Marc Andreessen & Ilya Sutskever Host TBPN, Mag 7 Earnings Recap | Aydin Senkut, Dean Ball, Shreya Murthy, Lulu Meservey & Gaby Goldberg, Jakob Diepenbrock, Shishir Mehrotra, Karri Saarinen

28:27Address the problem? They haven't, they're like identifying the problem, maybe prototyping. This is very oddly worded. I'm like struggling to read this. The idea has also attracted the interest of tech barons. In May, it emerged that former Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space due to his interest in space-based data centers. That's fascinating. I know that Relativity was not doing well with kind of the V1 strategy. And there was this turnaround project. And Eric Schmidt came in and was, I think, paying a ton to keep the business going and really investing. I had no idea that that was his thesis.

29:10That's fascinating. Then earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years. That's big. Now Elon Musk, whose SpaceX owns and operates significantly more space-based infrastructure than any other company or country in the world, has also expressed interest in technology. After Ars wrote a story about the potential of autonomous assembly to construct large data centers in space, Musk responded on X by saying that Starlink satellites could be used for this purpose. simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high speed laser links would work.

29:51He said on the social media site X, SpaceX will be doing this. Very interesting. Um, yeah, I, I think it makes sense. The question is just like, yeah, what is the actual timeline for any of this? This, uh, I mean, no one really expected Starlink to ramp as fast as it did. Uh, and then it just like kind of worked. But, uh, if there is, I don't know, a bunch of, uh, if there is a lot of, uh, uh, like actual fundamental like foundational science around like heat dissipation that needs to be done that might be something that's a little bit bottlenecked but at the same time at the same time i kind of like i would kind of bet on the spacex team to figure that stuff out since they already do a ton of heat dissipation and material science just on yeah it's it's also just fascinating to look at the space industry versus the automotive industry like the automotive industry is the most brutally competitive challenging business where elon is having to compete with every car manufacturer in the world.

30:42Obviously, there's export, import controls in automotive. But in space, it's like, you know, you can imagine that being not a perfect monopoly, but certainly having every possible advantage in order to dominate in that category when the time is right. Should we talk about Apple before we continue? Yeah, definitely. Apple beat top line, beat on bottom line. China sales declined year over year. If you've been paying any attention to Apple, you know that their China business is slowly going away. iPhone revenue, they missed just by$300 million. $50 billion or$49 billion this quarter. Yeah, iPhone revenue is$49 billion versus a 49.33 estimate.

31:35Stock is relatively flat since then. Yeah, so this is the real bombshell in their strategy. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a third-party analyst firm, said it observed great interest in the Pro and Pro Max models, while the new iPhone 17 Air model showed virtually no sign of traction. I saw my first iPhone Air in the wild yesterday. No, you saw that one get smashed. Tell that story. Which one? Oh, this was genuinely like the most. I posted about this. During L.A. Tech Week, we had a dinner. Why did you put it in quotes? It was L.A. Tech Week. Well, there wasn't, I mean. There literally was an LA Tech Week event.

32:28You're like, Los Angeles. Los Angeles technology. TVPN. No, so we had dinner with some folks, and there was a founder there from Venice. From Venice. And he was saying that the iPhone Air is the strongest iPhone ever made, and that he challenged anybody at the dinner. There was like 20 people. Do you remember Bendgate? Do you remember the, do you remember Ben gate Tyler? It was like the iPhone five or something. There was, I was pretty young. Okay. Yeah. You're probably before your time, but, uh, but there was a time when the iPhone launched and you could just bend it. And it was like a lot of phones were getting bent.

33:06So this guy is going to you and, and he, and he's going around and saying that no one can bend this phone, right? That's the strong. No, he, he said nobody can break this phone. This phone is absolutely unbreakable. They've tested it internally. You cannot break it. It's the strongest iPhone ever. He compared it to every other iPhone, even the titanium iPhone. And so he was bending it like this, going crazy. And he challenged anybody at the dinner and say, who wants to try to break this phone? And a Gundo founder, I'm leaving both of them unnamed, a Gundo founder. We got Gabriel from OpenAI in the chat.

33:43Good luck, man. You're building cameos over there, but you're going to compete with us. We're doing it the old fashioned way. Yeah, we're doing it the old fashioned way. It just took us three hours sitting here in makeup. What do you mean three hours? It was like more like four hours. It was like four hours. So Gabriel, you sped that up just a little bit, but you know, I think, I think we're sticking with this for the, for the meantime. Okay. So anyways, this founder challenges the entire group at dinner and he, can anybody break this phone? Gundot founder raises his hand, takes the phone and like tries for a second and just snaps it basically not just completely shatters completely broken won't even turn on and the venice founder sitting there saying like like he was like in disbelief like every the whole room just went completely quiet and he was like i'm gonna i'm gonna email tim cook about this emailing tim cook what is he gonna do you're not supposed to smash your phone uh anyways on apple uh john your take you said sort of the inverse meta core business not at risk due to ai but not investing aggressively consumers seem happy to just open an llm app i could take i said apple's trading at 40 times pe with very low growth this feels steep even if i don't think they're threatened by ai in the near term and then i highlighted a quote from bernard arnaud from lvmh he said i don't know if in 20 years time people will be using iphones but i do know they will be drinking domperion it's a good one and hopefully they'll be using graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI.

35:11Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. In other news... We should close it out with NVIDIA just to finish this little earnings wrap-up. Basically, John, your take was, on top of the world, but is the head that wears the crown heavy? Core AI factory build out going flawlessly, but unclear why NVIDIA is pushing data centers in space, humanoids, quantum computing, mumbo-jumbo. Maybe it's real. Maybe just forward of the same old AI story? Question mark? I said, I don't think Jensen would be just chugging beers on camera in Korea if he was having a rough one. So we'll see how it nets out their earnings or not until November 18th.

35:51What's wrong with chugging some beers? What's wrong with chugging some beers? Especially, I mean, he is superlative at this point. I believe just quantitatively, he is the most value creative founder CEO in human history. Like no founder CEO has created 5 trillion. I mean, no one's created 5 trillion in any capacity, whether in the CEO seat or not. Because like with a Microsoft or with an Apple, you have to start having the conversation when you're having the goat debate on how much credit do you give to Tim Cook for market cap creation? How much credit do you give to Steve Jobs, right? And same thing with Satya Nadella and Bill Gates.

36:38It's like, obviously, Satya has taken Microsoft from$300 billion to$4 trillion. Does that mean that he's 10 times better than the founders that started the company in the goat debate of value creation? He did have a big, he had a lot of great shoulders to stand up. It's not entirely about number go up. Exactly. Exactly. But with Jensen, you don't even have to have that debate because he's been the founder CEO the whole time. And so he deserves a beer. Let the man have a couple beers with his boys in South Korea. He's been on an absolute beer. A couple more posts here. Jay Boltard says, I'm sorry, but no company generating the cash meta is with the margins it has should ever be raising money.

37:21Of course, they announced another bond sale yesterday morning to fund their buildout. Jay Boltard says, absolutely pathetic. Maybe just spend a little less and don't pay every AI scientist like their Shohei Ohtani. Yeah. I want to understand more about the private credit dynamic here because I believe that a good CFO would tell you that if you're buying land, you should get a mortgage because it can be secured. And there's just some cost of capital math that you should do. And it would actually be irresponsible. Like if they were saying, hey, we're going to build a new data center. We need to buy some land.

38:05We need to buy a building, buy a bunch of GPUs. And they're like, and guess what? We're not going to use debt. Like that's like, that's like paying off your mortgage basically. And it's like, okay, yeah, you can pay off your mortgage and you can be like, I'm one of those guys that doesn't have a mortgage. And it's like, congratulations, but you're probably not using capital efficiently. And so I, when I hear that they're setting up a big data center and they're raising debt for that particular deal, I don't have red flags flying off in my mind. But I don't know. This Boltard guy does. Semi-analysis had a post here quoting Sundar.

38:41Sundar said, over the past 12 months, nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each process approximately one trillion tokens with our models for a wide range of applications. For example, WPP is creating campaigns with up to 70 % efficiency gains. Swarovski has increased email open rates by 17%. Let's give it up for increasing email open rates and accelerated campaign localization by 10x. Semi-analysis says AI is not a bubble. Enterprise AI is very strong. Nearly 150 enterprises each process 1 trillion tokens with Gemini models for a wide range of apps. and then they say, wait, that's less than a million bucks per year per enterprise or 150 million of annual revenue, i.e.

39:240.3 % of GCP annual revenue. The fact that Google leads a token count instead of revenue growth tells you everything. If enterprise AI was actually strong, those 150 companies would be spending 10x more. I don't know about that because when you're a big company, you don't want to break out more gap metrics, non-gap metrics than you absolutely have to. like because if you develop some monster of a business like the aws ipo story the whole idea that amazon had this amazing business and was like oh yeah like just include that and everything else like definitely don't let everyone know and satya told this to to us on the show was he was like when aws had to disclose what was going on over there it was the best day for us because everyone looked at our business and we're like they got the same thing going on over there they got a monster of a business cooking.

40:14And so the question of how Google positions this, do they want to share dollars? But I don't know. I just wonder what the shape of GCP adoption is if it's nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each processed$1 trillion. I wonder how narrow that slice is. I mean, yeah, if Sundar would come out and says, we got enterprise AI to$150 million run rate, everyone would be like, but it sounds really good when you say$1 trillion. Yeah, yeah, that is a weird, weird way to frame it. I don't know. I mean, this is all so weird because it's like, okay, so then what's actually happening in the core business? because they, they, they crushed earnings.

41:09They did, they did great. And it's like, are we just in this world, weird world where everyone, where every business is like, yeah, I totally want, like, I'll take$1 million of tokens. Uh, but then I also need$75 million more of just traditional databases. Is that what's going on? Like what's actually driving the growth, if not the token generation, uh, there might just be something longer tail going on here too. This might just be like this slice of this 150 enterprises that's actually, you know, that only makes up, I don't know. The big question is just what percentage of GCP annual revenue is AI, is Gen AI?

41:49Like we've seen that the CapEx at Meta, they have Core AI, they have Gen AI. Like everyone wants to track that now about what workload is happening. Sometimes the hyperscalers don't know because they just said, look, I just rented you a bunch of GPUs. Are you inferencing a recommendation algorithm on it? Are you playing video games on it? Are you generating tokens on it? We actually don't know because we respect your privacy and you can do whatever you want with it. So all we can tell the market is like, hey, we sold a lot of GPU hours and it's all masked. Anyway, Tyler, what you got? I mean, yeah, a trillion is just, like, not a lot at all.

42:31It's just not a lot of tokens. Because OpenAI is doing, like, just on the API, like, something around, like, 250 trillion a month. So compared to that, I mean, if it's a trillion over the past, like, year, even if it's 150, I mean, that's, like, that's pretty bad. Each 150 trillion tokens, and you said OpenAI is doing, like, 260 a month. I actually can't keep these numbers straight anymore. Like there's, it's just like, everything is like, nothing's in apples to apples. And I think that's very much intentional. I think that you don't want to be easily comped across anything. That's why everyone just focuses on valuation and then revenue and revenue scale.

43:12Dylan Patel says, so many people hated on us for the AWS acceleration thesis a couple months ago. And we were right, of course. Only we can do these calls due to our deep knowledge and insights with core research, data center accelerator, and tokenomics models. amazon and he does the amzn with and just drop sales at semi-analysis.com so i expect uh to be printing the next legendary 24 hours this was crazy i wasn't sure if this was uh fake news or not but uh on the coinbase earnings call yesterday um uh brian armstrong yeah uh went there was a prediction market that people were betting on which words he would say during the earnings call, and he waited until the end, and he just read through and read off every single word that he had missed.

44:02He says, you know, I just wanted to add the words in here, Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those all in before the end of the call. So completely trolling. We've had that a few times during interviews. I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. And I just want to, you know, add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3. It's actually crazy that he hadn't gotten to Bitcoin until then. Like, it really tells you a lot about how mature the Coinbase business is that you can get to the end of your Q3 2025 earnings call without mentioning Bitcoin, which was like the entire reason the business exists, but the business has grown so much.

44:48There's a lot else going on. It's possible that he said it and he just didn't remember. Maybe, maybe, but it is, it is funny that, uh, that he's just, yeah, one, one thing is, is we've had prediction markets created around different interviews we've done and it is wildly distracting when I'm looking at the chat and people are like, say this word, say that word again, say it three more times. It's a very weird postmodern, hyper techno capital accelerationist, like aesthetic to be like, People are gambling on the words that you're saying on a live stream. It's very, very weird. I don't know what his, I would love to know Brian's honest take on like how he feels about that.

45:24Like there's a little bit of just the market is going to exist. It's going to be a thing. And so he, by doing this, he's kind of trolling the market to just say, Hey, you're never going to be able to reliably bet on this market because you never know what I'm going to do. which is one way to interact with it as opposed to being like hey guys I know that everyone has a prediction mark it up on what I'm going to say and so please don't do that it's like no just like go create chaos and then everyone will just know that it's a meme and chaos well it's going to just drive more attention to the next earnings call because people are going to be like oh is he gonna well I'll just bet yes on everything in case he does that again oh my odds might be at like 95 for every word and then he just says like he just doesn't mention it at all yeah and then everything you know it certainly it certainly kind of cements him as uh as just a very in the culture ceo and a very a very like online founder which i think is positive um we are of course partnered with polymarket as a prediction market uh we're usually tracking the largest companies on their largest company at the end of 2025 nvidia has been predicted of course and what's the percentage here it's like 99 now i mean they're a trillion above everyone else there it was a horse race though um yeah it was really close mid-summer yeah at one point i mean the the market caps were were eclipsing each other and they were going back and forth and and at one point june 1st microsoft and and video were both at 37 exactly it's been a pretty crazy it's been a crazy pretty crazy year because of the the tariffs and what and the ai narrative and the deep seek moment uh the the horse race has changed a few times and microsoft has been in the lead Apple's been in the lead, but NVIDIA is running away with it.

47:14And that deserves a beer with your boys in South Korea. And so that's what he's been up to. Did you fully understand, there's an article here, Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost 11.5 billion last quarter. That seems like in line with what we've been kind of assuming. It's a massive loss-making business. I don't know that we'd heard that they were on like a$40 billion loss run rate. But that kind of winds up with the amount of money that they've been raising. Are they the least profitable business in the world? Maybe Intel? You mean like the biggest cash center? Who's losing more money than OpenAI?

47:57Do you count CapEx as losing money? because I would almost certainly assume that these are not losses. These are investments. So if I raise$10 million for my startup and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to buy an office building for$5 million, that's not negative 5 million earnings. That is negative 5 million cash flow. I've lost 5 million cash and I don't have liquid cash anymore. And so I would assume that a lot of OpenAI's losses are actually investments in CapEx one way or another. But they're also probably losing. Stock-based comp is factored into this as well. Yeah, and that's also in many cases a non-cash expense.

48:48And so still important to track, still significant. But all of this stuff, it's like I'm kind of in like a wait and see until the S1 drops, until we can actually get data. Do you have any intel? Yeah, so apparently this is double what they've, like what has previously been reported. So I think before there was a report that said the first half of 2025, they were going to do 3.5 in losses. So this is basically double that. But even then, it's still, I don't think this is very surprising at all. It's so hard to track how much money they're actually raising because they'll raise for a particular deal.

49:23They'll raise for Stargate. There'll be a secondary transaction. It's very hard to understand how much cash is actually going from investors onto OpenAI's for-profit balance sheet that is available to burn. And then once you have the cash, I think everyone's fine with the idea of Sam Altman burning money for 12 to 18 months and going out and raise more. That's not crazy when you're growing your business, especially in a new category. In other news, Palantir sues former employees for stealing company secrets. Company alleges pair violated non-competes to create copycat AI firm. They've two employees.

50:06They're accusing them of stealing confidential data to build a rival company called Percepta, backed by General Catalyst. I would not want to steal from Palantir. Bad idea. That seems like one of the worst companies to steal from. They will find you. Yeah. And they will kill you. um the company but uh it is a is a wild thing uh yeah you think about a company that's going to have like you know things pretty locked down their whole their whole shtick is they knew what's going they know that if i remember i read the article yesterday but i believe they they tracked that the employee had slacked themselves a document that they then opened on their phone and like presumably you know save so um yeah we'll see how this nets out uh they say that taking access to Palantir's crown jewels, such as source code and customer workflows, to create what it called a copycat platform.

50:56So they're just trying to block them from using the data and to force the return of stolen materials. One of the comments says, never go against a company that sued the government and won. Interesting. um shamsanker was on the uh ross douthat ross douthat it was really good i don't know how much he listened to but uh he he it's funny because they open with the classic question of um of uh like what does palantir actually do and i don't know like why are people so confused by that question it's so crazy to me it's like and shams explains it extremely well he's just like like you have data we help you understand your data we help you understand what's going on there um you know it's it's he's he's like it's a data analytics firm sir it's the same other thing um when when trey stevens went on sean ryan yeah like the questions were like almost the same exact questions like what does palantir do like and then you read the comments and then everyone's like this is the antichrist yeah people go crazy crazy crazy uh and i think it's i i like sean me this great example of like when you want to make a thing, like if you're running a manufacturing plant, you will have a system for tracking.

52:20Like if you're trying to make like yerba mate, you will have a system that stores like the specifications of the can, what type of ink you're using here, the size of the can, the shape, what materials, how this gets printed. Like that will all be managed in a particular software system. then how you're actually making the cans will be like, oh, okay, I'm producing 25 cans a second or whatever. That will be tracked in a different system. Then you might have a CRM to sell. Who do I sell these cans to? I'm selling them, you know, every month, Jordy buys a bunch. So I have a CRM that tracks you. And he's just describing like the different enterprise software tooling sets, like CRM, CMS, warehouse management system, inventory management system he's just describing those and say and explaining how palantir can tie them all together and how palantir can build them and sometimes you need custom ones for specific uh for specific industries um well let's check in with the palantir bulls anyway yes what is the what do the palantir bulls say the palantir bulls will get exhausted at these levels full send i like the guy doing it our team workouts should look like that we don't break Nearly enough of a sweat compared to this.

53:37This is so sick. Let's go. Look at this. Bro, backflips. I like that guy who's just like racing it like it's a chariot or like it's a horse race. That's hilarious. Yeah. This also seems slightly sped up maybe. What do we think? Do you think this is like 1.1x? It's slowed down. Oh, you think it's slowed down? You think it's slowed down? Get on Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? and chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. Where to next? We got the mansion section. There's a bunch of stuff we can go through. Did you hear that the Hamptons market is making an epic comeback?

54:18Let's go, finally. Home sales of$10 million or more houses are surging on the East End, even topping the COVID surge in the Hampton, New York's affluent beach vacation destination, the luxury real estate market has come roaring back. Have you ever been to the Hamptons? I still think I've never been. I actually... Bobby Cosmic was worried about the Hamptons. Maybe as a kid, but not as an adult. The number of home sales above$10 million on Long Island's East End has surged to unprecedented levels, even topping the area's pandemic boom. The uptick comes even as Florida and other locales have replaced New York City as a primary home for many billionaires.

55:03The Hamptons is, for a lack of a better term, kicking ASS at the very high end of the market. Wow, uncensored swear word in the journal. Absolute dogs over there in the writers' room. I mean. Out of control. Out of control, yeah. We would never. We got to get this under control. No, I think that's not that bad of a word, ASS. The high-end Hamptons market was in the doldrums before COVID. Home sales of$10 million or more plummeted from$58 in 2015 to$30 in 2019 as the Ritzy area faced increased competition from areas such as Nantucket or Hudson Valley. And so there are some stories here to the banner born.

55:45I've been working at my land thesis. Yes. I think that it's probably the most underrated asset class right now. Well, don't spill the alpha. I mean, I'm down to share the alpha with the team. Yeah, I just think throughout all human history, people were like, how do I acquire land? Yes. And then at some point or another, people just stopped, right? It became just about getting the home and not thinking about land. Where? Where do you want land? Do you want to buy Fifth Avenue? I just want to buy up land in the area that I love the most. American jurisdiction? Of course America. California? Of course, California.

56:35So Southern California. I'll never give up on California. I still think there's huge alpha in just acquiring massive swaths of Alaskan land. Yeah. I still think that. You've been working this one out for a while. Yeah, I think it's massively underrated because if global warming is real and unstoppable and we can't fight the force of global warming, well, then temperatures will rise and Alaska will be the last beachfront property. It'll be balmy. It'll be amazing. Everything else will be a desert, but Alaska will be nice and temperate, and that's where you'll want to be. And if we cure global warming, if we stop global warming, if we wind up figuring out how to manipulate the environment, we harness the…

57:20You can manipulate time. Yeah, manipulating time, manipulating the weather. If Augustus is successful, if geoengineering is successful, well, then it's not going to be cold up there because you'll just be able to transform it into a lush environment. 72 and sunny all day. So I think in either scenario, no matter where you land on global warming, is it unstoppable? Is it preventable? Alaska looks great in that world. What do you think? Did you ever resolve your beef with the Alaskans? No. I posted on X. Actually, it was Twitter back then. like four years ago i posted um like we got to go to alaska we got to build some condominiums we got to build some strip malls we got to build some skyscrapers uh it's too it's too nice up there uh and i was basically like we're gonna we're all the tech people all the all my tech friends we're all gonna go to alaska and the alaskans did not like this and they said stay out of alaska you tech boy uh and i was getting i was gonna attack both the left and the right kind of listen too.

58:27I did. I, I, I, in fact, I did not, uh, invade Alaska. Uh, but I was getting lots of DMS from, uh, Alaskans who are, you know, gun toting good old boy Americans. Do not step foot. Do not, you wouldn't last a day up here. Uh, you're not tough enough for the Alaskan wilderness. And then I was also getting canceled by the left Alaskans who are like, this is my indigenous homeland. You can't come here, that type of thing. And so I was getting it from both sides. I wound up locking my account because the post went majorly viral in Alaskan, like Twitter, Alaska Twitter. Of course I was joking around, but the internet doesn't care about that.

59:05Twitter is such a small place already. Imagine how small Alaska Twitter is. There's like six posters up there, regional posters. But this is the lesson for folks who post and are worried about getting canceled. Not that you should go out there and get canceled, but if it does happen, it usually starts by somebody quote posting you. And you can tell that you posted something, you got 100 likes, but the quote post is taking off and people are having a lot of fun quote tweeting you. That's when the like ratio on the original post is just abysmal. Exactly. So if that happens, you can just bail by locking your account, which then kills the quote tweet because it doesn't show up in the quote tweet.

59:44And so no one's liking or retweeting a quote tweet with just this account is locked. And so it just kills the virality of the quote and the dunk. And so you stop getting dunked on and then no one can really like DM you or reply to you or dig through your account. And so usually, at least in the short term, people are kind of like, ah, I'm moving on to something else. I'm not letting it percolate. We should talk to Lulu about how to handle cancellations when she hops on. She's, of course, seen a bunch of these. um speaking of people who should be canceled uh someone owns a disgusting house in los angeles we got to dig into this uh the mansion section is really getting wild today they put a curse word in here don't like that they also uh are listing an 85 million dollar mansion here for sale in la an estate with a curated collection of sex toys what's going on mansion section why are you getting so wild on Friday, October 31st.

1:00:43Spooky. It has a pleasure suite. Not like them. A pair of Los Angeles mansions, one with a pleasure suite, outfitted with a curated collection of sex toys, is hitting the market for$85 million. The seller is British music producer Alex DaKid. He's 44. He spent 14 years building one of the houses, a roughly 24 ,000... 14 years? Yeah, he started when he was 30, I guess. He thinks in decades. He thinks in decades. In addition to the pleasure suite, the Hollywood Hills home, which Da Kidd called his Entertainer's Fortress, has eight pools, an auto elevator, and a private nightclub. In 2020, Da Kidd purchased an adjacent five-bedroom home with its own pool for around$7.6 million, property records show.

1:01:29He bought the roughly 6 ,125-square-foot house with the idea of adding it to the main residence. he said but ultimately decided to use it as a guest house instead. DeKid bought the first property a Spanish style home in the Bird Streets area for around 4.3 million in 2011. The purchase came shortly after renegotiating his first publishing deal. Mr. Morale in the chat. Alex DeKid. He's 44. His real name is Alexander J. Grant. I basically got this house thinking it would be a six-month remodel, but after more than a year of renovating, DeKid decided to raise the house, destroying it, and start over.

1:02:10It was like making an album for me, DeKid said. I got these other ideas. McLean, who's known for designing modern mansions, is a madman just like me, DeKid said. The four-bedroom house has a glass elevator for cars, a pleasure suite with a Murphy bed, and mirrored wall, contains antique chairs customized with patent leather, upholstery, restraints and chains. I think we're beyond the days of it being taboo to enjoy pleasure, DeKid said. I wanted a place where you could feel comfortable and intimate and explore. All right, let's go to the next topic. We're not past it. It is taboo. Tear your house down.

1:02:51I don't know. No, the mansion section is all over the place today. Shutterstock founder sells a Bridgehampton home. What a great time to get out of Shutterstock with the dawn of generative imagery. This has to be one of the hardest businesses to make. He's not out yet. He's still the executive chairman. Yes, but he's clearly sold enough to buy$57 million. We should have John on. I'd be interested to hear how he's... Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they get so much traffic still, and I imagine they just help people generate assets based on other assets. I mean, the bull case is the Reddit thesis, right, where you're licensing the data, and that's actually very valuable, and the stock sort of pops off of that.

1:03:39He sold his oceanfront house in Bridgehampton, New York, for$57 million, according to people familiar with the deal. He bought it for$40 million in 2014. He's listed the house. The buyer's identity couldn't be learned. Huh, we've got to figure that out, get to the bottom of it. let's see uh set on more than two acres the modern bridge hampton home has a gym a game room and a media room interesting outside there is an infinity pool you'll love that uh an outdoor kitchen a fireplace and a television a private lighted walkway that leads to the beach um sales volume in the hamptons hit a 14 year low but it's coming back and uh the founder of Shutterstock is getting out at maybe the top, but a local.

1:04:24Boom. Very fun. What else is going on in the timeline? Back to the timeline in the journal as well. Back to the timeline. Turbo Puffer. There we go. Search every byte. Serverless vector and full-text search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Continue. BlackRock stung by loans to businesses accused of breathtaking fraud. An entrepreneur tapped private credit funds to finance his telecom businesses. Now the lenders say he defrauded them. So Stock Market News over on X says, we have our fourth private credit collapse in two months. And this one shows exactly why institutional lenders shouldn't be trustified to verify their own collateral.

1:05:03Bakim Bombat ran Cariox Capital, a New York telecom financing outfit that convinced BlackRock's HPS investment partners and BNP Paribas to lead him$552 million. The entire deal was built on one claim. He had legitimate receivables from T-Mobile, Telstra, B-Vix, Telecom, Italia, Sparkle, and Taiwan Mobile backing the loans. None of it was real. Brom bought forged contracts that appeared to be signed by representatives from these carriers. He created fake invoices supposedly issued by these companies claiming they owed Cariox money. Then he spoofed email addresses mimicking these carriers' real domains and sent verification emails to make the receivables look legitimate.

1:05:47By stacking these fabricated invoices on top of each other, he created what looked like$500 million plus in collateral. Lenders sought assets and funded the deal without catching any of it. Here's where it gets embarrassing. When HPS and BNP Paribas finally tried to verify these receivables by actually calling T-Mobile, the carrier said they had no idea what carry ox was talking about no contracts no no invoices nothing existed one phone call would have instantly revealed the entire fraud these are supposed to be institutional grade lenders with world-class risk management yet somehow they missed basic due diligence while all this was happening uh brand bots people were also stealing cash whenever payments came through the lender controlled collection accounts instead of applying those funds to the debt they diverted the money offshore so he wasn't just fabricating collateral He was stealing actual cash flows in real time.

1:06:37Lenders sued in August 2025 and froze all assets. Then the company Karyox filed for bankruptcy with up to$1 billion in liabilities and basically zero assets remaining. HPS is sitting on half a billion in losses with nothing to recover against. The kicker is that BlackRock acquired HBS for$12 billion in July 2025, specifically to expand into private credit and get access to its$148 billion platform. Within 90 days of closing that deal, they're holding a half a billion dollar fraud loss on receivables that HBS supposedly vetted and monitored. I mean, that's not that big of a deal, right? Half a billion.

1:07:20I mean, it's not great, but, you know, it is like 5 % of the deal. Like I feel like people get deals mispriced by a couple of percent every once in a while. I mean, it's just, this is a big deal in the broader context of like private credit has exploded as an asset class. Yeah. There's a lot of, uh, you know, people have, uh, you know, we saw this with, uh, sloppiness. What was that? What was the, um, AV in the chat? Large scale fraud is actually a sign of good times. I mean, that's true. Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, who, who knows? But anyways, that auto parts company that went bankrupt a while back also had a bunch of private credit in the mix.

1:07:58And so I think people are just waiting for more and more. We got to dig into that story of the satellite repossession. Maybe one of the private credit gets crazy. I mean, there's a famous example of one credit firm buying Argentinian debt and then repossessing an aircraft carrier or destroyer, like a military boat. And apparently the same thing can happen in space with satellites. It is possible to more or less repossess them. And so I think a lot of these deals, a lot of these private credit deals are like, you're on a knife's edge in terms of like, are you going to continue to get payment or are you going to need to get the value from the assets?

1:08:47whereas in venture capital it's just so much it's just so much further out on the risk curve that yeah you're you're never like or yeah am i like i like a big piece of my business is is making sure i can liquidate the apple display monitors you know in the office or the herman miller chairs it's like no that's going to be basically a material to your business it's going to be the difference between you know like not 99 of the value is going to come from one percent of the investments anyway. And then of the money you lose, you're not going to be recouping an extra 5 % making a difference. In some more positive news.

1:09:24Google AI Studio. That's right. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires the right models and APIs up for you. You can get started at AI studio, AI dot studio slash build. Uh, Britain over at Microsoft, uh, says, please, Mr. President, respectfully let us buy this truck. Uh, he was responding. Wow. 64 ,000 likes on that. Palmer says working on this, working on this, got another 20 ,000 likes. So people want these, what is these little Toyota trucks, but what does this mean in the Palmer context? Does this mean he's going to like call the president and ask trump to allow it or is he going to make a mod retro version of this car is anduril going to produce this like there's there's like 12 different ways that that uh palmer could like solve this problem of like americans not being able to get cool trucks which is interesting yeah i don't know why i don't know if these these trucks are blocked either blocked in the u.s or just you would have to import one yourself uh but they I mean, Ineos is basically, I think Ineos has basically done this.

1:10:37They have a, what do they have? It's not the main Grenadier, but they have, I'm pulling it up right now, the Quartermaster. The Quartermaster from Grenadier looks quite a lot like this truck, but it's certainly, I think this one from Toyota internationally sells for like 10 to 20 grand. Like it's very cheap. Yeah. People love to point out the fact that, uh, the Ford F one 50 has the same bed length as these tiny Japanese K trucks. Um, but interestingly, uh, that's just why you should always buy the Ford F two 50 super duty crew cab with the long bed. Cause if you just go for the biggest truck, then you will be bigger than, than the, than the Japanese K truck.

1:11:23Uh, People love the K-trucks. They have fun with those. Well, if you're starting a new truck company, you got to get your brand mentioned on ChetGPT. You got to go to Profound. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Andrew Reid says, if I ran a company, my first act would be to ban hard-boiled eggs in the office. Hard-boiled eggs are really an insane snack. I got to put these in quotes because the smell is so unbelievably bad that you should be forced to eat them outside only. Yeah. It's not more protein than a steak in a bag. You got to go Chesky mode.

1:12:03Chesky mode. That's the way. If you want to have protein on the go, throw a steak in the bag and take it with you everywhere. The hard-boiled eggs in the office, that seems like an odd choice. probably a time and a place. Maybe they should put... Name one time and one place. One place would be like... You know how in offices they have like... Well, where you can go... The smoking area. Like I wouldn't have a problem with somebody going in if there's like a cigarette smoking area, like a back alley, and you can go into the back alley and scarf hard-boiled eggs. That seems reasonable. People are smoking less and less.

1:12:45Or yeah, go outside, put one in each, cheek and then go back like chipmunk mode? Go chipmunk mode and then just pretend like you don't have them. I don't know. Yeah, I've never been big in the hard-boiled A thing. I have, however, been big into Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Our first guests of the show are in the Restream waiting room. We have Lulu Maservi and Gabby Goldberg stopping and by. Whoa! Look at this. Oh, shit. Hey. Hey. You look fantastic. Is that a wig, too?

1:13:30I don't know what you're talking about, but it's great to see you guys. We were watch shopping during our break between sauna and eating cheeseburgers for breakfast. The lore. The lore is coming through. Hey John, John. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, sorry. Very in the paper this morning. Do you want to show, we're live. You want to show the watch you got? Oh, this? Oh, this is nothing special. This is just my AP Offshore, but it's been on the show for a while. So, yeah, great to finally cross that off the list. What watch did you get, Jordy? Oh, I got the Jaeger LeCoultre. Oh, there we go. It's in the same color It matches The new MyBach that I just bought You know that's how you pronounce it MyBach MyBach It matches this watch Really sorry guys Let's get right into the show John you ready?

1:14:34Let's do it Jordy You're watching TVPN Today is Friday, October 31st. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. We even got the horse. The capital of technology. The fortress of science. The capital of capital. They got the whole shtick. What is that? Is that the soundboard? What is that? Oh, the air horn. Oh, the air horn. Happy Halloween, guys. Happy Halloween. happy halloween happy halloween good to see you the chat is absolutely loving this how did you how did you guys advise oh wow with the loafers up on the desk the level of detail here the shtick is remarkable here we'll fire back someone else is a shtick to us it's a lifestyle

1:15:35on a more serious note What's the advice to clients on how to approach Halloween? Is it just ignore? It's a distraction? Nope. It is, as with every other day, a chance to only lock in more. We actually, yeah, we printed out some examples. Yes, take us through it, please. What else you got for us? Don, you want to tell me about this one? You're disappearing. What is this? Oh, this is Halloween. the Halloween starter kit. I've seen this, but what is in the image? Okay, so this is Spirit Halloween, the Brian Armstrong set. It includes one great... For the whole head, right? Oh, perfect, perfect. Yes, yes.

1:16:23The whole head, everything below the head is strictly optional. Wait, why didn't we consider that? We were in makeup for three hours this morning. We could have just shaved our head with a razor in the morning. That would have been so much easier. We would have done 90 % of the work for us, really. And I could have just grown a beard. Yes. What other ideas do we have here? Let's see. So we've got, oh, here's one that John and I like. Printed posts. The level of detail here is amazing. This is insane. Continue. We might have to lose the virtual background, by the way. It's really cutting in and out.

1:17:00What is this? I can see it. What is this? It's the stressed out guy smoking. Gay Halloween. What do you mean you're stressed out? Hayao Miyazaki. Look at this. This is a fine. That would be a fantastic costume. Oh, someone did it. And that's what that post is. That makes sense. Yeah. You see, you're kind of tripping in and out. It is a wild. And then here we thought this was very disrespectful of you in particular, Mark. You see this person, we will admonish them on the spot. We're looking for them. We did like this comment from the random recruiter. This is my sleep paralysis demon. I do. I do look like a sleep paralysis demon.

1:17:44That's hilarious. I look a little bit scary. I don't know if I'm doing Mark justice. Yeah. It's a remarkable, remarkable effort. Who do you think won? do i look more like ilia than he looks like mark who wins who wins the costume contest today i think it's the ilia thing you think so i think so i i was getting freaked out before the show we had like five minutes after the costumes finish and watching a six eight jacked ilia just like come around the corner is is scary it's a wild wild experience yeah i mean yeah it's easier to climb the mountain when you're six eight yeah it's all in the eyebrows the eyebrows are really everything because as they were working on getting the the makeup on um i was like there's no way this is gonna work like this is not this is gonna look like party city level like it's it's fun that we did this but this is not gonna look convincing at all and uh and it's definitely a crazy your post lulu this isn't uh reposting uh john's post this isn't ai this is human craftsmanship But it's actually crazy.

1:18:58So the crew that typically works on normal film productions, they did, was it like 50 different layers of stuff that they were putting on our heads? It was one of the most complicated processes. They did like a base layer. They did the head. They painted over our eyebrows. They glued things over the eyebrows, and they put another set of eyebrows on, then they painted over that. There's a lot of eyebrows. It's going to take like probably an hour to just get all of this off. They said 45 minutes. Okay. I don't know why you'd want to take it off. Yeah. Right. Do you think, I mean, obviously we're in a unique position because we get to kind of have some fun on the show.

1:19:41It's like almost a comedy show in many ways. Do you think there's any hope to bring back April Fool's Day in a cool way? Or will tech just like flop on that immediately? It's hard to do. Someone told me a couple of years ago on April Fool's Day that actually doing it on April Fool's is the cringy part. Ew, interesting. You're surrounded by so many people doing it badly that it's really hard to get away from that. And they were saying, if you think of a great prank or jave or joke. Just do it randomly. Why wait till April 1st when everybody knows it's a prank? Yeah, so there was a company, a YC company that pissed a bunch of people off because they created an IDE that has brain rot in the software.

1:20:24So you can do like gambling on steak. You can do subway surfers. And like they pissed, because it's on the YC website, I feel like they're putting like, you can gamble while you code. They pissed a lot of people off. And I think if they had just dropped it as like a feature that was like a real feature that you could play around with, but wasn't like their entire brand, it would have hit a lot harder and gotten a much more like funny, positive reaction versus people just being like, I hate this, blah, blah, blah. like, you know, why does this exist? Yeah. It's almost like taking, yeah. Taking the joke like too seriously when, when you haven't established your brand at all, then people, there's just, you're making people do so much work.

1:21:05I guess that's the, I guess that's the benefit of doing something on April 1st is that you're, there's a lot less work to be like, is this a joke? You can just kind of, uh, you can kind of lean on, on, you know, the audience needs to like, uh, uh, uh, like you don't need to, you don't need to, you don't, you don't wind up in the situation where you have to explain to like 10 ,000 people, like we're, we're kidding. We're kidding. We're kidding. Like people kind of put it together themselves and be like, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm good. Are drops dead as a meta? Do you think like, it feels like launch videos and drops are both kind of over.

1:21:39So, so I don't think that drops are dead. I think that that specific style of drop with the like launch video has been over is completely saturated and overdone yeah um i think you just have to feel like people are not going to stop announcing things and stop dropping things you just have to find new ways to do it well i meant drop in the i meant drop in the context of like we made this product with our branding on it kind of thing i thought base did a really good job did you see bases drop for their uh one billion dollar round it was a newspaper and I thought that was like well executed in the sense that like it had a lot of text it had a lot of content there yeah Tyler has it there join the charge uh and I just thought like yeah it's like it's not just like a t-shirt it's like way way deeper uh and I'd say the same thing for the for the launch videos it's like uh we we found a very unique aesthetic yesterday I'm not going to share it because I think it would be a good launch video uh uh but there there are there are specific formats where it's immediately identifiable as like, oh, that's that type of video.

1:22:47And if you use that as your launch video, you'll break through and you'll be the first person to take, you know, the, like right now it's like the default meta is basically like, uh, after game of Thrones, stick around for the interview with the, the actors. Like that's the aesthetic of most launch videos right now. It's like cinematic couple minutes interview with a few people kind of like mini documentary. They said we couldn't build enterprise in this category. They said it was impossible. Yeah, they did get a little commoditized. But yeah, fresh ideas. I said at one point that somebody should do a version of it, of those sorority dance videos.

1:23:24That's a great one. That's a great idea. That's a great one. If you have someone who can do flips or if you just like all wear a matching outfit, like it has to be a company. If you're like solving cancer, doing cancer, that's probably not right. but as long as the joke is not too close to home the problem with being a slop adjacent company that jokes about slop because now it's so obvious that that is very close to what you're doing and now you have to defend yourself like what was that car company um that was gonna do that rebrand a couple years ago jaguar jaguar jaguar was really bad too yeah oh there was another there was another one where they joked about a rebrand i don't even know if it was a joke they claimed it was a joke because people hated it.

1:24:05What? I don't remember this at all. Claiming after getting a reaction that people don't like something and then saying it was a joke is not an effective strategy. You've seen that a little bit. The Substrate launch was crazy. That was kind of like a Lulu and Gabby masterclass special. Well, James is pretty... We'll let them know, yeah. Yeah. We'll let Lulu and Gabby know. They'll feel really good about it. James Proud is in heavy founder mode, by the way. He did a lot of the writing and outreach and a lot of that themselves, which obviously we think is the right way to do this. Like the founder can't just sit it out and deploy it and do it all for them.

1:24:46But yeah, Substrate, very cool company. Absolute, what do we call it? Absolute dog. There we go. Absolute dog. That's the word. That's what we love to use. He's an absolute dog. Straight from Pat McAfee. All right, guys. Well, have a great rest of your day. Yeah, get back to the gym. You know, before we go, we should talk about Ramp. Oh, please. What you got for us? Well, we almost had a whole conversation. Before we go to the gym, let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is mine to save both with corporate cards, bill pay, and more. The average company saves 5 % with women. There we go. Flawless, Adrienne.

1:25:25Incredible. We'll have you guys do a proper guest. guest hosting session sometime. Guest hosting would be fantastic. You're clearly well-propped. Some morning where we're like, two hours in the gym, not enough today. I'll call you guys up and you can fill in. Looking sharp. Hopefully you guys have some other costumes for later this evening, trick-or-treating. If not, tell them to go to tbpn.com, all the kids you run into, and tell them to us. Send all the children to tbpn.com and hand out the APs. Gabby's going to hand out APs, everyone. You got to get over there. Got to get over there. Great to see you guys.

1:26:11Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Bye. We have to do a real ad read for numeralhq.com, sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Dean Ball coming on the show next. Next, I don't know if he knows that we're dressed up as Mark and Ilya. Tyler, do you know Ball? Of course I know Ball. You can't keep getting away with it. This is one of the jokes that keeps getting funnier. Dean Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, author of Hyperdimensional, former senior policy advisor for AI at the White House and strategic advisor at the NSF, previously at the Mercatus Center.

1:26:52Do you know the Mercatus Center? Of course. Why do you know the Mercatus Center? Tyler Cowen. Of course. The absolute goat himself. He's been at Stanford Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, focuses on AI, emerging technology. He's in the Restream waiting room. Dean Ball, welcome to TVPN. How are you doing, Dean? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Sorry to jump scare you on Halloween. We're having a lot of fun over here. I love it. It's crazy. You look exactly like Dean Ball. Your costume is flawless. Almost to a T. It's amazing. Were you in six hours of makeup this morning to make me look like Dean Ball?

1:27:36Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Make me look like the former White House policy advisor. Yes, yes, yes. That actually would be potentially the most scary costume is getting prosthetic makeup to look like yourself. It's a very jarring, very bizarre experience looking in the mirror and actually seeing like for the first time in my life, seeing something that looks materially different from what, the way I, and I will say, I, I did, I did ask John, I was like, is, is Dean ready to do a somewhat serious interview with us and extremely unserious characters? And we talked and we thought that, uh, we thought it'd be a really fun conversation, even though we look absolutely ridiculous.

1:28:18But it's great to have you on the show finally. Yeah, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Featured a bunch of your writing on the show over the last year or so. Yeah. Very happy to have you on. Well, thank you guys very much. It's great to be here. Let's kick it off with sort of what's top of mind for you. There's a lot of different policy positions that I'm sure you could be working on. FAI is a pretty big organization. It feels very significant to me, especially right now in this moment. but also just feels like the organization generally has been on a massive upswing. What has been the key focus this year for you?

1:28:52And then let's just kind of like continue to dial in the aperture and go deeper and deeper as we go. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, started the year, I was still a kind of policy scholar and writing at think tanks, including at FAI. Worked on state policy, you know, all the crazy bills that were coming out at that time for AI regulation. And then in April, moved to the White House. And so I wasn't writing anymore. My focus was really entirely on the AI action plan, which the Trump administration released in July of this year. Then a couple of weeks after that, once the action plan seemed like it was in a good place and well accepted within the sort of bureaucracy of the federal government, I thought it would take longer to get it rolling downhill.

1:29:33But it really didn't take that long. So once I felt like it was in a good place, I retired from that role and went back to the private sector where I feel like that's my strength. writing, communicating, things like that. What do you think is a bigger force in AI regulation right now? A, constituents who just don't like AI, I'm worried about taking my job. I don't like the way it looks. It's slop. It's bad. It's brain rot, whatever. Like anti-AI for just genuine, direct, I don't like it reasons versus jockeying between labs of like, if I can get this law through, I will have an edge over you. And we're kind of doing jujitsu between both people who are actually both pro AI, but just trying to get a business edge.

1:30:22Is there one camp that you think is like more powerful? I think for the most part, it's the first thing you mentioned. I think it's that there's generally kind of a negative AI sentiment among the public. It's not that high salience of an issue. So people will say, I want AI regulation. But then when you ask them how important of an issue is that to you. It's like eight, nine, 10, you know, immigration economy is much higher. And like, once you get down to eight, nine, 10, it means it's not really an issue that that many voters are actually making their decisions at the ballot box on. Um, and so there's, but there's this general motivation that's a lot of politicians feel of, you know, oh, well, we let the internet get away from us.

1:30:59We let social media get away from us. We can't let the same thing happen again. And so we have to be preemptive and regulate this time. That's basically their attitude. then um then why is california trying to kneecap ai like is it just a bigger issue within california what are the dynamics in california specifically so california views themselves much like the europeans do they view themselves first of all the one big difference is that california is also an exporter of technology but the people in sacramento are not san francisco is the exporter of technology sacramento views itself really as a nationwide regulator so their mentality is the federal government's not going to act, especially President Trump.

1:31:37They would say President Trump was irresponsible. So we have to act for him. And one thing that a senior European diplomat told me when I was in government is when we want to talk policy in America, we fly from Brussels right over DC to Sacramento. So they're coordinating, the European Union has a coordinating office in San Francisco where they meet with legislators and companies. And it's basically like this sort of transnational governance regulation happening between California and Brussels. Interesting. And so is it correct to frame the idea of the motivations of Californian regulation as, well, nationally, AI regulation might be eight or nine, but in In California, it's much higher because there's more visibility?

1:32:31Or is there something else that's driving like the California regulation movement? I'm not sure it's a higher salience issue for the voters in California, but I think it's a higher salience issue for the legislators because the legislators smell power, right? I mean, you can regulate this, you know, what I think will be a multi-trillion dollar industry while it's still nascent. Before, you know, one of the things about regulating now is like if you tried to regulate the iPhone now in a major way, Well, like 150 million Americans or whatever use iPhones. And so they'd be like mad at you. But like AI is still a little bit nascent and there's all kinds of use cases that might just be killed in the cradle.

1:33:10And you can control it, you know, much, much easier when it's a younger technology. And you can control it if you're California. You can control it for the entire country, more or less unilaterally. And it's a democratic supermajority state. So they have all the cards. So if it's a low salience issue, is there a world where this is all about leverage to generate more taxes, to create a more balanced budget? What are the different incentives that are working within the California political jockeying that's going on? I think certainly regulatory power is one of them, but I don't really think they're after money particularly.

1:33:50particularly. If you're a California legislator, the basic reality is that money kind of just prints itself. They're basically opposed to scarcity, like petro state. Okay. Because of technology. Yeah. The petrodollars are not oil. Instead, it is capital gains taxation. Yep. I was once talking to a California legislator who was on the budget committee, and they get these, like, you know, every other week or whatever, they get these, like, reports from the state treasury about the state's fiscal position. This was a couple of years ago, sort of right post-COVID. And they were like, we had a$10 billion surplus in the last month.

1:34:26And they were like, where did$10 billion come out of nowhere? And it was the Snap IPO. One IPO generates that kind of revenue for the state. And it's going to be like that on steroids when the Frontier Lab employees start to have their liquidity events. The state is going to have an enormous windfall of capital gains tax. I mean, yeah, there was a rumor just earlier this week about OpenAI going out at$1 trillion, which would be an insane. Already the employee pool of the public, the PBC is worth roughly at current marks like$130 billion. So multiple in that, it's going to be substantial. How does this power struggle between Sacramento and D.C.

1:35:10around regulation play out going forward? I think people like Sachs have been, you know, not only talking about what Anthropic is doing, but I imagine doesn't want AI to be regulated, you know, at a state level. But how do you see this playing out over the next, call it six months? Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to see AI regulated at the state level except for the California legislators. and so at the end of the day, I think that President Trump and A.I.s, R. Sacks, have made their position clear that we want a nationwide legal framework to govern AI. The question is going to be, can Congress act?

1:35:50Can Congress get together and come up with something that sort of everyone can agree to? And I think we don't know the answer to that yet. I think it's hard to see where the politics will go. AI politics evolve. They don't evolve quite as fast as AI, but they evolve quite quickly. Um, and so we could be in a totally different, there could be a total vibe shift between now and say June, June's probably your cutoff before the midterms to sort of get something serious done. Um, and, uh, so yeah, can, can it happen in principle? Sure. But we'll, you know, we'll see. What are the, I don't know, like what are the regulatory frameworks that either you think will actually land on or California is advocating for?

1:36:33I just remember we were watching the Elio Sitzkiver interview with The Guardian a couple of years ago. And the point he was making was like in the long-term AGI might see humans like we see animals and just convert the entire earth, like, you know, all the land into solar panels and, you know, sort of like a complete AGI doom scenario. That doesn't seem like the focus of regulators today. He also was mentioning the the risk of fake news and the idea of generative content potentially muddying the waters of understanding what's real on the internet. That one feels like it's totally here today, but has also kind of always been here because of Photoshop.

1:37:15It is such an interesting, you know, tech, I don't, correct me if I'm wrong, but tech has never gone through like a tech lash where there's so much video footage of the key players talking about the doom states of technology. So if you look back, Go look at interview footage of Sam Altman and all these people, and they will say, like, yes, there's, you know, or Ilya, the one you're referencing. Like, it's very possible the world will be covered with solar panels and data centers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were playing that video this morning while we were getting this crazy, you know, costumes on.

1:37:52And, like, the people that were doing it were like, that sounds horrible. Like, they listened to the whole thing, and they were like, I don't want any of that. And so it's not like during social media, there wasn't footage of Mark Zuckerberg being like, it's very possible that the election could be stolen. Social media won't be social. The Facebook data could be used to target voters or something like that. And so that's just like incredible ammo that I imagine in Sacramento they're pulling up and it's like, okay, you want to go with what this guy wants and not what our - Yeah. What's the dynamic there?

1:38:23Are they actually pulling up Doomer clips? Because it's hard to be like, oh, I didn't mean that. It was just kind of a sci-fi thing. Yeah. talking about. It helped with fundraising, actually. It really depends. So there's people in the California legislature and elsewhere that have sort of very mundane concerns. And that's like sort of your modal policymaker, I would say. That's kind of, yeah, your misinformation, your deep fakes, the things, not that they're not serious, but that are here today. And then there's the people that are thinking about these sort of very far-flung doom scenarios. There's not that many legislators who do that, but there are a lot of people in like, quote-unquote, AI policy who think about that.

1:38:57And so they do influence some of the legislation. One of the funny things, though, is that thus far, the legislation that that camp, the sort of AI safety camp has been able to get through, has actually been like somewhat more measured than some of the crazier stuff that we've seen from the people that don't know anything about the technology and just kind of have a generally hostile attitude, like state of Illinois banned mental health chatbots, which is basically like, if I ask ChatGPT, you know, if I say like, hey, I'm having a bad day, can you like tell me something to make me feel better?

1:39:30In Illinois, that's like a chatbot engaging in mental health services and it's illegal. That's crazy. Yeah, it's like really, it's really crazy. Yeah. That's not like a doomer bill, you know? No, totally. That's like, that's like people with - What about Nashville has been going on their own path because of how big the music industry is there. Yeah. Can you get us up to speed on that? Like the regulation of AI music we were talking about Suno earlier this week. I think we're going to have the founder on, but we'd be very interested to hear the, the, how that landscape differs from other regulatory pushes.

1:40:02Yeah. So you're, you're talking about something called the Elvis act, which passed last year. And yeah, it's basically, that's a bill that's about like name image likeness, basically saying if you're a celebrity uh residing in the state of tennessee uh you can't if someone makes an ai model that you know mimics your style uh or mimics a song of yours or your likeness or something like that uh then you have a right to sue them not for copyright because copyright is a federal issue but name image likeness is a sort of property right that's like done at the at the state level Yeah, that's a creature of state law for the most part.

1:40:43So that's what they control there. And is there any early read on where that will pencil out? We were talking to – I forget who we were talking to. We were talking to somebody about how that is – oh, it was Zach Kukoff. He was talking about how the Elvis Act plays into national geopolitics and some players who are on the national stage are wanting to win at the more local. Pretty smart naming. The Elvis Act sounds like something that anybody would want to pass. Sounds cool. You don't think it would go farther if it was the Gunna Act? What's going on? You had a post, it was last week, calling out, there's a group, Max Tegmark said, a stunningly broad coalition has come out against Skynet, AI researchers, faith leaders, business pioneers, policy makers, NATSEC folks, and actors stand together and they say, we call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence not lifted before there is one broad scientific consensus that will be done safely and controllably and two, strong public buy-in.

1:41:49It's kind of a crazy thing to try to require, from my view, because even the scientific community cannot agree on much and everybody has these wildly different strategies and incentives. And then of course, it's very possible that the public will never, that to rely on the public of how we should develop technology that has to do with national security and try to make it like a direct democracy. But maybe unpack what the latest is on that front. Yeah. So, I mean, the statement is very simple. It says no super intelligence until we have agreement that it's good until there's broad public buy-in.

1:42:36So I think the first problem with this is like, look, if you want to have a letter signed by a bunch of important people or celebrities and whatnot that says super intelligence is something that has profound implications and we should really think about it and we should have groups of, you know, civil society type of stuff. That's fine with me. There have been letters like that in the past and I haven't complained about them. But when you say ban, you're making an ask about public policy. Not only that, you're actually making an ask about global public policy because the superintelligence could be trained in China, could be trained in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, a lot of other places are amassing large amounts of compute.

1:43:10It's not like we're the only people that can do this. And a lot of the researchers who do this work are highly mobile. So you need a global treaty to ban superintelligence. That's what they're asking for. And the problem is that not only is there not scientific consensus about the safety of such a thing, more importantly, there's not scientific consensus about what superintelligence is. is if GPT-5, or let's say GPT-7, say that it can make novel advancements in mathematics, it can come up with new theorems and whatnot, come up with new science, but say it also can't autonomously plan a wedding for me.

1:43:45I think that's a very plausible future, by the way. I think that's super possible that we'll get advanced genius mathematic AI before we get sort of an agent that can plan a wedding for you over six months. Truly, truly agentic AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like what, you know, which one of those is super intelligence, right? No, no, I mean, to take an even more extreme example, we were reflecting on the original open AI definition which Ilya was like reflecting on, which is AI, you should be able to tell it to do a job and it should be able to do that, any job at the level of a human. And we were sitting for three hours getting makeup done And we were like, okay, to replace this job with AI, you need like the most flawless humanoid robots because this is not a digital task.

1:44:35You need dexterity, but also understanding the artistry of how the colors blend and mixing the different chemicals and stuff. Like it's just like – and that's where like, you know, just a – it's just makeup. It's not as complicated as the IMO gold medal, and yet because it exists in this cross-domain world, it's somehow more challenging. So, yeah, it's just a fascinating thing that we truly do not have a definition. The other dynamic that's interesting right now is I feel like the industry is somewhat going through a small period of disillusionment when like the big labs are, you know, or OpenAI doing like Sora and announcing erotica and stuff like that.

1:45:18And realizing like, wait, like I thought we were building, you know, super intelligence. Like, why are we, you know, creating more forms of social media? But that's at the same time that you have like peak sort of like fear and like peak pressure to make moves from a regulatory standpoint because people are afraid of, you know, runaway super intelligence and, you know, losing their job and all these things. And also big tech companies have been doing layoffs. And the CEOs want to say, like, well, we did these, like, as a CEO, you want to say, like, well, we're getting so much efficiency out of our, you know, AI.

1:45:54Like, of course we're doing layoffs. But in reality, it's like they just went through, they've been bloated for a while. there's, you know, X is a good case study of like, you can cut, you know, like a lot of people and still have a functioning business. And so, uh, I don't know, there's just such a complicated moment. Do you think there's a massive tech lash coming? Uh, yeah, probably, uh, would be my guess. It's, I don't know exactly what'll cause it. Maybe it'll be fears about labor market, which could be real, could be not, could be caused by AI, could be not, could also be electricity prices.

1:46:28I think that's very possible. So again, the super intelligence ban, it's doing populist politics that are based on vague emotional sentiment. The problem with that is that those kinds of broad statements that implicate policy tend to not lead to good places. Defund the police was one of them. Net zero by 2030 was another one. We have no real plan for how to do this, but We're going to articulate some broad goal that sounds good that everyone can kind of, you know, you can just slide down the incentive curve of politics. And it's it's it will not lead to good places. I basically guarantee you. Yeah, that makes sense.

1:47:08Even if you're worried about AI safety, even if you're worried about AI safety. Uh, if you're, if you're to rank the, the reasons we, we, like if we rank like AI safety is like the eighth or ninth most salient political topic. And then within AI, you rank the most salient worries, job losses, energy prices. Those are at the top. How far down do you have to go until people start caring about dead internet theory and like the slopification? Because it does feel like it's aesthetically risky because if you launch a model early, it's sloppier. It doesn't have great aesthetics. And then you're faced with the question of like, so my electricity prices went up and I got slop as opposed to my internet prices went up.

1:47:55And yeah, I actually got like a kind of super powered Google search. Like it's actually pretty great. Like it's definitely helping me at work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I think there's a lot of people who say like, ah, deterioration of the internet is definitely happening. I think that's true, right? I mean, I think it's the current experience of the internet has gotten worse, I would say. And I mean, with the exception of the AI models themselves, which are great. But yeah, I mean, that's like probably true. I think it's up there. I think it's way above like catastrophic risk, you know?

1:48:23Like I think if you were to put like autonomous cyber attacks, you know, bioweapon development, I think that's probably lower than this sort of slop stuff. I would guess. Yeah, it's interesting to see. I don't know if anyone's ever done that, but it'd be interesting to see. So we were reflecting on this. This week, we had Christina from Vanta on talking about security. And then we also had the CEO of CrowdStrike on. And we were kind of blown away reflecting on, we've been in the AI boom for two years at least. And we haven't really had a moment where we're like, oh, yeah, that major cyber, that outage, that cybersecurity incident, that problem, that hack, that virus, that's generative AI uniquely.

1:49:03That hasn't happened. Like AWS went down last week and it was just misconfigured DNS in a database. There's been a bunch of crazy cyber attack stories. None of them have been related to Gen AI just yet. I still think it has to be coming at some point. But until you get that solid anecdote, it feels very hard to go and run the campaign of like never, never again will we allow this to happen when it hasn't happened for the first time. That's how it always goes with tail risks. You know, people can't really internalize them until they actually happen. And then there you go. I actually wouldn't shock me if we see something like that in the next, you know, six to 18 months.

1:49:46Because the models are now getting good enough that that kind of thing seems possible. Cyber or biological? Cyber. Bio is going to take a little bit longer, but cyber. Cyber. Maybe even cyber might take or bio might take much longer because like actually making a bio weapon is still hard in the physical world. But cyber is purely digital. There's already many skilled cyber attackers. So it feels it feels like plausible. Luckily, you know, cyber defense is keeping up right now. And we've seen a lot of advancements there, too. Yeah. Yeah. There are definitely like script kitties that go around and just like to unplug different pieces of the Internet for fun.

1:50:19And it's almost like it can be state actors, but it's also it just feels like low stakes. It doesn't feel like often like these like little cyber attacks are like life and death. So they feel lower stakes. They feel more like theft and like economic crimes almost. But being like, I'm going to go release a bubonic plague. Like that feels like way more like act of war or like mass murder. Like it puts you, it takes you from like script kitty who wants to like, you know, deface a website with a DDoS attack to like, okay, you're doing a mass shooting now. you posted a couple it's interesting how yeah yeah let's get a response to that yeah oh I just think it's interesting how like these cyber risks though like we think of them as like yeah it's not an act of war it's just an economic crime because it's like purely digital at the same time like if North Korea had a bunch of people that were like going into hospitals every other week and like stealing medical equipment or like taking people's patient records we'd be like yeah that's we're gonna kill you like we're gonna we're gonna destroy your country if you do that to us so it's weird it's interesting how people think about these things and sort of compartmentalize them Yeah, you posted a couple of days ago.

1:51:23My sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long term, really even near term result will be much more compute regulation. Any any updated thoughts on that front? It didn't Blackwell's didn't, I guess, come into the negotiation in South Korea. But you still expecting them to be a part of some sort of deal. I think it could very well happen eventually. And by the way, the wisdom of doing it changes over time, right? Because the chips get worse over the chips. You know, there's there's new chips come in and they get much better.

1:52:01And so, you know, like the idea of selling blackwells to China in two years is very different from the idea of selling them today. I think part of the reason that it seemed like many people in the Trump administration were opposed to this move was that we're racking black wells in American data centers right now. It was different with the Hopper because the Hopper was a previous generation. So the age 20, maybe the pill went down a little bit easier. But I think with this, it's like, yeah, I think that you have to – There's plenty in demand. I think it's on the merits end politically. You've got to wait.

1:52:37Yeah, you've got to wait. Yeah, what did you think about basically giving American companies a rofer on the Blackwell? Is that something that you think makes sense? You mean like this is like the, yeah, yeah. Basically, like if every American company says, we're good, we've got enough. Yeah, if NVIDIA says there's no more American companies that want to buy from us, well then, yeah, you can go sell some to China. That feels so much more reasonable. Yeah, there's a bill in Congress right now in the NDAA, the end-of-year defense bill called the GAIN-AI Act that basically tries to do this. You know, I think it's an interesting idea.

1:53:08I think the problem always is like, how exactly do you operationalize that? Particularly because there's things, you know, in this that are like, well, the public, the hyperscalers are going to have to disclose things kind of to the public about like, you know, that sort of sensitive proprietary information. So like, how exactly do you do that? I personally have not been super in the weeds on gain. But like, but like, yeah, I think that I think the implementation is a challenge there. And that's kind of what I was saying, though, is like, you know, so many people in Congress are opposed to the idea of selling black wells to China right now.

1:53:38But I think if the admin had done it in Korea this past week, I think there's a very high chance that you would have seen maybe some legislation with unintended consequences pass. What about the idea of you don't sell the black wells, but you do allow Chinese companies to purchase cloud computing resources from American hyperscalers? Is that more palatable? who gets upset in that world well that's the status quo right now sure uh you know that's that's basically what happens right now and so but could deep seek or high flyer actually go to aws and say we want to do you know a billion dollar training run uh they could yeah there's nothing there's nothing restricting them from that now i think deep sea kind of rolls their own i think they build their own data centers do everything themselves but yeah like i mean Chinese companies definitely do make use of American compute.

1:54:32Now, that being said, I think the Chinese government doesn't like that. I think the Chinese government does all kinds of things to incentivize them from that. So it's a complicated thing. That makes a lot of sense. What's your approach to truth-seeking? One of the challenges in trying to even conceptualize what the right policy approach is on a number of these issues is that everyone is just heavily conflicted. Like there's just so much money sloshing around. It's like the people that have the most knowledge of what's happening at the frontier quite possibly have somewhere between 10 and, you know, a billion dollars kind of like riding on a certain approach.

1:55:14And so I'm curious to know, like, kind of how you try to clock like the truth. I always try to start from technical fundamentals. So when I decided to get into writing about AI policy, one of the first things that I learned to do was train a toy neural network for myself, just so I could see how things work. And I like to really understand the roots of the technology that I'm talking about, whether that's the physical world or the digital world. And that helps a lot. That helps ground you quite a bit to understand those actual constraints and where the technology might actually go. And then beyond that, it's listening to a lot of different people.

1:55:53it's understanding financial incentives closely, right? You have to understand how everyone is incentivized. And you kind of know, like, there are a lot of areas where incentives are for you to sort of spin reality in a certain way. Those are a lot of other people who have incentives to just basically tell the truth. And you have to just be able to differentiate between those things. And so, yeah, you know, I mean, it's like, it's basically just, you know, there's no simple way. It's just read a ton of stuff, listen to a lot of people, maintain an open mind and be humble all the time. Yeah, that makes sense.

1:56:28How are you forecasting next year? What do you think the most important issues? Is it more of the same? Is there going to be a new conversation that you kind of see on the horizon? Basically, is the debate around chip sales just going to continue throughout the entire admin or do you think it'll at any point settle? I think that debate will continue. And then I think, you know, more broadly, though, my guess is that that issue becomes less salient in AI policy over time. And probably more people join the sort of join the debate. Right now, AI policy is very much an elite conversation. You know, it's not something that a lot of people, like the average American, so to speak, is thinking about that much.

1:57:16But I think that starts to change again, maybe it's the electricity prices, maybe it's the jobs, maybe it's a little bit of both. Maybe it's also some crisis that happens, like cyber stuff. But I think that, like, in general, the salience will go up. And it will also be quite complicated because I also expect that in 2026, just like this year, a very meaningful fraction of GDP growth will be coming from AI. So, you know, policymakers are going to find themselves, I think, in a bind. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know we're wrapping up, but I'd love to know your thoughts on like the AI as the only driver of GDP meme.

1:57:54How real do you think that is? How bad do you think that is? Yeah, it's interesting. Some people hear that and they're like, this is bad. And then the other take is like, if we're not doing this, like it's even worse. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it is a big chunk of it. I think it's probably at least like 25 % to 50 % of growth right now. Another big chunk, like the Q2 number was really high. It was like 4%. And a chunk of that is definitely companies stockpiling in anticipation of tariffs. So they're like mass importing stuff, which is going to be counted toward GDP. So it's like there's some of that going on probably.

1:58:33uh and but yeah i mean i think that it's almost certainly the case the gdp you know if i had to put an if i had to guess i would guess it's something like 40 percent uh ai is something like 40 and of course that's yeah and that's just enabling ai that's just ai capex that's not even you know what is ai enabling like business services and accelerated revenue growth and uh Productivity and stuff. How much of Google's revenue should be counted in AI GDP now or Instagram Reels? If there's an AI slop video that goes viral and that generates$20 million in AI ad revenue, are we counting that in GDP? We have no idea yet.

1:59:17It's going to be years before we understand it. Last question that I'd be curious to get your read on is sentiment around we're a couple months out from the Intel deal. How is Washington and like Capitol Hill feeling about that deal? Obviously, it looks good on paper for the taxpayer. But do you expect to see like more of this kind of thing? We've saw it with MP Materials as well. Yeah. But what's your read? I think you'll absolutely see more of it. More equity positions. I'm long USG equity positions in private companies. For better and for worse, I think that will continue to be a thing. We've seen it throughout the critical mineral supply chain.

2:00:04In fact, a lot of other companies, not just MP. How new is this? Is this a Trump thing specifically? Is this a 2020s thing? Are there other examples of Americans doing this? It's not new under the sun, but it's new in recent history. Okay. Particularly for companies that have like sort of consumer brands. Sure. But yeah, like it is this sort of national champion model is not something that's bad. It's not, again, America did it, you know, a lot. You know, there are periods of American history where we did this a lot. And not in a total crisis. Like government motors, general motors, the bailout of the banks, like that is very different than, okay, NVIDIA and AMD are doing pretty well.

2:00:51Intel's not exactly going bankrupt. There's a lot of market cap there, but we're still going to come in and do something. I think Intel's position was really precarious and you really needed that. I mean, I think you needed not just the injection of capital, which they were going to get either way, But kind of that vote of confidence and kind of that indication to the market that like, hey, this really is like, you know, the US government is serious about this. That says things to open AI as they think about developing their ASIC. It says things to Apple. It says things to NVIDIA. It says things to all sorts of people.

2:01:23And you've already seen some of these companies respond in kind with, you know, new orders to Intel or at least partnerships with them of various kinds. So I think you'll see more of that. In terms of Intel itself, I think people in D.C. are pretty nervous still because Intel's got a serious hill to climb. They've got a promising roadmap, and they have to execute on it. And thus far, the execution has been shaky, and their track record shouldn't make you confident. Have you been surprised that we haven't seen an open AI Intel deal yet? Sam Allman seems ready to do deals with everyone. Intel feels like it needs a deal.

2:01:55It needs several deals. That feels like a match made in heaven, and yet I haven't seen it yet. What do you think? I have to think it's gestating. Yep. I have to think that probably other companies too. I mean, if they're smart, they will. Yep. Yeah, totally. Just as a political matter. I mean, there's just so many, I've seen so many pundits like Asianometry laid out the thesis that NVIDIA should dual source their CPU for Grace, for Grace Hopper from Intel. Make the CPUs there. Don't go to TSMC for those. support Intel as a fab and a provider. So fascinating dynamic. And I feel like the Intel story is going to be one of the most interesting.

2:02:42Any plans to write a book? You've written a book. You haven't? No, I haven't. No, no, no. But I'm thinking about it. We'll see. More to come, maybe. I'm pondering it. Hard to know what to say. It feels hard if you're kind of like writing about what's happening to like pick something and start writing hundreds of pages when everything's so in flux that you could write six chapters that then maybe aren't even an important part of the story? Sure, sure. Yeah. If I picked up the phone and called an agent today, you'd probably be looking at a publication date of like Q1, 2028. Someone just the other day, I was asking like, why the hell is supply chain so long?

2:03:22Why is the timeline so long for books? And they told me it's because it's a manufacturing business run by humanities majors. No way. That's hilarious. That makes sense. Yeah, that's funny. Maybe the answer is Kindle print-on-demand or something like that. There you go. Kindle digital publishing, right next to all the literatica. We can slot in some geopolitical analysis. The AI slot books. Yeah, oh, I'm sure there's so many of those. Somebody's going to hit you up and be like, I can generate you 10 books by next week. Where can people find you? Where can people follow you in the meantime until the book drops in 2028?

2:04:04You heard it here first. You can find me. I've got a sub stack at Hyperdimensional and on Twitter at Dean W. Ball. Ball like football. There we go. Thank you so much, Dean Ball. Great to finally have you on. Welcome back anytime. Chat all the time. Thanks, guys. Great to chat. Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2, and breaking news from Sam Altman, GPT-6 will be renamed GPT-67. You're welcome. He's doing the 6-7 meme. But it's a joke? It's a joke.

2:04:43Okay. Wow, that one really did not hit. That was remarkably, remarkably not funny. Oh, it's a joke. That's so funny. This got 37 ,000 likes. I thought you were going to say it'll just be the chat GPT 2026. I would like that. I think that actually would be a better naming scheme. No, he's having fun with the 6-7 meme. Go through some timeline with Tyler. Not my shtick. Not my shtick. Well, I will first go through Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adios, the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Let's see. What in the timeline should me and Tyler talk about?

2:05:31What is here? Tesla Roadster, Sam Altman has asked for a refund. He says, a story in three parts, a tale in three acts. Act one, your Roadster reservation is complete. this was in 2018 long time ago Tyler was five years old he put down$45 ,000 as a reservation payment then act two Sam Altman emails reservations at Tesla hi I'd like to cancel my reservation could you please refund me the 50k and he's just trying to he's just trying to riz an extra 5k out of Elon. Did you notice this? Oh, because it was originally 45. It was 45K. Now, okay, with interest, with inflation, Sam clearly deserves 50, but it's a wild move to just have 45K on the line and be like, can I get 50?

2:06:28Can we round to the nearest 50? But when you're, you know, Sam, I guess it makes sense. It's probably pretty reasonable. So he says, can you refund me the 50K? I think he's actually just rounding. I think he's like, yeah, send me 45, but I'm going to refer to it as 50 because I'm rounding to the nearest 50K, I guess. But then he gets an address not found, reservations at tesla.com is unavailable to receive emails, recipient has rejected. He could use the extra five. You think so? I think he could put it to work in the business. Nobody's losing more money than OpenAI. That's true. Every 5K can go a long way.

2:07:09That's true. Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX seem to be doing less capital. That's one minute of store costs. That's true. Every minute counts. But, I mean, this just feels like they changed whatever the email is in the last seven years. But it is remarkable that the project has been in process so long that the email address has been forgotten. And also, I would assume that this type of stuff happens all the time because I imagine that people are canceling and placing new Tesla Roadster orders like all the time. So you would think you'd want to be monitoring that box. Well, it's funny to read into it as like more battles between Elon and Sam, although I don't think that's what's going on here.

2:07:55It's more of just a funny quirk of their email configuration. Bern Hobart says, wow, Elon passes the replies to your email in under a minute test. That guy is going places. Bullish. Well, whatever you think about Tesla, you can buy it. You can sell it on public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Jordy Hayes, what would you like to do next? Let's bring in our next guest. Aiden Sedgut, welcome to the stream. There he is. You look fantastic. How are you doing? Hey, Jody and John. Happy Halloween.

2:08:34Wait, wait, wait. What are you drinking? What is next to you? Wow. Do you recognize this drink? Of course, sir. Of course I recognize that drink. Cheers to you. That is Andrew Huberman's Matayina Yerba Mate. We refer to it as a podcast in a can. It's hard to drink this on my end. The fake beard is getting into the drink. But it's great to see you. You're looking sharp. Do you wear a suit often? You look very natural in it. You know what? I used to wear a uniform in high school. It's coming back to me. And I'm a huge Formula One fan. So I feel like I'm already wearing, like, this is the cap you normally get when you're on the podium with kind of the wreaths.

2:09:14Exactly. So I feel very good taste here. Championship hat. How did you actually get into Venture? It's a good story. I was Google's first product manager and then first international sales manager. Always wanted to start something. Both my parents were entrepreneurs. And I felt it's just kind of the way of the valley. You go from being an operator to being an investor. But interestingly, originally I thought, hey, maybe like the right way to do it is like go get a stint at a venture firm. And the five firms that I talked to not only told me I wouldn't make a good VC. they told me I wouldn't even make AVC.

2:09:52I just did not have the word with all. So I'm sure many people also told you that your idea would not run. Yeah, did they have any good reasons? Did you agree with them on anything? Obviously, they were wrong, but... It's so funny. I wasn't an engineer. I wasn't senior enough at Google. I never had done anything in venture. Again, maybe on paper it makes sense, but to be honest with you, it's the best thing that happened because I always feel rejection. I call it rocket fuel. And it was such a simple situation where I had to burn the bridges and the only way to prove the skeptics wrong to actually get into the business and do well.

2:10:32And even after 20 years, I'm like, 10 IPOs is still not enough. 100 exits. I think it should be 200 exits. And maybe then the point will sink in. Hit that gong. Oh, yeah. Great hit. But how big was your first fund? The first fund, actually, I started as a solo LP and solo GP, which was only$4.5 million. And then our first institutional fund in 2010 was only$41 million. Modest amounts. Modest amounts. What story did folks tell at Google about the funding of Google that helped you kind of understand how venture works? I've heard this story about Sequoia invested. That was probably more like a traditional round.

2:11:21There's also this maybe apocryphal story about somebody going to their car and writing a check before the company was even founded. What was your introduction to just like the concept? Jeff Bezos taking a flyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What stories did you draw on where you were like, this worked out for this particular person really well in the Google story that I felt and experienced, and I want to go and recreate that? I mean, look, I was there like right after the sequin, Klein around. First of all, the biggest thing about Google is that what people sometimes misunderstand about this business is all about outliers, positive outliers.

2:12:01And the best training for that is to actually be an outlier. and I think more than the VC story to me, it was my experience working for Larry Page because every single thing that I've done in that first year for Larry, he would see it and I'm like, this is kind of 1 % of what I'm expecting. You need to do things 10x faster, 10x more and then it's like, you know what? Maybe humans are not meant to do that and my joke is one of my projects was to launch Google in international languages because I was an engineer. I spoke six languages And I'm like, look, you know what I can do for Google is make sure it's launched in non-English languages.

2:12:39And he was frustrated with that. And so I always tell people I'm an occasional and accidental father or grandfather of Google Translate because they're like, from now on, anything that's internationalization or translation, let's make sure machines do it and not humans. That makes sense. What was your first true home run adventure? So the first true home run in venture, you can define it in many different ways. My first billion dollar exit was Meraki, which started as a Wi-Fi project in Mountain View with Google. And I was one of three ex-Googlers that invested in it. And the first IPO was Shopify.

2:13:19And that was amazing, like showing up to nice, not for Google's IPO, but, you know, as an investor that, hey, like, you know, early believer. And the company was great. And what was crazy is like$2.7 billion valuation at IPO for Shopify. And today there are like 150, like another 50x from that. Google was similar. Like it went 40x from the IPO. And that like in a nutshell is like positive outliers. And I can't imagine better examples of outliers. Yeah, that's remarkable. What about more recently? You've done Mercor, Supabase, and others. Maybe we start with Mercor. We just had Brendan on earlier this week to talk about the new financing.

2:14:04You guys have been in a couple rounds now. Is that right? Two rounds. Two rounds. We are huge fans of Brendan and his co-founders. Look, I think it's another great example. When I started right after Google, we thought going zero to 100 million in 10 years was a great achievement, maybe eight to 10 years. You know, I had companies like Shopify go IPO in six years, but Mercore is a new breed of company. They went zero to a hundred million in gross revenues in 11 months. They're essentially have built this great platform where they can essentially find any type of talent or discipline in the world, find the people, have AI interview them and generate expertise and data based on that.

2:14:48And it's just like, again, like what's so exciting about the AI age is these companies you never thought like would be at this kind of scale are able to deliver these things because it's just that age and that opportunity. We're very lucky to be part of it. You know, we're huge fans of Brandon and team. And then Superbase is another great example. Like we are like, listen, some of the most valuable tech companies were database companies. And somebody is going to build a developer-friendly backend. And at that time, there was a front-end company with no real back-end company. And it was crazy because when we invested in Superbase, we did almost a growth-round valuation.

2:15:25And the traction was not even close to a million in ARR. And since then, the company has grown 50, 70, 80x plus in just a few years. And that makes me think, like, what you're doing is really special because the private companies are growing 500 to 1 ,000%. and public companies are growing at 20%. So it's a 50x delta. So in case anybody's wondering why it's interesting and exciting to be in venture or to be involved with private companies, the very best are doing an insane job. And I think those are the stories that need to be out there. And that's why I love my job. I feel like it's the best job in the world.

2:16:03They announced their Series A in October 28th of 2021. I'm assuming you guys did the deal like, you know, some late summer or something like that. At the time, was that a deal that you think maybe other people would have passed on because of the price? Like it just looks crazy? Obviously, it was the peak. So we did the Series B and it was really interesting. Not only did multiple other VCs pass on price, but they went and then invested in competitors because they could get in at like half the valuation. But we never compromise what we believe is, you know, our belief in the founders and the company.

2:16:42And look, I mean, at the end, this business is all about early belief. And as all the founders, we get to participate in their journeys. And SuperBay is a prime example. They had all the initial signs that things could be really great. Like I said, you know, traction was really low. They were starting to, like, essentially, like, take off among developers. And it was built on Postgres. It was very technical and people are like, no, nothing could be worth that valuation at that stage with only that much signal. And I think that's kind of the magic of Felicis is that when we back these incredible founders, you know, the success is far from obvious.

2:17:19But then after we invest, like these companies go through these insane hockey stick growth curves and Superbase is a prime example of that as is Merkort. How do you think about what is different about this boom, this moment from previous cycles? The top things that have really changed in the last two years that justify more investment, that changed the job of the venture capitalist are, we're seeing higher growth rates. We're also seeing higher CapEx requirements for some tech companies than before. We're seeing just more potential new markets because you could be going after a labor pool instead of a different, like an existing market.

2:18:03There's entirely new markets. There's questions about enterprise adoption, churn. Like what in your mind is different this time around from the mobile wave, the cloud wave, or anything else that informs how you're underwriting deals this year? Yeah, I mean, look, I have seen the internet wave as well as the mobile wave. There are a couple of things that are really different. So one is the point that we were getting at is that venture game, it is like very basic, is essentially, it's a growth game. If you find a company that is growing 50x faster than public companies, it's going to end up in a good place.

2:18:44And even if you're off by 10x on price, if you're in one of those companies, things are going to work out for you. Also, interestingly, 20 years ago, like when I first got into business, a lot of people would worry about distribution. But the reality is today, like everybody's watching YouTube. Everybody has a mobile device. Distribution is no longer a problem. But what is really interesting that is different is the AI age. Normally before with software, first, the budget was limited. I don't think any company is going to spend more than 10 % of their budget on software. But also, the value creation was different.

2:19:19Like software, yes, it is helping you, but still people are working with it. You have to put data in it. And then to get value out of it, you have to look at the results and say, okay, now I'm going to do something based on what the software is telling me. And the software is like streamlining it a little bit. In AI age, what's really stunning is like, you now can have a full closed loop without humans where everything is being done by AI. So the data entry is automatic. The data output is automatic. I sometimes think of a turbo engine in a car, like one of the like interesting technologies is you take the exhaust gas and then if you channel into the engine the car can accelerate a lot faster so in some ways like what is happening with ai uh there is growth vectors in so many different areas i had to make an engine example since i'm wearing formula one like hat um but first of all there is so much more value creation and now you're going after labor which depending on the sectors you look at is like 40 50 60 70 percent of a company's budget.

2:20:19So the dollars at stake is so much larger. How much more important is it now to think about terminal market structure? Because I completely agree with you. The growth rates are insane. The risk, I feel like, is not that the growth isn't real. It's just that you pick a market and there's one company that goes from one to 10 million in ARR to 100 million in ARR and you project that out and you're like, well, the market's 50 billion. They're going to get there really fast. But if the market can support 50 companies that all grow really fast and they all take 2 % of the market, then you will see some sort of S curve in the growth rate at some point.

2:21:00And I feel like there's some markets that will probably be perfectly competitive, some that will be highly monopolistic and everything in between. And it feels like as a venture capitalist, it's going to pay to be the type of person that can clock how markets play out. Does that map with what you're thinking, what you're trying to do? Look, I think you're getting at a very important point, which is it is not just enough to have high growth, but you need to have durable growth. And we use the examples of Google, Shopify, even like more recently, we had companies like Canva. And I think one of the things that people sometimes really underestimate is that that kind of high growth compounded will generate stunning results.

2:21:40And one of the things that I learned from both Google and Shopify is that if and when you choose the right markets, you will probably get the sizing wrong. But if you choose a mega, mega market, even like at what we think success, there is still so much of the market left. Like one of the things that I never realized is even when Shopify went IPO, it was less than 1 % of that market. And that's what helped it get a 40x growth after that. Same thing happened to Google. And the very best companies can also expand the market. So to your question, though, one of the things that we really pay attention is what are the modes of these companies?

2:22:15It's not just that they have the chance of high growth, but how durable will it be? A lot of times it's the founders. A lot of times it's also different elements. For instance, we very frequently talk about data modes at Felicis, right? One of the things that helps you differentiate is if you have data that nobody else has, since data is the new oil, that's going to be a huge differentiator. Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of AI tech, and that's more pervasive. But if you have data that nobody else has, that's going to be tremendous value. And if you start doing something where you basically become a key part of the process, people are not going to rip you off.

2:22:50So we just recently won a term sheet of a healthcare AI company. And what was interesting is through AI, they've been able to service a part of the patient market that here too was not possible to be served at a positive return. and the moment they fix that part of the market, hospitals are like, why am I only going to give you 35 % of the market? You know what? The rest of the market, there are 19 players, but I'm just going to come straight to you. It's too much work. You guys can take 100 % of our referrals. So it's yet another good example of if you do a really great job with the hardest part of the market, you can essentially have a much larger portion of the market.

2:23:33Nobody is interested in somebody who's only going to win 1 % to 2%. they want people that can do everything together and not just one part of it. And again, that's kind of also the big leap from software is maybe only solving one part of the problem and they want like a full solution. I want like a full turnkey, not just like, hey, the software can get you the numbers or analyze things or be the system of record. Now everything is about system of action and AI can enable that. And if you have a data mode on top of it, obviously that drastically increases chances is that not only are you going to have high growth, but the high growth is going to stick with you.

2:24:12Did the venture industry learn its lesson in 2021? Things got a little bit crazy. There was a lot of top signals. We had a crash. But at the same time, you did companies like Superbase at what was then a crazy valuation. And then now it looks like you bought it. It looks like you stole it. now this time around it feels like you know that we we were I remember in 2022 it felt like we were going to go into like a VC apocalypse it certainly doesn't feel that way now do you think do you think we learned any key lessons or are we going to kind of relearn them in the future let me tell you an interesting lesson or maybe like a key secret is that venture business is you have to be consistent.

2:25:05You cannot sprint and pause, sprint and pause. If you're not growing in this business, you're essentially losing, stagnating. There is no such thing as cruise control or like steady state. And I think the mistake that happens with a lot of VCs, if their conviction is not deep and And they're essentially playing the market game. There are a lot of followers and not a lot of original thinkers. What happens is the moment the market gets risky and things look dire, people pause and like, oh, you know what, like I'm going to stop making investment. And one thing I'm really proud is even in the 2021 vintage and 22, when things were really expensive, we still kept on making investments and we never slowed down.

2:25:45And, you know, we were basically like steady growth. And part of that is because, look, this is not public markets where if there is 20 % growth, and your entry price is wrong, you're going to lose a lot of money. But if you find the right companies and you do have 50 to 100x growth ahead of you, even if you overpaid for them, you're still going to do well. In fact, the only way you're going to do well is to have these positive outliers that are fund makers. And so I think the biggest lesson is like a lot of VCs like spend too much time of like this valuation high and low and this trend and that.

2:26:16The reality is you got to be a surfer that can surf any wave in any season and not just one. Like you can't just go to the beach and call it quits. You need to go back out. And, you know, I know Jordi lives in Malibu, so he's going to like the surfer analogy. But part of the other thing also is that you have to find the companies where there is going to be so much growth that even if you got the price slightly wrong, it's not going to slow down. So anybody who's like, oh, like we're going to be in this business and it's all about the price, they're misunderstanding. It is all about like being early and understanding that incredible growth that's going to follow.

2:26:51So that's going to basically give you the long-term success. And so I feel there is definitely a delta between the VCs that are original thinkers that still had the conviction and the courage to make those bets. And not just like Superbase for us, but also companies like N8N. That was a sleeper company in Berlin. And all of a sudden, in fall, multiple VCs have woke up that they're doing a great job in agentic AI. Yeah, that's a company, interestingly enough, I saw it on getting people started making videos about it on Instagram, which I look at as much more mainstream before I saw anything about it on X, which is, I think, a good sign.

2:27:32It means that it actually has traction outside of our little Silicon Valley bubble. A hundred percent. How do you think about your philosophy on expertise versus being a generalist? Yeah, I look at it as expertise on a category versus judgment around a human. But take me through advice for a venture capitalist who's joining your firm, advice for someone who's graduating high school and thinking about how to pursue. What is your philosophy on generalism versus becoming an expert in something? I mean, look, I think generalism in general, it's a really good thing. But I think, look, there are a couple of really interesting secrets or insights.

2:28:24Number one, just to give you real data to make this point, is that when I started in venture, the other thing that people underestimated is they're like, listen, all these sectors you're going to invest in, you're not an expert in any one of them. and you're not going to be able to make a good investment. I think what people misunderstand is if you're an expert in a sector, you're going to look at a company and you're only going to look at the orthodox way of doing things. And when somebody comes in as an outsider and like, I want to do something the way it's never been done before, you're going to say that's never going to work.

2:28:56And so like the paradox here is the expertise, right? Like the experts are supposed to know the field really well, but that also anchors them in the way that things are done traditionally versus a generalist is going to be first principles and say, you know what, there's actually a new way of doing things. And if this thing works, it's going to be amazing. And at Feliz, the most interesting stat that I'm most proud of is that we made early investments in companies, 53 of them that exceeded a billion dollar in valuation. Not a single one of them was led by an expert. That's amazing. And so that's the thing.

2:29:30When you guys started, you were not media experts or like proven like media people and you had a great idea i would tell you the funny thing is in our case like i've been working in and around advertising my entire career john had been an expert on on like content production but we certainly were not experts on hosting a show and i know and if you had asked us even literally like 12 months ago if you had asked us like would you be hosting would you could you ever see yourself hosting like a daily show we would have been like, ah, like. I always love that Paul Graham formulation, which is like most co-founders, if you look at the co-founding teams, it's usually like two or three people where each of them are somewhat experts in like two or three disciplines.

2:30:18So you have someone who knows like marketing and finance and operations. And then someone who knows like front end and back end and technical design and architecture, and also some of the trade-offs about how the product design works. And so you wind up with like, you know, some level of expertise in 10 different categories bundled up in two to three people on a specific team that seems to work really well. But yes, they're not like pure play experts, which is what we think of, at least what I think of when I think of expertise. A hundred percent. Look, I'm going to add two more things, which is, I think one of the other elements of being successful, whether you're a founder or investor, especially as a VC, is it's all about the people.

2:31:00And I've actually done sales at Google. And you would say, how is that related to being a venture? At the end, it's a people's game. The founders are not, you know, taking money based on numbers, but if they can trust who you are. And so like being good with people and being able to relate to them is really important. So these days when people are starting in the business, whether they're a founder or a future VC or emerging VC, I'm like, look, your biggest asset is your network and the people that you know. But the second thing is, especially for venture, you need to be exposed to outliers, right?

2:31:31Like I feel like my training at Google, you know, every single thing that Google has done in the six years that I was there, not a single thing was standard. Every single thing we did, we did a completely different way that has been ever done before. And the results were stunning. So if you've never been at a company where the founders and the firm was crazy enough to do things completely differently, and you kind of understand that culture, that mindset, right? Like we did talk about being generalists, but it is also important to have been exposed to some of these things. And then you're like, okay, you know what?

2:32:04Now that I have seen it, it's in my DNA, it's in my blood. I can kind of like see other signs of that. So being good with people, being able to understand outliers, at least being exposed to them, I think are key ingredients, at least in venture. So those are things that nobody ever told me like, Like, hey, this is going to be really important for you. But now after 20 years of doing it, I can tell you that it is very important. And like journalists, like I worked in every discipline across four continents. I've done finance, sales, marketing, product. That was also really great. I didn't have to be the deep expert in all of these things.

2:32:41But being able to understand so you can like see around the corners and find little things, you know, just enough to make sure that you're not going to make a stupid move. But you don't know too much that you would be too anchored in it. and you would be skeptical of a brand new way of doing things. Well said. I just can't get over how good your outfit looks and your frame looks. Yeah, you're ready to co-host with us. Yeah. Come to the altar. Thank you. Like, honestly, like, I'm down to that. I love this hat and I'm enjoying my yoga buffet. Yeah, are you an SF? We are in Menlo Park, actually. We do have an SF office.

2:33:16Okay. But we are in the Bay Area right now. Well, hopefully we can cross over. soon in person. Yeah, let's hang out soon. Are you going to be at F1 Vegas? I'm thinking about it. So my older son is in varsity football. If there is no conflict with his game, I'm definitely going to be there. Let us know if you are. We will look quite different. You can watch some older footage to recognize us over there. Thank you for hanging out. And I'm impressed with how you were able to do a normal interview when we look. so ridiculous. But it was really fun chatting with you and thank you for sharing. That was a blast.

2:33:56Should I say Mark and Ilya? But very well done. A great impersonation. And Jordy and John, it's such a pleasure. Let's do this again. And the audio team is appreciative as well. You're looking absolutely crisp. Everyone's a fan. Everyone loves it. Great stuff. Awesome. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your Friday. Have a good day. Bye. You too. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? I got a 92 on 8 Sleep. You can go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod five. Code TBPN. It was seven hours and 32 minutes. I got a perfect 93. 93? Oh, you beat me by one. I smoked you. Very good job. I smoked you. Our next guest is in the Restream Waiting Room.

2:34:38Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome. There he is. Is that who I think is? Did you get full prosthetic makeup to look like Jacob Diepenbrock from Deskipolis Ventures? Is that what's going on here? That is correct. You guys need to be cautious better though. Yes. Your Jacob costume is flawless. How was Demo Day? Take us through it. What were the highlights? What are the new trends? What's the actual structure? Maybe start there. What's the structure of Demo Day these days? Yeah, yeah. So yesterday, 2 p.m. got started. We did it at Long Walls Space here in El Segundo. One of the OG El Segundo companies.

2:35:18It used to be ABL. Shout out to Dan of Piedmont. Started at 2 p.m. I think we had probably 160, 170 people come out for it. Had a panel with Augustus, Isaiah, and Ted. The boys, the godfathers, the brothers. It was a good group. It's a great group. Founding fathers. Everybody was hating on SF, which was all of the investors in the audience. Why hate on SF? Oh, well, Paul. Also, one thing is when we were there earlier this week, I thought they had like somewhat solved the human feces on the ground thing. And it was like John and I walked home from dinner. Granted, it was about a mile walk. And it was like at least six.

2:36:07It was through the Tenderloin, which is a rough spot. There are rough spots in LA, but El Segundo is beautiful. At least when I walked around, it's very clean. And if you're an industrialist, the smokestacks, you know. That's actually a plus. That's actually a plus. But yeah, so how many companies graduate? And it's a proper demo day. Like people are giving pitches, raising money like that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we had nine companies pitch yesterday from all over the country and a couple from out of the country as well. We started off with, like I said, panel, nine pitches. They all kind of go out to their booths afterwards.

2:36:45And then all the investors get to know and get to talk with them and meet them afterwards. And then we had a sick little after putty in Manhattan Beach afterwards. So it was great. But I guess companies, I was happy to run through some. I also posted a thread as well if you want to pull it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll have the team pull it up. But yeah, yeah. Read through and let us know who's down in mind. So I will say less defense companies this time than ever before. A lot more. Yeah, I was going to ask, when we, when we, across the different YC batches, like there's very clearly like some core themes and trends that you've seen.

2:37:20So I'm not surprised to see like less. We probably like don't, we don't need the same volume of defense tech companies now. I think in general, like there's just been so many, like every category now. Oh, you think the job's finished? I don't think the job's finished, but I think it's like probably healthy for like every category now as a few players, they can now fight it out. One or two will rise to the top. We don't necessarily need 10 more backfilling, trying to go after the same types of contracts. Yeah, I think my general thought is like, I think defense like prove that you can kind of disrupt these legacy industries and like build massive companies and these kind of legacy industries that haven't really had venture interest until the end of SpaceX.

2:38:04And I think it's now like, okay, like we will do these like hardware, we will do these kind of more, I guess, less tech, less venture heavy industries. There's a lot of stuff like that unlocked. So like within energy, within mining, we did something like. So I always make this point where, you know, Sam D 'Amico, I mean, SF founder, but he runs Impulse Stove. It's a stove company. And I don't want to, you know, tell his story for him, but it always feels like, obviously, that's not a defense tech company. That's not an Android competitor. But that's the type of company that maybe doesn't exist unless we make like hardware cool and get VCs piling into the category.

2:38:44But take us through some of the companies from this batch. Who stands out? Yeah, I mean, it's a small batch. Take us through all. I'll go through all of them. Starting off, we've got Petra Power. Shout out to Aaron Goodman. Hopefully, you're watching right now. He's doing basically replacing generators. So basically building a new electrochemical process to replace the generator. And there's a massive bottleneck. Generators, obviously, energy. that he's ordered is pretty real, especially with the new data centers going up. And he already has received $9 million in DoD contracts, which is pretty crazy.

2:39:21First one. Second one's a pretty fun one. Making shoes in America. Autonomous shoe manufacturing at price in the USA. That's bold. That's very bold. I think we're going to make it in America. Okay. There's all these missile drone companies. We're making shoes, guys. We're making shoes in America. I love it. I love it. three hedges they're one of the few software companies they're basically building a commodities hedging app for um smbs typically oil and gas to start because it costs a lot of money to actually have like a hedging team yeah and they said 95 percent of of uh distributors just can't afford a full team so they basically make it their whole thing is robin hood robin for industrial companies yeah yeah yeah yeah we've seen a lot of startups do the the sort of like treasury management, just like earn a little bit of yield because maybe you don't have access to an investment bank and a whole treasury team.

2:40:15And so plenty of companies have offered that type of product. It makes sense that you would need something a little bit different in the industrial space. Very cool. Imagine day trading commodities on your phone.

2:40:29What is actinide? Actinide is pretty cool. So basically what they do is they enrich isotopes basically. So they started off with one material. So there's three materials in the Russian sanctions list. These are materials we can import or cannot import. There's three materials that are actually removed from that sanctions list, which means you can get as much as you want because we just need them. The highest cost per gram one is a material called terbium. It's used in cancer medication. They basically make this material. It's a$2 per gram material. They enrich it. it's$36 ,000 per gram. Wow. And then they already have, it's in the tweet as well, they already have some contracts, very large contracts they just signed literally in the last week.

2:41:14It was pretty sick. Like Monday morning, done it yesterday, Monday morning signed two contracts locked in there with some companies everybody watching knows very, very well. Yeah, the traction so far is pretty amazing. Yeah, it was great. I think we've definitely seen over the last couple of batches like kind of an increase in traction just because people want to be here in El Segundo. People kind of see the brand we provide and that's, I think, pretty evident with the company. Tex.pro is Bloomberg for heavy equipment procurement. So that's, oh, dealerships. Interesting. So actually figuring out, so Bloomberg, you think that means looking across all the different industries, like how you can go on Bloomberg and find someone's auctioning off a private jet, but they're also selling some slug of equity or something like that.

2:42:06So this is a platform to connect buyers and sellers? It basically brings together people who want to buy mining equipment, heavy machinery more generally. There's no central database with all this information. It's just like Boomer X in Texas calls Boomer Y in Arkansas, and then they hopefully make it happen. But there's no label database of all this equipment. It's basically just like compile it all. Kind of like with Carfax, for example. Like early on, there's no data. And like, basically they just went out and like called all the dealers. Like, Hey, like how much does this work? How much is this worth?

2:42:38Is Loris sort of like the V2 of the vertical farming era that it says they turn grocery store rooftops into autonomous farms. Yeah. So like my, my take here was like vertical farming obviously been tried. It didn't really work because it was all like climate, like kind of carbon credit driven a lot of the time where like the actual economics did not make sense with that gone. basically they remove one of the biggest costs which is real estate and they basically just put these blow up farms on grocery stores roofs and then it's like a pretty I mean the numbers are here they have they don't pay for the actual unit they have people that go and license them and bring them out to grocery stores and then they get individual profit based off what the grocery stores make and then the goal is bring the produce profits per grocery store up by 50 % The produce is then sold directly in the grocery store that it's sitting on?

2:43:28Cool. Interesting. Co-location. They're already in store. That's awesome. They had a pretty big contract recently, which is pretty exciting. But yeah, I think generally, this, again, food security is important. Yeah. The stuff that was tried last, I don't know, five, five, ten years ago, so it didn't really work because of the economics. This makes sense. There's also these general tailwinds of like, we need to make food in America. It's like actually healthy. Cool. So that's them. Lark, Kai, Legend, at Skunk Works right out of college. there's this new Moses standard basically which is like open source like if you have a component it has to actually work with every type of system there's no way to actually test this.

2:44:06They basically have a software that can test the compliance for any component and then eventually you're going to build the hardware to test it in a more in-depth fashion starting with the software. I like Blitzpanel, that's a good name. Blitzpanel reminds me of Mixpanel. It's a pretty simple company and electrical panels for cheaper and they have a whole automation process he's built out. He was at Pipe Dream Labs in Texas. A huge problem and now he's basically just building the... Yeah, going through all this stuff it really shows you that there are a lot of stuff that fits in thematically that does not feel like it competes with Anderol, for example.

2:44:47It feels aligned with the general theme that you've put together of cool hard problems. There's a little bit of American dynamism, a little bit of military stuff in here. Tell us about the last company, number nine. Yeah, yeah. So Architas Energy. This guy reads old German papers from the 40s in German. And he found this process. What kind of German papers is he reading? You can guess. You can guess. that doesn't instill confidence tell this guy to clean it up what is going on no the papers are scientific papers okay okay that needs to be clarified papers about scientific processes okay yes yes they did have some good scientists in the 40s exactly and one of these papers in particular goes this way of making hydrogen for cheaper and if you can make fruit oil for cheaper.

2:45:48Very cool. Well, congratulations on the demo day. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, really cool lineup. It's great. I mean, it's cool to see a lot of people focus on energy. I mean, people will criticize accelerators

2:46:05for being too on trend. Totally, totally. But it's actually healthy. We want a big group of companies going after a bunch of different problems. This just doesn't seem like that narrow of a trend. It feels extremely narrow when you introduced it the first time, and it just felt like, oh, it's just defense tech or something. But clearly, it's such a big area that some of these folks, if they're both successful, they're not even going to do business together because they're operating completely different layers of the stack. It's just a fantastic end result and really cool to see the growth here.

2:46:38So congratulations. I think one last point about the general defense market that I think is interesting is like a lot of these big companies like annual, like Sironic, like the big tier ones have already chosen like a winner and like they're not going to back another annual competitor. So it's like you need to have like the stack, like the capital stack makes sense. And if there's going to be every single level of it, then like all these funds have already chosen somebody as like their winner. It's kind of hard to come in and like be back with these funds. So I think there's like so many opportunities now to come because again, legacy industries are like open for venture.

2:47:07There's a lot of talent flowing in. That's what we're trying to take advantage of is this like new movement, And the best talent and capital actually interested in solving these hard-critical national problems. Thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Congratulations on another successful demo day. We will see you next demo day and hopefully before that, of course. Yeah, great to see you, Jacob. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

2:47:32Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is a living legend. This is amazing. The founder of Partiful. I'm sure she's dressed totally normal. Yep. So let's bring her in. Welcome to the show. How many Halloween parties did you get invited to? Okay. Is this AI? Yes. Is this AI? Hi. I wish because it would have been a lot easier to put on. Did you do this yourself? Or did you have a team? I did do it myself, which is why I missed a few spots. Oh, it looks great. This is incredible. I mean, I feel like Halloween is probably high pressure, like on part of, on the part of full team, you guys are facilitating a lot of Halloween events.

2:48:15Like you kind of have to really show up and do it right. So, uh, congratulations. Did any, this is your black Friday. This is our black Friday. This is our super bowl. This is our D day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for taking some time to talk to us on your black Friday. Uh, is it actually black Friday in the sense that like the servers will be melting or is it just like it's the best opportunity to capitalize on the value prop that Partiful can deliver? Yeah, I would actually be curious, what are the biggest holidays or just days celebrations? Halloween is by far the biggest. Really? No way. People celebrate Halloween like 10 times, right?

2:48:55Like everyone can go to multiple Halloween parties and it's very valid. You're only going to go to one New Year's Eve party, maybe during the holidays you're like traveling so who knows if you'll be around but like everyone's here everyone's locked in everyone knows what the job is and so usually it's like you'll have six halloween parties uh and i don't because i like the entire particle team i'm like kind of on call uh today this weekend but that's why i'm dressed up right now yeah i love the idea of you being on call and then there's some serious thing happening in the business and you're just Let's hop on Zoom together and then you dress up like this.

2:49:34It's very serious. Yeah. It's great. It seems like you're not melting. Yeah. The servers are not melting because our engineers prepped heavily for this, but it is like a triple on-call situation. How has the business been growing? I know that a couple months ago there was like, oh, Apple's coming after you. And that felt like maybe it was just always going to be - Focus on yourself, Apple. Focus on yourself. But was that even like an OSHIT moment or was it just kind of like, okay, we didn't really see any blip in the numbers whatsoever. And we've just been on a growth trajectory the entire time.

2:50:14When it happened, it was definitely, are you not allowed to curse on this show? We don't curse on this show, but you're welcome to. But kids do watch. Our kids watch. So whatever you say, our kids will repeat to us later. they'd be like what did treya mean by that yeah it was an oh darn moment there we go oh shucks oh shucks uh but then we're like let's wait to see how this plays out because i think so many startups go through the thing where some big player comes in and they try to reheat your nachos and it either works or it doesn't and i don't know have you guys gotten an apple invite it no no there you go there you go yeah i mean it seems like an obvious i mean the other thing is apple is not good at fun like they they did the genmoji thing and and they were laughed at for it uh it was like kind of a cool yeah product but again it doesn't even get real usage and i just think Apple was always known for magical software because it was just like so polished and good.

2:51:26And I think they're becoming less known for that. Yeah. I have another take here. I'd like to know if this resonates with you. You're obviously on the inside of this, but I feel like the invite product has like, there are technical features that someone can clone and check the box, but the brand is so important. And I feel like when I get a partiful, it says something about what I'm going to expect walking in there. When I get a paperless post, that's a different vibe. That's a different thing. When I get a physical piece of mail that invites me to something, that's also a different brand, a different vibe.

2:52:05It sets me up. It's the welcome moment to the actual event. It's part of the event experience. And so I feel like there's a world where you could clone all the features, but it's not going to bring the same energy, which is actually what your customers are buying in some way. It's part of the product. I think it's part of the product, but how do you think about brand and how you stand out from the competition? I think it's brand. And there's something about, you have to want to break the rules because a party is not like a corporate meeting, right? A party is a party. And so we, from the very beginning have always been like the party page should feel as much fun as the party itself.

2:52:44Like you're already asking guests to do a lot by RSVPing. Like you might as well make it fun for them and give them a reward where they get to see the guest list after they RSVP. Like you, you got to make it something where people can actually feel bought into the experience. And you don't do that by, you know, building something that just looks like an online form or gets buried in someone's email. But I also think there's an interesting cross-platform aspect of this too. When you think about Apple, if I want to invite people to my party, I want to invite my friends who have an iPhone. I want to invite my friends who have Android.

2:53:19I don't care what phone my friends have. They're still my friends. And so I think it's really important and it's just hard for certain companies to execute on this. Does the Apple app only work if you have an iPhone? It does work for Android. Okay. I was going to say, that's just mean, okay? Not even being able to invite Android people to parties, that's just mean. I mean, well, they're already green friends. They already look like this. So we oftentimes, if we're talking to an enterprise software founder, we don't typically ask the question like, what's the 10-year vision? Where does this go?

2:53:57because usually it's like more seats, more contracts, more products, margin expansion, basic products. But how do you, like, you know, and I'm sure you've just been learning about what Partiful is as you built it, but like as a vision, like what was kind of the founding vision? What is it today? How has it changed? And kind of where are you going? Because I've always, I've like, I've seen like your posts or like different press hits throughout the years. And, uh, there was some really funny post about like have not having any, uh, not making any money that, that, uh, that stuck with me, but, um, uh, and obviously just like, you know, joking about it or whatever, but like, yeah, where, where, where did you start from and where are you going?

2:54:42Yeah. It's funny how many people took that post like very seriously. It's like, well, you can't joke the internet anymore. What was the exact, what was the exact line? I forget. at it was just like partiful won't make money vcs gave us funding to help you party enjoy it babes something like that there are all these like very serious news articles of like partiful said that vcs gave a party like is it true that's kind of a if you guys aren't making money if you guys aren't making money it's kind of a systemic risk to the part to big party you know yeah yeah no we we will definitely make money, just not right now.

2:55:20The long-term vision is if you look at where most social apps have gone, they've kind of turned into entertainment platforms, right? Like when I open Instagram, I'm being fed a bunch of reels. I'm seeing less and less of my friends' content. TikTok is obviously huge, and it's also an entertainment platform. And so when you really think about it, the content that we're consuming is more and more just like it can be Netflix, It can be YouTube. It can be reels. It can be shorts. It can be TikTok. But it's all just you're watching entertainment from people who you don't actually know. And so what's gotten lost in that is like, where do you go if you want to actually connect with your friends?

2:55:57Where do you go if you want to meet more of the people who could be your friends? Because less and less, you're discovering them online. And so what we want to do is create the home for you to hang out with your friends, see them more easily, discover new things to do and new people to do them with. And we think that as big social actually stops becoming social and starts becoming big new media, that big social deserves to exist. And right now it's small social, it's part of all, but the goal is become big social. I love it. Yeah. I mean, we were talking to Brian Chesky, he has somewhat similar thesis and it's grown on me so much.

2:56:36The barbell idea, you're going to be, there's going to be the internet slop feed there's gonna be a lot of content and stuff but then you're also going to want to touch grass and both can be true and you can kind of toggle back and forth uh what's the most underrated part of fold that you've ever seen okay so i they're they're somewhat rated it's not fully underrated but i'm obsessed with the the performative contest so there's like performative mail yes happening right now i saw in san francisco there was like a performative reading contest okay i think it's great yeah yeah it's just like there's something really funny that's happening where online meme culture people are using partiful to take that offline sure so they're taking like i know by the way i know i used to go to the same gym as a kid who like initially went viral for the performative reading in new york where he was reading like uh like like some infinite jest or something it wasn't that it was like it was like a feminist feminist feminist text or something like that and he's like you know reading and people are like hey he's been reading the same page for like yeah 30 minutes like what's going on and that i'm sure that was part of what kicked off this this kind of thing yeah yeah or like group seven on Tik TOK.

2:57:57Like there's not like a group seven meetup, I think this weekend in New York. So it's like the speed at which every single internet meme now has a real offline partiful event that people are actually going to that's actually happening. That's been pretty cool to watch. Take us through the SF party culture. I'm hearing nine, nine, six, it's getting crazier. Everyone's working nonstop. Uh, is that bear? Is that a bear signal for your business? No one's going to be partying right are they just using it for like happy hour come talk about sass oh that could be a bowl case break it down uh 996 culture is very concerning to the party community i'm here to declare a state of emergency in the SF party scene we have to end it the drinks happy hours are coming back it's okay to crack open a happy dad at 2 p.m pass me that happy dad i'm gonna to crack that open right now let's get the party started right uh yeah we do tech companies need to bring back boozy brunches during weekdays was that ever a thing like what what's what's kind of the solution here uh maybe that's what we should start using our vc dollars for the power lunch power lunch funding everyone's boozy boozy lunches and boozy dinners i mean that kind of that was kind of the joke in 2021 it was like there was like i you know people used to joke 30 of all dollar venture dollars go to meta and then in 2021 it felt like 30 percent of vc dollars were going to like founder dinners like it was just a founder you could basically eat for free as a founder by just going to a different founder dinner every night with with a with a fintech yeah okay but i i i want to keep going i know we're way over time but uh i want you to synthesize something you've been thinking about, uh, this, this idea of like rage bait marketing being not effective long-term synthesize that with some, I feel like part of, has done a little bit of it, but you haven't like crossed any line.

2:59:56So it's always like worked out. Like even that, even that example you gave of like, Oh, we're spending all our VCs money. That's kind of rage bait marketing, but it never, it never bubbled up to the point where people were like, Oh, you don't have a sense of humor. That creates goodwill. Yeah. So I've always loved like the VCs are financing this party. They can, and for the user, that's cool. Yeah. But, but there's, that's quite, that's quite different than like the memes that were going around earlier this year, people being like, I used VC dollars to buy this Lambo. Oh yeah, and myself. Yeah, how do you think about like Rage Bait, where the line is on your brand?

3:00:34Obviously you came on a show that's, I don't know, mostly a joke, but somewhat serious, dressed up. Like you have fun, but then there is the line. How do you think about that? There's a little bit that I think you kind of have to acknowledge it. If a company is pre-revenue, there's clearly VC funding that's backing it. So you can't not talk about that. And I'm a beneficiary of VCs funding a lot of free Ubers in my peak partying era. So I have a responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation. But I think we're here to make people happy. that's the entire purpose of the company. We're not here to make people angry.

3:01:13And so there's only so much rage baiting that like we, a Partiful can do that's authentic because it's like, no, the rest of the internet makes people angry. And we're like the one thing that's trying to not do that. So I think that's part of why we toe the line. It's just not as authentic to us if like, you know, the Twitter mobs are up in arms. There's also, John, you were writing about the come for the tool, stay for the network. Oh, sure. This is like a perfect example, but a stronger, like I think a stronger example than... Come for the tool, stay for the network. John Coogan, Chris Dixon.

3:01:45Chris Dixon, it was me quoting him. Last question, and we have to have you back on and go way deeper, but I'm super interested. It seems like Partiful has complete and total domination over like tech culture in terms of like, if there's a party that's happening in SF tech, like you found your beachhead, you've landed, you've dominated. How much time are you spending hunting around to find like these crazy adjacent markets for, okay, there's someone who collects some odd object in the Midwest and like you just dominate in Milwaukee now because like you're dominant is part of full because I don't.

3:02:22Yeah. It's grown. It's grown a lot. So we've never had boots on the ground in a market like DC or Boston or Chicago. And those are all huge, huge now yeah yeah yeah uh we're growing like crazy in london yeah we do it's on the ground there yeah uh but it's all just web flywheel stuff right yeah yeah just you know network effects yeah just good old-fashioned viral growth hit the gong for network effects

3:02:54great hit all right this was super fun uh thank you for taking uh 15 minutes out of your out of your Super Bowl to come on. Hopefully no crises later today because the people are depending on it. And I'm excited for you to become big social media. Yes, we're very excited for you. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Talk soon. Our next guest has been in the recent waiting room for far too long. Shishir Metcora from Superhuman, formerly Grammarly. We're going to break down the the rebrand. We had him on there when they acquired Superhuman. Yes. Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the show.

3:03:38Congratulations on the next iteration. We pressed you about this. We asked you, is there going to be a rebrand? And you were like, nothing to it now. I think you did. But congratulations. It's done. And it happened really fast, actually. Many corporations would take a year. I don't know. It feels fast to me. But anyway, how's it going? What are the key changes? What's the thesis? Why did you go with Superhuman and not Grammarly as the key hero brand? Yeah, that's great. We did talk about it a few months back when we bought Superhuman. There's two big changes we made. We changed the name of the corporate entity to be Superhuman instead of Grammarly.

3:04:17It's a little bit like the Google Alphabet transition. Grammarly is still an important brand in our portfolio of products. We now have four products under the Superhuman brand. It's Grammarly, it's Coda, it's Mail, which you used to know as Superhuman before. And the other big announcement is we added a fourth new product we call Go, Superhuman Go, which brings a new AI assistant product, takes the best parts of Grammarly, and makes it a platform. Okay, explain that more to me. Okay, before we jump into that, I will say Superhuman is a perfect name for a suite of AI-enabled apps at a time when a lot of humans, especially even, I would say, more so outside of the tech bubble, are worried about being obsolete in an age of AI.

3:05:07And so this kind of ethos of, like, let's give people superpowers, very strong. It makes a lot of sense. Exactly. You nailed it. That's why we picked the name. I had two tests. One was it needed to be broad enough for the suite, first thing you said. And the second one was actually the word human is more important than the word super. And it's actually part of the Grammarly DNA because Grammarly has always been about empowerment of humans. You still, you know, we help you, assist you in your writing tasks, but you still, at the end of the day, submit the article, you submit the essay, you write the email.

3:05:36We're just helping you be more human. So I love the concept of superhuman that way. Okay, so walk me through the actual instantiation of the product. I understand Grammarly is, you know, like a widget. Yeah, let's maybe talk about Superhuman Go, Oh, the new product, because that's what I have no context on. Yes, please. Right, right. Yeah, and actually we teased that a little bit last time I was here too. And the core idea is a simple reframe of Grammarly. So Superhuman Go takes the core underlying technology layer of Grammarly and opens it up as a platform. So most people think about Grammarly as a grammar assistant, and that is a big piece of what it does.

3:06:17But underneath it is a layer that allows you to bring AI to a proactive embedded experience in every tool you use. Grammarly works in about a million different web apps, desktop apps, and mobile applications. And now you can run any agent, not just your writing assistant, on top of that platform, embedded, connected, and personal. How do you think about the wars at the various layers of the stack? There's a war. They're fighting all of them. I mean, there's an AI assistant in basically every web app now. Like if I go into Gmail, it's asking me to use Gemini. And then at the browser layer, there's Atlas versus what Perplexity's got going on.

3:06:57Six companies built on Chrome. And then there's also the OS layer. So I was reflecting the other day on Gmail was trying to get me to use Gemini. ChatGP was asking me to use Atlas. And then Apple was trying to get me to use Apple Intelligence. And it's three helpful AI assistants all in just, you want to summarize this email. So you said the key word that you said ask. Yeah. So actually, interestingly, my frame for if you took all those AI providers and you put them into buckets, I call it the assist players, the chat players, and the do players. So the chat players, that's what you're referring to.

3:07:30There's a chat bot everywhere. ChatGPT is obviously synonymous with that category, and there's now dozens of them. Those all ask you to go chat with a virtual human assistant. There's a set of folks working on what we call do, which is I want an AI agent that can go do things on my behalf as headless tasks. And I think the most popular one right now, or the one people are talking a lot about, is all the ones in the coding space. The Anthropic team said 39 % of their queries are for headless agentic tasks and being used for developers writing code. But at the bottom of that stack is another category we call assist.

3:08:04And that's the category where we bring AI to you. So I'll give you one fun stat. We do about 100 billion LLM calls a week. It would make us a top AI provider based on anybody's volume. But we do that across about 40 million users, which if you do the quick math on that, that's a few thousand AI calls a day per person. So if you're a really, really good Gemini user or you're a really good JGPT user, maybe use it a dozen times. Every time you press a key, every time you load a new dock, load a new app, we proactively bring AI to you and we're figuring out all the places we can invisibly insert AI so it can assist you right where you're working.

3:08:46Yeah, that makes 10 cents. Any plans to get into the browser game? Or are you going to let people duke it out there? Yeah. That's not our plan. I think our strength is that we work everywhere. By the way, I should say, I'm so excited that there is a browser game. I remember when I was at Microsoft when Chrome came out, and I worked at Google for a long time, and I watched that happen. And then it just felt like it went away for a long time. It's pretty exciting, actually, that there's some competition in browsers, but we work wherever you work. We work in browsers, we work in the desktop, we work on your mobile phones.

3:09:17To be honest, some fragmentation in the browser world is probably good for us. It makes it even more valuable to have an assistant that follows you everywhere and that's the core of the technology we've built anyways. I don't see us in that game, but I'm very curious to watch it. That makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Are you dressing up for Halloween later? I am dressed up. I'm the superhuman CEO. Yeah, there we go. Nailed it. That's fantastic. That's the most locked-in costume. That is the incredibly locked-in costume. I love it. He's Superman himself, I'd say.

3:09:52Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Great to get the update. Love the new name. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. If you have a new name, you need to get on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Introduce everyone to your unified brand. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only add quick, combine technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. You also need to get a luxury watch to celebrate your new rebrand. Get your superhuman on your wrist with Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet.

3:10:24Our next guest is dressed up as the co-founder and CEO of Linear. I can't wait to talk. Come on in. Kari, how are you doing? Great to see you. Great to see you. Well, thanks for having me again. And yeah, my plan was the same as everyone else's. I could dress up like you guys. There you go. I saw it's already done. So I thought like, well, I'll just do a different thing and not dress up. Well, you're locked in. Locked in. Locked in. CEO of Lanier. You could plan to, like, if you grew out the hair on the sides, I bet by next year, you could do a pretty good impression of one of us without even a hat.

3:11:04For sure. A pure play. Great to see you. I think, did we overlap almost it? Were you at the GitHub Universe on Tuesday? No, I wasn't there. But yeah, that's why I couldn't join. But yeah, we can talk about that or something else. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked, we got a good whirlwind tour of what Microsoft's doing. Obviously, Asachi was taking a victory lap on the OpenAI deal. And we talked to the Codex team over at OpenAI. We also talked to some GitHub folks. And I think the general shape of software development in 2025 is becoming clear. You have asynchronous agents that you can fire off. You're doing code review.

3:11:45You also have a tab completion model and IDE that's getting smarter every month. But I'd really love to hear how you see linear evolving in that context. You can think about linear as delegating different tasks. How do you delegate when you have super long running agents? We were talking to the Codex team. What do you say? Something ran for 60 hours. It's like, that's something you need linear to manage at this point. But take me through how you're seeing folks change their use of linear and what you're doing with the product. Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about is that a lot of linear was founded before all this AI things started happening more.

3:12:26And as well as I think most companies out there today have like even like large companies they started before this this was happening so i think we're all in this journey of kind of like an evolution of like how do we do these things so like what are the workflows what needs to change like what doesn't change i've been like thinking about like the whole kind of um writing example so like we used to write on paper like we write documents on paper then we move to typewriters then we move to like online like a text processing on our computers and then we meant to like online writing the writing is still it's like you have a piece of paper on the screen you're still doing the writing activity and then now like okay like the ai can also do some of the writing activities but it's kind of like a lot of the tooling changed around that activity or that concept or that need but the activity itself didn't change so like we still have like documents and papers as an idea because it's useful so I see the like kind of like the chains on the software industry similar that like the AI doesn't mean that we we will just throw everything out of the window like there's no longer like any of these ideas or workflows or something but it's more like we have to kind of like go piece by piece like does this still make sense okay it does make sense let's do that and then like does this have to change okay it does has to change or it would be better if it changes so so I think like Our thinking with that has been that we want to help companies move to that direction as well.

3:13:56So we do have, for example, the agents platform where also GitHub Copilot now integrated with. So you can delegate tasks directly to the GitHub Copilot. It can work on a background. You can then come back to see what the results are and review the code. We also have other agents. Yeah. Is there any world where the ability to delegate to agents enables more non-technical people? It gives more non-technical people a reason to have a seat on linear. Yeah. I think it's something we're definitely seeing today. And I think it's one of the value we can give to our organization. So like IDEs and technical tools are used by engineers.

3:14:43but what we even see in our company now is designers are making fixes with the agents. When they see something like, oh, this is a little bit off, I can properly instruct the agents, find this in the code base, do a version of this, and you can also, in our case, you can preview the result through linear so you can actually see, oh, this is how it is and test it. so I think it's like it gives like a nice loop for a non-technical person to sometimes just like fix things when they see something and you don't always have to like assign it to the engineer how do you think about like project management software broadly evolving like do you expect to are you guys experimenting with any new paradigms like agents are great in that right now we even call them like human-like names oftentimes, right?

3:15:36Everyone has their, you know, like sometimes it's a girl name, sometimes it's a guy name. And like the way that we're using them today is very much like a teammate. That might suggest that we're not going to see a bunch of new UI paradigms, but are you and the team kind of like, what doesn't get shipped that you guys are kind of playing with, you know, behind the scenes? Yeah, I think like I like to think about there's like two areas. One is the organizational workflow. That goes everything from what Linear really offers is coordination and prioritization and communication and visibility to the organization.

3:16:14This is the direction we're going and this is how it's going. These are the people working on those things. I think with AI we are looking for those problems and what can we actually fix there or improve there with AI. And then I think the other is the individual engineering workflow. Where does that change? So I think there is definitely something we're thinking about that. Do the issues still make sense? Do pull requests still make sense as a concept when you are more working with the AI to develop something? I do think there is still need for reporting things like bugs or capturing issues, having discussions around it.

3:16:59So I don't think everything is going to change that. I think a lot of times what really helps companies with this, like some kind of direction and some kind of guidance to their teams. Like here's a system for you to operate in, and these are the pieces and this is the goals. And then you let them do their work. So I at least like to see that. But it's not like I don't – what we think about the SaaS future or like SaaS products, it's more about making them more proactive or self-driving. Like we like to say like self-driving SaaS is that we're not yet at the stage of like with transportation. Like we still need cars because we don't have teleports.

3:17:47So we need to – now like we're at the stage of like let's make those cars self-driving. And so I think when it comes to software products, I think we are also there that I don't think we are at the stage yet, and maybe not for a long time, that we no longer need no software products. But I think they could be much more proactive and driving things on their own, on the background, without you interacting at all. So the idea would be that bugs just fix themselves. So when bugs get reported, someone like the AI will fix it. And you don't even have to see it. I think there's still an instance eventually I'm excited for the future when teams can just go into linear and just watch a bunch of work happening you know it's an agent an agent finds a bug another agent solves it an agent has an idea for a feature or a user gives an idea the agent ships it it's you know the fully autonomous future is wild I was I wrote a post maybe it was a couple weeks ago at this point or last week about the uninspired company of Silicon Valley and how I mentioned at one point that companies, I'm sure now, like so many companies have copied linear.

3:19:01I'm sure there's companies now that copy linear without even knowing like the origin of design language. They're just like, oh, this is just the way that design looks. So I was wondering like your philosophy on like, you guys get a lot of credit for kind of like creating an entire way, you know, feeling for software and design language. and all these different UI elements, do you ever have a desire to reinvent the next paradigm and kind of ship something that would create an entirely new version of the software that would completely reskin it? Entirely skeuomorphic. It's all just like wooden blocks and grass simulation.

3:19:46Yeah, or do you just continue to own it and be the godfather of modern software as a service. Random fonts everywhere, random colors everywhere. We definitely think about that, especially on the website side, that what is the next thing we can do since everyone is doing this thing we're doing? I think there's definitely that need, but I think in the end we try to be functional or pragmatic about the design, that it still serves the purpose. I believe that old design quote of the form follows function. So it's like you're not like with productivity tools or other tools, I don't think like the point is to be an artist or something.

3:20:30Like you're not trying to like invent something crazy things just for the sake of it. I think it needs to be like to the purpose or the function of the tool. And then like around that, like there's always like you can like try to figure out what needs to, what could be better or like maybe you can go against some convention when you when you have that reason so i mean we're always looking for those opportunities and i think for us like part of the like the mission of the company is to accelerate and inspire builders so we also do in a way like that we're accomplishing the mission of inspiring a lot of different companies on how to design or like focus on the craft or the quality so that's that's kind of like personally what I also wanted to do that could we like shift this industry a little bit more into the, like we can do nice things and it doesn't always have to be just like what metric goes up or down and like, or, or some, some other reasons.

3:21:24Yeah. Yeah. Made the world a more, a more beautiful place. I love it. That's a good time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on Friday. Next time you're passing through LA, come by the Ultradome in person. We'd love to hang. Ideally on a day when we're not dressed up like fools. Like a couple of characters. It's going to be a little bit more serious. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. And thank you for supporting the show this entire year. It's been very helpful. One of the very first few. We've had a lot of fun. And everyone in the chat is celebrating Linear.

3:21:59Connor says he just onboarded his business onto Linear today, like 20 minutes ago. Let's hear it for that. John Axley says Linear is TBPN royalty. That's right. So awesome to see. car in the ultra dome. Thank you for coming by. We will talk to you soon. Have a great weekend.

3:22:19There's one scoop I want to talk about. Katie Roof is confirming a scoop from TechMeme that Axios is dropping human interest, a 401k platform for small and medium businesses that aims to cut down on administrative work, raised$100 million at a$3 billion post-money valuation. this is a leak but i know the ceo of human interest he's a good buddy and so i just want to say congrats to human interest because uh it's very cool and uh elon has a new pod up on all in and on rogan he's on a press tour he's on a press tour we got to get him maybe this is the time to strike maybe we get him on tbpn next week the team seems to like the idea we will work on it uh thank you guys for hanging out with us on uh on such a crazy day yeah it's going to be hard to we were while we were putting this on we were talking about how do we one up this next year yeah what could possibly let us know in the chat uh as iconic as these two titans do elon and joe rogan that would be good i think i think throwing in a rogan is a good one you as you as rogan even though you're 14 and maybe 14 inches taller than Rogan yeah yeah I I could see I could see a Rogan we could do a Rogan and a Lex Friedman that could work maybe we could do a Hewerman would be the experts yeah the experts is good like as other podcasters kind of hits we could do a David Senra we could both be David Senra how about that David Senra by David Senra yes we could both be David Senra an executive producer that'd be a lot of fun uh I think your mustache is actually falling off your face.

3:23:57I feel this weird thing where it feels like I'm sweating underneath everything, but I've had this like scratch up here by this like fake vein and I'm not able to itch it. And so I'm looking forward to taking this off. It's actually so trippy. A lot of people are asking, are you going to, am I going to go home and trick or treat with the kids like this? And no, I do not want to traumatize my young children. Yeah. I will be dressing up as something else. But thank you for tuning in with us today. Have a wonderful Halloween. And thank you to the team that helped us pull this off. This was a very special, funny thing.

3:24:33I never thought we'd be doing this, but that's the nature of this show. And so thank you for everyone that supports us. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. And go out and have a wonderful evening and weekend. Be safe. We will see you back here on Monday. We'll talk to you soon. Can't wait. Goodbye. Cheers.