Meta Connect Recap, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Louis Mosley, Brendan Foody, Darren Mowry, Kayvon Beykpour, Mukund Jha, Noah Löfquist, Dan Lahav, Ben Milne

29:14um but uh and so i think he was he was generally alluding to going back to yeah like like is it hubris for humanity to try and speak all the same language that there's always these uh meta loves these nicknames for projects that have or or it could go either way a a massive project that collapses under its own way yes yes the other way to interpret that is okay yeah glass you know yeah Yeah, every meta code word is a double-edged sword. I mean, every Greek myth is a double-edged sword. Like, just the Orion headset, their full augmented reality headset. Orion is the story of the hunter who gets so cocky, so much hubris, he decides he can kill all the animals, and he's struck down by God and then sent to the heavens to exist as a constellation.

30:09the new data center is called Prometheus which of course is stealing fire from the gods and there's another Hyperion in one of those the perpetrator of the hubris is sentenced to have his kidney or liver eaten by an eagle every day forever there's a lot of bad endings in these stories but they also are very powerful and cool names Tyler what's your favorite metacode word there's a lot but I think there's some Straussian reading where maybe Zuck is actually a doomer oh yeah he thinks that Prometheus he will steal fire from the gods and be smited perhaps I mean the behemoth thing was crazy because it's like behemoth llama and do you remember the AI generated image that they used to promote it it was like this very like demonic like beefy bulky llama It was crazy.

31:09Guys, how did this one get out? And then it didn't get out. And then it was actually like, it was too big to tame. And like, that is the story of the behemoth. I know, but simply the image. Yeah, the image was crazy too. How are we going to use this? And so, yeah, maybe just stick with like the version four, version five. I don't know. But then we get into numerology. Who knows? I got to try to find this. I have this. I'm putting this image in the chat, guys. Tyler, do you think that they're subsidizing the cost of this thing? So Joanna Stern said, wow,$7.99 for Meta's new screen-equipped Ray-Bans and the neural wristband.

31:44I thought that was shocking when they told us on Friday. Ben Thompson was shocked by this as well. Everyone's been reacting to just how cheap that is. The Orion headset, when they demoed it last year, the rumor that was going around was that it cost$10 ,000 to produce those. And so people were like, okay, yeah, so they'll get twice as cheap every year for five years or something, and then we'll be in the$750 territory. but this has a lot of the same tech and it's 799. It's half the price of the, of the original Google glass, which is crazy. Do you think they're subsidizing it? It definitely seems like really cheap.

32:18I was surprised that it was under a thousand dollars. I don't know enough about the actual technology to tell like what the price would be, but it does seem like really cheap. There's so many reasons to make it as cheap as possible. Totally. Right. Just like one user feedback to, it can help them improve. Oh yeah. There's the Llama 4 Behemoth preview. Yeah, this is a picture. It's a big Llama. I'm glad they transitioned. It's kind of fun. I think it's kind of funny, but it is crazy. Do you think that's fun? It's kind of funny. A Jack Llama. That's something I would do. You think somebody's sleep paralysis monster is fun?

32:51It was kind of crazy. It looks cool. It definitely looks metal. If they chipped it and it had great vibes when you chatted with it, it was goofy and laughing about the fact that it was moving. Extremely metal. But, yeah, it's heavy metal. It's hardcore. Anyway, much like Graphite, Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. So on the subsidization thing, I mean, they're saying like MetaRabians are the best selling product, but they're at the$300 mark,$400 mark. And I don't think they're selling tens of millions of those.

33:25I think they're selling like millions. So if you sell a million and you're subsidizing by$200 a pop, it's like, okay, that's$200 million. That's fine. Meta has no problem with that. In fact, they can - That's only two AI researchers. Exactly, exactly. So what they can do is they can say, even if they're like, let's subsidize this by$1 ,000 and let's sell a million pairs. It's like, okay, they're going to lose a billion. They probably can't sell 10 million or 50 million pairs, but they could just do a run of a million pairs at a huge loss and then just cap it and be like, yeah, we're out of stock.

33:56V2's coming. V2 comes. And then they raise the price and they say, it's even better and even lighter and even thinner. and then they slowly creep together. They never need to make money on hardware. No, I don't think so. They never need to make money here. I'm sure they will if they keep executing like this. But ultimately, it's just about owning the next platform. Signal screenshotted the stream and said, Meta is so rich they have a VP for just fashion partnerships. And Michael Miraflor, I don't know if he's in the chat right now, says Ava Chen has been at Meta since 2015 and is the primary reason why Instagram is Instagram.

34:35This should be common knowledge. You do not know Ball if you do not know this, especially if you've ever tweeted about tech and taste. I thought the post was funny. Signal's post was funny. Obviously, he's a friend of the show. But I thought it was funny purely because Instagram is the most influential platform in the world for fashion. they generate billions of dollars a year from fashion brands advertising on the platform. Like, of course, they should have somebody to do fashion. And you don't have to be that rich to have a VP. We have a VP of logistics, a VP of production. We have a chief intern officer.

35:13We do, a CIO. And so, you know, titles are free. I don't know if you need to worry about that. Yeah, I would be bearish if they didn't have somebody that was just focused on building. Because it's on both sides, too. It's not just companies. I mean, it's the creators, right? Yeah, totally. Think about the biggest creators in the world. Many of them are advertising fashion products. Also, I mean, think about the fashion partnership that they've done. It's like a multi-billion dollar deal with Luxottica. They've taken a position, a major equity position. Yeah, with the entire strategy being like, we can make face computers.

35:49But they have to look good. Otherwise, people won't wear them. Should we have somebody that understands the world? Yeah. Also, just in terms of the VP title, do you want a fashion partner analyst showing up to do a multi-billion dollar deal with the number one sunglasses brand in the world? No, you want to send a VP. You want to send someone with a real title. Anyway, very silly. But fun. Everyone's having fun on the timeline. We'd love to see it. We're promoting Michael Miraflor to vice president of taste. Yes, vice president of taste. Mark Gurman gave his take. He says he has a strong feeling these will be popular.

36:26I wonder if this will cause Apple to speed up its timeline. Right now, I'm not anticipating Apple glasses with displays for a few more years. Their first non-display model is likely being announced late 26, early 27. That is slow. That's a lot of time for Meta to iterate on this and actually get through. It's going to be a big fight. Google's talking about doing display glasses. Wait, so German is saying they'll do a pair of glasses that just have a camera in them? Yes, a competitor to Meta Ray-Bands. Yeah, I know. What do you get? Not that much. You do get slightly tighter integration with Bluetooth, so you'll probably be able to pair them and unpair them a little bit more easily because AirPods are a little bit easier to pair reliably than the Meta Ray-Bands.

37:18But as a competitor to Meta Ray-Bans, it's camera, headphones, access to AI. Okay, so you get the Apple Ray-Bans, which won't be Ray-Bans. They will look like Apple products. And they will have maybe a better camera because Apple is fantastic at cameras. Maybe better Bluetooth connectivity and reliability there. But you don't get any other features. And then instead of talking to Meta AI, which is probably going to ship something really sick out of MSL soon, Like you're dealing with Siri and Apple intelligence, which we don't know the timeline for the V2 of that. They're kind of moving slow on an anthropic partnership or something like that.

37:54But even though they have the chat GPT integration, like I have not become comfortable using the Siri button to reliably query chat GPT. I still open my phone, open that app every time. Yeah. And so there was also a rumor that they might partner with Gemini, which actually would be great because that model is fantastic. And so it'll be interesting to see where they pencil out on that. But Meta seems to, I would be surprised if Apple can just come from behind and dominate. Yeah, you have to look at Meta's advantages, which is like we own the platforms that you share content on too, right? Yeah.

38:34Well, Julius.ai, what analysis do you want to run? And chat with your data and get expert level insights. Julius, we love Julius. The AI data analyst that works for you. You can join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions. We should have had Raul show up at MetaConnect and then just hop on the stream. Yeah, that'd be great. In the background. Surprise. What else? Aaron Slodov was saying, start collecting training data right now. Put these on every manufacturing worker in America. Good. Yeah. Probably smart, may as well. You could just do that. You don't need the display either.

39:15But again, Amazon is already saying, they're developing their own pair of glasses to put on their workforce. Hopefully it's not a death knell. When Google Glass pivoted to B2B, it was sort of like going out to pasture because they were doing Google Glass for consumer. They thought it was going to be this massive consumer adoption moment. There was a ton of hype. It didn't go anywhere. And then pretty soon it was like, Google Glass for enterprise. We'll use it in manufacturing context. That's not what Aaron's saying, but I would be personally worried if Meta started talking about, oh yeah, these are going to be really great enterprise use cases.

39:53They're not ready for consumers. No, they need to be ready for the Instagram crap. It has to integrate with Meta platforms in order for it to be successful, in my opinion. Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's Best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. We should do a soundboard partnership with Fall. Oh, yeah. Anyone can generate TVPN-like sound effects. Well, we talked about Scott Wu earlier. He's in the timeline showing some love to Mark Chen over at OpenAI.

40:30Mark, he said, so insane, you guys have no idea how hard this is. Mark Chen said, we wrapped up this year's competition circuit with a full score on ICPC. after achieving sixth in the IOI, a gold medal at the IMO, and second at the At Coder heuristic contest. I never see you at the heuristic contest. Contest. I was at the heuristic contest and I didn't know your name. No, yeah. Yeah, we got to send Tyler to be our on-the-ground correspondent at the IMO and the IOI next year. I think that'd be great. Do some post-game interviews for the contestants and then get them directly routed into the tier one VC firms.

41:11They're already getting calls from investors. This was probably the biggest news of yesterday, but it went under the radar. There is a Rolex Oyster that's Domino's Pizza branded. Andrew Reid says he's not a watch guy, but he might get this one. It's a 1970 vintage Rolex Oyster Precision Classic men's Domino's Pizza watch. And we have the story behind it. The Domino's Rolex Air King in 1997. Well, this is another one. So Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan began incentivizing franchisees with Rolex watches when a high-earning franchise owner earned the watch off his wrist by hitting a$20 ,000 sales week.

42:01Let's go. Monaghan wrote in his 1986 biography, Pizza Tiger. What a great name for a biography. Send it straight over to David Senra. I wore a Belova with our Domino's logo on its face. A franchisee asked what he had to do to get that watch from me. I told him, turn in a$20 ,000 sales week. He did it. And so he won the watch off of his wrist. After that, Monaghan - I wonder what do you think the market value of that watch was at the time? Because it might have been an arbitrage, just realizing, hey. Well, we're about to find out. After that, Monaghan started rewarding top performers with Seiko watches and later upped the stakes by giving away hundreds of$800 Rolexes.

42:46So in the 80s, we're talking a couple hundred bucks for these. But that's still a lot of money back then. Initially, turning in a$20 ,000 sales in a week at Domino's would earn a Rolex. However, as Rolex prices increased, so did the challenge. Domino's continued. Would you get it every time? So theoretically, you could get 52 Rolexes a year. I don't know. Yeah, I imagine if you just pick the right location, set the right prices, have good traffic, you should be able to put up fantastic numbers. It's very motivating. The Domino's in Times Square has got to do. Tons and tons of revenue, right? uh dominoes continued to give out branded rolexes but a franchisee eventually needed to achieve 25 000 in sales per week for four consecutive weeks to win the watch but the air king and uh these apparently there is one available on bezel go to get bezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet you can ask them for a domino's pizza meta meta exec team had some tasteful absolute hitters yesterday i clocked boz had a great watch on.

43:53Adam Masseri. Adam Masseri had a Nautilus. Vintage Aquanaut. The Aquanaut. It was good. On a black strap. It was great. What do I have to do to win a TVPN Air King? I don't know. We'll have to figure that out. Chat, let us know if you have any ideas for Tyler. We were actually debating whether or not we should do Q4 bonuses and watches. And John's, just for the record, John's point of view is that you guys would probably just want cash, but it might be delivered in watches. We'll figure it out. We'll see. In other news. The guys are clapping. They want Rolexes. Okay, maybe Jordy's on to something.

44:34I think I might be on to something. Well, we have our next guest joining in just a few minutes. But first, there was big breaking news yesterday. Disney's ABC is pulling Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after the late night hosts' recent remarks about Charlie Kirk. The move comes as ABC affiliate groups told Network they would be dropping the host. So this didn't come top down from Disney. It came from some of the affiliates. Nextar Media is one of the nation's largest TV owners, said it would stop airing programming. We talk about OpenAI having a complex corporate structure, but they have nothing on media companies.

45:08And then Sinclair is also involved. So Sinclair put out a statement. Mike Solana says, so this didn't have anything to do with the FCC. There was a lot of debate over what the FCC's role was in this, who was really putting pressure on there. There was a viral video, a clip of Kimmel's monologue that went viral on Tuesday after he delivered it Monday night. There was a lot of backlash to that, and then this came up. Jason Calacanis, the host of the All In podcast, said executives at ABC, like those at CBS, wanted to fire these money-losing late-night franchises for years. Trump has even given them cover.

45:48Trump has given them the cover they needed when it was wildly profitable to back these same comedians a decade ago. The networks had no problem letting them mock our wonderful, amazing, tremendous, beautiful, brilliant, and astute President Trump, wink, every single night. And so we got a little bit of detail on Colbert's financial situation. I have no idea what the financial situation was like at Kimmel. Viewership ratings were dropping, though. We did hear that, like— I think it probably tracks the—basically the audience on these networks is, like, retirement age, right? And so these audiences were naturally getting tracked.

46:2867 was the median age at CNN, and that was, like, the lowest or something? It does feel like it gets harder and harder to monetize an older audience just because they're not as profligate with their money. They're not just going and spending money on all sorts of things. They're not building AI companies. They're not using Turbo Puffer. They're not even in the ICP for Turbo Puffer. They're not using serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper. Loves by cursor. Extremely scalable. Linear. and our friends over at Readwise too. Some very important breaking news.

47:08Chinese Joe Weisenthal has hit the timeline. Whoa. Chinese Joe says... Familiar with American Joe Weisenthal. When we first started raising awareness about Chinese Joe Weisenthal just a few months ago, the legacy media and the corporate establishment laughed in our faces. Something tells me they aren't laughing any longer. Chinese Joe Weisenthal. And Geiger Capital says very bullish China. It is. It is. They're catching up to the U.S. much faster than anyone anticipated. Every country should have a Joe Weisenthal. They would be lucky to have one. Yes. And every country needs a profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT.

47:47Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And we have our first guest of the show from Palantir coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Louis? Good to see you. Very good to see you guys. Thank you for having me on. Thanks so much. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, a little bit of your backstory, history of Palantir, and we'll go into the news. Yeah, sure. So I'm Louis. I run Palantir out here in the UK and Europe. You can tell probably from my accent that I'm British. And I've been at Palantir like almost a decade.

48:24Wow. So seen a seen a seen a lot of change, a lot of growth out here in the UK and Europe. That journey from a business that was very focused on defense and Intel with a tiny bit of corporate to now a business that's serving every bit of the public sector and every corporate sector you can think of. And what's the news today? Or yesterday? Well, the big news is, well, technically, no, technically it was early UK time this morning. Okay. So you're not out of date. Here we go. We announced a big deal with the UK Ministry of Defense. A billion dollars. A billion dollars. The first billion dollar deal.

49:07A billion US dollars. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Well, it's the first billion dollar deal that Palantir has done outside the US. So it's a big, significant milestone. And alongside that deal, we also announced a big investment into the UK,$2 billion over the next five years. The creation of 350 new jobs. And our European HQ for defense will be in London. What does the$2 billion investment look like? Is that just the investment in the team, OPEX, CAPEX? How are you thinking about that? It's all of those. And London is already a little known fact. It's already home to about 20 % of Palantir's headcount.

49:55Oh, wow. So it's actually our second largest office globally. So we do a lot more than just support British customers from this office. We do a lot of product development, and it serves as the European and broader EMEA headquarters. When did you realize that billion-dollar deals were possible? Was it 10 years ago when you started? Was it five years ago? Was it more recently? It's a big number. Yeah, I think I always believed. And I think we're only just getting started. You know, this is, you know, we'll look back in five years' time, I think, and we'll think, yeah, those were small deals. You know, the power of the software is such, and it's meeting its moment.

50:42You know, the significance of this deal is it's, you know, we are the operating system for the modern battlefield. And we've seen the U.S. make that move. And the significance of the news today is the U.S.'s closest ally, the U.K., making the same move. Yeah. What's the mood like in the U.K. relative to the rest of Europe? We talked to Dr. Karp, was that just last week or was it the week before? Week before, I think. about the reception and what's going on in Germany. He, of course, studied in Germany, and he was kind of joking about the lack of entrepreneurial talent and adoption and kind of getting with the program in Germany.

51:25But it seems like the UK might be a little bit more forward thinking. Walk me through sort of the view in Europe technology right now. I think that's spot on. I think the UK is an outlier. We've got, especially here in London, an incredible talent pool, especially in the computer science, software engineering domains. That's why Palantir has so many people here. It's why we do product development here. It's really access to the talent. And you've got DeepMind. You've got key parts of the broader AI supply chain ecosystem are here. And I think it means UK is like the only country in the West, broadly defined outside the US, that does have that kind of talent pool.

52:12And obviously, the language helps, speaking English, the connection to the US. And, you know, we weren't alone right today. Palantir is not the only company to have announced a big investment in the UK alongside President Trump's visit. We saw Microsoft, we saw NVIDIA, we saw OpenAI, we saw Google, a whole raft of big tech make big investments. How are you thinking about the work that you'll actually do? How concrete is it? How much can you share about what's actually in scope for this contract? I can share bits of it. And obviously, a lot of it is sensitive operational details, but a key part of it will be what the UK is calling the digital targeting web.

52:57We Palantir will be a component of that. It'll involve many, many other companies and players. And you could think of that a bit like what the MavenSmart system does for the US. So it's really your targeting infrastructure, how you connect up all your sensors, your satellites, your drones, all of your various data feeds with your effectors, you know, the stuff that you're going to use to shoot airplanes, tanks, missiles. And it's that data infrastructure that sits in between that. It's the harness in which you then run all of the sophisticated AI and computer vision algorithms and so forth. And a lot of it is inspired and, frankly, lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, where the same technology, our platforms have been, as you'll know, deployed by the Ukrainians day in, day out now for nearly three years.

53:47And those lessons are being learned. And, you know, we're seeing the future of warfare play out in real time. And, you know, the significance of this is the U.K. government making a multi-million pound investment in that. What was the precursor technology to Maven? I remember when I dug into it, I mean, it was like a controversial program here in the United States. And when I looked into it, it seemed like the precursor to using image recognition and computer vision to identify objects and images was thousands of Air Force airmen manually tagging and basically doing something that you would expect like a data labeling firm to do.

54:35And it's not like the government wasn't trying to identify images, objects and images. They just weren't using technology. Is it the same thing over in the UK? Like what's the lineage of this? Yeah, exactly right. And if anything, the problem is more severe because the UK is smaller and has fewer resources than the US. So, you know, you're never going to have enough eyeballs to watch all of those feeds. So you need to find some way of automating that and surfacing something of interest to the human when that occurs, when that matters. That's how you're going to scale up. Does this type of deal make the next five deals with other Western allies easier?

55:16I'm assuming that it would be given, it just becomes much more difficult to coordinate if allies are operating on different systems. But I don't know if I have the wrong framework for that. I think that's, I mean, obviously, I hope that's a likely scenario, but it's critical. And again, this is a lesson from Ukraine, right? The interoperability is everything. The ability to pass targets seamlessly between units, between allies, that is the way we're going to confront and deter the adversaries that we now have in the West. When we talked to Dr. Karp, he mentioned that because of the current structure of Palantir, because of where we are in the technological adoption curve, artificial intelligence, he did not expect headcount to grow significantly.

56:11Does this deal change anything for Palantir's UK office? I imagine it's like a whole lot more business. It might justify some hiring. Are you hiring? How do you think about it? Yeah, you said 350 new hires, but that didn't feel like a huge number in the economy. I mean, it just showed the efficiency of the platform. It will mean we hire, we will be creating jobs, but the output per head is going to grow even more significantly. You know, I think, you know, Ted Mabry, my colleague who runs the U.S. The global commercial business was just tweeting today about AI FDEs. So the four deployed engineers we had that have historically been human beings starting to replace some of the work they would have done manually in the past with AI.

57:05and you can just see a path now where like 90 % of what used to be the day-to-day job can be done by AI. So then suddenly you've got 10 FTEs for every one you used to have. I mean, the exponential here is crazy. It's amazing. Well, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on and staying up late to join the stream. Not at all. Yeah, billion dollar deal. We have to hit this button for you. Overnight success. There we go. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Good having you on, Louie. Congrats. Thank you. Cheers.

57:41Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Head over to Linear. The bond market has completely rejected the Fed's rate cut. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Yields have ripped higher following an initial drop on the rate cut announcement. the rate cuts had the opposite. We need to set up a prayer circle at this point. Yes, mortgage rates will now spike. Mortgage rates were creeping down. This is not very good news. We're still talking about 0.1 % of a move over the last day, but not in the right direction.

58:16So not fantastic. But of course, that account is from QE Infinity, which is quantitative easing, of course. No bias there. Our post earlier on August 10th, Leopold - Aged like a fine wine. Yep. We were extremely bullish on Leopold and situational awareness. Back in August 10th, his fund topped$1.5 billion and posted 49 % gains just for the first half of 2025. This was from filings. Whenever you're running a fund, you need to - Remember at that time, there were some people saying like, Long Intel? What could possibly happen? Is his fund already blown up? Yes, yes, yes. And so Swix shares a screenshot of what Intel has been doing over the past year.

59:07They're up 28%. And Swix says, oh my God, he's going to destroy H2 2025 too. Good. And Nat - Good year to have some situational awareness. Yes. McAleese says, everything reminds me of him. And it's all green lines up and to the right with a variety of stocks up 50%, 100%. He has fully nailed the AI trade. Will Brown says, you could buy so much Diet Dr. Pepper with$2 billion. I don't know if that's like Leopold's favorite drink or something. I don't get the Diet Dr. Pepper reference. This stat was insane and a little disheartening. Yes. What happened? The top 10 % of U.S. consumers now account for half of all consumer spending, which is a record high, up from about a third in the early 1990s.

59:57Okay. So creeping up over time. Just a different way to understand wealth inequality. And it just goes to show if you're building consumer products, you probably want to be building for that top 10 % that are spending half of all dollars. For sure. and you got to pay your sales tax on numeral numeral hq sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax numeral just announced a new round today at 350 million dollars up from their series b uh earlier this year or series a earlier this year um and uh we're gonna have sam on tomorrow live from the studio for his uh first uh first ever guest appearance and it'll be in person for that.

1:00:47Still on Intel, funny journey. If you bought$10 ,000 worth of Intel 25 years ago, it would be worth$10 ,000 today. Absolutely zero movement over the past 25 years, basically. It's a store of value, I guess. There has been movement, of course. You got to factor in inflation. And then it actually sort of ripped from 2010 up to 2021, but then it fell and went back up. But now it's climbing back up. And the big news in Intel World is that NVIDIA invested$5 billion. They marked Trump up. They marked up Trump. They marked up the U.S. taxpayer since now we all own Intel shares. But this could be the start of something cool.

1:01:35This was what, who was it? John at Asianometry was proposing the idea that NVIDIA would second source the CPUs from Intel. NVIDIA is up 22 % today. Today? Wow. Is there China news? Sorry, not NVIDIA. Intel. Intel is up 22%. I'm so used to saying NVIDIA. NVIDIA can't be up 22 % a day. It's so big. It went down 3 % yesterday on the China news. Back up 3%. It's back up 3 %? 3.7%. Wow. Back to where they started. Market thinks they're going back into China, baby. That Blackwells are going to be shipping the B30s. It's happening. Bobby Cosmic is rooting for Intel and says he loves it. Of course we're rooting for Intel.

1:02:25We're all rooting for Intel. We're having Pat Kelsinger on the show soon. This post is hilarious. Every AI app today. and it's a box truck with a sprinter van inside and then inside the sprinter van is a subcompact car and this is just the nature of uh recursively calling various api abstraction layers probably um the agent that calls the underlying llm so south park uh delays new episode hours ahead of airtime because creators didn't get it done in time they say apparently when you do everything at the last minute sometimes you don't get it done do you think this is because they were about to do something that that was going to get them taken off the airwaves maybe i think it's high stakes i think a lot of people that um are used to joking around are on our understanding that uh at least in this period of time jokes can have uh consequences blowback yep cancel culture is back cancel culture is back it is remarkable that they uh that they uh ship an entirely new episode that they that it's a it's a produced animated show but it's created around the news cycle and so real time i believe when they when the obama election happened they had i think they prepped two different episodes and then they were able to air the one that was that corresponded with the correct winner or something like that because they had that episode up like the same day that obama won which was crazy um but uh hats off to them considering their track record it's impressive this doesn't happen more often that's what i'm saying you really yeah you got a tinfoil hat moment tinfoil hat moment yeah they yeah i don't know that they've ever missed uh have they ever missed an episode they must have at a certain point and they do and they do go off air for a little bit and i'm sure they have uh stuff in the backlog but it's crazy how long they've been at it this has been what 20 30 years on the air um it's it's one of those shows that i keep forgetting about and then somebody shares like oh they did one about ai you gotta you gotta watch this they do this about the thing that you really focus on so you gotta do it so fin.ai the number one ai agents for customer service number one in performance benchmarks number one in competitive Bake Off's number one ranking on G2.

1:04:52I'm only able to find one other instance where they had a official production delay for a new episode. Really? It was in 2013.

1:05:04Well, Bryce Roberts says, don't wait for more resources to have kids. John Woo broke it down, got 9 ,000 likes almost. Yeah, this post went super viral. He said, my only regret in life is not having kids earlier. When I was 27, I was going out four nights a week, working 12-hour days, six days a week, waking up at 5 a.m. daily for CrossFit. Kids would have been a breeze. Don't wait for more resources to have kids. Energy is scarcer than money. It's a good take. Thanks for blowing this up, guys. Follow me. Yeah, the other thing here is if you have kids younger, it just means you're younger when your kids are fully functional and independent, right?

1:05:42Yeah. Also, I mean, there's just this idea that you like, oh, you need to like, like you, you don't, you actually don't get to stop working when you have kids. Like you actually do go to work and make more money. And so it's, it's, you know, it's not just like, oh, you need to be retirement age or have like retirement money before you. I mean, I think it's entirely a fixation of people have had in their mind forever. This idea of like you buy your first, you get married, you buy your home. Yeah. And then you have kids. And that's so ingrained in the culture that people just don't even consider having kids.

1:06:17Yeah. Because the house. Because. House prices are so high. Yeah. They're not in a position to buy a house. But I think, yeah. Oh, well. Kids are nothing more, nothing to motivate the grind set like. Indeed. A couple of pups. Deeply motivating.

1:06:36We got John's soundboard finally. He's trigger happy. Amit, who we met at Palantir Dev Day, said... Number one Palantir retail soldier. Yes. He's a brigadier general. He told Jensen that if he didn't pump his Intel bags, then he wouldn't be able to sell to China. Then Jensen saw the$60 billion they had in cash and was like, screw it, put$5 billion into Intel so we can ship to China. Do you think this solves Jensen's China problem? I don't know. I don't know. Because it's not a Trump issue anymore. It's a Beijing issue. It's a Beijing problem. So, yeah, I don't know what Trump has left. I mean, Trump up 36 % on his first real trade size.

1:07:19Pretty good. Makes him want to get him set up. But there are a lot of other chips on the table that Trump can pull. There's rare earth, there's TikTok, there's all sorts of what? What did you say? Chips on the table. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. It was an accidental pun. But there are other places where if NVIDIA rises to this top of the stack and becomes one of the most important American geopolitical issues and the mood around exporting chips and chip bans just kind of completely cools and China has an ask, well, then Trump can order the deal and say, hey, you gotta unban NVIDIA locally.

1:08:03It is funny that we split from America banning NVIDIA selling to China to China banning NVIDIA selling to China. And it's like they both at one point were banning but at different time horizons and we're kinda going back and forth. But anyway, I think Jensen will figure something out. This is not the end of that story for sure. There's gonna be chips flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing. uh near shares that you can just copy trade leopold's fund and triple your money in a day the forms are public it's crazy the january 16th 2026 24 call that leopold put on is up 200 percent so triple is that good it's fantastic near says absolute kings i kneel grats on the extra billion anyway the uh coachella lineup dropped two months early and over 60 percent of attendees were on payment plans last year what does that mean that it dropped early i don't understand yeah i just i think i think they maybe anticipate it's going to take longer to sell the tickets okay it used to be back in my day yeah in the heyday it was uh weekend one was always fully sold out The tickets would be selling at a pretty significant premium to retail pricing.

1:09:29And so, and I think last year, if I remember correctly, you could just basically buy, you could basically buy a weekend one ticket at below retail. I wonder if that's a, I wonder if it's like a dynamic around like who is actually playing Coachella, who's hot, like are there, are there as many? They dropped the lineup. Is the lineup crazy? Sabrina Carpenter is headlining day one. Justin Bieber day two. Okay, but it's not Taylor Swift and the Backstreet Boys. They're over at the Sphere. So maybe the Sphere's sucking the energy out. Because the Sphere tickets are selling great. And they're super expensive.

1:10:01So maybe people want something new. Maybe Coachella's washed up. Should we do a live show from the Empire Polo Club this year? I don't even know what that is. That's where Coachella takes place. It's on the polo field. But not during Coachella? Just like at a different time or during Coachella? You want to be on stage next to, you want to be going up against Sabrina Carpenter. I just want to be podcasting next to. I'm in the timeline. Yeah, next to.

1:10:29Interesting. Dario went out on stage and said he does not think we should be selling AI chips to China. Quote, I think it's completely nuts. It's very important that we defeat China in this technology. Well, you got what you wanted because Beijing decided to make that decision themselves. Yeah. Dario. Anyway, Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. I'm going to start for three. Also, sponsor Privy. The team just went absolutely wild in here. Max Siegel over at Privy, our latest sponsor, says, wow, OG Privy customer won an Emmy.

1:11:12Shout out Dylan Abrescado. And People Pleaser, doing some serious damage, getting on-chain projects represented at the pinnacle of media accomplishment. White Rabbit just became the first crypto project to win an Emmy. Imagine telling 2021. They won the Outstanding Innovation in Emerging Media Programming. It's cool that they have a new award. There has to be a new award, right? That award can't have been around for that long. But People Pleaser says, imagine telling 2021 Crypto Twitter that in a few years, our producers and ETH would get a shout out on stage at the Emmys. Pretty remarkable. All right, let's pull up this video.

1:11:52Yeah, let's play that. Let's check in with Europe. Yeah, let's play the Emmys. Check in with Europe. Why Europe? Oh, I was on to the next post. Oh, OK. I wanted to watch the Emmys video if we have that one. I want to see exactly how they frame this. But we can watch the. I don't think that's the right video. I think that's just a different humanoid robot. Got the wrong guy. Let's pull up the People Pleaser Max Siegel post, and I'll tell you about 8sleep. 8sleep.com. Get a pod five, five-year warranty, 30-hour free trial, free returns, free shipping. You know why I'm smiling? Because you're home, and you get to sleep in your 8sleep tonight.

1:12:24I know. Finally. It's always hard being away. Anyway, can we pull up the Emmys video from the timeline? I think that might have just been a screenshot. Am I off there? People Pleaser? Okay. We'll circle back. Let's pull up this video. I put it in the chat of this humanoid. This is Calvin Forty, the humanoid developed by the French company Wandercraft. And Chris says, Europe is cooked, lol. I don't know why they're cooked. They're cooking if they're making robots. Let's see. Is it bad? I didn't actually see the full video. I hope it's not bad. It doesn't... Okay, it's picking up a tire. This This seems fine.

1:13:05This is good. This is good performance. What's not to like? Picks up a tire. It seems useful. Headless. It is weird that it doesn't have a head. I mean, it's not exactly Pixar level cute. This is a literal clanker. It's clanking around. One of the comments is, was this trend on folks over 40? Yeah, it does seem very slow. So I mean, I swear almost every humanoid company today has just been training on like Biden. They haven't been training on that at all. They're trying to train on Usain Bolt, but, you know, it takes time to integrate all that. Maybe Bolt is holding out and saying you can't train.

1:13:49I'm locking up my training data. He's like, you got to pay up. What do you think, Tyler? I mean, the difference between this and the Unitary demo or the demo on the Unitary, I don't think it was Unitree that did that, where it was fighting, and then it fell down and immediately got back. Yeah, that was crazy. It's, like, pretty crazy, the difference. Yeah, and someone was saying that that robot was being teleoperated. Like, there was someone in the background with, like, a controller controlling it. And Rune had a good point that was, like, well, like, telling it to move forward is, like, the easiest part.

1:14:19Like, the hard part is, like, actually having a button to press to, like, pop up. Yeah, you're not manually controlling that motion. No, no. It clearly has some incredible, incredible ability to like respond and understand its position and hop back up. It's pretty good. Well, I don't know. We'll have to check in with Wandercraft, see how they do. You know, this is better than nothing. I don't know. I think they're... It's a good start. They could keep going. We have our next guest, Brendan from Mercore coming in the studio. Brendan, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you?

1:14:55I'm great. Sorry we couldn't link up on Tuesday. You have some massive news. Introduce yourself. Break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest news? Yeah, I'm glad you finally, you know, it's good. You get to the$500 million revenue mark and you decide, all right, I'll do some podcasts. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm Brendan, the CEO and co-founder of Mercor. started the company with my best friends from high school when we were 19, scaled up a little bit to a million dollar revenue run rate, dropped out of college, started working with all of the AI labs and scaled from one to 500 million in revenue run rate in 17 months, which has been pretty wild.

1:15:38Yeah, no, and super, super exciting and surreal, as you can imagine. So very excited about all of the progress with the business and the best is yet to come. What was the first task you did? Like what was the first data you labeled? What was the first project to get from, how'd you go from zero to one basically? Yeah. Name every piece of data. Well, so I remember the very first, oh, let's see, there were a few, but the first meeting that really jumped out was when we were hiring Olympiad medalists because everyone was interested in how the models could become super human at Olympiad math. And so we turned around 25 Olympiad medalists in 24 hours.

1:16:25And I bring up this example because I wasn't completing the task successfully. I was obviously haven't don't have an Olympiad gold medal in math, but it was it was incredible to just see like how capable the models are and this indication of the huge trend underway in the market away from low and medium skilled talent towards this super high skilled sourcing and vetting paradigm ranging from Olympiad math all the way to the FANG software engineers and top investment bankers and consultants that help to push the frontier of models. What was the onboarding process for those 25 medalists? Was this just like cold outreach or something?

1:17:06Like how did you actually meet these folks? Largely through referrals, because we have a big pool of people that we've already hired on the platform. And so the largest sourcing channel by far is that people we've previously worked with will send the link to their friends and we'll pay them$250 for a successful referral to help grow the talent network. It feels like most of the labs are, I mean, we saw this with OpenAI. Mark Chen was just posting that they basically dominated every hard programming and math competition this year. Um, what are the labs interested in next? Yeah, I think the largest transition is, and we'll share more about this in one of our product releases soon, but it's away from academic evals like Olympiad math or GBQA for PhD level reasoning, uh, and moving towards all of these professional domains of how do we measure what it means to be a great software engineer to build products?

1:18:06How do we measure what it means to be an investment banker that can do thoughtful financial analysis or a consultant that can help to segment a market? And these end-to-end evals over all of the professional capabilities, I think, will be one of the largest, most exciting trends in the market over the next year or two. What's the shape of that task then? I mean, it's so vague. It's so much less quantifiable than what your score was on the IMO, although that's incredibly impressive if someone can do that level of math. Go build good software feels really unverifiable, feels really broad. Exactly.

1:18:46And so that's why you need humans to define the stasis points. It's so much more difficult to measure. And so one way of doing it could be to build a rubric where the model can use the criteria to score the deliverable that's being produced. Like imagine you want the model to be really good at building a web app that looks beautiful. You could have rubric criteria for, you know, all of the different elements of said web app or whatever you're ultimately building. And so having humans define the success criteria and using those verifiers as part of an RL environment to train models iteratively to learn how to optimize for those criteria is one of the enormous trends that we're seeing across all of the frontier labs.

1:19:32How do you sort of plan with the team when you have overwhelming demand for a current product, yet simultaneously need to try to predict future demand in a way that I think normally when companies are doing traditional demand planning, it's very clear of just how many customers can we reach with our current set of products and future products. But in your business, it's not always entirely obvious what the needs are going to look like, you know, even a couple of years out. Totally. I think that the most important thing is always working on the frontier and understanding what are the leading indicators of what the entire economy is going to be doing soon and adopting soon.

1:20:17And emphasizing that frontier in all of our product development and all of our investments is one of the most important decisions that we've made historically as sort of a framework for resource allocation. That makes sense. We were just watching a video of a French company, Wandercraft, making a humanoid robot. People were kind of joking about it. I thought it was pretty impressive. I haven't seen any humanoid robots out of France. but can you talk about like what the data collection process for humanoid robots looks like now? Yeah, specifically a lot of, you know, we were at MetaConnect yesterday talking with Zuck and Boz and the team and a lot of people saw the announcement and they said, okay, a lot more people are going to have cameras on their faces soon.

1:21:03How valuable is this? Should frontline factory workers be, you know, be collecting data today or is that not necessary? Yeah, it's interesting. The key thing for the models to learn is having a clearly defined reward. And so I'll give like a couple of examples of that and sort of the role that humans can play. The first one actually without humans is that I was at the robotics office where they had robots that were folding laundry. And then they would have a vision model look at the laundry to see if it was folded properly as the reward. So having that stasis point where you can have 100 different model trajectories, see which five trajectories are right, and then reward those trajectories so that the model increases its probability of doing that correctly in the future is very powerful.

1:21:51All the way to another example where models are proposing scientific experiments. And then we need humans that we hire as contractors to run those experiments in the physical world, report on the results, and say how they did. And so I very much believe that models will learn from their experience and interacting with the real economy. But so much of that experience, similar to the way that you or I learn, is curated by humans in the way that we help models with running the experiment in the physical world and giving feedback, et cetera. You tweeted the letters IPO a while back. What did you mean by that?

1:22:30well i did i did comment in parentheses below that kidding uh okay i missed that part i missed yeah yeah okay that it's all good well people people took it seriously because i remember that i'm sure you got a lot of like frantic calls from bankers being like brendan you told me you'd tell me yeah well it's funny because last year when we were a seed stage company i tweeted ipo by end of year and everyone thought i was you know a little bit crazy because we'd raised our 40 million seed round. Or sorry, I tweeted, yeah, Unicorn by end of year. And we ended up making it happen. And so people thought maybe this time was real, but I was just kidding about the IPO.

1:23:11What's the shape of the business now? Obviously, there's a huge amount of focus on these expert networks and these really high-skilled, specialized talent, getting data from that and working through different problems and all the examples that you gave, is there still a need from big labs for just the more traditional RLHF? Is this good? Is this bad? Thumbs up, thumbs down? Or has that been completely absorbed by just users of the users or also just the models themselves? Like is our GPT-5 or, you know, any of the other models, the frontier models, are they able to deliver the thumbs up, thumbs down, if you need to do some sort of fine tuning on a specific problem?

1:23:58Yeah, it depends on the lab. There's definitely still large investments that are happening in RLHF. However, it seems like it's more efficient to collect those via data flywheels in real world. And where you really need expert human involvement, that's incredibly valuable, is someone that will think about a problem for five hours and come up with this very structured framework for how to evaluate model success in a way that it's difficult to expect users of products to do in a reliable way. Is that like a reasonable way to think about a task, a single task, like five hours? That might be one way.

1:24:38But one thing I'm very excited about is that the time horizons of agentic trajectories will go up dramatically. And so I think a lot of people initially think about AI in the context of what can they see on their screen on ChatGPT at any given time. But over time, and maybe using one tool with like online research, but over time, we're going to have the models working on problems that would take a human 30 days to do or 90 days to do that are using 10 different tools or interacting with various employees in the companies. And we need environments for all of that, right? We need ways to eval and to measure success to define the rewards.

1:25:16And that's going to be a very exciting problem space to continue pushing the frontier of. How do you or just humans generally fit into solving the problem of like booking a flight or ordering DoorDash? We've heard about these simulated environments, RL environments, verifiable rewards. Is it mostly designing the environment with the reward? or is there actually a process for someone who's just a fantastic travel agent to, you know, create a rubric or create a or just actually do a ton of tasks to generate data? Yeah, it could be. So one way you would do it for those kinds of browser use workflows is that you could have a simulated application and then a unit test that measures if the model effectively, you know, completed the task to change the state and like booking the flight or whatever the action is.

1:26:19And ultimately, you do need a human expert to help write what is that unit test. But my guess is that computer use will be solved relatively quickly in the next like, or at least in the next like two or three years. And then there's going to be this much longer tale of sort of the broad space of knowledge work and everything that we want to do of how do we get the model to build a startup or help prep for a podcast episode or whatever the workflow is. Yeah. How do you think about solving problems that take decades? I always go back to health. There's certain things where the FDA does a lot of work to try and understand if you're consuming this particular ingredient for 50 years, how does that affect you?

1:27:12it feels like until we can simulate the entire human body and run it at a faster clock rate like that seems like something that you just can't really short circuit we're already getting to like longer and longer rollouts and that feels like that might be some sort of like damping function on how quickly we can compound but are there any promising uh strategy that you've heard for dealing with uh problems that just take a long time to actually understand the reward or understand the did pass fail yeah the concern i would have with that scenario is it's so difficult to perfectly simulate like the human body and how that would play forward and so my guess is that for a very very long time models will more so look at empirical analysis however models might survey people that took certain uh you know vitamins or whatever uh drugs uh when they were a certain age and see the impact that that's had in their analysis.

1:28:13But it'll be difficult to simulate in that case. There are other cases where it's like a well-scoped physics simulation of how well does this ball roll down the plane or whatever we're modeling out. That'll be easier to simulate and therefore for models to have an accurate understanding of how things will play out in the real world. Are you guys naturally 9-9-6? Oh, yeah. I always get this question. But I feel like you guys are probably more on like 9-9-7. Like six is almost for the week. You guys are 20, 21. What else do you have to do besides this? Well, it's funny because we have actually never really mandated hours at the company.

1:29:04It was just that. That's what I figured. But there's like, if you're ramping revenue from one to 500 million and - It's a lot of work, yeah. And a little bit of time. Exactly. So I think the way it started was our initial core team was working like seven days a week. And everyone was in the office, like super late, all this stuff. And so we initially gave that rough guidance because we wanted people to have a little bit more balance and going home earlier, et cetera. But obviously, as the company's developed, I think it's important to be able to hire people that have families. And even though they'll work hard on the weekends, they might still be at home.

1:29:41And so there's some of that as well, still emphasizing a lot of intensity and, you know, moving mountains for customers, but at the same time, not necessarily being as input oriented and much more focusing on outputs. How big is the team now, like the full time core, not the network? Relatively large. We're 250 people now. Wow, congratulations. Fast. Yeah, exactly. Across the U.S. and India and then a little bit across Latin America and the U.K. as well. But yeah, it's it's been exciting. Certainly a crazy feeling to start having all these people on our new SF office and new faces that I have to meet.

1:30:24So what kind of predictions are you going to make? Any numbers you're throwing out? You said unicorn by end of year last year. But what about what about going forward? Anything you're willing to willing to take? We could say decacorn by end of year this year. So it feels like you might have might already had it in the bag. Yeah, we'll have to call our for rock to get the congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Good to get you. up next we have Darren Mowry from Google Cloud coming in big Google announcement today big event over at Google in the global startups at Google Cloud world let's bring in Darren how you doing Darren good to see you

1:31:18cool spot here in Mountain View so yeah be able to spend a few minutes with you thanks so much for hopping on the show. I'm looking sharp as well. Thank you for wearing a suit. Thank you. I had to brush off the suit. I had to kind of dust off. It looks fantastic. somewhat presentable today, guys. Yeah, it looks great. Take us through the event, what's going on today, what's been announced, who's there, everything. Yeah, that's great. So we're actually, in a couple hours, going to be kicking off our first Global AI Builders Summit. And so we're going to have a couple hundred founders and builders here in this room, which I can tell you about if you're interested.

1:31:50A little bit of cool Google history here. Yeah, that'd be awesome. And then we're going to have a few, actually tens of thousands of startups and builders around the world joining us digitally as well. And so today we're having customers like Lovable, Reflet, Fireworks and others on stage talking about, you know, the problems they're trying to solve, but how AI is actually helping them completely revamp the industries that they're in. We also have some Google Cloud and some DeepMind folks joining us as well to talk about kind of how quickly we've seen the evolution, where we are now. And we'll look around the few corners into what's coming.

1:32:21So some really great sessions today over the next few hours. So we're excited about that. That's great. Tell me about the history of the building. You said there was something special about it. Yeah. So we're actually in this place called Charlie's Cafe, believe it or not. And you guys probably know Google has been known for having good food, good cafeterias for a long time. This was our first cafeteria named after our 57th employee, Charlie Ayers. And so in all seriousness, although it is a little bit of an urban legend, we actually do deeply believe in creating great spaces for people to come together.

1:32:51and challenge each other, have good conversation, and eat a little bit of good food too. I'll definitely admit that. But we're here in this space. We thought it's a perfect spot to kind of bring everybody together, talk about building and innovation. So it'll definitely be a great few hours. Give us a high level on what the last year has looked like in your role specifically around supporting startups that just have an insatiable demand and for inference and all the other infrastructure needed to scale these types of applications? No, it's a really good question. You guys should know I've been in cloud computing for a while, I was at another hyperscaler for a long time at the early days of cloud.

1:33:34And I thought we were moving fast then until we've entered this AI revolution, right? Which I think the compression and the speed is like nothing I've ever seen before. Over the last 18 months, we've definitely felt what I think we would really call like a seismic shift, frankly, of the old school way of thinking about cloud through the lens of infrastructure as a service. All of a sudden, people talking about all layers of AI from chips and infrastructure, right? Are we going to use NVIDIA chips? Hey, Google, what's up with this TPU concept that Anthropic is relying on? Kind of what does that mean?

1:34:05When you get to the model level, you know, the fact that Gemini and what we're releasing with BO, these are first class citizen models, as I think you guys can see in terms of performance, cost efficiency. But the fact that we're building and going to continue to innovate on our models, but also partner with, you know, folks like Anthropic, folks like Meta to make sure Lama and Sonnet and others are also first class products that startups that are building on Google are able to use in a super integrated fashion. And then this concept more recently, right, which is this agentic, this agent AI, this is not a theoretical pursuit.

1:34:39I think it's interesting that when we talk to founders and they give us some feedback, the feedback they're telling us is the agent capability from Google Cloud is a real capability. It's not a planned release of products, hopefully in the future, right? It's a fully integrated stack where startups have an SDK and an ADK. They can build these agents, as I said, using first party and third party models. They can publish them, distribute them, and we can even help them go to market, right? So to this, to your point, the last 18 months breakneck speed. I think we're all learning quite a bit as we go.

1:35:11But I would say the feedback that we're getting from founders and builders, especially are a telling us we're on the right track, doing the right things. And frankly, they're saying, go even faster, right? Help us do even more, even more quickly. So with nano banana, you guys may have seen that was released recently. These are things that are coming out of our deep mind team. And there's going to be further announcements again around agents and new models fairly shortly that are going to keep us very top of mind and very much a part of what startups are building every day. Yeah, that's fantastic.

1:35:42Google's always been very, is a great partner to the startup ecosystem, giving out credits. Do you feel like startups are burning through credits faster now in the AI age? I feel like I remember going through Y Combinator and getting some huge amount of credits and not really knowing what to do with them. Exactly. Yeah. Well, they usually expire after a year. But I feel like with AI, you can actually accelerate much faster. What's the mood been like from startups that you work with? That's a really good point when you think of our Google Cloud for Startups program which does have a credit component, an engineering component, a support component, training, etc.

1:36:21We definitely have had a dramatic increase in the amount of startups coming to the platform. So that's first and foremost a really good signal. To your point though which I think definitely shows you understand this space is getting into these programs is one thing even being approved for credits is another thing, but actively consuming the credits and building value. That's what the startups care about. And that's what we care about. Right. So what I've seen now over my almost five years at Google Cloud is in the last 18 months, not only do we have more startups than ever in the program, they're consuming the credits extremely quickly.

1:36:53And more importantly for us, at least, and I think for these startups, they're staying with us, right? This concept of I'm going to jump from one platform to another to use credits, worked in a commoditized cloud world where you could go from a virtual machine to a virtual machine to a virtual machine. Now that I'm able to come to these startups and do what we talked about a moment ago of GPU, TPU, Gemini, Claude Sonnet, Lama, agents wrapped in Google Cloud, we're finding these startups are using the credits, but then they're like, I'm not going anywhere, right? And so I think that is the true business case and value proposition behind these credit programs.

1:37:28That's great. Anything else, Jordy? No, thank you for joining. and have fun out there. Wish we were going to be able to catch some of the talks ourselves, but we'll have to be there next time. Yeah, we'll catch up with you soon. Thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, that's all right. Great seeing you guys. Have a good day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Darren. Have a good one. Thank you. Up next, we have Kayvon from Macroscope coming in the studio. Also the founder of Periscope. We will bring him in in just a minute. In the meantime, let me tell you about public.com investing. For those who take it seriously, Lastly, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields are trusted by millions.

1:38:05I like the worst noise. Thank you, Jordy. What were you about to say? Periscope was acquired by Twitter. Yes. And did that become - Live streaming. Live streaming. Well, we'll get it from Kayvon directly. Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultradome from the Restream Waiting Room. Kayvon, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Great to meet you. Clarify Jordy's question. tell us the story of Periscope we'll work through to Macroscope but I'm super interested in some of the Silicon Valley lore here. By the way huge opportunity for somebody to buy up all the documents with scope at the end just every English word so your next company you're going to be like I gotta double down.

1:38:47I might have already done it you never know I gotta tell you actually funny thing nine years ago almost to the day nine years ago we launched a feature called Periscope Producer, which is the same infrastructure that is powering this very broadcast right now. And our dream when we built Periscope Producer was literally for a show like TVPN to exist. It's sort of like the perfect blend of high production, live streaming content blended with the conversation of what's happening on Twitter. And it took a while for that to come to fruition, but it just makes me so happy and proud and a very emotional way to see everything you guys have done and to see it happening on Twitter slash X.

1:39:29That's awesome. Congrats on everything you guys have done. Thank you for building the bedrock. Yeah, I mean, I want to get to Macroscope, but tell me more of the lore. What were the early days of Periscope like? What was the first, like, go-to-market motion? There's all these famous... Back then, there was the era of, like, go to South by Southwest. This is the story of a bunch of social apps, including Twitter, where you get the early, you kind of create a groundswell of tech early adopters. What was the first product build? What was the story back then? How'd you launch the product? Well, I mean, if you want to go way back, the very first version of Periscope, A, it wasn't called Periscope.

1:40:09It was called Bounty. And B, it wasn't actually live streaming. Our first prototype was essentially, I sort of think of it as like a reverse marketplace for Google Maps. Like you would drop a pin somewhere in the world and someone would take a photo you would you would you would have some prompt like you would put a bounty on you know what's happening at the tokyo fish market right now and someone would respond with a photo um and that to us was like a really cool way of trying to attempt to build like a teleportation device um we didn't know how to we didn't know how to actually build teleportation there were so many fascinating like social social mobile local apps at that time it was big it was a big trend and there were a whole bunch of different ideas that were experimented with it was such a fascinating time well and it's yeah interestingly enough like instagram has like delivered effectively that functionality now or snapchat where you can teleport and see how what's the vibe at this restaurant right now and if you click on the location that you tagged i can see who else put pictures there if they're public so yeah those features you were clearly very early yeah i think snap map actually was like probably one of the best manifestations of that early on the our stories feature really brought that use case to life for periscope's journey you know we When we built that prototype, we realized it just wasn't really interesting.

1:41:19And B, you have this liquidity problem if you're just dropping pins randomly in the world. And C, it didn't really feel like teleportation because the static photo is by definition old by the time you see it. So that's when we were like, let's flip this and make it press a button go live. And rather than not using static photos, let's try making it live video. And so that was one key thing that we did. And then the second key thing that we did that really made Periscope click was the floating hearts. I don't know if you guys remember, but like it was the first social network we had seen where you could have an infinite form of expression.

1:41:52It wasn't just like pressing a button to like it. It was sort of an infinite, infinite amount of love. Yeah. And, you know, we had this beta of 20 users. It was like our friends, basically, and some, you know, family and investors. and when we shipped that version of the build that had live video with the floating hearts, it just was so clear to us that there was something here. And one of the early beta users happened to work at CorpDev at Twitter. She invited Jack and Dick, who was the CEO at the time, and that sort of put us on the radar with Twitter. And so we actually ended up getting acquired before we launched the product.

1:42:28There was no go-to-market motion that got us. It was just a beta of 30 people and Twitter was like the 31st user. Yeah. That team was crazy about the early acquisitions. I mean, Vine had launched, but they acquired Vine as well. They were very aggressive about picking stuff up early. Top-tier picking companies, not top-tier at landing the plane on the integration. That's my TLDR. Someone called it a clown car, but we're not going to get into that too much. Someone you met with yesterday called it a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Gold mine, which is a great quote. So anyway, I want to know, like, what do you think about live stream monetization?

1:43:08Like we've we have we have ads running on a ticker. We've we've we've we've brought through a bunch of like the TV era aesthetics. But then we also do just host red ads. We don't really that I'm aware of get a big share of like programmatic ads. We don't do I know Twitch. You can do like I'm going to an ad break and it will play programmatic ads. We haven't done that. we've heard a ton of stories about TikTok shop and the live streaming sales stuff we've joked that we want to be like that for enterprise SaaS live commerce for macroscope I got one license I got one license I got five seats left bye now I got 25 credits over here I got an SDR on the line I think you guys are an interesting place where you can sort of benefit from all of these models right you can do the pre-roll You can do the mid-roll.

1:43:59You've got obviously incredible brand placements from some of the best tech companies in the world. And then I think also you have a unique vibe going where you can benefit from a lot of the monetization techniques that have become popularized on Twitch and TikTok and even Periscope. Early on, we had this thing called Super Hearts, which was like people could pay for in-app purchases to fly Ferraris on the screen or whatever. I think you have enough super fans that watch this show that there's an end-user monetization component in addition to what you're able to do with the big brands. I don't think there's many types of content that can benefit from all of those forms of monetization.

1:44:39Did you feel like you were at what point? Now it feels like Periscope was extremely early, even though I think people anticipated live streaming would be big. But I feel like only in the last few years, people, at least the tech world, has woken up to how big live streaming is, even outside, more so outside of tech. And on mobile, too. I mean, that was one of the unique insights. Like, there was a host of companies that were really focused on solving. Like, I mean, Flickr existed, and then Instagram was huge. And then there were a whole bunch of video apps. Vine, one of them. Like, YouTube existed, but no one had cracked it on mobile.

1:45:20And it required actual deep insight into the user experience and also the engineering to understand how to get it to work on a phone, which wasn't as powerful as a laptop back then. But, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of tech. There were a lot of technological problems to making mobile based live streaming work well at the time. A lot of those problems are just solved now and somewhat commoditized. I mean, there's like SDKs that let you do this really easily. I think my big takeaway, and call me somewhat jaded on this, but I think what we learned the hard way is that a live-focused social network on mobile that's like short-form live video isn't tenable.

1:45:59And that's what Periscope was. It was live only. As distinct from Instagram or Facebook Live at the time, live was a feature amongst the social network that let you communicate and keep in touch with people asynchronously. And I think it took us longer to build async forms of connection than it did take Instagram and Facebook building all of our features into their existing platforms. And so that was our sort of like our lesson learned. Because, you know, we had a parallel track where we were trying to make Periscope integrate into Twitter. It was the whole thesis of the integration. And it just took us way too long for reasons that we can get into if you're interested to make that integration come to life.

1:46:36And so as much as we grew from zero to 100 million users in like a year and a half, it was insane. But just everyone else built all the features quickly. Yeah. What do you think about the lack of – sorry, last question on Periscope. I want to talk about macros. I know. But lack of screen sharing API on mobile. I felt like during the clubhouse era, that was something that was sort of missing was like you go to Twitch. Yes, you're watching someone live stream, but a lot of the work is done by the video game that they're playing or the video that they're reacting to. And being able to put something else on the screen so that someone doesn't need to just stand there and do an eight hour standout routine with no support for eight hours straight.

1:47:25that helps and I felt like Apple kind of nerfed that or never really and maybe it was just a hardware thing but uh what was your take on like like how important that was am I misunderstanding that and and like how how would it play out if it was easy to screen share um I don't know the state of the current APS but I know at the time and this is probably like 2018 I want to say we did a lot we actually built a bunch of integrations that let you share your screen including from mobile i think just the reality is it's such an edge case relative to what people like the the vast majority of the use case for our product was people just was people talking to people right it was like 98 was that type of broadcasting yeah and two percent was what you guys are doing which is like professional broadcast whether it's from the nfl or tvpn or anything in between um and so i i just i don't think that would have had a material impact for us as a use case but I don't know if Apple did indeed nerf those APIs.

1:48:22That's news to me. Yeah, I talked to a YC company once that was trying to do mobile Twitch, so you would screen share from the phone. Now people do that with, like, you take the video feed out of USB-C, you ride it through a PC. There are huge mobile gaming Twitch streamers, but they basically, like, are screen recording with a third-party device. It's very complicated. It's not something they can do on the go. Anyway, sorry, I want to move on. Jordy, what do you got? I want to continue that conversation. It's fascinating. Limited time. Yeah, let's switch gears to Macroscope. Give us the, I don't know, give us a hybrid investor slash customer pitch.

1:49:00I want kind of a bit of both, kind of long-term vision as well as like why somebody should sign up today. Yeah, totally. So I'll start with the sort of customer-focused angle because it's, I think, what resonates the most with me. You know, we think of Macroscope as x-ray vision for your company. You know, we help you understand what's happening. How's the product changing? How's the code base evolving? What's everyone working on? But just answered automatically and answered via the source of truth, which is the code base. For any company that builds software, the source of truth is the code base.

1:49:33If it's not in the code base, it hasn't happened yet. And if it isn't in the code base, you know, AI and state-of-the-art alums can do a really good job of articulating how things work, who did it, when it happened. And sort of our observation, having worked in many companies, both small startups that we've started and, you know, very large companies like Twitter is it's actually extremely hard to answer these basic questions. Like the classic, what did you get done this week, which is ironically very relevant to Twitter's history, is something that every leader thinks about constantly. Like so much of my job as a head of product at Twitter was literally just understanding what the fuck people were working on.

1:50:06Yeah. And usually it's like the state of the art solution to this problem is meetings, issue management systems, spreadsheet trackers, just bugging engineers and asking them and sort of multiply that out by an organization that's hundreds, if not thousands of engineers. There's a lot of human capital waste that goes into this problem. And so our thesis is that this is silly. Like in a world of LLMs, you know, there's a lot of amazing AI tools built for engineers, not a lot of great AI tools built for leaders. And so that's what Macroscope is trying to do. It's trying to be an understanding engine for your company that simultaneously gives leaders clarity while saving time for engineers.

1:50:45It's sort of this interesting hybrid where we're solving problems that are paper cuts that engineers feel 50 times a day, whether it's automating their PR descriptions, doing AI code review, avoiding them having to go to status updates or write status updates, which there's nothing the engineer hates more than getting distracted from building something and instead reporting status through some game of telephone. And so we are simultaneously helping the leadership team get automated visibility while saving engineers a bunch of time. And we think that, like, I mean, we're obviously biased, but there's just no way every company in five years, like every company is going to have a tool like this, whether it's Macroscope or some other tool.

1:51:22It is just complete insanity to imagine that we are doing this the old-fashioned way. So when did you actually start the company? Because you announced around yesterday with Lightspeed. our friend Michael, but imagine you've been at it for a while. Yeah, we started the company in July of 2023, raised a seed round from our mutual friends at Thrive Capital and Adverb and GV and some amazing angels. Nice. And then, yeah, we did a Series 8. But to go back at that point in time, at that point, the AGI-pilled folks were saying, AGI by 2025, SaaS is not going to matter, fast takeoff. So did you never lose faith in enterprise SaaS?

1:52:11It feels like you had conviction that this type of thing was going to be important for a long time. I think there's a lot of dramatization that goes into the shifting of the landscape and they make for great headlines and all that. I actually think that as every engineer gets turbocharged by AI and as coding agents completely revolutionize how software gets written, I think this problem, the problem that Macroscope is solving, only becomes more important. If companies are writing 10x more code and humans are writing less of it and humans are reviewing less of it, then it becomes even more challenging to understand what's happening.

1:52:50And ultimately, humans are still accountable for the outputs of what a company is shipping and building. And so I think having this AI air traffic control system and understanding engine for what's happening in your company becomes even more imperative. So the company is built, like assuming that agents will get better and better and better and that humans will just stay at this, like more and more at this global level of just kind of witnessing, okay, what are all my, what's my whole team doing? What's this player doing? It doesn't really matter if they're a person or an agent. Yeah, today it's like 95 % of the use cases are what are my humans building assisted with AI.

1:53:29And in tomorrow, five years from now, it might be, you know, 90 % of it might be what are what have all my agents produced, and maybe 10 % of that is like, what if humans produce, but I think the problem that's being solved is still fundamentally the same, which is what's changed, what impact did it have? And, you know, and where do we go from here? Like, that's, that's a never ending thing that is the highest leverage thing a leader whether you're an engineering leader or product leader or a CEO, like those questions are always on your mind. How do you think about the level of integration to the systems that you want to pull data forward?

1:54:04Like I could imagine like a Slack bot that talks to every, it effectively acts as a middle manager, literally asking people, what did you do this week? And then they write their little status update and that gets rolled up and then that can be queried. I could also imagine something like, you know, a screen recorder super integrated into everything the employee is doing. And you can query, did my employee do send this email that you have full transparency and then a wide swath of trade-offs in between for the level of abstraction integration you want into the systems. Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll say is like, we're not, we're not big fans of the, there's a surveillance state.

1:54:43Panopticon. Yeah. We're not a fans of that angle. And like the last thing we want to build is a, is a spy tool. So we don't imagine, you know, doing screen reporting or anything like that. But I do think having sort of extensive integrations with the stack that a company uses to build and manage their product is really important. Like today, we've started with a few systems. We integrate with GitHub. We integrate with your issue management system. So when you use Jira Linear, we integrate with Slack. And we think that those are the critical starting points. But it's just the beginning because, you know, the code base can tell you what you did and how it works.

1:55:15Like how does our billing system work? The code base can answer that question. It can't tell you why you did something. Like what customer problem we're resolving with this feature is not in the code base. But it's probably in a Google Doc or a Notion. It might be in a linear ticket. Likewise, who can see this feature is not necessarily in the code base. You might have a LaunchDarkly flag or a Statsik flag that tells you, oh, this is available to 1 % of users in Japan. But the code base can be the glue that then stitches into all these other systems. And we're building Macroscope in a way that allows it to be a conversational interface to all those questions and answers.

1:55:51Like today, we have a Slack bot that lets you ask a question like the one I asked. Like, have we launched this feature? If so, who can see it? And we imagine over time building all these other integrations that let you essentially get more insight into what's happening and how things work. How are you kind of setting goals with the team and forecasting? With Periscope, you built like a viral consumer app. And so, and today, even in developer tools, like there's this intense, like, you know, a lot of companies are growing ridiculously fast, pretty unprecedented for B2B products. And so there's this intense pressure to like, you know, show massive traction and adoption quickly.

1:56:32but Macroscope feels like a pretty complicated product that you're still going to need to be like iterating around and figuring out where different types of companies are getting value. So how do you kind of like set goals with the team and what does success look like over the next 12 months? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. and it's obviously early days for us. If you really sort of simplify our product down into two components right now, there's really two pieces. We have a code review feature, which is relatively speaking, it's a more mature space, right? Like we are not the first code review tool, but code review is an enormously important problem for companies to solve.

1:57:13And I think that the sort of like heuristics around whether our product is working well for them are much easier to quantify, right? Like we released a benchmark as part of our launch yesterday, which sort of is one indicator of what we use to evaluate whether our code review tool is working, like what percentage of bugs can we detect in a customer's pull request. And so like we think about goals very differently for a product area like that, where we can measure ourselves in a very quantifiable way relative to competitors. Then we do the other part of our product, which we sort of refer to as status, like we help you understand the status of anything happening in your product development process.

1:57:49That's way more greenfield, right? Like it's we're not aware of really any other products like technological solutions to that problem. And so both our roadmap and how we think about goals for for that part of the business is a little bit more greenfield. We're just sort of excited to push the envelope on where this goes and how we can solve bigger and bigger problems for customers. Talk to me about where the budget is coming to buy Macroscope. It feels like with even zooming out broader to just the AI-enabled SaaS market, there's a lot of products that don't neatly fit in with, okay, I'm going to rip out this and replace.

1:58:28It's a lot of adding something on top. We're seeing a lot of like the SaaSpocalypse, the seat-based models going away. But it feels like it would be hard to quantify this with like value-based pricing. How are you thinking about justifying a budget internally if you're dealing with a larger customer who's trying to kind of underwrite the value that Macroscope brings relative to the cost? Yeah. Well, so our buyer is, I would say, half the time it's the engineering leader. So this would be like a CTO or a head of engineering. And the other half of the time it's the CEO. And I think from a value standpoint, if you're an engineering leader, you want your team spending as little time reviewing code and as little time dealing with production issues as a result of shipping bugs into production as possible.

1:59:17And so the value of even catching one production incident from an AI code review tool, I think, is intuitively very easy to understand. Like we don't see customers asking the question of, is a code review tool valuable? What they wanna know is like, why is this tool better than all the competition? So I think, you know, and that's just gonna become, that's gonna be more and more true over time, just given what's happening in the AI coding landscape. I think for the other aspect of our product, which is the sort of understanding layer, it is, you know, relatively speaking, it's greenfield, right?

1:59:48There is no product solution that are ripping out with ours. And so what we've seen resonate with our customers is, you have an intuitive feel for how much time your team is spending in meetings and dealing with all the bullshit work around the work. And so I think the value proposition really is, do I buy that this tool is going to help my team focus more on building and less on doing that work around the work? And is that worth the price of entry? Which from our standpoint, again, the questions that our customers are asking is not like, is this valuable? The question is, does it work the way you say it does.

2:00:24Um, and obviously that's where we have to do our job well. Um, but I think anyone who's worked at a big company and is, you know, invested in solving this problem the old fashioned way knows that it's like the worst part of working at big companies and they would gladly pay any amount of money to solve the problem if it actually works. Yeah. How do you think about a generative UI or actually like, I can imagine some people want to text result of, they want to chat and ask, how are things going? Someone in the chat said, this is more of a progress bar. And I could imagine someone wants to see a dashboard, a progress bar, stats.

2:01:00Do you think in the future, you'll be able to instantiate exactly what the particular manager wants to see, kind of like a dashboard of what's going on in the organization? I think there's lots of interesting vectors here. One is just oftentimes we're describing in words how a product is changing, and there's nothing more powerful than just showing how the product is changing. So whether that's integrating with Figma and showing you the intended mock-up that just got shipped, or whether it's actually running the code. Think about what an engineer does when they ship a feature. They ship the feature, they go into Slack, and they literally record their local branch in a mock-up of the product, and they post it in Slack and say, hey, I just shipped this thing.

2:01:37It merged into staging. We should just automate that. We should literally automatically run the product and show you the thing that just got shipped and save the engineer the time from having to do all that. So that's like one angle that this can take. And the other is sort of what you were saying, which is kind of like in the appropriate time generating dashboards or some other visual manifestation of some status update. I think all of these things are possible. We have to sort of pick our punches in terms of where we start. But yeah, humble beginnings. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.

2:02:11So it was great catching up with you. Let's come back on again anytime. Yeah. I love Silicon Valley lore, and I'm very excited about what you're building. Congratulations. Thanks for having me, guys. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Public.com. Investing for those that take you seriously. I already told you about Public. So I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Ad-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. I timed the double-call button perfectly. You did. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, ad-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

2:02:40We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, Mukund from Emergent AI. How are you doing? Hey, I'm doing good. How are you guys? Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's happening? Super excited to be here. What's going on today? We actually launched our product three months back, and one of our goals was to be on TBPN. No way. Yes, I love the show. That's fantastic. Thanks so much. Break it down for us. What are you building? Yeah, so I'm a good at Emergent. We are building world's most advanced wipe coding platform for consumers, for non-technical users. They can come in, prompt an idea and get a fully built live app that they can take to production.

2:03:19And we launched a few months back. Over a million users have tried the platform. More than a million and a half apps have been built so far. We're going pretty crazily right now. How do you think about beachhead markets and sub markets? It's there are platforms that focus on get an iOS app in test flight, build a game, vibe code a website. Like are the people that are signing up saying, I'm going to start a business. I'm going to build an app that will be the foundation of like, you know, some monetary thing. Or is it, you know, are we in the era of like vibe coding apps as memes somewhere in between?

2:03:54Are you still exploring? What do you think? Yeah. So, I mean, we are the only platform that supports web app, mobile app and backend all integrated in one. And we have consumers coming from all parts of life. We have business owners trying to digitize their business. We have entrepreneurs building their startup on Emergent right now. A lot of people are building apps that are monetizable right now and they are shipping them. And so it's a crazy spectrum of ideas on the platform right now. It's amazing. A million users is a lot. Like what's the acquisition funnel? Like how do you actually get people?

2:04:28it's a buzzy space it's a cool tech but I imagine it's hard to get people to go to your specific website like what's working yeah so I think people really love our product I think that's what's sort of working really well for us a lot of the acquisition is word of mark today for us the people are referring each other on the platform as they get successful app they refer each other we also do a bunch of influencer marketing so we use TikTok, Instagram, X to promote our brand and we partner with influencers and they're able to sort of create stories which resonates with their audience. That's something that is working really well for us as well.

2:05:02That seems to be working really well these days. I feel like there's this interesting flywheel where maybe for the first time we're seeing influencers drive software adoption, software downloads. I mean, we've all seen like VPN ads, but we're in a new age where people are pushing like... What's good retention in your view? Because obviously a bunch of people are going to come in, create stuff and then uh but uh you know 12 months from now how many of these people what does success look like in terms of retention now i'm a real business i think you can hire a tech person i think i think the beauty of these things is somebody can come in in 20 30 minutes an hour they can create something very cool yep you don't need to retain all of them you don't even need to retain the majority of them but how are you thinking and kind of planning around that yeah So we have good retention on the platform.

2:05:51With Man3, roughly 40-50 % of the users are still on the platform. We have a very strong power user behavior where top 10 % of the users are spending a lot more money on the platform who are building serious apps. They're taking them to production. And their retention is north of like 80 % right now. So we think it's still early days. But I think what's going to happen is a lot of people are going to come on the platform. Because we also take care of deployment. We host these apps on our platform. They're going to stay with us on the platform. And what's also happening is as they build more, they want to add more feature.

2:06:20As they get more feedback from their users, they come back to build more on the platform. Still sort of early days, but we think that you can build a pretty large business around these power users who are trying to launch their app, launch a new business or a new idea to the world. What do you think for business model? Consumption-based? Do you want to get people to spin up an app, subscribe, and then you're acting as their hosting provider long term? A lot of people build websites and then they're happy with them and they don't actually have a lot of feature requests. We've seen Squarespace and a bunch of other companies, you know, they're not, they're templated based, but they wind up being great businesses because people are happy to continue managing on WordPress or Squarespace.

2:07:01What business model makes sense in the vibe coding AI era? Yeah, so for us, like almost most of our apps are actually like full stack web apps, which has back-end databases, also mobile apps. So what we are seeing is a lot of users coming and adding features to them and building them. I think in a steady state, a lot of these users, you'll have a power law where top X percent of users are going to deploy big apps, have breakout success on the platform, and those are going to be continuing to be on the platform, and the business is going to get built around those people. Do you expect enterprise-vibe coding or consumer-prosumer-vibe coding to be more competitive in the long run?

2:07:42And do you think that companies should try to do both or pick a lane? I mean, we are very focused on consumer. We think these are two separate markets, require separate sort of personal. For example, like a lot of our users, they call GitHub GitHub, right? So we have to really, you know, like think through like who we are catering to. We have a lot of education baked into the product, which tells them what is API, like, you know, how to sort of, you know, look through errors and things like that. So I think these are two different sort of swim lanes. And of course, there's an intersection in the middle where small teams use us as well.

2:08:14But largely, we are very focused on consumer market right now. Very cool. That's refreshing to hear because we've had a number of other platforms on the platform. And they always say, oh, yeah, we're doing consumer. But we're really basically not really admitting that they're two separate markets. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of growth masking, like a lack of actually understanding what the product will be when it's mature. Yeah, what the long-term market looks like. Exactly. I mean, when we started, we thought like, I mean, a relation that we had that like a billion people have ideas in their head, like how do we sort of bring that out?

2:08:50How do we sort of help them launch? And we think it's going to usher a new sort of economy, and we just want to be part of that. Well, congratulations. Thanks for so much coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Keep us posted on your progress. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Vittoria has a post here. It's happening. For the first time in history, AI designed a complete genome, and it has been proven functional in the lab. Let's go. Yes, this is going to get a lot of people going. Many of the most complex and useful functions in biology emerge at the scale of whole genomes. Today, Samuel King is presenting the preprint generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models where they validate the first functional AI-generated genome.

2:09:35Fascinating. In other news, Dylan Field shared a leaderboard of ranking a bunch of different vibe coding tools. Figma Make came in second place, number one in our hearts, but also featuring Lovable at three, Bolt at five, Base 44 at eight, and V0. and Replit, of course. This is so interesting. I didn't know that you could do rankings here, but I guess they did blinded pairwise matches. So I guess they're human judged as an eval. They sent them out to lots of people. They give it the same prompts or something like that? Yeah, and it's like, how much do you... Yeah, so various prompts, and then show two results to...

2:10:26This is just like how LM Arena works. It's LM Arena for vibe-coded websites. Yeah. Very cool. Well, congrats to Dylan Field over at Figma. Rune has a great post here talking about the anthropic mea culpa. Sholto posted, we're sorry and we'll do better. We're working hard on making sure we never miss these kinds of regressions and building trust with you. And Rune says, Sholto has a Japanese sense of honor to his customers. I love it. Love it. Yeah, the comments. You were saying that people were really, really upset about Anthropic. And it's interesting because. Yeah, it was hard to suss out. Was it like extreme power users or was the average user actually mad?

2:11:08What was your take, Tyler? I think it was definitely like power users, like API. So if you like kind of built a business on top of Anthropic and then there's regression and you have downtime. Yeah, and it's just like kind of unreliable. Got it. Sometimes it's like really slow. Sometimes responses are just like. Yeah. And they did not say that this was like they ran out of GPU capacity, something like that, right? This was more in like they shipped a new version and it resulted in downtime, right? So it was very much like not on the CapEx side of the business. It was more on the actual like development that they did.

2:11:49Yeah, I think so. I mean, they made it very clear, like, we will not degrade performance of the model just to serve more people. So I think there might have been some aspect of there being, like, just not enough GPUs. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly been, like, demand's been skyrocketing. Brown paper bag in the chat says, Claude Code subs are mad. Big mad. Big, big mad. Well, you know what's not down? Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities. He's doing you guys top-tier cleaning and 24-7 constant service. It's a vacation home, but better. Also, in other news, LimeWire has acquired the Fyre Festival brand for$245 ,000.

2:12:32And Liquidity said, my phone got a virus from reading this tweet. That is, I have no idea what's going on here. We need to do a deep dive on LimeWire. We need to get the red string out and figure out if we're, like, what is LimeWire still doing? What is their business? Why are they acquiring the Fyre Festival brand? What are they going to do with that? I feel like there's something to be done with the Fyre Festival brand. Fyre Festival is a big enough brand. There's been a documentary at this point. People know it. That if you were able to buy the brand for$245K, you could potentially do a marketing stunt with it that would generate half a million dollars in value, maybe.

2:13:09But it does seem like it's got to be really, really inspired. Fyre Festival, the tech conference. The brand is pretty bad. The brand is associated with disaster. Yeah, it's one of those things. If you're going to put all the effort into creating a real-world event that's not embarrassing, why not just kind of create a new brand that's not toxic? I don't know. It's attention-getting. But yeah, this had been on the market for a while. Wait, the brand? Fyre Festival. Oh, I had no idea. It was on the market. Billy McFarlane. Did you go to Fyre Festival, Tyler? I did not. But I think the main, like whenever I see stuff like this.

2:13:50He was too poor and then he was too rich. But I think you could see some kind of like Enron thing where it's like, it's a marketing thing and then it's crypto. Yep. Oh, be careful out there. Watch out for Fyre Festival coin. How is Enron doing? The meme coin? Yeah, it was meme coin. It was a publicity stunt. Taylor Lorenz did some crossover video production with them. the team behind it seemed like genuinely great like comedian videographers but then it took a really odd turn as things always do when they turn into meme coins and it was a funny bit for a little bit it was a funny idea you know, leaning into Enron certainly fertile ground for jokes everyone's familiar with Enron I saw people buying old Enron merch years before this brand revitalization You could see them doing something funny with Fyre Festival.

2:14:47Or you could honestly see the value of that brand just being like producing more content about the failure of Fyre Festival, like instantiating that. Like there's been a documentary, but maybe you buy the brand, you get the rights to do more with it. And so you can monetize that way and actually lean into the fact that it has a lot of baggage. It's like a negative association. association yeah you you would have hoped they could have done something more with this this iconic brand yeah did you see this comparison of the thickness of recent iphone cameras next to each other we were really in the bulky iphone era the iphone 5 completely flat no bump the iphone 6 gets bulking season the iphone 6 they called they they said it was a camera bump or something and we didn't know what we were in store for.

2:15:36This is a, well, now it's called the plateau. That's the official term. The plateau. I don't think Apple comms wants you to call it a bump. I just ordered, I just. You ordered it. I just ordered. What color? I just got the silver. You got the silver. I think, I think that the orange. If it was in ramp yellow, it would have been done deal. Done deal. But orange is a lot. Yeah. I kind of liked the orange less and less as time went on. Yeah. Unfortunately, I ordered it late. Now I have to wait until mid-October. Oh, they're selling out. That's bullish for Apple. I think so. We like it for the stock.

2:16:10Yeah, I mean, that seems good. What about you, Tyler? Are you itching for one, or are you satisfied? He just got a new phone. So you're happy? Yeah. I mean, I had an 11 before, so this is a big effort. Oh, yeah, you jumped forward in the future like seven years. Yeah. That was great. 17 Pro looks pretty good. Did you see the latest on the OpenAI brand exploration? This is the latest. This is from February of 2023. That's a decade ago in AI terms. Yeah, I like that. Area, I've never heard of this firm before, but really, really cool work. John Palmer's firm. Amazing. He has a crypto company. Yeah, okay.

2:16:46Backed by Injason. So, Arius says, brand exploration for OpenAI with Sam Altman, February 2023. Two logo concepts, a circle and a monogram, alongside broader exploration for ChatGPT across brand and product. and this just like threw me back to the 90s. Like it's just remarkable. It feels like old Microsoft, old Apple, old Mac. I kind of get why they didn't go this direction but like sort of beautifully nostalgic. And Sam Altman commented on it. He said, fun to look back at this exploration with area on the OpenAI brand. This work partially inspired the circle that we use and love in our products.

2:17:26the the serif open ai font just feels like a boxed piece of software this feels like you'd throw this logo on it sell it at best buy one chat gpt please i'll take version five and i'm good for the next two years they got a cd key in there lock it in but the the oai logo on the on the right there on the top right is is wild this is like it's a very loud design i think they should re-release these as as like uh merch for the team great yeah yeah it's it's a little like of of like yeah it's just so retro in my opinion uh you see this post from kaz over at opendoor this morning we filed an 8k to say that my and opendoor's x accounts would be used to talk with our investors we've also parted ways with our former external pr agencies when we want when we want to talk you will hear from us not paid professionals who don't share our mission i I didn't realize that you had to actually disclose that in the 8K that you're planning to post.

2:18:28Should be God-given right. But yeah, Kaz is on a tear. I'm excited to hear more from him and his plan. The top comment, you're a god. He says, I'm not. There's only one god. I'm just praying very hard that he gives me the power and the perseverance so I can fulfill his will. Let's go, Kaz. Good job. Rallying retail. Did you see this movie coming down the line? Oh, I haven't seen the movie. I saw the news that broke. Well, it hasn't released yet. Jackson Dahl said, ladies and gentlemen, we have what seems to be an absolute banger on our hands. The movie is called One Battle After Another. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio.

2:19:09It's in theater September 26th. That's what I was thinking. It's in IMAX. Get the tuxes ready, boys. A little task for the team, guys. Figure out when we can all go see this movie together in IMAX. Get the tickets today. And without further ado, we have our next guest. We have our next guest. Noah got carried away.

2:19:33Sorry to keep you waiting, Noah. Welcome to the stream, Noah. How are you doing? We got lost. We got lost in the timeline. I'm good. Are you going to the Google event today? Break it down for us. Oh, not right now. I got busy with work. Okay. I'll be at a dinner tonight. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Too locked in. Locked in. Well, what are you locked in on? What are you building? So it's often we're building computer use agents. Okay. So we're training foundation models on how to use a computer like a human to really automate any type of work. What's the secret sauce? How do you differentiate? It's a complicated industry.

2:20:11You train the model and then you say, hit the keys in the right order to make me$100 million. Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes. Yeah, exactly. We don't allow it to make mistakes. That's the secret. There's big consequences. But I mean, right now, is the barrier to computer use just scale? Is it algorithms? Is it data? Like, what are the key inputs to getting good results? It's really a mix from what we've seen. A lot of these things kind of combined. But a big part of it is actually the data. There's not a lot of, like, really good data to use. Where do you get more data? Who are you going to call?

2:20:50well i think a lot of it can be synthetically generated like we we worked on these pipelines back in april for our first model release where uh like pretty much our entire data set was just synthetically generated yeah and then i think like obviously you have things like you can label your own data um you can collect it or you can get it from products so you need to use a combination of everything computer use is so broad i mean it can mean everything from like you know ordering DoorDash to playing a video game. What's the low hanging fruit? Like what is the next step that, you know, feels solvable in like the 12 to 18 month time horizon?

2:21:29Yeah, I think the first few tasks that you really need to solve are these monotonous type of tasks, which are like pretty easy for a human to do, like cleaning up your email inbox to like scheduling your calendar to finding all of your receipts in your email, like things that are very low level, which like cognitively, it's not like super advanced. Why do you need a computer use agent for that? I feel like email, calendar, these products have existed for decades. They have APIs, like they can be interacted with via JSON. Yeah, there's actually a lot of like software out there, which like either has really bad APIs or things or different types of products where you need to use computer use to really interact with it efficiently, usually because they might just have broken APIs straight up.

2:22:15So do you expect in the future people will be like a while thing into their email on a virtual machine and then letting you hang on to the cookie or the login in some VM for like a long period of time? Because it feels like Apple's not going to let an AI agent run on my app. And that's how I use email mostly. way you know i think like um i think what we're going to see is like uh we're going to see a mix between like the current llm paradigm where it's like you use things like structured outputs you use apis together with computer use um and like in the future i think like you're going to like models are going to jump between both and they're going to do so like really efficiently so it will just can't depend on what the input is.

2:23:06How do you think about your place in the stack? Do you want to partner with Google? I know you're talking to them. Is the goal to build applications on top or stay as this point solution work with foundation model companies? How do you see your customers developing over time? The way I view it is that computer use is still very new. so there hasn't been like any product that has really taken off in the space like there was chat gpt operator there was cloud computer use but like none of these have really taken off like immensely like just normal chat gpt and i think like initially it's going to just be that you provide an api to a very good computer use model which you sell to enterprises you sell to startups that are working on in different industries really across with different customers and different vendors.

2:24:00And then eventually, what we're looking at is if this can somehow transition into a more consumer-facing product as well. Well, it sounds like the dinner tonight will be a steak dinner, a sales dinner. Hopefully, you can get some customers. Thank you for stopping by. Yeah, thanks for joining us. We'll let you get back to your busy day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Did you see the Arizona Iced Tea account posted? Legendary link up. The Arizona founder and the Costco CEO. No. And then it's just inflation. What? Because Arizona is always 99 cents and then the Costco hot dogs always 99 cents.

2:24:36Look at these two. The founder of Arizona is still cooking too. And the Costco CEO, they're just boys. Inflation literally doesn't exist. It doesn't. It's fake. It's made up. It's in the computer. You're making it up. You can just not print a sign that says the hot dog costs more. Yeah. And it will stay the same cost. Just hard code the pricing into the register. Yeah, look at this. Costco. Don. Don and who? And Rob. Don and Rob. Dream guests. This picture. If you know them, introduce us. We want to have them on the show. Have you ever seen this picture before? Tracy Allaway. This is iconic. I had no idea this existed.

2:25:16Financial crisis. Tracy's most iconic picture. This is a fantastically iconic picture. Is she like. Hamming it up a little bit? I think a little bit. I mean, it's not like she lost. But the chart, everything's looking red. If anything, crises are pretty good when you're in the news business. But we love to see Tracy in an iconic photo. What a fantastic insight with the Dell computer. Rocking the Dell. She was in the trenches. And the stapler. Got the papers. And it's unclear what. She's looking at some sort of Bloomberg terminal, but it's just all red. But I have no idea. It doesn't look like a stock chart that's red.

2:25:55It just looks like a lot of red cells in a spreadsheet or something. I have no idea. We'll have to ask her what she was actually looking at and how real this was. I mean, it was a stressful time for everyone, even if you're in media and you have more to report on as the financial crisis is unfolding. I remember reading The Wall Street Journal every day during the global financial crisis trying to understand what was going on. And there was no lack of news. There was tons of interesting things happening as people understood what was going on at Bear Stearns, what was going on at Lehman Brothers.

2:26:24These are storied institutions that are collapsing. You want to hear about what were the decisions made by the board members? Who was involved? What was the plan for the bailout? What's the government's response? But it's still stressful no matter what job you're in. But what an iconic picture. What do we have next? Ryan Peterson is in ArenaMag. You got to go subscribe to ArenaMag. If I saw this, I thought I was looking at the cover of GQ. It looks fantastic. Looking at the cover. Max Meyer stepped in to write Ryan's world. world's Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson on the craziest year for global trade.

2:26:59With trade chaos and the rush for companies to implement AI, there are few executives in higher demand than Ryan Peterson. Flexport builds technology for logistics, freight forward. He's been on the show a bunch. The Flexport office is full of curios from the world of logistics. I love a curio. We have a lot of curios in our museum of business. We do. The hallways are decorated with posters that Ryan Peterson himself generated by ChatGPT. on the engineering floor. We got a cardboard model of the Ever Given. You remember the Ever Given story? Back to your point on relics. Dylan was saying that a friend of his, the only Zuck signature signed object that he's aware of that traded hands traded at 100K.

2:27:47Was it? Oh, yeah. So there was a Zuck signature that went for about 100K, which would put the game hit gong probably in the eight figures. Seven figures, eight figures, I'm thinking for sure. But you can never sell it because it's going in the raft. We did have a plan to engrave on the gong a contract and not show him that so when he was signing the gong, he would accidentally be signing a contract to onboard ramp. That would be the real goal. I don't think that would go over well. but uh nathan i don't think i don't think keep it keep it in the comedy sketches i suppose we'll have have much problem there yeah um built rewards built uh their own tv show short form series called roomies they release on tiktok and instagram i'm gonna guess that uh adam phase did this oh yeah because he does he does these types of things for different companies i'm gonna message him i gotta yeah i gotta meet him i'd be a key his name keeps coming up and and i and i want to know more.

2:28:48Yeah, we should actually. Yeah, I'd love to have him on the show and meet him. But yeah, Built Rewards, founded by Ankur Jain. Cash back or what? Credit card points on paying your rent is the pitch. But pretty remarkable to actually get a scripted series actually running. It's pretty hard to do. Most people, they can do this level of content. We'll see how quickly he gets back. Get him on the show right now. We'll see. Derek Thompson says, AI is overrated. He says, my baseline case is that the AI being built right now is overrated. Soon it will be a disappointment. Then it will be a bubble. And by the 2030s, it will be world changing.

2:29:32Self-driving cars are a model for this. In 2015, I heard autonomy was five years away from taking over the roads. In 2020, they were nowhere. Even in 2022, you could say they were a huge disappointment. Now they're quietly a revolution. driverless taxi usage in california grew 8x in one year and waymo is expanding to other cities truth zone tyler cosgrove what do you think he's not just wrong he's unpatriotic whoa shots fired where the shots fired

2:30:05amateur over here first time first time first time on the decks yes you're now you're just and random stuff. That's, that's, uh, that's, that's offensive. Hey, easy. Don't go. Uh, well, I mean, it's not that crazy. It does feel like we're in some sort of like the last, the last 1 % takes 99 % of the time. You know, we got 80 % of the value and, but that's not enough. And so the last 20 % is going to take 10 times as long. I don't, I mean, we, we don't have a Dyson sphere how are we getting 80 of the value we're only getting like a 10 000 so so what's your timeline for a dyson sphere you think we're gonna have a dyson sphere in in two years two is a little close he's saying 2030 that's only five years away i guess he said the 2030s yeah so that's what's your what's your dyson sphere timeline in my lifetime in your lifetime i yeah okay well yeah oh so so if you lose the bat you won't be around to make do you won't be yeah in my lifetime in your lifetime i think so yeah i could see i could see it by 2100 potentially but it's a lot of work a lot of a lot needs to happen to get to get the dyson sphere up there gonna be a lot of rockets going to the sun well we have dan let's bring in our next show from what do we do this one

2:31:36what's going on how you doing hey it's such a pleasure to be here I've asked Sequoia what to prepare for and they've told me that this should be the most fun exciting fast-paced interview so I'm you know just like shoot at me let's keep it quick introduction what do you do we are irregular we just came out of stealth yesterday we are the first frontier AI security company out there. Our goal is to be the counterpart to the open AIs and Anthropic and GDMs of the world. We're already working with all of them to create the security stack of the future. Yeah. What does that mean? I mean, there's already a ton of security companies out there.

2:32:13I see them when I walk through the airport. They're all thinking about AI. How are you positioned differently? Yeah. It's a great question. So the thing that we're actually building is a high fidelity simulator that allows you to put in any model in it and essentially just like see how different scenarios in order to attack the model or whether the model can attack other targets so for example we were the first in the world to see jailbreaking that ai was doing to another ai or alternatively just like seeing how ai can bypass things as windows defender in order to just like hop from one endpoint to the other.

2:32:50What is different about us is that we're working very closely with the labs out of the assumption that what AI is doing right now is simply not a story. And security is about to have a huge paradigm shift moment, which if you think about it, it makes sense, right? Because enterprises are probably going to look very different in the next five to 10 years. So naturally the security stack is also going to look very differently as well. So we are using this high fidelity simulator to find the novel attacks and to build the next generation of defenses a few years in advance. Why do labs don't want to do this internally?

2:33:24It feels like something that they have responsibility for. They have tons of, I mean, they've got questions on Capitol Hill about this. Like if they outsource it, that seems like a very tricky thing. Yeah, but I mean, it's not entirely outsourcing it. Like they have to care about these things. The same thing that, you know, I think every company does. It's like you want to have your own security practices and protocols, but simultaneously have partners that can help you see things in a different way. But what do you think? Exactly. It's a great question. If you think about it, you know, there is a thriving security industry already that is very mature.

2:33:57And, you know, most companies are using, you know, the grades of the security world right now, the Palos, you know, just like the CrowdStrike, etc., even though they're external to the companies. And the reason is that we're about to encounter what is potentially the greatest security challenge ever, just because we're innovating at such a fast pace. And there's so much work to do. So we kind of think about it in terms of like the differentiation from the inside to the outside is that there are some defenses that you would want to put on the models themselves, bake into the neural nets. And that's clearly lab territory.

2:34:27But some defenses are going to happen on the AI agent side. And some defenses will have to be in the environment. just because if you believe that we won't be able to do secure by design to AI, that means that some of the defenses will have to be implemented on the enterprise side in the environment. Otherwise, you won't have any defenses beyond what the frontier companies are going to bake into the models. And because there's so many different verticals and scenarios and contexts that you need to put in, there is a lot of effort that needs to be created in order to create defenses across the entirety of the stack.

2:35:01And we're working side by side in order to make sure that whatever the labs are not doing, we are going to do in order to create the next powerhouse of security. What does a regular look like over time? Is one way to think about it as a network to detect rogue agents, right? Is that a potential kind of scenario that you guys would be helpful in preventing? Or what does the surface area of the product look like over time? Yeah, thanks for the question. So I'll say that's indeed one of the scenarios that we are covering. Already today, we are doing things as understanding and monitoring AI network systems in order to see if they go out of bounds.

2:35:47But our view is that something deeper is going on here and that the entire infrastructure will need to be replaced. I'll give a concrete example around that. So, you know, just like anomaly detection, that's a huge part of the security stack right now, right? But how does it work? you have a baseline and you're seeing whether a model is or just like whatever you're trying to monitor is doing something which is outside of what you would expect as the normal behavior but if you don't know how an attack is going to look like you don't have a proper baseline and as an outcome of that our view is that the first order thing to do is to create a strong research infrastructure that would allow you to essentially figure out and map the novel attacks that are unique to AI, see what are the gaps in the current security stack, and start to fill them in and just build a new platform that's going to be the platform to secure the agents of the future.

2:36:39So our hope and our ambitions are high. We believe that there is a place to create a huge company that is new around security, very much like we started as part of the transition to the cloud. And Checkpoint started early on, just a few decades back, when people started to implement networks in enterprises. And usually when infrastructure is changing, you have a window of opportunity to create the company that is going to be able to create a platform to secure that infrastructure end-to-end. And that's our goal, and that's what we want to do around AI. Do you think it's more, are you more worried about the like rogue AI, the AI that just randomly decides independently to try and break out of its environment or more bad actors thinking that if they can get an LLM to do something inside of an open AI environment or inside of a Google DeepMind environment, that they can extract some sort of value?

2:37:34Like who is inciting the attack? So ultimately it's both. I think in the near term, it's the latter. So it's much more likely that we'll need some human interaction in order to elicit AI capabilities to push them more dangerous scenarios. And I'm much more concerned right now about, you know, it's like terror organizations getting access to advanced AI system that are already, you know, if you look at like the system cards of OpenAI and Anthropic, they put the capabilities of around on bio and chemical, so models being able to just like actually help in order to produce them at higher risk levels over time, which makes me personally just like, you know, concerned about what happens if some bad actors are going to have access.

2:38:15That's also true on the commercial side, that the more that we delegate to AI, if malicious actors are going to gain access, there is potentially going to be a whole new wave of viruses. And I think the near future is AI augmenting attackers and being used as part of the attack surface. Over a longer horizon of time, we need to also make sure how we take care of rogue actions that are done by the AI itself. Sure. Well, good luck to you. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Come back on. I expect in the next, at least in the next two years, probably the next year, there's going to be some type of event, and we're going to think we've got to call Dan to break this down.

2:38:55But hopefully you prevent it before it ever happens. It would be my pleasure both to prevent it but also to come back on the show. Thank you so much. Let's do it. Congrats with Marcus. Thank you. Bye-bye. Jensen Wong is a huge Nano Banana fan. Love to see that. And Sundar Pichai quote posts him and says, mine too. It made his day. They're both very happy. Also, Joe Gebbia is shouting out Breathe Realm. Yes. I threw this in here. new air freshener company. The team, when we moved into the studio, bought a bunch of air fresheners. I said, throw those away. They release a bunch of toxic chemicals in the air that you then breathe that then go throughout your body.

2:39:42Sarah, my wife, actually invested in this company years ago. So it took a while to get out to launch. But cool to see that. The new standard of air care. Go check it out. The saffron citrus. and Verbena Santal. Sounds delightful. Well, next up we have Ben from Braille coming in the studio, working on Stablecoin infrastructure. In the room and into the TVP at Ultradone. Welcome to the stream, Ben. How are you doing? What's happening? I'm doing good. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. Kick us off with an introduction. Good to see you again, actually. I think the last time we spoke was probably 2022.

2:40:25It feels like a decade ago. Yeah, I think I might have been trying to, like, shill you on doing something with stable coins, and we were trying to get started, to be honest. You know, like, it also takes a minute, as you know. Yeah, yeah. Catch us up to, I mean, since it's your first time on the show, quick history on yourself, and then we'll get into Braille and everything you've been working on. Yeah, cool. Well, hey, guys, I've been building fintech companies for, I think longer than fintech's been a word. I worked on one for about 10, 12 years. Took a couple of years off, kind of went for a long walk in the woods and then kind of started trying to think about what's next.

2:41:03And when we were workshopping ideas, it became pretty obvious that, you know, like blockchains were going to surpass traditional databases in terms of like speed and costs, which is great for financial transactions. And stable coins were the obvious way to fill the space, but they were just super expensive to actually create. And so when we started, it was kind of like the litmus test or the baseline was like 100 million bucks in two years to create one of these things. It took us two and a half years to do it, but we got it down to a dollar in a minute, where any business or anyone that wants to go launch a stablecoin can go launch it.

2:41:34And basically the reason people love these things is because it reduces cost and makes revenue. Okay. First question, why do we need Infinity stablecoins? I'm sure you have a good answer. I mean, why do we need anything? It's like there are lots of different types of t-shirts in the world. Why do we need so many different types of t-shirts? People like to customize things. And I think that we now live in a world where customizing your own type of money is possible. Some group of people are going to do it because it's just fun. Other people are going to do it because it's a good business decision to reduce costs.

2:42:11Other will do it because it's a good business decision and they're going to make a bunch of revenue. And so generally speaking, the reason people, I think, are going to create more of these things once the barrier comes down to actually create more is just that they're fun, they reduce costs, and they make money. What is the actual mechanics if somebody goes to Braille.xyz today and creates a stablecoin? Like what's happening under the hood? You know, it looks and feels a lot like using like a traditional fintech product. It's almost like you're just depositing money. If you've ever used PayPal, if you've ever used Venmo, if you've ever used Coinbase, if you have a Circle Mint account, it's the same for all these tools.

2:42:51You just put money in. And in our case, you get a custom stablecoin back out. And then you can go use that in your business. You can exchange it with any number of other stablecoins. You can use it on, I don't know, 10, 12 different blockchains. And it's compatible with our assets, Circle assets, Paxos assets. So it's like it just works with all the popular stablecoins. And so and then once it's created, let's say somebody creates$1 ,000 worth of a new stablecoin. How does like swap functionality work when you have these sort of like new pairs? So it's all actually built in. So when a new stablecoin gets created and deployed, it's all reverse compatible.

2:43:32So let's say that you go create your own stablecoin. You've got$1 ,000 sitting there. You can use the APIs and swap it in between 50 other stables, again, some even that we don't issue at really no cost. And you can swap it at the speed of basically the chain confirmations. So there's no slippage. And it's, you know, like we think pretty ideal in that way. And then obviously as these programs start to grow out into DeFi, there's a need to work with customers to set up different liquidity pools and things like that to make sure that they maintain peg, work with them on on ramps and off ramps for building into fintech apps and all that good stuff.

2:44:09But, you know, all summable problems, all these things are like, impossible to imagine five years ago. And now all the tech is sort of like right there off the shelf to use for people. What are the what are the key kind of customers that you're excited about working with today? Kind of what are the categories? We work a lot with blockchain ecosystems. So we just launched LightSpark. We're doing a lot of work right now with Canton, which is like an institutional privacy focused blockchain. And there are like eight more of these in development. I think we've done another 12. And then there's kind of like a fast follow once the chains are implemented to what are the use cases on the chain.

2:44:46For us, a lot of that is like payments. People love these things because it reduces costs, increases revenue. It's like a revenue source they never had access to in a pretty stablecoin world. There are embedded finance applications, which is just like building on blockchain infrastructure instead of kind of the last version of things. And then there are all these other kinds of trailing use cases. But right now we see a ton in the blockchain ecosystems, a lot in payments and a lot in embedded finance, financial institutions as well. But let's be honest, those are a little bit more hypothetical, I think, at the moment.

2:45:17What's the status of those like state-based stable coins? And you mean like U.S. states? Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't it Montana that launched one? And it seemed like, well, America already has a stable coin. USD. I was kind of confused. Wyoming, maybe. Yeah, you got it. It's it's I think it's FRNT in Wyoming. And you know, it's even like it once you can launch these things, states want to launch them themselves, banks want to launch them themselves, fintech companies wants to want to launch them. And the rationale for it is always the same, like, reduce costs, make money, you know, and maybe the fun side is customization.

2:45:51You know, developers like to customize. And so I think that's why we really believe like, there's just going to be a number of these things. And one of the challenges is just making it interoperable between the deployments and making it easy for developers to build it into their app. And, you know, our sort of like value add is we just take care of the regulation and we just take care of the tech so that you can build whatever product you want to build on top of the new stablecoin. What any any predictions on on stablecoin market caps over the next few years? I mean, there's a lot flying around from, you know, TradFi trying to just understand the opportunity to people that are, you know, more crypto native that are that are super bullish themselves.

2:46:33But but how are you thinking about it? I mean, I think the number goes up, gentlemen. It's like you guys know how big certain like name brand fintech apps are. as these name brand fintech apps roll out their own blockchains and their own stable coins, the market cap of crypto generally is going to move. And so suddenly these new like corporate chains, they're going to be top 10, top 20 chains the day they're rolled out, at least in terms of like AUM and stable coins deployed on that chain. And so in a world where most of the world is still off chain, it's like, imagine what happens when the repo market comes on chain.

2:47:11It like, you can't even compare what's possible in terms of where we're at. At least I don't think so. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations. Congrats on the lunch. It's great to see you. Have a good day. Good to see you, Ben. Thanks, guys. Good to see you. Bobby Cosmic in the chat has a point that I think I agree with. All these different coins remind me of pre-1863 currency in the U.S. before the National Banking Act of 1863. Bank notes were issued by thousands of different state chartered banks, which often had weak oversight and issued notes that could lose value or be difficult to exchange outside their local areas.

2:47:51And I do, I do wonder if there's some sort of like, you know, network effect. I mean, it's like everyone spins up their own stable coin and then you need interaction between all of them. So then like someone's trying to take an extra cut at some point and, and, and you would, uh, and maybe like it all trades through and everyone gets lower cost. But if there's one standard for interchain exchange, then they could take a cut. It is odd that we're in this explosion of stablecoins at this point. But everyone's sick of paying high transaction fees, I suppose. Yeah, I think my immediate thought is I can understand why every institution and company wants a stablecoin if you're a fintech company and you're moving a lot of money.

2:48:40I can understand that. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, it's like... There's a lot of different types of companies where, of course, they would want a stablecoin, but are they providing value to the users, right? Yeah, yeah. The promise of many stablecoin projects, though, was like, hey, use ours. It's low fees. So it's like, is that the arbitrage? Do you go even lower fees? Below, because it's not 3%, right? Yeah. So, and I know that, I mean, that was the original pitch for Bitcoin was like, it should cost nothing to, it's electronic money. It costs nothing to move. But they're definitely, they're definitely going lower, you know, Braille's going lower in the stack, right?

2:49:18Yeah. It's like Circle was like, here's, we're going to, we're going to issue the stable coin and we're going to give you infrastructure to, to leverage them. And then this is going, you know, a layer deeper and just saying, we'll just make you the stable coin itself. In other breaking news, Cluelay mentioned us in their blog on going viral and shared some stats about TBPN posting a lot of clips with views ranging from 5K to as high as 500 ,000. There's a reason for this. Some of the content does not deserve to go viral. Roy Lee is stressing the idea that you cannot inherently make an undeserving tweet go viral.

2:49:59Viral sense gets you from one to a hundred, not from zero to one. He's stressing like the importance of being able to identify viral concepts. Obviously, they put a ton of work into the content that they post. But the interesting takeaway here is what are the benefits of going viral? There are only two, top of funnel for your users, two, to get your mission seen by potential hires. Importantly, virality does not equal top of funnel. only converting content will get you downloads and you must make sure your viral bets are converting or at least have a chance to be in the future which is interesting with clearly because it's two-stepped act they go they need to go viral and entertain and create something that's like funny or or controversial or something that everyone watches but then they also have to get you to go to the website download and pay for the for the product sure and and that and that's hard here where does clearly stand clearly has more than enough consistent usage that we can reliably test every single one of our new features against a pool of users and know where the product is retentive and where it is not.

2:50:59Cluelay is post-PMF in a few areas. Interviews, certain quizzes, and homework that require an undetectable AI. Students, that's enterprise clients who've spent time building out custom workflows for, but conquering any of these will not end in the grander vision. We have our eyes on the ultimate commuter interface for multimodal AI. Same vision that Zuck has his eyes on. With AI mode. Always on live AI. We need faster magic moments and larger tangential consumer markets. We spent the last few months working on making sure the product works for our more general users. There's a magic moment that exists with Cluely but does not exist for all the markets that interest us yet.

2:51:45The truth is it is actually quite hard to build software that feels truly magical to everyone. It takes a lot of time. That feels honest. That feels honest, and I don't think anybody would disagree. There's an interesting stat in here. He says, in fact, some of our meme viral videos, the most views, 50 million views, generated almost zero downloads despite being viral. So conversion, if you're using viral marketing, conversion actually matters. There's probably a question about, you know, Built Rewards did that big TikTok campaign. They have 88 ,000 followers, 1.4 million likes on their Roomies series.

2:52:20and the headline numbers look really good, this could be extremely high converting. It could be extremely low converting. It's an open question as to, and when you're doing viral marketing, you have to understand that the bottom of the funnel matters just as much as the actual views and top of funnel. Totally. Any other breaking news you want to cover? I don't think so. I think everybody's relaxing after a busy day yesterday. Yes. Well, we will see you tomorrow. I can't wait to get back with the mic. Have a fantastic day. We'll see you on Friday. Thank you, folks. Have a good rest of your day.

2:53:00Great to see all your names. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Bye.