Saratoga Water, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Kian Sadeghi, Vercel and Replit

29:38Now, they do have Vercel competitors. They have Heroku, which is kind of a Vercel competitor in the sense that you can deploy. Yeah, and to be clear, it feels like, I mean, Vercel ate Heroku's lunch. Yes, it definitely became a new Heroku. There was an era where I feel like every Y Combinator company was on Heroku. I built on Heroku. It was great. And then it was, okay, everybody's building on Vercel now. And basically, it's a more expensive option, but it allows you to come product first. I just wrote the code, and I want you to handle the scaling, and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it.

30:08It'd probably be a lot cheaper to go direct. And it's even cheaper to go below AWS at a certain point. You wind up like, you know, these big LLM foundation model companies are building their own data centers right now. They're out renting those from AWS because you save money as you go down the abstraction layer, but you lose flexibility. And so early product launches in 2016, they launch now a one command development service for static sites and Node.js apps. In 2016 October, they released Next.js 1.0, which was an open source React framework for server-side rendering and static sites. Now, React, there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time.

30:46I don't know if you remember this, but like jQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework. People were debating, should we use jQuery or vanilla JS? and then the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated. Google came out with this great one called Angular, which was, it had basically the model view controller, like you could basically say, on my front end, I have an idea of data. Like I have on our website, you have all of our sponsors listed there and there's like a row for ramp and a row for bezel and you pull those in and then as you're dynamically changing them, the front end's updating.

31:20Angular was really cool. It allowed you to, you had to learn it, but it was pretty performant. And then Facebook came out with React and just like ate their lunch. And Angular went through the second version. They came out with a new version. It was much more complicated to use, in my opinion. And so React really took off. Next.js is a framework for React. So they're layering on top here. And they wound up building an ecosystem around immutable deployments, preview environments, and serverless architecture. So the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the back end. And if a million people show up or a thousand people show up, Vercel will just send you a bill that scales, but you don't actually have to go in and say, okay, I need a hundred servers today instead of one.

32:03That's the whole pitch. And so in 2020, they rebrand to Vercel and they wanted to reflect a broader focus on developing, preview and shipping. They retained the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility, acceleration, excellence. I got to say, Vercel's website is the fastest site in the West. It is hilariously quick. It puts every other site to shame. It's really great. They're obviously just like flexing the power of their product. But go to Vercel.com and just click around. It's almost addicting. When I figured out that these like CDNs, and you can basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN so that when someone hits your website for the first time, They're not pulling it from your server on AWS in Virginia.

32:47They're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple blocks away from them, and it's much faster. I was really hooked on it. But at the time, if you wanted to deploy your whole site to CloudFront, which is AWS's product, or CloudFlare, which we'll talk about later, it was a lot of work. Like you had to bake everything down into HTML and make sure it was served just like a single file, and there were no server calls. and it was very difficult, but it was a magical experience when you click on the link and it just loads immediately. It's amazing. Let's go through some funding milestones.

33:18Vercel does a Series A. So they were kind of grinding for like five years doing this open source stuff. This is a 10-year-old company. 10-year-old company. But in 2020, things start working. They rebrand. They raised$21 million from Excel and Nat Friedman. What do you know? He's in there early, of course. Get him. Classic. Goat. Series B, they get$40 million from Google Ventures. Series C. That A was a COVID round too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe announced. Maybe. No, I'm saying if it was announced in April, it was getting done. March maybe? Yeah. Well, in Series C, June 2021,$100 million at$1.1 billion valuation.

33:59Series D, just six months months later, they get 150 million from GGV Capital. The valuation goes up to 2.5 billion. And then a Series E, just last May, 250 million from Excel. Company valued at 3.25 billion. And they hit over$100 million in ARR. And they have over a million monthly Next.js users. And so, we can go through some of their technology. They've built their whole game plan is build Next.js into the best React front-end framework that everyone kind of needs to use. Now, that is a controversial statement. There's a lot of Next.js haters out there that say, hey, you should just be writing React.

34:38Why are you messing around with Next.js? It's gonna lock you in a box. And then there's a lot of people that might say, hey, you could use Next.js, but why don't you just host it on AWS? Just figure it out. Figure out the actual implementation. And so they also launched the v0 tool for generating UI components. They wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features, which we'll need to talk to Guillermo about. And in January 2025, they acquired Tremor, a React component library for data dashboards. And so they've built their team, they've made some acquisitions, they've done some partnerships, and now they have a pretty diverse list of customers.

35:18Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour, Fanatics, HashiCorp, Sentry, Auth0, OpenAI, Perplexity, Chick-fil-A, reduced build times from 25 minutes to five seconds. I love it, you love to see it. And Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days, you love to see it. And Mr. Beast, as we mentioned, also. Absolute dogs. Yeah, I think most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Vercel-based. No, of course, because you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about the scaling later. And at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost.

36:05The server bill is going to be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementation. So you should just be able to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure or your servers. And so that's kind of where Vercel is. I'm very interested to hear where Guillermo is planning to take the company. Because now they're talking about, well, we're gonna host Anthropic APIs. We're gonna host LLMs at the edge and deploy and scale those for you. So you should, in theory, be able to have a front-end website that has an interaction with an llm and it's not needing to go call back to some anthropic server because one of the most time-consuming things if you're wrapping one of these apis if you're an api if you're a rapper is okay i take the user's request the user said you know write me a funny joke i take it to my server and then i take from my server over to open ai server and then i get the response from open ai back to my server back to the client and that's just extra round trips and Vercel's all about speed and you can't have that.

37:10It's unacceptable. That's right. Well, should we move on to a company that's been going even longer, I guess? Or, I mean, I guess the story has been going on for longer. This is Replit. They were officially founded in 2016, basically the same year as Vercel. Very different product approach. But Amjad Massad has been in the development technology world for years. In 2019, he wanted to build a browser-based coding environment, a Google Docs for coding. He envisions a REPL, which is a read-evaluate-print loop running entirely in the browser. Normally, you have to open up the terminal, install Python.

37:48But what if you could just do all this in the web? It would enable you to share these and then obviously add a bunch of features over time. So he released an open-source version in 2011 called JS REPL to allow interactive coding in multiple languages. Brought some people on the team. He brought some design stuff. And then he worked for companies like Code Academy and Facebook. He built development tools there. Then JS REPL used to power in-browser tutorials at Udacity and Code Academy, proving the concept's value. So if you go to Code Academy and you were learning Python or learning JavaScript, you would be able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate it and run it in the browser, which was very fun.

38:30And it definitely helped people learn this stuff. And so the platform grew to over 100 ,000 users, primarily students and self-taught coders. He founds Replit in 2016 with some co-founders, initially bootstrapped with personal savings and early community traction. They received seed investment from Bloomberg Beta and initially targets both the education market, coding classes and hobbyist developers. And so Replit has always been about democratizing programming, much less about, hey, let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure. It is abstracting away complexities, but it's taking a much more product-focused approach.

39:12And that's led to a lot of fans, basically. A lot of solo developers, indie developers have really come out in support of Replit throughout the years. PG's been a big supporter. And so in 2017 - Yeah, and it's interesting. both these companies felt like they exploded onto the scene in that 2020 era. Totally. They actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that. So it was like these sort of like 10 year overnight successes. I mean, he didn't get into YC until winter 2018. And, but then once he was in YC, he quickly closed a four and a half million dollar seed round from Andresen, they surpassed a million registered users and developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects.

40:03And so the focus is really on these interactive multiplayer coding, kind of like Figma for software development, writing even backend code, any scripting, multiplayer functionality was really new. There's GitHub integration and support for many programming languages they raised 20 million dollars the big moment really came in in 2021 when they got the dot com absolutely right that that just really that's a turning point you know march 2021 pounding the table let's go let's go let's go for replet.com moving away from the dot it go to snag.com and reach out to our friend rob you want a great domain i love it uh so they upgrade the uh from the ace editor to monaco in 2017 later transitions to codemir the move to Codemere sparks community backlash, which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes.

40:50There's Series B funding in 2021, another COVID round. I remember when these were happening, he raised 80 million at 800 million valuation. The user base exceeds 10 million. Infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth. And there was always this question of like, is Replit for learning and testing or will someone actually build a real business on top of a Replit app or something that they develop in Replit? Is it more for practicing and prototyping? Is it a tool or is it an infrastructure? And I think as we talked about - What is the long-term customer base going to look like, right? Is it the indie hacker who wants to create their first one to 10 apps or is it somebody who's, if you look at their website now, it's really oriented around this similar thesis to like Lovable, which we talked about with Harry last week, turning your ideas into apps with AI.

41:43What do you want to create a website for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, et cetera. So kind of, you know, long-term, this feels like the user base could, and he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like that, but more so with anybody can make a website that actually has like crud app sort of functionality. Totally full functionality, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's what all these companies are fighting over, is that everyone recognizes that that's a huge opportunity, and whoever gets to it first and becomes the portal for making new websites is going to be extremely valuable.

42:28But at the same time, Vercel is very much also competing with Cloudflare, competing over the enterprise and moving up market and moving into these other use cases. So, yeah. And so Omjad and Replit have launched a few things over the past few years. They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks. You could just put up a bounty and say, hey, I need this built. Yeah, I remember that. And they had this massive community of like kind of indie hackers, kids who are learning. It was like, hey, let's give people their first time making money by writing code. Yeah, I thought it was a really cool thing.

43:00In September of 2022, they debuted Ghostwriter, which was a competitor to GitHub Copilot. something to help you, AI powered coding assistant, essentially fancy auto complete, but extremely valuable in the context of Replit. And then they partnered with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly secured a 97.4 Series B extension, reaching a$1.16 billion valuation. So up there with Vercel in the Unicorn Club, they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users. and then they fully removed the education product. The free starter plan limits new users to three public projects and they're kind of going up market trying to be more serious in like the business world.

43:47They relocated their headquarters from San Francisco Soma to Foster City and now they are over 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development. It says they remain committed to innovating in cloud IDEs and AI powered coding tools guided by the founders of Regional Vision. And so that's the story of Replit. We have four minutes. Should we try and do some Cloudflare? We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this. Cloudflare. Yeah, let's do it. Found in 2009. Oh, wait, we got Guillermo on? Okay, let's just bring him in right now. Let's do it. We'll do Cloudflare after.

44:21Welcome to the show. How are you doing? My man. Great. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. I think everyone's looking forward to this. There's drama on the timeline. We need to have a TVPN segment. We really appreciate you coming on. Can you just give us a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Vercel right now? Well, yeah. Maybe to introduce Vercel, too, for those that are new to our company, Vercel creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications. We're super invested in open source. We created a framework called Next.js that empowers a lot of the internet, and we're very proud about it.

44:58But we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects. I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, TypeScript ecosystem. So if you're building a new application, Vercel and Next.js are a pretty good choice for people. Fantastic. And what's going on most recently? Yeah, I mean, if you go Next, there's a lot going on. Maybe the thing that started a lot of this was we got a ping from a security researcher about a potential security vulnerability on Next.js. We get lots of this operating at the scale that we're in. We have millions of monthly active developers on XJS, tens of millions of applications deployed at the Vercel platform.

45:40And so we get a lot of things. But this one in particular was interesting because it was a potential auth bypass, which in the security industry, it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, like bypassing login, signup, things like that. We took a look at it. We processed it through the queue. We remediated it. And then when we disclose it to the world, you know, we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it. So we filed a CVE in partnership with GitHub, which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every Next.js user on the planet, whether they use Vercel or not, about this vulnerability.

46:19But the awesome thing about Next.js is that once you use Next.js, you're actually not just getting the open source project Next.js, you're getting a huge ecosystem of products with it that you can use that integrate really nicely into an HIS. There are a lot of auth partners, a company like Clerc, StackOft, BetterOft, Lucia and the open source ecosystem. It's just awesome products. And I think we should have notified those people before that CVE went out so that they could have had the opportunity to look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that. On the other hand, we did test internally like okay is Netlify which is another deployment option for Next.js affected and again we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like Netlify and Cloudflare who host Next.js as well but it kind of became like a Twitter thing you know that like it got big and then Cloudflare got involved I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined and yeah there's some banger tweets being exchanged here and there.

47:22uh yeah you're entertaining i'm curious to get your read on it you've been in the game for you know you founded socket uh back in the day uh do you feel like the environment now there's let you know there's still a lot of internet to build and there's still a lot of opportunity but at the same time we have these sort of scaled businesses like cloud flare and versell and things like that do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before because there's you know people are there's now like sort of like the market's established in many ways it's not maybe going quite as quickly as it used to there's new opportunities but it's yeah it's like it's it's started you know is is this sort of more zero-sum environment making things a little bit more charged today i think not i do think that on x people get really spicy i was very shocked that the ceo of uh cloudflare came i mean he's he's the ceo of a public company and he came guns blazing, even putting out some cringe-worthy memes against Purcell, which is a company that is very developer-loved.

48:27We invest not just in Next.js, but we power, for example, the AISDK, which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product. It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic. It's deployment platform agnostic. So to come after in such an aggressive way, I was a little taken aback. Our style has always been, if you look at my X feed, the thing that I love to do is highlight great products. If you create anything great, especially if you use NextChase, I just love to say, look at this really cool thing. I never talk about competitors. I never, especially in a diminishing way.

49:09But in this case, I had to reply. Because he's saying, oh, if you want security, come to Cloudflare. And the record shows that if you want security protection, come to Cloudflare, there's a very mixed bag there, right? There's a mixed bag. And like, I had to recover from the adals of Cloudflare. I did bring up Cloud Lead, which legitimately was one of the worst things that has happened to the internet. You could, I don't know if the audience knows, but you could Google and literally find auth tokens of different companies like Uber indexed by Google. So that was important. And by the way, our bug was bad.

49:49I'm not here to say like, oh, like whatever, make excuses for middleware and whatever. Our bug was really bad, but theirs was catastrophic. And the attack, the impact of the bug was Googling. It's like accessible to everyone. The impact of our bug is actually very nuanced. And I'm super thankful to the researcher because it takes a lot of like thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions. But yeah, to your point, I think that it was uncalled for. We've tried to, I think, and that we could get into like the speculation of why he would do such a thing. We tried really hard to use Cloudflare.

50:25We were a customer. We tried it out for a new compute product, which coincidentally it was Edge middleware. And it didn't work out for a number of reasons. So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that, you know, we had a piece out of the, as a customer, we had to build our own. But I can only speculate. Let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and what the biggest opportunities, you know, that you feel like Vercel has in this sort of new, probably the most, you know, most exciting time of my life. John's, you know, a few decades older than me. So I don't know.

51:02It's good business to be in the internet and AI. It really is. No, but yeah, let's talk about, yeah, let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and I love to talk about the future. Everyone loves drama, but my message to all of the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be, the pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology. Vercel doubled the number of signups year over year, mostly due to the introduction of V0, which is our coding agent. I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension where every piece of software will be rebuilt and reimagined with AI.

51:43And the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about the size of your slice and taking cheap shots if you're a security competitor, to me does signal short-sightedness on this AI opportunity. In fact, the ISDK is powering competitors to vZero. So today, one of our partners announced, knew that email is like the B0 for crafting email campaigns, all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from B0 and given back to the world. And so, and I also had a, you should check it out. I had a banger ideas thread on X the other day. Every single day I'm thinking, here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy.

52:31I just actually interviewed, we're at a company offsite slash Orgbo, and I interviewed one of the greatest public company CEOs of our times. I can't disclose who. And I asked him, what are your priorities for AI? He's like, oh, we're completely reimagining the company across these three dimensions with AI. I want to buy AI for this, AI for this, AI for this. So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody. there's all this amazing open source technology that you can use to create new products and new ideas i also believe part of my optimism is that in the beginning two years ago there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chatbot to rule them all uh like a sci-fi movie you go to one computer or you talk to the room hey computer everything is computer or what i believed at the time and we actually this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology that it's going to be expert AIs, focused products that cater to specific requirements.

53:32And that's actually what's ended up happening, right? So on Vercel, we host companies like Open Evidence, which is a chat GPT for medicine. GetGC.ai, which is like the chat GPT for lawyers. Amazing products for finance like Heavya. And so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, that's happening with AI. There is also, I call it sometimes the unbundling of Google. It's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers, sorry, are not going to Google for certain queries. And they're going to specialist products to answer, like when I think knowledge, I might go to perplexity or I might go to Grog and do a deep search, right?

54:11So that unbundling of one of the largest companies and information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes. So I really do think I share your optimism and positivity beyond the drama that happened. One thing I always think about with Vercel is just like the focus on speed. I feel like that's almost like the core brand tenant is just like, I mean, Jordi, pull up Vercel.com. It's so fast. And that's the whole brand. And I want to know, what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments? Oh, it's dramatic. I know you're hosting AI, but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a CDN?

54:52How does that work and what impact does faster AI usage happen in the consumer experience? There's a couple of things if you're running a business that you should know right off the bat. Number one, a lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. I reported recently that we see 5 % of our Vercel signups that also happen to be some of the highest intense signups coming from ChatGPT, which is up from being like 1 % or less than 1 % six months ago. And it's growing. I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys since I like you. It's 30 % month over month. Wow. That's insane.

55:33So walk me through that. It's people going to chat GPT asking, how should I deploy this? What should I build? It's recommending Next.js. It's recommending Vercel. Sama had a really good take. And also, if you want to see a fast website, I am very proud that we host openai.com. Sama recently shared, you might not want to learn so much coding or only coding. You might just want to learn how to use AI, which one of the artifacts of that, and I love the Claude artifact name. I think it was one of the most important inventions as it has happened. in AI in recent years is that coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the AI.

56:11So what's happening is people are asking, what is the best way to build a website? What is the best way to deploy? I actually posted, so we have a little tool, a little playground. You can check it out. It's sdk.priscilla.ai and you play playground. You can ask a bunch of models what they think about you. And that'll give you a glimpse into how the AIs are thinking, but not only how they're thinking how they're directing the world's behavior in choices i was very proud i shared a screenshot that i asked like four frontier models in parallel what's the best way to deploy and they all said for sale and i actually constrained it to like you can only you know the classic thing you can only do one thing or myself like okay for sale for sale for sale for sale and so to me that was i actually didn't know at the time i was just like like messing around in the weekend with the tool.

57:01I think that's the canary in the coal mine of how you should be thinking about AI sending traffic to different places. The consequence to our business is, number one, SEO still matters. So one of our customers, for example, sponsored this fantastic show, Ramp. They're in the business of being found. And so it's going to be through Google searches, or it's going to be through these agents. And so the agents are still performing a web search. So you still want to be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are retrieving and crawling the internet. So that's one thing. And Vercel really helps companies with SEO.

57:42That's an interesting thing to think about. It's interesting to think about Google over time. If nobody's searching on Google, every link is paid for. They still have this sort of pay-to-play. model. Has the train left the station on SEO or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations? And I also want to hear your second point. Sorry for cutting you off. No, no, it's totally fair. So I think what's still relevant is that quality content, facts, crude. I actually like also Elon's truth-seeking AI goal because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is post-trained on truth-seeking, right?

58:27During the pre-training, you throw a bunch of data at it. During post-training, you sort of like orient its behavior. And this model, and this is why I'm a big fan of open AI in the sense of open source and also in giving developers choice. The AI SDK lets you very quickly swap models. I think it's going to be very important as a community, I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or business people. I'm talking about as citizens of the internet, we have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models, the decentralization of AI. Something that Vercel deeply believes in is, and we have a template you can clone.

59:05You can basically roll your own ChatGPT within two clicks. And we recently partnered with XAI to power the default model. So you can go to chat.vercel.ai and you can basically clone and deploy your own ChatGPT in your own domain name. And so what would be great for society is if we all invest in massively decentralizing intelligence so that we're not at the behest of like the one truth center or truth company of the world. Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's one kind of question that comes to mind. So you guys are powering openai.com. And openai.com somewhat recently is like very much reoriented around being a sort of like, you know, search bar answer engine.

59:46And OpenAI right now is being priced like it's the next Google, right? At$300 billion plus, like that is the next Google. You talked about... Yeah, by the way, one comment on that because it's been super double mind. I actually think that's a brilliant design. So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuilt as an AI product. What people will expect is that when they go to your product, there is an interface like that. And I actually think that's really good design because they've blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website. I sometimes dismissively call them e-brochures to remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the internet.

1:00:28The whole point of Next.js and Vercel that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web, a web that powered products. And so what's brilliant about that design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience and it's AI native. And I think that's just a sign of things to come. You're going to go to so many other products. I mentioned the email one, and OpenEvidence is so many of those where the interface will be, okay, what do you need? What do you want? When you go to v0.dev, the question that we ask is, what do you want to ship? Because we want you to convert an idea into an application.

1:01:03Talk about the line between developers and non-developers, right? It seems like it's sort of blurring today. Vercel's entire brand has been around building products for developers. That is the core of the mission. But is there a point in the future where, and you have your coding agent now, right? There's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where, you know, you land on Vercel.com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in a prompt, right? Because it seems like, you know, part of the drama, if you extrapolate it out, it's like there's, you know, real. Whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable.

1:01:47Yeah, that was going to be my third point, actually. So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agentic deployment infrastructure. So there's going to be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet. And also to your question, I think that the TAM of what a developer is, is going to so, I mean, we're already seeing it in the numbers. I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews. I was chatting with a lady yesterday on the X platform, the Everything app. She was reporting feedback about V0. And at one point in the conversation, she was like, by the way, I want to be very clear.

1:02:16I have no idea how to code. I use B0 and I get stuck and I need some other, like another, another expert's opinion, like go to another doctor. I asked Rock and she brings it back and forth between the two products. And she's creating, the reason that she was giving me feedback is what she was saying, like, the app has gotten so big. What do you recommend? And so people are like just having the best time of their lives being able to create when they couldn't code before. But going back to the agentic infrastructure, think of it this way. V0 is automatically calling out to Vercel to create deployments, to assign domain names in the future to even buy domains.

1:02:55V0 might even just say, hey, I thought of a banger domain name for your product. What do you think? And so we're very excited to see the growth of this infra. And by the way, there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working in infra that are listening to this call. I'm very convinced that Vibe coding will eat a lot of the world of creating frontend applications. meaning this AIs are so good at writing React and Tailwind and Next.js, it's actually shocking to me. And I've been a front end engineer. I started front end engineering when I was 11 years old in Argentina.

1:03:36And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of writing front end code. I contributed to a library called Mood Tools when I was 15 years old. I was like the kid that could do front end. And now I'm ready to give up on part of my identity of like, hey, V0 is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating front ends. Totally. Now, what I'm not so sure about, and you've seen all these conversations on X about security and you can vibe code, but it's hard to vibe debug. I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. We operate in 20 regions worldwide.

1:04:18We reach dozens of cities through our POVs in our CDN network. we have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties from you know ai companies to cryptocurrency companies some uh presidential meme coins whatever you think of so much is going on on versell every second of uptime everything that can happen to this platform is absolutely mission critical it's life critical so many health care companies banking on versell And so I don't want AI to necessarily be messing with the foundational sort of infra and software that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly, that the train runs on time.

1:05:03On the other hand, and this is why Carpathia, I think, coined the Vive Coding, when you're exploring, when you're creating, when you're designing, when you're crafting the interface, that's where AI is completely dominating. Makes sense. And now it's gaining full stack powers where you can integrate with that infrastructure. So we recently partnered with companies like Superbase and Neon and Upstash that they also hire those cracked infra engineers that, you know, they might be using some AI, but, you know, hopefully for our partnership, they're very careful. And that creator, that new creator is getting the best of both worlds, that you vibe code and you're working on rock solid foundations.

1:05:46Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about value accrual in AI? I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer. You could even abstract that. And now people are just saying, I either want to be the aggregator, the ChatGPT app that's installed on 100 million phones, or I want to be an energy and get me shares in a nuclear company. Because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized. You don't have hardware yet or your own infrastructure. Does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time? How are you thinking about just the different opportunities?

1:06:23It seems like you're obviously going up market to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps. But are you thinking about going down the stack further, training your own models, developing your own chips? What does the far future look like for Vercel? I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud and mobile. but it's going to be much bigger. And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it, there wasn't a particular player or category that had a lot of upside. It was all over. It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware, obviously.

1:07:00And we're very proud to partner with AWS to provide sort of that quote unquote hardware layer to Vercel as a global network. There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly changed their behavior. So this is very important, by the way. When I noticed AWS, I was very quick to this. Luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me because I got so excited by the automation potential. And there's merits to all solutions, but being an early adopter and riding the right wave can be transformational to your career. Later on, it happened with React. React was open source by Meta.

1:07:39I believe that's one of their greatest inventions. and I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Next.js. And so I think my advice to people would be, you know, just adopt AI and see where you can add value. I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI, as I mentioned, will decentralize and unbundle. There's going to be a lot of upset for agentic infrastructure. So companies that know how to work well with not just humans, but agents. And that's a very, that's a remarkable shift, right? A lot of products have been so far created for developers, not for the agent.

1:08:21You think of it as a representative of the developer. You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer. How do you, yeah, I was going to say how, you know, as a leader, how do you work with your team? You know, a lot of people that sort of like high level leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus. But then in the case of Vercel, there's so many different areas of the business now. And it seems like you're very focused on serving your customers, the developers, and the sort of companies building on Vercel. But at the same time, you have all these different bets.

1:08:58How do you kind of prioritize internally? And it seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that Facebook releases React. They've benefited from it, but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it. And so it seems like you're okay with sort of, you're very open to sort of releasing things and not, it's less oriented around, we need to, you know, capture a hundred percent of the value that we create or. Yeah. I think short-term obsession over value capture is that it's not the right recipe to build a generational company. And I'm obsessed with growing the size of the pie. My number one allegiance is the web.

1:09:35So when I was in Argentina, I was able to, and this, I, you know, when you're a kid and you try lots of different programming languages, the thing that blew my mind is the URL. In fact, if you look at the success of Vercel so far, it really is about the success of a URL is that I thought, holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard. CDNs are so hard. What if people could just deploy with one click or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on that they can share with the world. Look at other companies that have been massively successful, or products like Google Docs or Figma. They've essentially done that.

1:10:14A thing that didn't have a URL before now has a URL. We're doing that for every application on the planet. So it's primarily an infrastructure business. And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest, biggest number of people, open source is the only way. It's non-negotiable. And in addition to Next.js, like I mentioned, we created Next.js, sorry, Next.js and AI SDK and Turbo, and we acquired a bunch of companies like ShadCN. And so the more we can, you know, cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win, and also it needs to win because we have the best products.

1:10:56You know, you can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem. Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple. Apple is holding an entire world hostage to a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls. You know, the web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless, which is also why I'm CryptoPill, then we could get into that and whatever. But permissionless is actually the most important. It's like freedom of speech is up here. And then right up there is also permissionless, which is also increasingly a form of speech, is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission.

1:11:38And so that is the true enemy, so to speak. And I think my message to all desired comments would be like, let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an app store review process. You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto. So whatever you want, you should be able to, and AI, right? Like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible so that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems. I think I'm trying to think about like how 9000 or whatever that is like, or Sky.

1:12:11I just, I don't want to go to one interface. Bursell needs to decentralize and democratize URLs and interfaces to the world. And by the way, my other point was going to be, I'll give credit to Apple. they have a culture of quality and they've managed to permeate that culture of quality to that, to their ecosystem. And, and I want that for the web as well. I want to make sure I actually don't even have a particular force in the race. We don't, we not only support Next.js, we support another 35 frameworks, whatever framework allows me to go to a website, like a blind tasting and be like, Oh, this website is freaking great.

1:12:47You should be able to work backwards to, oh, they use some technology supported by yourself. That's my, that's my fitness function. Uh, curious, did anybody ever, uh, come to your office with$5 billion in cash and tell you to ask you to train a foundation model? And, uh, how did that conversation go? Cause I'm sure like, you know, and all the craze of the last couple of years, there could have been an opportunity to just like, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to say, Hey, you're really well positioned to build. Yeah. When's the humanoid robot coming? Yeah, not that far.

1:13:18People seem to be very obsessed with the VZero data. So I'll tell you, I also haven't shared this before, but so many companies have come and asked for... Because by the way, the interesting thing about VZero is in going back to the design mindset and quality mindset, is we're trying to produce things we're proud of. And nest it. We're proud of, our customers are proud of, and users of the internet say, okay, now there's a better web. I think we should also band against AI slop. Like we shouldn't create a web that has this overly brushed texture images coming out of like, like low quality models and whatever.

1:13:53And so a huge inspiration for me was actually Midjourney. Midjourney, speaking of which, is that Next.js user, that self-hosts Next.js, extremely proud of that. And there's something about the taste that gets embedded into these models. So it's not just the data that you want. It's also infusing your preferences and taste. And it's almost like casting an opinion into the world. This is what I believe products should look like. And by the way, you also want, and this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic, you can still leave the customer to their own creativity. So you can say, you go to VZero and you say, build me a product for travel.

1:14:30Like wonder actually, also over sell customer. And then you're like, well, I don't like it. Make it more yellow. And like the model will follow. So it's striking that balance between creativity and best practices for a better web. I have a question. So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of bringing in new developers, allowing even non-technical folks to build and deploy websites. But some of your companies, some of your clients are absolutely massive. And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure. It can get kind of expensive. What are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber on Vercel long term?

1:15:16and how do you see those relationships going and how important is it to not only enable someone to show up non-technical, prompt, build an app, but then scale it into that one person, $1 billion company. And they're saying, yeah, you know what? I'm sticking with Vercel forever. Yeah. Yeah. Your question also contains the answer because you said, you know, Vercel has been getting a lot bigger. Yeah. And because we've been getting bigger, which, you know, comes with these challenges like X drama and whatever, But the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do.

1:15:49When you're starting a company, a little company, you're not thinking about optimizing. If you're thinking about optimizing, you're probably not doing the... We have this motto that we introduced at Next.js Conf. There's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of you first make it work, you then make it right, and then you make it fast. And I would add a fourth, and then you make it cost efficient. And actually, from a computer science point of view, fast and cost efficient actually almost come together. We've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure. I think this year we've already announced eight price decreases or like last quarter and this year.

1:16:29And we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure on all sides. The CDN is getting more efficient. The compute, we just announced fluid compute. It's a staggering what we've done in terms of compute efficiency. Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of 85%. Wow. So what I would say to the 90s of the world, the previous story of Vercel, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on-call and those human costs, which are ginormous. and now you'll be fighting for like high quality infrastructure engineers with all of the AI companies as well.

1:17:13So like the human cost is very real of doing something like Vercel. But then the scale cost of like Vercel actually gets more efficient the more I use it is awesome. And we're committed to continuing to sort of share those infrastructure savings with our customers. And by the way, the inspiration here is AWS. I think when I started using AWS, it was quite expensive. And then they just announced so many price decreases because, and by the way, that's kind of the dance. We manage Next.js for people. You can also self-host and manage it yourself. And we're actually also partnering with companies that are even competitors over sell to help them manage Next.js better when they want to create an offering like that.

1:17:52And we know that there's work to do there. But the nice dance is that if you let up and let us manage your workload, we will be able to optimize it to a level that is sort of unbelievable. Well, it's noon. We'll let you go. I'm sure you have a bunch more to do today. Great having you on. Please call back in when you have more news. I love it. It's a really fun conversation. I love your show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. I'll see you on X. This was fantastic. See you on X. See you on X. Yeah, that was fun. Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story. I feel like we struck the balance there.

1:18:27It's great when somebody is able to speak with more than 144 characters. Yeah, all of a sudden the nuance just comes in. It's amazing. Emerges. yeah fantastic but very very cool yeah very cool company and it's a crazy position to be in where you're hosting potentially the next google yeah right like if you go to open ai right now this is relatively recent i don't know exactly when they searched it it just says what can i help you with yeah yeah and then yeah there's no landing page anymore for learn about open ai jobs it's like you're here to do yeah they still have a little bit on the side but you know Yeah, they're very oriented around.

1:19:07Anyway, we got Lulu coming on to break down the drama and the comms. We're going to talk to her about a bunch of stuff. But we got to ping her because she's not in the waiting room yet. So let's ask. Let's see. Okay.

1:19:29Good.

1:19:35we do have her on uh okay maybe i should send she's extremely busy she is she jumped on she only had 30 seconds we weren't ready she bailed no i'm kidding i believe it yeah um anyway let me try and send her this uh thing and in the meantime we should do some posts and she is back is she back let's see uh well i mean maybe she was getting tell you about bezel that's a great time i got a i got a beautiful vacheron constant on on purchased from bezel highly recommend you go pick something up over there they have over 23 500 luxury watches folks uh fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts this watch right here it's shipped from the seller to bezel.

1:20:25And anytime I see drama on the timeline, I can't help but think if the two people arguing just went watch shopping together. I was thinking about that watch to watch. If they went or no, if they just went and they browsed around bezel together for an hour talking about what they like and what they don't like, they would find common ground and then they would squash the beef. This is bezel is a, is a technology that will bring harmony to the timeline. I believe. No, a lot of people said, Oh, we got Lulu in the chat. Let's do it. Hey, how you doing? Hey, good to see you. Welcome to the temple of technology.

1:20:57We're live. You're live. The fortress of finance. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Great to see you. I'm kind of surprised it took this long to get you on the show. Former brother of the year, 2024. And for some reason we had to do 75 guests before we could get you to sit down. What happened? I had to make sure the show was good. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Big dogging us. She big dogged us. It was reasonable. But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us chat uh there's so much to talk about i want to talk about the comms around saratoga water i want to talk about uh morning routines did you wake up at uh 3 40 this uh this morning and dive directly into a pool or are you taking a little bit slower today no every morning i dive for five minutes yep in the air suspension is four i like to go for five sometimes seven fantastic average five for me great i took my face like every once every 10 minutes i think just gotta go a little bit above and beyond uh stay ahead of the pack rub the banana peel i don't just do the face i do the neck get behind the ears so fully ready for this show always taking it always taking it to the next level uh what what do you uh you you had critiqued that saratoga water uh that their their last post was a bunch was hashtag soup.

1:22:13You described it. Yep. How, if you were, if they were a client, do you have anything particularly that you would have advised them on of what they could have done better? Yeah. You're, I don't have any fancy water companies in my portfolio. So you might get a call later today. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. Okay. I think they just have to wake up here. There's somebody whose job is to run social for them. I'm sure there's like a person whose area of responsibility is this. And they were just completely out of the game. Like some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there.

1:22:47Like they were present on Instagram with a checkmark. The posts weren't actually that good. I think there's some brands that are like boycotting X because of Elon, whatever, but you're just kind of hurting yourself. Like it's like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own elon you're owning your own cash flow because you're mad at elon just like go on x make money do what you need to do forget about your personal feelings i don't know if that's actually the reason but if it is it's bad reason it does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame moment for them and so i i wonder like what is the good ending here like they quote tweet the video they lean in they're making jokes they capture a bunch of you know attention maybe they grow their account from a thousand followers to even like 100k because it's such a viral moment and a billion people saw the morning routine uh but then what do they do with that after after that i think they have to okay i think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the hawk to a girl like she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seemed to suggest was possible yep and um i think what the water company could have done here to extend would be like lean into the routine like partner on some routines uh lean into the unhinged like i know that they're this sophisticated fancy type of person but still sometimes you just got to roll with it um strike up some partnerships have like follow-on content like lean into the funny just do the bar is like literally anything and then it's like getting creative and then it's like something really enduring if they want to do something really enduring maybe it's like a program maybe it's like some pop-up stuff to just stay top of mind but the the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit yeah yeah i feel like the challenge is i have no idea what saratoga brand stands for but now in my mind it stands for getting up at 3 45 putting the banana on your face having four minutes of airtime and so it's almost like they they i'm i'm the most water obsessed person that i know by a long shot and i didn't know what they stood for before it's almost like the right thing to do is the the right deal to do is you hire you just say hey we're gonna kind of scrap our brand from the last 200 years i think they're a very old company we're now the ashen brand uh you know we're signing we're signing him to a maxed out it's just 150 eight figures 150 yeah it's 150 year old brand 72 uh well listen it's time it's time for a reefer do a brand partnership with chiquita banana that's great there we go yeah the banana collab you could be doing like uh some people commented when he opens up the journal he's on page one of his journal oh yeah like a notion partnership that like the world is no oyster here there's a lot you could do yeah uh let let's talk about uh you created a meme going going direct uh i i feel like it's one of the the most powerful yeah like basically was there a trend of the year potentially trend of the year i mean that and founder mode are the two when you think about when you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last five years it happens to be in my view going direct in founder mode totally and they go they go hand in hand uh have you i'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what what the next play is is the next is the next play going indirect going and sort of like it going getting puff pieces you know getting puff pieces and stuff like that um no but what do you think is uh now that sort of this sort of like way of comms has become the standard is this just the enduring approach for the next however many years until we get better institutions or you gotta you gotta always outrun yourselves i'm really glad you brought this up we did not coordinate by this by the way like you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no talk points i can be like fully unprepared thank you um so we didn't coordinate but i actually had been thinking about this because rostra launched around a year ago almost exactly a year ago and in that intervening year founder mode has has kind of become part of the canon like it's here it's not evenly distributed maybe deloitte is not going direct but like founders going direct is now part of the default playbook for comms like any yc company that's coming out into the world today they're thinking the founder is going to go direct um but the thing is you have to outrun yourself like once something becomes the thing that everybody does that becomes the new norm and you always want to be standing up above the norm like i remember for a while last year i was doing manifestos i was having all of like my founders and my companies do manifestos and then for a three month span it was just like every other week of manifesto it actually began i kind of got like manifestoed out and same with like the secret plans same thing kind of burn through them that one happened really fast yeah yeah sorry everyone yeah well so how do you how do you think so more montage reels guys yeah so we just had uh guillermo on versell creates next js they release it to the world and then they say yeah we'll manage it for you if you want or you can just use it by yourself you basically open source the concept of going direct but then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders is there anything else that uh you know the thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exact any any sort of like highly specialized skill set double fisting celsius what is that in front of your hands i go i go your jongo celsius that's uh that's pretty reflective of our brand sorry it triggered me because the uh week before last i had two so i didn't know how caffeinated they have a lot of caffeine in there i needed like a defibrillator oh yeah well red bulls 400 yeah it is six red bulls i think technically um who's counting though yeah gotta be careful no but the idea is like is there other things that are that maybe fall outside of that that you feel like you can sort of like open source like things that you can just tell the world they're very hard to execute so they should still go to uh your firm to actually pull them off But what else are you thinking about kind of like open sourcing?

1:28:56Yeah, or they can just do it. I like the concept of open sourcing. Like, in fact, you should be able to do it by yourself, whether I get hit by a bus or your team gets hit by a bus. It should never just like rest on any one person. I think the next era, so going direct was probably the big thing for the last year. I think the next era is in shorthand, attention is all you need. like in a world where ai can just do anything all the time you can see people like shipping and launching stuff it used to be monthly then weekly and now daily there's just like huge drops all the time and it's a tree falling quietly in the forest unless you can get people to actually care about it so the two things are number one how to get the attention and just like focus it for a small period of time and then number two how to harvest it and turn it into something like the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention and then it goes away.

1:29:47Like we're talking about Saratoga water, it goes away and you didn't do anything with it. So you're doing like attention, catch and release, like California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing. Like don't do the catch and release, hold on to the attention and turn it into money. Like your job is turning attention into money. I mean, that's the beauty of the Ashton Hall thing. He went super viral, but he already had been on Instagram for five years, had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral. He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff. Like there is a funnel.

1:30:20And if you found him from this ex post, you're going to be paying him if you like him very quickly. Whereas with Hawk to a girl, we were talking about this, like she had to spin up a podcast. And then I'm sure at a certain point, she was like, well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money. Whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize. We got a delivery here. Oh, thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga. You guys should do the dunk lives, the new ice bucket challenge. Yeah, we also need bowls to dunk our face in. Yeah, we definitely do. So here's a question for you that I think is actually an interesting one.

1:30:50So the three of us are dear friends with David Senra. And David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence, right? He made a post two weeks ago that was something to the effect of, like, I talked to this family. They had written biographies about the family. And he asked if he could do an episode on them. And they were like, absolutely not. We're not giving away our sort of secrets. Do you think that the playbook of just sort of like building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and not really sharing what you're working on, And do you think businesses like that will, there seems like there's tons of examples throughout history, but that was pre-internet, right?

1:31:38If you take the strategy of we're going to kind of like build in silence, you know, be very secretive. Does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are going to be extremely loud, constantly sort of like accumulating attention? And I just wonder if that's sort of a pre-internet strategy. So the thing here is, one day soon, maybe you'll have the one person billion dollar company. But for now, the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent. And the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated. And they're all being headhunted by like the same firms.

1:32:14And so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can. And they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you. And so if you're someone who's already a household name, like if Palmer Luckey went silent for a while, it'd be fine because people know what he's about. Ilya Sutskover has been silent for quite a while. And you don't have to try to figure out, like, what am I going to get if I try to go work for them? And they have, like, demand knocking on their doors. But if you don't have that, then you do need to build it. And I think where your question is coming from too, is like, we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much.

1:32:52And it's like, when are you building your company? You're tweeting like every hour. And I think the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap. It's about the ship yap ratio. You have to respect the ship yap ratio. And if the ratio is right, you can get away with anything. That's great. Yeah, Elon's a perfect example of this. Nobody's like, hey, bro, you're posting 20 times an hour. Relax. It's like, okay, the rockets are being caught. The rockets are being caught. It's sitting in the chopsticks. He can post what he wants. On ongoing direct, I've always thought that there's a little bit more nuance there.

1:33:31Obviously, it's really key to tell someone that like, hey, it's okay to start posting and going direct and doing founder-led communications, but that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels. And I see it almost as like tiers or levels. So level one is like you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility. Maybe there's some posts on X from the founder's account. Then you start doing new media, like podcasts like this, calling in, telling you're using other people's platforms, but you're accelerating. And then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile, and that still has a lot of benefit.

1:34:09Can you talk to us about how founders should think about riding up that curve and where the value is across all three of those? Yeah, so roughly you want to think of it as like concentric circles going outwards. Sure. And you cannot mess up the order. So the innermost circle is your co-founders and executives and the people who work for you. And they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle. Next circle maybe is investors board, and then you get to customers, and then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people.

1:34:44But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is, let's say that you're launching a new mission, and you didn't brief your employees on this refreshed mission, but you go to the press, and now your employees are reading it in the press, and there's a disconnect. Two things can happen. One, they're like, WTF, this isn't what I signed up for. Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external. And two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like, well, wait a second.

1:35:16I'm not. Are you sure? This isn't this doesn't seem right. And then all of a sudden, everything, everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it. And so sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important. Like always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles. That makes sense. In terms of getting every company wants to get attention, the challenge is that there are some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like, you know, basically like slop.

1:35:52Like I won't name it, but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just in my group chats was like super cringe. But then it got like millions of views and I was looking at it. I'm like, all right, like this seems like cheap attention, but then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about maybe talk about like taste when it comes to getting attention. And is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower base of sort of like tasteful releases and messaging and comms versus like the cheap high attention moments? Yeah. Tasteful, tasteful vids. So there's two things.

1:36:34One is, you know, the crazy hot chart? Yeah. The crazy hot chart. Of course. Who doesn't? There's like a company crazy hot chart where if you're really hot as a company, there's a lot that you can get away with. But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you, then every single thing you do or say is like disproportionately affecting how they think of you. And so if you have a 10 year history of just like wins and bangers and you have one thing that is kind of weird or flop or a little bit cringy, you can kind of get away with it. It gets absorbed a little bit better. But if your company is launching for the first time and the one thing people see is 100 percent.

1:37:13of the data points that they have about you. You can't really afford that. So I'm not saying don't take risks. I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up like even, even more when you're new and there's not a lot of data points about you. And then the second thing about just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage. And the responses are all like bots. like if you go to a tech crunch um x post and look at the replies it's just straight up bot replies if you go to these uh these like framework bros or i don't know the like mental model bros sure here's what happened this week thread bros um get a lot of engagement but i would not trade that for the world and so the thing to look for is like who is in the replies and who is not in the replies because replies are usually really positive too, but it's positive from people that like, it's a counter signal if they like it.

1:38:15Yeah, exactly. It's all about signal, right? Signal. Yeah. Do you think the best sort of like going direct founder mode to put it in one bucket, CEOs are sort of like born that way and maybe you need to help uncover that ability of like sort of communicating their story to the world or is it something that anybody can figure out with sort of proper training and understanding sort of social mechanics and the platforms that we distribute content on and all that kind of thing? Okay. There are different archetypes of super cracked, impressive founder that you want to just throw your life to the side and go follow them and do whatever it takes to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling.

1:39:00There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is, you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes. You can't be in the cringy, uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you. And you're sort of like make it halfway there. You can be the like, super brash, controversial, loud type. You can be the meme-y, funny type. You can be the strong, silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year. But if you're type three and you're trying to force yourself into type one, it's going to be painful for everybody, like most of all you.

1:39:38And people can tell. Right. So I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it. And can you learn it or do you have to be born it? It's more like there's different types and you can fit into one of those types, but you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between. Yeah, think about the difference between like David Holes and Justin Mares. Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down. David Holes just shows up once a week and tweets something like about the future and how AI will like change.

1:40:10Yeah, like alien civilizations. Yeah, alien civilizations. But they're both great posters. But if they tried to swap, it would be really, really weird. You sometimes see people like online LARPing as Palmer. Yeah, they're trying to be someone else. Yep, exactly. I have a chip on my shoulder. And I always say this for the going direct thing is like, how do you communicate? Because there are some people who their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post. Other people can be really pithy and just post bangers. Other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit.

1:40:44Other people are great on national TV. And so figuring out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like, well, X is the popular one. So I got to figure that out. it can be very hard. This is what we were talking about and you were saying I should describe it as default out. Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that. Weren't we? You and I were talking. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out. Standard out. You were talking. Oh, right. So in programming, in programming, standard out. As like a metaphor for the default type of medium that somebody should use.

1:41:20Yep. And if they need to go outside of that, they can, but everybody has like a strongest, like a default medium. And you don't have to like only stick to that. Like you can go outside of it. Some of these like Andre Karpathy posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into the Xbox and hits post and it's fine. Yeah, I mean, a lot of that's about the flexibility of the X platform, but there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually be going and sitting down with, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin and doing an interview and they will crush that. And then that clip should live on X and someone else should post that.

1:41:55But they should not try and turn it into a banger, hilarious post because that's just not authentic to who they are. I have a prompt for you. One of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit. What's the strategy for getting TVPN on the cover of the New York Times or The New Yorker? What should we do? The journal would be the really ideal. So how can we reverse engineer this? Take us through the steps. I think financial times could be good for you guys. I see you looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop. Oh, yeah. That'd be fantastic. Okay. Yeah. Financial times.

1:42:33How do we get the profile done? Okay. So the first question is, what is the business goal here? Like, how do you convert attention to money? Right? And you guys convert attention. Okay. Let's just work through it live. You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners so that you have leverage with advertisers. and then the advertisers pay you and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world. That's the business, baby. Number one question is, who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet and you're going to get more bang for buck by converting people in tech who've been living in a cave and don't listen?

1:43:08Or are you going to go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet? Or are you going to go to some in-between adjacent community where it's people who in, let's say it's people in DC who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington, DC, and they need to understand tech better. So it's like policy people who want to understand tech. So here's my first question to you is like, who is that next group of listeners that you're going after? Probably slightly older public markets investors. We're pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving, or we like to think of it as like, YC Demo Day was our NFL combine.

1:43:45Earnings season is our Super Bowl. And so we want to deliver on, you know, a Super Bowl level event for TBPN covering public company earnings, Mag7. Okay. So you want to go to sell side analysts. You want to go to the big banks. You want to go to probably the exchanges have some events. Like New York Stock Exchange has events. You probably want things that are like Citadel adjacent, like D.E. Shaw adjacent to get into that community. And also there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young hedge fund and quant trader people. Obviously, like the young Jane Street people just go back and forth.

1:44:22And so if that's the audience, then I would work backwards, like reverse engineer this whole thing and think, OK, where are they getting their information? And what do they already care about that we can tap into? Like it's it's it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just never heard of. Yeah. Whereas and Derek Thompson had this insight to the best viral thing is something that's a little bit new, but a little bit familiar. Yes. OK, let's say that we're talking to those people. You're probably going to aim for. I mean, they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times.

1:44:53Let's just say Journal because the paywall is less strict. Now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas? Like, are you in tech? Are you in culture? Are you in finance or something? So there, for example, New York Times has a guy who is like between tech and culture. And so maybe someone like that. Or let's say it's the journal and their tech. Honestly, their their tech desk, their tech team is in like shambles right now because they had this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago. And there's just like a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people.

1:45:35The cusp of AI. It was crazy. Weird. Yeah. So maybe you want to aim for like culture, finance. And then now you're putting together two pieces. One piece is like, what do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about? And what are they thinking about? They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not. And they can see publicly available information, which is very scant. but they're trying to read behind the scenes of like, which founders are respected and how good are they really? And can they recruit that kind of thing?

1:46:07And then what is the paper cover? And the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening in the world of AI, like as we approach AGI, what are changes happening in the world? So, and then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring. So I would start by not doing a pitch at all, just vibing, networking, going out for drinks, chilling and starting to talk about what's in the middle of that venn diagram which is like you have the unique experience it's interesting to the people you're trying to reach and it's interesting to what the journal has been covering do that like for three months or so and then figure out one hook that's in the news and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook and then have somebody who's not you like have somebody else that they respect who's in your network and their network tell them or like like a me or like a founder like an Eric Lyman you know go to them and just tell them like this is the thing blowing up in tech and they should really take a deeper look and at that point you're familiar to them familiarity breeds affection positive feelings but it also breeds credibility so people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard a lot so at this point you're familiar you have the story dialed in you have your unique area of expertise and then you have some third-party validator telling them to look deeper into it and that's how it begins well thanks for coming on the most profitable podcast in the world last one i know you've got a minute left uh are we try not to swear on this show because swearing is vulgar and we're very short bearish uh using cuss words online right now how are you advising your clients in a world where you know big names are thrown around mean words?

1:47:51I think it's the same thing as before, which is like whichever bucket you're in, stay in the bucket. And if like. If there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are, you can try to ask them to clean it up. I've never seen that work. I've never had an experience where someone tells the founder, like clean up the potty mouth and talk different. And they actually do. And so it's just that's your archetype. You stay there. But I will say the big takeaway, if people are trying to figure out like what is the next era of comms and just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about building a cult and a movement around my company, it's we're entering the era of personality hires with respect and affection.

1:48:35You guys, ultimate personality hires i'm one too safe space it's okay cheers cheers cheers but in a world where ai is better than us at pretty much everything every human is going to be a personality hire so just figure out what your lane is and lean into that and if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while it's not the worst thing and if you don't don't try to larp as palmer lucky and find the fights just so that you can have something to beef over. Just find your lane, be in the lane. Don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous and unnatural for you because people sniff it out.

1:49:14Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot. Authenticity, as silly as it sounds. Great. Well, I have to say thank you for coming on. When your clients have historically that I'm aware of have come on the show, I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show. I always come away and just tell John, he was too media trained. too prepared too good uh so you're doing great work and uh thank you for for uh for being a a the former brother of the year and a friend of the show we'll see what happens this year keep up the good work there's just to be clear just to be clear it can be two times ceremony you need to do the ceremony where i go and put the crown and then we all cry yes well i mean we're gonna have a black tie event this year for the award show and i'm sure you'll be invited that's it perfect all right fantastic amazing thanks for stopping by take care bye that was great uh lots of great insights from lulu as always um what's your review of the saratoga water is this gonna is this gonna put rora out of business is this gonna put every water company out of business they're getting so much let's do a taste test tastes good i mean it tastes fine it's okay uh this just screams to be the restaurant that amid restaurant or the water that a mid restaurant would stock okay trying to be like oh yeah we have bottled still yeah yeah oh we have saratoga okay yeah i think it's i i think it's fun that it's uh going viral and good luck no i'm happy for them because i i enjoy and appreciate value creation so i'm glad they're they're doing glad i'm sure their numbers today fantastic they must be so happy yeah every single uh well you know what they should do if they want to keep up the sales coming out of this viral sensation.

1:50:56They should buy some ads on. Buy every billboard in the United States. They really should. Just take advantage of this moment. They should go on adquick.com. They have out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say 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. That's great. Do you want to dive into Cloudflare? Should we just move on to some timeline? What are you feeling right now? How much did we actually get into of Cloudflare? We didn't start Cloudflare, but they are the third player in this debate.

1:51:30We're going to have Amjad Massad from Replit on in 30 minutes. And I thought it'd be good to kind of show the three companies that have been duking it out on the timeline. Let's briefly cover it and then we'll go into the timeline. Fantastic. So it's an older company. It's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince. That's the CEO who has been chirping at Guillermo on X. The goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance. And so when you run into Cloudflare, it is a CDN. And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic. The idea is instead of those hits triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on ABS.

1:52:12They hit Cloudflare first. It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's just delivering the front-end web page first. And Cloudflare is a product that helps your website, similarly to Vercel, be very quick and fast. And they started with a$2.1 million Series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations. They launched a TechCrunch Disrupt. What a throwback, 2010. They had core services, CDN, DDoS protection, which I mentioned, performance operation, and it was all a freemium model. So you get onto Cloudflare free for a little bit, and then quickly as you start scaling, they start charging you more.

1:52:51But as the tenor on X has been, Cloudflare is still pretty affordable, even when you scale up. Amazon AWS has a lot of Cloudflare competitive products. CloudFront, I think, is literally a direct competitor to their CDN product. But CloudFlare has been price competitive, roughly. And so you get a lot of stuff. And then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionalities to their product catalog. So in 2011, there is a Series B by NEA. They wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domains served. They're scaling pretty quickly. After only two years, they get to that 20 million dollar series b then the next year it's interesting 50 million series i mean they were basically five years ish ahead of versell yep but it's interesting how versell's series a was 20 you know so yeah everything just kind of like around that's just standard and now now it's 50 million dollars series a is common 20 million dollars series b yeah that if a company does that and doesn't say, hey, we intentionally raised less money than we could have, you're like, okay, they're probably struggling.

1:54:00And so Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, comes in for the Series C, that's$50 million in 2012, and they added more points of presence, which means more local servers that can deliver content even faster, because the whole name of the game is, if you're in Chicago, you want a server in Chicago that's delivering that website, so it's extra fast, because the speed of light and physics come into the equation when you're going, even just going across the US and back is, you know, at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters. I think it's almost like 30 milliseconds. I don't know for sure, but it's significant enough that the content delivery network makes a lot of sense.

1:54:39Is that roughly how fast I was running this morning? Oh, yeah. When I smoked the whole team. Yeah, we had a little foot race this morning with the team and Jordy came out on top. He's a fast, fast brother. In 2012, they reached a$1 billion valuation, or close to it, based on rapid growth and network expansion. In 2013, they added DDoS mitigation and they successfully defended against high profile attacks, the Spam House incident. You know that's gonna be a good start when you dig into Spam House. But I'm sure there were a lot of DDoSing going on. I mean, basically anytime someone was, I mean, DDoSing was so crazy at the time.

1:55:18The backstory here is hilarious. So in March, 2013, Spam House, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses, experienced a massive DDoS attack, which experts called the largest in history that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the Internet. So, hey, let's you know, the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do. Let's let's stop him. Oh, yeah. I mean, DDoS stuff is serious. I mean, a lot of nation states use it to knock off different services that they think are not aligned. X has been the subject of DDoS attacks. Elon's talked about this.

1:55:56Somebody thought it was a nation state, potentially. But it's happened all the time. And it can happen on a very small scale, too. If you're just running a small company and there's some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just wants to troll you. my dad's website oh yeah that's right from our own home i'd set up i'd set up a computer yeah and it's basically i mean ddos it sounds complicated i'd mess with them and i'd go like dad why is your website down and then he'd go spend like yeah 10 minutes being like yeah i don't know but it's it's really as easy as just going like like in the python code while one like infinite loop request this website and it just requests it millions of times and it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something set up you can be in a lot of trouble um and so they doubled their domains to 1.5 million servicing roughly five percent of global web traffic getting really really big uh then they go on the acquisition the best thing is when companies do the mean it turns out these generational companies they do they do the meme and that's the lesson always do the meme whatever whatever percentage of your tam that you put in your pre-seed deck that you want to achieve just do it do it just do it yeah you'll be a big company they face and resolve scaling challenges uh then on 20 in 2014 they go on this acquisition spree they They acquired Stop the Hacker, what a great name, in February of 2014 to boost threat detection.

1:57:11They acquired CryptoSeal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management. CryptoSeal, I believe founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine, great, just kind of genius programmer, honestly. Major initiatives, they launched Project Galileo to protect vulnerable public interest websites, introduced universal SSL, free HTTPS for all customers, and keyless SSL for high security clients. And then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers. That set them up for their Series D,$110 million from capital G, that's Google, Microsoft, and Baidu. They got three of the hyperscalers essentially in the company.

1:57:52They expanded to China, and then they adopted a bunch of other technologies, web application firewall, introduced the I'm under attack mode to counter layer seven DDoS attacks. And at this point in 2015, they hit 62 points of presence worldwide. So they're continuing to grow. And whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge, we saw this with Vercel. Vercel going to something like 30 points of presence. Cloudflare's up at 60 in 2015. And that's the name of the game when you're trying to deliver the internet very quickly. In 2016, they acquired Eager Platform Company to build out Cloudflare Apps Platform, and we'll talk about that because that's kind of the product that will compete with the Replit and Vercel stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on Cloudflare instead of just deliver content.

1:58:39So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load. Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them. Netflix is a great example. You want to put Squid Game, the video for Squid Game, you want that to not come from far away. You want that to be up close unless you're caching it. But in general, you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that button. Yeah, we had explored high, you know, people talk about high-frequency trading. We had explored high-frequency podcasting, trying to get, you know. I mean, with the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build our own Cloudflare, honestly.

1:59:09Yeah, that's right. And just buy our own hardware. We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants to run the facilities. Yeah, just the energy requirements. Create our own chip fabs and ultimately design our own chips. Yeah, exactly. Just completely vertically integrated down to the mining and extraction of nuclear fissile material. That's right. But that's the modern media game you play. Yeah. When you're a 75-person company now, I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple years. That's right. Cloudflare in 2016, they hit 100 global cities. They had some outages and operational errors. It's a rough and tumble game that they're in.

1:59:412016, this is what Guillermo was mentioning, the Cloudbleed incident. a security bug led to data leaks quickly identified patched and mitigated i don't think there was a huge uh huge impact on the business i don't think information and we didn't get a chance to talk to about this but i think both with the versell uh security issue and with cloud bleed i'm not sure that there was a lot of like you know customer credit card data that was stolen but it was the potential for harm was was really significant and that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication, which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now.

2:00:17There was also a little bit of a political content debate because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right-wing website, was using Cloudflare and obviously was the subject of intense DDoSing constantly. Cloudflare had taken a stance of, hey, we're just an infrastructure provider. We abide by the First Amendment, free speech. If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that. But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on the internet. We're just an infrastructure provider. But in 2017, they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews.

2:00:54And they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy, what's acceptable and what's not. Of course, they're a private company. They can decide. what is appropriate to use their server for and they have the right to refuse service but it was later they had they had 8chan that was the same thing yep so they they dropped them at some point and so that's always been kind of a hot button for all these infrastructure platforms when alex jones got deplatformed uh it was all the way down to like you know the shopify plugin that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore and uh and it's all it's all a nested bottle like bag of worms basically it's very frustrating uh yeah and uh and i mean I mean, we saw this with Trump where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff.

2:01:40So sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues, but back to the interesting tech stuff, they launched Cloudflare workers enabling serverless code execution at the network edge. So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your HTML and your images, you're also allowing the user to interact with your app and create actual server-side functionality through these Cloudflare workers, part of the whole serverless trend. They acquired Numob to optimize mobile performance, implemented creative entropy generation, lava lamps, pendulums, Geiger counters to enhance security.

2:02:20That's crazy. Have you seen the lava lamps thing? You're familiar with this? So basically, there's this big question on, when you're working in security, a big piece of that is, how do you generate random numbers? And so one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way. And so they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted. Because even if you're just like, we're going to use some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there where you can actually truly predict.

2:02:57They're all pseudo random number generators. So there's this race to create the craziest random number. Yeah, look up Cloud Flare lava lamps. They have a picture of the actual wall. It's so cool. It also just like a great vibe. So I love that. 2018, they launched the 1.1.1.1 DNS service. There's a free privacy first DNS resolver. They expanded to domain registration, wholesale cost domain registration with no markups, formed an alliance with major cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees, which can actually get really crazy expensive. zero trust enhancements, Cloudflare Access and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for comprehensive security suite.

2:03:37So they're taking security seriously. Oh yeah. Putting the screws to Google and they set themselves up for an IPO. So in 2019, they go public. Right before they did pre-IPO funding, Series E, that's$150 million at around 3.2 to 3.5 billion. They dropped more controversial clients, as you mentioned, 8chan. And they had a few operational hiccups around this time, some outages, some software deployment issues, but nothing that stopped them from going public. Yeah, this is what Guillermo was talking about. The number one thing is mitigating outages. Yep. And so they filed their S1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at$15 a share.

2:04:19They raised over$525 million. Let's go. Historical size gone for them. There we go. They launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN mobility service, and then they went on another acquisition spree. They acquired S2 Systems for browser isolation technology and Link to bolster developer tools, leading to Cloudflare pages, getting more into the application layer. And then they appointed the co-founder, Michelle Zatlin, as president, marking a milestone in tech leadership. Revenue reached$431 million in 2020 with significant growth in enterprise customers. because again, even though they are competing with AWS, they famously have built their own servers, own their own hardware, and it can be much more competitive on pricing.

2:05:04So they enhanced workers with support for new languages, launched Cloudflare pages and R2 storage, which is S3 compatible object storage, but it doesn't have egress fees. So if you're storing a bunch of images or text or JSON files on S3, you can just move right over to R2, which is, I think, isn't that the one letter more and one number less? It's a very funny name. And so they're all about getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare. And then they acquired Zeraz to improve third-party integrations. Revenue grew to$656 million in 2021. They surpassed$1 billion in annual revenue in 2022.

2:05:49introduced D1, a serverless SQL database, and went on some more acquisitions, sprees, navigated complex issues during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, balancing service continuity with policy adjustments. They blocked Kiwi Farms, which is another controversial website. There were harassment issues there. And so they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of having a whole bunch of companies on their platform. Launched Workers AI in 2023. Partnered with NVIDIA to deploy GPUs at the edge. So if you want to do AI workloads in an actual city, very low latency, Cloudflare now offers that.

2:06:31More acquisitions, zero trust networking company, secure infrastructure access companies, cloud native security company. Just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go. And now they are aiming for net profitability and targeting$5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years. They're expanding enterprise sales and enhancing zero trust and edge computing offerings. And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform. Yeah, and one thing I love about Cloudflare is they sponsor the U.S. ski team. Oh, that's great. So if you like skiing, you might also like their set of products.

2:07:09and this is a cloud flare at the moment is 42 billion dollar uh public company uh and they've actually you know they've suffered you know much of the same sell-off that other firms have but it's just wild to think about whatever that pre-ipo round was the series e they did 3.2 billion so they're up 10x those those ipo buyers something like that that's great and certainly a good outcome for union square and all the early early investors that got in at those 10 million dollar 20 million dollar rounds but took a while to get here 15 years interesting um one thing that's fascinating so cloud flare is a sort of scaled uh platform has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers sure and you would think if matthew prince the ceo is coming after guillermo tell me that they would have be positioning.

2:08:07I would expect a Cloudflare versus Vercel landing page. There's no mention of Vercel on Cloudflare's website. Who are they comping themselves to? Vercel does mention Cloudflare, but I'm sure it's not. Cloudflare does not. Interesting. Well, maybe that changes after today's spicy episode. Yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know, who knows what's going on behind the scenes, right? Guillermo didn't mince words when he said like we tried to use Cloudflare for a pretty important project internally it didn't work and so now I can imagine uh there very well could be some ego involved yep um but uh anyways yeah it does feel like a little bit of like a big dogging going on just like hey little bro like you don't even have servers you know Vercel like you know we have our own infrastructure we compete with AWS you you're not even in the conversation like that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings.

2:09:04But, you know, hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a growing pizza pie. And the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we want to see. We want to see bull markets everywhere. Do you know where you can enjoy a nice piece of pizza pie? At a wander? That's right, John. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander. Go to wander.com. Go do it. Use our code. enter uh they're giving away a trip to tbpn uh audience yeah go check it out so go check it out wander.com slash tbp inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks that's right anyway we got eight minutes should we hit the timeline let's hit the timeline uh let's go to shiel yeah great post from shiel here he's pulling up uh he says venture capital in the 90s was wild good funds had triple digit IRRs and he's pulling up.

2:10:03So KP here, vintage, their first vintage. This is why they're in the Holy Trinity. This is why they're in the Holy Trinity. So their first fund, it's an$8 million fund. They only got a 31x on it. So only a 51 % IRR. Why is the IRR so low given the multiple? Is that just because it was such a long fund? It took them a long time to get liquidity on those? Because they had a 32x fund, fund 7, but it's 122 % IRR for Kleiner Perkins Fund 7. I wonder what's going on there. There's no other insight here. We'll have to get Everett Randall from Kleiner Perkins on the show. But anyways, their best performing fund was in 1996, unsurprisingly.

2:10:46Right before the dot-com boom. That was the right time. They IPO'd everything in that portfolio. Yeah, so they have a 17X multiple, but their IRR was 286%. That's crazy. On 300 million. 300 million. It was a much bigger fund. Yeah, so they turned it into like almost$6 billion. Yeah. Wow. And then there's a bunch of other funds here. You got Mayfield, which I feel bad. I should know my venture history better. Mayfield's legit. Very old school, though. I mean, you can see in the 80s, they were already on fund four. Can you imagine KP comes out, their little$8 million venture fund, the 31 exit, and they're like, oh, I think we might be on to something here.

2:11:22What's also interesting is all through the 80s, they just were like, we do$150 million funds. Like, that's what we do. they were very just fascinating thing is they have their first fund 1972 eight million dollars they don't raise their their second fund until eight years later oh yeah the 55 million dollar funds probably just so slow and took so long for those companies to get to it's funny that they had to prove it the learning is like they do this huge we don't have any data past their 96 fund because i think it just switched to being kp at a certain point but um it's funny that like they didn't learn their lesson on like upsizing the fun because they just put up this ridiculous performance on the biggest fun that they have outlined here so yeah i mean i wonder what's in that 72 vintage it might have been like intel maybe i don't even know apple that kind of thing yeah get a couple of those a lot of bangers in there sequoia also doing quite well putting up big numbers it'd be fun to do um i have a feeling that this summer the new cycle will slow down a little bit and it would be fun to do totally deep dives on like the top 20 individual funds ever and the individual partners i want to talk i mean if they're they're still in the game or they're still got to get them on the show maybe probably retired probably skiing where they don't have chairlifts let's be honest that's right but we'll get them on the show we'll have them break it down we'll have them toast to the good old days where you could put up a 31x multiple in a couple years i want to i want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the 70s send them a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Saratoga and say, hang out with us for three hours straight.

2:12:55Yep. And let's just. Let's do it. Talk about the good old days. Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism? Yep. I love this one. It's Andre Carpathie. And if you break down his last name, it's Carpath. And of course, this is the man who worked at Tesla on self-driving cars. An AI pioneer in DJ Cowes says, I think about this every day. And I think about it too. A lot. Not every day. We do think about this phenomenon. but i love this yeah uh the the bill ackman is really into nominative determinism that's why he's ack man activist man sure yep makes sense yeah it's a good it's a great one it's anyway uh should we go over to super dario talking to yeah i just thought this was funny because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show so arvind uh srinivas from perplexity says we're building uh why explaining why they're building a browser he says it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps, especially on iOS.

2:13:52The goal, agents that can book travel, buy things, and act as a personalized assistant. So we're just waiting for one person to build an agent to book private jets. You know, this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read, but ramp travel is fantastic. It is a magical product. And I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted. But honestly, like you go there, it aggregates all the flights. It saves all your information perfectly. You click it and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into like, you just show up to the airport and, oh wow, like TSA PreCheck is in there. I bet they find you the cheapest rate too.

2:14:36Yeah, no, it's a flawless product. And then you can also book the hotel right there. It is such a good product. And of course, like as a, you know, a manager of a company, you can decide what's in policy, what's out of policy, how much you want to spend and stuff. Um, but, uh, you know, for, for us, it's more of like, you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel. Um, so that we're not staying anywhere, but, uh, for some companies that want to save same time in money, they can put the cap on that as well. Um, but it really is, it really is a magical product. And I, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent book for me, it's in there because they've, they've built all of the like the harnessing to actually plug in in a really uh really seamless way and there's no like ads or upsells it's it's so much better than booking no ads in there so we'll put one in here we got a post from austin a friend of the show uh has been giving uh me a bunch of just you know he built the morning brew into a monster has been very helpful on tbpn he's retired i and a minute.

2:15:42I put this in here because I want to call him out. Stop it. This is like one of the worst things I've ever seen. I really, really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring. It's like, get back in the game, create some shareholder value, build a massive business. You should be working a hundred hours a week. America needs you. And I saw this and I was just disgusted. It was revolting, honestly. It's really, really depressing. but okay but clearly he's a marketer he's a media man and he's retiring so that he can unretire come out of the gates i get it i get it i still i just have a lot of sensitivity around our words specifically yeah i don't think we should be talking about retirements i think we should be working to the bone forever well he's staying busy he is staying busy i love it he's got a bunch of things that he's doing and uh we're gonna have him on the show soon i love it i'm trying to pull him out of retirement we're gonna pull him out of retirement we'll convince him we'll give coming to talk and we'll give him a come get on the show yeah we'll give you a dedicated spot yeah yeah i mean it is funny because he's like i'm in i'm in retirement and here's my focus i'm training for a half iron man i'm investing i've written five angel checks i'm tinkering i'm playing with dozens of ai tools i'm growing i helped uh 3x oceans talent monthly growth rate to 2 in 2.5 months obviously he's still in the game he's merely in his michael jordan playing baseball era i believe that's right he's getting back i was looking for the right sports analogy I was like, I just don't know these things, but did Brady retired at one point briefly?

2:17:13Did he? I don't know. Is that not even correct? It's more like, doesn't Bo Nickel retire in between every UFC fight, right? And then he comes back. Is that how that works? It's technically a retirement. Amazing. You always find something new to not understand. Well, come out of retirement, come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work, Austin. You're on notice. let's skip the humanoid thing because that's a bigger deep dive let's do just a funny funny post because we only got a couple minutes actually how we doing on Amjad is he in no okay we will do this Ashley Vance post Dan Primack shares remember when Elon and Zuck said they were going to fight in a cage and lots of people believed them I believed them and Ashley says I heard somewhere that Italy wanted to charge them$300 million to use the Coliseum.

2:18:04Not sure if it's true, but I think it is. And I think it killed the brawl. What a miss. It would have been so good. In general. It would have been amazing. Cash grab, not usually a good idea. And missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, pay-per-views, things like that. Huge miss. also they had a rough weekend who do you think would have won because there was always the thing about like elon is just much physically is physically bigger but zuck had been training more and so it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing zuck would have won but if you gave elon a year to train elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win what do you think in a pure play boxing rule set it was going to be mixed martial large oh it was yeah this is something i know about the only thing i know about UFC is from the Zuck it's actually so funny because i do think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right and and Elon would go into it being like yeah i'm just gonna rely on my size advantage and just try to not work out at all yeah show up um and then Zuck would just be nerding out he'd get some like super technical submission i mean the weight alone i mean there has to be like a 40 pound gap or something it's like pretty significant right yeah um well speaking of the italians they had a rough go and f1 this weekend coming in at uh what happened uh both both didn't uh didn't finish um no leclerc and hamilton um they've had a they've had a rough start to the year people are saying was it mechanical issues was the call it's always something with ferrari always but um people people are saying like uh lewis has gotten like a full season of like the typical Ferrari stuff just in, in, you know, barely starting the year.

2:20:00Two races. Um, it's unfortunate. It's rough. But, um, predictable. Well, should we go to Zach Glabman? I don't know how to pronounce that. It might be Zach G. Labman. He says, crazy ad placement, try ramp. And, uh, it's a, uh, United worker at an airport. And in the middle of his, in the middle of his, uh, bright yellow vest, it just says ramp. And this just makes a lot of sense. because you have a bunch of business people traveling ramp has travel products uh i actually saw this and i was like wait is this actually do they actually do this yeah no of course not it's a joke but the guy works on a ramp i guess we got a chart here from oran hoffman uh he says insane growth what an amazing company and he's showing the flock safety arr chart from sakura we gotta have the soccer guys on sometime oh yeah because they have some of the best insight We got a fact check.

2:20:54Adcock came out and said that Figure is the number one most in demand stock in the private markets, which I think is categorically incorrect based on my insight into the market. But I would like to have soccer on to talk about what are these sort of, they do this research, heavy research on private companies, kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely. And yeah, I would imagine they would have something to say about that. but um yeah i mean yc company flock safety we've talked about them before 200k in revenue in arr in 2017 growing to 285 million in 2024 wow that is a lot and i wonder what they do next um i can talk briefly about uh persona who's the founder of rippling sounds like he had a was really in a pickle over the weekend uh this was yesterday it's 6 a.m a lot of people sent this to us uh i like when there's just something extremely dramatic people send it to us yeah i'm like yeah i get some of these texts and i'm like and i'm like is this a tech story cover it but it's not necessarily top of our list uh but it sounds like he was had some uh but you got to pay attention when there's a billionaire on the run that's always an interesting story on the run something like that.

2:22:22I don't know. It's close to it. At least, um, we just spend like 10 minutes analyzing like dilution. Well, well, green Oaks came in at this valuation. They wanted 10 % dilution. They added that kind of emergency round of sorts. Um, and were they 50 50 when they started the company? We don't, we don't really know. Um, but, uh, anyways, he's going through divorce, had a bunch of issues over the weekend, but they've been resolved, I think. So I was happy to cover that now. He sent an update post. Yeah. So, I mean, the high level here is that Prasanna posted a massively viral thread, 17 million views, 68K likes.

2:23:08He said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chinay police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu. He had a rough go with his wife, who he was married to for 10 years. They have a nine-year-old son. Their marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair. He was accused of a bunch of crimes. The police came for him, but it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now safe and sound. And fortunately, the kid is unharmed and I think that's the silver lining of what really matters here. yeah uh we got a post from will brown he says bro this is why we do the show last night was a deep seek moment it's funny because like that makes sense and the whole deep seek thing the whole reason that that phrase makes sense is because people were saying deep seek is a sputnik moment yeah it's like now last night it was a deep seek moment i love it the internet utterly and we did we kind of miss coverage a little bit on deep deep seek there is a new version of deep seek out but i don't think it was as revolutionary it was much more incremental and it didn't have the narrative of oh it was built for ten dollars in a shed with you know screws and hammers it doesn't hit the same doesn't hit the same uh you have a bunch of fake news around it yeah they uh there are so there's also the new baidu model that they're they're training right or no it's jack it's jack ma with uh with ant well speaking of someone as handsome as jack ma we got i'm john I'm inside in the building.

2:24:45Welcome to the show. There he is. Crazy intro. How you doing? What's going on? How are you? Good. I just dunked my head in a ball of ice. Oh, we got a Saratoga here too. I hope you used Saratoga, man. I hope you got your banana on there too. Yeah, my banana is key. The banana is key. You can't start your morning without a banana on your face. No, no, just some banana. I'm put all over, you know? Are you still lifting like crazy? Last time I saw you, you were deadlifting like 500 pounds or something like that. I lost a lot of weight. You know, it's just like you get to a point where it's unhealthy.

2:25:25It's not exercise. It's fucking killing you. It gets a little risky. The risk of injury gets up there. But you got to be able to, you know, break a sweat every once in a while. You see Daniel, growing Daniel's tweet is like, if you want to look like shit and feel like shit, start powerlifting. Yeah, because you just, oh, well, if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more. And then I'm just eating so much. Yeah, I still maintain some of the muscle, but, you know, just trying to work out for longevity and health. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining. Can you give us just like a brief overview of like where Replit is, what you're working on, how's it going?

2:26:05Yeah, so Replit, kind of like the genesis of it, has always been how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people. It's had a profound effect on my life, like, you know, coming from Jordan, growing up there, you know, lower middle class family, being able to come to the U.S., come to New York initially and then move to the Bay Area and be able to build a billion dollar company. That's outrageous and it shouldn't be possible. But the reality is that, you know, we have this massive wealth engine machine that's called the Internet. And for a long time, you know, it hasn't really been possible for a lot of people to kind of take part in that.

2:26:55There's the I think Peter Thiel said, like the paradox of the Internet. It was supposed to sort of decentralize wealth, yet somehow concentrated into Silicon Valley. But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are becoming more accessible. And that's really been my mission. And so initially Repl.it was about let's get people learning how to code. And I think that was a good pursuit. But people don't want to code. The reality is I spent the last whatever working at Code Academy and Repl.it. I mean, it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code. And at Replit, we built a ton of infrastructure around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating all of that and all the way to deployment.

2:27:43But really the big unlock was the agent, putting an agent on top of all of that. We were the first agent in the market to be able to configure services, databases, deployment, and go all the way to deploying an app. And it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months. Can you talk a little bit about the benefit of knowing how to code and how that collides with Vibe coding? I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I Vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Karpathy is like, I vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding.

2:28:26Like, is there still value to learning to code in 2025? I think there is. But I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if, you know, in the up case, like, you know, what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. You know, I assume this optimization path we're on where agents are going to get better and better and better. You know, the answer would be different. The answer would be no. It would be a waste of time to learn how to code. But like, you know, you could have different predictions and I think different people will make different assumptions.

2:29:06I'm at this point like sort of agent-pilled. You know, the progress we're seeing with agent, we just are rolling out V2. I've never seen a sort of like an A-B test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy just by improving the agent, like 100%, 500 % on certain metrics on success that users are having. And so I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using Cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there's the guy that lost six months of work on Reddit.

2:29:51There's the guy on Twitter that leaked his API keys. Like on Reflit, we do get commit for you. You don't have to worry about that. We hide the API keys in like a secure vault. And so I think a lot of it goes to like, hey, these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools. And instead, they should come to places like Replit. But that being said, I'm very bullish. Like, you know, I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago. I would say kind of learn a bit of coding. I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, right? learn how to communicate clearly, you know, as you would with humans, but also with machines.

2:30:33Can you tell me some stories about, like success stories from Replit, maybe like what's possible as a solo dev today? I mean, we're seeing Peter levels IO do crazy stuff, but what are you seeing from the most successful Replit users? Let me start with the business cases, because I think those are kind of really profound because we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money and, you know, it's certainly accelerated massively, but a hundred plus year old company, Sears. I don't know about you. I didn't know they continue to exist, but they have this spinoff called Sears Home Services.

2:31:16About a year ago, they hired a team to like a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever, 100-year-old program language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they'd done that, basically most companies, as they're modernizing, they go adopt a bunch of SaaS tools and no-code tools and local tools to become like a modern company. They actually skipped all of that and went to AI. And their operations team, which manages the kind of field workers that go out and every day kind of do house repairs and all that uh they part they started building ai tools so one ai tool that they have is like the worker would would go and would talk to the ai and it would optimize its at their route and would you know that made it so that they're making a lot more money and now that team everyone in that team started building ai tools and so you have this ops theme that's highly levered that are able to move business metrics.

2:32:19And they leapfrogged an entire era of computing and landed on AI agents. And now these are the generalists that are building the business. And I think this is a view into the future where firms would not be made of like, you know, SDR and like, whatever, it's going to be like I'm a sales generalist, right? I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things. That makes sense. How do you think about balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people and customers of your platform, right? You have somebody that comes on, they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey.

2:33:08They build something, but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business. And once you become a business and you're sort of like servicing. So like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform and some of them can end up wanting different things. What does it look like in terms of, you want to be able to continue to service these users over time while still making sure that Replit is the best place for somebody to sort of like start their journey? we we've taken uh a a difficult approach approach and perhaps not not the smartest right the reason i've been working on it for my entire life is because uh you know what i try to do is like um build a an end-to-end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers.

2:34:07Actually, you had that in the past where like the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers and even Windows as much as we look down on it. But Visual Basic was a great product. It made a ton of decisions for you. And a lot more people were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement. And the open source was this radical, disruptive, bottoms-up thing where there's 100 competing libraries and 100 competing ways of doing things. And that created a lot of mess and created a lot of power. But now getting started and doing things programming became a lot more difficult.

2:34:51Like imagine setting up a modern web app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. like if you mess up your python environment the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new one i've been there it's miserable it's terrible so you know so you had this you know bottom zappa innovation and kind of like the early hacker lingo you had the cathedral versus the bazaar so the windows ecosystem is the cathedral the open source ecosystem is the bazaar And so in my mind, well, let's build cathedrals made of bazaars. Like I think open source is awesome, but let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that.

2:35:34So my work at Facebook, I was part of the early React team. I was working on the tooling there. And especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes you can spin up a Hello World app. as if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS. That would take you hours, perhaps. So now fast forward to Replit, and we built basically all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to make software. And so that's been a lot harder, but I think you end up with this general purpose, horizontal tool that can satisfy a lot of needs. The challenge, of course, is like positioning and marketing this thing.

2:36:25You guys know as entrepreneurs, like people like to do to pick one product on the market. But look back on the history of computing. Typically, the best products that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal product. there's kind of a narrative that's floating out right out there right now that companies that are aligned with the ai growth trend are seeing extremely fast rates of adoption you're seeing companies get to 100 million arr faster than ever before the risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up as customers test a new ai tool and then kind of bounce around they're using cursor one week and then cloud code the next week and then they're bouncing to this one um what are you seeing and what do you think is happening and do you think there's any uh any merit to that fear in the market or on x right now that maybe the ai revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous sas installation cycles it's certainly suspicious I mean, anyone who tells you differently is sort of, and I was a little worried about our growth.

2:37:45Like, is it going to go away? What is going on? Like, this is like a little too fast. And I think, you know, we really start focusing on the metrics that really matter, which is the revenue quality, retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention. we actually have above 100 % net dollar attention, even for our consumer plan, which is probably unheard of. But I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you want to make sure you're providing an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform.

2:38:30I think especially on the VS Code Wars, the switching cost being so low is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot to Windsurf to Cursor in like five minutes, same project. Like it's one click, you can open the project. And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate. The great thing about Replit, we provide this really great convenience. And so if ain't broke, don't fix it. You deploy something on Replit and people really tend to stay. That makes sense. Internally, I'm sure the entire team is using Replit all day long. Is there still a place for traditional prototypes or is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping of features, which is obviously something that your end customers use?

2:39:27Or is there still like, hey, let's just make this in Figma and kind of align around it first? There's certainly a place for Figma. I think there are, first of all, there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very, very quickly, even faster than sort of any kind of software prototype. And it depends on how people think. Like I think designers still would want a canvas to think. I think these products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you go to Replit and you initially have some kind of canvas and that kind of results in an application. But right now, I still think there's a place for Figma.

2:40:18But the way I think about what Replit is doing to our organization, I hope more and more companies, is like everyone is highly levered. Like we just built, you know, agents are new. And part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents. There's no tracing tool, you know, like an APM, like a New Relic or Dare Dog for agents. So we built our own internally. And, you know, a couple people on our team spent like a week using Replit and Vibe coding. this really great infrastructure tool that has saved many, many hours of engineering. We have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do or it was too expensive.

2:41:10She spent three days, she spun up this org chart tool with like a connection to ADP and sort of a versioning history. And it's amazing. She never coded, right? So I think the way to think about it is like how to increase the productivity in your company and less about like, oh, what should we displace? You know, I think I think these these tools will have their place. Yeah. How do you how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software when, you know, you've obviously been building Replit for a very long time? 10 years from now you guys are in market for a new crm you're talking to the big players is is building it yourself just become uh a part of that sort of like rfp process where the team is like okay well we can build this like this is you know what we think is gonna it's gonna cost to you know basically build it maintain it it used to be the biggest bear signal if a startup was building their own crm it was like oh no you're way over your skis this is going to get terribly wrong and you're going to be maintaining this thing for years and you actually don't have a special you're not a special snowflake in this case just use salesforce or something but yeah like nih not invented here uh syndrome yep totally so um yeah i agree so i think i i thought quite a bit of like future of sass i think that the the question is like uh if you can conjure up a sass product?

2:42:42Is there even a future there? And we do see this every time I wake up on Twitter. I see someone using Replit and replacing a piece of software that costs them$15 ,000,$100 ,000. I just retweeted one this morning. And so there's a lot of, I think, vertical niche-specific SaaS tools that are generatable very easily. Even with today's technology, let alone like a year from now, I think you'll be able to kind of generate them, especially on a platform like Replit, which gives you all the cloud services involved. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. So I think about RipLink.

2:43:27How embedded into your company is like the what do they call the system of record. And Salesforce, think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have. So I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese-style company. I think what Rippling is doing. And I think this idea of being generative and having larger pieces of software, I think is going to become more important in the future. So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SaaS, but I think I would bet on those horizontal SaaS companies.

2:44:09Well, we got to ask about the Vercel drama. We talked to Guillermo earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us? Well, someone asked me, do you plan on supporting Next. Yes and Replit agents? I said no, because we want to bet on something like Vite that is open, community built. And the way Next.js has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel. They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. There's a project called Open Next that makes it so that Next.js is deployable on more platform. Matt, the CEO of Netlify, commented agreeing with me.

2:45:00The larger community feels like Next.js is perhaps more tight of herself than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and they strisoned my comments. I think it would have been less of a story if they didn't overreact to it. And look, Vercel is an amazing product. It's an amazing brand. They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just Next.js. And for me, water on their bridge. Like, you know, I think, you know, emotions get high on Twitter and you start calling. And, you know, I wish them really the best. Yeah. How is Next different than the React relationship with Facebook?

2:45:45I mean, with all these big main core frameworks, you're kind of, if you're an Angular, you're aligned with Google. If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook. But has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community? They're not trying to monetize it as aggressively. Well, not at all. Not monetizing. Look, I worked, I exclusively worked on open source at Meta. And the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at Meta is that there's no direct tie in to the bottom line. Right. So we were not trying to monetize React. So far, they haven't monetized Lama in terms of like selling an API.

2:46:30Sure. And so generally, as long as they are sort of they're using it internally, they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and mindshare support. Now, the disadvantage of that, we actually weren't ever able to make a complete product because if you go to Google and use Flutter, I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct incentive to advance the Android ecosystem, for example. And so Facebook, we built really cool pieces of infrastructure, but the UX around them are bad. So you have companies like Expo building on React Native to make it a better experience, companies like Vercel building React to make it a better experience.

2:47:21And these are amazing companies. And I think that's how it should be. I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the core software and really tying them together. What do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibe-coded apps and websites and games. Obviously, for a long time, it's felt like web development services, if you could call it that, were very much, it was bifurcated. There was Shopify, which is a PowerLaw winner, but then there was also So Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well.

2:48:05But if there's a new aggregator emerging and Nikita Beer's written about this, like maybe there will be one company to really break out and be the hub for vibe coded N64 level games, that would be very valuable. It would also be more of a winner take all environment. How do you think that that plays out in your category? Look, I don't really. That's not the model for our business. Like the way I think about it, in the early computing era, you had the mainframe. It was the domain of the expert. And then you had the PC and it became possible for anyone to use computers. And that ended up eating our economy essentially because that's how disruptive technology work.

2:48:48And so in the modern era, the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert. And now it's become so that anyone can make software. Initially, it looks like a toy, vibe coding, games and things like that. But I think it will fundamentally change and transform the economy. And my model for what we're building, it's let's build an Excel. It should be fun. We do a lot of things that make it fun. We actually build a 3D gaming stack. But the model is like, can a billion people use it as part of their everyday work, to build businesses, to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy?

2:49:38And the idea that it's going to be Roblox, I don't see that as interesting. I mean, Roblox is a great company. Maybe Roblox is the aggregator for Vibe-coded games. But I think it's really not the big prize. It's like, you want to build a trillion dollar company, you got to think a little bigger than that. I love it. Yeah. Do you have any words for your doubters? Something you said is like, the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you can apply to, you could have applied it to crypto. This was Chris Dixon's, I think, original thesis. It still feels like, you know, Ripley is this billion dollar company now.

2:50:19but I still think your doubters and your haters would say, Oh, it's just a toy. Like it's, you know, kids making apps or whatever. But, uh, do you, do you like that, that people still kind of underestimate this potential? Is that part of what creates this sort of, uh, the, the opportunity for the next 10 years is people not realizing like the tsunami that's kind of about to hit, uh, the industry. Yeah. Uh, I think I used to bother me, but, but now I think it's, it's actually an advantage. And I think, you know, when, you know, when we're at the height of like AI trendiness and it replicant obviously was early, you know, we were the first outside of co-pilot to train a code model.

2:51:03We're like this company in the city and we're growing fast and, you know, hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the, the sort of the hype kind of Silicon Valley, they jump from one company to another. And, you know, Last year, I did the founder mode. I cut the team in half. Wow. Now, like 65 people. I moved us out of the city. We're now in Foster City. Literally, there's no other startup. There's actually nothing out there. It's sort of a desert. And so we have this nice sort of kind of office that we're turning into a campus. We have food. We have all that. And the team here is sort of a tight-knit team.

2:51:45there's a selection effect on who joins Replit. If you are smart enough to figure out that Replit has this amazing potential in the future, then we would want to on the team. If you really think it's a toy, it's not worth your time, then great. And so I think these things that just sort themselves out. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. I love having you. We'll have to have you back soon. Yeah, I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10. And yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon. Yeah, this is fantastic.

2:52:20Thank you, Bert, for doing this show. It's been really cool. Thanks so much for joining. Cheers. Awesome. Do we have another guest? We have a surprise guest for you all, folks. Surprise guest. Is he ready? I just sent him the link. He's jumping in in just a minute. And he should be all queued up. We'll go through some more posts while we wait. Oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We got to talk to him. We got to have him on the show, figure out what he bought. Bryce Roberts over at IndieVC says, bought two cars today. One dealership wanted me to come down to the lot, get on a bunch of calls and refuse to send me basic info over text.

2:53:01The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested over text and email. Can you guess which one got the sale? and it's not a Tesla. He said he's done being a Tesla customer. Not a political statement, just that his lease is up and his Model X was absolute trash, according to him. I wonder what he did to the car, but we'll have to talk to him about what car he chose. I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM002. I think that would be a perfect fit two-car garage for Bryce, but we'll have to talk to him about it. But it really is an interesting take. We talked to the car dealership guy, and I've wanted a car dealership that, I mean, sometimes I just wanna buy a car, I just wanna click a button and they don't really care.

2:53:46Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree. I wanna just push a button and have it arrive, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I certainly enjoy it. And let's see if I'm ready when you are. So we are going back into the 23andMe news, and we'll give some more context on this. But I like that we're able to be responsive. It's actually crazy that Keon single-handedly bankrupted 23andMe. Yeah. He was barely in market for... Well, I mean, it's not a surprise because he did the TBPN interview. And I'm sure the market saw it and said, hey, if he's going to be in the temple of technology every week, Let's just get out of the stock.

2:54:35Let's just call it. So let's bring him on down. Keon, how you doing? There he is. What is up? Welcome to the show. Are you guys celebrating? I mean, it's kind of depressing. It's kind of macabre to celebrate on when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened? Listen, let's put this tweet up, John. We got a tweet up here. I put up late last night. I think it was around 2 a.m. Eastern or so. Maybe 1, 2 a.m. Eastern. I saw the announcement. The first thing I have to say to 23andMe is thank you. Because the reality is you spend the shoulders of giants here, right? We spend the shoulders of giants.

2:55:07All companies do. You go from Blockbuster to Netflix. You go from Blackberry to the iPhone. You go from MySpace to Facebook. And now you're going from 23andMe to Nucleus Genomics, right? The industry is wide open. Nucleus is years ahead. And we're going to seize the moment. But before I talk about that, thank you to 23andMe. Did a great job building the foundation. And now it's time for something new. That's the reality. So, yeah, talk me through the key. It seemed like your post was really focused on the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing.

2:55:39Talk to me about that. How different is the technology? And also, why can't 23andMe just use the same tech as you? Yeah, great question. So I have another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another tweet right out here that I should pull up on the screen, give some further context on what's going on and what 23andMe users should actually do. It's currently riding high on Twitter. But no, the difference between micro-reliance and whole genome sequencing is massive. It's like a horse versus a car, right? You're talking about 20-me's technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers.

2:56:06Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment. So it's fundamentally different here. And the same question is the classic innovator's dilemma's problem, right? Why can't this big company do this thing? Well, because imagine, you know, 20-me is a castle. They have to pull out the foundation of their castle. Everything has to change. Technology, product, regulatory infrastructure. Every single part of 23andMe has to change to actually embrace full genome sequencing. This is capitalism at work. We love capitalism around here. 23andMe is dying because we couldn't adapt.

2:56:33Nucleus is sending because we are embracing the newest genetic technology. But actually, I think it even goes beyond technology. Yeah, go ahead, John. You have something to say? No, I just want to push on that more because if I'm... I like you. I'm not going to compete with you. But if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23andMe, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, Illumina or something and figure out how to do whole genome. You would independently derive nucleus. That's the beauty. Yeah, exactly. So maybe you need to change all the models. Yeah, maybe the DeNova approach is correct.

2:57:06And I mean, that's why I'm bullish on you. But, you know, at the same time, I'm still not really understanding, like, why is it such rocket science for them to just offer, all right, hey, we're on V2 now. We were like, you still spit in the tube. You still pay a hundred bucks. You mail it to us. We just put it in a different machine. It doesn't seem that complicated to me. No offense. Well, it's a massive informatics change. It's a massive regulatory change. It's extremely non-trivial. It's kind of like being like, you know, horses both get out of places. Why can't they just make an engine? It's fundamentally different, you know?

2:57:39But really the thing that 20th Me got wrong, it wasn't just technology. It was also actually the philosophy of the business. They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs. But because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer, the customer is the pharma company. And I want to say here's something really important, which is a lot of people ask me right now, what should I do with my 23andMe data? What should I do with my 23andMe data? Well, first and foremost, you should move it to a HIPAA compliant environment, right?

2:58:07Like, one of the most shocking things about 23andMe is it's actually not HIPAA compliant, right? It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded. So Nucleus, for example, we are HIPAA compliant. We are a physician-ordered clinical-grade test. We make sure no genetic or protected health information is shared with any third party. It's very similar to going to your doctor's office. Another thing to know, and I hope you have the thread up here, which is we outlined some of these things, is 23andMe, the reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company, any health insurance company as well as any employer to use your genetic information.

2:58:42That's been legal for two decades. It's very, very important to say that. So there are some safeguards in place, even though 23 is not HIPAA compliant. But if you're a 23 user and you're listening to this, you do two things. One is to download your genetic data, secure your genetic data, and then two, which is microarray data, small snapshot of your DNA. But two, you should probably put that in a HIPAA compliant environment. You can actually DM me. I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading their DNA to Nucleus currently because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA because it is, of course, the ultimately all about the patient.

2:59:10Talk about, uh, there's not total clarity right now. 23andMe is not HIPAA compliant. I'm trying to understand in a, in, you know, 23andMe in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset. It's pretty damaged. It's pretty damaged brand. There's not a lot of brand value necessarily. Uh, what are, what are some of the risks of, of the types of buyers for that business. And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it. And with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business, but just monetizing the underlying user data. Is the value the data or just the revenue stream?

2:59:54Because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running. I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them a hundred bucks a test or something. There's some, there's some normal business going on there might not be profitable, but like maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability. Or is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data? Is that at all credible? Yeah, so it's a good question. I think one thing this nucleus actively is looking into right now, considering whether it makes sense. Earlier, I'm sure you remember, we explored the possibility of acquiring 23andMe.

3:00:26And we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we can do and how we can help in this situation. I think the thing to remember is that, again, this is microarray data. It's a small sliver of someone's DNA. A lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about simply do not exist in the data. And that cannot be overstated. because it is microarray data. It is a small sliver of your DNA. It misses the most fundamental health list that someone could have. So in some respects, it's a little bit overblown when people are worried. Sometimes there's this funny narrative.

3:00:55People are like, I did 20 to me. I learned that my pee smells like asparagus. If that gets out, I mean, that's bad. It should never have gone out. But like, you know. Not that big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah. It can't be both doomsday, they're getting my DNA. And also the product isn't that good and it's not that reliable. It can't be both. I would encourage you to think about this. You should know. There's two really extreme narratives about 23 minutes. Totally. It's actually interesting. So I look at it. It's like, oh, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learned nothing? Because it's a small sliver of your DNA.

3:01:23That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world. My data is shared. It's like, well, actually, you know, the reality is that it's a small sliver of your DNA. Obviously, no data should ever get breached. No one's saying that. Of course not. But of course, it's micro-e data. And so what I recommend is download the data, knowing that one, there's better regulations that protect you and protect old people who do genetic testing, and that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical genetics companies like Nucleus that can safeguard your data, right? It's like going to your doctor's office.

3:01:49So that's the thing I think that should be top of mind for consumers right now. You mentioned that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies. Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable, then who are they selling it to? Is that true? But this is also, again, this is a great point. This is one of the reasons why 20th Me failed, because originally the founder, Ann, she said, okay, listen, we're going to use this data. People are actually, she has a quote on the record. People are going to donate data to 23andMe. In other words, one of the reasons why 23andMe failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application.

3:02:20It was never actually about, hey, can we provide you with life-saving or medical insight? It was about, hey, because it was really a genealogy business for a long time. Hey, we're going to get Ancestry on. We're going to get as many people as possible. We're going to take this data and then go to GSK. They worked with GSK, for example. The problem with that is, this is the thing they underestimate, is because it is a small slip of your DNA, it's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which caught up with them. Because then if your business model is based off collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's microarray data, it doesn't work, right?

3:02:49The customer doesn't want what you're buying, which is why eventually 23andMe collapsed. So in some sense, it's a technological problem, which is again, it's a small slip of your DNA, but also I think it's a philosophical problem. The customer wasn't the customer. The farmer company was the customer, right? And so that's why people say, I didn't learn anything about it from 23andMe. 23andMe, Their goal was not actually to really help you in your health. And that's another big shift from 23andMe to Nucleus. We're HIPAA compliant. Our technology is far more advanced. We actually want to give you medical-grade insight that helps you live longer, helps you have a healthy family as well.

3:03:20And then also we want to continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, urea analyses, full-body MRIs, and beyond into a true consumer health application. Imagine 23andMe shipped. How far ahead did that be? They'd be 20 years ahead of everyone. right consumer health has just recently hit the zeitgeist by 20 they would have had a head start but that wasn't the customer and so it's not just technological difference it's actually a very strong softball difference as well how uh how are they such a you know they have this sort of one time purchase problem uh that that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint uh becomes much harder if you're sort of get this upfront you know payment and then you know i'm assuming the average 23andMe customer just like you know gets testing done you know maybe references back at some point but uh why why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy given the scale that they were at right this is a company that does hundreds of millions of top line revenue you would think they would be able to figure out some economic like they've been in trouble for a long time you would have thought that they would have gone found you know and would have gone founder mode and figured out a way to...

3:04:34Well, it sounds like she tried and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode maybe. I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And the reason why people always say 23andMe is one time, 23andMe is one time, right? There was actually no difficulty for 23andMe to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated. But again, their customer was the pharma company. They actually, they didn't care that it was one time. They got your DNA. And that is the fundamental difference.

3:05:0420th and me could have solved that problem. I mean, you look at some companies today, you know, some blood testing companies that are building on top of Quest Diagnostics. 20th and me could have sapped their fingers and launched that product in one minute, right? But of course, that wasn't the cost. That wasn't the business model. It wasn't the strategy. So this is a great example where strategy means technology, which eventually results in failure, right? You have the innovative dilemmas problem. The genetics has really changed. 20th and me has been around since 2006. 2006, the cost of being a genome was, you know,$10 million a sample.

3:05:29Today, the nucleus has over a couple hundred dollars. It's one of the greatest technological shifts ever, right? And so all these pieces together, you have, you know, toy to be collapsing, which is sad, but I also think it's the sign. It's time for something new. It's time for a true health, consumer health application. Can you talk a little bit about Ancestry.com? They were acquired by Blackstone for$4.7 billion. It seems like that business is doing pretty well. Again, not a genetics company. Particularly, they have their little niche in Ancestry. People really love that. They become experts there.

3:05:57But how does that business play with you and 23andMe? You know, it's interesting because one time a very, very wise investor of ours said, he said, retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case. Okay? It's a very sharp comment. And I think Ancestry is a good example of that. Because genealogy is a very super high touch point of business. People love genealogy. They love looking at who their ancestors are. People would like literally spend their entire hobby actually around this, right? And ANSRs just capitalized on that. They realized that genetics was a mean to do better genealogy.

3:06:3123andMe never realized, are they a genealogy business? Are they a health business? Are they a drug discovery business? They never got that right. For Nucleus, we use genetics to help people live longer and have healthy families. The value prop is very clear. It's not about DNA. DNA is a means to accomplish some end goal for the user, which is namely better health and having a healthier family, right? That is a fundamental difference. And to your point, Ancer is a multi-billion dollar business. Natera, people say genetics businesses don't work. Natera is a clinical genetic business. It's about$20 billion.

3:07:04Okay, so genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here. And I really do think in the next decade, you're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth. And that consumer health behemoth is going to have a whole genome, the entirety of someone's DNA at its foundation. And it's going to impact not just someone's health, but again, also their family and nucleus is building that future. So is it possible then that 23andMe had become this sort of toxic brand? And even the pharmaceutical companies said, you know, we like the data they have, but we don't want to kind of like even mess around here because there's huge potential for blowback, right?

3:07:41I imagine, you know, there's some risks there. Is that part of why they potentially come in? Farmer companies worked at 20th and me, but because the data is such a small sliver, they realized that there was something to be found. The most important thing for drug discovery in a genetics context is finding rare genetic markers, because those actually elucidate mechanism. To identify novel rare genetic markers, you need a whole genome file, right? Because a microarray, again, is such a small bit of your DNA. If your DNA is a thousand page book, 20th and me, they said one page. One page, you can't actually get anything out of that.

3:08:11So it didn't work from a drug perspective business. It didn't work from a consumer health business. Hence, it's collapsed. There's a great, actually, chart here. I don't know if you guys, it's an old tweet, Peter, maybe you guys pull it up later. It's on Bedrock. Does screen sharing work? Can I share my screen? I think you can, actually. Oh, here we go. We're going to try. This is a Technology Brothers first here. Whatever you screen share is live, so do not share your API keys. Ignore the tabs. There's a lot of tabs up there. It's actually cropped out perfectly. Yeah, looks great. So here we have this great thing.

3:08:44shout out to bedrock right they have this narrative violations right clean tech is dead you have tesla day not so he's fast you have tinder consumers dead you have canva and then of course the most recent artificial intelligence has been overhyped under delivered for 10 years you have open ai i will tell you what is next in 2024. popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead and then right now nucleus is open ai that is what's going on let's go pump the bags let's ring the size gong for Keon on Nucleus. Do you have any idea how quickly, do you have any sort of read on how quickly this is going to get resolved?

3:09:19Well, you know, Nucleus might be the one resolving it, if you know what I'm saying. Let's do it. Rumping his hands. Some of our big boy investors, they currently text me saying, Keon, what can we do, Keon? What can we do here? You know, we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars. You know, what's$50 million? Hey. You have to ask us. Getting cheaper every day. Getting cheaper every day. There we go. I mean, that's great. Well, good luck to you, Kion. I hope you can pull it off. I know you'll be successful regardless. Thanks for jumping on. Love it. Great to be back. I hope this gong is going to get hit for a very specific reason soon.

3:09:54Absolutely. Good luck to you. Thanks, guys. Take care. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Breaking news. I love some breaking news and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down because we are going full golden retriever mode. I don't understand anything about that, but that's why we get the experts on. That's the way the show works. Trust the experts, folks. Trust the seed stage founder pumping his bags. Don't even trust yourself. Just trust the experts. Exactly. You want to finish out the timeline right now? What do you think is interesting? Yeah, we can do a This one from Liz Wessel. This has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and pre-seed I've seen in my tech lifetime, 2012 to present.

3:10:36It's becoming truly absurd. Ramp investor. Seed stage. Wow. She did the seed round. Crazy. Yep. Goated. I haven't seen anything crazier personally than 2022. I was going to say crypto stuff was really crazy. Like the last company that I committed to was like a$60 million post seed round. But the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions. And I don't care. But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's trying to, you know, cares about ownership targets or anything like that. This is good context from Jason Lemkin. He says, I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher.

3:11:21And so, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, we had Logan Bartlett on the show to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets, because there should be some sort of tracking between these two. And it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think, hey, maybe the public markets are a leading indicator on what will happen to venture valuations. But at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are getting to hire ARRs faster than ever. And it'll be interesting. The weirdest outcome, I think, would be that seed and pre-seed deals, they get overpaid for, and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes.

3:11:57Maybe there's not a single trillion dollar company that comes out of this vintage, but all of those companies wind up producing 100 million of EBITDA, and they're good businesses. And then the funds kind of perform anyway like that would be a very strange outcome it would look nothing like venture has ever but to see a just it would be very interesting to see a venture fund vintage 2025 produce a reasonable irr without a power law winner in the portfolio yeah i have no idea if it's possible but it'd be the the to steel man that yeah there's potentially we've accumulated in the last 25-ish years, the know-how to repeatedly build valuable software, just technology businesses generally.

3:12:51And in that scenario, paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team and maybe you only get a 3X on that one investment, but you get a bunch of other 3Xs and collectively you get a 2X fund and that becomes venture. That'd be very interesting. And there's nothing, if that happens, and I don't, I can argue against it easily as well, but if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has, you know, has just been doing these sort of 2x funds for however many decades they've done very well. Yeah, of course. And we want higher success rates for founders and teams too, even if it's lower terminal sort of like exit values.

3:13:37It's also interesting that, I mean, OpenAI is maybe positioned itself as like potentially the power law winner of AI. Like people are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of like a trillion dollars. They think it's going to be a big consumer tech company. And no one's really concretized how, like what the source of monopoly power will be in that company. Like there's not really a network effect yet at least. there's no the value is it's just an aggregation theory thing it becomes a verb yeah and it's it's like google competition is always a click away but you accumulate so much customer support that you just data and by nature of the usage the product gets so much better i would think so too and then you know so maybe we're bullish who knows um but i mean it's certainly not cornered resource because the llms are you know commoditized now it's not really scale because everyone can serve these all the hyperscalers can serve these it's really just that attention uh anyway we should have augustus on to talk about this next one soon yeah uh from lee zhin i actually want to have him on to talk about his uh oh yeah the debate with ron desantis or or yeah his his he was debating ron well ron desantis uh trying to ban clouds he has been trying to ban cloud seating and rfk recently came out saying i support what ron desantis is doing like part of the maha movement is anti-cloud seeding and augustus came out very strongly saying like no rfk like don't do that like like this there's more nuance to this argument and so we should unpack that we should unpack his uh testimony which was uh very interesting and we should also have him talk about this which is that china is erasing deserts from its map the first time i ever met augustus at josh steinman's house having some cigars was he could just comes up to me and is like oh yeah did you know that like the goby desert is going away and i was like what are you talking about dude it's the goby and he's like yeah china's erasing their deserts and i was like how he was like yeah they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees and that's exactly what this video shows uh he says by far 65 million mu of desert has been greened that's around the same area of denmark and you can watch this video and it's crazy because it's just like literally just sand dunes and then the most verdant lush greenery you've ever seen and it just looks like wow like i would never want to live in the desert but i would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farm land like imagine plopping like a nice farm farmhouse on that and that's just like the american dream and we could do that with our deserts in america and so we should yeah yeah and so we talked to agustis about this earlier saying you know after you do cloud seeding like is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built or will that be your company and he was kind of saying, maybe it'll be a different company, but, uh, but I want this to happen and I want to figure out what the economics of this business are.

3:16:32Is it just a handout from the, uh, from the Chinese government? If so, do we need to do that in America? Uh, if there, is there a way that you can do this just with the free market, that would be amazing. You know, yeah, this ties into the terraforming stuff with the, uh, what's the, the salt and sea. Yep. If we can get water back into that boy, then everything around it. But, uh, we have some, breaking news. I wanted to pull it up. It's not actually breaking, but it is breaking. It's the nucleus genomics team. They were all posted up watching Keon come on the show. So Ben, pull it up if you can.

3:17:06Look at the team here. All meetings were canceled, but shout out to the team. Thank you for keeping our genetic data safe. It's great having Keon on the show. He's definitely built for television. We talked about this earlier. Oh yeah. Lulu. Like what is his format? What's the format? He's a good poster, but he's great in an interview. Just come on and rock and roll. And rub the eye. He thinks about acquiring a former multi-billion dollar company. Yeah. Absolutely fantastic. Well, that's a great place to end the show. Yeah. Thank you for watching. Go leave us a five-star review. Put an ad for your business or your fund.

3:17:44Read it on the show. into the review. And if you're breaking news, if you're raising the big money, if you think we should ring the size gong for you, give us a call. We'll have you on the show. And we have a number of founders this week coming on to break their fundraisers. Yeah, we can't wait. I can't wait. Yeah. It is a beautiful day. We're going to have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it. It's like, oh, 50 million, that's a Tuesday for us. Yeah. Call us when you're raising 80. Exactly. But right now, it's a golden opportunity for anyone who's making money. making waves and venture it's a beautiful week to get to work in and around technology for sure so many interesting stories and if we keep up this pace we will be doing a dom episode probably next week i can't wait we're at 26k i can't wait 6k out let's go let's thank you for everyone who's been supporting thank you everyone really appreciate it have a great rest of your monday have a great day bye