OpenAI to Support Adult Content, CoreWeave’s AI Ranch, Apple's M5 Vision Pro | Zachary Perret, Panos Panay, Eric Wittman, Brian Baumgartner, Adam Ryan, Adit Abraham, Dan Shipper & More

28:10Totally. Just make a bunch of apps and hopefully one of them hits. Yeah. And he started to and then he realized like, okay, there's actually nothing here. It's crazy, crazy how slow that takeoff has been. One of the things that they're highlighting here is a couple games that you can play on the Vision Pro. One of them is Sniper Elite 4. It's a great game. if you haven't played it. But what's interesting is that it actually is just a 2D screen that is in the Apple Vision Pro, so you need to mirror it in from a Mac or a console. But you'll love this. The folks behind Sniper Elite 4, do you know their website, Jordy?

28:47Sniper.com. Whoa. That's a great domain. So let's hear from their domain. They sniped the best domain for a sniping-based video game. Wait, this is funny. Sniper.com just redirects to SniperElite.com. They don't even use it. Elite. Elite. Elite behavior. Well, if you want to design something for the Apple Vision Pro or maybe for a more popular platform like the new MacBook Pro that has the M5 in it, get on Figma. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Dime Square Holdings has a funny little post here. Right now, a lot of these skilled engineers are laborers.

29:25They're literally working 12 to 15 hour days to get data centers built quickly. As fast as they finish one, they're on the next. If I told you the story, you're not going to believe it. They're being flown around on PJs to get to the next site. Literally, they're packing these guys into PJs and saying one was in North Dakota and he needed to be back in Texas the following week. They flew him down there on Sunday in PJs. There were probably 10 guys on the plane. Some of these stories right now are just wild. And the interviewer asks, when you say PJs, you mean pajamas? And the data center national solutions broker says, no, private jets.

30:05This comment, bro, is so broke.

30:12Mogging the allocator who thinks PJ stands for pajamas. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantage's trust management platform takes the manual work out of security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. You already talked about the mass horror scenario. Matt Turk says some VC firm should rebrand associates stalking founders at events to forward deployed capitalists. It might be good. It's happening today. It's happening this week. It's LA Tech Week. What's that? It is a technology celebration, a celebration of technology and business.

30:48It's right up our wheelhouse. Have you seen driving around LA Have you seen any of it going on? I saw one technologist, some business enthusiast, indulging in a little self-driving today. That was pretty cool. Interesting. Like driving themselves. Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing a lot about self-driving generally. Yeah. So it was cool to see someone driving themselves. Yeah. Because that's how we think about it. I'm pretty bullish on self-driving broadly. I could see one of the cheekier, smaller VC firms giving everyone the Ford deployed capitalist title. I think it'd be funny. I've seen those before.

31:22Anthropic projects as much as$26 billion in annualized revenue in 2026 sources. That's a lot. That's good, right? How are they projecting that without entering the incredibly lucrative erotica market? What will they be doing? The code must be generated. The code, their API must be really on fire. That's a lot. I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. Do we have any insight into that? Because there are 13 billion run rate, right? That was the stat that was shared. So 13 billion in ARR. I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. I mean, if the agent of commerce stuff comes online in a big way, if the ads product comes online in a big way, like you could definitely see them hitting 30, 40, something like that.

32:15But these numbers are getting big at this point. Yeah, the other thing with the OpenAI announcement is, didn't they say it's December 1st? Yeah, they're kind of like letting the chaos cycle work its way out, letting everyone have their anger and take out before the product's actually updated to allow adult content. Yeah, because the... They need to lose the 10 ,000 Aura points so then they can start farming up extra Aura points with some math competition. Yeah, and the good thing is that people are going to use this product in private. They're not going to be like, yeah, I had a 7 ,000 prompt conversation with 4-0.

32:58I'm actually in love. It's amazing. If they cure cancer on November 30th, you are going to feel so stupid, Jordy. If they cure cancer on November 30th. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're just like, oh, yeah. You'll look like a real. You'll look like a bozo. A real bozo. A bozo. So that's probably the strategy. That might be it. It's like, let's take the aura hit to get into adult entertainment. We'll make it all back in one trade. Yeah, it really is setting the expectations low. And then they can just build back up from here. I don't know. Well, in some much lighter news, Wander is giving away a$10 ,000 Wander trip for the craziest vacation rental horror story.

33:39You can head over to their X account. All you need to do is reply or quote that post with your spooky tale. I love that spooky is happening during October. Spooky is an amazing word. And they'll create ghostly videos of the best ones and choose one winner. And so they put out a promotional video and I highly recommend you enter this because why not try and get a$10 ,000 Wander trip for free? Of course, you can also go over to wander.com, find your happy place, book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. we're very happy to be supported by Wander.

34:14George Hotz is blackbilling. Mad. He is. What do you say? Read it. Blog post from today. It's titled Pathetic Losers. I will read it. I want money. I have high TC. I get big comp. I advance in my career. I have many business opportunity. I am senior employee. I have many reports. I have big package. I am important. I fly on private jet. I party with model. I go to prestigious school. I have piece of paper with school logo. You can see I am important. You can see I have big package. LOL. You got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men. You sought status instead of skill.

35:01You are a loser. Get the F out. And, uh, he references, uh, I'm going to pull up this. It's a good message. Yeah, he's basically calling out the... Is this like a direct subtweet of something that just happened? It feels like it's just a general vibe of anti-status-seeking behavior. I immediately think of that post where somebody said, wow, I went to a dinner last night in San Francisco. Everyone had gone to Stanford or Harvard. And obviously that post got dunked on. So I think that he's... There's a little bit of that. I think there's already kind of pushback against this sort of status-seeking culture in tech.

35:44He references a post on September 13th that he made. You heard there was money in tech. You heard there was status in tech. You showed up. You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself. You're an entrious piece of S-H-I-T, and it's time for you to leave. But you won't leave willingly. We need to take action. Give it all away to everyone for free. Then you'll have no reason to be here. so um geo hots is operating on another level and he's pissed off and he's probably going to create free versions of he's created free versions of a lot of stuff he's going to keep doing it it's great i'm a huge supporter um easily the most baller email signature i've ever seen european curator like art curator uh i check emails on wednesday on tuesdays at 4 to 6 p.m and Wednesdays at 1 to 6 p.m.

36:38If your matter is time-sensitive, please resend your email with urgent in the subject line. So the only thing that doesn't make sense here is like, okay, so you have notifications on. Yeah. You're just getting email notifications. You're actually checking them constantly. You're watching them all roll in. What this person is saying is more like, I actually go into my email inbox and respond to random emails that aren't urgent at this time. But I'm not going to open your email if it doesn't say urgent. Sure, sure. We should try to figure out, hey, Tyler, try to figure out this person's email. See if they say it in the comment.

37:17And let's send them to today's newsletter and just say urgent. Urgent. Alex Stapp says, it reminds me of this line from Tyler Cowen. People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive. They're cultured. They have wonderful taste. They understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you live in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%. It's hilarious. Anyway, if you want to grow your company at more than 1%, get on Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free.

37:57Speaking of free, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, is saying he's living rent free in the Oval Office. So we really should get POTUS a bigger model. I'm thinking life size. Talk about the ultimate drop. You know, people will say, oh, I'm going to make a drop. I'm going to send something interesting. How about you make a plane? How about you make a plane, make a model of that plane, and send it to the White House? No, just make, just. Oh, just make the actual plane. Just make the plane. Yeah, just make the plane. But yeah, wow, really, I mean. Supersonic Air Force One would be insane. I mean, imagine trying to underwrite this as the boom team.

38:29They're like, yeah, it's like kind of a hassle to make these models. And it's kind of expensive. Who should we send them to? Like, is it ever going to come back to us? Is it just like for clout? And then like it winds up in the, in the oval office, like directly inspiring better legislation around a supersonic aircraft, which is very exciting. Oh, massive news. Ken Griffin. Ken Griffin born today, October 15th, 1968. Let's hit the gong for Ken. He trying to figure out what magazine there's another. There's a cover story of Ken. He looks like maybe in his early 30s at this point. Do you know what magazine this is from?

39:09I have no idea. This is a wild. Anyways, folks, this is who you're trading against. And he is older today and certainly wiser every day. So good luck out there. And in other breaking news, we don't know if we didn't technically break the story. I think the Financial Times broke the story this morning. But Erebor, the new bank from Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale, has been approved. They got their, this is, I have it in my notes, the fastest conditional approval for a depository institution, DeNovo, application in 25 years. they recently raised 275 million led by eight vc with participation from many top vcs and strategics this is largely for regulatory capital purposes as they intend to hold uh 12 a hold 12 of the regulatory capital against deposits um the origin stories of arabor is that uh you don't want the bank for your industry to be risk on or at least be lending super aggressively against deposits.

40:29We saw this with the SVB collapse in 2023. Those few days were some of the worst in my life. They will be fixated in my mind forever. I have some more notes here. Most tech companies that had deposits with SVB remember the pain and uncertainty around that weekend if if the government doesn't step in how many companies collapse as well Erebor aims to be one of the most conservative banks in the country when it comes to lending to deposit ratio most banks lend up to 90 percent of their customer deposits and Erebor is going to start at around 50 percent and trend downwards as the bank scales should be a huge surprise but going to be focused on re-industrialization, American dynamism, working with a lot of companies that many banks have historically said, you know, we don't even really want your business.

41:21So very excited for this to get off the ground in the new year. It's been so interesting watching the narrative around like what it takes to build a bank shift because years ago it was like you need to operate at like seven levels of abstraction away from any legacy financial institution because there's just no hope of actually playing at like the base layer. Then it became, well, if you're doing crypto, you can buy a regional bank and maybe layer some technology on top, but like, don't even think about trying to get a new charter. Definitely partner with someone who already has one. It's impossible to start from scratch.

41:59And there are a bunch of crypto platforms that are looking to set up a slightly different type of financial institution. I'm blanking on the name, but it's something trust company. I'm going to botch it if I try to remember. But the speed here is because they are being hyper conservative. And that's what we want out of what will, I'm sure, very quickly become one of the most important financial institutions in the industry. um amjad uh is quoting uh apparently larry fink larry fink says uh uh talking about um uh he went on cnbc uh yesterday and says this is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway uh money property and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form i'm sure that uh the conspiracy theorists will love this one but amjad says whatever your crypto web three nft monkey degen trader friend is saying today larry fink will be saying in five years of course um many uh many of the people in the crypto community have been saying this for i don't know as far back as 2015 yeah even i have an update on the 100 tariff on china that went into effect last Friday, put the market in turmoil.

43:30Polymarket has a 16 % chance that that 100 % tariff is in effect on November 1st. And so everyone's kind of pricing some sort of renegotiation in the trade war coming soon. And hopefully, I mean, things are already starting to stabilize. What is the market actually doing today? We're up half a percent in the NASDAQ. Bitcoin's down one and a half percent but overall half a point a modest modest increase yes so we'll take it the bubble popped we're reinflating now it's great um annie says this guy know funded his wife's etsy sticker business by buying her one of these and like 500 in social media ads to give her something to do and now he's quit his job entirely because she's making them so much money wow that's amazing etsy feels like an underrated story right now, especially with the sort of like chat GPT long-tailed commerce.

44:29Ben Thompson told some stuff. Well, the reason that integration is actually cool is I can imagine a future where you can generate a mock-up for an object and then find an Etsy seller that makes something like it and just ask them to make it. Totally. It'll be like one click to go to generate an image of something or video and you can just find the right vendor that can actually physically make it for you. And in one click, you know, purchase. This is the real like, uh, like 3d printing boom. Like there was this whole vision about a decade ago of like 3d printers now work. Everyone's going to have a 3d printer in their home and they'll be able to print whatever they wanted.

45:05That didn't quite happen, but there are a lot of Etsy sellers that have figured out specific 3d printed objects. Uh, we just got one at home for taking the wheel off a stroller more efficiently. And it's just a 3d printed little key that takes that off. Ben Thompson was talking about some 3D printed device. I forget what it was, but it holds an HDMI cable into a specific device at a perfect angle. Or it adapts a rack mounted thing in some way. And it was just something where there's no real market to fully productionize and mass produce it. But a 3D printer can go on Etsy and find the right customer.

45:42And so you're seeing this super long tail emerge, which is honestly fascinating. Well, before we have our next guest join, our first guest, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And we have Zach Parade from Plaid in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultradome. How are you doing, Zach? He's suited up. Yeah, it's nice to see you. Thank you for having me. Good to see you again. Looking sharp. Are you in D.C. today, or you're just dressed for the occasion of TBPN?

46:20I mean, you all dress so nicely when you're doing the news. I figured I had to dress up, too. No, I'm in D.C. It's D.C. I knew it. I knew it. If you couldn't tell, we borrowed a bunker to film this from. It looks great. It looks great. Yeah, very, very, very sound padded. Yeah, give us the update. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the company, but what's the latest and greatest in your world? So today's a big day for us. We do two big product releases each year. This is our fall product release. Lots of new exciting stuff that just came out. Probably chief among it is a product that we call Lenscore.

46:56It is a new credit score. We've been working on a bunch of credit analytics products for many years, and this Lenscore gives a really robust picture of a potential borrower. Let's say that you got a new job. Your income went up a lot. We could actually recognize that kind of thing in real time. Let's say that you sign up for seven loans all in the last 24 hours. It's probably pretty sketchy. You can recognize that kind of thing in real time. So a big upgrade to the credit scores. Also launched a bunch of stuff around risk and fraud analytics, payments, so on and so forth. So big day for us today.

47:27How do legacy fraud scores work? Like I'm familiar with, you know, it's out of 800 and you get a random number. And if you pay off, but there's all these weird, like there's these weird things and you hear recommendations like, Like, oh, don't pay off this loan early because that'll actually hurt your score. It always feels very, very indecipherable. But like, what did you not like about the current system? What's currently broken? Well, the way that you feel is the way that everybody feels about credit scores in the past. They're kind of a 350 to 850 score. It's largely based on your history of payments and the amount of loans that you've taken out in the past.

48:07And it's not responsive to the changes in your life in real time. It also skips a lot of important data inputs. Now, the lending industry has been built on these credit scores for decades, and they work okay. But when you think about an average lender, they want more information because today the fundamentals of lending have changed. There's a lot more attempted fraud in lending. There's a lot more new insights that you could be gathering. And frankly, consumers change their patterns a lot more. So the seven-year look back doesn't make a ton of sense. I, myself, I had gone to an optometrist, and that optometrist sent the bill to an old address for me.

48:46And my credit score was hit because I never got that bill for years. And then I finally figured it out. I had the same thing happen. So our new version. Yeah, my first company, we had a whole bunch of Wi-Fi hotspots on Verizon contracts. Dude, this happened to me. Really? This exact same thing happened to me, too. My credit got dinged because I sent the router back, and they were like, we never got it. But I was like, so you lost it and you have my card on file and you didn't just charge me for it. And then just deal with it. Yeah, it's very, very frustrating. I'm sure there's so much frustration.

49:16I have a bunch more questions, but sorry, I cut you off. Yeah, I guess my main question is like, okay, obviously the industry and consumers deserve like a more modern credit score. But it feels like these, the existing scores are heavily entrenched. and it's like you can make a better product, but how do you actually get it to mass adoption among lenders broadly? It's a great question. The new product that we launched is focused on looking at consumers in real time. So how do we look at your income? How do we look at your expenses? You can do the math to figure out free cash flow, and that should be the amount that a consumer can pay back in a given month or a year.

49:57The way that we're launching it originally is actually in partnership with a lot of folks. So we'll partner with the existing bureaus, with a lot of the existing lenders to add this alongside FICO or alongside Vantage Score. You can look at a FICO and then you can say, oh, but this user said that they just changed jobs. Let me get the data from that new job. So we can add that in. And then there's this interesting insight that we have, which only we have because we work with all of the lenders. And we can see the velocity of loans applied for. We call this network insights. There's a bunch of other data points that we can see just based on the traffic that you're doing across the entire Plaid network.

50:30So it's kind of a unique vector that people can now lend against. The net effect is we're seeing, you know, call it oftentimes 20 % lift in the quality of outcomes from this new one. And we're seeing a lot more people actually be eligible for loans because let's say they have a really high income and good rent payment history. That actually should indicate that they're a better loan. How do you think about, I imagine that there's a very complex algorithm to actually just to decide the score. There's probably some machine learning or AI in there. But you also want to deliver something that's like a human readable insight.

51:07So you can tell someone why their score dropped or what they can do to make their score better. Maybe I have a friend who works in, it's not high frequency trading. It's like out, like it's quantitative trading. So it's like a couple of days out. And he was like, we'll crunch all these numbers, we'll come up with some thesis for buying a billion dollars of some company in a day, and we'll be selling in like three days. And I was like, is there any way that you could say, oh, well, it's because if gold goes up, could you put it in business logic or if statements that a human could understand? He was like, it's impossible.

51:39Like there's just so many different parameters that go into finding alpha in the financial markets. And I feel like there's a world where a consumer would be very disappointed if you're like, yeah, your score went up one point, but we have no idea why. And we can't tell you the first thing about why it went up. Just these tensors, these weights activated in this massive model and your score went down. Sorry. So how do you think about actually educating the consumer on like how their score goes up or down? So we do a bunch of machine learning and AI to obviously like clean up the data and make it structured in a way that we can build our models on top of it.

52:16But ultimately, our models are representative roughly of the financial health of a consumer. So almost everything that a consumer would do to better manage their money will end up with a better credit score. Almost everything they would do to more poorly manage their money will end up with a worse credit score. And so the nice thing is when we build it, we're actually able to show it to the consumer first. They're able to review it if they want to, click submit, and then it goes to the lender. So the lender can then subsequently make the decision on the back of it. That's cool. So it's very lender friendly and that they're opting in if they want to just run with their experience score or whatever else what other options they have they can they can do that or they can add this on as a way to kind of improve their application exactly yeah so the idea is over time though over the over time though the lender would realize hey we're getting actually much better insight here we want to just you know roll with this i imagine that's what we hope um but the goal at first is that consumers feel like they can get more and better loans.

53:20Lenders feel like they can make more and better loans. So it's kind of opening the market initially. And then over time, we hope that this becomes one of the most important, if not the most important way that a lender makes their decisions. How does Buy Now, Pay Later fit into the ecosystem at this point? I imagine that they all have their own systems, but then they would love to just have more data because that probably enables better underwriting. How do they fit into this ecosystem? So buy now, pay later are sophisticated lenders. There's a scale of sophistication of all lenders. There are some lenders that will just use an out-of-the-box FICO score or an out-of-the-box LendScore score to make a lending decision.

54:01The highly sophisticated lenders, they'll want a zillion inputs. Yes, they'll still get maybe a FICO. They'll get a Plaid LendScore. But they want to look at the underlying inputs, the underlying raw data, and then they'll build their own models on top of it. I would say the BNPL lenders are quite sophisticated in the way that they lend. And so they're pulling a ton of data into the picture and then building kind of their own custom models on top of it. Now, our inputs are, yes, still inputs to their model, but they're not looking at our score as the sole determining factor. Is the business model for the Lens score the same as the previous credit scores or different in some way?

54:34How do you think about it? Pretty similar. Yeah. Pretty similar? We sell it on a kind of per loan application basis. Our customers are the lenders. They pay us for it. There's a handful of things that we can do to actually help them track credit worthiness on an ongoing basis. So whereas FICO or Vantage oftentimes is a one-time snapshot, sometimes a lender will want to maybe make offers to a consumer if they realize they want to increase their credit line. Or maybe they want to kind of give better preferential payment terms to a consumer if they think they can pay a loan down faster. And so ours is an ongoing credit score.

55:09That's maybe the only big difference. How do you think about what the consumer's interface is to the credit scores? I remember like years ago, you used to have to actually go to the three credit. Go to the credit store. Yeah, you had to go to the credit store and like check out and pay like 30 bucks. And then you'd get that and then you'd take that to a loan application sometimes. Sometimes they just do it on the back end, they'd pay. But then over time, I feel like the credit scores just became almost commoditized or free. Like it just shows up in my banking app a lot. And there were also like Credit Karma and different companies that figured out ways to basically pay that as a customer acquisition cost for free.

55:51And then they give you a bunch of products on top that they would monetize. How do you think the, what do you think the long-term consumer adoption of the Lens score looks like? Well, we hope it's pretty similar. Actually, we want consumers to be able to get a clear view of their credit profile for free. We're working on building ways that a consumer can come in and look at that. And ultimately, the customer then would be the lender. Like, it's to our benefit to have consumers that understand this more. It's to our benefit to have consumers that trust this score and that trust the things that we build.

56:26And so we want to be as direct and open with the consumer as you can. So a lot of that stuff is to come, and you'll see some launches from us kind of over the coming quarters on that front. What else besides Lens was the focus today? So a big upgrade to our anti-fraud model, and we launched a kind of broader suite of products called Protect. So again, Protect for us, it's a set of products that looks at consumers' underlying actions that they take across almost any financial product, and we can back it into an overall score of riskiness for the consumer and then a bunch of attributes. So some of the attributes are very easily explainable, such as this person just signed up for three crypto apps in the last 30 minutes.

57:10Some of the attributes are less easily explainable, more on the machine learning side. But this stuff will feed into the models for a lot of our customers and then they can build kind of this really fascinating step-up, step-down requirement for users based on their relative levels of riskiness. This has been a huge unlock for a lot of the fintech companies that are trying to sign up more users faster. We can create a fast lane effectively. So we've seen you before, we recognize your device, we've seen your phone number, you just do a two-factor code and you're good to go. And then we can also create a slow lane.

57:42So, hey, we've never seen you before, your device doesn't seem to match the IP address that you're dialing in from, what's going on with all this stuff, let's add a bunch of step ups and be really, really certain that you are who you say you are. So that's Lane for Financial Services. That's what we're trying to build. This sounds like the worst nightmare of somebody doing large-scale financial fraud on the internet. What's the shape of AI adoption at Plaid right now? I feel like obviously there's probably a ton of AI that you're doing on just like software development stuff. But at the same time, I feel like if I was offing with Plaid and it was like, hey, you want to chat with me right now, I'd be like, no, thanks.

58:21I'm actually good to just click a couple buttons. So like, are you seeing a lot of like LLM token consumption or more just focused on the machine learning, the custom models for underwriting, where you train a specific model for that. And you're not just leaning on a big like token factory for a lot of work. I'd say our use of tokens, I would call it like medium. We do build a custom training data set and then run a ton of the data through that model and the training data set. A lot of it is around just cleaning up transactions, identifying what kind of thing is happening. The textual analysis is very, very helpful for that.

59:02So that's the input into a lot of our models. But you're right. We don't build an active chat app for any consumer. A lot of the AI that we're doing is used to fight AI, meaning there's a lot of attempted AI fraud, and then we have a lot of AI on the other side to try to fight AI fraud. And then it's kind of building the foundational kind of data set upon which we build a lot of the models. So whenever you have a big pile of text in kind of behind the scenes and the back end, you can run LLMs over that and get a lot finer-grained data, categorize, understand what's actually going on with those large text dumps.

59:39But you don't necessarily even need to surface that to the customer, the end user, which is great. Generally, not directly. Generally, we'll surface it to the consumer indirectly saying, hey, you had elevated bank fees. And we won't even send that to the consumer. We'll send that to our customer. Our customer will then say, all right, in your budgeting app, you had elevated bank fees. And look at all these different bank fees. That makes a ton of sense. Well, congrats on the launch. Thanks so much for stopping by. Always great to see you. Have fun in DC. Thank you for having me. Have a good one.

1:00:03Cheers, Zach. Before we hop on with our second guest of the show, let me tell you about fall, the generative media app for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. And our next guest is about to be in the Restream waiting room. We can go back to the timeline. BlackRock and NVIDIA are participating in a$40 billion data center takeover, also including XAI and Microsoft.

1:00:39This is in the Financial Times this morning, an investment consortium that includes BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, and that's a great name for a fund that does global infrastructure investing. And of course, Abu Dhabi Fund MGX has struck a$40 billion takeover of one of the world's largest data center operators as it launches an initiative to underwrite the infrastructure for artificial intelligence. and I believe we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. So let's bring him in. Pondus from Amazon. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you. Thanks so much for hopping on.

1:01:19Congratulations on the launch. Sorry for the delay, but very excited to catch up with you. Would love to start with just an introduction on yourself, kind of where you sit within the organization, and then we can go into some of the news and some of the updates. Sure. I'm the Senior Vice President, Devices and Services. So what that means is, if I frame it around brands, it probably helps a little bit. But think about devices across Amazon. You'd start with Project Kuiper, which are the satellites for Leo Constellation that we're building right now. And on the other end, you would think about Zoox, which are the self-driving cars that you might have seen in Las Vegas.

1:01:56But in between, kind of the consumer brands, Alexa, Ring, Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle, Echo devices, you know, just an array of all the kind of consumer front devices that we build here at Amazon. Yeah. And what's the latest update across the hardware ecosystem? What was announced most recently? We just launched a set of new Echo devices. Super cool. Kind of built for Alexa Plus. This is our new, Alexa Plus is our new AI interface using Alexa. Just more conversational. It's a really fun product. Helps you get stuff done. Two screen-based devices, an 8-inch and 11-inch, and two new speakers. Killer sound.

1:02:41They're absolutely beautiful, by the way. They're just gorgeous. We can talk about it if you want. Three new Kindles. It's called the Kindle Scribe. And one of them is in color, which is gorgeous color writing. A whole array of 4K cameras with ring, including doorbells, which is bringing that clarity. Quite cool. These are your cool products. And some new Fire TVs, just quite literally TVs from 40 inches up to 75 inches, including what you call Fire TV Stick. Yeah. How are you thinking about Alexa? I mean, we've been following like Siri launched a long time ago and it feels, I just activated Siri.

1:03:24And it feels like they are at a point where the current, the previous system was very much like business logic with a bunch of different routes that the, that the Siri app could go down. And now they're kind of in the LLM era in the completely AI generative AI era. and maybe that necessitates a rethink or a rebuild or a partnership. How has Amazon grappled with this idea that the architecture of what an AI assistant is might be changing? Yeah. There's a couple of ways to think about it. First, I think the way you framed it is previously a lot of this was deterministic. If you said the right thing, you kind of got the right answer or call it point and shoot where question, answer, question, answer.

1:04:12it's flipping on its head now because when LLMs come into play, you have to re-architect the whole problem. You move from this deterministic model where if you say the right thing, you get the right answer. It kind of feels limited. It's like a different type of speak that you have towards some of these, in the previous agents, if you will. But now you're in this conversational world, anything you ask, unlimited knowledge, specifically to Alexa, you found there's personality that comes into play. There's empathy that comes into play. So you get this personalization, but you also get memory. And so the more you talk to her, the more it knows about you.

1:04:48So you've gone from this, what you would say, just give and take moment to conversation in depth, understanding, and then actually getting some stuff done. The power of it, though, not only do you have all that, you have this kind of ambient world around you. If you have a few Alexa devices plugged in, they'll all update with the new Alexa Plus AI baseline. And now you can just have a conversation from anywhere, ask anything you want, keep your phone in your pocket in those critical moments where you don't have to go do the research that way. Just have the conversation. It's pretty powerful. Do you think there's a risk or some sort of tension between the Alexa developers, the app store?

1:05:31I know some folks who have built specific apps that do specific things. But if you drop a more generalized LLM system on top of it, that might actually be competitive. You're kind of competing with your customers. How have you messaged to the developer community around that? Developers are pretty pumped about it right now because these skills, we're still calling these APIs that are routing to a skill. So while it's not deterministic point and shoot, it still is kind of think of it as different agents on the system that you can call on. So you're seeing these developers write apps where the LLM makes, you know, the product Alexa makes the decision, kind of orchestrates and says that you're trying to order a car.

1:06:18Let me, we'll call Uber. And then Uber makes the car happen. And I think as you see that as an example, or you wanted to order food from Grubhub, whatever the answer was, you just ask for the food. And then that service makes its move and delivers it. I think there's this fundamental of it's actually better for developers because if you're serving your customer, they're sitting here, they're trying to tell you what they want. They don't have to be as explicit anymore. They can almost be general. in their asks. And at that point, if it's calling on an app or a skill or an add-on, as we call it, developers are pretty pumped about it right now.

1:07:02We have a pretty long list of developers right now. We probably have the largest group of, if you will, agents attached to any LLM out there. And so it is a pretty rare situation as it's just not being done anywhere else. How do you think about the future of smart glasses and wearables? Amazon's done so many smart devices from the TV you mentioned, the Kindle, the Alexa, it feels like an obvious thing. You have a number of products that have been announced or already live, but where do you think that goes? What formats do you like most? And where are you seeing the most adoption, really? So we see a ton.

1:07:39We see our usage kind of just spiking with Alexa Plus on the current device lineup that we have today. We have frames, frames that people wear. We see the usage go up, the buds are going up. Because when you take an agent that's smart with you, it's quite powerful. So we already see it happening in different form factors. I mean, it's down to user preference. I will say this. I mean, you're hitting a point that I think is just worth noting.

1:08:07I think there are plenty of jobs moving to what you would call AI devices it's just kind of changing and if you think about kind of the evolution of different portions of tech over time let me take you back when I was developing I think 14 years ago I was making a laptop and somebody had come to me and said what are you doing? the laptop is dead. I can't see you guys right now, but assuming you have laptops in front of you. We do. Now I can see you. Yeah, not. Yeah, like just think about that for a minute. Like that was 14 years ago, guys. Like literally I was, we were creating this product. We're going to make this laptop.

1:08:47It's going to create, and I have this vision and you're getting all after it. You're like, this is beautiful. Look what it can do in every detail. And you're going, and the first thing is like, why would you build a laptop? That thing is dead. Yeah. The phone has replaced it. It's over for the laptop 14 years ago. Yeah, these things stick around a long time. What really was happening, you know, it wasn't that the laptop was dying. It was just getting stronger at what it did great. Jobs had kind of moved to the phone. And the things that mattered to you on a phone came to life, communications, then, you know, the advent of social media, shopping probably, like things that were easier there.

1:09:20But the things that mattered, like right now, your notes or your other things that mattered for the laptop, they just got stronger. I think we're kind of in that same era. I think AI devices are coming down the pipe. Yeah. They're going to be great for certain things. And to your point, a lot of them will be on the go, whether it's glasses or something on your wrist or, you know, something in your pocket. I don't talk about, you know, what's in the lab, but for sure you would imagine that as the jobs move, there's going to be form factors that evolve that are going to be more important. I think it just strengthens the form factors that exist today, just like the laptop got stronger, in my opinion, because when the phone came, you know, you got better at the jobs on your laptop, just like when the laptop came, the desktop got stronger for gaming and developers.

1:10:03And you just see that evolution where it's not that these form factors go away, but they get better at what they are meant to be. And then new form factors show up. I think that's happening right now. How do you think about the personality and brand of individual models? I feel like there's a world where I would love an Alexa that I can just say it's Claude. And I'm talking to an Alexa hardware device, but I like the personality and functionality of Claude. And so I want to just kind of run that piece of software by default in the same way that I can select like a default browser. I have a MacBook, but I run Chrome as my default browser.

1:10:39Is there a world where I could be able to do that? It's an interesting thought. It's not how it works for Alexa right now, but it's pretty, it's interesting. I don't think for like, if I think about the customer, the, you know, kind of the, I don't know what you would call it, but just the baseline customer. What I'm trying to do is just be more. Yeah, I'm extremely online. I have opinions about individual models. I don't even know what to tell you. But many people don't care. You hit the extreme in the question, but here's how I think about it. I think like Alexa is basically model agnostic. Like what's the right model for the job?

1:11:16Sure. And of course, we have fine-tuned models specifically that are built specifically for Alexa to do the jobs that you're looking for. The thing that matters most, I think, to our customers is that it personalizes to you. And so the more I talk to it about the things that I love, the more it understands me. I think you see that today in other products. But then as you're in natural conversations or you're asking for the next thing, you don't have to go all the way. Alexa can be proactive for you. I'll give you a simple example. Maybe it's a silly one, but it is simple, just kind of being practical.

1:11:46So if I ask Alexa, I have a camera. I have a ring camera right now. You have it where my dogs eat in the dog bowls. And if I can ask Alexa now, it's a pretty cool feature. It's just AI and it's simple sense, although kind of fun. Did anyone feed the dogs today? That's a classic question at my house. I get in trouble every night when I get home. Have you fed the dogs yet? I'm like, I just walked in, that sort of thing. And then there's that moment where I can just turn and ask Alexa, and Alexa says, no, nobody fed the dogs today. So it's got that in problem. Yeah, it's just very cool because it knows nobody fed the dogs.

1:12:27You know, we use ring video descriptions. We understand there's a dog. We understand that somebody fed the food or fed the dog the food. So if the dog's not fed, I can ask. But in three days or four days later, it can be proactive and just say, hey, nobody's fed the dogs today. and like you just take that it didn't matter which llms or which agents kind of created that scenario to the customer what mattered was it had the personalization it knows i care about it and then uh kind of proactively gave me that information back i think it's that's the essence of just staying agnostic to it but we do use different models and how are you thinking about the way that advertising should integrate into ai assistance because there's a lot of debate happening right now.

1:13:11People are going to assistants for product recommendations and advice on things to buy. And I think there's a very real and important debate around when should this assistant that's like a trusted advisor, how should ad-based recommendations show up? When is it appropriate? When should it just recommend? There's usually no objectively best product in a category because every consumer is different but what's your framework for that because obviously amazon's very pro ad when do you think you should recommend or what should it recommend you the way you framed it is right i think the like any assistant the better it knows you the better the recommendations can be and so where i get where i think ads do work is when you're actually helping the customer you know find what they're looking for um and then it just comes down to the that personalization aspect and some of that history.

1:14:11If you, if there's something you use quite often and you're having, you know, and there's an ad that actually helps you if it's raised to you, uh, that's when I get excited. Cause I think it's like a holistic approach to, you know, that kind of circle when it's just random and you're like, what is this? I really, that's painful. It's just where it gets. And I think people really have no problem with the idea of going to your Alexa and then Amazon taking a cut of the commerce transaction that happens because you see the Amazon truck and you see the delivery network and you see how fast things arrive.

1:14:49And so there's clear value pervade there. And so I think most customers are happy to have Amazon take essentially like an affiliate fee almost on that or a cut. Yeah, the issue is how how agnostic yeah is there a world where where alexa would be getting and if like an if like effectively be an affiliate on the platform like it was an external like you know source that was sending traffic because what i would want is to arrive on is basically say hey alexa uh and sorry to anybody at home i'm setting off your alexa device if you're listening to this um but uh hey, Alexa, I want to buy, I use the example of a paper towel holder because I've had a, and I want it to be from a brand that is over 50 years old.

1:15:40And like that is the kind of, that's the kind of product I want to buy from a reputable brand that has been operating. And that isn't just, you know, importing the cheapest possible product from overseas. and so that is like a very valuable recommendation to me and as a consumer i don't care if alexa takes a cut but uh that's different than me just searching in in uh you know in a search bar i agree i mean i don't know about i'm not exactly sure what you mean by alexa taking a cut there but what i would like to see happen in that scenario and i think is what happens today is because we're so conversational we can do that search for you we can bring it up we can also just look at your shopping history if you choose to enable that and then say, look here, this is the size of paper towels you've been buying.

1:16:28And fundamentally, you know, if you just go to that next level of beyond just, I'm going to, I heard what you said and here's the answer. Maybe just do a little bit of logic flow for you and bring back a few options. I think that's when it does get like, these are those emotional connection points. I know it sounds silly. We're talking about paper towels, but if you're asking for something indirectly and you don't know exactly what you're pointing and shooting for, and you get something that's close and you can have a conversation, just think about any assistant kind of mode. I'm just talking to somebody.

1:16:54I'm just going to have this conversation and we're going to brainstorm it together. You're starting to see that happen on Alexa. It's more so about refining what it is you're getting after. And you can see that in kind of most aspects. On the Kindle side, are you getting feature requests from users that want more AI integrated into products. I can imagine I pick up a book I haven't read in a while and it'd be nice to be able to say, can you summarize the first three chapters? Summarize the entire book in one sentence. I'm done. Okay, I'm done. We're getting a bunch of it. And this is a fun, I'm going to answer your, we have a thing called book so far.

1:17:34So I'm going to tell you about that. That was the exact feature you just asked for. And it's AI based. And it's basically continue watching for books. Do you know what I mean? You watch the first three episodes of whatever it is, you know, rings of power and you're like, just keep me up to date or, you know, whatever it is, what show it is. And you just see the recap and then you go into your the next episode. This happens to me all the time because I don't watch enough TV. Yeah. We have books so far, which is that, you know, hey, summarize how far I am to this book. Remind me. You also can ask the book anything you want.

1:18:04Yeah. You can ask Kindle anything you want about the book. And that was a big feature request. Like, I just want to talk about the character. I want to know more about what really happened here. And now that's happening. So that's where AI enhances it. But you have to be really careful because there's something pure about Kindle that customers love. And this is like near and dear to my heart. You have to be a super fine line. We do have, like on the Kindle Scribes that we just launched, we do have AI search for any of your notes. So if you have hundreds of pages of notes now, you just search for it.

1:18:33And then you can say, summarize all the notes that I wrote about John or whatever. And, you know, you'd get them all summarized and it would do a smart summary for you. And then you can put them in. You can do all that. But here's the risk that we're very cautious of. Like Kindle's like a sanctuary. It's like this. You get into it and then you just want to disappear into it. Our users, like they love their books. You know what they hate when they're reading books is distractions. I don't use that word lightly. But it is like if you popped up an ad or put a link up or I infiltrated you with a text coming in, if you will, from Jordy, you'd be like, God, I'm just trying to read, man.

1:19:11This is my one place to disappear. And it's crazy because readers are popping up everywhere, new readers. I think like 60 % of our new purchases are from totally new readers right now, just so you know. So there's a bit of a spike happening because it's a growing category again. the trick is to hold that as like that sanctuary where when you do pick up to read that's what it becomes the more tech you put in there beyond a book you know you you have to be careful we i think i know where that line is the team knows where that line is we have an amazing kindle team they've been doing it for you know years and years this isn't and they are they they understand the customers so well but to your point the customer is starting to ask can i can i get to what we call book so far or continue watching is the best way to say it in analogous.

1:19:57And so we created that or summarization. We have that. And also in your writing, you can search your notes, but we're being very selective not to over techify it. If that makes sense, you got to be careful because at the end of the day, it is a book or it is a notepad that you want to write on. And you can have plenty of other devices to let your distractions kick in, but this is the one that we kind of hold coveted and protect quite a bit. I have one last question, but maybe it's just a technical one, but on Kindle and AI, I think of Kindle as, I don't want to say underpowered, but like it's designed for long battery life, you know, not the craziest screen.

1:20:40It's supposed to be something you can throw in your backpack and pull out on a trip and know that it's still charged, right? So I imagine that there's - You should be a product manager for Kindle. You just hold that line. If you hold that frame, man, you're perfect. Just religiously hold on to those statements. Fantastic. And so I imagine that the AI workloads need to be done in the cloud, and you're not thinking about on-device AI, and that's generally the right trade-off because the summaries can be processed asynchronously or they can be queued up and kind of gone back and forth over the Wi-Fi network or 4G.

1:21:19I'm just kind of interested in what the median connectivity versus on-device compute trade-off looks like for Kindle going forward. Yeah, it's tricky. We're doing a lot of work on the edge right now as you put it on device. And I think you have to because it can envelope speed and sometimes. Specifically though, basically we serve the customer transparently wherever it's right. But we are doing work to, when it's time to use on device, so let's call it, like if you're trying to reduce latency on writing and you're doing some beautification, it's an example. You're going to want to do it on device.

1:22:03If you want to, you know, do books so far, like it's a cloud-based thing. I mean, what if you started reading on your, this is a good example, you started reading on your iPhone, you came over to your Kindle and you picked it up. You want that to be a cloud-based experience. So that's not something you wanted on device. So there's tradeoffs, but we do both. It's a good question. I think that's true, by the way, across every single device we talked about today. Yeah, totally. Like where is the edge workload more important if I did want to, depending on if we were doing, whether it was for security or speed or cost, whatever it might have been, you're always trying to find the right balance for the customer.

1:22:42By the way, when you say it, can I show you this? Yeah, please. You may not be able to see it on the screen. pull it up this is the new color kindle can you see it wow wow so is that is that color like how thin it is like the thing is 5.4 millimeters thin like it's crazy it's so fun and it has the same battery life talked about same latency same speed and i'm i have it here taking notes as i'm talking to you guys but it it's like a it's a powerhouse now so the processor is that yeah is that uh is that like e-ink screen like it works outside and yeah it's It almost feels like when you look at it, it's so soft on the eyes, right?

1:23:18It has a front light, and the front light basically goes across the screen, so it's not blasting you. So it still has that subtlety. You don't feel as tired as you're looking at it. You can do it in the dark and the light. There's nothing that you lose this screen. It's a matte screen. It's perfect for writing. So you get all those pieces. The refinement was color. So there's always this battle. But it's not an LCD with the beautification of OLED and so forth. but I mean, there's something beautiful and subtle about this, almost like colored pencils on the screen. And so even when you're writing in color, it feels that way.

1:23:53It's quite, it's pretty, it's one of my favorites. We got to get one. We got to figure out how to jailbreak it, sideload the Sora slop feed. I want brain rot on that thing ASAP. Don't tell me, don't tell me. Don't tell me any of that stuff, man. I don't want to hear it. Last thing, do you think Amazon's AI opportunities broadly underappreciated? I mean, it feels like there's so much service area, everything from retail opportunity, Anthropic. You guys already have a suite of devices that people use and love that are in people's homes. It feels like in many ways, other, you know, you guys also have data centers too.

1:24:28A few of those. A few of them. You got a few racks. They invented the data center. For sure. Yeah. For sure. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. But hands down, every part of Amazon is entrenched in driving through AI. Whether it's Bedrock, AWS, what's happening cloud-wise, all the models we run, we make available to our customers, all the way through stores and what they're doing fundamentally to help your shopping experience better, Prime Video and what they're doing. We have a jump to scene with Fire TV. Did you guys know that? It's very cool. Well, that's very cool. Just pick a movie scene.

1:25:10I mean, also the largest deployment of robots, I believe, in the world. Correct. Well, I don't know if that's accurate. Maybe in the US. I saw some chart where you guys were passing a million robots. Yeah, it's pretty massive. And then like, you know, controlled by, and then you have the other side of it. All the Alexa devices now are about to be powered by Alexa Plus. This is like core foundation of like consumer AI in its most practical sense. you're in this place now where you know i'm at the dinner table with the family and instead of somebody pulling out their phone to get the answer or research something we just have a conversation with alex and you got the full depth of what you would have expected from an lm-based product but it's just very practical and ready for you and so like i think the whole gamut is you're right it's it's quite underappreciated right now i don't i don't know what the right way to frame it is on the other side without sounding too like you know but i i do think i i agree so i think uh and i think i think the market will will uh will realize eventually so i do too i think you know first thing serve the customer serve the customer serve the customer and do it in the right way i think you know that's our focus and we'll we'll we'll kind of continue to do that but you're right i think that it gets it'll get noticed seen understood um i'm pretty proud of it right now And when you see what's coming with Alexa Plus with Ring video search or Ring story descriptions and summarizing your day, it really starts making it something.

1:26:36It takes AI to the next level in my mind because it just makes it practical for people. It just puts it right there. Don't get me wrong. You can actually use Alexa.com, too, to do all the things that people are associating with a traditional LLM, which is quite cool as well, or the app. But at the end of the day, there's just a whole new set of practical ways to use it that I think are going to be pretty delightful for our customers. When's the new Scribe actually releasing? I just tried to buy it while we were talking, and it says coming soon. I'm not allowed to give you the date on here, but you have to get on the wait list.

1:27:08Our demand is a little bit higher than we expected it to be right now. We're in production, so you put it on. Amazon, you guys couldn't get the demand planning right? I want a scrub in two days, Panos. Tiny. You'll have it before the holiday. I want it in two days. As long as it's under the Christmas tree. By the way, people are very bummed about it. I'll make sure you guys get it. Thank you. That'd be awesome. Put your name down and I'll make sure. We will. We will. Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. Great to hang out. This is great. Congrats on all the progress. Yeah, really, really fascinating tour of the ecosystem.

1:27:37I appreciate you breaking it down for us. Thanks so much. It's been fun, guys. You take care. Wait, also, I think, obviously, it's too late now, but is Panos the first? I think you're the first person from Amazon ever on our show. I think so. We've had over 1 ,000 interviews this year. Bring the damn dong. There we go. Congratulations. It's great to have you. Thanks. We'll see you soon. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. We have some breaking news that we've got to cover. Sam Altman has replied to his post about erotic content in ChatGPT. He says, okay, this tweet about upcoming changes to ChatGPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to.

1:28:20You didn't think posting E-R-O-T-I-C-A was going to... There are so many other words that you could have used to kind of like, you know, get there without saying that word. You could have just said romantic companion. Exactly. We have said that. The entire time we were discussing, Grok, we like that this is a clean show. We like that we don't... I've never, I never wanted to say that word on the show. Exactly. So when we talk about this, we say adult content, adult romantic companion. We don't go to the other words. But yes, he went there. He said E-R-O-T-I-C-A. He typed it out into his X app, sent the tweet.

1:28:56And he said, it was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults. Here is an effort to better communicate it. I'm going to read it. And you tell me, is this better communication, Jordy? He says,

1:29:38in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission. It doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not. Without being paternalistic, we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals. But we are not the elected moral police of the world in the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries, R-rated movies, for example, we want to do the same thing here. Let's hear it for the MPAA rating system that's gaining popularity.

1:30:15Yes. I want this so badly. I just want to, in the app store, it should say R-rated. R-rated. But that is not NC-17 rated, which is a different thing. And so we were debating this. So you're a movie buff. No, no. I mean, is Amazon's erotic content on the Kindle, is that X-rated? Is that the same as OnlyFans? Is that the same as an adult content video site? It does feel somewhat different. And so, I don't know. Maybe this is a nod to staying in the R-rated category, not going further. I don't know. We'll see. What's your reaction, Jordi, to this post? Is it effective comms? Put on your Lulu hat.

1:30:56I mean, the problem is that 14, almost 14 million people saw yesterday's post. You add that up with, you know, thousands of other posts. And, you know, this post is going to get certainly get plenty of, plenty of views, but I think the, the community has already taken it. I don't know. I think, I think the, the, the December timeline, there's a, there's a lot of days between now and December. AGI might hit before that, but there's so much that could happen to tweak that policy before it goes out, really silo it. I don't know. We'll, we'll have to see. I can almost guarantee that when it rolls out, there will be crazy screenshots on the timeline that day of people getting it to do crazy stuff because people love jailbreaking this stuff.

1:31:43They've already been doing it. Anyway, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte. Serverless vector and full text search. Build from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. You can load all your erotic content into Turbo Puffer. Search it 10 times cheaper. And we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got Adam Ryan from Workweek. The legend. The legend. Bring it in. It's the platform for professional networks. Welcome to the show, Adam. Second time, third time. I've lost track, but thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to turn this microphone here.

1:32:21We're going to be talking about your strategy to bring erotica to professional networking. I've been waiting for this moment. That's exactly what it's all about. Actually, kick us back off. This was the thesis of the whole company, is that people wanted erotica in the workplace. Kick us back off with the actual overview of the company, how you introduce yourself these days. And the quick history, too, for anybody that missed the last interview. Yeah. Started the company four years ago, and this guy was part of the founding story of that. And today, one of the things that we learned along the way that everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of, hey, I trust individuals over institutions and beauty, fashion, gaming.

1:33:11There's a Kylie Jenner out there. There's nobody in work. If you're a VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? If you're into beauty of Kylie, you don't have anyone else in that space. So that was the first problem we wanted to go solve. And then we thought it was potentially because of money, bandwidth, Like this, what these people are busy, they already make a lot of money. That's why they don't create content. We realized that there's, there's an actual just platform missing. People aren't going on LinkedIn being like, Hey, I'm prepping for a riff. Can someone help me?

1:33:44And all these platforms are open networks. You can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analog. Mm-hmm. So putting it in my terms, you're building effectively a professional network, but hyper-specific to people within basically certain, I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you're a VP of marketing and you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing, Workweek is the platform that you can do that on. Yeah. So we've built a horizontal platform and then we verticalize it by the profession so we have one for uh uh in healthcare marketing hr e-commerce etc yeah and so if you're in if you're kind of senior leader in one of those spaces we verify you so that prevents the bots the erotica uh as uh as well as uh make sure that you can kind of have those those trusted discussions i mean i imagine that uh with the with the erotica discussion that the hr group is support group is probably going wild all the hr leaders across the fortune 500 yeah that's a big question what are we going to do about this because we've given chat gpt to everyone and then they're going to be able to use it forever yeah and i'm assuming on business plans you can just turn off that yeah like this is can you maybe yeah so it's that's 40 chess you got to upgrade to the uh to the enterprise solution now because you got to be able to fine tune your entire organization so we can keep intern Tyler off of the adult version.

1:35:16Tyler's been grinning this whole series. He's just wrapping up. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, I've heard crazy stories of value in these niches. There's some phrase like there's riches in the niches, there's reaches in the niches, something like that. I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communities. So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups, put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of. But then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to fix up the HVAC system, they'd be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey, who else is managing an office and needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of filtered water or a better Wi-Fi provider or something like that?

1:36:04And that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff. hey, we're talking. How do you think about if there's this continuum between LinkedIn's, this super broad category, or you have someone like a Lenny, a Substack creator with a show that's this individual off in this world versus these curated communities? Where do you see the water cooler existing for the average user? I think there's the traditional social networks, which are all free to join. Yeah. And then you have the chief of staff one. Silva owns that one. It's a subscription. Okay. Most of those, you know, it's the YPO, but for X.

1:36:44Sure. Like they've all created those, but it's a subscription. Yep. There's really only been one company that's done verification with making it free. Interesting. Which is Doximity Professional Network for Doctors. They're like a 10-ish. $14 billion company today. Produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting. No idea. And only raised$50 million. Wow. Hell of a company. Go buy the stock. That's good. Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial advice. And we're really following a lot of that blueprint. Sure. How do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops like a social network, but you still have the verification?

1:37:22Got it. Because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing on a network, the impressions against that audience are worth thousands of times, potentially the average impression on a LinkedIn. Well, and I think it's to the, Alexis on the show yesterday talked about the dead internet theory. It's like the perfect time for trying to solve that is like, how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit, I love Reddit, but I used to be able to tell, are you smart by your reply? And now with ChatGPT, I'm like, I don't know. Or like, have you put effort into the reply? And if you did, I'm like, all right.

1:37:57Now I'm like, I have no idea who this is. And so the kind of whole trust of the internet is, I think, shifting, particularly when it comes to work. You really care about who's giving you advice. Yeah, Isaac, a friend of the show, posted a couple days ago, do what Raya did, but for a social network, humans only, human verification, hard to get into, no idea how to do it, but feels intuitively like it could work. and I love seeing this because this has been Workweek's thesis for years now. You guys have been building towards it so people are finally realizing. What do you think about some of the recent changes on X?

1:38:34They're adding functionality that shows where the user is based. There's probably a lot of good reasons for this and then some bad reasons. I think some of the concerns for people that are in areas like the UK that don't tolerate free speech. You could be targeted, uh, or, or, or authorities there could be trying to come after accounts, but, um, it's like such a, X is such an interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional network and a place to talk about our, the industry or various industries broadly. Uh, but at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar, right?

1:39:11It's like, uh, it's the people are getting in fights all the time there's like you know uh that that shady guy in the corner that you know it's got a history yeah it's got history yeah exactly um but uh yeah i don't know i mean that's what nikita's doing if you're an open network that's free you're gonna get bots yeah and then you also are gonna get you know people abusing them we loved i'm on twitter all the time but the twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots and then also the blue check market changed the verification process a little bit where you could buy your own verification, but Russian bots still have credit cards.

1:39:51I remember I got verified, and then six weeks later, they did the... Dude, I spent years. Me too. Text the grandma like, I got it. I finally went through the file. I found old... You used to just have to... You needed five news articles. So I found some old news articles. Wikipedia page. Got approved, and then a week later, It was like, oh, everyone thinks we're good for it. Give us your take on the current state of independent media. You were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying, I want to build the morning brew for X or the hustle for X. There were some great businesses built off of that.

1:40:33Are many of them still thriving? What is the current state of the, maybe you start with like the newsletter media business. Yeah, I mean, I think what Substack has done has democratized access. I think, like, ultimately what people always come down in media is you need to, like, help people make money, help people get eyeballs, or help people make content faster. Like, you solve one of those things, you have a decent business, solve all three, you have a good one. And what's happening is, you know, I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Beehive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case.

1:41:07I think we're starting to make our own case there for more specific kind of verticals. But I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the truth. There's like Lenny is getting more money on a subscription basis than most publishers in B2B trade publications have been around for like 50 years. So consumers' wallets always end up where it's going. Walk me through Trung Fan's existence, his business. The most interesting man in the world. He writes on business with Workweek, not at Workweek. Is he an employee? Is he on the network? Like, he has a newsletter. He's just Trung, man. How does that work?

1:41:46He's just Trung. Trung was one of the first creators that Workweek partnered with. Yeah, well, so we signed him at The Hustle. I hadn't known him for a while. Yeah. And he actually was a big part of, like, our shtick is because when we brought him on at The Hustle, he was so funny and so much better than everyone else. he changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1.5 million people like like overnight i mean it was like everyone just started like reading more and opening more um ads went up and so uh we actually that was like a big part of his like one person could totally you have like the 100x creator which everyone talks about developers um today uh one he's like the best dad in the world uh you can't mention trung and not talk about tj trung jr uh and uh i don't think he's ever been on a an all hands call for any company I've ever been a part of with him.

1:42:38But, you know, that's just kind of his vibe of what he does. And he comes with comes with it all. But yeah, I think he's true rockstar. But is he an example of someone who's who's stewarding a smaller community of professionals that could be given some sort of moniker? He works more on the workweek side of helping us. So what we have a lot is we have people like Blake Madden, who covers health care. If you're in healthcare, you know who Blake is. Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche healthcare. Trung's the guy to help us do that. Okay, so he's a little bit more like top of funnel. He's a halo creator, yeah.

1:43:15Got it, okay. And then there are specific niches. Is there a power, I imagine there's some sort of power law to those, to the various communities that you have. Like, what's at the top? Like, where are you really, like, dominating? About, like, 30 % of revenue is HR, 9 % is healthcare. but if we look at like TAM, it's actually pretty indexed pretty equally of like how many people we think we can get per network. And then within HR, for example, are there multiple communities, multiple creators, or is it all just one big pool? How do you think about that? So we think about it more like a network.

1:43:44So SafeSpace is the HR network. And I think this is part of it. You have to use the lexicon of lingo. Like Blake uses very different language than HR. They just talk about. And so each one's developed to match that. And then within the network, we have creators. And so we believe if you want to write for HR leaders, we're the best place to get the eyeballs. And then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that, that they can get money off of. Are there other kind of services or activities that are kind of, I don't know, amortized or shared across the entire platform? Obviously, ad sales seems like one of them, but actual software?

1:44:25Or do you say, hey, Trung, there's no better product than just posting on X, so we're not going to try and build our own short-form text app? Yeah, we just let them do their own thing. Yeah, use whatever tool is best for the job if you want to be on Substack or Slack. We use our own newsletters. So newsletters particularly is that, and that's our way that we use content to drive people into the networks. Yep, and then you can shuffle people around through the different networks. Not that different than how Substack's now doing it for theirs, but ours is more vertical. Yeah, yeah. And there's more like news driven.

1:44:56Yeah. Makes sense. Political and yeah. I wanted your take on on David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Skydance. A lot of people thought that the price they paid for the free press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it when you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience. But I wanted wanted to hear how you thought about it. The the merger itself, I mean, it allows them to compete. I think like taking a big step out, everyone wants to win streaming. I mean, that's like the name of the game. And so it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney Plus and Netflix.

1:45:35While they're all, and Netflix just announced, I think today, a partnership with Spotify to start bringing more podcasts on, like is an IP race of the streaming. And Paramount was losing. And I think this allows them to do that. So that's, I think the bigger picture is actually that. Yeah. Everything else. The free press is like a rounding error as part of this it's 150 million total and they're buying you know 12 revenue of that it's not the end of the world i think that was also uh if you're going out there was that the revenue number uh 12 to 15 i think okay yeah it was higher than 20 but um yeah it was around like 10x multiple i think or 10 to 12 um but they um i also think when you're starting your own company which basically david ellison is like you want your own people sure and that's you're going to make sure you build the right foundation.

1:46:24Yeah, everybody's focused on what did they pay for the free press. You should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make CBS. This is no different, like in a totally different world and very different numbers. But then Zuck saying, like, I need an AI team. I'm going to go get the people that I want to get. He's saying, I want to have the best editorial team. I'm going to go get the people I want to have. Do you think the bigger platforms, the public platforms, have kind of become less relevant in those niche professional networks? I feel like if I went back like 10 years on Twitter, there would be like hashtag like Marketing Tuesday.

1:47:00And I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing that. On Tuesday. Yeah, basically. It was like that. What a crazy concept. Maybe it was Marketing Monday or something. Manifestation Mondays, that was a thing as well. There was a thing around like hashtags. All the corny hashtags. Chats around certain things. And you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific. But now X feels like teapot political news. It's at a much higher level than any sort of niche one. The irony, I think, was when they went all algorithms first, they lost the sense of communities.

1:47:34And when you used to follow people, and that's who you did, it was like your people. And when you went to algorithms, it totally changed the dynamic of the product. But because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them differently. It happened slowly. It's still, I think it makes the feed more interesting, but we definitely lost something. And they make more money. I mean, like, you're there for engagement, and your Dow Mal goes up as Nikita makes that algorithm better. So, like, that's all he cares about. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, like, ultimately what their incentives are.

1:48:00I do think, like, LinkedIn, you know, I know you guys are huge there and really rely on the show. The Sports Center of LinkedIn. The Sports Center of LinkedIn. So, hate to say this, but, you know, I think, like, 10 years ago, someone would be like, hey, I see you're connected on LinkedIn. then can you make that introduction? I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know. Today I'm like, I have no clue who that is. I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. The more people at it, the worse it gets. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. We were talking off air about how OnlyFans hasn't been able to sell itself.

1:48:29They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday, obviously, you know, other companies leaning into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting, which OnlyFans has done better than probably any company in the world. When XAI was leaning into Romantic Companions earlier this year, we were like, it made sense for them to do. They needed a strategy to drive, you know, new user signups, engagement, subscriptions, et cetera. But why do you think, have you been surprised that there's no buyer for OnlyFans? Yeah, it's like the, on a cashflow per headcount, I think it's the best company in the world.

1:49:13Until, what is it, Tether? 1.9 billion, I think, only Flames does in cashflow a year with like 70 employees or something. It's like absurd. I know the owner takes like a, he pays himself a 500 million dividend check a year. And then they leave like plenty in the bank. But they've never, they can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content. And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they've created the tooling. The old CEO of OnlyFans, former colleague of mine, she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better.

1:49:51And now they've advanced further to where it's a chat bot. They're essentially not even having real conversation anymore. It's not that different than what we're talking about for OpenAI. And it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, X being the everything app. You're like, I can kind of see that. That's, I think, your point earlier about the Apple comparison. This is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for OpenAI. Yeah. Well, we have some breaking news we've got to cover before our next guest hops on. But thank you so much for stopping by. What's the breaking news?

1:50:22I've got to know it. There's a ton of these. Mr. Beast has filed a trademark launching his own bank. His own bank. It will be called Mr. Beast Financial. Mitchell. He clearly saw our post about Erebor and was like, I got to get it on the action. Just kidding. The application was filed two days ago. Oh, but it's real. No, it happened this morning. No, this is real. What's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that. It's kind of like... I guess. Yeah.

1:50:55I mean, I just don't know that. I don't know that. I think there's like a lane of trust sooner or later that like you're just going to screw it. Like, why do I want a Mr. Beast bank? I don't know. I mean, the lesson from the Mr. Beast bar or the Beastables and the hamburgers is that it has zero price discrimination. And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like you're only going to be able to charge them a$5 for a candy bar. Okay, but let's break it down. A bank you can actually get. It's not that different than like drop shipping basically. But yeah, but think about wealthy people are not going to see this bank launch and decide, I need this.

1:51:32I'm going to move a bunch of deposits over. Think in decades. A kid watches Mr. Beast is like, yeah, I need my first checking account. I'll set up Mr. Beast checking. And then 20 years later, they're like, yeah, I should probably switch to something more serious. It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on Beast Financial. But here I am. I made a million dollars. So yeah, if he's actually a bank charter, it means he can get into doing mortgages and like hardcore lending. I mean, I think like that all, it always sounds good in like a board meeting. Yeah. And then you like don't care about the product and you don't actually make it differentiated.

1:52:03And then you're like, cool. When distribution's like your only moat, it's not a moat. Yeah. So, so I guess, I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person in my audience is like 16, how much money did I spend a month? I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will want to use it and you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like okay the average teenager spends their parents are going to send their allowance or maybe they have a job they send it into the account maybe they spend a couple hundred dollars a month I don't know what teenagers spend these days I remember back in my day it was like allowance was like$20 and so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool and cash back and he can monetize some of that that rewards but i don't i don't really believe like i became an adult and i was like i want to use a real bank i'm an adult you know like i i just remember i migrated from like a credit union in my hometown to like uh i want to you're using a card all the time it's coming up like you think Like a kid that goes into college is like, yeah, I'm still using my Mr.

1:53:15Beast debit card. I do think it's like a Lunchables competitor and a bank. Like know your audience a little bit. Yeah, but so I guess like from the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to just be using Beast Financial as their... I mean, as a piggy bank? It's technically called Mr. Beast Financial, which is, I think I like Beast Financial more than Mr. Beast Financial. The filing was submitted on an intent-to-use basis, which under trademark law means there are genuine plans to bring this to life. I think he should have went with Jimmy. He's like a grown-up version of the bank. Well, it clearly got Wilmanitis up in arms.

1:53:55He's thinking about it because he says he's calling the top on incubations, subtweeting Mr. Beast. Just kidding. He's probably not subtweeting Mr. Beast. But Wilman I just did call the top on incubations. He says, every guy I've talked to in the past six months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies. Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go all in? They just want to clip 20%. And so, yeah. Incubations are incredibly hard. He says, they're amazing. They're way more work than just investing. Jordy and I spent some time trying to that.

1:54:32It's tough. It's a tough game. He says, they're amazing incubation individuals. I cannot say their names here or they will blow my car up. You are not incubating anything if what you are doing is clipping 20 % for an idea. And some intros, you are not the tax man. The real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in. What's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill? Like that's a real incubation? I guess like you could kind of - Thrive. Thrive. Thrive Oscar. There's a healthcare one that's done really well that like they only focus on like certain healthcare one. But their like model was like, they had no capital risk.

1:55:06Yeah. And they're also like a platform that's done this for, and they take it very seriously. Like we did talk to somebody who incubated like what, 200 companies in a year or something. Yeah. There was a studio that made so many companies and was so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announced, We will never fund these companies. Because when a CEO walks in, there's like, how much do you own? CEO, founder? They're like 10%. 10%. And you're like, who owns the rest? And also, are you the 199th of the 200 CEOs or number five? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's actually a problem.

1:55:43I'm coming around to the Mr. Beast financial. You like it. You're bullish. What's the terminal value? I think that they can, so this idea came up in 2021, 2022 during the fintech craze. It was like, it's not that hard to start a software product that can take deposits. I mean, in this case, it sounds like he's maybe trying to be a chartered bank. He's trying to go to the base layer. It's unclear. But who knows? It's literally just a charter. But still, it's like if you just run the numbers on how many million accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're going to be spending on a recurring basis.

1:56:25And then even the partnerships that he'd be able to drive around, like becoming a referral partner for Netflix and Spotify. Yeah, to be clear, I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank. It could be Mr. Beast Financial, get some financial advice. It would be like a clever idea. And I would be supportive of this. Like you buy one of his feastable Lunchables, you get like a nickel in a savings account. You keep going or something like that. Or flip it around, you pay for the Lunchable with$1. If you don't pay for the rest of the Lunchable, Mr. Beast comes and personally breaks your legs.

1:57:03He becomes a loan shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see. In other news, on the way back to the United States from NATO's defense ministers meeting, the Secretary of War Hegseth's plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standards, procedures, and everyone is on board is safe. Thank God. What a crazy story. Crack in the windshield. That is a very crazy moment. In other news, an exciting milestone in AI from science. Sundar Pichai was probably holding this in his back pocket for when open AI does something that's negative aura.

1:57:43Sundar busted this out and said, our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on Gemma generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells with more preclinical and clinical tests. This discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer. He dropped it. Oh, just a coincidence. Just a coincidence. They're doing that. Tyler, tell me more about this. Like what is actually going on? Do you, have you dug into this at all? Uh, I haven't read the full paper, but I mean, it is, there's like a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about, especially with all the, um, Gemini three rumors going on.

1:58:28Oh yeah. It's like, this is the most cracked model of all time. Interesting. So I don't, maybe it's just like, this is just maybe, maybe it's just like a vague post as a blog post. This is interesting. Vague paper? We're doing vague papers now? I mean, you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like, oh, we have this new way of doing RL that's way better, but we're not going to really get into the details because obviously we don't want to share. Well, we are sponsored by Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You're going to hang out for all the...

1:59:00Eric, you can hang out. You can interview the next person. I'm having fun. I'm having a great time. This is an interesting post from Brendan Buck. He says, here's a telling sign of where we are. On day 15, there are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall Street journals. What is blank? I have no idea. The government is shut down. Oh, the government shutdown. Yeah, that's right. I'm getting a new passport, and I have no idea if I'm going to get it in time. I paid for it to be expedited because I have to go to Europe, unfortunately. I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic event, but I never like leaving America.

1:59:34But it did rise to the occasion, and I need a new passport, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No news? That is wild. It does feel a lot less newsworthy than it was last night. I think a lot of people just don't like the government. And so they're like, yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government. See ya. See ya. I do think most of those, it will get, I heard this, most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees. Okay, so they can hang out for a while. So basically for like four-ish weeks, no one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves.

2:00:12Once that happens, I think it starts to get noisy. Okay, well, we do have our next guest in the Restream Rating Room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting the Ultra Dome. We have Eric Whitman from VSCO coming on the show next. He's in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring him into the TBP and Ultra Dome. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to see you. Doing great. How are you doing, guys? Good to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Great to have you. Give us a state of the union with VSCO. I think a lot of people are familiar with the product.

2:00:41They know the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, look, VSCO, it's been a minute, right? VSCO has been around for 14 years now. Overnight success. That's what we love to see. An overnight success. I love it. Yeah, so, you know, and we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and creators overall for, you know, well over a decade. and what, you know, we love our jobs. I mean, we love building for creatives. And, you know, we've seen various moments in time come about for VSCO, but I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI, you know, right now people, especially photographers and creatives are looking for a company that has their back as building tools for them, as really helping them find ways to be successful, whether it's just doing things on the side or making a full-time living as a creative.

2:01:44So that's really what we've been up to. Cool. Take us through the most recent updates, and then I have a bunch of ideas to pitch you, get feedback on, understand more about, I mean, basically how I can level up my photography workflow. Yeah, I love it. So, you know, obviously, AI is impacting the whole industry and a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives. And, you know, our perspective has always been, how do we preserve the craft? How do we preserve the artistry? But also bringing some of those benefits that AI can provide to support the creative process. So the last couple of years, we've been releasing tools like, for example, VSCO Hub, which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content.

2:02:39We, earlier this year, launched a product called VSCO Canvas. And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase. And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific mood boarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on VSCO and their content, and then bring your own content to the fore. So really a hybrid way. And then today, big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools.

2:03:16We call it AI Lab because we know a lot of this technology, as we hear about on your show almost daily, continues to evolve at this massively rapid clip. And I see the gong getting ready. There we go. So AI Lab. Thank you. I was wondering if I was going to get a gong. We love product launches here. Okay, here's a workflow that I struggle with regularly, and I want you to walk me through how I could level it up. So I'll often go out and shoot photos, and I shoot RAWs, and then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the RAWs, and I hate that process. And if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button, and it never gets it right.

2:04:02And I feel like there's room for AI to fine tune on what it takes to actually take a raw image and then make it look great in color correction. That's not generative AI. I don't want to regenerate the image. I want the actual pixels there. I just want to understand, you know, the different looks, kind of like AI filters. I've tried different apps and a lot of the apps, they kind of like hit everything with a different colored hammer and they all get really extreme. and then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack and it looks great, but then you apply it and it's not right on your photos because you shot slightly differently.

2:04:39So what do you think the future of like, just you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just want to speed up that workflow of the post process once you have a great raw. I love it. I love this example because actually the future is here now. So actually with VSCO today, you can import those raw images in And we actually have some ML built into the product today that we will look at that image that you have, and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets. Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful.

2:05:19I mean, a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our work that's been around, like I said, for 10 plus years. and there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company in Cupertino, and they are still using our color grading presets as their default starting point so that they can just get that great look much more quickly. So the future is here already today, John. It starts with VSCO into our VSCO studio. You can import your RAWs, use for this photo to automagically pick the right preset, and then you take your creative process from there.

2:05:57Again, we're not trying to get in the way from an AI perspective. We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process. What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today around AI? We had one shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI. He was hoping that the government would regulate it so that certain products could only be like legally had to be authentically photographed because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them. meanwhile we have like an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things even i think in my home right i don't i could go and generate hundreds of images of my family and yet i still we still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos and so i even even if the models get a hundred times better which i don't even know if they can get a hundred times better because they're already so photo real i just think that photographers that are craft driven, that genuinely enjoy photography and that want to capture moments will always have a job?

2:07:14That might be naive, but that's my current feeling today. I'm curious how the broad community on VSCO is thinking about it. I think that's right. I mean, look, I think we all shall recognize there's tension today, right? And I think back, like, look, I've been in this industry for 30 plus years. I've seen a lot of hype and where it ends up resolving to itself. Like e-commerce, right, when it first started happening, everyone thought, oh, brick-and-mortar stores are going to go away. The reality is 16 % of overall commerce happens through e-commerce today. The rest is still very much brick-and-mortar.

2:07:49So I do think when AI, and especially generative AI, came out, you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat. And there are certain categories where, realistically, it is a threat. Stock photography is a perfect example. I think this is why you see companies like Shutterstock and Getty are coming together because there already is duress in the stock photography market. But as you're saying, there are different segments of photography. I mean, the photography services market is$105 billion a year. It's going to grow to$160,$150 billion a year by 2030. So it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize.

2:08:28So I think the question has always been, well, how is AI going to affect me and my specific line of work? I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process. There are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10 ,000 photos, how do I quickly cull through that? Today, it's very much a manual process and it does not give photographers energy.

2:09:03But there are more and more companies that are coming out with culling tools that will automatically apply your look. And also because they've learned what your look has become over years and years of editing. And they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really, you know, like you see an airplane in the background. Okay, take that one out, right? It's just AI is supportive of that. I think another area that I think is very emerging, and you're going to see a lot more from VSCO on this front. I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with you all. But is that a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft.

2:09:39They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business. And so, they're just mundane tasks around managing customer relationships and responding back to people and making sure that your edit list is appropriately organized. Qualifying clients. Qualifying clients is another great example. So, we actually announced a product called VSCO Workspace. The whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business. and we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can, again, take a lot of those mundane tasks out. So that's where, as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very human-centric from a photography creator standpoint.

2:10:26But AI is going to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers. Did you always know you were going to come in and build SaaS at VSCO? Was that the plan? I mean, B2B SaaS specifically. Obviously, you're at Atlassian, then you're at Figma. You're kind of a SaaS demigod, you know? Yeah. I do love it, man. I can't look at a business and not think SaaS. I'm not going to lie.

2:10:58Us too. There's a few things better in the world. I have a question about AI and the trajectory of smartphone photography. So I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras. And I saw a video where they were, it was on MKBHD and he was testing, I think it was Leica versus iPhone. Can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard. But they really made it harder by only doing extreme, you know, no shallow depth of field, landscape photography, super bright. They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with, you know, controlled lighting or something like that.

2:11:42And so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone, it got amazing, superhuman level or super, you know, Leica level at a certain niche in photography. But it really has not replaced like moody portrait lighting where you want shallow depth of field, like just because of the physics of the lens. And I'm wondering if you think AI, generative AI will do the same thing. Because I'm just thinking about like, even in the stock photography example, like if I'm buying a stock photo of Yosemite, like even if it looks photo real, like I want half dome in the right place. I don't want half dome.

2:12:21I don't want something that looks like half dome. The reason I'm buying that stock image is because I can see exactly the shape of Half Dome perfectly, not something that feels right and looks photo real but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things. We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street, and the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever versus the ones that are going a layer deeper on that. Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think composition is arguably one of the most important things for you to learn in photography.

2:13:00You know, most people will say that Ansel Adams wasn't a great photographer. He was amazing at composition and editing. I mean, he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop, like back in the day, you know, little known fact. But, you know, it is about that editing process. So, yes, you've got to get that composition right. But oftentimes, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head. And I do think where AI is interesting is it's starting to help people sort of, hey, you have this vision. Lighting is another classic example, right?

2:13:33Lighting is something that most photographers, even the best of them, mess up. And being able to use AI to help augment and correct some of the lighting issues or composition issues, I think that's another area that's really – there's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a look at some of that as well. But I think that's where it can aid. Right. And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone or if you're you got a very expensive Leica, love Leica's great products. But, you know, from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachable for the average person.

2:14:11And when people are just getting started into photography, right, like I think even not even the latest iPhone, but like old iPhones, pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just build your craft, build your look. That's why people love coming to VSCO because they get to see what other people are doing, like authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there. And then they get to learn from other people. And I think that's also very important. Being a photographer, especially a professional photographer, is a lonely place. Being a creative is a lonely place.

2:14:47And so if you can find communities of people, we sponsor a lot of photo walks. Just meet up with these folks. Get to learn from each other. and learn about the tools that they're using, learn about the techniques, see the gear and the camera. Ultimately, it's about bringing people together and to help support and elevate their work and their craft. And whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing in-person stuff, I mean, we're all here for that. You spent 15 years at Adobe. Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity because from my view, it's like you have some of the most advanced tools, the most advanced tools for creating media across different categories.

2:15:37And if AI makes it better, if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible, I would think that creates an amazing opportunity. but the stock's down 34 % in the last year. They haven't found a way to get people to understand the opportunity. But I'm curious, like, what your framework is for Adobe in the year 2025? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came through the Macromedia acquisition. And, you know, I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things. I think what people realize is that Adobe used to be this unassailable company, right?

2:16:25And it was very, very dominant in the market. And then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like, oh, there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else. Canva, same thing, right? Canva is also looking at another part of the market that was underserved. And so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress in the Adobe stock. It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big. But there's a lot of players there right now. And who knows? I mean, right now, this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting.

2:17:01They're coming out with different tools. Just look at how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. It's almost impossible to underwrite the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess. People are just trying to pick what they think is going to be the winner of these respective categories. So me personally, very long on the AI opportunity for the creative community. I think you alluded to this earlier, there's just a thirst, a massive hunger for really high-quality content at a volume that we've never seen before. And we know that Generative AI isn't cutting it.

2:17:40Even if Generative continues to get better over the next three to five years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human-created. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, especially when it comes to what brands want and need. And, you know, humans are very instinctual creatures, too. So even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's real AI and what's not? You know, I think humans understand, like, what is real still. And I think that's something that we're going to continue to see more and more content being created by real people for a long, long time.

2:18:15So I'm long on that bet, but also I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI is going to present in supporting the human creatives out there. I agree. Totally agree. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was super fun. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, it's so great to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. Thanks to you, Eric. Cheers. Before we bring on our next guest, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe. didn't want to talk trash about Adobe, but I'm happy to.

2:18:47I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe and I'm so mad at the company. 30 % should be a hundred percent. And I'll tell you why it's so simple. So I use... You want that John is calling for the stock to drop a hundred percent. It's not that serious, but I am very annoyed with Adobe because for a long time, I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix. And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image, you could cut it out, put it in another one. Eventually they put ads in front of every single, you had to click an X to get out of an ad.

2:19:23Every time you open the app, fine, I'm already paying for Adobe. I don't know why I also get these ads for the other app. Very annoying. I finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely. It's not working at all. I get a new app, Photoshop Express. This is their new app for the iPhone. They fixed it. You don't need Photoshop Mix anymore. You're on Photoshop Express. And so I get Photoshop Express. And I learn all the new tools, all their new UI. And I figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app, Photoshop Express. Then I get a new iPhone. Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express.

2:19:57They literally took the feature out of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop the actual app. You can't even do layers in this country anymore. You can't even do layers in this country anymore. And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset. And maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple of months. But I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just, I guess I'm just such a weird power user of like niche. Like I want to do everything on my phone that I'm just demanding a niche set of products and features that just don't exist anywhere else.

2:20:30But I've been very, very upset with my Adobe experience. So anyway. Mog. That's my rant for today against Adobe. but hopefully they can turn it around. They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully they get some sharp people who start building great products and apps because I would love to be using them. Well, fortunately, I believe the president of Adobe is coming on later this month. Really? Fantastic. I can take it up with that. Talk to them about it. I can talk about the wrongful death of Photoshop Mix, PS Express, two apps that I've created endless memes in. Anyway, without further ado, We have our next guest from Reducto.

2:21:09Welcome to the stream. Thank you for hanging out. Sorry to keep you waiting for the rant. Congratulations on the news. Sometimes you just got a rant. Please, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah. So I'm Adi Abraham, co-founder and CEO here at Reducto. We help people get data out of all of their most complex documents and spreadsheets for all sorts of LLM use cases. So plenty of thoughts here on Adobe as well that we can go and see. Fantastic. I like that when you're in the restroom waiting room, you can kind of hear me ranting before you hop on. Give us the news. News.

2:21:39Give me that hammer, too. News. News. News. News. News. What do you got? What you got? Yeah. So yesterday, we announced that we raised a$75 million series B. This is five months after we announced our series A for Benchmark. Wow. And that's$100 million in total funding. Congratulations. On an absolute terror. I missed who led the new round. I missed that part. Andresen. Andresen. There you go. Congratulations. Um, so I mean, we got to go a lot deeper on the actual product. Who's the key customer? What are the key use cases? Obviously, you know, understanding documents broadly, like there's a lot of products for that.

2:22:18So what was your landing zone? What was your go to market? What's the target customer like? Like take me one level. Yeah. How old were you when you realized you wanted to turn documents into data? I guess. From day one. Day one. Day one. Yeah. No, I think, look, the thing is like PDF processing is, of course, not a new thing. People have worked on it probably longer than I've been alive. I've met the people that worked on the original drivers for printers to print PDFs. But the context here is very different. Right. Like we're not far from a point where language models are going to reason on pretty much any points of human data.

2:22:49Like before you say hi to your doctor, there's going to be some sort of summary of your medical records. When you apply for a loan, there's going to be some agents that goes through and understands all of your financial statements. And if you're going to have all of those human points of data with real human processes, you need human level accuracy. And that's what we came in with. So two years ago, we released what at that time was the first parsing API that used VLMs and tried to really set a new standard for what accuracy could look like on anything. We looked at it as this problem of how can you read documents the way that a human would?

2:23:21And since then, obviously, the product's gotten a lot broader. But today, a lot of the newer AI companies, like in the Harveys of the world, the Rogos, the Lagoras, and so on, people were building really great AI applications, use Reductive for that sort of ingestion. But also some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Fortune 10 enterprises in tech, some of the largest hedge funds in the world, private equity firms, insurance companies, and so on. Talk about the decision to use VLMs. What are those? Break that down. yeah so for a while you would have some sort of you know idp vendor that is using traditional ocr but you can really go a step further there's a lot of things that weren't possible two years ago like if you tried to read east asian languages there's just so many more characters and so it would be really hard to get every little mark correct if you're dealing with something like health care documents you have all sorts of handwriting you have check boxes you know You have a doctor annotating it on the side, and they just assume that somebody would be reading that.

2:24:19But when you read that programmatically, you make a lot of mistakes. And so what we do is we're really good at the traditional CV side. A lot of our team is former self-driving car researchers, so we try to apply a lot of frontier techniques there. But also, we have this agentic flow where I almost liken it to a human loop. We're making corrections to the last mile of mistakes. Like maybe we made a mistake on a period versus a comma, or a zero was mistaken as an O. and we'll iteratively go through correct all of those so that no matter what you're uploading, you can get to good, reliable outputs.

2:24:51Thank you for waiting until we had self-driving cars to hire all the self-driving car engineers to work on turning PDFs into structured data. Thank you. It's really important. Yeah, yeah, no, it is. I mean, what are people demanding on like the output side? Is it just like dump a bunch of JSON files in S3 buckets? Like how far do you go from like, okay, I have a stack of PDFs or maybe papers and you're going to scan and turn that into text and data. But like, are people actually coming to you and saying like, no, I want it loaded into this relational database or I want it in MongoDB. Like how far do you go?

2:25:34We see all of those. So in some cases, these are real-time applications. Like a user is uploading a file and they want to be able to talk to it. And so there, like, we're actually just extracting the data and making it easier for models to reason on. But we also have cases where one of the biggest hedge funds in the world wanted to digitize two decades worth of historical data. This is things that an analyst would have combed through, you know, extracted individual data points. And they want signals off of that. And so in their case, we can actually structure it into the exact representation that they want.

2:26:05And especially recently, we started going beyond just the initial parsing and extracting. We take care of everything. You want to split your documents. You want to classify them. You might even want to edit data in. A lot of human work is you get information from some set of documents and you put it into some net new PDF or spreadsheets. People can do that end to end. And we offer different endpoints for them to be able to do that. How hard is it to get from 85 % accuracy to 90 % to 95 % to 99 % to 99.9999999999? I imagine it's critically important if people are working on legal cases or you have medical records.

2:26:43You can't really mess these things up. Yeah. I mean, the long tail is really long. And when you're looking at like a financial document, a period versus a comma is not, you know, like a oops, it's millions of dollars. Like you've just changed the order of magnitude. You can't have something like a patient's medical record and have it say, is the patient vaccinated and guess at what the checkbox says. Right. Like you need to get these things right. And that's why I think even for that last mile difference, people are really excited about reductive unlocks for them. because there are use cases where they didn't think they could digitize it before.

2:27:21Like it just wasn't reliable enough to put in production. And we're trying to not just get really good initial extracted results and not just get that layer of redundancy to correct those in cases we might have messed up, but also give them all of the last mile things that they would need. Like if they want to have a human in the loop, we're really good at citing where we got answers from. We're really good at catching our own mistakes and pointing to things that we're not sure that we can extract. so they can feel confidence that in production, they're not going to have issues. Do you actually have a hot take about Adobe?

2:27:53I am getting dinner with the CEO tonight, actually. I'll play back your clip. Because I have another. Play back the clip where he said it's down 35%. It should be down 100%. That was maybe hyperbole for the comedic effect. But I do have another ax to grind with them because every day I make a PDF and every day I open Adobe Acrobat to make that PDF. and there are seven different pop-ups asking me to use their AI assistant that just says, do you want to summarize this document? Do you want to summarize this document? And I never want to summarize the document. And I always have to say, no, close this.

2:28:24It says, ask AI assistant up here, AI assistant over there. And it's too much. And it should be more intelligent to know that I don't need a document summary for my workflow because I do the same thing every single day. It's unacceptable. Honestly, AI day. Yeah. What? Yeah. I think people aren't really looking at PDFs in and of themselves. It's not the file format that you care about. It's what's in there. You want to be able to do the things that you want to do. And hopefully we end up in a place where people can just interact with the underlying data. That's what we want to help with. I'd love that.

2:28:54Well, thank you for helping make data more interactable. Thank you for everything that you do. And thank you for joining the show. Yeah, great to get the update. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building on linear today. There are a bunch more stories. Where should we go? What's the story? A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America's fracking boom.

2:29:26That makes sense. Core, we, and poolside. Poolside. Is this poolside the foundation? It's a different poolside. Poolside. Wait, yeah. there's poolside was a viral meme about the product managers who were at who are poolside talking about the day in the life and it was then there's poolside fm poolside fm that is a cursor and windsurf competitor i believe something like that it's a coding ide it's a fork of a vsc but that is not this this is a different thing so that ai poolside is joining the cloud infrastructure provider. That's the one I was talking about. Poolside is, and Cor, we've aimed to take advantage of the natural gas produced in the Parmian Basin, the epicenter of the U.S.

2:30:10drilling facility. I believe the CEO of Poolside is coming on the show, by the way, so we can get to the bottom of this. Okay, but in this article, Poolside, it's a, okay, I found it. Okay, figure it out. Poolside is in the midst of a$2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at$14 billion. Oops, and a preemptive gong. Preemptive gong. It's not announced, but we're still ringing the gong for you, poolside. According to people familiar with the matter, it raised$500 million just a year ago at a$3 billion valuation, the coding-focused startup. So it is the same poolside. Yes, it is.

2:30:43It is the same poolside. It is. Which counts the chip giant NVIDIA among its investors in one of several technology companies seeking to build AI systems with human-like intelligence. While many operators move quickly to secure continued access to the chips, America doesn't have enough data centers. It is far from certain whether many data centers will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain on local resources. It's not about your headline numbers of gigawatts. It's about your ability to deliver data centers, says the co-founder of Poolside. The real physical bottleneck in our industry.

2:31:15Interesting. Poolside and CoreWeave declined to provide details about the cost of leasing the land from the Mitchell family in Texas who own it. But they said that the overall expected cost. That pool side, they say, we build the models, you build the future. AGI for the enterprise, starting with software agents. Just interesting that they're actually getting into the physical infrastructure side when you have cognition, you have cursor, a bunch of other players that have just said, hey, we're happy to just be at the application layer. We'll build some models. But ultimately, we want to just get kind of off the shelf.

2:31:56Totally. This is fascinating. We've seen this vertical integration happen in the previous era, but mostly because the cloud platforms just weren't mature. But when Facebook started, they at some point could have said, hey, let's just host on AWS. But they became a hyperscaler. But then so did Cloudflare. So did, I believe, Netflix has their own infrastructure. I mean, 37 Signals famously moved. You were going to say that, right? 37 signals moved off of AWS. Yeah, thank you, Jack Cohen. The chat says it's with Jason Warner, who was the CEO of GitHub. Yeah, that's right. An absolute legend, an absolute dog.

2:32:34Absolute dog. But this is another interesting fact in here. We've been talking about building these 2-gigawatt data centers. They clock the industry standard cost of building a two gigawatt data center at$16 billion. But in this case, Poolside expects its cost to be lower due to its use of off-site modular construction techniques. And that total cost doesn't include the cost of the chips. And so what percentage of the is the actual like physical structure? Like what percentage of the cost of a data center is the. because we've seen like people you're just using tents yeah so it can't be it could it be double digits of the actual cost of data center we need a pie chart we need semi-analysis to break down exactly what goes find a pie chart yeah can you figure out because it feels like it feels like i'd be shocked if it was higher than 10 for if i'm spending 16 billion dollars on a two gigawatt data center how is that like what what percentage of that money is going towards chips you know concrete like you know what are the different buckets because you're going to build uh all sorts of stuff what do you think yeah i mean i'm trying to i'm on some analysis site right now trying to like find news about this yeah and i'm not really seeing anything which is surprising because like i mean two gigawatts is like super huge huge that's like bigger than colossus two yeah which is one gigawatt well i mean this is breaking news like in semi-analysis publishes like like on a weekly cadence yeah that's true it's very surprising to see i mean this is not a major LLM provider.

2:34:09Totally. Yeah. I feel like when SemiAnalysis does something, it's more like, okay, they actually fully understand Amazon strategy and they're going to take you through all the different pieces with tons of new data points. Yeah, that's definitely true. But I mean, this is like extremely ambitious. This is extremely ambitious. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk to the founder. That'll be a lot of fun. In other news, the frothiest AI bubble is in energy stocks, says the Wall Street Journal. Concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. Forget about the froth in tech valuations. The real excess might be building up in energy stocks.

2:34:42For all the fears about stretched technology shares, again, we've seen that the big tech companies, the multiples aren't that high. And so a lot of people are saying, well, it can't be a bubble if you're still able to buy Apple and Google at, I don't know, 30x earnings. Well, that's not the case in the energy market. Not so in the energy sector. sector. A group of non-revenue generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than$45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet to be built power. Oklo is a good example of this. Their shares have risen eightfold to date.

2:35:21The company is now worth $26 billion. I've actually met the founders. Apparently, Oklo is like an obsession of Korean retail traders. Interesting. Korean retail trailers. Korean retail army. That's fun. I wonder if they have a name for the retail army. Sometimes they name themselves. It's the biggest U.S. publicly incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the last 12 months. I mean, yeah, it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor. Oklo is developing small modular reactors that use a non-water coolant liquid metal sodium and an enriched type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply.

2:35:59It doesn't yet have a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall Street analysts don't expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028. Of course, the bull case is that the U.S. government has said, hey, we want to advance this very aggressively. We want, what was it? We want a new reactor online next year, something like that. And so there's certainly a lot of energy around, let's speed up what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission does. The NRC has been moving too slow. I believe in the history of the NRC, they've never approved a new nuclear reactor design.

2:36:42Right, Tyler? I believe that's true. Yeah. And I think they've only approved a few existing designs, build it again. And so people are kind of like, that's not the goal. Like, it was never designed as, like, the nuclear banning commission. It was just regulatory. And so you should regulate but not stop all progress completely. Also, I think the headline just about energy stocks ripping is, like, kind of misleading. Like, you're still, like, I'll believe it when I see natural gas stocks, like, ripping. That's when we're actually, that's, like, real energy. That's massive energy that we need to, if we're going to keep accelerating, if we want like 10 gigawatt data centers, that's basically the only path unless we have some insane buildout that's like partially government funded of like clean of like solar or like nuclear's going to take so long to build.

2:37:31I mean, those are probably way harder to meme, right? Because they're way bigger companies. And they have revenue. Revenue. But seriously, I mean, like we're in this like frothy time and there are companies that are scaling valuations very fast, the private markets and the public markets and NVIDIA's way up. but NVIDIA is way up at like, not really on like a revenue multiple. Like they've grown revenue significantly in line with their market cap. Whereas on like the retail armies have been searching around for pockets of like quantum computing, like the next trend, because there's this idea that like, if you missed NVIDIA, what are you going to go out and find?

2:38:06And like a nuclear thing, it feels like nuclear will be a thing in a decade. And so you can get it on the action now, get it on the ground floor. That's the narrative. Much harder to say, yeah, there's going to be more demand from this legacy oil and gas company, but it's already huge. Right now, you can own Oklo at a$25 billion market cap with$0 of revenue, or you can own EQT, which is a big natural gas company that had$5 billion of revenue last year, and they're currently trading at a$34.6 billion market cap. So, but stocks up over almost 11 % over the last month. So here's my recommendation.

2:38:51If you're a massive company with no revenue, as soon as you start generating revenue, get on numeralhq.com because you got to pay your sales tax. Once you make revenue, numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Another zero revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly$19 billion upon its public market debut earlier this month. only two other no revenue companies had larger market caps than fermi on the first day of trading after an ipo adjusted for inflation there there was rivian which went public in 2021 in corvus an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot-com bubble i mean rivian's definitely like shipped and like i see the cars around like you know it's not it's not that much of a bear signal to be like yeah you went out as a public company with no revenue but it has historically been like you only go public when you are cash flow positive and like and it's kind of like the end of you fundraising constantly.

2:39:43And instead, now we've just pulled all that forward. And in some sub-markets, a lot of companies stay private much longer. So lots of different ways to grow your company. What else is going on in the tech world, in the army world, in the world of the army? The secretary of the army, former TPPN guest is on the timeline. Happy Captain says, I was debating whether or not to tell this story, but it feels like it's worth telling. Yesterday at AUSA, the Secretary of Armory gave a powerful speech where he talked about a soldier's right to repair. Essentially, soldiers should be able to repair their own equipment without having to rely on a contractor.

2:40:24In 2010, we were in a remote part of Afghanistan on a combat outpost with roughly 70 to 90 soldiers. We had two robots and use them a lot to work on IEDs. Their service was under contract. We weren't allowed to fix them. After a lot of use, they both broke and a field service representative couldn't get to us in a timely manner. So what do you do? Do you force your team leader to put on the bomb suit and risk their life for every call? Or do you fix it yourself? We went with option B. We completely took apart two broken robots to create one working one that we used on the mission. That's amazing.

2:41:02Did we get yelled at? Yes. Would I do it all over again, knowing it kept my team leader safe? Absolutely. What a remarkable story. Yeah, this is one of those little tweaks to how the Army works, how the military works, that was probably pretty low on the agenda of most other secretaries of the Army. But I'm glad that he raised awareness here in his position. Yeah. Yeah, and Aaron Slodoff has a clip here and he shares, I'm glad that Secretary of Army is going on a crusade against the insane spend and blatant waste in sustainment parts the army deals with. Let's get it back on the show. We should.

2:41:47Rune says, it is so effing cold. Summer is over. It's all over. If you haven't secured a mate for the winter, it's time to commit to monkhood. Yeah, cuffing season really snuck up on everyone. It got, yeah, it got absolutely frigid in LA. We had to turn on the fire here. Yeah, we had to turn on the fire. Not so much today. But I'm excited to keep the cozy maxing going. It's hard to really lean into that Locktober spirit when it's still warm and sunny. Exactly. Much easier to Locktober in the winter when it's cold. Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2.

2:42:26Keith Raboy put the timeline in turmoil. He said if Anthropic actually believe the rhetoric about safety. Oh, look who we have here. Here he is. Brian, how are you doing? Hello, hello. I'm, I mean, I'm good. How are you guys doing? We are doing fantastic. You must be exhausted. Yes. Long day at the office so far. Yeah, I have, I've had some people allegedly helping me. I took, I took like 25 minutes during this entire day and now it looks like a bomb went off in here. Oh no. I felt like I was in a good place before I left, but anyway. It's hard to compete with the super intelligence for the finance suite that is.

2:43:10But it's great to have you on the show. As a leader, I felt like it was incumbent upon me. I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase, but to show my own value and how I could contribute and process like Ramp does. Yes. What has been harder, playing Kevin or trying to be the CFO of Ramp? This has been much more difficult. There's also a fly in here now that looks like the size of a hummingbird. So, I mean, there's a lot of adversity here being on the street. There's also, by the way, I don't know. I'm used to working in front of an audience, but usually they're not live and in person here.

2:44:06They're waving. There's lots going on here. Lots to distract me, but look, I'm doing the best I can. What's the tracker out right now? How many receipts? Does that say 80? well it says 84 84 okay but to be fair i felt like i was i was almost at 100 before i left for a few minutes so basically i got no help from the people who were supposed to help me okay brutal that's so what am i supposed to do and and you're racing against ramp uh what what what uh what's the counter up to now on that side? Uh, 225 ,229, uh, 50, 60, 70. Okay. It's going very fast. I don't, I guess that's accurate. I guess they process a lot, but yeah, it's tough showing for you so far.

2:45:00Uh, how are you feeling? Are you optimistic that you can catch up? What's the strategy? Yeah. You got 15 minutes left in the work day. I don't know if you're getting out at five o 'clock. No, I'm working overtime for sure. I think I'm working until 7. I think for a C-suite. By the way, that's a new phrase I learned. C-suite. I'm a C-suite guy. And so I think, yeah. C-suite guy. I think I'm a big C-suite guy. So I think we work until 7 here. Maybe you have 500 ,000 tag receipts. But there's a lot of distractions, I have to say. Oh, yeah? Who's been the biggest distraction? Yeah, who's the biggest distraction?

2:45:38Was it Eric trying to throw you off the game to prove that his software is more effective than human labor? Well, I mean, to be clear, you guys are a distraction. I mean, I'm trying to do inputting here, and now I'm suddenly doing a press interview. But again, that's what C-suite guys do, I think. Yeah, you got to make time for media. Yeah. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they had RAMP? I'm sorry. Could you say that again? Do you, a question from the chat. Do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they used ramp?

2:46:20You know, I, when I was there, I wasn't really, I wasn't really a part of those, those C-suite type decisions. Yeah. I'm not, but listen, I thought we did a pretty good job in the accounting department there at Dunder Mifflin. So remember, I got fired or my character got fired. So things went downhill after that, clearly. Yeah,

2:46:51I guess I guess kind of zooming out a little bit, obviously, obviously zooming out. That's another great program. We use that a lot in the C-suite. We're just podcasters, but we talk to people in the C-suite. OK. What, yeah, I guess like what is your, like there's hundreds, thousands of people surrounding your office here. We don't have a view, but people are looking at the stream. What is your experience like walking on the street in New York day to day? Do you cover up and wear a hat? Are you getting, are you getting. I do. I do. Does it work? That would be the first day that I've been on the streets of New York without a hat on and sunglasses.

2:47:39And, you know, look, what I've learned as a leader here is you've got to be a people person. So I'm really, it's all about doing people for me. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I know what I'm saying, but it's about that connection that is important when you're a CFO. I mean, that and finance, but that's secondary in a way. Do you prefer finance or finance? How do you say it? Am I saying it wrong? I mean, you can say it either way. The really fancy people on Wall Street, often they call it finance, not finance. Finance, yes. Do they spell it with an E? No. Finance? It's spelled the same way, but they say finance.

2:48:27Finance. High finance. Hold on. I've been taking some notes today about things that I need to work on. I've got another question. How's your golf game? Has your golf game improved since you became a CFO? Well, it's one day, to be clear. You know, I still talk about golf. That's sort of a different job. I'm kind of trying to transition in a new direction. But look, what I've learned is if you're a CFO, you have to work much harder than other people think you do. Yeah, but I feel like the best CFOs figure out a way to combine their love of golf and their role at their company. So I would say once they let you out of the cage at 7 p.m., hopefully you can at least hit the range and get some movement in.

2:49:22They need a putting green in there. Here's the thing that I'm thinking is I think I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue, meaning I need to be more efficient with finance. So maybe I'll get to golf after I decide that this is not working for me. I need to stay high level. I think you're right. Yeah, stay high level, zoom out, bring strategy into the C-suite. Start, yeah, focus on strategy. Yeah. You know, another thing that occurs to me is probably working on the street with people watching is probably not the best idea. Maybe that was the problem all along. I mean, it's a high-pressure role.

2:50:13you got to be, I mean, if you're going to perform in the boardroom on earnings calls, you got to be able to perform, you know, in Flatiron Park. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a cheering crowd of thousands. This is similar. In a way, in a way it is. In a way, it's very, very different. Yes. Yeah. You got to be able to perform under pressure, perform in front of, in front of thousands as they walk by. It's all important in business. Potato, potato, as we say on the C-suite floor. Potato, potato. Guys, pause one second. Say again.

2:50:56Is that Taipei? She's probably got to get on with Taipei. Yeah, well, we do. Listen, I thought you guys were ESPN. I'm going to be honest with you. so I think it's time for me to go and try to actually get some work done you've got a lot of work to do we appreciate you calling in and good luck catching up I've got some Jaeger here in the office if you guys ever want to stop by we'll see you soon great to have you on Brian cheers he truly an incredible actor his ability i kept trying to throw him off he stayed fully in character uh but uh but yeah i seeing some of these videos like the crowd outside uh we obviously couldn't see it on that camera angle but uh meanwhile on x the crowd outside of the office uh is absolutely yeah we should share some of the videos to the timeline i saw jeb bush was uh coming out in support was coming out in support as he does as he does um but uh that was super fun i were you big into the office back in the day yeah i watched a few seasons of it at some point one of the few uh like work focus shows yeah it's actually still relaxing to watch because it can turn your brain off right silicon valley is on the opposite end totally it just reminds you of like emails you need to respond to and things that you need to do whereas the office is just great nothing matters it's just uh all of our problems are made up it's all it's all uh fake politics yeah it was very odd being so young and still extremely into like workplace white collar comedies as a kid it's like not what you'd expect but i was obsessed with office space that was like one of my favorite movies as a kid i enjoyed the office and uh i don't know even though like i'd never worked in an office i still found it funny at like age 12 for some reason.

2:53:05It was very, very fun. Evergreen. Anyway, we have our next guest joining from the Restream Waiting Room. We have Colin. What's happening? Welcome to the show. I'm not actually going after the ramp event, am I? Yeah, you are. Fast follow. Welcome to the stream. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, any news. Awesome. Yeah. Hey guys. Thanks for having me. So Colin Loose, co-founder and CEO here at Basis theory, I think the simplest way to think about what we do is we help merchants, platforms, fintechs not have to face the decision of working with Stripe or Adgin or Checkout, but rather be able to seamlessly work with Stripe and Adgin and Checkout.

2:53:48There's a myriad of different reasons why that's important. I think first and foremost, these platforms today are just global by default, right? I was thinking about it the other day, the fact that I think the latest numbers say 10 % of the world's population uses ChatGPT. Less than three years in, Facebook was still moving from Ivy Leagues to state schools in the US. And then I think the other side of it is payments has kind of moved from being a cost center to a growth driver. And I think that's forcing companies to think about it less from a cost perspective and more from a performance perspective.

2:54:29And look, each of these individual PSPs has their own secret sauce and areas where they specialize. And so it's just increasingly important that you can work with multiple of them as opposed to one. Explain S.H.I.E.L.'s take. Explain S.H.I.E.L.'s hot take and then debunk it. I had a note to call out S.H.I.E.L. and I love S.H.I.E.L. I went to Sheil's first Phish concert with him. So like Sheil and I are homies. But yeah, like he took this like victory lap last week, you know, saying like Stripe's win, Stripe won agent in commerce. It's over. And like that just couldn't be further from the truth.

2:55:04Right. Even if you look at Stripe's core business, I think people sometimes forget like Stripe and Adyen together are still less than 10 percent market share in the U.S. Right. That means 90 % of the U.S. acquiring volume is still sitting out on these legacy platforms. And so as much as we talk about Stripe, I'd argue Stripe hasn't even won U.S. acquiring yet. There's a lot of volume to port over. And we're seeing the same thing play out on the agentic side. Stripe can do a magical demo for merchants within the Stripe ecosystem. I think the second you eject out of that, there's a lot of complexity.

2:55:41Sorry, I'm just adding dramatic sound effects. Where's the shots fired? These are a bunch of great lines. I wanted you to explain basis theory like I'm a venture capital associate, right? So explain it in really simple terms. No, no, no. I'm trying to understand where you guys - It's explaining like the killer GP is completely checked out. Yeah, like two years from retirement. But I'm trying to understand. Customer comes in, they want to buy something. Are you guys sitting before that? Yeah, we sit in front. Yeah, that's right. So we sit at the very front. We provide some real-time data to the merchants about the payment credential, the actual credit card.

2:56:21Hey, this is a Visa signature card issued by a U.S. bank, or this is a MasterCard issued by a European bank. Based on that real-time insight, where do you want to route this transaction? Do you want to route it off to Adyen? Do you want to route it off to Stripe? And oh, by the way, if you get an immediate decline from one of those, why don't you turn around and reroute it elsewhere and see if you can get that customer through, right? I think that's the other side of it, right? Like these modern merchants who are selling these like ridiculously high gross margin digital products, like they just want to get more stuff out the door, right?

2:56:56They're actually okay taking on more fraud and risk if they can just sell more 90 % gross margin goods, right? So it's all frustrating. From the merchant side, merchants want to have multiple payment providers so that they have some leverage in these conversations. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, that was I was going to answer your question about explain it to the GP. But then I thought about the GP doesn't have this problem. But but maybe like, you know, the GP's nephew. Right. I always talk about in the terms of Comcast here, you know, in California. Right. Like every time you call Comcast and you say, hey, I'm switching to YouTube TV.

2:57:33they magically have a 50 % discount that they can get you on, right? Same thing applies here. The problem is your data is locked away with these processors today. So the minute you take back that control and start storing it yourself, you have immediate leverage to make that call. Interesting. Give us the fundraising news. Yeah, so we just announced we raised$33 million. It was a pretty cool... There we go. It was a cool event because our lead investor, Costa Noah, we actually met at the Seed and ended up going in a different direction. Our A came together quickly with Bessemer. This was 2021.

2:58:12And then when I reached out to Amy at Costa Noah and told her we were going to kick off a B earlier this year, I was like, who should I talk to? Does this round mean that you guys are officially back? Because a lot of fintech companies went into the valley of despair and they're still down there. Pintech's back. Look, I wish I was an ERP, a native AI ERP company. Maybe I'll get another round tomorrow. Yeah. That's literally our next test. The chat says this guy looks like he surfs. This guy surfs. Do you surf? Such a disappointment. I don't. No, it's okay. It's okay. Surfing is wildly distracting from creating enterprise value.

2:58:55I always struggled. I grew up, you're in Mill Valley? Yeah. I grew up just north of you, and I always struggled. Surfing in the morning, you get so cold, and then your body is spending all day long trying to heat up, and it's taking energy away from spreadsheets. That's pretty counter to Silicon Valley wisdom and ice baths and stuff, though. Yeah, but getting cold for a few minutes and then heating up is different than 90 minutes in 45 degree water or whatever it gets down to in the winter. But what was I going to say? Are you guys actually building the company in Mill Valley or do you have an office in SF?

2:59:40Yeah, look, we're a COVID baby, so we're fully remote. But it was definitely pretty funny when we announced our Series A, the news headlines were like, Mill Valley-based payment infrastructure company raises$17 million. I mean, it sounds pretty cool. It sounds pretty cool. Yeah. No, I'm here a block away from our friend Nate and Offline Ventures. Oh, nice. And then we squat in our investors' offices for free in San Francisco once a week. Nice. Smart. Smart. Awesome, man. Well, congratulations on the milestone. Yeah. Excited to follow the journey. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

3:00:16Thanks for having me, guys. Cheers, Colin. Yeah. Quickly, let me tell you about Adio Customer Relationship Magic. Adios, the AI and CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in now to the TVP in Ultradome. Sorry for keeping you waiting, John. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Here he is. How are you guys? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today. Of course. Congrats on the massive news. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll go into the news.

3:00:49Yeah. Well, it's wild. I was on three months ago. We were talking about our Series A. I was not planning on reaching out to you guys for a year or two. And I went to bed, Series A founder, woke up a Series B founder. And so today we announced $65 million Series B. Bring in$100 million. Thank you. Thank you. We have a smaller one of those in the office. Let's go. But yeah, well, Series B up the gong size. You could have a gong for every stage. Yeah. Well, look, I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the seed stage hotel rooms here. But we've come a long way. So yeah, that$100 million was all in the last 12 weeks.

3:01:32So it's exciting times. It's an AI-native ERP, if you're not familiar with Campfire, taking on the mid-market incumbents. And the incredible demand we've seen has just led to us to go out to market again on the round. Yeah, what was the key accelerant? It's a huge category, a bunch of different ways that you could attack it, a bunch of different kind of verticals within it. Why have VCs come around to funding a bunch of ERPs again? Because there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well and something's different this time. But why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a great question.

3:02:13going through Y Combinator, they call them tar pit ideas, ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die. And for like 10 or 20 years, this category has just had a lot of, there's a lot of gravestones in this category. This is the personal CRM. That's the, that's a great tar pit idea. The personal CRM. Every VC says I need a personal CRM. It's like, no, you just need a real CRM. You're doing business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's one there a lot on, a lot on the social media aside. And so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting. And then we had incredible demand. And then going into the A, they're like, wow, this category is on fire.

3:02:51And since the A just had overwhelming demand, I think there's a couple of themes. Certainly, the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. You guys were talking about zero revenue IPOs earlier. I mean, literally, these companies were founded when Pets.com, Webvan were public companies. And so it's come a long way in terms of like, it's time for something new. One of your sponsors, Ramp, has really pioneered consumer-grade software within the finance stack. And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for, I just want the Ramp for GL. And then we're also seeing huge demand for, we need to buy AI. There's literally no AI ERP out there.

3:03:32With today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model. and so we've trained this like rich accounting data set and so accountants are finally like i hate doing bank rec and that's always been true but now there's actually someone you know an ai model that can take on bank rec for me for those don't have bank reconciliations is like accrual like some of these just very transactional accounting tasks they're allowed they can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model they can just like allow them to focus on on higher value work, strategic work, things as a former finance exec, I really enjoyed doing.

3:04:09And so there's this big mindset shift that we are really driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers. You guys work with Decagon, Replit, and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new, like entirely new needs surface that people want out of their ERP, that legacy ERPs besides just speed, usability, just ease of use, etc. Yeah, I mean, this big shift, and I know you just had Reducto on the sheer volume of transaction data, the legacy ERPs we've just heard from customers are unable to physically handle. And so being on a modern stack, these AI usage-based companies have hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily ingest and allow them to scale on the platform.

3:05:02And then we can apply our AI layer to this rich data set and allow them to operate in ways that just fundamentally were not able to before. So the shift in, you know, you think of, if you have 10 million rows of accounting data, you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet, right? It just physically taps out. And so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when they have that much transaction data. And so we've been really helpful in allowing them to not become engineers and focus on what they do best as accountants. That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again?

3:05:36Are you announced? Guys, I'll tell you next week. We're doing our Series C. Let's go. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be nice to take a breather and just build and build the team and all that stuff. For two days. Yeah, for at least two days. For at least one week. Every VC listening. Just schedule it now. Congratulations. We appreciate you. I'll be there. Yeah, that's actually good. We should start. Yeah, please come by. We'd love to hang out. We can go way deeper. I have so many questions. I'm going to bring the biggest gong you've ever seen. Love it. We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want.

3:06:13Let's do it. Let's roll it out. We've done 24-hour, you know, NetSuite to campfires. We've done SAP to campfire in weeks, you know, and the world's shifting fast. But, yeah, to your point, we'll do one live on the show. We'll do it live. That's showbiz. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Great progress. Thanks, guys. Cheers. You're off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a bold move. I like it. It's very aggressive. It's a hot area. He's distracted. He's focused on the AI boom. He is. He's going to forget about his baby. He needs to step up. I mean, the story of NetSuite was an acquisition.

3:06:53Next up, our guest's nominative determinism is absolutely insane. We have Dan Shipper, who is shipping another product. Let's bring him in. Is he shipping something? The shipper himself. What are you shipping today, Shipper? Do people ask you about that? Does he ever ship? He does. I have gotten that. I have gotten that. And I don't know if my ancestors were nautical or not, but certainly it works for the startup world. So yeah, shipped a couple new things today. What'd you share? Give us the news. Okay. First, first big thing is we shipped a new incubation. We incubated a company. We spun it out.

3:07:36It raised$3.6 million from General Catalyst and Inovia. I got the gong, the first ever gong for me. I'm excited. And it's called Good Start Labs. It's run by Alex Duffy, who was previously our head of AI training. And the idea of Good Start is it teaches AI models to play games. And by playing games, they're able to generate high-quality reinforcement learning data and pre-training data that helps make models better. it started as a product a project inside of every that we launched as ai diplomacy where we taught ai models to battle each other for world domination uh it went super viral it had like 50 000 people watch it on twitch um and it taught us a lot about um how models work so for example claude never lies in diplomacy what the whole point of diplomacy is to backstab your opponents and claude never lies um it's really interesting and alex you know the response to that was was really incredible and Alex has a vision for how not just diplomacy, but all sorts of games can be used as dynamic environments to help models learn to be smarter in all sorts of different ways from long horizon task planning to writing to humor to training them to not be as deceptive, all that kind of stuff.

3:08:56I'm mostly hearing AI that lies though. So it can win diplomacy. But no, I completely take your point. Claude has to launch liar mode. I mean, yeah, there's so many, like there's so many examples we could go into about alignment by default, like resulting in like not what you actually want. A hallucination is sometimes a feature. There's a million different areas there. Do you have any questions about that? How concentrated will the customer base be for this? Is this the kind of thing you're going to work with hopefully all the big labs really quickly? what does that look like? Yeah, I mean, I think the idea for the company is being a vendor to all the big labs and anyone who wants to be a big lab.

3:09:40So yes, the customer base, at least initially, is going to be pretty concentrated. Rebut Will Manitis. He said he's calling the top on incubations. You're still doing them. Put them in the truth zone. Break it down for me. Why are incubations still a good idea? This feels like, you know, to come to Dan's defense on this one, having an employee at your company who's proven themselves internally and discovers a good idea and then decides to launch a spin-out company is very different than, like, I have an idea. Let me go find a random person, which is really hard, right? I agree. Because you have this adverse selection bias.

3:10:19Yeah. I agree, but we also do that, and it works. And so this is our second venture-backed incubation. um collectively so uh good start labs and our first one is called lex and collectively they've raised like six million dollars which is um more than like about more than three times or four times what we've raised for every itself yeah um and we also run um four apps internally to every many of which are ideas that i or someone else inside of every has come up with and then we've recruited someone from our audience to take it and lead it. And that works really well too. So we've got four apps in market and we grew collectively for every, for, you know, all the subscriptions we sell, we grew MRR 50 % in Q3.

3:11:06So it's just growing super fast. You can really, you actually can do this. And I think you can uniquely do it in AI because you can, you can have these products be run by one person. Yeah. Which was really hard to you before. Help me synthesize this. There's like this general mood on the timeline today that like a lot of the foundation model companies might be like plateauing. And so they're going into other categories. Yeah, what's your erotica play? No, no, it's not. That's not my question. My question is. Every. We're going to do every. I mean, you're already a writing platform. Why not spice it up a little bit?

3:11:46No, my question is. Every spicy mode. There was a moment where the mood was like, don't build a new company because you're going to get steamrolled by AGI. It's just going to be able to do exactly what you do, but better. And so it's super risky to build anything that's in front of the steamroller that is the big model companies. Now we've seen that a lot of companies have popped up and done very well in other areas. But now it also feels like the foundation model companies might be going after social media, going after erotic content or adult content. So is it more or less dangerous to build a startup that is in the wake of the AI, like, you know, new hyperscalers?

3:12:30So, I mean, I think of every, if you're a sapiosexual, we're already doing erotica for you. So that's one thing. Got to get that out of the way. Yeah. But, you know, when we first incubated Lex, that was like in 2022, 2021-ish. And that was right in the very beginning. It was right before ChatGPT came out. And so it was in the very beginning of, you know, rapper, anti-rapper hype. And that was a dumb take then. And I think it's a dumb take now. Incumbents always manage to fuck things up and need to also, you know, if you're PM and OpenAI, they're super talented. They're doing amazing stuff. And they also have to look for opportunities that look like they're going to be a billion or 10 billion or$50 billion in value.

3:13:15And there's just many, many, many different corners of the market that they just can't see. And I think founders are incredible at finding those corners of the market. And because of what these foundation model companies are building, like OpenAI, founders have never been in a better position to serve the needs that they find. And so I think it's the best time in the world to be starting companies. And I think doing it in an incubation model, like the way that we're doing it is kind of, it's like one of those things that shouldn't work, but it's sort of uniquely interesting because we have distribution.

3:13:46So in a world where anything can be vibe coded, we can give founders a stamp of approval. Like, hey, this thing is actually good. It's going to be supported. And there's a lot of interesting things you can do if you have a network of apps that are all in the same ecosystem. So I'm super excited about it. And I think every time we've called, oh, it's the end of this startup or this startup because OpenAI is doing it, that's never happened. Yeah, makes sense. What's your take on the regulatory debate in Anthropics' recent moves? A lot of people are pissed off about it from Keith Raboy to David Sachs to Marc Andreessen.

3:14:29I agree to some extent. Like actually looking at what, you know, the kinds of things that Dario says, for example, I'm like, how can you be building this stuff and then go on the news and be like, it's going to replace all white collar workers in the next 18 months? I can't remember the exact quote, but like, I just, I don't like that. And also I think Sax is wrong. Like you're watching nerds who have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility grapple with that publicly. And I think that they are being earnest. I think they're doing it in a sort of ham handed way. and I think that they could clean that up and they should get smarter about it, but I don't think it's some sophisticated regulatory capture scheme and I imagine Sachs is sort of telling on himself there.

3:15:10That's what he might do, but I don't think that's what the anthropic people are doing. Genuine believers. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, I was going to ask. I did want to push you. We do have somebody in the restream waiting room. We have one person in the waiting room, but what was your immediate reaction? Where do you stand on the debate on the adult kind of content entertainment debate with ChatGPT? I think anything they do, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they allow it, they're damned because people are like, you're going to turn this into a waifu platform and if they don't allow it, then it's a freedom of speech issue.

3:15:54It seems like they're trying to be thoughtful about it and restricting it to over 18 people and not doing it by default, like only doing it if you select it. That seems like a reasonable first pass at it. I'm sure there are ways that... So OpenAI's mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Do you think that it's hard to argue that adult content, porn bots benefit humanity i'm sure that somebody can make a justification for that do you think their justification is like this is a necessary step to generate the revenue that gets us to the scale that we need in order to deliver the ultimate goal i mean i think that the caricature of you know uh adult porn bots uh is obviously bad and and and there are uh there are places that you can take this that are obviously bad for people and also people choose to engage with adult content.

3:16:57And I, you know, it's, it's hard if you're trying to build something for everyone, which is what they're trying to do to completely say, Hey, like that's off limits. Like that's a, that's a particular moral stance that I think you can have smart defaults, but I also think it's within bounds for them to say, um, in certain circumstances for certain kinds of people, this is what they want and, and they should be allowed to do the thing they want to do. Yeah, it just feels like YouTube has never gotten a ton of flack for not allowing adult content on the platform and being like, YouTube's anti-free speech.

3:17:29YouTube has gotten a lot of your anti-free speech criticism, but never because there's not enough adult content on the platform. It's always been because of deprioritizing particular political thinking or something else that is like more in the wheelhouse of free speech. Everyone, at least in the tech zeitgeist, has kind of been like, yeah, it's fine that YouTube doesn't have adult content. That's their choice. And they just chose not to do it, I guess. I don't know. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage, as it always does. And we will continue to monitor it. And thank you for coming on the show.

3:18:01Congratulations on the launch. Excited to see it play out. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields entrusted by millions. Our next guest is the founder of Finch. We'll bring him in from the Restream waiting room. It's time to Finch. It's time to Finch. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Dote to be here. Thank you, folks, for having me. How are we? Happy Wednesday. Happy Wednesday. What do you got going on today?

3:18:36Do you raise any money? We announced a raise. Let me do it. Let me do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm wrong. Please do it. I'm so pumped for this. Give me the news. Give us the details. What happened? We raised a$20 million series day led by Redpoint.

3:18:54Congratulations. Amazing. The reason I was so excited for this, I worked at DoorDash for eight years for a while before starting Finch. And one of the company values was being really thrifty with money and everyone should be an owner of the budget the way that the founders were. So we have that here, which means when we decided to get a gong, someone spent like$25 on a gong from Amazon that is tiny and fits in like the size of my palm. And so you all getting to hit that was really a big moment. We'll give you three remote gong hits. If something big happens in the company, just email us. We'll record a video of us hitting the gong.

3:19:31We'll send it to you and the team. You can drop it in the Slack. Extremely economical. Yeah. That's fantastic. Where is the business today? Are you live? What is the business? revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Break down the business and give us the progress. Yeah. Yeah. I heard you're early. Should I do it like as if you were five version of what Finch's? Yes. Please. Yes. Great. I'll start with, have you seen personal injury billboards? Yes. Great. What are your reaction when you see them? Need to call immediately. I pull out my phone and I call now. That's mostly it. It's usually, I assume a phone bank that then routes to a lawyer at some point, but I imagine that I'm like seven layers away from a real lawyer.

3:20:12Yes. And look, I think they're hilarious. Some of them are wild. There's one in San Francisco. They're like, Ann Fong is on every bus ad. I love her head of intake. The something wrong call Ann Fong is one of the better jingles I've ever heard. We have one in L.A. that's Sweet James. We like Sweet James. Sweet James is great. And it always kind of had a creepy, it felt a little bit creepy. It is a little bit of an odd name. The other thing that I always think about. But it's certainly memorable. Whenever I see a personal injury attorney billboard, I always think about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable.

3:20:50Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I'm sorry for doing an ad read in the middle of your segment. But we are running behind today. I need to catch up. No, but okay. So we understand that that's like, one of the many, these injury law firms spend more on out of home than pretty much any other group, right? Correct. With like the highest cost per click on Google out of anything else that you could search is like, I've been injured in an accident. And like the, what I was going to say about it is I think it like has one perception from the advertising.

3:21:24The field itself is genuinely noble. It is a like, I, if you are someone who's in an accident, America's system of handling injuries and accidents is for profit insurance companies, which means if you try to represent yourself in a claim, you will never get what you're owed. And having an advocate on average means you get three to four X higher of an outcome just because the EB calculation changes for that go or all state of whoever the insurance is on the other side. So incredibly valuable members of this society is you will otherwise as victims and injured people, 80 % of you will never have an advocate and don't realize what you're owed.

3:21:58Problem today to solve that gap is the amount of admin work at pretty much any law firm, but especially in personal injury law is massive. And so we've built a call. The first AI driven pre-litigation team. But our solution really is a bunch of really experienced paralegals that we pair with enough AI agents to handle the admin work that we take over half of what a firm does, which is pre-litigation. So intake through demand, letting them say yes to more cases. So specifically, like someone makes that phone call. They see the billboard. They call. Are you transcribing that? Is there still a human in the loop?

3:22:34Like what else is happening? Yeah, so you said there's a human in the loop. It's an actual paralegal in the loop, but they're just immensely more efficient. I'm assuming this is like fully white-labeled, so somebody doesn't necessarily know they're working, they're onboarding to a firm through Finch. They're just experiencing it as like a fast, seamless onboarding experience. Correct. Our goal is we'll have a real paralegal who's 100 % dedicated to that firm, and their name at the email address will be the one emailing you. They'll have a local phone number that they message from. So very white labeled experience.

3:23:09But if you're to roughly think about it, the average paralegal or case manager takes on somewhere around 100 cases at most. At a typical firm, for us, they're doing somewhere between 300 and 400 just with the augmentation of agents that help with a lot of the busy work. How quickly is a company scaling? I'm going to say quickly, but that's part of my job is to highlight how quickly we're going to be. No, but I mean, it feels like, it seems like these firms want to take on, they want to take on more cases because it's all success-based so that there's a real incentive there. They're already drowning.

3:23:42And if you give them a solution that they can turn on and start making. My bigger question there is like, what's the driver? Because we've seen with the Fortune 500, like there's like this mandate from the shareholders and the board to like develop an AI story. But that's not true for like your average, you know, plaintiff law firm, right? It has to be a little bit more ground up. So what are they actually focused on? Is it a strict ROI? Are they focused just on efficiency or all sorts of things? They're mostly focused on growth. Everyone cares about efficiency and service of growth, but I'll give you the example.

3:24:15Our first customer was a friend of a friend named Ryan who operated his own firm out of Austin. He started the firm three months before we started Finch, and he had actually built up more litigation experience than most other attorneys his age. He was like 31 starting this firm. and had a bunch of great connections in town, which meant he got a bunch of referrals of cases in. So he hit 50 cases in his first 30 days, which a solo practitioner might hit over the course of a year on average. After 50, though, he had to start saying no to cases because he just didn't have the same back office he used to have at a big firm.

3:24:46And I will draw a DoorDash comparison, but at DoorDash, one of the ways Tony talked about that starting as a business was seeing restaurateurs say no to delivery orders that were coming in each day because it didn't make sense for them to staff and fulfill them. And his solution was not, let me build software to make delivery drivers faster, but let me go be the delivery service. And so we're kind of taking the same model here. But for him, it is all about growth. It is a Sweet James or Morgan & Morgan or a big name will come advertise on the street corner tomorrow. And he wants to develop enough of a strong relationship with clients that he's going to build a massive firm over time.

3:25:19And I think that's what we help folks say yes to. Are you seeing lawyers at firms see the capability of Finch and just decide, I actually want to start my own practice now because this thing that was a huge headache of building out back office support, I can now outsource to Finch. Are you seeing that already? Early-ish. I didn't answer your actual question of how fast we're going, but we launched officially in April. We've been around for 14 months as a business. We grew about 10x in the last six months. Whoa. And so the pull from the market, fun numbers, relative numbers, but fun numbers. Overnight success.

3:26:03The pull from the market to give a real why to it, I think you thought about shareholders pushing on bigger law firms or enterprises. There's two largely branches of consumer law that operate on contingency, which means they make a percentage of the case. They don't do hourly billing. And that changes the economics entirely. If I try to go sell efficiency software to someone who bills by the hour, there's no good rational reason for you to care about adopting it until your clients demand it. Whereas anyone who's taking a percentage of cases, you get them the ability to take on Forex. The case is tomorrow.

3:26:39They say yes to that. They pump that money into advertising, and then they go grow. Yeah, if you're billing by the hour, it's, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think AI is cool, but I don't want too much of it. I like billing three hours. I like billing three grand. Let me re-pitch you the benefits of having an expert lawyer spend hours combing over every document. It's worth it. What was your number one learning from working with Tony? He's also an investor in Finch, so he must be a big believer in you.

3:27:09You mentioned the frugality, which is... Frugality is a good one. Scaling ownership. I think like how to build an org where you scale decision-making while still keeping the founder being close to the wheel. I do think the biggest one that like very in the DNA of Finch is do the hard work. I mentioned this. We started as a software model, to be honest. Like we raised our first round from Sequoia and the idea of we're going to go build this intake software that transcribes and then goes and does a bunch of stuff after. but trying to train a large team of paralegals and case managers many of whom are 60 plus on how to use that tech and get the most out of it is just very different than we will be the paralegal who goes and does it a to z we guarantee you're going to be able to take on forex the cases tomorrow and i think the real tam expansion comes from doing the work and so i would say that was the meta lesson Well, if you ever overdose on frugality, I'd encourage you to head over to getbezel.com.

3:28:11Come on, relax. Pick up a Patek Philippe Nautilus annual calendar. It's$126 ,000. It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch, and I think you'll love it. And I've loved this segment. Thank you so much for coming up. Where are you based, by the way? We're a whole team is based in, I would say that the whole product engineering ops team is based in New York, but we have paralegals around the country. I'm flying out to a lawyer festival called La Digra tonight. So that'll be in San Diego. Well, when you do, be sure to book a wander. Be sure to book a wander. And you can find your happy place. I'm sorry.

3:28:51When you go public someday, I look forward to playing this clip back where John read three ads to you on the day of your fundraise. Oh, public? No, John. plus uh it's awesome having you on i appreciate i appreciate your point i appreciate the point of you on on basically saying like no this is this is noble work this is everyday americans getting support from the legal system in an aligned way so um keep it up thank you both appreciate it have a great rest of your cheers the last gabe in the chat said jordy must be on the cap table I am not on the cap table. I wish I was. Seems like a great business.

3:29:32But I get fired up even if I'm not directly financially invested. But that was great. Invested in having some fun. I'm certainly invested in having some fun. Also invested in a good night's sleep. Yep. 8sleep.com. Get a Pod 5 Ultra. How'd you sleep last night? I got absolutely roasted because I fell asleep while I was watching a show called Last Frontier. It's an Apple TV production. I was watching it on Apple TV on my Apple TV. And it's a pretty good show, but it put me to sleep. So I fell asleep. So I spent like maybe an extra hour of sleeping on the couch, I think. And that doesn't count because I don't have eight sleep strapped to my couch.

3:30:12Yeah, probably not the best sleep, but I still get an 86. How'd I do compared to you? You beat me. I got a 78, only six hours. Step it up. Brutal. Play that sound cue for me. I got a six hours, six and a half hours of sleep death. Absolutely brutal. Hopefully can catch up tonight. Did you see this post from Levels that said from concept car to production car? Oh, yes. This thing is crazy progress going from, this is the original Mercedes-Benz electric car concept. Looks insane. And then there's like still pretty cool lights contrast in the final. Even the way it just sits on the road. Yeah. The second image looks great.

3:30:56Big wheels. And then the third image looks like a Honda Civic. And as a Mercedes enthusiast, a Three Arrows enthusiast, this is one of my least favorite cars on the road. You know, I saw one outside of our breakfast spot and I was just starting to think, maybe it's growing on me. Because when I saw the EQS launch, the new electric Mercedes, I was like, I don't like that design. I think it's too bulbous and rounded in the front. It's not for me. But then I saw one in person. I was like, maybe I'm just, you know, maybe it's coming around on it. But then I saw this picture and the progression. And I say, never, never.

3:31:35But maybe we'll stick to the new SL Goldwing. This post is hilarious. Variety says, exclusive. CBS has indicated that staffers at CBS News will not be disciplined if they don't respond to a much scrutinized message sent last week by Barry Weiss. It was scrutinized? She literally said, hey, what do you do at the company? What do you think we could do better? This is the perfect reaction. And the perfect meme, stop giving me your toughest battles. Barry's just, I'm literally just asked for an email about what you're up to. Ridiculous. Yes, this is the Mercedes-Benz Vision iconic concept car. uh this is something that i can't wait for it to get completely watered down and look like absolute garbage by the time it ships but uh you didn't like it i think this concept car looks pretty cool it looks like a mob boss in tron yeah exactly it looks different concept cars always look cool and then they never make it uh to uh to production and there's a there was another question on the timeline a couple slides back of 41 uh cynthia says is there a good reason that car companies don't just re-release old models.

3:32:41Like this is so beautiful and it's Mercedes from probably the 80s, right? Can you clock this? Do you know vintage Mercedes models? I mean, that's an SL. SL, convertible, two doors. Isn't that just like a vintage? Maybe 280 SL? But it looks fantastic. And unfortunately, the reason that car companies don't just re-release old models is because there's new regulations. And some of those are for good reasons. They need more crumple zones so that pedestrians, if they get hit by the car, they are safer. 280 SL. 280 SL. And so, but of course you can always go and buy one of the older ones, fix it up and continue to drive it.

3:33:15At least the new regulations don't take the old cars off the road. But also I don't understand how pedestrian safety regulations work at all because the Cybertruck exists. And like, if I had to pick between getting hit between a Mercedes SL going 30 floor pedal to the metal and a Cybertruck doing, you know, 90 and zero to 60 in two seconds, I feel like I would pick the 280 SL. So I don't know. I don't know how those pedestrian rules work because the Cybertruck seemed to just completely get through all of those. Everyone was calling for sort of panic when the original Cybertruck design was announced.

3:33:53I remember Matt Farah from the Smoking Tire podcast, great podcast on Rogan. saying, like, he was like, I don't believe that Elon will ship the Cybertruck. Like, it's just impossible. He will never ship this because... You can't make a truck out of metal. It's not just that. I mean, the angles are crazy. Like, the angles on the Cybertruck, it looks dangerous. People wanted it to fail so bad. 100%. It was like the rust gate. People were like, oh. Oh, yeah. I mean, people are always rooting against Elon's stuff. But the Cybertruck, in particular, looked like... Like if I've been told for years that like the reason the cars got round was for pedestrian safety, I was like, okay, well, if that's true and the rules do state that you can't make a Mercedes SL anymore because it's too angular or something and you need to make a, like, how can you make a Cybertruck?

3:34:39And so lots to unpack there. There must be some like workaround or something like that. But anyway, anything else, any other breaking news you want to cover before we wrap up for the day? Tenebra says, great place to end the show. So life is so much easier and better when you have a number to make go up. That's true. Well said. Well, we want to make the number of reviews go up on this show. So please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review. We'd love to read it on the show. And thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a wonderful evening.

3:35:11We will see you back here tomorrow. Bye.