Jensen on Dwarkesh, Cursor + xAI, Codex Update | Kevin Hart & James Morrissey, Ben Smith, Jonathan Criss, Paul Scherer, Matan Grinberg, Akhil Voorakkara, Charlie Cheever, Victor Cardenas Codriansky, Theodor Marcu

27:20And there's some news around TerraFab potentially getting involved. But first, let's start with the scoop from Grace K over at Business Insider. She says, Scoop Cursor plans to use XAI's infrastructure to train its Composer 2.5 coding model. Where's the golden scoop, Tyler? According to people familiar with the matter, Cursor will use tens of thousands of XAI's GPUs, they said. And we got a scoop for Grace K. This one's going to Grace. Grace, congratulations. You win the golden scoop of the day. Congratulations. Interesting to see something we talked about probably midway through last year. XAI has shown a tremendous ability on the kind of infrastructure data center side, spinning up a huge amount of compute very, very quickly ahead of any timeline that any reasonable party would have probably expected.

28:19And demand hasn't exactly followed in the way that they would have liked. And so opening that up to a company like Cursor, who has all the demand, and what they really need is their own model. It was also interesting because, I don't know if it was thrown out as a potential project for other companies. I feel like MSL mentioned it at some point, maybe OpenAI, but there was some talk of like, okay, if you're marshalling all this compute and you wind up with too much, like what do you do then? And the idea of becoming a cloud provider if you have a data center and everything works there. Yeah, that's been the big question of like with everything that SpaceX is doing and now TerraFab, They're going to be creating all of this capacity.

29:08But where is the demand for that capacity going to come from? And so you can imagine a world in the future where SpaceX has a bunch of space data centers. They open up that capacity to a bunch of companies other than just Elon, Inc. businesses. So Grace says the setup effectively turns XAI into a kind of cloud provider by renting some of its GPUs to other companies. XAI could start generating revenue from its massive infrastructure while still developing its own AI models. The arrangement could help the company offset the costs of building and operating data centers while also deepening ties with a startup that has access to valuable coding data.

29:48And so there could be some sort of trade deal going on. Ed Ludlow at Bloomberg has a report from the TerraFab. Must team is actively requesting price quotes and delivery timelines for a wide range of chip making equipment, photo masks, substrates, etchers, deposition, cleaning, testing tools, according to sources. Elon Musk's lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers for his Envision TerraFab project. Remember, he was pictured with LibBouton from Intel, I think, last week. Early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. That is a very, very tall order, but maybe there's never been a better time to break into the cutting-edge chip market, given that you don't need to, I mean, you sort of need to reinvent CUDA, but it's becoming easier, potentially.

30:45That is the story. Well, there are two big releases from from Anthropic and OpenAI today. Claude announced Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model yet. It handles long-running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely, and verifies its own outputs before reporting back. You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision, they say. Very good score on Sweebench Pro, 64.3%. Excited to test it. They say Opus 4.7 has substantially better vision. It can see images at three times the resolution and produce higher quality interfaces, slides, and docs as a result. On the API, the new X-High effort level between high and max gives you finer control over reasoning and latency on hard problems.

31:31I'm excited to see how these do on ArcGi V3. Yeah, I think the most notable thing here is you have a model card that shows a model that's not publicly accessible. Yeah, they share the Mythos benchmark. Mythos, logging, Opus 4.7, just sitting there. But of course, unless you're one of the select companies, you won't be getting access to it, at least yet. Well, Addy gave Opus 4.7 the tiny man bench, which is a very funny one, where you ask the model, I am a tiny man. When my son was born, they handed me to him. And Opus 4.7, that's a nice little riddle. The answer is a bar of soap. No, wait, let me think about it.

32:13Tiny man handed to him when his son was born. This sounds like it's pointing to a cigar. The tradition of handing out cigars when a baby is born and a cigar can be thought as a little man-shaped object. That is very, very odd. This is like the new how many R's in strawberry where all of the models seem to have weird results for this. We, of course, have shrimp fried rice bench, which no one has really solved. Even just humor bench and tell us a novel joke has been increasingly difficult for these companies. Yeah, I think I think going to have to wait and see on Opus 4.7 how what the reactions are.

32:57I will be keep an eye on Dan Shipper, who is always does great analysis immediately after launch. Yeah, I mean, I feel like generally benchmarks are almost completely meaningless at this point. There's so many open-source models where they can really, I don't know if you know if they're actually bench-maxing, but you just talk to the model for a while and you say, okay, this is a good model, or this is not a good model. It's very hard to get a quantifiable signal at this point. Yeah, I mean, increasingly, I mean, it feels like all of these models will be sort of like tested through like enterprise, like rollouts and you just do a demo project, swap in something, test this model, test that model, just see, okay, well, our goal was to deliver value.

33:47And we had some KPI, like reduce cost, increase sales. Like were we successful when we implemented this model, rolled it out to our team, used it for a couple weeks? Did we see a tangible result or not? That's at the end of the day all that matters for businesses. So I could imagine that that's where all of this goes. Well Open AI announced codecs for almost everything. It can use apps on your Mac, connect to more of your tools, create images, learn from previous actions. Remember how you like to work and take on ongoing and repeatable tasks. With computer use on Mac OS, Codex can now use any app by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor.

34:27It runs in the background without taking over your computer, working on tasks like front-end iteration, app testing, or any workflow that doesn't expose an API. You can now generate and iterate on images with GPT image 1.5 and Codex to create front-end designs, mock-ups, game assets, and more without leaving your workflow. Usage is included in your ChatGPT account. no API needed. Automations can now run in the same thread. Lots of updates here. And Tebow says, Codex just got a lot more powerful. Computer use, in-app browser, image generation, editing, 90 plus new plugins to connect everything, multi-terminal, SSH, lots and lots of stuff.

35:04So go give it a test. Go take it for a spin. OpenAI.com, of course. And you can download it for macOS. Well, speaking of websites, DJB went to the Oreo website and hit accept all cookies. Now we wait. I love this. Very funny. What else is going on in the timeline? The West creates the internet. Try nailing that jello to the wall. CCP nails it. The West creates LLMs. All right, try nailing this. And the CCP picks up a hammer. There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal opinion section. AI is bound to subvert communism. This is a very contrarian take because people, at least with the internet, there was the perception of like decentralization, permissionlessness, anonymity, a lot of things that felt very democratic.

35:59AI is very centralizing by default. This is the Teal take of like AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. And so this is a pretty wild thing to argue, but read the opinion piece and see what they say. Nailing Jell-O to a wall, I believe that's from the Clinton administration, the idea that the internet would spread so widely that the Chinese Communist Party would not be able to control the population, everyone would be coordinating. It'd be sort of like an Arab Spring type moment. But of course, the firewalls went up, the surveillance happened, and nothing really changed, and the Communist Party seems stronger than ever.

36:40But this does sort of undergird a lot of what Dwarkesh has been saying about the risk of China and having strong AI and stronger control over the population. It's always hard to get a read on exactly how things are rolling out in China. There's some people that seem to like it over there. Of course, Dwarkesh took a whole trip to China and made it back okay. So it's not all doom and gloom. But it's a tricky, tricky thing to argue, but we'll see. YouTube, according to The Verge, now lets you turn off shorts. It is getting community noted. What does the community note say? This feature is a new setting for YouTube time management.

37:21It does not hide the shorts tab in the app, nor does it hide shorts from appearing in recommendations. When set to off, the only change is that a dismissible warning screen will appear when the shorts tab is selected. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I've tried. I've tried. I land on YouTube on my phone. It immediately recommends a bunch of shorts. You can hit the three dots and say, like, show me less shorts. And that feature does not work at all. And I don't watch shorts on YouTube. The shorts in the feed have been a lot. I wonder if they're seeing, yeah, I mean, they must just be seeing data that shows that the shorts are more retentive or keep people on that.

37:59Well, there are, when you're using YouTube as a video search engine, there are so many types of searches where it can be vastly preferable to watch a 60-second video on something. So an example is like if you're doing research on cars and you want to like quickly understand how the seating, I need to get a new like family car. So I've been looking up different cars, trying to get a sense of how spacious the cabin is, what the seating arrangement is like. And so I'd rather just click into a short and just get a quick 60-second overview and then bounce. I don't need to see a 15-minute review of the entire car.

38:39But yeah. That YouTube shorts creator, Forrest Auto Reviews, sort of pioneered the perfect 60-second car review where he talks really, really fast and says, like inside you get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and the heater, heated leather and massaging seats and vinyl on the dash and carbon fiber here. And he sort of runs through the whole car in 60 seconds, shows you how fast it takes off. If it's a fast car, opens the door, shows you all the features. And it's sort of like a 20-minute Doug DiMuro video cut down to 60 seconds, which of course is doing very well. Doug's response has been to create one-minute cut downs of his content.

39:17And so you can enjoy that as a short as well if you want. But if you do want to turn off shorts on the YouTube feed, the way to do it is to uninstall the app, use the mobile version, and then get a plugin that there's an extension for Safari, I think, that will just go and remove the actual shorts as they pop up. But it's a hassle, and it's much slower than using the app. So hopefully this feature becomes more real in the future, since it does seem like some things that people are demanding. But always tricky to ask a platform to give you an option that would, in theory, increase churn. Very, very tricky.

39:57Well, we have the beginning of our guest lineup starting now. We have Ben Smith from Semaphore. He is the editor-in-chief. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBB and Ultron. Ben, how are you doing? What's going on? Doing great. Can you guys hear me all right? We can hear you. We can see you, but we don't know where you are. You're looking very sharp. Dapper, I might say. Thank you. We're convening a biggest gathering of business leaders in the U.S. this year here at Summer for World Economy. Wow. How many business leaders is that? Yeah. How many people are attending? About 500 global CEOs and then lots of political figures from the U.S.

40:35and Europe. Had Scott Best sent earlier. We got a Lutnik later. I assume they all just kind of came over from Hill and Valley. Yeah. We do our best. That's great. What's the structure of the conference? For instance, a few days, are there specific breakout sessions, talk tracks, certain themes, or is it more driven by the individual who's on stage at the moment? It's five days, three simultaneous stages, a bunch of really interesting Chatham House rules, breakfasts and dinners and things like that. The core topic is really where we live is the intersection of politics and political political power and finance and technology.

41:17And so, I mean, that is what people here are obsessed with. Yeah. And within that intersection, what are the top topics that people are discussing in particular? Obviously, the conflict in the Middle East is big, but then AI is big. What's actually driving the conversation today? You know, every conversation winds up coming back to AI. Really? And yeah, and I think whether that's, you know, Besson, actually, I did an interesting conversation with Bassett on stage where he really downplayed the conflict with Anthropic. Okay. He said they have kind of like some minor technical issue with the Department of War.

41:53Oh, interesting. The Treasury is working with them to make sure, you know, the banks don't go down. Sure. But just, you know, I think there's just a sense in particular that like really big enterprises and the kind of big brand name American companies are the ones most at risk in the transition. And I think people who work for those companies, who advise them, who compete with them are thinking a lot about that. Yeah. What about on the labor side of big business? We've seen some reasonable strength in the job market recently. At the same time, there's a lot of layoffs going on. How are people grappling with the unemployment situation in the economy?

42:31Yeah. I mean, you know, the numbers are good. Yeah. And yet there is this sense, you know, among the American public that AI basically exists to put everybody out of work and they hate it. And so that's lingering over things. And I do think there's also a sense that the class of 2026 is not a great time to get out of college. And I think there is a, I would say we're both kind of authentic nervousness about what is everybody's labor force going to look like? Because, of course, class 2026 are also the ones who are native to these tools and are the ones you ought to be hiring. And then also of like, are they going to come and chop everybody's heads off when they realize they aren't getting jobs?

43:13So I would say those two competing questions about the youth. Has there been any discussion around resolutions to that or economic policy that can strengthen the safety net or, you know, deal with taxes or more weekends or anything that can sort of offset the anxiety about weakening labor markets? You know, every member of Congress is like thinking about this all the time, taking questions about it all the time, and yet also aware that this is an institution that spent like 20 years talking about regulating social media and only now is sort of getting to it. But most of it's happening in the States.

43:55Yeah. And so I think there's a lot of pessimism that Washington will act. But I think there's also is a sense that I think a lot of companies are seeing unexpected jobs coming out of AI. I talked to somebody who operates basically the sort of call center dealing with financial fraud that you would think would really get wiped out by AI. Yeah, totally. But the good news is there is so much more financial fraud being driven by AI that they're keeping people very, very busy. You can see something like that emerging in the legal space. You just get way more contracts because contracts are easier to create or you get more lawsuits.

44:33So a lawyer is spending less time per lawsuit, but there's a lot more of them to work on. And so you still have full. The good news. Yeah. How are you using AI in the newsroom at Semaphore? Are there, I imagine you're not just writing AI articles, but is there internal tooling that's been built? Are you understanding metrics better? I feel like you guys are well set up for this because there's like, hey, here are the facts. And then here's like takes and like separating those two things out. Yeah. I don't care what you use here. I want the takes to be generally pretty organic and coming from the author, but how do you think about it?

45:12Yeah, you know, we use it, and it's interesting, because I think like a lot of media, there's these two sort of huge trends. One is AI and automation, and the other is creators and individual connection, and people do not want AI in the way of that. I mean, when they realize that you're just avatars, you're going to be in trouble. For sure. And so we use it all over the place behind the scenes to try to help amplify our journalists. I vibe-coded something that predicts meme tweets about stories that I'm personally very proud of, though I cannot say that I have driven wide adoption with my team.

45:45That feels like that would just create anxiety in the newsroom. If you want to get pre-dunked on, use this tool. That is what the tool, I called it pre-dunk. Pre-dunk. No way. They spent a whole day. It's in Google Apps Script. I love it. That's awesome. I would say more usefully, one of my colleagues, because actually one of the challenges with an event like this is you've got three simultaneous stages and the reporter who's most qualified to write the story or even to know what's news is often the same one doing the interview and sitting on stage. Sure, sure. And so we did build a great tool that just takes the transcript of every interview instantly and pops out what's new.

46:19Oh, yeah. So that a reporter who's maybe more of a generalist will know, oh, yeah, this is news, this isn't, which is incredibly useful. And obviously we check it, but that's a great starting point. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense because there's so many times when people fall back to a talking point, but you're looking for something that's actually novel or a new data point or a new prediction or something announcement, and that just might sneak in. You know, you just get this. Like, how do you deal? You do an interview and you think there's one part that's interesting, but you're on the air and something else goes viral, right?

46:48Totally, totally, yeah. And that's a very interesting tool. We should probably think about integrating something like that because we, yeah, we found that It's very, very hard to predict, even with the best AI tools, what content, what clips will actually perform, what is news. And we see a lot of coverage downstream of our show where something that's said on our show will then turn into coverage on other news sites. And we've never really figured out how to grapple with all of that. But that's an issue. Yeah, and it's not just performance, right? Like it's also you might think this is the new part, this is the interesting part.

47:23But if you're doing it live, it just sort of floats by. Yeah. So that's that's probably the thing that I'm just this week that I'm most kind of jazzed about. What about overall market sentiment? J.J. Capilouto who made it. Sorry. What about overall market sentiment? I don't think if you told me last year we would be, you know, over a month into a war with Iran and the S &P 500 would be at a record high. I would not have believed you. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And, you know, people who, CEOs, people who show up at events like this tend to be optimistic people. It's sort of a job quality. And so there is like a pretty positive vibe here and the driven, the sort of parallels and is driven by the markets.

48:04One thing about Washington now, though, is there's also a lot of self-censorship. And there's a real difference between what people say in public and what they say in private. it and i think you know in our kind of chatham house rule gatherings you're hearing a lot more concern about a kind of about a bit just about the long-term direction of of u.s power the u.s economy the u.s markets people hedging away and no one's saying that stuff in public yeah well yeah biggest biggest ever disconnect in my life between like group chat conversations and like timeline conversations among among people who have something to lose is how i would put it interesting times hopefully what's the plan to turn the synthesis of what you're hearing in the Chatham House context into reporting or content will you be writing op-eds that are informed by what you learned how do you think about actually distributing that information I mean the basic Chatham House rule is that you can steal the ideas and pass them off as your own but you're not allowed to contribute them so that's the plan okay well we'll look forward to it I'm sure everyone can follow along at Semifor.

49:13Thank you so much for coming on the show. And we'll make it next year. I would love to. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. Yeah. Thank you, Ben. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great rest of the conference. And congratulations. You guys too. Thanks for having me on. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jonathan Chris from Vital Life working on desalination with a fantastic new fundraising round. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. How are you guys doing? We're great. I'm so excited to talk to you. We are insanely fired up. We were talking with Peter Diamandis about desalination, and it's always been such a fascinating, just not even a sci-fi technology, but just an underutilized technology that has incredible promise, but hasn't felt like it's hit the takeoff that it needed to.

50:03And so excited to hear your plan. But why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and how you're thinking about things? Yeah, so I'm John, CEO and founder. I was at SpaceX for 13 years before this. Started off in Dragon.

50:22Elon was like, stop using dragons or building dragons, you idiots. And I was like, oh man, I'll figure that out, boss. Spared off with a small team to go figure out Dragon reuse. The whole program became a reuse vehicle, so just took over as product manager slash RE. and then kind of got bored of spaceships wanted to take on a new challenge uh jumped over the starlink team to figure out rate manufacturing where we got really plugged in on how you design for really high volume manufacturing uh and then you know my co-founder and i started started really talking about how do we make a meaningful impact in the world what's the next big challenge and then got our heads wrapped around answering that question that every eight-year-old kid has how could there possibly be water scarcity when there's oceans everywhere yeah um and then just like you said at the top of the segment, it's like, man, this technology feels like it's really cool, but it's just right on the cusp of becoming awesome.

51:11And we think if we apply the lessons that we learned on Starlink with high rate manufacturing, driving down the costs and really delivering this technology to everyone, we can really make that meaningful impact. So walk us through the first product. I was always thinking that the next big desalination company would be a huge desalination plant, but you're going much smaller. So walk me through the thesis there. Yeah, I love that, because that's pretty much where everyone in the industry has focused, right? We got to clean a ton of water. These systems are super freaking expensive for upfront capital costs.

51:46So the only way that you make your unit economics in that use case work is by going really large and cleaning a ton of water. We just looked at it from the other end is like, man, if the upfront cost is negligible, and you can keep your energy and maintenance costs low, you can probably do about the same and just scale it in terms of number of units, not a large centralized system. And then it's just kind of blown up the thought process entirely inside of that because now you're looking at infrastructure resilience and people being less reliant on centralized systems. And then you can open up to people that are more on the move, people that are island struck.

52:25And really, man, the customer base kind of exploded from there. Like, oh, man, like if you could just deliver a low cost product, people will want to use it. Yeah. So walk me through like a textbook customer. Where are they? Can you explain first? Can you just explain the product like I'm five? Yeah. Like how big are we talking? Is this diesel generator size? Yeah. So we launched Access this week, which is our first consumer product. We're a little bit more in the middle market going into customer bases that already exist. So Maritime Industry has these types of products. It's a reverse osmosis is at the core of our technology.

53:02What we do is we're able to do that manufacturing process at a much, much lower cost and a much higher volume. So the product that you're seeing on your screen access, the facility that we got here in Torrance, we're able to produce more of these devices in a single month and currently exist. so we're kind of really taking that whole taking that whole process okay but explain but sorry this is you put a hose into salt water and then it goes into the machine and out comes potable drinking water exactly so we always say we design for Terry for the audience I wanted to be clear so how many people push button hydrate yeah how many people off grid actually have access to salt water or dirty water Well, this should work for springs and lakes.

53:50Yeah. Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. So you can clean what we say is any naturally occurring water source. Saltwater being the hardest one to clean and why desal has been kind of out of reach for most people until now. Well water is super common in the United States. I think it's like 11 % of homes live on well water in the U.S. And then brackish water is super common. And I mean, in marshlands, I mean, lots of lots of south, pretty much all Florida. Yeah. How do you deal? One of the common things we hear about desalination is that, yeah, you get clean water out, but you also get all of the dirt and all of the salt and whatever else you don't want in your clean water.

54:31What do you do with that in your case? What happens normally? Yeah. So the stigma is in your what you call brine or your concentrate. So when you run a very large plant, you want your recovery as high as possible. So your concentrate is much, much higher, like two times the salinity in your salts. We actually run our system efficiently at a much lower recovery rate, like 15 to 20%. So as long as you're putting your rind or your concentrate back into a source water greater than five gallons or so, it almost immediately dissipates into that volume. So we get the wins inside of there in terms of, hey, you can use this product.

55:13It's not making that environmental impact because it's smaller form factor, lower flow rate, and lower Brian concentrate as well. What about battery? Is it battery powered? Do you plug it in? What's battery life like? Could you eventually create some type of solar array so that it's entirely self-sustaining? 100%, yeah. Yeah. So it runs on ACDC. It's got an integrated battery. If you're cleaning ocean water, you're running for about an hour. If you're using fresh water, anywhere from about probably closer to three hours. So it all depends on the source water that you're cleaning. So ocean water has a ton of salts inside of it.

55:53So it's really difficult to remove those at higher pressure. Fresh water is much, much easier. You're essentially just killing bacteria and viruses. So, yeah, you can run it on ACDC. we do integrate with solar as well. So, you know, if you have a decent sized solar panel, you can run this thing as long as you have sunlight. Amazing. Talk about what you've learned about the traditional large scale desalination operations. There's actually an article in the Wall Street Journal today about San Diego producing surprisingly a ton of water from desalination. San Diego now has so much water that it's selling it.

56:31Once a drought poster child, The California city now generates enough water to rescue parched states like Arizona and brew beer from recycled sewage. Are you optimistic? What about that last part? Recycled sewage. Sewage beer. So they take sewage water and they clean it so effectively that they can brew beer in San Diego. They might have to disclose that on the label, but I think we can get past the stigma at some point. The wastewater one's fun. Bill Gates solved this problem a long time ago. And it's like no one wants to drink poop or pee water, right? Yeah. Luckily, the ocean is arguably the most abundant resource on Earth.

57:06And that's kind of the resource that we want to tap to bring this technology forward. But large plants, they serve a purpose. We want to be a partner with them, not a disruptor in the near term. Similar to a Starlink, you had your, what was it,$10 billion infrastructure bill to give Internet to rural areas that service zero people. yet Starlink could do that at a fraction of the cost so we look for those people that are kind of high and dry right now and need access and that's kind of our initial customer base that we're going through How much does the product cost? Where's the business? Give us an update on the round Yeah, so$7.49 is our launch cost right now but you can pre-order for$8 total year fundable We're getting into production here over the next, actually our first PCB show up next week, which I'm very excited about.

57:59The round was towards the end of last year. We have a great table of really awesome partners with GC and Interlogos. And that capital has gone a really long way to help us accelerate. The business has only been around for a little over a year. And we're about to step into production here over the next few weeks. Yeah. It looks like you're in a production facility. How big is the warehouse? How many people do you have on staff yeah uh we're 37 000 square foot facility here in torrance uh we're actually right next to the k2 guys oh cool um i keep seeing all my friends on your guys at show man it's kind of a rite of passage uh at this point um uh we have 37 full-time employees right now plus a ton of contractors that that help out um and we'll probably be closer to man 70 ish when we're at rate with a bunch of associate and production staff just waiting to hire once we get into production this summer.

58:58Yeah. Do you think that the business will remain almost entirely direct to consumer or do you think there will be applications for business to business, construction crews, military, government, all sorts of different things? Yeah, I use this a lot. Gwen gave us a talk in 2013. She was like, yo guys, we got to get NRO certification because NASA is pretty much supporting this entire business. So when we started the business, we wanted to have multiple revenue streams. In the event of a macro event, we can be reliant on. So the U.S. military has a water logistics problem. Half of all casualties coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan were related to convoys moving water and fuel.

59:33So they're excited to be able to open up where they can get water from. And then NGOs, humanitarian groups, are almost solely reliant on bottled water, which is another logistical nightmare. So these are both groups that we've engaged with and we have a lot of exciting conversations with, but then also some partnerships that we're going to be announcing pretty soon. And then direct-to-consumer is the hardest problem. Elon used to tell us all the time when we were starting Starlink, go after direct-to-consumer because they're going to give you the biggest feedback. You're going to get roasted on Reddit and you're going to know quick whether or not you made a mistake.

1:00:09so after being personally wrote it on Reddit a number of times you learn really fast so that's who we want to go after first we want to solve the hardest problem first and then open up to those other larger customers afterwards yeah that makes sense awesome very very very very cool product and I'm going to pre-order one just to play around with it bring it to the beach just to have some fun come by the factory I always say bring a bucket of your favorite Osho water we'll clean it and drink it it's a lot of fun that's amazing how long does it take to clean a bucket of ocean water Uh, well, we do six gallons of ocean water an hour.

1:00:45Okay. So about one hour, well, a little under an hour because most buckets are five gallons. Five gallons. Cool. You're going to need two. John's like horse size, so he could easily get through like 10 gallons an hour. Okay, the chat wants to know, what happens if you put a Diet Coke through it? It'll separate all. We do this all the time. You do? We did a reverse Jesus the other day. We removed all the alcohol and water from wine. That's amazing. Yeah, you'll pull out all the gross stuff and just have a – It's a pure glass of water. Some water. We did monsters the other day. We removed all the water from five monsters and then drank the concentrate, which was just a super caffeinated syrup.

1:01:23Wow. That's insane. Sounds like a fun time. That's crazy. Well, congrats on the progress and thank you. Yeah, great to meet you, Jonathan. Such a pleasure, guys. Have a good one. Great stuff. Goodbye. Up next, we have Paul Schur from Egan. Egan raising$15 million from Benchmark to build a mutual friend platform. Paul, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, so good to meet you guys. Great to meet you. Great to meet you. And excited that you're not building another agent for the enterprise. You got something new for us. Yeah, break it down. Introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I mean, so great to meet you.

1:02:06Thanks for having me. You know, we're building, you know, we call the world's mutual friend. Sort of, you know, instead of all of these things that are, you know, out there trying to, you know, optimize our own bubbles, we're sort of, you know, they're diverging more and more. And, you know, the world that's super hyper-personalized for all of us is also really isolating because it's different for all of us. And we want to bring these bubbles a bit closer together again. Yeah. So walk us through the experience. Well, first, maybe like, where are you in this journey? You've raised some money, but do you have a team?

1:02:42Is the product live? How are you thinking about actually building the company? Yeah. I mean, it's super early. We're really, really grateful for all the support and all the partners that we've been able to meet. I'm from Germany. I grew up in this tiny village, less than a thousand people. I moved here less than a year ago to San Francisco. And I've been, I literally landed, I had a one-way flight here, stayed in a hostel. And a few months later, I've been, you know, meeting some of the greats and they've been, you know, so incredibly helpful. And we've built a small team. It's very early. We don't, you know, we haven't launched anything when we were working with, you know, early users to build something really special and something really meaningful.

1:03:24So what can you share? Living the SF dream. Yeah. Well, maybe take us back first. Kristen, what were you doing before this? How did you get into startups? Walk me through that. I've been building things, you know, forever. I grew up, you know, this was a middle-class town and I never knew anything about entrepreneurship. So I've always been building things. And then during the pandemic, I actually just went on Twitter and I started to spend a lot of time, like 12 hours a day on Twitter. I think I have like 25 ,000 tweets and replies from like a three-month period. and that's when I first I didn't know what a VC was until I was like 18 and yeah, it was like during the pandemic about to turn 17, I left high school to do that and so I've been doing startups for five years now, spent some time in Paris where I worked with the incredible people of a company called Augment and then I could finally get a visa and go to the US, which I always kind of felt like was my real place to be.

1:04:33All right, and then take us through the idea, Mays, and how you landed on this general kind of space. You know, I think I've always been really interested in sort of this intersection of arts and culture and technology. And growing up in this place where I grew up, I really love German children's literature. And there's this book that my dad read me when I was 10 about this little girl called Momo. who kind of connects everyone in her little town and helps sort of save the world from the time thieves. And I've always sort of been inspired by this. And so it's been something I've been thinking about for a really long time.

1:05:11And I think now more than ever, we really need this. It feels very early, but you got Benchmark to come in and invest$15 million. They are the consumer social fund. They're willing to bet big and early, but typically I see them investing after there's like a spark or like some sign, real like sign of, of, of life. Do you feel like, do you feel like you're there yet and that you have something that early users love? Like at what point do you, and then I guess at what point do you think you'll, you'll launch? So I think with benchmark, you know, and, and just more broadly, we already see, I think moments of magic and it's very, very early.

1:05:57but it's been just really incredible to see how people create these moments of connections, you know, early users. And I think just partnering up with Benchmark has been an incredible experience. And I think, I don't feel like I've ever pitched Benchmark. I think we just met and we sort of very quickly, I think it's yoga done in like three days. And we very quickly just realized that we had very similar ideas of what the future should look like and that we wanted to go on this journey together. And everything else kind of became secondary to just trying to make that happen together. Do you think there's a risk of becoming a dating app?

1:06:37Or is that the wrong way to think about it? That's funny. Is it just like, historically, the meet people in your area apps, even if they're intended to create friendships, you may get power users that have other intentions. I mean, totally. I think for us, we care more about strengthening already existing relationships, right? We live in a time where we have all made way more relationships than ever before. A hundred years ago, you might have a hundred friends. Today, you have probably like about 600 relationships. And we really care about making these relationships meaningful much more than adding just random people on top of that.

1:07:24And so I think it's less of a thing for us. Have you been surprised that we're this far into the consumer AI boom and yet the only AI apps topping the App Store charts are basically language models? I think it's natural, maybe. I don't think we're in the consumer AI boom yet because the great product people usually take a bit of time to sort of come out of the woodworks and start imagining what the new paradigms might look like. We've seen an incredible thing, which is that the sort of single-player experiences are more powerful than ever, ever before. Multiple orders of magnitude. I think now the interesting thing is how are the enduring experiences built?

1:08:19How do you build a product that is so different that it couldn't have been done five years ago? Because it's just a new paradigm and sort of new primitives. And I think it takes time to find and invent that. How do you think about Dunbar's number? I remember Dave Morin had this app, Path, that you were supposed to add no more than 150 friends, I believe. and I'm wondering if you think that number's changing or you think that there's some sort of like optimal ground truth to that idea of Dunbar's number. Have you reflected on that at all? We think a lot about it, and I think there's a lot of interesting things in Dunbar's research.

1:09:01To me, the two things that stand out are that the headline number is growing. We have way more relationships than ever before. It doesn't mean that our brains are getting better at computing the social dynamics. But the real big problem is that we have way less close people. And I think that really is the most interesting thing to me is how do we get that back? Do you think there's anything to be done on the social networking side to make filter bubbles less prevalent? There was some work done, it felt like, on YouTube where you would watch one video and immediately get served another video that was similar.

1:09:47And so you'd wind up sort of down a rabbit hole. And then YouTube seemed to have changed the algorithm to sort of show you the opposite side of the argument. If it was a video in favor of something, you'd see a video that took the other side pretty quickly. but I agree with you on the general trend that like there is these like, you know, niches and niches and niches and that's been good in some ways, but it's also created some isolation. Have you just reflected on like, if you had full control over all the social platforms, what you might do differently? It's an interesting question. I think what's missing is sort of opinion, right?

1:10:25We went from, you know, five newsletter outlets, you know, maybe 12 radio stations, a bunch of TV stations, to like sort of infinite nuance, right? And everything, you know, every take that you could possibly have, you can find it on Twitter. And what we want is not the average of the world, right? Like you don't actually care about the recommendation or the take of the average of the world, but you care about, you know, the take that your people care about. And so you're sort of, like, we think there's something in the middle, right? An in-between space that's really interesting that brings you closer with actual people versus, you know, just makes it the average of the world or, you know, leaves you alone in this like hyper-isolated bubble where you, you know, you end up seeing things on TikTok that maybe are generated on the fly and like no one else will ever see that video.

1:11:15And you can't go to your office anymore and be like, guys, did you see this like insane thing, like, and talk about it. How do you think about just app growth? There's obviously viral loops that can happen with anything that's somewhat social, even if it's a little bit tighter. There's launch videos and paid marketing. Have you explored sort of like the current landscape of what it takes to actually make it in the app store, which feels like more competitive than ever? I think maybe the answer is to not make it in the app store. What does it look like to build something? I don't know how the, I mean, we have obviously strong opinions on how the world might look like.

1:12:00And I'm not convinced that it's going to be another app. I have this wonderful story that one of our investors, Ben Silberman, told me when I first met him about sort of his son describing his job, like Ben's job. And it was just like, oh, you know, he was asking, you know, all these squares on your phone. and my dad makes one of them. And I don't want to make another square. And I think we have enough squares competing for our attention and maybe the next thing isn't another square, but something completely different. And I think that's what's exciting about this time. You can build something that just truly has never been there before and that sort of escapes any previous incumbent.

1:12:40Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because even within Pinterest, the app that Ben Silverman founded, it has more squares within the square. It's like squares all the way down the layout. It tends to be a bunch of squares. Well, we're extremely curious to, to try, to try what you're building when you're ready. I know the chat is, I think the mystery is good. Everyone's coming out. They're launching with, you know, the three minute launch video explaining, and you're just coming out with pure mystery. Where can people go to, do you have a wait list at least? we're on team eigen.com you can sort of visit our office visit the office if you want to learn more come in person yeah we love in person that's why we built our office as the website no email capture on the website no you guys are post email post app post software this is amazing yeah come visit us on our office website or in person in our office we're hiring exceptional people and we're excited to build something really special I like this typewriter that you can play on this is very fun beautiful website I absolutely love it the bowling balls and everything great website concept unfortunately it will be copied relentlessly but you did it first and that's what matters Anyway, thank you so much.

1:14:12Great to meet you, Paul. Very excited to see where you guys ship and come back on when you launch. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Thank you. Did you hear that Alphabet is poised for a$100 billion windfall on the SpaceX investment they made? Google owns around 5 % of SpaceX and could get$100 billion from SpaceX's IPO if they managed to pull it off with a$2 trillion valuation. Not bad. That is a crazy stat. And they needed a windfall. Ashe Sangvi from Haystack says, what are the odds that this was a result of this? And he's showing the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel where Peter made the argument that Google is printing too much cash and needs to innovate, needs to invest in more things.

1:15:00It's funny, Dworkesh actually asked a very similar question to NVIDIA. He was like, oh, you guys have all this extra cash. Are you going to train a new model? Like do something internally, right? because they've said they're going to do open source models. Yeah, aren't they? Wasn't the answer just yes? I mean, you didn't say like, yeah, we're going after the labs. It's like very different. They're doing open source. But it feels like a very similar question. Yeah, yeah. They're also doing self-driving cars at NVIDIA. And obviously Google has been very successful with that. It feels like the Google investments that burn money for a very long time, although they obviously stayed very profitable, a lot of those penciled out very, very well.

1:15:37And it does seem like the end result of this discussion was Google should invest more. And they did. And they invested in SpaceX and Waymo and a bunch of other projects. And some of them didn't pan out. But certainly many, many of them did. What else is in the timeline? Mark is noping out. Zach says, okay, actually in the same paper published yesterday, a research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using EMS. EMFs. Wow. EMFs. Electromagnetic fields. They expose mice to 60 hertz EMF. Same frequency as your wall outlet using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal for cyclic three-day or four-day off pulses.

1:16:23This showed that you could activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in the progeroid in aged mice. Extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues. Conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes. only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't. No drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside the body. That's pretty crazy. I'm close to taking a victory. I'm very paranoid about EMFs. But this could be positive. There could be a positive outcome. It could be positive. But we have... It could be used responsibly.

1:17:02We don't have... Anyway. What? Oh, we have our next guest. It's time. We have James Morrissey and Kevin Hart. Welcome to the show, folks. How are you guys doing? Gentlemen, what's going on? How are you? Welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time. Big day. Thanks for having us. Big day. Would love to get, I think everyone knows Kevin Hart. Well, I think everyone knows James. I was going to ask the opposite. I was going to say. It's not about me here. I'm going to take a second and I'm going to highlight my guy. Okay. Yes, you know, some may be familiar with the idea of Kevin Hart. But in this space, man, it's more about my business.

1:17:47And, you know, business is great. We have great partners. So take a second to highlight my guy, man, James. James has done a phenomenal job in self, with self, with his company, with his own entity. and the idea of finding cool ways to create and develop partnerships with faces that are and can be more than just an ambassador, but more of a brand. He's done a great job, man. He's done a really good job of vetting out the space. And I'm lucky to have found someone with the mindset, the understanding to help me do the things that I want. So execution only happens when you have people that can do so.

1:18:27James is that. He's an executor. So, you know, how did you two meet? What were the first meetings like? Where did the meetings take place? Like, where did all this come from? We met about five years ago in the depths of COVID through mutual friends. We're in the space of building brands in joint venture with well-known individuals in entertainment, brands that they want to own, not just endorse. Yeah. And we wanted to go into the tequila space for a long time. Sure. We liked the category. We thought it was very compelling, but the celebrity tequila space is completely oversaturated. At the time, it was very noisy.

1:19:06We needed something really compelling to break through and to make it right for us. And when myself and Kev started talking during COVID, it became very clear very quickly that we matched each other's energy. Absolutely. In terms of understanding the responsibilities of being not just a face for the brand, but being a business partner. Yeah. and the responsibilities of owning a brand and building one of these businesses for the long term. I think you understood early on what my wants and not wants were. Like, you know, the biggest, I'll say the most important rule that I have, I'm never slapping my name on anything, right?

1:19:45If I can't embrace it or I can't do it on a daily and really have an authentic response to it and engage with it, as if I engage with everything in my life, then I don't want to do it. So all of my partnerships across the board, whether it's ownership plays, equity plays or ambassador like roles, I truly am invested and invested into the thing. So with the wine experience space, having my own tequila, it was necessary because I said, look, I only drink tequila. I'm drinking everyone else's product. So developing my own version of a product that I can then drink at the same level that I drink my own when I am in a space of comfort or celebration could be dope.

1:20:27But let's put a story behind it. Like, let's make it different and let's exist in some rare air. What can be defining or redefining in this space that basically represents me in the best way? And he was very diligent in answering those questions and helping me navigate on that road, right? So the idea of hard work and hard work tasting different and the idea of a celebration being attached to Grand Coramino because we believe that life should not only be celebrated, but what you do on a daily should be celebrated. So hard work in whatever, whatever way, however it fits to you. How do you choose to celebrate it?

1:21:06My job is to give you a choice. Grand Coramino is that. You mentioned that the space was crowded. How did you think about finding differentiation on the product side, the distribution side? what really stuck out is like, okay, it is a complicated space, but there's a big opportunity here. I would say, man, you know, you, you have to have access. So Juan Domingo Beckman Jr., of course, the family, what they've done in this space, you know, you're talking about generation on generation of success and growth in the business, right? Like from a distribution, you know, outlet or opportunity, there isn't a bigger option.

1:21:46So I think for us, it was getting Juan to understand the real want, getting him to understand the passion behind my want, and that this is not a celebrity play. This is not a check grab and run. This is a want to build something that can literally be attached to my family name and give me an opportunity to build generational success, wealth, visibility, whatever you want to call it. But I want that. How do I get that? You have to go to the people that have it. So I think that was our biggest want. And as you talk about separating yourself, when you have that machine and that machine understands your real energy and those two things connect, well, you're already so much different from anything else in the space, right?

1:22:33Like the space is crowded because people believe that, oh, let's get a famous person and put the famous person name on a bottle and just put the bottle on the shelf and it's yourself. That's not true at all. Like, why did you make it? What's the story behind it? What do you care about? Do you really drink this? And if so, why? And how did you develop the liquid? What is your plan for a year, two, three, four, five? Like people really love a story. And if you have an authentic one, I find that people respond to it. So the years of operation and configuration as to what we want to do were the best parts of the business.

1:23:10Because after the liquid came out, it wasn't a shock to us of why we were happy and why we loved it. We did the work. We did the work. Yeah, question from the chat. Walk us through the actual product development process. I'm assuming trips to Mexico, a lot of tastings, iteration. But what did that look like? So there's a lot more that goes into this business than meets the eye for the consumers, right? So to your point earlier, the liquor business, the alcohol business, it's a very complex industry to navigate based on the three-tier system dating back to the years of prohibition. So there's certain criteria and ways you've got to navigate and ultimately to build success.

1:23:50Our perspective on it within consumer products and goods, and particularly within alcohol, where we saw the biggest opportunity over the last five years, is large corporations typically do not disrupt. They innovate. They innovate well with liquids. They innovate well with package. But generally, they're not disruptors. And that's not saying the alcohol industry alone. It's every large industry. So it takes independent entrepreneurial companies to be real disruptors. Like you guys were speaking to the guy from Grunz the other day. You guys were speaking to John from Happy Dad. These are independent companies that are bucking the trend.

1:24:26And our model has been, let's be that independent spirited business. Let's make those bold, calculated decisions in real time and be really fast and agile in terms of how we operate in the market day to day. But let's partner with the best large corporate in the business, being Proximo and Juan Domingo Beckman from the Beckley Corporation. And let's bring some real scale to the table. So that muscularity of the Proximo machine and the agility of us in the market every day leading on what consumers see, that's been a very successful partnership for us and it's helped us block that trend. And I also think just to add to that, right, like, you know, you're not dealing with rocket sciences, right?

1:25:11Literally, like people that are successful and people that have won, they've done it for a reason. So you're not trying to recreate the wheel or redesign the wheel. You're trying to better service the wheel. So sometimes the wheel, it falls into a space where everybody jumps on and the expectations are of norm. And they don't understand that you got to energize the wheel. You gotta go in with some new energy, which you'll find those people will respond to that. I think our energy... Yeah! I don't know what that was, but yeah! Okay? I don't know what that was, but yeah! Okay? Yeah! Is this guy real?

1:25:51Is this guy real? I don't know what that is. What's the name of me? What's that shirt? Yeah, you need you guys. We'll get you guys set up with a soundboard for some of your other meetings for when you're on Zoom. Brad just did something to me. I took an espresso in real time. For sure. Okay. So, yeah, Teresa on strategy, you have a massive platform, but you have to get the product to a place where people can buy it when you're promoting it. What was the thought between distribution, getting it in stores, and then starting to push the promotion funnel versus just telling everyone about it? And they're like, yeah, I'm excited, but where do I get it?

1:26:31Oh, it's only available in a few stores. Well, A, it's patience. And B, it's actually realizing the real work that goes with that. Like, yes, I have a large platform and a huge social media following. But that doesn't mean that as soon as I post something and say do it, that people respond. Yeah, you have to like be on the ground. You have to do the real work. So within distribution You gotta go and you gotta go talk and meet and shake the hands and build the relationships, right? The work that you're looking for is a response of what people feel the The reason for your your implementation in this space like when when the partners meet you and they say oh he's not here for fiction he's here for real this is not fake yeah we will support and we will back and we will suggest this to the new customer when they walk in try kevin hearts to kill it's really good because kevin came in here and kevin sat in front of us and kevin made us understand not only why we should taste it but why we should back and support it um it's no different from a new artist If a new artist is really hungry, you're showing up at every radio station, at every DJ outlet, and you got your CD or you got a hard drive because I want you to hear my sound.

1:27:49Listen to it. And you're going to get way more no's than you are going to get yes's. But the breakthrough yes when it goes on the radio waves makes the work so much worth it. In this space, the work of getting every restaurant, every brand, every chain, every wine and spirits, liquor store, independent chain, et cetera. Like, yeah, I win. So I expect to see the results of my work. I expect to see people responding because I know what I did to get it into a space of conversation. And I think for me, that energy is an energy that I'm not going to let go of. And my partners have responded to it tremendously.

1:28:32That's where we sit today. Where is the business today? How big is it? What are sales? What can you tell us about the shape of the business? The business today, Grand Cormino is another fastest growing celebrity tequila brand in the world. We had a taste. There we go. We grew last year by 100 % year on year. We've done$200 million in retail sales. 200 million? Hit that gong, John.

1:29:01Congratulations. Congratulations. Turn it to a DJ Calamidia. This is the matter of anything I've ever done. Yeah! I agree. Should, zooming out, should every celebrity launch a product? Should every influencer have a product? Absolutely not. What advice are you giving to other celebrities? Absolutely not. I would say that from a celebrity perspective, most celebrities should not create businesses that they want to own. The endorsement model is a good model for most celebrities. But for entertainers who truly have the understanding, the know-how, and the commitment to put in the work and prioritize said project over everything else outside of their day job, that's when it's compelling.

1:29:46And that was what was compelling in this partnership. Well, I don't even like the word celebrity when it's used and attached to me. Because it's underwhelming. Yes, it's underwhelming to what I really am. And I get it. I get what that is. I get the star, celebrity, et cetera. Not what we partner with each other. But as an entrepreneur, as a real business mind, as a real worker that's not afraid to do, build, et cetera, you're so much more. Right. Like the the the idea of a mogul or a concept of that is just a person that wants so much and is willing to do so much. And in doing so much, it means I'm not afraid to partner or align with people who have done.

1:30:33So in this space, slapping somebody's name on something and just thinking that it doesn't work. It doesn't work. You're you're you're in rare air of opportunity. And the celebrities that have had amazing success in the space of business brand portfolio, they do the work, right? Like, just throwing out names. You look at a Kim Kardashian. I don't think Kim gets the true credit that she deserves at all times of actually doing the work. People don't understand. Kim shows up. She doesn't just have the idea. She shows up. Like, the people know that they're going to see her on a daily. The office full of employees know that Kim walks through the halls.

1:31:17They know that her office is there and she's in meetings. She's on call. She does the work. So I myself am a do-the-work individual. And I think when you are and you are committed, there is no world of loss. You're always going to win because you're doing what everyone else refused to do. They don't have the patience. They don't have the strength and mental ability to stay true to something through the ups and downs and see it all the way through. It's not easy. It's a very, very hard space to operate in. And yes, we're in a maze and air right now. And I love it. Will it stay this way? Who knows?

1:31:59But no matter what, if you're committed to it, whether it's up, down, whatever, you're true to the process. And you know that ultimately sun is always going to be at the end of the tunnel. That's where we are. That was the most compelling part of this partnership, having a partner who understands who's willing to be on the phone every day, the good days and the bad, but ultimately understanding the business behind the brand. So, Kevin, how are you thinking about maybe not work-life balance, but work-work balance? You have multiple roles, multiple projects. if you're going into a movie, are you telling everyone, okay, I need to, you know, I need space, I need focus for a couple of weeks, or are you trying to have, okay, I'll do something in the morning and then something in the evening.

1:32:43What, what is your workflow like on a day-to-day basis? It's going to be pouring shots for the whole cast and the director. This is an example of why things need to, why things need to fit your lifestyle, right? If things fit your lifestyle and fit your day-to-day, you'll find that you're never forcing and truly fighting for time, right? Everything can be done correctly. I am a product of structure and operation. I have an amazing team around me. And within that, if I'm doing a movie, I'm doing a movie. But while doing a movie, well, how do I make my partners a part of said movie? Is there spaces for me to amplify partnerships or relationships?

1:33:23If I'm on tour, can I position or present certain relationships or partnerships that I have to be visible while I'm doing the things that I'm doing? Hey man, I'm golfing. What partners can I align or place in within what I'm doing on a regular? Hey, I got vacation time coming up, but when I do go on this vacation time, Man, it's relaxing, but I have certain relationships and partnerships that service the idea of relaxation and what it looks like and what it should feel like. As a partner, you're always thinking of how to service those that are aligned with you. And when you have a mind like that and you operate like that, it becomes a systematic thing.

1:34:06It's never a fight. So, yes, I am 365. 65, I am, you know, a sun up to sun down person with work. But because of my system, nobody gets left out. Wife, kids, partners, business, comedy, film, you know, company. Let's just say within company, employee, relationship. Like all of these things are embedded into an idea of my day to day and what I have to do. So it's never left behind. It's never skipped or overlooked. It's implemented and rightfully so. Yeah. Everyone's been tracking a million different changes in media and entertainment over the last decade. Throughout your career, what has been the biggest crucible moment?

1:34:58What has been the biggest trend change that you felt, okay, I need to adapt my strategy. I think everyone in my community needs to adapt our strategy. How have you processed the evolution of media over your career? I'll say getting older. Yeah. Right. I mean, I'm about to be 47 this summer. Overnight success. Witnessing. Witnessing a shift in marketing and a shift in entertainment. Right. This younger generation and how they're navigating and operating within social media, within storytelling. Yeah. We're then finding ways to present themselves to the masses. I mean, you know, the concept of a live streamer and a person that is literally talking to a screen all day and looking at a chat with comments, but finding a way to build revenue to where it's coming in droves.

1:35:57Right. Like that to me, it's exciting. It's exciting to see a shift. So you don't fight that. You find a way to be a part of it. You find a way to support it. So where I think I've had an amazing lift is in amplifying that younger generation, right? Like when I have a chance to sit beside some of these younger guys that are doing these amazing things, or it's dope for them to have stars like myself on their platforms or supporting them in that space. I don't need nothing or want anything in return. I just want to see people win. But when you're supporting the new, it just makes you aware. Not being aware is ridiculous.

1:36:38Fighting what is in real time a new space of success. You're seeing ad revenue, crazy spins from the biggest brands in the business. And you're seeing where they're now spending it. Television is changing. The on-demand feel and want has changed. How we watch movies and want movies have changed. A lot of entertainment still exists today, but it's bigger than ever because people still want to go out, but you realize they still want to be home. You've got to go and you've got to say, how do I basically fit into these pockets and how do I deliver in a manner to where it's real and it's never forced?

1:37:16Well, you do that with support first and elevation for them, and then things come back to you. Right now, it's all about me saying, I see you young guys, you young women. I love what you're doing. I want to see you win. How can I help you? And then in return, their audience gets to say Kevin is cool. But it's a them first, me second now. This is a bright example, Jordy, of you guys. We've been tracking what you guys have been doing for the last two years. It's incredible. And when the business outlets came up and turned to the list of targets, TBPN was on the top. We want to be in the story. We want to know what's new.

1:37:53We think it's bold and exciting what you're doing. Congrats on the deal with OpenAI. But I mean, you guys are just getting started. But us knowing you, us knowing that we want to be on that platform, that's what it's about. And big companies don't often think that way. But we're empowered to be able to make those decisions day to day to be here with you. It's a great point. Last question, guys. James, is there a competitive dynamic between some of your different partners? The chat is talking about your work with Post Malone and ASAP Rocky. I know all these guys are very competitive. is there any kind of dynamic internally who can build the biggest brand?

1:38:32I know you don't want second or third, Kevin. It's not a competition, but there is no shortcut to success, and hard work is required. It's looking like it's a competition. Whenever somebody says it's not a competition, you know it's a competition. I will tell you this. We should all look at what each other are doing, and you figure out ways to take small pieces of the recipe that's working. I think ASAP and Post have done a great job in building businesses and building brands, myself included. And when you see what's working for each other, you find ways to take pieces. Ultimately, I want to see everybody win.

1:39:17I would love to see us all win. I would love to see his company succeed and be everything that it should be and more. You would just hate for somebody to win more than you.

1:39:30I want everyone to win, just slightly less than me. I'm winning.

1:39:40I love it, guys. If I was a betting man, I'd be betting on you. I know your work ethic is going to be insane. I know while they're sleeping, you're going to be at every restaurant, every club, getting everybody on the program. So I'm excited to follow along. And thank you guys for sending. We will enjoy it this weekend. Yeah, the next time I'll be in the studio. Yeah, let's do it. I want to get all the effects in real time, man. Yeah, I think your energy is unbelievable, man. You guys deserve the hype. Here, scoot over a little bit there.

1:40:27Let's go. That's what I'm talking about. Thank you guys. Thank you, guys, man. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

1:40:38Out of control. Fantastic response for the soundboard. Really working overtime. I love the soundboard. Poor Maton from Factory. That's a tough act. to follow for sure, but he'll be joining us in about 10 minutes. We can go through. Well, speaking of entertainment, Variety has a post. Val Kilmer has been, is this a movie? Is this an actor? Val Kilmer is an actor who passed away recently. He was in Top Gun and in the new Top Gun as well, but that was his final movie. Very sad. Has been resurrected by AI to star in the new movie As Deep as a Grave. Here's a first look at the film's trailer. Kilmer's digital return has the support of his daughter, Mercedes, who previously told Variety, he always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.

1:41:27This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part. I'm curious, does this mean he was involved with it prior to his passing, or she's just saying? I mean, there's been a couple companies in Hollywood that have done facial captured, high res digital scans, trying to capture as much performance data. But of course, there's just the raw training data of every movie and every shot that was recorded while they were on set. And a lot of those, even the outtakes are captured and saved, even if they don't make it to the final movie, the final cut of the movie.

1:42:05So this has always been an option. And then you imagine with the advance of models you'll be able to train a really high high quality output even just on what's like out there in in the in the final cut you don't you might not need special capture or special special data but this is a very interesting very interesting time I imagine there will be a ton of pushback on this broadly. But if the audience opts in and the actor opts in, I imagine this will be written into a lot of wills and a lot of, you know, contracts and agreements. I imagine that all of Hollywood will be grappling with how they process this going forward.

1:42:52But if it makes for good entertainment, you know. Yeah, the reason that I think it will become extremely frequent is that just the financial incentive for the family. For sure. For better or worse. I'm sure a lot of people will be upset about that. Do we have our next guest in the waiting room already? Before we get Matan in, we've got to talk about Zach. Zach has this app share, Aura. It's a running-focused app. They now have a feature, from what I've been seeing, where people can basically go on a run. It's like a live stream of your run. So people can come in and like heckle you. They can cheer you on.

1:43:32You can come on with like video or it just has you on the map. So it's like tracking your pace, your mileage, all this stuff. It's very, very cool. We got to have Zach on to talk about it. This used to be such a hard feature to build. And it just, I mean, of course, there's services and APIs that allow for live streaming to be bolted on pretty quickly. but remarkable that Zach was able to roll this feature out with such a small team and so early in the journey for the app. So it seems fun. Feels a little hard to walk, to run with your camera there to show your face, but I guess certain runners will adapt if it's good content.

1:44:09Well, we have Matan from Factory. He is the co-founder and CEO. Matan, welcome. You dog. How you doing? You dog. You absolute dog. I'm doing well. What happened? I am doing well. Tell us the news. How are you guys doing? How you doing? How big is this market? Because... This is the most important market there is. It seems like it. It really seems like it. Break down the news for us first. What happened? Hit us with the news, and then we'll get into the details. Well, first of all, so I'm reporting live from, and let's play a quick word association game. I'm going to tell you where I'm calling in live from.

1:44:42You've got to give me a first word that comes to mind. coming in live from the Rosewood in Menlo Park. Oh, Andreessen Horowitz. Enterprise Software, come on, guys. This is the temple of selling enterprise software. It is, it is. I'm in here closing deals, but more importantly here to share with you guys about our latest fundraise. We raised$150 million from, there we go. We're the great folks at Coastal Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Blackstone, Insight, NEA, and some other great partners. And we're very, very excited to have their support. That's amazing. Talk about the last, I feel like it's at least three months, maybe a bit more since the last time you were on the show.

1:45:34Talk about how the space is evolving. I mean, there's just so much noise. Like every single day, you know, somebody's saying, you know, this company is over. This entire paradigm is dead. You guys clearly have just kept your head down and are making a lot of progress. But, yeah, walk us through kind of how the space is evolving, how your business is evolving. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess, first of all, I think, you know, there's obviously a lot of excitement in this space because there's just so much to be done in terms of software development. There are so many things that software developers don't enjoy doing, but they unfortunately have to be doing.

1:46:12And I think there was kind of an early phase of excitement where everyone was just, you know, thinking about all the possibilities and kind of investing kind of the resources, both from the financing side, but then also in the enterprise side in terms of making sure they stay up to date. But I think there was a bit of a lag where first, you know, they were like, hey, here are all the things we want to do. Let's go and tell our developers to actually do it. And there's kind of a lagging period where they didn't do it. And then in the last six months, really, everyone started adopting Agente. You see that in the revenue numbers of every model provider.

1:46:49And I think now there's a bit of a hangover where, you know, some people are realizing that they wanted their engineers to go and adopt things. And adopt they did. However, they might not be doing so in the most efficient manner. There are large enterprises that we work with that found that on a monthly basis, they spend on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers saying things like hello to Opus 4.6 fast or GPT 5.4 ultra high, which is probably not the best use of those tokens. And I think a tool like Factory, where we can be model agnostic and dynamically route them to the appropriate model for the appropriate task, that has been something that's been really getting a lot of enterprise excitement.

1:47:35Yeah, this token kind of token maxing trend meta, of course, was they love to spend money on AI. They had their internal leaderboard to see who could basically produce the most tokens. There had been some chatter that people had effectively just created loops to just like go to get to the top of the chart, even though I'm not sure it's an award worth winning. Do you think that like large corporates are already like, hey, this like do you think this is a period where it'll be like for the first half of this year? People are like, yeah, just try a bunch of stuff and then we'll see where we land.

1:48:17Or do you think there's already going to be more of a pullback? I know the Uber CTO had went on the record and was talking about like, hey, we basically spent our whole inference budget in in in, you know, the first quarter. And we got to figure out what our plan is on a go forward basis. Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing is that every company kind of has to go through these phases. We're like, phase zero is reluctance to adopt. Because, you know, developers have their workflows that they've had for the last 20 years. They might not want to change it. And phase one is kind of throw the kitchen sink, just use as much AI as possible.

1:48:54Whatever you do, just change your workflows. And then I think a lot of people, and maybe more of the frontier companies like Uber, who's always kind of very ahead of the curve as it relates to these things, They're now getting into the phase two, which is meta, obviously, is an example as well. Okay, great. People are now adopting. We're proving that they can change their behavior and use these tools. Now we need to make sure we're actually doing it efficiently and effectively. And I think it's fine as a natural process. Yes, you'll overspend in that phase one, but the point of that is to get to the phase two where then you're actually really efficient on a per-token basis, moving the needle for the business, delivering software faster.

1:49:31What's going on international? We saw you in SF, I believe, the day of the Super Bowl, and you talked about going international. How are companies and developers abroad thinking about CodeGen and the category? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing that's really important is that, you know, people build software around the world. Even though the best software is probably based in the U.S., there's still some fantastic software out there. And so I think, you know, the way we build factory in particular is amenable to places like Europe or Asia or Australia because they have different rules about where the data needs to live, where the models need to live.

1:50:12And factory is one of the only solutions that is fully on-prem, fully modular. So my co-founder, Eno, likes to say you could deploy factory on a nuclear submarine as long as you have GPUs down there. And in places that tend to have a lot of regulation, like Europe, that actually works quite well. And so with some of this funding, We're opening up an office in London and expanding our house for them. There we go. Can you talk about some of the projects that you're seeing speed up on the back of AI agents? Because there's this weird dichotomy where we see huge token budgets, huge AI spend. And then you dig in and you see people tell stories about building a lot of internal tools, a lot of new dashboards, automating workflows, being more efficient.

1:51:04But people, it feels like they haven't really felt the external facing. I don't know. It just feels like if you like meta is using a bunch of AI, if you open Instagram, it's sort of the same app. It's not like, oh, wow, they have like an entirely different paradigm and it feels like an entirely new app. And maybe that's just because that particular platform is mature. but where is like in terms of internal tooling, customer facing software, entirely new ideas, automations, like where are you seeing the most adoption, most impact? So I love the framing of that because I think there's kind of two separate types of usage that we see.

1:51:44There's one that's like the fun and cool stuff of like, let me build all these new apps from scratch, which probably doesn't move the needle for the business. And then there are the less sexy things, but actually save developers a ton of time. And that's where we're seeing kind of under the hood a lot of the ROI coming from. And I think generally the name of the game there is, you know, developers are really smart. They spend years of their lives becoming experts and they get paid a lot of money. They should not be spending their time on low leverage things like documentation or testing or, you know, spend two years doing legacy code migrations.

1:52:19So generally the orgs that we see get the most ROI are the ones who basically play whack-a-mole with what is the lowest leverage thing that our developers are doing right now? Great, let's use droids to automate it. Or some language that's really emerging is, let's build a software factory that goes and automates these low leverage tasks. And I really think we take a lot of inspiration. And it is even where our name comes from, is what Elon and Tesla did to the physical factories. Like if you go to Tesla factories, They're mostly like, you know, machine arms going and doing things. And there's no reason that software can't be very similar.

1:52:55Like, obviously, you still need humans involved. But those humans tend to play a role of more designing that software factory, figuring out what is the most efficient way to configure that factory so that you can move the needle on your business, you know, produce more output. How important is wide diffusion of models? We've been following the latest model from Anthropic Mythos. That's only available to a few companies. Is the strategy to focus on being cross-platform or get access to that model earlier and then act as a diffusion layer for that? How are you thinking about the future where more advanced models are sort of gated?

1:53:37Yeah, I think for us the biggest thing is enterprises need to be model agnostic. It is a non-negotiable that they cannot standardize on just one provider for a number of reasons. One might be if that API endpoint goes down, which some models these days haven't been the most reliable. And if you're a highly regulated industry and you get your developers to become agent native and start delegating tasks to these agents, and that endpoint is down, what are you going to do? It's non-negotiable. And so being model agnostic for every serious enterprise is kind of table stakes. And for us, what we can do is make sure that we get those models day zero, that they're released just so that they can stay at the frontier.

1:54:25Same with the open models. Because also different models end up being good at different tasks. They're better at different languages, perhaps. And making sure that we kind of give the optionality to the enterprises to adjust accordingly is pretty important. How are you thinking about the forward deployed model? Is that more important now? I know that you have a very small team. It's, what, 70 employees, probably growing very fast. But how much about enterprise adoption is actually spending time on site with the customer, answering questions, integrating deeply into these large enterprises? Yeah.

1:55:03The way we think about the deployed engineering is they should never be doing the same thing more than once. because with the tool that we've built, if they've learned, hey, here's something that enterprises care about, we should be able to build that into the product very quickly. Our core competency is not providing services, but it's building product. And we treat our deploy team kind of as the tip of the spear where they're figuring out live, shoulder-to-shoulder with the enterprise engineers, what are the things that, if we put into our product, would allow them to become agent-native faster.

1:55:37There's some news from Cursor today that they're teaming up with XAI to potentially train the next version of Composer. Are you thinking about training your own model at some point? Is that interesting to you? I think it's interesting at some point. I think it doesn't make sense right now because I don't think right now enterprises need another open model that you fine-tune. Sure. I think there's sufficiently good ones out there, and I think most of the alpha is actually on the research side as it relates to the agent itself. So, for example, Droid, which is our agent, ends up, it's model agnostic, but it also outperforms all of the agents that are coming out of the model labs.

1:56:22And so as an agent lab, most of the alpha on every incremental hour of our time is from the agent itself. And then we'll probably get to a point, you know, where eventually maybe there's sufficient alpha in RLing a model for ourselves. But right now, every incremental hour on the agent ends up being very, very high ROI. Jordi, anything else? No. Great update. Congratulations. Great progress. Congrats to the team. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for hopping on. Goodbye. And up next, we have Akhil from Ulysses. He's the co-founder and CEO. How are you doing? Hey, fellas. Good to be here. Look at that.

1:57:05Good to have you. Look at that beautiful drone. Massive day today. Kick us off with the announcement. What happened today? Well, you know, I've got, you know, my friend, my Mako here, one of our pet robotic sharks, and we're going to be building a hell of a lot more of them. We've just announced our Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz, American Dynamism Fund at$38 million.

1:57:33Congratulations. Very, very, very, very, very cool. And, yeah, why don't you give, yeah, what have the last, like, six months been like? Will's been on the show before this is your first time, but kind of walk us through what you guys have been focused on, what the opportunities are, and what the future looks like. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, as you guys might already know, you know, we're building autonomous maritime robotics to solve the most critical challenges in what is arguably the most critical domain on the planet. You know, we're talking commercial applications ranging from just monitoring and maintaining infrastructure for offshore energy, oil and gas, renewables, also telecoms, you know, maintaining and securing the critical communications infrastructure, also shipping terminals, ports, that kind of thing as well.

1:58:30And then as we recently started doing a lot of work in the defense space as well, taking our commercially available and deployed robots like this Mako behind me that's been on probably a dozen missions for various commercial customers till date and taking the exact same technology and helping to fill capability gaps for allied forces. You look at shipbuilding where China is ahead of the U.S. by 200 times or something like that. Unmanned underwater vehicles, the gap isn't that big. It's the gap that can be easily closed. We're the ones closing it. And it's the underwater domain where most of the work happens.

1:59:13It's where all the infrastructure is. It's where all of the communications is. And it's a place where we have a chance to deliver an asymmetric advantage. And over the last six months, we've been hard at work taking our commercial tech and bringing it in front of Allied forces to get it in the water with them. So talk about the commercial applications. If I have a, I don't know, an oil rig and I want to inspect and make sure that the barnacles aren't getting out of control or something, I drop this in the water. Am I piloting it remotely? Does it have an autonomous sort of path that it can swim around on or drive around on and collect data, imagery?

1:59:57What are the sensors stack? How am I actually getting value from this on day one? So that's the beauty of the product. It's modular, which means that you can put, you know, it's made up of all these sections. You can change the thruster configuration. You can put different sensors on. You can take other sensors off. So it depends on what you want. Are you trying to do a magnetic analysis of your structure? We have a magnetometer payload. Are you trying to just see what's there? We've got cameras like we have right here. Are you trying to see through really dark and murky water, really wide areas?

2:00:32Then we have a variety of acoustic mapping, sonar payloads, and things like that. And so then in terms of, can it work autonomously? Can your remote control it? Well, you can do both. That's the fun of it. You could have it, just drop it in the water with a pre-programmed path and be like, hey, go and search this wide area or scan all these pylons supporting my rig. Come back, pull the data off and have a look and then you might see something interesting. You might see something, I want to take a closer look. But then you can connect a cable, live stream the data and drive it down yourself and then you can look at it and we support robotic payloads as well.

2:01:10So then you can start interacting with it. You might want to scrape something off. You might want to cut something that's entangled. You might want to place something. We have payloads that do all of that. Yeah. How are you thinking about range and battery life and just all the different trade-offs that go into actually getting something that can have an impact for a meaningful amount of time or across a meaningful amount of space? It doesn't look like the biggest ship. How far can it go? How deep can it go? What are the options here? Yeah, this is one of our more compact vehicles. This one's about 60, 65 inches in length, but we can go in excess of 140 inches because you can stack batteries.

2:01:59This one here, in this configuration, it's not the most hydrodynamic configuration, which means it's not the most efficient. So it's only going to go maybe 20 nautical miles with one battery box. but if you wanted to go 60 nautical miles with three battery boxes on or if you take the thruster pods off and you just have this big tube, that's the most efficient. And then you can actually go, you know, four battery boxes in length because you take the pods out, that gives you space for another battery box. Then you can go up to 250 nautical miles. This is going slower but farther. That makes sense.

2:02:34Yeah, and it's also a more efficient shape. Yep, more efficient. I saw that there's two cameras on the front. Is that for stereoscopic vision, or is one of them telephoto, one of them wide angle? Why two lenses on the front? In this case, it doesn't really show up, but they are actually two separate lenses, two different sensors as well, just different use cases. But they're modules. You can see this port is actually blank here, but we actually make our own cameras as well, and you can plug them in with different lenses. You can have a stereo configuration. You know, we've actually got ones on top here as well.

2:03:10Because this one, you know, the idea is you can have it like sort of like underneath structures and you can be looking up and doing inspection above. So, yeah, again, very flexible. How vertically integrated are you? This feels like with defense applications, it's really important to be onshore. But I would imagine trying to take advantage of as much of the supply chain as you can. What's been the build versus buy strategy? Well, we found, you know, coming into this, there are a lot of things we honestly wanted to buy and we looked into buying, but we found the idiot index in maritime is insane.

2:03:46Oh, yeah. What is the idiot index again? Can you break that metric down? Yeah, that's, you know, the metric that Musk came up with where, you know, what's the ratio of the cost of the raw materials in a park? That's right. Versus what you're actually paying for it. Yep. And, you know, there's been, like, you know, sensors and, you know, motors and other parts that we, like, we get in, we take them apart. We're like, why are we paying$150 ,000 for this thing? It's got, like, a microcontroller in here worth$10, some, you know, networking and power switches. And, you know, it's not even like, okay, this is really new, really advanced technology, and they need to amortize the development costs.

2:04:26It's like, we're buying a sensor that's 20 years old. Why are we still paying this much for it? You know, and the thing is, you know, the tech and the knowledge and the fundamentals have been publicly available for a long, long time for a lot of the stuff that we're bringing in-house. So, you know, for us, it's like, if you look at the maritime industry, it's been the same for centuries. You want to do something big and important, you get a big ship, lots of expensive equipment, and you're really CapEx and OPEX heavy, right? But that's not the case anymore in space, in the air, on land. you know, we want to bring that moment to the ocean as well.

2:05:04And what that's necessitated is a ton of vertical integration. All the metal that you see on this, all our pressure vessels, they're machined in the machines just over there. Wow. All the internal brackets and mounts, everything also machined on the same machine. The plastic fairings and propellers and everything 3D printed on the 3D printers over there. All the internal printed circuit boards with all the electronics. We don't make the boards ourselves yet, but we do have the ability to actually assemble the boards. You know, we get the raw components in, place them on the boards, and we've got an automated line doing that.

2:05:41And that's massively brought our costs down, made it much easier for us to have a product that's fundamentally very easy to scale, but also massively, like saved us tons of money in terms of development time and iteration speed. There's things we've done that we did in three days that before we brought machining and has probably would have taken us three months. Well, that's very exciting. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats to the whole team. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me on. Goodbye. Our next guest is Charlie Cheever, the co-founder of Expo.

2:06:16Previously, he co-founded Quora, where he served as CTO and helped scale the platform to millions of users. How are you doing? Hey, I'm great. How are you guys? I'm good. Welcome to the show. I think most people are familiar with your background, but would love to get the introduction on Expo and go through the news today. Yeah, we just raised$45 million Series B from Georgian.

2:06:47And yeah, what's the shape of the company now? What's the plan? Yeah, we're about 62 people right now and we're all over the world. We've got great people everywhere. And the plan is just that we've got a ton of stuff to do. And this will just let us do it. What's basically happened over the last year or so is that Expos sort of become the best way to make apps with AI. And so we've just gotten really popular. And so that's meant that there's just a ton of stuff to do. Yeah. Um, and so we're, we're working on it. Um, yeah, I mean, coding models are clearly aware of react native and objective C and swift to some degree, but there's always been a disconnect between X code or, you know, actually delivering the product.

2:07:39And it feels like when you click on some vibe coded app, it's almost always in the web. Uh, and you know, this, it feels like there's going to be a boom. We're already seeing some stats on the App Store, but walk me through what it takes to actually deliver value in app creation that's differentiated. Yeah. So our basic philosophy for the last couple of years or since the beginning has been that we want to take everything that's good about web development and bring that to mobile. So that it just is easy and everything that's just easy and fast about building and distributing on the web, we bring that to mobile.

2:08:16And so a year and a half ago, I would have said, what's great about Expo is that you can take your React web developer team and you can point them at mobile and they can build a great mobile app that feels really, really good. And today, the pitch now becomes like, these AI models are so well trained on React and JavaScript, TypeScript, et cetera, that they're really, really good at this for this. But the other really important thing there is Expo isn't just a way to build mobile apps with JavaScript. like we kind of see saw that attempted in the past and it just didn't work out that well because people would use you know the HTML5 is a content delivery mechanism and it just wouldn't feel right it's like phone gap so one of the popular ones yeah stuff like that and so what's different here is just that like Expo is really a way to make you know apps with TypeScript and react native and stuff like that but also let you drop down really easily to Swift and Kotlin and stuff like that so wherever you need to you can go make that polish Sort of in the same way that a developer making server-side software might write a code base in a mix of Python and Rust or something like that, you can move in between them seamlessly.

2:09:22And that's a huge deal and means that people who are making Apps with Expo are making stuff that's top tier, top of the App Store charts, that kind of stuff, because you can hit that quality bar that people expect on mobile these days. uh what's your view on how like uh maybe i won't ask you that but i would say like what do you think apple how do you think apple should be approaching explosion of of new software applications like they they are i i there's been so much frustration with them they've been under pressure because of you know billing and payment policies uh but they certainly specifically just looking at like if you just if you 10x or 100x or maybe someday a thousand x the amount of software, that is a real challenge for them.

2:10:10And so they're not going to get everything perfect. But I'm curious, what advice you'd give them? I think one place where I think they've done a nice job is on the Macintosh, or Mac I guess I call it these days, where if you want to get software on the Mac, you can go to the App Store on the Mac, or you can get it from the web. A lot of places, like if I install Slack or Notion, I typically go to their website and download an installer and it works. and they've done a really nice job of tightening up the security model around the kernel and the operating system and things like that. And there's not really any significant security problems I'm aware of on the Mac.

2:10:42And I think that should be a really good model. And also, on the developer side, I don't know of a lot of developers who are super frustrated with distributing software on the Mac either. So I think from my perspective, I feel like they've actually figured out a pretty good model and they just should apply that to iOS.

2:11:02And it's true. I was reading an article the other day that I think App Store submissions are up sort of 84 % this quarter. And obviously, a lot of that is new Expo apps. A lot of those are vibe-coded. There's a lot of new app-building tools out there. A lot of those are built with Expo, most of them. And so, yeah, a lot of people are frustrated that they're getting rejected for strange reasons or they don't know what's going on or why. But I think overall this will get sorted out. I mean, it's too possible and there's too much demand for building new software and building customized software and building software with bigger surface areas.

2:11:39It's clearly going to happen. I don't know. I feel like when Uber launched, there was a bunch of regulatory things and policy things to find out. But it was just such a good idea and just needed to happen. And it's still like eventually the dam kind of, I don't know if it bursts, but it like things got sorted out and people take upers now. And I think people will be able to make software and distribute it in the future. Yeah. What percentage of your growth do you think is like agent led as in, you know, various coding agents effectively choosing Expo or helping guide the team or entrepreneur to using the product?

2:12:20I think it's still word of mouth. When people make a decision big enough to sort of pick your stack that you're going to build your mobile app on, that you're probably going to be stuck with for a bunch of years. And for a lot of companies, it decides their business. They're not going to use one thing to decide that. So I think that it's a combination of word of mouth, which is the strongest thing. The story that we hear over and over again is sort of like, oh, our company needed to build a new mobile app because we had this older thing that just wasn't cutting it anymore. Someone on our team came in on a Monday morning with a prototype that already had six screens built and felt really great.

2:12:54And the CEO was really impressed. And so we just kept going with that. But a lot of times that person found out about it because an AI told them about Expo. Or they just asked an AI, hey, how can I build a mobile app prototype really quickly? And it directs them to it. Or they also find out about YouTube is a huge referrer for us. There's a lot of great content out there. Yeah. Yeah. Is the story about Facebook writing a compiler from PHP to C++ apocryphal, or is that roughly correct? I believe that's correct. This guy, Hi-Peng Zhao, made something called the HPHP compiler. And they're actually kind of doing something.

2:13:32One thing that's really relevant to Expo is for React Native, they built this custom JavaScript virtual machine called Hermes. and they're actually working on something called Static Hermes, which will come ahead of time, compile TypeScript and JavaScript to native code. And so you'll be able to take any React Native app, assuming this project completes, which it hasn't yet, but hopefully will soon, you'll be able to take any part of your JavaScript-driven app and convert it into native code seamlessly and have that, if you want to speed up that part at the cost of a more brittle, bigger binary, you'll be able to choose that.

2:14:07Yeah, that's exactly where I was going with it. We're moving up these levels of abstraction. You say that you think people will be able to build apps and develop software in the future. Do you have a view on sort of like real-time UI instantiating things at runtime and whether or not Apple embraces that? It feels like that's something that could be coming with artifacts that are generated on the fly based on a query. Doesn't make sense for every app, but does that seem like something that might happen in the future? Yeah, I mean, basically every big app that you know does something like this. Even if you just think about something that you think of as kind of basic, like Yelp.

2:14:50At first, it's like, oh, this is a really structured, every restaurant page looks the same. But then they start to add more features, and there's like, oh, well, this restaurant wants to post its hours in this way, or there's a chain here, so we need to link to other locations. And they start to make some sort of JSON format that describes the complexity of the UI. And then they keep extending it and extending it and extending it. And so there's an old saying that every sufficiently complicated C++ program contains a poorly implemented, half-baked version of Lisp in it or something like that. And I think every mobile app that gets sufficiently big basically ends up with some sort of custom dynamic on-the-fly rendering system as their content becomes richer and richer.

2:15:31and I think like what's nice about using JavaScript and React and React Native it's like it's a fully featured like you know real programming language takes care of all the problems like make sure things are you know correctly updated etc etc and like you you why not use the real thing once you're going in that direction. Yeah what does it take to get a job with you these days if you're a software engineer there's a lot of people that are stopping they're not studying computer science anymore there's a bit of a reckoning there's a question about where young people should go how do you counsel someone who's uh in college right now and interested in yeah i personally there's three things that i look for yeah i would say like taste is probably the most important thing i mean like i've said this for years but now with like ai this becomes even more important we're just like we still need somebody to say like this is good and like this is what we should be doing and what you're actually trying to build.

2:16:31And that's really hard to replace. It's rare to have someone who's really, really good to taste. And so someone who just has good judgment, that's incredibly important. Then the second thing is we call it high APM. APM is a term from real-time strategy video games, where it's basically like, if you've played StarCraft back in the day or something like that, part of it is a strategy game, but part of it is just if you just do more stuff faster than other people, you're going to beat them. And so we look for people to just do a bunch of stuff really quickly, but with a precision that you're not just doing totally random stuff, but you're doing effective stuff.

2:17:11And then the third thing we talk about is just high agency, where you can see right now that writing code has become not a big problem for a lot of companies, but shipping good software is still a big problem for a lot of companies. And that's because the problem of actually making stuff and getting over the finish line out the door and to your users and properly messaged and all these other things and supported and iterated on to match what your customers actually need, etc., etc., etc., those are all pretty hard. And a lot of times they involve doing annoying stuff or solving problems nobody ever wrote a manual on how to solve before.

2:17:48And just so people are just like, oh, I'm going to get this done and I'm just going to figure it out. And I'm just going to run through walls to figure that out. That's always really important, I think. Whether it be a coding engineering context or any other role at the company, I think that's super important. Yeah. It's great. I like it a lot. Jordy, anything else? No, this was great. Yeah. Thank you so much. And congratulations on the round and the progress. Very excited. Have a great day. Thanks. Great to meet you, Charlie. We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is Victor from Slash. I take it back.

2:18:25I did have one more question, but it's too late. The question was going to be around payments. Oh, yeah. Like, would they, this feels like something they would build in? Yeah. Helping you bring your product to the App Store. Yeah. App Store now has more flexibility around payments. But I'll save that one. For the next time. For the next appearance. Well, let's bring in Victor from Slash. He's the co-founder and CEO. Victor, how are you doing? What's going on? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Long time watcher of the show. First time being here. I know. Long, long overdue. Long overdue.

2:18:53You guys have been probably 100x'd since we started the show. Yeah. So better late than ever. But for those who already know, introduce yourself and the company first, and then we'll get into questions. Of course. I'm the founder and CEO of Slash. Slash is one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing business banking platforms in America. over 5 ,000 businesses spend nearly$10 billion a year on our corporate cards. And the reason all these business owners are coming to Slash is quite simple. We live in an age where you can talk to machines, where cars can drive themselves, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs in America are still banking with an institution that has an interface that was last updated in the year 2003.

2:19:34So core to the Slash thesis is this idea that your bank can do so much more for you than just let you hold and send your money. It can be the place where you invoice your customers, where you reimburse your employees for out-of-pocket expenses, where you figure out how to just run a much more efficient operation. And we have ambitions to be this generation's JP Morgan, and we're going to do it by building the most powerful platform imaginable. And, John, I'm not sure you remember, but we met one time. Oh, really? At a Teal Falls, Shepard Street. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Awesome. Like a round number or somewhere like that.

2:20:01Very cool. So, yeah, what is the go-to-market strategy? Obviously, it's a crowded space. Do you want to go bottoms up, top down, startups, enterprises, somewhere in between SMBs, Silicon Valley Darlings, or Main Street Everyday companies? Totally. I would say a very underappreciated fact is that fintech is very underpenetrated in the U.S. The vast majority of businesses in the U.S. still bank and spend with a legacy financial institution. Less than 5 % of American businesses work with a fintech company like Slash or others. And so there's a lot of market up for grabs. The crux of a slash thesis is that business owners deserve banking products hyper-tailored to the needs of their specific industries.

2:20:46So I would say we work with companies that have a very small amount of employees. We work with very large companies, but usually it's very sector-focused. So we figure out how do we deliver a ton of value for a business in one segment, and we really tune out the rest of the markets. And in terms of actually getting those customers on the platform, is it some sort of magical demo that is AI enhanced that wows them? Or is it, you know, just, just gumshoe getting to know folks and reassuring them that this will be, you know, just a reliable banking platform for them? Yeah. I mean, banking is a very relationships driven industry, all else being equal.

2:21:25People prefer to bank and spend with an institution that they have a great relationship with. And so the crux of our go-to-market is depends on building amazing referral flywheels. So part of this vertical-by-vertical strategy exists because we have a phenomenal product that works on a vertical-by-vertical basis, but also because once we penetrate and acquire a few customers in one particular sector, willingness to refer is quite high because we deliver very strongly on customer support and just going above and beyond. Yeah. How are you thinking about integrating AI tools, AI agents, AI chief of staff, anything that can help a business owner understand their spend, understand their business, actually manage their finances better?

2:22:13Absolutely. The future of software, generally speaking, is moving away from click and drag UI and towards just textual interfaces, natural language. right now to today we actually announced our our ai agent it's called twin and it allows you to take every single action you can take from within the slash dashboard but in natural language so that's where everything's going that's where all software is going and we decided to practically take that step today that's number one and then that's the most gen z name for an agent ever twin love it that's my twin that's my twin it's my twin it's an underutilized term it's super underutilized Yeah.

2:22:49And the really cool thing is it can buy things on your behalf because we're the issuer of the card you use to place all your expenses. Your employees can actually go out and tell, hey, twin, make this DoorDash order for me. Place this order on Instacart. And I think that's a super, super powerful thing, an agent that can actually go out and make purchases on the internet on your behalf. You just raised a bunch of money. What is VC sentiment around fintech right now? I know you guys have stablecoin functionality. I'm sure that that was interesting. And at this scale, like you have a bunch of real, really, really positive metrics that you can lean on.

2:23:28But I'm curious what overall sentiment was from the investor base. I think there were two things that investors found quite compelling about Slash. The first is that we're a very revenue efficient company that our business approaching 300 million dollars in annual revenue. We have a team of just around 70 people. So our business does over$4 million in revenue per employee. And the reason, thank you, we've been able to do that is because so many of these processes that legacy banks and the fintechs that came before us throw a lot of headcount at, processing disputes, parsing documents when somebody applies for an application, submitting a SAR filing to regulators, we've agents automated away.

2:24:10So Slash's leanness and this differentiation of we're building this back-end AI operating system was super attractive to investors. And then the other thing that's super interesting to investors is we're living in a super interesting time in fintech history where for the first time ever, an American fintech company can serve businesses all over the world. It used to be the case that if you were a fintech company and you wanted to expand internationally, you had to get licensed on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis. but now stable coins are this enabling force that allows you to deliver usd banking products to businesses all over the world so a lot of this funding is going to go towards making slash this global product and bringing the caliber of product we've given to to american entrepreneurs but to business owners all over the world as well amazing uh well congrats on all the progress and yeah great to finally meet great to have you on the show yeah super impressive we'll talk to you soon cheers victor have a good rest of your day powerful nominative determinism Victor, yes, he will be the victor.

2:25:07I like that. Well, our next guest is Theodore Marcoux from Cognition. He's the head of product growth. Theodore, how are you doing? Hey, guys. How's it going? It's good. Good to see you. It's great. Obviously, everyone here on the show is familiar with Cognition, the makers of Devin. But take us through sort of how you're positioning the company, the updates, and any big announcements we should be aware of. Of course, yeah. Thank you again for having me. Of course. This is a very exciting day. So yesterday we had a huge moment for the company that I think a lot of us are very excited about. We had the biggest launch since the acquisition of Windsurf last July.

2:25:48This is something that the team has been looking forward to a lot. We launched Windsurf 2.0, which did two big things. It brought Devon to Windsurf. So finally, the world's software engineering agent is available in Windsurf. And we have now an agent command center. So our sort of vision for the future of software engineering, which is managing a team of agents, both remote and local, that works sort of alongside. You have an army at your back. Windsurf 2.0 makes that easier than ever. Got it. So what goes into an agent command center to make it effective? We were talking about Gastown and having different agents for different tasks.

2:26:34I think the buzzword is like orchestrators. There's a various amount of open source projects. And sort of the idea of orchestration is percolating in the AI industry. How do you think about educating customers and enterprises about why they should be using an interface to manage agents instead of just having a bunch of different terminals open? Yeah. So first of all, this is something that I think, frankly, arose as a need internally at Cognition. What we're seeing is some of the best engineers here are, and we think this is sort of where the future is going, the best engineers are using local agents.

2:27:14Yeah. And they are planning their tasks. They're going very deep into the code base, architecting systems, coming up with a plan. And then they're handing those off to cloud agents. And when we launched Cognition, Scott and Walden and Steven and a few other folks had this sort of, they saw into the future and they saw that cloud agents were going to be the future. But we also saw that engineers are sort of, you know, around. And they are working very closely with their code, and they want to make this sort of like golden age of engineering where, like, you know, you can sort of, like, go very deep into what you're excited about and then hand out off to cloud agents.

2:27:55So with WinSurf 2.0, the bottom line is that, and what we're telling a lot of our customers with the command center, is that you get to have this overview of your agents so that your limits on your attentions are no longer there. Because as you're working with dozens of agents at a time and you switch contexts, it gets really hard. So we actually were very intentional and we built this Kanban view. Sort of anyone that's familiar with project management has seen a Kanban view before, where you can see all your agents working on different projects at a time. And then you can sort of like switch in between them and quickly check on them and then spawn or create new sessions when you need to.

2:28:37And then those sessions are actually grouped into spaces, which is sort of this way that we built to make it easier for agents to share context and also share sort of states together. So from our perspective, what goes into a great command center is just making it very easy for a single engineer to work with a team of agents and have sort of like this army at their back. For big enterprises, they have so much different development work to do. What is the most low-hanging fruit? Like if you're talking to a customer who wants to get spun up with Winsurf and Cognition and Devon. Are you trying to understand their backlog, the hairiest tasks, the most miserable?

2:29:28Are you trying to get them excited about greenfield projects and new dashboards and automated workflows? Are you trying to get in the hands of their best engineers, their youngest engineers? What is the greatest foothold for you right now? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that is something that has been evolving ever since the beginning of Cognition. I think early on with Devin, what we found was that we would go in and talk about all these sort of very specific use cases that we'd find inside companies, whether it's migrations, whether it's building internal tooling, whether it's these sort of like big backlog projects that they've been wanting to work on.

2:30:06I think more recently, as models have been getting better and as our agent harness has been getting better and better, what we're finding is that there's a lot of, frankly, everyone can use a software engineering agent. And the universe of possibilities has expanded greatly. and I was talking about how you can start working locally and there's this sort of like gold. The way I think about it is there's this golden age of engineering where the best engineers in the world can do more and they can offload their tasks. And not just the best engineers, frankly, everyone can offload the tasks that they don't want to spend as much time on to agents in the cloud that can sort of like handle them sort of very quickly or over many minutes or long hours.

2:30:52And then they can sort of like stay in control and work on the things that they care most about and the hardest problems that are most exciting to them. So Scott always uses this idea of you're going from being a bricklayer to an architect. And I think what we're seeing a lot of our customers is that entire teams and individuals on those teams are moving from being bricklayers or sort of like writers to architects or directors where they're sort of like managing an orchestra of agents. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Jordi was asking this question earlier about just model agnosticism, how valuable, like do you see demand from customers and companies for wanting to switch between model providers, use open source for things?

2:31:40Like how much is using the right tool for the job, understanding the parade of frontier and not, you know, blowing up your budget in one month if you're token maxing? Yeah, that's something that comes up all the time. And as you know, Cognition has been model agnostic from day zero. We've always worked with the best models and all of the models that are available, evaluated them internally, figured out how to make the best agent harness for Devon, how to make the best sort of agent harness for WindSurf as well. And what we're seeing from our customers is that there's a lot of demand from trying out different models for different tasks.

2:32:20We're constantly working with them, actually, to make sure that we can sort of advise them on what are the things that... Models have this sort of jagged line of intelligence. Some of them are really good at specific things. Others are less good at those things. For example, Opus 4.7 came out today, and congratulations to Anthropic on a great model launch. That model is very good at deep investigations. So we're sort of trying to look at how can we use that in our sort of, So for example, Devon review workflows where Devon can go in and look at a PR and try to figure out all the bugs and all the issues that might be associated with it.

2:32:59Yeah, that makes sense. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. Great to meet you and give our best to the team. Yeah, we'll talk soon. Thank you, guys. Have a good rest of your day. There's a ton of breaking news. The big one is Netflix. Reed Hastings. Reed Hastings is stepping down. the board of Netflix and the stock is down tremendously. And, uh, but this is good. He's not stepping off the board. He's stepping off the board in June. He announced that he's stepping off the board, but yes, I mean, it's, uh, no, but, but, but again, it's good because, um, it's good for Reed specifically because it shows that people have, uh, confidence.

2:33:40Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. And, um, and, and, And I'm sure that I would expect Netflix to make a quick recovery. Yeah, it's up 12%, 13 % in the last month, down 8.5 % overnight after hours. But we'll see where the stock settles tomorrow after the market processes this. The alternative is a nightmare for Reed because if he announced this and the stop popped 20%, he was handicapping the company. Yeah. And I mean, the flip side is that Ted Sarandos, it seems like he put on a masterclass over the last six months with the Paramount negotiations, not getting over his skis. The shareholders wound up really liking how that all penciled out.

2:34:27And so it seems like the company's in good hands and all of the different strengths that Netflix has continue to show across advertising and subscriptions. and while they've kept their, the big headline with Netflix is that they've kept their content budget essentially flat or slightly growing while they've grown subscriptions and revenue and top line very precipitously and very consistently, even at a time where they haven't needed to invest exponentially more money in content. Obviously, they spend a fortune on it, but it's not growing as fast as their revenue is growing, so their profits are growing, which is good news.

2:35:08Hastings' departure marks the end of an era for Netflix, which under his leadership transformed from a DVD by mail business to a juggernaut in subscription video streaming and disrupted Hollywood. He said, my real contribution at Netflix wasn't a single decision, Hastings said in a statement that was in a company letter to shareholders. It was a focus on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve, and building a company that could be both beloved by members and wildly successful for generations to come. Well, we wish him the best on his next chapter, whatever he winds up doing.

2:35:44What an absolute run. Well, Jordy, is there anything else we should talk about? TSMC, of course, has earnings. We can cover those later. The chipmaker TSMC is more bullish than ever on AI despite the Iran war. So some good news there and lots more stories to talk about, but we will be back with you on Monday at 11 a.m. It's been an honor and a privilege to be with you here today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye. Throwing flashbang. Throwing flashbang. Love you. Goodbye.