Palantir's AIPCon 10, Ramp Hits $44B, 60 Minutes Considers Rogan | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:We are live from Palantir AIP Con. Big news from Ramp today. Massive fundraise. We're going to cover it in a little bit. But first, we've got to talk. Oh, is it still going? I like it. The Ramp song's back. This was early days. We really talked about Ramp so much. Turned into a song. The topic of conversation in DC is still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released today, it's about the bio threat. Brandon Garel wrote in the TBPN Newsletter today. The great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups.

0:45John Coogan:We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI advanced, we got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a type verifiable reward reinforcement learning works really well in that context bio has some similar characteristics and it was a very tangible y2k style moment exactly where there was let's just say a powerful business strategy yeah is it yeah it was like is it over you start thinking about the consequences of this and you don't need to get to agi super intelligence god you can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem and that uh creates full employer for Nikesh Roar over at Palo Alto Networks who we had a chance to talk to yesterday.

1:28John Coogan:And he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cybersecurity threats posed by new AI systems, some of the new AI capabilities that are rolling out. But bio might be next. And so it's exciting to see that the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threat. So let's take you through this. So in 1981, a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal Nature. So they're basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio, which just a few years earlier, polio, I think, was on the decline by 1981, but a very, very problematic virus.

2:05John Coogan:It's an RNA virus, meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are A-C-G-U, if you're familiar with RNA, adazine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. Put more plainly, thanks, Brandon Gurel, he says, When the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus, they gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from start to finish. By the mid-20th century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide, and you have just open sourced it.

2:41John Coogan:What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the poliovirus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to. It's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the this is the shape of the threat. If there's a new if there's a new virus or an existing virus or forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands even if you don't have a sample.

3:13John Coogan:Instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into a full-length DNA copy of the poliovirus genome, and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675 ,000 Americans and had a 2 to 3 % mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses.

3:51John Coogan:All you needed was the blueprints. As long as you have the code, literally just like text in a text file, a bunch of A-T-G-U, you can go and make this. as long as you have the equipment on hand, but that is getting democratized as well. And that's what this AI letter is all about. So that's the situation that we're still in today, except now that we have AI, there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI tech policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening and record keeping.

4:30John Coogan:You might have seen it on the timeline. And at first glance, Brandon here assumed, and I assume the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this fear-based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction. And that's what Brandon felt. I think some people's reaction would be, are we not doing record keeping here already? That's a great question. And Brandon actually did answer that. But it's not just a PR stunt. And it's not a new capability.

4:59John Coogan:They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus, you know, one shot, that that is solved yet. It's not there. But they see it as something that's coming down the pipe. And this letter is not this dangerous new capability. It's more asking the U.S. government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So, hey, somebody just ordered this. looks a lot like a virus. Like, what are we doing here? You said that you were trying to treat cancer or you said that you were, you know, trying to make a new peptide and all of a sudden you're asking for polio virus or something that looks like polio virus.

5:35John Coogan:Like, let's dig into this. That's where they're going with that. They also need to verify the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records? They were a little bit. He gets into this. So he says, the reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by ai so anyone with an ai tool in the future could in theory if the models don't have safeguards on them could uh synthesis could create a sequence that then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company get printed send it to them mix it up boom they got a virus not good so uh most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this they did they started this in 2009 with what's called the international gene synthesis consortium and roughly 80 percent of commercial synthesis is on board but membership great so 20 percent still just hanging out now we're good 80 percent of nuclear weapons are safely stored don't ask about the other 20 that's kind of what this letter is getting at because 80 percent it was a good first effort 2009 it's been 16 17 years uh we haven't had into yeah but There's a new reason to go further.

6:50John Coogan:Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. Membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80 % number is also self-reported, for example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of the agreement. So it's not government verified. So you can opt into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting once you're opted in is voluntary. So I think the way this works is the International Gene Synthesis Consortium is probably a nonprofit NGO, you know, non-governmental organization.

7:23John Coogan:All the companies, they volunteer. 80 % of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this. And then this organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, they say, hey, we've looked at the market and we're covering about 80 % has opted into this. We're on board with 80%. And the government isn't coming in and checking the records. They're not actually saying, okay, well, we have a different number because we're the government, and you have this number. Let's verify this number. It's self-reported by that organization, but there's no reason not to trust that organization necessarily.

7:54John Coogan:A bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flinchiness of this agreement. HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter and doubly refreshing that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately come to expect from announcements like this. Hopefully, the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order.

8:26John Coogan:So I thought that was a good breakdown, and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some deep dive on this with some more of the signatories. He shares screenshots of all of these, and it really is everyone. uh yeah y-combinator deepmind microsoft interconnects ai harvard uh tons of stuff and then over in uh in the nucleic acid synthesis industry you have twist bioscience uh ansa emerald cloud lab and kathleen mcmahon from valthos is on here so uh good news but uh obviously and just an early step this is just an open letter to the government saying hey we think you should so we want to support this we think that the government should start thinking about this uh the other news in the bio world yeah i mean the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech it feels like biotech uh after yeah momentum but not like volume not scale yet because you're looking at three trillion dollar ipos going out this year potentially so much news in ai microns at a trillion every chip stock is you know in the hundreds of billions trillions this is much smaller but but it's notable because biotech had been uh left for dead in some ways we had a biotech investor on probably 14 months ago at this point who said i don't even know i mean just looking at the return so far i don't know why you would invest in this asset class yeah uh but of course every asset class goes through that kind of phase and clearly there's a lot of momentum and they should be you would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven maybe not as extreme but if you pull out spacex open ai anthropic from power law capital yes but i feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of like a culture of like base hits doubles triples where they flip companies pretty pretty frequently and the yeah we had that didn't we have a guy on that had sold like three companies we didn't have money we were two billion dollar exits yep and then he joined another company and sold it for three billion like the next day uh and so that so anyways you have isomorphic labs spun out of uh deep mind uh coinbase uh or not coinbase but but ryan spun out or like founded new limit uh you have retro they just raised a new round we're gonna get jacob on the show as well um altos labs uh jeff the chad from amazon as this post puts it and then uh anthropic obviously acquired coefficient bio as well but jensen and larry ellison and oracle are also doing stuff so there's a lot of activity it's very fun and i hope we're going to be able to cover this a lot more in the near future at what point do the uh at what point does like a pfizer or johnson and john johnson and johnson start joining the press release economy of just coming i'm not i'm not saying it'd be a good thing but coming coming out and saying we believe we're, you know, right at the end.

11:24John Coogan:Because there are partnerships all the time that happen. And they're always just like tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes the front seat to the bio news. But there's a whole bunch of deal making going on. Anyway, there's other deal making going on in fintech. We're going to talk about ramps raised today. What's going on in Rampland? $44 billion valuation. Whoa. Really, really solid traction just, you know, every 12, 18 months, sometimes much quicker. sometimes they do two rounds in two weeks but uh really solid progress they raised 750 million dollars at a 44 billion dollar valuation last time we grew this fast we were 120th of the size so yeah this is the most notable thing to me yeah uh lots of chatter on the timeline around uh you know other fintech valuations you can perhaps apocalypse yeah well yeah you can't be a victim of the sax box you know ramp is now worth more than paypal okay paypal has 32 billion of revenue yeah uh But PayPal certainly has, I would say, probably negative momentum, whereas Ramp has incredible momentum.

12:28And this is the standout line. They were 1 20th the size the last time they were growing this fast. And so, yeah, just really, really, really, really impressive execution and incredible opportunity still. Yeah.

12:44John Coogan:So Eric took to the timeline, posted an essay about the third pillar, comparing the previous eras of value creation, the two pillars, people and vendors, dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in 2026 AD, and he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot, boiled down 500 years of finance. And it's really just three questions. Who spent what? Was it worth it? What's the bill next month? I mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things. I mean, you see this in like marketing, I'm sure, and ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI, ROAS, and all this other stuff.

13:32John Coogan:And it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money. Did the bank balance go up in this company or not? All personal and business finance at the end eventually comes down to, are we making more money than we're spending? Yeah. And I think, yeah, Eric is right to dive super deep into, like, token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building. But then at the same time, like, don't get lost in the sauce. And, like, actually zoom out and try and understand, like, what is the core value that you're delivering to your customer? It is answering that question.

14:05John Coogan:So, fantastic news over there. there's some other fundraising news sabi the beanie bci company is getting preempted at 35 million at 500 million post uh this is a leak from r4 rock we'll see where it goes this is huge for you why because you are a beanie guy i do like beanies you love to throw out a beanie in the morning keeps it together yeah yeah i like a beanie uh very very i it's interesting i think that uh this format of course I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats yeah but this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California at least Southern California Arizona big amongst creative directors though yeah huge huge huge potential silver like silver like yeah every it's not too hard to change your beanie into a hat a cowboy hat like that's just extra leather around it you can wrap the beanie in the in the cowboy hat you can here's What's interesting, though, so are for rock.

15:03Yeah, usually it's pretty. Dying pretty dialed pretty dialed pretty dialed. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he somehow got.

15:12John Coogan:But I mean, we've talked about the game theory of like, do does he work at a real like tier one venture capital firm that is like, what's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs? I mean, zero benefit for a lawyer, right? Yeah, the rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal. You're a lawyer. You're just like, I need a banger. Add a fund for sure. Yeah. And I don't know anything else. But he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build. Because a bunch of people are going to see this, that this didn't sort of land in their deal flow, or land on their desk, and they're going to reach out.

15:55So it does create momentum, but can certainly be annoying for teams as well. uh this was notable though so 200 million of loi from b2b customers and so very curious what the

16:08John Coogan:enterprise play is here does that mean like uh like through hospital networks or through like the healthcare system or is it like mark zuckerberg wants to go further he wants to track the brainwaves of the employees not just we're gonna track your screen we're also gonna track your brain i mean it go either way because you imagine like Neuralink has had a bunch of traction and a bunch of amazing. I saw Nolan, the the first patient P zero on Rogan talking about playing Cod with the Neuralink. Amazing. And you can imagine that a certain point, like some sort of partnership. They have multiple hat form factors.

16:47There we go. We're good. I was getting really hung up on the beanie. And like there's so many different enterprise or B2B contexts. You're in a a warehouse in Dallas, Texas in the summer. Yeah, you don't know.

16:59John Coogan:Maybe this$200 million LOI is from REI or Patagonia. You know, you don't know. Who makes beanies? What's the Carhartt? Carhartt makes a great beanie. Go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're completely out to lunch. I went through the beanie economy. Beanie economy. Anyway, any market map. Goldman, very optimistic. What they say. Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge 100 times by 2030. Huge. Big, big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking, okay, what's Grok's actual revenue today if you take out X? Yeah. What is their AI revenue today? Is it just Grok subscriptions plus Grok tokens?

17:40John Coogan:Do you include X subscriptions? Do you include cloud vendor and NeoCloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100X, But we have seen other AI companies 100x revenues over two years, over three years, four years. Like the 100x has become, it's not a one-of-one scenario. It's happened multiple times. And so we have seen these charts many times. And if they execute well, this is entirely possible. It is extremely. Other notable data points from the roadshow. So the forecast anticipates SpaceX making about$360 billion of capital expenditures through 2028.

18:23Jensen somewhere this pumping. Very excited about that number. Be a new hyperscaler. Should be unsurprising, but very aggressive.

18:33John Coogan:The new NVIDIA Foundation model is also live. We'll have to go check it out and look at the model card soon. See how it's benchmarking. But we got to move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world. So moment of silence. Moment of silence. Why is it the end of an era? I guess I guess they have been very focused for decades. The last tier one that was a pure venture capital. What did they get called again? Internet boys or something? Soft boys. There's some book about them. That was very funny. But e-boys. E-Boys is a hit piece of a book title. That was a fantastic book. But the subtitle makes up for it, and it's a fantastic book.

19:16John Coogan:And it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they deal. E-Boys, the true story of the six tall men. Yeah, see, he clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I got to take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I got to take it down a notch. And so he threw the E-Boys in there. But anyways, big moves from Benchmark. what's wrong with clark has a scoop in the journal benchmark has raised two billion two billion two new funds wow and uh most notably their first ever dedicated growth fund did they hire anyone who has experienced growth investing who could possibly do growth investing there someone who's maybe like a bond capital and then founders fund that maybe kleiner like someone with that somebody with that kind of background yeah it would be fantastic pretty good for growth investing now that you say that though yeah ev randall ev randall that's right they did pick up they did pick him up they're almost thinking two steps ahead there are they building their fun strategy now their entire platform strategy around ed randall potentially potentially austin-based podcaster reportedly being considered for 60 minutes 60 minutes they're gonna have to call it 200 minutes but um because he records long podcasts in 60 minutes is it enough for hundreds It'll just be called.

20:32John Coogan:Barry, if you're listening, put us in. Put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need tech correspondent, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for 60 minutes. We do 60 minutes three times a day. We're ready to go. This is going to be light work for us, Barry. I'm ready. I'm ready. You can do 60 minutes right now. You can do 60 minutes tomorrow. You can do 60 minutes. You can do an extra 60 minutes easily. We're putting up a thousand minutes a week. It's no problem. We did consider that at one point early on. Should we do basically a morning show? Take a two-hour break and come back and do another show?

21:04Late night show. Yeah, late night show maybe.

21:06John Coogan:Anyway, we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real? Motor One? This seems real. It's real. It's a big deal. It's the brand's first supercar since the R8. Twin turbocharged 4-liter V8 hybrid, 217-mile-per-hour top speed. That is 10 % faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking? Depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10 % faster. And so everyone is going to be rotating out. I mean, I think the new Velary looks amazing. It's a really cool design. It's a really cool design. Feels like somewhat Cybertruck-inspired.

21:46John Coogan:Cyberpunky, futuristic. I don't know. It just checks the box for like the next supercar for me. And in a way that the - Ben says it can't touch the R8. Oh, can't touch the R8. Okay. Okay. Well, it goes zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds. Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday. Yes. And we look forward to it. Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tppn.com. Have a wonderful afternoon. And have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you later. We love you. Goodbye.