and complexity. I mean, that film is now, let's do the math, that is nine years old. And it is still probably one-stop shopping, even among scholarly works, to aggregate all of the new scholarship into one place.

1:20:07Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And nothing certainly replaced it in film and nothing that I know has replaced it in scholarship. So we're feeling pretty good about that. That's great.

1:20:17Nik Seetharaman:Has fundraising gotten any easier? Is it just as hard every time? Did you ever kind of hit a moment where you decided to maybe pick up, return the calls from people that wanted to be more traditional financial backers?

1:20:35Dr. Felix Ejeckam:No, because the sacrifice in control is it. So as the films got longer, in the beginning, the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge cost$180 ,000. I probably made two cents an hour over the five years I did it. So there are more zeros on the other side. So I guess it's proportionally harder. I do have a good reputation, one I wish to maintain. And so we're not looking for compromises or ways to sort of get that cash in hand. You sort of, part of the duty of running the marathon is to run the marathon. And the reward is in not only crossing the finish line, but every single moment along the way, the million steps that you take where one part of you is saying no and another part, maybe weak voice is saying yes.

1:21:23Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And so these are often really complex, you know, struggles in which the analogy of a million problems is not an exaggeration. You just can't see a problem as pejorative. You just see it as inevitable friction to be overcome, like picking up that step and making another step.

1:21:40Matthew Belloni:After the adoption of digital editing, what was the next technological advance that you found useful?

1:21:50Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I don't know. I'm a Luddite. I don't know what I'm doing on your show, but I'm really glad you reduced it to initials because there's nothing. People say PBS. Nothing could be less sexy than that, but Technology Business Programming Network. I mean, KFC has behind it Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, I knew all my life or most of my life what it was. Now it's KFC and I kind of, but this is a really good move. No, I went reluctantly to digital editing because during the 90s, a lot of the interns that would come and work for us, they could see working in analog as some sort of badge. But about halfway through the 90s, I realized these kids want to be race car drivers and I'm telling them how to shoe a horse.

1:22:40Dr. Felix Ejeckam:It just doesn't make any sense. And so eventually, almost for them, we switched to digital editing. It's been incredibly interesting. There are still some things, you know, stuff I might tell my editor that I knew would take two weeks, now take, you know, two days and things that took two days take two hours and things that took two hours now take two minutes. And there's you think there's salvation in that way running to daylight there. But there are as many traps, as many places of quicksand. And so you just want to be sort of careful about how you approach it.

1:23:13Matthew Belloni:What is your opinion on digital restoration of archival footage, archival imagery? Technology seems to be advancing there, and yet there's risks. It's terrific. There are a lot of risks.

1:23:26Dr. Felix Ejeckam:You know, a lot of filmmakers are going back to original film masters. They are taking a digitized thing. And one of the reasons why is that you may have a one and a zero, which is absolute in one way. But as you change the programs, you need to have the machine that did the original thing. And now they're not there. They're in a museum someplace. And you have to go get that thing and figure it out. So I know some filmmakers that are, I can't do it just economy-wise because I've got 250-plus hours of programming. And that's reels and reels every half hour is about a reel of stuff. You can do the math yourself.

1:24:05Dr. Felix Ejeckam:There's probably 500 reels in all of this. So it's almost a prohibitive expense. And so you're hoping that your next iteration of masters will be able to read not only the contemporary films that you're working on, but the ones you made 20 years ago and updated. But the restoration part of it, to be able to painstakingly do that sort of stuff, has been really terrific. Can you tell me the story of the Ken Burns effect? Yeah, sure. It's pretty interesting. I got a call in November of 2002 from a guy claiming to be Steve Jobs. And I went, okay, yeah, right. And then I realized very quickly it was Steve Jobs.

1:24:49Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I live in rural New Hampshire. I said, okay. He said, would you come and visit me? And I said, yeah. So a few weeks later in early December of 2002, I visited him in Cupertino at Apple headquarters. And he ushered me into a room with two engineers and he showed me this stuff. And as I said, if I'm a Luddite now, you can imagine what I was like in 2002. You know, I could barely do word processing. And he said, so look, we've figured out a way to download or upload whatever it is, your pictures that you take and that we can do all this. And they showed it to me. And I was kind of like, OK, a fairly superficial version of what I've tried to do to wake up the past, not just, you know, visually to explore energetically the surface of the photograph you're doing.

1:25:37Dr. Felix Ejeckam:In a way, the feature filmmaker I used to want to be has a master shot, a long shot, a medium shot, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, insert of details. But here was just a very simple sort of panning, zooming through stuff. You could add it, you press a button and add a music thing. and and i said you know okay cool you know whatever and and he said well you know next month in january 2003 every mac computer from now on will have this i said okay cool and then he said and then he said and we want to keep the working title and he i said what's that he goes the ken burns effect i said i don't do commercial endorsements and he went what and the two engineers kind of blanched.

1:26:20Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I think they were, you know, aware of this Titanic temper, which I never saw. And he come with me. So we go back to his office. We talk for a while and we end up becoming friends till the rest of his life. And when I was in the Valley, I'd stay at his house on the futon above the garage and the flats at Palo Alto and knew his wife and his daughter. We even gave an internship to his daughter, Lisa, the famous Lisa. And, you know, it was a terrific friendship. But what I did is I walked out an hour later with about a million dollars worth of hardware and software, which I turned around and gave to nonprofits, usually Final Cut Pro to schools that needed it, you know, computers that nonprofits needed it.

1:27:05Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I think a couple fell off the truck because we needed a computer. But 99.9 % of it went to a good cause. And I think he was intrigued that somebody in a world in which it was all a one or a zero for him, or somebody would say, okay, you should charge. And the world tells me, oh, you should have charged him for this. And I said, then he'd call it the pan and zoom effect. I wasn't interested in having my name on it insofar as it could help other stuff. And it ended up, you know, giving me, and way too short in that regard, a really good friendship with, you know, not arguably one of the five most important people in the United States in the last 150 years.

1:27:48That's remarkable.

1:27:49Nik Seetharaman:What is your process for truth-seeking and understanding history?

1:27:58Dr. Felix Ejeckam:So I have in my editing room and I've had for years and years and years a lowercase neon sign that says it's complicated in cursive. And that can mean a lot of things. One is when a filmmaker has a scene that's working, you don't want to touch it. But finding out new and destabilizing facts obligates you to do that. It's not true of every place, but it does in our shop. And so I think pursuing truth isn't the question. It's there. You can find out the facts. You just have to wade through a lot of shit. Because today, everything is just dump truck after dump truck of manure, dumped on top of other manure.

1:28:38Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And it's just hard. It's one of the reasons why mostly it's to manage a complex narrative with lots of different balls in the air and hundreds of characters in the case of the American Revolution. not just the bold-faced names who are, you know, just statues, you know, out in the park collecting pigeon shit and not real dimensional complex human beings. We try to do that, but introduce you to scores of other characters and set a narrative in motion that's at its heart a military one, but is also adorned with very complex political and social and geopolitical and economic sort of factors. And so that takes a while, but also making sure you're right.

1:29:16Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I mean, we lock the film, meaning we're not going to do any more work on it. We promise. We promise the sound editors. And we unlock it because we found out that word 16 battleships, deaths, months. We've got a little footnote, and it says two scholars of a repute said that that, you know, making this up, said that that was right. And then you find out a third scholar who says, we're not sure it's 16. So you scour. The narrator's already read and gone home, and you're not going to get him back. So you scour all of the written stuff, you know, hours and hours of stuff, and you find a perhaps. And you copy it, and you move in front of perhaps 16, and then you sleep better.

1:29:56Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Like, that's the kind of level of truth-seeking, as you put it. And I don't know any place else that kind of is that kind of concerned about that level of accuracy. But if you add that up a billion times, then all of a sudden you have something, get ready to blow your whistles, that has four billion plus minutes of watching. That's amazing.

1:30:21Matthew Belloni:Another sound effect. Thank you. Can you help me understand some of the through lines, emotional elements or takeaways or the fingerprints that you try and leave on your work across projects? That's a really wonderful question.

1:30:42Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Thank you. That's a very thoughtful question. When I was working trying to raise money and I looked like 12 years old, I was trying to get people to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember writing a sentence that I was not interested in the mere archaeology of dry dates and facts and events. I was interested in an emotional archaeology. And now I didn't mean sentimentality or nostalgia. That's the enemy of good anything. But I'm looking for that thing that animates art, that animates faith, that animates a lot of the most intimate stuff that we care about. And that's where you say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but you never ask yourself, what's that difference?

1:31:18Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Where one and one always in your work has to equal two. In my work, you want it to equal three. You want to have that unknown factor. So I guess once when we were working on our jazz series, the trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. I'll relate it back to the revolution. George Washington, you know, is the indispensable man. Without him, we don't have a country, period, full stop. And in a world in which we're more interested in bottom up than top down, it's exhilarating to be able to resurrect somebody. But he's also deeply flawed.

1:31:54Dr. Felix Ejeckam:He owns hundreds of human beings in his lifetime. And as the writer Rick Atkinson says, you know, you can't square that circle. He is rash on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the entire cause. He also makes some pretty bad tactical mistakes at the largest battle, Long Island, of the war, and then later the same tactic leaving a flank exposed at Brandywine, which the British take full example of. But, and this is the biggest but I know, he's able to hire subordinate talent that's better than him, and he's not threatened by it. He's able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight and to remind them that they're not from New Hampshire or Georgia, but they're a new thing, Americans.

1:32:37Dr. Felix Ejeckam:He knows how to defer to Congress. He has incredible humility. And more than anything, he just waits it out. He understands he doesn't have to win. He just can't lose. And he does that successfully and defeats the greatest empire on earth. And even more than that, he gives up his power twice. The second New York is the British leave New York in November of 1783. That is like eight and a half years after Lexington and Concord. He goes to Annapolis where the Congress is meeting and resigns his military commission. He's brought back out of retirement to run the Constitutional Convention and then is unanimously made president.

1:33:15Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And after two terms, he walks away from it. And as George III, the King of England said, if he did that, then he's truly the greatest character of the age. And so you can have both. and a problem in a binary world in both computers and media, we want to have a black hat and a white hat. We want to say good or bad. And you can't do that in our own personal lives. And we ought to extend that to our history.

1:33:40Matthew Belloni:Yeah, the dialectic. I love it. Yeah. You have been very fortunate in that it feels like there's no project too big for you to undertake. And I'm wondering if there's ever a desire, how you balance going big with a massive story that everyone has at least some conception of versus going back to something like the Brooklyn Bridge and refocusing on something very narrow. Is that something that appeals to you? Do you feel like you've graduated, you've done that, you never want to go back? Or is there something, talk about the tension there.

1:34:21Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Yeah, well, that's another excellent question. I mean, within these big, huge epic series are all the intimacies that were contained in the Brooklyn Bridge. And we do have a kind of exhalation. They're big series. We could just say Civil War, baseball, jazz, World War II, national parks, the Roosevelt's, Vietnam, country music, and now American Revolution. But within them are, I think that's fewer than 10 films. There are at least 30 plus films that are shorter than that. And so they experiment more with what you're talking about, that earlier experience. But again, the more important point is that any given minute in a film, say a series, a lot of people would say, okay, you're the director, but you'd assign a different producer for each of the, in the case of the revolution, six episodes.

1:35:08Dr. Felix Ejeckam:We don't do this. We all do work on all of them and they all are shaped. Same with the editors. They cross episodes and they do more than one. And so what happens is you have a kind of unity of presentation, but within each scene, you have the same kinds of intimacies, the same kinds of small moments that you would find in Brooklyn Bridge. And you're also elevating not just George Washington to a more dynamic and complex and understandable and real, truer version of who he is, but you're introducing people to scores of others that you've never heard of because I never heard of them. You know, a 10-year-old girl named Betsy Ambler who's a refugee most of the war.

1:35:48Dr. Felix Ejeckam:We don't think of Americans as being refugees unless you realize how bloody this was, what a civil war as well as a revolution it was, what a global war. And you're dealing – it involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. And when you say Native American, you don't say them. There are all these nations to our West that are as distinct and separate culturally, economically, diplomatically, militarily as France is from Prussia at that time. And if you think you're going to just make it them and not say French, Prussian, Delaware, Lenape, Cherokee, you've made a huge mistake and left out an important dynamic.

1:36:27Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Or take half the population, women, and say, yeah, we don't really care about that. or the 500 ,000, 20 plus percent of the population that is enslaved or free black Americans. All of that makes an unbelievable dynamic. And if you add the violence to something that we say is, you know, this sort of bloodless gallant myth that attends the revolution, just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, and they are great thoughts, as great a thoughts as ever been thought. But it ain't the whole story. And when you try to integrate that whole story, man, you start to have something that fires on all cylinders.

1:37:03Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And, you know, that's what wakes me up every single morning of every day.

1:37:06Matthew Belloni:Yeah. When I think about, like, what has changed in America throughout my life, I go to Apple. I go to technology. I go to business. And your work has focused, you know, you've obviously touched on business, but you focused on politicians and generals and athletes and musicians and artists. And I'm wondering about your perception of the business community, the technologists over the history of America, their interaction with your other subjects, how you want to integrate them into the stories that you tell.

1:37:44Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Well, you know, I've done four wars. It seems disproportionate because they're all big, long series. But wars are huge sponsors of technological change. All you have to do, I made a film on the Second World War called The War, and it ends because of one of the greatest technological changes that you could possibly imagine. But the Civil War happens because back in the 1700s, an industrialist, Eli Whitney, who will invent the kind of exchangeable parts in the beginning of an assembly line thing, goes down and sees a cousin who's lamenting how long it takes her enslaved people to card a pound of cotton and he invents the cotton gin which revitalizes cotton and slavery and sets in motion the wheels economically and technologically that will sponsor the civil the civil war that's upcoming so it's all the way through that and we're constantly thinking about and dealing with those changes and and you know one of the stuff in the my head full of ideas you know if i were given a thousand years to live which i won't i won't run out of topics in american in history is invention and technology.

1:38:52Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And I'd start with Eli Whitney because there's an underbelly to it. And I'd go to Steve Jobs because there's an underbelly to it. I got kids. We're all addicted to this. I mean, my new statement is, and it's such a Luddite statement, I apologize in advance for offending your sensibilities, but I say social media isn't and artificial intelligence is. oh they're not social yeah ever been in a room of people or a subway car or a block where

1:39:24Matthew Belloni:everybody's on their phone that is not social yeah and artificial is artificial is artificial yeah no that makes a lot of sense i'm sure you get asked this question all the time but uh what walk me through some of the advice that you give for aspiring documentarians

1:39:40Dr. Felix Ejeckam:it's really so bad and platitudinous that i'm embarrassed almost to repeat it because there's no laws. And everybody I know that is a working documentary filmmaker, meaning they don't have a side teaching gig, you know, to pay the bills that are actually making, you know, living, supporting their families have all come at it at different ways. And so I realized that there's no set career path the way there might be for a feature filmmaker or a doctor or a lawyer. And so what I tell them is one is Socratic. You got to know yourself, right? Who am I? film is intensely glamorous for teenagers and at a college level, the first, you know, the introductory classes are jammed with people.

1:40:25Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And then all of a sudden next year, it's pretty winnowed down. And there ought to be a mechanism within us. This is the Socratic dimension that says, you know what? I don't think I have something to say. I thought this was going to be easier than it actually is. I see how difficult it is. And then the other one has to do with that difficulty, that there's way more talented people than there are possibilities of making a film in this economy, even with the explosion of documentary films now, and some of it quite dreck. So obviously, some of those people who didn't deserve to get a budget got one.

1:40:57Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Is that is that you have to persevere? I mean, I used to keep on my desks, two three ring binders filled with hundreds of rejections just for that first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, just to remind me, you know, that it doesn't come easy, you know, and that was sitting juxtaposed from a little thing on my door, a quote from a theater empresario in Minneapolis Globe Theater named Tyrone Guthrie said, we're looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again. Not a very good English sentence, but it just means just bite off more than you can chew and learn how to chew. And a lot of that is what I try to impart when people ask me the questions and I warn them in advance that it's just going to sound like, I'm sure I've just described things that you guys know about what you do.

1:41:41Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And I'm sure everybody who's listening knows, yeah, those kind of apply to what I do. And so I think there's, basically in his essay on self-reliance, Emerson says, do whatever inly rejoices. You need to actually figure out what this thing is that is, you say I do, of which there are millions of eyes, and which one is the authentic, and how do you proceed to do whatever inly rejoices? as he said.

1:42:10Matthew Belloni:Is it refreshing to change centuries? Do you think your life would be different? Do you think the projects, the quality might suffer if you had at some point when you realized that this was going to be the career, you had started linearly and done American Revolution, Civil War, World War II, then Vietnam, and you just go year by year as opposed to bouncing around a little bit?

1:42:36Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Yeah, it's not even bouncing around because only in retrospect can you do that. Yeah, exactly. I just, my best friend was a book salesman and he, I was sick and he threw on my bed a paperback, a trade paperback version of David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the bridge. I read it in one gulp. I said, we're going to make a film about it. Yeah. And then, you know, we're thrashing about to what to do. And my future wife and I are driving through western Massachusetts. And we pass a shaker village outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with this beautiful round stone barn slammed on the brakes and said, who are these people who made these buildings?

1:43:09Dr. Felix Ejeckam:That was the second film. Another guy was trying to convince me to do a film on Huey Long, the turbulent southern demagogue. And someone else said, boy, you know, you did a great film on the Brooklyn Bridge. You know, the Statue of Liberty's 100th birthday is coming up. Why don't you do something on that? I said, yeah, but I'm not going to make your film. And so if you give me the money, I'll do it. But I'm not, you know, so Liberty Mutual, you know, insurance before they got the fucking emu gave me money for the whole thing. And I made a very complex film, which also got nominated for an Academy Award.

1:43:42Dr. Felix Ejeckam:But each one of those first four films come from different things. And so you begin to sort of make choices. So at any given moment, you know, I didn't think until I was in the middle of Vietnam, not the middle, the end of it, we were locking it. I was looking at a map we made of the Yadrang Valley in the central highlands. And you could see the positions of the Viet Cong and the NVA and the Americans. And I thought, boy, this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn. And I looked up, I said, we're doing the revolution. So they come, everything comes that way. And it's much better.

1:44:14Dr. Felix Ejeckam:It's like a batter, you just got to read the pitch. And at that given moment, it's a fastball. So you're going to hit it this way or, or, or hit it to the opposite field. Or you're going to try to choke up because he's throwing junk and you've got to figure out how to respond. I mean, it's, it's literally, I'm so glad there's not a plan, you know, or a chronological stuff. And, and, and, and, and you can do is take those 40 films and then put them in chronological order. And, you know, that wastes.

1:44:43Matthew Belloni:I just have to pass something along. A lot of people in the chat are saying that they love your work, obviously, but particularly that they became much closer with their fathers through watching documentaries.

1:44:57Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Yeah, this is true, and mothers too. I mean, particularly with regard to baseball, I don't know how many people come up and say, I've seen baseball more than you have. And I go, what are you talking about? They say, well, every single January during the Hot Stove League, My dad and I would watch it. And my dad just passed away, but my son is old enough. I mean, I've had so many moving things about that or mothers taking kids to baseball games or going over battlefields. So there's a nice – we talk about how divided we are right now. All you have to do is look at my films and see we're way more divided at other times.

1:45:30Dr. Felix Ejeckam:And what brings us together are stories. The power of stories neutralizes that dialectic that you were mentioning. neutralizes this false notion that there is a simplistic binary that we can impose impose on everything and figure it all out you can't and the complexity of us in the end reminds us that there's only us and know them so i make films about the u.s but i also make films about us

1:45:57Nik Seetharaman:you may the chat also uh uh wants us to ask about ai i already have an idea of of your reaction i I appreciate your approach of not letting technology guide the work, but are you at all excited at some point in the future of being able to, you know, recreate a scene from history using image or video generation tools?

1:46:26Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Not really. I don't, I don't think so. I think every once in a while when you're trying to run down a portrait of Benedict Arnold, who's not a popular person in the United States, so there's no real visual evidence left of him. AI can be helpful in locating that. I use it when I Google a question. I notice how quickly the AI answer comes up. I have to take it with a grain of salt right now. It's not that it's wrong. It's just you may not be offered all the nuances and possibilities. That's going to change and whatever, but not to write a thing or to generate an image. There's a sanctity. I mean, if you say a picture is worth a thousand words, then if you make it up, then what is it?

1:47:05Dr. Felix Ejeckam:I mean, when everything is permissible, what's true? And I just, I mean, that goes back to your question. You know, what is true? And I think it's really important to at least have, you know, it's like a kid. You remember this when you were young, four or five years old, and your mother or your dad sitting on the bench at the park and you're playing. But every once in a while, you've got to go and touch home base. I want to be that person. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

1:47:34Matthew Belloni:You mentioned McCullough and I'm a fan of Robert Caro.

1:47:39Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Yeah. We just interviewed him for a film we're doing on LBJ and the Great Society.

1:47:43Matthew Belloni:I can imagine. Are you excited about where that genre of historical writing is going right now?

1:47:52Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Oh, God, yes. I mean, there are so many heavy hitters. I've been on the road for the last year, a lot of it with Rick Atkinson, who's two thirds of the way through his trilogy of the American Revolution is the first talking head you see accidentally in our film, but no accident. And the last talking head you see, there's Doris Kearns Goodwin. David McCullough has left us. Stephen Ambrose has left us. But I was just on a podcast with Ari Emanuel and Walter Isaacson yesterday talking about, you know, what the Mount Rushmore that wasn't a president would look like and having great arguments with him and his friend Ben Persky and the four of us, you know, arguing and fighting for now the fastest hour that i and i've spent so there's so many there's so many good writers walters uh influenced two of my films you know i he's one of the biographers of benjamin franklin and he also did our he also wrote a biography of our first non-american topic

1:48:45Matthew Belloni:leonardo da vinci yeah well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us ken this is very informative this is really yeah john has done a great job keeping it together but uh i think he's

1:48:57Nik Seetharaman:he's definitely one of your biggest fans and you've come up a lot often times when I can't get a hold of John

1:49:05Matthew Belloni:he's probably watching and yeah we watched so many documentaries together what's her name? Marjorie

1:49:13Dr. Felix Ejeckam:Marjorie, thank you for watching, good job thank you

1:49:17Nik Seetharaman:great stuff Ken, thank you for joining be well, have a great rest of your day

1:49:21Matthew Belloni:goodbye let me tell you about Gusto the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about Gemini, Gemini 3.1 Pro. I'm going to have to update this soon. With a more cable based baseline, it's great for visualizing super complex tasks, synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life. And without further ado, we have Gokul Rajaram from Marathon Management in the studio. How are you doing? on? Good to see you. Great to see you, John. Welcome to the show. Is software dead? First, introduce yourself.

1:50:04Matthew Belloni:Sorry.

1:50:05James Everingham:We'll get to that. Hey, guys. I'm a huge fan, a long-time fan and listener to you guys, to TBPN. I'm Gokul. I've been an operator and investor for 25 years in the Valley. And yeah, excited to be here with all of you. Amazing. It's about time. It's about time.

1:50:20Matthew Belloni:Long overdue. Yeah, walk us through how you have been processing the SaaSpocalypse, the Satrini article, all the different narratives that have kind of shaken the tech industry, both to the upside in many cases and also to the downside in others throughout the start of this year.

1:50:39James Everingham:Look, I think software is going through a change. I don't think it's dead. Software is still going to be around. In fact, every industry is going to use software at its core. I think what is going to be challenged is companies that are surface level, where they're going to be lightweight, which are easy to rip and replace. I think of software as two kinds. One of them are lightweight, seat-based, easy to rip and replace. A good example, I always say I don't want to pick on them, is Zendesk. Zendesk is customer support software. They sell on the basis of seats and use it for delivering outcomes for customers.

1:51:15James Everingham:The problem with Zendesk is that if I'm a customer of Zendesk, I'm buying 50 seats, I could reduce it to 20 seats and use 30 seats for AI. In the same budget with 30 seats, I can use AI. So I can literally compare Zendesk's performance to AI agents in parallel, and Zendesk won't even know this is happening. So you might be running an A-B test, and you can literally run Zendesk in parallel. And that's a challenge for a company like Zendesk because it's not deeply rooted. You can use it part-time for only part of your employees or part of your customer service request. The other kind of software is stuff that is not outcome-based, that is truly running your company, that's truly running a process.

1:51:52James Everingham:A good example is NetSuite, which is an ERP, which is literally at the core of your general ledger, is running your accounting, a lot of your business is running off it. You can't really run another version of NetSuite in parallel to NetSuite. You've got to run. And so NetSuite is in a much better position than Zendesk. Now, at the highest level, the reality is every piece of software has to reinvent itself over the next, but the timeframe, it's much more urgent for Zendesk to do that in the next six to 12 months, while something like NetSuite probably has years, three to five years to think about it.

1:52:25James Everingham:So if I were NetSuite, what I would do? I would create AI agents, which I'm sure they're already doing. And I would, as I say, commoditize my complement. I'd basically make it free to actually have a bunch of interesting workflows which are offered to AI. and I would basically still charge for the data. Very, very different.

1:52:45Nik Seetharaman:How did you, there's a whole new class of AI native ERPs that have come online and raised over the last one to two years. How did you process them? There's certainly like a long graveyard of startups as well, but part of the challenge is there's just so much software to build with a system like that. And maybe now is the right time, given that we can create software a lot faster than we could historically.

1:53:17James Everingham:Right. I know many of those companies. I think they are great entrepreneurs. I think the challenge for them is that there is no pressing, burning reason for somebody using a Netflix or NetSuite, I should say, to rip and replace NetSuite. So what you have to do is you have to go with a company that doesn't have an ERP today and get them to start using you as a software company, as a vendor, and then grow with them. And so I think it is, so that's the strategy. Build your customer base from net new companies which don't have an ERP today. I think going to somebody who's using a large ERP and saying, well, throw out your ERP and replace it with me is hard.

1:53:53James Everingham:So you've got to either come up with a very, very, very narrow wedge where you can inject yourself in and then use it to over time take on net suite. But more interestingly, I think, go after younger, fast-growing startups which will need a net suite or an ERP system in a few months, offer it to them for free. Some of them actually, some of these ERPs have been saying, if you're funded by one of these VCs, you can use the first tier of my product for free. And that's a smart idea because you use it for free, you're not going to generate much revenue, but in exchange, they become sticky. And when you actually start generating revenue a year from now, they're there for you.

1:54:32Matthew Belloni:What do you think is happening in the private markets for software companies where their public comps have declined by 50%. We sort of went through this, and I'd love to know how you process the end of ZERP. I remember reading Logan Bartlett on this at Redpoint a lot. He was pulling public comps and seeing how multiple compression had happened in the public software SaaS market and the effect that that was happening in the private markets. It feels like the private markets haven't fully digested the SaaSpocalypse in the same way because a lot of the startups in the private markets that are going after those comps were sort of AI native or earlier on the AI narrative.

1:55:18Matthew Belloni:But at the same time, there's like a bigger question there.

1:55:22James Everingham:That's right. The way the private markets work is what can the private markets do? They can't re-rate the company on a daily basis like in the public markets.

1:55:29Matthew Belloni:So what they can do is they can do to the capital. That term sheet I signed is due for a wire at what valuation? Exactly. I'd like a 50 % discount, please, because the cop is down 50%.

1:55:39James Everingham:Yeah, you can't exactly do that. You know, that happened in 2008, where you did see when the 2008 Lehman thing happened. You did see people pull term sheets right after that happened. They're outstanding. But those kinds of things that happened on the edge. But the biggest thing that's happening is there are certain classes of business models that have maybe raised a C or an A that are now unable to raise a B or will be unable to raise financing. and those are business models that are primarily application layer. I think if you're just doing workflows, it better be a deep and complex workflow that is deeply, deeply, deeply embedded.

1:56:10James Everingham:Because now with OpenClaw emerging, you guys might have seen this, OpenClaw actually does the work. It's not just workflows. It actually goes and does the job. If we're just putting software workflows that's enabling other people but not doing the job yourself, it becomes harder to justify that you will exist. Because remember, the VC timeframe is not a year. it is five to seven years and if you think about compounding over five to seven years that's insane why because the capabilities these models are doubling what once every six months say yeah and if once every six months it's quadrupling every year that means in five to seven years it's two to the power of two to the power of 12 which is a thousand fold better than what it is today and my human brain is unable to comprehend what it means for these models to be 500 to a thousand times better than they are today, what it means in software.

1:56:58James Everingham:So I think everybody's trying to figure out over a venture time frame, what does this mean if you extrapolate these models and make them a thousand times better? What survives and what doesn't? What survives? Things that are deeply rooted, that have atoms. We think, as software investors, that things that have atoms, yes, there are human-ed robots, but I personally feel general-based human-ed robots that are machinists or HVAC repair people, whatever the case is, that's going to be slightly further. So things that have atoms are generally protected over the five to seven year time frame. Things that have regulatory modes are protected.

1:57:28James Everingham:Things that have money flowing through them are protected. So there are a few classes of things that are protected.

1:57:33Nik Seetharaman:If somebody came to you and wanted to Vibecode, DoorDash, what advice would you give them about the challenges that they might face on building a competitor?

1:57:45James Everingham:You know, I'll give you a story. I'll give you two stories, actually. Assume it's June 2028, right? which is what I think Citrini had for 30 % drop in stock. Because you were hungry. You open your phone. You ask Claude, say, or whatever your new startup is, the food ordering startup to order your sandwich with gluten-free bread. It routes you directly to the restaurant because it's figured out how to connect to all the restaurants and it saves you$2. But it takes an hour and a half to show up. It was cold and they forgot to make the bread gluten-free. So you can't eat it anymore. Who owes you a refund?

1:58:17James Everingham:Does Anthropic have a customer service number? No. So basically, you open DoorDash, the sandwich is the first recommendation, you tap on it, 90 minutes later, you're holding your sandwich still fresh, and guess what? You remember the gluten-free bread. So that's one story where if something goes wrong in the physical world, who takes care of it? DoorDash is a managed marketplace. I'll get back to that. The better, more pertinent story is run from 2016 or 2017. Google launched a product called Google Food Ordering. You might have seen this. Google Food Ordering, you can actually order from a restaurant.

1:58:47James Everingham:and it literally, it was driving at that point, multiples of traffic to any restaurant compared to what DoorDash was driving because Google still massive, back then it was massive. You could search for a restaurant, you could order from a directory from Google. However, the retention of people who ordered Google food ordering was basically zero. It was negligible. Why? Because after you place the order, there are tons of things that go wrong in the physical world and you couldn't really call Google. The restaurant didn't take responsibility either. So that product doesn't exist today. And I think that's the fundamental reason.

1:59:20James Everingham:There are things that happen in the digital world that are not enough to replicate something like Doordash. Doordash manages not just aggregation and supply of restaurants. It manages everything afterwards. It manages figuring out how to get you out of the right dasher. It manages how to basically refund if there's something that goes wrong. It manages customer support in what case you want to reach. There's a collection of systems that work together. Discovery is something that I think agentics will do well, and hopefully Doordash will incorporate many of those. But discovery is not enough. If you think about Google and digital, what did Google disintermediate?

1:59:56James Everingham:What do we use Google for today? It did really well with Expedia and flights and hotels and also things like mortgages. So the types of marketplaces that Google has been able to disrupt or search are things that are more lead gen or just I would call light marketplaces where payment happens to Google. You can book hotels or flights to Google. You don't have to take care of what happens afterwards. But a managed marketplace in the physical world is the most durable thing. It is not a piece of software. This is the thing I think people get wrong about Doodash. Doodash, the first piece of software they built after the website, if you remember, Doodash had a Spalowalto delivery.

2:00:31James Everingham:It had this website with a PDF. The first piece of software they built was not a consumer app. It was a Dasher app. It was the app for dashers because that was what was needed to get the food properly, to make sure the dasher got the order, accepted the order, picked up the food, delivered it before the consumer app.

2:00:48Matthew Belloni:Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to build liquidity on a marketplace? It feels like that's also underrated if you need to spend billions of dollars to actually create the scale of a marketplace, that that's something that can't necessarily be vibe-coded.

2:01:04James Everingham:Exactly. So the biggest moat here, one of the moats is density. Density leads to liquidity, which means the more orders you have in a given geography at a given time, the better you can batch deliveries, which increases driver utilization and reduces cost per order. And that's what you have to do. If you were to actually pay the actual cost of delivering, it would be$10,$12,$15. The reason you're only paying$2 or$3 is because these orders are batched and you're basically not having a single person. You're basically batching it to the best Dasher driver. That's what you might see in busy times that there are drivers waiting outside certain restaurants because they literally know that that order, they can pick it up and there is massive density of orders.

2:01:51James Everingham:So density and liquidity, that's what drives marketplace economics. And so whoever wants to replicate DoorDash doesn't just need to improve aggregation at the consumer level, but build a massively dense geography by geography marketplace in every city and every suburb that DoorDash operates in. And that's a massive endeavor. That's what DoorDash spent a few billion dollars building.

2:02:16Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, just a few. What does it take to be a great public company board member? So it's interesting.

2:02:23James Everingham:I think, you know, it has changed over the last several years. I think a few years ago, a decade ago, say, the profile of a board member was quite uniform. It was people from the finance or corporate worlds. And that's still important. I think you need a finance person who runs your audit committee. You need a CEO. I think every public board member, if you would go to any public CEO and say, what is the archetype you want in your board? Most of them want CEOs. They want a CEO on the board because you want a CEO you can confide in. And you can ask for help from. But there are new architects that have emerged over the last few years.

2:02:56James Everingham:One, product engineering leader. Someone who's led product and engineering at a company. Why? Because every company, like I said, has become a software company, a technology company. So every public company wants someone with product engineering chops. Second, you want someone who represents your customer. At DoorDash, for example, sorry, at Square, we had the CEO of Shake Shack. And why? Because Shake Shack was a prototypical customer for Square. No, Danny, it was Randy Garuti. Danny was a chairman. So Randy was a CEO. I mean, yeah, Danny was a founder and Randy was a CEO. So he was excellent.

2:03:30James Everingham:He always, he would really assume. And then typically what happens is, especially if it's a company that came through venture capital, typically one or two of the VCs that have been early in the journey of the company stay with the company and the CEO trust them. In Square's case, it was Roloff Botha at Sequoia. In DoorDash's case, it's Alfred Lynn, ironically, again, from Sequoia. But in Pinterest case, it was Jeff Jordan from Andreessen. So each company has one VC probably. And then in Coinbase's case, it's Fred Wilson and Mark Andreessen from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen. So VC, product engineering chops, voice of the customer, CEO, finance person.

2:04:08James Everingham:Those are the five archetypes. One of the best practices today that I've seen companies using is the notion of a board buddy. what it means is every exec at a company should actually be paired up with a board member who's an expert in the same area so for example i typically will work with the head of product and the head of engineering at the companies i'm on the board of and i meet with them once a month outside of the board meeting those meetings are actually really good i am essentially listing them in a judgment-free zone and trying to be helpful and getting feedback from them how can we be helpful and the same is happening with the finance person the finance oriented board member they meet with the CFO, the customer board member they meet with the CRO, et cetera, et cetera.

2:04:45James Everingham:So I think that board buddy system I've seen helps dramatically because that's what your board member should be helpful, not just the CEO, but the exec team. It also helps get exposure for us to the exec team who they are. And as we think about succession planning and stuff like that, we can evaluate who these people are and who should succeed the CEO or the people. Yeah.

2:05:05Nik Seetharaman:What are your forecasts around M &A in in 2026 last year was the year of the of the licensing zombie acquisition with the ghost ship yeah the ghost ship acquisition uh but it still feels like we could see a lot of activity

2:05:22Matthew Belloni:uh this year a lot of cheap companies out there gopros at 150 there's a lot of well yeah in the

2:05:27Nik Seetharaman:public markets but also but also public companies that want to bolt on fast growing teams yeah

2:05:32James Everingham:i think there's going to be both i mean you saw for example my fitness pal yeah bought this company Cal AI and that thing is 18 months sold right 50 million and so I think there's going to be a tremendous amount why because like you said there's a few things happening one software companies are valued and the valuations has gone down and so I myself in a portfolio I've seen if the CEO has courage they can actually your the stock market is already telling you that the terminal value of a business is zero so there's really no downside to burning the boats and going all in on AI. And I have a company, Podium.

2:06:07James Everingham:I mean, you should actually get the guy. He's amazing. Similar to Intercom. Very similar to Intercom. He had a business that grew to 200 million, was kind of growing very slowly. And he said, you know what? I'm going to go build an AI agent. It's basically a product for SMBs. And he's basically gone from zero to 100 million in 24 months and is accelerating by just saying, you know what? I'm not going to worry about the legacy business. We're going to start a new business. So I think, but the assets are there. These companies have great assets. They need that. And so it might be PE buying these companies for cheaper, but the PE can no longer have the playbook of operationalizing.

2:06:42James Everingham:It's not about operationalizing or improving costs. It's about building a new product, a net new product, an AI-native product. And then, like you said, I think there's a tremendous number of, for example, inference clouds are a new thing. Fireworks, modal, base 10, there's multiple$5 to$10 billion companies. I have to assume the hyperscalers, are not sitting around saying inference in AI is happening on these completely different cloud platforms. Different than what I have. What the hell am I? I'm going to be a commodity cloud platform. So almost certainly, I think you're going to see one of the hyperscalers buy one of these Neo clouds.

2:07:16James Everingham:I think CoreView was one kind of cloud, but there's together, there's like six or seven different next generation cloud companies. So cloud software, you saw chips, with NVIDIA buying Grog, there's a bunch of next generation chips. I think you're going to see, and of course, the whole Warner Brothers thing at the application level, the consumer side, And it's a tremendous amount now that I think we are in an administration which is much more open to this. For lack of a better word, you're going to see, I think there's going to be amazing activity next year.

2:07:44Nik Seetharaman:Do you think that the Square, you were at Square for almost six and a half years. Do you think the Square riff from last week will be an anomaly? Or are you expecting 40 % to be the new 10 % riff?

2:07:59James Everingham:The latter. I'm almost certain there's going to be multiple 20 to 30 % cuts, maybe even 40. The reality is nobody's hiring. I think almost every public company has basically net new hiring is almost zero.

2:08:12Matthew Belloni:Why?

2:08:12James Everingham:Because you can do much more. Every function can do more with AI. So it's equaling to a 30 % boost in productivity. And that's the first year. Next year, if you get another 30 % boost, you need 30 % fewer people. So over the next 18 months, almost certainly every public company is going to have a 30%. If they don't, I question the leadership.

2:08:32Nik Seetharaman:So a lot of people's reactions to the square riff was, okay, AI is just a convenient excuse. It kind of is a narrative that the market will be able to process. You think they're actually seeing the efficiency to be able to make a decision like that, and it's not just marketing?

2:08:54James Everingham:100%. I think they realized that they could basically do the same job and probably more efficiently with fewer coordination. The fewer people you have, easier it is to coordinate, as you know. I mean, the two of you run the show. Assuming you had four hosts, how hard it would be, like some of the ESPN shows, right? It's just the two of you. Every time you add a person, it's M times N. It's like it increases exponentially the coordination problem. So I think that 12 ,000 % company, 6 ,000 % company, night and day. I bet they're going to move faster, be more innovative, and drive more productivity than they were doing before.

2:09:24Nik Seetharaman:What's the update on Marathon? Where are you guys focused in Q1? What's most exciting for you?

2:09:33James Everingham:We are an early stage software and fintech focused firm. We focus on some of the best companies we do at the intersection of the two. But in software, we look at infrastructure, security, and application. I think the themes we're looking at are some of the themes that we talked about. One is what are durable companies at the application layer? There are lots of interesting things on the security side we're looking at. For example, phishing is something which is going, I mean, I have been phished now. I mean, I feel almost on a daily basis I'll get an email that looks like it's coming from a human being, but it's actually AI.

2:10:08James Everingham:And then the third area is around infrastructure. Like I said, there's a lot of new infrastructure that has been built because every piece of infrastructure that existed until two years ago was built for humans.

2:10:19Nik Seetharaman:every piece of infrastructure has to be rebuilt for ai agents on fintech um you know stable coins

2:10:26James Everingham:is just i think i i'm in love with stable coins i think usdc i have so many people i know outside the us now who basically want all their money to be not in their local currency but in usdc a stable coin because it's back to the us dollar it gives the opportunity for everyone in the world to not suffer a 10 % daily inflationary, basically reduction in their purchasing power, but to hold money in a way that prevents, basically, respect to the US dollars. So I think stablecoin is one of the greatest. So far, I think it's the best real world, outside of tokenization, it's the best real world application of the crypto industry in some ways, and I'm extremely bullish on it.

2:11:08Matthew Belloni:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

2:11:12Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, great to finally have you on the show. It should have happened a long time ago. Yeah, always been a big fan of your host.

2:11:17Matthew Belloni:Huge fan. Keep it up.

2:11:18Nik Seetharaman:Yep, always welcome.

2:11:20James Everingham:It's been amazing. Has it been two years since you started? It's been incredible. No, a year.

2:11:23Matthew Belloni:One year. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. That is incredible. Congratulations, guys. Huge fan. Thank you, Google. Thank you so much. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

2:11:40Nik Seetharaman:board member coinbase board member pinterest board member the trade desk spent four and a half years at doordash six and a half years at square overnight success three years at meta

2:11:51Matthew Belloni:let me tell you four years at google fin.ai wow google that's insane uh the number one ai agent for customer service if you want ai to handle your customer support go to fin.ai there is a a talent shakeup going on at Quen, at Alibaba's AI lab. I want Tyler Cosgrove to take us through it, but there are a number of posts. Junyung Lin says, me stepping down by my beloved Quen. And another individual highlighted by Zephyr says, bruh, Alibaba, Quen disintegrating in real time.

2:12:31Nik Seetharaman:Tyler, why? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of unclear, right? The Chinese labs are like very not open about what they're doing. Also, it's not like an independent lab, right? It's under Alibaba.

2:12:39Matthew Belloni:Yeah.

2:12:40Nik Seetharaman:But yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, Quen has like recently has been like kind of the main, they're the staple in open source and like in Chinese open source, but in open source broadly, right? Even the American open source labs are still like pretty far behind Quen. So yeah, it's very interesting. People are saying that there was like new leadership. They apparently Alibaba brought over people from deep mind. And then maybe they're just like completely transferring the leadership there. And then some people are saying, oh, these guys are all going to come to the U.S. Maybe they're going to go to XAI or something like this.

2:13:14Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. But yeah, it's I mean, definitely very interesting.

2:13:17Matthew Belloni:Do you know where these folks are located physically? I believe they are in mainland China, correct?

2:13:24Nik Seetharaman:I think. Yeah, I think that's that.

2:13:26Matthew Belloni:That's reasonable to assume because there is a world where there's a whole bunch of AI talent that's missing or looking for the next gig. You sign up for some golden visas, even at$5 million a pop, that's completely affordable for an AI lab these days. It'll be interesting to see where these folks land. Yuchin Jin says, the end of an era, Quen lost its tech lead when we launched the Quen 3 Next endpoints on Hyperbolic with Jun Yong and his team. They were still online at 6 a.m. Beijing time. They were grinding. Thank you for pushing open source AI forward. Do you think they were caught distilling other American models and then they were fired?

2:14:08Nik Seetharaman:Busted. Yeah, I don't think that's like a fireball offense. That's the best way to...

2:14:13Matthew Belloni:That was probably the top-down mandate. Please, spend as little money as possible.

2:14:19Nik Seetharaman:Maybe they were fired for not distilling fast enough.

2:14:21Matthew Belloni:Maybe, maybe. Nathan Lambert has an extra take here. He says, the gaping hole that Quen imploding will leave in the open source research ecosystem will be hard to fill. The small models are irreplaceable. I'll do my best to keep carrying that torch. Not that I've reached the level of impact of Quen by any means, but every bit matters. It will be interesting seeing how DeepSeek responds to this, whether these folks go to DeepSeek, whether DeepSeek adjusts their strategy. when it comes to small models, that feels like something that High Flyer could potentially fulfill. But also, who knows? We don't know how large the Quen team, how sizable this is, what they have planned.

2:15:02Matthew Belloni:Sometimes there's large departures because there's a whole bunch of new people coming in. And so they might have just hired a ton of people that just haven't announced. It also will be interesting if this is one of those situations where it's clear that there is There's a raid going on, but people aren't announcing where they're landing for another couple weeks. And so they just announced their departure. We see this a lot at the American AI labs where people will say, it's my last day. And then two weeks later, they'll be like, I joined the competitor. And then two weeks later, they'll be like, I'm back at the original company.

2:15:30Matthew Belloni:And they'll go back and forth all day long. Anyway, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta.

2:15:43Nik Seetharaman:I want to talk about fast food CEOs. Yeah, let's pull up this video of McDonald's CEO.

2:15:48Matthew Belloni:We never watched this all the way through. I want to see for myself. This is McDonald's CEO, Chris Kepenzinski. He went viral after seeming reluctant to eat his own burgers. He takes a tiny bite, looks uncomfortable, and calls the food product. That's the size of it. With, you've heard about it. The big arch. Here it is. The big arch. This is something that we have tested already in Portugal, Germany, Canada. On animals. I love this product. It is so good. I'm going to do a tasting right now, but I'm going to eat this for my lunch, just so you know. So here we go first. If I can survive a single meal, it's good enough for you.

2:16:28Matthew Belloni:We've got a very unique kind of sesame poppy sort of bun on it. This isn't that bad of a public presentation, in my opinion. We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious Big Arch sauce. It's probably his first TikTok, but he's doing okay. Oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing. I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. I like this. There's also some crispy onions on here as well. I see those kind of coming out. He's stoked. All right. I met the CEO of McDonald's, the previous CEO, at South by Southwest in like 2013. That is so good. That's a big bite for a big arc.

2:17:04Matthew Belloni:That's a huge burger. It's distinctively McDonald's. So undeniably not that big of a bite. Yeah, not that big of a bite.

2:17:11Nik Seetharaman:He just kind of.

2:17:12Matthew Belloni:But eating on camera is so hard. If you just start housing that thing, there's going to be a whole different set of backlash. It definitely looked like his first ever bite of a burger. Yeah. It was not a strong performance. Lulu said lay up opportunity for the number two ranked fast food chain CEO to film a brutal. And I think somebody did.

2:17:32Nik Seetharaman:We can pull up another video here.

2:17:35Matthew Belloni:Someone did it. uh there's someone saying japanese manga writer trying to write americans the ceo would perhaps

2:17:42Nik Seetharaman:compete over who would take the manliest bite of a burger oh that's ridiculous surely america cannot be like okay but watch this oh that's a real bite that's a real bite yeah i'm a burger

2:17:55Matthew Belloni:king guy now he won me over very very well it's this guy seems like he he he can flip burgers he He can take bites of burgers.

2:18:04Nik Seetharaman:I saw another video of Chris, the McDonald's CEO, coming out on his personal Instagram saying he eats. He wanted to clarify that he does eat McDonald's three or four times a week, he said. Okay. So he is defending his honor.

2:18:17Matthew Belloni:McDonald's is great.

2:18:18Nik Seetharaman:But, yeah, saying Gabby Goldberg called it out. I love this product. Yeah. I love this product. That's what every chef says after they bring out a meal. They say, I love this product. I think you will too.

2:18:34Matthew Belloni:He's a business guy. I don't have a problem with that. Refer to it as product. Go off. I stand by it. I think it's great. I think it is his product.

2:18:42Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, I just think even though it technically is a product, I think people want their food to be food.

2:18:48Matthew Belloni:Yeah, probably should just use food next time. Well, good luck on the comps front. What is happening with Claude? the traffic is spiking due to all of the news and people are having fun with... Has it actually been going down? I've been seeing mixed things. I checked, Claude, to see if it was down. It was fine for me, but people are having fun.

2:19:14Nik Seetharaman:It went down last night for enough time for people to pay attention. To the tune of 4 ,000 likes.

2:19:21Matthew Belloni:I do wonder if there's like the compute debate over how many servers you need, how many chips you need to marshal, how much investment do you need from various hyperscalers. Does that equation change if there's a new sudden influx of consumer adoption? it's unclear that consumers are driving insane inference loads compared to your open clock folks who might be firing off 12 hours of agentic programming. That feels a lot more inference heavy than people that are like, yeah, I'm replacing my daily driver LLM app and then they fire off the usual one query a day. That's maybe not. But at the same time, Lots of people coming in, scaling challenges, comes for us all.

2:20:11Matthew Belloni:We need a new whale for AI. You remember the Twitter whale, the fail whale? Twitter had such a funny, whimsical culture. There was this thing, when Twitter was scaling, they had this monolithic Ruby on Rails app, I believe, and they couldn't scale the app fast enough because things would go viral, big moments would happen in the news in the media basketball NBA finals would happen everyone would get on be talking about it and the site would just go down for everyone and so their 404 page their page that you would land on when the service was not responding or populating tweets or showing you any content at all had a fail whale a whale that was being lifted up by some birds if I remember that correctly?

2:20:57Matthew Belloni:And it became loved by the Twitter community. And the rest is history. And eventually they did scale. Our next guest is here. First, let me tell you about LabelBox, reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, we have Nick from Wraithwatch. He's the founder and CEO. How are you doing, Nick? What's going on? Good to meet you. What's going on, fellas? Good to be here. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. We have a big gong.

2:21:27Nik Seetharaman:You've got a big deal. Yeah, yeah.

2:21:29Matthew Belloni:Kick us off with that.

2:21:30Nik Seetharaman:No, introduce yourself.

2:21:31Matthew Belloni:Introduce yourself first. Tell us what the company does.

2:21:33Gokul Rajaram:Yeah, thanks, guys. Well, I'm Nick. I'm Raythe Watcher's CEO, one of the founders, former CIO, chief information officer at Andrel. Joined Andrel when it was about 100 people. Scaled it through when it was about 4 ,500. I think they've doubled since then, since I left a couple years ago. So SpaceX and Palantir before that, leading cyber defense teams at both companies. And then prior to entering the private sector, was responsible for pre-assault, electronic warfare, and cyber warfare in support of United States Special Operations Command.

2:22:08Matthew Belloni:But you worked at Palantir, SpaceX, and Anderil?

2:22:12Gokul Rajaram:Yeah.

2:22:12Matthew Belloni:That's insane. Yeah, it's unserved. And served. Wow. Well, thank you for your service. So it was really hard to raise your first round. Thank you for your service to the venture-backed defense tech industry and the LPs. Thank you on behalf of the LPs. It was tough.

2:22:28Gokul Rajaram:Sprinkled some AI in the deck, and it was all good.

2:22:31Matthew Belloni:The rest is history. So, yeah, where is the product today? What are the key landing zones that you're going after? Because cybersecurity is pretty broad these days, right? Yeah.

2:22:43Gokul Rajaram:So fundamentally, what Wraithwatch does is we build autonomous cyber defense systems for the United States government. and its allies. That includes private sector and Fortune 500 as well. So we're deployed today to Fortune 500, commercial nuclear, aerospace defense, manufacturing. But the byline on the screen is our recent announce with the federal government, where we just landed a$30 million deal to deploy Wraithwatch in parallel. Queen hit. Queen hit. to deploy Wraithwatch to almost a dozen federal agencies in parallel. So pretty, pretty exciting time for us. And ironic time, given that we're in the middle of a shooting war with Iran, which is known for its offensive cyber warfare capabilities.

2:23:37Gokul Rajaram:Yeah.

2:23:38Matthew Belloni:Can you explain to me cyber defense? I mean, like you can go and look for holes in systems and scan code bases. You can also be, you know, rerouting, dealing with firewalls if you're getting DDoS. Like what's the nature of the threats that you're seeing? What's in the wheelhouse? What do you leave to other cybersecurity firms at this point? Yeah.

2:24:04Gokul Rajaram:So just to set the stage here a bit. So historically, cyber is kind of the last mover when it comes to any kind of advance in software engineering or tech in general. We're always the last to adopt stuff for whatever reason. Maybe it's because we're just, at the end of the day, a bunch of skeptical neckbeards. I don't know why.

2:24:24Nik Seetharaman:Well, is that because basically people want to develop a new capability and that's really exciting? And then people realize, okay, now we need to defend against said new capability.

2:24:35Gokul Rajaram:Yeah, now we need to secure it. And so it definitely, the Gartner hype curve applies to the cyber adoption curve, I would say. And it's precisely because of what you just said, like OpenClaw is a great example, right? There was all this excitement around it. And then two days later, it's like, well, shit, this entire ecosystem is open to attack. There's API keys floating around in the wild. There's people injecting prompts. There's all kinds of stuff going on. And so what you'll find is just a default sense of skepticism across the industry when it comes to anything new. And AI is no stranger to this.

2:25:10Gokul Rajaram:Makes sense, right? But what we're seeing is that the attackers on the attack side of the equation have no such compunctions. They are generally willing to try and take on any new technology that comes on board. And they certainly have adopted AI in order to industrialize and weaponize their exploits and their attacks and campaigns in general. And they're moving at warp speed. Like when we started the company a few years ago, we were met with skepticism like, do you guys really think this is a thing? No one really knew what an agentic workflow was with AI. Like to everyone, it was still a chatbot.

2:25:51Gokul Rajaram:Now everyone knows what an agent is. everyone knows you can string them together. And the adversaries have been kind of one step ahead of everybody. And they've been wiring these things up to offensive frameworks, offensive tools. And now you're seeing this kind of asymptotic attack pressure that's targeting organizations. And that's just coming up with novel new exploits, attack techniques, and so on every single day. Now, the problem is there's no corresponding defensive counter pressure. So you have this mounting attack pressure on the outside and then organizations and their cyber defenders are still moving at human speed on the inside it's like what do we do every six months a red team comes around tells us you know how screwed we are and then we scramble around and then deploy a bunch of controls okay what knobs do i have to turn over there and as this is happening out here in the attack landscape moving at human speed in here just isn't sufficient so what we intend to do is essentially drive a similar asymptotic curve for defenders internally.

2:26:51Gokul Rajaram:Yeah, that's ultimately what the strategic landscape is. And the way that that needs to happen, and I don't care if it's us, I don't care if it's another company, essentially the same problem that Palantir set up to solve, and we can get into the reasons why cyber resisted it for so long, is that the data lives in silos. It doesn't talk to each other. The tools don't like to talk to each other. Your CrowdStrikes don't like to talk to your Octas, don't like to talk to your Splunks. Splunk in general is like an old model of, let me just send data there and then worry about it later. And so Splunk to me is where data goes to die.

2:27:32Gokul Rajaram:And so what we do is tackle multiple things in parallel. Number one, break down all these silos, force these tools to talk to each other. Number two, for any dead data sources that are sitting around your organization, whether it's Splunk, whether it's data in S3. All right, let's light those things up. We can dispatch swarms of agentic whatever's to get in there and start asking questions about, okay, what kind of data exists in here? What kind of aggregations can we do? Let's just build swarms of these little mini data scientists and throw them at these dead data structures, light them up, and then bring them into the greater cyber defense ecosystem.

2:28:08Gokul Rajaram:So you can almost think of the thing that's necessary as we move forward into this future is like the cyber version of JADC2, essentially. For anyone that's familiar with the defense tech ecosystem, JADC2 is Joint All-Domain Command and Control System. And it was an initiative by the U.S. military, still is, to tie together sensors, fuse that sensor telemetry into a common, cohesive command and control layer, and then allow the warfighter to make decisions at speed against it. And cyber defense just has no analog to that capability. And that's the capability that we're bringing to the table for our USG partners.

2:28:46Matthew Belloni:Very cool. Walk me through a little bit more of why I would want to investigate dead data. Is that like, if I'm a business, I have a bunch of data in S3 and it happens to have customer credit cards, if that got hacked, that would be bad. And so maybe I want to lock that down, delete it if I'm not using it? Or is there some other shape of the threat of this dead data concept?

2:29:08Gokul Rajaram:Yeah. So dead data exists in one of two dimensions. So the data exists in the sort of pre-attack dimension of, okay, there's data that could tell you about latent risks in your organization. So I'll rewind you guys back to 2019. And there was a massive malware attack called Triton against oil and gas facilities in the Middle East. And the reason that attack was able to go down is because no one put the pieces of the puzzle together that, hey, we've got a senior engineering dude with a system that has weak controls applied to it that also serves as a jump off point into the OT or critical infrastructure sector of the network.

2:29:49Gokul Rajaram:Now, to put those four pieces of data points together, you need a board security engineer. You need a red team to come in and find it for you. And they might not ever find it, even though they might spend three months trying to look for it. So, you know, that could be one of 100 attack pads that exist in your environment. So that's kind of the pre-attack latent risk piece. And then on the post-attack side, you've got data that's just being emitted from everyone's devices inside these environments. and what that data can tell you is, all right, all this latent risk back here, is anyone actually taking advantage of it or exploiting it?

2:30:25Gokul Rajaram:This is where this second half of the equation is where you discover that. But what we've done over the past 20 years, because I don't know, the big four consulting firms of the world have told us to do it, is we send data to these data stores like S3 or Splunk or what have you. And then we just don't have the bandwidth to come around and then do something useful with it. You need some kind of sophisticated data analytics. People that think along the lines of how to make use of this data appropriately. You need to think along the lines of joins and tables and objects and ontologies. And that kind of skill set seems to just not be there when it comes to cyber defense.

2:31:06Gokul Rajaram:You know, Palantir, I think, was the first one to kind of break through and show people that this could be done for cyber defense as well. And there's a multitude of reasons why it didn't work. Like Foundry was early at the time when we were trying to break cyber. And so what we're trying to do is close the gap and just have a turnkey solution and say, OK, you've got dead data here. You've got dead data here. So you don't even know what where the adversary is going to come from. Like we can't predict the next breach because no one's looking at it. we can't tell you whether a breach is actually underway because no one's looking at it.

2:31:36Gokul Rajaram:So let's break all of this down, fuse it into this cohesive layer. And then we can tell you where the next breach is going to come from. And we can tell you if it's actually going down right now as we speak. So that's where we view the kind of like lighting up these dead data structures, because otherwise you needed a person to kind of sit there and come up with, okay, what queries are we going to ask? And what automations are we going to put into place? And it's like, dude, when the dimensionality of some of these attacks is so large, you can't predict what queries you want, right? You don't know how that attack is going to go down.

2:32:09Gokul Rajaram:You don't know how it's going to manifest itself until it does. And so the only way to solve it is by generating and evaluating those queries and their results at machine speed.

2:32:19Nik Seetharaman:Can you give us a brief history of cyber warfare with Iran?

2:32:30Gokul Rajaram:Yeah, the Iranians have a long history of executing advanced cyber warfare attacks against the United States and our allied partners as well. So, you know, the cyber companies love to give the Iranian cyber warfare groups all these cute names like Hydro Kitten and all this shit. But at the end of the day, they are a well-known, advanced nation-state cyber warfare outfit, like on the same level as kind of Russia GRU or PLA cyber warfare units, DPRK cyber warfare units. they were really not happy when Stuxnet was a thing. So back in 2010, for anyone who doesn't know, Stuxnet was kind of the first, hey, let's have a cyber thing that can be implanted in a physical system and then have kinetic effects in the physical world.

2:33:18Gokul Rajaram:So that thing went into the nuclear enrichment facilities and or the one facility that it was targeting and then made the centrifuges rotate to the point where the hardware just broke down. Right. So that was the first equivalent, that was the first kind of example of that. The Iranians took that as an inflection point, kind of ramped up their offensive cyber capabilities. And, you know, for the past, I'd say 15 years, they've been, you know, on a campaign to kind of bring those capabilities to bear targeting U.S. government and private sector entities pretty much across the board. So, you know, all of that happens.

2:33:54Gokul Rajaram:And it not only happens with Iran, it happens with Russia, it happens with North Korea, it happens with China. It kind of all happens as this cosmic background radiation against which the regular commercial industry and private sector operates. And there's very few people that actually realize that there's all these nefarious characters in the background that are continually targeting our organization, whether through external cyber attacks, whether through trying to flip insiders, corporate espionage or what have you. And so there is a cyber cold war going on. Iran has been a key player in it.

2:34:27Gokul Rajaram:And and despite, you know, decades of trying, you know, it took, you know, let's call it for what it is, an administration that said, you know, enough is enough and we're going to put some bombs on target. So hilariously, the Cloudflare founder tweeted out a few days ago that basically the Iranian cyber warfare outfits, activities have ceased completely since the strikes have gone down. So we'll see what happens.

2:34:56Matthew Belloni:Yeah. Wow. Well, good luck out there. And congrats on all the progress in the business. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Cheers. See you soon. All right. Let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we will begin the Lambda lightning round. Let's see that cloud in all of its glory. There we go.

2:35:32Nik Seetharaman:That is the moment that we've been building towards all year. We're working on this.

2:35:36Matthew Belloni:We're doing live TV and we have our first guest of the lightning What's happening? How are you doing? Raj, great to meet you. Great to meet you.

2:35:43James Everingham:Good to meet you, John. Thanks for having me on your show.

2:35:46Matthew Belloni:Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Since this is your first appearance, please give us an introduction on yourself and the company. Sure.

2:35:53James Everingham:My name is Raj Rajamani. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Jetstream Security. We just came out of stealth this morning, so super exciting times. And we are building an AI governance platform to help companies scale their enterprise AI adoption.

2:36:08Matthew Belloni:Okay. How much did you raise?

2:36:12James Everingham:$34 million. In a seed round. Yes. Seed round, Let's Buy Red Point Ventures, and the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund.

2:36:22Matthew Belloni:Yeah. So tell me about how this fits in with CrowdStrike, Okta, Wiz. You have a lot of experience at those firms, some investors in common. How do you see yourself fitting into the market and going to market?

2:36:40James Everingham:Yeah, we think we are building something very unique and differentiated. And this is something I've discussed with both George and Mike, who are the CEO and president at CrowdStrike. So before starting Jetstream, I was leading the products initiators at CrowdStrike for the last three years or so. And we had a lot of discussions about AI adoption and adoption challenges. And at Jetstream, we believe companies have an AI trust problem more than a technology problem. And by that, what we mean is with AI being probabilistic and being able to create compilers, their own social networks, and even deleting the odd email or two without being prompted, we have serious trust issues.

2:37:22James Everingham:And we think there are certain tools that you need in order to know what type of AI products you are using, understand them, and even control them. And once you have all those in place, you are able to trust it and move it into scale production. That is what we are trying to help customers do.

2:37:39Matthew Belloni:So, yeah, what's an example of this? Because if you build a tool in-house using AI, you probably know exactly what model you're using. you might not have the weights, but you can read all about the various model, the capabilities, the context window size, everything else will be made available to you in the API. Is this more for SaaS products that are vending in AI features that you might have less insight into or more interpretability of the models themselves?

2:38:14James Everingham:I would say the number one casualty in AI adoption is institutional wisdom. By that, what I mean is documentation is never anyone's priority. It's seldom accurate or up to date, which means that we have subject matter experts within companies who are responsible for understanding how these systems operate. Frequently what happens, especially with AI adoption, is that everyone's role and responsibility is going to be much larger. And what that means is that the institutional wisdom gets diluted. And the way we counter that is by delivering what are called AI blueprints. These blueprints are the operational contract of an AI workflow.

2:38:56James Everingham:They define what AI is supposed to do and flag any deviations from the intended purpose. They also track all the runtime activities, the permissions they are using, the data it touches, the services and tools it calls, and so on and so forth. So you have everything that you need in one single place. And just like blueprints, like the ones that we use for building homes and other buildings, it helps you see things that are not obvious to the naked eye. It helps you understand the specifications and tolerations that you as a company are willing to agree or use within your enterprise.

2:39:33Matthew Belloni:Will you be learning to drive a Le Mans prototype so you can hang out with George Kurtz more?

2:39:39James Everingham:I'm afraid I'm more of a swimmer than a driver. And the last time I was on the track with him, he chided me for driving a Ferrari the way I drove my Prius. I've been driving a Prius for the last 15 years.

2:39:51Nik Seetharaman:That's amazing. You're a swimmer, though? You're a swimmer?

2:39:55James Everingham:Yes.

2:39:56Nik Seetharaman:Interesting.

2:39:56James Everingham:I try to get in at least two or three times a week. So I had to swim yesterday and hopefully one later this evening as well.

2:40:03Nik Seetharaman:Open ocean or are you more of a poor guy?

2:40:05Matthew Belloni:24 hours of the Pacific Ocean.

2:40:07Nik Seetharaman:24 hours of Alcatraz.

2:40:09James Everingham:It's more like 24-hour fitness lab pool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to start somewhere.

2:40:15Matthew Belloni:That's fantastic. How big is the team? How quickly do you want to go to market? How are you seeing enterprise versus the mid-market small startup adoption? Where do you see all this going?

2:40:28James Everingham:We have about 40 employees now. And the interesting thing is almost every last person has worked with everyone else for an extended period of time. So this is a team and crew that knows each other really, really well. And we are open for business. The product is in POVs already. We were doing demos and I was getting texts from some of my investors saying, hey, I want to introduce you to these accounts. We are obviously targeting the large Fortune 500 accounts initially, but we think this is a universal category in the sense that regardless of geo region, vertical, or even the size of the company, everyone will need an AI governance platform, much like how everyone uses an EDR product today.

2:41:11James Everingham:And if we are able to solve it in a graceful and elegant manner, I think there is a lot of room in this market for both large enterprises and SMBs.

2:41:20Matthew Belloni:Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the fundraising round and say hello to George. Sure, you'll be back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. Jay Butard on Twitter or on IX says, there is a 0 % chance regime change is accomplished in a short time frame, referring to Iran. But there is a 100 % chance Trump quits this war ASAP if Intel keeps gapping down 6 % a day and the Dow Jones stays losing 1 ,000 points per day.

2:41:59Matthew Belloni:We have priorities in this country. And so watch the stock market if you want to know where the war goes, I suppose, is Jay Boutard's point. Trump said that you'll be finding out very soon who's in charge of Iran. And, of course, Ani Iyengar said, I'm a cheer, the brief CEO of OpenAI, which would be, of course, the funniest outcome. So never write it out. There is another big story in the technology and venture world. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are leading a$4 billion round into Anderil. Very exciting. And congrats to everyone over at Anderil. Still in the works. It's still in the works, but Bloomberg is reporting Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and venture firm Andrews and Horowitz are co-leading a funding round for Andrel that could nearly double the defense startup's valuation.

2:42:55Matthew Belloni:There have been rumors about this round. It's 50 or 60, correct? So the fundraising—

2:43:01Nik Seetharaman:Andrel's finally going to be worth more than figure.

2:43:04Matthew Belloni:That's right. And they're getting up into the defense tech prime territory. It was a big moment for Palantir when they passed the legacy primes on market cap.

2:43:18Nik Seetharaman:Well, still got a ways to go with Lockheed Martin sitting at 150.

2:43:22Matthew Belloni:150, but within the sights, I don't know. Josh Andrew is seeking to raise about$4 billion. The fundraising is expected to value the startup at$60 billion. The company is raising capital as it pursues projects, including a facility in Ohio, to mass produce aerial and maritime drones and other products. There was a piece in the New York Times about Palmer Luckey that was going back and forth, kind of digging into, honestly, just a lot of history on the company, but also sort of trying to understand how deployed the different products are, where things are going well. I don't think it was the most friendly piece, but certainly painted an interesting picture of Palmer and a nice graphic in the header.

2:44:09Matthew Belloni:Well, without further ado, let's bring in our next guest. We have James from Guild. How are you doing, James? What's happening? Doing great. Thanks for having me on. Welcome to the show. Since it's your first time, please introduce yourself and the company. Sure.

2:44:23Nik Seetharaman:Sure. I'm James Everingham, the CEO of Guild AI, building an agent control plane.

2:44:30Matthew Belloni:Okay.

2:44:31Nik Seetharaman:This is important because my agents are out of control. Yeah, yeah. They're going to get worse.

2:44:36Matthew Belloni:We're here for you. Yes, I was very interested in orchestration, what's happening with Gastown, some of the stuff we've been seeing with OpenClaw. How long have you been working on this? And then what do you think the correct user interface, the correct user experience paradigm is?

2:44:54Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, absolutely. So I think I was reading your post about the 2026 being the year of agents and orchestration. And first off, completely agree with that. And what we're seeing, though, is once you start getting these agents in your infrastructure and they're starting to come in pretty heavily into a lot of companies, the next problem becomes controlling these things. You know, it's like gremlins. You know, the first one's fine until they start multiplying and taking over and pulling levers in your infrastructure. You know, they can cause a little chaos. So what we have built is an infrastructure layer that provides governance and control around these.

2:45:32Nik Seetharaman:You know, you can centralize them. You can run them efficiently. You can give them and control what they have access to and what they don't. You need observability in order to figure out what they did, what they touched, and, you know, who can get access to configuring them. So that's where we're coming in. We ran into this problem, a lot of us came from meta. We were working on the developer infrastructure teams, and we were working on getting the engineers to use agents to embed into the infrastructure. And, well, we got that to work, and that basically highlighted the next problem is like, okay, now you have lots of these.

2:46:09Nik Seetharaman:We think there'll be more than 10. We think you'll have thousands of these in your infrastructure at some point. Then suddenly, you know, security pops up. And if you're in a regulated business, compliance pops up, and you need a layer to control this. Agents are non-deterministic, and you need a deterministic layer if you're going to have a stable infralayer.

2:46:30Matthew Belloni:How much is just cost-benefit important these days? I've seen crazy bills from people that are orchestrating a ton of agents, and it starts to creep up on you. Like, wait, you spent how much on tokens for that to-do app? Like, I don't know if that was a good trade. And I imagine that in the enterprise, if you're talking about deploying fleets of agents to hundreds or thousands of employees, you could be looking at a really big inference bill and monitoring that seems important too. But is that something that is just too abstract for clients to demand at this point?

2:47:04Nik Seetharaman:Not at all. That's actually one of the top requests we're seeing. Like, you know, some of the customers that we're engaging with early, like literally one of them had this problem is they had a monthly budget and, you know, it's built for single player so that engineers are off running these on, you know, on a separated server or on their laptop. One engineer blew through their entire budget in 12 hours and they didn't know. So, you know, building a centralized place where you can put circuit breakers and say, hey, you know, like turn this thing off if it gets too hungry or, you know, be able to report and understand where your spend is.

2:47:38Nik Seetharaman:But not just like where the spend is, it's like, what am I getting for that spend? And like you need to be able to measure the impact of these as well.

2:47:47Matthew Belloni:I feel like you're at the tip of the spear. What type of companies are being most aggressive about adopting fleets of AI agents these days?

2:47:55Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, you know, the timing is really interesting because we're seeing like many of the customers are now just leaning into it. It's like, you know, last year it was like experimentation. We've got one agent. It's a really interesting, you know, demonstration or example. But now they're all starting to scale. So we've been talking with small companies and large companies. And interestingly, they all seem to be at the same phase where we've now figured out that, you know, the models are powerful enough to operate tools and to be able to, like, be part of our infrastructure. So we're seeing it across the board.

2:48:32Nik Seetharaman:It seems to be hitting all these companies at once. Okay.

2:48:34Matthew Belloni:So evenly distributed across scale and stage. What about industry? Are there particular industries that are more rapidly adopting fleets of AI agents?

2:48:44Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, I think that there is some little bit of differentiation there. Of course, you know, some of the more, you know, the companies that are a little more tech forward, you know, they map up to what we traditionally would look at as the early adopters and the laggards. It's the same. So the highly regulated businesses are slower by design because they, you know, they can't take risk. And one way to think about it is the companies that we see really leaning into this is, look, you know, there's a lot of pressure for competition and being able to move faster right now. So I think that the calculus between risk and the consequences of failure has changed.

2:49:23Nik Seetharaman:People are willing to take on a little more risk and try these things. But, you know, our aim is to allow them to move fast while still reducing that risk in their infrastructure. What kind of tension is there between, like, I can imagine a world where Guild provides all of the enterprise infrastructure, so somebody can just bring, somebody can create an agent and, you know, effectively give it access to Guild, and that gives it access to the enterprise, but a lot of companies will want to actually own the full stack. How do you think about that tension as well as opportunity? Yeah, I think, well, one, I think it's an opportunity.

2:50:08Nik Seetharaman:Right now, what we're seeing is that a lot of companies are off building sort of like sort of small versions of this internally. And it's not their core competence. They don't want to build it. They don't want to maintain it over time. It's not going to get better. They don't have the specialized expertise to do it well. So what we think is that companies are really open to using this as a service. And one thing that's important is that being vendor neutral and model neutral is also important because people don't want to be locked into one vendor. Because the competition right now is things are leapfrogging each other and they're hopping from model to model.

2:50:50Nik Seetharaman:So vendor neutrality is also important here. Totally.

2:50:54Matthew Belloni:What about the types of activities, the types of use cases for fleets of agents that you're seeing? I'm interested to know about this. There's a lot of narrative around like, oh, you're just going to go vibe code your CRM and rip out that legacy software. But it just feels like with agents, you're so much more likely to just go pull your roadmap forward and go deliver more value for your customers. Maybe you'll go ask for a contact renegotiation. negotiation, but what are you actually seeing?

2:51:25Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, sure. So the interesting thing is like people, we're seeing the most innovative agents come from our customers and not ones that we thought of. I like some of the favorite ones that I've seen so far is this onboarding agent. There was an agent that made the code base sentient. And so instead of saying, hey, I want to check out these files, you can say, check out this feature. And it would say, oh, that's these files. Would you like a system diagram? Sure. And we'll paint you a system diagram. Do you want to know the history and you could have a conversation with it. Another one, or we're seeing these agents, and by the way, agents can get executed not just by a person, but by a tool and by an event.

2:52:02Nik Seetharaman:So we had a risk analysis agent that when it gets pulled, like when the CICD system pulls from source, it would analyze the risk to have how likely is this diff going to take the system down. And it can let low-risk diffs go through and high-risk ones stop. So, things like this can help eliminate holiday code freeze of the code base. So, those are a few. And they can expand way outside of just development. They can go into all of these different workflows. Anywhere where there's an integration prompts and evals, you can make use of this. We have one in ours that doesn't allow duplicate bugs to happen.

2:52:45Nik Seetharaman:So, So hooks into Git, fires an event, the agent goes and says, this is a duplicate bug already, it'll just mark it. With the Guild system, though, we were able to just go in and natural language interface just say, hey, don't make it, make it so it's not possible for duplicate bugs to exist in our company. And it just went and did it behind the scenes, installed the agent, set it up right, and boom, like that wasn't possible for any engineers in the company.

2:53:10Matthew Belloni:talk to me about where guild sits in a world where i build a product that is effectively a fleet of agents maybe you call me a rapper whatever but my customers love the product which is heavily agentic i'm using guild your product to orchestrate and then i want to vend that into a company am i like white labeling you am i using you internally and then my customer doesn't know are they going to be wanting to use Guild on their site? Where do you fit in that stack?

2:53:42Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. So one of the things that we found is that a way for these agents to be, for engineers and for companies to learn how to use these is by looking at them and seeing it. So we have something we call Agent Hub. And Agent Hub will be a public surface. So companies can have internal agents that are private, but they can also push them externally. And they can be a series of agents that work together. We look a lot like GitHub in that way, where you can go, you can find agents right on the surface that might work for you. These could be distributed by third parties or people that are building agents as products.

2:54:18Nik Seetharaman:And within minutes, they can just authorize, set up a workspace, click and boom, have these things working in their workspace. So we're big open source believers. We've been in that space our entire career. So there is an aspect of that that we're bringing to this agent marketplace.

2:54:37Matthew Belloni:Very cool. Well, we want to ring the gong for you. How much did you raise?

2:54:43Nik Seetharaman:Oh, thank you. Yeah, we it's kind of tough following that$4 billion when that you just announced. But you know, we will go we raised 44 million. It's our second, it's our second round. Apologies. It was 30 million plus 14 in our seed. We raised both of these rounds within four months. That's incredible.

2:55:02Matthew Belloni:Who participated? Yeah, any companies I might have heard of involved?

2:55:07Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, sure. Our lead investor was Google Ventures. There we go. So GV, we have NFX involved. We had a Coastal Ventures came in this round. We love Coastal. Scribble Ventures. Fantastic. Accrue Capital. There we go. Web Investment Network. Amazing. I think I got them all. You will have missed one, and that one person will hold a grudge against you forever. Oh, of course. That's a great line.

2:55:35Matthew Belloni:The rule of lists.

2:55:36Nik Seetharaman:You always forget one. It'll probably be the biggest one too, right?

2:55:40Matthew Belloni:But thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Have a great time. Goodbye. You too. Bye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about phantom cash. Cha-ching. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. And without further ado, our final guest of the Lambda Lightning Round. We have Felix from Akash Systems. How are you doing, Felix? I'm good. I'm good.

2:56:12Matthew Belloni:How are you? We're good. Good to meet you. Since it's your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

2:56:18James Everingham:Sure. My name is Felix Adrachem. I'm founder and CEO of Akash Systems in the Bay Area.

2:56:23Matthew Belloni:Amazing. What do you guys do?

2:56:25James Everingham:We are a venture-backed company that makes diamond-cooled servers for AI and cloud service providers. Okay, very interesting. Yes, very exciting. I love it.

2:56:36Matthew Belloni:I'm familiar with air cooling. I'm familiar with water cooling. What is diamond cooling?

2:56:43James Everingham:So diamond is interesting because it is not only a very beautiful material, but it is also the world's most thermally conductive material. It is extremely thermally conductive. If I held a stick of diamonds in my hands, it would take the temperature of my body and move it very quickly through the entire material and propagate it to whatever is on the other end of that material. What we do with Akash is we take that diamond that's very pretty, but also very thermally conductive, and we place it right on the GPU. So a GPU, for those of you who don't know, is the hottest component of a computer or server.

2:57:23James Everingham:So the things that answers your questions on chat GPT, on Claude, the very essence of the thing that does those questions is the GPU. It gets very hot. You've probably heard people talk about that. And cooling it down can be very expensive if you use liquids. But what we do is we take synthetic diamond grown in the lab with thermal conductivity. We put it on the GPU. It reduces temperatures by 10, 15 degrees Celsius. That reduction causes an acceleration in the inference of the GPU. It also reduces the cost of cooling the entire data center.

2:57:59Matthew Belloni:So once the heat's transferred from the GPU, die, to the diamond, it's got to get shuffled away at some point. Is that air or water? How is it getting moved away?

2:58:12James Everingham:So we're compatible with liquid cooling. If you want to have, if you already have an infrastructure of liquid cooling, we're totally game for that. But if you don't have the capital to invest in a liquid cooling infrastructure, then you don't need it because you've got diamond that we provide on the GPU. And so it goes from the diamond to a heat sink. And then that goes to air.

2:58:33Matthew Belloni:And so people that might have built a gaming PC, you put something directly on the CPU. Is that copper typically? That's typically copper.

2:58:42James Everingham:And by the way, with a Diamond Cool Server, you don't need to have your air conditioning on. You can literally turn off the AC in the room, and the room can get as hot as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And the server's literally like – Because it's shuffling it away so fast. Correct. Got it. Okay. It can be so fast into the ambience, and you'd be fine. We just released today a server made with an AMD chip that is cooled by Diamond, and that can operate at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And you would not need any liquids, no air conditioning, and it would just be – the computations would still be fine.

2:59:18Nik Seetharaman:How much actual diamond is – like what is the cost?

2:59:24Matthew Belloni:Is it like one very thin diamond or are we talking about something that could fit on a ring? I love your questions.

2:59:30James Everingham:Yes, it is a very thin layer of diamond that we place on the GPU. and to your question about cost. So the effect of this diamond cooling is that it generates about a million dollars by our conservative calculations, about a million dollars of revenue and some cost savings to the operator of the GPU. And that's over typically a lifetime use of around three to four years. So we're not just giving you compute, we're giving you cash. So roughly about a million. And so we take a slice of that to add on to the cost of a traditional server. So the cost of our servers don't compare to the million dollars that you would get back in returns.

3:00:15Matthew Belloni:Yeah. So I imagine -

3:00:16Nik Seetharaman:You're literally, you're icing out the GPUs. I love it.

3:00:19Matthew Belloni:So I imagine that a diamond cooling system has got to be more expensive than the legacy system. but you're saving money on the energy cooling, the AC, the water flow, all of that. That's correct. So less energy intense. That's correct.

3:00:36James Everingham:And we're talking about, I can give you some numbers here. So a typical server, maybe like 250, 300K. Yep. Ours would be on the order of, let's say, 400K. Okay. But on the other hand, over the three, four years of use life, you're going to get a million dollars.

3:00:51Matthew Belloni:And then also, I imagine that you're on sort of a Moore's Law-esque scaling curve of your own costs because lab-grown diamonds have gotten dramatically cheaper over the last decade and you expect that to continue? Okay, explain that. That's exactly right.

3:01:05James Everingham:The cost of making diamond has literally collapsed through the floor. It's so low. And that's just improved our economics.

3:01:12Matthew Belloni:Okay, so for actually making the diamonds, you're working with a contract manufacturer who also makes diamonds for saws or jewelry?

3:01:21James Everingham:We source diamonds from all over the world. We buy diamonds from wherever we can get them very cheaply. We have ways of growing them ourselves. But the interest of scaling rapidly, we buy diamonds from everybody. As long as you can meet both quality and cost requirements, we're happy to buy from you.

3:01:41Matthew Belloni:Yeah, I remember seeing the first lab-grown diamond, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago. And it was basically like a massive dome that was putting an immense amount of pressure. And it would come out with a diamond-shaped diamond. It was something that would belong on a ring. Now, I imagine as wafers and GPU dyes have gotten bigger, you need to make a bigger lab-grown diamond and then slice it. Can you walk me through, like, how are you dealing with, like, the size of the GPU die that I would imagine is bigger than, like, a one-carat stone?

3:02:16James Everingham:Yeah, so you're very perceptive. What you described is the old-fashioned way of making diamond where you try to replicate the conditions of the core of the earth. Oh, yeah. Very high pressure, high temperature. What we do is something called chemical vapor deposition. It's a more advanced way of making diamond where you don't need to get a massive thing to recreate the core of the earth. These reactors that we use are very small typically. And the amount of diamond that we need is relatively small. Yep. because it needs to be cost-effective and it needs to fit into the traditional size of a server.

3:02:52Matthew Belloni:Folks who have purchased a diamond, maybe for a loved one, might be familiar with the 4Cs. Do any of those matter to you? Can you use a lower-quality diamond? Or is there a benefit to heat dissipation if you have a particularly clear diamond?

3:03:08James Everingham:Great question. The answer is yes. we don't quite use gem quality beautiful spectacular twinkling little star diamonds. Diamonds that we use are actually what we call industrial diamonds. So they're not pretty but they do have an extremely high thermal connectivity and that's the thing to care about.

3:03:27Matthew Belloni:Yeah of course. And so we use that for our work. Are diamonds forever? Do you need to replace these at some point?

3:03:35James Everingham:Diamonds are forever. We actually reclaimed the diamonds at the end of the life of the server. We're happy to take the server back and pull the diamond out and reuse it for our needs. Yes.

3:03:49Matthew Belloni:Talk about flexibility of integration. Congratulations on the AMD deal, by the way. But it feels like it's not rocket science to get this working on a different chip. Walk me through that.

3:04:02James Everingham:It's not. So it is, but it isn't. It's taken us a long time to get here. Actually, this technology that we've deployed with the AMD chip actually started off in space. So we actually started off doing diamond cooling in satellites. In fact, last year we launched about a half a dozen satellites with diamond cooling. But then when we saw what was going on in AI and that the power densities in the GPU are actually a lot less than what we deal with in space, and the fact that in space the conditions are much more harsh, we're talking about solar radiation, space radiation that's a lot more difficult and challenging to work with than what we have on a terrestrial, we said, wait, if we can address a problem in space, we can definitely address a problem in a GPU.

3:04:46James Everingham:And so that gave us the confidence to replicate what we now have on ground. And getting to space took us a long time, and we're leveraging all of that to do this. So the technology that we've deployed here is covered by dozens of patents. There's a lot of material science and device physics. But in the end, we're able to do it cost effectively and scale rapidly for our customers.

3:05:14Matthew Belloni:Amazing. I heard that there was a secret shopper who stopped by the Diamond store, placed an order for a huge amount of your product. How much is the deal? I know you can't tell us who it is with, but I'd love to know the size.

3:05:29James Everingham:It's a$300 million deal.

3:05:35James Everingham:You said the biggest number.

3:05:37Matthew Belloni:Congratulations. that is amazing this is amazing what a remarkably sci-fi yeah incredibly amazing product i i love this and thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us thank you do you have any other questions this is great uh yeah are there any other interesting uh applications for diamonds that you can think of i've heard of the diamond drill the diamond saw i this was not on my bingo card, but should we expect big things from diamonds in the future if they get really, really, really, really, really cheap?

3:06:11James Everingham:Definitely. I mean, we get calls all the time. People want to put our stuff, I mean, because we have the space heritage as well as now servers and GPUs, people want to now do data centers in space. Of course. So that's super sexy, amazing. To be honest with you, just trying to execute what we have in front of us is already quite a bit of a full plate. But yes, there are applications in space, as we discussed, applications in other areas, industrial areas, such as with Bitcoin mining. That's something that requires a lot of compute. And so we do get pings, but right now we're very focused on just getting compute to data centers and cloud service providers and AI companies.

3:06:59Matthew Belloni:Well, Felix, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This was very fascinating. And good luck to you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

3:07:18Nik Seetharaman:The Germinator says it's official. Apple launches the M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro, M5 MacBook Air, New Studio Display and New Studio Display XDR.

3:07:32Matthew Belloni:This is what I always say. It's not official until Mark Gurman writes about it. I don't actually go to Apple. It's not official when they post about it. I like that he's got the scoop. But I believe him, and this is exciting. The M5 Pro, M5 Mac, M5 Max, Macintosh Pro.

3:07:51Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, so apparently there's still redesigned rumors for the MacBook Pro.

3:07:55Matthew Belloni:I might jump at this. I might upgrade.

3:07:58Nik Seetharaman:6.15 a.m. Pacific tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning. You can order.

3:08:03Matthew Belloni:Yeah. The studio display XDR is going to be awesome. The pro display XDR has been dominant for like a decade. And you will go on YouTube and look up, should I buy an Apple pro display XDR in? And it will just autofill 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. And the answer is always yes. Like it's still a great monitor. And so it's always, the only problem is just, it's been really expensive and it hasn't been refreshed in so long that a lot of Apple folks that want a beautiful display, high refresh rate, there's really like no trade-offs with it. Whatever they have planned there, I think will be very, very exciting.

3:08:44Matthew Belloni:So buckle up Apple fans. There's gonna be a lot of good news tomorrow to react to. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. The last thing I think might be worth mentioning is that Ted Mabry over at Palantir is issuing a call to former Palantirians, former hobbits, as he says, if you've ever considered returning to Palantir, this is the week to do it. The world is demanding every last unit of creative energy we can muster. If you return, you will be on a plane one day and committing code that matters within hours of getting your laptop from the foxhole to the factory floor.

3:09:23Matthew Belloni:to the surface area to support something incredibly meaningful immediately is immense. I promise you nothing other than a sense of satisfaction that comes from the purpose and intensity of the most intense deployments you've ever worked on. If you have been chasing that spark, come find it again. The Shire is calling, saying come back and work at Palantir. Very fun.

3:09:40Nik Seetharaman:Anyway, time to plant the bomb. I think so. OK. Actually, let's not plant the bomb today. But thank you for being with us. We will be back tomorrow. Tomorrow, 11 AM. I can't. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. Have a wonderful evening.

3:09:57Matthew Belloni:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbp.com. Call your parents. Tell them you love them. Tell them you want to watch Ken Burns with them. See ya. Do it. Goodbye. Bye.