Shaun Maguire, Nic Carter, Jeremy Giffon, Trump Stands His Ground, 20K/Month GPT

31:28That's great. That's fun. I'm definitely letting it loose. I think the answer is like, if I'm low energy, just like let it fly. Yeah. Because it makes for a better show for sure. Absolutely. All right. Aidsleep.com slash CBPN. Go check it out. Yeah. Back to the show. Back to the show. Let's talk about Ilya let's give her absolute goat raising billions of dollars i mean we've talked about that before apparently it's impossible if you're an open a co-founder to build anything but a foundation model company yep we would love to see someone start i don't know supplements company yes i want to see you know him build a you know i don't know or just say post economic i'm gonna go into bodybuilding yeah because go golden retriever max start a podcast do something i i don't know It's like all they can do is just foundation model, foundation model, foundation model every single day.

32:19Every single person. Maybe the machine god is real. Yeah. And what's weird is they don't want to do it together. Never. They all want their own companies. They all want their own foundation models. But, you know, apparently it's profitable. The company is already worth$30 billion, raising multiple billions. Is that the fastest value creation event ever? It's got to be. It's got to be. So anyway. Not to say the value has already been created. but has a company ever gone from zero to 30 in less than a year? I don't know. So Ilya Sitzkever, he was an open AI researcher. He's the one who found like the transformer paper and like, you know, Google built it, but he really recognized that it was very important.

32:59He, you know, built the early GPT architecture. It was very foundational in the development of LLMs and AI. And he left open AI last year. Now he has a new startup called Safe Super Intelligence, and it's become one of the most valuable companies in tech, thanks to his reputation. And SSI says it doesn't plan to release any products until it develops super intelligence. And I was thinking about this. So they raised like a billion dollars or two billion at a 30 billion or they're in talks to raise funding at 30 billion. What would be hilarious is if DeepSea comes up, they're raising like two billion.

33:38Is the journal just front running this and saying his startup is already worth 30 billion? Because it sounds more interesting. Yes, yes, definitely. Okay. It would be so funny if it was like, okay, hey, we need to train this foundation model, guys. Like we need like 3 billion. We'll just give you like 10%. So we'll do like 30 billion valuation. But it makes sense because like it's going to cost us 3 billion to build a frontier model. And then DeepSea comes out and they're like, we actually only need like 300K to do this. So we're still going to do the 3 billion, but it's just going to be secondary.

34:03And don't worry about that. But we're going to keep the valuation where it is because it's like the same tech. That would be genius. he's just in it for the cheeky secondary maybe i mean there is a there are group of groups of people who are basically like you know the my asi agi world is just like i need to just corner some resource because like like yeah there will be abundance but there will only be so much beachfront property yeah and so like i must like get my beachfront but of course like this isn't what ilia is doing he's he's like obviously a true believer in ai and tech and also fantastically wealthy from open ai uh i forget what they get they get the credits or yeah i would they don't have stock how much would you pay to get the full hour-long pitch for ssi because arguably just getting you know i'm sure he's pitching relatively few people for this right he's not trying to go talk all over the town yeah a lot of people are conflicted already he probably is talking to sovereign isn't this a nat friedman was the first group i thought and uh it's gross daniel gross daniel gross is the ceo right um yeah so so but but getting the pitch from ilia would be uh almost priceless totally i would lever up tbpn to just get the full pitch and then be able to act according to um you know who knows he seems like somebody who would give a very authentic pitch versus just you know promising you know you know he's sick of this sort of like high-flying deal-making approach of his former co-founder totally yeah i mean he seems he has that that quote and that i was like a guardian piece or something or sf chronicle video where he's like if if the agi doesn't go well the entire earth will be uh covered in solar panels have you heard about this half earth concept half earth h-a-f-f yeah uh i think his name's peter half he's a uh scientist he named it after himself yeah it's a coinage it's like kugans law great no this is like a real thing so so he's like a he's a like a futurist a scientist and he has this uh theory there's like this four quadrant model for like how how uh how the earth can develop and accumulate more and more energy over time like eventually like uh we're growing our energy consumption at like two percent a year and if you just play that out exponentially eventually we will be consuming all of the energy that is that hits the earth from the sun and then eventually you go into Dyson sphere that's like Kardashev 2 uh but there's a question about like do you go black or green green is like we we focus on like bio and and you have like you know more trees that are like you know absorbing energy essentially black is like solar panels and then the question of like do you stay on earth or do you go into space there's like this there's like this interesting four quadrant model um but half earth is basically like yeah just uh just black out the sky put put solar panels everywhere and then uh we'll all live in pods and most of the humans will die and we'll basically just be ais and that'll be like our progeny and like dark maybe that's good for some people some people like it some people are into that not me they've never been part of that whole world never been big into that big into that whole that whole matrix world uh but he's like worried about this like genuinely like like we're we're kind of joking like like like dancing around it but he he he ilia definitely is like if if we mess this up we're just going to be continually optimizing like more computers more computers more computers and then you're going to have solar panels everywhere and robots taking over okay here's a question and i don't mean this in an offensive way at all yep i have many family members that struggle with hair loss is it possible that ilia doesn't just shave his head because he wants to reach agi before his hairline reaches the back of his head it is a funny choice but i think it's just because he's like focused on other stuff but yeah i mean put out but if you're looking at the mirror every day and you've got billions of dollars to deploy and your arch nemesis sam altman is racing to achieve agi and you look in the mirror and you say look i maybe have i maybe have like it's a wild choice I maybe have 18 months before of a hairline.

38:23I got to grind harder. This is disrespectful. I won't abide by this. I think he looks great. No, he's an absolute chat. He just cares so much about the AI. I think that's the right approach. And he wears a suit. An absolute dog. True, true. An absolute dog. Yeah. No t-shirts over here. No, I love it. I'm excited to see this round get confirmed. And I do think this will be a first of speed running zero to 30 billion in less than a year. So check this out. He's running this place. It's a super tight ship. He's very, very worried about security. And so most AI startups work hard to get attention, hoping it will attract employees and investors in a highly competitive space.

39:09SSI operates as secretly as it can out of its offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. Its bare bones website contains little more than a 223 word mission statement. Candidates who secure an in-person interview are instructed to leave their phone in a Faraday cage, a container that blocks cellular and Wi-Fi signals before entering SSI's office, one of the knowledgeable people said. Most of its staffers aren't well known in Silicon Valley because the company is looking for promising technologists whom Sutskiver can mentor rather than experienced people likely to jump between employers and take what they have learned with them.

39:44I love that approach. Still, Silicon Valley's top investors, including Sequoia and Andreessen, have poured money into the company. The latest financing, which marks a six-fold increase from its$5 billion valuation, is being led by Green Oaks Capital, SSI's in talks to raise funding at$30 billion, but doesn't include the new cash it's collecting, which were previously reported by Bloomberg. Were Sequoia and Andreessen in the same round? I guess. Must have been close. We don't see that much. This also feels like super conflicted aren't they both in xai too and they're doing the exact same thing like hey there's no conflicts in the foundation model world everybody's in everything i think it's yeah it's commoditizing it's drilling you're drilling oil and like yeah i want a piece of that well i want a piece of that well like let me get it all i guess i don't know it just seems like like there would be some discussion of like hey like can you not invest in a direct competitor but you know maybe it's dramatically different like when you think about the pro like just the product pacing like grok three is very much like productizing so fast like yeah like grok one was immediately out and then and then embedded in twitter and you can see and we talked about like maybe it gets embedded into teslas and it becomes the way you you talk to your car and and it seems like elon really really wants to like be product focused like there's the voice mode and like all the different features we've talked about this that what he sees in open ai is not benchmarks yep it is consumer adoption right open ai will probably reach a billion you know a billion users at some point this year or somewhere close to that yep uh i think even potentially they could be in the territory of a billion like monthly actives which is so so difficult to reach and elon even if elon got every person on x to download the grok app he wouldn't even come close to that right there needs to be sort of organic adoption don't sell him short i do think elon could potentially unseat jimmy johns for number two that's true unseating open ai for number one is a tall order right but never bet against elon and just never bet never bet for it's hard to bet against jimmy john's new hot honey sub but if anyone can take them down it is so funny that the number two app in the app store and they hit number one i think they hit number one they went number one they went number one uh jimmy johns for some reason is the number one app in the app store amid all this like, you know, billion dollar, you know, lawsuits and fights over.

42:13Well, this is why Ilya is staying out. He's like, I'm not going to release an app until it can just immediately be better than Jimmy Jones. I'm not even going to try and go consumer. Sorry, I'm wrong. They hit number one in food and drinks. Okay. ChatGPT is still on top. ChatGPT is still undefeated. And which is why investors are willing to pay over$300 billion. dollars. Well, now, now, you know, normally people would be like, Oh, if you have Jimmy Jones on the show, it's no longer a tech show, but now there's a tech angle. So let's get them on. Yeah. Let's get the founder on Jimmy Jones. Let's do it.

42:44Uh, Jimmy himself. Anyway, we got, we got five minutes until our first guest is joining. Uh, let's, let's, let's close this out. Um, you know, everyone's, everyone's interested in following all the different co-founders around the world as they build ever increasingly large foundation models. The interesting thing is like, you know, we heard about, what was it? Test time compute, reinforcement learning, deep research, all these different tools that were, they clearly came out of Ilya projects early on at OpenAI. I forget what they were originally called, Qstar. Remember Qstar? And it was like, Like this was leaked that Ilya was working.

43:28What did Ilya see, right? And so clearly he has some ability to put together kind of new algorithmic paradigms. And even though he was, people get so obsessed with like, is deep learning hitting a wall? Are you scaling pilled or not? Whereas Ilya was like, he was both scaling pilled and went super long the transformer and deep learning architectures. but at the same time was working on reinforcement learning approaches on top of the big, massive, scaled LLMs to bring those two together. And I think they were kind of – I guess they were kind of obvious. I was watching a video earlier from Two Minute Papers from five years ago from OpenAI.

44:18And it's talking about this game that they did where they had two AIs on each team. So it's 2v2 game, hide and seek. And they play and over like, you know, a million rounds they simulate. And like, they just can't even find each other. And then they get into like 10 million rounds. And then they start learning these strategies of like, well, if I go in this box and then I put like a cardboard box here and I lock it in place, then I'll start winning. and then and then the other ai figures out that if they take this like ramp they can surf up over it and eventually they start like figuring out how to like break the physics engine of the game and do all this cool stuff uh and and that reinforcement learning obviously it played into when open ai played uh defense of the ancients dota 2 do you remember this at all they did like a 5v5 uh basically like starcraft i mean they also did starcraft literally yeah uh they did uh they started playing video games on was the thing that would actually go viral yeah and also live streaming it yeah yeah yeah yeah and so those types of well the pokemon thing is interesting because it's not like they didn't train on pokemon yeah it's just clawed like also running it running a 24 7 experiment is also very powerful yeah and that you're putting it all out there yeah it's verifiable yeah yeah um so anyway i don't know ilia i hope he comes up with something cool it's it does seem like he's very aligned with safety oh to me this is my about this is my Ilya is my bet on what Keith was getting at when we had him on the other day where he said, what comes after the LLM?

45:48It seems like every other former OpenAI early team member co-founder is working on language models. It's very possible Ilya is working on whatever comes after that. Sure. So very excited to see that play out. And as the AI brain develops, you have the the memory core the reasoning core like ilia and he set the expectations so incredibly high saying i'm not going to release a product until i you know presumably have something that's significantly better than whatever else is on the market right yeah um i wonder how he would even release that like what what would the product instantiate itself as like we need we need it's just another app there needs to be the information needs to send the tech paparazzi you know outside of the Tel Aviv office snapping the picture of Ilya walking out you know all secretive that's the content I want the information that's great well you know what he has to do when he launches this company billboards billboards because he's gonna have no one's gonna know about this it's one thing if you're in YC and you launch immediately and you grow organically and you're going direct and you're posting and you go viral for your sweatshop he's gonna have this fantastic product but he's gonna no one's gonna know about it so Ilya's gonna have to buy some billboards and he's got to do it on ad quick so ilia i know you're listening go to adquick.com uh start working with the team now also i mean honestly ilia you could do some recruiting ads on there uh throw some billboards up waterloo tel aviv silicon valley there you go the billboards up ssi we're hiring uh but go through ad quick because they make out of home advertising easy and measurable ilia i'm talking to you directly they you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising ilia uh only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe so ilia go to adquick.com tell them the technology brother sent you and uh good luck with your new venture and so we're gonna have jeremy come on the show right now and you know our main advice for jeremy was to start buying 101 billboards start buying one-on-one billboards uh saying you got a special situation raise too much money call mr graffon what's up guys how you doing good how are you have you bought a billboard yet i'm working on it i'm working on it i think uh i think all the management fees need to go directly into billboards that's that's what i've learned from the most profitable podcast that's great uh break it down for us what would go on the billboard what's your business How do you pitch it to people these days?

48:29My business is picking up the roadkill of the venture industry. The startups, the founders that have triumphantly built heroic and wonderful businesses and have gained millions and tens of millions of revenue and built incredible teams and have a wonderful product and customers that love them. but for the fact that they had too much capital forced upon them. And it has buried them under an untenable prep stack and made the whole business not work and left them with no choice but to kind of get stuck in no man's land. And my mission is to help those founders get back in control of their businesses and run them as fully profitable, cash-flowing, great businesses as God intended.

49:21Love it. Incredible line. I would love to get a sense. We spend a lot of time covering the news, and the news tends to fixate on these sort of colossal failures and these sort of moments of glory. The humane AI pin, for example. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're seeing the behind the scenes, which is companies that raised a lot of money, you know, maybe three to five years ago that are now in a tough spot. You know, the venture world has sort of turned sour on them. What is the state of that market right now? How busy are you? I know you spent a lot of the last year raising your first independent fund.

50:02Now you're investing. What's kind of happening on the ground? Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of great businesses out there and a lot of stock founders. And there's more and more of them. And increasingly, a lot more VCs who realize that there is a severe lack of DPI, especially in the middle of the portfolio right now. And so you're starting to see a lot of great companies that realize they need probably a different owner, an owner that's more in line with actually like their goal and their vision. And then a lot of funds that are realizing, you know, gross IRR is all well and good. But eventually, you know, you can only eat the DVI.

50:49And that's what the capital allocators are starting to demand. Have you seen founders that get in that position? You know, they have the opportunity, you know they're talking to you or they get into position are they ever trying to sort of pivot their business into a better ai narrative and then go back to market and is that working or are they trying that and giving you a call back and saying uh yeah you were right like let's try to figure something out well yeah so no what they're doing is what they're realizing is that they can pivot to ai and they don't need any more capital uh interesting they they can you know especially if the business was built, you know, four or five years ago, they can replace a lot of their costs with AI.

51:33I think like every organization should be thinking hard about whether or not they ought to cap headcount and just, you know, keep headcount at or below where it is and increase kind of head count, so to speak, through AI. And I think, you know, I think we're about to see kind of the renaissance, the bootstrapper. And so I think a lot of founders are starting to think like, you maybe I can grow my business 10x without more capital because of these tools. And so, yeah, certainly you can slap an AI label on and go raise another round. You certainly have the founder who's in the just two more million bucks, bro.

52:12Just give me two more million. I got this. But I think that's a mistake. I think we're about to see an era of incredibly capital efficient businesses that, by the way, are not giving up growth at all. You can still grow 100 % a year. And if anything, you can do with a lot less capital, you can own more of the business, you can like, you know, be a lot more in the driver's driver's seat and, and, you know, really kind of control your destiny versus kind of lever yourself up as much as I know that, you know, you guys are always in favor of the max lever option. Exactly. Can you walk me through anatomy of a deal and how kind of the, the pref stack waterfalls out on one of these?

52:51what are the different kind of tension points for some pre-seed investor who feels like they're sitting on a 10x or a 100x and then someone who got in late and clearly kind of knows they overpaid and just wants to get something back like how do you get all the parties around the table and then think about incentivizing the team going forward look i mean i i think i think one thing founders don't understand or maybe underappreciate is that, you know, your your cap table ultimate like really affects your business in a wide variety of ways that are that can be kind of very subtle. And so at some point, you know, maybe you go from having a venture fund as an ideal owner to being a neutral owner.

53:35I think a lot of funds are in that stage now where, you know, it's not detrimental to be owned by a venture back to be owned by a venture fund, but maybe it's not super additive. And then eventually you get to a point where it can start to become, you know, it can detract because just the incentives really diverge. And so, you know, what I'm really looking to do is like what I implore everyone to think about, especially if they're not in a business that's like on a clear trajectory to raise, you know, need to burn hundreds of millions in CapEx for some kind of like nine or 10 figure outcome. is think a lot about like, who are my owners?

54:08What are their incentives? And like, you know, when you get to the board meeting, is it actually, is there friction or are they actually behind me? And I think that's a lot of it. And a lot of it could just come down to like, what is the cost of capital of your owners to get a little bit boring? Like the cost of capital of the people that own you makes a really big difference for like what they expect and what they demand of your business. And so, you know, it varies. Like if you're an individual, if you're you know a pre-seed or seed you're happy to stay in the business there's no reason for you to sell you can roll over um if you're like a growth fund that maybe did you know a somewhat regrettable you know it's a little bit wake up from the night after the party look around there's beer bottles everywhere would prefer to just pretend that it didn't happen maybe you want to get your capital back like um um you know i think like oftentimes the best outcome is just returning capital which used to kind of be a norm in venture and because this like bifurcation between huge outcomes and then very little liquidity in the rest of the portfolio is not happening as much anymore.

55:11Every venture capitalist today says they're in the people business, right? If you ask them to have any type of specific thesis, they just say, you know, we're in the people business. That's Sanders. Yeah. Yeah. So that's generally the right take. That's Sanders' point of view. Are you more in the people business or the value business? Because from my lens, you know, you're looking for value. And in some cases, you're more than happy to let the founder move on to their next chapter and bring in a professional CEO. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm also entirely in the people business. But it's, you know, is that I think everyone should be, you know, doing their highest and best use, like following their calling.

55:52sometimes for a founder that's, you know, getting more control, more sovereignty over their business and really kind of being in it for the long haul, having way more optionality in terms of like financing. Sometimes a founder, you know, a thing that happens far too much that no one talks about is all these founders who are stuck. You know, if you have 20 million of revenue, 100 employees, and you've raised 100 million bucks, you can't just quit if you're the founder, even if it's clear that like what you're trying to do is build the next you know Decker corn or whatever. And so there's a lot of founders out there who are who know and what's funny is the board knows and the founder knows but they're like not letting know that conversation.

56:33And so you know there's a lot of founders who are stuck and for those who are stuck and would like to leave but don't want to abandon the building the business I think you know there's more options than you think. And there's someone out there to get back to the people thing. There's someone out there who is the perfect person to come in and run a business like that. Because, you know, a lot of times the person who takes a business from 20 of revenue to 100 of revenue can be a very, you're looking for a very different type of person than someone who's going to start it from zero and grow it into a huge business.

57:01And so it's really just about like, is this person doing the thing that they're really fired up about? And if they're not, then like, do you really want to be in that seat? Are there any common character traits or kind of either even background career paths for that type of operator who's maybe not the founder, but the type of person that can, with pretty high confidence, take a business from 20 million to 100 million in your experience? Yeah. I mean, I think my friend Andrew Wilkinson has written a lot about this. I think he really has it right. There's a lot of C-suite and senior executives at a business that's two or three times bigger than maybe the business you're looking at.

57:46And those are people who are like highly capable, has at least some entrepreneurial spirit, but maybe they're not, you know, whether by constitution or circumstance, not interested in taking the full risk of a founder, but still want to be in the driver's seat, want to, you know, want to run a business. And there's actually a lot of talent there that can be unlocked, who are people who, you know, can't do the go through YC thing, but still, you know, would love to have real upside, would love to to uh to lead a team and run a business and um yeah i think there's actually a lot of really untapped talent there um and uh it's kind of an underrated option it's kind of like how it used to be like buying a business and running it if you're like an mba or something was like an underrated path to you know quote-unquote entrepreneurship um i think coming in and running a a like decently sized startup or business uh is kind of one of those now that not a lot of people consider it's kind of like very like you're either a founder or you're just an exec or maybe like a 4 to 500 CEO or something.

58:40But there's a lot of middle ground. And I think, yeah, I think there's a ton of untapped talent. Question going off of that. Search funds got very popular. Simultaneously, it seems like venture, the world of venture capital discovered private equity and roll-ups. And, you know, we've seen a number of companies come out the gates and decide they're going to basically raise venture dollars to pursue a PE style strategy. That concerns me, you know, given that private equity is pretty good at what they do. Right. They've sort of gotten better and better and better over the decades around, you know, finding, you know, fairly priced businesses and making them more efficient and growing them and selling them.

59:22What do you think happens to these sort of software or AI enabled roll ups? And are you salivating over the potential of buying them down the road once they.

59:36look i think um i think raising venture to acquire businesses is a great gig right now you know um it's yeah so and here's here's why jeremy's like the grim reaper like if you're if he's excited about something no and here's why right you can if you typically in private equity if you want to if you want to go buy businesses you raise a fund you get two and 20 which is a great business model uh you've talked about this before jeremy sort of the perfect business model but in that right now in venture you can go raise 20 million dollars at 100 dilute yourself 20 and so you actually have much better economics if you're going yeah you know buying up these businesses uh and and eventually i think that's going to stop right yeah and and by the way there there's there's a hurdle uh in private equity and there's no hurdle in venture capital which makes the whole thing even sweeter yeah um but you know i'm i'm not i don't think i'm a groom reaper i i think i think i think i'm a i think i'm a liberator i think all these founders are trapped what i'm saying is that if you're if you if you envision that you're gonna be doing a lot of business in the category in 10 years it's probably a bear signal right yeah i i think i think it's more uh more seeing exuberance you know once the uh once the nba is pile in it it might it might be over um but like look if you build a business to 30 million bucks for revenue That's like a heroic feat.

1:00:57It's extremely hard to do. And, and then you somehow end up with 8 % of it under a$200 million press stack. That kind of sucks. And I don't think that's the outcome that anyone is like trying to have happen. But it happens as like a as a kind of, you know, a spandrel of the of the venture industry. Yeah, the Grim Reaper is the bankruptcy attorney. You are the you're the winged angel. Yeah. And you know, there, there are there are there are if you really want to sell your startup for parts, there are people out there who can do that with brutal efficiency. And they're great guys. But like, I'm a fund.

1:01:34I want to sell these businesses for more money in the future, which presumably means they get more valuable. You know, I'm not a, I don't want to just like, you know, make Toys R Us go bankrupt. That's someone else's job. But I mean, over the long term, is your business correlated with like frothiness and volatility? Like in a post-froth, post-highly, you know, high exuberance, like that is a good signal for you, right? Yeah, for sure. There will be more opportunities. For sure. I mean, I'm interested in dislocations and dislocations certainly happen more in bubbles or exuberance. Yeah. But I also think it's just a feature.

1:02:18It feels like it's happening more frequently too. It seems like it's a good model. It doesn't seem like your fund is a one-time, like, oh, it's just a unique case right now. It's like, no, VC is built to do these types of things. There needs to be a system to help process the ones that don't go perfectly, and that's where you can come in. Yeah, well, look, I mean, venture is 10x in terms of dollars deployed in the last 10 years. It's a completely different thing now. You know, just as the biggest firms are turning into PE shops, the biggest venture firms are functionally PE shops, there needs to be there's basically one product in Silicon Valley and it's like primary growth capital and and you know once these markets become bigger and more liquid more efficient there needs to be a different kind of different just as there is in Wall Street or like on the East Coast there needs to be different products offered to founders like equity at different costs of capital and things like that again like a really basic fact I think people should understand is like if you have if your model is to have a lot of zeros in your portfolio your cost of capital i.e the like minimum return that you need is just really high which like creates all these knock-on effects i really think founders would like just take a crash course on venture it would really help them a lot like a lot of really exceptional founders kind of get into bad situations um that they probably you know probably like 30 minutes with like chat gpt could could really kind of help them avoid and like maybe you should make a rapper i honestly think you should make a rapper and just like create the the the sort of uh product for these founders and say yeah anytime that somebody raises around send them your send them your little rapper and say hey put your term sheet in here understand what you're about to embark on and uh it's good could lead lead generation for you yeah yeah i mean i think a lot of the board members could use the rapper as well Got him.

1:04:08Okay. Another question for you. Historically, you've been heavily focused on software. You acquired 30 some odd businesses while at tiny. We've seen new categories attract venture dollars, like traditional, basically traditional manufacturing businesses that have some sort of tech enablement. Is there a world in the future where that is an area of interest for you or are you all in on software you know indefinitely everything is of interest to me, Jordy. I just love there's always interesting problems to be solved that can create like Pareto efficient outcomes in everything. Right now, there's like a lot of them in software venture.

1:04:53But yeah, there will, as long as like humans are not even in the driver's seat, but like involved, there's going to be like weird, you know, dislocations and problems to be solved. It's like amazing how many times everyone could be better off if they just It's like, you know, it's not something that they could, it's not something they need a third party to do. But, but oftentimes like a third party really helps. So yeah, it'll be, it'll be on all kinds of things. I mean, right now you're seeing the ventureification of middle America. And like, as all these venture co's start to buy up, you know, vets and med spas and all these things like venture capital.

1:05:33I'm in like, I'm in the rural Midwest right now. And like, you're going to, these people are going to start to feel venture in a very tangible, physical way. And I think that's really going to change. It's just going to change the industry dramatically. You had a great heuristic for early detection of potentially great founders being, I think you put it as a Stripe account plus high school diploma or something, high school report card. Can you break that down and tell me any more about that? Yeah. If you made money online in high school, I honestly can't think of an exception of someone who's done that and has not ended up being like quite a successful founder in one way or another.

1:06:19This is like the Internet. You can just go on there with a laptop and make money. It's like you don't got to do all this. You don't got to go to Harvard and do YC and all that. Like you can just go on there and like drop ship stuff. Make something that makes money. That's the new tagline. Yeah. What's your read on General Catalyst exploring an IPO? It's been something that everybody's waiting for, the first scaled venture fund to go public. Do you see all the big firms going that direction over time, or is it going to be a pretty binary in that Andreessen stays private forever, blah, blah, blah?

1:06:56What does that look like? So I think like one very simple cut at this is just firms that are started by founders versus firms that are started by investors. So, you know, Mark and Ben, they're founders. You know, GC, it's also founders. You know, David Fialco, obviously an entrepreneur. And so I think it's kind of expected to see that when a founder starts a business, even if it's an investing business, they're doing it to grow a big business. And, you know, I thought Mark Andreessen put it nicely on Patrick's podcast when he talked about, you know, you can be a small partnership that generates some good returns and then kind of is relocated to some Wikipedia page.

1:07:49Or you can build, you know, Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or Andreessen Horowitz. You know, I think it's also in the name. Like, you know, I think they put a lot of clues there. So, you know, I think founders, great founders are just going to build big, important businesses. and your business can only really get so big if you're actually in the business of like true alpha outperformance. You can't build the JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or something. Do you think that there's potentially alpha in getting into one of those big VC firms but not in an investing role and instead going into an operating role like what you see as not a deal team but operating partner at Bain Capital or Texas Pacific Group or any of the large PE firms assuming that these large organizations are going to wind up actually operating more like PE firms, not just at financial scale, but in terms of their behavior.

1:08:41And so you're going to come in and reliably be CEO of portfolio companies that are coming in through like the PE arm essentially. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like joining Goldman in the 70s or 80s or something. It kind of depends. It's actually kind of funny. This is kind of a niche thing, but it's very interesting to me how COOs at funds are either incredibly important, heroic individuals that the firm would explode without, or they're completely back office, kind of low status. No one likes them. And they're either extremely well-paid or really badly paid. It's one of these very high-variance roles.

1:09:26And I think it depends a lot on the culture of the firm. And so, yeah, I would argue that a lot of these firms, most of the people there already are not strictly investors in the sense that they're not making judgment-based capital allocation decisions. There's research and all different portfolio support and all this stuff, which is not what you would have thought venture was in 2005. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess you just mentioned like the idea of like having a venture owner is not the right thing. And that's where you come in a lot of times. But in the future, some of these firms might actually kind of set up shops to become better owners of turned around assets.

1:10:05They already are. I mean, Sequoia Heritage, you know, Sequoia Heritage is significantly or maybe not significantly, but it's like roughly the size of Sequoia. Yeah. I know Andreessen's doing a kind of Sequoia Heritage thing. thing gc is like they're all just starting to be giant at some sense at some scale you just become an asset manager and really what you're looking for are um uh you know different fee paying products basically and like you really can think about it yeah i mean i mean i guess there's still there's still like a decision to be made between like oh it's like an index fund and they're just gonna like blindly take a slice of everything versus they're gonna like that's kind of been like the the meme around Andreessen a little bit is that they're just like in a lot of deals but then you have general catalysts where it's like we're buying a hospital network and that's much more like private equity and so I understand that like all of this is going towards like venture becoming asset managers but they're still built there still will be forks in the road like Goldman Sachs does have a proprietary uh prop desk right but they don't have as much high frequency stuff as Jane Street right there are different strategies uh and so it'll be interesting to see like where each fund kind of goes, I think.

1:11:18One more question for you. Mostly a prompt because we were talking about this in a group chat I think a week ago. There was a chart showing some of these new AI startups and their sort of revenue milestones. You laid out very clearly, somebody was basically, somebody in the chat, I think it was Bill, said something to the effect of are we short all of these? And, you know, I've kind of like struggled with the question because people get a tremendous amount of value out of these products. They love them. It's real revenue. It's real customers sort of trading dollars. You fired back and basically said iron law of the universe.

1:11:59Easy come, easy go. Maybe just kind of extrapolate that in the context of the, you know, current AI market. Yeah, look, I mean, I'm sure some of them will be great businesses. but it does seem very true to me that just, you know, anything that can be done very quickly can sort of be undone. And I think you're seeing that. I mean, I think all the kind of like IDEs, the best one changes from day to day, the switching cost is pretty low. Like these are very smart teams. I'm sure they will come up with moats and, and, and, you know, stickiness and all that kind of stuff. But I think, you know, I think it's kind of like, if you think about, you know, the internet, it's like, yeah, everyone's going to rush to use the internet enabled version of XYZ thing.

1:12:48But does that mean, you know, there's the idea that like Google is the last search engine, not the first, right? And so I think for a lot of the companies where it's just like, I wish I had an AI version of this. I want like the consumer intent is like, I want to buy an AI version of this. Not like I want, you know, pick your kind of specific AI business. And so, you know, I think some of them will make it out, but I think a lot of them will not because it's just, that's just what the rush is. It's like anyone who can add AI into this is adding so much value that I'll just like buy it. I mean, I know like I pay for, you know, whatever, six different models, like that's probably not gonna be true in three years, right?

1:13:28Like there's probably gonna be one that I'll end up paying for too. There's certainly no reason to pay for six right now. And so, yeah. And like, if, you know, if someone launches a slightly like an incrementally better model tomorrow, they're going to get my 20 bucks a month until like, you know, until they don't. And so, um, yeah, I don't know. I, I just, I can't think of an example where like a whole class of businesses have cropped up, grown immensely quickly, and then kind of just been the new equilibrium. Um, you know, that, that's certainly not what happened in the.com. There's some exceptions, but in general, that makes sense.

1:14:02We have a couple minutes left. Uh, how are you thinking about building your firm? Are you hiring for any roles right now uh what does the future look like for guffon and company um yeah you know it's it's very interesting i've i've been i've been uh dutifully studying the uh all the great solo gps of the venture world and and and analyzing their their setups and everything i think it's very compelling i think asset management is actually a great like ai use case um so yeah i think you know the answer is yes i'm hiring uh uh a little little tech bros exclusive here i'm hiring uh there we go breaking breaking news scoop put the chiron up yeah um uh yeah i'm i'm gonna make one hire i'm looking for like an investment principal someone who's super smart wants to you know be kind of the first hire um keep the team really small you know a lot of economics to carve up.

1:14:58Um, and you know, basically like I am, uh, I have more deal flow than I can handle right now. And what I need is, is help basically. And so, um, yeah, you know, if it just wants to be someone who joins me and then, uh, me and me and them and 30 AI agents, uh, you know, allocating capital, if that sounds appealing, uh, well, we have our next guest on the line right now. Thanks, Jeremy. Thank you for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. We love you. talk soon this is fantastic nick welcome to the show hey guys i didn't mean to kick off the last guy i don't know you're all good what's that booted i was three minutes early you're all good how you doing doing great man how did investment committee go uh break down introduce yourself what is what do you do and then what does investment committee mean on a monday like what who's in the meeting what are you talking about now and a little asterisk first yeah nick just started lent okay and he's not uh he's giving up nicotine so he said he's a little bit grumpy today yep but we're gonna we're gonna turn it around because we're gonna eventually talk about core weave yeah which is uh maybe a 2 000 bagger or something and i was trying to run the numbers on it but uh how did investment committee go it was good yeah we're actually having i am having a poly crisis with all the companies that I'm on the board of.

1:16:20So that part's not good. So never become a venture capitalist. I don't advise it to any young folks listening. Don't do it. Okay, become an artist. Become an artist. What kind of art should the fans do these days? What's that? What kind of art is not going to be immediately commoditized by AI? I don't know. Sculpture? I think you just have to learn to work with the AI. You know, look at Grimes. Little Sitar model. There's the Grimes AI, but people still like her. Yeah, that's true. That's good. How often do you take a board seat when you make an investment? Is that you sound like future investments?

1:17:02You may just write the check and say, you know, good luck. No, don't say that. I can't have potential investees hearing that. No, no, no. I'm on five boards. uh i've yeah i got capacity you know i got i got some space still so um if i'm leading and it's my deal then we try and lead most of our round so i will i do we do end up on a lot of boards for sure would you want to be on a public company board at any point like you know how andreason has visibility into facebook and that's just like alpha for the entire portfolio right yeah and i think they pay you as well so that that part's nice so i don't get paid to be on well maybe Maybe CoreWeave will bring you up.

1:17:46We'll bring you back. I'm silently hoping that they're going to ask me to be on the board. Explain the business to us. And if they like how you explain the business, then you're on the board. Boom. We'll send them this clip. Yeah, we'll tell them the Technology Brothers collectively requested that Nick be added to the board prior to the IPO. Yeah. And get a little. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Let's just break. I'm a very small shareholder. Right, right. For now. Could start building that position up. When did you invest in CoreWeave? What were they doing at the time? And what are they doing now? It's obviously been in the news, but I would love to hear it from you.

1:18:23What a fun story, man. It was my first angel investment ever. What? Yeah, it was a good way to start becoming an angel investor. So I have like over 50 now, but that was my first. And I was not accredited at the time. I mean, you know. Dirty dog. Dirty dog. No one checks, okay? That's the trick. No one checks. The SEC doesn't check. I don't think I even had the money to make the investment at the time. I think I borrowed it from my dad. Wow, amazing. And I had met these guys because we were mutual haters of Ethereum. So we hated Ethereum proof of stake specifically. And I think I found them on Reddit.

1:19:07And Brian Venturo, he was posting on Reddit about how proof of stake was stupid and bad. Because they were ETH miners, right? They were mining ETH. They're against the transition of proof of stake. And I was as well, because I just love proof of work and hate proof of stake. So we were kind of strange bedfellows. And then they were just mining ETH. That's what they were doing. They had a different take on it than other ETH miners. They used more high-end NVIDIAs, which became very important later, versus other ETH miners used AMDs, more commodity AMDs. And then we became friends. I became friends with Brandon and Brian and mostly centered on our mutual shared disdain for Ethereum, Ethereum culture.

1:19:53They had like a very like weird relationship with Ethereum. It was all their revenue, but also they just like had a very antagonistic relationship. and then they pitched me the idea of of repurposing their gpu hardware just like idling by mining eth and other proof of work crypto assets and then uh also you know on a more bursty basis doing like rendering and stuff like cgi yeah yeah cd yeah like blender so that the ai wasn't even in the conversation yep wasn't even in the discussion this is 2018 though yeah no one was this except for Goran knew yeah was this related to the the render network like the octane renderer rndr was that a thing or is this just like general purpose rendering for do you know what they pitched me was like they were gonna like go to the blender conferences and be like the industrial uh hbc farm for blender yeah and uh and movie studios and whatever and that sort of happened actually but then um so i i did the the first round in which they raised capital i think it was i'm was the only like vc to be on the cap table i did it personally actually brought it to the fund and we didn't do it because it was seen as outside of scope which was a catastrophic mistake obviously worst mistake of my career by far like i just ran the math that i did the numbers on it and yeah it would have been big i it was our first fun fun one would have been a 50x fund on that alone wow if we'd done that check so uh that was that was a miss um and then uh what was the scope you know back then like like why was it not in scope because we had done some crypto mining stuff and then we got really turned off by it okay and you know we invest in like more like asset light crypto businesses so mining we thought was totally the scope and the whole pitch was we're going to stop doing crypto and we're going to pivot into this other stuff yeah it makes sense so then in 2019 they almost went out of business because eth moved to proof of stake so all the proof work market for gpus ceased to exist and but right around the same time uh all of these early applications for loms uh like transform-based lms came out like gpt2 was actually really big for them because um there were all these apps they were built on like ai dungeon if you guys remember that i think it was 2019 you guys remember that yeah that was my first it uh they were like yeah this thing's going crazy like the usage is hockey sticking and i played it i'm like oh my god like wow this is actually like amazing technology like yeah uh that's when i realized lm or like you know the transform model was was gonna you know change the world and so then that just hockey sticked and they obviously did an incredible job of being creative about financing and you know magnetar was obviously a great um you know capital partner to them in many different ways over the years and technically they've delivered um it's not it's not an undifferentiated product it really is um you know they built with the idea of HPC big performant synchronous HPC clusters in mind when absolutely no one was doing that.

1:23:17None of the hyperscalers were doing that. And then now, of course, everybody's realized AI-specific data centers make sense, but Corey was really the first to do it. And so they've been able to lock in a long duration contract, so they've done very well. Yeah. Very cool. Changing subjects a little bit. I want to go back to it feels like a year ago. It wasn't that long ago. What was the vibe at the crypto ball, which you were at once everybody started realizing that the incoming president had launched a token? No one knew at the ball that the Trump coin had launched. Or maybe others knew, but I certainly didn't know.

1:24:01I think it launched around 9pm and I didn't get out of there until like 11.30. and really so there wasn't too late there wasn't people were at the ball just hanging out having fun and people weren't realizing what had happened yet nobody that i knew at the ball knew i certainly didn't know no one was talking about it so i felt that we were rug pulled actually by dr yeah because because most most conferences there's quite a lot of people just looking down at their phone the whole time because it's just not that and obviously this wasn't a conference it was a party um but uh the timing was hilarious and then and then the lesson from this last sunday was if there's ever anything white house related you know any type of crypto event expect some uh expect some big news i thought you had some of the best takes on the strategic uh crypto reserve now that a few days have passed have any of your thoughts changed you know you're generally um I'm not super excited about it.

1:25:02You had written a post before that you were sort of broadly against it. What's your thinking on today, March 5th? And where does this all go? Yeah, I mean, we're going to find out on Friday what they're really proposing or thinking. I think there's so many unanswered questions. Like, how are they going to pay for it? Is Congress going to have to authorize? Are they just going to hold the seized Bitcoin? Are they going to sell the seized Bitcoin to buy Cardano? Is that really going to happen? I mean, can you imagine? portfolio rebalancing you know it's strategically important for the united states to uh you know diversify yeah i mean really like if if they can't find some ersatz way to finance this thing without asking congress because they can't ask congress let's be real congress is not going to pass this yeah so okay are they just going to use the bitcoins they hold 200 000 bitcoins okay we want to do a basket of bitcoin cartano eat solano ripple so you're selling bitcoin to buy ripple and card that's crazy come on uh so we're gonna find out what david sachs has up his sleeve i mean i like the guy i think he's smart i don't know how this policy came to be uh i don't support it uh continue to not support it whether or not it's just bitcoin or bitcoin in a basket of other crypto assets it doesn't make sense at all there's no strategic purpose to uh owning crypto at the government level other strategic assets that we hold are commodities that are like hard to acquire in a pinch if we have liabilities to nominate those commodities right we it makes sense to have a petroleum reserve makes sense of a tungsten reserve or uranium reserve even medical equipment agricultural commodities whatever where is the industrial need to own bitcoin or ripple or cardano there is none so i just don't understand the whole thing seems totally incoherent to me What I think we share the same point of view on Saks.

1:27:02Do you think that he is having real influence on the sort of messaging coming out of the White House related to crypto? Or is he finding out live like the rest of us? I think if it was just up to Saks, we wouldn't be talking about the reserve. There wouldn't be a Trump meme coin. World Liberty Phi wouldn't be as big as it is. What other crazy stuff did Trump do with crypto? I don't know. I mean, I've just been hoping that Trump would just fire Gensler, put in Atkins and then never say the word crypto ever again. We'd be so much better. Instead, he's like hugging us to death. And I don't know where it's coming from.

1:27:40I don't know. Is it Barron? Is it Eric? Is it Don? Who's doing it? Who's the puppeteer? Whoever it is, they need to stop. Hopefully, Sachs can put an end to all this nonsense. I just it's not good for us for Trump to care. It does feel like a distraction from the other side of Sachs' responsibilities, which is the AI stuff. We heard a good take on the strategic crypto reserve yesterday that I want to get your feedback on. Trump is known for coming out of the gate hot with a very aggressive proposal. Canada is going to be the 51st state. And then when all things are said or done, it's like a 5 % tariff or something like that.

1:28:21And so the idea here was, hey, maybe the Cardano thing is this opening salvo of craziness that winds up just being pure Bitcoin reserve. Do you think that's strategically 4D chess possible? I know you're still against it, even if it lands there. But is it possible that that's what's happening here? Yeah, certainly. I mean, the thing is, I kind of like disagree with the premise of the question, though. So like everybody says this is an amazing negotiation tactic, but like I make deals for a living, right? This is what I do. If a founder came to me, they're like, yeah, you know, we're raising a pre-seed.

1:28:59It's$100 million pre-money. And then they expect to get negotiated down to like 50 million or something. I'm like, this person is clearly insane and not like trustworthy. And I don't want to look at them. Especially if they have like a track record of doing just that. And it's like very public. I mean, yeah. Look, Trump, he wrote the order deal. He's a great deal maker, whatever. I still don't like the strategy. I think it sucks. What about just like being a fair and honest broker? You know, like what about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's totally fine. Yeah. Does Trump launch another crypto project while in office?

1:29:31Well, are you, are you, or you think he's, he's had enough? So he's launched what? Four, five in close to six. If you count October, Melania. Oh yeah. Four since October. So there's world Liberty Phi. there's trump coin there's melania coin there's the reserve which kind of is a project is there's probably something else that i'm forgetting sure nfts he has trump nfts two editions actually not to be clear because i know a lot of the holders the first edition of the trump nft they're very upset at the second edition okay yeah so dilution and the trump nft market i mean It's immutable. No inflated supply, no inflation.

1:30:15But when you issue a whole new batch, of course, you're going to dilute. That was the problem with Melania, too. I mean, look, if we extrapolate this, it'll be 5 ,000 Trump crypto projects by the end of this. They're growing exponentially. The supply of Trump crypto projects is growing exponentially. He loves it. More broadly, where does crypto go from here? it's sort of it feels like a very interesting moment because it's never had more attention it's never had more users it's never had more adoption right even you know with stable coins things like that yet the uh the vibes are are bad right like uh there's a and and the price action is not what you would expect out of the government saying you know we're going to start buying these these assets where does it go from here how are you thinking about it as a as an investor i think markets are calling trump's bluff i actually don't think we're going to see a reserve we might see a stockpile i don't think we're going to see a reserve where this we're using government taxpayer funds regardless of how they're accounting for whatever accounting tricks they use we're not going to see taxpayer funds used to buy crypto assets that's crazy okay that's not going to happen markets are calling his bluff also you know risk markets are going crazy everyone's worried about the tariffs and inflation and uh you know recessionary signals whatever that probably explains a lot of the sell-off too uh vibes are really bad in crypto because the big uh l1 launches of this year have not done well uh meme coins are dead as a category um even though we have sort of like emerging regulatory clarity around it like the retail bid's just not there i think retail got hosed one too many times so they're just not willing to do that they don't want to buy the you know 30 billion dollar fdv hot new l1 that andreessen put 400 million dollars into right nobody wants to do that okay there's no ultimate bias it's just vcs buying from other vcs now with a lot of these launches so in terms of liquid tokens yeah like everyone's down bad the cycle didn't happen bitcoin did well nothing else happened there was no alt season right so the framework people have this mental framework that's wrong that cycles have to happen in a certain way and they happen every four years and it plays out like this it didn't happen like that um in terms of like actual usage of blockchains like it couldn't be better stable coins are taking over all of fintech all of global finance all banking remittances b2b uh you know international trade settlement like my corner of the world the little stable coin corner we couldn't be happier but most people in crypto don't care about that uh the coins matter and uh the coins might be dead for a generation here so yeah how are you thinking about net new stable coin investments where are the opportunities obviously uh anywhere that money you know fiat moves today is an opportunity for stables uh but there's now been a bunch of teams sort of tackling you know these various areas for a while are you making a lot of net new kind of pure stablecoin bets are you kind of letting your bets uh ride yeah i have wires going out for two new stablecoin related deals this week um so we're at 19 now in our portfolio i believe uh if you if you look at the stablecoin stack i don't know how exciting this is but uh you know there's the issuers then there's like the infrastructure like the intermediaries like the b2b stablecoin startups then you have like consumer uh which are like fintechs built on stables um the issuer game is like immensely competitive and it's the domain of banks and consortia now so like and also basically no one's ever created a new stablecoin issuer from scratch done well except for probably athena i mean tether and circle dominate so that one's very hard the bb stablecoin payments like the The PSP, stablecoin based PSP thing, immensely commoditized.

1:34:17There's 100 new bridges, right? Everybody wants to be the next bridge. Very, very competitive, very hard, going to be thin margin. I'm looking at, you know, weird stuff like, you know, the banking layer itself. Like, you know, how do you incorporate stablecoins into the core banking infrastructure? structure um we're still looking at regional fintechs that have a stable coin angle like that's very interesting to me but so you're looking for moats like that would be more of like maybe a regulatory driven moat or a local network effect something like that um but yeah i think just like tossing checks into the next bridge that that's probably gonna be a losing strategy is is tradfi even trying to move to stable coins in a meaningful way like in ai you know we see yeah chat gpt is dominant but there's gemini and and copilot from microsoft and every hyperscaler has their products baked in is western union thinking about working on this or is it just you know just completely the train's just passing them by because it's more complex from the regulatory perspective i would say the major fintechs non-bank fintechs are very interested They're looking at making acquisitions.

1:35:36Sure. The remitters are either being disrupted by stablecoin remitters or building their own. So for sure that's happening there. The big credit cards like Visa and MasterCard are pretty active. Like the big global payments networks are, I would say, all looking at it. The last bastion, though, is banks, the domestic banks. Foreign banks are actually doing a lot of stablecoin stuff, depending. like look at sos gen or um standard chartered uh tons and tons of stablecoin stuff the domestic banks have ptsd from what happened over the last two years with choke point they are very afraid um i think many of them would like to be in the business of either issuing a stablecoin or being a service provider for stablecoin being the first mile um that's going to take a lot longer they're they're still afraid that the fed is going to destroy them if they so much just think about stable coins is it shifting from like regulatory arbitrage to more just like i don't know like yeah yeah whatever the inverse of fear like boldness courage arbitrage like if you're if you're courageous there's an opportunity right now i think so i think so that's good that feels good there's still a regular actually i mean yeah that's why people say regular to mean crime like i don't see it that way you know um a lot of like fintech thought leaders on twitter will say that like oh you're just doing reg art like you're just a criminal yeah i mean stable coin there will be questions asked of how stable coins work from a kyc and surveillance perspective that's actually not settled that's a big gray swan hang of the industry people don't really talk about much grace well i've never heard that term before i like that it's like a black swan but some of us know about it it's a known it's a known unknown not an unknown unknown got it yeah great cool like that uh what other gray swans are out there yeah gray swan give me your top five gray swans in crypto or just in general yeah yeah in general uh i only know about crypto so i'm gonna limit my okay that's fine tether is the top gray swan and crypto uh some kind of can you Can you explain that?

1:37:50We have some crypto investors and entrepreneurs in the audience, but I would say it's not the average. Why is Tether so sketchy? I know the answer, but I'll let you kind of explain. Yes. I mean, you know, they made they did some like, let's say, light accounting fraud in the past. You know, they were hacked for eight hundred and fifty million dollars. And then they are Bitfinex was a Bitfinex or Tether. Anyway, they co-mingled their balance sheets. There was like a weird ersatz promissory loan type thing. I mean, look, they're just an offshore dollar that serves people that want dollars on the blockchain in a kind of lightly surveilled way outside of the contours of the U.S.

1:38:34banking system. So, of course, they're going to be used by a lot of insalubrious people. That was always going to happen. And, you know, so the Wall Street Journal is always going to be digging up examples of kind of nasty criminal use. And there's only so much activity they can flag and freeze. So that's just that's really it. Obviously, the reserves have been questionable in the past. I think they're fine now. But they're fine because even if they got hacked for eight hundred and fifty million, they just make so much money that presumably they would be able to cover the hole in the balance sheet.

1:39:10Is that the idea? Well, that they could do today. Yeah. I mean, the reason the hack was they were forced into it because no U.S. bank would really serve them. So they had to use these sketchy banks and one of them scammed them, basically. So like the sketchiness, it like the fact that they've been sketchy is also kind of a function of the fact that the DOJ is like chasing them around. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're like forced to use some of the worst intermediaries on the planet, if that makes sense. Yeah. Now they've been able to legitimate themselves. Now they have Cantor Fitzgerald. They hold all the treasuries.

1:39:42Like, that's probably fine. But in the past, that's like the thing that people don't understand about Tether. The reason that they looked sketchy and they like wouldn't disclose what banks are using, whatever, they were untransparent, was kind of because they were playing this cat and mouse game with the U.S. government. That makes sense. Any other gray swans? Well, if Coinbase's custody setup gets hacked or anything happens, they custody hundreds of billions. they were really the main custodian for all the etfs that would be like absolutely catastrophic for the industry i don't expect it to happen but that's that'd be bad yeah is there i'm curious if you're looking at businesses uh there seems like some of the biggest opportunities in crypto outside of stable coins are just solving uh like the security problem right and the and the lack of you know once funds are on chain they can move around instantly right you know we saw that uh with um what's the firm that got hacked for 1.4 billion oh two weeks ago by bit we saw that with by bit right there's not a lot of recourse there um is there opportunities around security and this sort of broader sort of like fat finger issue we talked about this you know yesterday in the context of citibank you know accidentally uh sending you know they're constantly uh sending money around sort of not actually sending dollars but like these dollars are sort of appearing in client accounts uh are you looking at opportunities uh where software and can kind of like solve for that or is that just going to be kind of a ever-present sort of risk in the industry yeah so first of all yes cyber is actually one of our biggest investment themes on a go forward basis so we we think that we've really under invested in like security in the crypto space second of all what i think we should do is take crypto away from being a real-time gross settlement network or like a bearer asset a digital bearer asset and then make it more like the way that traditional finance works and i know like people like matt lafine are going to like make fun of me for saying that like oh you're just rebuilding traditional finance from scratch my answer to that is yes that's exactly what we're doing okay but instead of working with like fax machines or whatever and like weird file transfer protocols that predate the internet we're going to do it on a better substrate and we're going to introduce this amazing thing called deferred settlement where you don't sell the payment instantly and in so doing you obtain scalability and you can't obtain recourse and so if we're able to create like pull payments as opposed to push uh you know all crypto payments are pushed that solves a lot of this problem if we create a messaging layer alongside side, the settlement layer.

1:42:24You know, like that's what Swift is to wires, right? It's the messaging layer to the settlement layer. Yep. You know, all of these structures that are like make traditional payments work and be safe and have recourse. They just don't exist in crypto. It's so weird. Like if you were to examine the crypto market from first principles, you'd be like, this is garbage nonsense. I don't know how anybody uses it. I don't know how anybody trusts it. So So yeah, it's just a matter of making it more like traditional payments and finance. So that's the next chapter here. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it takes away from, you know, we built an alternative to traditional financial rails and we did it in, you know, I say the collective we, we did it in 15 years and it's moving hundreds of billions of dollars around the world and it's showing a lot of potential.

1:43:14And I think it's totally, I think your point of view and I share this view is it's okay. for just sort of making a better version of the sort of the legacy systems that are more internet native. So I love that point of view. Do you have anything else, John? This is great to have you. We'd love to have you as our resident cryptographer.

1:43:38I don't actually know any cryptography. Well, it sounds cool. And that's what this show is about. Cryptographer sounds like we're gonna have them on the show to like crack people's passwords it should be a fun segment yeah just don't ask me to explain it zk proof i can't do that i'm sorry it's impossible no one can actually did any of the did that dark forest game go anywhere people were pretty hyped on that for a while uh was that like a paradigm thing i don't know i i it was like a couple years ago uh it was zk proof powered uh like multiplayer online game and the in the map like the fog of war is cryptographically sealed so i can both open source installations we know we're not hacking it was kind of a cool idea in general crypto rule of thumb if you ask me did that crypto game go somewhere the answer is no and that's true 100 of the time it's never not been true yeah so there's the answer yeah what's interesting is that uh i mean did uh what was the thing you were talking about with gpt2 ai dungeon yeah i i haven't seen like we have gpt 4.5 now and i'm still not seeing like dungeon games ai generated games taking off i see a lot of demos of people building games with clawed code for example or cursor but i don't see a lot of people uh saying like this game is completely ai generated and it's a mobile game and we're printing millions of dollars and it's working it's like a business um it seems seems like somebody should have run with that or maybe they have and i just i'm not aware of it i don't know if you've seen anything like that i think ai dungeon was popular because people people could just like jailbreak the game and then just use it as a conventional lm pre-chat gpt but now you can just that's why it's so magical interesting yeah um but yeah maybe this is the new benchmark like can you make a good game with ai soup to nuts like that's what uh levels did right have you guys played his i haven't played it have you played it yeah yeah i've like i've i've spent like a weird amount of time playing play a lot that's great that's great there's a there's a pmf or die blimp ad yeah yeah there uh oh you guys sponsoring it uh pmf or die has a has like a blimp in the game i think they did some corrupt bargain or something and they did no i think patty patty uh one of the players was so excited that he just said i'm paying for this out of pocket oh wow that's great very cool well i think this answers is your question you can make a game with ai yeah it's just it it's a horrible like flash game from 2000s but it's hey you're playing it it's got your attention yeah you're addicted i know they got me it's a skinner box you can make a skinner box that's your he's a whale on on the uh on the peter on the peter game on the levels io flying flight simulator that's great it's a terrible game but it's fun you guys should get on there i will go i will go play it we'll see you in the we'll see you in the air next time we're on we'll all be playing at the same time see you see you in the metaverse yeah we'll see you later thank you for coming on nick it's great take care guys bye bye soon a lot of fun apparently levels is up to 58k mrr in about 14 days it's really ripping with this according to heskell in the chat that's pretty good it's it's funny because he has enough of an audience now that he can almost release anything and hit metrics like that is sort of potentially warping the actual PMF.

1:47:04Who knows? Do we got a couple of posts we can run through? Well, I mean, we're inviting a Sequoia investor on and you know, Sequoia is an investor in RAMP. So let's do a RAMP ad. There we go. Time is money saved. Both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. uh and uh what oh uh there was news about core weave they're buying weights and biases for 1.7 billion did you see this deal i saw that have you ever seen weights and biases before i've uh i used to watch these videos called two minute papers and they had this very interesting like professor who would have all these like funny turns of phrases and he would uh he would always say hold on to your papers whenever he saw some like ai breakthrough and he was like and he had a bunch of other like funny, funny like little phrases that everyone would like, he had a great community of like, uh, just, uh, giving you updates on like what the latest AI papers are.

1:47:59Uh, and, and weights and biases was like his main sponsor. And so that's where I know about them. Uh, so weights and biases, they have paid tools to start for$50 per month for professionals have attracted data scientists from various industries, including pharmaceuticals and medical imaging firms. It's more than 900 ,000 And users hail from companies, including OpenAI, Siemens, and Salesforce. And so Corwee is expected to IPO at a public market valuation north of$20 billion. But its concentrated customer base has prompted investors to debate how long the company's growth will continue. Weights and Biases competes with major cloud providers and other AI-focused firms, such as Databricks, Hugging Face, which sell similar tools to developers.

1:48:37Weights and Biases are common terms in the AI field. the revenue. The information couldn't figure out the revenue, but they raised at a billion dollar valuation in 2021 and then 1.25 billion slight up round in 2023. The company started in 2018 and previously raised 250 million in funding from investors, including KOTU Management, Insight Partners, and Felicis. I can never pronounce that. Felicis. Is that what it is? yeah i don't know i think you got it at the end well uh let's see about sean let's see it's 12 31 i'm here i'm here what's up boys amazing welcome to the what's going on i'm scared to pop on with you guys you guys are uh wittier wittier than me and uh that's unfair territory well oh i love the t-shirt counter strike i figured yeah i i i what what what what versions of counter strike did you play throughout the years so i i was unbelievably hardcore and yes i mean i played early but primarily 1.0 to 1.6 1.0 i started 1.3 i was through 1.6 i played multiple cal invite teams cali baby me too did you yeah yeah yeah like god's exiled angels gxa and then uh eek the elite knights for a while i was on a bunch of these teams i remember i remember dek i was i mean i'm probably older than you yeah on a team called http high tech performance one called neg did you ever go to the cpl of course i went i could never go i could never convince my parents to go because i was too young yeah we were like what are you doing lugging a CRT monitor out to Texas.

1:50:24No way. Exactly. In the Volvo station wagon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I, and I would go to a lot of tournaments in SoCal is the best. Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember going to a Best Buy, a tournament at Best Buy, and we played against this team called, what was it? It was, these guys made one of the, the protocols before a 3G, there were, there were two different wireless protocols. I forget what they were called. I mean, I think I can't remember the timing, like maybe 1G was primarily TMA, like the original time division multiplexing. That's right. It was primarily like CDMA. CDMA. Yeah. So we go up against these guys and their clan tag is CDMA.

1:51:07And we're like, why? What does that stand for? Like, it is like, you know, Counter-Strike, cool guys, you know, like everyone's name usually is like something, a reference to like the game. Oh, that's a good name. And their name was like this reference to this wireless protocol. And we were like, why did you name it that? And they're like, well, we're the guys that invented that. And like, we're the founders of the company or something that did something. And they absolutely destroyed us. They were really, really good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They were like Qualcomm engineers, basically. And so they destroy us.

1:51:35And then they felt so bad because we were like 13 years old that they gave us the prizes, which was great. so there was when i first started playing the best team in the world was called tso and they were based in seattle yeah um and they were like i i never met them because i was a little kid at the time but they were described as like yeah telecom engineers too but they were more on i think more on the infrastructure side like they like they would actually build the early fiber connections and stuff. And so, I mean, that was how you got an advantage back then. Like if you could figure out a better internet connection, you would have an, yeah, you would have an advantage every time you played.

1:52:17And so I got an F in algebra two in high school, but I, but I got a networking education through Counter-Strike. Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, well, I don't know. Are we live guys? We are live. We've been live. Uh, anyway, Sean McGuire's here partner. Yeah, we're live i'm so glad we didn't have like a zuck moment zuck was on rogan yeah and he was like pretend he was larping like he does like bow hunting oh yeah and like joe rogan started kind of pressing him on it like john's asking you like oh you got the counter-strike t-shirt and like you actually could like back it up but like of course like uh of course zuck like actually didn't have much substance behind it i'm sure he had it but no oh man we're live uh super excited to chat there's been yeah spacex elon companies that's what we want to dive into yeah first of all uh We are a show built on X.

1:53:03Take a little victory lap on X. You invested in Take Private. $800 million, guys. And no victory laps until it's exited in liquid. But there has been some saving of democracy that's been happening. No, and the bigger thing is, you know, I think around six months ago, there had been, you know, legacy media like The Washington Post basically reporting coming out and saying Sequoia Capital and listing out all the investors have lost$20 billion dollars on this investment now that obviously wasn't you know true it wasn't uh it had been i think marked down internally and some of the other asset managers had but it was more so to kind of reprice it for employees and uh you know it's very clear that the in many ways uh there's two things happening right now one uh people that used to be active on twitter that are less active now they message us and they say like i'm sure this guy's social yeah yeah um but i i think the app has never been better yeah and it's very clear that it's here to stay so I just wanted to give you a little bit of credit there you never lost conviction I mean no on that I never lost conviction a lot of people did and I think that I people people are very susceptible to believing what they're told and I think if you believed what you were told by the media then you could understand oh it's dead but if you use your own eyes it's like the whole thing is operating no major outages elon at the helm product innovation happening and like lowering costs i i honestly found that to be one of the more interesting like cultural mass hysteria moments that i've lived through uh and that was just so easily disprovable in like a short period of time but you know yeah I'm glad it I'm glad you only had to wait a couple years it would have been more excruciating if it if it had taken much longer to get in a repriced what there's so many different things we want to run through today I'd love to get your you know and we run through your guys style like guys so well dress well we had to come out the gates we were calling ourselves you know uh we tech tech bro is sort of derogatory we were the technology brothers we need to kind of reclaim it elevate it and part of that was was dressing uh dressing nice but you've had your sort of uh hands across the whole sort of uh elon empire obviously have a relationship uh with elon i kind of want to go company by company and just kind of get your take on them uh right now i think Tesla is very interesting.

1:55:44It's not a pure play humanoid bet, but it does feel like humanoids are the next platform for Tesla, especially when you look at sort of generalized EV sales for Tesla have not been performing great. Talk about kind of the humanoid market. I'm sure you've gotten pitched by a lot of these companies. I'm guessing you're still a Tesla shareholder, but talk to us about that category because it seems to have everybody's attention for good reason. so let me first of all i work at a registered investment advisor none of it is financial advice is my own entertainment and also not the opinion of sequoia capitals is all yes the dumb individual sean mcguire as a poster nonsense um and also we're not investors in tesla just given the timing and that it was public we're you know major investors in spacex invested boring company investors in x investors in xdi um and i love all those companies and very optimistic about all of them on humanoids um look i i strongly believe it's gonna be a real thing and a giant thing i think the only question is like the time frame for when this happens i don't think it's a it's an if, I think it's a when, I really struggle to make a forecast there, in part because there's such a complex supply chain and there's just so many different subcomponents from, you know.

1:57:19My partner, Constantine, has spent a lot of time thinking about rare earth metals and getting different rare earth for making magnets all the way to scale. know like scaling manufacturing to you know like every just every individual sensor every actuator like i really just don't know the scaling of it but i was at the tesla optimus event i can't remember when maybe you know months ago or whatever and it was more impressive in person than i think people realized online. I was just standing there in the street. It was at some studio in LA. And you're just standing there. And all of a sudden, like 20 robots started walking out from behind a curtain, like right next to me.

1:58:15And I think it's one thing when you just like see a robot video. It's another thing when you see like a tethered robot demo to see 20 untethered robots walking in like a progression and I genuinely couldn't tell at first if it was human in a costume or a robot and I had to like figure out how do I verify because it's about the same size and they were maybe 20 feet away when they first started coming out and so I was like scanning down the whole thing and then you look at the waist and the waist was very narrow it's like, holy crap, you know, that really is a robot just walking. And they were out there for about two hours interacting with the crowd.

1:58:58And like, even if there was like some human control for safety reasons and all of that, the vast majority of actuation and all that was autonomous, you know, meaning like the whenever you have multiple actuators you get feedback loops of you know all these things and like you can't no human can can like put out handle all the like feedback loops intuitively and so you need controllers that smooth out all the noise and like can map whether it's like a computer brain that's telling you the goal or a human telling you the goal mapping it's It's almost like with computers, how you take raw electronic signal in transistors and then there's like, you have very, very low level programming, and then you have assembly, you have firmware, you have operating system, you have higher level systems, you have all these things up to queue.

2:00:04It's like everything other than maybe the final operating system level was everything else was basically autonomous. And it was just, it was insanely impressive. And so it's just, it really gave me the sense of the stuff that's coming soon. I just don't know exactly when. And I, look, I think that for Elon, he is playing all the different angles of AI from, you know, foundation model with XAI to, to robots, which I think will be like the ultimate embodiment of like the combination of if you have AGI plus a robot, that's what lets you do kind of unlimited amounts of physical work in the real world.

2:00:48The foundation model lets you do kind of unlimited just knowledge work. And then, you know, Neuralink lets you merge with the AI. If we actually get like AGI that's way smarter than us, maybe existential for humans. But if you, you know, if we have neural link, we can merge, uh, just put the AGI in your own head. And now you're, you know, an enhanced human. Um, you know, we're back to playing counter-strike me and you are going to be piloting Tesla optimist robots against each other, uh, shooting each other. Like no human can beat the chess systems, but it's still fun to play chess. You still have Magnus, you know, Heroku or whatever his name is.

2:01:35you know, we're still going to be tearing each other up at the LAN. And I think we'll be doing more of that with AGI. Do you think it's a good time for me to put a deposit down on a Tesla Roadster? I think Elon might deliver it. I think we've been waiting, but all the pieces are falling into place. I think it's going to be an epic car when it drops. What do you think? I actually have to be careful around any public company. Okay, sure, sure. No comments on any - I just want to know with the car. Yeah, let's move on. So let's talk some of your recent investments. So talk to us about Reflect Orbital.

2:02:11That round got announced last year. Very exciting company. I would love to hear it in your words and then a little bit more about your investment thesis. And I'll stop there. No, I love it. So for anyone that doesn't know, Reflect Orbital is an absolutely insane idea where they want to eventually have a constellation of satellites that reflect sunlight back down to the earth with kind of two phases of the business. The first phase is lighting applications. And that's everything from like, imagine the LA fires, you know, firefighters operating at night, couldn't see anything. It's genuinely really difficult to fight a fire at night and be able to just like put sunlight and let these guys operate almost in daylight um you know say in a disaster when there's a hurricane like the hurricane in north carolina or you know anywhere there's lighting or like let's say you're doing a giant construction project um somewhere like away from the city that the lighting costs on these projects are insane um and so basically let you extend the hours, especially like in Northern latitudes, let you actually do construction more year round.

2:03:31But the longer term market is energy. And I'll come back to the thesis and why I was willing to make this investment in a second. But basically, the real, the crazy big business someday is extending the useful time of solar power plants by a few hours a day. You know, so it depends on the latitude and time of year, but like a solar farm will, you know, operate for with like decent efficiency, call it 10 hours a day on average, something like that. And by having this reflector ring that basically lives kind of the satellite is a ring that the constellation is a ring that basically only lives at the interface of sunrise and sunset all the time like just the the light dark boundary and you can basically extend the very high efficiency time of a solar farm by you know call it two hours before sunrise and two hours after sunset with this constellation um so anyways insane idea i i have been involved in the space community for i mean officially for over 15 years unofficially for most of my life i've been obsessed with space since i was a little kid um like literally obsessed i can show you guys a sick ass video from i think like sixth grade where i did this thing called satellite amateur radio experiment SARX, which was this NASA program, sick retro 90s video where we learned ham radio and talked to astronauts aboard one of the shuttle missions.

2:05:19Using ham radio, I got to ask a question in sixth grade. It was pretty fun. But I've been obsessed with space my whole life. I've been skeptical on basically every space business model I've ever seen. um the reflect guys there's a few things one i just profoundly believe that the launch costs launch costs plus a bit like mass to orbit over the next five years or so is going to increase the costs are going to drop dramatically and mass orbit's going to increase dramatically basically guaranteed spacex is driving this if you look at the mass to orbit curves from the last five years. It's incredible how much more mass to orbit we're doing every year because of SpaceX.

2:06:04The cost hasn't dropped as much, but I am very confident it will with Starship. And so we're getting to the point where you don't want to start making space investments once all of that has already happened. Then you're late and it's competitive. You want to be a little bit ahead of the curve. So I think we're at a point right now where for like the right businesses, it makes sense to be building them right now. So you can actually be alive and be scaling a little bit as we hit, like, you know, you can ride with the cost and mass curve. For what it's worth, I passed on Varda early on. Obviously, you guys are very close to Delian.

2:06:46I love Dellian. I think I should have done the investment.

2:06:54And I'll tie it to reflect in a second. But with Varda, in my opinion, in the seed pitch, I think they had the wrong micro idea, but the right macro idea. And it was my mistake for wanting both the right micro and the right macro. And to unpack that, like Waddellion, the first product that they wanted to do was ZBLAN. It's like this ultra pure fiber optic cables that are really good for very long range communications. To me, I just don't think that's a very important product. And I actually think that with Starlink, we're going to need very little like ZBLAN in the future. Almost all long range data movements in the future is going to be done via Starlink.

2:07:44In my opinion, I think Starlink has like a 10x plus cost advantage per gigabyte for long haul data transmission compared to, say, putting a fiber optic cable line under the ocean. And that's where you actually get a benefit from something like ZBLAN. And so anyways, Delia and I love to argue with each other. Super smart guy. That's the one where I had been so involved in space for so long that I already had a thesis on ZB Land and already thought it was like irrelevant with Starlink and kind of passed because of that. But the macro, I think, was 100 percent right. It was just like we're at the right time in space and just building a cracked team of space engineers that know how to get things in and out of space.

2:08:26Like, I think that will be very valuable. And I think it's like hard to imagine what Varda's revenue driving product will be in five to 10 years. But I think they will have a successful product. I just can't tell you what it will be. So anyways, back to reflect, like I've met with so many space teams in the past. And these guys just they're just insanely good. And they know they and they have like a real, even though it's such a crazy idea, I think that the best businesses in history oftentimes sounded like insane ideas early on. You know, Sequoia was a seed investor in Airbnb. The like hearing the stories of how people thought about Airbnb in the beginning, like it's crazy.

2:09:19People were like, I would never share my, you know, house with a stranger. They're going to trash it. They're going to, you know, use all my toilet paper, whatever people's issues were. But lo and behold, like it worked. And Sequoia, we, you know, made a huge amount of money from this and they couldn't even raise the seed round. You know, if you look at SpaceX, when Elon started it, everyone thought it was insane. Like you're a internet entrepreneur is going to build a rocket company. Isn't there a NASA for that? I just, there's, I think so many of the best businesses in history really sounded insane.

2:09:57But for reflect, I think, I think they have, if you really go through the details and I think very few people have actually gone through the details, like they have unbelievable macro tailwind. So one is like just dropping launch costs. Second is, I don't think you could have done this business 10 years ago, even if the launch was there, because we haven't yet built enough solar power plants on the ground. Something that's nice to reflect is we don't have to build any of the ground infrastructure. Zero. There's already, you know, 10 ,000 solar power plants. We get to leverage that. Anyways, you go.

2:10:34Is the idea that Reflect would take basically a rev share on the incremental sort of energy generated that they are directing at these farms? And is that why? Yeah, exactly right. So basically, like for one of these solar farms, there is almost no additional operating expense to operate for these extra, call it four hours throughout the day. It's literally just like silicon photovoltaics sitting on the ground that is otherwise just not generating power. And so it's like either they get no revenue from this or if they work with us, then they get revenue. And it actually has very profound ramifications to the kind of financial engineering of running a solar farm.

2:11:22A lot of these utility style infrastructure projects, you basically juice it where you use debt to build the solar farm. And your revenue, if we call it the first 15 years, is just paying off all the debt you have. And then years 15 to 30 is a lot of profit. But it takes a long time to get to the point where you've paid off a lot of the loan and it's generating lots of profit. if you can increase the useful time by 40 % or whatever of a solar farm, that's all profit upfront. It's insanely valuable. And so it's like an incredibly easy sale. It's one of these things like if you build it, they will come and they will come in droves.

2:12:08But the point is this company would have made zero cents before there were 10 ,000 solar farms on the ground because we couldn't build those ourselves. it'd be too expensive but now that they're there we have just this very clear value prop and i and like i i think these guys actually know how to build the satellites needed and anyways it's an easy idea to shit on and it may not work you know like the but i believe in taking risk and i think these guys what i'm excited for i want to sit outside at night have set up our podcast set you come over and the sun just appears and we we do the uh you know the first podcast under Space Sunlight.

2:12:49I love it. Question for you. I think, you know, it's easy to see why SpaceX is a multi-hundred billion dollar company. In many ways, it feels cheap at times being the sort of toll road to space. At the same time, how do you advise, is there sort of any type of fear among founders that are building, you know, spacefaring startups that what if SpaceX does this, right? So you're benefiting from the sort of decreased launch costs, but at the same time, there's this risk that somebody that, you know, can, can has even more access to the, to space can, can sort of enter that market. How do you think about that risk?

2:13:36Well, I think that, I think that Elon has probably the biggest target on his back from a regulatory perspective of anyone. and there's no one I'm aware of who takes like antitrust and all that more seriously than him and like I I think that those guys are gonna like they're just building the best launch platform in the world and they probably will launch some other business like obviously they launched Starlink but I think there's also a fixation on on Mars that's sort of helpful right it's like it's actually great that the attention is going there and there's plenty of opportunity in sort of low earth orbit for the rest of us.

2:14:24Yeah. So I think that's a great point. Look, I think SpaceX is deeply incentivized to have a giant ecosystem of lots of great independent companies in space. And I think especially in LEO and yeah, you're right. I in addition to Starlink, which is already operating and scaling. And on Mars, I'll just say, I was... I mean, I've always thought just from an intellectual perspective, it's the coolest thing ever to build a city on Mars. But when I wrote my initial SpaceX investment memo, I was like, yeah, I don't really understand Mars from a business perspective, but I think this is going to be such a great company.

2:15:10Irrespective of it, that it's fine. like it's a side quest yeah business perspective i am now at the point where i actually i i really believe that mars is going to be like one of the biggest profit generating endeavors in history and not necessarily not like from the direct like building a city on mars but from all the indirect things and i'm sure you guys remember all the myths about or you know all the stories about nasa in the 60s and 70s all the spin-off technology microwaves materials and all these different things um i think the spin-off technologies from having a clear goal of building a self-sustaining city on mars which will have about a million people or whatever in 30 years the spin-off technology is going to lead to it's basically probably going to have to make sure that nuclear power plants in a box get built that are very safe and reliable and you can transport in space.

2:16:04It's going to have to perfect vertical farming. You're going to have to perfect surgical robots. You're going to have to, or just have optimists do it. But there's so many things. You're going to have to make fabs that you can assemble in space that can remake whatever leading edge silicon you need. You're going to have to do mining. I think all the second order effect spin out businesses that are going to come from this are going to be outrageously valuable. And there's something about when you have a clear goal and all the constraints of like being in Mars. One, it lets you recruit the best people in the world because it's such a cool project and the best people will do more than the second, like a level below.

2:16:51And the second is just having all these constraints forces you to come up with solutions you would never come up with otherwise. And those are oftentimes better solutions. So anyways, I think we're going to, I think the company is going to rip. We have one more minute. I want some advice for new entrepreneurs. New grad wants to work with you, wants to work with Sequoia, wants to start a company at some point. What are you telling them? You had a little bit of an uncommon path, PhD, DARPA, all these things. What do you, what do you recommend for new grads going into entrepreneurship in the age of AI, in the age of Mars colonization?

2:17:28I mean, look, it's not what people want to hear, but I think that if you don't have a very, very clear idea, don't start a company just for the sake of starting a company. Go join SpaceX or go join XAI or Tesla or go join Varda. Go join some amazing company for a year or two. I strongly think that's better than just like trying to start a company for the sake of starting a company um and then when you do like when you do have an idea for a company don't listen to what other people tell you even even me even like vcs you got it you got to kind of think for yourself and a lot of the best ideas seem crazy great place to end great place to end you are a new resident space brother.

2:18:19Thank you. Great having you. This is fantastic. Nothing makes me happy than being your guy's brother. Music for my ears. Peace. Welcome. Welcome to the brotherhood. Amazing. Thanks for coming on. We're going to play Counter-Strike someday. We should. We should. Let's have a late party. Mid-pod. Yeah. Awesome. Have a good one. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having you. Fantastic. I got a call right now. Yeah, we got to wrap up. This was a fantastic show. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Tune in tomorrow. We're doing more call-ins. We're going to do more timeline, more deep dives.

2:18:49We're just doing more of everything. That's the theme of this year. More and better and more and better and more and better and more and better. Moss. So it's the Live Moss Lifestyle. It's the Live Moss Lifestyle. Yes. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Talk to you soon.