Meet the New Thiel Fellows, GPT 5.5, Thoma Bravo Loses Medallia | Victor Boyd, Alex Shieh, Nick Dobroshinsky, Ishan Gupta, Antoni Kiszka, Milan Lustig, Galen Mead, Aubrey Niederhoffer, Samuel Carvalho, Claire Wang

15:28Victor Boyd:That sounds bad.

15:29Claire Wang:I don't like that at all. Exploiting American expertise and innovation.

15:33Victor Boyd:Every AI researcher needs this button on their desk. If they detect a distillation attack, fire it off and the security team will come and make sure you're locked down. and it does seem like overall all the labs are being more careful about how the apis roll out where how they're doing kyc how they're doing uh different uh you know partnerships and stuff and i think it's all uh a back and forth and a dynamic but uh it's fun that this new model is available and uh people will play with it and i'm sure we'll see some cool stuff some yeah and quen

16:09Claire Wang:3.6 rolled out yesterday. People are like, wow, it's almost as good as Opus 4.5. Yeah, because they distilled Opus 4.5. Don't ask for its name. Anyways, I'm glad that Kratios is on it, and I'm glad the labs can coordinate and work together on this one.

16:28Victor Boyd:Yes, yes.

16:30Claire Wang:More breaking news. Yes. And unfortunate, but we had talked about this previously. Obviously, Meta is cutting 10 % of their workforce, which is 8 ,000 employees. But this has been telegraphed for a while. Eliminating 6 ,000 open roles.

16:43Victor Boyd:Yeah. I saw Microsoft was doing something similar. They're offering early retirement to something like 7 % of the workforce, trying to lean out a little bit. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage over the underlying motivations. These companies can be big, and sometimes maybe they're too big. Maybe there's AI gains. Maybe there's different investment strategies. We will have to see where they are moving chips around, what projects they are actually cutting, what projects they are doubling down on, because these companies are also hiring at all times, effectively. Well, Kristoff had some actual media ideas for the tech industry.

17:23Victor Boyd:He says there's not enough media in tech. He's upset.

17:28Claire Wang:We need more tech-positive media.

17:31Victor Boyd:For sure. So he says, silent library with founders. Winner gets investment. What is that? What is silent library? Silent library? So is this like a webcam that observes people?

17:44Claire Wang:Silent library is a television show. It had four seasons. It's a game show.

17:49Victor Boyd:Oh, it's a game show. Game shows are fun. I could see a game show being fun, at least different.

17:54Claire Wang:Six friends vying for a cash prize. If only they can remain silent, as one of them is forced to endure a bizarre stunt while seated in a library. Okay, okay. What else? Jackass with founders.

18:07Victor Boyd:What does that mean? How do you make that tech-related? Maybe like humanoid robots? When I think of Johnny Knoxville, I just think of bull riding effectively, and so I imagine riding some sort of robotic bull would be it, but it's very dangerous. The team that worked with Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville, they had some serious injuries from time to time. And I don't know if it's in your best interest to be a founder and be like, yeah, I need to launch my startup. So I got to go in the ring with a mechanical bull and potentially break my arm and not be able to code. And I don't know, it seems rough, but would be entertaining.

18:47Victor Boyd:And with the right twist, I believe it could work. Interview founders while going ghost hunting. I feel like paranormal tech content, Jesse Michaels doesn't get enough credit here. You know, he is a technology. It's in it's in the technology charts and it charts high. It's up there. And he has an incredible pedigree, great investor. And also, you know, has some of the best reporting on aliens and paranormal activity and conspiracy theories. And, you know, I guess he just hasn't cracked the way to bring a founder along. But if you're if you're friends with Jesse Michaels are in touch Maybe you just tag along for a little cameo on one of his on one of his videos and that's all the PR you need

19:33Claire Wang:founders give their pitches while skydiving can you like Scott can you talk while skydiving?

19:41Victor Boyd:With the right headset you gone skydiving no, but I like the idea and I like the videos I like I like that. It's always in like the vibe reals of like the what's that movie? Is it Keanu Reeves Point Break? They go skydiving and he goes skydiving and there's only one parachute so they have to fight it out for the parachute. You haven't seen this movie.

20:00Claire Wang:Have I told you the story where I was on an overnight flight back from Europe? No. I'm sitting on a plane and I'm awake. I can't sleep. Okay. And out of the shadows Skydiver. John Wick Oh walking up the aisle Keanu Reeves.

20:21Victor Boyd:Yeah, I'm just sitting there.

20:22Claire Wang:It's effectively like 2 a.m. Yeah, and Keanu Reeves is like walking at me on this plane in the middle of the night.

20:29Victor Boyd:Yeah

20:29Claire Wang:We ended up talking for like five minutes. It was cool. That's cool He went and then went back to see

20:35Victor Boyd:And yeah, well he stayed on the plane. He did not super super nice guy. What else do they have here SF party? I'm schmacked videos. I don't know. I'm schmacked Wow

20:45Claire Wang:Unc. You're Unc. You guys know. I kind of remember, but Basically, this was this whole like, you could call it a media company, but it was really like a guy that would make party videos. For every college. So it was really popular probably 2010 to 2013. Okay, okay. And I will say a lot of people use these videos as a sort of college guide. Okay, okay. So I'm sure they have millions of videos. views at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last one.

21:18Victor Boyd:VC price is right. Is this a good idea? I feel like people don't, like there's always a huge adverse selection problem with anything related to sharing financials or sharing your company. I mean, this is a twist on Shark Tank to some extent, but they actually did try to do Shark Tank for software. It was called Planet of the Apps. Gary Vaynerchuk was a host. We can ask about him tomorrow. He's coming on the show. and I'd love to know his reflections on tech media. I think Gwyneth Paltrow might have been a host, co-host. They had a pretty stark - Planet of the Apps. Planet of the Apps. Look it up.

21:52Victor Boyd:Planet of the Apps instead of Planet of the Apes. Yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow was there. And Will.i.am. They had a stacked lineup. Jessica Alba. Jessica Alba, founder of the Honest. On each of the episodes,

22:07Claire Wang:software makers have 60 seconds to pitch their idea in front of the advisors on a slow-moving escalator with a visual idea of an elevator pitch. Why not put them in an elevator? Yeah. New episodes were released on Tuesday. Did it get renewed?

22:25Victor Boyd:Did any of these apps go anywhere?

22:26Claire Wang:They had silo, focus, and study timer. Okay. Companion. I could imagine that. Mobile personal safety. Pair a showroom to your home. Yeah, yeah. Dote, the mobile mall. Tracks Battle Squad. twist live events for the dating twist scooch the word game uh yeah these are no these sound like interesting ideas not as interesting as like a is a cooler that is like has a gas powered engine that you can like ride around which i think of as like the quintessential shark tank yeah exactly

23:00Victor Boyd:like shark tank works because the products are highly visual and you get to see oh we made a new mop okay we're gonna watch mark cuban try and mop and this is going to be like physical and visual and interesting. It is very difficult. Are we making progress on our Shark Tank idea? I feel like this is very, very important. We'll have to get the updates in. How's the Shark Tank idea going? Are we making progress? We're on the way. Okay, good stuff. We're very excited about that. Anyway, lots of opportunity in media. Also, lots of opportunity in simulators. We have talked about simulators, TVPN simulator.

23:36Victor Boyd:We made Jeremy Giffon simulator. But the simulators are getting less advanced in some weird twist You would think they get bigger and bigger and you turn them into real games We're going the opposite direction because the simpler the game the funnier. This is coconut simulator. Let's watch this simulator

23:52Alex Shieh:This better be worth 99 cents. Okay, I'm not gonna lie It it looks good. I can't move Why can I not move? Am I like dead-ass a coconut? I spent 99 cents to be a coconut? There's no way. What could be the difference between arcade and realistic? Coconut has no eyes, so you can't see anything. Realistic game modes are like, you gotta be fucking.

24:17Victor Boyd:It's just black because the coconut has no eyes. It's first person view. This is impossible. You were in third person view. But it gets better because there's a sequel. There is Coconut Simulator 2, which is now, I believe multiplayer. Let's play this one.

24:31Samuel Carvalho:What game mode? Arcade.

24:35Victor Boyd:It's the same game.

24:37Samuel Carvalho:So what's the difference between coconut simulator 2 and 1 coconut simulator 2 is a lot more in depth the other coconuts It's multiplayer. I thought you guys said there was a story to this one. There is you're just not seeing it It's a beautiful story about growing old with your friends around This game is definitely game of the year. It's beating crimson desert no chance it survives Trust realism mode is different in this one. I'm telling you right now If realism mode ends up being the same, I'm going to crash out. Coconuts have no eyes, so you can't see.

25:12Victor Boyd:It's such a funny prank. I love a simulator prank. What were you saying? Who's in the chat? Ty? Ty says games has a bit. Yeah, no, it is true. There's actually a third simulator that we need to review. This is a banana simulator.

25:26Samuel Carvalho:Banana life sim. You are the first person in the whole world to play banana sim. What do you mean? Remember when I showed you Coconut Simulator and I added this to my wishlist? It's not supposed to be out yet. You're the first person to play it ever. I'm kind of jealous. How did you get it then? The developers liked our last video and they sent me an email. They gave me this one for free. The developers of this game sent you an email. I have it on my phone too if you want to see it. It's the same email, just smaller. So you didn't have to pay real human dollars to play this? Not this time. This one doesn't even have sound?

25:59Samuel Carvalho:It's the beta. Technically you're the number one banana sim player in the world right now. You have 391 points. How do you get points? 395 points now. Just for playing? Just for sitting there?

26:12Claire Wang:Diet Coke Simulator. Diet Coke Simulator is good. You just sit there and every few minutes...

26:17Victor Boyd:I mean we have Data Center Simulator. Maybe the next one is just GPU Simulator. And it just sits there and it just hums.

26:23Claire Wang:Yeah. That's it. Sometimes you overheat. That's the end. Sometimes you gotta be plugged back in.

26:27Victor Boyd:Yeah. Well, let's move back over to Tech. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, had some incredible predictions in 2016. Let's read through them. Summary of the inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. This was Kevin Kelly's book from 2016. According to Kelly, much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable. The future will bring with it even more screens, tracking, and lack of privacy. In the book, he outlines 12 trends that will forever change the ways we work, learn, and communicate. Becoming, moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions.

27:06Victor Boyd:That has definitely happened. We're moving away from even seats. Everything's consumption-based now. Cognifying, making everything much smarter using cheap, powerful AI that we get from the cloud. Nailed it. That is a fantastic prediction for assuming he wrote it.

27:25Claire Wang:He actually wrote it probably in 2015, published in 2016.

27:29Victor Boyd:But he's the creator of Wired. He's been tapped into tech his entire career and has a ton of interesting reflections, too. He's written a more recent book about reflections on life. It's very good. Depending on unstoppable streams of real time for everything, for sure. Turning all surfaces into screens. That definitely happened. Your toaster can watch TV now. Shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we have access to all services at all times. Collaboration at mass scale. On my imaginary sharing meter index, we are still 2 out of 10. Filtering, harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires.

28:08Victor Boyd:Remixing, unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways. That's definitely happening. Coconut simulator, unironically, an example of that. Interacting, immersing ourselves inside of computers to maximize their engagement. Tracking, employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. Sounds scary. Potentially a good outcome if things are done properly. Promoting good questions is far more valuable than answers.

28:33Claire Wang:What? You think total surveillance is potentially a good outcome?

28:36Victor Boyd:Well, he says total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. So if there is a black box where my Netflix activity exists, where no Netflix employee can see it because it's encrypted, but it can make great recommendations and recommend me the next great show that I will actually enjoy. I'm cool with that surveillance. That's surveillance, but it's like, it's potentially good for me. And I have a better experience. For the benefit of John Coogan. Yeah. Yeah. There is, there is a surveillance bowl case. Constructing a planetary system, connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix.

29:08Victor Boyd:Okay. That one we're still waiting on, but a lot of good, interesting predictions. Jason Schumann says wild how accurate these predictions were. And they were, in fact.

29:19Claire Wang:Well, without further ado. Yes. We have our first guest of the Teal Fellowship GigaStream.

29:26Victor Boyd:Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

29:28Ishan Gupta:Great, guys. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

29:31Victor Boyd:Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Introduce yourself and the company.

29:37Ishan Gupta:Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. We're building autonomous forklifts. The real goal of all of this is get anything anywhere in just a few hours. and we're starting with what we think is right and we're going to do everything it takes to get there.

29:50Victor Boyd:How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What are you thinking?

29:59Ishan Gupta:Yeah, we actually started thinking we'd be the comma AI of forklifts. But you know, cars have CAN bus standardized since 2008. It's a software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts, even if it's the same forklift, same year even, the internals will look different from each other pretty often. So if you want to build like a kit that goes on any forklift, it doesn't actually make sense. So we tried that. We did. And then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift, you know, one model, you know, we'll deal with the differences throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay.

30:36Ishan Gupta:We tried that. That also sucked. You know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer. We were kind of where everybody else was in the market. You know, this isn't the most original ideal in the world. Everybody knows like, yeah, construction.

30:49Claire Wang:Well, there's also big, there's applied intuition, like the company, there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. You do, you kind of probably have, you know, you got a speed run trying a bunch of different approaches and figure out what works.

31:03Victor Boyd:But the same thing happened in the car industry where, you know, Ford and Toyota were like, yeah, we're doing self-driving too. And then it was like, okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control, but we're still, I'm still waiting for even Tesla level FSD from like three years ago to roll out into like the major American car manufacturers. So there's clearly an opportunity. So, uh, how do, uh, so where are you now? Did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like what went into that? Yeah.

31:31Ishan Gupta:I mean, uh, I think what Tesla did right was that they got control over their platform, right? We realized that, you know, that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts. If you wanted to make it viable for customers, you actually had to make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift and we did. We built our own forklift in Q4 last year through a manufacturing partner and it worked great. I've done some iterations since then. And now we are deployed and we're deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability, which is really all we care about.

32:07Ishan Gupta:we plan on continuing this year what we want to do this year is we just want to make it you know a super scalable product because to be honest it's not right now sorry to interrupt but

32:18Claire Wang:what has there been a company in the last 10 years that decided to build a new forklift from the ground up or is this a category that has been generally overlooked as everybody has wanted to build new evs and platforms that are maybe more exciting to some you know there's some

32:36Ishan Gupta:people that kind of got halfway there. Like they would go with somebody else's design and make a few changes and think that that was enough. But realistically, like you have to be in the process from the very beginning. Otherwise, there's just all these trade-offs that are made in the design process that, you know, really affect you. It makes your product horrible. So we did it from scratch. You know, we have some off the shelf parts, but that's a motor, right? Like obviously I'm not going to design a motor from the ground up. I don't need to. I'll just use a forklift motor, but everything else needs to be me.

33:11Ishan Gupta:Everything else has to be my design so that we can have full control over the system, iterate faster than anybody else and build the actual real product that actually works.

33:21Victor Boyd:Can you talk about the environments that forklifts operate in? You mentioned that you're deployed in a difficult environment, but what's the standard environment? and then how does your test case differ from that?

33:36Ishan Gupta:I mean, the standard environment, you can think of like a warehouse where they just ship a bunch of dog food. Let's say like 400 ,000 square feet, just lots of racks. It's not that difficult, right? Like if you cause product damage in a dog food warehouse, it just stinks. It does stink really bad. Like, don't get me wrong, they're not gonna be happy. But we went into a pharmaceutical warehouse. So whereas in the dog food warehouse, like, okay, I damaged the pallet. Let's say I destroyed everything on the pallet. That's a couple thousand dollars. In a pharmaceutical warehouse, I destroy a whole pallet, dude, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars.

34:09Ishan Gupta:So I think like our idea behind it was, you know, this is an incredible forcing factor. This makes us like actually build a reliable product that's not going to cause damages. And then when we are successful here, we get to show this to all of our other potential customers. Like, look guys, I know you've been burned by the industry before, but look at how good we're doing in this place. I mean, if we destroyed product in their place, we wouldn't be there anymore because we would have already, you know, it's a bad thing. You don't do it.

34:39Victor Boyd:Yeah. Talk about teleoperation. Did you go down that path at all? Are you compatible with teleoperation? Is there any value? Yeah, I feel like this is such a unique environment

34:50Claire Wang:because you can figure out autonomy, but there should be a relatively easy way to take over the system and just use an Xbox controller as you get to full autonomy.

35:01Ishan Gupta:I don't know if that's what... I'm glad you said Xbox controller. That's what it is. So when we do tele-op, which is about 50 % of the time right now, it is with literally an Xbox controller. There's some things where they have to click on the screen to select what palette they need to pick up, for example. But when there's some scenario where the robot's lost, like it delocalizes, or we need some extra training data, on some workflow, then it's like, yeah, just pick up the Xbox controller. It's literally guys, uh, you know, they're not on site. They're, they're somewhere thousands of miles away, just getting it done.

35:36Ishan Gupta:Um, it works perfectly. I think it's, it's extremely valuable. I think it was a dirty word in the industry for a long time to say like remote operation, which is, which is really stupid because like customers don't care guys. Like, you know, the customers don't care if you're fully autonomous customers care if the work is done. So if you're over here, like you know stressing about oh dude we're we're only you know 10 autonomous but you're getting the job done every single time and you're profitable like i mean obviously keep going for more autonomy push those margins but dude the customer could not care less yeah totally we've we've said that

36:14Claire Wang:to some humanoid yeah founders on this show and they're like nah it's got to be fully autonomous

36:19Victor Boyd:Yeah, it is like a less sexy narrative. And so I think people want to deny it or something. But yeah, the end work product makes the most sense. Talk to me about the interaction modality for the human or the manager or the owner of the warehouse in a basically full autonomous mode. Because I imagine at some point you have to have a system that decides, okay, we actually need to dispatch an order to get that dog food off of the top shelf. And there's a lot of different pallets that are stacked up at different levels. And what systems are you plugging into? Or do you want this to be something where there's still a human in the loop managing and dispatching orders?

37:06Victor Boyd:And then they're sitting in an office maybe overlooking the warehouse. just sort of giving orders, but what is the path of the workflow?

37:17Ishan Gupta:Right now, it's basically like the robots have this task that needs to get done every day, pretty much all day. This is very common in warehouses where there's only a few things that you need to do every day, and it just takes a really long time, and you need to have it done by the end of the day, but it doesn't really matter how fast it is. And in those scenarios, I mean, you just kind of give the robot instructions. We have a map and you can set up like zones or shelves and you say like, this is what's in this zone or this is what's on this shelf and it needs to go to this other zone or this other shelf.

37:50Ishan Gupta:And then the forklift just does it. I mean, it can be that simple. Eventually, the idea is that I would like to be able to run the warehouse for the customer. I don't want them to ever have to think about it at all. I'd rather it just be like, okay, we are literally your pallet movement within this warehouse. We run your whole business anyway in terms of physical movement. We also have your inventory management. We can make decisions based off of that. We know your truck is going to be in here soon. For example, we'll just set up the staging for you. You don't have to tell us that has to happen.

38:22Ishan Gupta:That's the goal in the next year.

38:25Claire Wang:Forklift is the wedge. That's very, very smart. Have you thought about, we were talking about simulator games earlier. The chat is asking, have you thought about making a forklift simulator where normal people could play the game online, but in reality they're actually helping you train your own. Sort of like the capture.

38:44Victor Boyd:Yeah, getting training data.

38:46Ishan Gupta:Yeah, that's actually funny. I did think of that because I was looking for a game myself. Because, you know, like, I've always been into logistics, but I got into warehousing like a few years ago, and like, you know, I looked everywhere, dude. I even looked on Roblox. Like, I was looking on Roblox. They don't have any, like, good warehouse games, man. It's such a shame. somebody needs to do that maybe maybe somebody in your chat will do that for us yeah how did you make your first dollar how did i make my first dollar yeah i i think i i'm pretty sure it was when i was selling i sold candy on easter when i was very young um and i actually made money there uh which is funny because like the kid i sold it to was literally walking with a basket full of candy like definitely more candy than i got that year but i sold him this egg and i was like dude there's there's something really good in here and you want it but i'm not going to tell

39:34Victor Boyd:you unless you're in the house did you did you uh did you drop out from anywhere or were you are you are you coming out of uh high school high school yeah i dropped out of uh uab i i went to a

39:50Ishan Gupta:state school in alabama i mean i grew up there and then uh you know i didn't have the money to go anywhere else and i didn't know i didn't want to go to school in the first place so you know the second I got the opportunity to fly out here to SF, I was like, okay, it's over. I'm leaving.

40:07Victor Boyd:It's over. I love it.

40:08Ishan Gupta:Just getting started.

40:09Victor Boyd:Well, Victor, thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down. Fantastic to meet you.

40:12Claire Wang:I'm sure you'll be back this year.

40:15Victor Boyd:Good luck. Yeah, guys. Have a good one. Up next, we have the Anti-Fraud Company. If you hate fraud, you're going to love this company. Alex from the Anti-Fraud Company uses AI.

40:27Claire Wang:We've got to ask him about those bears. Oh, yeah. Fake bear attacks.

40:32Victor Boyd:Yeah. This is a big opportunity. Yesterday on the show, we were talking about an insurance scam where individuals dressed up in full bear costumes with fake bear claws and vandalized a Rolls Royce ghost from 2010 and then filed an insurance claim, which was then disproven by, I believe, some sort of a biologist who knew about bears and what they look like on camera and was able to debunk it we were able to debunk it too because it looked ridiculous anyway we have alex from the anti-fraud company back on tbpn here for the teal fellowship gigastream welcome to the show alex how are you

41:09Galen Mead:doing great to see you suited up suited up fantastic looking sharp i cannot look like a fraudster when i'm catching fraudsters yeah you've been dailying a suit not not every day only only when we're doing formal things. Yes, indeed.

41:23Victor Boyd:So you've been on the show before, but sort of reintroduce the company and the shape of the business and how you think this will play out. And then I want sort of the update on where things are, what traction looks like, how you're actually applying the technology. And then I'm sure there'll be a ton of follow-on questions.

41:39Galen Mead:Yeah, so it's very simple. We're building AI models to detect fraud when it happens. And then we go and sue the fraudsters. And we only make money on contingency when we actually get a recovery for the government, we're able to keep 15 % to 30 % under these whistleblower laws.

41:55Victor Boyd:Interesting. Yeah. And have you received whistleblower bounty yet? Or is that something that's a goal for the next year or two?

42:04Galen Mead:That is a goal. Maybe not for the next year or two, because the U.S. legal system is quite slow. So it might take three to four years before we see our first dollar of revenue, actually.

42:15Victor Boyd:Okay. How much can you pull forward? I know that the plan is to use AI, but how much can you pull forward by just rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself or hiring humans to sort of follow the same process? Is this a problem that can only be attacked with AI, like a recommendation feed? Like you could never curate like the TikTok feed for every individual on that platform without AI. But you can certainly, you know, go and take a photo instead of using AI. How dependent is this on AI from the very first project? Right.

42:53Galen Mead:So I would say that people have always been able to find fraud manually, but usually either they luck into it or they had a tip for somebody on the inside. And we're sort of trying to eliminate that bottleneck, essentially. We want to find the fraud using AI because we're essentially building the palantir of fraud detection. We're tapping into all these sources of data. And once we have a good idea of what's going on, then we'll send out human investigators. Again, go talk to sources. But we want to be going outbound. We don't want to have to wait for people to come to us because that's just less efficient.

43:25Galen Mead:When there's$600 billion in fraud, you're not going to get tips for most of it. And if you want to solve it, then this is sort of the way you have to go.

43:33Victor Boyd:I remember during the COVID stimulus checks, there was someone who got a check for a company. What were those called, the stimulus checks? It was specifically for business loans. SBA. SBA loans, something like that. But those loans, one of them was just called like Ford Raptor LLC. And then someone dug into it. And lo and behold, like someone set up a fake LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor. And that one seemed extremely obvious. But I'm wondering how much is available in terms of public records versus stuff that you plan on doing FOIA requests for to get new sources to comb over.

44:13Galen Mead:That's a great question. So this sort of stems off of the OSINT community, open source intelligence, which is where people go around and they look at publicly available data. And when you're doing pure OSINT, you're only using, again, open source stuff that's publicly available. That limits you. So we do get closed sources too. But I guess we want to start there. We view it like a funnel. So starting with the open source information lets us cast the widest net. Of course, some of it we're going to need to do other things. Like you mentioned, FOIA is one way that you can get private information.

44:46Galen Mead:But it's really like you have to know, again, what you're requesting from the government or what sort of private data source you want to buy or what human you want to go out and talk to. And so to get the high level view, you do need to be essentially just ingesting a bunch of stuff. So one analogy we like to make is the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? Is there's like five blind men and they're each touching a different part of the elephant. The guy who's touching the legs thinks it's a tree. The guy who's touching the trunk thinks it's a rope. Fraud is kind of like this. It always leaves traces, but it's somewhat difficult to put them back together.

45:21Galen Mead:And that's why we just want to have as many different, essentially, sensors on the government databases, on contracts, on all these data sets. And that gives us sort of a good look into what's going on. Then we ontologize it, run it through the models, make graphs, and see if it matches on to any known patterns of fraud that we're searching for.

45:40Claire Wang:How many projects are you guys taking on at any one point? Because I'm sure every single day there's new ideas, new opportunities. Sounds like a very, very big market, unfortunately.

45:52Galen Mead:Quite a few projects at a time. And again, we're just looking everywhere. I mean, like you mentioned, small business administration is a great place to look with all these loans, defense, just anywhere the government spends money. there is undoubtedly going to be people who are doing it in an unethical way. Oh, absolutely healthcare, yes. I mean, like, we spend trillions on healthcare, we spend trillions on defense. There is a lot of stuff going on in these places.

46:20Claire Wang:And what's going on in Sacramento right now? Is there some new legislation that's trying to make it harder to do journalism around fraud? Did I see that? I believe so.

46:31Galen Mead:I think this was a response to Nick Shrilli, I believe. Oh, really? I think it's called the Nick Shirley Act.

46:38Victor Boyd:Wow, okay. Right? I don't know if it's actually called that, but that's what people on the internet are calling it. Over the break, over the holiday break. Yes.

46:45Galen Mead:No, that's my understanding. Obviously, Nick first did the big expose about the daycares in Minnesota, which were getting funded by Medicaid or something of that sort. And so that also helps drive a lot of awareness and interest in our company as well, because, I mean, it's just sort of visceral. I guess first there was doge where people just got really mad about how their money was being spent and then the daycare sort of was the next step. And I think there's just a big anti-fraud moment in the United States these days where people are just upset about their dollars aren't going far enough, right?

47:22Galen Mead:I mean like it's$600 billion a year. That's like 7, 8 % of the federal budget. So that means like a good chunk of your hard-earned tax dollars just being stolen by people who are contracting with the government in the wrong way. And I mean we need to restore trust in our institutions. We need to have good governance, have people have faith in our institutions. I think that, again, aligning the incentives, having sort of private actors come in and do this and rewarding them when they're able to claw back money for taxpayers. Most of the money that does claw back will go back to the treasury and to the taxpayers.

47:57Galen Mead:I think this is kind of a no-brainer.

47:59Victor Boyd:How do you think about the actual application of AI tools and models in this particular case? I understand that you're sort of creating a database or mirror a data lake of all the different sources. But then do you need a bunch of examples to fine-tune a model? Do you just need to load examples of red flags into the context window? how far down are you on like the ai research side of understanding the problem because i can imagine like with a frontier model you can go and if you give it a lot of examples and and data points you could potentially just one shot like a detection and then it's just applying it at scale is the problem but how are you thinking about applying the actual technology so there are essentially

48:47Galen Mead:two steps here though the first step is that a lot of this data is unstructured a lot of this like is documents. And so LLM's really speed that up. It's sort of getting structured entities out of the unstructured data. And then we ontologize this. We have like, this company has this contract, has this relationship with this employee, et cetera. We build sort of this ontology knowledge graph-like thing. And then we have the second layer, the rules model, essentially. My co-founders are both lawyers, have a legal background. They've been working on sort of the fraud issue in the legal sphere. And so they know what that looks like.

49:21Galen Mead:And with their input and with their expertise, we're able to essentially develop this rules model, this rules layer, compare that to what we're seeing in the real world and flag things that look like violations in real time, or at least stuff that could be violations and we need to get more information on.

49:34Victor Boyd:Did you drop out? Because if you have two lawyer co-founders, did they drop out? Like, what's the story? Who's the dropout?

49:42Galen Mead:I'm the dropout. My co-founders have JDs, unfortunately. They're also a bit older, so they're not eligible for the Teal Fellowship unfortunately. I did drop out of Brown in 2025 to work at Palantir and then start this company.

49:59Victor Boyd:That's great. Well, good luck and thank you for everything that you do.

50:03Galen Mead:How makes the team now? We have 11 full-time employees, but we're hiring engineers. If you're an AI engineer that wants to work on this problem, visit antifraudcompany.com and we'd love to work with you. It's a great name.

50:17Victor Boyd:Well, good luck out there. Great to see you, Alex. Great to have a good fight. And let us know when you catch a big culprit so you can come on and tell the story because I'm sure it'll be riveting.

50:25Claire Wang:Yes, indeed. Thanks, fellas. We'll talk to you soon. Great stuff.

50:27Victor Boyd:Goodbye.

50:28Claire Wang:It would be funny if he was investigating a company to have the founder on. Oh. We're interviewing them and then Alex joins the call.

50:39Victor Boyd:Sort of, yeah, to catch a predator. That's what you want to do with fraud. This is a new media thing. This is the new media opportunity, new media for for pump and dumps and schemes and all sorts of stuff and rug pulls. That inadvertently happened during the NFT and crypto boom because there were a number of founders who went on shows and then it was revealed. I mean, the famous one is Joe Weisenthal and and and some Bloomberg reporters talking to SBF, I believe on Odd Lots. and they ask him like so this is like a black box that you put money in you just get more money out and uh he was like yeah exactly exactly wait sbf was on odd lots i'm pretty i'm pretty sure it was odd lots uh with uh yeah i i know i know joe was on uh that that podcast yeah um and uh yeah and and and he basically describes a ponzi scheme this is crazy sbf and matt levine matt levine Yeah.

51:38Victor Boyd:And Matt Levine asks, like, so he describes a Ponzi scheme and SBF basically just says like, exactly. Like, that's why it's good. It's like you, you put more money in than you, and then it grows. And then it's this magical system. He was like describing like crazy DeFi schemes. It was a very, it was a rough time. It was a crazy time. But we lived through it and we became stronger in the process. We do have our next guest.

52:00Claire Wang:Yes, it was April 27th, 2022. Yes. And so just six months later, everything would.

52:07Victor Boyd:Yeah, it was a wild, wild time. Well, we have Nick from every ticker in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel. Nick, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? We're great. Great to meet you. Thanks so much for taking the time. Great to meet you.

52:21Claire Wang:We hear you are the youngest ever Teal Fellow. Is that true?

52:24Victor Boyd:That is true, yeah. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. So are you dropping out of college? You can retire now. You should drop out of the Teal Fellowship now. Yeah, I'm dropping out of high school. It's a pretty crazy experience. Wow. Congratulations. What led you?

52:41Claire Wang:Yeah, what have you done to date where you get identified and chosen for an opportunity like this? Yeah.

52:49Nick Dobroshinsky:So the main thing I've been working on for the past year or so is EveryTicker. And I'll start with the problem that we're solving. It's that the vast majority of the U.S. equity market is in the small, mid - and micro-cap stocks, but Wall Street only covers the mega - and large-cap stocks. So what we do is we use LLMs to generate high-quality research on every single U.S. stock, including the ones that Wall Street doesn't cover.

53:13Victor Boyd:Interesting. Okay, so like the big stocks would have an equity research report from Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. these are the 20-page PDFs that you see come out every quarter or so with a buy, sell, hold. Are you offering financial advice? Who is the end consumer of this if it's some small or micro cap?

53:34Nick Dobroshinsky:So our philosophy is that we explicitly do not offer any sort of financial advice. We don't give a buy, sell, or hold recommendation. Since from talking to my users, I find that they want to use their experience and evaluate the stocks themselves. So what we do is we aggregate and synthesize all of this research. We come up with a thesis and then we let the end consumer decide for themselves whether it's a stock that they're interested in.

53:59Victor Boyd:Yeah, that makes sense. And then what about the business model? Is this a subscription? I know if you want those Goldman Sachs equity research reports, you got to pay a pretty penny. How much does it cost to get an every ticker report on a smaller micro cap?

54:14Nick Dobroshinsky:So right now, all of our 5 ,000 reports are completely free. Eventually, we want to transition into a subscription model. But right now, we just want to grow as fast as possible. That makes sense.

54:25Claire Wang:Love it. How do you think about competing with LLMs over time? I'm sure people are doing this where they say, like, act like a Goldman equity research analyst, analyze this company, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can, you can prompt your way to it right now. It'll probably get easier over time. Um, so how, how are you thinking about that dynamic over time? Like, and I guess like, how do you, how do you expand the product? Cause I'm assuming that's where, that's where you'd go.

54:53Nick Dobroshinsky:So, um, for our competitive advantage, um, you know, if you ask Chachi PT to write you an equity report on say Apple, it will generate you something that's decently surface level, but I would not say that it's as high quality as an analyst. So, um, our competitive moat is that we have a agentic system that is fine-tuned specifically for this task it acts like an actual analyst yep and then we have all sorts of different data feeds that are proprietary sure and as for the product this is just the starting point we want to get really good at the specific niche of high quality research reports yeah and then we want to expand to adjacent parts of the research

55:30Victor Boyd:workflow in the future yeah so is one way to think about what you've built is sort of like an agentic harness on top of the frontier llms so that uh you can deliver yeah but it's running

55:41Claire Wang:in the background and then just producing the report oh and then the report's just

55:44Victor Boyd:instantly available on at the at the click of a button correct uh not even at the click of a

55:49Nick Dobroshinsky:button we pre-generate all of the reports so you can just search a stock and it's there it's already

55:53Victor Boyd:there got it and then you're probably putting those on some sort of cron job that runs every

55:57Claire Wang:quarter or every month or something how yeah how did you how did you kind of stumble into this opportunity, were you investing a bunch yourself and just kind of struggling to find great research on some of these smaller names?

56:10Nick Dobroshinsky:So in seventh grade, I convinced my parents to open a Fidelity account for me. And I just instantly fell in love with the stock market. I really liked the idea of it. And I quickly got into fundamentals focused investing and learned from Warren Buffett and that type of philosophy. And over the summer of eighth grade, I was looking into smaller cap stocks because I think that's where a lot of the opportunities are. There's more mispricings there, right? And I realized that you can use LLMs to generate decently high quality research on all these smaller stocks. And so I just built a quick MVP in three days, published it.

56:46Nick Dobroshinsky:And then I found that so many people found value in it. So I just started scaling it from there.

56:50Victor Boyd:Have you thought about what you're going to do with the Teal Fellowship money? I know some previous Teal Fellows that have made angel investments very successfully. Is there something in your mind that wants to potentially dip your toe into the hedge fund world or actually managing a portfolio.

57:07Claire Wang:Yolo into NeoClouds.

57:09Victor Boyd:Maybe.

57:10Nick Dobroshinsky:Yeah. I don't think I would do that. In the short term, I think it would probably just go to paying my server costs and things like that. I'll be moving to San Francisco. So also things like rent and things like that. But if there's any opportunities that I see, I would definitely be interested in that.

57:27Victor Boyd:Do you have a team yet? have you built out an executive team of grizzled 60 year olds yet? I imagine that that's the next step for you.

57:34Nick Dobroshinsky:No, right now I think that, um, just being a solo founder is pretty good. It allows me to move super fast. Yeah, that's awesome.

57:41Claire Wang:That's very cool. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Was it through every ticker?

57:47Nick Dobroshinsky:Actually, no. Um, in fifth grade, from fifth grade to seventh grade, I built a Roblox game. It was tens of thousands of lines of code. I was spending five hours every day. It ended up being a complete flop, but I did make a bit of money from it.

58:00Victor Boyd:Oh, there you go. Amazing. That's great. What advice would you give to young people who want to invest in the stock market? Where should they start? Well, every ticker. Sure.

58:12Claire Wang:That's for sure.

58:14Nick Dobroshinsky:Yeah, I think that I personally would advise fundamentals focused long term investing. I think a lot of people get carried away by these like, you know, super volatile stocks and all of these moonshot opportunities. I think it's important to stay grounded in where the real value is.

58:30Victor Boyd:Yeah, that makes sense. What? Yeah, that's interesting. Um, what goes into a great equity research report? Can you share a little bit about differentiation? What I always find interesting personally is, uh, is the research reports that can sort of contextualize a company in its broader competitive set in the market. Uh, but, but what do you think, uh, makes for like a good flavor, like the qualitative elements that go into something that's readable, digestible, informational, effective, and ultimately satisfactory to the user?

59:08Nick Dobroshinsky:Yeah, the qualitative element is one of the most important things, and it's one of my competitive advantages because I know exactly what the user wants. I'm one of my users, and I talk to a lot of my users to see what they want. So the research report is, I take that into account. So, you know, as you said, you have to contextualize it in its broader industry. And the goal of the research report is that after reading this 10-minute report, you'll be able to understand exactly where the company is, its competitive advantages, its moats, its trajectory, and you should be able to determine if it's something that you want to invest in or not.

59:42Victor Boyd:How do you think about the tells of LLM writing? You're absolutely right. It's not this, it's that. Those stylistic flourishes, the contrastive parallelism that annoys tech insiders because as it reads as LLM generated, and that reads as maybe subpar. But what are you actually seeing from users? Do they like that quality of writing? Are they looking for a different stylistic tone in these research reports?

1:00:15Nick Dobroshinsky:So I personally am quite annoyed by that. And so I have a method of making things sound very human. So from talking to some of my users, one of their first questions is, how do you have so many research reports? And they don't even realize that it's LOMs or AI. So yeah, the language in our research reports is much more human than some of the other AI stuff you see out there.

1:00:39Victor Boyd:I love it. I love it. I won't ask you to divulge the secret, but good luck. It seems like it's going very well. And congratulations on the Teal Fellowship. Great to meet you. Great to meet you. And excited to follow the journey. Come back on whenever there's a milestone. We'd love to talk to you again. Yeah, thank you so much for your time. Have a great day. Great to hang out. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Here's a micro-cap stock that might be making a breakout move. Spirit Airlines. They potentially are getting a bailout from the U.S. government to the tune of$500 million in rescue funding.

1:01:09Victor Boyd:The money would come with equity warrants that could make government majority owner of struggling discount carrier. I know you're not a fan of Spirit Airlines, Jardy. Well, I can't say I'm not a—

1:01:23Claire Wang:You've never got it? I've never flown Spirit.

1:01:25Victor Boyd:Oh, it's bad. It's real bad. It's real, real bad. You have to pay for everything. You have to pay for where you board. And if you get a water bottle, if you can go to the bathroom, they charge you for everything. But it allows them to charge for the bathroom. You get charged for water, too. You get charged for water.

1:01:42Claire Wang:Unless you tell them that you need it for an emergency, then they'll give it to you for free.

1:01:46Victor Boyd:Yeah. But it allows them to advertise very, very low headline prices. So if you're looking for LA to Las Vegas, you'll see something like$50. And you're like, that's impossible. And it's because you actually cannot just get through the plane. Because even for a carry-on, sometimes they'll charge, I believe. I don't know. A lot of this is just my memory from a decade ago. But the Trump administration is looking to invest as much as$500 million in Spirit Airlines to fund the discount carrier's exit from bankruptcy. The government money would take form of a senior loan with equity warrants that would come with it.

1:02:20Victor Boyd:eventually owning a majority stake in spirit, which has struggled with high operating costs, stiff competition, and surging jet fuel costs amid the Iran war. Well, we will follow that story more in the future. But we have our next guest returning to the show, Ishan Gupta from Juicebox. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hello. I'm doing awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you. Introduce yourself and the company. Yeah.

1:02:49Milan Lustig:So I'm Ishar. I'm one of the co-founders of Juicebox. We are an AI recruiting platform, and we help companies find and engage talent using LLMs. We build agents that will go out there, find the right people for every role you're trying to fill, and get them into your process.

1:03:02Victor Boyd:Okay. We have a friend who's an executive at a big tech company. He's been getting absolutely spammed with new outreach from what appears to be a new Gmail account that has been created. And what's so remarkable about this cold outreach is that it even nails the sort of like cringe footer that says like, you know, do not print this for the environment's sake. And like, you know, a little quote. And like it doesn't feel just like a prompt box shot in there. There's a huge variety. But it's not. It hasn't been successful. He's annoyed by it. So how do you think about actually targeting the outreach so that you're not annoying potential new hires?

1:03:49Of course, yeah.

1:03:50Milan Lustig:I think the main problem is that the exec side is almost like the extreme side of it because they're getting so much outreach anytime an exec is available and everyone's kind of spamming them. The thing is that for the average role, the best way to guarantee that you're reaching out to the right people is to spend more time on the search. What ends up happening in organizations today is that there's a hiring manager who really understands what they're looking for. And then there's sort of these pattern matching that happens afterwards where talent teams are basically relying on these really hard filters like, oh, I'm going to reach out to every software engineer at Google.

1:04:20Milan Lustig:That's not a smart strategy, right? What LLMs are able to do is to truly understand.

1:04:25Claire Wang:Jeff, are you interested?

1:04:28Milan Lustig:It's like LLMs are able to truly understand what makes someone successful in a role and try to actually find people who are good at that. And instead of just pattern matching based on what company you're at or what job title you're at, we'll actually go in there. We'll analyze your real work product. We'll see what you're doing on GitHub, what you're doing on different platforms, what companies you've been at. And develop a more deeper understanding of who's going to be a fit and then reach out to the right person. So that, in fact, reduces spam.

1:04:54Victor Boyd:Yeah. Let's flip it around to the person that's looking for a job. They want to get spammed with great offers. What should they be doing? because there's a lot of software engineers where they can't contribute publicly because they work for an important company. There's a lot of folks who their work happens behind the scenes and maybe they are sharing it on LinkedIn, but can your scrapers reach into LinkedIn? Should they have a personal website and then put that in some sort of robots.txt and web crawler filter so that they get indexed properly? How can job seekers show up in results more aggressively at a time when more people are looking for jobs more aggressively than ever.

1:05:36Milan Lustig:Essentially, put your work product out there. Talk about what you're working on. Putting out blogs, putting out open source contributions, putting out any projects that you've worked on. Those things help. Would three hours of live daily content help? I'm sure. I mean, it helps with an acquisition. That's true.

1:05:55Victor Boyd:Just talk about AI comms for three hours a day. And yeah, You turn some turns, raise some eyebrows. Anyway, uh, what we, yeah, what about, so are you purely focused on technical roles? Because you keep coming back to like GitHub contributions, breaking down, uh, breaking down example work products. And I'm just wondering for someone who's in more of a knowledge role or they work in PR or marketing or biz dev or finance, like what should they be educating people? Should they be explaining their strategies? Like if If they're not a natural writer or they don't just have an obvious side project that they can open source, how can they show up to the AI recruiters of the future, your company included?

1:06:41Milan Lustig:Yeah, of course. We started out more tech-focused because that's the industry we understood the most. We started out working with tech startups and we started working with companies like Ramp, Scale, all of these kinds of companies. And then eventually, what has happened in the last year is we've grown way, way past that. So like now tech does not represent the majority of our customer base. We have more than 5 ,000 customers. And a lot of them are larger enterprises. And they're looking for all sorts of people. So what we are able to do is we're able to join profile data and your experiences on all the company data that we have.

1:07:12Milan Lustig:So essentially, if you put a little bit of information about yourself on different platforms, we're able to take that information, enrich that, and do a deeper research on every single company we're at. every single skill you've had, everything you've worked on, and build a better understanding of exactly what your area of expertise is, and then make better matches using that. And it applies across industries. So for example, we have people looking for traveling nurses in the Midwest, very different type of role. But what we can do is we can look up profiles, there are registries available for nurses on the internet as well.

1:07:42Milan Lustig:We'll look up those profiles, we'll understand the different places you've worked at, we'll try to build a good understanding of what these different environments are, what kind of people do these other companies higher and where you've been at in the past and then make a good inference on whether or not they're fit for the role you're looking for okay that's why do you why do you

1:07:57Claire Wang:think there hasn't been a like a big like a like a decacorn scale outcome in in recruiting tech

1:08:05Milan Lustig:today what is indeed i would actually argue yes that like linkedin's a pretty oh got it

1:08:11Claire Wang:indeed is a pretty massive outcome uh yeah recruiting holdings 70 billion enterprise value bro come on but that so that's but but that's but that's like kind of where i'm kind of where i'm going isn't that like a a holding company of staffing and recruiting firms yeah so more more like labor intensive but i can imagine it's not the database market let's just yeah it's not like it feels like you could have you could have like if you execute properly there could be an outcome closer to that holding company that you just mentioned than some of these other kind of just like recruiting tech platforms.

1:08:48Victor Boyd:Yeah, yeah. I guess like where's the source of like economic power and lock-in and scale that would allow for a really, really broad outcome here as opposed to, okay, there's a whole bunch of AI recruiting firms and companies sort of bid them all down and there's not insanely high margins, good businesses, but not the$100 billion outcome. Like, have you been thinking through that? I know it's early, but have you been thinking through like what does this look like at mega scale?

1:09:15Milan Lustig:Of course, yeah. We've thought a lot about that. The thing is that the main value in the recruiting industry always accrues in the services layer. So far, it has never accrued as much in the software layer. Because it's really actually the work that goes into finding people. It's the ability to search for the right person and get them into any role. That is what people pay for, right? And so far, there has been no way of actually automating that because you cannot do that. It requires judgment. It requires actually understanding what someone's working on or what their capabilities are. That is exactly what agents are able to do.

1:09:47Milan Lustig:So this is really the first time when you have a massive opportunity in a market that's incredibly important and you're able to build that with LLMs because it's just not been possible until now. And most companies have traditionally in recruiting tried to target this like software layer, which is like, hey, we'll build another CRM, we'll build another ATS and all of these different platforms. But the main value always accrues in being able to find the right person. That is what someone wants to pay for. And that is exactly what we're able to do with LLMs. Very cool. So, well.

1:10:13Claire Wang:Yeah. I remember first discovering that just everyday recruiting services companies could be big because, hey, there's a public company called Hayes. No way. Hayes.com.

1:10:24Victor Boyd:No way.

1:10:24Claire Wang:Really? It's just a public recruiting staffing firm. Wow. Yeah, good business. That's a very, very big opportunity for you guys.

1:10:32Victor Boyd:Congratulations on the Teal Fellowship. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us and hope to see you soon. I'm sure there's a lot of milestones in the near future. Yeah, great stuff. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk soon.

1:10:42Milan Lustig:Thank you so much for having me.

1:10:43Victor Boyd:It was awesome. Cheers. Up next, we are running one minute behind, but we're going to catch up because we have Derpetual next, building infrastructure to enable derivatives trading on any asset. Interesting. Okay. Derpetual. Anthony Kizuka.

1:11:02Claire Wang:Before we go there, let's pull up this post from none other than Ben Horowitz. not Ben Horowitz. Yes. Ben Horowitz has made the anti-grammarly. The anti-grammarly. Mess up your emails with AI. I love this. So if you're worried about people accusing you of using AI to write your emails,

1:11:25Victor Boyd:use sincerely to use more AI to add misspelling. Yes. It condenses down that long, boring email that you were about to send that says, to whom it may concern, and I wanted to reach out to express my interest in connecting regarding potential synergies between organizations. And it just dumbs it down to wanted to reach out. Let's talk. And this is a newsflash. This is how people actually email and communicate when it's person to person. And I think everyone would be better off with a little bit tighter communication methods, especially in the age of AI. So this seems like a joke or a drop, but I would imagine this being a good product.

1:12:08Victor Boyd:and I think people might actually pay for this. I think. Like there are so many times.

1:12:13Claire Wang:I think it's actually a real product. I hope so. They're going to charge five bucks a month.

1:12:18Victor Boyd:Alex Lieberman said such a good viral drop idea, but I think it's not, I don't know, I would not expect this to go away. I think this is a business and I think this will be successful and I think this is a valuable tool. And it's something that probably, it would be hard for Google to justify baking into Gmail. It's like it is a little bit counter-positioned against.

1:12:40Claire Wang:Yeah, it's a tough pitch. It's a tough pitch to be. We want to help our users get more type of.

1:12:44Victor Boyd:It might be a good April Fool's Day joke that they could bring in and then lead it around.

1:12:48Claire Wang:Not anymore, because Ben did it first.

1:12:49Victor Boyd:Ben did it first now. So good luck to Ben, and sincerely, we'll check in with him later. But we have our next guest from Der Petruel in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP on Ultradone. How are you? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for helping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

1:13:06Alex Shieh:I'm Anthony and I'm building a company called Derpetual and we want to create the derivatives exchange for everything so basically we created a new kind of derivative and we want to use this type of derivative to bring derivatives to assets beyond the top 1000 that exist now

1:13:25Victor Boyd:Is there any crypto involved?

1:13:29Alex Shieh:Currently yes our protocol is working on meme coins so you can trade meme coins with longs and shorts. But it's honestly a great way for us to test everything. We have the craziest markets in the world and the craziest people in the world doing stuff on our tech. So we get to improve and check if everything is fine.

1:13:55Victor Boyd:Yes, problem. Meme coins weren't crazy enough. We made them crazier. You're welcome. Yes. What is there a plan to bring this to real world assets, prediction markets? You know, we've seen the different financial approaches to so many different categories. How do you think this actually crosses the chasm? Because we went through the meme coin boom and they did sort of go mainstream. But I think a lot of people just didn't really find lasting value there necessarily. and they sort of moved on and it's become sort of a bifurcated market. And I'm wondering if you have, is there a business to be built just in like the meme coin community?

1:14:37Victor Boyd:Or do you want this to go broader and wind up on Wall Street or wind up with retail investors? How do you think about the long-term plan?

1:14:44Alex Shieh:We definitely want to go to traditional financing and up on Wall Street. In the end, the problem with meme coins and with most things in crypto is that they are not useful. So, of course, there is a market for them, but that market is going to be 1 ,000, 10 ,000 times smaller than something that actually creates value instead of just being a casino.

1:15:05Victor Boyd:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do you think about the current strategy that we've seen Kalshi roll through around CFTC and futures contracts? It feels like there's been a major acceleration in at least the, I don't even know, it's like the approval process for these new futures contracts. I know that for every new game, if the Super Bowl is happening, they have to get that contract approved. And it feels like with their technology.

1:15:42Claire Wang:Yeah, I think it's like a 24-hour cycle.

1:15:44Victor Boyd:Yeah, there's like a 24-hour cycle. And so that restricts some of the things they're doing, but it still feels like the fastest that the financial sector has ever moved. Is that an interesting pathway for you, or do you think that there's an entirely different way to attack the problem?

1:16:01Alex Shieh:Definitely. I think Kalshi has been doing it right. And in the end, their strategy was pretty unique. As you probably know, they started their company, and for a couple of years, they didn't do anything and just rolled letters. to the CFTC about how they please want to be regulated. And in the end, that worked out, and no one else is even close. So they are definitely something that we want to be learning from.

1:16:34Victor Boyd:How are you... Is there a North Star asset that needs a derivative that would resonate with a broader, everyday audience? because the derivatives on mean coins, that seems like there's a community for that, but that's probably not something that's super aspirational for the everyday American. How are you thinking about the actual application? The one that I always go to with derivatives is like weather futures for farmers. That's a very practical or hedging the price of fertilizer. These things are financialization, but they're clearly beneficial if you're running a farm. And so that's somewhat relatable to people.

1:17:20Victor Boyd:Do you have other derivatives that you think need to be unlocked in the near future in the real world?

1:17:26Alex Shieh:Definitely. And I think the inspiration is something that we probably want to have as one of our first assets in traditional finance, is hydrogen. Because there is no hydrogen derivatives anywhere whatsoever. And it's a very popular asset for the industry, for energy, for things like that. But it's just to spread out. The production is to decentralize, so you can't just create one hydrogen index and have it be traded. So I think this decentralization makes it impossible for traditional markets to bring liquidity to that.

1:18:06Claire Wang:What were you doing before this?

1:18:08Alex Shieh:A lot of things. I was doing a trading terminal for crypto. I was doing a software house, and that was my first company. And I was also making money selling Minecraft items.

1:18:26Claire Wang:There you go. A lot of in-game item sellers so far in this fellowship.

1:18:32Victor Boyd:Any chance that we will see onion futures traded in the future?

1:18:41Alex Shieh:My fellowship money might be deployed to lobbying for finally getting onion futures.

1:18:48Victor Boyd:Onion futures. There's many single-issue voters out there for bringing back onion futures. They were banned famously. Very obscure piece of financial regulation.

1:18:59Alex Shieh:Yeah, and I think in general, farmers in the U.S. have a lot of political power, and especially onion farmers. They really want their futures. They do. They do.

1:19:08Victor Boyd:Well, hopefully it happens. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to meet you. Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Cheers. While we bring in our next guest, we were in Cultured Magazine, culturedmag.com. What happens when OpenAI buys your tech podcast? Ask the boys at TBPN. We did an interview with them. Yeah, we had Sarah on the show. Yeah, we have. So the first question they asked us was, what's one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life? I said Godfrey Reggio's 1982 masterpiece, Koyanis Katsi. Jordy, what'd you say? Borat. Borat.

1:19:47Victor Boyd:I think that's good. I think that's good. They asked us, what keeps us up at night? We said data centers being even slightly delayed. That would be terrible. I lose sleep thinking about it. A single supercomputer delayed by even minutes. Even minutes.

1:20:05Claire Wang:We missed opportunity to say supercomputer.

1:20:07Victor Boyd:They did ask us. We had some fun with some questions. We told some serious answers. You know, we mixed it up. They asked us, what do you think your biggest contribution to culture has been? This is the question of cultured. What do we say?

1:20:19Claire Wang:Making tech people put on a suit.

1:20:21Victor Boyd:We've seen a few suits on this Teal Fellowship GigaStream. We've seen some suits creep into the tech podcasting world. Job's not finished, but we're making progress. We'll go back to our Teal Fellowship GigaStream with Milan from Opt32, developing compute infrastructure from compilers to chips for physical autonomy and local intelligence. Welcome to the show. How are you? Good. How are you guys doing? Thank you so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

1:20:52Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, totally. So I'm Milan. I'm one of the co-founders of Opt32. And at OP32, what we're trying to do is essentially build modern full-stack compute infrastructure for physical autonomy. So more concretely, like you said, that's everything from software, so compilers, down to chips, custom accelerators, to run on-device machine learning and things like robots, drones, cars, autonomous defense systems, other autonomous vehicles.

1:21:17Victor Boyd:That seems extremely, extremely, extremely broad. Are you going to narrow it down? Is there a beachhead that will happen where you will find a particular niche or is going broad a piece of the –

1:21:30Claire Wang:He's like, you know, the idea to pick a small niche market and dominate it, I think it's wrong. Maybe, maybe. Everything all at once.

1:21:38Aubrey Niederhoffer:I'm super curious. Yeah, so I guess a couple things to touch on there. So the first is that, you know, the nice thing about building infrastructure and compute infrastructure in particular is that it does generalize fairly well to many different applications. Sure. So you can use the same chip and the same software to run ML in a robot as you could in an autonomous vehicle.

1:21:55Nick Dobroshinsky:Yeah.

1:21:56Aubrey Niederhoffer:I do think we are, you know, taking a sort of an entry approach into the market, particularly from the robotic side.

1:22:02Victor Boyd:Sure.

1:22:03Aubrey Niederhoffer:And from, you know, our side, we are starting at the software layer and then gradually working our way down the stack towards hardware.

1:22:10Victor Boyd:Okay. And in terms of, so if you're starting with a software layer, walk me through the infrastructure stack that you might be buying off the shelf. Are you buying like Nvidia GPUs? I know that like when I think of like a previous autonomy stacks, I think of like Tesla being very vertically integrated and then Nvidia and a few other partners sort of being like Mobileye, sort of going around to the rest of the automakers and the OEMs and sort of plugging in with a little bit more flexibility. But those companies that provide that stack aren't fully integrated. So I see the opportunity, but I'm curious about how you're solving the short term where even if you wanted to design custom silicon today, it's probably not going to ship to you in a year, right?

1:22:55Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, certainly. So what we do right now is we essentially build a fully automated model optimization platform. So say you're a robotics company. You're deploying some perception model on your robots. You very often need extremely low latency. You have compute constraints, and you can't just toss a massive server-scale GPU on a robot that runs off, say, a battery. So what we do is we work with these companies to get their models running faster or for them to be able to fit more intelligent models on cheaper hardware, stuff like that. And right now our software layer is pretty much hardware agnostic.

1:23:31Aubrey Niederhoffer:So it could, in theory, run an NVIDIA GPU or even like a, I don't know, a Qualcomm accelerator or something like that. But primarily we do target NVIDIA GPUs as our back end. Okay. Yeah.

1:23:43Victor Boyd:Are you excited about robots that are too small to house an NVIDIA GPU? I'm thinking of the Matic robotic sweeper or the Roomba. And I've been super excited about the potential. The Roomba had such wide deployment. It really did break through across the chasm in terms of robotics in the home. And I'm wondering if you're excited about or optimistic about sort of a shorter timeline to those more incremental steps to robotics, robotic deployment versus, you know, we've heard a lot of pitches for like the straight shot to humanoid AGI. And I think that's coming. But is there a walk, crawl, run that, you know, technology sector will do here?

1:24:34Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. I think we're very excited about sort of the gradual deployment of robots and autonomy into our everyday lives over the next few years. I do very strongly agree that as we get maybe jumping three years into the future, we'll see a lot more autonomy in consumer life. So that could be something like a Roomba, could be something like a cooking robot, could be civic duties like street cleaning, as well as another area I'm particularly excited about is autonomy in manufacturing. I think it can do a great job at sort of augmenting human workers and helping to sort of bridge this gap we're seeing where there's not necessarily enough skilled, say, like welders or something to fulfill all the manufacturing wants.

1:25:18Victor Boyd:Is there enough data in manufacturing to do anything at scale with machine learning? Or is there enough, you know, transfer learning from the big models?

1:25:30Aubrey Niederhoffer:Today, maybe not. Over the next few years, I would hope so. We don't concern ourselves with the model layer. We try to be everything after that. So we don't build our own models. We don't train models. We work on running models, essentially.

1:25:43Victor Boyd:Sure, sure. Jordy?

1:25:43Aubrey Niederhoffer:Very cool. What were you doing before this? I was a freshman at Harvard studying CS and philosophy. That's cool.

1:25:50Claire Wang:Why did you get into Harvard other than you seem like a smart guy?

1:25:58Aubrey Niederhoffer:I have no idea. I don't know. I spent most of high school doing CS research. I started writing compilers back when I was a freshman, worked in a bunch of different university research labs, all on compilers, computer architecture, programming languages. While you were in high school?

1:26:13Victor Boyd:Yeah.

1:26:14Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah.

1:26:14Victor Boyd:There you go. What do you make of the decline in computer science as a major across universities? It feels like there's a, I've seen some stats that show like a pretty, pretty steep drop off. And yet. He's contributing to it, John. No, no, no. I mean, you're still CS major, effectively. But it feels like the fear around don't major in CS is very much like don't major in CS and then try and go get a front-end engineering job that's just writing code. but if you're majoring in CS, that still might be the best path into working in robotics, working on infrastructure, doing a lot of different things.

1:26:56Victor Boyd:So how have you processed the value? Do you feel like the CS that you've learned is less relevant today?

1:27:04Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think there's sort of going to need to be a reallocation, so to speak, of talent and focus within the field of CS, where as we see artificial intelligence capabilities advance, we see a move up layers of abstraction. to where skills like system architecting, sort of higher level theory, are gonna become more and more important. And kind of these very low level implementation details, like you said, being like a front end developer, doesn't provide as much value. So I don't necessarily think CS as a whole is dropping off, so much as it's reallocating towards those higher levels of abstraction.

1:27:36Victor Boyd:Yeah. How big is the team? How are you thinking about the capital intensivity of this business? When I hear Custom Silicon, and I'm hearing like hundreds of millions of dollars to do really anything interesting. We've had some previous Teal Fellows from Etched on the show or I've talked to them and done podcasts with them. And it feels like this can be extremely capital intensive or you can find partnerships and do something that's much more on the actual, you know, software and infrastructure side that might be less capital intensive. But how are you thinking about it?

1:28:12Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, so right now the team is just the three of us co-founders, me and my two high school best friends, all technical. We are hiring and hoping to grow pretty quickly. In terms of capital intensivity, the really great thing about building full stack compute infrastructure is that we can actually sell our software in isolation of the hardware, and we're already doing that and working with some design partners. So we can get revenue, we can do that quickly. Software development costs are relatively cheap. Sort of the cost of operating our software is essentially zero. So any revenue from that is pretty much pure profit.

1:28:43Aubrey Niederhoffer:And in terms of hardware development, I think there's a great path towards gradually moving towards a full production run of a custom ASIC. In particular, what we're going to do is build single board computers, so PCBs, around some existing accelerator chips and build the entire software layer there. Then we'll move on to maybe implementing some chip architectures and FPGAs. And then from there, you could do a smaller, not super advanced process node kind of prototype tape out run. And then, say, one, two years down the line, once we've raised a lot more capital, that's when you go for the big advanced process node, full production takeout.

1:29:17Claire Wang:Yeah. Are you working with Victor and Kavala yet?

1:29:22Victor Boyd:Or are you competing in bitter rivals? No, no, no.

1:29:27Claire Wang:They'd be natural partners to some degree. Yes, yes.

1:29:30Aubrey Niederhoffer:I think we'll be definitely working with Kavala at some point in the future. Right now, we're mostly focused on sort of internal technical work, but shortly.

1:29:38Victor Boyd:Uh, why, uh, what is the, uh, the, the, especially in the manufacturing sector, uh, is there not a lot of energy being devoted to, uh, not tell operation, but just putting compute, like, like, I guess like a thin client for robotics would be the term. Like you have a server room with a NBL 72 rack on site, and then you're doing inference in the IT cabinet or closet or the local data center effectively. And then your robot can just be much lighter and has like barely it just has a camera on that's just feeding stuff. And like, yes, there's maybe a little bit of latency, but you're talking about, you know, the speed of light across a high bandwidth Wi-Fi.

1:30:24Victor Boyd:It seems like that might be an interesting solution. Like, is that happening? Is that one of many strategies? Or is that a dead end?

1:30:33Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, I think it's a split, right? I think there are definitely use cases where you can do that. And there's also other use cases where you might have some sort of network constraint, or some sort of extreme latency constraint where you can't. And, you know, some things that we work on are actually like splitting the workload across both a cloud server call, and maybe something that's more latency sensitive can run on device. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

1:30:55Claire Wang:Have you guys raised money already outside of, obviously, you know, fellowship is for you. But what about the company?

1:31:02Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, we raised our seed round about two months ago. We raised a$5 million co-led by Box Group and by Ventures.

1:31:09Claire Wang:Box. Petitionator. Petitionator would get into this one. Petitionator. We love him. Great pickup. And great to meet you. I'm sure he'll be back on soon. Yeah, great to meet you guys as well.

1:31:23Victor Boyd:Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Thank you. Goodbye. Up next, we have Galen Mead from Standard Intelligence, focused on not to be confused with nonstandard super intelligence. Nonstandard unintelligence. You don't want to be unintelligent. building aligned general learners galen mead joins us on the show and i believe galen is in the waiting room so we will bring him in to the tbpn ultra dome as soon as he's ready galen how are you doing hey doing well reintroduce yourself and the company uh yeah we build

1:32:06Alex Shieh:computer use models, a general research company towards Alain DGI. I dropped out, I think, around three years ago. Didn't spend much time in university. And I just wanted to do AI research full time.

1:32:22Victor Boyd:Did you jump straight to computer use or was there something in the intervening years? We, at the time that we were started, there wasn't really this notion of a neolab.

1:32:34Alex Shieh:So So we, from the start, wanted to be a general research company. But initially, we started with some work on audio models that I had continued from massive compute. Interesting. Just because you train some state-of-the-art model, and people see that you can train models, and you can go from there. I think this is maybe one of the worst decisions. Not worst, but worse. Yeah, sure. Strategically. But computer use models are nice because it's a very general form factor. I always wanted to have another space for taking actions.

1:33:12Victor Boyd:Yeah, why is computer use important? I think there was maybe like a one-week period where everyone was super, everything will be a CLI. And there's maybe like a resurgence in computer use. But what uniquely captivates you about computer use as a goal here?

1:33:32Alex Shieh:So it's a training recipe that I had always wanted to do. You can see in some of the early work on games from DeepMind, there's this notion of training a policy on tons and tons of supervised data from diverse environments and getting something that is like a base model for actions. And it occurs to us that this exists for real world work in the form of screen recordings with a computer being the universal actuator that humans use to interact in very diverse environments. So there's this real opportunity to pre-train base models for being agents. And this is a very appealing concept from a research perspective if you want to make very competent agents.

1:34:26Victor Boyd:Do you think... How far out do you think we are from using a truly complex piece of software like Premiere Pro or Cinema 4D or AutoCAD, any of these tools? It feels like we're on the cusp. Is that this year? Are you seeing glimmers of, okay, the average Premiere Pro user will probably be interacting with it through a prompt pretty quickly in the same way that software engineers migrated from the IDE to the CLI and the text box pretty quickly?

1:35:04Alex Shieh:Yeah, I think it'll be this year. I, back in middle school, did freelance animation.

1:35:12Victor Boyd:Oh, yeah.

1:35:13Alex Shieh:And I had to sort of bring that out recently for our model launch. It was a bit over a month ago to put together Dharma videos. And it honestly felt like stone ages compared to working with the AI-assisted code editors for my day-to-day job. So I think we'll get there by the end of this year. And I think that will be a pretty big step change for all of these industries that aren't used to working with Copilot. Yeah.

1:35:44Victor Boyd:Is there any difficulty with the lack of open source tools in other computer use areas? is because it feels like part of the reason potentially for the acceleration in coding is that the IDEs were open source and also the programming language is open source. And GitHub is this rich repository. But will there be this battle fighting between some proprietary piece of software that doesn't want to be used by an agent and then you're trying to figure out how you can do it? Have you grappled with any of that?

1:36:23Alex Shieh:So I think we're somewhat unique in that we are rather obstinate about hitting the input and output of a human exactly.

1:36:33Victor Boyd:Sure.

1:36:33Alex Shieh:So we take video inputs, we output mouse state deltas and character level keystrokes. And nobody's copyrighted the form factor of a screen and a keyboard. So if we interact on that level, it's fully general.

1:36:48Victor Boyd:How do you want to instantiate this with a customer?

1:36:55Alex Shieh:We're pretty agnostic on that right now. There's a lot of ways to go on the model capabilities. We can get pretty crisp signal. There's a lot of things where we should be able to tell the model to do something and it should do it. And once we're at that point, we'll think about it.

1:37:10Victor Boyd:It's just download the app and start paying probably.

1:37:12Claire Wang:A little bit of a tangent, but how have you processed the SaaSpocalypse? There are still some SaaS bowls, and they'll tell you we're going to have, we might even have more seats because we're going to have agents that are using computers and using existing software, just like a human would. But how have you processed it overall?

1:37:33Alex Shieh:I mean, I have one friend's doing a search product who frames it nicely, that there's an opportunity for a lot more usage you have tons and tons more agents actively using these products. I haven't been following this sort of stuff very closely. I'm pretty off the internet. Locked in.

1:37:53Victor Boyd:Love it. Did we get how you made your first dollar?

1:37:56Claire Wang:Yeah, was that doing blending? Freelance animation. Freelance animation. Basically, artist.

1:38:02Victor Boyd:What was the actual project? Was it like marketing videos?

1:38:07Alex Shieh:It was a bunch of forum graphics stuff. It's a very niche space.

1:38:14Victor Boyd:That's cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

1:38:17Claire Wang:Great to get the update. Come back on for your next big launch.

1:38:20Victor Boyd:Yeah. Congrats on the progress. We'll talk to you soon.

1:38:22Claire Wang:Cheers.

1:38:23Victor Boyd:Back to the Culture Magazine article. They asked us, what grounds you and what invigorates you? We said the daily schedule grounds us. The show goes live every weekday at 11. So there's no room for projects to drift or spiral. Booking a fascinating guest on the same day. everyone is discovering them is incredibly energizing. That's the Soham Parikh moment in a nutshell.

1:38:46Claire Wang:They asked, what would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?

1:38:49Victor Boyd:What did we say?

1:38:49Claire Wang:A TBPN racing jacket covered in logos. So at least we're getting ad impressions for our sponsors.

1:38:56Victor Boyd:That's great. Yeah, we had a lot of fun. What are we looking forward to this year? Self-improving AI systems. That's on brand. Anyway, we have our next guest from Swoop, building a super app for Africa. Starting with food delivery in the waiting room. Let's bring in Aubrey from Swoop. Aubrey, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

1:39:17Aubrey Niederhoffer:Hey, I'm doing well. Thanks so much. Yeah. Please introduce yourself and the company. So, yeah, we're building a super opera Africa. So I live in Nigeria now. I started my first company in Africa when I was 15. So I got really into geography growing up. I had this first company. It was a recruitment company in Southern Africa. and I was spending all my summer and winter breaks in high school living in Africa building this company. And I realized that all the biggest opportunities, basically you had to live in Africa. All these export industries were way more competitive. Anything where you had to live in Africa was a lot bigger opportunity.

1:39:55Aubrey Niederhoffer:So I was figuring out what is the biggest opportunity in African tech because I knew I wanted to move to Africa, build a tech company, landed on this idea of building a super app. Biggest opportunity has been tech, but I felt like doing a super app is going to be the way that you can get there, how you can build a multi-billion dollar consumer business in Africa.

1:40:18Victor Boyd:Let's start with the state of food delivery in Africa. Are the major players there in a minor capacity? Are they failing? Or is it sort of a wide open blue ocean market?

1:40:29Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, so it definitely depends on the country. So, for instance, in Africa, Uber Eats is doing quite well. But Nigeria is our big market right now. So, Nigeria, where we just launched, we have two major competitors. We have Glovo. It's an international competitor. And you have Chowdeck, which is actually the market leader. It's a local company. But Nigeria is very early stage. If you look at the ratio of GDP to how much GMV food delivery is doing, Nigeria is five or seven times behind a lot of comparable countries, and it's still growing more than 150 % every year. So it's still very early days.

1:41:09Aubrey Niederhoffer:What you see is in food delivery in particular, once that kind of service becomes available, the culture adapts and it can continue to grow for a really long time.

1:41:19Claire Wang:What do you think the other players are doing poorly? Like where's the opportunity to differentiate?

1:41:25Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is price. Prices are really expensive in the market. we're a lot cheaper. And then I think obviously to have a lower price, you have to have a vision for how you can keep those prices low. So that's when we get to this super app idea. If we can convert a significant percentage of our food delivery customers over to being payments customers for us, that's something that's really exciting because payments are extremely large. There's$18 trillion in digital payments being sent in Africa every year, $2.6 trillion in just Nigeria. If you can capture a significant percentage of that, and you can be converting each food delivery customer, maybe one in five of them, starts using your peer-to-peer payments product, sending money to other users, that becomes not only a really effective way to acquire customers for something that's very high margin, but also it allows you to keep the food delivery service cheaper because you don't necessarily we need to make your revenue from it.

1:42:28Aubrey Niederhoffer:Whereas a company like Glovo, they're international. They only run a food delivery service in Europe. It's too late to build a super app in Europe. So they're not set up to build a super app. They'll never launch a payment service in Nigeria because that's not their business, but it is ours. So we do have an advantage there.

1:42:46Victor Boyd:What does the North Star super app look like these days? What is the canonical example of

1:42:51Aubrey Niederhoffer:success is it's still wechat i'd say wechat is definitely big i think one company that i uh you know get really excited about in terms of comparison is caspy so they're not only like the biggest e-commerce company in kazakhstan um but they're also one of the biggest payments companies one of the biggest banks in kazakhstan i uh you know they do e-commerce they ride show they do a bunch of verticals i think it's a really exciting business and you know kazakhstan's not that much of a bigger economy than Nigeria it's about the same size but you know Caspi is doing 2.4 billion in profit every year in just Kazakhstan and I think that you could do that in a number of African countries with the state of you know what the competition is I think it really is early days these verticals are going very fast the competition is not established the point that's impossible to win in a lot of these verticals and in a smaller market, you have this phenomenon where the gains to scaling become greater than the gains to specialization, whereas in a bigger market, you might need to specialize because the fixed costs are relevant relative to the potential size of the business.

1:43:57Victor Boyd:How big of a deal is the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa these days? We were reading about some potential bailouts for some loans from the IMF being discussed at a very high level, but is the Belt and Road Initiative a big deal from being actually there? What's your perception of it?

1:44:20Aubrey Niederhoffer:I wouldn't say it's maybe top two or three things that we're thinking about in terms of what's going to shape a country. Obviously, it's very real. There's a lot of infrastructure that's going on that's being built. Actually, one of the countries that we work in, our first country actually aswatini you might know it as swazian that was the old name uh in in swazian that's the only country that hasn't taken belt and road money and it's interesting to see because they actually recognize taiwan so china will not uh you know do belt and road there's 53 african countries that do get belt and road funding swazian is the one that doesn't uh but there there is like a difference there and like you know who's building roads who's building uh you know different infrastructure but i don't think it's like you one of the top three things that I'm looking at as something that's going to change development in Africa.

1:45:10Victor Boyd:Yeah. How do you think about geographical expansion? How local do you want to be focused from a staffing perspective? Do you imagine having satellite offices internationally or do you want to centralize everything? What are the trade-offs there?

1:45:26Aubrey Niederhoffer:In terms of recruitment, first of all, our team is primarily across Nigeria and India. So I decided that we would go international with the software development function in particular to be able to capitalize on just all the markets. My first business was a recruiting company. That's what I felt was the right thing to do. And I think we've been able to bring on a great team that way. That being said, the majority of our team is in Nigeria. And going forward, I expect to expand primarily in Nigeria for, let's say, the next year. And then from there, we'll be looking at primarily launching other African countries and hiring there.

1:46:07Aubrey Niederhoffer:So the vast majority of staff is in Africa. There's amazing talent in African countries, particularly in Nigeria. And if you are able to identify that, if you have a good process, I think there's amazing talent there. In terms of geographical expansion for the business itself, I'm definitely excited about a couple of other African markets. And we just need to be able to get to a point where launching another country would not hinder our business in Nigeria, which that's not where we are today. Obviously, we just started in Nigeria, started marketing actually last week. So we're not at that stage yet, but I would love to be at that stage where we can start launching other African countries.

1:46:51Victor Boyd:What did you learn from the recruiting company? What was the story of that business?

1:46:55Aubrey Niederhoffer:Yeah, I think the most important thing I learned is how to recruit. The second most important thing I learned is how to sort of operate a business in Africa, what it's like to live in Africa, what are the challenges, what are the biggest opportunities. I learned a lot about what the opportunities were. But I think number one most important thing is how to recruit. I feel that most companies in the world, but maybe particularly in Africa, are not meritocratic with hiring. If you are, if you, you know, could go out into a new market, if you can figure out how to, you know, source thousands of candidates, if you can reach out proactively to people that you know are good, if you can do more than reliable referrals, if you could build an effective way to actually assess people that, you know, you don't know before, right?

1:47:43Aubrey Niederhoffer:If you can actually build that, there's incredible talent on ContN. We've been able to, you know, bring some amazing people to our team. I think that's the biggest thing I learned. Basically, how can you get an advantage in recruiting?

1:47:57Victor Boyd:Yeah. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much. Jordy, you have anything else?

1:48:01Claire Wang:Yeah, very cool. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats on the lunch. Congrats on the fellowship. Yeah, thank you so much. Cheers. Great to meet you.

1:48:11Victor Boyd:People are having more fun with the OpenAI image model, a hydrologically accurate cutaway of the straight-up for moves drawn by Richard Scarry. Are you a Richard Scarry guy? I'm a huge fan of Richard Scarry with the cats. This is a good way to learn. It's a good way to learn. Riley Walls was doing some crazy stuff where, or actually it's Riley Goodside, the prompt engineer. I got them mixed up. So Riley Goodside worked at DeepMind and Scale AI, and he asked, chat GPT images 2.0 pro, generate a photo of a cake decorated with an SVG that when transcribed to a file renders the cake another cake and so it is absolutely wild people have been

1:48:56Claire Wang:putting putting the model through its paces for sure for sure I like this other one from tender yes that gotta say GPT images 2 is pretty clutch for

1:49:05Victor Boyd:interior decorating ideas yes yes if you if you have an empty wall put a fridge of Sobe Monster and Red Bull in your blank wire apartment.

1:49:18Claire Wang:Wow, Sobe's been discontinued, John. Really? Insane opportunity for certain people to remember who they are and bring this back.

1:49:25Victor Boyd:Yes, yes. I was never a Sobe drinker, but I always respected the brand and what it stood for, the funny ads, and what a wild time. Was it highly caffeinated or was it not caffeinated enough? It seemed like it just got steamrolled by Red Bull and Monster. eventually. It'd be interesting to dig into the story of Sobe and what happened there. But we will have to do that another day because we have Samuel from Prasso creating an AI-powered infrastructure for wholesale commerce, covering procurement, credit, and workflows for SMBs. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

1:50:00Milan Lustig:Good. How are you? We're good. Good to meet you.

1:50:02Victor Boyd:Please introduce yourself and the company.

1:50:04Milan Lustig:Yeah, of course. Well, I'm originally from northeast of Brazil, a city called Recife. I ended up going to Stanford for undergrad, but dropped out and came back to Brazil and started Prazo. And we're tackling a major problem in Brazil and trying to build the new infrastructure for wholesale.

1:50:22Victor Boyd:And when you say infrastructure, that could mean everything from warehouses to warehouse management system to e-commerce software. Help me understand what infrastructure means in this context.

1:50:33Milan Lustig:Yeah, for sure. We're trying to build it end to end. So the idea here behind business is that while retail has seen a lot of digitization in the last 10, 20 years in Brazil or in other countries across the world, wholesale, in our view, has been left behind. And these small and medium-sized businesses are still procuring the same way that they were 20, 30 years ago. Distribution hasn't changed. we're basically building a tech-enabled wholesale commerce player where we deal end-to-end. So we deal with manufacturers and we help them reach small and medium-sized businesses in a more efficient data-driven way.

1:51:12Victor Boyd:Sure. So is Alibaba a reasonable comp here? I feel like that's where a lot of people meet wholesalers and suppliers if they're operating in China, at least. Yeah.

1:51:25Milan Lustig:But we're only tackling Brazil. So we deal with Brazilian suppliers and Brazilian merchants. We started out with food and beverage, which is the highest frequency category with the most number of merchants. So today we serve a little bit over 10 ,000 restaurants and just the Northeast of Brazil so far. But only restaurants, if you look at restaurant procurement, is an over$50 billion a year market. But if you go to other verticals in Brazil, if you go to LATAM, it's double the size, so about$100 billion a year. And if you go to other verticals than restaurants, the market just multiplies by five or six.

1:52:01Milan Lustig:So it's a massive market. We're starting out with restaurants.

1:52:04Victor Boyd:Yeah. What is the secret to getting 10 ,000 restaurants on board? Is this cold email, phone calls, sales reps, advertisements? What's the funnel look like to actually grow? Because you're operating this two-sided marketplace. I imagine that demand generation is top of mind at all times. Yeah.

1:52:21Milan Lustig:I think the trick with serving small and medium businesses is that they have high natural attrition. So the way to grow in an efficient way is having very low CAC. And the only way you can grow at a very low CAC is if merchants love your product, then they will refer you to other merchants. So basically today, about 40 % of our customer acquisition is sales led. So we have sales reps just reaching out to these merchants and onboarding them into Prazo. But 60 % of our merchant acquisition comes through either organic or merchant referrals or channels, which are more product-led.

1:53:02Victor Boyd:How do you, is disintermediation a problem for you? Like, how do you stay, I imagine that there's transaction fees for finding and working with a supplier if you're a company that's on the platform. is there a fear of someone meets a great supplier for their food or beverage product and then they start dealing with them directly is that an issue really um and the reason for that is that we are

1:53:27Milan Lustig:serving these very small merchants uh so the biggest challenge for a manufacturer to serve them is not it's one of them might be reaching them but they couldn't do the logistics by themselves which is why we do the logistics as well and we also do the credit so oftentimes a manufacturer they don't want to get into these small merchants because the drop size for delivery is very low and they can't do it in an economical yeah like i want 500 coca-colas yeah that's like exactly and i want credit yeah exactly and they want credit as well and manufacturers are in general one they're not very good at assessing credit risk of a small merchant but second uh they're not senior in the in the merchant's payment stack right um at prazo since we're serving them as a one-stop shop and we are getting more and more share of their procurement, we are becoming more and more senior in their payment stack.

1:54:17Milan Lustig:So as we grow and we become more relevant to these merchants, our delinquency rates just go much lower.

1:54:23Victor Boyd:Do you think you'll have to raise a lot of money to underwrite more credit products? Or is there a banking system that you can plug into and sort of use like another fintech

1:54:35Milan Lustig:you know ally to sort of service that yeah today we already use a partner for financing uh but i i don't think we would have to raise a lot of money for that and the good thing about our business is that we we don't believe in offering very long uh credit uh to small merchants because they're very volatile right so we have to offer short-term loans so our average loan is about 10 days so we we turn that three times a month um and that helps a lot in keeping a low outstanding balance but compounding at a very high rate the company overall is already profitable so we've raised funding to date but we've become profitable thank you congrats how big is the team about 100 people whoa when did you start this then uh i started the company about four years ago and moved back to the northeast of Brazil.

1:55:31Milan Lustig:Today, we only operate in two cities in northeast of Brazil. So there's major opportunity for growth from there. These two cities combined are only 4 % of Brazilian GDP. So we have an opportunity to tap like a 25 times bigger market just in Brazil without even expanding to other countries in that time.

1:55:53Claire Wang:do you feel a little bit like an unk being a part of this teal fellowship class we we had the youngest ever teal fellow you seem like maybe a 10 year age gap with is that correct yeah yeah

1:56:06Milan Lustig:well uh not that much because so i i got into stanford a little bit earlier so i had skipped uh grades in school so i got it to stand for i was a little bit younger um but I think I might be the oldest in this class. So we're going to call you the elder, the wise elder, usually the youngest or wherever I go to somewhere. But in this group, I'm, I'm definitely the oldest.

1:56:31Victor Boyd:Well, we'll keep you, keep you aggressive. Can you zoom out for us? Oh, sorry.

1:56:35Claire Wang:Yes. I had one more question around what do you think the path for this business is? Is this eventually come and IPO in America? how deep are kind of Brazilian capital markets? How do you think about scaling? Yeah, for sure.

1:56:54Milan Lustig:Yeah, most of our investors are U.S.-based, so it definitely helps a lot to raise venture funding here, and I think ultimately we would want to IPO in the U.S., but if you look at this, there's just a major opportunity. I think the market potential is even bigger than food delivery. So, for example, iFood, which is the largest food delivery player in Brazil, is controlled by Prozuz. It's an over$10 billion market cap company. And we think there's an opportunity to build something even bigger. But while iFood goes in the consumer space, we go B2B. And we think there's an opportunity to build a multi-billion dollar profit company.

1:57:36Milan Lustig:So it's such a massive market and there's a long way to building it.

1:57:40Victor Boyd:Yeah. Last question for me was, I believe. Zooming out, Can you get us up to speed on the Brazilian economy broadly? China's been growing very quickly. America's at the risk of some stagflation. Gas prices are high. There's some economic growth. It's heavy in data centers. And we've been tracking the American market. But how are things going in Brazil broadly? What is the economic outlook? Yeah.

1:58:08Milan Lustig:I would say it's not great. However, the way we generally put this is that compared to the other emerging markets, we are better. So they're all in a very bad position. So relatively, we are better. So that's why, like, if you look at the Brazilian stock market has been going up. But it's mostly because I think investors want to invest in emerging markets, have relatively worse places to put their money. But I think Brazil tends to grow a lot in the next maybe decades. And the reason for that is too, I think, especially energy. So like the demand for energy will probably like go up a lot in the next few years.

1:58:47Milan Lustig:And Brazil has sort of a very big renewable matrix. And we have a lot of opportunity for energy. So I think that helps a lot. Over 50 % of our energy is hydro. I think over 70 % is a renewable.

1:59:01Victor Boyd:That's crazy. I have no idea. Yeah.

1:59:04Milan Lustig:And the second thing is we have one of the largest reserves of rare earth metals in the world, which I think is very strategic as well. So I think Brazil is a very well positioned country. It just needs great leadership to take it to the next phase.

1:59:19Victor Boyd:Well, we're glad you're taking the helm and they're lucky to have you.

1:59:24Claire Wang:Yeah, super impressive.

1:59:25Victor Boyd:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Come back on the show next time you guys have a big milestone.

1:59:29Claire Wang:maybe a profitability milestone like your first eight figure EBITDA quarter or something like that

1:59:37Victor Boyd:I can see it in your future

1:59:39Claire Wang:well have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon bye bye

1:59:45Victor Boyd:someone went to the new chat GBT images 2.0 model and said make me the most AI slop image that ever AI slop the pinnacle of slop a seminal work on AI slop. And people are saying this is unironically a work of art. This is a crazy, crazy image that's all over the place. It's really just like every style, sort of. There's some Fortnite in there. There's a jazz cup, a car with an alien, and clippies in there somehow. I wonder if this is the real prompt. You never know when people post online. But certainly a... It's pretty rough to look at. It is very weird. It didn't nail the beauty of many of these things.

2:00:32Victor Boyd:Anyway, we have our last guest of the show, Claire Wang, building biologically accurate simulations of nervous systems.

2:00:40Claire Wang:No company. Cure research.

2:00:42Victor Boyd:Welcome to the show, Claire. How are you doing? Great to meet you.

2:00:45Antoni Kiszka:Hi, nice to meet you.

2:00:46Victor Boyd:Thank you so much for taking the time. Please introduce yourself. Age of research. Age of research. Yeah, tell us a little bit about what you're working on.

2:00:53Antoni Kiszka:Yeah, of course. So I'm Claire, I actually just struck out, but I was a junior at MIT studying electrical engineering, computer science. A lot of my interest in the past bit has been in the field of neurotech, which includes a focus in whole brain emulation, but the focus on doing this with worms first, but also like how useful this could be for brain-computer interfaces and understanding consciousness maybe in that sort of direction.

2:01:18Victor Boyd:So, I mean, we've talked to a number of companies that are working on brain-computer interfaces bumping into this general scientific discipline. What was the... Take me through the decision to not join one of the existing efforts or stay in academia and actually go out on your own.

2:01:39Antoni Kiszka:Yeah, that's a good question. So I would say there's still a lot of current efforts that I think I really believe in and that I'm great friends with them, would help out with them. I think there's a lot of bets that people have to make. and these bets are unfortunately kind of fundamental science bets of like oh is this physics gonna work is this like biological like truth actually true yeah so i think like while these people i think all these bets are really interesting there's no 100 and so i think it kind of makes sense to um instead make your own bet on what you think makes the most logical

2:02:09Victor Boyd:sense that's that's kind of my reasoning here yeah do you also think it's a better time than ever to be working more independently on biotech generally because of the advance of AI? And we've talked to a couple of companies that are sort of working on, you know, the AWS of lab equipment, more rentals projects so that maybe you don't need to raise, you know, a billion dollars out of the gate and build a biosafety level two lab on day one. do you feel like more empowered to do, you know, to validate those hypotheses that you were articulating earlier?

2:02:47Antoni Kiszka:Yeah, no, I think that's a, this is like probably the right time. I think it's a mix, like definitely AI, definitely surgeons, like insurgents of like alternate science funding, a willingness for academics and for example, like people in startups to work together. I also think that people are just much more open to, you know, new ideas and research risk in startups, which I think like, you know, 10 years ago, you'd be told like never ever invest in research risk versus now, like everything is a research risk. I think, I think that's like a really good time for you to do it like right now. Yeah.

2:03:23Victor Boyd:Yeah. Jordi, you have a question or?

2:03:25Claire Wang:Yeah. I mean, my, my main question was like figuring out when, when that right moment is, because there's, especially after the, you know, the announcement of the fellowship this week, I'm sure you've been offered. Uh, I'm sure people would offer you millions of dollars over email to just say like it's fine if you want to just keep doing research um but uh but i guess you'll know it well help me help me bridge the gap between uh

2:03:49Victor Boyd:what we've seen in bci with mostly reading from the brain getting an x and y output so you can control a mouse on a computer incredibly impactful technology uh and then uh simulating nervous systems. How are these two things related in your mind? Why are they important to overlap? What is the overlap?

2:04:12Antoni Kiszka:Yeah, yeah. So I think right now BCI technology is very powerful in the sense that it is on a great path towards clinical applications. Soon, people who are paraplegics can maybe walk again, and people who are blind can see again. But a lot of this comes from almost post-hoc problem solving. You throw enough data at a model of someone's brain, and maybe you can help them move their arm in the X, Y direction or move a mouse in a specific way. But when you are able to actually decode information from the brain and read and understand exact signals coming from every region of the brain, being able to truly control the brain, for example.

2:04:50Antoni Kiszka:If you know which regions to activate, then you have a more naturalistic control method. So instead of only being able to move my arm left or right, you can move your arm very naturalistically in any degree of freedom. And I think that's kind of the power of being able to simulate the brain. You could do a lot of research and understanding of one of the most complex things in the universe. And I mean, obviously, we're not starting with the human brain, but any level tells you the sort of data that you need and tells you the sort of imaging techniques that work. And I think through that, you get a lot more information and progress in BCI.

2:05:25Victor Boyd:Why C. elegans and not mice or monkeys or something else? Is it cost or do you have a firm belief that if it works in C. elegans, it'll scale? Is there prior art? What excites you about that particular target?

2:05:41Antoni Kiszka:Yeah. So C. elegans is 300 neurons. It's really dumb. It's really just not. I mean, it's not close to humans at all. But I think the argument is we can't even submit the C. elegans. there's a lot of benefits C. elegans gives us. It is translucent. It's much easier to do gene therapy, so like fluorescence therapy, so easier to image as well. And also they're just like very simple. They have graded potentials instead of action potentials. So I think the idea is we can't even do C. elegans, so we have to start with that. And there's a lot of like, what is the sort of data that you need? Like, do I need voltage data or is calcium data enough?

2:06:18Antoni Kiszka:Is light sheet or electron microscopy enough? So like there's all these questions that C. elegans can answer. And once we answer that question, obviously the goal is to move on to like zebrafish and mice and fly and so on. But right now, like we are not close or like we're not close to mouse, for example, because like there's no way to image the mouse brain while the mouse is still alive.

2:06:37Victor Boyd:Yeah.

2:06:38Antoni Kiszka:Yeah.

2:06:38Victor Boyd:But you came with Seattle. Fascinating. Are you thinking about you'll do you think you'll wind up with co-founders? Like how early are you in the process of like turning something into a company? Do you want to just sort of like be on your own or do you want to build a, some sort of team, even if it's loose, how do you think about like research collaboration?

2:06:58Antoni Kiszka:Yeah. So, um, I mean, I've been able, I've been lucky to work with some of the most amazing researchers. Um, and I think these are people I want to continue to be around and learn from, but I think in terms of specifics, like finding co-founders, finding the right, um, bet, for example, a scientific bet I want to make, that's still up in the air. I'm still like learning. I'm still meeting a lot of people. I'm seeing like, what do I believe in? And what do I think makes the most sense? So it's still quite early stage for me.

2:07:20Victor Boyd:Are you going to move to San Francisco?

2:07:22Antoni Kiszka:Yeah. Yeah, probably.

2:07:26Claire Wang:Reluctantly, maybe.

2:07:27Antoni Kiszka:I mean, I like SF. I lived in SF in the past, but like, I don't know. It's kind of a principles thing. Yeah.

2:07:34Victor Boyd:Have you always been pure researcher or do you have entrepreneurship background as well? What else have you done?

2:07:39Antoni Kiszka:Oh, yeah. I mean, I would say like almost most of my background is a very clean mix between like the startup space and research. like I've done a lot of work in like for example working at various startups helping out with startups some like small scale like investing stuff so I think like I have a good mix of both

2:07:56Claire Wang:sides that's very fun well good luck well come back on whenever you have news and congratulations yeah we'd love to catch up soon great to meet you have a great day we'll talk to you soon goodbye Intel is up Intel's up massively the the market is broadly down today Intel is up 15 % after hours. They reported earnings. That's good news. Let us see. Intel reported.

2:08:23Victor Boyd:Leopold Ashenbredder continues to cook with his Intel bet.

2:08:26Claire Wang:He needed another win. He needed another win. It had been a couple days since he had a massive win. Yep.

2:08:30Victor Boyd:I think there's actually another story in here from today about a memory company that he invested in that's doing very well.

2:08:37Claire Wang:Well, more breaking news in the journal. Bob Iger is returning to where? Disney? Thrive. Thrive. No way. That's amazing. Back to Thrive.

2:08:48Victor Boyd:Love it.

2:08:49Claire Wang:Yeah, I think he's been an LP in Thrive, but he also bought a piece of Thrive. Yeah, that's right.

2:08:55Victor Boyd:Okay, well, that'll be a good next act for him. I'm very interested to see where he goes. There's a whole alumni class coming together. Reed Hastings is out and on to the next thing. We'll see where they go, hopefully.

2:09:07Claire Wang:Back to Intel. Intel announced its first quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom line and providing better than anticipated Q2 guidance on strong data center sales. Intel said it expects a revenue of$13.8 and$14.8 billion for the second quarter. Wall Street was anticipating$13 billion. And as of this morning, they were at around 100 times PE. and so it's only, I guess, only up for Intel.

2:09:44Victor Boyd:Climbing the ranks, climbing the ranks. Tesla also released Q1 earnings, revenue of$22.4 billion versus$21.4 billion estimated, so they beat on top line. They also beat on net income,$1.45 billion versus$1.17 billion estimate. The interesting article in the journal was that Elon was being more cautious about Tesla, saying, I think we need to get realistic about some timelines. So he is certainly not pumping everyone up and he's trying to sort of reset around the fundamentals. And so we will see where that goes. It is a wild timeline that SpaceX, if it goes out at 1.75 trillion, will be bigger than Tesla, which is sitting around 1.1, 1.2 trillion these days.

2:10:36Victor Boyd:So still both huge

2:10:38Claire Wang:credit to bubble boy over on X two hours ago. He says, everyone asked me about how I'm playing earnings. He says, doubling down 25 % of my portfolio is in Intel calls.

2:10:49Victor Boyd:Wow. There we go. Bubble boy. Congrats.

2:10:52Claire Wang:Well done. Good. Well played stuff. Well played.

2:10:55Victor Boyd:Thank you for tuning in to our Teal Fellowship Giga Stream. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Throw that flashbang, Jordy, because we are out of here. It's been an honor. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Thanks for hanging out with us. We love you. We will see you tomorrow.

2:11:14Claire Wang:We'll see you soon.

2:11:15Victor Boyd:Goodbye.