Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers, Grok 4.6 Launch, NVIDIA Nemotron | Darren Rovell, Patrick Whitesell, Harjot Gill, Jeff Huber, Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire, Andrei Georgescu

28:36It seems like a relatively stable asset. They get some potentially some halo effect from it.

28:43Darren Rovell:I think leagues will still be very careful as to who they let in just because they're worried about information as a whole. Right. They don't want things to come out, especially as long as a lot of these teams are going to still be asking for public financing for their stadiums. So so I do I do think they they I know I'm contradicting my contradicting myself, but I do think there are some caveats. And if they open it up to many people who are, say, invested in a fund who then have to have access to those financials, I don't think your sports leagues think that's interesting. So that's the only thing that I think is probably prohibitive to all of that.

29:30Got it. So when you say information, you mean financial details about how that particular team operates? Because there's been teams. Yeah, but can't you – you could certainly raise from a number of people and just have it be a condition that they don't get any information rights. Sure. Right? Yes. Yeah. But that would be hard if it's like Microsoft owns the bulls. For example, I know a bunch of people that would happily co-invest with Kushner and Iger on the commission of like, you don't have to tell me anything ever.

30:02Darren Rovell:I just want to be effectively be able to say, yeah, I own part of the Lakers. Sure. And that's the thing, by the way, minority ownership. It's ridiculous. I mean, I can't believe people say, hey, I'm going to put a hundred million in and and I'm going to own like an infinitesimal part of a team. I mean, it's like, yes, there is a trophy value, but there are seemingly better investments. I will say, obviously, I have been wrong at every stage of since covering Mr. 30 years. I've been wrong. If you want to pull all the videos, you can see me on CNBC saying in 2011,$450 million for the Warriors. That is crazy.

30:50Darren Rovell:And then the next year, the bucks sell. And I even said in 2014, bomber for$2 billion. It was 12 times expected gross revenues. And this deal is now 20, probably 20 with LeBron leaving. It's probably 22 to 23 times gross revenues. 12.5 billion for next year. Yeah, it's crazy. Someone some under the numbers in the chat said most of the leagues allow up to 30 percent institutional ownership in individual teams. Yeah. Thank you. But I think that's going to I think that will change a little bit more again. I mean, there's not there's there's been relatively little that we haven't seen like majority Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds come coming into American sports.

31:44Darren Rovell:I know that the monumental Washington Capitals and Wizards, you know, small piece in there. But and it's obviously infiltrated European soccer, football a lot more than it has. Well, yeah, and for all the existing owners, no one is probably sitting there owning one of these assets and thinking like, no, I don't want to unlock large institutional buyers for these assets. Of course, there's a massive incentive to allow these like much, much bigger buyers to come in. Do you think the trophy asset thesis is still driving the market or is there something else going on? because, I mean, I guess the trophies can just keep getting bigger and bigger as the pool of capital and the larger buyers come in and people are wealthier, so they need a bigger trophy.

32:33But it feels like there are other things afoot in the U.S. economy, changes to, like, the big macro thesis around sports is usually, like, we're all on our phones and that means we're craving experiential, right? And so I'm wondering if there's some other way that we should be thinking about a deal like this outside of the typical, it's a trophy asset.

32:57Darren Rovell:Yeah, well, you have a lot of people who are interested in ownership because they're rich and no one knows who the hell they are. Yeah. And that's obviously not the case with Kushner and Iger. Yeah. You know, one of the things that's not a surprise is Kushner and Iger. I mean, Iger's been walking around forever. And he obviously was at the helm of Disney, which owns ESPN. And he's had a first look at, you know, everything in sports over the years. And I just I just thought they were going to get the Vegas team. I mean, they were looking at Vegas a week ago. Yeah. So, you know, that just shows you how quick this is, you know, and and Kushner and, you know, obviously what he's been doing.

33:38Darren Rovell:And always, you know, hey, every day you got to throw in a Trump connection somewhere. Sure. So. So what I'm interested in, though, and I'm not. But you said, so I haven't been following the Vegas team at all or anything in the NBA. The opportunity that there'll be a Vegas team. But my question was, is it possible that they always wanted the Lakers and this was going on in the background and they just were using the Vegas team? Not what I was told. They wanted a great team, and this happened over the last 100 hours. What is the shape of Las Vegas sports these days? I know teams have relocated there, and there's F1.

34:28But is there an indigenous fan base that's strong enough? Is the indigenous fan base relevant?

34:33Darren Rovell:They can't believe how big it is. Listen, I was there the day they announced the Vegas Golden Knights. And obviously their first year going to the Stanley Cup helped. I mean, that crowd is probably in the top five best crowds in hockey. Everyone go, you know, people go there for road trips like they go when teams play, you know, the Raiders. You know, the Raiders Stadium, Allegiant Stadium is amazing. It's great. They've won. You know, Vegas is very hard to win at, and people laugh at me when I say this. But, you know, eating has become the next act and it becomes eating versus Cirque du Soleil.

35:14Darren Rovell:It used to be eating and then show. Now eating is actually an activity. And so you're competing with eating over the last five years because of the chef brands and everything else that's out there. And so I think they think the A's are really going to make a lot of sense. And listen, if you look at the Knights and you look at where the Raiders are, I mean, 10 years ago you were concerned about gambling. Now Kalshi has you gambling on what flights are late. We've gone from, oh my God, when I asked Gary Bettman that day when they said they were moving to Vegas, he said, oh, no, we're going to have the odds will be off the board at the two closest casinos to T-Mobile Arena.

36:06Darren Rovell:We're concerned. And, you know, and now you look today and you look at the prediction markets and we're literally betting on toad races every two seconds. Is toad racing a thing? I mean, there's crazy. No, it will be, though. I showed you that crazy Russian live streaming site where people play fake sports. Like there'll be two guys sitting in a chair and they're playing soccer. You can bet on how many cars will go through a traffic light. I've seen those. Yeah, until it turns red. I mean, listen, prediction markets are the dopamine that is going on, whether it's gambling, whether it's opening packs, collectibles.

36:52Darren Rovell:Obviously, I'm close to, you know, my son who's 12 is on a free to play app and he's looking at whether, you know, Giannis is going to sneeze during a game. And by the way, I don't say don't play that. I say, yeah, play that, play that and make you use your fake money. And when you lose 14 times in a row, that's a learning experience. And if you had real money, you'd be screwed. But I don't know. I mean, it's the prediction markets are the craziest thing that I've ever had to watch in my entire, you know, reporting, gambling life. Are prediction markets net good for sports in terms of the businesses of like the Lakers?

37:36There's more points of entry. And so you wind up buying tickets and going in person or does it not affect or does it pull people away?

37:44Darren Rovell:No, I think until people run out of money. People run out of money. It's very, very addictive. And it's difficult to avoid because, again, we need to be on dopamine. We are a degenerate nation. And this is, in a way, the perfect and most horrible product. Yeah, interesting. We talked to a former head of the CFTC yesterday about where the regulation might go, whether you're going to get some of those gambling addiction warnings applied to production markets. And what about Calci and Polymarkets market cap? And what if you're Andreessen Horowitz or how are you predicting if you're raising a$50 billion valuation?

38:35Darren Rovell:But at some point, you have to believe that with the sports books and you get a complete proctology exam if you're related to the sports books. And then if you're Calci or Polymarkets, you get a free pass to do anything. You'd think that that would have to come to an end at some point. But I and is that end when Trump is out of office? Yeah, who knows? That's the question. Breakdown. What's what's your updated view on what not? Oh, yeah. We had Grant on the show. I believe it was on Friday. The business is growing like crazy. It seems like there's a lot of like traditional online commerce happening in this live format.

39:18you know he gave an example of a guy selling fish doing quite well selling yes i love that example that was crazy that was and that's like you know the example that people always would give with china is like you can go on these chinese live streaming apps and buy like mangoes and kiwis and fruit and all this stuff and we hadn't haven't really seen that at scale in the u.s yet But but but if you were going to put a number on it, what percentage of the activity on what or what percentage of the volume on what not is like closer to gambling than commerce? Ninety percent.

39:59Darren Rovell:I mean, I mean, I you know, it is so much breaking that I'm surprised that they don't have an insurance policy against breaking by selling, you know, normal memorabilia. Right. I mean, that there if if in this is it's not as close to prediction markets, but if a bunch of attorneys general decide that they're going to go after breaking, you know, what not is going to go all the way down. and so break it break breaks down breaking for us it's like it's like i buy you're sitting there with a pack of cards you're about to open it i can buy it for ten dollars and it's possible you pull a card that's worth a hundred is that is that how it works and then people just spam that all that by three you put in you put in 300 to win 3 000 or you put in 700 and then potentially you could get nothing, which then becomes a lottery rule issue.

40:59Darren Rovell:And Whatnot has done a lot more recently to try to curtail it, but it's very hard to say that it's not gambling. And so I think they should be doing a lot more regular, traditional eBay-type memorabilia sales. I didn't believe in them in the beginning because I confused the smallness of their transactions, that the average transaction, I think was like$15, that they wouldn't be able to get a critical mass. And to their credit, they certainly have gotten that. People enjoy watching the shows. They enjoy being a part of it. But again, as they get bigger, I'm surprised that they're not investing more in traditional commerce, almost as an insurance policy.

41:47Well, you got to figure out if they're gambling on fish. because it's like yeah because like this fish might have caviar inside you don't know how much caviar is inside this is a real thing with fish by the way by the way if anyone wants to uh

42:02Darren Rovell:have a great time you should go to um oklahoma where you can fish for paddle fish which is pretty much a fish when you pull it out of the water it looks like it was on the simpsons okay And you can fish all you want, but you must give Oklahoma the fish. They will then clean out the caviar and then hand you back the fish. Oh, interesting. American paddlefish. American paddlefish. Well, thank you so much for the tip. And thanks for coming on the show. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?

42:40Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Patrick Weitzel. He's the founder of WTSL. Here with us with his first appearance, joining in just a minute or two. There are some other posts in the timeline, but while we wait, let me tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is with us here in the TVP and Altrium. Let's bring in Patrick.

43:15How are you doing? What's up, boys? What's up? What's going on? Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm good. I'm just in New York City. Can you see me okay? Yeah, you look great. I'm in this hotel room here in New York. You look great. There's a little bit of lag, but I can hear you fine. Yeah. So make it work. Well, let me. It's that hotel Wi-Fi. Yeah. I know. It'll get you every time. All right. Well, sorry about that, boys. No, you're good. We can hear you fine. Okay, good. So, yeah, give us a little bit of an overview of your firm, the thesis, and then the recent deals. So the idea was, you know, when we took Endeavor private, essentially what that effectively did was kind of we dismantled the company and essentially sold everything but our ownership interest in WME, the talent agency, and our position in TKO.

44:09which is now around 61%. But everything else that we ran and sat on, we sold. And so effectively kind of eliminated the job. And going forward and looking at the next chapter, I didn't really want to start a new company right away. And one of the things Egon Durbin and I talked about, we had a really great long relationship with Silver Lake, like everything we kind of did at Endeavor was really fueled by them and with their partnership. And so out of that, I talked to Egon. He goes, well, why don't we just keep investing in the field that you're in, kind of entertainment, sports, content, the things that I've kind of spent my 30 years in, but on a much smaller level.

45:00So we just started with$250 million. And the idea was to make kind of$20 to$100 million investments in different things that were in our sector and help companies that I could have some influence on and help build. And so that's kind of what the whole thesis is around Weitzel, the investment company. And then the other part of it is when Egon bought Raiders or invested into the Raiders, I should say, we had a WME at a football representation business. And per the league, you can't be a buyer and a seller. So I took that entire group out and started Win Sports, which is predominantly a football agency.

45:44We're starting and doing a little bit of golf too, but it's really focused on building a really great dynamic football agency. And we have also a handful of artists in there of clients, mine that I've worked with forever, of actors predominantly and directors that just have been longtime clients. So they're also part of it. But the investment that we put into Alex Cooper's company came from Weitzel. Got it. Awesome. What are the key ingredients to a great investment, great media company in the modern era where it's individual led, influencer led, podcasting, live streaming, these types of things?

46:23What are you looking for? I think the reason why I was attracted to Alex is, I mean, again, going back, you know, 30 years, the one thing that is always the most important thing is having someone really talented and really special. And Alex, to me, I mean, obviously her podcast, you guys know how big it is, how influential she is. She's a cultural powerhouse to kind of Gen Z women. But she's also built out already at Unwell a really diversified company that is not only in these other sectors but doing very well. It's in live events. There are consumer products. Of course, they're in content, both, you know, kind of scripted and unscripted.

47:11And that's at, you know, kind of the traditional media companies like Hulu or Netflix. But it's also she's kind of started her own network of channels on YouTube and funding and producing content for YouTube. Everything from micro dramas to just reality shows. And that's gone exceedingly well, you know, on top of it. And then lastly, an advertising agency account for digital solutions for people, creative agency. That, you know, Alex was saying yesterday that she thinks that by the end of 27, that the revenues of that will exceed her podcast revenues, which is quite a feat. So what I thought was interesting is, yes, she's a big force as a podcaster and talent, but she really has built a company that I think can only grow in every one of these sectors that we're in.

48:02So that's what kind of attracted me to her. I think also the part about, you know, what you're seeing in this kind of creator economy is they can, they don't, for 30 years when we built our company, if you had someone who had an idea like Alex's, you had to go to one of the traditional media companies, convince them to pay for it, you know, and finance it, distribute it, market it. Now, of course, people like Alex and others have done it themselves. You guys know that very well. And didn't need to go to the traditional players. but in that, I think now you're seeing a bunch of capital coming to this space and are going to invest in it.

48:40You see people raising funds for it. I think that what Alex has done is really, really hard. And so I don't think it's at the agency business, you do it at scale. I don't think this is a thing you can do at scale. I think there are going to be unique individuals and opportunities that can build multi-billion dollar media companies. And so that's where I I think kind of where I want to kind of spend my time. And I think I hopefully can help them think through the strategy, whether it's M &A or just in kind of figuring out how to grow their content business or live event business. Hopefully my, you know, kind of three decades of doing this could be additive and fun.

49:22That's great. All makes a lot of sense. I feel like so many different investors have been so excited about the creator economy for so long. and have struck, despite that excitement, they tried to invest in, the best thing to do is invest in the actual platforms, right, a decade ago, go invest in Spotify and Google or Meta, do the YouTube seed round, things of that nature. But then all the other attempts, you look back at like 2019, 2020, people were like, well, what if we can invest in the sort of tools that these businesses are using? The problem there is that these businesses will just like, They don't need a QuickBooks for creators.

50:03These are just media businesses. They just use QuickBooks. You can use Bank of America. You don't need a FinTech just for your business. You don't need a – creators don't need an Amex card. They can just use Amex or Ramp or whatever it is. And so it's becoming a lot more clear to me. And then even looking at investing in the early stage of creators, the best creators early on are scrappy. They figure out how to get an audience without a lot of capital. They can just turn on their phone and start recording. Maybe they hire an editor. And so they can ramp revenue pretty quickly. And I think what investing in this category is going to look like is people like you waiting to see who these sort of power law creators are.

50:46And then going in and investing real dollars once they've established at least the beginnings of a platform. just because I'm looking at the early stage. There's a lot of early stage content creators that I'm bullish on, but none of them, the smart ones, would take money because they're like, well, capital is not a constraint for my business. The constraint is like, how do I reach more people? How do I grow my existing business? And these businesses, at least on the advertising side, just generate a lot of cash. I think perfectly said. And I think it's all the more reason where I think there will be a lot of people rushing to this space and will, I think, make the wrong decisions.

51:27Because to what you just described, you have to get to this place. And where Alex came to us, it isn't like she needs the money. I mean, obviously, you know, it's well documented what her Spotify deal is alone. And, you know, and we'll only grow there. Oops, what was that? That was an air horn for the Spotify deal. Cha-ching. And the Sirius deal. She's put up some huge numbers. Yeah, but the point of it is, she's like, listen, I need help. I want smart people around us to help kind of grow it and think through exactly what you described. And what's interesting is the traditional media companies, they are kind of saying, listen, we don't know how to get to this audience that you reach.

52:09And we don't really know how to do creator stuff. So she's kind of going to, I think, be able to, if we do this right, go back and forth, have her own ideas, her own kind of things that we will incubate and do on YouTube, but also for the traditional media companies. And that's a kind of a hard thing to do because I don't know many people who can do both, at least that have come along historically. So, you know, and also she's, you know, her audience follows her as she's becoming a new mother. And I think that's going to open up a whole different, you know, categories, not only consumer products, but other things that she can kind of get involved in that her audience is going through those same things.

52:48And I think there's just an authenticity to her and a connection that is real. And it always starts with that. You got to have like great talent to build these things. And she is very ambitious and loves it. I mean, just loves what she's doing every day. So it's going to be fun. How are you thinking about flowback from the creator economy to traditional media, to Hollywood? Obviously, we've seen the Netflix, the Spotify deals. But the more interesting trend that emerged this summer was around obsession and backrooms and iron lung. these YouTube creators, these independent, you know, new filmmakers who were able to put up really incredible numbers at the box office.

53:32If we were having this conversation in two years, and you told me that there was an Alex Cooper directed rom-com that put up 200 million at the box office, I'd be like, yeah, that tracks. But is Hollywood set up to embrace a new modern creator now because it's because in the past it's always been well take take take six months off your current podcast to come do a hollywood project and maybe you'll make six figures maybe maybe a million dollars is in the mail and that's just not enough to take the whole podcast down for six months while you go do a project yeah i think you're right i think where you're going to see it is and you reference those two movies yeah is what what's happened with the tools and this is not brand new, but like, you know, when Chris Nolan was 15 years old, right?

54:20He either had to get his like, you know, video camera out or go rent film equipment. If he actually wanted to shoot a short film, he'd actually go rent lights and cameras and all that. And so the kid today, whether it's just on TikTok or YouTube, that 15 year old Chris Nolan is doing that every day and getting really, really good at making content and coming with ideas and very fast with the technology. And that's where I think the next generation of filmmakers are going to come from. And, you know, we would used to go to film schools and not that they won't still come from film schools, but I think what you're going to see is the writer, director, creator in the film business and in television is going to come there.

55:01And the power of like both of those things, when you kind of like, you know, get the kind of virality of online and you can incubate things there. So I I think part of what I think will happen with Alex is she'll have an idea that we'll do there. And just start as a micro drama or something for YouTube. And it'll catch on like this. And then you're going to socialize it. So by the time you go out, then you could go make it as a feature film or as a show for Netflix or whatever. But you've also got this built-in awareness. I mean, obviously, you guys followed it. But Backrooms was massively well-known by a target audience long before it went out.

55:36Totally. And so I think that's where I think it'll land. I think the idea of leaving your podcast to do it, I think is still going to be risky. But these other people are sitting here every day making really, really good stuff, really good content. And so I think that's exciting. And we'll see long term how Hollywood embraces that because ultimately, where the role of the studios are in that and how does the studios compete? They made that movie for$700 ,000. It looked really good for that. And those efficiencies are only going to get better and better. Last question I have before you leave. I'm curious how you think about generating returns from an investment like you're making it on Well.

56:26I'm sure you have a preference on it. You probably make back the original investment over the next few years. And on top of that, it's just you're in the money. but is this the kind of thing that you and the team want to just own and help operate for 30 years? Or do you think that there's going to be, in 10 years from now, a bigger set of buyers that would come in and do majority buyout of these type of platform creator businesses? It's funny to talk to Alex about that, because obviously it's her company and how she decides to grow it. And she's not really sure. I think she wants to keep doing this kind of forever.

57:05And I think one of the things that, you know, when we went through it, you know, we started our own company. Several that came and invested. And over time, as we bought other things, obviously our shares got diluted down and we owned less and less of the company. But the company became worth, you know, obviously exponentially more. But we still kept control of the company and had the governance of that. And so I kind of look at it in a similar light here. is I think as long as Alex wants to do it, yes, I think there'll be room for other capital partners to come in if needed and if wanted. But I think my experience with Silver Lake is kind of like, you know, I got a bias to, let's keep building something great as long as we can and as long as we're enjoying it.

57:49And then I think the exits and all that will kind of take care of themselves. But, you know, she started this company. It's, you know, it is her. So I think, And she's got such an incredible work ethic. I just think she's going to be doing it for a long time and, you know, just going to grow it and own it. That's my guess. She's done a fantastic job. Love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to meet you. Let's do it again soon. Likewise, and congrats on everything you guys have done. Thank you. It's incredible. Yeah. You know, start this thing and, you know, the OpenAI deal.

58:21It's just awesome. And even down in L.A., people are watching you guys. I love it. you know, spend some more time. I saw the Bob Iger thing today. Yeah. That was incredible. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of, that was the first thing that made me optimistic on LA in a long time. Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, California has fallen apart. LA is a disaster. Bob and Josh are just like, we're dropping 12 and a half billion. We're setting a new record. We're going. It's incredible. It's going great. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, man. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously.

59:01Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is from Code Rabbit. We have Hardjaw Gill, the CEO, here with a big fundraise. We got to warm up the gong. How you doing? Hey, folks. I'm pretty good. How are you? Welcome. Tell us the news. Welcome back. Great to have you on the show, finally. Well, he's been on the show before, haven't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Have you? But it's been maybe a year and you didn't have an orange background. can you up the volume please sorry um oh sorry um yeah well give us the news tell us what happened i want to hit the gong for you and then we have a bunch of questions about the business yeah so we're pretty excited to announce like cdc round of funding so we just ended up raising 143 million dollars at a billion and a half dollar valuation so officially a unicorn now and in a shorter like we started like two and a half years back so it's been an amazing ride pretty good just creating only$500 million of value a year not bad, not bad what's been the biggest driver of growth what do customers like about CodeRabbit more than anything else what's the real growth vector we're pretty much riding the wave of AI code generation here so the growth it's a second order effect of growth of CloudCode, CodeX, as you know the biggest use case for generated AI has been code generation.

1:00:26And that's what's leading to the bottleneck downstream with code reviews now being a massive, massive bottleneck and a choke point. And that's where CodeRavit is right now, the market leader, providing automated validation and building trust in these AI outputs. And that's what is bringing all the growth to our doorsteps. Yeah, unpack a little bit about, I was just reading on Hacker News, the death of the mid-tier engineer. You either need a vibe coder who can just, hammer prompts or you need a real experienced expert architect to make any headway and the messy middle is getting much messier with endless code, huge PRs, huge code reviewing steps that are unmanageable without AI.

1:01:09What is the correct balancing act that a company should be pulling off to actually move quickly, not run up the budget, but still be able to understand their system and get a good result. Yeah, it's pure chaos right now. I mean, especially like the recent inflection point we have seen with these agents becoming more and more capable. Like in the last, I would say three to six months have been amazing with some of these models like Opus 4, 5 being so capable and being able to run for longer periods of time. And what that means is that the inner loop of coding is now fully automated. Like you can just go from idea to code without even going through like planning process of linear and Jira tickets anymore.

1:01:50Even linear famously did a blog post that issue systems are dead, which is the truth. Now your ideas are just being translated to code directly. And it's not just the developers writing code. Now you are seeing, as you said, product managers, even designers who are non-technical in terms of coding capabilities are now actually opening pull requests. And on top of that, we are now seeing every company wants to be a coding company. Now we are seeing Spotify release a coding app. I mean, linear is writing code, Notion is writing code. and Datadog wants to write code, or Sentry, everyone's writing code, right?

1:02:22So what that is leading to is a massive backlog of the code changes you now have to validate and understand those massive outputs and then ship to production. So the role of human has become more of a reviewer now. So every day you're waking up, you're deciding which AI task I take to completion. Where do I add my taste? And it's a taste thing, it's a judgment thing now, which is scarce now. So that's what we're helping scale. So what CodeRabbit does is it first of all fights fire with fire, essentially like you're making Cloud Code fight with CodeRabbit in a loop. So it's a lot of loop engineering aspect of it.

1:03:00Making sure your changes are all meeting all the guardrails or the pre-merge checks that you have. Then after that, we are helping the reviewers also triage and prioritize the work. So the nature of planning has now shifted downstream because that's the joke point. and thirdly we're helping the reviewers also understand the changes so no one's looking at the code which is the fun part like the this is like the biggest inflection I've seen like when I'm not reading the code anymore expecting a reviewer to do that is certainly impossible now so what CodeRabbit is also doing is like raising the abstraction of understanding these changes like where you're not looking at lines of code but understanding the blast radius and architectural impact of those changes I have one last question Jordi I'm interested in the opportunity internationally?

1:03:46You're expanding. How big is the opportunity in Europe, in Asia, abroad? How focused are you on it? Is there a unique opportunity because other companies are maybe less serious about international expansion and so you can be a more trusted partner, faster, accelerate there? Or is it just the logical next step for your company to expand internationally because there's demand and pull everywhere. For us, we have always had pull from all segments of the market, even globally. When we started, initially we went viral in Japan, which was so funny. And even in this round, we are partnering with a partner in one of the VCs who led that round.

1:04:30Atomico is a very large fund out of Europe. BMW Ventures invested in that round, so BMW has one of our early customers who believed in us. so massive opportunity I think it's a global opportunity like the developers across the globe are like sorry we like cars yeah I hope they throw an M3 M2, M4 I was thinking of a wrapped I8 yeah yeah yeah doors do go up on the I8 sorry to interrupt but what was what were people most skeptical about during the financing process. Obviously, it sounds like a bunch of customers invested. They have a good feel for the product. But, you know, Cursor buys Graphite.

1:05:22I'm sure that was an accelerant to your business in some ways. But it also signals that, like, these companies that are generating code want to do everything. thing. And so I think you can, like I imagine a good argument is like, you know, it's helpful to have a non-lab review your code, you know, like a third party be in that flow. But how did you answer that question? No, that's a great question. I mean, this was one of the interesting fundraisers I've done. Like this is my third startup, by the way, like seeing all kinds of fundraisers. This one, you can clearly see like there's a lot of like anxiety in the market when it come to the SDLC space, everyone's just concentrating their capital on a few model labs.

1:06:07Everyone wants to be an entropic, for instance. And the other dynamic itself is, what does the future of SDLC look like? Is code review step even needed? People are completely on the fence on what the future of... I mean, Dario gets on the stage and says that you don't need software engineers anymore. So all those anxiety had been there, which we had to talk to the investors to make them understand where this is all going to land where the stable ground is and code reviews. In fact, you bring up Cursor, it's a great example. What we have seen in the last three years, even the code editors are not future-proof.

1:06:42Cursor started with tab completion and then they got blindsided by Cloud Code, which was almost like a Yahoo versus Google moment for them. On the other hand, the code reviews and guardrails, they never go away. You can never have a scenario where you're going to take AI code and ship it to real customers without having any sort of guardrails in place. So the GitHub is becoming like a choke point for a good reason. It's in a lot of distress, as you know, but that is kind of a sign of things to come. That is the only place where you can actually take a look at the changes and then approve them.

1:07:12And this is kind of like an example that I'll give you from my first startup was in the observability space. I had seen kind of the same thing happen where when microservices were taking off, cloud was taking off, there was a lot of chaos. So operators were kind of flying blind. and then Datadog comes in and defines this whole category of observability and became a massively valuable business. While AWS, GCP, they were all growing, but Datadog also continued to become a standalone company. Same thing we're seeing with code reviews. Now there's a lot of chaos. Explainability has become a bottleneck.

1:07:45Just like observability, now you have an explainability problem. In a way, CodeRabbit is now kind of becoming the Datadog of this new world. And very interestingly, Datadog is one of the investors in this round as well. So they see the analogy here as well. I love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Awesome progress. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats to the team on the milestone. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Thanks, folks. Cheers. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

1:08:17Our next guest is Jeff Huber returning to the show. I think it's been over a year. He's the founder and CEO of Chroma. And we got some good news from Jeff Huber. Let's bring him in. I know we were keeping you waiting, Jeff. Sorry for that. I'm running late today. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm doing great, guys. Good to see you again. Good to see you again. It's been too long. Give us the latest in your world. Take us through recent announcements, and then we can go all over the place, I'm sure. Let's do it. I think it's been a really interesting year in AI, in particular, seeing how companies are more deeply adopting AI agents.

1:08:53I think as we reflect on, the biggest gap in AI still feels like memory is the biggest gap. I'm sure you all try to use agents all the time, and they're constantly forgetting how to do things, and they're not the right context. We're announcing on the show our solution to that. Yes, take us through it. What is Zeitgeist? I think in short form, there's probably a lot of sophisticated approaches to solving memory for AI, but in very simple form, if you can get AI agents just to be able to write things down and then later find those things. That's all you need. And in some ways, I think Wikipedia solved it 20 years ago.

1:09:32You can call it a revolutionary data model. It's just a wiki. And so I think really inspired by how OpenClaw and HermitAgent have been managing markdown files. Yeah, I was about to ask. Why not just a bunch of markdown files? Why not just take the OpenClaw VibeCoder Mac mini guy and scale it up to the organization of 1 ,000 people in the enterprise? It's a great place to start. As our team was adopting this technology over the last three or four months, we wanted this shared memory layer for our whole team that knows everything about our whole company, really. And you've got to think about concurrency control and access control and versioning and lineage and just a bunch of infrastructure things that matter as the data set scales.

1:10:16So as a concrete example, there might be someone in human resources that's developed a skill to give people raises, but you don't necessarily want that skill proliferating across the entire organization. So otherwise, everyone's just giving themselves raises left and right. Is that a reasonable example? I think so, yeah. Hopefully, the other access control systems would not allow anybody to give anybody a raise, right? But yeah, maybe more grounded, like what we've seen amongst our own team is that now our engineering team, the first place they go and they have a technical question is they ask Foundation, what's it called?

1:10:50They ask Foundation that question. And Foundation has seen all of our Notion docs, all of our Google Drive docs, all of our coding agent sessions, which actually have so much high-value casted information in them about how our team works, how they operate, what we care about. But now it spreads. The customer support's constantly asking questions. Sales, GTM's asking questions. It's really become this repository of everything we know. Yeah. Take us through the shape of the core business, the launch of Chroma Cloud, how that business is going, just overall demand for core products in and around the AI boom, because everything's sort of booming and every system's straining.

1:11:29What's your experience been? Yes, we launched Chroma Cloud in late 2025. We now have close to 1 ,000 paying customers on the product and tens of thousands of other users who we'll bring on board soon. I think these lower-level infrastructure primitives are cool, right? A core database, core search, core operations. They allow developers to pick it up and build useful applications. As we were looking at the market and seeing really what our customers were building, we realized there was an opportunity to meet them where they were. They were all asking us, hey, how do we build wikis? How do we solve access control?

1:12:11How do we solve versioning just time and time again? And so us just building those infrastructure primitives for customers to use allows them to focus on what that actually differentiates their business. Give me not your AGI timelines, but your timeline to just good search. I feel like I go into my Gmail and I search for something and it's still bad. And I want an LLM to be involved, but I don't want it to be as slow as a current LM. I know I can wire it up to codex or whatever and, and have it read through everything, but I don't want to wait 10 minutes, but I also don't want the current experience.

1:12:46And I feel like there will be a merging of these two, but do we need to bake it into an ASIC? Like how complex is it going to be until like you just show up to a website and the search function is magical and also as fast as you remember it. Yeah. I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle. So number one is having highly expressive, accurate, and fast search throughout the database layer. And the second piece of that is the agent itself or the model being really fast. One thing that we made a bet on earlier this year was agentic search becoming the default. All searches will go through a model.

1:13:24This is what I think the bitter lesson means for search, is that you'll spend more tokens, you'll use more inference, that's how you get better at search. and so we released a model in the spring called Context 1. It's a fine tune of GPT OSS 20D and that model on Cerebris today already runs at 3 ,000 tokens per second and we were targeting, I think, Talus got bought last week. I think you guys covered that. Chat Jimmy. Chat Jimmy. We were proof that names don't matter when the product is really technical and good. the team is that cracked you can name your product whatever you want chat jimmy.ai we were shared investor you know we were targeting context when running at like 15 000 or 20 000 tokens per second um on that chip and i think like if you think about that's gonna come right that's coming uh this year and that's gonna change how we really rewire how people think about language yeah is there still um like even though the the the token speed is very quick in that example, is there a delay to sort of like fire up the chip, like load, load data into memory, build the context window, uh, like do whatever you need to, to actually get the, once the inference is cooking, I can imagine it being very fast, but is there, if you're dealing with something that's like a scaled email product and you have millions of users that are going to be searching things randomly.

1:14:47You can't store all of that in memory all the time. What is the process there? Is that a meaningful barrier or not? I think fast inference, sort of what you're implying here, fast inference does not solve just for you, conduct engineering. You still have to make sure that you're bringing the model, the right information, the right granularity of information, letting it forget information successfully such that it can refocus. And so I think it's been cool to see like context engineering to some degree get folded back into the model. But also as we've seen as of late, like, you know, really good harnesses like the stuff from Prime Intellects, like really good harnesses that are targeting specific tasks.

1:15:29You know, that is in some ways context engineering and like they can outperform frontier models by a huge margin. And so I think there's still huge gains to context engineering. Jordy, anything else? I got more questions, but we're running behind. Yeah, sorry. Great to see you, Jeff. Let's not let it be so long again. Yeah, let's do it again soon. Congrats on all the progress. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. 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.

1:16:00Go check it out. Up next, we're going back to back again. Sean McGuire is doing deals left and right. He said, I want an entire gundo. I want every gundo. Kind of like the Kushner of deep tech. Yeah, look at this. But we got Sean McGuire and Soren Munra Anderson from Neros. Great to see you guys. How are you guys doing? It's doing fantastic. It's good to have a lot of money. Yeah. It's great. Job's finished. Take us through the deal. What happened? Yeah, I mean, overall, this year has been super, super strong. We've been growing like crazy, building the team, producing a lot more drones. We're up to about 1 ,200 a week in terms of production output.

1:16:46So things are going really, really well there. And we've also started expanding into multiple product lines. So we just started talking publicly about Bandit, which is our interceptor drone. And really this round is fuel on the fire to go expand to new verticals and make bigger investments into the core technology behind the platform. So, you know, core business doing extremely well. And now we're ready to take some big swings. How much did you raise? We raised$250 million. Let's go. All right. This is the third round we've either led or co-led in this company. You were early. Yeah, we led the seed.

1:17:30There was a pre-seed led by Ian Roundtree from Kanto. Got to give him a shout out. Yeah. He connected me with Soren. back in the day. But then we also Sequoia co-led the B and co-led the C. And so that is, I'd say that's max conviction, boys. Like that's, that's up there. Yeah. Uh, really, really cool. Uh, thing I'm most interested in for you, Soren is like, how is the American supply chain developing? How much are you guys having to take on yourself versus are there, are there companies coming out of the woodwork hitting you up saying, hey, I can make this, I can make that, and you're vetting them.

1:18:06Yeah, we heard rumors of an American drone motor company because those were in really short supply. But walk us through what's going on on the supply chain side. Where are their green shoots? Where are you issuing a call for new startups? Yeah, it definitely depends on what part of the supply chain, and it's pretty varied across. So we have taken the overall strategy of designing our core components in-house. We really specialize in the electronics design. So this is things like the radios and the flight computers. So when we're going and figuring out how to build these at scale, we're going directly to the chip companies.

1:18:43We're going to many different board houses. We get a lot of control down at the granular level of the subcomponents and the materials going into these parts. We do a similar thing with motors where we are sourcing neodymium, non-Chinese neodymium, where we have a place where we can get that processed outside of China. And then we're also working with multiple motor companies, including one of the American motor companies that has started up recently. So I think because drones are getting so much attention, there are some really capable companies, like West Mag is one of the motor companies that's making fantastic progress.

1:19:22us, we benefit from that. But we also know that we need to control our own destiny in many of these areas. So we are going very vertical in our design and our manufacturing. And the intent is to be multiple, like sourced, have multiple sources for all of these critical things. Problem number one feels like you're on the path, which is as a country, we need to figure out a way to make a ton of these as fast as possible. Second is maybe like capability and form factor and how do you basically push the form factor forward. Sometime between when the last time you were on and now, I saw a video of a drone where effectively the whole body of the drone was spinning and it almost made it invisible and it was very, very scary looking.

1:20:10It feels like there's a lot that can be done on the form factor side. how important is that to the company right now versus just problem solving problem number one yeah i mean we're constantly iterating on form factor for archer basically figuring out ways that it can be a better product for the soldiers these are really granular things like uh for example you know every time they train with it they find this one little like plastic part breaks and so then now you need to go and figure out how to change that plastic part that's a really really specific example, but we get a lot of advantage by having now tens of thousands of drones deployed and constantly doing that iteration with the end users.

1:20:53But in terms of overall form factor, the biggest thing I would look at right now is Bandit, which is our interceptor. So it is pretty much all of the same components from Archer, but in a new airframe with a different payload. It's designed for maximum speed versus really like maximum range with a heavy payload. And it's designed to go and chase down other drones. It's a great example of how we've built this ecosystem of these core components that we can produce at scale with a secure supply chain. And now we're applying all of that to a new form factor. And we're able to go and chase down shot heads with it, which is something that we cannot do with the current product line today.

1:21:34Wow. Can you explain, like M5, sort of the buyer here and how the drone procurement process will change over the next few years? Because drones don't, you'd think like Air Force, they fly, but I'm sure the Navy needs drones. I'm sure the Army needs drones. Recently, Space Force was built up, and that makes a lot of sense for where space is. But you can see selling to the Coast Guard, selling to different branches of the military, even within. Are you saying we need drone force? Maybe. Maybe that's the solution. But I can imagine like the Navy SEALs needing something different than other Navy servicemen.

1:22:13And so how diverse will your customer base be within the armed forces, within the Department of War? How does it break down currently? Is there one buyer and then they do deployment and repurposing? or are you actually interfacing with smaller segments of the armed forces? Yeah, it's a great question. So today we sell to every service branch of the U.S. military, but the Army and the Marine Corps are the largest volume customers. Navy and Air Force have less of a large quantity demand, at least for Archer, because Archer is really designed for maneuver forces, striking targets within a 20-kilometer radius.

1:22:59And that's really the specialty of the Army and the Marine Corps. However, with Bandit, the counter-UAS system, that is, I think, very applicable to the Air Force with protecting air bases as one example. But we design all of our products to be useful in many different domains. and in our business development team, they are broken down by service, but not by product. And so we really want the folks who are interfacing day-to-day with the customers. So this is our BD team and our mission success team. We want them to be really intimately familiar with the customer's needs and focusing on what does that specific service want so we can deliver them the best product.

1:23:43How are you thinking about lessons from the F3? John, let me just add to that. So you talked about a bunch of the American Department of War customers. Soren has also already started international sales. So obviously these products are needed all over the world. And then with this next product, Bandit, the Interceptor product, we need to defend pretty much all critical infrastructure. And with the Iran war, especially what happened in the Gulf, it's not just going to be government customers. I think that if you're building a data center, you're going to have to buy interceptors and you'll do it in cooperation with your government.

1:24:21But maybe the dollars will come from whoever owns the oil rig, Exxon or anyone. And just this this problem is so big and it's gone. It's like already going beyond the traditional just Department of War procurement cycle. And we're seeing it just extremely strongly at Nero's with their demand. Mm-hmm. Lessons from the F-35 program, some really amazing technology, also tensions between different branches for different features that might have delayed, might have caused cost overruns. There's a bunch of different ways you can tell the story of the F-35. But are you leaning more into modularity than another company might?

1:25:06Are there benefits and trade-offs of modularity at your current scale? Or is there something where you're thinking, okay, down the line, we'll need different products, so let's set things up now to be prepared for when that comes? Yeah, that's exactly right, actually. And we've started really trying to instill this in the engineering team, which is breaking down our systems by the logical component and sub-component level and thinking about what is going to transfer to the next product and being really smart about what every interface between components looks like. Neros, our theory of victory is building a component ecosystem and making it so every new product is utilizing that.

1:25:52And so we just build this flywheel. A lot of companies have done this really well with software. Neros is trying to do this with hardware as well. and that is very clear as we're developing Bandit that we're able to reuse so much of the componentry. I will say that modularity is generally hard for mass manufacturing. You can take parts of a design, but actually having individual components is generally harder for making a really mass manufactured product. But it is something that our customers demand, especially with components like radios. We've just seen that you have to be able to switch out your comms quickly.

1:26:27And as we redesign this next generation of the drone, we're doing a full ground up redesign from what you see today. And that is going to be in service, partially in service of modularity, but also setting the requirement to be manufacturable at a million per year. So those things are somewhat at tension with each other, but we have to we have to figure out the right line in between. Sean, it's your third investment of this company. You have a ton of capital. In terms of your defense tech investing arc, are you in growth investor mindset now? Do you expect to do fewer seed checks, really early stage companies, and focus on growth stage, board seats, figuring out the public markets, doing later stage deals?

1:27:16Or is there still an opportunity for early stage defense tech in your mind? yeah i mean many people will disagree with me on this but i am personally more in the growth mindset now i think there are these moment in time you know these why nows that happen that an opportunity for the first movers to go just like build companies that could not have existed prior in the ukraine war was that for a lot of defense tech and so like the companies that were started immediately then or right before and are actually delivering value you know abroad in some of these active theaters, like they're just in a different level than the ones just getting started now.

1:27:57And I personally think it's going to be hard to catch up for a lot of these. I do think there are, you know, like let's say there are 10 very successful defense tech companies started in this decade or so. My guess is seven of them have already been started. We know the names. Maybe there's opportunity for like two or three more. So I am open-minded and paying attention to the space, but like it's more active on the growth side. And I got to say on that, Nero is still today a deeply underappreciated company, like$2.5 billion valuation. That's cool and great. These guys, their revenue is growing at an insane clip, actually very efficiently from a financial perspective, which is very rare for a hardware company.

1:28:41they are actually like having profound impact in theater right now in multiple places and it's like that caliber of company is very very rare there's maybe another couple companies in that you know group but this company kicks ass i love it great way to sum it up last question i have uh how meaningful is drone racing as a pipeline for talent like are there people that that uh i'm I'm sure you have plenty of attention from that world, given the meteoric rise of Neros. Is what the IMO medalists are to Scott Wood, is that what drone racing is for Neros? A little bit, yeah. Basically, our whole flight test team is insanely good drone pilots.

1:29:33And we've actually started going to the biggest drone racing events just to be there, have a presence and show people that there is something that they can come and work on that is actually a real career. Drone racing is not much of a career, at least for the majority of people who partake in it. And honestly, I just wish it was bigger because it is such a fantastic source of talent. So my theory is that over time, as military FPV is really growing, it'll eventually mean that the hobbyist FPV world will come along with it and we'll see more very, very cool racing events happening. I was going to add one more pipeline, which is now that these guys are doing very, very real deployments, they have a pipeline of former special forces operators joining the company.

1:30:22And I mean, for me, it's like an American that used to work in that world as a civilian. It makes me very, very proud. So the drone racing is where Soarin' comes from, but it's really incredible to see these guys hiring a bunch of X-mill guys. Yeah. There was the story of Palantir. A lot of guys like used it and were like, let me go work for this company and did very well for them. We have had that happen multiple times. So that is, that is saying something good. Yeah. Are you the best drone racer at Neros currently employed or have you hired somebody better? What percentile are you if there's a company?

1:30:56Oh man, I I'm definitely not the best and I'm probably not even the second best. I have not flown very much in a long time. That's because he's old at 23 and his skills are exponentially decaying. I'm washed at this point. I would say Levi is our lead flight test pilot. He runs the whole flight test team and he was a professional pilot before. He's like the most naturally talented pilot I've ever seen. He's probably the best at the company. He also flies for a living, so that helps. Yeah, there you go. And for those of you that don't know, Soren was the world champion drone racer in multi-GP. I've watched him in person.

1:31:37Ben over there on our team came and filmed you in the park in El Segundo. And it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Because I'd seen a DJI drone sort of like take off and sort of, you know, like float away. Maybe it goes a little quick. And Soren puts on this headset and is just whipping around this tree going as fast as you can. It was a crazy video. It was a lot of fun. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you guys. Great to see you. Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

1:32:11Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scale, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is the real liver king, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andre from Vivodyne. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit. Sure. So Vivodyne grows human tissues at very massive scale. Okay. So we can test drugs in humans without testing in people.

1:32:56Okay. And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run in the U.S. every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. So 19 out of 20 drugs fail because all the animal experience we've done just don't translate to people. So we can cure cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice and then they fail in people. When did humans first grow human tissue in a lab? Yeah. this is uh this is the first time we're able to grow uh like large pieces of human tissue so hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece and we're growing you know tens hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations so it's a hundreds of thousands of cells this is still microscopic or oh you can see them yeah you You can see the little blood vessels growing in them.

1:33:52So it's like inch scale, centimeter scale. Interesting. Have you ever had a rogue tissue? Yeah, I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of the sky back here. You know, here I am. What is the key unlock that allows this? Because I imagine that 50 years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now? So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them, which the robotics, you know, by kind of dogfitting or technology, we also get better at.

1:34:34So it's, you know, with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a little valley at the top. Right. It's the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just kind of nest there. And that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do. So it gains the function it would normally have. We can dose these blood vessels that self-assemble, and this tissue actually performs the function of its native organ counterpart. Are humans like sourdough? Do you need a little starter? How do you actually kickstart tissue? Yeah, so we use – that's a very good analogy. So we use primary human cells.

1:35:17So we get them from donated blood or biopsies of things like tumors, and we get the primary cells out of there. We're not using transformed stem cells or the old cell lines. They are primary human cells, and they are what kind of seed this process of the tissue cell. So someone has a tumor, they do a biopsy, and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it because if you kill this, you're done. You can scale it up and clone it effectively. And then you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works. Yeah, 50 ,000. 50 ,000. The search space is just so big, right?

1:35:54I mean, the kind of real problem I think drug development is butting up against is, you know, over the past decades, we've tried to find like single target cures, right, for disease. So, like maybe this receptor or maybe this compound in the blood, by reducing it or by increasing it, we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just keep getting away from us. We might get a little bit close and then it does nothing in people. And you imagine if the check engine light comes on in your car, the solution is not going to be you turn a single screw. It's a little more complicated than that.

1:36:31And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology at the complexity that it has is how do you search that space? How do you know which things to bind and how it all works? And to really address such a large search space, you can no longer just do screening. Like it just runs away from you, right? It's like a cliff of just like numerical climb. And so you have to do the inverse. So just understand biology and back solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens. and so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, we have to be able to test it.

1:37:13We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because it feels like we're very close to the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas, but then of course you go, what was it? Mouse or monkey or something at some point. And then human trial. Yeah. And, but this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models, or would this be a full replacement for mouse models? Or would this be after a mouse model? Like where does this fit into the, to the story arc of a new biotech company?

1:38:00so you know we we're currently working with like the very large majority of the top 10 pharma and the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people okay so even the primates are not giving the same responses that humans are or strange things are being seen in the primates that were not seen in the mice and dogs and you wonder like which one is it right sure and so the the instead of just jumping you know we have some cells in a dish here we have some inorganic acid here we're not now we're in mice and then you know woodchucks and the sort of uh we just need to test on human tissue from the get-go and replace this whole like outdated approach to you know maybe the mouse is going to tell us because all these drugs that are failing in clinic right these 19 out of 20 uh like they are working in the animals right they're safe they're they're pretty efficacious right um so it's like you know So we're like, fuck, where are our cures, right?

1:38:56Instead of all these cures for the best of these. And so we are working from discovery all the way through to, like, supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people and also things that might be too unsafe to search in people. Yeah. Jordy, do you have another? What were you doing before this? How did you get into growing human tissue? Doing it for fun, probably. Hobbyist. Yeah. How did you get into this? Um, yeah, so my, my, my, my background was in designing a high throughput microfluidics. Okay. And then I met my co-founder Dan, um, as my PhD advisor, and he had invented this concept of the organ on a chip of growing, um, you know, these, these functional units of human tissues.

1:39:42And, um, we, we kind of came together and said, we need to scale this up dramatically and also improve like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a deep biopsy punch. Interesting. Fascinating. What are the regulatory guardrails for creating,

1:40:05like I just imagine like you kind of, if your company continues to gain traction. You're worried about accidentally creating like a Frankenstein type of thing? Well, yeah, like I feel like that's the natural path here. And I'm just wondering, like there's a lot of like moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be regulation surrounding that at some point. And yeah, it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of people living in this. People.

1:40:40Anyways, I'm not a big movie guy, but it's the Matrix, right? Where they're all... I mean, you're pretty far away from the Matrix. It doesn't feel that far. Hopefully we get there quickly. I see the robotic arm in the back. Well, the real movie is The Island. With Michael Bay as The Island, they clone a human. That's right. And then the rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very, very dystopian. We can do this hopefully without the full person. Yes, yes, yes.

1:41:16And the FDA, you know, like the FDA is actually, I think, among all of these cases where there's a new technology and you're like fighting with the regulator to push something forward. The FDA has been, you know, has put up now like three modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives, right? Like given the failure rate. And it really gets worse with biologics, right? Like antibody based therapies and, you know, by specific antibody drug conjugates and all these new modalities for drugs that are that are good because they're specific, but they're specific to human targets.

1:41:51Sure. And so it's even harder to test those. And so the FDA has been an extremely strong tailwind actually in making these. Yeah. And then at some point, would you grow a specific individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was going to be most effective? That also feels like the next logical step is personalized medicine. Personalized medicine. Yeah. Take a bunch of tissue from there or something. Okay. Yeah. So by definition, these cells have to come from someone, right? And so, you know, we are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on both, you know, age, sex, race, and so on.

1:42:35But ultimately, too, for various patient-specific diseases, cancer is a great example. I mean, just imagine being able to, if you have a solid tumor, I mean, the island is like the perfect movie, right? You imagine like 50 ,000 clones of yourself and you say, all right, like who will survive? There's a lot of moral weight to that movie, though. You've got to actually watch the movie, I think. You're going to get in some hot water. We'll pick up the good parts. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, just the tissue in a Petri dish. I think most people can get behind that. No brain. But as soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, it gets a lot darker.

1:43:17Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think. Yeah, very interesting. Well, congratulations on the progress. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much. If you want to grow copies of yourself. No. When we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. So I'm pretty much good to go. But this sounds good for those who don't have a title. Where are you based, by the way? San Francisco. We're right in the Bay Area. Cool. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for having me. Have a good rest of your day.

1:43:46Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce over at Listen Labs. He's been on the show before. Coming in with one of the hottest takes. Yeah, got some pushback. He said founders only send investor updates. Yeah, give me the boat horn. When you're winning, Listen has sent three in its history all fundraise announcements. Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying.

1:44:23I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine. Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same. Yeah, this is just, I think this is terrible advice. Really? Except if you're winning. That's great. I think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates. Yes, I do think. No, it's just like, it's just such bad advice because I've had so many, I mean, I've had instances like kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year. And I just assume the company is like dead and dying. And then they pop up with an update.

1:45:03I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead. I didn't even want to. I almost felt bad asking. It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for like, you know, a quarter of a billion. So anyways, I just think like investors, yeah, if you have 10 investors and you send a bad update, a lot of people aren't going to be able to help. But if there's a chance that one helps, then that's great. And even if you're not winning, you can show momentum, which is going to like updates are how you build trust.

1:45:42It's how people start to process, like, how is this team and this founder performing? Even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how, and if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money, like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the trust. People can't get a good read on, like, okay, do I believe, do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested, even though they haven't figured it out yet? Okay. Right.

1:46:15So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness, maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre-seed company? Like you're purely in the idea of May's very early stage. The revenue is zero every month. You're just sort of figuring out the first product. I mean, at that stage, it depends. Hopefully, you only have one or two investors. But it's still important to see. It's valuable to see a snapshot. It doesn't have to be. At that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm super, super bare.

1:47:00But it's still better to just have even quick bullet points. hey, here's what we're working on. We'll have another update in a month. Okay. Because Listen Labs is only a three-year-old company. And they raised their Series A in April of 2025. And there's a rumored Series C going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April of 2025, January of 2026, and August of 2026, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly. It's not monthly, but it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly.

1:47:39So it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more like less like hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every three months. You're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically every 24 months. It's a harder industry. And so as an investor with a Series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runaway is actually left. But that's not the equation here. So a little bit of a unique – this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates and still be emailing all your investors every six months.

1:48:18So there's a little bit of that. And a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen Labs has been crushing. I remember when they first came on the show. It seemed like the company made a lot of sense. They quickly raised follow-on rounds from great investors. I'm sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you weren't winning. I'm still sure they're doing well, but just really, really bad advice. It's not one-size-fits-all advice. I completely agree. The other thing I would say is how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stop building in public. No, that's true.

1:48:53They haven't like, I've seen this like at least 10 times right now. You see the company that's got all this momentum, founders like, I'm sharing our, here's our, I'm sharing our best revenue publicly. Because they're just proud of it. And they usually will string together like six months of that. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what, what, you don't want to build in public when you're not growing anymore and revenue is declining or, or you were, you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. The other side of this is this nobody reads a bad update and helps they just mark you as dying.

1:49:28I think that maybe that's not 100 % accurate. But the thing is like you're dying unless you're winning. Yeah. I think there is something where in investor updates, a good investor update can be a pitch for the company a little bit. And it can be an opportunity for the founder to sort of rehearse their next round's pitch with their current investors. and say, okay, let me restate the vision, the mission, the progress, what we're doing. And instead of framing things as like, I need all these different things, it's more just like, I'm going, I'm working. And then also there's the dynamic of sometimes companies stop sending investor updates because there's a tier one partner on the board who's shepherding the company.

1:50:16And all of the activity really happens at the board meeting. and maybe one of those early angels has a bigger stake in a competitor. And so you don't actually want to share the update broadly, but the board meeting is still happening. There's still like oversight and infrastructure around the business. And so in fact, you're getting something that's bigger and more important than an investor update, which is a board deck and a board meeting. It's just not being shared to all investors. Yeah. The other thing about updates is they just keep companies top of mind. Like I have a friend, I have a friend, he has a bootstrap company.

1:50:46He effectively sends a monthly update. and it gets him so many customers because it's just at the top of the inbox. He's like, hey, I'm trying to connect to this company and people just loop him in all the time. It's an amazing way to just stay top of mind. Yeah, that's happened a few times like companies that I'm not even invested in, I get on the investor update list and I'll just be getting it months later. The other thing is like, if you're not updating somebody, like I had one of the 70 odd angel investments that I've made, like hadn't heard from them in a year and then they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up?

1:51:20And the ask was basically like, will you do a bridge round? And it's like, yeah, I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made. But it's so much different to be getting those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, seeing how they're building momentum Momentum as a company. And yeah. So anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it. Don't do it in every case. Don't listen to Alfred, the founder of Listen Lab. I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm fully, I can fully get behind not sharing up, if you have a ton of angels.

1:52:10What if you raise money every month? If you have a ton of angels. And you're only sending fundraising announcements. does that if you have a ton of if you have like a really kind of crazy cap table i think it can be i think it can be fair to and you're in a competitive category i think it can be fair to say like we're keeping these numbers closely held yeah we're gonna specific numbers or uh or even just say like hey we're basically sending updates to people that have invested like more than a million dollars right yeah or like leads threshold like that but um anyways very very funny very funny post put the timeline in turmoil we definitely got the people going and we should have alfred back on the show to get an update on the company they must be crushing this is the only thing you post when you're just on fire yeah you must be ready to send another let's churn let's churn walk us through the funnel pull up the slides i want to see them anyway we got one last news story it's good news for the gamers in the audience if you're a gamer The U.S.

1:53:09government wants you to consider becoming an air traffic controller. You've had the practice. Now it's time to go into the real world and become an air traffic controller. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a federal campaign specifically targeting gamers has helped the FAA hire more than 2 ,000 people to train as controllers, putting the agency at 94 % of its hiring goal with another 2 ,000 plus candidates moving through the pipeline. Duffy launched the effort in April, arguing that the government needed to look beyond its traditional recruiting pool and that gamers already practice some of the skills controllers need, including rapidly processing information, maintaining focus, and keeping track of multiple things at once.

1:53:56You don't necessarily need a four-year degree either. the FAA accepts candidates with qualifying work experience, education, or a combination of the two, ideally a steam account as well. It's also a potentially lucrative career. The median air traffic controller earned$144 ,580 in 2024, according to the BLS, while the top 10 % of air traffic controllers earned more than$210 ,000. Getting the job, however, is another matter. applicants generally have to be U.S. citizens under 31 years old, pass medical and security screenings, and take the FAA's three-and-a-half-hour air traffic skills assessment, which is designed to predict whether they have the cognitive aptitude for the work.

1:54:42Those who make it through then undergo extensive training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City before continuing their training at an air traffic facility. The recruiting push comes as the FAA tries to dig itself out of a longstanding staffing shortage, a government accountability office report published in December found that the controller workforce had shrunk 6 % over the past decade, even as air traffic increased 10%. So the number of air traffic controllers relative to the amount of flights was decreasing really, really in a bad way. At the end of fiscal 2025, the FAA employed 13 ,000 controllers and shortages at critical facilities.

1:55:23We're already contributing to delays and cancellations. We've all seen the reports of those. The problem in the chat says being an air traffic controller must be like being a lifeguard for planes. Just MFs doing laps all day. Just shoot me instead. Speak for yourself. Some people like controlling air traffic. Yeah, it's the same thing as playing SimCity. I don't know. You think you could make it? Not for everyone. Not for everyone but the few the proud the air traffic controllers do you think the specific games that they recruited from i mean you have to imagine starcraft rts is better yeah i would go with a starcraft player over a fps player all day yeah i don't know um all right final post of the day hit me tyler i want you to read it what does he say the got a post here from hamant over at Lightspeed.

1:56:17Wait, oh really? Okay, let's find it. Let's see if your new app works, Tyler. Mont over at Lightspeed. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does. That's some great wisdom. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline. This one did crazy numbers. Whoa! I did not Not every day you see a VC other than the ball putting up numbers like this. True. True. Very, very rare. He went mainstream. Yeah. Very good post. He went mainstream. You're going mainstream. You're going mainstream with some advice for everyone in the boys group.

1:57:02If you have a boys group chat, take the picture of Adam Silver, Josh Kushner, and Bob Iger, and send it to your boys chat, and just say us. it's going it's going to 3k for sure it's going it's going it's going it's ripping well thank you for tuning in to tbpn we'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m pacific can't wait five stars on apple podcasts and spotify sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com it's been an honor and a privilege and have the best wednesday ever please do goodbye we love you

1:57:41you