H200s in China, Apple Blocks Vibe Coding, Peptide Debates | Andy Fang, Matt Jayson, Dr. Cameron Sepah, Chris Gadek, Chris Hladczuk, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Matt Huang

14:52Chris Hladczuk:NVIDIA's biggest GTC announcement was a$20 billion bet on the same problem that Cerebris solved six years ago, says Andrew Feldman, the CEO and founder of Cerebris. Shots fired. Shots fired, indeed. He says, their next-gen inference chip, not available yet, has 140 times less memory bandwidth than Cerebris. To run a single 2 trillion parameter model, you need 2 ,000 GroK chips. On Cerebrus, that's just over 20 wafers. Even paired with GPUs, GroK's max is out at 1 ,000 tokens per second. We run at thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production now. Why? When you connect 2 ,000 chips together, every internet connect has latency.

15:34Chris Hladczuk:Every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny chips. We solved this with wafer scale. One integrated system, little interconnect tax. Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebris. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebris versus Rubin plus Grok together on one system. and he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a two trillion parameter model.

16:12Chris Hladczuk:I don't know how relevant, I don't know, is there, like I wonder how this scales relative to, well what if you're not running a two trillion dollar, a two trillion parameter model? If you're, you know, five X lower, does this number get much more manageable? It does feel like he's talking his book here. But I don't know. But it's a big book.

16:40Matt Huang:It is a big book. A lot to talk about. It's a big chip.

16:42Chris Hladczuk:I don't know. I mean, Tyler, have you ever run into any Grok chips in the wild? I remember the original demo was inferencing Llama that was pretty fast and everyone was like, wow, this is amazing.

16:54Andy Fang:Yeah, I've hit the API a few times. Okay. Because there's just like consumer API where you can run local, smaller models. I had heard that you need a lot of chips,

17:03Chris Hladczuk:but that's not on its face a huge problem necessarily. But it did seem like they had made some design decisions that maybe painted them into some particular corners, but those corners might be still economically advantageous in certain cases.

17:20Andy Fang:Yeah, I mean, it was definitely still slower than there was the Chat Jimmy thing, right? Because that's very much like, it's literally the model. No one can beat Chat Jimmy.

17:28Chris Hladczuk:I mean, do we know that that's what's happening with the chatjimmy.ai demo? Because the Grok demo was very much like, we have a chip, here's a demo, and it was actually 2 ,000 chips behind the scene, or a bunch of chips together behind the scenes. And so it's possible that the chatjimmy.ai is doing something similar, where in order to speed things up... Sure, yeah. I just asked chatjimmy, what's your favorite thing

17:58Matt Huang:about Tyler Cosgrove from TBPN. Couldn't find any information about a person named Tyler, especially in the context of TBPN, which might refer to the Big Bang Theory, a popular TV show, or maybe the Bachelor Paradise, a reality TV.

18:15Chris Hladczuk:TBP?

18:16Matt Huang:TBP.

18:16Chris Hladczuk:The Bachelor Paradise Network. TBPN, okay. Yeah, that works.

18:21Matt Huang:It's fast, though.

18:22Chris Hladczuk:It's fast, but it doesn't... I don't think chatgmail.ai has search. Yeah. I think it's all... That would slow things down. Let's play this video of, I want to play this video of Jensen back in September 2009. Bubble Boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says, GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player. And so someone stood up and asked, hey, why'd you invest$4 billion in these companies?

19:02Chris Hladczuk:I mean, that's a reason. Well, let's take a walk through history. I make content for investors so they can have the average American and people around the world. Let's play this Jensen clip from 2009, September 2009. Jensen walks onto a small stage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. about 1500 people

19:26Georgios Konstantopoulos:in computer science if Dave Patterson and John and I know that Pat Herring and I are sitting here watching me, you guys are going to go nuts

19:34Chris Hladczuk:you need to put a mic on him

19:36Matt Jayson:this is called CEO man this is not computer architect man this is called CEO man that stage so much smaller this is an illustration of co-processing

19:49Matt Huang:Carlos says no jacket

19:51Matt Jayson:no jacket He is looking pretty jacked. This is a simple map. The first section on top is an example of a program that is parallel intensive. On the bottom is an example of a program. What is this person doing? The way that I simply made it is the serial code part of the parallel intensive program takes about one second to run. whereas the parallel parallelizable part of the code takes 109 seconds to run which makes sense

20:29Chris Hladczuk:Nvidia was a 7 billion dollar company when this happened Jensen kept saying the GPU wasn't just a gaming chip it was a computing platform kept saying parallel processing would reshape every industry from medicine to finance

20:44Matt Huang:yeah yeah yeah just put the video games in the bag seriously this was

20:50Chris Hladczuk:yeah, before training neural networks. Wow. Pretty remarkable. 17 ,000 people are at GTC 2026 now, packing a hockey stadium, watching the same guy explain what comes next. Very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. LinkedIn.

21:16Matt Huang:Semi-analysis. is over there, slopping it up. They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll, and it will get tons of engagement. We need to do this. Wow, they're just really throwing shots. I give LinkedIn a chance. On a long enough timeline, they will all come to X. It might take 30, 40 years. They'll make it over to the dive bar eventually. Maybe. And so...

21:44Chris Hladczuk:I like that semi-analysis leans into the particular rough edges of every platform. I follow them on Instagram, and they actually post just hilarious vibe reels and brain rot. It's just like brain rot. Yeah. But often it's our clips. I'm the only one that's liking them.

21:59Andy Fang:I comment on a lot of the videos. Yeah, I comment too.

22:00Chris Hladczuk:It's amazing. They are not having broad success, but as far as what Instagram deals like.

22:08Chris Gadek:Well, it's like the fine details of inference max or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it's like Minecraft parkour over it. Yeah, yeah.

22:15Chris Hladczuk:I was in a few of them because they clipped our interview with Dylan Patel from Cisco AI Summit and put some videos on there. But there's a hilarious one where it's like, it leads in with some text about like, you know, semiconductor analyst, like explains like this thing. And then there's just no audio while he's explaining it. And then it just cuts to me and I'm like, hmm. And then it cuts back because we were editing the footage. And so I don't even know if it was like a mistake upload or it's like intentional, but it's all very, very funny.

22:51Matt Huang:Apple cracks down on vibe coding apps. It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as vibe coding apps help people create apps.

22:59Chris Hladczuk:Vibe coding apps, not vibe coded apps.

23:02Matt Huang:I know it's over for him times two. No, because he doesn't vibe code on a phone. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

23:08Chris Hladczuk:He doesn't vibe code on a phone.

23:09Matt Huang:I'm kidding.

23:11Chris Hladczuk:But let's read this.

23:12Matt Huang:Apple's move comes as Vibe Coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices, as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store. Let's get into Stephanie and Aaron's reporting from the information. Apple has quietly prevented AI Vibe Coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications, from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications. The company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe Coding capabilities violate long-standing App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function.

23:45Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when vibe coding apps are emerging as a

23:49Matt Huang:potential threat to the company by helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple. Some of these vibe coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown and approval process in some cases, developers say. An Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to VibeCoding apps. Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believed Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and VibeCode.

24:22Matt Huang:Those app makers had agreed to either tweak their apps the way their apps showed customer previews of VibeCoded apps or get rid of certain VibeCoding capabilities entirely, like making apps for Apple devices. So it sounds like you're able to basically generate an app with Replit and then use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit, the app, to do things that Apple didn't approve of. So, yeah.

24:54Chris Hladczuk:Never heard of VibeCode. That's what I was looking up. The App Store is always so fascinating. So if you search VibeCode, you get an ad for Replit as the first response. Replit is number three in DevTools, has 14 ,000 five-star reviews or reviews. Then VibeCode is listed as VibeCode Website Builder, has 3.3K, pretty solid. It doesn't look like it's charting, but it says learn how to VibeCode, no experience needed, build websites with professional designs. Much more focused, I think, on static content. but there's been a number of these like website builders in the app store for a very long time.

25:33Chris Hladczuk:Then Replit ranks number two when you search for VibeCode, because it says Replit, VibeCode apps. Then you get Sticky, an AI game maker, VibeCoder, AI app creator, anything, the AI app builder, VibeCode, Claude, Codex, AI with 21 stars. There's a lot of people that are like just jumping in. There's one that's called VibeCode AI.

25:57Matt Huang:Replit's argument is that they're helping the user generate an app that's just opening it up in a web view. So it's effectively just an app built for mobile web. And Apple's arguing that, no, that's effectively in the Replit app.

26:14Chris Hladczuk:Would you download this app, Jordy? I don't know.

26:17Matt Huang:That's insane. I don't know if you can see. Definitely Vibe coded the App Store preview.

26:21Chris Hladczuk:It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the GigaChad using the computer. It's very funny. But, man, there is so much IP infringement. Love a code. Not from Lovable. Love a code. Build with Vibe code. They're like, I wonder who they're trying to SEO against. Clearly, there's a whole bunch of people that are just trying to steal market share from incumbents that have name recognition. Do you remember that company that was doing vibe coding on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app? We talked to them at YC Demo Day last year. Oh, yeah, yeah. And there's a number of these companies that are trying to be like the AI game store, sort of like the meta simulator, like build a simulator and create a harness that's really good at vibe coding a game.

27:17Chris Hladczuk:It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it, but you are going to be bumping up against the App Store all the time.

27:25Matt Huang:You just have to compete with Sam Altman, Dario Amadei.

27:31Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, maybe. Amjad. I do wonder if there will be some sort of, or I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one, maybe. Or does it come out of Codex and Cloud Code instead? Like how do you I wonder I wonder what the barrier and how much distribution matters there for that for that audience of people that want to like vibe code a game

27:51Matt Huang:Yeah for gaming I just think Roblox is just going to continue to be like Roblox is the Roblox of vibe coding

27:57Chris Hladczuk:And yet we did not build our simulators in Roblox

28:01Matt Huang:Yeah, but they're not like massive multiplayer

28:06Chris Hladczuk:Games and we want people to be able to click a link and and use it on their phone immediately We have a new simulator coming, by the way.

28:13Matt Huang:We're addicted to simulation.

28:16Chris Hladczuk:We do love simulators.

28:17Matt Huang:And this one we're putting a little bit more effort into. And John's already addicted.

28:23Chris Hladczuk:I would say this one is just actually fun. Jeremy Giffon's simulator was more just a different way to experience. It was educational. It was educational. Yeah.

28:32Matt Huang:It was for people that didn't just listen to his episode on InvestSync. They sat down and simulated it.

28:38Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. but the actual interaction pattern of like guessing and whatnot like it was like oh this is novel and then it was like okay this is a chore and then it was like okay how many questions are there? 200 there were what like 60 questions or 48? That's a lot of questions

28:55Matt Huang:this new simulation you're not going to be able to put it down.

28:59Chris Hladczuk:You're not going to be able to put it down

28:59Matt Huang:and it can effectively solve some industry wide issues that are happening right now.

29:05Chris Hladczuk:Potentially

29:06Matt Huang:we're going for impact we're going for fun.

29:09Chris Hladczuk:But, you know, Apple's had this long standing policy around do not, do not like, like they want to review the software. And so you can't create an app that rewrites its software.

29:21Matt Huang:But yeah, I wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer, like a mini, like sort of peer to peer experience. Because I remember I made, I was like learning how to, to build iOS apps when I was like an early teenager and I was so frustrated that I had built Pong, but I couldn't just like share it with my dad and say like, Hey, you can play this. Like it just wasn't, it was, you can do test flight, right? Yeah. Test flight. But, but test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for, it's not like a social peer to peer experience.

29:57Chris Hladczuk:Like you, you still have to opt into the test flight network or do all these, do all these jumps. Like it would be, and it, for some reason, it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem when I get a text, a test flight.

30:08Matt Huang:Goldrock says high key Tyler could make better Siri and replet with a thousand dollar budget.

30:15Chris Hladczuk:And replet two massive things.

30:17Matt Huang:No better Siri in replet. Oh, better. Oh, okay. Oh yes. For his last thousand dollars. He's down to his last, he's down to his last thousand bucks.

30:26Chris Hladczuk:That's a good challenge. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that should be the new constraint on, like, hackathons. Instead of it being, like, two days, it's, like,$20 ,000 is the max budget. And what can you do with that budget for the token allocation? $20 ,000 is a big budget for a hackathon. Yeah. I mean, maybe the$200 plan or something, like, exhaust it, you can't use multiple or something like that.

30:53Matt Huang:The question is, how much is Apple itself vibe coding? because the software quality in the apps that I use.

31:00Chris Hladczuk:Mark Gurman said they're using Cloud all the time, right? But to me, I'm saying, so far, my experience recently,

31:09Matt Huang:I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone, which is...

31:15Chris Hladczuk:You were complaining about the Photos app.

31:17Matt Huang:That was just poor design.

31:18Chris Hladczuk:The phone app has gotten a lot worse.

31:21Matt Huang:Yeah, John finally came around because the phone app is like... The phone app. You're like, okay, I'm going to hit this button. I might be calling this person out of the blue, even though I just want to...

31:29Chris Hladczuk:And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number. But I still have a lot of people. This is blowing your mind, Tyler. But back in the day... You're talking about like a home phone? Back in the day, people used to have multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. It's true. I'm so unk. But yes. Like a work phone. Yeah, like a work phone. I mean, when I was at FF, I had two phones. Two phones. Two phones. That's right. But a lot of people will have a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a long time.

32:05Chris Hladczuk:And the problem with the new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone if I have it saved. So I need to maybe go delete those numbers or put them in a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone. Because I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones. But anyway.

32:21Matt Huang:Well, the good news, we have our first ever Apple employee coming on the show. Really?

32:27Chris Hladczuk:Oh, yes, we do. We do. I'm very excited.

32:29Matt Huang:First ever Apple employee on the Technology Business Programming Network.

32:34Chris Hladczuk:That's not, I mean, current Apple employee. We've had ex-Apple employees, of course. Live players. Before we move on, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. And let me also tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, Martin Scrawley.

32:59Matt Huang:We got to go over to SF with Martin Scrawley.

33:01Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, wait. Oh, okay. This is part two. We're just jumping straight into the sample.

33:04Matt Huang:We're going straight into part two.

33:05Chris Hladczuk:Okay, we're going straight into part two.

33:06Matt Huang:He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing? That's happening now with peptides. Holy S-H-I-T. I don't know where to start. Pharma Basics. Most people obsessed with peptides don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s.

33:25Chris Hladczuk:A peptide is just a small protein.

33:28Matt Huang:Peptides have extremely short half-lives. 10 minutes before 8 p.m.

33:32Chris Hladczuk:yesterday? What's that? 1950, that's like 10 minutes before 8 p.m. yesterday.

33:37Matt Huang:Yes, correct. Peptides have extremely short half-lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So if you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying, I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharma... Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics. That's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are a subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target, typically, but far from always, the receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug.

34:10Matt Huang:You have delusion. Next, drugs are tested rigorously, not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmacokinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body. Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics. It's a collab. They're linking and building. It's arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half-life? Without this basic information, you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans, but you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea considered a priori as to why this medicine just might work.

34:50Matt Huang:You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays.

34:56Chris Hladczuk:Assays.

34:56Matt Huang:Assays.

34:57Chris Hladczuk:This is going to be a rough one. This is a rough one. Also, a priori. Not a priori.

35:04Matt Huang:Brutal. A priori assumptions. Exposed. what was your drug tested in what did it show direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis and you

35:17Chris Hladczuk:can continue John preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab we're done a priori etc there we go clinical reality is far harsher without a double blind placebo Neurocontrolled study. There is often nothing to talk about if I hear, but I know dozens of people one more time, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Screw the FDA and pharma. Really? Really? Coming from Martin Screlly. He is saying maybe don't screw the FDA and pharma. When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking, and this is going to be a hard one for me, octreotide.

36:02Chris Hladczuk:They're thinking some random stuff that's been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softie. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it. But I'm also not stupid and spent 20 years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a clinical trial from a university. If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed.

36:38Chris Hladczuk:The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal, I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it wasn't BPCBS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument. But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes, there are plenty. That is how I made a living, says Martin Screlly. But it is not for you, world traveler, to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals.

37:18Chris Hladczuk:It's not that you're not smart. I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, etc. But Martin, I want to optimize my health.

37:37Matt Huang:You could fly a 747.

37:39Chris Hladczuk:I could. That is the thing that I take. I agree with a lot of this.

37:43Matt Huang:We don't need studies to know that you could land a 747.

37:47Chris Hladczuk:If I needed to.

37:49Matt Huang:If it was asked of you.

37:50Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. 100%. But Martin, I want to optimize my health. No, stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma I have zero doubt you'll change your mind There are no health care professionals that I know of who give an SHIT about these unapproved research chemicals But wah, there are actual people. There are actual dying people in the world Duquesne muscular dystrophy, PECAN, Lefora Go fix those diseases. You'll make someone in their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine This has to end.

38:31Chris Hladczuk:Interesting. Lots of debate. Yeah. So we are going to be hosting a debate.

38:36Matt Huang:Max Marcioni from Superpower will be coming on Monday at 12 to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor, himself. So we're going to have a little debate. Superpower, I believe, sells these small proteins. Yeah. And so it'll be an interesting conversation. So Monday at 12 Pacific, we can look forward to the great debate.

39:04Chris Hladczuk:So there's some conversation in the comments here. Michael Drugan says, when people talk about peptides, they mostly mean things like retitrutide, which is in stage three clinical trials and looking extremely good, or BPC-157, which has tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self-aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using. So he's saying, look, most people aren't using this stuff that's like crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the pharmaceuticals.

39:41Matt Huang:Just another pod, guys. This great post would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of Retta.

39:49Chris Hladczuk:Martin does not think, he doesn't like BPC-157. He says BPC-157 has no evidence LMAO. Retta-trutide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly, pirating the better acceptance is not what we're talking about.

40:00Matt Huang:The concern with BPC-157 has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth. Yes, I saw a quarantine cycle talking about this. It stimulates growth. Yes. And so because it hasn't been studied well enough in humans, that is a risk that people,

40:16Chris Hladczuk:I think, should be aware of. How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines? Like, is there a real overlap in San Francisco between like, yes, it might give me cancer cancer in 20 years, but I think we will cure cancer in 10. So if it makes me look good in the next five.

40:33Matt Huang:But I think it's all about people just want some type of edge. They want to alter their state. It's somewhat basically human nature. Yeah. You can make the same argument for why you should wait, though,

40:44Andy Fang:because then in 10 years, AGI will create a super drug that will just instantly make me jacked.

40:50Chris Hladczuk:Oh.

40:51Andy Fang:Right? OK. It's like you can do it either way. No one has a decade to wait to be. Yeah, yeah.

40:55Chris Hladczuk:You want to be jacked now because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40 years.

41:06Matt Huang:How much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper? There's no amount of money you can pay me. That's right. Exactly. You can't wait 10 years. Ridiculous.

41:19Chris Hladczuk:Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search. Build from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless real-time experiences and new value are unlocked every day with Cisco. Pretty iconic. Someone hire this kid. Robin Smith is sharing a poster. Warning.

41:43Matt Huang:This man has been known to increase shareholder value with a QR code out to his LinkedIn. I love this. And his name is Lachlan von Eggman.

41:53Chris Hladczuk:That's a great name. And he's looking for a job as a summer 2026 electrical engineering intern. And I cannot recommend this gentleman enough. He has the correct mindset to go into a summer internship, optimizing. Lachlan von Eggman, you should get a job as an electrical engineering intern.

42:13Matt Huang:Yes. But if you don't, hit us up.

42:15Chris Hladczuk:Yes, this is good marketing. Maybe we could hire Ben.

42:18Matt Huang:Maybe we could hire this guy to work on our little electrical engineering problem back here. We got a lot of cords under the desk. He's just doing cable management.

42:27Chris Hladczuk:I think he has bigger fish to fry. But whatever increases shareholder value to the most, he might go for it.

42:33Matt Huang:If you can handle cable management in the Ultradome, you can go far.

42:38Chris Hladczuk:Dependable thermonuclear work ethic. That's a good phrase. Thermonuclear work ethic. He says he's smart with a capital S, and he shares his email. So if you're looking for an electrical engineering intern this summer, give Lachlan a call or shoot him a call. Let's head over to Eric Suford at Mobile Dev Memo.

43:00Matt Huang:He writes, private credit and the AI value reallocation. Starts with a quote, the essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e. of truth. Martin Heidegger.

43:16Dr. Cameron Sepah:I like it.

43:16Matt Huang:Says, a familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty, which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the GFC.

43:48Chris Hladczuk:And yesterday, Carried No Interest was giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals. But he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis, correct? He was just saying that some of these deals are underwater. Some of those investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities. Sort of the bull case for special situations, right?

44:16Matt Huang:Yeah, yeah. Leaving the firm and be like, no, I didn't really work on it. I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018 to 2022. I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, like, I don't think we should do this deal. Well, I guess the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds that are being deployed, that have been deployed on different time horizons that have longer time horizons in general, right? And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus like a run on the bank where you have like one day where everyone realizes... It's like a rolling glass.

45:00Matt Huang:It's kind of like the worm. Like you were doing the worm yesterday. Yeah. It's kind of like that. Yeah.

45:06Chris Hladczuk:That does not seem great. It's like a weight. It's like a title. It's like a title weight. It starts small, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

45:13Matt Huang:Yeah. So you're 6 '8", so you're starting the worm. Okay. And you're really tall, and you're kind of coming down. Fall like a tree. Falling. But then you bounce back up like this. Okay. And you're steadily kind of like losing.

45:26Chris Hladczuk:I hope that's not where this goes. Let's continue. This framing is incomplete, says Eric Suford in Mobile Dev Memo. He says, it isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate and where value ultimately accrues. In this piece, he makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. I also argue, he says, that any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there, but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit.

46:08Chris Hladczuk:That's very exciting. The private credit market, he gives a little history on the private credit market. The private credit market has grown precipitously since the 2020 era COVID pandemic. In a note from the Federal Reserve, you're just like, There will be a rolling collapse. But also, I'm excited to grow.

46:27Matt Huang:You got to hit the air horn for growth.

46:29Chris Hladczuk:The authors, in a note from the Federal Reserve, the authors remark that private credit.

46:34Matt Huang:It is funny that if you go back to our early bits. Yes. We were joking about praying for bubbles, encouraging leverage.

46:42Chris Hladczuk:People were listening. I'm not saying who was listening, but people were listening.

46:46Matt Huang:Encouraging ads. Yeah.

46:48Chris Hladczuk:A lot of things came true.

46:49Matt Huang:Obviously, we were joking. They were bits. I guess some people have taken it a little too seriously.

46:55Chris Hladczuk:Isn't there some humor in every joke? Isn't that the point of humor? You mean some truth. Some truth. Some truth in every, what did I say? Some jokes.

47:02Matt Huang:There is some humor in every joke.

47:03Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, some truth in every joke.

47:04Matt Huang:As John Coogan once said, there's humor in every joke.

47:08Chris Hladczuk:I'm only on my second diet coke. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me until I've had my 10th energy drink. Cheers. Anyway, this is what the Fed had to say. Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of non-bank financial intermediaries, NBFIs, over the past 15 years or so, reaching a total asset class size of$1.34 trillion in the U.S. alone by the middle of 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley published in October of 2025 estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025 at$3 trillion. A report from Vanguard said it was$1.8 trillion. So people are sort of all over the place.

47:46Chris Hladczuk:Private credit is an asset class that functions as a parallel banking system. Don't call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness. Look, I'm going to be concerned.

48:00Matt Huang:Here's what I'm going to be concerned. And you have leaders at these private credit firms that say, you know, look, private credit's amazing. Yeah. But it's unfair that we're keeping all these gains private and we need to make them public. like yeah yeah yeah so some type of like federal yeah kind of involvement yeah that in the private

48:21Chris Hladczuk:credit sector could make sense it would also be really really bad if like one of the most respected leaders of one of the biggest banks in the world was to compare the industry to like cockroach yes like some really like you know uh some bug that would be that that would be you don't want to be

48:40Matt Huang:Compared to a scottling creature.

48:43Chris Hladczuk:No, no, no. Maybe a soaring eagle instead. There are some soaring eagles in this portfolio of private credit assets. So while it predates the global financial crisis of 2008, the scale of assets under management for private credit began growing precipitously following the global financial crisis to fill a funding gap. As the regulatory standards for lending and capital requirements applied to banks, such as those introduced by Basel III, intensified in the wake of the GFC, non-banks such as private credit lenders became a key source of funding for companies, especially those operating unprofitably, as many software companies might be earlier in their life cycles.

49:23Chris Hladczuk:Chernenko specifically attributes an increase in non-bank lending to regulatory rigor. So the banks become more regulated after the financial crisis, and so non-bank lending that is not subject to the same regulations increases. Many, many such cases. Another note from the Federal Reserve identifies private credit as a significant vehicle through which private credit is, or identifies private equity as a significant vehicle through which private credit is deployed because private equity acquisitions are often funded with debt through leveraged buyouts. They used to go to banks for that, for those lines of debt.

49:57Chris Hladczuk:Now they're going to private credit firms. Okay.

49:59Matt Huang:And I think we should fast forward to down further private credit and the AI bull case because this article is very long and you should go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo and read it entirely, but let's skip to the AI bull case.

50:12Chris Hladczuk:Okay. So last month, Blue Owl sold$1.4 billion in private loans across three of its funds and announced that it would end regular quarterly liquidity payments in one of its funds, OBDC2, opting instead for payouts tied to asset sales and other liquidity events. This month, Blackstone experienced a record number of redemption requests.

50:33Matt Huang:And this is, they wanted to inspire their LPs to grind harder. Yes.

50:37Chris Hladczuk:The company indicated that it would honor all requests. If we give you too much mailbox money. Mailbox money? I've never heard that term.

50:44Matt Huang:Mailbox money? No, what's that? It's just money that, you know. It shows up? You have some apartments somewhere and they just send you the check.

50:49Chris Hladczuk:Okay. No, I've never heard that before. Wait, do you know that, Tyler? Mailbox money?

50:53Matt Huang:No. Okay. Am I crazy? I don't know. Mailbox money refers to passive income that thrives regularly with minimum active effort. Okay. commonly in the form of real estate income, oil and gas royalties, or dividends.

51:07Chris Hladczuk:That's why you listen to TBPN.

51:09Matt Huang:It also is a mixtape by Nipsey Hussle.

51:12Chris Hladczuk:Nice. That's why you know it. Also this month, JPMorgan marked down the value of loans the bank holds as collateral from private credit funds related to software businesses, reducing those funds' ability to borrow. Some of this negative sentiment is attributed to recent bankruptcies from firms to which private credit facilities were exposed. First brands and tricolor are among the headline cases. But the substance of the current negative outlook might be traced to fears that AI will render the vertical SaaS products into which PE funds invested in the 2020 to 2022 vintage irrelevant. So this is the SaaSpocalypse narrative, but playing out in the private markets.

51:54Chris Hladczuk:In a recent note, JP Morgan states, private credit has 21 % exposure to software driven by the attractiveness of SaaS recurring revenue models and the fact that 96 % of software companies are privately held. Exposure rises to 40 % when including broader tech and business services, the highest among extended credit markets. We see software volatility as a sector-led reset rather than a start of a macro default cycle. Similarly, last week in an analyst memo, UBS proposed that investors increasingly want to talk about AI disruption and our tail risk scenario, a rapid, severe AI disruption. This is not our baseline.

52:34Matt Huang:This 21 % exposure thing is important because when John Zito was talking to the journal or he thought he was talking off the record and being a little candid, He was saying, you know, I would expect, you know, some of these loans to only recover 30 to 40 percent of the overall loan value. And that just says to me, like, OK, if you have 21 percent exposure, but you can get 30 cents on that. Yeah. Still recover.

53:03Chris Hladczuk:You're down 15 percent overall.

53:05Matt Huang:Yeah. It's not. It's not. But the goal is not to be down at all. Yeah, but you're also getting, you know, a lot of these companies have been getting interest. You know, you've been getting some amount of interest back on the loans. But again, it doesn't feel like you're getting anything close to a GFC-style systemic risk yet, especially when you account for the fund kind of time horizons and the fact that you can just say, sorry, you can't get any money out right now.

53:36Chris Hladczuk:So here's what the Swiss bankers over at UBS had to say. They said, what is new is a clearer catalyst, rapid, severe AI disruption, assuming contagion impacts not modeled in our earlier note. We anticipate US HY, LL, and PC high-yield leveraged loan and private credit defaults could rise to 3 % to 6%, 8 % to 10%, and 14 % to 15 % for private credit, respectively. Blue Owl's updated redemption policy has been compared to BNP per bus suspension of redemptions for three funds exposed to U.S. subprime MBS in August of 2007, roughly one year before Lehman Brothers failed. For reasons I've stated above, I think that comparison is flawed.

54:22Chris Hladczuk:The GFC was a systemic crisis driven by leverage, opacity, and reliance on short-term funding. Mortgage credit risk was embedded throughout the financial system and amplified by opaque, securitized products like CDO, CDO squared, and CDO cubed securities, which established tight interdependencies between institutions. Furthermore, the deep interconnectedness of the U.S. financial system rendered the GFC inherently systemic. Home prices were tethered to a mortgage derivatives market that was amplified in value by complex instruments that couldn't easily be valued or understood. The same isn't true of the private credit market, writes Eric Sufort, which comprises relatively straightforward bilateral loans and is largely concentrated within private equity-backed companies and dedicated credit funds.

55:08Chris Hladczuk:While pockets of stress have emerged, the system is less dependent on short-term funding and less tightly interconnected with core financial infrastructure. While the total value of the private credit market is vastly larger than the high-yield energy debt market of the 2014 to 2016 period, my belief is that distress will remain similarly localized and not spill over into the broader economy since there are limited direct risk conduits into the core banking system or short-term funding markets. So further, valuation multiples for PE-backed software companies and especially vertical SaaS companies are compressing for two reasons.

55:43Chris Hladczuk:One, rising interest rates have increased their debt burden as a result of their floating rate loans. So a lot of these companies were sitting at, you know, with Fed funds rate of 3%. Now it's at six, or I don't know what the Fed fund rate is, but interest rates have basically doubled since the ZERP era. And so their debt burden has also increased. And then two, AI-enabled coding tools, more specifically, jeopardize the defensibility of their businesses. So viewing the composite impact of these two effects as a potential threat to the broader economy ignores the productivity gains posed by AI that imperil vertical SaaS software solutions in the first place.

56:20Chris Hladczuk:If a company can replace a SaaS vendor with a homemade solution because new AI-enabled engineering tools reduce the time to deployment of a narrow task-specific piece of software to days from months or even years. That's exactly what we've done here. We have a number of point solutions that didn't really exist before, but previously we might have gone to some sort of software company and said, oh, well, can you do a special version for us?

56:45Matt Huang:Or can you change the economics and reduces the efficiency? basically like moats.

56:52Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, so that same company is not only saving money by no longer paying for that specific point solution, but they are also likely accomplishing more across a number of other software development related vectors, like clipping in our example. What might be critical here is the hurdle rate in terms of labor to accomplish any task. If one person can build software now with assistance from AI enabled development tools that previously would have required a team, then building software becomes more accessible generally throughout the economy. For small companies, there is no build versus buy tension.

57:26Chris Hladczuk:The base cost of SaaS solutions may have simply priced them out of the market completely since hiring a software development team is likewise unattainable. With AI-enabled tools, the cost of building a point solution is reduced dramatically. Certain companies may now benefit from those solutions where before the economics were prohibitive across either building or buying. As Sudil Security notes in a rebuttal it published to a recent macro short thesis. That was something big is happening, or no, that was the Strini prediction. Job postings for software developer roles have increased with the availability of AI-enabled development tools.

58:02Chris Hladczuk:Critically, AI reduces not just the cost of building software, but the cost of attempting it, expanding the set of economically viable solutions across the long tail of firms. Not just more software, but more bespoke solutions to commercial problems that should result, theoretically, in better firm-level outcomes that aggregate to greater levels of economic productivity.

58:21Chris Gadek:Let's give it up for better term level.

58:24Chris Hladczuk:Philippe Aguilun, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, speaks to the expansionary effects of technology in his book, The Power of Creative Disruption, co-authored with two other authors. Automation is thus not in and in itself an enemy of employment. Automation is not an enemy of employment. By modernizing the production process, automation makes firms more competitive, which enables them to win new markets and therefore to hire more employees. This is what we call a productivity effect. This same productivity effect was at work in prior industrial revolutions, those induced by the steam engine and then by electricity, and explains why neither of these revolutions produced the mass unemployment that some had predicted.

59:07Chris Hladczuk:How can we reconcile this optimistic conclusion with the more pessimistic finding mentioned earlier that automation has a negative effect on employment at the level of commuting zones? One response is to invoke the difficulty of measuring automation and robotization at the commuting zone level, as we discussed earlier. A second possible explanation is that firms that do not automate sufficiently end up downsizing their employment, outsourcing their production, or simply going under. This would reflect an eviction effect of automation on employment. Firms that invest significantly in new industrial equipment substantially lower their likelihood of going out of business over the following 10 years compared to firms that do not make such an investment.

59:47Chris Hladczuk:It is thus not automation or manufacturing processes that causes firms to eliminate jobs, but rather missing the critical juncture of automation and consequently finding themselves forced to reduce the scope of their activities or even exit the market. In other words, it is through the process of creative destruction that automation can lead to job losses. In that sense, the vertical SaaS companies acquired by PE firms under low interest rate conditions face headwinds, not just from rising rates, but also because it's simply more costly as a result of institutional momentum for them to rebuild their workflows and internal development processes around AI than it is for a company to establish those workflows and development processes in the first place.

1:00:28Chris Hladczuk:In other words, established companies face higher costs in adapting to the AI era than do new entrants or companies that are internalizing these tools de novo. And PE-backed firms are fundamentally averse to cost increases. All right.

1:00:41Matt Huang:Go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo. And before we get to our first guest of the show, we got to check in with Gene's, the restaurant in New York. They are weighing in on private credit. They say, if you think private credit is a problem, wait until you find out about the annuity businesses they all bought.

1:01:01Chris Hladczuk:I love that this story has gone so broad that it is now being posted to the Instagram stories of New York restaurants. But that's where we are in this cycle. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Fang, the co-founder of DoorDash, who is waiting for us. Let's bring it into the TV. Andy, how are you doing? Hey, what's up, guys?

1:01:23Matt Huang:What's happening?

1:01:23Chris Hladczuk:Good to see you again. Welcome back to the show. Wait, actually, we did not have you on the show. No, I was never on your show. I'm sorry for that. Stanley and Tony were both on the show. That's right.

1:01:33Matt Huang:The boys. It's just the three of you guys, right? Or is there a fourth? Yeah, it's the three musketeers.

1:01:39Chris Hladczuk:The three musketeers. How's life these days? How's 2026 going?

1:01:44Andy Fang:2026 is good. I mean, lots going on. um i mean i guess you know for us i think uh ai is like a big focus of mine personally at the company so um yeah i mean recently we just announced yeah maybe start with some background

1:01:59Chris Hladczuk:on your role how it's changed over the the the period of building doordash and growing the company uh i'm sure it's been a wild ride but i'd love to hear it from your perspective and then we can go into the acquisition yeah totally um i mean let's see 13 years in the making i

1:02:16Andy Fang:I guess. I mean, so I've been always involved on the tech side. So really focused on product and technology at DoorDash. You know, I helped scaled up our like product engineering teams for I don't know, like eight, nine years, first eight, nine years of the company. After that, we brought on more senior leadership to kind of manage the growing organization. And I've been more focused on how do we help DoorDash find the next big bets to help us keep growing. I think whether it's our international businesses, our DashPass subscription program, more recently with AI stuff. And so I think really just like sinking my teeth into various technology and business problems.

1:02:57Andy Fang:and figuring out how we can continue to grow the business and find those next seeds.

1:03:04Matt Huang:Love it. So talk about how the news today ties into your focus.

1:03:10Andy Fang:Absolutely. So, yeah, I was just briefly mentioning. So AI is something that we're really trying to figure out at DoorDash, how we can incorporate it into our business. And so earlier today, we just announced that we acquired a company called Netis. They're an applied AI research lab. they went through YC and we met with them I want to say like six or seven months ago and I think we were thinking about how to

1:03:38Matt Huang:be honest six seven I don't know

1:03:43Chris Hladczuk:it really just pops into your brain it's such a weird oh my gosh I'm such an old head I was reading through some Wall Street Journal article and I kept saying the two numbers that shall not be named together. And Jordy was like, are you doing this intentionally? September. September. You meet him. Absolutely.

1:04:03Andy Fang:So, yeah. So then September is when we first started talking to them. And we were trying to figure out how to productionize AI use cases at DoorDash. And so really, I mean, we kind of spread in terms of talking to a bunch of different startups. There's a lot of startups trying to figure out how to deploy AI for the enterprise use case. And we just decided to be really open-minded about it and partner with a bunch of them. But Metis really stuck out to us. I mean, we were working with them since September. There are some really cool use cases around agente commerce and physical intelligence that I can talk about a bit that we're working with them on that we're super excited to accelerate with them joining the company.

1:04:46Andy Fang:So, yeah, I mean, they're like a bunch of cracked 22-year-old AI pill people, and they're like super high hustle, very knowledgeable about what's going on in the space. And, you know, we just want to inject a lot of the energy into how we're trying to innovate here.

1:05:05Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, maybe take you through some of the history of AI at DoorDash because I imagine you were doing recommendation systems very early. matching yeah all sorts of stuff and then when the LLM revolution happens like the obvious like bolt-on like chat box went into a lot of apps like did that happen and then and then everyone starts using coding agents and IDEs and so like what what have been the key turning points just internally at DoorDash in AI adoption yeah I mean so I think to your point I think there's two

1:05:43Andy Fang:themes in terms of how we're trying to think about it. I think one is employee enablement or productivity. I think obviously you guys are very well aware of since November, basically, I think there's been an explosion, especially on the coding side in terms of people being much more productive. I'd say, I think at DoorDash, our evolution in terms of AI on the product-facing side has been a longer journey in the sense that I think we've been trying to figure out how this all fits into our marketplace and how this would benefit our customers. To your point, I think a lot of people, ourselves included, we're just trying to bolt on some sort of chat box just to see how it would play in.

1:06:19Andy Fang:And I think, one, when we did that a couple years ago, the LLMs were not nearly as smart. But two, I think we just need to be more thoughtful. How do we integrate this into the experience? And I think agentic commerce is something that a lot of people have been talking about and trying to figure out. And for us, I would say agentic commerce is basically figuring out how we can leverage this technology to make it actually easier for restaurants to run their business and for customers to find what they want on DoorDash. I think one of the big problems that we've had on DoorDash is, and what people tell me all the time when I talk to them, is like, look, Andy, you guys got a ton of selection.

1:06:53Andy Fang:I have no idea what to order. There's so many different restaurants and all these different cuisines. I'm having decision paralysis right now. I think that's a very interesting problem where we feel like AI can be beneficial in helping you like find what you want and give you confidence in that as a

1:07:12Matt Huang:customer so i can't one of the one of the the greatest luxuries uh or first world problems in life is is a decision paralysis on what to eat it comes comes for everyone yeah have you been seeing

1:07:27Chris Hladczuk:folks like vibe code uh sort of like plugins or uh add-ons or features that then you can potentially use to adopt a role into the actual roadmap. I swear I saw someone post something about this where they vibe coded basically a Chrome plugin that would filter DoorDash for vegetarian options. And it was like a pretty mature functionality. And they just went through like a series of prompts and got to like something that they were very satisfied with, but that feels like they're sort of doing the R and D on their end. And then once it's working, they, you can actually bring that back. I'm wondering about this like primordial explosion of, of, you know, people building custom software and then the pipeline to actually bring that into the business as new features.

1:08:18That's interesting because I think there's something, I haven't heard of that

1:08:22Andy Fang:one specifically, to be honest, but I think there has been a lot of interest is like, Hey, like, can you figure out a way to like enable whatever my agent or like whatever software I'm building to integrate into the DoorDash ecosystem. I've gotten some pings from founders and be like, yo, when's the DoorDash CLI coming out? And I'm like, hold on. We need to figure out what that means. And I think I would say, and we also did something with OpenAI in terms of being an early partner with our apps ecosystem and stuff. So we're trying to figure out how we want to play in this space, to be honest.

1:08:55Chris Hladczuk:So just walk me actually through that OpenAI partnership because wouldn't that be the CLI? If I have Codex, that's a CLI. and then if you have a partnership with OpenAI, can't Codex CLI talk to DoorDash then? Or is there some break in the chain that needs to be resolved? I think it's more like in ChatGPT.

1:09:14Andy Fang:It's not really accessible through Codex, I don't think.

1:09:16Chris Hladczuk:So I have to tell Codex to go use ChatGPT. Open a web browser, click on the ChatGPT box. It is weird. These unhobblings are so intuitive and then you realize that, okay, there's actually some sort of business reason or whatnot.

1:09:29Andy Fang:Yeah, I think a lot of people are just trying to throw stuff for the wall and see what sticks. So I think one thing that we've been finding really, like, getting a lot of traction, especially with, like, what we're working with MetaSong, is, like, I think there's some actual agentic workflows, like, customer-facing workflows that we're working on that. Like, just, like, us playing around with it the past couple weeks, like, we legitimately think this is going to be something that's going to be beneficial to customers and help you find what you want and help you order, like... Okay, so...

1:09:55Matt Huang:How do you think about even positioning these products? Because, like, obviously, like, broad public opinion on AI is not great. Is this the kind of thing, I'm assuming you're just trying to deliver a great experience and not slap DoorDash AI, the thing you've been waiting for. Yeah, exactly.

1:10:11Andy Fang:I think we want to introduce it in a way that's actually beneficial to conversion or you finding what you want and being satisfied with it. That's why we've taken our time in some ways in terms of rolling something out that we want to launch more broadly. I think some of the challenges we've had historically is like these agents are not very smart at like finding you what you want this was like a while ago right obviously things have gotten a lot smarter the question is how do we get leverage the intelligence that you know a lot of like harness building context engineering type stuff um but it's also like how do you build a great experience around it like you know there's like obviously llms if they're super smart sometimes they like are slower with their reasoning, but we're just trying to find that balance.

1:10:57Andy Fang:And like, I think to your point, it's like, how do we create an interesting experience that doesn't just feel like we're slapping something AI on?

1:11:04Matt Huang:Yeah. Are you going to do anything with, with voice at all? Like I can imagine somebody in the DoorDash app saying like, Hey, I want a Chinese food. I want to avoid

1:11:14Chris Hladczuk:this is where it tells you that they integrated with Syria a decade ago.

1:11:18Andy Fang:yeah we do have some voice modality stuff but uh i think i would say that's a little bit more like just a modality in terms of how you sure place your order and like i guess if it's more natural language with the technology like that's yeah i'm saying like yeah it's natural language

1:11:34Matt Huang:you're kind of searching over all the offerings in your area and and then it's like potentially putting together like a cart for you yeah that you or an order you can check it out a couple couple more things. How does Metis tie into the physical, uh, AI autonomy? You mentioned something about that earlier.

1:11:50Andy Fang:Yeah. So, I mean, I think DoorDash wants to play the frontier of physical intelligence. I think that's something we've talked about for a while. Obviously our, you guys

1:11:58Matt Huang:have your cute little robots.

1:12:00Andy Fang:Exactly. The dot delivery robots. So my co-founder Stanley, who has, uh, been working on that full time, like we're super excited to deploy those more broadly. but we have a large courier network we have a large support network where we're collecting billions of data points in the physical world every day and it's like how can we leverage that to actually push forward what's possible with robotics and physical intelligence I think there's some interesting conversations we've had with various startups and labs on how we collaborate to push forward the frontier together and I think Metis has some great experience doing that type of stuff in the expert data space.

1:12:40Andy Fang:I mean, you know, Aria and the CEO is like a former Mercor. So I think there's some really interesting stuff there that we're interested to explore. And yeah, we're excited to accelerate some of that together with them. Awesome.

1:12:53Matt Huang:Matt from Tempo is coming on later today. Tempo is launching today. I know you guys were an early design partner. Yes. Talk about kind of that decision to get involved. It's funny you bring that up

1:13:04Andy Fang:because Matt literally texted me before. but he's like, hey, we're going to be on the show together. I was like, six. So, yeah, we're excited. I mean, I'll let Matt talk more about that, but I think some of actually what Matt's working on is going to be synergistic with the agent of commerce stuff we're working on potentially. But essentially, like, we are very excited to just partner with companies like Tempo to see how stable coins can be disruptive and innovative in our space. You know, more to come in terms of what exactly our pilot use case is going to be. But yeah, we've really enjoyed working with them.

1:13:38Andy Fang:And Matt's been great. We've known Matt for a while. Awesome.

1:13:42Chris Hladczuk:I want to ask one more about Agentic Commerce. I'm trying to think about the product that I might actually want. I understand when most people say Agentic Commerce, it's like open up ChatGPT and fire off a query, say order me a burrito, and it goes through DoorDash and you handle the rails. But I'm thinking more about the next version of that. And maybe it's something like, okay, I want lunch every day, but I need you to check my calendar because the show ends sometimes at 2, sometimes at 2.30. That information's on my calendar. But also sometimes I'm leaving to go to the airport and I'm flying, so I'm not available.

1:14:25Chris Hladczuk:And I could potentially encode all these preferences. I have favorite things at different restaurants. I'd like some variety, but some consistency. Maybe you should fire off a text message to me and let me know that I can opt out of today's order. And I feel like that's the system that someone would vibe code if you gave them the CLI. But that should probably just live within DoorDash. So how do you think about that sort of operating at a higher level, like encoding all of your preferences and then putting your DoorDash experience basically on autopilot? Totally.

1:15:00Andy Fang:I think one thing we say to ourselves is if someone was building DoorDash today, it would not look like DoorDash. And when we think about agents versus just like Outlines, agents in an ideal world, they're not just telling you stuff, they're actually doing stuff for you. And I think I would say from a consumer-facing use case perspective, in my opinion, I think besides the chatbots, I think OpenClaw is kind of the closest thing you've seen to something that is where agentic commerce is heading towards. And so we're very inspired by that type of, I don't know if use case is the right word, but that model and that paradigm of like agents doing stuff on behalf of you.

1:15:38Andy Fang:And I think your example like kind of hit it on the head is like, I don't want to just like you tell me stuff, like do stuff for me. And I think we have a ton of information on your preferences. We have a ton of information, real-time information on what's going on logistics-wise in your neighborhood and your city, like real-time inventory information and restaurants and retailers. And so we can create some magical experiences there. And again, for us, it's not just about slapping this technology on just for the sake of it, but it's actually stuff that restaurants would really appreciate because we can help them run their business better.

1:16:07Andy Fang:A concrete example on the restaurant side, and I'll get back to your use case in a second, but on the restaurant side, it's like, I don't know how to price my pad thai in my neighborhood. Or what deals or promotions should I be running right now? Because I just want to figure out how to grow my sales. or help me figure out how to – the lulls between lunch and dinner, help me figure out how to get more demand there. And then on the customer side, I think to your example, it's like I don't want to think about ordering my lunch to the office every day or my weekly groceries. The groceries –

1:16:40Chris Hladczuk:Which is a crazy thing to say because you basically invented the I'm hungry button on your phone and it's literally like two clicks for me when I used DoorDash. And I'm like – We still – I'm in the past. I don't want the horse anymore. Give me the cold. yesterday? I didn't have lunch yesterday. We actually messed up somehow. Because we at the

1:16:57Matt Huang:office forgot to order.

1:16:58Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, we forgot to order, actually. No, I did have a salad, but it was like

1:17:02Matt Huang:hours later and I figured it out. How rare is it to be 13 years into a business that has been as successful as DoorDash to still have three founders in the business?

1:17:15Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, that's crazy.

1:17:17Matt Huang:I was trying to come up with an example of a business at this scale. That's interesting.

1:17:23Andy Fang:I did not expect that, but I don't take that for granted at all. I mean, in fact, Tony's standing up.

1:17:28Chris Hladczuk:You guys secretly hate each other, right? But there's some weird contract where if any of you leave, the whole company shuts down, so you're locked to each other, handcuffed on the Titanic together. No, I'm messing with you.

1:17:42Andy Fang:I'm very grateful for the dynamic and the relationship we have. I mean, I think Tony is like, you know, one of one CEO. And I think like we have a really good dynamic together and we put a lot of trust in each other to like just do the right thing.

1:17:56Chris Hladczuk:Have you guys always had the same roles basically and sort of known, okay, I'm not going to step on this person's toes in this particular region because then there's mutual trust as opposed to like a lot of founding teams. They get in trouble when it's like there's three people that want to be CEO and they're like fighting over it constantly. I mean, that's usually what happens. Oh, yeah, it's true.

1:18:15Andy Fang:I would say we delineated our responsibilities pretty early on. And I think Tony's role has stayed consistent. I mean, CEO is CEO. But I think Stanley and I, our roles have evolved around both how to stay on the forefront of innovation, but also just making sure we're thinking about what are the most important problems to solve. But no, I think we have a really good relationship. I think it's high trust. I mean, we're getting dinner tonight. We try to catch up every so often.

1:18:42Chris Hladczuk:um but yeah door dashing dinner tonight no we're gonna go out i don't know where we're going out

1:18:48Andy Fang:but we'll pick a spot but uh fun no boys it's uh yeah it's a it's a special relationship i i did

1:18:54Matt Huang:not expect that but yeah it's right no it's cool um last last question after the the uh very silly citrini piece did you guys have you thought about doing a hackathon and getting your best engineers to be like hey just vibe code doordash yeah make the agent native doordash because i think it would actually be really interesting to just actually try to do it and see you know it's funny you bring

1:19:18Andy Fang:that up because there's uh that's the trini report like blew up out of nowhere um and i don't know i mean honestly we didn't react too much to it i mean i tweeted something in response to it just in terms of my own thoughts there but i would say like in general like two words network effects yeah i mean i would say in general like we just try to focus on growing our business and focus customers. But I don't know. We try to get people to vibe code a bunch of different use cases, but not try to vibe code DoorDash.

1:19:49Chris Hladczuk:There's more to it. A Bits and Adams company.

1:19:53Matt Huang:Awesome. Great to meet you, Andy. Next time bring all three of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd love to have all three of you. Yeah, we'll do a roundtable.

1:20:01Chris Hladczuk:We've got enough chairs and mics. We'll do the whole history. Awesome. Well, yeah, congrats.

1:20:06Matt Huang:Give our best to the Metis team. Congrats on the partnering up. It's very cool. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one.

1:20:14Chris Hladczuk:Speaking of agentic commerce, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about voice mode. You want voice mode? Why not sign up for 11 Labs? Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And without further ado, we will bring in Matt Jason from Multiply. How you doing, Matt? What's going on? Hey, guys. Nice to see you. We're talking about my favorite topic.

1:20:46Chris Hladczuk:What are we talking about? Introduce yourself in the company.

1:20:49Andy Fang:Right on. So my name is Matt Jason. I am the founder and CEO of Multiply. And we are the first ever hybrid AI media agency for a big company. We're making ads. You're speaking my language. Yeah, we run some ads.

1:21:02Chris Hladczuk:Okay.

1:21:03Andy Fang:Do you guys like ads?

1:21:04Chris Hladczuk:We love ads. ads make you got some money yes the entire business is ads and we uh we refuse to have any revenue that isn't ad and and just to be clear we would run ads even if we weren't being paid and we have run ads that we didn't get paid for because we'd have a lot of the game

1:21:23Matt Huang:early on we had this bit uh where where we would just be talking and then we'd be changing the subject and John would go, before we talk about XYZ, I need to tell you about Gulfstream.

1:21:35Chris Hladczuk:And it would sound like a podcast ad. It would sound like a podcast ad. But I didn't say that we were sponsored by them. I just said, I got to tell you about this company because it's really cool and I got to run an app.

1:21:43Matt Huang:And we would put in the description, this show wouldn't be possible without just a number We weren't being paid.

1:21:49Chris Hladczuk:It's just like it wouldn't be possible without them because they're awesome. I like it. We love this company. Anyway, break it down a little bit lower. Who are your customers? How are they actually using Multiply? What piece of the funnel are you touching in the B2B advertising space?

1:22:06Andy Fang:Definitely. All right. So first, just the big news of today is we came out of stealth today. We raised$9.5 million. Oh, yes. Thank you. Thank you.

1:22:19Andy Fang:Congratulations. Thank you. Head source and capital. Instacart co-founder Max Mullen. Oh, cool. Josh Woodward leads Gemini at Google. Yeah. and lots more great people. And the reason we're all huddled in this advertising space, this is an old world in advertising. Google has built massive business, LinkedIn and Twitter, but massive advertising businesses. But ads feel the same way they did five, 10, 15 years ago, despite the crazy rise in AI. And we work for B2B companies. We work for, so I came from Brex before this. We work for high growth B2B companies who have these crazy goals in their head.

1:22:55Andy Fang:They have to go 5X their sales pipeline. and that's a lot of honestly your sponsors um here too and it's pretty impossible of a task today you've got to go figure out across all your channels how can you go grow faster and advertising is just stuck in the old world so what what we found a way to do is say hey the big problem in advertising is stuff goes stale right away you launch a new ad your audience is tuned out in two three days a week tops and your message is stale so what we've done we've said great Let's go combine AI agents with the best humans in the world at MediaBuy. And we built this combination AI plus human media agency.

1:23:36Andy Fang:And what we do together is we build self-learning apps. So really what that means is you put out initial campaigns. We're connected into your sales call recordings. So we see why your customers actually say to your sales team, hey, we love what you do. Here's why we want to buy from you versus competitor. We read your customer emails. We get the same thing. Every time there's a new quote or pain point, we ingest this and we can actually go create tens or hundreds of new ads dynamically learning based upon why people love just what you do. So that's our world. We're already partnering with companies like Banta, like Listen Labs and Superhuman.

1:24:13Andy Fang:Thank you. Thank you. And the growth is insane. And for a lot of these companies, they're hitting 300 to 500 percent or more growth on these ad channels just from changing from static old world ads to new world self-learning ads.

1:24:27Matt Huang:Basically, there's all this knowledge that has been trapped in sales and you're basically just bringing it over and helping.

1:24:34Chris Hladczuk:And it's different from just going to an off-the-shelf LLM provider and saying, like, come up with some taglines for my business because you're ingesting proprietary data that happened on a phone call between the top salesperson and an interesting client that surfaced something interesting. And then you can actually pipeline that through to the creative. That makes sense?

1:24:55Andy Fang:That's it. That's it. Spot on. It's grabbing this proprietary data for your business. Yeah.

1:25:00Chris Hladczuk:We see why people love what you do.

1:25:02Andy Fang:Not like some generic company might like it. like specifically your product, what you have. And then we help you grow based on it, which we love. Like we're an official company that's discovered.

1:25:11Chris Hladczuk:And a lot of that stuff isn't, it's just not available on the open web. Like that's probably true for consumer. People do post about their clothes that they purchase and the food that they eat. But a lot of people aren't actually sharing how a particular piece of B2B software is making their business more efficient just organically. So even if you have...

1:25:32Matt Huang:I'm euphoric right now.

1:25:33Chris Hladczuk:Even if you have an LLM that can scrape the web and is very good at searching, it's not going to have access to that data.

1:25:39Matt Huang:Help me with a kind of thesis I've had for a while now, which is historically ads had very limited targeting. You'd be, let's say, running a TV ad on a specific channel, very limited targeting. You're creating creative that's going to be seen by tons and tons of people, and you can't really control who those people are. It's just like the most general ad. And then with social, you could create an ad that was effectively for 100 ,000 people, and you run it, and it gets stale quickly, and you have to create more creative. And it feels like we're on a trajectory towards at some point, and people that hate commerce and ads and the economic engine of the internet won't like this.

1:26:22Matt Huang:But it feels like we'll get to a point where every ad is basically created in real time for a specific individual. do you do you see that you see us kind of headed in that in that direction and part of that is just like the right message at the right time for the right like one specific person and there's obviously kind of like layers to that stack maybe you need to multiply that's also working with like a you know a meta platforms etc but headed towards like targeting that's so extreme it's like one ad

1:26:52Chris Hladczuk:for one or potentially a vibe.co where do you see brands bb startups ai companies advertised on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on Meta. You could deploy for your customers. You could potentially be a big partner to Vibe.co, our partner.

1:27:07Andy Fang:So I love that vision. We're seeing companies are demanding the same thing. We're running these personalized ads where we see, hey, a similar set of customers decided to buy food for this reason. Hey, actually, let me step back. When we're seeing financial services companies with a certain sector, buy from a certain reason, we're already running different ads to them than manufacturing customers with certain revenue ranges. So it's already, we're actually ingesting CRM data where we can do a version of what you're talking about and saying, hey, don't advertise to these folks. And for these folks, give them this specific messaging based on why they buy from you.

1:27:44Andy Fang:So we're going there. We're having companies ask us all the time for more personalized. So we're building more for one-to-one as well. I think the question and the thing that I think is so interesting about the space, even if you can go do one-to-one advertising for everyone, how do you know it's the right message when it's predictive? And really one of the things that we focus on is not saying that we know the right answer. A lot of traditional media agencies have like a playbook. They'll say, hey, we know the best way to break through and we fundamentally disagree with that. We think the best approach is always on obsessive testing.

1:28:18Andy Fang:So when we talk to growth marketers, like the way we frame a lot of our AI, We frame it as we built the world's most insatiable AI agent. And just like a good growth marketer, there's no such thing as enough pipeline. And the reason I say that here is we're running hundreds of experiments every week for a lot of companies. It's thousands over time. And when you see all of that, you're actually learning by doing. You can't just say one-to-one, here's the right message. It might be one-to-one, let's try 10, 20, 30 things until we crack. This is what really isn't speaking the language of that person or that customer.

1:28:52Andy Fang:that speaks to them. And you want to speak their language, even though it's your value, your brain to life.

1:28:57Matt Huang:All right, here's a challenge. Sell me a pen in the next 24 hours.

1:29:03Chris Hladczuk:Sell me, actually sell me a, it would be the B2B equivalent. Like I want an ad for a co-packer that can make me custom pens by the billions if I want them.

1:29:14Matt Huang:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:29:14Chris Hladczuk:TBPN branded pens. This could be our next merch drop. Thank you so much.

1:29:20Matt Huang:Great to meet you, Matt. Congratulations on the raise.

1:29:25Chris Hladczuk:Very exciting company. We'll talk to you soon, Matt. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken. It helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And we have Cameron here in the studio. Are you a doctor? Should I be calling you doctor?

1:29:48Dr. Cameron Sepah:You don't need to call me doctor, but I am a licensed clinical psychologist. Wow.

1:29:53Chris Hladczuk:Congratulations. Give a little bit of your background. Explain the company. And then obviously I want to dive into the current thing, which is the peptide debate.

1:29:59Dr. Cameron Sepah:Of course. Yeah. So I'm Dr. Cameron Sapaugh. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I served as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine for over a decade.

1:30:09Chris Hladczuk:That's a good school, right?

1:30:10Dr. Cameron Sepah:It's the number three medical school in the country. And since 2012, I've become a serial healthcare entrepreneur. So I was on the founding team of Amada Health, which is a unicorn that went public last year that creates online weight loss programs. It's helped a million people lose 10 million pounds and cut their risk of diabetes and heart disease in half.

1:30:27Matt Huang:That's a great KPI.

1:30:29Dr. Cameron Sepah:The thing I'm much more proud of than the financial outcome. Spent a year at Trinity Ventures on the VC side of the business. And now I'm currently the founder and CEO of Maximus, where we are pioneering performance medicine.

1:30:40Chris Hladczuk:And what's the core focus of Maximus? Obviously, we're going to talk about peptides, but you've been in the business since before the peptide boom, correct?

1:30:47Dr. Cameron Sepah:For sure. And peptides is really almost like a meaningless term. It just really means like drugs. It's a particular chain of amino acids that are getting hyped right now. Performance medicine spans hormones, peptides, and other small molecules. Yeah, it does. You'll appreciate that.

1:31:02Matt Huang:We were at a conference in 2024 and it was like we had we had just started doing the show and we were asked to give a talk kind of last seconds. We were like, oh, what should we talk about? And it was it was meant to be like somewhat of a provocative subject. And we were making the case that basically founders should be on like a performance drug stack. Right.

1:31:26Chris Hladczuk:And that venture capital firm should have platform teams that help.

1:31:30Matt Huang:Their platform teams should be like helping them optimize. They have their go-to-market team.

1:31:33Chris Hladczuk:They have their brand team. They'll help you with hiring. They'll help you optimize your performance stack. But how important is performance these days outside of, you know, bodybuilding competitions?

1:31:43Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, you know, I think a lot of, in fact, the trend that we're seeing, this huge consumer wave, whether in peptides or sort of performance enhancement, really trickles down from professional athletes and bodybuilders. Yeah. One kind of hack I describe is you can look at the WADA list, the World Anti-Doping Association, and that gives you a pretty good indication.

1:32:02Matt Huang:That was our point. There's no banned substances. I mean, there are actual legal drugs, but there's no governing body in business that says you cannot take these because they work too well.

1:32:15Dr. Cameron Sepah:Exactly.

1:32:16Matt Huang:Right.

1:32:16Dr. Cameron Sepah:And I have a private practice on the side. I work with the top Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs. I can tell you without naming names, a lot of the folks that you interview are taking essentially doctor prescribed but performance enhancing substances in order to be more effective at their jobs with less stress.

1:32:33Chris Hladczuk:And what does that mean effective? Because like you just being in shape and, you know, being able to walk around and not be too tired during the day, that's valuable. But then there's also focus if you're working on a spreadsheet or programming. Like there's so many different like levers to pull on performance broadly. How do you narrow it down? Is it case by case? Yeah.

1:32:54Dr. Cameron Sepah:So the way I describe it, I think there's sort of five foundational health behaviors. So diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and intimacy are the five things that are critical for health and lifespan. And let me make a little bit of an analogy that I think really captures the field of performance medicine. So Steve Jobs used to love to tell a story about how there's an article in Scientific American that would track how effective various animals of the world are at locomotion. So who can travel a kilometer with the least amount of calories, right? Now the condor, a bird, was the most efficient animal.

1:33:27Dr. Cameron Sepah:And human beings, despite being the crown jewel of creation, were like a third of the way down the list. So it was pretty unimpressive showing. But someone had the bright idea and they said, if you give a human being a bicycle, they skyrocket to the top of the list. And so Steve would make that analogy that the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind, right? And really revolutionize the world with that idea. I'd argue now we're seeing the precipice of two new revolutions in that AI is the motorcycle for the mind. It's not only as smart as a PhD, but it has all of the PhDs and can work 24 seven.

1:34:01Dr. Cameron Sepah:And similarly, we're seeing a revolution in biology and this shift towards performance medicine. So if you take the five foundational health behaviors that I described, and you want to enhance your ability to do these things because they're critical to your health, you probably have a supplement stack, like you're saying, right? So let's just walk down those five things. So if you're trying to enhance your exercise, and the main goal of exercise is to build muscle mass, you're probably going to take the most studied ergogenic supplement, which is creatine, right? Now creatine, if you just sit on your couch all day, is not going to do much for you except make you bloated.

1:34:34Dr. Cameron Sepah:But if you combine it with strength training, it will increase slightly the amount of your lean mass. Now what happens if you introduce testosterone. Now, testosterone, there's a great study that was done.

1:34:43Matt Huang:Don't get John started.

1:34:45Dr. Cameron Sepah:Don't tempt him. There was a great study that was done that gave guys testosterone and told them not to exercise. They gave another group, they told them to exercise without testosterone, and then obviously the combination. Now, the combination obviously grew the most amount of muscle in that testosterone and strength training are obviously synergistic. But the fascinating thing is the guys who took testosterone and sat on their butt all day grew far more muscles than the guys who are lifting weight five days a week without testosterone. It is literally a cheat code. And so it literally mogs creatine, if you will, in that it is far more performance-enhancing, which is why it's banned by water.

1:35:20Dr. Cameron Sepah:That's such a black pill. And so really, if you want to grow muscle in the most efficient way possible, testosterone is clearly the best way of doing it. Now, what about diet?

1:35:31Chris Hladczuk:Wait, quickly on creatine, I have a question. So I heard a theory that creatine has benefits outside of muscle building. And the basic effect was that it helps with hydration. It's good to be hydrated. It's helping your cells retain water, which is why some people complain about creatine. Oh, it's just water weight. But water in your muscles makes your muscles look bigger. So people are happy with that. But that creatine could potentially be beneficial outside of a bodybuilding context.

1:35:59Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah. So there's some recent studies that show that it can help with sleep deprivation. Okay. So there's some brain absorption effects.

1:36:04Chris Hladczuk:Don't you have to take a ton of it for that, though?

1:36:06Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, I think it's a little overhyped, I would say.

1:36:08Matt Huang:I've tried doing that on some shows. I'm like, I don't know, boss. I don't know if I can have the 50th gummy today.

1:36:16Dr. Cameron Sepah:Well, that's the irony, right? People are mega-dosing creatine in order to eke out some very slight performance-enhancing benefits when they could be taking testosterone and having very clear performance-enhancing benefits. So the other health behavior, diet, obviously critical for minimizing fat. body fat. So the most common supplement that you can take to try to regulate your appetite is fiber, right? Almost everyone takes fiber in some form or another, whether through whole foods or a supplement. You might lose one, maybe 2 % of your body fat if you're consuming a fiber supplement. But now with these prescription GLP-1s, semaglutide, tears of appetite, clinical studies are showing 14.7 % weight loss, 22 % weight loss.

1:36:56Dr. Cameron Sepah:So it absolutely trumps anything that you can take in terms of a supplement. And it's obviously literally bending the obesity curve in America. If you look at sleep, the most common over-the-counter supplement for sleep is melatonin, right? Melatonin mildly works. It can particularly help if you have jet lag. But what if you take a growth hormone peptide? So when you... It is, but think about this. Your growth hormone peaks at puberty and it actually declines throughout your lifespan. And so...

1:37:25Chris Hladczuk:What if you stub your toe? Have you considered trend?

1:37:28Dr. Cameron Sepah:Well, Trent is an anabolic steroid that I would not recommend for most people. Or a subtoe. There's a lot of anti-aging. John's like, all right, you forced my hand. I'll take it. Yeah, for sure. But the fascinating thing is because growth hormone declines across the lifespan, you can take a growth hormone peptide and just restore yourself back to youthful levels.

1:37:48Chris Hladczuk:And that's what a lot of the scientific consensus is about. Not the super physiological levels, not getting your testosterone 10 ,000 times bigger than what it would be naturally. But if you are truly at a deficit, bringing you back in line, that's sort of the medical consensus, correct? Okay.

1:38:04Dr. Cameron Sepah:So there are growth hormone peptides now, sermorelin and tesamorelin, that enhance sleep. They enhance recovery, allow people to sleep back towards that seven to nine hours of sleep. That's critical for physiological restoration. Okay. If you think about stress management, the other kind of fourth health behavior, the most common supplement that people take is magnesium. It helps you kind of be calm and kind of not be too stressed. It works mildly as well. But now you can take oxytocin. So oxytocin, you probably know, is sort of the love connection hormone, right? We've actually developed a topical formulation of it.

1:38:38Dr. Cameron Sepah:So you can actually apply it. I'll show you what it looks like. This is a little container. You can apply it intranasally or on thin skin, such as the scrotum or the perineum. It absorbs and it reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, and it helps people feel more connected, far more than a magnesium supplement.

1:38:54Matt Huang:This is what the kick streamers need if they get frame-mogged. Oh, that's true. The cortisol spikes. They're keeping an EpiPen.

1:39:01Dr. Cameron Sepah:It will prevent, actually, a cortisol spike. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're getting frame-mogged. Yes. There you go. Yeah, you don't need to stab. You don't apply it, I would say. And then finally, intimacy, I think, is the most underrated health behavior. Zinc is the most common supplement that people take in terms of enhancing sort of sexual function. Sure. But the ED drugs, Tadalfil, Viagra, Vardenafil.

1:39:24Chris Hladczuk:There's been a big boom with HIMS and HERS and Roman. Exactly. Those companies.

1:39:28Dr. Cameron Sepah:So people are taking that because it not only enhances sexual function in terms of erectile strength, ability to last longer, enhancing the enjoyment of sex, but it actually increases blood flow to all of your body and to your muscles, to your brain. People take it as a pre-workout. There's interesting associational research showing that it reduces the incidence of Alzheimer's and dementia. of there needs to be further studies that needs to be done to substantiate that. But that's the future that I see is that almost everyone right now has sort of that supplement stack. But I predict, this is my kind of bold prediction, is that the top founders and VCs in the next five years will be taking at least three of those five things that I mentioned.

1:40:07Dr. Cameron Sepah:So testosterone to build muscle, tears of betide to drop fat, tessimoralin to increase growth hormone and recovery, tadalafil to increase intimacy and blood flow, and oxytocin to reduce their stress.

1:40:19Chris Hladczuk:Okay, so you have the five supplements and then the five drugs that need prescriptions, right? Is your prediction that the FDA will approve non-prescription versions of those exact chemicals or that everyone will sort of elevate to working with a doctor that can actually write prescriptions?

1:40:39Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, it's a great question. All of these prescription drugs that I mentioned are already FDA approved. Yes. But a physician has the right to prescribe any of these off-label, right? So tadalafil is a great example. It's FDA approved for erectile dysfunction, but we actually prescribe it as a blood flow enhancer. So some people literally take it as a prescription pre-workout for non-sexual reasons, or they are taking it as an anti-aging sort of drug. Because that's sort of the vision of performance medicine is it's not just treating a deficit or a medical problem, but it's enhancing your health, your aesthetics, or your performance.

1:41:14Chris Hladczuk:And so like between those two, you would expect like many more doctor's visits, many more consultations with medical professionals to get access to that tier of prescription only medicines. Yeah.

1:41:27Matt Huang:Well, I feel like that fits into this, like, you know, put differently, you're positioning this as like much more proactive approach to medicine, not just trying to survive when something bad happens or experiencing some sort of disease, but like proactively trying to take yourself from the baseline to the best you can possibly use.

1:41:48Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. The problem is right now in America, we don't have a health care system. We have a sick care system. Right. And it's run by an oligopoly of insurance companies that are not in the business of providing health care. They're in the business of denying health care. Very sadly and tragically when the UHG CEO is killed.

1:42:04Matt Huang:There's some issues where various health tech companies will be talking to VCs and they'll say, oh, we're going to be able to get access to insurance dollars. And the issue with that is that insurance companies don't care if something will make you healthy in 10 years because you're most likely going to be on a new insurance plan. Absolutely. They're just wasting money, right? They expect you, the average American stays at their job, like, you know, low single digit years, I think. And so that just means like they're like, that's great. You're going to be healthier later, but but I'm not going to pay for the benefit of some other insurance carrier.

1:42:40Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, that was what we learned at Omada because we sold through employers that if the employer didn't retain their employees for more than three years, there's no point of selling into it because they're like, it's not my problem. Someone else is going to have to pay for it. So really, the antidote to that is performance medicine in that it bypasses the insurance system altogether. And within basically we're a cash pay private practice that operates in all 50 states. and our belief is that the only person that should be making a decision is you and your doctor and that every drug of course has risks but it's up to you and your doctor to decide whether the cost benefit is worth it for you and making that decision not the insurance companies who are really in the business of minimizing the amount of care i'll give you a really great example of this if anyone measures their testosterone levels unless you're below the second and a half percentile the insurance company will deem you're not sick enough essentially to be warranted to be in the bottom two and a half two and a half percentile so the question is naturally what happens to the other 97 and a half percent of americans um obviously the lower half of that would probably feel better in terms of their energy their motivation their drive their sexual function their ability to build muscle mass but even folks who are let's say low normal would probably benefit from a higher level of testosterone in terms of the performance enhancement that we're talking about.

1:43:55Dr. Cameron Sepah:Insurance will never pay for that. And so there's been a proliferation of the rise of sort of private practices like Maximus in order to really meet the needs. Because I think there's this huge consumer trend, which includes peptides and hormones, of people who want to enhance their health, enhance their performance, and enhance the quality of their life.

1:44:12Matt Huang:How are you advising clients and just people broadly around the risks associated with peptides, there's a debate raging right now. Is BPC-157? Just like efficacy, but also the potential risk because we don't necessarily have, for some of them, we have plenty of data, even if we don't have full-on studies. But how are you kind of guiding people?

1:44:40Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, really the question is which peptides and which drugs? Because we can't sort of...

1:44:45Chris Hladczuk:Just some are fully approved.

1:44:46Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, exactly. So the GLPs are really, these are peptides as well, oxytocin that I mentioned. those are also peptides that have literally been FDA approved, some of them for decades, have a very substantial body of literature on them. And so comparing that to, let's say, a BPC, which is not FDA approved, is a very different ballgame. So responsible clinics, I would say, like ours, are only prescribing FDA approved drugs that have a very substantial body of human literature, in addition to a lot of clinical experience, right? So we're actually the largest prescriber, for instance, in Clomiphene in the United States.

1:45:21Dr. Cameron Sepah:We publish studies with ends in the thousands on the safety and efficacy of these things. And so with the body of literature, then I think you can evaluate each drug on their own merits and decide, okay, is this something that's worth prescribing as a clinic? And then obviously each person between them and their doctor make a decision of whether that cost benefit is worth it for them. Now, I think, you know, individuals can always make a choice in taking something that's a little bit more experimental. That's up to them. But really, I really recommend that people are getting it through a doctor and it's fulfilled by an FDA inspected compounding pharmacy.

1:45:57Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah.

1:45:57Matt Huang:What kind of, what kind of, have you heard any horror stories around these kind of like offshore compounders, just people getting?

1:46:05Dr. Cameron Sepah:Well, those aren't compounders. Those are just, yeah. There's a lot of people who are just literally buying black market illegal drugs directly from manufacturers or from resellers in the United States. And yeah, I mean, there's literally labs that are... The problem is you can't ensure what you're getting is pure. It's even the compound. Like Peptide Sciences, which just shut down, people were testing it. They're buying a non-FDA approved GLP that's soon to be on the market. And literally it didn't... RETA? Yeah, it didn't contain any of RETA in the vial. or what's a common thing is they might contain it, but the dose might be off by 50%.

1:46:42Dr. Cameron Sepah:And so what you're seeing is people having side effects because RETA is a glucagon agonist. It has effects on the heart, increases heart rate, reduces heart rate variability. If you're not able to dose it properly, you're more likely to have side effects as a result. So it's a wild west. Any responsible clinician would say, don't buy things on the black market. Now, obviously, individuals can make their own libertarian choices about what they do. But the difference is that there are good alternatives on the market. For instance, tears of betide is generally efficacious for weight loss. There's no reason for most people to be taking RETA and also to be dealing with the potential.

1:47:18Dr. Cameron Sepah:We have one that's FDA approved. We have one that's FDA approved. We have two, actually. You know that it's pure. You know that it's relatively safe because there's a wide body of literature. And it doesn't have the cardiac effects.

1:47:27Matt Huang:Do you think Hollywood is going to be somewhat of a model for Silicon Valley in the sense that actors have, have historically been like, how did this actor have this insane transformation? And they're like, chicken, broccoli, a lot of water. And it's like, I don't know about that. But basically, it's like bodybuilders lead the charge. Hollywood kind of picks up on that. But is Hollywood kind of somewhat of the model?

1:47:55Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, I think so. And I think increasingly Silicon Valley investors and founders are going to increasingly become the model. The problem with Hollywood is until maybe recently, a lot of people literally have to lie and say they weren't on TRT, despite the fact I have friends who are personal trainers to these guys who prep them for the movies. They're clearly on performance enhancing drugs. Nobody bills like, well, yeah, it is irresponsible for like,

1:48:17Matt Huang:you know, Zac Efron to be like, yeah, I'm on TRT because a bunch of young people are going to see that. I want to look like that. Exactly.

1:48:24Dr. Cameron Sepah:But this is a really great point that you mentioned about sort of young people in TRT. And this is actually one of the whole, you know, founding genesis of Maximus, right? So testosterone is a really interesting compound. The gold standard is injectable testosterone. So if you inject exogenous testosterone from outside of your body, your body realizes it's getting enough. And so your testicles will shut down, shrink, and you become infertile. So nobody under the age of 50 or nobody who wants to still have children should really be injecting testosterone. Now you can take something called HCG, which is a replacement for LH, and it can help you get off of it and restore your fertility, but it's not perfect.

1:48:59Dr. Cameron Sepah:Um, and it's, um, there's some risks involved. Um, however, there are, um, alternatives nowadays. So we actually prescribe oral and topical testosterone. So you don't need to inject it. Um, and it's native testosterone, the same testosterone that your body makes. The problem with injectable testosterone is we made sort of an interesting devil's bargain is we took testosterone and we added a molecule to it called an ester. So you probably have heard of testosterone sippinate. The benefit of the ester is that because it's annoying to inject every single day, you only need to inject it once a week.

1:49:29Dr. Cameron Sepah:So it becomes more convenient. The downside is it red lines your testosterone for 24-7 for a whole week. And so it shuts down and suppresses your endogenous production. So you basically become dependent on it. And if you come off of it, you're going to go through withdrawal symptoms. The benefit of oral testosterone is that it peaks within two to four hours, lasts about six to eight. And topical testosterone peaks at about two and a half hours, lasts about 12 to six. And so they're shorter half-life, shorter duration, and they're less suppressive. The interesting thing that we found in our research is that if you take oral testosterone, it's actually not very suppressive for most people.

1:50:01Dr. Cameron Sepah:And if you combine it with enclomiphene, which is a selective estrogen receptor modulator, it basically blocks estrogen in a particular part of the brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary. It prevents that suppression from happening. And so you can kind of have your cake and eat it too for the first time in that it...

1:50:17Matt Huang:Somewhat like a free lunch. A little.

1:50:18Dr. Cameron Sepah:There's no such thing as completely a biological free lunch, but you can maintain your natural testosterone production and then supplement it with oral testosterone and aclamiphene. And then the really revolutionary thing that we found is topical testosterone, which has been used for over half a century, you apply it to your scrotum, it can increase your testosterone by several fold. It's normally suppressive, but when you add aclamiphene to it, you can maintain your natural testosterone production and enhance it to high normal levels. In fact, we have two patents on the combination of oral and topical testosterone plus aclamiphene.

1:50:51Dr. Cameron Sepah:And so actually men as young as 18 can take these without suppressing their fertility markers. So it's really a revolution and it allows us to really fulfill the vision of performance medicine because there are safer alternatives. The injectable testosterone is still great for the guys who are over 50 and they don't mind being on it for the rest of their lives. But they're now essentially safer alternatives for younger guys or guys who want to maintain their fertility. And we're actively doing this research, publishing it, patenting these protocols and disseminating them so we can democratize performance medicine.

1:51:21Chris Hladczuk:How do you think about the personalization of medicine? We talked to Paul Quiningham on Monday. He was the fellow who used AI to process some DNA data around his dog who was suffering from cancer and was able to work with a lab to synthesize a custom mRNA vaccine that was targeting the specific cancer that his dog had, sort of looking at the delta between the healthy dog's DNA and the cancerous DNA in the same animal, and then was able to create sort of a one-of-one medicine for that dog. I could imagine that coming to, well, there's these peptides. They work broadly on populations. But in the future, is there a world where you're getting a terzepatide that's designed specifically for you?

1:52:09Chris Hladczuk:And would there actually be a benefit of that? Or is that where we're going?

1:52:12Dr. Cameron Sepah:Absolutely. It's already here. In fact, with terzepatide, we have micro doses.

1:52:17Chris Hladczuk:So that's modulating the amount of... of product, but not the actual molecular construction at all.

1:52:24Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah. In this particular case, it's not. Okay. But the benefit of doing a microdose, for instance, it's for people who are not overweight. Of course. Right? So BMI under 25.

1:52:33Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, why would you?

1:52:33Dr. Cameron Sepah:They may not even want to lose weight, but they might want to take it to reduce their inflammation, is sort of the term that's used. Okay. It reduces, you know, impulsivity. It can just help reduce some of the food noise. And maybe there's some folks who are not necessarily overweight, but they want to maintain a six-pack without having to constantly fight this willpower battle for the rest of their life. That's obviously a little bit more aesthetic and performance enhancing. But that custom dose, people can kind of find the right dose that fits for them. So yes, there's going to be both personalized medicines in terms of the type of medicine.

1:53:03Dr. Cameron Sepah:But also I think the dosing is really critical because it allows flexibility. So inclamifene is a really good example. When inclamifene first was introduced to the market, literally the only dosage that was available, 25 milligrams. And it's like him. That's what they studied. You get 25 milligrams of Viagra no matter who you are, right? We offer eight different dosages, all the way from 3.125 milligrams to 25 milligrams. And the way we titrate it is actually through lab testing. So we have an at-home blood test. You don't have to go to a Quest. You can just stick it on your shoulder. You press a button, and you can take out about half a pinky full of blood.

1:53:35Dr. Cameron Sepah:And we can not measure 100 markers like at Quest, but we can measure about a dozen of them, including testosterone.

1:53:39Chris Hladczuk:So you mail that back, you take it to a lab. Exactly.

1:53:41Dr. Cameron Sepah:It mails next-day air to a lab. So you can take your baseline levels. You know where you stand. Yep. And then we can put you on, let's say, topical testosterone plus inclomiphene. You'll probably notice your total testosterone goes over 1 ,000. Your free testosterone goes over 200. And then we can titrate you to just the right amount by retesting you after 30 days. And usually after one or two iterations, we can get you to make sure that your lab numbers are ideal, but also that you're feeling and functioning your best. So this is really the promise of personalized medicine that you're talking about that will be personalized to every single person.

1:54:13Matt Huang:How much do you care about wearable data when working with clients?

1:54:17Dr. Cameron Sepah:I would say my private practice, I look a little bit more at that. At Maximus, I honestly think most wearables are a little bit overhyped. Yeah, I noticed I don't think you're wearing one. You have a nice watch. Thank you. It has no battery or technology. It's my anti-tech watch. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, interesting thing as a psychologist, I think it actually causes anxiety in a lot of people, right? A lot of these sleep wearables, because they look at it and you're like, oh, my whoop score is not 100. Now I'm going to be sleep deprived. I have to take Trent. Exactly.

1:54:48Matt Huang:Great. To John, his entire life is just signaling like take Trent.

1:54:53Chris Hladczuk:I got a 98 on eight sleep and I immediately Googled like D-ball plus Anivar plus Trent plus massive needle this big.

1:55:05Dr. Cameron Sepah:There you go. That's what I want. Your sleep score is going to go to about 20. Do not do any of this. But yeah, I mean, look, it can be helpful. We use tracking really when we want to see if an intervention is making a difference. So a lot of our clients actually, when they're using oxytocin, because we've published a study showing that it enhances sleep quality, extends sleep by about 25 minutes sleep duration on average, they'll look at their aura or their WHOOP scores, and then they'll notice improvements in, let's say, REM or deep sleep. And this is kind of, I think, beyond sort of randomized control trials.

1:55:35Dr. Cameron Sepah:as the top of the evidence-based hierarchy is running really a randomized control trial of one. And so you can look at your own data. And then if you see, you know, if you do sort of an ABA test where you don't do the intervention, you add oxytocin, and then you come off of it. And during that period of time, that B portion, when you were taking the intervention, you're clearly sleeping better. Your sleep duration's better. Your deep sleep at REM are better. It gives you a pretty positive personal indication that this treatment is working for you.

1:56:00Chris Hladczuk:You didn't mention across any of those five categories, like the ADHD meds that I feel like have been popular in Silicon Valley for decades across Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, and Modafinil. There's a few others that people take occasionally. Some of them are prescribed. What is your overall thesis on that? That one feels, it's always felt like a Faustian bargain, but what's your take?

1:56:22Dr. Cameron Sepah:Exactly. And I think it is. And I'm, especially as a former psychiatry professor, I'm incredibly conservative about things that are psychoactive and specifically work on the neurotransmitters.

1:56:34Chris Hladczuk:Sure. It doesn't come from a biomarker. It's not like I get a blood test and it says, oh yeah, you're low in... No.

1:56:40Dr. Cameron Sepah:There's no great blood marker for dopamine, for instance. Sure. Okay. And the diagnosis of ADHD is problematic. Most people aren't doing a full neuropsychological examination to get a true diagnosis. It's a little over-diagnosed these days.

1:56:55Chris Hladczuk:One of the questions in the survey was like, did you lose things as a kid? And I was like, Like who has never lost anything as a child? Like everyone loses their sweatshirt when they go to school in the morning and then it gets hot. You take the sweatshirt off, you lose it. Like this is not like – I never did. You never did? Okay. Fair enough.

1:57:11Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah, and there's a lot of folks who may have – there's kind of a notion that people outgrow ADHD in adulthood. Really what may be happening is they're learning to behaviorally compensate routines and patterns. But anyway, obviously, if you have true clinically diagnosed, properly diagnosed ADHD, prescription stimulants can be like Ritalin, Adderall. The various amphetamines can be life-changing in that despite the risks and trade-offs, obviously, if it lets you function and keep a job, that cost-benefit is going to be beneficial. From a performance enhancement perspective, I've been very public in companies like Cerebral.

1:57:47Dr. Cameron Sepah:We're doing the wrong thing by shilling Adderall on TikTok. talk, we won't prescribe it because it's addictive. And we don't prescribe things that are addictive because I think to your point, it is a Faustian bargain and there's significant trade-offs in doing so. So I didn't mention focus as part of those five. I do think there are things -

1:58:04Chris Hladczuk:Well, it feels like your philosophy is that focus comes from the other areas if you're balanced everywhere else.

1:58:11Dr. Cameron Sepah:Well, in 2019, I popularized dopamine fasting as a behavioral way of improving focus. The main thing that's actually messing with people's focus for the majority of people is not ADHD, but digital distraction. Right. So everyone's distracted by social media, gaming, gambling, shopping.

1:58:26Chris Hladczuk:I do a dopamine fast every single day, like at least six hours. Yeah. That's fantastic. Usually from like 11 PM to 5 AM.

1:58:33Dr. Cameron Sepah:So yeah. I mean, you know, you know, in China actually, um, literally from 11 PM, I think to like six or seven. You just can't access it, right? You cannot, uh, computer game manufacturers are legally required

1:58:44Chris Hladczuk:to take the servers to do it.

1:58:45Dr. Cameron Sepah:And so there's, there's something there, right? That's like institutionalized dopamine fasting.

1:58:49Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. It's interesting.

1:58:51Matt Huang:How often do you do full blood panels? And by 2035, how often do you think the average kind of American will be doing a blood panel?

1:59:03Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah.

1:59:04Matt Huang:I mean, assuming right now the average person does it if they're sick and they are having an issue that's starting to change. But what's your protocol now?

1:59:12Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah. It's a great question. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't even have a primary care physician. I mean, I think the standard recommendation and one that I will continue to espouse is everyone should get an annual physical every year and have a relationship with a doctor, ideally, you know, a good primary care physician. Unfortunately, because of the health insurance situation that we have, it's tied to employers. A lot of people are freelancers. They don't have health insurance, or if they do, it's like a minimal amount through the open market. They don't have that. So that's problem number one.

1:59:39Dr. Cameron Sepah:Problem number two is the blood tests that you get through your primary care is very sparse. So I'll tell you a funny story. So So, you know, being at Omada and literally being in the diabetes industry, I never had my blood sugar level check. And when I brought it up with my doctor, like, you're young and healthy. You don't need to check your blood sugar. And I was like, my dad has type 2 diabetes. I want to check, you know, and just make sure I don't develop it. But that's the mentality. Similarly, it's not routine to measure your testosterone levels or get a hormone panel unless you are like incredibly low energy and symptomatic and your doctor would be concerned.

2:00:10Dr. Cameron Sepah:They don't think it's sort of necessary. And so the unfortunate thing is going through the traditional healthcare system because they really want to minimize the cost associated with the panel. You're not going to get a good comprehensive blood test done, right? So through Maximus, we have a comprehensive test. It costs$199.99. You can get 110 biomarkers measured. True unique biomarkers. There's a couple of companies out there that repeat tests every six months, and they're not unique biomarkers. So that will give you an assessment of standard CBC, CMP, your lipids, your hormones, your thyroid, all the things that you need to know.

2:00:41Dr. Cameron Sepah:And obviously now with AI, you can throw that into an AI and identify areas that are problematic. And obviously, if you have a clinic or a good PCP that can work with you, it can help optimize it. Like a good example of this is almost everyone is vitamin D deficient because we just don't get enough sunlight. It's the easiest thing to fix. You can take a multivitamin like the building blocks that we produce. And we do before and after lab testing so that after a couple months, you can get into an optimal range. and it's going to enhance your mood, your sleep, 100 different biological functions.

2:01:12Chris Hladczuk:We've got to pop the top on this ultra down. Let the sun in. Get the vitamin D going.

2:01:16Matt Huang:We actually want to eventually get to natural light.

2:01:20Chris Hladczuk:It would be so good. We've got to make it happen. Pleasure. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great rest of your day, and we will talk to you soon. I will tell everyone about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. and I will tell you also about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we will kick off our lightning round, the Lambda lightning round. We will go to the cloud, hopefully. We'll see. The Lambda lightning round begins now with Chris from AdQuick, one of our favorite people.

2:01:56Chris Hladczuk:TBPN royalty, as the chat likes to say. Let's bring Chris in to the TBPN UltraDome. Chris, how are you doing? Great to see you all. Is that a TVPN green suit? This is a beautiful jacket. That is a fantastic jacket. I like the liner too. Anyway.

2:02:12Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, I picked it up in London at Charles Turret.

2:02:15Chris Hladczuk:No way.

2:02:16Georgios Konstantopoulos:Very cool. Couldn't miss out on the opportunity to get dripped out with my fellow technology brothers.

2:02:22Chris Hladczuk:I love it. I love it. Re-introduce the company and sort of explain the shape of the business these days and then take us into the news.

2:02:30Matt Huang:For anyone that hasn't heard, 1 ,000 tad quick. I think we did 250 last year or something like that.

2:02:37Chris Hladczuk:Probably more, yeah.

2:02:39Georgios Konstantopoulos:So AdQuick's building the infrastructure for real-world advertising, so out of home. So when you think about it over the last 30 years, every dollar of every ad spend has gone to doing one thing, reaching human beings with a message, and that's primarily been done through digital channels. Cookies, pixels, real-time bidding, programmatic. It's all digital. But what they did forget is that people are outside. People are constantly getting exposed to an advertising medium. And this one hasn't been optimized. It hasn't been architected with technology. And so the big players like Google, Amazon, the Trade Desk, none of them have cracked the nut that is out-of-home advertising.

2:03:28Georgios Konstantopoulos:And we're building the pipes and the plumbing for it.

2:03:32Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. So there's a lot of interaction with the physical world. At a certain point, someone has to physically print the billboard, put it up, like tape it down, tie it down, do whatever. And you are able to abstract that and then serve a company with a thing that looks like a more traditional digital platform, right?

2:03:52Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, absolutely. And most importantly is proving that the medium works. So we now live in an age where You know, you don't get investment in advertising unless you could prove that it works. And so we pioneered the measurement and the analytics. So if you get exposed to an out-of-home ad and then to subsequently do something online in an app, go into a store, we can attribute that to the exposure and then model it out with all the rest of your channels.

2:04:21Chris Hladczuk:So it's out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. That's what I'm getting from this. That's right. But take us through the more recent news. What's going on with the business?

2:04:30Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, so there's three big players in the space in the United States. It's a$10 billion market. $2 billion, roughly, is sold by Outfront Media. And you'll see their billboards and their transit in New York, Los Angeles, and all the major metros in the United States.

2:04:49Chris Hladczuk:And to be clear, they own the physical real estate. They own the physical, like the structure that the billboard goes on. That's part of their business.

2:04:57Matt Huang:Or just the rights. Or the rights. The rights and the structures.

2:05:01Chris Hladczuk:Got it. Okay. Yeah.

2:05:03Georgios Konstantopoulos:And so this is an organization that's like 2 ,000 employees, 1 ,000 sellers, all regionally distributed. And they've been selling this medium very much like real estate agents have prior to like your Open Door, your Zillow, so on and so forth. and for the first time ever, they're going to have world-class technology to support their sales efforts across these thousand sellers. And then they'll be also using our audiences to find the best fit for their inventory against an audience and then also measure the success for their clients.

2:05:41Chris Hladczuk:So yeah, walk me through the measurement problem because on my drive to work every day. I drive through Hollywood. I see so many billboard ads for movies. And whenever I buy tickets, I wind up going on Fandango and there's a huge disconnect there. I don't know that I've gotten a survey, but with the right data, you could probably see that I was in this area or I purchased something on a credit card panel in this area. And I might've been exposed to that billboard. Like I could imagine how you could piece that together that I went to this particular movie because I saw this billboard. I've been seeing billboards for the Project Hail Mary, and we are actually going.

2:06:22Chris Hladczuk:And the billboards should get some of that attribution. But other than hearing me say it right now, I don't know how you would puzzle that together. So what is the process these days? Sure.

2:06:33Georgios Konstantopoulos:So your weather app doesn't make money by telling you it's going to rain. Okay. We buy up all the highest quality mobile traffic data. Sure. We pipe 7 billion pings into our platform every single day. So we know where you are, what time you're at, what direction you're heading at, what speed you're heading at, and all these things. And then we use that to basically identify when the mobile device is inside of a geofence that we have geofenced all of the inventory in the platform. And then we count that as an exposure. We then map the exposure to a pixel on the website and an SDK and an app. Sure.

2:07:13Georgios Konstantopoulos:Or we also, in the case of brick and mortar, will actually geofence the store location. Yeah. And so we can kind of connect the dots that way. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

2:07:23Matt Huang:Breakdown kind of trends in the SF out-of-home market. Like how is kind of all the AI funding boom?

2:07:32Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, does a billboard up in SF cost like 10 times as much as anywhere else? Like what's the ratio at least?

2:07:37Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, I mean, it's after, you know, we had that 2023, we had the software recession, 2024, we started to see things come pick back up. And in the last 12 months, it's gone gangbusters for the AI companies. to answer your question. Yeah, the prices are some of the most expensive in the market. And but, you know, you know, some of our customers are some of the leading AI companies, Finn being one of them. Yeah. Eleven Labs, we've we've done campaigns for. And so, yeah, you're starting to see AI companies use this channel to, you know, kind of break through the clutter of digital.

2:08:17Matt Huang:What's the most underrated out of home form factor in your view?

2:08:24Georgios Konstantopoulos:If you're B2B, I really like account-based marketing or account-based. So basically, you take all of your HQs for your target accounts, you put them in the map, and then you buy up all the inventory surrounding those.

2:08:39Matt Huang:That's like bus stops, basically just flood the zone in a two-block radius kind of thing.

2:08:47Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, exactly. And I don't know if you recall, but say like maybe like five or six years ago, the founders of Brex took over all of San Francisco, most of San Francisco being their target market. And I think they spent like half a million bucks and, you know, customer acquisition.

2:09:04Matt Huang:I think people haven't fully processed that there seems to be increasing returns as you spend more on out of home, which is that if you spend 50 grand on a campaign somewhere around LA, you're going to have some effect. But if you spend dramatically more than that, like an order of magnitude, it seems like you really break through in a different way. uh it's funny sam sam blonde uh who who did that original campaign he's back with his new uh a new company and uh taking the same approach you know heavy heavy heavy out of home spend um

2:09:47Georgios Konstantopoulos:yeah so some of our teammates in san francisco were saying that monaco's up and down the uh 101 i think they bought like 60 60 or 70 billboards so they're making their presence felt yeah he told

2:09:59Chris Hladczuk:me about that before we had him on the show and I was like, that is such a bold way to, to introduce your company, but it really does break through. I've seen photos of it. And if you're there, you'll, you'll see.

2:10:09Matt Huang:What about on the, on the supply side, how, how heavy are the restrictions on bringing on new out of home supply is I'm assuming, obviously it's city by city. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to put like, you know, a massive billboard on my house. But no, I just think in general.

2:10:29Chris Hladczuk:Hey, honey, I sold the front yard. I sold the roof. Hey, our mortgage is going to be half the price now. That's amazing. Yeah, so in terms of limitations, in 1965, the Highway Beautification Act was passed.

2:10:44Georgios Konstantopoulos:So that kind of restricts how many... That required every highway to have 10 times. To have beautiful billboards.

2:10:49Matt Huang:Okay.

2:10:50Georgios Konstantopoulos:Yeah, so basically there's only a certain subset that you could put near highways, but you're starting to see all these other formats kind of come about. There's folks putting ads on trucks. There's folks wrapping Ubers. They're putting ads inside of Ubers. They're pulling planes in the sky, which is kind of old school. Yeah, skywriting. And then drone shows are the new big thing. And I expect to see a lot more of those in the future. I know, I'm surprised it hasn't been utilized.

2:11:21Matt Huang:The only other thing is, can you put a blimp on AdQuick? I've given this advice to enough companies now, and they haven't done it. I feel like - But just flying a blimp, like a Goodyear blimp over SF for -

2:11:37Chris Hladczuk:Goodyear's just cornered the market. I don't think Goodyear would sell their blimp for a billion dollars. I think it's just their greatest capital asset they have, because you could monetize that thing so well flying around San Francisco.

2:11:49Georgios Konstantopoulos:You know, we do have 2 ,000 media owners on the platform, and I'm pretty sure that might fit the bill. That'd be amazing.

2:11:56Matt Huang:Love it. Well, congratulations on the partnership, and thank you again for being our. You had to have been the second advertiser right after Ramp to back us, and we'll never forget your support.

2:12:12Chris Hladczuk:We appreciate you, Chris. Thanks so much. Congrats to the whole team. Great to see you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Well, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me also tell you about LabelBox, RL Environments, Voice, Robotics, Evals, and Expert Human Data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

2:12:35Matt Huang:I'm expecting our next guest to be duct taped to his chair. Oh, is he? Is he?

2:12:40Chris Hladczuk:He was duct taped. Oh, he's free. He got free. I'm alive. Okay, okay. introduce yourself, introduce the company, and then explain the duct tape stunt.

2:12:49Andy Fang:I love it. Co-founder, CEO of Hanover Park, think about us as financial infrastructure, power investment firms, private equity, venture funds, the most unsexy industry in the planet. We're now making sexy. Thank you for your sense. Yeah. So I was duct taped to a chair and I announced a blooper that I tagged Jordi and you guys in. I was like, okay, how can we make the most boring industry in the world sexy? and that was obviously replacing human duct tape. And so, yeah, pumped to do it. We launched our announcer series day to day.

2:13:19Chris Hladczuk:Okay, so the metaphor is there's a lot of human duct tape inside these funds, piecing different puzzle pieces together to manage the financial assets and LP relationships, and you make all of that go away, correct?

2:13:31Andy Fang:A hundred percent. And also, like, I don't know, I've been saying this for two years, like B2B SaaS is dead. We want to sell outcomes, not tools. And so tools are things that are a bunch of duct tape around with humans and software. and we're like, we're going to replace the human-heavy services business out there too.

2:13:46Matt Huang:Sure, sure, sure. What is the key moment for an allocator using the platform that really wows them or clicks?

2:13:58Andy Fang:When you want to make a$100 million follow-on decision and you have to ping your CFO and say, hey, can you pull together the data that we haven't had in real time for the past two months? Can you figure this out? AI agents solve the problem by getting you real-time data and then help you make those decisions. And so we're pulling in data from granola notes. We're pulling in data from emails and board decks. We're pulling in data from all the boring accounting data on those positions. And so people are like, oh my God, I can finally make a decision in real time without waiting a bunch of days.

2:14:28Chris Hladczuk:Okay. So there might be a whole bunch of decks from all the different investments and all the different companies that have various ARR figures and growth rates, but they're sort of buried uh hanover can go in there get that data put it in some sort of centralized database and then uh visualize that or maybe even help with marks is that something you do or is there still

2:14:49Andy Fang:a human in the loop for that yeah even more importantly we think there's a world where you don't even need to log into hanover park we're going to expose all the data via mcp server and so we launched that where people are accessing it via claude co-work and via gpt etc um and so That's been a key piece, I would say, for GPs, whereas CFOs are going to use us for things like capital calls, distributions, financial reporting to LPs, et cetera.

2:15:12Chris Hladczuk:Got it. Got it. So interesting. So if somebody's on the enterprise OpenAI plan or something, do they have to integrate this themselves, or is that just like an off-the-shelf plug-in? And then if they want to actually get this into like a deck, what's the current stack to get that information? They would be exporting it, like transforming it over in their LLM tool of choice and then taking it to the LPs?

2:15:42Andy Fang:It's actually even worse. You would have to email some human called your fund admin and say, hey, can you pull that data that's locked in some random tool you don't give me access to? You then get a spreadsheet. You then put that into another tool. You then put that into Claude or GPT, et cetera. And so a lot of the value prop here is you're going to pay a fund admin anyway to do this boring financial reporting. LPs demand this from a third party. And so instead of having that data locked away, we can at least give you access to it. And then you can put it into Claude and other things.

2:16:12Matt Huang:Got it. How big is the market? This is a market that like, you know, compared to like SMB.

2:16:20Chris Hladczuk:There will never be too much venture capital, Georgia.

2:16:21Matt Huang:I know, I know, I know. And we're trying to get more people to be brave enough to enter private equity. I'm assuming with venture funds, private equity, all this stuff, you have to kind of ignore individual SPVs and entities. But I'm assuming you can kind of clock pretty precisely how big the market is, and then you've got to go and try to get as much of it as you can.

2:16:49Andy Fang:Yeah, so there's$100 trillion of global assets, and there's a$20 billion public company called SS &C. I know, but isn't that like somewhat of a...

2:16:57Chris Hladczuk:Are you going to get PIMCO at some point, right?

2:17:00Andy Fang:Yeah, it's like hedge funds, right? You have like private equity funds, real estate, private equity, venture, et cetera. Like SS &C is a public company today. They have like$5 billion of revenue. Citco has$5 billion of revenue, right? So there's a bunch of like these massive dinosaur companies that exist, and it's really like venture and private equity is just the start. Okay.

2:17:20Chris Hladczuk:And so within, I mean, venture also scales from$15 million fund to$15 billion fund. Like, I imagine that there's some trade offs where the bigger you go, the bigger the dollars, but also the bigger integration, the more requests versus somebody who's just starting a, you know, a new fund, they don't have any software. So it's super easy to get off the ground. have you been picking one or the other as like a beachhead market or have you just been doing like

2:17:47Andy Fang:whoever you know yeah you'd be surprised the bigger it is the easier it is to differentiate actually okay and so a lot of these bigger funds they've been like running around with players like SS &C which I call like the evil empire which is basically like you're using them and all of your data is kind of trapped where it's like an early stage venture fund that's just getting off the ground, things are pretty clean and pretty easy. And so we've actually focused on like mid-market enterprise. So think like 250 million plus in assets, venture and private equity to start at least.

2:18:19Chris Hladczuk:Do you do any work on the, is it all equity or are you starting to do stuff in private credit or private or like public debt or any of the other asset classes or are you just purely in alternatives?

2:18:32Andy Fang:Purely in alternatives today, I would say like six to 12 months from now, obviously focus on expanding into things like private credit. Obviously a big opportunity being here in New York. I've been saying this for a long time. Favorite sponsor, Ramp. It's like Stripe for payments, Ramp for expenses, Hanover Park for investments. Love it. And so that's kind of the beast.

2:18:48Matt Huang:Have you had any customers just ask you to just handle just all the actual investment decision-making? They're like, I'll just put money in a box and then you deploy it. Let me know how it goes. Talk to my LPs too. I don't want to talk to them anymore.

2:19:03Chris Hladczuk:Talk to founders or LPs.

2:19:07Andy Fang:I think it's been funny. It's like a lot of LPs that we talk to are like, I keep, you know, my venture funds are investing in AI, but they're back in middle offices run by the anti-AI. And so this idea of like we're investing in it, we might as well move to it as well has been pretty exciting for people. But I think long term, it's like unlocking alpha for the investment firm based on all the unsexy financial day that we have could be interesting. But we got a lot of work to do to get there. Let's unpack a little bit more of the dream, unsexy, proprietary data set.

2:19:38Chris Hladczuk:Does that look like PitchBook or Crunch-based data? There's a lot of different data sources that venture capitalists go to throughout diligence. Do you want to be a conduit to those sources? Or do you imagine that the LLM tools that venture capitalists are using will interface with those separately and just do the joins in whatever work session is happening?

2:19:59Andy Fang:Yeah, it's actually not really Crunch-based PitchBook. It's really like the unsexy financial cash flow data. So like, give me the cash flows from every LP through history and how that flows into our next cap call or our next distribution or our next financial statement. So it's actually that data, which is the data that's mostly trapped in these fund admins. I think Crunchbase and PitchBook access will get commoditized. Those will go into the underlying models. And I don't think we want to play that game.

2:20:24Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. Talk about the overall health of the venture capital market. I feel like you're in a unique position. There's been these sort of warring narratives. We joked earlier, like$110 billion raised, but that was OpenAI. There's sort of a crunch in K-shaped recovery, maybe, in venture capital. There's a variety of mega funds that are scaling up. What are you seeing when someone just asks you from the outside, maybe they're a public markets investor, and they say, how is venture capital doing these days?

2:20:55Andy Fang:We're actually seeing a lot of haves and have-nots. It's a very stark bifurcation because when you start a fund, you basically sign a lawyer and a fund admin. And so we see from inception of how your raise is going. And so literally it's there's people that are raising in three, six, nine, ten weeks for a first fund, which is crazy fast versus six to 12 months. And then there are people who are never raising. And so I think it's the people that are spinning out of a lot of the major funds that are targeting called$100 to$200 million fund ones are having actually an easier time from some of the emerging managers that are focused on like$25 million fund ones.

2:21:28Andy Fang:And so it's a pretty big bifurcation there.

2:21:31Chris Hladczuk:How are you processing this new holding company roll-up firm? It looks like a private equity firm, but it also sort of looks like a startup. We've had a couple of these founders on where they -

2:21:45Matt Huang:Yeah, those probably aren't clients because they just get a bunch of money.

2:21:48Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, would they be or could they be in the future? How do you think about that?

2:21:52Andy Fang:It's actually funny. We've had a lot of these folks reach out because fund admin and accounting services more broadly, Think about us as a subset of that because we're doing financial accounting reporting for investment firms. That is a ripe industry for roll-up. And so people have been like, oh, my God, should this be a fund admin roll-up as an idea in terms of vertical buyout? What we've realized is like if you just toss agents, the word agents, on top of any accounting data, it doesn't really do anything. Having like the core ERP for the fund and the system of record that we had to build from day zero is actually like way more important than just saying like AI solves all our problems, which I don't think does quite yet.

2:22:28Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. Have you had to do any like fine tuning on your own data or your system or are the agents sort of able to, you know, find their way around your system pretty quickly? Like, did you need to build your own MCP servers or your own CLIs for these things? We were just talking about this with DoorDash. There's like demand for a DoorDash CLI now. And it's funny, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of agentic engineering.

2:22:53Andy Fang:Yeah, we've actually had to build our own little AI fund accountant, I call it, which is doing simple things like AI cash reconciliation. When you get an email from someone to make a decision, how does a human do that? It's actually client specific, different clients have different preferences. And so almost how do you build that like AI fund accountant? So we're using a bunch of the models off the shelf to do that as well. And then we're doing some fine tuning on top.

2:23:14Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. Does that look like a.md file, like a skill, or is this more of like a full harness that's actually, you know, like a whole bunch of code that you've written? Like, how do you see that system growing as you develop more core capabilities?

2:23:32Andy Fang:Yeah, I think, so there's a bunch of different ways that we've sliced it. But like for something like migration, which is how do I get the most complex financial data in the entire world from one system to another? That's a lot about building harnesses and building skills in and around the core underlying model providers to say, this is the weird, messy financial data from pick your massive investment firm. Here's how we need to think about this. Then for things like doc processing a little bit differently. It depends on the workflow.

2:23:57Chris Hladczuk:Tell me a little bit about the progress of the company. Where are you based? How big is the firm? How are you growing? Where do you see this going over the next couple of years?

2:24:05Andy Fang:Two years old, raised$31 million. Obviously, today we're announcing a$27 million Series A led by emergence. We went... Congratulations. There we go. We did it. We're just getting started, though. We're just getting started.

2:24:20Chris Hladczuk:Oh, there we go.

2:24:21Andy Fang:We're just getting started. What are you talking about?

2:24:23Chris Hladczuk:I love it. I love it.

2:24:25Andy Fang:We went$1 to$15 billion in assets in the past 12 months. We 15x'd. We've had a lot of excitement from folks. I actually, I was joking with the team. I said, guys, this is a top 0.1 % problem. Having unlimited demand and people excited, now let's go make them raving fans, which is our goal for 26. And so not cursor, but we're focused on, you know, keeping our heads down and executing.

2:24:47Chris Hladczuk:That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

2:24:50Andy Fang:I love it, dude.

2:24:50Matt Huang:It's awesome to see your progress. Yeah, I mean, I remember, I mean, yeah, just the absolute thread grinder from the 2021 era. Just ran it up. Yeah. And you're just.

2:25:02Chris Hladczuk:And so I'm sure you angel invested, right?

2:25:04Matt Huang:I did. I did miss.

2:25:05Chris Hladczuk:What happened, guys? Saw how one got in.

2:25:08Andy Fang:You didn't get in.

2:25:08Chris Hladczuk:This is the nature of the show. This is why we're podcasting, because we see people like you all the time, and we just miss everything. So back to the show. I don't. Yeah, Jordy makes a lot of good investments. I just don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come. Great to see you, Chris. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. See you, Chris. Let me tell you about Apple Oven. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom card.

2:25:41Chris Hladczuk:And our next guest is in the restroom waiting room. Georgios, how are you doing? Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. Good afternoon. Good to see you. Great to see you. Please, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

2:25:55Matt Jayson:I'm Georgios. I drive the engineering team at the Tempo Project. Tempo is a payments-first blockchain that we started developing in August. Today, we just launched the Temple mainnet live in production. Alongside it, we also launched the machine payments protocol, which is our answer to how agents should pay. If you think about it, agents are great at searching the web. We use agents all the time in our development process, like AMP, Cloud Code, Codex, whatever it is for developing. But we find it very hard to make them pay, so we developed a solution for it. And I'm excited to talk about both.

2:26:31Chris Hladczuk:So you have MCP. A lot of people were saying, like, why does an MCP have a payment spec already baked into it? There's this whole debate about HTTP maybe having a payment spec in it about 20 years ago or something. MPP solves that. But is MPP like a subset or a superset of MCP? Or is it a completely different spec? Is there any relationship between the two technologies?

2:26:57Matt Jayson:Very complimentary. You should think of MCP as a way to talk to an API that has been designed to be baked into the agent harnesses. And MPP is a way that you can payment gate an MCP. So imagine that you have your service, you have written an MCP for it, but you actually want to make that a paid service. Maybe, for example, on TPPN, you guys do great prep for all of the people that you work with. Hey, well, what if you just added a paid API to that? Sometimes.

2:27:28Matt Huang:Awesome. So, yeah, I think anybody that hasn't been living under a data center has heard of the potential for agents to use stable coins and blockchain technology generally for various services. You guys are working with a bunch of really cool companies. Like, what kind of use cases are you trying to guide your design partners towards enabling?

2:27:57Matt Jayson:I think the most exciting use case that they have to do around commerce. Basically, there's a lot of very interesting work around, hey, I'm on ChatGPT. My ChatGPT is browsing around, but hey, it wants to buy things for me. I think that's one of the things that is unlocking. The other thing to think about is that your ChatGPT is, again, browsing the web, but it hits a paywall. You want it to be able to, instead of saying, hey, I can access this information, you wanted to instead be able to say actually pay 30 cents and you can actually access this wonderful article that would have been paywalled which might improve your research queries by say 30 percent or something so in that in that case you'd be going to like so is there a plan to go

2:28:42Matt Huang:to publishers people that do have paywalled content and try to get them to enable mpp is that Is that the idea?

2:28:50Matt Jayson:Totally. I think that would be awesome. And the other thing that I think is just happening already is that, again, envision that people these days don't have an attention span. And people these days also don't want to click buttons around. They just want to tell their, again, their AI app to do things for them. I think what we've been seeing ourselves as developers is instead of me going to, say, CloudFerve or Cell and saying, hey, log in, add billing information, get API key, pull it back to my terminal, or go to 11labs and say, hey, do me this text-to-speech thing or any kind of API-gated service that exists today.

2:29:27Matt Jayson:Instead, I can just say, hey, agent, here's five bucks. Go and figure it out for me. And actually, he doesn't just do it in one service. He does it on many services. You can imagine a waterfall of queries. He can tell it, hey, go search the web, pull off this data, translate it with this API, then voice-to-speech it, text-to-speech it with some other API, and then upload it onto a website and email me that link of the website, all one shot.

2:29:55Matt Huang:uh yeah i was going to ask more on the on the technical side there's been a lot of protocols created blockchains over the last you know decade you've seen pretty much all of them uh i'm assuming this is your mona lisa you know taking all the different learnings from the different blockchains and trying to build uh the the perfect uh perfect uh product experience this time around? What kind of technical decisions did you and the team make for this kind of use case? Yeah.

2:30:27Matt Jayson:So the Tempo blockchain is itself optimized for payments, which means that it's really fast. It has very high throughput and very low latency. Our block times are less than a second, which means that you hit. And before the spinner even finishes spinning, you have a confirmation back, which is what any normal person would expect from a payments experience. But in addition to these, the innovation that we've done on the MPP side is a feature called sessions, where normally you would need to, let's say you're talking to, let's say again, the OpenAI API. And if you were to do payments, if you were to pay for every query that you're doing, you would need to wait for the blockchain to like conferring your transaction.

2:31:11Matt Jayson:You would need to pay a fee anytime you do your transaction. And that these days, maybe you can do 10 ,000 transactions per second or something. But really for the agentic web, and it does seem that everyone will be making a lot more API calls than they were doing before. We need to scale up to hundreds of thousands, millions, if not billions of payments per second. Just to put it, the analogy would be that instead of thinking of like financial transactions, we should be thinking about API calls per second. So we developed this feature called sessions, which let you really go at API scale by bypassing the blockchain and thinking about it like going to opening a tab where you say, hey, I'm opening my tab.

2:31:52Matt Jayson:And then every time on your notebook on the side, you write, what are the updates? And then only at the end, when you want to settle, do you pay, which amortizes the cost of a very expensive otherwise operation. If you want to do, you know, a thousand or a million API requests, just two, the opening and the closing.

2:32:08Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, makes sense. How are you dealing with the just general perception that there's always a risk that AI's hallucinate? And so maybe you don't want to give an agent the ability to go spend an unlimited amount of money. Maybe you want a transaction to be reversible. There's this joke about giving OpenClaw your credit card. That seems irresponsible. But in some ways, I would maybe rather give a credit card to an agent than a crypto wallet that if it sends it to the wrong address, it's gone forever. It's not really reversible. How are you thinking about handling those long-tail errors that can be catastrophic?

2:33:00Matt Jayson:that's an awesome question because i absolutely have in the past lost money using systems that you know others have built where where you just give your agent money and then the agent goes and spends it without realizing how much access it has yeah we developed a feature called access keys which basically is your standard card permissions it's a bit more programmable but You should think of it as limits, spend limits. And you can program that. So whenever you open a tempo session, you can just authorize the agent and say, you can only spend up to$10. Or you can tell it, hey, you can only spend up to$10 an hour or$1 a second.

2:33:42Matt Jayson:So it lets you have any kind of granularity on the assets that you're accessing, the functions that you can call or the API calls you can make, and also on the frequency that these budgets can be applied.

2:33:54Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. How do you think about getting the long tail of publishers onto some sort of agentic payment rail? Because...

2:34:04Matt Huang:Hopefully they're already on Stripe. Otherwise, they've been living under a data center.

2:34:09Chris Hladczuk:Yes. I'm just thinking about like the actual...

2:34:12Matt Huang:That's like why when I saw the launch and heard about the project previously, say, okay, Stripe already has a long tail of merchants. If they can easily enable MPP, then you're kind of able to kind of bootstrap a network.

2:34:28Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. I'm just thinking like if you have a blog and you put AdWords on it, you got a stream of payments from Google. Whenever you would show page, they'd show an ad, they'd auction that ad, they would send you maybe 50 % of what they made on that ad. And that would be paid monthly. And they were able to onboard sort of the long tail. It feels like the opportunity here is like this many-to-many relationship, but I'm wondering about like, is that onboarding going to happen on Tempo directly? Is that going to be decentralized? Or would we expect the big labs like OpenAI Anthropic to say, okay, now we have opt-in for anyone who wants to get paid when one of our LLMs, one of our agents, hits your website, and we will use Tempo as the payment rail?

2:35:20Matt Jayson:So there's a few questions here. So I think what you just said is true and will happen. It's already happening. So Anthropic or OpenAI or both already have a service where you plug in only to OpenAI, and then you can just have a billing relationship with all of the integrated partners that they have. So that will happen for sure. on the tempo side the machine payments protocol MPP which is what we launched this morning it is co-built with Stripe we co-authored it and it's payments method agnostic so every merchant that is on Stripe and if you go to the Stripe docs MPP is already there and it's already an option you can enable every merchant could turn that on and their API and their website could become MPP enabled which would cover a part of that tail if not that part that you just said.

2:36:10Chris Hladczuk:Sure. So is this a bet on model commoditization and local compute? Because if there's consolidation and the vast majority of LLM traffic is coming from like a single lab or two labs or three labs, like the Wall Street Journal does get scraped by OpenAI, but they have a deal between OpenAI, the corporation, and News Corp, the corporation, and they sat down in a boardroom and they said, hey, this is the value, like send me the check and pay via invoice. And it's a very different relationship. But for these long tail, the long tail with Google can pay a ton of small bloggers who set up their own websites on whatever.

2:36:51Chris Hladczuk:They can go to their own blog. But is this maybe a solution to like if models commoditize and you're seeing LLM traffic come from all different sources, then you need your agent to go and make the payment?

2:37:06Matt Jayson:I think for the publisher use case, I think that totally could be the case. The thing that we're the most excited about is the machine-machine payments world and developers. Right now, there's just a tailwind right now where with AI, more and more people are building things. Everybody wants to make paid APIs or everybody wants to monetize their knowledge base, their API. And these are just not things that it just means that the tail is just going to be so long that it's not something that I expect will be realistically captured by the labs in that way. Just because any random dev can spin up an API that could be very, very, very valuable.

2:37:44Matt Jayson:And I think that the lowest friction way to access and monetize that API will be via MPP on Tempo.

2:37:50Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I've run into this issue where I've gone to a particular LLM and said, I want you to take this video, convert it to an MP3, then transcribe it, then transform that. and it can do, and it's like, oh, I need a tool for that. Like, why don't you download the file? You're like, no, you're a computer. It literally told me, like, open up QuickTime and turn it into an M3. I was like, no, no, I want you to do that. And if you Google it, like, you know, MP4 or M4A2 transcript, like, there's a tool out there that does it. It's, I don't know if it has an API. It probably should.

2:38:22Chris Hladczuk:It probably is an API out there for a lot of these things.

2:38:24Matt Jayson:It might have malware in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:38:26Chris Hladczuk:A lot of them are, like, websites that have a million ads and stuff. It's way better if it just came back to me and was like, hey, that's going to be 15 cents and I've already approved that. Or hey, it's going to be 50 bucks to do what you want because you asked me to go generate a whole bunch of AI video and crazy stuff. And that was a big request. Is this in budget? And I can be like, yeah, absolutely.

2:38:46Matt Jayson:Absolutely. And this is right now supported. There's the MPP services registry where if you literally go tell your agent, hey, build me an image, convert this to whatever you want. There are APIs already integrated, which let you do all of these things without ever leaving your agent, without getting every this like API, you know, install your own API tool. So totally.

2:39:07Matt Huang:Explain if I'm a developer and I'm using something like Codex and I want to like effectively enable the agent to buy different services with MPP, what is the process for, what is like the recommended process for like actually giving it funds, everything on that side?

2:39:31Matt Jayson:So this is the use case that we've been optimizing for. It is the exact use case because we're developers and we actually dog food this experience every day. The process is extremely simple. You tell it, install the Tempo skill. The Tempo skill is available on Tempo website. You just paste the link in your agent. And then once you tell it to install the Tempo skill, the Tempo skill bootstraps the whole process and says, install the Tempo command line interface from your codex and then onboard the user. The user's browser opens, the user face IDs and then or touch IDs if you're on your MacBook.

2:40:03Matt Jayson:And then the user just gets onboarded via Apple Pay if they have an Apple Card or via another crypto if they have stable coins. Or right now we provide some referral codes to make onboarding easier for people. very cool and then you're in then you're logged in and you can go crazy and then you could ask

2:40:20Matt Huang:the agent like add more fun you know i need to add more fun absolutely yeah absolutely and so if you hit it if you hit some type of paywalled experience or paywalled api it'll just tell you i need access to more funds and then you can just enable it that's very absolutely amazing uh well thank you

2:40:37Chris Hladczuk:so much for taking the time to come chat with us yeah very gradually launch we'll talk to you soon Thank you both. Great to meet you.

2:40:42Chris Gadek:Have a good day. Have a good one.

2:40:43Chris Hladczuk:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Matt Wong from Paradigm in the TVP and Altrium. How are you doing, Matt?

2:41:06Matt Huang:What's going on?

2:41:07Chris Gadek:What's up, guys? How's it going?

2:41:08Matt Huang:Great to finally have you on the show.

2:41:10Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, fantastic. Long-time listener, big fan. Appreciate that. Where should we start, Jordy? Can we do a little biographical stuff? Can we go back in time a little bit, get to how we got here?

2:41:21Matt Huang:Let's touch on tempo, since we've been talking about tempo, and then there's a bunch of other stuff we can talk about. But glad to see you're drinking a virtual Diet Coke with John. Yeah, I mean, I guess my question for you on tempo is,

2:41:36Chris Hladczuk:it feels like a big project. It feels like it launched very fast. Is this faster than expected? Like, what were the keys to actually getting to this point as quickly as you did?

2:41:45Chris Gadek:I think it's perhaps one of the fastest projects start to mainnet launch in crypto. And it certainly was top of mind for us to move really fast. I think the genesis of the project was around noticing the problems that existing infrastructure had serving all these stablecoin use cases. And we didn't want to wait around for many years.

2:42:06Matt Huang:But certainly you would have seen the opportunity before August of last year, right? Like it's not like you weren't thinking about AI or stable coins or anything. So was that like somewhat of an intentional strategy of like, hey, we need to build a really strong thesis of how this market is going to evolve in it. We shouldn't just like rush in, launch something and then go through kind of wandering in the wilderness to then get to the point where you could launch something to mainnet.

2:42:31Chris Gadek:You know, you're ascribing a lot of foresight. Candidly, I mean, obviously we've been paying attention and investing and building in the crypto space for a long time. Candidly, it was kind of two sides coming together on the paradigm side. We were noticing the slowness of existing infrastructure. And then on the Stripe side, they've been doing a bunch of great work in stablecoin and were themselves experiencing a lot of the infrastructure challenges that existing chains had. So we had a conversation in April about maybe we should actually get together to build something. And then a week later, the entity was formed.

2:43:10Chris Hladczuk:Are there any other big distribution nodes that need to fall into place besides having the network up and running and then the partnership with Stripe? Because it feels like that solves everything. But I'm curious to know, what are the other next steps in the rollout broadly?

2:43:29Chris Gadek:yeah i think there's probably two layers to think about right there's tempo the chain which all the crypto infrastructure and exchange infrastructure needs to support and we have a bunch of great infrastructure partners there uh then i think there's just the broader trend of stable coins um like if you think about payments i like to think about it as like a thousand or ten thousand different markets it's not a single market you know there's what country does it originate from? Where does it go? The size of payment, whether it's a business, consumer, et cetera. And so some of those are much better served by existing infrastructure and some of it's much worse served.

2:44:09Chris Gadek:And so stable coins are actually particularly good at certain segments of that kind of big matrix. And that's where it's being adopted first, you know, cross border remittances, payouts. And so part of the goal around Tempo is to kind of promote stablecoins more broadly, not just offer another chain.

2:44:31Matt Huang:How predictable has stablecoin adoption been to date? Like if you go back five years ago, were you pretty confident that you'd see it more in emerging markets and then it would go eventually to business use cases for businesses that were operating internationally. And then obviously trading use case, which has been dominant since the beginning.

2:44:56Chris Gadek:Yeah, stable coins have been around for 10 years, mostly dominated by trading. And I think the emerging market use case is definitely expected. I mean, the monetary rails and monetary units are much worse there. I will say we were probably surprised in the last 18 months by how much it's taken off. I think even the most bullish people inside of crypto, maybe some predicted it, but all of us have been surprised by how much stable coins are being used outside of crypto. And that's really the bullishness that drove us to get excited about launching something like Tempo.

2:45:36Chris Hladczuk:And is the big driver, I mean, I've heard about the scale AI use case. I think SpaceX has mentioned a use case for stable coins. There's a lot of cross-border deals. Deals. Deals. You're invested heavily. Is that the current narrative, or are there other little offshoots popping up around adoption?

2:45:56Chris Gadek:There are probably three big buckets. The first is the cross-border. Okay. And so that's where you have deal, which serves so many different countries. and Shopify is thinking about similar things. And then you have the instant nature of stablecoins. So, I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of crazy that the financial system shuts off during nights and weekends. Like the internet is on 24-7. The financial system is off more than it's on. And so I think stablecoin potential is just to bring that into the 21st century where it's on all the time. Yeah, and the U.S.

2:46:36Matt Huang:dollar has insane network effects, obvious product market fit, and then you're taking a product that works, that's pretty great, and then it has some of its issues. And then you just wrap it in something that unlocks all this additional airtime.

2:46:52Chris Gadek:And there is a trend in the 70s and 80s called Eurodollars, which is sort of the offline TradFi equivalent of this, of dollar deposits outside the U.S. And that also started kind of illegal and frowned upon pretty small and has now grown to north of 10 trillion in offshore deposits and fully legitimized by the U.S. system. And I think stable coins are probably on that track as well. But back to your question, like the instant payouts, instant payments, I think is underrated, too. So it's not a cost advantage. It's more getting the money immediately and being able to spend it immediately. And if you think about a lot of these labor marketplaces, that's something that the supply side of those labor marketplaces really values.

2:47:39Matt Huang:How do you think the shape of the kind of issuer market evolves? You think it's, you know, right now it seems to be like a winner take most market. But it's certainly a number of companies are kind of promoting this idea of like there should be millions of different stable coins. What's your view? you?

2:48:00Chris Gadek:So I think there's probably, there's the how many stable coins will there be that are generally have some usage? And like, what will the distribution of volume and deposits look like?

2:48:14Dr. Cameron Sepah:Yeah.

2:48:14Chris Gadek:And I think the distribution is going to be very top heavy just because network effects around a single unit of account and how liquidity works in DeFi and exchanges. On the other hand, I think a lot of enterprises that we're talking to own the interface that people are going to be using these stable coins through. And you can think of them in that context, maybe a little more like stored balances or gift cards, where like Starbucks has a massive gift card program. And it's essentially bank-like, if you think about it in some ways. And so I think a lot of those types of financial services that are kind of hiding inside these consumer businesses will end up considering launching their own stable.

2:48:59Matt Huang:Yeah, that makes sense.

2:49:00Chris Hladczuk:How are you feeling about the regulatory environment? It felt like 2025 was a great year for just getting clarity around where crypto was going from a regulatory perspective. Has that trend continued in your mind? Are you happy with where things are? Are you optimistic for new regulation or less regulation or any changes? Just what's your read on the regulatory environment right now?

2:49:29Chris Gadek:I'd say we're in the top 1 % of universes that we could have hoped for. So things are going well.

2:49:34Chris Hladczuk:That's amazing.

2:49:35Chris Gadek:Like the Genius Act passed. That's been huge for stablecoin adoption. Obviously stablecoins were growing even before that. But a lot of the enterprises we talked to, they weren't really comfortable participating in stable coins until the regulatory clarity. The next stage, hopefully we get market structure, the clarity bill passed as well. There's some kind of last details to work through between the banking industry and crypto. But I'm feeling optimistic that we can hopefully sort through that.

2:50:05Chris Hladczuk:Are you a believer in stable coins to the degree that you'd put your own fund capital in stable coins?

2:50:13Chris Gadek:uh well yeah tempo tempo would not be the the best place to hold stable coins if we weren't

2:50:19Chris Hladczuk:comfortable pod footing yeah is there is there actually a future where stable coins wind up showing up in venture capital uh well stable coins i think will be

2:50:33Chris Gadek:like as a as a cash instrument i think for sure yeah yeah then you don't have to i mean you can do instant capital calls. When you sign the term sheet at 9 p.m. at night, you don't have to wait till the next day. That's actually pretty bullish.

2:50:48Chris Hladczuk:Take us back through some of the previous investment experience you've had. There was someone in the chat asking about your early fund one investments, very heavy on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can you tell that story of what that was like from a risk perspective, what actually played out there?

2:51:08Chris Gadek:Yeah, when we launched Paradigm in 2018, I mean, a lot of our thesis was we knew that crypto would expand massively. And then there was this open question, should you invest in the core protocols like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or invest in startups? And obviously, in hindsight, the answer was both, like you could own Coinbase and Bitcoin. but I think it's a lot like the AI landscape now of this question of do you own the model companies or do you own the application layer on top and so in 2018 Bitcoin and Ethereum were open AI and anthropic and those are the things to own and we're thinking much more bottoms up about what we wanted to own for 5-10 years rather than is this too much in one investment or it happens to be a publicly traded thing those are all details

2:52:01Matt Huang:That's such an interesting comp because I feel like you can almost think of like L2s and comp those to like cheaper, smaller, open source models today where like L2s have been, you know, great in some ways, but also kind of threaten the revenue stream of the underlying protocols at that point.

2:52:23Chris Hladczuk:Take me back to the ByteDance investment. Was there a similar thesis around should you own ByteDance or Facebook or something? And in reality, the bet was to own both. What went into your initial investment? Take me through the thought process for that one.

2:52:41Chris Gadek:uh you know i wish i was that thoughtful back then and i could claim some some kind of genius yeah uh but i was just very lucky to meet the entrepreneur you mean on a trip and you know he's just one of those people you meet that jumps off the page and i'm sure you guys have had this experience and i was going to give him money even if he was building a hot dog stand sure sure what

2:53:06Chris Hladczuk:was it that stuck out it's just the conversation the level of detail the technical side the EQ IQ like how were you evaluating him at that time well it

2:53:17Chris Gadek:was a weird conversation because he was I don't really speak good Chinese I can kind of stumble through ordering dim sum I don't speak good Chinese either and and he didn't really speak good English so it was through a translator yeah but He's one of those entrepreneurs that seems very thoughtful, academic, highly technical, but then in the revealed nature of his actions is just extremely hyper-aggressive. And I think a lot of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs look like that too in a great way.

2:53:52Chris Hladczuk:Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm thinking of a number of CEOs we've talked to, founders we've talked to.

2:53:59Chris Gadek:Patrick and Stripe. I was going to say.

2:54:02Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, exactly. Where they have one demeanor, one level of they can communicate about the technical side of the business very thoughtfully. High EQ, but the level of ambition is just unlimited. And that just seems like such a rare combination. But when you find it, you got to go all in.

2:54:21Matt Huang:How should people think about Paradigm today? That's a good question.

2:54:25Chris Gadek:um so you know we've spent a lot of time uh in the crypto space and increasingly as crypto goes mainstream we're finding that distinction to be a little less uh meaningful and there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world so yeah like it was it was it was entirely right to be

2:54:47Matt Huang:entirely focused on crypto in 2018 and then as the technology diffuses you realize like hey there's a lot of other businesses. And then you also have to follow your own personal interests. And I feel like if you're logging off and then thinking about biotech or AI at a certain point, I think the best investors follow their obsession. Yeah.

2:55:15Chris Gadek:And don't get me wrong. I think crypto is still one of the most interesting frontiers. It's finally winning. It's getting mainstream. It's Many other areas are also super interesting. And I think a paradigm today is a lot of the team we've assembled. I mean, you just spoke to our CTO. And, you know, he found out, like, what a balance sheet was somewhat recently. And, like, is not a typical GP or investor at a fund. But everyone at the fund knows how to code and is in kind of some kind of CLI tool all day. And the team really embodies this hacker ethos that lives at the frontier. And we want to be spending time anywhere that is interesting at the frontier.

2:55:59Matt Huang:Is this the best time in history to be that hacker archetype?

2:56:06Chris Gadek:I think so. It's like the joke that there's a billion dollars stuck in your laptop. You just need to press the right keys to extract it out. And I think that's never been more true with the leverage of intelligence kind of on tap. Yeah, I completely agree.

2:56:22Chris Hladczuk:What a time to be alive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, great to finally have you on. Have a great rest of your day.

2:56:28Matt Huang:Yeah, excited to watch the rollout. We'll talk to you soon.

2:56:32Chris Hladczuk:Goodbye.

2:56:32Matt Huang:Cheers. See you guys.

2:56:33Chris Hladczuk:Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks, visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jordi, what else is in the timeline? Trevor Milton is out raising money for a new company. Trevor Milton, of course, was convicted and then pardoned for defrauding investors in his truck company, Nikola. Now he's raising funds for a new jet that he claims will transform flying.

2:57:12Chris Hladczuk:And there's a quote in the journal here that we can pull out.

2:57:16Matt Huang:He said from the journal, now Milton has joined an exclusive group of post pardoned business people seemingly anointed by Trump's favor. I hope they've got a group chat for the post-pardon mafia. Trevor says, I walk into meetings now, and I'll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world, he said. They're like, welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire. We can trust you now.

2:57:41Chris Hladczuk:Wow, that is a wild quote. Felt him has wasted a little time embarking on a second act. He's now CEO of CyberJet.

2:57:49Matt Huang:And he's unveiling plans for a new small jet that he says will have the highest speed and range and largest lavatory in the light jet category. Just lavatory, okay. Yeah, it's important. It's important.

2:58:02Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, I guess we want to be able to take a full shower.

2:58:04Matt Huang:Investor documents reviewed by the Journal said the goal is for the plane to be the first light jet to focus on AI flight to get to market. Cyberjet plans to create an entirely new avionic system, likening the effort to Tesla's approach designing its infotainment and vehicle control system. The company also needs to secure more funding and suppliers and overcome regulatory hurdles. Yes, it's interesting. I mean, the concept of the jet is cool. This was an existing business that he acquired with an investor group. And then they're raising more money after that. But the kind of interesting thing is I feel like Trevor made a name for himself for being a great showman, but not exactly the most competent and sort of like engineering-led CEO, right?

2:59:02Matt Huang:Like everyone stuck in their mind. You have a video of like the truck rolling down the hill. and I don't want to buy a jet from that kind of archetype of CEO, right? You kind of want to buy a jet from...

2:59:16Chris Hladczuk:Like a hacker, like a hackathon guy who just like whips it up.

2:59:19Matt Huang:A vibe coder.

2:59:19Chris Hladczuk:A vibe coder.

2:59:20Matt Huang:No, no, no. You know, you want to buy a jet from a company...

2:59:25Chris Hladczuk:Someone with decades of experience, ideally.

2:59:26Matt Huang:Yeah, a company with ideally with decades and decades of experience, you know uh uh millions of flight hours uh because reliability is more important than anything when you're you know thousands of feet in the air so well we'll we'll make tyler demo it first yeah i mean i think step aboard yeah and then and then and then the the the ai the ai component is interesting i mean i think there's a number of um there's a number of light uh jets and even i think the pilatus pc12 i think the pc12 has like an a lot of the planes have the auto land functionality they still require pilots yeah i'm sure big pilot will figure out a way to make sure that like

3:00:10Chris Hladczuk:legally well you just get a normal a normal jet with no autopilot and then you put a tesla optimus

3:00:15Matt Huang:in the front seat yeah we got a pilot drives the plane grok take the wheel take the wheel uh

3:00:21Chris Hladczuk:Kalshi has a market here. Tesla Optimus released this year, 25.2 % chance right now. Obviously, it's declining a little bit as the year goes on because every day that it's not released, there's a lower chance. It was up at, where was it? It was up at like 50, above 50 % last April, but it's since declined. And the market resolves to yes, if Tesla Optimus or another humanoid robot is on sale to the general public before December 31st. That feels tough because I have to imagine that what is on sale to the general public? The demand is going to be so high, you would think that you would go with business consumers or someone that's at least, hey, why don't you come in and let's talk about your use case and let's see how we'll be pricing this because it's more interesting.

3:01:13Matt Huang:Let's talk about the security use case. Oh, yeah.

3:01:16Chris Hladczuk:Go for it. Oh, I was just going to tell everyone about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. Sorry.

3:01:23Matt Huang:We've got to talk about the security use case. Tech companies are now using robot dogs, costing up to$300 ,000 apiece to guard AI data centers. Remember I was saying, I just want to put a humanoid in my backyard, let them patrol around. I think it'll be a good deterrent. It's working for dogs. Let's pull up this video.

3:01:40Chris Hladczuk:Yeah.

3:01:42Matt Huang:All right. That's freaky. It can open a door. This is the last thing you want to see when you're trying to...

3:01:48Chris Hladczuk:They're sort of mixing footage here, right? Because you wouldn't have a robot dog walking on two feet in an actual business.

3:01:55Matt Huang:Yeah, that's its attack mode. Yeah, it seems like it.

3:01:59Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, I guess that's just the news, that the robot dogs are being deployed. Guarding some of those data centers? I don't know. Seems relevant.

3:02:08Matt Huang:You're not impressed because you think you could take it.

3:02:11Chris Hladczuk:Yeah, totally. You kind of know you can take it. Yeah, yeah. Dropkick that thing, no problem. Still got it.

3:02:19Matt Huang:Taylor Lorenz highlighting from this Vanity Fair profile, which we'll get into tomorrow, but in the profile, Dario Amadei never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning. So I created a version of Dario Amadei using his own machine. I led Claude several published interviews, including everything Amadei said at Davos, plus the contents of his two books of essays and told, which I'm sure Claude already has access to. and told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It took Claude less than three minutes.

3:02:52Matt Huang:You probably couldn't tell the difference and maybe there isn't one.

3:02:55Chris Hladczuk:There was some hot mic moment. Is that real? If everything's... I still have to read through it. We got to properly read through this. I'm sure there's some interesting stuff. It does seem like there's a few interviews. I saw some quotes about like Trent saying that he doesn't wear sunscreen anymore, which I've been advocating for, you know, getting on the Trent and D-ball and Avar because AI will cure all the downsides potentially. It's sort of a sort of twist on that. But at this point, now that I've seen the screenshot, I'm kind of wondering like, okay, like what in here is real? Is it all going to be revealed at the end?

3:03:33Chris Hladczuk:It's a very long piece, but we'll give it a read and see what's going on there.

3:03:37Matt Huang:We can briefly cover introspection, gait. Yeah, yeah. Mark Andreessen shared something from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Stop talking about what the good man is like and just be one. And Rune says an entire book where the guy is introspecting.

3:03:56Chris Hladczuk:I think that's the joke, right? Yeah. Yeah, Mark Andreessen's like.

3:04:00Matt Huang:Yeah, I think, you know, seeing through, I think we saw, We got what Mark was saying, even though a lot of people have, he's, you know, leaned into the chaos and seems to just be having a good time. But he was basically saying just joking about it. Stop ruminating. Stop ruminating. Just.

3:04:23Chris Hladczuk:I mean, it's an it's a transposition of the you can just do things idea. It's like actually go and do the thing. You know, Jeremy Gaffan has another post about this. where it's like people are like rehearsing for the fight that never comes. And that is like a different formulation of like the don't. It's like don't spend your entire life just thinking about what you're meant to do with your life. Like go do something, get some real experiences. There's probably a room for introspection. And then go back and forth and watch the game tape, monitor your KPIs, but also just think about what brings you joy and what you can do in the world that's beneficial.

3:04:59Chris Hladczuk:What's your ikigai? What are you good at? What does the market want from you? What can you make money doing? That type of stuff. Like, these are reasonable. But should that be 99 % of your time spent? Probably not, you know?

3:05:13Matt Huang:Never ruminate. Never ruminate. Always spec'd. Never ruminate. Always spec'd. Okay. Spec'd max. Well, let me tell you about Plaid.

3:05:22Chris Hladczuk:Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI.

3:05:30Matt Huang:Bill Gurley says, I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized slop emails slip through the spam filter and hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form. Great use of the word cooked. Nikita was saying February 11th prediction in less than 90 days. All channels that we thought were saved from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. I message phone calls, Gmail. Email inbox certainly feels that way. Nikita says spam laws will need to be rewritten soon machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted this will actually make your job actually just hitting the button because no a machine didn't send that a human did the human hit the button and you're going to have to press a button 10 ,000 times a day if you're BDR sending sales emails anyways it has been an honor to do the show

3:06:26Chris Hladczuk:we have one last gong

3:06:28Matt Huang:today.

3:06:29Chris Hladczuk:Kendra Barnett was just served her first OpenAI ad impression. It's amazing news.

3:06:36Matt Huang:For the Wall Street Journal, the benchmark in business coverage since 1889.

3:06:40Chris Hladczuk:I can't imagine a better ad to get served. We love the Wall Street Journal here, and we love ads, so congratulations to Kendra for being served that first OpenAI ad impression.

3:06:52Matt Huang:We hope you all have the best afternoon, evening of your entire life and we look forward to being back with you tomorrow we'll see you tomorrow goodbye