MetaCloud, Bending Spoons IPO with Founder Luca Ferrari, Amble Founder Joins | Mark Pincus, Shubh Sinha, Wayne Ting, Jeffery Liu & Jon Wang, Eliot Pence, Luca Ferrari, Nick Grossman, Julian Hoenig

30:54Then you watch some of his videos and there's no metaglasses pranks, no vine boom sound effects, no meme clips interspersed, no undisclosed gambling ads, no Dexter background music. I don't know the Dexter background music thing. I'm not online enough for that. I think you would probably recognize the sound. You would probably recognize. It's just kind of like meme background music at this point. Yeah. Dexter background music. I've got to figure this out. Bullpen is planning his bachelor party for November. He's not getting married. Just feel like the fellas need to let loose a little. What's that?

31:33Interesting idea. Interesting idea. Which one? Christopher Nolan went to an AMC Burbank 16 fairly often. Team loves it. We're seeing the new Nolan movie. We just bought tickets. We got a crew assembled for the Odyssey. We're very excited. Look at this. kind of blown up his spot a little bit. Yeah, really. Let the man just enjoy a film and a big bucket of popcorn. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Mark Pincus, the author of Life at the Speed of Play.

32:15He's with us in the TV pin Ultradone. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you doing? I'm great It's good to meet you guys Online Great to have you here After a whirlwind media tour I feel like you probably Have worked through all your Best bits at this point This is going to be the finale We can play the hits We can also just go a different way I want to play the hits Where do you want to start, Jordy? Where should we start? We're supposed to be the very first one No, we were traveling. We got rescheduled. It was terrible. It was on us. No, but I hope this is the first of many. It's great to have you on.

32:56Me too. Yeah. I mean, let's start with a book. I want to know, like, before the actual, before the thesis came together, like, why write a book at all? Are people even reading books these days? I don't know. We see these charts of, like, books just falling off entirely. What was the, is it about legacy? Authors should do that. They should have, they should, you should put something in the book that's just like, Hey reader, I want you to pause for a second. If you ever meet me in person, I will ask you for the code word. This is the code word. Easter eggs. Yeah. Easter egg. Reward you for making it this far.

33:32And if you tell me, I love your book, I will ask you for the code word. Oh, there you go. But yeah, I want to hear about just the general motivations and the general. I think everyone should, I think you should build a house and write a book one time because neither one ends up feeling like it was, you know, the right return on the investment of time. But you have this passion in you and you should be all in and get it out. One time. And this is my one time. I'd say that there was just a lot of lessons and a whole playbook built up across five companies and in building Zynga. And I created a course at Stanford Business School and Stanford CS.

34:23And I give this advice over and over to founders and even people running companies at scale. And I just said, I might as well get in a book. And I think that my reference was Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book. And I thought it's a big reach goal. But if my book can be referenceable 10 years later like that, then it's of use. Yeah. Where do you think you either differ with the Zero to One thinking? Do you think it needs expansions, updates? What needs to be added to the canon that isn't in Zero to One? well, like what, what to actually do. So, I mean, zero to one is I just reread it a year ago and, and it motivated me again.

35:16And I was like, Oh yeah, I love the moral arbitrage and the monopoly. And it's these big ideas that you love and you can repeat, but it's not a, it's not a how to guide or a playbook. And I think so many people have ideas and they either don't pursue them. And I think in this new world, AI, that's a shame because the bar is so low or they do. And they fail for the wrong reasons. I think you guys have probably seen this too. So many people who they have a great idea, but it's buried in a losing product. And so the core thesis that I've been saying over and over to myself and other people across my career is that that it once you realize that you have winning instincts and you've attached them to losing ideas it changes everything and that's how you change your odds of success yeah yeah I've heard that a plus entrepreneur with a c plus market or c plus opportunity it's a plus idea yeah is the enemy of an a because it's good enough to get funding and get a team.

36:19And yeah, it's funny. Cause when I was, when I was, uh, like around maybe senior year of college, I was working on a product and I felt like I was getting like two different types of advice. Like one is like, don't listen to anyone just like, you know, advice is worthless. Just like do, do, do, and you'll, and you'll figure it out. And then, uh, and then, and then on the other side, uh, you know, people are giving you, you know, advice and sort of playbooks. And I distinctly remember one meeting that I had where somebody who's now a friend was like, you're super talented. This idea, like it's okay, but it's not great.

36:56And it's going to hold you back from your potential. And I, and I just like, didn't fully listen, but it's just stuck in my head. Since that point, right? We see founders who are talented and they are just sticking with an idea that's just not quite right or not that good. And it's because there's something in their gut that they know is amazing. And that was me. I mean, I talk a lot about in the book that I, this is not a humble brag. Okay. I managed to fail. I created one of the first three social networks, tribe.net. And there were probably 10 launched in that two or three year period, including Facebook and MySpace and Tagged and Bebop.

37:40Eight of the 10 probably made it, were successful on some level. I was probably amongst the two that weren't. And so it took an act of willpower to fail. And I had that much will. I was so determined to stick with this one losing idea that really, by the time I got to Zynga, I was just not going to do that again. And, and I think that's a big message in the book. And I think it's, I, I still need to hear that message today because we fall in love with our ideas. Yeah. How much, uh, like to you, what is the balance between some ideas? Like I find this in consumer, like quite a, quite a bit more than, than enterprise.

38:24Cause it typically is a lot more defined, but in consumer, like there's ideas that I've been pitched and I'm like, that's a terrible idea. And then like the founder, you know, uh, just does it and it, and it totally works. And sometimes it's unpredictable. And I think you can like tune your intuition like quite a bit, but it can never be like a hundred percent crystal ball. You just know exactly whether an idea is going to work or not. Like, what is your, what has been your framework of, uh, yeah, like what's the point where you're like, I'm not 100 % sure this idea will work, but it's worth putting in the three weeks or three months or whatever time is necessary to actually get the reality check to the idea?

39:07Well, I think that we have idea veins or instinct veins. And so there's a zone that you have an instinct around. And then I have this framework proven better new, which is a way to kind of de-risk that and keep ourselves out of trouble. So it's like just narrow down where your idea is new or novel and wherever it's not, look for what's already proven and copy it. And people like Nikita Bear have really, really been good at that. And he's done kind of the same product over and over again, and it's worked each time. So I think that at least means you're not going to feel for the wrong reason and you get a lot more shots on goal.

39:52And in consumer, even much more than enterprise, it really is, if you test more ideas in a week than the industry you're in can test in a year, you probably have a 4 or 5x advantage, higher odds of success. And I'll also say that the reality in consumer is where you see traction, there's a good idea. and where you don't see traction is not a good idea. And that might sound kind of dumb, but I find in consumer,

40:28you're better off backing an unproven entrepreneur who's found for whatever reason product market fit than a proven entrepreneur like me with no product market fit. And that's just an unfortunate reality. I have a bunch of questions. I have a fun thought exercise. So John and I have had this debate of, is it possible to build a competitor to Instagram? And I think that I would like to see someone try, because I believe the capital markets are in a state right now that even though it's insane and there's 99 % chance it doesn't work, like there's going to be people that would take the bet. And you have Instagram, which is one of the most popular products in the entire world.

41:20And the company is like very focused on like other things, right? Like they're focused on AI and now a cloud business. And, and, uh, maybe the company overall doesn't fully appreciate just how amazing the business is. Um, and it, and it still continues to grow. And so I want to believe that it's possible to, for a smart team to actually go and create something that would actually compete in that category. John is like, it's just not possible. It's over. It's like network effects and the scale and the social game that it's turned into. But I want to believe, I'm curious what your view is. Well, one of these instinct veins that I talk about is the cocktail party.

42:05And originally, like there was a cocktail party on Napster and then there was a cocktail party on Friendster and then Facebook and now Instagram. And once the cocktail party is there and working, it is hard to get people to move. But these cocktail parties can wear out and kind of lose their excitement or appeal. And in the case of Instagram today, I think it's lost a lot of its original value to us, which was social networking. It was the kind of serendipity that we get at a cocktail party. And they, for maybe business reasons, they pursued engagement. They want to be more like TikTok and get you, be more entertainment, reels.

42:52And so I do think that that opens up an opportunity. I don't know if you guys spend much time thinking about net promoter score. It used to be really popular. NPS. There's a funny thing. You could go research this now or maybe AI could simulate it for you even quicker. I would bet that today users of Instagram probably have an NPS of 35. The day they quit, it's like quitting cigarettes. It's probably a minus 35. That's usually the sign of some weakness in your product or brand. Looking at that on the exit, they're not promoting it. In fact, they're proud that they've given up this bad habit. And what I would say though, is there probably has to be a new - The only thing, it's a small sample size, but the friends that I know that quit Instagram, they end up still sending me memes from their business accounts.

43:53And I'm like, all right, I get it. You quit it. They can't give up the addiction. Yeah, I think they're actually like they're they're signaling that they've quit. But but they're they're still like, you know, having a cheeky drag here and there. Well, I got to say, I I got my drags down to like I probably use Instagram once a month. And then I find myself just drawn into time wasting. I'm on Twitter or X. That's like my social network, my drug of choice. I tell myself it's more valuable content. But, you know, that's what we do. Yeah, I look at it as like it's an opportunity to do whatever the inverse of a meditation is, right?

44:32In a meditation, you're sitting there, you're like, I'm going to let the thoughts flow through, but I'm not going to hang on to them, whatever your approach is. And it's like, what if you could add 20 new ideas to your head every 10 seconds? Would you do that? And it's like, here's drone warfare, and here's a protest somewhere else, and like, here's some startup who's rage baiting you, you know, it's, but it's addictive, whatever it is. It is. But I would say that it's probably, you need a shift. You need something new, I think, to get consumers, to get all of us. We are lazy and apathetic and low attention span.

45:11And so, you know, no one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something probably AI and agents that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party. But I do believe it'll happen. Even though I'm skeptical about the particular go-to-market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital. Because if you go back to zero to one, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're very enduring. And everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. And so I guess I have been surprised, even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network.

45:54I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a$1 billion pre-market round. Well, yeah, so that's what I'm saying. Some attempts by the venture capital community to actually buy their way into network effect. Yeah, you can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars. And like TikTok is evidence of that. TikTok was spending how much money on Meta, how much money on Snap, all these other platforms. They were probably the biggest advertiser on the internet for a while. Yeah, yeah, for a minute there. And so I do think it's possible. And on Snap, I think they were getting their users from social networks.

46:24Yeah, yeah. But I would just say your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you've got to pull the camera back and just also say we're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator, probably less than 10 % of their companies are consumer. I'm investing in some consumer, but it's after I see traction and it feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. I just think distribution is pretty broken, even though AI feels like a new platform. At a consumer level, it's not. We have a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember We're so early.

47:08GPT is a single-player experience. There is no multiplayer version of Cloud or GPT. There is no app connection. None of the things that enabled Zynga or MySpace was started. YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. There isn't an obvious way to jumpstart distribution. And I think VCs rightly want to see something predictable. And so the small number, a company called FOMO announced a big round last week, and I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction. Yeah. How do you think vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development?

48:02because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very, very close to some inflection point there. The indie dev community is already booming, but how do you think it'll play out? Like a thousand flowers bloom. We've been playing Capybara Simulator. The simulators are fun, but yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that there's like a business opportunity there if it will just be more like the D2C boom where there were a ton of small brands, a couple breakouts, but by and large, it was just that, oh, there's a ton of solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today, and that's great.

48:43Right. It's a$280 billion industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation. I think games have gotten really boring and have kind of stagnated, and I think it's because distribution's broken. Will AI change distribution? Probably on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas like what some of the hyper-casual game companies, like a company called Rollick that Zynga bought was brilliant at that. They would say, what was TikTokable? so they would figure out what's a TikTok meme. They made a game in a week called High Heels that became the number one game in the App Store.

49:33So that happened. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to, well, okay, AI can reduce the cost. Sure, and I think it is making headway in reducing the cost, but I don't think you get hits in games because of less cost. you get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. And I do think AAA will come down from 100 million to maybe 30 million, but I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market. It's so fascinating that I can't think of a single, even media asset game, anything like that, where AI created the hit factor, whatever. like the we we we go back to the harry potter balenciaga video that was one of the first ai videos that really went went super viral and people were like whoa this is actually entertaining and interesting yeah and it's always like the human that use the ai to do something that they wouldn't have done yeah if they had just had an idea pre-ai because it would be like well i'm not going to pay for all the cgi to do you know it would have just been way too much work but right The human still is the hit maker.

50:51We still got it. Yeah, and even if it's awkward because when we were doing games, there was Flash, we were doing web games, and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower. But AI is really well suited for web languages and web gaming. web gaming is 1.9 billion out of 280 billion. So a lot of people are betting that 3JS is going to unlock innovation and growth, but you're going to have to see people embrace web gaming, which is a tough bet. How do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting challenge.

51:43they're kind of I don't think they necessarily at least they don't necessarily know how they want to approach it or they haven't made it clear yet. They've made it hard for these apps to you know I think they kind of froze updates on a bunch of apps and said like you know we're just basically like saying like your business is like over until we figure something out. So clearly they want to make money from it and they want to protect users which I think are both you know developers are going to be annoyed at or at least good developers will be annoyed at both of those things. But it seems like a tough one where users are clearly going to want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences that they can imagine and then share with friends.

52:28But it feels like it's at odds with all of Apple's kind of principles. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I don't think that there is a real incentive for Apple to do anything about that. And I don't think it doesn't feel like that's not the energy I get from Apple. It's not the vibe is vibe coding. Yeah. And I don't even see Apple doing anything to help distribution of the apps that are put out on their platform now. I have a hard time seeing them motivated to help people put out tons more apps. I think it's more likely that that logjam gets broken because somebody makes an app container that somehow Apple allows people to keep changing massive amounts of change of content inside.

53:31I mean, almost like a Roblox, but it hurts my brain to figure out how that's going to happen. And Vibe coding, I think Claude Code, Codex, I think automating coding and using co-working agents has, obviously, you don't need me to tell you that has legs. I think that's going to go somewhere. but vibe coding almost feels like the misstart we had with blogging and GeoCities where there was a moment where everyone was going to make their own website and they did and then they just weren't very good and it didn't go anywhere there weren't really websites that blew up that were built on top of like GeoCities or maybe I'm dating myself you guys don't even remember those yeah we are like it feels like we're very close to being able to effectively vibe code an ios app in the cloud have it deploy it to test flight and you get that app back on your phone and close that loop entirely on your phone in an apple compliant way now it couldn't go viral because it's not in the store right you might be able to have your agent go and submit it to the store and wait two weeks and then it gets out there, which might be an acceptable flywheel for some developers, but it is like the technology is going to get there quicker than the distribution and like the ideas, I think.

55:07I think you're spot on it. And the ability to test. I'm also surprised this far into this AI cycle that I would have thought that the first thing we'd see is kind of top of the funnel, massive testing of using ads and links and things. and tell your agent to spend all night testing and come back in the morning with the winning variant. I don't know about you guys. I don't see even one successful company or service offering that, and I don't find any founders doing that. It's more you can build something in three months that would have taken a year or two. It's more of I can get to my prototype faster, but not I can test a lot of ideas faster.

55:54Speaking of ads, do you think hyper casual games should be allowed to advertise with fake CGI versions of a different game to promote the install of their very basic probably pick three game? Hmm. Wow. Now we're getting to at a class level. Should they be allowed at a morality level? I'd say it's. I don't like it. I mean, I think it's misrepresenting. I wouldn't blame Apple for taking somebody down for that because it's misrepresenting things. It's a bad user experience. now what i would be okay with is what we did in the beginning of zynga is i would go i'd put up a link for some amazing new game you want to try and it would go to 404 page not found because i was just testing for heat yeah and interest yeah so i or eventually we got more sophisticated and say you know will you'll be the first to know about this game you know i had a i had an experiment record the fake game have it have an agent vibe code you a real version of the fake game because a lot of people they want to play the fake game but the fake game doesn't actually have the the flywheel of you will keep playing it you'll play it for a couple minutes and then you'll get bored and so they have to funnel you to something else jordy i had a product in college i was taking a lot of film photos and there was like it was a 30 minute drive to the closest place to get film developed reliably and i was quite frustrated by it so i wanted to make like effectively a subscription service they would send you one or two rolls of film a month and you just send it back and they would develop it and upload it for you and whatever and uh to test it i just like ran a bunch of facebook ads at a landing page and i actually got i think i had like a 15 20 cac or something at the time facebook ads were a lot cheaper back then ended up not pursuing it but i just refunded everyone like obviously right afterwards because i wasn't offering i wasn't able to offer the service they're just like uh hey sorry like you know we over that's cool oversold or whatever but uh best way to test something yeah back to the book uh peter teal didn't uh a reddit ama after zero to one uh launched and someone asked him what is the straussian reading of zero to one and he said don't become an entrepreneur which is a very Funny response.

58:29What is the Straussian reading of life at the speed of play? I would, not to be completely a carbon copy, but I would say don't become a product founder. Don't do it if you want to make money. Don't go be a product founder if you think this is the best path to be rich and successful. I end the book by saying, how ambitious are you? Everyone says I'm an 11 on a 10 scale, but then the question is, the flip side of that coin is what are you willing to sacrifice to get to that place? Would you toil on obscurity for 10 years in order to have an 80 % chance of the greatest home run of your life? Or would you take kind of an 80 % chance of a first base hit in one to two years?

59:34And most people would take the latter, and that's why they stay in their jobs or careers. Or that's why even once we go found a company, I think we make all these compromises to de-risk it. Yeah. Is that the correct question to ask to assess someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80 percent chance of a home run in 10 years versus, you know, 20 percent chance of base hit or something like that? Or sorry, vice versa. I'd like that. Yeah, 80 percent. Those are good odds. But or are there other questions that you can dig into when you're talking to a founder to actually assess their level of ambition?

1:00:15um i think you can pretty quickly you guys have seen this too get get a sense of what's motivating somebody and and why they're doing this and i think i think that the best founders have a passion for this that that goes beyond this one business or opportunity and they need that because it's probably going to fail. I think that there's a question like, why are some founders repeating success and some have one big success? I think it is your commitment and willpower. If you're more committed to that, because we've talked about founder mode, and there's all these moments where I think as a founder, we have to have real courage, but it's not courage to go against the world, it's usually courage to go against our own team, our own investors, because we've promised them things.

1:01:15We've built expectations with them. And now we have to tell them we are wrong. And you come in on Monday and you're like, I just saw another product the competitor had last week and what we're doing is totally wrong. And people have complained working with Mark is like third grade soccer. Every Monday he wants to chase another ball. And they're not wrong a lot of the time because I'm trying to be intellectually honest and I can burn people out that way, you know, but it's because I'm more committed to winning than I am kind of harmony or even keeping this team with me. Um, so I think that's more of the thread that I look for is, do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than, you know, being liked or respected.

1:02:04Yeah. It's so, it's so interesting because you have, I've been in that mode too, where third grade soccer strategy where, and I think that comes from like fundamental knowing that what you're working on is there's something wrong with the idea, at least in the early days for me, because with, with, with, with, with our, with our, with the podcast early on, even when we literally had like a hundred viewers, I didn't have that. I didn't have that like third grade soccer strategy. It was just like, this is a good product. And I know because there's people I trust that are not lying to me. And they say like, this is great.

1:02:41Keep doing it. And so like we had the blinders on, but I've been in that mode. And in hindsight, where you're just kind of like, oh, like, let's try this other variation of this thing, or let's, you know, we need to go in a totally different direction. And that was, it comes off as scattered. but if you're able to admit that it's more like you need to be intellectually honest with yourself and your team that you're scattered because there's something that's fundamentally off with the approach. Right. You knew that you liked this product that you, I mean, I think, and in feedback loops you got from people around you, like you felt good about it and they liked it.

1:03:18You're like, okay, if it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patient's question. that's different than you kind of feel in the pit of your stomach. It's just not that good. I think a lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building and then when we finally see it, it's usually never as good in code as it was in our mind. What do you do? That's happened to me so often in games. This will be so cool and then we build it. Or we see a competitor who has that and I want to send them a thank you note because I'm like, thank you for building my bad idea for me. I'm definitely not going to do that now.

1:03:59But when you, it's kind of like love, you know, finding your partner. I think when you do find the person, you're not asking, is this right? You're not asking other people, what do you think of her, you know? Totally. You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house. Everyone should write a book. was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it was it appropriate to have it on that list what was that like well this is the second company i took public i had a company called support.com that took public in 2000 on the last day of the ipo window because it was because it was enterprise software yeah our vcs had no interest in the company until the consumer fell apart.

1:04:45You know, we had 170 million bookings. We were able to go public. I, I think it's a false dream. I mean, I, and I think I even felt it a little bit then, but I for sure, by the time I got to Zynga, I didn't want to go public. We were forced to go public. We, we were incredibly profitable. We had over a billion dollars on our balance sheet when we went public, but we were forced because of the SEC rules, which Obama changed with the Startup Act. And there's all this pressure because people want your stock and they're finding ways to buy it through side letters. And then that's exposing you. And there's all kinds of things.

1:05:26We're seeing it happen now with Anthropic. And you write really, really mean letters and policies, scaring them and saying, like Anthropic has, that we're not going to recognize your stock if it wasn't issued to you. But in the end, you still, the SEC is going to see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. So anyway, we were forced to go public. So was Facebook. So was LinkedIn. This other class of companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you that there's anything that's going to help your company about going public, I think nine times out of ten, they're lying to you.

1:06:03Now, SpaceX and these large-cap AI companies, they legitimately need access to capital markets. And so they are optimizing for that. If you don't have that need for capital market access, there is no benefit. It's only bad. In fact, you have so many employees who leave because they say, yeah, I always wanted to be at a company that went public. It was on my bucket list. Goodbye. And so you give them this liquidity, you know, you give them this thing on their resume. And so now they're gone. Your culture changes. Ours did. And now, you know, Michael Dell once told me before he took his company private and then public again, that the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with his employees because he said, you know, they get their views from stock chat rooms and what their family is reading and not from Michael Dell.

1:07:04And so it's, no, it gives you like five other jobs as a CEO that you don't need. Like you should be focused on your product, you know, customer product team, not investor IPO, you know, media. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is life at the speed of play. It's available everywhere. Books are sold. Go pick up a copy. Congratulations on the launch and let's do this again soon. I have a million more questions. Yeah, we can go all over the place. Yeah, there's so many more topics to get into. This would be great. Yeah, I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing, which - Yeah, we didn't even get to Snapchat.

1:07:45Yeah, we didn't get to Snapchat. that's a whole show that's a whole show let's do it soon come back at one maybe have me and Evan on together we can debate like whether you know this this whole journey into AR goggles is is the best thing shareholders love the specs yes shareholders really love the specs we'll get to the well thank you so much no I mean wait till we see how many sell I think you know I'm I'm pricing in I'm pricing in 20 I'm gonna I'm pricing in 20 pairs 20 pairs but I think it could there's a chance That's the accident surprises to the upside. It could. It could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

1:08:22Have a great rest. Great to see you, Mark. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Mark just gave the anti-ad for going public. Hey, hey, if you need to raise capital, if you want to raise the most capital, you got to go to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the endorsement that we're proud to give. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Shubh Sinha from Integral is the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Thanks for having me. Just okay. Just okay.

1:08:53On this big day. I'm riding the highs and the lows and getting back up right now. That's pretty normal for the entrepreneurial journey, but take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How'd you get here? What are you building? What's the news today? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited today. We actually just announced an$18 million Series A for my company, Integral. And so the gong.

1:09:24It was a good warm-up hit. Had to get the real hit in there. You like to warm up the gong on this show. Double hit. I don't think we've done that before. It was a warm-up hit and then the real hit. Yeah, yeah. That was special for Integral. So tell us about Integral. Yeah, so what Integral does is we sanitize proprietary real-world data sets such that AI builders can get very bespoke, very sensitive data sets, but that data holders can also make sure that privacy and compliance is adhered to. And so this looks like medical records, financial transactions, et cetera. A lot of this contains the real-world human behavior patterns that people like you and me have.

1:10:01And there's a ton of individuals and enterprises who are now monetizing it since the AI companies and the AI builders want it. That being said, the builders want the signal. They don't want the secret values. They don't want the proprietary secrets, so to speak. And so Integral sits in the middle where we ensure that through privacy engineering, both with our privacy teams and our engineering teams, we can retain the utility in the signal while also ensuring that privacy and regulatory and contractual. Yeah, so how about this for an example? There's been examples of a company buying a company just for the data around how that company was operating, like just for the Slack.

1:10:43But then you can imagine a Slack, there's so many things that, so much information in Slack that, again, you talked about as Signal, but not necessarily information that should be available for even people, let's say working at the labs to see, right? That's like PII, et cetera. That's right. And folks at the labs don't even necessarily want to see that, right? They want the context of it all. And so it's a real win-win for data holders who want privacy and trust and also revenue. And then the lab or the AI builder who wants to ensure that they're not stepping into anything they shouldn't be stepping into, but they get that value.

1:11:19What are some types of companies that have valuable data that don't know that it's valuable And it would be something that they could monetize if they were, let's say, working with you. For sure. And that's one of the bets that we're making, that there's this new proprietary data economy of individuals and enterprises. And so we've seen kind of all across the board, just given the kind of newness of the economy, the types of data sets that are coming in and the bespoke demand. So we've seen, for example, like mid-market hospitals that see compressing revenues, but have a very, very specific treasure trove of data because they focus on a rare disease or a specific procedure.

1:11:56And that's not available anywhere else. Fitness apps. Some people, you know, they log their entire lives into fitness apps. And these apps have free or paid users. They're only making money off the paid users, but they can then, those apps can then monetize what is that entire real world signal and really continue to make that app free and introduce a ton of value. And it all becomes circular because as AI gets better, a lot of these same companies will actually use it. So it's a real win-win there. What's the state of the art in sanitization and maintaining privacy? We talked to Ed and Ty from the National Design Studio on Monday.

1:12:29They shipped something like less than 15 meg. It's like small language model for sanitizing documents in the browser. It runs very efficiently. Are you just throwing open source models of this? Do you need frontier models for data sanitization? And then is there some worry where it flows back if you're using some closed source model and the frontier lab takes the data that you sent them and stores that improperly? For sure. For sure. And there's a variety of solutions out there mixed with call it human services, BPO is an entire team of PhDs looking at it. So it might just be like regexes, right?

1:13:08Like if it's a phone number, identify it, just turn it into X or number, number, number, sign or something like that. That's right. That's right. So there's a ton of solutions that kind of do that first layer. I think where Integro really specializes is, you know, we got our start in healthcare. And healthcare has all proprietary data. Your doctor should not be putting your data on the internet. And as far as we can tell there. I told my doctor, go ahead. Yeah, because it would be embarrassing for everyone else if like your lean muscle mass and your body fat percentage got leaked out there. Well, if your test levels leaked on the internet, it would be crazy.

1:13:45You'd be getting accused of doping. Yeah, yeah. When did you make the switch from AirPods to wired? I'm also a wired headphone guy, so I'm curious. I hit number five on AirPod placement, and then I went wired. and it turns out, so I'm in New York, and it turns out it's a fashion state as well, so I'm kind of rocking both sides. I think it is entirely superior, and that is even before the fact you can get a bunch of pairs of wired headphones, have them everywhere, and for the cost of just one pair of AirPods. So we're ahead. Congratulations on the round. Business makes a lot of sense, and excited to see where you go with it.

1:14:29Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Wayne Ting from Lime coming in on IPO Day. Wayne, how are you doing? There he is. Congratulations. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Talk to us about the journey to get here today. What does it feel like? What's going through your head right now? it's been a it's been a long journey and i i feel great to see lime go public today and i think yeah it's it's certainly not been a linear journey i mean as you guys know there's been a lot of companies in micromobility and lime is the last man standing in a very tough industry and i think we're the only ones that have built a scalable sustainable profitable business and i think that's why we've earned the right to be a public company today.

1:15:24And I feel like to see Lyme trade publicly was a validation of the hard choices we made along the way, but also a lot of sacrifices to get Lyme to this point. Yeah. What changed culturally recently, or what is the culture like? Because it feels like the key to this business is operational efficiency. Excellence. Excellence, not having a ton of side quests. You have to be focused. This is not a business with some, you know, just crazy, you struck lightning 25 times in a row and you can just make a ton of mistakes. Like operational efficiency is key to the business, correct? You're absolutely right.

1:16:05I describe it as it's a game of inches. I mean, our average vehicle is generating$7.50 of revenue a day. We have to charge the vehicle, fix the vehicle, use spare parts, make sure it's positioned in the right place at the right time. And we do all that, and we generate a 50 % plus cash margins on that$7.50. And because we're able to get that level of margins, we pay back our vehicles in less than one year. But you're talking about a relatively low price point product. small mistakes very quickly adds up and the business becomes upside down, which is what you see most of our competitors. And it's not for the lack of capital.

1:16:47A lot of our competitors raised more money than we did. They were in the market longer. And it's obviously hard because if it was easy, they would have done it too. And I think it also requires a clear view of what actually matters. In the world of limited resources, we are very focused that we want to be the way to crack this business is great hardware, great software, great operations, government relations. In everything else, we have to deprioritize in an incredibly strict way in order to put our limited resources towards the things that actually matter in this business. What is going on on the supply chain side?

1:17:27Is there a constraint on battery capacity because of demand from AI broadly? It feels like the AI industry is sucking up every possible piece of the supply chain from coatings that go into toilets to everything that generates power under the sun. Rocket motors and jet engines are being bolted to the ground to generate power. Is that a constraint or is there an opportunity that demand for energy will ultimately reduce the price of batteries or maybe even extend their life? I haven't seen a shortage on battery cells today, but I think one of the advantages that Lime has is we are vertically integrated in hardware and software.

1:18:15So we have every e-bike e-scooter you see online. We have designed, engineered in-house. We control our own supply chain. We outsource the manufacturing. But because Lime is the world's largest purchaser of e-bikes, e-scooters, it also means we get warning when there are shortages of critical parts. And suppliers want to sell to Lime. So I have seen this year a shortage and inflation in memory chips. I mean, clearly, AI has driven up demand on the high-end memory chips. We don't put the AI chips into a Lime bike or scooter, but I think a lot of this supply chain has rewanted towards manufacturing the high-end.

1:18:55So even if you're using a middle-of-the-road or low-end memory chip, we're seeing significant price inflation. But more importantly, if you don't lock in supply, there's not going to be any supply to be bought in 2027, 2028. But because Lime is the global leader in micromobility, our suppliers are coming to us early and saying, how might we work with you to secure supply for next year? And let's lock in prices now before the kind of price inflation that we see. And I think that's one of the advantages of being vertically integrated. But even this is it. It's a real game of interest. We have to we have to look ahead on not just what's going to happen this year, but what's going to happen in the future.

1:19:35The other supply chain challenge we navigated this past year was Liberation Day. So the president announced a series of tariffs. And some of these tariffs were 150 % on some countries. But because Lime controls our own supply chain, prior to 2026, we started to diversify where we are doing our manufacturing. In fact, we stood up full manufacturing capacity in three different countries. And what that allows us to do is depending on the policies of the day, we can work with different vendors to ensure that not only do we have the right supply, but that we are optimizing for any sort of tariff headwinds that we see.

1:20:22If you're buying off-the-shelf hardware from the same Chinese manufacturer, these are not tools in the box for you. And I feel like a lot of our competitors really couldn't navigate whether it's the tariffs or any sort of component shortages in the same way that Lime can. This is also where scale matters. We are in a winner-take-most market, similar to Uber and Reicher and DoorDash and food delivery. And winner-take-most market is great to be the winner, and that's Lime. It sucks to be second and third place because you don't have the same reliability, the same scale to invest in software, hardware, capital expenditure.

1:21:00And you don't have the scale to actually build proprietary hardware. It doesn't make sense to build your own scooter and e-bike if you only have a fleet of a thousand vehicles. Because you have to amortize that RD cost over a much smaller fleet. We're able to have an independent product strategy because Lime operates over 300 ,000 bikes and scooters in 230 cities, 29 countries around the world. That scale advantage only accelerates now that Lime is public because we have more capital to invest in the business. I think we realize it's important to be vertically integrated. We realize the importance of scale and we build a business to capture those competitive advantages early, which is why Lime is here.

1:21:45And most of our competitors are bankrupt or not doing very well. Yeah. If you could rewind to the early days during the height of the competitive dynamics between, you know, you and Bird and other players, how would you have knowing everything that you know now? What would you have done differently?

1:22:07I think there's lots of small things I would do differently, but I think the overarching strategy, it was the right one. And I think it's proven out by Lime's going public today. I think it starts with, I remember early days of Lime and people still have this debate in Silicon Valley. And it really is a false choice, which is, is growth more important or profitability more important? And that's not really, you need to get your unit economics right to earn the right to grow rapidly. And the incentives in the early days were so that it really incentivized the wrong behavior. Because nobody was making money, the only way to survive is to open up incremental venture capital.

1:22:51And when venture capital firms are saying that what we're going to value you on and what we're going to give you money on is growth, it incentivized companies to chase after unprofitable revenue and, frankly, unsustainable growth, even if it doesn't make financial sense. Yeah, and that would be even like markets, markets that turned out to not be a great fit for this type of mobility solution. Is that like an example? Because I imagine like there was just like, like LA is an interesting city because it's like so dominated by cars and it feels, you know, anyways. And I just remember when I moved to LA during the early days of this, like of the war that you guys had during the heyday of like bird graveyard and all those accounts that probably made everyone's life a lot harder.

1:23:41But it felt like if you're just chasing growth, you're going to go into markets that you know are not even that great because if you don't get that revenue growth, your competitor is going to and they're going to be able to raise more capital, et cetera. Capital fight. Exactly. And in fact, one of the first things I did when I became CEO was shrink our footprint. Because I mean, if you're, if you are running a coffee shop and you're losing money at every cups of every single cup of coffee, you should probably sell fewer cups of coffee and figure out how to make money before you started opening up new coffee shops.

1:24:13And that was the reality of Lyme eight years ago. I think I want to say our gross margins were negative 300%. Every dollar of revenue, we lost three bucks. It was like, before we think about growth, let's fix that. We should be making money at the trip level, at the scooter level. So we shrunk our footprint, focus on the things that matter, fix our unit economics, and then really accelerate a growth once we got that right. And I think the companies that really had a growth at all costs mentality, even when it doesn't make financial sense, actually raise more money for a period of time. But the law of economics catches up to everybody.

1:24:53You can be economically irrational for a period of time, but you can't be economically irrational forever. Even the dumbest VC at some point figures out the game. And I think when the irrational funding left the industry, that's actually when I think Lyme's competitive strengths really became more obvious. Because we were not competing on our ability to raise more capital and to burn it faster. We started to compete on the quality of our hardware, the quality of our operations. and I actually think getting past the hype cycle was a major reason why Lime is here. If we're still in the middle of the hype cycle, then we'll be on that treadmill of crazy growth, burn all this money to raise more money to burn more of that in order to raise more money.

1:25:38And I think that's a loser's game. Congratulations to the whole team. I'm sure when you took the job as CEO, maybe eight out of your 10 closest friends were like, you're absolutely crazy for taking that job, but you did it. You got it here. Congratulations. I actually was texting with a, the day I got, took this job, I was having drinks on the rooftop of a friend's house. And I was there with six friends from Uber. Every single person is like, this is such a dumb decision. It's a no win job. You will never be able to turn this around. You should have never done this. Locked yourself into a trap that you can't get out of.

1:26:16And I just recall, I mean, the fact that you mentioned that I recall this conversation. I was texting with that group of people being like, remember, what you said to me. No, contrarian and right. The Victory Lab. You deserve a drink on top of a roof deck. Hopefully you got one. I'm sure it's been a long day. No, I literally knew. I knew. I was like, these guys, I'm sure around a lot of smart people. It was very contrarian to go and do this and congratulations on an incredible moment. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it and congratulations on all your success as well. This is a great podcast.

1:26:49Really, really appreciate it. Thanks, Wayne. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guests are from Assort Health. We have the co-founders and co-CEOs. Co-CEO Alert. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the show. Introduce yourself for everyone. Love the cowboy hats. Jackson, can you grab mine? Yeah, we got to get some cowboy hats. Get as many as we need.

1:27:22Maybe get John the bear mask over there. I don't need the bear mask. We love that you're in J &J as well. We always, our Slack hack is at JJ. You guys are John and 40. That's right, Jeff and John. Well, tell us about the company. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. Tell us what's going on. Sweet, yeah. So we're John and Jack, co-CEOs of Assort Health. We are an agentic platform for the entire patient journey for provider groups. So healthcare providers, we do everything from work call center automation, voice AI, to handling facts and document processing, patient intake forms, care gap activation and payment collection.

1:28:04I have a bunch more questions, but tell us how much you raised. We got to hit the gong together. Double gong. You go first. No, together. Together? Together. Tell us how much you raised. 222 million dollars total

1:28:25wait when did you guys start the company 2023 2023 all right not bad just a couple hundred million of value creation annually i like it yeah take us through take us through the actual the customer journey, who's buying, how do you interface with both the doctors, the patients, the hospital networks, and the insurers, like healthcare is like famously a seven-party negotiation for everything. But how do you, who do you actually sell to and how do you flow through? Yeah, I'll let Jeff answer that. Yeah. In terms of how we actually approach these provider groups, it's, I think when we first started the business, it was actually educating the market on voice AI agents.

1:29:10Like when we first started, it might've been too early, right? It was, no one else was really thinking about this in early 2023. And I think the landscape has now completely evolved where all of our customers and partners, they know voice AI agents really well. They understand, like they have this burning need and then they're really eager to adopt, right? I think the big difference for us now is we're really overarching, as John mentioned, agentic platform for every part of the patient care navigation journey. That's really our huge, you know, durability and differentiator. It's like you've all experienced this, having to tell your story over and over and over again with the health care system.

1:29:47Like, well, I didn't remember that. Like the patient, like you feel invisible as a patient. Right. So really with our SORT Synapse model, which is now powered by over one hundred and ninety million patient facing interactions, super proprietary data that our agents are generating to feed back into our product and agents to make the next interaction more concierge and personalized. and then also the fact that every product talks to each other, right? If you engage with our voice AI agent inbound and you book your appointment through us, when we send you those patient intake forms for consent and everything, it's going to be 70 % prefilled.

1:30:18And it may also recognize like, hey, you know, John is eligible for colorectal screening. Let's get him booked for that, right? And that I am kind of, you know, make sure to take care of your health, right? So like you got to be really preventative with these things. and then also be like, you know, instead of getting a paper bill, it's going to surface that payment right there to be like, you have this outstanding bill, right? And then let's say on that first inbound call, you're like, you know, you will remember that you prefer Monday mornings. We'll remember what type of voice you like, what tone you like.

1:30:49For us, it might not be, you know, we won't, the next call with the agent, it's not going to repeat itself over and over again for a more elderly patient. It is going to proactively repeat their Medicaid or number back to them, the address, how to get there. So this level of personalization per patient, and really the kind of durability that we've built across all of our products talking to each other, where it's like, I'm never going to turn off iPhone because I have iMessage, right? Talk, you know, that's what we really want to build with patient journey memory to really create the best experience possible for our patients and our, in our practices.

1:31:20What, what, uh, what flipped in the procurement process over the last few years? Cause I mean, if, if we were doing this show and you're building in healthcare, you know, five years ago, you guys would be doing this round after like 12 years or something like that. And you probably have less revenue. You know, it just, it just was always like every healthcare founder would be like, it's an insane slog. And now that's clearly flipped because you guys are growing super quickly. A bunch of other founders have been on the show saying that there's like such insane pull. It's just the magic of, of AI and, and it's real.

1:31:57Are there any other factors at play? How do you guys see it? Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd say there's like two components of market and then of course our unique approach in terms of the market. If you talk to any of these provider groups, it's more challenging than ever to run a business in healthcare, right? You're seeing revenue actually go down every year from re-improvement from insurance. Costs are going up because the cost of working with payers, the cost of administering healthcare, it's literally going up 20 % year over year, right? So they're in this, one of the hardest businesses, every single admin labor person they hire typically has a 40 to 50 % turnover rate on average, right?

1:32:36Per year. So they're just in this really tough position as a business and as a market. And the past 10, 12 years, if you talk to any of these provider groups, CEOs, they have not really seen any change to their technology stack. It's been pretty static. A lot of existing partners have not really innovated in the space because there hasn't really been much appetite or hunger for like AI, right? Historically. And so with this technology, you know, it's really mind blowing. We work with like groups across the entire country, over 200 customers and like we'll fly out to like rural parts of Idaho. And they will literally like hear our demo and be like, this is mind blowing.

1:33:20Like this technology is going to change and transform my practice. Patients will no longer have in the hold for 30 minutes, right? They can actually finally get access to care. You know, elementary school teachers working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. can actually, like, get access to care after the work, right? So stuff like that, really heartwarming to hear. So, yeah, that's been a really inflection point in the market. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Do you guys wear the cowboy hats normally or just for the show? Yeah, we were at our board meetings, all hands, customer events.

1:33:52We just had a huge customer event in Sonoma last week. We went all out. I love it. It's the Asian cowboy. It's very memorable. It looks great. It is. It is. You've got to be being quirky. It's your edge. Yeah, it's your whole edge. Love it. Well, gentlemen, it's been an honor. Have a good one. Cheers. See you out there. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. Our next guest is Elliot Pence from Dominion Dynamics. He's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show.

1:34:30Sorry, that's a special sound effect. It's very dramatic. It's very dramatic. But I feel like it's fitting. It is fitting. Let's do it again. Welcome to the show, Elliot. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Love it. I'm great. It's hard to follow the Asian cowboys, though. I know. Tough act. Tough act. Well, we'll hit the gong even harder for you. Yes. We'll make it up. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the round. Yeah, for sure. So we just raised$100 million. The company is called Dominion Dynamics. It's focused on...

1:35:06We're building a Canadian neoprine. So we connect autonomous systems. We're focused on domain awareness in the Arctic. All software or hardware as well? Software and hardware. We've built 10 things, five hardware, five different platforms. And we're about to build a big drone. Why is that not crazy? Like building one thing is hard. Building 10 things, five things like that. That feels like, you know, obviously$100 million Series A, it's great. But like, you know, isn't there value to focus? Why is this industry different? No, look, the opportunity in Canada is not to focus. It's such a wide opportunity landscape.

1:35:48Canada used to have a very rich and deep defense tech history. You know, you can track it back to Canadair and Bombardier and have all these companies. First autonomous submarine, first two operational drones, first passenger jet. And then we basically went on a starvation diet. So there's talent in tech here, but we've not actually had a large prime for some time. So I think actually the the opportunity is to basically do a land grab and but to do it with software, not just kind of one specific thing. So like in the US, yeah, there's 970 companies that have been backed over the last six years.

1:36:28But in Canada, it's a G7 country without a defense prime. That's insane. Yeah, that's crazy. Is the in America, Palmer Luckey's talked about how the government does not want Anderil to be a monopoly. It can be a great business. It can be a big business. But if it gets to be the only supplier of something, the government will say, look, we're going to give a contract to someone else because we want a diversity of supply chain. Of course, the government's not going to want to have a monopoly. That's not the point. Like the point is have the best capability. Yeah. But it is likely that some of those companies will build the best capability.

1:37:02And if they build the best capability, they should have a monopoly. Okay. How are you thinking about, you guys feel uniquely situated to be able to dominate with Arctic capabilities. How big is the opportunity outside of Canada in your view? Yeah, so what we want to build is a global company. We want it to be a Canadian company headquartered in Canada, majority owned, majority controlled, which it is. We think it's a huge opportunity. What we're really building is not just Arctic, right? The reason we're starting in the Arctic is it's the harshest operating environment in the world. But the other reason is because you have to architect solutions very differently.

1:37:43There's no comms. The hardware situation is insane because power doesn't work. The ground, what they call breeze because of the tundra. So it like cracks and breaks. So runways don't work. If you're building drones, you've got to go 5 ,000 kilometers. So like, it's basically like building for the moon. If you build for the moon, you will build massive moats because it's the hardest thing to do. In terms of Canadian ownership, what does that look like when you go out to fundraise? I see Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Bessemer, amazing funds. I think of them as American funds. Do you draw the line around G7 investors or is there a broader scope that you can think about?

1:38:27or do you think about cap table construction one way or another? 100 % we talk about and think about cap table construction. We've been super intentional about who we bring in. So we wanted to have pension funds in. Canada has$2.5 trillion under management by the Maple 8. So we brought two of those pension funds in. Exactly. BCI and OMERS. Just for the pensioners. Let's give it up for the Canadian pensioners. it's fantastic but you know those those fun like valory trees and that's where they're all global funds right they have mandates to do global investing and we wanted the best of the best so we went out and got the best of the best very cool um what what have been the biggest breakthroughs since you were on the show last i think it was january of this year five months well we did a 5 ,500 kilometer snowmobile operation across the Northwest Passage with Orinette, which is our kit, our back end.

1:39:28Turnball? Yes, exactly. Across the Northwest Passage. Is that a drone snowmobile or you guys are... No, literally snowmobiles. Dudes on snowmobiles for three months across that testing out the communications back end. That's very cool. I love it. No gong for that. We'll hit it again. We'll hit it again.

1:39:56Tremendous, tremendous progress. Great to have you back on. And you're coming on at a good clip. So I'm confident that we'll see you again this year. And you know the name of the communications platform? AuraNet? It's called AuraNet. Exactly. Wow. Powerful. Aura Farming. That's good. I love it. Very on trend. thank you so much for coming on the show and happy Canada Day guys wait it's Canada Day? it's Canada Day we gotta hit that gog again wow four everyone who's listening please text Jeremy Diffon happy Canada Day I'll give you his phone number right here it's oh wow Canada into the round of 16 we're hoping to follow you guys in there congratulations today.

1:40:45Exactly. And thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Yeah, great to see you. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify, founded in Canada, Canadian company. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Good news. We're going to do Canada Day. Canada Day Deep Dive. I'm glad we got one Canadian in the show. But up next, we have an Italian, Luca Ferrari from Bending Spoons, the co-founder and CEO. Luca, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Nice to see you.

1:41:16Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming back on such a great day. Great to have you back. How's it going? Where are you at mentally? Are you relieved? Are you excited? What's it like? Just another day, John. Just another day? I'm exhausted. Exhausted. Okay. You know, I'm an extreme introvert, and there's nothing worse for an extreme introvert to do a road show on a media day. Yeah. Well, we appreciate it. Well, we can just hang out. We'll keep this casual. Well, pretend it's just the three of us catching up. Yeah, how is your approach overall? When Klarna did their IPO, it was literally they had a handful of people on the team.

1:41:55I think it was like sub 10 people. They dropped into the stock exchange. They did the IPO, and they left the next day. What's been your approach overall? Because it's a company-building moment. It's a celebration. but also it can be exhausting to fly a whole bunch of people around the world if you want to do that. I think we've done probably the opposite. NASDAQ told us that we broke a record by bringing over 500 people. Pretty much everybody who could fly on a remote mountain. That's awesome. No, it's been wild. I mean, look, we are a very competitive group, and we're already, if possibly, more motivated than we were before.

1:42:34But at the same time, it's good to pause for a second and acknowledge this milestone. It's not easy. So, you know, happy for it, but also just hungry to show that this is just beginning. Yeah. What was the one liner that resonated on the roadshow most with bankers and investors who were trying to get their head around the company? I mean, the financials. Okay. Just start there. So that helps. When you double the company pretty much every year for as long as I can remember that. That goes a long way, getting people to like you. No, I mean, jokes aside, I think you have to ask the investors. Every person is different.

1:43:11In my opinion, what people liked about us is a combination of a technologically advanced platform where everything is highly integrated. We're pushing AI to its limits, which is obviously the promise for the future and how companies get to be run. and at the same time a track record that shows a combination of we are willing to make aggressive moves, whether it's in acquisitions, monetization, but at the same time we invest just as aggressively and in a farsighted manner on product, having added a ton of features, brought innovation to product that sometimes hadn't seen it in a long time. So that combination I think is unusual and we see a huge pipeline of acquisitions out there.

1:43:55So I think that that was quite resonant with at least the best investors. How crazy is this as a reason to be excited about what you're doing? A lot of the companies, there's a lot of fear around AI disrupting tech companies, but a lot of the companies in your portfolio have survived the mobile apocalypse and the cloud apocalypse. And so you have a number of organizations and brands that are just resistant to sudden disruption from the new hot thing in a way that a company that was started in the pre-ChatGPT era might not be quite equipped, might still be in the hyper growth. But then there's a newer thing, whereas a lot of your companies have maybe more resiliency built in just by virtue of the fact that they are maybe over five, over 10 years old at this point.

1:44:50Is that realistic? Absolutely. I don't think we have any significant business that hasn't been around for at least 15, 16 years. On the one hand, you know they're not going to go to the moon, which is bad. I'd prefer it to be the case. But on the other hand, yes, they've gone through so much, and the customer base is so self-selected at this point. It's a huge advantage. When you bet as a VC, for example, on a fast-growing company, of course, that's exciting. but also you need to believe that growth will stay. That company typically is, you know, end of one offering that product or that product in that way.

1:45:26So as competition comes up, you don't know what's going to happen. You haven't seen it happen before, but for AOL or Eventbrite or Vimeo, we have seen it all. Like they've had, basically they've lived in a perfect competition kind of environment for a decade plus. So plenty of clones, emulators, those kinds. So you kind of know what you get and there's value in that for sure. Yeah. Are you getting calls from VCs who are trying to offload shares or whole companies of zombie corns? There's an article in The Economist this week about zombie corns, companies that were valued at over a billion dollars and have not raised an upround in years.

1:46:04What kind of deal flow is getting pushed your way? And then what are you doing with that deal flow? Is it interesting or not? Yeah, look, we look at everything. It's like you got it. I mean, it's a particularly good time for a serial acquirer. There's a bit of dislocation, fear due to disruption from AI, which I think is a lot of truth to it in many cases. It's a bit nuanced. And we can only do so. One of the disadvantages of our model where we almost rebuild some of these businesses from the ground up, we try to keep everything that's great and rebuild everything that's less great. I mean the good thing is I think it's much more challenging and interesting than going a little bit more shallow and also it's delivered very high returns but at the same time you can't do it a million times a year it takes a lot of time a lot of effort from a big team our engineers, designers, product managers and so on and so forth so we have to be very selective so yes it's a good time with a lot of opportunities but equally we can only do a few so the key is listening to what's available the opportunities but also not get too excited stay patient for the right one Yeah, more than 50 deals done.

1:47:12Yeah, how much of an advantage is being public going to actually give you in net new acquisitions? I imagine a lot of acquirers are going to be, you know, it's potentially a lot more compelling to get, you know, if they're going to sell to you to get, you know, depending on whatever the cash equity debt split is, to actually just have exposure to something that they feel like can compound while having access to liquidity. Sure. I think, I mean, you may be right. We will see. Of course, it's day one in that regard, so I don't have a track record. We chose to go public primarily to improve our access to debt.

1:47:46It turns out that the lenders really like lending to public companies. It's better regulated, more externally transparent, a life valuation, all things a lender loves. And historically, if you look at the capital we have deployed, it's been like 80 % directionally from debt and like 15, 20 % free cash flows. So it's important for us to have access to debt dollars and cheap debt if possible. And this should help on the margins a little bit. But yeah, I think you're right. We may find opportunities that wouldn't have been available to us had we stayed private. Do you think any of that new debt market access might unlock sort of like a white whale acquisition, some mega deal where you're taking down a company that fits the thesis but is much larger than anything you've done in the past?

1:48:45Look, I would say I believe that a good strategy is predictable to some extent. and our predictable strategy is do three, five, eight deals a year of relatively speaking the same scale more or less, and it's going to grow as we expand. But yes, that's an upside. That's a cherry on the cake. I'm sure that in time something like that will happen and we'll try to move quickly and seize the opportunity. So, yeah, possible, likely, no. Possible, yes. I think if you look at this over long enough a period of time, it's almost guaranteed to happen before or later. Yeah, what, oh, sorry, Jordan. Do you think, how do you think about people's nostalgia around software products in general?

1:49:33I feel like we were talking with Scott Galloway yesterday for his podcast, and he was saying that he's quite excited about Bending Spoon, specifically because he was like, they're great brands that people have positive association with. And in fashion, everything that's old and uncool eventually becomes cool again. Right. I would say like you look at an example of, you know, one of the hottest brands in the world, Chrome Hearts. Right. Has gone through periods where it wasn't the hottest thing. But then, you know, and these things go in cycles. So, like, I can imagine a world where five years from now, every Gen Z kid is like, of course, I'm using AOL.

1:50:12Like it's like, it's like, you know, it's, it's like vintage and it's like cool and nostalgic and like the, and so I can imagine like at some point, uh, and it feels like software is going the way of, of, of fashion where it's like fashion, you know, it's very easy to make a new fashion brand, right? Like it's very easy to go compete with a Gucci or a legacy brand, but there's some, there's just brand value is like a real thing. Do you see a potential where you see a reacceleration or renewed cultural relevancy in any of the brands? Or is that not something you think about at all? I would say it's possible.

1:50:52It's not something we would embed in a business case. We're kind of math, science and engineering people. We look at the numbers and try to make sure that we base our capital allocation on the assumptions that we can be close to certain about. And I would say what you just described is plausible, but does it happen when it's? So, again, maybe we'll try to make these products better to the best of our abilities. And if that helps ignite some of that, we'll be incredibly happy. But even if it does, our investment thesis does not hinge on it. yeah it certainly could be true for vimeo the community there has always been uh very culturally different and like anti-brain rot you don't have a lot of like youtube style slop on there yeah i associate vimeo with like quality filming filmmaking and it's still right like when i think about my favorite surf movies growing up they were always always there snow you know snowboarding all these different kind of niches i was into like the quality was going there.

1:51:54You're right. By the way, on that one quickly, I agree we have some surprises in store for that community. I think they've been a bit frustrated over time, whether rightly or wrongly, but I can empathize with the direction email has taken, which has been more like enterprise. It makes sense. We'll see whether we can do something for them that they like I don't know if that will turn out to be a success, but yes, I do think there's potential there for sure. Yeah. A lot of people have fond memories. On AI, we've seen a lot of engineering organizations sort of like take out the biggest hammer possible.

1:52:38Wait, are you talking about advanced Italians or artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence. I know that you deploy a lot of advanced Italians, but I want to know how you're deploying artificial intelligence. Obviously, your operating team is fantastic. But I imagine that your operating team is also fantastic at making sure that you're not token maxing and overspending, that if you are using a coding agent, you're using it judiciously. What have the learnings been? Have you been on as much of a roller coaster ride as some of the bigger tech companies? We've seen headlines out of Uber where they spent so much token maxing.

1:53:18They spent their whole budget. Then they had to pull back. There's been these back and forths. What's your journey been like at Benningsmiths? Yeah, totally. So, by the way, we have more people in the States than in Italy. I think we're based in Italy. It's a little bit like, it's unusual and so it's cool that in the Italians and whatnot. And I'm Italian, but yeah, anyway, we've got a bunch of Italians, that's true, but not just Italians. Sure. Just as many Americans. Just to be clear. In any case, yeah, AI, I mean, almost nobody knows that my co-founders and I had an AI startup in 2010. Wow. Massive failure.

1:53:49and we raised a million dollars, which at the time felt like a lot today. It's basically, you know, like nothing. No, that was a lot. So Demis in 2010 raised 2.3 million at a five cap. Yeah. And that's like the most elite AI scientists in the world at the time. Yeah, that was the market. It did much better than we did at the time on AI. I'm sure it's more competent on AI, but I mentioned it because it's certainly something my co-founders and I have been passionate about and try to use as much as possible in the business. We've had it as part of our proprietary technologies for almost a decade.

1:54:23I think 2018, certainly, we were using machine learning. So yeah, we push it pretty hard. We actually don't have any limitations on using AI at the company. We encourage everybody to push the envelope there, but we have very limited cost. And the reason why we have very limited cost is that we have developed a ton of models in-house. It turns out that if you're very good people, you can build narrow purpose models that do one thing really well. They're pretty dumb in general, but they can do that one thing pretty well. And they're very cheap. They're self-hosted basically, almost free, just a little.

1:54:53And then, you know, there are good open source models you can fine tune, combine. Again, they may not be as good as the frontier models, but if you use them intelligently, we have built our own AI orchestrator that will help us make sure that for each task, we're using the models that are optimal in terms of cost quality. We don't end up using the frontier models for a whole lot, just either the more complex stuff or supervision of more dumb models. And with that, we are pushing pretty hard on AI. As per our disclosures, we are over 90 % of our code being written by AI and pretty modest expenditures.

1:55:29So we're pretty happy there. Yeah, that's fascinating. How do you see the footprint expanding for the company post-IPO? You mentioned that you have a lot of employees in the United States. Do you expect to spin up more offices, go more regional, centralized, decentralized? What's the thesis there? I think the trend is one where we open more offices. And also ultimately, basically a key way we do well is by creating this core team of exceptional people, giving them a lot of responsibility, powerful tools, and a culture that helps them be a little bit better than they would otherwise be. And sometimes we acquire companies that have failed to attract some of the best for a long time.

1:56:14Not for anybody's fault. Sometimes management teams are great. It's just that if the brand is not as appealing, it really just doesn't attract the right applications. And so by injecting some of that talent, we help reinvigorate those organizations, bring back that. We call it startup mode with high talent intensity, more intensity, ambition, innovation. And basically, we look to hire as many great people as we can. and from wherever they are. Historically, just out of, you know, simply where we were based and are based, it was like Milan, Italy, and then London, and now again the States and Madrid in Spain, Poland, anywhere we can find great people who are excited about what we do using tech to reinvent how businesses are run and take a lot of responsibility much earlier in their careers than would appear reasonable.

1:57:03I think that's us. uh so yeah probably more locations not fewer locations going forward makes sense what uh do you track average timelines from first conversation with a management team to to close like i imagine there's some companies that you've acquired where you're talking for for years and they're not really ready yet but then the moment comes and then you can move really quickly and then others where it's like you have an opportunity to do a deal in you know six weeks yeah we've seen both i'm sure we track it i'm not i don't i don't have the the data off the top of my head but we have had cases like that we want to be an excellent acquirer like like i'd like ideally a 10 out of 10 reputation where you know super honest super reliable good price fast and and it starts with establishing a good relationship with with founders owners boards um So I'm actually, I think our ability to do that has surprised me in a way because, you know, we're so active that you could imagine.

1:58:02My assumption was selling to someone who's so active and rebuilds parts of your business can be a little bit more difficult than selling to a more passive investor. But it turns out a lot of founders see us as the preferred partner because, number one, we never sell. So you know exactly what you're getting into. Like it's Benny Spoons and it stays there for decades, forever, probably. Also, people appreciate that we invest for real in these products. They keep expanding and improving, and often founders see that as their legacy, and they like to know that technical people, product people, will continue to pour love and effort into their babies.

1:58:36And I think we have a good history in that regard. And also, we're super flexible. Say, a founding team wants to depart two weeks after closing because they feel that their time there is done. and move on, they can do that. And many more financial acquirers would ask you to stay for three years and roll over equity, and it can be pretty difficult after, you know, you ran that business for 10 years, 15 years, and now you've got to stay there essentially taking direction. So, yeah, and so that's, you know, that's what we find they like, but also it starts with meeting and spending time and getting comfortable with each other much earlier than the transaction takes place.

1:59:18So yes, absolutely. We've had cases where we have known each other for two years and then the company felt ready and we got it done. There's so many companies that I would love for you to own. And I hope that you do in time. Companies that are you're now quite a bit bigger than in the public markets. So I have one last question. Is AI speeding up dealmaking specifically on research, spreading comps, getting to valuation, legal diligence? Are you seeing AI bleed into your deal-making? A little bit. It's not really a major area of efficiency for us because ultimately we only do five acquisitions a year.

1:59:58You get like order of magnitude. So it's not really there that we unlock a lot of value. Where I think it's helping us tremendously is by enabling us to do more acquisitions and so scale, like the operational side of things, after we close the transformations around these companies. because that's really a bottleneck to growth. And we have seen major improvements there. We went from the KPI, we think ultimately is the best proxy for our productivity of that core team. We call them Spooners. It's revenue per Spooner and then went up from about a million dollars in 2023 to roughly$4 million round rate.

2:00:36Let's give it up for the Spooners. That's fantastic. I love it. So, yeah. Well, thank you so much and congratulations. What an incredible moment. I'm so happy for you and all 500 of you and more. Really, really incredible. Too many more successful deals. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you, guys. Good luck. Great to see you. Congrats again. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents mean the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Did you see what Riley Walls shared? he shared a heat map of the most popular types of dogs in san francisco the city is dominated by chihuahuas it's overrun by chihuahuas apparently i had no idea it's the capital of explains chihuahua apparently a lot there's some labrador retriever hot spots there's a couple golden retrievers in the city there's a little area where there's a lot of poodles what do you guys think about pitbulls Are you pro Pitbull?

2:01:35Um, not my favorite. Not around me. Not my favorite. Or anyone I love. A skill issue. Just learn to wrestle with the Pitbull. Just exert your humanity over it. Are you a big pit bull guy? You like pit bull? No, not a big pit bull guy. What about Mr. 305? I like a golden retriever. That's my dog. Even though I have new fint lines. I like new fint lines. Bending Spoons opened at around$30,$29,$31 a share. It's now at$40. Nice little pop. Bill Gurley in shambles. A very modest pop. He only gets mad when it's like up 2x or 3x. 40 % pop, not too bad. Not probably. We probably will not get a post from Bill Gurley about this one.

2:02:28Luca is clearly just an absolute animal. Yes. He's just like a guy who's just going to, he's got the blinders on. He's going to just keep executing the strategy. he's gonna own every iconic american company in time running them out of a castle in milan everything he's clearly like he's clearly like just like seven he's he's clearly 50 years he's clearly he's clearly drooling over snap you know that every day he's just is texting no like you up sell now question no but i mean that's the kind of that's the kind of like i would say in the fullness of time spiegel's obviously happy running the business but um that that to me would be like a white whale but social networks and network effects businesses seem uh uniquely durable in the long term uh and i wonder if that's where they'll get into next a lot of these businesses have recurring subscriptions they have great businesses some of them are enterprise lots of stickiness in the revenue, but would be interesting to see them at the helm of a true social network, potentially even a growing one.

2:03:40Our next guest is in the waiting room of Nick Grossman from USV. He's a general partner, and he's here to break down the Rebel Alliance thesis. What's up, guys? How you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? So you're fighting against the Death Star. First, introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your general investing thesis, and then break down the Rebel Alliance thesis. Yeah, you got it. It's great to be here. Great to have you. I'm Nick. I'm a partner at Union Square Ventures. I've been at USV for about 15 years. And we've, over that time, been an investing... Overnight success.

2:04:16Overnight success. Bingo. Been investing up and down the stack and across moments in time when different sort of layers of technology have emerged and open the door to lots of new stuff. And I think if there's one thing that's consistent about the way we look at the world, it's like every sort of wave of technology is either kind of expansive or consolidating. And those moments where it starts to feel expansive are just incredible, right? So back in our history, the first one was like Web2. You had built the core internet and now you could build anything on top of it. The other one, for us, Twitter was probably the big investment from that era.

2:05:00If you look at the crypto era. Wasn't USB also in Tumblr and Etsy and a bunch of other companies from that era? It was a great portfolio. Yeah, so the firm was founded in 2004 by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. And the thesis back then was there's been this epic infrastructure build in the fiber and switches and routers. A first pass at building mainstream consumer apps, but a big blow up with the dot-com pop. And the thesis in 2003, which was pretty contrarian, was there's going to be a big opportunity at the applications layer. And there's going to be a moment, it's time to build, basically. And that wasn't the most popular view back then.

2:05:43I think it created an opening to make some really great investments in a lot of early application layer things. So we did Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, SoundCloud, Indeed, a whole bunch from that era. And it was all about the tools are on the ground, so what can we build with them? And I think those moments when the tools are on the ground and it's time for people to build with them and anybody can build anything in any direction, I think those are the moments that have always felt the most exciting to us and that we've been looking for for 20 some odd years. Pros and cons of thesis-driven investing.

2:06:17Most, I would say, investors now are humble enough to be like, I just try to find the best possible founder and give him money. The most common thesis I hear is this one, buy low, sell high. Yeah, that's also a good one. But I just feel like, you know, you guys have done so well, like trying to really crystallize your vision of the future and the opportunity in the present and then investing and like actually being like, we know there's a company that should be built here and then taking the time to figure out what the right team is to go and attack that opportunity. but I'm sure there's like the other side of it was like sometimes you just like get a little high on your own supply and back an opportunity that doesn't exist and you kind of forced it because you wanted it to exist.

2:07:02But so every good strategy has its downsides but I'm curious. Yeah, I would say the two potential downsides of sort of thesis driven are you're wrong. Like that's the worst one. You're just like something's going to happen and it doesn't. That's happened to us. Don't get me wrong. And then the second flavor is like right idea, wrong team, or, you know, right idea too early, you know, or whatever. And like, we've had our share of those two. And so I think, you know, we're a small fund. We don't need to play a coverage game. We don't need to play momentum. That's just not how we've operated. And so we're sort of set up to be able to pick our moments and take shots and, you know, have a point of view about what we think is going to happen.

2:07:43And hopefully if we're right, we're contrarian and right, you know, and we've been that way a bunch of times. And hopefully if we're wrong, we limit the damage on the losses. Yeah. So take us through the Rebel Alliance. Who's in the alliance? Who's out of the alliance? Break it all down for us. Yeah. So the Rebel Alliance, we just put this up on the USV blog last week. It's an idea that's been cooking for some time for us. And it's basically the idea that if you think about AI and now agentic AI, the opportunity is so much bigger than any one company. and that there is a massive ecosystem exploding around these incredible magic core models.

2:08:23And there are layers and components and modules, and we're just beginning to start to see all of those get built out at an ever-increasing rate, especially now that model-like capability is so good. And that means that we believe there are going to be generational companies built up and down the stack, not just, you know, and really the, you know, I don't think that OpenAI or Anthropoc or the Death Star, I do think they are these really powerful companies that have sort of a vertically integrated approach. And I think the meme in the market is like, maybe Claude becomes the world's only employee and all value gets sucked into those companies.

2:09:03Our thesis, the Rebel Alliance thesis, is that the opportunity is so big and so massive and so expansive. and there are so many forces pushing for this expansive motion that there are going to be companies in all these components of the stack including the models themselves but also so many pieces around them. We're already starting to see it. We're making lots of investments around them. To us, it feels like the beginning of the whole economy but maybe the whole internet getting rewritten on the agentic stack and with an agentic approach. And so really the idea is that what's happening is bigger, is so freaking big.

2:09:44And that the opportunity, it's like a great time to be building. It's a great time to be building for builders. And there's a lot of big companies that are going to get built. That's really the core thesis. No, I love the thesis. And we see it every day on the show where someone's coming on, not just with a big fundraising announcement, but a ton of revenue traction and a ton of customer love. I'm interested in the down the stack feels maybe less contrarian to me just because you see announcements from the big labs where they're using Salesforce or they're storing all their data in ClickHouse or even going deeper into the semis and the memory and the energy.

2:10:23All of that feels really obvious. But the bigger meme from a year ago was like, are you going to get steamrolled by the next model? And there were some companies that were just sort of thin wrappers with some prompt engineering. But then you have companies like Eleven Labs and Suno and these specific mid journeys doing really well. There's so many companies that have gone and carved out different niches and done really well. Yeah, Suno is one of my favorite examples because it's clearly a massive opportunity, already a multibillion dollar business. millions of people love the product and yet it's not a good fit for the labs to prioritize because the size of the prize is just like you know, I don't, you know Mikey's extremely ambitious but like you know, maybe it's a$20 billion business over time, right?

2:11:10I mean, the Gemini app has I was just going to say like the Gemini app has a make music button inside of it and Suno has still carved out like this incredible niche. And I think there's two ideas is just looking at an example like Suno. One is user experience. And I think as we cover this, we rewrite the world of AI, whether it's in media or industrials or robotics or health or whatever, these experiences are going to need to be specific and tailored. And maybe you could call them niches, but they're really big. And I think that all doesn't collapse into a single app. And then the other thing, or an experience, and the other thing that we're seeing from everybody we talked to building at the application layer, however you describe the application layer, is model competition.

2:11:59There are so many good models today. And as more things move into production, we start being aware of the trade-offs between model capability and model cost. Everybody who's building is thinking about how to build an abstraction layer to make those best trade-offs, to deliver the best experience, and to have margins. If you're building a product like Suno, you need to have margins. If you're an enterprise adopting this stuff, you're thinking about your token cost. And I think both of those sort of forces are good for the Rebel Alliance. And at the end of the day, a core theme is competition among the models, but it's not the only one.

2:12:36All right, let's live workshop an idea that I have that I want someone to build. uh i over the weekend i was uh messing around with uh in chat with the image model on some furniture ideas that i had i managed to make some stuff that i think is cool i would happily pay like for this like chair that i made i happily pay a couple thousand dollars to get a very great version of this chair and i was thinking like it'd be great if i could upload it and then have like some combination of like an etsy or an upwork style thing where furniture sure fabricators could say I will make it for this price here's the work that I've done and basically like a marketplace to kind of manage that uh theoretically if I made it and it's great then other people could just buy that product and the order would go to the fabricator and maybe I could get a little bit of a cut and I thought it was an interesting idea because it sort of like rides the tailwinds of like anybody can imagine and prompt a product into digital form and then like you need this network of people globally that can actually go make the products I'm not sure if it's just like too small of a TAM, you know, like how many people really want to make furniture?

2:13:47But what's your immediate reaction? Well, there was a company maybe a decade ago that did this for physical products. I'm blanking on the name right now, but you know, this idea of invent your thing and make it, you know, from the 3D printing era to the, you know, furniture or other things, I think is even more possible now because part of what we have is the ability to design, amazing things overnight. And I think where you're going with this is this isn't really part of the Rebel Alliance idea, but it's another theme that we've been really focused on is services that plug into agentic experiences are, I think, with unique data or networks or sort of systems attached to them, right?

2:14:30So in this case, like product fabrication, distribution, so on and so forth. It's like, you know, these are durable types of networks that need to exist with a very different architecture that can plug into the agentic future. And so I think things like this are going to be successful. And then there's a question of like, at the end of the day, who owns the interface? Who owns the distribution? What's the consumer experience for that? Does it all roll into a chat DBT or a cloud? Or is it something else? Kind of a separate question, but I think another theme is durable networks as APIs into agentic experiences or MCPs or whatever.

2:15:05I think we're going to see tons and tons of those. Should I pitch my idea? The agentic AI for doctor billing? No. No, definitely not. Definitely not. For another time. For another time. For another time. How are you? Yeah, how are you? It's interesting. I still have some wariness around this Rebel Alliance-style plays because of the first generation of companies that were leveraging GPT models. They grew like crazy, and then it just was a matter of building an interface, and an interface is straightforward. How are you like you clearly are overcoming that fear and are willing are investing a lot against it.

2:16:03Part of it is like I just feel like this dynamic now where hiring an agent is like quite different than hire, you know, just sign, you know, using software. And like you just assume that agents are going to get better. and one of the challenges is it's like an agent that is generally intelligent just like a human you can kind of plug into an organization and it can start just doing things and you don't really care that much how it how it does things and so I just feel like the the process of like hiring agents for companies is going to be like quite a bit different than like the last generation of software where you had to build out this massive sales force and you know you're going to conferences and it's like it's it's it's just a very different motion and i think that like the growth of of cloud code specifically is like proof that like software has changed to some degree and you can get adoption of something at a speed that is entirely unprecedented um so i'm curious how you're thinking about like how, how just like the procurement and sales is going to change.

2:17:14Because like, again, we have, we have companies on every single day that have, that have grown revenue incredibly rapidly. They clearly are solving customer problems. Um, you know, we had a healthcare agent company on today, started in 2023. It's a billion dollar company now. Um, but, uh, but yeah, the question is like, are, are you still betting against when you invest in these companies? Are you just betting against general purpose agent progress? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think one important idea here is we're not just talking about, will there be other agents that compete with Claude or ChatGPT?

2:17:52Will people build personified agents and how will those get to market? I think that's one version of what agents look like. Another version of what agents look like is cloud infrastructure, where every company that's building any system is going to have agents and the orchestration of hundreds or thousands of agents built into their underlying platform, whether that's an app or whether that's an enterprise or anything else. And so I think part of the Rebel Alliance thesis for us is agents are moving from personified people you hire to cloud infrastructure. And when we look at how agents are getting deployed and orchestrated today, it's not just I'm hiring an agent and it's showing up in my Slack.

2:18:39It's like I'm programmatically spawning 50 agents to go sort of be part of whatever system I'm building. And so if you think of agents as infrastructure as opposed to agents as employees, I think that's where a lot of these forces come into play where every company, every enterprise who's building in an agentic style is going to need model routing, model choice, orchestration, memory, some sort of harness. And there's different options at each of these as you're building up agentic systems. So that's really a big driver of this is the move from agents as people to agentic systems that have all of these layers in place and have more of like, corporate's the wrong word, but like a more of a production vibe to them where they're going to get built by professionals who want to have control and who are going to want to lay them out in increasingly sophisticated ways.

2:19:34And so I feel deeply like very, very strong that that's happening. I see it everywhere. And I think a big, like a lot of the stuff that we're looking at right now in the agentic stack is like kind of low level, like networking and identity and payments and all these like pieces you need in order to compose and orchestrate agents. We're moving from like agent as employee to agent as infrastructure. And I think that also is like a big driver of why we believe so much in the Rebel Alliance thesis. Last question. Can you take me through the financials, what they might look like at a Rebel Alliance company versus a non-Rebel Alliance company?

2:20:10When I think about a lab, they might spend a billion dollars on a training run, amortize it over months. And there might be all these GPU commits. And they're spending money like an industrial company sometimes. if you're building Rebel Alliance Company, does it look different? Is it all talent? Are you subsidizing tokens at some point? Is it cost of customer acquisition? What are you pattern matching to in terms of like the shape of the business? Are we doing 12 to 18 month runway here? Like, how are you thinking about deploying capital and watching that capital flow through the business at the early mid stage of a company?

2:20:49Yeah, it's good that you brought up like capital. intensity, right? Because I think an idea here is there's this category of hyper-capital-intensive AI companies, which is the big labs. And then there's kind of everything else maybe that's less capital-intensive. We have a portfolio company called Pluralis Research that does model training, but in a decentralized network using compute that's scattered around the internet. So you can still do training in a capital-like way. I think that's possible. So I don't want to make it seem like all the models must be capital intensive in the form of a single company.

2:21:23But I think generally speaking, you're looking for things that are more capital light. A lot of the things in the middle, like harnesses and memory and identity and payments, I think a lot of that looks like kind of regular tech companies. And then anything that sits at the sort of user level that's passing through token spend, there's a category of margin profile there that's new in the AI era. You're either taking a loss on token spend passed through to the big labs or you're eking out margin by swapping out models. And so I do think there's like, actually, it's almost like this barbell of capital intensity where at the model layer, there's a lot of capital required.

2:22:02And at the application there, there can be, if you're subsidizing a lot of token spend, certainly on a free tier or something like that. But there's a lot in the middle that I think has more of a traditional capital profile. And it's just all wildly different than Web2 where a dollar of revenue was usually a dollar of gross profit, basically. And now you might see 60 % gross margins, you might see 20, you might see 90. It just depends on how the entrepreneur has positioned the business and what the shape of that is. And like 20 % gross margins for some application companies is like great. Yeah.

2:22:33It might be negative 50%. Maybe they're going really fast. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Really fun chat. And we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, my pleasure. Have a good rest. Thank you so much. Cheers. Let me tell you about public investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. With great customer service, our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Julian Honig from Amble. He's the co-founder and chief design officer. Julian, welcome to the show. Round of applause. Round of applause. Hi, guys. We're very excited to have you. We very much enjoyed digging into the images of the new vehicle.

2:23:12Would love to. I view you as an angel sent from heaven to make my dream motor vehicle. You saw the Ferrari Luce and just snapped and said, there has to be a different way. Enough. It's time to make something beautiful, useful. Actually, take us back. Tell us how you got here. A little bit of your history and then some brief history on the company would be a great place to start. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Super excited. Yes. How did it start? I mean, it started with a pretty simple conversation with me and my friend José, who is the co-founder, one of the co-founders. And he has this beautiful hotel in Portugal, in Alentejo, called Barrocal.

2:23:51And it's really beautiful. And he's building a second one on the coast, directly on the coastline in the dunes. And he asked me, do you know of any good mobility solution or golf carts for my resort where everything is designed perfectly? And then, you know, I did some research before and said, I think there's nothing that really fits your standard you have in the resort. And we said, well, for fun, let's do something. Let's design something for you. And this little idea became reality because we realized if one hotel wants this, probably more hotels want the two. but also if you make it street legal you open up a whole new customer base right and i i lived in in pasadena i lived in la so i you live in pasadena california you got a resident right here i live there currently i was born there raised that's amazing i and it's amazing and i went to art center i mean you're sure you know art center yeah yeah yeah yeah i live very close there and i sent this to a friend who lives also in that area uh because we've been talking he's we were talking about like can you get a golf cart in this area probably not i was asking chachi pt like how much trouble will i get in if i have a golf cart and and he saw a golf cart and was like i think it's just an unlicensed golf cart i think somebody's just bending the rules and then i sent him the amble immediately because i was like this is what we've been talking about so i i fully expect these to take over pasadena um but but anyway sorry i interrupted you there no no no no but it's you know those are the the lsv and you can you can through the low speed vehicles you can make in street league in most states or almost all states yeah um but yeah i i i you know growing up there i know that the need and and you know i've been many times in florida all parts of california texas so i think the understanding a bit of the american market i thought this could could really work well because there's nothing really nice out there yet that is electric open and and then we also said well you know we don't we just don't want to take a golf cart and make it pretty.

2:25:52It's like we really started from ground up, meaning we make it slightly bigger, it's wider, has of course bigger wheels, has individual suspension. So not only the design, but also the engineering. We spend a lot of time with engineering. One of our head engineers actually comes from Formula One. So we really take it seriously to make something special. No, I was joking when you came on, but I totally agree. I've spent, I live in Malibu, So we're the perfect customers for you. I live in Malibu. John lives in Pasadena. I've seen every possible type of golf cart in every setting from commercial settings.

2:26:29I worked at a hotel a long time ago where I would drive these big, bulky commercial golf carts to driving golf carts on golf courses to around the neighborhood. I've seen the ones that are street legal, the ones that are not, the ones that are gas powered, the ones that are more like farm vehicles, things like that. So I've looked at the full spectrum, and you guys really nailed to me all the different elements that matter. Specifically, I think a lot of vehicles in this category try to sell you on tech. I went through the buying process recently, and they're like, well, this has a smart system and the backup camera, and it's got you know full full speakers and it's got it's got all these other things and and to me i think just people are desperate for the best of modernity but also the best of you know the the the 50s and the sort of like truly analog era and i think that um and i and i and manufacturers just haven't haven't like really listened to that feedback and so yeah when i look at all the design decisions that you guys have made, it looks like it's, you know, going to be incredibly solid to drive, right?

2:27:50The wider base, the proper suspension, it'll feel better in corners over things like as simple as speed bumps. And then just the usability of it. Like, I don't want my outdoor vehicle to feel like a big computer, you know? I just want it to feel like a classic, you know, like something closer to a modern moak or something like that so i mean i i yeah i think you you absolutely because what for us was the most important is of course the design but then the comfort right comfort also performance it's not something you know you take to bismo beach and you go down the dunes but it it has quite some some some power like three times more than the you the average golf cart so it's quite more powerful you can go 25 degrees up uphill with full load so this is something you know so it's the comfort the performance the design and in terms of gadgets and screens we really intentionally said just the the basic screen in the front that's really nicely designed and then bring your own device like some of these you know you know some of of these products They have the screen, but after a year, sometimes already when it ships, it's old, right?

2:29:05It's old news. So we said, instead of that, let's focus on having a nice USB-C port. You bring your phone and then, you know, have, I mean, we all know this, right? You're in your car. You have a huge screen. And what do you do? You put your iPhone on the screen and use Waze, right? Or Google Maps or whatever you use. Can you take me through your design process? Does it start with pencil and paper? Do you start in Photoshop? Do you pull a mood board together? Do you use AI to generate something? What is the process? Because I imagine it ends in something like CAD, but where does it start and how does it evolve?

2:29:46I'm just looking for my sketchbook. Okay, sketchbook. You got it. I think it's all for, I mean, I tell my son and I think all students, they should never stop sketching. I think sketching with pen and paper is still the most direct way of expressing ideas and the fastest. Okay, now with AI, you talk to your phone and the drawing comes out, but I think that's half the fun. So it starts with sketching ideas. And then fairly quickly, we went into 3D modeling, like into CAD. And what we did, I think what's very, you know, my experience before was Audi. I was eight years at Audi, then a year at Lamborghini doing car design.

2:30:27So my background is really on the one hand car design. On the other hand, I worked in 10 years at Apple in Johnny's team. So I have bring both the product design and also the car design. But yeah, but what we did, I think what's unusually, we built a driving prototype fairly quick in the process. Usually you make a lot of models, like one-to-one scale models, and we just went directly into a driving prototype, which was pretty cool. What is the next two years like? What needs to happen to get to 2028 for deliveries? It feels extremely fast. It's amazing. At the same time, I'm not happy I want it today.

2:31:08But I am interested. Is it supply chain? Is it manpower? Is it regulatory? Is it all of the above? What does it actually take to bring a new vehicle to the market? Because, I mean, every other company, it's 10 years. So two years is great. But what does the next two years look like? So what we are in the process now, we are, I would say, 90 % finished with engineering for manufacturing. What it means is basically we have this amazing prototype. But the last year, we spent the full year of making this ready for mass production, which is the most difficult part. Because you have something you love, then you have to factor in cost.

2:31:46You have to factor in visibility, the parts, the extra parts you want to order, the supply chain. So we are like 90 % there to have that ready. Spending a few months, two, three months more to put it together. And then we produce. We start producing end of the year. And we ship 2027, but only to hotels. Because as you said, the process of making this street legal takes another half a year. So we intentionally start with clients like, you know, Amangiri and really the top clients for hospitality. And then we have the dream come true. We talk about Amangiri a lot. I mean, it's fantastic. Yeah. So do you have it seems like there's a little bit of ambiguity in your mind about where the split between hospitality and personal sales will be in a few years.

2:32:43Are you starting to narrow the aperture there? Do you have a vision for where you want the company to be? Because it feels like with developing a great brand, interfacing with the user, the first time they ride on it, it's at Almangiri. It's beautifully cared for. It's in this idyllic setting. They wind up buying one. They have very great brand aspirations. Do you want this to go into street vehicle sedan SUV? Do you want this to be 90 % consumer sales eventually? Where does this go if it becomes a huge business? I mean, it's interesting. I mean, the hospitality is a great starting point, but we already see now after three days, we have already over a thousand pre-orders and a lot from the U.S.

2:33:36I like this. I have to get one of those, too. Yeah, we have lots of sound effects. We can get you one. Yeah, that's great. No, I think there's going to be a big market here. I know so many people that, and I guess I would say maybe it's a smaller market, but I think you can get a very, very, very meaningful amount of it just because I know so many people that have spent this much money on a vehicle and gotten something that is just not special in any way. The open air, not having the doors on. I was looking at getting Ferrari Luce and taking the doors off for a similar experience, but it's like 20 times the cost.

2:34:18And so this just makes so much more sense. It's a more rational purchase. I think that the door is more expensive than our car. Probably. I think every door is probably 50K on that car. Anyway, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining. We will be your strongest supporters. And you guys are welcome to come on anytime. and thank you to Riley for connecting us. This is fantastic. Yeah, thanks so much for having me and looking forward, yeah, and hope to meet in person, maybe for the first deliveries. Yeah, that'd be amazing. First deliveries, we can go do a tour of our neighborhood. You can do the second car review on the show.

2:34:56The other one was a hyper car. The Zinger. Yeah, the Zinger, which is, I think, over a million dollars. This is much more affordable. It's available at driveamble.com. You can go check it out if you're listening at home. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Great to hang, Joey. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Jordy, people were asking you to do a little bit of a spin for everyone. Show off the new merch you got there.

2:35:31I'll tell everyone about Codex on the arms. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, or just trying to look good. Codex. We just got our first shipment of, I think, around 200 of one of our new merch product. Oh, okay. I know the one you're talking about. And that one is going to be available online. That's the one? No, no, no, no, no. Not the one you're thinking of. Okay, okay, okay. No, that one will also be available online. After all of that. We have one that's a little bit silly.

2:36:07It's groundbreaking. It's groundbreaking. In the best way possible. It's a product that humanity has been trying to create for centuries. Yeah. And we did it. We did it. We did it. We had a breakthrough. We had a big breakthrough. We had a big breakthrough. It took a long time. We did. But, yeah, the merch will finally be for sale, and it will be dropping in the chat first. Yeah. We're not exactly sure exactly when, but we will give it to you guys first and thank you for the patience. Yeah, we appreciate it. But on that note, we'll see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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