Jensen vs NYT, New Model Reactions, "You Can See Everything" Trailer, Saudi EVs | Cristiano Amon, Talia Goldberg, John & Louis Antonelli, Max Levchin, Sam Ross

27:47We are one week out from the Roadster reveal. Yeah. And I'm quite excited. Did you listen to the end of the show when you bounced? We went deep on the Roadster. We got a scoop. We got a scoop from our guest who was next to a Tesla employee on a plane and was like pulling facts about him just to go leak it on TVPN. Yeah. Crazy. No, no. I mean, I don't know how real this was because the guy could have been messing with them. I don't know. It's all rumor mill stuff. But the guy was basically like, yeah, I was next to a Tesla employee. And he was saying that the jets are not to make it fly. It's actually for downforce.

28:20It's going to suck it to the ground. And it's going to go 0 to 60 in one second. Very cool prediction. Very different from what we were saying. So who had the lowest number? Yeah, the only thing is it doesn't track. Who had the lowest number? So you're closer to win if that's what happened. Well, it doesn't track with what Elon was saying on Rogan, which is that he was applying to fly. And that's what I was getting at. I was like, if you can have a fan or a jet that sucks you to the ground for one purpose, you can probably reverse those and boost up at least for a little bit, for a little jump.

28:49But we'll see. We're counting it down. Well, in other EV news. The road to Christmas, road to Roadster, but we're still keeping an eye on it. Saudi Arabia is aiming to disrupt the auto industry with these radical EVs. They're wedges. They have a brand called CER Exobot. It's coming as a sedan and an SUV. It looks like sort of a futuristic Lamborghini. Yeah, there's a little bit of Huracan wedge in there, a little Cybertruck in there. Is that a good one? This is Saudi Arabia's first true production car brand. So they're going to be making these. There's such a hard trade-off between the wedge looks great, but it's a terrible use of space.

29:32Like, the optimal use of space is like the new Waymo vehicle, which is basically just a box or like a bus. Oh, so you just care about utility now? I'm just saying it's a trade-off. Like, the more wedgie you get, the less utilitarian the vehicle's space is. Of course, you need to have— This one looks like somebody broke up with the new generation of Prius. Yeah. Now they've leveled up again. That was the original read on the Prius is like, who hurt you? Because the new Prius is looking pretty stanced. Yeah, it is. It's a level up. But this is a level up. Is it the Prime? Prius Prime looks pretty good.

30:12Yeah, they've done a good job. Anyways. 850 horsepower, tri-motor, electric powertrain. This thing looks insane. It does look insane. I wonder where they'll hit in terms of price. That'll be interesting to see. I mean, it's cool. Saudi Arabia is obviously known for pretty outrageous car culture in many places. John, what if they could make this the performance of the Luce at only 60 % of the cost? Yeah. Still hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hopefully not that, but it will be interesting. Yeah, I have no idea where they would price this because it could be sort of like a national treasure, a point of pride.

30:53It could come in at a very high price. At the same time, EV is a tough sell when you're in the six figures. Should we watch the trailer, the official trailer? Let's do it. Where you can see everything. We watched the preview clip. Now we get the full trailer. And I want you to pay attention to the quotes because the reviewers were floored by this movie. I've never seen quotes like this on a movie. I know. It's crazy. people really, really enjoyed this. Trickle glaze. Yeah, seriously. While they pull that up, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. We've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

31:32I feel you did nothing wrong. I did not. So where did things get lost? Like, how are you where you are right now? I wish I knew. I don't know. I don't feel like I understand that.

31:52So I know you guys invited me to stay here. Does any part of you worry about me being here 24-7? I don't think so. Okay, so pause. But what if I see you 24-7? He's actually, I think, living with Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah. And it's crazy because only Nathan Fielder would even think to throw out an idea of, hey, would you mind if I moved into your house before you go to prison and documented the entire process? Because you would think that there would be no circumstances where that would be a good idea. I think it's just pure upside. there's very little downside to doing this. I mean, you're going to prison.

32:46Like, worst case, you look worse, but you're in prison either way. The only way you can go is up and actually endear some people to you, which is the attempt. We'll see how it lands. Let's keep watching. And it makes you look bad.

33:08I think this is the moment in time. No other film I've ever experienced. Captured this story before I'm gone. I fell in love in that first conversation. Before or after she revealed she was the founder of Theranos? Probably before. I mean, weren't you worried she was sort of scamming you? 100%, but what did she have to gain from me? Well, isn't your family rich? Yeah, I think that there's like a lot of different levels of wealth.

33:40Come jump in with me. You're asking me to go? Yeah.

33:48What is this for? Why are they doing a 3D scan? That's just something they didn't do. Do you mind if we give it a 3D scan of your body? I saw that and I was like, this has nothing to do with Theranos or going to prison. I don't think I have that match in this. I know what you're talking about.

34:17I may think about this movie for the rest of my life. That is a crazy quote. Be okay with... It feels like there's going to be some twist or something. Something very interesting, but I'm hooked. I think the whole thing is going to make the viewer feel like they're in a really bad acid trip. like all these scenes yeah the pauses the silence the way the lighting the sort of sense of impending like doom right because she's going to she's about to go to prison yeah uh the the the kids you know being present in these scenes like the whole thing is just like incredibly but dark and weird i feel like it has to break expectations in some way because the average viewer is going to sit down and believe that she is guilty and that she lied and is like a sociopath because like that's sort of her brand right is that like she never admitted any guilt and was guilty in the john carrie telling of the story and obviously the court findings and so the for it to be for it to be like that i feel like there has to be some twist or something.

35:29I don't know. I would be shocked if it's just like, yep, like she defrauded investors and didn't really build a good blood testing device. And now she's in jail, like the end. Like, would that be, would that be, I don't think it would get those quotes. I don't think it would get those quotes. So I feel like there's going to be something crazy that happens. Some like complete twist. Like maybe she's innocent or something, or, or maybe she's like, I don't know, guilty of something else. I, I, there's gotta be something. The question is how does the, uh, uh, who's, who's the guy that, that she would, she would call tiger.

36:03Oh yeah. Uh, uh, I actually don't know. Um, uh, yeah. Uh, yeah. Like, because there, there has, during the, during the court case, there was a question about his responsibility. Um, should, should he bear more of the responsibility? And so, uh, but he doesn't seem to be in the trailer. so I don't know. Because one weird twist would be if you came away being like, that guy's more responsible than I thought. But anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have the president and CEO, Paul Kahn, Cristiano Amon in the waiting room.

36:45Let's break into TVP and Ultradome. Cristiano, how are you doing? Very good about yourself. We're doing fantastically. Where are you calling in from? From Maui, Hawaii. It's our Snapdragon Summit. This is day two. How long have you been doing Hawaii? Why Hawaii? It's probably more than 10 years. I think we have a lot of global press to come here from all of our countries, a lot of partners. Nobody complains about coming to Hawaii. I can imagine. Yeah, it's a good place to be. What are the highlights? What are the messages that you're trying to drive home today and with this conference? Look, at the Snapdragon Summit, we always announce our latest, you know, Snapdragon flagship processor for smartphones.

37:31But this one, it's special because for the past couple of years, we have been seen. We have a clarity of vision. We have seen how smartphones are going to change to an AI smartphone. And I think that's actually started to happen right now. Yes. How does your business actually change in an era of folks wanting to do more on-device inference and AI on something like an Android phone, one of your big partners? How do you think you need to adapt? Is there something you need to change, or has this been years in the works you think you're ready? no ears in the work look we if you we were kind of a long time ago um it it feels like a long time ago when we're kind of showing you know multi-billion parameter model running on devices look there's this whole conversation about ai running on the cloud and on the edge and people often ask the question why the edge why the cloud and i think that's probably the wrong question It's almost, I like to go back and say, okay, everybody get their phone out of their pockets, get your 200, 300 apps that you have, and let's go have a conversation about what part of your app runs on the device or runs on the cloud.

38:45And I know, even though we build incredible processors, if you put on airplane mode, you know, use your phone. So at the end of the day, AI is no different than that. It's going to be running on the device and on the cloud. It's going to be all transparent to you. Yeah. How are you viewing what the next couple of years will look like in automotive? It feels like the demands for AI on device at the edge are even more important potentially, but maybe it's equally important. How are you seeing the automotive business develop? Well, automotive has been ahead of that. Like we've been very fortunate.

39:20Automotive is a new business for Qualcomm. And we now serve all the car companies in the world. and what has been interesting about that is AI on the edge actually is being very big in automotive because of assisted driving and autonomous driving. That's kind of AI running on a processor in the car. But what's happening with the car right now is when you're behind the wheel and you don't have any legacy of OSs and apps, agentic experience is very natural when you're behind the wheel. We also see now the fusion of the systems in the car that was designed for navigation, like the cameras, for example, being also being used for see what I see and have an agentic experiences.

40:06Like, you know, people are in their car and they say, well, it gets the agent. This restaurant on the right, what's the Yelp review? And do they have availability for lunch right now? Those are kind of some of the experience we see. And that's accelerating for us. Got it. How are you processing the narrative around the CPU crunch? We saw the agentic era boom, and there were whole websites that were going down because so much code was getting pushed. It feels like agents, the idea that everything would be done at the model layer on a GPU is not the way things are playing out. CPUs are incredibly important, especially in the data center.

40:48I'm wondering if, are we going to experience another CPU crunch as we enter the era of personal agents? Because we saw the effect that the enterprise agents and software coding agents had on the CPU demand. What does the next couple months even look like for CPU demand in the data center? Okay, let me separate that conversation into... I think one topic is there's so much more demand for computes than availability right now and across the board. So I think what we've seen this right now, And by the way, as a semiconductor company, I'll tell you, the supply chain, it's operating at 100 % capacity.

41:30Everything is short because there's so much more demand than the availability of compute. Now, the second part is the way we see it, and we're just entering the data center, but we kind of see that also on devices of the edge. The data center is going to have to evolve, and it's already on its way to do that into a terogenous compute. You have different agents to do different things. CPUs are going to be very important for orchestrator and agents, and CPU demand will continue to rise. And that's also true on the other side of data center phones. As those agents get deployed on devices, they have a lot of CPU demand.

42:14but you're going to have different engines for different things, right? For example, for inference, we see there's engine now for pre-fill, engine for decode, decode attention, and so forth. How are you thinking about the changing landscape of consumer devices? I mean, MetaConnect is today. I'm sure that they're going to announce some new consumer devices, but we talk to founders all day long that are building just like really cool, small robotics projects, wearables, devices, there's rings and wristbands and ankle bands and anything you can wear or put on your body, it's happening. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually start to move up your to-do list as like you got to engage with that smaller community, even though it might be nascent.

43:04And are you actually trying to engage with the smaller device community on the consumer side at a conference like this? Look, and I'm going to say this in all humility, but the majority of those new classes of devices are actually used in Archa. And there is now, there's a multitude of those products now, and there's big companies and small companies. And the reason is because when you think about agents, and agents are not bound by OSs or applications, and you have multimodal. Like, think about glasses, for example. I'm actually a big believer that glasses is going to see an inflection point.

43:53The glass is a prime real state. Close to your eyes, to your mouth, to your ears. Your head turns. Your camera sees it. And then those things like see what I see, read what I read, hear what I hear are going to come up. But we've seen all sort of form factors. We've seen earbuds with cameras, jewelry, pins, buttons. And this is kind of the new personal AI category. And I think that would be a very big category. How are you grappling with the open source ecosystem versus closed source tooling to enable the next generation of devices to integrate? I mean, obviously, you've already won a huge portion of them over, but you want to keep that forever, right?

44:38Oh, thank you for asking this question. I think it's maybe a great opportunity for me to make a plug about what we're doing with modular. So I don't know if you heard about what we're doing with modular. Tell them. Look, we made an acquisition of a company, and that's a great team. It's the modular team. I think the founder is Chris Lattner. I think he's probably a legend within the computer science world. He was the inventor of the Apple Swift programming language. He was the inventor of LVM. And he built a stack, which is like CUDA, but it's designed to work on any hardware. It doesn't matter.

45:15of CPU accelerators and will run on NVIDIA, on AMD, on Qualcomm, or on any hardware whatsoever. So we bought that company and we're making that open source. That's what we're doing because we actually believe that the industry will benefit from an open source stack that scale from the data center across different hardware and the edge. And it doesn't matter. I'm going to celebrate that stack in each and every one of my competitors because we probably need an open stack to drive innovation and AI. Otherwise, it's just one company doing most of the innovation. Thank you. That's a very helpful explanation.

45:59We were just earlier in the show talking about Jensen Wong sitting down with Ezra Klein, engaging with some of the very deep questions about AI jobs and existential risk. Is this something, is this conversation that we're seeing bubble up in the public sphere actually making its way to the C-suite of your customers that you engage with? Or are you sort of in a mode of put one foot in front of the other and let those conversations take place in other platforms? Have you been engaging with all these debates around slowdowns and open source AI versus closed source AI? It feels like every week there's a new big hot topic and meaty, almost sci-fi scenario to engage with.

46:45But what has your approach been as the CEO of an important company in the space? Well, I wish we had at least half an hour to have this conversation. This is a very big topic. It's a very big topic. But look, in one minute that we have, I'm going to try to maybe give you an answer. Solve the whole problem. Solve it all. One minute. One minute. I think there's a lot of different conversations. And look, any kind of changes. For example, in the United States, you see a lot of conversation about safety of the models. Look, I think people talk about safety in general, but they are very specific things.

47:27I think cybersecurity is actually a big one. And I think it's really important. It's important to have products that are done responsibly. I think that nobody's going to argue against that. Hey, do you want me to build a product that is going to go crazy? No, no, I don't want you to do that. I think that's kind of a logical thing. and cybersecurity is actually a serious issue. You know, there's a big surface area. But if you go to places like China, the conversation is very different. It's about putting AI in every car and every phone, every PC, every industrial. And it's kind of very different.

48:03Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, we were talking about that, how there's just such a wide gap in the discourse between the impact putting AI in all these little places. And then you have like the bigger questions. But we'll get to that next time. We'd love to have you back on the show. We can spend a full hour solving everything. Yeah, 30 minutes we can get to the bottom. Yeah, yeah. Then we'll solve it. It will be solved. But congratulations. Thanks for calling in from your event. Thanks so much for taking a couple minutes today to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

48:30Cheers. You too. Great talking to you guys. Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. coming back on the show we got talia goldberg partner at bessemer adventure partner we very much enjoyed her last appearance what's going on doing hey great to see you guys you had a hot take last time that went very viral and proved true everyone thought everyone was like no it's about to collapse and you were like no i think like it's okay if there's some you know margin compression in the short term uh things will iron out models are gonna get models will get cheaper and everyone was like, she's not taking finance seriously.

49:15And here you are vindicated, vindicated. So congratulations, victory lap. Your margin is my opportunity. There we go. How are you processing the current moment? What's exciting to you? Is the is the lab trade over? Or is the more opportunity above the fold at the application layer below the fold at the at the semiconductor NeoCloud build-out level? What's exciting to you personally? Yes and yes. I'll say a few things I've been thinking about lately. One is physical AI, and one is this new concept that a portfolio company of mine called Token Market Fit. I love this idea of Token Market Fit. I wish I had invented it, but they did.

50:03And the idea of token market fit is like, simply put, like, what are the areas in the categories where we've found the ability to productively use the average end user, like$10 ,000 a month of tokens? And if you actually look at where a lot of the spend has gone, it's really like there are basically only three categories I can think of right now that have like real token market fit. One is encoding, like, you know, enormous spend encoding. The second is in video and in media and in your line of work where you can very productively spend huge amounts of money creating great content. And then maybe the third is in high-frequency trading.

50:45But if you look at, like, on average, legal, customer support, sales, like, we actually haven't really hit, like, product market fit in a real way in a lot of those areas. And we will. And I think the bottlenecks are moving away from things like code and video. Is it possible that you can have product market fit without massive costs? Because, like, I would argue that you have, like, token market fit in something like a legal, but it's just not, you're not going to see massive spend in the way, due to the nature of the work, right? So it's, like, possible that you can have, I'm just, this is maybe a question, is like, can you have token market fit with just like relatively modest per person spend at a company?

51:30Is this sort of the argument that like, we're like, we need a lot more software, but maybe we don't need that many more legal briefs or something like the market size is small. Yeah. There's, there's in some ways almost like infinite soft, like a product is never finished, but in legal work, like you do a deal and then it's sort of like done and there's not, you know, I don't know. My question, yeah. My question is like, I believe there's, I believe there's going to be some categories where like AI is incredible. It transforms like the task or the job, but you just don't end up with that much.

52:02It's just very efficient and you don't end up with like, you know, exceptional spend, right? You're saying like$10 ,000 a month per company in a category. It's possible. I mean, I think like, I guess, yeah, there's difference between product market fit and token market fit. But legal is like a really interesting example. Bessemer's been a longtime investor in Lagora, which is a great example of this. And I think they're still very early, actually, in this transition towards what's possible and what spend even for their customers is possible. So I think legal is yet to be unlocked in a lot of ways.

52:34And in a lot of use cases, Lagora is still co-pilot. It's not really autopilot. It's not like truly doing the work of lawyers and you don't see like large law firms like, you know, massively changing their team compositions yet. I think that is still to come. And that's on the come. And as we can give and figure out how to productively leverage models to give more work to agents, like we will be spending more on agents and on models in fields like legal too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we saw that transition maybe last year, earlier this year with like the software engineer who says, like, I don't read the code anymore.

53:16And that can sometimes be a little bit risky, but in a lot of places. The lawyer who's like, I don't even read the contract. Well, that would be token market fit. Like if I heard a, you know, a star lawyer say, yeah, I don't even read the filing anymore, the document. I'd be like, OK, yeah, super intelligence is here. It's working. Yeah, well, the difference is software, you can ship a feature and it can be broken 1 % of the time. Where in legal, if you have a 1 % major error rate in contracts, it's a lot of money on the line. Yeah, maybe you have to be a little bit higher up. Look, there are these categories that I guess the point is they're still to come.

53:58And they're still growing. And so what are those next areas with token market fit from an investment perspective are interesting. because while you're right, there will be some that are maybe a lot more efficient. A lot of the dollars are in the token flow. Yeah. How important do you think it is to be the entry point to a certain token flow, to be an aggregator in the Stratechery parlance? I was just thinking about Fall and Higgsfield. Access to incredible models. There's a few other companies in the category, But a lot of people, the workflow is like go to their preferred AI agent, then send an API key over, and they've already put some credits in an account.

54:40And then they're using another tool to sort of access that inference. And there's a world where that billing relationship lives within Cloud Code or lives within Codex, and they're taking sort of an App Store cut. Is that a nightmare? Is that a death knell for the inference provider? or could that actually be the future way of these companies working together in a positive way that actually grows the market and the distribution so much that it offsets whatever rent the model labs and the front doors are taking? Yeah, look, I think it's probably not black and white in every single category, and so it's somewhat different.

55:22Even in the case of fall, as an example, they are the front door. And so, you know, that you can even access a model like, you know, in the past models like Nano Banana and Google's models, even through fall. So you don't have to go to Google. So they have their cake and eat it too. But we do see this playing out. And I think like Instinct and Muse and what's happening with Meta or Amazon and Shopify are other really interesting analogies of this aggregation, disaggregation theory. And at a high level, like I am a believer, like there will be places for both. And like both exist. Amazon exists and Shopify exists and like the tension between the two is real.

55:59Yeah. Personal agent predictions. How are you thinking about the category? Well, we're very small seed investors in Instinct, so we're very bullish on their – I don't know if I should be offended by that sound or – No, no, no. That's the Airhorn. No, no, no. It was a small check, but now it's – because you went in the seed, it's big now. I wish we were bigger investors.

56:26But it is such a magical experience. I'm obsessed with these products. Like other than when ChatGPT launched, like this is the second, oh, my God, moment that I've had. My parents are having this moment and my sister's having this moment and they don't even use technology. And so it's kind of crazy. It is much broader than what we saw with the Cloud Code Codex boom, where it was this magical experience for people in tech and for people who knew how to open up a terminal and then were familiar with code and had these tasks that sort of fit neatly in that world. this is something that you can give to a family member who doesn't have a GitHub account and they'll have fun and they'll, and they'll get some value out of it and be, and sort of see the progress, which they might not have updated on three years or something.

57:11But yeah, everyone is going to need to own this and there's going to be a major war and every large lab, every large company is going to be out there trying to figure out how do I create like similarly such a delightful experience and how do you bring this to enterprise? I think it's just like the, the interaction modes, the delightful proactivity, the simplicity of the interaction is something that could absolutely be ported over to the enterprise use cases as well. And so I think this is not a winner-take-all market. There will be multiple agents and different angles on it. And I think this is about to be arguably the most important next category in AI.

57:51It's another knife fight, too, which is fun. Give us the update on Bessemer. Raise some more funds. but what's the structure of the fund? What's the structure of the, of the strategy evolving? Yeah. All that good stuff. Yeah. Look, so we have, uh, exciting news that we just raised$5.75 billion. Uh, one point.

58:14That sounds good. That's how we feel. We're, we're so excited. Um, we have$1.75 billion of that is dedicated to early stage companies. which lets us write really meaningful investments in companies at their earliest days when conviction matters a lot, when it's not very obvious. Two$800 million seed rounds. Let's do it. Get it done in two deals. Convition. Probably not. And it looks like 70 % of our investments have started early, often way before there's even revenue or sometimes even a company name. And we're going to continue to do that. And then$4 billion for growth, which lets us keep backing companies as they're at their inflection points and not just participate or let others kind of invest.

59:03And then we're going to be leading these rounds. Returns are concentrating, as you all know, in fewer, larger winners. And so the right move for us is to be a meaningful investor and have meaningful positions in the companies that really, really matter. And we don't want to spread it thin and be peanut buttering across our growth dollars across a bunch of companies. We want to be super disciplined, but disciplined not by taking small checks in growth companies, by making big checks, being highly selective and really committing fully to a smaller subset of companies. So that's the strategy. That's exciting.

59:36Amazing. Very exciting times. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is so funny to rewind like 10 years and if somebody from the future came and they're like, Talia, like you're going to have a$5.75 billion fund. And you would be like, so we're the biggest venture investor in the world, right? It's like, well, you know, this is now like if you want to be like a real fund, you got to have. Companies are staying private so much longer. I mean, the trillion dollar IPOs are, you know, unthinkable years ago. And now there's. Here we are. It's crazy. Wild time. Yeah. A lot to come. Well, thank you guys for having me.

1:00:13Great to see you. Great update. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We have our next guest in person. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Sorry, let me get this out of here. Welcome, welcome. Introduce yourselves for those. Introduce yourselves. Great name. Yeah, John as well. Introduce yourselves for the audience. Tell us about the company. Yeah. My name is Louis Antonelli. I'm John Antonelli. We're brothers, if you haven't. There we go.

1:00:50You can guess. But, yeah, so we started Reel six years ago. It's a score stat tracking app. It's very social, engaging, and it caters towards those fantasy players, bettors, just avid fans that want to know what's happening in sports. Is it the ultimate second screen experience? Is that the trend? Or is this actually like a third screen now? How do you think about this? Yeah, I think it's the ultimate second screen. And then, I mean, it's the penultimate first screen. So like when you're not watching the game, it's the fastest way to know what's happening on sports. Okay. We started like, when we started live data, it was kind of, play-by-play data was kind of this concept that was kind of shoved on a fifth tab on ESPN.

1:01:30You'd have to like tab over to the play-by-play. You'd have to look at like really tiny Excel looking rows of data to try to find those small numbers. and see what's happening. So we wanted to bring engagement, comments, reactions, a bunch of community around the data. And then the latency too at the time with gambling companies, low latency data is super important. So we brought that more from a media perspective to show people, bring people that knowledge in real time about what's happening. What is the data source? Are there sort of open APIs and companies that are comfortable sharing the raw data?

1:02:06At some point, like, someone has to write down what happened in the stadium, I imagine. It's pretty commoditized. Okay. Genius sports, sport radar. Okay. We scrape a lot of the data as well. Okay. Got it. So it's pretty, like, the fact that Steph Curry hit a three isn't owned by the leagues or anyone. Got it. Okay. So, like, we've kind of taken a spin on it. We can put all that together. That's our content. Public ball knowledge. Exactly. And then, but so the magic, like, the secret sauce is really transforming that into a feed that is intelligible, intelligible not an excel sheet more like a twitter time and contextual too like i think we add like we started to add historical milestones okay this is a player's five on 500 career three or yeah a player's 12 straight point in a row yeah a lot of the times when you're on these products like you won't know or even when you're watching you're just tuned into a game like you won't know how well a player is performing or what they did in the first or second quarter and this kind of brings them that like it adds like what an announcer might tell you yeah okay so you guys have one one and a half million monthly actives uh and it sounds like the social product is actually like working and real yeah which is notable because i feel like so many people think about this idea like i'm going to create a data product and there's going to be a social layer and then for every hundred pitches like that are people that take a shot like yeah maybe less than one are going to actually build something where there's like tons of highly engaged users just because I think about where these sports communities pop up, it's on Instagram, on X, on Reddit, on all these existing social platforms.

1:03:38So how was that? How did you actually make that happen? Yeah, I think so. From my perspective, and John can touch on his, but we basically, on Twitter, for example, have a million people who are all separately leaving the same comment about some big play. We take that play as the piece of content, and then underneath that, you'll have the million people so we've kind of inverted it yep a little bit so instead of like one to many it's like kind of yeah just flipped and then and it's more ephemeral so people feel like instead of posting on twitter it's more like sometimes when i see somebody in tech will post like it's over like and you're like oh this must be about yeah they'll be like you're like you know it's actually about the game yeah yeah and so like i didn't realize that you like ai discourse and also basketball yeah the issue is super fragmented yeah across like tons of different i mean there's only a few people that control the conversation like meme pages and fan pages for every sport team and player and we kind of built for those fan pages and yeah people used to use sort of hashtags on x to sort of organize around a particular game or something but that has gone so far out of fashion the algorithm sort of replaced a lot of that but you lost in that place the ability to actually tell the app today i only want to focus on the lakers game like exactly And so even if there's something a player, yeah, yeah, exactly.

1:04:58And you'll see X has added like a live chat now at the game level. So we break down our chats to box scores. So instead of just everyone in one massive chat, we're like, oh, I'm talking about Seth Curry's box score or his most recent three or his block shot. So like you can dive into these very deeper places. A cool stat too is like 30 % of our monthly users leave comments, which is crazy. It's like a couple orders of magnitude higher. Yeah, normally it's like 99 % lurkers. Just lurk, yeah. So we bring that really cool global community feel to everything, yeah. Did you get your start on Vine? I started on Vine, yeah.

1:05:33What were you making on Vine? So I was taking highlights and putting songs to them. I was like one of 30 people that were like the OBJ catch that went viral. I put a song to it and went viral when I posted it. That's awesome. And then I grew a page. It was close to 100 ,000 followers in six months. Okay, so no front-facing, no personality. No front-facing. Like original faceless content. Wow. Yeah, exactly. And I still know, like, a decade later, a lot of the same. And this is partly why we were able to grow is through these meme fan pages. Sure, sure. I grew a page on Instagram close to a million followers.

1:06:04Yeah. And I would just curate content. Yeah. But we noticed, like, why do millions of people go to Instagram and follow hundreds of basketball pages, NFL pages, super fragmented and sensationalized? I would pull, like, the top three stats in a game and, like, make a graphic out of it. And so a lot of what we've done is we've codified that content. So people share real, it's the most shareable score app. Sure. So it feels like, I mean, you see it all over. That's how we've been growing is people are using it as a means to like slander or praise players. Slander. Like in the first quarter, you can see like, oh, Dana went like 0 for 11 or whatever.

1:06:38Yeah. And people screenshot that and, you know, use it as a fueling of like narratives. Yeah. Yeah. what's been the mix of, uh, of top of funnel awareness and I guess how it's, how has it changed amongst, I can imagine using, uh, you know, paid partnerships with creators. We want you to, you want, we want you to promote us, uh, versus in-house clippers or even like distributed clippers like WAP, uh, like, like what's been, what's worked in the past, what's working now. Uh, how has it changed? I like, we just started to seed, like we started with just the MBA, I think the way that we started to grow is like we added, now we have 18 leagues.

1:07:16But we seed this content among, like, there's creators that talk about the game. Sure. And they might use like a score in the background or whatever. We encourage them or pay them to use the scoreboard of Reel or whatever. Yeah. And our first thousand users were all my friends that run these meme fan pages. And there's like thousands of these meme fan pages. Some have like hundreds of thousands to millions of followers. Yep. The NBA Centels or NBA Centrals of the world, Legion Hoops. Yep. It would take their – I would just, like, encourage them to use it or naturally weave real into the conversation.

1:07:48Because they might just – I mean, they're already posting, like, oh, LeBron had a sick game. Might as well add that, like, box score or whatever. How do you make money? That's a great question. Yeah, so we started with a kind of virtual box model, like Roblox or Fortnite, that users could, you know, earn and then also collect different moments. So, you know, instead of collecting like a player, collect his home run or his three years touchdown and build your fandom kind of based on how many cards you've collected. And you have to be like in the app when a play happens in order to collect it. Yeah, there's like real time raffles and then there's also just like general packs.

1:08:23So it's cool because like as soon as every touchdown right now in the NFL happens, you can kind of get like a digital representation of it. It's a stat based representation. This is a 30-yard touchdown, and a really cool thing we do is we rate everything between 0 and 10. Or it can actually go above 10 so we don't become like a dunk. I like that. So we don't want to go in the middle. How can it go? We're at the dunk contest. Sometimes you're like 14. 14. So Shohei's like 10 RBI, that legendary 10 RBI, 6 for 6, 50-50 game was like 15 or something. And Ashton Gentile regularly was sitting in his college days at like 12.

1:08:57So it's sort of logarithmic. Like, a 15 is 10 times better than a 14. Like, the dunk contest is the worst back when it was, like, everything was a 10. It was stupid. So we didn't want that. Yeah, yeah. But people actually now reference our scores, and it's really good for, like, rookie ladders, for MVP. Like, usually it reflects really well without us needing to, like, subjectively say, like, this is just a – Do players like this? A lot of them use it, yeah. Because it's just fast. I think that's, like, the difference. They're opening it up during the game. How many points do I have? Whoa, at halftime.

1:09:25Wait, really? Yeah. At halftime? Like, Trey Jones. No way. Every single game. That's crazy. Don't tell Microsoft Surface or whatever, because I think they're supposed to use that. It's all good, though. Then you're like, damn, I've gotten an 0 for 15. Wow. I really thought I was on a hot streak. It's so funny. It's the opposite approach of the score takes care of itself. It's literally just obsessing over the score. I think another thing we do different, too, is a lot of the ESPNs, Bleacher Reports, their score apps would never send real-time notifications only like halftime end of end of game moments sure sure so we'll inform you like this is like Tatum's 12 straight point in a row or like this touchdown just happened we'll take you straight to that moment yeah I think that we send like 50 million notifications a day yeah on average is that sort of like predictive like you can it's based on the rating I model or okay so you have a rating yeah if something is happening you can be like oh you should really tune in this game something cool is happening.

1:10:24Yeah, we'll tell you when it happens. We do some cycle watches are the coolest ones. So when a player is about to hit a cycle in baseball and they have three of the four things, we won't tell you when they need a triple because that's very unlikely. So we'll only bring you in when they need a single, double, or homer. Oh, okay. So we'll bring people together for more of that expected things to build that hype. But most of the time, most people, there's so much going on in sports. They just want to know what happens. Is real replacing sports radio in some ways? because I guess when I was a kid, I would be cycling through the radio and I'd hear a baseball game on.

1:11:00As a kid, you kind of grew up on the Internet. I'm like, who's tuning in to just the radio? Who's watching sports? Listening to radio? Listening to radio. But it's just sort of that you're kind of passively following a game or a team that you care about. But now people can stream the video on their phone. I feel like that's probably more dominant. It is fast. I like to think of it as written radio and Twitch. It's faster to read than it is to watch than it is to listen. Especially when there's 15 games on at once. You're not streaming 15 games on an NBA Wednesday, right? So this is kind of the red zone of every league.

1:11:37It's kind of like how we create it. What's the smallest league you support currently? Do you like curling? We just added... That's a good question because every league technically can be considered big. I mean, we're starting to add golf, tennis, some of the more longer tails that we haven't had. F1 is going to be coming on the product as well. But we have tons of soccers. What about Kar-Jitsu? You've seen that one? Ping-Pong would be sick. We're considering putting a community vote for some obscure next quarter. Some crazy ones. Like hot dog eating? Hot dog eating would be fun. People ask for everything.

1:12:13I'm sure. And we have this pretty strong Australian fan base. I get every 3 a.m. every day. It's like add the AFL. Oh, yeah, okay. The Down Under group. Down Under, okay. The NFL. It's like our third biggest city. How cyclical is the business? I mean, imagine the Super Bowl is your Super Bowl, but... NBA Finals too. NBA Finals is big. It fluctuates, yeah. But in general, is there like a pretty stable demand for this across... It's definitely cyclical. I mean, like summer when it's just baseball. It's just like natural cycles. Okay, sure, sure. But... World Cup was big for us. Oh, sure. I think as we continue to add more things in the summer.

1:12:51How are you thinking about Olympics? We're talking about like Olympic basketball. The tough thing is like it's four months out of the year. Sure. So like put engineering time into it. A lot of work. But I think now that, I mean, our team hasn't really grown from like a, I mean, our engineers are outputting because of like AI and everything. Yeah, a lot more. We used to be outputting updates every three to four months, not every like two to three weeks. That's great. And so like we're just continuing to add more insights, make the data more contextual. Sure, sure. I think that's how we continue to stay ahead is how do we add a next-gen stats to NFL.

1:13:21You can see telemetry data. And then you can see personnel, personnel coverages, and things you wouldn't, while you're watching, you wouldn't be able to conceptualize. We're just trying to bake it in into a very digestible way because then that makes it more shareable. You'll tell your friend. All that helps is the growth flow. You can go really deep on live still. Live for us is everything. I think that's most of our usage is live, so just go as deep as we can. What's the house philosophy on prediction markets? Partner, roll your own, stay away from, how do you puzzle it out? Yeah, we have an engagement feature we launched kind of with the virtual books, kind of more of a kind of fun play thing to build your profile and compete with others on that dimension.

1:14:07We've considered kind of the prediction markets. We, yeah, a lot of our, I mean, our recent, I mean, we, in the last year and a half, two years, a lot of our usages come from fantasy players and batters. And people just, like, sweating their bets, basically, like, around players. Comment sections are, like. Like, they're going, oh, I need another 12Ks or 10Ks or whatever. Okay. Or, like, another touchdown. And so we were, like, how do we play into, like, more of a real money gaming space. Real money gaming space. And we've talked across the board from the Calches to Polymarket and all of them.

1:14:39We ended up landing on FanDuel as a partner for us. So that's another revenue stream. I was like, how do we bring odds to the product? I mean, we were talking about it. It's like we have so many bettors, and we can't even serve them with live odds. Sure. And so it's another data source. Yeah, the data layer of live odds, too, it adds a dimension that people kind of expect. Now, you see it on every broadcast now. It has live odds and what Vegas thinks, what the people think. So I think there's a lot of cool things we can do with real-time charts about how the lines are moving for everything. People can discuss every market.

1:15:12They can kind of just have it where they expect it, especially with our, we've signed up millions and millions of the gamblers in the last couple of years. A lot, and I mean, for the people that are interested in it, I mean, have we just been missing that as a source of data? And it's a good conversational piece, too. And you can turn it off. Like, obviously, there's people that don't want to see that, so they can just toggle it off. Do you think AI is allowing people more time to just watch sports? I think the thing that's missing though which I think we separate ourselves even across Instagram and Twitter and TikTok is they don't have deeper community like I can spend six hours a day on NBA Twitter and get nothing from my fandom like I don't get badges, I don't get anything related to like, you know, viewing these games, we build up your profile and I think that's something we want to continue to like triple down on is that community side because a lot of these, I mean you look at like there's hundreds of millions of Taylor Swift fans but there's no like, I still think there's these communal things that can be built for like tons of different niches yeah a lot of it's offline like you have the tour merch or the signed you know album or the jersey that's signed but on the digital world uh there was i mean there was some movement towards this with like nfts but it sort of died off i mean you think about it with belly and yeah even like the letterboxes of the world sure yeah same thing pockets yeah clout people like they want that like community profile that they're building a focus thing.

1:16:33I think sports is pretty safe, though, and AI because it's like the last kind of human thing that people value. I mean, that sounds distoked. I don't know. More than family. More than your children. But it's like, if you think about it, it's like... And that's why you see these ticket prices are going. Yeah, ticket prices are high, and of course there's a bunch of venture capitalists that are trading AI. More than anything, too. They're humans. Yeah, yeah. Community building, how do you deal with moderation? Do you have an in-house team, an AI system, hybrid? I imagine that culling the most disruptive folks in order, there's probably a dance there.

1:17:14Yeah, it's a huge dance because our demographic is 18 to 30. So you definitely want to keep some of that edginess and whitewash everything. Yeah, you want people to be able to go and talk some trash. Exactly, yeah. What do you say, libel or slander? There needs to be an appropriate level of slander. But we use, yeah, we've been using AI for moderation from day one and just building that up over time. So it's always going to be a dance and a balance. We're pretty confident now. We actually scan like every single reply in real time just to make sure we catch like the really, really bad stuff. Do you use like a really cheap commodity open source model for that?

1:17:49Are you actually passing that through AI or is it just like lookup table if bad word? Yeah, well, we use the lookup table. It catches like 80, 85%. And then we have like a classifier that's super fast that catches another 10%. And then anything that falls through there will hit like any of the latest. Yeah. And then you can, and then you can escalate. So we have a couple of layers there and escalate if we need to. Generally it's, which worked super well. And I think it's something that's missing on a lot of these kind of live chats. There's a lot, some of these live chat stream, you just have to close the chat.

1:18:20So like we don't want that. So yeah, it's a dance, but I think it's, it's important. What's stopping you guys from having one and a half billion monthly actives? Right now you have one and a half million. That's a great question. I think we just need more sports, more content. More sports. Start creating more sports. Just more data within the product. Sure, sure, sure. Also live events in general. Yeah, most, I mean, if we want to go for like the billion users, say we can have every like live show, The Bachelor, from The Bachelor to like Love Island. Oh, that's interesting, yeah. You take data.

1:18:56I mean, you can talk about what you said. Yeah, the original idea came from, so my now wife and I, we built like a fantasy bachelor app where we would sit and type in everything that was happening, every kiss, every hug. And we had like, we built it. It was just us two. That's the funniest. Yeah, we had like 50 ,000 weekly users. Walking in for the bachelor. 50 ,000 weekly users for every kiss and every hug. So I watched. We watched four years. So you're sitting there like, Riz them up. Riz them up. Four years. And we had to be on live because if we weren't on live, people would just be like, where's the data?

1:19:32But the most used screen of the app was the live feed with people commenting and watching as their second screen. And, of course, like John at the time was building his, like, incredible social media properties. And I knew what he could do. And, like, it was just like a perfect mix with play-by-play and sports and, like, this live feed concept. So that's kind of the thing. And him not having to type in the data every time. Yeah, not having to type in. even though some of these third-party providers aren't. But you look at politics. There's tons of like, even how like - We get tons of competition politics.

1:20:01Yeah, especially around like the elections. It's like, it would be cool in theory. We don't want to go down that path before we dominate. I think sports is still like a 10x with what we have. People do ask for elections a lot. And it kind of does, it has similar feel to like a prediction market with like the - Yeah, everyone's watched like the election map populate and go red and blue over the night. and that's sort of like a similar visualization for sure. We are a daily use product though. Okay. I love talking about like monthly actives, but we've peaked at like 1.1 million daily. Yeah, it's really good.

1:20:31Sometimes our peak, yeah, our down mile is like 70 % at its peak. Like during moments you would think people would be watching. But they're almost like people want to also see, because a lot of people watch alone, like just at home or whatever. They want that community or that second screen. um like during the bam out of bio game we had like 200 ,000 concurrent people like tracking his like every point yeah towards his 83 points yeah so we see like during big moments like that or even just like the NBA finals or the Super Bowl we have like very concurrent usage like high concurrent usage yeah just like figuring out how to make that more engaging and then also more fun with your friends I think is a big growth unlock for us and all the all the betting and prediction market companies must be so pissed off that they don't have this product because it's like actually like all they care about is is you know user acquisition and figuring out how to get engagement and deep usage and you guys feel like you built something that um built something that's going to be very hard to actually replicate um but uh would be would be very valuable to them Yeah.

1:21:38Are there like walk me through the, how a subculture emerges. I'm thinking about like on Twitter, it's just one big global chat room, but then there's like teapot, like that part of Twitter, like these, like the, the, the SF tech insider community has, has created its own little sub community. I mean, are there groups of people that break out and build like a discord further? Or do you have the functionality to create like a group of people that are all commenting on similar games and then they, you know, become friends on the app and can interact more communally outside of a particular event?

1:22:16Yeah, we have like, so we have groups in the app so people can create groups and it's kind of nested under any piece of content. You can kind of talk in that group. I think most of the sub-communities, though, are still global, but they're around kind of those meme moments. So when Brandon Podzemski was trying to hit 30 points, for example, every game was just this community, and then they would grow. Who were rooting for that. Yeah, like we need the 30, and here we get 28, and everyone would just be devastated. So tracking those type of moments when they pop up is really big, like the meatball sub thing with the interceptions right now in NFL.

1:22:49There's like random stuff. It feels like you're just making up stuff. I don't know any of these references. You can just throw one in that doesn't exist, and we'd be like, damn, that's crazy. But they happen all the time. It's like crazy. But we don't create them. It's kind of like they're already a known, like people are already talking about, like, yeah, like the Brandon Pazemski 30-point. Like it comes from a Twitter almost. I think we can do, like we haven't really been at this scale before. So I think we can start curating those subgroups or encouraging them beyond just teams or players or whatever.

1:23:24That's awesome. Well, thanks for coming by. Thanks for explaining and breaking down. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is coming in in just a minute. We have Max Levchin from Affirm coming back on the show. Always fun to talk to Max about his role as CEO, how he's adopting AI, what he's seeing in the consumer markets and debt markets and all sorts of things.

1:24:02While we are waiting for him, let's talk about another electric vehicle, another international electric vehicle, the Gigli EV that can charge under five minutes. Is this fast enough? How long does it take to get gas? Two minutes? Four minutes? Five minutes? This feels like maybe a tipping point where people will be more likely to adopt this. It does make me wonder about the Roadster. Is that going to be a new, will they roll out a new charging technology that allows them to charge faster? They've been sort of, Tesla has not moved fast into the sort of wireless charging. the actual porsche the cayenne ev does wireless charging you just put a mat down on your on your garage floor drive over it and then it charges that's it seems like a no-brainer i'm surprised that tesla hasn't done that especially since they were working on that crazy robotic snake arm yeah uh and well i'm hoping the roadster will just send the battery out the side with rocket with rocket engines okay uh but but we'll see but yeah it's an interesting trade right now you know it's charging at these charging stations can cost, you know, in the tens of dollars.

1:25:15It takes quite a bit longer than gas, obviously. So dropping that down, I think, is going to be pretty key. Well, Nikita Beer is, oh, do we have our next guest? It's red. It was green for a second. Let's wait. Nikita Beer has a, oh, I guess we do have Max. Is that correct? Okay, great. Let's bring in Max Lodz, the founder and CEO of Affirm. Welcome back to the show, Max. How are you doing? It's been too long. It has been too long. Let's start with the latest and greatest in your world, in Affirm. And then, as always, I have so many questions about how you're running the company, what you're seeing, what's working managerially on the new technology on adoption side.

1:25:57But first, what's the biggest news in Affirm world? Today's news, we are available in the UK on Amazon. That's a massive announcement. Huge. Not everyone can get an Amazon deal done these days. Congratulations. Do you have to go straight to the top? Are you negotiating with Jassy? No. Amazon does feel like a company that might build this themselves. What is your pitch to a big company with a lot of engineers and they have AI tooling? What do you bring to the table when you're partnering with another company at that scale? It's a huge company. But it doesn't hurt that we've been partners for quite some time in the US.

1:26:38And so we're definitely no strangers to working with the Amazon engineering team. They're excellent. They're very capable of building things. We're a specialist. We know what we're doing in things like underwriting. We have an extraordinarily diverse capital markets program that allows us to fund the loans that we do for them and for all our other merchants. And so I think every company that's not a financial service specialist at some point or another flirts with the idea of like, hey, maybe we should do this ourselves. And if they're not serious about it, they'd sometimes stick with it. If they're very serious about it and they're on a certain scale, they usually say, wait a second, we should partner with the very best.

1:27:17And, you know, I'm obviously biased, but I think we've demonstrated that we're pretty great. So this is a great continuation of the relationship we've built with them over the years here. and UK is certainly a super important market for us. We're very excited to be there. Also, we came there a little while ago with Shopify, but we've been meaning to expand the relationship and are excited to be live with Costco and now with Amazon and many others. Having already worked with Amazon for so many years, I imagine that the hurdle to rolling this out is not technical. It's not the actual integration.

1:27:51They probably have a great team. You have a great team in place. where are you seeing technical challenges emerge? Where are you seeing acceleration in your ability to deliver a better product? Is it on the underwriting side? Is AI helping there? Or is it on productization, conversion, all the downstream customer service? Like there's so much in the business. What's really moving the needle for you? It's like QRiter press releases. So I'll answer a bunch of it. There's actually a lot of really cool stuff in the question you just posed. the thing that I was referring to, we just announced we launched an entire new family of underwriting models.

1:28:30And this has been a long, long time coming. So we are a biopilial data specialist, biopilial services specialist. We've been building underwriting models for 15 years. We have umpteen petabytes of data that we train on. So we've been an MLAI specialist for a very long time. But up until recently, we primarily stuck to tree-based models. They're deterministic. They're easier to audit. They're easier to explain to regulators, which we have to do every year. And so all of that has been kind of the stronghold of a firm. And about three-ish years ago, we said this attention idea that you see in LLMs and the transformer architecture is really compelling because it just opens up new ways of capturing complex patterns in a way that humans actually cannot.

1:29:16And fundamentally, improving underwriting models for things like underwriting is expressing patterns you see in behaviors over and over again in a way that can be reused across multiple humans. And so we started an internal research project into using attention-based modeling to understand behaviors, to surface these patterns, all in the service of underwriting people that are figuring out a little bit more about them. And so about a year ago, we had something we thought was really compelling and we've been testing it quite obsessively. We're finally live as of a few days ago with a full suite of these attention driven models that outperform our own gradient boosted tree based models.

1:29:59And the way I mean, just to give you a sense of just how compelling this breakthrough is. So every quarter, we launch a minor edition of the model. Every year or so, we launch a brand new approach to the core model, all using these tree-based architectures. We measure the improvement, and that's what we report to ourselves and our shareholders on. The improvement for this new, we call it ARC, the code name for the architecture, the ARC-based model outperformed the next planned improvement by a factor of two. I don't remember the last time I've seen a factor of two implementation improvement. So it's just very hard to overstate how compelling this is.

1:30:39And so this is very, very proud of the team. And this was a very, very large scale project that was just unbelievably successful. It's awesome. Talk about what you've learned about the timelines it takes for basically like the difference in execution between two companies to become obvious to, the market and when I say that right now there's a bunch of new like AI companies for example let's say two vertical AI companies they both have 500 million in funding right now it seems like like you know maybe there's two-ish years Where where where it's sort of unclear like just how much better is one company versus the other but over time You know that like one will surface at the top And then I would say we've also you can basically see that in every category where there's like there's a category like prediction markets last year.

1:31:32There was like two heavily funded companies and then you saw like difference in execution and they sort of like bifurcated over time. But I'm just wondering from your view how you how you work with your team. Like when I talking to you, you just get this sense that like competing with you would be like living hell. and it's because of the just like the experience level and then the approach to all these different layers of the stack and the understanding of the category in your business and like it just it feels like you know a firm is just pulling away very very strongly from other players in the market whereas it looked like it was a pretty even race in many ways like you know five years ago.

1:32:15Thank you. First of all, that's it. I mean, I happen to agree, but I'm obviously biased. I do agree that these things take a while to play out and who knows which inning we're in and sort of how many more sort of ups and downs we're going to see in kind of the superficial judgment, you know, AKA the stock price. But like private markets seem to like muddy this a lot. It's like Almost like companies have to get public and then have to actually... I'm not even sure public markets make it that much better. Public markets force you to be very transparent about a quarterly check-in. One of the things that I think we did really well as a public company, if I do say so myself, is we put a timeline of getting profitable out on the map and said, we're going to get there.

1:33:02And we did it quite far out. So 24 months before we were profitable, we said, we're going to be profitable. 24 months from now. And we just printed quarter after quarter after quarter, saying like, look, we are that much closer. And then on the dot, actually a couple of months prior, said, yep, profitable now, here it is. And I think that was a big credibility thing that private companies don't get to have because the only people who know their internal metrics intimately are the venture capitalists. And even if they publish metrics, they wouldn't be helped to the sort of a standard gap accounting, SEC regulated way of communicating.

1:33:36So in that sense, public companies have it probably a little bit easier, but you also get slapped around if you miss on a metric or the market thinks that you messed up one of your metrics. But I think the way you know who's pulling away kind of early, if I were putting on my occasional investor hat, I think, you know, I'm feeding your compliment to me back to myself, but I happen to agree with that. I think you can tell operator to operator, people who are quote unquote, for lack of a better term, serious people, you can tell. People who know their metrics, people that understand the entirety of their stack that don't just say, well, you know, I have a great team and so my AI engineers told me to say these words and those are the words I'm going to repeat now obsessively.

1:34:25Maybe the shortest hand is like companies run by engineers. We are skilled in not BSing. And so that may be like a good 1A predictor. Like how likely are they to do what they say they will? Like if the person running it has an engineering degree in whatever engineering, probably going to be pretty truthful. Evergreen, evergreen. I had one more follow-up question. I'm very curious to get your point of view. We've heard a million pitches on this show about how agents are going to need to pay agents and we need all of this new financial infrastructure. And I've been consistently incredibly bearish on that just because we have a bunch of really robust financial infrastructure that's regulated.

1:35:08We even have companies that like, think about Stripe for an example. They've built four developers at the core from the very beginning, which means that they're inherently well set up to work with agents. And using an example, we see new personal agents like Instinct and Muse and there's a bunch of others coming. and there's no point where I'm sure somebody's pitched like a firm for agents, you know, or some silly pitch like that. But with all these new, you know, sort of applications, the agent will just go and tell the user, do you want to pay cash or do you want to use a firm? And they'll just get to select like they would as a consumer.

1:35:48And so there's no new financial infrastructure needed. And I feel like agentic payments, like net new agentic payments might be an entire mirage. And we may have gotten a bunch of like, you know, posts online and blog posts and all this stuff. And then really nothing new happens. But what do you think? I'm going to make a bold claim. There we go. A firm for agents will be the firm. I'm going to put it out there. I know it's risky. I know I'm saying. No, I happen to agree with you. I think there are definitely many really cool, exciting developments in Agentic. I am trying out all the same agents myself.

1:36:32Some of them are surprisingly good. Some of them are still lumbering through the same problems you see with some of the earlier attempts. But it's very clear that we will all have agents doing our chores for us. I happen to believe that quite a lot of shopping isn't actually a chore. In fact, it's a form of entertainment. And so human in the loop will not just be a requirement. It will be a loss to humanity if we are not allowed or if we're not participating in some of the shopping choices, which includes, by the way, the way you pay. But some of these things will go to the agent. The underlying plumbing, and by that I mean everything from deciding the best way to pay all the way down to figuring out the smartest choice of a plan, most rewarding transaction, best 0 % loan, etc.

1:37:23I think that's going to primarily accrete to people who know what they're doing for specialists in the space. And that's why we have to continuously work on improving underwriting. We want to be more inclusive, as in say yes to more people while maintaining the same level of credit performance. And so all of that is still like the work we have to do and we have to do it faster and we have to pull away from the competition as aggressively as we can. But I don't think there's an opportunity to dislodge a firm by showing up and saying we are just like a firm, but smaller, less profitable with less credibility in the market and the capital markets in particular.

1:38:00but we are agendic. We are agendic too. We're pretty, pretty agendic ourselves. Yeah, I know. I love it. That's a great take. How have you been approaching leveraging open source models in various sort of like employee use cases and workflows? I think it's been, you guys are such an incredible engineering culture. I'm sure a lot of your team has been using open models in a bunch of different ways. Yet at the same time, if you were focused maybe five months ago about building your own harness or using these harnesses in open source models, and then the cost of the frontiers drops so dramatically to the point where you now have frontier-ish models that are cheaper than open source in some cases, maybe that wasn't the best use of time.

1:38:48So like, how are you thinking about allocating time to getting the most out of open models where it makes sense versus trying to avoid just wasting time when the cost of intelligence will continue to fall? So we actually did something pretty smart, if I do say so myself, pretty early on. So I'd sort of predicted that we're going to go through these moments where like, oh, my God, the best harness, the best model, the best combination of harness, model, user interface is going to change. And there's so much money. There's so much innovation. There's so many really brilliant people who are working all day, every day and making AI useful specifically for software engineers.

1:39:30It is foolish to commit to a configuration today. you know someone else is looking at it and saying, wait a second, that is the best way of writing software, except I have a better idea. And writing software just became the best it's ever been by the hands of the company I'm about to compete with. So like the whole recursive self-improvement that everybody's sort of either excited or terrified about, it hasn't come to the models yet, but it's certainly come to the development industry. Like we are living through recursive self-improvement of software engineering for humans and agents together.

1:40:00And so sometime around January of this year, we split off a team of about 12 people and basically said, your job is to make our development experience the absolute best for the current state of the art in a way that is easy to take advantage of now, but switch out to the next best thing later with a thoughtful, continuous matter. So we don't want to have this disruptive moment where everybody stop. We're all going to switch to product X. Oh, wait a second. Product Y is available. So we've had this team and it's run really, really well by a bunch of very, very smart engineers who love their craft and know what they're doing as practitioners, but also great thinkers when it comes to developer experience.

1:40:44They have been keeping us at almost the cutting edge of both the commercial frontier models, as well as open weight models, harnesses, et cetera, where we organize the entire process through with our hands. And whatever it is they offer to the entire company is usually within a hot second of whatever is considered cutting edge. But it's thoughtful enough where if you yesterday you were on harness A and today we really believe harness B is better, they will make the transition really simple. So just having a dedicated team that gives us the best possible developer experience without having to do a handbrake turn every three months has been unbelievably good investment.

1:41:25When we locked off this team and said, we're going to have this big group of people whose only job is to make us more productive at the meta level, I think some people were kind of doubting the validity of the idea. Yeah, it's interesting because the alternative is similarly sized companies. You have hundreds of people that are experimenting in real time and be like, well, I think I found the best way to do it. And the other person's like, well, I'm using this thing. We started there. I'll give you real stats on this one since I'm a fan of numbers. So we were in the experiment away mode until we had this developer experience team, developer productivity team.

1:41:59And we were probably, I think the percentage of code written by machines and humans together versus prior to this team's arrival increased by a factor of 10 when we organized this team and said, look, here are the prescriptive approach we're going to take. And there's always a menu, like you can use cursor, you can also use claw, there will support all sorts of different harnesses and models. But we have a menu versus go figure out what works for you best. The tyranny of choice is a terrible thing. And telling a software engineer, go explore over the weekend your favorite way of writing code with an agent, it's not going to be a weekend project, it's going to be a six months long project.

1:42:36So lopping that off into a separate area where you have a rigorous approach, and then we constantly produce here's the best way according to this team, and here's some of the choices you have in there has been really, really useful. We know it's doing well for us. So we measure productivity long before AI in PRs, pull requests per engineer per unit time. The cost per PR fully loaded, everything from salaries all the way down to AWS costs has come down 30 % since we created this developer productivity team. And so not only are we increasing the amount of code we're writing because we're able to leverage agents, the true cost per pull request is coming down quite steadily and has been for a while.

1:43:18And so I'm very excited about what's to come there. But I love the fact that we have this really well-constrained approach. I love it. Makes a lot of sense. One word to answer for the next one. Since you like numbers, what's your P do?

1:43:37No answer. No answer. All right. We'll get to it next time. Next. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Great update. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Sam Ross from New World, the co-founder and CEO, in the way. Get that gong ready. Sorry for keeping you waiting. Sam, how you doing? Welcome to the show. Big dog. Doing well. We got a fresh gong now. Jordy already broke one, I think, because he was celebrating that it's only 92 days until Christmas. That's right.

1:44:06We got some bigger news than that, a number that's bigger than 92. How much did you raise? The most boring AI company in the world. Whoa. No, no, no. They ran that as an ad. Oh, yeah. That's our campaign. Oh, yeah. And you guys trigger a bunch of people. Yeah, you triggered me. I don't find it boring at all. Anyways, let's talk about the round. How much did you raise? We raised$100 million. With the awardee. Woo. Insight partners, you got Salesforce Ventures. You're being careful if you shake hands with Mark Benioff in the wrong place. You don't want to get frame-mogged. That's a big risk if you're partnering up.

1:44:49I know he's already mogged you guys, so I stay away. Yeah, we were early. Jordy more than you, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Both of us. Absolutely brutal. What unlocked the round? What was the most exciting thing that Insight latched onto? Is it just top-line growth? Are the margins better than what we're seeing in other companies? Like what was the thing that they were like, okay, let's back up the truck. Yes. Well, we solved sales tax, RSI. But beyond that, I think ultimately this business is, you know, sales tax is not going anywhere. In fact, it's growing in California starting in January. All businesses selling software have to collect and remit tax on software.

1:45:31So there's this growing trend where as the world, as AI takes a bigger share of the economy, there's going to be more and more of the tax dollars are going to be taxing things like AI. On top of that, I think you look at the world of accounting and really our space is like tax advisory. And AI has not penetrated that space as much as areas like law. And so there's, you know, there's some really large potential there to build a really large business. And so I think, you know, we've been building this business for about three years. who've had phenomenal growth. And I think just with a great engineering team and great customers, that's what gets the investors excited.

1:46:10Here we go. What are the most valuable growth channels for you? Are you able to sell through tax accounting firms and then the accountants tell their clients how you should be using Numo? Or do you go direct to the CEO of the biggest software companies in the world and say you've got to use Numo? What are you thinking? Yeah, look, we do all of the above. More and more partnerships with firms is getting important for us, especially as you move upmarket and these complex businesses really trust their advisors. I've always been someone who was, before this, I was running e-commerce businesses, so I love the world of growth.

1:46:47And so, you know, a lot of direct sales as well. All the things you'd imagine that most SaaS companies are doing, a lot of marketing. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Go for it. I was just wondering about$100 million. Are you staffing up? Are you hiring a lot of salespeople? Are you just going to run even bigger ad campaigns? Like, how are you seeing deploying this capital? Yeah, I think for this money, it's primarily focused on R &D. So again, there's a lot to be building in this space around, you know, building things in the tax advisory space for firms, for companies directly. And the space is heating up, you see companies like sponsor ramp building in the space as well.

1:47:36And so it's, you know, I don't see them as competitive. Like this is a big space with a lot of different sub verticals. We're really focused right now on like the indirect tax space. So things like sales tax, VAT, we file in 80 plus countries. And so there's a lot of low level grunt work that gets done by armies of tax, you know, tax workers throughout the globe. And that's what we get excited about going and making their lives easier so people can be more strategic. last question and it's a choose your own adventure you can answer either of these questions you don't have to answer both one what's your p doom two what's the biggest fish you've ever caught oh p doom that that's that's based on time um well we already we already solved we already solved rsi uh it's sales tax rsi so and we're in you guys are fine and we're fine I'm living in the future here.

1:48:31Live the tell the tale. So it's P-Doom Zero. A vote of confidence. I'd love to see it. Well, congrats on the new round. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We're going to close out the show with you. We did have a hard stop. Sorry for the little running late on the schedule. But I wanted to close out the show with you. Well, then I've got to tell him about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplace, and now with AI agents. Sam, I wanted to throw a flashbang with you. Okay. as an early partner of the show and friend.

1:49:02So I'm going to throw it, and then we'll sign off. And congrats to the whole Numeral team on an awesome milestone. Yes. Thank you. I wanted to also give a shout-out to our customer, Lucy. Oh, yeah, that's right. I know. Thank you. And also, I don't have it here. Very important. Rora Water Filter is another customer of ours. Let's go. So, you know. The Shopify Numeral ecosystem is cooking. It's powerful. Everyone's working together. Let's hit it. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBBN. and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.