Garry Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nichole Wischoff, Billy Thalheimer, Mamma Mia!

36:58Wow. Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a show on HBO Max. Wait, is it live already? No, I think it's, the trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4th. And Jake says, this company used to make The Sopranos. So not a great reception. but you know my reaction to this was like I'm sorry like the market demands what it demands this is gonna do really well and it's smart so here's the thing this is clearly a strategic move from max to try to get a younger demographic that's that uh they can pay more to get the show than netflix because netflix is looking at this and saying all the people that are really going to want to watch this already have access to netflix accounts they're on family plans as a younger demo.

37:46Yep. Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers. And so, um, the deal, the deal makes sense. Um, and I'm, I'm, uh, I'm not surprised at all to see it. Okay. And it's easy for the brothers, uh, the Paul brothers that is because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point. Yeah. And, um, yeah, now they're going to have to sit down in front of a camera. It's, it's just, yeah. I mean, I obviously like deeply controversial people some people like love and hate the content uh but uh have you seen the slap that changed my life no it's a uh youtube video but it's like almost like a documentary about logan paul challenging a russian slap boxer to a slap fight and it's edited so well it's edited by this guy hayden hillier smith who's like this like youtube mastermind and it's like emotional like it's it's it's it's like art and it's so ridiculous because you're watching this logan paul like like slap boxing thing but it takes you on this emotional journey of him like wanting to go and do this fight and it's like is this too risky will he have like brain damage from it uh and it's it's it's just really well shot really well paced really well edited uh it's exciting it's emotional you can see some of it here jordy look at this and he's talking to his mom and his mom's like don't do this like if you get hit you're gonna get one shot at you're gonna get one shot at exactly uh and i mean look look it's it's it's rough yeah oh you can see it over there um and and and this was the moment i was like oh man this guy's like he's a good entertainer regardless of what you think of all his products and and other content like the whole slap learn to be like just a master because he's just so i we we've talked about this i know we've talked about this offline i don't know if we've talked about it online but the whole slap boxing thing um dana white went on um went on like this whole like podcast road show talking about how power slap is is the number one sport in the world and he says we get more views than nfl nba mlb you know all combined and people are basically saying i actually just lost power oh you did I guess it'll be better.

40:00Cool. No. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive roadshow to promote Power Slap. Yeah. And people, obviously, all the data is public, so they immediately start fact-checking it. And first of all, they're like, one, Dana, this is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things. Yeah. And apparently, it's actually been really underperforming uh from a rating standpoint uh where it has this sort of shock value that people are drawn to on social media because you see this guy about to slap this other guy it stands out people stop they watch it yeah uh but then the comments are almost universally negative that actually actually how people feel about it yeah um and uh so so anyways we'll we'll see kind of what happens there but um there was just a great uh profile on dana white i think in forbes i think he did the cover and so we should we should read that on the show it'd be great yeah we should then we should have him call in yeah no and and then again the challenge is um doing combat sports that involve um somebody being completely defenseless yeah is uh is much harder to watch hey we got gary here hey how's it going it's great how you doing good good there he is y 'all fantastic it's Amazing to have you on.

41:24We wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much. It's fantastic to talk to you anytime. But it seems like YC is like completely transformed by LLM's writing code. So break it down. Okay. I mean, I think we're just at the dawn of this technology. And it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it. And, you know, I'm seeing the haters on the Internet coming at us, but that's fine. Come at me, bro. What's happening is that like, you know, 100 % of YC companies these days have technical co-founders. And then you're stupid not to use it.

42:12Like, basically, why would you subject yourself to, you know, spending a lot of hours on things that you don't have to do? and being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing. And basically a prerequisite of using these tools well is that you don't need the tools. Yeah, that makes sense. How long do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have in AI right now is going to be perpetual? Or do you see a world in five years where the playing field has been completely leveled? You know, I still think like it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. If anything, what it is, is it matters even more.

43:02The bar was lower before. The bar is much higher now. Like back then, if you go back like 10 or 15 years for startups, period, you know, when I first worked at YC in 2011, almost anything that had really technical co-founders and a real problem, like you were going to be, you know, at least a series A company. Like, you know, and then I don't think that that's, I think that's become less and less true even today. Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills and, you know, are in pretty big problem spaces. and then there's competition like the bar is just so much higher so i think the way to think about it is if you're not using it you're actually leaving um time and attention uh that could be used for all the other things that you're going to need in a perfect competitive world and um so it's you know all the people who are like you know f vibe coders or you know all that it's just like It's cope.

44:09It's like the world just changed. We're just trying to help you. And you live in that old world where, you know, you're sitting there, you know, writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code. Or you can embrace the future and, you know, get that alpha, get that edge. Talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint. You know, YC has always been about you have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. us it's really around you know preparing for for demo day the bars all you know anytime you take hundreds of super super talented people and put them under that pressure uh they're going to produce amazing results uh from a revenue standpoint from attraction standpoint you know it seems like the bar has jumped uh dramatically but would love some more color there yeah uh I guess like YC, we've been really intentional about trying to go back to founders who are actually right at the beginning.

45:11So, you know, these numbers fluctuate, but pretty much every time 70 to 80 percent of the companies have no revenue and, you know, probably 70 to 80 percent generally are unlaunched. So it's really during those 10 weeks, like, can you go from zero to, say,$100 ,000 or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue? But even that is, like, you know, sort of secondary. Like, the funniest thing when you really think about it, you think about a company that actually does make it to$100 million or a billion dollars a year in revenue. Like, are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well, that company went to 50K ARR and that other company went to 150K ARR.

45:56It's like, if you like play it all the way out, like it's all these other factors. So, you know, I think basically if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills um and even then like you can't count teams out like there are tons of teams that uh deferred demo day had nothing had you know they took their money and basically nose to the grindstone like stayed in the idea maze and then they went on to create things like retool and you know these are things that everyone uses now so oh man so yeah i don't know it's wild passed on yeah my my my favorite joke on the show is that like the the way to outperform as an lp is to travel back in time and just give john as much money as possible to invest in his early uh first and second yc i remember i yeah i remember being a you know demo day with retool and being like that company looks cool but i don't even know what i would say to them because i didn't realize you could just like yeah just invest uh anyway um we we've had this uh thesis obviously like you know what why see anything successful attracts like haters uh we've had this thesis that yc is like entering like a renaissance like with the ai stuff like this is the best time to be running like the yc business model but can you talk a little bit about um specifically like are do you think about yourself running yc in founder mode and can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level.

47:33Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like in Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know, like I, I'm sure I, it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook. And Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back to YC, the first thing he said was, all right, Well, if you were the founder, what's zero-based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the U.S.

48:08government. Like, you know, I think I just stepped in it by bringing that up. But hey, like, you know what? This is actually how you should be a leader. Like, you actually have to think about things from first principles, from zero-based accounting. Like, if knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And, you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, you know, thinking. Yeah. So what are the biggest changes you've made? You know, doing the right thing. So I think YC was always the, like, center, the sort of, like, tree of prosperity. You know, I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness running Initialized.

48:52And I, you know, built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome. Yeah. I realized that actually if I stayed at Initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to right the ship at YC, I would be out of a business. I, at Initialized, would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in the right direction. And here we are. I think that we're doing it and we're going to keep doing it. And the biggest thing that, you know, it's just funny that Founder Mode was the meme that was born at the alumni, top alumni conference. And, you know, Brian Chesky didn't even, he wasn't even like scheduled to appear.

49:39And I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his, you know, it's funny. For him, he's like, yeah, I'm going to tell the selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time. He does that every single time. But I remember seeing him extremely animated, telling his not his zero to one story, but his like save the company pre IPO story where he had to. Nobody believed in him. Covid was happening, you know, and then he just buckled up. He's like, look, I made a lot. He admits like he made a bunch of different mistakes that. But the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at, that was such a pivotal moment.

50:24I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. There are about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked easily$10 to$100 billion in new market cap that very night. That's amazing. There are just people who, you know, there is a machine in Silicon Valley and it's not unintentional. It's not malicious. Like, you know, our corporate governance and Delaware C-Corps are designed boards or like designed to maximize shareholder value. But there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self-serving, that cause you to do the wrong things.

51:10Like you hire people who did it at a big company before, and then you're supposed to do it that way. And it's like, no, no. Like, well, maybe. Like, you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting that you shouldn't innovate on. Innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail. Yeah. But then you can do podcasting and tweeting from jail now. I don't know. Like keeping your wits about you, you know? Be founder mode. Yeah, yeah. what do you say to people that want to put yc in a box right you guys have had some high profile hard tech deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies and there's pushback from people that that almost want to say you know you guys are it's like obviously completely bs because there's a long history um and the guy who's running the place was a palantir like it's you shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of this thing once gary takes it I don't want to answer you.

52:06Five eyes. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we have strong opinions here around why this is great, because if you're a super bright, you know, engineer or technologist and you want to build something, YC can teach you how to build, you know, a company. You have to build your product and sort of own your market. But, yeah. What do you say to people that want to put YC, you know, in a box and say, stick with SaaS, stick with software? Oh, man. I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know. I mean, Boom is – Astronus is right across the street. They're, like, getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs, like, I mean, Albedo is super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites.

52:43But, you know, they're better than what the U.S. government can do. And, you know, they might just replace that market for – it's just nuts. Like, you know, this is a small team out of Colorado, you know, putting satellites up that are better than, like, the entire – you know, government waste machine. It's like not, I guess, you know, in some, in some respects, like it's not that surprising actually. So go through their nuclear company. Yeah. We've got nuclear companies. We got, you know, fusion company. I get it. You know what? Like I think that we're, it's a weird thing to sort of deal with for me.

53:22Cause I always think of myself as the little guy, but you know, I got to realize like, Hey, I get it. Like we're going to take the arrows and it's fine. And we're just going to keep helping founders. And the reality is like, hey, you know, actually, like, it's I want to shout out the Gundo bros. I want to be like, you know what? Like, you guys keep doing your thing. Like, you're always welcome at YC. Like, you know, but I know there was like a little bit of ex beef, but there shouldn't be, you know, like, you know, I think the challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in you got to reject a bunch of people right because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment uh but the ultimate evidence of the value of yc is that you have highly highly successful founders that go back for a second time right and so whenever i see drama on the timeline about yc uh it's never coming from people that have experienced the product right it's always coming from you know people that just really aren't live players, right?

54:28Like people that aren't really in the conversation. So yeah, be a player character, man. And if your player character is just like, you don't got to be like that. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about just long term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500k investment level? I mean, when I went through, I see there was this whole like hardware is hard. it was always like oh it's going to be so capital intensive and yet i think we're seeing people do the yc model and yeah you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of you know whatever boat you're building on demo day like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app yeah but i mean the reason why hard tech at yc can happen is like i mean kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier like it's not necessarily literally just about, you know, SaaS, did you grow 10 % week on week?

55:24Like, did you hit 100k ARR? Like, that's, you know, sort of weak, like spreadsheet thinking. And the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with like, you know, if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in 10 weeks? And sometimes it's a prototype, sometimes it's a demo. Like, the other thing is, I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just like hard allocated to YC companies. Not from us, from like, you know, hundreds of VCs who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves. And, you know, name me another place that has that actually.

56:08Like, and they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug. Like, you know, they are actually meeting the founders. They're actually making up their own minds. And they're funding hard tech. I think we're about 90 % AI. And the age of intelligence is here. Dude, the machines are able to do all knowledge work. That's insane. And then simultaneous to that, I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's the built world. How do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another. And, you know, God knows in America, we need it, you know, like we don't even have, we can't even make screws for ourselves.

56:51It's nuts, right? You know, I just saw Balaji in December in Singapore, and he like super black pilled me on, you know, American manufacturing, we need, you know, 1000x what we have right now. And, you know, it's not, it's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing, intelligence or people, right? It's the will. We have to have the will to do it. And so my message to everyone watching is if you're thinking about it, YC is a great place to be. It's not the only place, right? But we think we're trying to build one of the best places. And it is for AI, it's for software, it's for all kinds of technology.

57:35We are building abundance from here. And we want to find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all, all the political crap on the side. Like, that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of just like unbelievable innovation. And, you know, all the world's like, you know, being rewritten by, by code and atoms and, you know, what, what brushstroke, what line of code, you know what what will you bring what you know yeah it's great where will you build uh talk to talk to us about happenstance you've i've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company it seems to be a personal favorite uh like i'd love to i'd love to hear the pitch uh you know uh from you directly yeah i mean i i just use it a lot personally i mean i get hit up for um And, you know, I was thinking about how Sam Altman, when he had my role here at YC, he used to have like basically a team of EAs.

58:39And his email wasn't, I think it wasn't even Sama. It was SA-Router. And it was sort of a nod to basically what I feel like I am now. Like I get, you know, dozens of requests every day from all kinds of YC founders and, you know, people I've run across. And that's pretty cool. I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in tech. And then the best thing I can do is like, oh, yeah, know-how, like capital. It's human capital, all these things. Like people are recruiting, they're trying to sell. If I think they are legit, it's the purest form of creating value from information, right?

59:25And so happenstance just happens to be that thing for me. you know the world is way too big like my world now is uh i think my i have like 11 000 contacts in my phone or something it's like i always hit the yeah i always break apple like apple my my iphone cannot support 11 000 contacts are you uh are you an inbox zero guy or do you just give up and try to make sure you give up it's a river so if someone's waiting for an email for me right you know i don't know you might have to i'm sorry you might have he's on tvpn yeah come ask the question in the chat uh one more question for you you put out a uh you know yc's you know um famous for your request for startups list uh wanted to highlight one specifically that you had uh called out which was a secure ai app store we want a new kind of a app store an os layer that sits on your computer or phone it should protect user data offer one shared memory help users find the best ai apps and help developers build and handle payments.

1:00:24Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing teams in that space yet that you're excited about? Or is this coming down the pipeline, hopefully? I think it's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, in full transparency, I don't know if I found one that really quite fit on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is it's pretty clear that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Windows Apple, iOS, Android, like this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software. And it's just, it's more like a thought exercise. Like I think it is possible for someone to do this right now.

1:01:11And we'll see if it happens. We're on the lookout. Fantastic. Well, speaking of Gundo Bros, you wanted to give a shout out to the Gundo Bros. We got Augustus joining next. Great to see you, brother. It's a party on this show. One person after another. Well, thank you so much for joining, Gary. We'll have to have you back. Talk more soon. It's always a pleasure chatting. And hopefully we'll see you at YC Demo Day. All right. Look out for application, tbpn.com. Yes. Yeah, you do media companies. We're in there. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, Gary. Yeah, have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus.

1:01:51How you doing Augustus? What's new? I'm blessed dude. I'm back in Gundo for a spell rather than the Near East or the mountains of the Rockies. So it's been a vibe. It's been sunny and warm, which has been different for Rainmakers the last four months. That's great. Wherever you guys go, it gets cold. It starts snowing, raining. It's a tough life. I mean, this looks kind of like, I haven't watched the SBF prison interview, but you kind of have a prison vibe going on behind you. But I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one. Yeah. But we were talking about you earlier because Luke Metro's in Arena Magazine talking about how everyone wants to re-industrialize America, but nobody wants to work in a factory.

1:02:36And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an eight sleep soon? dude it's so funny you say that we um we decided like a month ago um okay we're big enough now we're hiring like serious scientists we're bringing government people through no more bunk beds in the factory um so the room that i'm in now used to have four bunk beds in it the room over there used to have two bunk beds in it um a lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here we had a tradition for a bit where if you move from across the country you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds um so that was fine well lasted the peanut gallery on x is gonna start saying oh it's time to short rainmaker they don't sleep in the office anymore they're too legit they have too many government officials coming in to try to get their bit you know to try to work with them uh yes but at the very least we're staying in gundo like some other unnamed gundo companies a little bit of drama scoop drama no we don't need I always thought that Gundo was like the place that you can eventually graduate out of because once you need 100 ,000 square feet, like it's just not, it's just, it is a small city.

1:03:49So, you know, I'm rooting for the Gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas. You know, that's what I hope for you. But can you give me the quick, like the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit. But what's the core product that you're selling right now? Yeah. So Rainmaker is making earth habitable by making it precipitate more. More rain and more snow in air environments. So farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored, and cities in arid regions that need water.

1:04:29We're making that happen with advanced remote sensing. So radar, LIDAR, satellite data. We're using open source stuff and some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month. Our own radar to find the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti-icing capable drones into those clouds. Spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they fall and stay as snow or if it's warm beneath the cloud melt back into rain. How many drones have you crashed?

1:05:09between you, me, and not the Federal Aviation Administration. No, we've crashed dozens of drones. We have one corporate value at Rainmaker, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. And that's sort of an extension of like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass. It's kind of just a bummer, right? And like building a deep tech company is especially hard. but if you pavlov yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get like good feedback you learn how you failed you learn what to do better next time um you end up with a bunch of people kind of like uh rocky you know that like just fight harder and do better the the more they get punched in the face and so um we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy wet cold mountaintops and everyone's better for it what's the balance like now for you in the field doing the engineering work, building the actual product, selling, and then government stuff.

1:06:02You're in a suit, you're testifying, you're shaking your head when someone's espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen the viral clips. How do you balance those two things? Yeah, I'm going back to Tennessee this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification to a criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm going to go to Florida. Arson's legal now, but if you want to make it rain, yeah we're putting you i mean i i i think you'd be just as productive in prison like you're already kind of in prison you're more locked in uh it'd be a minor setback if they lock you up i'm sure i'm sure the rest of your bros would like break you out in some heroic scheme or you can or you make calls like it like a don from the prison right exactly exactly uh yeah i guess going off of that big question for me is weather modification is so charged you're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both, you piss off people in the center sometimes, you piss off people on the left, people on the right.

1:07:01You know, people on the right might say, you know, it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there. People on the left are just, you know, maybe anti-science sometimes. How has it been trying to thread the needle? Obviously, you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen. Dude, water's a nonpartisan issue. whether you want ecosystems restored or you want more water for your farm or you want urban development in your city we want to bring you water we can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination um and then when it comes to like the real fringe edges because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance right for whatever their uh particular issue is um you know i personally believe that like genesis 126 it's the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time is to steward the earth, the seas and the skies.

1:07:54Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the right. And when it comes to the left, some people think that like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just like not true. But even if you believe it to be the case, like we've we've messed up the planet so badly already, we might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left are generally more game with that.

1:08:26Yeah, that makes sense. What are some of the most ambitious projects and places? Obviously, we went out to, what was that place out in the desert we went to? Salton Sea. The Salton Sea. That was a really cool case study. Are there other kind of long-term projects that you think are kind of on the bucket list that you want to make amazing one day? Yeah. The Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500 ,000 acre feet of water per year. The Bear River is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake. And it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho, all that flow into it.

1:09:08I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must. And even more interestingly than that something in the distant future for rainmaker is um the winter olympics in 2034 are going to be held in salt lake and china in 2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades so it didn't rain on the olympic games we want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh pow for all the olympic games in salt lake uh speaking of china the first i think the first time i ever met you you mentioned you came in just like completely just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the Gobi Desert by planting a bunch of trees.

1:09:49That's obviously not your business, but like, is anyone working on that? That feels important if you're really thinking about like terraforming certain parts of America and like reclaiming and just improving different biomes. Like how does that play in? Is that just a different startup? Do we need another company to build that? Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this whole plan? Yeah, Rainmaker long-term is the terraforming company, right? We want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and the environment.

1:10:22There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs that are spraying seeds from drones. Really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground that's pretty cool i haven't seen it commercialized yet and um someday i do want rainmaker in the business of all sorts of different terraforming stuff like planting trees literally boiling the ocean by the way if you boil enough of the ocean then you can create more clouds um so we'll hear it here first is uh boiling the ocean boiling the ocean eventually we'll talk to you in 20 years when you're still grinding at this being like, yeah, I'm still trying to boil the ocean.

1:11:02Yeah. One, I just have to say, you know, I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus arc obviously met you right after you were graduating in New York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I always, you know, and it's been amazing to watch and be a small investor. um you have found the um you've you've shown the the perfect ability to balance attention and progress right so many people would have said augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish right because founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive that feedback loop that becomes negative where they're so good at posting and they're so good at the internet that they just get sort of fixated on that and then that becomes their sort of dimension of progress.

1:11:58How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I want to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year, right? There's, you know, multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. How, what is the next, you know, two, three years look like for you in terms of balancing, yapping, knowing that you need to be making massive forward progress on the business as well? To give credit where credit is due, it was in no small part Coogan's shot that was called where he said, like, listen, you guys are going to get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually, in fact, are.

1:12:38And so we deliberately decided about the middle of last year just to kind of go like media blackout. and I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said like yeah I worked at other companies where the founder was a really big yapper and yes you need to be an evangelist but then like the founder doesn't know some like fundamental crux of the tech problem and the company blows up because of that and so I you know we were talking about like our publication strategy and some media stuff and we gave it to our PR people and they were like hey can you dumb it down and make this less technical and the funny part about that was like our science team already told us like you guys are going to make us seem like idiots um and so we have we've done extraordinary things particularly in the last five months and i'm so proud to work with the people that i do and um you know not to be like a coming soon guy but um in uh the end of this month in april we're going to start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made um across the entire western united states and then um i've alluded to online the middle east a little bit we've done some stuff there thanks actually the progress the progress uh the fox business pod was taken from a mountaintop in the middle east i didn't share that a lot that was that's amazing that's cool uh when i read your last investor update i genuinely was shocked because i people don't have any uh i don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys uh how much progress you guys um you know have made in the in the last year and a half it's it's really incredible yeah narrative violation yeah not for not for augustus not for augustus but yeah i mean for the for the peanut gallery yeah the peanut gallery but we're that's where the show exists to what uh i want to get into some gallery i want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions uh what uh what are you benching these days oh dude i imagine it's going to be like the last time I lifted, like you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational.

1:14:40I don't even know if we've, I don't, have you ever gotten a proper lift with Augustus? Like he's going in there. I've seen the rack in the office. He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set, but it's hard when you're traveling. It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling. So break it down. How's it going? So yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started Rainmaker. um that's mostly muscle um so i i don't think my one rep maxes are what they used to be but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs so i was telling john john uh woke up monday like deathly ill and i and i was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set so that if we need to really we need a podcast with the same intensity that augustus builds you know hard tack exactly of course i would rip lucy smelling salt we we actually got some in the office uh back in like 2016 2017 when we were building the company and it's a it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling salts it's intense um what uh what area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about obviously uh you're 100 locked in but uh yeah i'd be curious like what is the space that uh you know when when you're sort of looking left or right, what's most exciting?

1:15:57I know that on a long enough time horizon, I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces, but in the near term, what are you excited about? Fission, fission, fission, fission. You might not be very surprised, but my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear. And I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor, to get power positive. I also think like a really important point, you know, when you, you brought up before how you do publicity, how you do media, um, the Valor Atomics Ward zero unveiling was an incredible event and the aesthetics were off the charts.

1:16:35And like a lot of people said, Oh, look at the facade. Like that's so over the top, but also if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the Gundo is like, it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick, because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again, And the next generation, the lower class of Zoomers, they're going to end up doing software engineering. So making things incredible and cool, I think, is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal prototype, like that is really sweet.

1:17:07And I'm excited to go hang out with the tailors in the Philippines to see War One come online. Yeah, it's the future should look like the future. and bringing those aesthetics to bear can have a benefit as long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware, right? Is there a new class of Gundo startups that are coming in? Because you built this universe, this cinematic universe that was kind of around you and whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there, a couple other guys would be there, the Nearest crew, the Pico Grid crew, a couple other folks, Dirac, right? But is there a new addition that we need an update on Gundo?

1:17:45or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the godfather of the gundo dude yeah so the gundo book club is a lot of these dudes rather than being like i don't know 23 through 27 they're like 19 through 23 totally different cohort um a lot of cool companies teddy cohort from durin finally made it uh to the gundo from georgia it's really cool aries is sick um uh Chris, what's his last name? Ottoman. Yeah. Yeah. He is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new clique. And we're almost out of touch with us. You know, part of what made Gundo possible and like the initial Dodge vibe real possible was we were all running like pre-seed companies.

1:18:28So we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like help around. And so we didn't even get to know these guys as well. But they're a super tight clique, like the original founding group of Gundo Bros. That's cool. What are you thinking about supply chain? there's been a lot of debate over you know Chinese drone motors and how hard it is I mean I've talked to anduril guys who are like yeah like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get I was hearing I think you were at that talk where someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now and like it's just like there's all these weird things where like you just can't get American made tin or you can't get American made so I'm sure you're thinking about that, but also, you know, early stage, it's not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain.

1:19:15But what are you seeing as the supply chain develops? And are there any other gundo companies that you've been able to like kind of build on top of? I know at one point you were saying that like, oh, yeah, you just walked across the street, there was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company. So the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot though. So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro.

1:19:46When it comes to like immediate supply chain in Gundo, I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by Rangeview from Cameron Schiller's company. And so like having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet. How you get someone to innovate in like winding motors. I'm not totally sure, but like boards, I think actually we are going to see, if not just because of SoftBank's$100 billion that they maybe do or don't have, we will see a lot more of in the United States soon. Yeah, that's cool. There's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle.

1:20:24And I think they might've been family owned, they got bought by private equity, and then they shipped off to China. And so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back. Cause like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core, core competency here, but, uh, I'm sure lots of people are working on it. Uh, Jordy, you got another question? Should we let Augustus go? No big questions. I know you got to get back to work. Uh, what are you hiring for right now? Uh, how can we help you find them? Who's the most critical next hire? Thanks. Um, before even I answered that question, uh, I briefly lived in South Lake, Texas, um, which is where Quinn yours is from.

1:21:02So yes, actually the, the QB of UT Austin I was mistaken for multiple times. I saw that reply. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so I don't know, that was pretty funny, but who am I hiring for? Go to make rain.com slash careers. What we're interested in most now are radar scientists. So if you have either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar. so that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector those are the people that we want most after that though I would say aerosol chemists so if you've worked at Juul if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke that's of interest and then government affairs if you're a seasoned yapper from the hill then we'd love to talk to you fantastic amazing well thanks so much for joining gustus you're always welcome on the show whenever you're the absolute man we need one of those uh quarter zips there they look fantastic yeah send them over to the studio wear them special episodes whenever it's raining we'll wear them yeah that's good uh we'll have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon you're the man stay safe out there get some rest awesome should we get into some timeline we should we should we should do a bunch of timeline we have what an hour and a half something like that until the next call in uh oh no we got like 45 minutes okay so did you hear that italy has soured on starlink i have some reports here that's there that italy doesn't want to do business uh and i had grok rewrite it in a comically italian accent and i'll read some to you uh the italian governo nowadays are having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1.6 billion deal with elon musk starlink eh bloomberg she said mama mia people whispering that the worries come from the u.s pulling back like a scared of linguine from the promises to keep europe safe by the bing by the boom starlink he's got some competition capisce they talking about satellite communications right here in Italy.

1:23:11It's like known a secret pasta recipe. The report, she say, Elon Musk, he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the Trump administration. Forget about it. Already the stats in Europe, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg, she say, on Wednesday, that Tesla shares in China, oh dear mea, down 49%. That's no good, like overcooked spaghetti. But wait, Musk might have picked up some extra business in the U.S., at least for Starlink. Salute. Word on the street. They say the Federal Aviation Administration might ditch a Verizon like a bad batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead.

1:23:51That's a spicy meatball. Amazing. So thank you to Grok. That's the first belly laugh that an LLM has provided. That might be a world first. Yes. Grok is undefeated at humor. I really enjoyed that. uh anyway uh yeah so the news uh italy does not want to do business with elon musk because he's close to trump and trump is not supporting uh i guess uh europe grok actually followed this up by the way and said how's it dad hey you want me to cook at the pizza next a ridiculous character i love it you know you know funny story so uh the domain partyround.com was a domain owned by a catering company in Milan.

1:24:37And I had my buddy who lives in Milan negotiate for the deal. And we ended up settling on a fair price. But I thought it was hilarious that party round, the sort of word that was such a part of Silicon Valley lore, was operating a catering pizza company. Fantastic. Party round. speaking of party round did you see do you know andrew ettinger of course okay so did you see this breakdown he did yeah yeah you're you're the stuff of thread guy lore now well so and andrew worked oh he worked there he worked oh that's cool uh he was on the team awesome running a bunch of brand uh stuff so yeah do you have that pulled up yeah yeah i thought this was a cool post i feel like my i'm concerned that my version of the deck is out of order uh you want the you know the hard posts i'll take some hard posts here you're gonna have to skip through to find the uh the andrew ettinger post it's towards oh i found it you found it okay it says capital was founded on the premise that yes there's some backstory andrew ettinger uh is a good buddy joined the uh joined my team in 2022 i want to say um and so he was breaking down a lot of the work that uh that went into uh as we transitioned from party round to uh capital xyz he's breaking it down so he says capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win uh early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true capital was an evolution from the cult followed fundraising app party round known for an all-out assault on twitter and appointment viewing drops uh quote from paki but after a year and a half of bill i gotta say with Paki yeah Paki almost every single day for over a year straight would would repost our stuff it was an unbelievable ask most people would have folded yeah but we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say Paki please and he would basically guilt trip him into it every time Paki always delivered and that was when repost still actually carried a little bit of weight yeah totally um he says but after a year and a half of building that brand party round was uh evolved into capital, positioning as a bank for founders, raise, hold, spend, and send funds all in one place.

1:26:49And Andrew highlights here, we launched this founder series, which is still available, capital.xyz. It's a very rare footage of Wilmanitis in that series. Very rare. Yeah, that's actually the only video of him online. I think so. It actually might be. Anyway, so the idea for that campaign was, you know, whenever you thought of financial institutions making video content. It was always about, you know, some small business owner or things like that. I wanted to make the sort of like chef's table of, you know, highlighting founders. And so we made this series that highlighted Wilmanitis and a number of other early stage founders, ended up getting nominated for a Shorty Award, which was cool.

1:27:31I don't think we won. I was annoyed about that. And then we had a couple sort of rough instances. We had FTX collapse, and we had a bunch of crypto related sort of customers. We also had stablecoin functionality in our product and we were building a hybrid fiat and stablecoin bank. And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto for obvious reasons. And so we had to shut down all the stablecoin functionality and come out as sort of a more commodity neobank. And then a few months later, SVB collapsed and we only had 250K of FTIC coverage.

1:28:14And our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were obviously venture-backed startups. And so they looked at us, they looked at our underlying banking partner, which their stock dropped like 80, 90 % because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal with Rowe very quickly to move our customers over there. um but anyways uh cool story i'm really proud of the work that we did there and then i've worked with andrew since then andrew uh was uh heavily involved in uh rora cool uh and now does a bunch of other great work for companies so and and the whole team went on to do it yeah i didn't realize the team that you like yeah we keep seeing these people in like the geordie cinematic universe it's like the gundo bros but seriously it's like you know we're talking to uh yeah so brandon so brandon jacoby first ever jacoby he's at x now yep uh dominating timelines and it's so it's so helpful to have someone at the company that you're like building the stream yeah yeah we can just text uh brian armstrong brian armstrong our our cto uh is over doing meta uh ai stuff at meta now that's awesome uh dylan uh our head of marketing uh started a company with two other engineers on our team sold it to uniswap that's so you can play it uh today they have this whole like uh online survivor game.

1:29:34That's cool. Um, you know, we have, uh, another one of our designers is at ramp now, uh, that, that went viral recently because he sort of like fixed something, you know, in an hour as they tend to do. So, uh, and then you have, um, Spencer who's over, uh, one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So, uh, I'm very proud of the team that we built and, um, yeah, they're all doing a fantastic thing. We'll have some breaking news. Elon Musk replied to one of our clips. No way. Yeah. Very cool. Uh, it's about Sean McGuire. Uh, Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot. Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world.

1:30:09Foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work and Neuralink lets you merge. Uh, we really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday and Elon Musk says pretty much I'm open to the other ideas, but it seems like that's what's going to happen. So thanks for engaging Elon. Uh, we'd love to see it. Uh, Anyway, let's keep going. What do you got? Wander. Sponsor post. Wander. Of course, of course. Wait, one, two, three. Find your happy place. Find your happy place at Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.

1:30:53It's a vacation home, but better. if you're going to Italy, you're putting the pressure on them to bring Starlink over, book a wonder. Fantastic stuff. We love wonder over here. I mean, you got to follow, follow at wonder, follow John Andrew, the founder, but follow Kyle Tibbetts. He's our dear friend. And every single day he is just racking up the impressions. He is a CMO over at wonder, but he's also delivering totally uh delivering you know uh impressions himself so inspired he's posting some of the time to book a summer vacation look at this look at this house in cape cod fantastic fantastic unbelievable yeah uh we we gotta have chris williamson on the show at some point but chris has this fantastic uh philosophy about the it's like the vacation dividend or something like that it's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book like if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go to the super bowl you get all the joy from that and then you also get the joy from thinking back to like your super bowl experience or your stay in a fantastic wander but he thinks that you should book a trip that's like two years out so basically you're looking forward to it for two years or like you know you should always have you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out and also not only is it like obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out um but your schedule's clear.

1:32:17And then, and then you'll be like, I've had this book for two years. I'm not going to pass this up. I'm going to, I'm going to stick with it as opposed to, it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never, I'm never doing it. I'm never, I'm never, I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something. Uh, and, uh, so yeah, get on Wander, set those dates far out and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company, do something to reward yourself, treat yourself. Uh, do it. Vittorio. Yeah, let's do it. We got to have him on the show to explain all this. Cause it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo.

1:32:44I don't understand. yeah but Vittorio says it's here you got to get him on the show and say okay break down this news like you're explaining something to a podcast exactly yeah yeah I know you already broke it down for like the x user uh and like and like x uh like like tech twitter about somebody that that talks exactly who like basically can't read and just talks the whole time anyway we have a friend who's very smart he can't read but fantastic intelligence is yeah it's kind of a separate thing. Literacy is not for everyone. You can still do great things. Vittorio says, it's here. Cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer.

1:33:21Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips, programmable and adaptive living computation, synthetic biological intelligence. Traditional silicon-based AI has a fundamental limit, huge energy demands, rigid structures, and limited adaptability. AI today consumes massive computational resources, yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence. Biological intelligence, BI, he's coining it, Coogan's Law, says it doesn't have these limitations. Real neurons inherently adapt and learn, have high efficiency around 30 watts per unit, natural self-organization, and have more flexibility, perfected over billions of years.

1:33:55And so congratulations to Vittorio on the launch. If you want to learn more, he has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts. Does he work for this company? I'm confused. I actually don't know. He's just sharing. He's just posting maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing, but he's got a million views on it and that's what we really care about here. He got 8k likes on this. That's really what matters. So Vittorio, call into the show, break it down for us. Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on AdQuick? AdQuick delivers out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable.

1:34:29Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology. out-of-home experience, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So congratulations. I really think that Jeremy, we've joked about this a few times, but Jeremy Giffon needs to do the 101 Billboard ad campaign. We mocked it up for him. So if you didn't listen to the show yesterday, Jeremy Giffon has a fund that is buying startups. He specializes in buying companies that are good businesses, that have been overcapitalized, Exactly. Have extreme. Rebuilding the cap table, re-incentivizing the management team, the founders, figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company and making sure that the VCs can move on to another kind of home run swing.

1:35:16And so our idea was to do personal entry style ads where it says accident. Yes. Call. Cap table accident. Call Jeremy Gaffan. John's amazing copy was cap table accident. Cap table accident. It happens. Term sheet accident. It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news. Let's go. Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined ENIAC Ventures. She says, I moved to venture because I wanted to work with and enable bold entrepreneurs who were pushing the boundary of technology forward. When I met the ENIAC team, it was obvious they shared that vision. The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages.

1:35:57I'm honored to continue working alongside Hadley and the rest of the team. As you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because I'm not super close with ENIAC or Hadley, but in college, I interned at a startup that was about Series B called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project. Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley, the show. Totally, totally. And so Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute, SRI. That's where they got the name Siri. Siri and Vlingo started, there's Nuance is a voice recognition company.

1:36:37They make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, one of the first voice recognition companies. And they had some of the smart kind of AI, ML engineers had left Nuance, started this company Vlingo. Stanford, so these guys were like MIT guys or yeah, out in like, we were in like Harvard Square, Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford. Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was like get on Android and get on Blackberry. And you want to be installed as a default app. And it was just like a very fascinating thing.

1:37:17They were doing all this cool things. They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read, but they did a billboard ad campaign, but they did it outside of RIM's headquarters who makes BlackBerry in Canada, specifically to get the attention of BlackBerry executives because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think they had like a$20 version, a$5 version, a free version, et cetera. It was something you buy and you use. And then you could use a voice mode just like Siri on your BlackBerry. But they wanted to be installed by default and they wanted a big deal done with BlackBerry.

1:37:55So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company, you know, right outside. And then all the executives at BlackBerry would like drive in and be like, oh, Vlingo, like they're a good company. Like I got to do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this like kind of business development MBA type. And I just remember him coming in and he was super young. And during like the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man. because i was like a kid i was an intern at the time uh and the ceo they they the founders were like these mit scientists uh but they brought in a kind of corporate ceo who was a he'd been in war like basically he'd been in iraq deploying uh like mobile technology basically like like cell phone towers and he was so like hardcore he had bullets on his desk with like the names of the rival companies on them.

1:38:52It was a really, it was a really crazy like experience, but it was really cool because like a series A, series B company, 50 people building a tech product growing, like it's just a unique thing to be in. It wound up being like an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't like a generational company or anything, but it was just cool to see like, okay, this is what a startup looks like at this scale. Uh, and it was really cool and uh and i remember that we did some deal and uh and and hadley like uh got like bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table and that was huge to me as a college kid so amazing yeah it was great so no one thing uh yeah congratulations to kristen mcdonald this is huge um the the the title partner has been diluted over time uh but getting partner at a fund like eniac yeah really means something and uh it's it's awesome to see it's great should we go to Evan Armstrong.

1:39:44Let's do it. Evan Armstrong says, people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027. If LLMs can do all listed below, the vast majority of American labor is automatable. We are entering an economically, politically, and emotionally dangerous period. Buckle up. And the quote is from this blog post. As our CEO, Dario, writes in Machines of Loving Grace, we expect powerful title by the way uh it's referenced to all watched over by machines of loving grace which is a hindline book i think um we expect powerful ai systems will emerge in late 2026 to early 2027 powerful ai systems will have the following properties intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of nobel prize winners across most disciplines including biology computer science mathematics or engineering the ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio, and video, and the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the internet, the ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would, the ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems, and manufacturing tools through digital connections.

1:41:07What do you think? 2027? Is it over? We're just getting started. Just getting started. No, I mean, no challenge. No mention of comedy. Interesting. The final eval. I think that Anthropic is crushing software engineering. Yep. Struggling on the comedy side. Yeah. And that's okay. Not everybody has to be funny. Yeah. I, you know, you read this and you're like, oh, massive job displacement. But the question is like, is there just a thousand times more work to be done and when i think about mars and when i think about dyson spheres and when i think about like all the crazy things that we want to do as humans um i'm thinking like yeah yes and like let's have every human piloting a thousand ais and let's all work together and let's all going back to friedberg had a really great point which we covered last week around you know if you have these incredible uh incredibly powerful ai systems what are the sort of massive you know incredibly daunting sort of large-scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence yeah um so anyways i don't think um i think we need to go into this with uh you know generally with optimism and then still i think i still personally reference people like tyler cowan who i think are less directly conflicted yep on these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know, you know, evaluation, evaluation, right?

1:42:30He's just sort of focused on what he believes is, is the truth, and making predictions based on that. So we'll see. But it's certainly the most I would never I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time. No, totally. It's, it's truly, truly incredible. Yeah, this morning, completely unrelated pretty soon we're gonna see people joining X not not pretty soon but but isn't it funny to see somebody in ten years when people are like why do these boomers call everything tweets yeah and quote tweets like what are they talking about because like they will not have they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter yeah it'll just be like the most obvious way to out yourself as has a boomer yeah or maybe an LLM that's just trained on a bunch of content from you know the early 2020s yeah yeah that's funny uh well regardless of whether or not ai takes every job you're gonna need to use ai and use software to close your books using ramp time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place i actually have a cool post from our karazi and we've talked about he's an economist over at ramp So he looked at the top SaaS vendors on RAMP for March so far.

1:43:50And I'll run down the list here. So by new customer count, OpenAI topped the list. LinkedIn was second. Cursor was third. Canva was fourth. And then fifth was Anthropic. By new card spend was Elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo, and Salesforce. So that was interesting to see. I'm going to read out some of the standouts. So Elastic was a standout. they were the the top um vendor by new card spend is an ai search company that builds software for businesses to build their own ai driven search platforms like personalized e-commerce searches for consumers or ai searches for customer help centers um they're a public uh company so their stock recently surged uh following an earnings beat um so narrative violation ai company with earnings that's public let's go uh wild to see i'm looking it up at um looking it up on public right now um but jumping back to the post they also xai was a standout um and uh so they seem to be pretty doing pretty well had a surge of signups in february and then uh the claude 3.7 sonnet launch also drove um quite a lot of new volume um and they can see here so ramp data shows that as of february 2025 only 4.7 percent of u.s businesses have adopted anthropics model compared to 19 for open ai yeah um so it's kind of like doesn't seem super surprising i'm actually surprised that anthropic has that much adoption yeah uh but i think it's the developer usage that's driving that yep i i was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly gdp but all like to the uh yeah to the sati nadella point but also uh there's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating this idea of like kardashav one uh which is i believe 10 000 we're at 0.6 right now i think it's 18 terawatts of uh electrical capacity globally and if you, it's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10 ,000 times less.

1:46:07So if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10 ,000 times more where we would be essentially consuming every amount, all the energy that's coming to the earth from the sun essentially is like Kardashev 1. And then Kardashev 2 I believe is like the Dyson sphere where you're capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction, right? And if you forecast it out based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7 % growth pre-1970 stagnation, it takes like 500 years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given... I think that this anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive, but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something, like we're going to be able to do more things.

1:46:57And so my base case is maybe like we go back to 2.7 % growth, whereas we've been at around 2 % energy growth for the last five decades. But even if we grow at 2.7 % for the next 20 years, by 2045, we'll only be double the total energy capacity, which will be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's interesting to see if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take that's like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics.

1:47:40So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen. So at a certain point when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like they do need to dig things out of the ground and move them. and there's there's like a physical cost to that uh and so uh we like it's you know there's the humans year for the minds yeah we can help the ais yeah yeah i mean there's the whole meme of like feel the acceleration and i feel the acceleration in the in the in the llm progress arena a little bit although you know over the past few years it felt like we were really accelerating going from GPT 3.5 to 4.

1:48:18And now it feels like we're kind of tailing off and hitting some sort of local maximum. That's why we need L. Yeah. Yeah. We need some major breakthrough. He doesn't care about benchmarks. And then we need to build a lot more capacity because I think even if we have the super PhD researchers, like we don't have enough servers, we don't have enough data centers, there's still just more to do as humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like oh this this world is like true post post-industrial revolution post-second industrial revolution or whatever anyway uh let's move on to something um completely unrelated conor mcdonald over at ridge conor mcdonald he says direct to consumer cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach uh and i'll give some backstory here so i uh my career sort of came online during the height of the ddc sort of boom i remember uh i actually had a college class that was about ddc and that oh yeah and that almost basically the professor was fixated on what was happening over at wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of wharton uh that the mba program there um i think uh warby is a good example i think maybe some harry's or the shaving like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies and yeah there was a sense like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison they basically got generally more expensive yep year over year and people were realizing working with distributors you know this from Lucy working at distributors is a nightmare for every company right they sort of sit between you and the retailer the retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer and so there's these layers and there's this idea of if you could sell products online uh facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products probably in history you could scale uh brands tremendously fast overnight and a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital uh on the idea that that um basically if uh ad uh rates didn't go uh prices prices for ads didn't go up a lot you would have been able to just print money it was like a money machine where spend$100 on Facebook, get$500 back.

1:50:34You can just do that perpetually. So I became close friends with Connor at the time, and we helped him out with Ridge and then got to work out of their office for a while. And Connor's daily life was just finding, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here, of optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. even you know the connor and the ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social it was never uh sort of a huge priority for the company and that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media uh facebook at one point was just like yeah like you don't this is not this reach isn't real your reach is not reach you know uh we're basically going to take this away and from uh and from that point on um there was a period where organic social almost didn't matter at all um and um um so anyways uh if when i see you know i'm invested in a number of uh different sort of consumer product companies uh people like um pat pat um uh paki's brother dan mccormick who's intensely good at this similar archetype as connor he's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing paid acquisition.

1:51:55The Aurora CEO, Brian Keller, my business partner, is like world class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on like performance optimization. And it really is this scientific process of experimentation and, you know, proper, you know, balancing these sort of super, super complicated tasks where like the idea of e-commerce is so simple you make a product you put it online you run ads against it but then the reality is like this constant uh stressful labyrinth of um you know trying to make the equation of e-commerce work you got two that means you should shotgun one john's got a couple celsius i mean we we really got to do the deep dive in celsius because uh born in the ddc era and yet not a DDC play at all.

1:52:48And I think that's kind of the next, I mean, Ridge is certainly still heavily e-commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that, but they are going into retail and growing that category. And I think more and more teams are realizing that omni-channel early makes a lot of sense, but it's a very different skillset. It's very, very hard. And it's just a completely different culture, motion. I mean, I remember reading this book by Mark Rampolla, The High Hanging Fruit. This guy started Vitacoco, this coconut water company that he sold, I think, to Pepsi for a lot of money. He did very, very well.

1:53:26And he was telling the story of how he got a distributor network in New Jersey on board. And he went to the distributor and was just like, showed up with an F-150. whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this f-150 and that was like the best money he ever spent that's wild and that is just so different from let me look at the spreadsheet and see you know what was our row as to cac and click-through ratio on this ad and what was the two-second retention on this video ad and how do we get more ugc like the ddc playbook is just completely different from like oh you know a guy you know which is the very much like the retail uh old school uh so blending those together really difficult but when you get it right the company can really really rip uh anyway should we move on to uh erwan this erwan that my grocery store has a stolen phone laundering laundering machine and lets me open carry post from sam austin uh you're a big erwan guy are you gonna be switching i might i need to find out where this is this is wild i i don't understand the stolen phone laundering i guess it's a it's a machine and it says safely and securely an iphone xr could net you up to 65 you just dump the phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash uh pretty crazy business model i wonder who's behind this i wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iphone's actually unlocked or factory reset you would hope that they require you to have a factory reset yeah i wonder if this is i wonder how much i mean obviously they're joking that oh this is about laundering stolen phones but clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this.

1:55:07And I wonder what safeguards the company has in place for that. But I thought this was funny because they're taking shots at Erwan. I just wanted to highlight it. Defend Erwan. Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff on the timeline. Epirus announced a$250 million Series D fundraise to hyperscale Leonidas production capacity. Leonidas is a solid state software defined high energy, high power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter electronics capabilities tested and proven as a scalable counter swarm solution another uh another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline uh very cool uh defense tech company the joe lawsdale project i believe and uh yeah yeah and so there's a lot of reasons why this company is important uh there's been um there's been uh some naysayers around this tech right so that this is non-kinetic which means it's entirely using uh energy yep directed uh uh towards these sort of swarms the reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones yep that you can't shoot bullets into the air so a picture at a um you know so alan control systems makes a ton of sense on a battlefield right it's a sort of turret that you uh you know can put on a truck or a tank or you know stationary gun on a truck but the challenge is you can't put that on top of a um nfl stadium exactly because it would just involve firing bullets in the air you know into a city right it just doesn't completely doesn't work and so if we're going to have uh effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non battlefield environments.

1:56:52Also, there's a volume, there's like a volume problem too, right? If you have a drone swarm of a hundred, are you going to be able to reliably hit, uh, you know, a hundred of these? And so we need both kinetic and, uh, non-kinetic solutions and, um, uh, huge vote of confidence for Epirus. And I believe, uh, this is an eight BC company, uh, Joe Lonsdale had a post. He said, direct to DMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence. DoD bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites, and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect warfighters and civilians in various contexts.

1:57:26So cool, both wartime and civilian applications. That's great. Let's go to Shweta. She says, your fear of being cringe is limiting the ceiling of your potential. Well said. Yeah. Everything you want is on the other side of cringe. and a phone call that you don't want to make, which is a form of cringe. Like you're cringing thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon parlance. Yeah, I see Julian Weiser's commenting here saying we're killing cringe. Yeah, let's just stop. Everybody just, let's put a year-long pause on cringing, both the act, the worry. And using the word. The word did get played out very quickly, right?

1:58:10But yeah, you got to put yourself out there, take risks. I mean, the beauty is that, I mean, I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during COVID because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time. And being an adult man saying I'm going to be a YouTuber. There's a million things that are wrong with it, right? So I just didn't tell anyone. And I just put it out on YouTube. And then the bad ones didn't go viral. So no one saw them. The Schwedda's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively. I guess, I guess, but there is something to, uh, like at least on YouTube, like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out and, and just getting the reps in and stuff.

1:58:54And yeah, maybe, I don't know. Maybe you'd be at 10 million by now. Maybe, maybe, maybe who knows. But, uh, yeah, I mean the, the, the beauty is that it, it, you have to be really, really bad to get, to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or, negative or or dumb like it just doesn't get views and so it doesn't matter so put yourself out there uh let's go to robin robin says when sf realizes their waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high schools in canada they're gonna go nuts yeah to be honest john the smartest vcs i know are actually going even further they're offering to fund the middle school middle school schools that go to those high schools so they're going to these these um you know uh middle schools and saying 100k uncapped note just take it now uh and we just want to look once you get through waterloo once you're starting a company yeah you know people have people have copied so much of like peter teal's stuff no one's no one's done the more aggressive teal fellowship of like drop out of middle school drop out of lower school like stop everything yeah we'll give you$200 to, to, to, to skip third grade and try and build a company.

2:00:14I wouldn't be surprised. Um, but yeah, probably stay in school kids. I think kids are listening to this. I think you can wait. I think you can wait until you graduate high school, at least. Dad, I saw the episode back in 2025. Yep. You said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school. I want to make the leap. Yep. Did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday? I didn't see the meme. I mean, people are just posting about it, but Greg here says, benchmark idea. You fund a model, an AI model with$200 in a Stripe account, and you give it access to the internet and a large list of MCPs.

2:00:53Measure increase in balance at 14, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days. No developer intervention. Most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal or not universal basic income. It's that, uh, uh, what is it? Artificial economic intelligence. Just once the model can make money, then we're in business because that's very quantifiable. It's a new, it's a new benchmark. Yeah. And I like this. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, it's going to be very funny when there's just like online activity that does not make sense to humans or just like some equivalent of these sort of nigerian like prince scams or some of these like you know you get dms from nft projects saying hi boss i'd like to you know promote you know whatever uh this sort of spam there's going to be this sort of ai slop uh money making sort of uh programs running that that you're just going to see as a human and you're just like like come on but then it works like one out of every 10 000 times and so that then it becomes a sort of viable uh economic model so Oh man, I saw a great AI scam.

2:02:01I got a breakdown for you. Hit me. It's a 30-minute AI-generated deepfaked lip sync video of a priest and then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. And if you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after 30 minutes of watching this AI slop, that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's like close. There's like a add to cart button. The add to cart button is just like you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say.

2:02:48And it's so funny because they walk through the pitch and they're like, oh yeah, like I saw this in a corridor crew video uh like oh yeah like you know uh like we we have to we have to pay for like our servers and stuff to host this prayer and so you you you have to pay a little bit we can't just give it to you for free uh i don't know it's probably like 20 bucks or something uh but uh the corridor crew's been doing great great uh videos they're vfx artists uh but they also work with all the frontier ai visual tools and so they they highlight a bunch of these ai scams one of them that was really funny that i saw was uh they ai generate an image of like a sweater that's like a cable knit sweater and it looks all like uh like irish and like regal like you're out in like the forest or something and it's on this like you know uh blonde model and they run an ad on that and then when you go to buy it what they ship you is not a sweater it's a t-shirt with a sweater printed on it because they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters but just to print anything on a t-shirt no and so you get the ai design that they sold you but it's just printed on a t-shirt it's so funny uh but at the same time the quarter crew guys were talking about hey they're they're actually going to do some like ai generated camo t-shirts we're the only they're uh disclosing this hello do we have someone joining perfect perfect timing welcome to the show let's go let's go uh what is it nikki wiki oh my god rory i could kill him we've we've i think we've mispronounced your name so many times is it whisk off wish off wish off i'm sorry well now now we'll know so anyway uh thank you for joining uh give us a little kickoff introduce yourself uh tell us about your fund tell us about why you're here today?

2:04:43Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one, thank you so much for having me. Huge OG fan. So Nicole Wishoff, solo GP, I run Wishoff Ventures, which is a fund focused on precedency stage companies, North America, and super unsexy businesses, which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds and about 80 million in assets and just trying to freaking build this thing as I fly it. So How'd you raise the first fund? First one was 5 million. I was still operating. So that's my background. And I had met a ton of VCs, raised a few hundred million on the startup side of the world and learned about VC fund to fund.

2:05:23So Bain, Thrive, Foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early. And so got a call from a VC friend that was like, you should raise a fund. You're angel investing. Let us give you like half a million bucks. The rest is history. So I raised, um, 5 million pretty quickly. I think like 20 ish LPs was doing it on the side, decided I loved it. And then in 22 raised 20 last year raised 50. Um, so it's like, it's actually such a narrative, such a narrative violation. One solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you like, like the fund came before the Twitter account, which is rare to started in 2021 and have delivered, you know, uh, from from all the data that that i've seen uh phenomenal performance uh and so it's just uh no it's it's been amazing to see how did you so many people never find their voice online it felt like you did quickly and it's just it was natural and and you know we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce x content that just completely flops yet it seems like you have this Oh my gosh.

2:06:35Effortless ability to just, I think you treat it like a, like a personal, like notes to self almost, but it just resonates. Yeah. How long did it take you to kind of find that voice? I, I would say it was from the start, uh, though it wasn't intentional. And I, to this day don't have any drafts. Like I could, I think, but maybe I have four in there from like drinking too much and like, you know, like maybe I should wait until tomorrow. I have rules. I tell my LPs, I have three roles for Twitter. Uh, I can go through those, but so I was in a group chat with like Alex Cohen, who like shit posts and like you guys know Alex and Aaron Frank who's now an investor at Lightspeed Aaron don't kill me um and we're in this group chat was never on Twitter not even as like a I'm scrolling just to see what like lurking um so I actually didn't know how uh insane people are to each other on it so I came in and I was like cool this is like a cool app um in 21 because Aaron was like Nicole you're a VC now you have to like use Twitter and so I hard launched with a five million dollar fund i have like my first viral tweet probably like a week later and it was something like i don't know if you guys were even following you probably know who i was this was like through a couple years ago and i said something like ken confirm that it is 10x easier to raise a five million dollar fund than to get 500 twitter followers on x like when that acts and alex cohen retweets it and is like you guys you're in a call of bone like she's a loser and anyway like totally takes off so i always say like the first thousand was tough um and since then honestly like I think, I think a few things, one, I keep them super short.

2:07:59I try to never say like, start them with I, and I'm like, Hey, you know, had a thought last night, blah, blah, blah. And then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip. And so I've stuck to that. I try to just say what I think. It is absolutely backfired. If I don't have one, once a quarter that like, doesn't like bury me alive and VC Braggs is like taking it to the moon, then I'm not doing it. Right. And so I just have to like, I just lean into it. But that's like kind of the motion that I've, that's been happening. What do you advise your portfolio founders around using X?

2:08:31Because there's no perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure is through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through X. And so I'm sure you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform. how often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them uh you know hey you can get some value here so honestly because i'm doing pre-seed seed and it's so early there's so much other crap to figure out that like if they're focusing on getting like you know 10 followers a day which you guys know you're building this thing too like in the beginning it's slow and then it's not but like it takes a commitment it's daily they could be doing so many other things to de-risk the business for the first at least two years.

2:09:18So I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly, series A, series B, um, they've got like more of a team. And I've, by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and tried to get it going. And like, it just, there is no time for it. There's no consistency. So I think it's largely a distraction though. A caveat this with some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't, I don't think it's like this learned skill. Like look at Nikita, like ask him if he ever got help with like tweets, you know, it's just, he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin and it just works so if my founders are asking me for help on building a twitter strategy it usually means they shouldn't be doing it and that's most people generally not even my founders uh how sharp are your elbows your pre-seed seed your your i'm assuming you're trying to get you know 10 uh ownership uh i'm sure there's some flexibility there uh you put out like uh uh i wouldn't say an aggressive you don't have an aggressive persona but, but, you know, we can tell you're really like a, an athlete, right?

2:10:16Like, uh, when you're competing for rounds, are you trying to take as much as you possibly can, or do you take a more collaborative approach these days? I, I'm a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series, I take the whole round, you're adding like strategic value, you have a platform and like one fund can do that. So if my founders are like, Hey, one fund wants to take the whole, I'm like, go for it. I think if your series, like if you're pre-seed seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're like one call away from an intro to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want, or like those little things that people like do for you early on, like actually I think do, do help the business first customers, first hires.

2:10:55So I always try to take, let's say for fun too, is I wanted to get 5 % typical dilution at pre-seed seeds, like 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm, I'm never usually having issues like getting that by the way i hate hot deals they're they never were i've done all the deals all the multi-stage funds at pre-seed c they're like my worst like it's i shouldn't say they're it's they're still in business and it's going well but like they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies like this is super hard and also i paid 2x what i should have um and so i hate noise if there's a ton of funds running in one direction i just run the other so like sharp elbows no but i try to be super realistic about rounds and structures and really collaborative is the short answer.

2:11:35Where have you made investments that you're still excited about that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category? So, well, I feel like I'm dipping my toes back in even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard in a high industry environment, right? Like your facilities are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insure techs or lending businesses, and they only had maybe 2 million in the bank, they just can never raise another round. Or I was looking at those businesses thinking like, if I even see this, you're not going to be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business.

2:12:12And so, I mean, I got my MBA, I feel like right when I started my venture journey on like great markets and horrible markets, because fun one is 2021. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so fucking good at this. And then like 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then 24, I was like, you know what, I'm going to stick around and like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending's dicey, but now I'm getting excited about it again. So, um, yeah. What's the vision for the fund, uh, going forward? I saw you just hired two people. Is that right? Is that how big the firm is? Yes. So there are three of us full time and then like outsourced the agency for some of the social stuff and all of that, which is really expensive actually.

2:12:49Um, and so, yeah, I want to keep the team super small. I want to stay scrappy. I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers, the team, like I want to be fresh. I want to be on calls. Like I want to be in the ground, like just doing the work with companies longer term. Look, I want to be the fund in North America and the categories we invest in like precedency stage founders, like want to work with first above anybody else. And that takes time. Like that's a lot of that's brand. Like how do we build this repeatable motion of like, everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me.

2:13:20And I reference well, cause I like do the work. Um, so what about That's super long-term private equity arm, asset manager, wealth manager, going public, we're seeing this with catalyst, you know, why not you? I think I had a tweet once that was like, listen, may I be so successful in venture that I have like a PE arm, I have a growth arm, I'm doing like roll ups. I have a fund of funds and I think the last piece was like - High frequency. Yeah. I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we like no one can manage it all like which i would say are a lot of these platforms like no one could tell you how their fund to funds are doing like uh maybe you know honestly like i i'm a big fan of small and nimble like i think if you realistically if you want to put up great returns and i think usv has been amazing at this like if you ask them and they're doing series a and their funds are sub 300 like they that keeps them up at night and like 50 million that doesn't quite keep me up at night i'm excited but i think like going over 150 and you can guys can pull this up when I, hopefully if I don't ever do it, but if I do and be like Nicole, but we'll have you on for the news and then we'll pull up this, this, this clip and we'll say like Nicole did everything wrong.

2:14:32Um, no, but look, I think there's value, a lot of value. And if we want to say that we can legitimately, ideally more than three X, I always try to aim for, let's say five X plus, which by the way, not even$10 million funds, three X ever. Uh, it's just really hard. Um, then we need to stay nimble and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math and then, yeah. Well, we have five minutes. I want to hear about the company. What's going on? Oh my gosh, you guys. So I was not planning to do this, but I was like, John, I might just like hard launch a company I just co-founded. So this is the exclusive.

2:15:06This is like no joke. So raise money for it. No one knows about it except the person that funded it and like my LPs. So I have been investing and just like to tee this up um in software companies serving data centers i think if you follow the power you and the infrastructure you'll know where ai is going so um and then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center a guy building data centers in waterloo so we're both like wait there's something here um so we co-founded a business called kratos which i think is a good name, but you know, Kratos AI. And we are building next gen AI data centers, not great venture bets.

2:15:46So there's founder shares in the funds, but no check from the fund in it, though we've raised money from strategic family offices, more of like a private credit, think like 75 % debt, 25 % equity. And we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers. If you're a hyperscaler, you're saying, look, we're going to own the market and there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers. And we totally disagree. I think if you're for training, it makes a lot of sense for inference. You don't need as high latency. So we could be like a hundred miles or less from like the tier two, tier three cities and still have solid latency for inference.

2:16:22So if you've started asking around and hopefully people are listening in, like I had a founder tell me in like the YC, like alumni channel, all these companies like are like hey like who has data center like co-location capacity for us like we want to like like save costs from hyperscalers like where can we go from here either there's a huge market for these like 10 to 25 megawatt data centers so um working on our first location 20 megawatts you guys this is like the craziest thing i've ever done um i don't have an active role because like the funds are the baby but i can certainly help with distribution and fundraising and the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects.

2:16:59So these are a 20 megawatt facility net, like brand new constructions around a hundred million. Um, and so, and again, we don't want to give up too much on the equity side, but there's something here and, uh, we're going for it. So I like it too, because even if it's, even if it's not a traditional venture bet, if there's a common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund. I imagine off of just this one, uh, company, which is amazing. Uh, you've done the last question I have you've done, you do a bunch of stuff in supply chain uh you're a venture capitalist so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert uh comes at the territory um how are you do you think these sort of trade wars are are um are good for a number of your portfolio companies specifically focused on supply chain management just because there's going to be uh suddenly it's it's sort of the thing to talk about it's sort of this pressing issue uh what what and and more broadly what advice are you are you giving to those companies in your portfolio?

2:17:57Yeah, I'd say that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact significantly one being a company that's like literally in logistics between Mexico and the United States. So like part of me is like, holy crap, like what's the impact there? Look, ultimately, we have to show dominance. So like I'm very pro every every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico, which are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go honestly, like I think, ultimately I'm hoping that we're bluffing um to get what we want so my bet is like oh my god keep delaying I think I just saw the headlines in Canada they're like like Trump's delaying it like 30 days or I don't know what it is um so anyway I I love the flex I hope it's only a flex um but it would impact what's going on at least for for a couple of our companies so I'm like keeping my fingers and toes crossed but again we have to exert dominance so I'm happy with the administration I love the energy Augustus Dorico was on the show uh earlier and he called Taiwan an American colony.

2:18:50So you guys are both in the same camp. Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats on the new company. We would love to have you on whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news. You're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us. Technology brother. Love you guys. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much. Bye. Talk soon. Now we have Billy. Are you there? Billy Wrights. Hey guys, how's it going? it's going great i'm going to read your post and then you'll uh kick it off uh enter the sea glider era the world's first sea glider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and 100 battery powered the test vehicle is human crewed from day one 65 foot wingspan 15 000 pounds trials are underway you're in the back of a car break it down what'd you launch uh how's it going and to be clear this has always been john's vision for the show is that you could just basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show.

2:19:46So welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Exactly what it is. No, thank you guys. You know, the, uh, the startup grind for sure. So we're hustling right now, but, um, awesome week for region. So we're, we're four years old as a company, uh, building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation, dual use. Uh, so we're doing regional routes. Imagine like Manhattan to the Hamptons and under an hour for 60 bucks going Miami out to the Bahamas or Key West all around the world. So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history, 15 ,000 pounds.

2:20:23For now, first big milestone was just getting it on the water and starting some testing. That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat. And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you to just move faster, bring this to market and deliver kind of a flying car almost or a new plane, new mode of transportation in a way that's just so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down. Yeah, that's exactly right. My background was in the aviation space.

2:21:00And so I was engineering and sort of the beginning of the EV total hype cycle, which I think we're still very much in. We're starting to see some consolidation there. But, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid. We were building those vehicles. We even flew a few. But the sort of the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of an electric aircraft flying on batteries. You can't really go that far. And also this billion dollars decade long certification pathway. And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually solve both problems.

2:21:32The first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water, there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle. We made up the word sea glider because wing and ground or wig is very difficult to Google. You don't get vehicles when you Google wigs. And so, but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally you're in the waterways anyway. So you're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air, like birds are flying over the water, you're actually really aerodynamically efficient.

2:22:09So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems. That's cool. Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me? That's exactly what I told Bellion in our first pitch meeting. It was exactly that, right? We need to build this business around sustainability of the business model, not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product.

2:22:43So the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance costs. They age by the cycles. You take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear. You're expanding and contracting your fuselage when you pressurize it. You're heating up and cooling your engine. So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the shorter the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it. So it's sort of this runaway effect. If you switch to an all electric system, now you have very few moving parts. They age by the hour. There's not a lot of heat generated.

2:23:12And so for short haul, electrification makes a ton of sense. And that's actually where the range sort of buys you with electrification. I don't need to cross the ocean. I'm trying to connect people to the metropolitan centers. and there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of 100 to 200 miles today that can get up to 300 to 400 miles with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high speed rail in America or even around the world, but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself.

2:23:45Yeah. I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it why 10 not two big ones yeah so um so we had uh our quarter scale prototype that had the eight propellers on the wing our full scale now has 12 propellers across the way so what we're doing uh this configuration is called a blown wing uh it's not that clever a name we blow the wing with the propeller wash uh coming off the props and so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast moving air even when the vehicle's moving slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders, if you're like, you know, this isn't that new, we have seaplanes, why are we doing this?

2:24:24You know, the whole point is that seaplanes and flying boats in the past have these planing hulls. And so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets. So sort of in the best case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers uh so we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem we do that with hydrofoils so uh if you're familiar with uh you know america's cup sail gp the e-foil so we were looking at going sail gp here in adela in l i haven't yet we're thinking about going it seems awesome you need and it's it's so it's like you and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works because it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet and it's kind of surreal.

2:25:14So it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing, because balancing yourself takes a little while and you fall on. But the point is, we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going to we can take off in five foot seas. Hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrofoil machine for the first ones that figured that out blowing this design we slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil so that was actually the other reason why we electrified again the the sustainability is is a nice benefit but it's secondary we electrified because it's economical and we electrified because it's a pretty good way of distributing propulsion on on a wing rather than a bunch of different engines or gearboxes yeah yeah that makes sense uh long term are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously making the aircraft i can imagine this as kind of a jsx that actually owns and you know develops and um certainly and

2:26:28i think we can hear you can you hear us yeah we definitely thought about it Yeah, do you got me? Yeah, we're good. I'm on the road. You still got me? Yeah, we're good. Cool. We definitely thought about it in the early stage. The eVTOL companies are sort of doing that end-to-end thing. For us, we said, like, this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are going to need to build trust on it. And what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly investors to build up trust in this wacky electric flying boat company than to have sort of established brands with already existing operations.

2:27:02be our customers. So our customers are airlines, our customers are ferry companies, our customer is the Marine Corps and the high-speed logistics mission. But those are the entities that are buying sea gliders and operating it. We're the Boeing or Airbus here. When we founded, I said we're the Boeing of sea gliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the Airbus of sea gliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but here we are. Oh, well, that's amazing. Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised what where you're going next uh who you're hiring that type of stuff yeah we are based in the silicon valley of the east yes of rhode island yes uh so you know it's actually a growing technology andurals moving into town there's a few uh drone boat companies and underwater companies so we're really seeing a growth in rhode island you know the ocean state awesome test environment for us some of the best boat builders in the world, Newport, Rhode Island, home of the America's Cup.

2:28:04So it was a really great place for us to set up. We're about 100 people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255 ,000 square foot manufacturing facility also in Rhode Island. So we're going to be building sea gliders here. We're going to be scaling to another few hundred employees as we spool up our manufacturing. Expect to open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service, probably starting in Hawaii or Miami or some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to. And that entry to service in like late 26, early 27. That's fantastic. Amazing. Jordy, you have anything else?

2:28:39We got to host a show on one of these bad boys as soon as we can. It's been a dream of ours to do it from the air. I want to take it out to California. Definitely summer in Rhode Island. Got to come out. Yeah. Yeah. We got to go out there. Well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in, giving us the update firsthand. We'll share the video and repost the clip. It's fascinating stuff. And we really appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for calling in. And we'll talk to you soon. Give us a call back when there's more news. You got it. I'll see you in Rhodey. We'll go out and see you later.

2:29:09Fantastic. See you in Rhodey. We'll see you. Bye. That was great. That's wild. Yeah. I don't know if you can pull up that video, Ben. But they have some video of the plane. And it's remarkable. It just feels like we were talking about this with Gary. Like the pace of play. and it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something but like it just seems more doable to get a you know like 10s 20 million 50 million together and then go and build a big you know prototype and actually fly it around and people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying how to do the right uh yeah all the regulatory stuff and finding the regulatory arbitrage that's my favorite thing about regent like i think that the tech is cool obviously but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do so uh i love that as soon as i heard that i was like oh this is like this is something that i really want to follow it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical yeah yeah you can take a look at it here uh i mean it's pretty it's pretty sick the biggest people on apple podcasts are having a bad time yeah they're a bad time well we will describe it uh it's a cool plane and do you see they christened it with champagne and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they use in europe america undefeated i love it uh but yeah i mean 12 i guess three engines on each wing uh and it just coasts along the uh the surface and we had a friend of the show asking us uh when are the one of the billionaires going to start building hydrofoil yachts i think this is the beginning of that trend.

2:30:53We've talked about the land yacht that can dig with a massive drill. And yeah, this is the next evolution. Anyway. Amazing. Let's go back to the timeline. We'd love to see it. And then close out the show. That's our first time having a guest call in while in the back of an Uber. Yeah. And it worked. It worked. We had a brief moment, but he's... No, I mean, that is my goal for the show. Someone posts something, they're announcing it, you'd go on, you want to amplify it, just come and talk about it on the show. And so I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at Scale AI.

2:31:34He says, reminder of American exceptionalism. US companies make up 74 % of global market cap. Returns of the S &P since 2008 are 297 % versus the rest of the world at negative to 4 % is pretty ridiculous. And it's funny because like - Hit the gong, John. Yeah, hit the gong for America. I mean, it's funny because like the narrative in so much of the media is like, things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided. Everything's terrible. And it's like, you know, when the right wing's in power, the left wing says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible.

2:32:10But when you zoom out, even just, you know 15 years you can see that america's doing pretty well pretty well and uh i i remain extremely bullish on america but there's not more much more to say about all of our guests today have been extremely long america exactly uh as they should as americans um there was some bad news about the american economy there was a big miss on adp payrolls you saw this from joe Weisenthal, right? Yeah. They expected 140 ,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77 ,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth, the kangaroo market, right?

2:32:49Yeah. That's what it's called, right? Bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the economic data, but everyone's worried about job prospects and job growth. But let's go to Jeff lewis he says overheard at blue bottle technology brother a i love that he's using that term uh hadn't heard anything from mock since that hit piece thought they were dead technology brother b says nod dog it's called show don't tell mock a reference to had a new mock had a new video drop i think it was tuesday yep very very cool yep uh they seem to have made a bunch of progress and you never let a hit piece get you down.

2:33:35Just keep building. They're not given in to the negativity. So love to see it. Jeff was an early investor in Mock and he is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media has turned on them. And I think that that is one of the most important reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to be your best friend when everything's going great, but to double down on supporting somebody when they're in this sort of darkest period of their company is what really matters. Very cool. And I'm talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show very soon.

2:34:16So excited for that. Yeah, I hope he's wearing a tank top, looking absolutely shredded. Absolutely diced. Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be diced. He is. he um and uh open uh we want we would host a temp check uh weekly for jeff segment on the show weekly segment we need temp check segment every single week jeff you don't have to do any production well well i mean you do have to continue working out yeah that's that's the key thing you gotta you could do the temp check while working you gotta spam the delts and get the shoulders popping and get the bicep going uh because yeah we we don't want we don't want to scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show.

2:34:53That's unacceptable. But you know, as long as the takes are hot and, uh, he's sporting founders. It's great. Yeah. I hung out with Ethan. Uh, I want to say like a year or two ago. And, uh, I mean, obviously the company has been like up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning. Uh, but, uh, he just seems like someone who's like really, really driven and is going to do something at some point, very cool. and it's just like a good person to have on the america team yeah and i think they're iterating on product too yeah totally and they also to be clear they announced a u.s army contract and that they're building a weapons factory it's great yeah we need more people building more cool stuff so you know i'm i'm excited to see ethan get through the the the rise and fall and rise again and i hope that he's successful uh let's go to david vcs are living out again vibe shift i didn't put that in you didn't put this in i i don't we don't talk about politics i don't know who they're talking about but it is hilarious it is clear that if you wanted to be contrarian you had to um bc's for kamala yeah that that was the actual contrarian move was to sign the list yeah even though although gavin newsome people are saying like he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some uh charlie kirk show do you see that was him having charlie kirk on his show wait gavin newsom has a podcast he has a podcast no way really okay interesting well i mean clearly there's going to be a uh there's going to be a vibe shift and uh uh but but everyone's lost on this everyone's like i don't see it elaborate like who nature is healing uh people are having fun with it who knows uh anyway flock safety is raising uh katie roof has a scoop andreason's leading around jeff lewis company yeah it is it is we should have one to talk about when the when the funding finally breaks uh 7.5 billion for flock safety they make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment uh kind of the palantir of local governments that's been like a big question is like is that possible it's such a different sales motion because you're not just going lobbying in dc you have to go district by district but when you get in and when you're installed it's very very sticky very low chart yeah and so uh i think they're doing it great finances uh great great cohorts great company uh interesting team and i want to get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company and it seems like like a very important task obviously anyway let's move on to autism capital uh they say if steve jobs were alive we're still alive he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow.

2:37:45Interesting, rare, like hard post. I feel like this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff. Breaking. Yeah, breaking. Also, his post on X would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people the R word all day long. I don't know if that'd be that good. Here's the main thing, is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier. I think they have 60 right now, 60 billion. But they have returned over a trillion over the past like 15 years. Yeah. Apple spent an estimated 150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone.

2:38:20Million? Oh, million. 150 million. That's so crazy. So Steve would have seen what's possible. You know, obviously there's been inflation and, you know, whatever. You could come up with a bunch of excuses, but you have to imagine that he would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and sort of going founder mode. Yeah, it seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make like crazy aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Like, do you believe that Tim Cook daily drives an Apple Vision Pro?

2:38:59or do you think he's churned from it? Churned for sure. I think everyone kind of churned. Yeah. Except for that one guy, I forget. Yeah. There was one writer who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while and I want to be using it. It's so close to being good but it's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with? Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky. wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so is this was identified early on as a likely outcome going to be using this a lot i love this one i just thought it was funny yeah i put this one in you put this one uh we got to start we wouldn't honestly use that because our our culture is well no our corp our culture internally is we we try to make uh yeah you know uh you don't Take a victory lap on an I told you so.

2:39:56Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're working and you're trying to take the job of your CEO, this is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome and really take the victory lap on a poor outcome. Yes. Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled Mac Studio with M4 Max, M3 Ultra. Every time I see one of these, I'm like, eh, it's like nothing. But then I'm like, I want one. I always just want the latest thing. Even though Paki was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same. I was like, that would make me happy for five minutes. For five minutes.

2:40:34Exactly. Unboxing an Apple product still feels good. And then you're like, oh, okay. It's just like, I'm not using it. I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab. And the other news is Alexis Ohanian is now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration plan. Yep. So we are, he's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. he also is relaunching dig rose which is which is awesome uh i actually gotta reminds me i gotta email back his team yep um yep we're gonna be on he's gonna be coming on at 12 30 tomorrow to talk about everything he's cooking on he was gonna come on uh today but he was traveling i said he's got this amazing home studio i told him wait wait till you're back home okay come on then uh so i'm excited to have him back on i say we save some of these posts um let's end on a joke okay from base baron yeah uh who's been an early listener of the show we invested by following him when he had 200 something followers yeah it was like buying bitcoin in the 90s and yeah exactly um or solana in the in the early 2000s yeah uh base baron says i love ramp so much that i broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management call that my brex

2:41:48i've read this it's still funny when you read it it's still funny silly uh good one anyways uh great show today yeah i thought our guests were were fantastic i thought it was a lot of fun and good mix i think we're dialing in the format little news little timeline we got to put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest but like think of it more as like you walk into a house party yeah i I don't know if we want to keep the house party vibe going or maybe we want to use the waiting room, which is like a feature on Zoom. But we'll keep dialing it in.

2:42:20Stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied. We're going to keep changing it up, keep you guessing. This was just two weeks ago. We'd never had a guest and we'd done something like 60 episodes. And now we've had more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting. I think we had like, what, 15 already this week or something like that. Oh, wow. Anyway. By the way, we got some breaking news. We got breaking news. From the chat, Rory shared that Intuitive Machines, Athena Lunar Lander, landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is. What? Oh. This is live. I'm on the New York Times, famed technology publication, the New York Times.

2:43:01It says, Intuitive Machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 landing set at spacecraft. Athena has power and is communicating but may not be upright. it's unclear how that might impact the mission. Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your, you know, your rovers turned to the side. That is rough. So this story is unfolding. Well, good luck to them. If you need somebody to go up there in a space suit and tip it over, I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting. John's 6 '8", by the way. I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime.

2:43:40Yep. That's something I'm very confident of. Yep. It's going to happen. Yep. Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you tomorrow.