Synthetic Humanoids, Quantum Chip Breakthrough, Nikola is Cooked, Salesforce vs Microsoft

33:44This property makes them ideal for storing quantum information in a way that's naturally protected from certain errors. Picture it like this. Think of a regular qubit as a spinning coin that's easily knocked over by a breeze. A topological qubit is more like a knot tied in a rope. No matter how much you shake it, the knot stays secure. Interesting metaphor from Grok. Microsoft achieves this by using a topo conductor, a material that combines the properties of a conductor and a topological insulator. This setup allows them to create and manipulate major on a particles forming stable qubits. Why is this a bigger deal?

34:15Well more stable more stability faster progress and Microsoft is super committed to this They've been researching this for 20 years and they've had a bunch of say That's the kind of stuff like I want to see the 20 years of research and then boom boom we're gonna commercialize Yeah, and so they actually had some setbacks In 2018 they published a paper on quantum computing and they had to retract it Yeah, because this the put there was so much pushback from the scientific community And so the article highlights potential applications. They're going to work on self-healing materials, sustainable agriculture, safer chemical discovery.

34:46And going forward, they still have to scale up. Going from eight qubits to a million is a massive engineering challenge. It's not just about adding more qubits. They all need to work flawlessly. We're focused on doubling here. Yep. They're focused on going eight to a million. But all the best projects are. But let's go to Nature. So I believe Microsoft published their paper in Nature. And there was some pushback. And I have an article here from Nature that will kind of show, you know, a little bit of truth zone on Microsoft claims. We'll see if we agree with it or not. We'll let you be the judge.

35:22So he says, Microsoft claims quantum computing breakthrough, but some physicists are skeptical. The tech giant aims to make topological quantum computers that will reach useful scales faster than competing technologies. and so machines based on topology promise to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies so again it's not that they've built the million qubit machine yet they're just saying hey the tech tree has been going this direction and we think if we go in this direction it'll be a faster shortcut to the quantum computer that we want that will actually be able to like you know simulate the universe essentially like the the qubit the whole thing with quantum computing is that like you can do such complex like you can break encryption but you can do such hard computing problems that you can actually like instead of just physically like modeling like the pen dropping and and it's like the pen has a weight and it and there's like a force it's like you can model each atom in the pen and and it's like yeah no problem like sure that even though that would be like that's good boss insane amount of calculations so the announcement came in a february 19th press release containing few technical details, but Microsoft said it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research center in Santa Barbara, California.

36:36Would I bet my life that they're seeing what they think they're seeing? No, but it looks pretty good, says Stephen Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was briefed on the results. It's got to be such a crazy dynamic doing this frontier research in a space like quantum computing. And any day you don't know if you're going to wake up and your nemesis is going to like publish this sort of groundbreaking piece and then you have to sort of react to it but you got to be like somewhat supportive because you want to you you ideally want the space to be pushing forward and getting more investment yep but then simultaneously there you know you want to be the guy that like has like the the breakthrough that really matters yep so he's like yeah like it seems seems legit yeah wouldn't bet my life on it yeah you know and so uh i say at At the same time, the company published intermediate results, but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits.

37:30And so big question on what was on that chip. Because it's kind of the classic, like, there and I got the thing and who knows if it's working and it's not working. And it's like, why did you instantiate in the physical world? But clearly from a marketing perspective, the reason that you say, like, I'm showing you the iPhone is because, like, it's real and you can buy it. and like Steve Jobs pulled it out of his pocket and was like, this is a real thing. You wouldn't, you won't believe it. Beth brings a chip around. Yeah, Beth Jezos does this too. I think Beth Jezos is in one of these tweet threads being like, why is this a big deal?

38:03Like, I don't care about this. It's heating up. But I mean, in the markets generally, quantum computing has become very hot. There's a lot of SPACs that were down and now they're popping again. And so I'm sure we're going to be hearing more about this. The very interesting thing is that most of the techno optimists, really smart people - Yeah, I'm going to pull up on public. Like what was the - Look up Rigetti computing. Rigetti. I think that's probably a good one. D-Wave, I think as well. But it's very interesting because you can look at all of this. It's like one of those things where people overestimate what can be done in a decade and underestimate what can be done in a century or overestimate what can be done in a year or underestimate what can be done in a decade.

38:40Yeah, Rigetti's all over the place. They're up 16 % this month, but it's been up 700 % the past quarter. Oh yeah, I told you. Yeah, 10x. So what's the market cap now? They're 2.68 billion. Wow. Losing 60 million a year on 11 million of revenue. Yeah. I mean, they can't possibly have revenue because they haven't created a quantum computer. No, no one has. It's not like there's no work to be done. It's a research organization now, but you're betting that they will be one to commercialize. And if they do, it'll be extremely valuable. So good luck to them. Wait. What you got? Somehow up. Yeah. I misread.

39:20Right. It's 960 % over the past quarter. So it's 10X over the last quarter. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Not bad. So it's a$270 million company and now it's a$2 billion company. Hopefully other companies, Satya sees this and says, okay, this is a new bar now. I need a 10X Microsoft in the next quarter. Let's go. What would you have to announce? You would have to announce we solve quantum computing. But I mean, to my earlier point, a lot of really smart tech people that I talk to do say, yes, like this is the century where we will solve quantum computing. It's going to take a long time, probably longer than we estimate.

39:53It's hard to, hard to exactly, you know, uh, you know, forecast it out. But when we do, it will result in crazy, crazy new abilities. Um, and, uh, yeah, one, one, one guy I was talking to, a very successful founder was like, so million qubit, uh, you know, quantum computer by 2040, 2050, uh, talking to somebody else. And then it was like, yeah maybe and he's like so dyson sphere by 2100 uh and it was like yeah that sounds about right and it was like so casual but i was like that sounds crazy but also like that things are really accelerating and we're building crazy stuff like you know you think about a hundred years before we can talk to the computer now yeah a hundred years ago we didn't have computers at all yeah nothing yeah it was like you know it was like trains are cool a hundred years ago yeah Yeah.

40:42Trains are still cool. Trains are still cool, but we don't need more of them. We don't need more of them, but yeah. Well, let's go through other interesting hard tech demos that kind of went off the rails and landed one guy, I think in jail. We're moving to Nikola and we have a chart here from the stock is all over the place. The market cap is at 40 million. They declared chapter 11 bankruptcy today they were in the wall street journal and so uh it's interesting it's interesting that there's somebody out there that's still buying nicola shares today because it's still they declared bankruptcy but obviously you can still trade it yeah so somebody out there is watching some like slop youtube video of like nicola being the future and they're like oh this company seems really cool a lot of slob um yeah but at their peak they were in the multiple billions market cap and they've dropped significantly uh let's give a little bit of an overview they popped so in in june of 2020 yeah a few months after the pandemic started they went public at at uh around 20 20 20 billion 20 billion but they put they didn't go public they didn't expect so they expect that's crazy normally like four billion dollar companies and this is five times yeah but the but think about the the pop on on so many i know i know looks like a meme coin chart it really does look like a meme coin chart uh and and it had about as much tech as a as a meme as a meme coin yeah and what a silly name it's like tesla already exists let's make a company called nicola clearly people will think it's literally meme coin it's like how there was like uh you know there's trump coin and then there's melania coin it's like oh like let's just joe boden and kamala harris or whatever hillary clinton coin or whatever uh or even after doge coin.

42:33They were like cat coins. And, uh, you know, they were like the monkeys and the dogs and then the owls and all sorts of stuff. Uh, people know when there's attention, just farm a little bit, sneak a little bit off the side, proven, proven, uh, path. So this story starts back in 2009. Uh, Trevor Milton, the CEO of Nicola, uh, he had a project called D hybrid for swift transportation. It fails amid accusations of misused funds, hinting at future deception. In 2014, he founds the Nikola Motor Company after selling dehybrid, touting revolutionary hydrogen electric trucks with hefty seed investments.

43:122016, the Nikola One truck is announced with claims of thousands of reservations and technology years ahead of its competition. What was the Nikola One truck? Was it actually like a commercial? I think it was a semi, like an 18-wheeler type truck. I don't know. yeah and it's so funny because the strategy of saying hey we have this uh you can reserve it for either no dollars or a hundred dollars remember the cyber truck it was like a hundred bucks yeah like i had numerous friends who were like oh yeah i threw a hundred bucks because the novelty of being able to say like yeah yeah i pre-ordered versus the roadster i think you have to put down like 50k yeah which is like a wildly different bar yeah but for that buyer it's you know true but but like they hadn't announced pricing so i guarantee there'd be there's like a massive price elasticity to uh to you know electric car pre-order deposits so if the roadster was a hundred buck down a hundred bucks down and they were like hey maybe it'll cost 50 bucks and it'll be better than a turbo s like people would definitely be jumping in 50k yeah hey maybe it'll be 50k and you only have to put 100 bucks down now like even if it came out of 200 later people would pre-sell a ton um which could be good for just establishing demand but i don't know and just for context i think uh like to to put in some of these like pre-orders like i think the humane pin even at their price point got like 7 000 pre-orders so like they couldn't even get pre-orders based on a device that didn't actually you know the humane device didn't work reliably yeah but uh anyways It's back to trucks.

44:49Okay, so December 2016, they unveiled the Nikola 1 prototype. Despite obvious signs, it was not fully functional, i.e. visible external power cables. So people are like, wait a minute, there's a cable coming out of this car. You haven't untethered this thing. And in January of 2018, that's a year later. It's funny because it actually wouldn't be that damning if they were like, hey, we're going to make the car roll uphill. because then you could say, well, we don't have the battery set up yet, but we have it connected to basically an extension cord. It's like a vacuum. And then we're going to get the engines going.

45:26Now we're going to get the motors working now, but instead they put it in motion two years later. Yeah. Yeah. A year and two months. Yeah. So they do the rolling truck video. A promotional video shows the truck quote unquote in motion, but it was later revealed to have been rolled downhill to simulate. They actually towed it to the top with a tow truck and then rolled it down. What's funny is like, is like, I'm sure if you're building a car, there is a process where you go from like, we're in the clay, you know, the clay, like where they carve out the design. Then it's like, Hey, we have CAD designs.

45:59Hey, we, Hey, we Matt, we fabricated like the external shell. Yeah. Hey, we, we fabricated like the, the, the wheels and the transmission and the axles enough that it actually moves. And that could have been just a cool thing if they didn't lie about it. and then like look yeah it's not actually working yet but we got it rolling at least it's just funny because you presumably could have got the rolling truck video in the first month oh yeah by just building out the frame putting wheels on it yeah you know getting i mean there are like kit car guys that can do that in their like garage on the weekend there's some great there's some great videos of people making like like things that look like porsches that are just totally fake yeah you've seen the uh the the uh for the fiero the pontiac fiero people put body kits on that to make it look like a contash because it was a mid-engine sports car from the 80s by pontiac but it's like you know 10 10k or something so you can just mod it like crazy uh this is hilarious in may of 2018 they sue tesla for two billion dollars over design features an action scene is both bold and bizarre just like the company that the company that names themselves after a derivative of tesla then goes back and sues tesla yeah it's like you'd think you'd be getting sued bold and bizarre egregious uh honestly the whole thing the whole thing nicola bold and bizarre both to boost credibility they refund all pre-ordered deposits despite not having delivered a product probably just because they raised some money off of the off of the off of the pre-orders and they didn't want the pressure from the consumers uh april 2019 nicola world spectacle spectacle is just not a good name for anything a lavish event unveils multiple prototypes and secures a high profile order from anheuser-busch so they're they're you know they're deal guys they're making deals happen i guess uh but rough milton purchases a 32 million dollar Utah ranch and public offers proposing a Tesla pickup design draw increased scrutiny.

48:06And so by November of 2019, people are getting real suspicious of this guy. He's suing Tesla, launching these weird truck videos, or they're kind of fake. And then also - He's proposing the guy who was just suing them for$2 billion is now giving them design saying, hey, Tesla, you guys should make this. Yeah. Wild. Hilarious. Kind of gangster. Do you see the next one? The Nicola Badger. You want to read this? February 2020. So this is a few months before they SPAC. The company unveils the Nicola Badger pickup with over-the-top features, including a built-in water fountain from fuel cell exhaust.

48:45Can you imagine? I mean, as a father, I do like trucks. Yeah. I mean, you're in the filtered water game, Jordy. Why not put that in the car? Yeah, as a water fanatic. Yeah. maybe we need to hook the aurora up to the exhaust of the the cooling of the turbo it's funny this truck looks like i've got it pulled up right now it looks like a complete knockoff of the tundra meets a trx sure uh and uh a water fountain using the the dispensed fuel is pretty cool so funny uh but but again great viral story little feature and you know to be fair like the cyber truck and other Tesla products have had similar things like that.

49:25Like the model X has the goal wing doors that are like total showstoppers. And it's like, you could just do minivan doors on those, but actually more attention. So yeah, you could do the minivan doors. The, uh, the, the one thing about minivan door, I mean, all these types of doors having kids, I got, I got a Mercedes van because I realized being able to just sit, stand and just put the kids straight in, put the kids straight in with the seats. But then the doors are always kind of worried. Like, are they going to get yep anyways i i thought that was very smart elon has always been able to thread the needle and the tesla team around yeah novelty and and actual and use function utility totally because like think about one by wire another fire truck is very gimmicky but it's also amazing because you're in this huge truck and you just move your hand like two inches and you're turning and then tesla also does like the the novelty of oh we're gonna make like a fart sound effect yeah car and totally um nicola could never no no never so june 2020 uh the frenzy begins nicola goes public via a spac skyrocketing value despite having zero revenue as investors buy into the hype so immediately uh can see on public goes you know basically pumps to 20 billion dollars and then just uh drops basically every single day for the next uh five years i'm sure they had I gotta look.

50:45They had some bounces at different points. Our boy gets mentioned here. Who's that? Hindenburg. Anyways, so in September 2020, they had SPACed in March or June, sorry. So just a few months later, GM announces an 11 % stake. So they take a position in this public company and plans to manufacture Nikola trucks only for Hindenburg Research to expose a series of deceptive claims. so terrible look for gm uh sounds like they didn't do a lot of technical due diligence first they saw they went and visited the ranch in utah and they were like this ranch is awesome the tech must hang out with this guy the tech must be great shortly after milton resigns amid mounting evidence of fraud and the gm deal is dressed dramatically scaled back um yeah i'm sure they still like had their position you know uh hopefully um and then at that point like this is so long ago, like a little under five years ago.

51:45And so there's all this legal fallout, July 2021, still like the absolute top of the market. Milton is indicted on multiple fraud charges in October, 2022. He's found guilty and sentenced to prison with hefty fines. They're clearly clawing back. Um, you know, I'm sure a lot of, I'm sure he did various transactions over time, uh, that he benefited from personally. Nicholas settles with the SEC for$125 million over misleading investors. So they had raised, I'm sure, billions of dollars through their public offering. And then in February 2025, today, with production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished reputation, Nikola files for Chapter 11.

52:24So anyways, wish the story had a better ending. But it's honestly, in some ways, amazing that they are made it so far, even after their founder, you know, went was out of the picture. It's crazy on public. They have, there's been$27 million of volume today. Whoa. So is this, I'm trying to understand who's buying the stock at this point. Do they feel that, I mean, who knows, right? I just. It's so bizarre. I mean, this is just such an interesting company because I... They still are loaded up with debt. Similar to Theranos. Similar to Theranos. This is one of those companies that I feel like was like an open secret in Silicon Valley that everyone knew that this was fake.

53:16There was never a moment where people were like, oh, maybe this will work out. It wasn't like Tesla was losing engineers to Nikola. That never happened. And also, there were never VC funds piling into this. I just pulled up Crunchbase and it was the U.S. Department of Energy, CNH Industrial, General Motors, California Transportation Commission. So like the guy was clearly just really good at rizzing like non-financial investors who don't do this stuff. And I'm sure that if this founder had walked into like a Holy Trinity firm and tried to pitch this, they would have gotten laughed at. At this time, the other car manufacturers didn't really have a strong EV strategy.

53:59It did make sense from a narrative standpoint that there would be a commercial, you know, commercial focused version of Tesla focused on trucking. Everybody knew that Tesla would eventually do this, but it wasn't a priority for them. Right. And so from a narrative, it all made sense. That doesn't mean that they can actually execute on that narrative and capture value based on that long term trend. And who knows? I know Amazon has EVs now, but it doesn't seem like EVs have gotten that sort of widespread commercial. They haven't had the level of traction that EVs have had in the commercial market.

54:34So Milton is indicted the CEO on multiple fraud charges. This is around 2021, 2022. And in October 2022, he is found guilty and sentenced to prison with heavy fines. Nicholas settles with the SEC for$125 million over misleading investors. And just now, the reason we're covering it today is that it's basically the end of the road with production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished reputation they filed for bankruptcy. He's going to be out of prison in 2027. Let's get him on the show.

55:12I mean, maybe, you know, this is another thing. We believe in redemptive justice, right? Yes. And if he does his time, the main thing is I want to see some banger deep tech analysis. I want him to come out with some ground. I want him to hit the books while he's in the clink. I want him to be the Dylan Patel of the commercial EV space. Yeah. Handwrite analysis on happenings. Prove that you're the real deal. Yeah. Not just a charlatan. Come out with some groundbreaking research. Show me that you've at least read every book about battery cell technology. He's 42, so he's not even going to be 50 when he gets out.

55:50He was born in 1982. He'll be great. A little bump in the road. Get him back in the game. Get back in action. Yeah. I love a comeback story. America loves a comeback story. Let's see. So another green energy unicorn died Wednesday as Nikola Korp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The 11-year-old EV maker aspired to be the Tesla of trucks. They went public through a SPAC. They benefited from the Green New Deal. That's a$27 billion market valuation at the time that was greater than Ford's. What a coincidence. Wow. Lots of people trying to take a shot at Ford's. Ford gets, I mean. Ford's Lindy. They're going to be around longer than all these companies.

56:35If Ford had a Satya, that is a$100 billion company. For a while, there was a grandson of Henry Ford running the company, Bill Ford, which was awesome because their tagline was built Ford Tough. And his name was Bill Ford, Bill Ford Tough. I love Ford as a first name. Oh, it's great. It's on our list for the next son, Ford Hayes. That's a good sounding name. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to see Ford make a comeback. I had a Ford Explorer at one point. That was a great car. The Expeditions, fantastic. uh for gt fantastic mustang also great you know these are great cars but let's bring them back uh supposedly sophisticated investors were taken in by its marketing hype general motors took the 11 stake which ceo mary barra hailed as an industry leading disruptor uh it was supposedly sophisticated uh it was just it was disruptive in a different way they posted a video on twitter of its model truck appearing to power effortlessly down a flat road with the caption the nicola hydrogen electric trucks will take on any semi-truck and outperform them in every category weight acceleration stopping safety and features all with 500 to a thousand mile range it would that would be revolutionary if true it wasn't according to a 2021 federal fraud indictment of founder trevor milton an inoperable prototype was towed to the top of the hill then nickel employees released the brake so it looked like it was cruising along all while the door was taped shut to keep it from falling off and its batteries were removed to prevent the truck from catching fire rough after taking investors from a ride uh mr milton was the only ride they they actually went on good writing good writing good pun journalists are underrated underrated bloomberg or they're not who is this this is wall street journal opinion section it's great uh california regulators and the biden administration tried to boost the electric truck market with mandates and subsidies.

58:34The Inflation Reduction Act included a$40 ,000 tax credit for buyers of electric trucks. EPA rule last spring requires that electric truck models make up 25 % of long-haul tractor sales by 2032. Man, talk about a bull case for Tesla now. It's crazy. Another electric truck maker, Lordstown Motors, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Fisker failed last June. Rough time. The British electric bus startup Arrival sold its assets. lots of bad stuff going on in the ev truck market power law rules everything around me that's the story here anyway great opportunity though for one of our our listeners to become a hero come in pull them out of chapter 11 yeah run it back up to the top yep you're definitely going to get it you know you could this could be turn it into a meme coin turn it into a meme coin yeah and we were saying earlier actually just continue it's you know you know trevor's going to try and come out of the clink, hit the ground running, build a new company.

59:32One thing in the clink. Still going to be a young man. In the clink, bed's famously uncomfortable. Maybe he needs an eight sleep. That takes us to our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. You can get one at eightsleep.com. And we have another post from Eight Sleep. They formulated and sleep elixir with valyrian root, nature's secret to winding down faster. You can check that out at eightsleep.com as well. And so we love eightsleep and thank you. One note, they set up a URL, eightsleep.com slash TBPN. Oh, cool. And they say TB approves the pod, which is the name of their product.

1:00:08Oh yeah. The pod approves. So they could just say the pod approves the pod. We have a quote up here that says you can't publish 15 plus hours a week of live content without being at peak performance. We simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without eightsleep. And if you want to win as bad as we do, you can't afford to not sleep. yeah yeah that's amazing okay yeah we simply gotta show that we simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without a sleep and if you want to win as bad as we do you can't afford not to sleep on the pod so uh check it out same same pod that huberman uses i love it i love it and rob over there are absolute boys well let's move on to some drama between salesforce and microsoft you know So we love drama on the show.

1:00:50It got spicy. I love being there on Binary Violence. I love it. I love it. Mark Benioff and Satya Nadella have been going back and forth. There's an article in the information breaking it down. But first, I wanted to pull up what the stock has been doing. So we went to public.com. We looked at Salesforce. They're up 20 % in the last six months. Market caps,$310 billion. It's a big company. Big, big, big, big, big company. CRM, big business. But they own everything now. They own Slack. And they're trying to get everyone to upgrade to Slack AI. Have you been getting those notifications? I haven't seen Slack AI.

1:01:25Oh, man. Like whenever you're in Slack now, there's a modal that pops up. Request AI. David Sachs launched like a Slack competitor that leverages AI. Didn't he build like a Slack before Slack? Like that was his main thing, right? That he sold to Microsoft? I almost clicked on David Snacks, which is a parody account. well um sax what sax pulled uh his chat well i was thinking of yammer like that was the company he did after paypal and he sold that for a billion dollars yeah so he uh last year he announced an ai powered work chat app rivaling slack called blue um anyways i didn't know about that interesting okay well anyway let's go to this article in the information salesforce in talks with microsoft oracle and google about cloud deal to handle ai uh salesforce mark benioff has long been a vocal critic of Microsoft.

1:02:16A couple years ago, he accused the company of violating antitrust laws and how it sells software bundles. More recently, he slammed its artificial intelligence chatbot for giving inaccurate responses and being difficult to use. I think he dropped Clippy as a pejorative. It got spicy. I think it was in Aspen or Sun Valley. It was an iconic moment. But that history hasn't stopped Salesforce from including Microsoft in negotiations it's having with several cloud providers, also including Google and Oracle, about a major new cloud agreement. The deal is likely to be worth more than a billion dollars over several years, said a Salesforce manager with direct knowledge of the deal.

1:02:55And so here's the takeaway. Salesforce isn't talked with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for a big cloud deal because they need AI inference, of course. The deal could be worth more than a billion dollars over several years. And they're currently on AWS, but they're bidding it out according to this reporting. But we'll see what Benioff has to say. Salesforce wants to rent the servers to run its customer management, AI agents, and other applications. A sign of how new AI products are expanding Salesforce's computing needs. So obviously Salesforce is stuffing AI in every single product they own. They need inference and they need more servers.

1:03:29So they're going to the hyperscalers and they're bidding it out, allegedly. Salesforce already uses AWS in addition to Google Cloud and its own data centers. So we don't know who's emerging as the favorite to win. He also didn't specify the size and scope of the agreement. A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment, but the agreement will be in the same range as Salesforce's past agreements with AWS. The negotiations with haven't previously been reported signal Salesforce's shift to public cloud providers for more of its computing needs. They're getting out of the data center building business, more or less.

1:04:02That's the shtick here. Salesforce has told customers that eventually it will sell its applications through all major cloud providers. AWS didn't comment. Oracle didn't comment. Google didn't comment. No one's talking to the information. No one's commenting. The information is commenting, though. The information is commenting. Didn't stop them. And we'll go to Mark Benioff because as soon as this dropped, he said, the story and the information is incorrect. In 2024, Salesforce explored a fourth deployment option for our customers alongside our existing choices, proprietary data centers, AWS, and Alibaba cloud.

1:04:32Last year, we decided to extend our partnership with Google, giving customers the option to deploy Salesforce customers, 360 apps, Hyperforce, Agentforce, and Data Cloud on Google's platform in future Salesforce releases. So he's coming out and saying, hey.

1:05:16I'm not rugging AWS. co-pilot thing has been a disaster yep um and charles uh who's over at microsoft says uh one of the execs there working on co-pilot he says this is a big moment for salesforce because crm is not going to be the future for customers it's going to be the strategic imperative for customers i think that's why you see salesforce taking jabs at co-pilot because there's that pressure is very real and it's here so that was just uh this month in february uh 2025 so they're going back going back and forth not mincing words uh we love i mean we we called that we need to get people in tech need to get more you know fired up combative yeah right more physical more physical altercations yeah i want to see oh mark benioff and scotty nadella were leaving the club after an altercation the shirt ripped and honestly if you're a centi one of the best things you can do is go prison mode and take shots at a take shots at the big dog right go take shots at a yeah benioff yeah this is like the east coast west coast say hey the lineup this year at dream force sucks slopp slop you should call it dream slop this wouldn't even be on the you know you know the this wouldn't be on what what are some of like i haven't been to coachella in so long i forget about their stages this wouldn't even hit the side stage yeah at 12 noon yeah on friday at coachella yeah this doesn't even make you know this is garbage the do lab it's not going on the do i don't even know what that is but i get it you've never been to coachella i've never been to coachella wow i've been to outside lands and maybe a few others but i'm not a big festival guy sometime i'll have to talk about uh going to i've been to both weekends of coachella in the same year which is dusty dusty dusty that actually kicked off my uh original fitness arc oh okay that was the catalyst yeah yeah yeah i think we i think we did mention that one point um and so uh yeah Yeah, the information is sowing seeds of dissent between the hyperscalers.

1:07:14I'd love to see it. There's a Hyperforce rewrite going on. This is interesting. Salesforce has already rewritten the code for its applications, databases, and other operating systems to run on AWS services in a project called Hyperforce. The AWS version of Salesforce's applications became available in 2020. Salesforce intends to make the same applications available on whichever cloud provider it picks in the current negotiations. while Salesforce incurred a significant upfront expense in developing Hyperforce, making it available on another cloud wouldn't be as costly since roughly 80 to 90 % of its code built for AWS would run on other providers.

1:07:50Interesting. So customers of Salesforce want to run on their own clouds. Salesforce needs to do deals to make those clouds happy and get them going. And Benioff wants to keep everyone happy and wants to be able to play all of the different hyperscalers against each other without... I mean, you can do that if you're throwing billions of dollars around. Every single one of these hyperscalers has a sales team dedicated to Salesforce, and they're trying to win said business. Yeah. But there's Bean Air on Bean Air. But he has been negging Microsoft a lot, and so that's got to make that negotiation harder.

1:08:25And they also have the most competitive products, so doing a deal to... What's Microsoft's CRM product? Do they have? I mean, they have a product for everyone. thing yeah i guess xl but i they have a they so microsoft dynamics 365 is there yeah i mean the big i think the big war is you know slack versus teams teams really crushed slack and i don't i don't know how you would value slack as an independent company now post acquisition but salesforce bought slack and uh whether or not that was a good deal for salesforce kind of depends on and Teams execution. And Teams has become really popular because it's bundled with the Microsoft Office that goes into so many different companies.

1:09:11Well, speaking of software to help you run your business, this show is of course supported by Ramp, our good buddies over at Ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Okay, I'm gonna give you an example. So we launched PMF or Die on Monday. Yep. and turns out running a 24-7 live stream with multiple camera feeds multiple audio feeds hundreds of you know concurrent viewers streaming on multiple platforms very hard we had to tap in a guy named sam sheffer this is very was at humane he was at humane on monday humane gets acquired by hp he decides i'm not going to go into the ai printer business even though i kind of we we've talked about this.

1:09:55We want a better printer. I'm excited for better printers. But, uh, so I talked to Sam this morning at, I was driving to work. It was 5 30 AM. And so he's coming online. He's on the East coast where, you know, Tyler gold introduced me. I'm like, dude, like you got to help us out. Like we need to level this up. Like we've, we've got all these viewers. Like I think PMF or die has product market fit in the sense that like viewers are super excited about it. Sam's like, I'm down. I got to go pick up like, you know, basically like my exit package. But after that I'll go. And so he rolled into the PMF for Dye stream today.

1:10:30And, and right as he was headed over there, I just made him a card on ramp. And I was like, if you need to buy any supplies. And so he gets the invite, downloads the app, adds it to Apple pay, and he can now buy products on our ramp account, even though he's like a, you know, a contractor, right so uh that level like that that used to be like so annoying of like okay go and and and get the receipts and we'll reimburse you or we'll pay you so just so fantastic and uh ramp gets it done um let's go into let's go to the the timeline i want to do this eric stromberg post on boot scaling i thought this was interesting you flagged this uh he writes a little screenshot essay uh Eric, if you don't know him, he was at Bedrock with Jeff Lewis, absolute dog of a capital allocator.

1:11:19And Eric writes, traditionally, startups raise millions of dollars to start and hundreds to scale. Today, AI is giving everyone an army of agents to design, engineer, and build on their behalf. Perhaps AI will deliver so much leverage that founders will raise only one round and be done. Profits will fund from there. This is a comforting idea for seed VCs, but not right. If you can reach 1 million of ARR in 90 days from an apartment, why raise seed money? Instead, I expect a different strategy to grow. Boot scaling. Founders will bootstrap at the start, leveraging near zero cost of experimentation.

1:11:51They'll only raise after achieving product market fit and building conviction in a venture scale business. At that point, they'll use capital to scale distribution. Boot scaling allows founders to avoid early dilution while later securing capital to win versus well-funded competitors. A prior generation has proven this model works, and he flags a few here. Atlassian, founded in 2002, they first raised money in 2010. They raised$60 million. Qualtrics, founded in 2002, they first raised in 2012 for$70 million. GitHub, founded in 2007, first raised in 2012. 1Password, founded in 2005, they raised in 2019.

1:12:31Unity, they started in 2004, they didn't raise until 2009. And so a lot of these companies that build for a long time independently and then they start doing the growth rounds while skipping those early seed series A rounds. This shift will reshape the landscape of seed VC. Those stuck in existing structures and clinging to old assumptions will lose to those who adapt. So break it down. What do you think about that? I thought that was an interesting post. Yeah, so I mean the obvious example here is PMF4Dye. Blake came out, built a few sort of these like AI native apps, like generated so much revenue that he's now building his fourth app in like two years, which he's announcing on PMF or die tonight.

1:13:07And he did not want to raise money at all for this business because he's like, I have the cash. I don't really need to spend that much money. I have like the equivalent, like just by using cursor and some of these other AI tools, I have the equivalent of like a bunch of developers that are on demand. And so he's very ambitious with this next business. Like he wants to, you know, he's going to, I'll let him announce it tonight, but it could easily be a multi-billion dollar company. He will get to the point where, you know, he could say, yeah, I'm going to raise like$20 million at a 200 post and sell 10 % of the company.

1:13:41But it's very possible we're going to see a lot more of these businesses that just basically never raise. Right. And that's not necessarily like the good thing for VCs is there's still plenty of businesses. it actually frees up capital for VCs to invest in these sort of capital, CapEx intensive businesses. Defense tech is a good example. Like the foundation model companies too. Yeah, the foundation models. AI is bifurcated. It's like the consumer app companies that are building AI companies need no money to start. And then they need money to scale distribution. And then the foundation model companies need a billion dollars up front to do the training run.

1:14:14And then once they have it, they've kind of cornered the market and they have the commodity and then they can just sell it. Yeah, and so I see more rounds happening where it's like kind of these YC style rounds where it's like, Hey, we need 500 K. So we can, so like, if you're working somewhere and you want to quit your job and still be able to have like decent health insurance maybe, but it's really more. So the, the, the, you know, these companies across the board are just getting way less, you know, capital intensive and then simultaneously attention is free. Now, if you understand algorithmic feeds, right?

1:14:43Like PMF or die, another good example. We spent$3 ,000 producing a video. It should have like a million views at this point. Right. super high leverage. And so, yeah, if you're a seed VC, how does that change your strategy? Do you need to go and convince someone who doesn't really need money just to get you like a little allocation? Maybe you're the only person you're putting in, you know, maybe the initial dilution is 1%, but you got your 1 % like you're an angel in a larger round, but there just isn't that lead anymore? Or are you just out of the game and focusing on growth fundraising? Yeah, I mean, VCs will still have the opportunity, you know, basically say sell 10 % of your company to me because like I'm going to go to bat and help you win, right?

1:15:25With distribution on X, you know, LinkedIn, et cetera. Those are maybe tougher sales right now, but that's why YC's product, which is you have to figure out what product to make and you have to make your product. But we are going to help you figure out how to make a company, which is really the product of YC. And also the pressure cooker. And the pressure cooker. value of YC is you're sitting there listening to some generational entrepreneur. Mark Zuckerberg's on stage and you look over and the guy next to you is coding on the laptop and you're like, I should go ship a feature right now. Like people are grinding and that, and that pressure of seeing everyone else, all your competition move super fast makes you want to move faster.

1:16:01So, uh, yeah, it, it, it, it, it, why do I see as a bunch of interesting value ads that don't really come in the form of just the money? Uh, it's fascinating. Well, if you have a money, if you have a business throwing off a lot of cash uh highly recommend you pick up this beautiful car posted by joe wisniewski uh one of my favorite builds for a vip uh a pts 911st with 55 600 and 860 dollars in cxx options uh break it down jordy why did you want to cover this on the show so uh this guy joe talked to him before uh he works at a dealership i think in like potentially memphis i forget exactly uh somewhere um on the other side of america but he basically i think he sources the best porsches amgs bentleys in the entire country and so he's constantly sharing these incredible examples um this is one of the best uh that silver on uh tan interior the sort of heritage interior i think it's just fantastic so um need to get one of these in my garage at some point um but if you're in the market go hit up joe he's also got an instagram account with like some of the best car content and he wears a suit when he's talking about these cars so he he respects the cars and says i'm not just gonna you know film this you know uh slop video uh anyways that's great okay well let's go to this uh next post by ash untapped market uh no one has my current dream project opposite of friend.com pendant named foe llm text-to-speech computer yells at you adversarial computing guys it's on the come up i mean this is sort of what friend yeah friend is very adversarial but it's like hey you know save save my life kind of thing uh that's hilarious and yannick chimes and he says pov you're smiling for a picture but unaware that they're debating how to build a computer that yells at you i love it that's so funny uh yeah very very lots of fun opportunities building this i think i think that the the adversarial friend.com is probably friend.com i agree i agree with that but i i think that there is something beautiful in here like the story that we kicked this off with about the the the horrific humanoid robot as opposed to the friendly asimo humanoid robot uh the the the the computer that yells at you that is a viral concept that will get a lot of downloads or installs or people testing it out it'll get you a lot of attention.

1:18:29And then from there, you can kind of figure out, okay, what's the real product here? What really has product market fit? And friend.com certainly did that with their market entry. Let's talk about Apple. This week, they launched the iPhone 16E. It's$599. This is a big jump up from the 429 SE. Mark Gurman has had the scoop and then the breakdown. Here he says it has an action button is in 128 256 and 512 gig options black and white color options it iphone 14 and iphone se are discontinued uh pre-order start on february 21st 28th for release and the c1 apple modem is official and this was a big uh a big story uh although it was kind of buried uh mark says the c1 apple modem which is a uh the cellular modem that actually connects to the cellular network.

1:19:20Normally these are made by Broadcom, I believe, is a monumental technical achievement because there's a ton of intellectual property. They're not just like hard. It's like it's as it's as complex as making like an NVIDIA GPU, apparently. And so he says a several billion dollar effort that has been in the works for seven years. In the end, it gets two sentences in the press release and 15 seconds in the announcement video. Apple is clearly downplaying this intentionally daniel that's what it do yeah beth says why and steve says patent cases hinge on how significant a feature is in the whole injunction depends on novelty and criticality the more words the more to hang in the inevitable qqc litigation on and so uh steve is saying hey and steve sanowski is very sharp i think he's at andresen but he was uh i think at microsoft for a long time and he understands this stuff really well and he was saying that basically hey they they built this modem it works and it's going to be able to connect the phones to starlink do a whole bunch more stuff it's just retooling their supply chain gives them a huge advantage on on the supply side but they're going to get sued and so they can't make too big of a deal out of it because if they do uh the lawsuits are going to come for them that that's the thesis here at least what people are thinking and so uh there's another con there's a little bit of extra context here c1 was birthed from apple's one billion acquisition of intel smartphone modem biz in 2019 c1 is going to give apple more leverage and carrier negotiations because they say hey verizon like we we can be independent we can use starlink we can use whatever um and it will allow deeper device integration and better better battery life so you know they'll be able to have a hundred percent battery life right up until they release the new brick your phone on the day yeah exactly exactly yeah apple silicon team is consistently i'm so used to the landline mode now apple landline i like this one uh i actually would like an apple charger made from apple that's one of those like stretchy landline type things you know yeah so you can maybe people used to walk around the house yeah hp give me the give me the give me the printer the ai printer give me the ai landline uh these are the things i want here we got the polycom on this on the table uh But let's move on to a promoted post from bezel.

1:21:32You can shop over 22 ,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts. A lot of people probably don't know this, but when you buy a watch on bezel, the person who's selling it doesn't just ship it to you. They actually ship it to bezel first. And then people at bezel verify that you're getting a real watch, which is really into the space. Yeah. It's a fortress. And there's just guys nerding out all day long. Yeah. and just making sure that the watch you actually get is legit. And they catch a shocking number of fakes floating around. I was Googling for some watches and I just saw a, like in Google shopping, it was like, you know, Patek Nautilus,$300.

1:22:14And you click on it and it's like, it's from like a knockoff website. I'm like, how is this even like on Google? It's crazy. Now that Google clearly has not made an effort to catch nearly enough fake watches because if you look up yeah if you look up patek aquanaut yeah pull up a some sketchy website yeah it pulls up these watches that are just objectively you know obviously not real yeah and uh google's happy to put them in front of you and so uh when you buy a watch on bezel i'm actually going through this right now uh the seller shipped it to bezel they received the watch and i have the update they've started the authentication process uh and so it's very fun.

1:22:55You get a little Domino's pizza tracker and you get to see exactly where it is in that process, which is very fun. And I also wanted to go through this fun little post that they ripped explaining the perfect three watch collection. Say less. They argue that the perfect three watch collection is a steel sports watch for the everyday flex, a dress watch for closing deals and a wild card because it's fun. Here's what they're going with. And let us know in the comments what you think about this. They recommend for the everyday flex, a Rolex Submariner Hulk reference 116610LV. Which matches our new color?

1:23:32Yeah, you might see it in the corner. We're using a beautiful, is that a Kelly green? I don't even know what that's called. It's a great green. That's a good question. It's built like a tank, water resistant to 300 meters for all the diving you'll never do. I need to relax the next time I go diving. I actually scuba dive a lot. And somehow it goes with everything, even though it's bright green. For the dress watch. like can we figure out how to underwater pod you could do it if you had a rebreather setup scuba diving in a in a tux yeah underwater pod this would be potentially viral uh the the dress watch they recommend the cartier tank louis uh reference wgta 011 arguably the cartier to have the tank lc is pure old school elegance uh this is timeless sophistication at its finest perfect for closing deals sipping negronis or just reminding people you have taste i love the cardia tank i think it's fantastic watch worn by andy warhol and muhammad ali and uh jackie kennedy and it's just a fantastic watch with a beautiful history and for the wild card they recommend the iwc pilots watch chronograph top gun uh big bold straight out of a fighter jet this top gun chrono's lightweight ceramic case laughs at scratches the military aesthetic means business and the flyback chrono is just plain old cool and great option for hard tech tech founder for sure you don't know if you're going to end up in an apache that day yep uh just so why not pick up a uh an iwc pilot's watch chronograph top gun and so there you go uh jordy you're you're working on a watch collection what do you think is going to be next any any teasers i actually need it i need a you need a dress watch tank would be great I still think JLC Ultra Thin would be really good.

1:25:18Yeah. I think there's a lot of good options. Or of some sort. Yeah. But anyways. I think the 222 is the Vacheron that you're going to wind up with. That's the only one that I actually want. It's so good. Sometimes in life you have, you sort of justify purchases that are adjacent to the thing that you actually want. but you need to just look in your heart and understand what it is you actually want and figure out a way to get that thing. Exactly. Well, let's go to Zach. He says, the mission of Aura, make it easier, more beautiful, and more customizable to share your workouts with the world. Hundreds of millions of people use apps like Strava, Nike Run Club to track their workouts.

1:25:59Tens of millions use apps like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to share their workouts. His goal is to start giving creative tools so that second behavior sharing becomes an art form of its own. And as a byproduct, I believe if you make training more creative and public athletes want to train more. So Zach is based in New York City, operating under the PMF for Die mentality right now, working on Aura, which is a new app. John already said it, but it's basically think about, yeah, a workout app that makes these sort of beautiful graphics so that you can share your progress. A lot of running is this sort of like communal activity everybody sort of pushing themselves independently.

1:26:38And Zach has, you know, a million plus followers on Instagram, wants to build a product for himself and them to just be able to share their training more. And I'm super excited to see it. I don't run much myself. We should go over to New York and just go for a run with Zach and just get absolutely smoked. But we're getting a treadmill in the cage for PMF or die. And so we'll have to have Zach go on a Tesla app in there. So I'd love to see it. excited to see Zach roll this out. Yeah. So good luck to him as he builds this app. We'd love to see it. Let's go over to Andreessen Horowitz. Chris Dixon was on a podcast with their head of growth, David George, talking about what will happen in the world of AI just to the internet and just to websites, which I thought was very interesting because everyone jumps to Terminator or complete job loss.

1:27:29Chris is thinking in the future, but not so far in the future, about something that seems like a very real possibility. So he says, what happens to the billions of websites if they aren't getting traffic? AI isn't just disrupting search, it's changing the internet's economic model. For decades, websites provided platforms with content in exchange for traffic. This was the covenant, as he puts it. AI flips this, content fuels its model, but traffic doesn't always flow back. So historically on the internet, the beautiful thing is that if you had great content, the traffic would show up. The Google search crawler would find you.

1:28:06You would go viral on LinkedIn or Facebook. Stumble upon. Yeah, stumble upon. Twitter used to link out. Those things have stopped. And then the LLMs will just give people answers directly. So as users turn to AI for answers instead of the traditional search, control is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant systems. He's worried about the future of the internet and what this shift means for creators. to address this he asks what new incentive structures or architectures should we be thinking about and so he's not saying hey we got to ban ai he's just saying that uh you know there needs to be a new deal for content creators and what does that look like whether that's it uh whether that's a content we talked about this like the content licensing model from the llm like if you are really great at crafting recipes at a superhuman level you craft them and then yes you only get one hit from the open AI scraper and one hit from the anthropic scraper.

1:29:03But that one hit is then you're basically on like a YouTube style creator fund where they split the profits with you. And they're saying, yeah, we're taking your content. We are training our model on it. But when we, when someone asked for this recipe, we used 50 % of yours and then 50 % of someone else's. And so yeah, we're going to send you, you know, a couple cents for every query that we turned over. And And there's this abstraction layer, but we're still paying you somehow. And that would definitely keep the economic model in place. I'm sure Karras, as the head of Andreessen Crypto and a massive crypto investor, former number one on the Midas list, has a bunch of ideas for how crypto can be involved in that.

1:29:40He doesn't explicitly break that down in this clip, but you know he's thinking about that as well. What was your take? Yeah, I'm excited to see, you know, crypto is entering a new regulatory regime, right? Starts with a bang a few days before David Sachs gets into his official position as crypto czar. We have presidential meme coins coming out. And so this new administration will seemingly be getting, you know, trying to get innovative around the actual regulations that have been in many ways forcing the cryptocurrency industry to orient around meme coins. Right. If you can't invest in value, because oftentimes, you know, many of these tokens couldn't be tied to cash flow or anything like that.

1:30:27So if that changes, which, you know, we're all sort of waiting around to see, there's going to be so many new actual ways for companies that operate on chain to like generate revenue outside of trading. And so Andreessen Crypto has been making a bunch of bets, like sort of betting that this will eventually happen. and I'm just excited to see like you know I expect that Chris Dixon is like actively working with Saks and many of the other people you know in the White House admin to try to figure out how to influence this policy to fully unlock crypto's potential right because it's been handicapped for years and years and years by the regulatory environment and not not not allowing like the the the most exciting use cases to flourish yeah yeah i i always think it's interesting chris's uh framing like he is uh somewhat an early entrepreneur uh in like kind of post.com era started two companies sold them both has been deeply involved in like the early internet and he's like weird like he i'm pretty sure he did the oculus seed deal or like a very early oculus deal he did some drone companies skydio uh he i i sat on a board with him for a number of years worked with him very closely and really enjoyed that.

1:31:40And he also backed Kickstarter and a bunch of like crazy, like he's really close with Fred Wilson and the USV guys. And so he sees the internet as something that's valuable by itself to humanity. And he has a real reverence for internet communities. A lot of his investing thesis early on was like, I think he had some quote, like, like what people do on the, on the internet on the weekends will be your job in five years. something like that. And I thought that was very interesting. And so he's very driven to maintain what is great about the internet. Well, anyway, let's go to how startups are changing.

1:32:20Anthony Poppliano says, the real flex is raising as little money as possible for your startup and succeeding with the smallest team necessary. I thought that was an interesting post because are we in the business of flexing? Does it matter? Does it matter if you build a massive of business with 10 ,000 employees or a hundred employees, like, uh, I, I, I guess it's, it's always impressive when you see a high revenue per dollar or revenue per employee number. But at the end of the day, it's the only thing that matters really. And like, and like durable market cap and durable value and durable cashflow and how you get there.

1:32:56Like Amazon has an order of magnitude more employees than Google. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Because Amazon employs people that do pick and pack. I think the revenue per employee is always a fascinating metric to look at. It's always, it can be very impressive if you look at Tether, right? I think they do like$8 million of net income per employee or something ridiculous, like multiples of what BlackRock does or these sort of more legacy financial institutions. And you see Cursor with 30 employees, you know, multi-billion dollar valuation. So I think it's awesome. I, you know, I think that, but, but, you know, I think pomp is probably just like baiting people a little bit here.

1:33:39And ultimately it shouldn't be what, what you fixate on early. It's how do we build a really massive durable company? Yeah. Many paths to success. And it kind of depends on what kind of company you want to run. Like some people want to have the small, like David Holes mid journey. He hasn't raised a lot of money. He hasn't hired that many people. Clearly he wants to run this lab and this product. That's like very dedicated user-based, very profitable. Uh, but he's not, he's not like in this takeover the world like raises much money do the deal with masa build the data center like immediately i think he's i think he's building what he wants and it's more about finding the ikigai or like the life's work that aligns with you uh but anyway let's move on to wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel grade and amenities dream beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better head on over to wander.com uh they're giving four hundred dollars off your spring trip with spring 400 and there's a beautiful photo of a wander in rockaway beach oregon i've never been there but that looks fantastic so crazy that check it out like every single one of their homes looks like that i know we want to so i really want to partner with wander for the for the you know if we do a season two of pmf or die they have this private island somewhere in florida that's yeah that would just be cool absolutely perfect to um you know pick up the drawbridge yeah lock them on the island yep if If you want to leave, you can, you got to swim, you know, a few miles.

1:35:04Yeah, it'd be great. So head on over to Wander and check it out if you're looking for your next vacation home while you're traveling. Did you see this one from Overfit Quantitative Strategies? Great meme account. Good watermark on this. I don't know if we can pull this up here, but it says, choose your Silicon Valley think boy. Mark writes more manifestos than gender neutral communist undergrad. It's time to build, but not in his backyard. Is a techno optimist. He shills meme coins. Brian injects his son's blood to stay eternally young. Guern lives in the woods and on a 12K income. Sammo, San Francisco's Rasputin.

1:35:42Andrew, cumulative probabilities final boss. Yes, Anon, no coffee, no alcohol, no medication in the morning. Meditation in the morning. Do you enjoy life? It's very, I don't know. I don't even understand that. Naval writes Facebook captions, but for millennial tech bros instead of boomers. mark his career at oracle taught him that software can be a more profitable racket paul wants to be in founder mode is reading neval's reading list is the airport books hall of fame i feel like part of that is when he recommends a book it probably goes into the airport yeah because he actually does have a massive audience but who knows it's very silly very very silly but you know you love to see some wojacks from the guys you know uh and uh and love the guys you And a lot of good content from these guys.

1:36:29I don't know. I think this is a fun, silly little post having fun. Poking fun at some of the legends in Silicon Valley. You go on Dorkesh and you're drowning in e-girls, he says. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He is hosting an event in San Francisco. If you're in there, you should check it out. He says, a little over two years ago, Marky Wagner and I published an essay in Pirate Wire's Child entitled Choose Good Quests that blew up way more than I was expecting. I was also surprised that more than a few readers were able to read between the lines to see the theological underpinnings of the central argument.

1:37:05I'll be giving a talk hosted by Axe17 and Gary Tan on the evening of March 6th in San Francisco in which I'll draw out the explicit theological message and its implications on how we think about our quests in tech, invite link in thread below, should be fun. And so if you're in SF, go check it out. I think it's$50 to attend and some absolute killers in Silicon Valley attending this. I talked to Trey's wife yesterday who is organizing the event and the lineup for the speaker cities is fantastic. And just the people that'll be in this room could probably put together a$5 billion round with a few texts.

1:37:44So a good room to be in and a fantastic topic. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very, it's a great post. If you haven't read it, read it. The, the, the good quest idea is trying to answer this question of, yeah, what, what should you do? Where, where, where do you fit in within the messy world of Silicon Valley? Is it an employee at a company that's working on something that you really think is extremely valuable? Is it founding a company? Whatever you, you choose, he kind of lays out a framework for thinking about that. And it's a, it's a rallying cry for, for young, for young folks in Silicon Valley. And I really enjoyed the piece.

1:38:17So go check it out. Let's go over to Guillermo Rauch. I need to learn how to pronounce his name. Guillermo at Vercel. We love him. He says, inherent to founder mode is the courage to be disliked. For a founder, the mission, customer, and product reigns supreme. Effective leadership is not about making everyone at your company happy or producing the average of everyone's opinions. It's about doing what's right. Great post. Great post. Very inspiring. We love Guillermo. Yeah. I mean, that really is the distillation of founder mode and also going direct. It's like this authenticity and not being afraid of cancellation or just negative pushback.

1:38:57And that's the pressure of being a CEO. You're trying to make your team, your customers happy, your team happy, the media happy, you know, other shareholders, whatever, you know, partners, infrastructure providers. Like, you're never going to make everybody happy. And so he's saying, don't try to make everybody happy. Try to do what's right, you know, generally for the company. And, you know, usually it'll net out to being what's right for everybody else in the long run, at least. Yeah. And I love Juwan from Ramp chiming in here. Well said, Guillermo. Many people dislike me, probably because I'm so founder mode.

1:39:34Because he's been posting day 99 of asking Ramp for a raise. He's getting the raise. i i think once he gets to day 90 we need to get ramped to put him in the cage put him in a cage if he can live stream for 90 days and add a million of arr to ramp then he gets his raise but i think the first 90 days of asking for a raise were just the warm-up for him totally he's not grinding hard enough you're unnoticed juan good luck uh let's go to andrew ross sorkin have you read too big to fail books or seen the movie it was adapted into a movie or documenting yeah yeah andrew ross sorkin mass monster uh noted noted mass monster run at the arnold yeah yeah yeah uh let's see it let's watch andrew ross sorkin get diced let's see him i want to see his traps eating his head some death star delts i want to see him on some gear get some d ball some anivar some tests and try andrew come on the show let's talk about your stack yeah let's get you too big to fail.

1:40:36But you know, Andrew Ross Erkin is a fantastic interviewer. And the book is fantastic. If you haven't read it, it's a breakdown of what happened during the housing crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis. And he's been working on a follow-up book, 1929. For the past eight years, he's been working on a follow-up to his book, Too Big to Fail. It's written as what he thinks of it as a sequel, a prequel, a nonfiction character-driven behind the scenes account of 1929, the year the most infamous market crash of all time happened. It'll be out in October, but you can pre-order it now. I will definitely be reading that.

1:41:13That sounds fascinating. I know about the Great Depression and I know about 1929 and a lot of the anecdotes. I don't know the character-driven story behind it. I can't name the guy who lost it all or the person that made it through. It's very abstract to me. And so I'm sure this will be a fantastic read he's a great writer great reporter and uh you know go check it out if you're looking for your next book um let's go to uh vc braggs you want to check out this one i had to throw this in leaked image of the latest humane ink product from hp printer division you put on the pin and it tells you the toner's low this would be helpful for us because our toner is low all the time okay all the trash talk about printers printers are back uh this is important technology folks yeah we gotta i hope that they roll this out i mean it's actually it's actually smart for hp to say hey you know a lot of these other companies i'm sure a bunch of the best people at humane are already taking offers from a number of great companies but still for humane to add that the humane product while it didn't solve a critical need for consumers it was very cool tech like the tech itself was great and so um i'm excited to uh see what they do great great designers maybe this was maybe this was hp's way they they probably know at this point that we run on a brother usa printer this is their way to kind of just like get on our radar and say hey why don't you bring your posts over to a powerhouse hp printer yeah we'll give you a pin that allows you to you know better interact with your device i mean what is the bull case for the HP humane acquisition.

1:42:49I think there's probably two that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of a few others. One is, you know, there might be some sort of industrial or B2B application where you go and you give these pins to a workforce where they're in a medical environment or industrial environment and they need to be hands-free and you sell these pins into this one workforce and it's highly specific, highly specific. And so I don't know, I'm imagining like i pick up an amazon package and then the the micro projector just projects exactly what i need to do with it onto the package i don't know something like that we know that they actually got bought by the print like it wasn't no no no no no people are just they got bought by hp yeah and hp is just known for printers now but they do make other stuff like it's hewlett-packard it's like a big company yeah um but uh the other thing is that uh yeah they actually still make computers yeah of course and the other thing is that they might be in an ibm type arc where they're going to wind up doing more consulting and they actually have some good looking desktop computers let's go um and and if i'm if i'm working with hp on some sort of project and you're saying i have two options on your staff one is the person who designed the latest hp printer and the other person is the person who designed the humane pen so i actually have i think the design language is better on the pen i have hp.com pulled up they have what do they have uh their printers which they highlight first so clearly important and they have their pcs desktops and they have monitors and accessories so it's totally possible that what humane built is actually super relevant to their monitors they're like um cameras mounted cameras right you could imagine a world where you just go like that and it like shuts your computer off and like humane was like focused on using gestures to control devices and so stuff like that it would be cool if i go like that to my app you know maybe Maybe I can, maybe I can't, but just being able to go like that, turn off my computer, clap, turn it on, all the stuff that Humane was kind of working on.

1:44:44Yeah. I heard some theory that the company was bought for a hundred million. They might've had around a hundred million left in the bank because the company kind of failed pretty quickly post launch. And so it's possible that it was kind of like almost more like an acqui-hire and you just get a bunch of people that are, surely they didn't solve the overall product in a way that was cohesive in a way that could actually gain traction. But they clearly have great people who work on projectors, great people who work on batteries. They have great people who work on all these different things. And so you can deploy those people into the different arms of HP.

1:45:17And it seems like it could be a good deal. And one of the humane guys is working on PMF or Dino, which is great. HP couldn't lock him down. That's why shutdowns are good sometimes, because it frees up super talented people to just go work on new things. Yeah, maybe HP should start a live streaming division. HP, HP, if you want to sponsor a live stream where guys code all day long, work out shirtless and jeans, PMF or die. Send some printers over. Yeah, yeah. It's great. Well, speaking of gadgets, these ones didn't fail. Nat Friedman says, what's your favorite new gadget? And there's a couple interesting ones on here.

1:45:56Unify AI key is the top result. Locally embeds your camera feeds. not yet mind-blowing but that's a software update away uh and he and nat freeman says he got one of those and it's really promising kyle russell buddy of mine says still still the ray-ban meadows he got last summer so he's a dau of those i guess or regular yeah driver of those uh we both kind of churned from them but i i think we're pretty uh optimistic about them as a product long term um and then uh there's some other people that chime in one guy says a dad bike the turn gsd It has room for the kids in the back, which is kind of cool.

1:46:31And it also has electric boost. Thought that was fun. Matt Mullenweg chimes in and says, really digging the Daylight Co, like a Kindle meets iPad, allows for lifestyle change. Actually, I'm an investor in Daylight. Yeah, you said it was pretty good, right? We got to get one for the set. Basically mimics paper really well. The same feeling of using a Kindle. But you can navigate the internet, have a browser, et cetera. Spencer Bratman says the things he uses daily are an Ember mug. have you ever seen those i have an andreessen ember mug you do yeah uh they have he has his airpod max uh eight sleep of course love it uh an aura frame which is kind of cool it's like a picture frame that you can upload photos to a juicer vision he uses the vision pro no way i'm surprised by that uh whoop pretty good for tracking sleep haven't seen that another daylight co shout out this hackable e-ink watch is kind of interesting the sq fmi watchy not to use as a watch, but to wear at night to detect movement past a certain hour and wake me up more naturally.

1:47:30Cheap, easy to code. So a little bit hacker stuff going on there. I thought that was fun. It was a good like little, hey, let's get some community engagement from Matt. And, you know, I'm sure Nat's cooking up the next idea for, you know, some sort of side project. Put some kid on it. Well, let's go to Nikita. Nikita Beer says, ladies and gentlemen, the king has been dethroned because Grok AI is now the number one app in the app store under free apps, all apps, and is one above chat GPT. And he attaches a meme from a high school yearbook quote that says, it is not enough that I should succeed.

1:48:06Others should fail. And this is from Kevin Chang, the guy, one of the guys leading the charge at XAI. Wait, really? Yeah. No way. Real quote. That's hilarious. I had no idea that that was actually him. That's so funny. And what I love about the screenshot, deep deep seeks nowhere to be seen yep they're probably thinking about i gotta get on intro i gotta hire uh i gotta hire nikita we gotta go number one again yeah um and we gotta get nikita on the inside and so uh how uh there's a bunch of uh there's a bunch of back and forth here the app store ranking doesn't mean anything and they're just pure vanity and nikita says wow major buzz kill man uh so interesting to see obviously we've talked about how the apple app charts are momentum driven.

1:48:48So it's unclear if Grok usage really is higher than ChatGPT or getting close, but certainly there's a lot of momentum. They just launched Grok3. There's a lot of big news. I'm 90 % certain Nikita helps, works on XAI or advising them as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. Well, let's go back to seed investing. Delian has an interesting post here. He says, doing VC full-time is a bad setup for seed investing. If you have a company you're working on, anytime you spend on VC, you're trading against your life's work. So you spend time only with the four to six companies a year that truly matter.

1:49:20If full-time WTF, do you fill your day with a lot of meetings? What do you think? This is another pitch for, you know, moving away from full-time seed investing, running around spring checks around Silicon Valley. What do you think? Is it possible to do it full-time? Well, you know, I think that if you are a VC operating with little to no brand which is 99 of uh venture capital firms right where they technically have a website and a brand but they're not being sought out by the generational founders i think this works really well for founders fund where when founders fund bids on a company they can bid lower sure than everyone else and the founder is still like yes i want to work you know i just went through that with a company with one of my portfolio companies that i did um i did the pre-seed and when they're raising their series a they were even before they started the process being like whatever price founders fund bids you know within reason we're going to take it and they had other tier one offers right and so there's like a certain uh i think you know um you're on the inside uh so you'd be a little too conflicted to say this but founders fund is in a unique position where i wouldn't recommend necessarily the part-time strategy to a no-name seed vc who's got$50 million to deploy.

1:50:38And it's like, you probably should be spending all your time trying to meet founders that aren't coming to you. Yeah. I think the other takeaway here is just that one of the ways to bootstrap a brand as a seed stage investor is to build a great company, because then all of a sudden you're meeting founders. They're coming to you for advice and just through the founder network, founder to founder conversations. And then you can write seed checks. It doesn't need to be full time. And then over time, you can kind of scale that up and take it more seriously. And that's certainly been Delian's experience at Varda.

1:51:11He's met everyone that's relevant in the space industry and seen all the deal flow there. Because even if you don't even think of him as a VC, you're going to want to reach out to him just as a fellow founder in the category. Same advantage. Yeah, big advantage. Helps when you're putting devices up into space. uh yeah i mean there's a lot of advantages going on there um what was funny here is uh joe morrison here chimes in says your best posts are the ones where you're a little self-loathing and delian's like what are you talking about like this this is actually like he's not guessing myself he's gassing himself up he's basically saying like i'm doing it perfectly yeah yeah yeah and he's like don't even try and compete with me i love someone else's comments i'll take the other side to the odds you'll find and lead the seed round of a generational company while working 60 plus hours a week operating are dramatically lower.

1:51:59Dallian just says, look forward to comparing and contrasting our comparators at the end of the decade. Do not try and dunk on Dallian. It's been a graveyard on X this week of people that tried and got smoked. It's very rough. But yeah, I mean, when you're a seed investor in Ramp, it's pretty easy to drive solid returns. He's got a whole bunch of great seed stuff. And he's like the main, he does a lot of seed stuff. It's great. Well, let's move on to Kim Kardashian. This is crazy. Yeah. Narrative violation. Okay. So Skims has grown into an absolute powerhouse, closing in on$1 billion in DTC revenue and has raised$730 million, most recently at a multi-billion dollar valuation.

1:52:46Kim owns 5 % of the company after raising so much money. They recently did a partnership with Nike. The business is on a tear. but daniel here asks absolutely wild to me i get it amazing and valuable brand but is it worth it when you own almost none of it she owns 200 million dollars so the question jordy is uh is is it worth it to have 200 million dollars what is 200 million dollars worth i think it's worth 200 million dollars yeah and so uh i don't know what's her opportunity cost is she really is she really putting more than 200 million dollars of effort into this project Yeah, I don't think so.

1:53:24So I think absolutely it's worth it. It's more of this perception that people see Skims as a proxy for Kim Kardashian's brand. But the pushback there is that if you if you talk to Skims customers, they will say these products are just better than other products that I can get. and it's at a point where you know you could argue that uh kylie um kylie jenner's products people wouldn't care to use them as much if there wasn't her association totally kim uh skims and kim kardashian i think it's different in that they make really good products she's non-operating she's sort of the face of the brand and it's going to net out like if you're going to make hundreds of millions of dollars for being the face of something that's better than doing a bunch of brand deals for Nike and Lululemon and Aloe.

1:54:10And it's going to net out. It's going to net out fine, but it's still the idea that there's been a lot of press recently around these creator-driven holding companies and this idea that just having a big audience will allow you to build a big company in an inexpensive way. But Kim Kardashian basically has one of the largest single audiences and the most consumer influence of any person in history. And she still needs to raise$730 million to achieve what maybe she didn't have to, but she's done that. And yeah, it just goes to show that, you know, I've talked to a bunch of founders recently that think, oh, I'm just gonna work with this one influencer and it's gonna, you know, dramatically change my business or my co-founder's got, you know, 200 ,000 followers and it doesn't mean anything because you tap that following pretty quick, right?

1:55:03Very quickly, yeah. Like very quickly. Yep. And so she is big enough to actually get market entry. Yeah. But if you run the numbers on the dilution here, you know, seed series A, series B, series C, 20 % dilution rounds, let's assume. She got diluted maybe 75%. I don't even know. But that means that she still only started out with 20 % of the company. Yeah. And I still think that's a phenomenal trade. I don't think that's crazy because she's in a non-operating role. and what would it take for her to make 200 million dollars in profit otherwise yeah i mean we got we learned a little bit from the ethereum max thing that i think she she gets paid about a million dollars per like one-off brand deal like post or something like that or like partnership and so you're talking about 200 of those there's only 200 days in the you know 200 business day 250 business days in the year like all of a sudden she can't do a post five years a million dollars a post no no no no no certainly not and so even though she's like a huge figure like this is a great way to monetize her audience.

1:55:59It looks way better for her brand because it builds her brand as a co-founder, as a business person. It's more aligned. She only needs to focus on the reputation and products of one company. Whereas if she's advertising for six different brands, what if one of them has a scandal? What if one of them is making the product and it's low quality? All of a sudden that roads hers. She can just put all of her eggs in one basket more or less. Obviously, she's doing other stuff. I think it's a good strategy. She had her private equity firm that you know, had a huge fundraising target, didn't come close to achieving it.

1:56:29I think they made one investment in a, like a hot sauce or like a, some hot sauce company. Um, but this goes to show that like maybe even the strategy of this creator led private equity firm was not even that good of a strategy. If, if, if, if, if a, if her primary company had to still raise. hundreds of millions of dollars, then maybe it's not enough. Like maybe it's not enough to be differentiated as a private equity firm. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Anyway, let's move on to X. We got some fundraising news. Katie Roof has a scoop about X. They're thinking about a new financing round that would value it at$44 billion.

1:57:06Same as the take private price in 2022. Elon Musk has never done a down round. Not about to start in 2025. So earlier this week on the show, we were talking about if you looked at X, dot com investors washington post would pull up uh google's like gemini would pull up a summary and lost all their money so and so lost 700 million sequoia lost x you know 200 million etc etc and they didn't ever lose the money if they would have lost money if they would have sold it right and so now they're going to be back up this is great for the employees x x had marked down their valuation internally interesting the employees were getting their options lower options at a$20 billion.

1:57:47So they're going to get a nice pop out of this. And I'm sure that Elon will start to allow employees to sell, do these sort of secondary transactions. Yeah, he's very good about laddering up the valuation, doing the secondary sales, making sure everyone's taken care of. He is very, very good at that. And yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the media was very anti-Twitter acts, saying it's going to fall apart. Everyone's going to leave. There's going to be no users. All the advertisers are going to leave. Well, we got data from Ramp that is Ara Karazian. He's their chief economist. And the economist at Ramp looked at the spend on corporate cars across all the Ramp data, showed that advertising on X is increasing.

1:58:27So that was another bull signal. Then we got the leaked financials showing that they might have over a billion dollars in EBITDA. And so, yeah, you apply a 44X multiple on EBITDA for a growing tech company. Like, that's not that crazy. And then we have that great post from Liron Shapira saying everyone was worried that X was not going to even stay online. Well, now you click on X and in one of the new tabs, you have access to a cutting edge frontier model. And there's just, you know, live streaming has been taking off. We've been doing really well there on PMF or Die. And all of my core tech friends are still there.

1:58:59Like there's a lot of craziness and the algorithm changes every week, but it's still fun. It's still the app that I open. And for a lot of people, that's what their experience is. and i don't think it's going away and so i think elon's got it are back we are back uh well speaking of pmf or die i thought this was an interesting post from will at shouldn't speak he says startups used to be two guys a laptop and a dream just now laptop yeah just one laptop so now he says now it's 50 engineers 100 million dollars in funding and a full-time dc lobbying strategy what happened gang and i just tagged at pmf or die deep tech happened yeah deep tech happened defense tech and and ai like regulatory capture stuff happened and just the threat i mean honestly a lot of this happened from lena khan it was like well maybe you do need a dc lobbying firm if your plan is to sell your company at any point in time yeah and there were just so many different things where there was now oh well if you're not playing in dc you're not in the big leagues maybe you need a government contract even if that government contract isn't going to drive the most profit or the most revenue It's going to make people take you more seriously.

2:00:01The kind of the Palantir narrative pulls over. So there's a lot of different things that make sense and can justify 50 engineers, 100 million in funding, full-time DC lobbying strategy. But you can still just do the two guys, two laptops and a dream strategy if you want. And PMFordai is a great example of that. And we see examples of that on the timeline every single day. Yeah. The next post from Santi Genghis Shots. Yeah. If you can skip to that. So he says today was definitely a day of product. Progress coded, talk to users, got Jack's time with friends, more users for his product. Lebon Master PMF for Die really helps you bring your A game.

2:00:40And I love to see it. We've seen a lot of people since PMF for Die kicked off posting and just saying, I'm locking in from home and just like putting this on. Because one thing is for certain, if you're building, if you're solo building an app remotely, the biggest downside, it can be a great lifestyle. You've done it with, I've done it. everybody many people go through phases where um they're just sort of building and uh being able to turn on pmf or die and just like feel like you're a part of something and have that motivation is awesome so yeah it's free to lock in it's free to outwork your peers uh and we love to see it that's great uh well we have the our carazin uh post here that we should cover uh because he has the actual real data on what's happening on x with advertisers he says advertisers were leaving x in January 2025.

2:01:25They came back in droves. Here's the latest from Ramp. Last month, 68 % of advertisers increased their spending on X slash Twitter. If you're surprised about X's latest valuation, you need to look at this chart. And it's from Ramp. It says advertisers were leaving X in January 2025. They came back in droves. And you can see the trend month over month. Now people are ramping up. I'm certainly ramping up on X spend. And I think a lot of smart companies are because they realize that the AI is going to get better. The targeting is going to get better. The audience is going to get better. Everything is getting better.

2:01:59So there's a good opportunity. And at the end of the day, these advertising markets, they're just markets. So if there's cheap CPM somewhere, it's going to get sucked up and hoovered up by someone. And so that's the nature of these things. Let's go to Zoomer. Zoomer says, SF man hogging the umbrella while his fold out is left out in the rain sad and yeah we need to bring back some uh chivalry some uh hospitality some manners don't hog the umbrella uh you shouldn't be caught dead under an umbrella if you're if your girlfriend wife is using a jacket to cover herself yep terrible look this is a career ending uh you know picture potentially so hopefully the guy's not identified yep you don't want to dox him fade into um but if this is you you're on notice uh you gotta you gotta have a better umbrella etiquette for sure absolutely better etiquette in general across across the internet across the real world hold the doors use the correct forks don't swear don't swear what would your mother say don't say the s word the r word the f word what about the c u c k word i don't know if we should we don't say that on the show okay uh but we need an alternative to that because i need to fill that in anyway we're going to ravi shiftman wrecking yourself there we go uh if you are building in any other industry than love or entertainment you are wrecking yourself you are building an abstract i don't know if i fully believe that it's great that that's what he's doing and i think that's his life work but um i don't know that that's the only option but you know engagement friend new round at 500 million confirmed uh no i mean i think i think avi's like very convicted in what he's doing and i think it's i think i think what he's doing building in both love and entertainment in some ways right totally uh building a digital best friend is a good strategy i think there's a very real scenario in 10 years where a lot of people the average person is working less potentially than they are now we're already at a point where even though lots of people have jobs they're still working less than they were 30 years than they would have been 30 years ago because half their day is spent on at work is spent on tiktok right like imagine jamie diamond realizing realizing how much i'm sure i'm sure like they could see through the wi-fi somehow that like 20 of all of our bandwidth is going to like tick tock or something like that and he's probably just raging right but uh but yeah so so anyways we'll see what happens but uh it's a good strategy to to a lot of founders don't know what they're actually selling so if you're working on a consumer app are you selling you know are you selling uh you know a love like something that's solve for loneliness?

2:04:58Are you selling entertainment? And I think for us, we talk about we are in the news and entertainment business, right? So like, we're here to deliver the news, we hope to do it in an entertaining way. Yes. There's other media brands like Jason Carmen, who's in the inspiration business. He's like focused on telling these massive stories, and following, you know, these trends and inspiring people. But Jason, if you want to throw in some hot takes and some jokes in the next documentary, we're available we're available come spice it up spice just all of a sudden super serious interview with elon and then we're just there like just you know chopping it up uh it'd be great anyway let's move on to kip mock we said congratulations to isaiah taylor for raising the seed round for uh his nuclear company uh and kip has been a huge supporter of the show we've had him on before, but he shares an awesome picture.

2:05:52And he says, he's pleased to announce what I've been working on for the last year and looking forward to seeing this project through in the Philippines. So they signed a coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. Isaiah went all over the world trying to find a hospitable government that would let him build a nuclear reactor very quickly and efficiently. And he found one in the Philippines and everyone's excited for them to repatriate this technology once they get it up and running. but nothing to put a little fire under the US government's behind than saying, hey, we're going to build it internationally if you don't let us build it here.

2:06:28And so you take this to the INL or to the, what is it, the IRC or NRDC, the National Nuclear Reactor. I don't know, the guys who approve nuclear reactors in the United States. And you show them, hey, we did it in the Philippines. Let us do it here. It's a lot easier than saying, hey, we've never done it anywhere. So I love that they're moving quickly. I love that they're globetrotting and getting stuff done. So congrats to the, to the Velar Atomics team once again. And Jordy chimes in and says, absolute legend, making us all proud. We got to, we got to bring up more of those phrases. Some of those great phrases like gunslinger.

2:07:07Gunslinger. Yeah. Gunslinger is such a good one. These are some gunslinger entrepreneurs. he's a nuclear gunslinger. For sure. Gunslingers. Anyway. We got a post from Colin Dunn. I've talked to Colin a couple of times. We actually have used his app, Visual Electric, to generate assets for the show at various stages. Very cool product, sort of takes a place of stock footage, allows you to just very efficiently generate images for various uses, decks, marketing, et cetera. He says Figma should use their$1 billion breakup fee from Adobe Dubai cursor. could be their Instagram. Near comments, another friend of the show says, how do you come up with this price?

2:07:48I don't think that cursor would sell for anywhere close to 1 billion, considering how much their growth right now and access to capital. But Colin would probably push back on that say and say like Figma actually has access to plenty of capital themselves. There could probably be a price. There's always a price, right? Yeah. And people always forget with these mergers that if you like Instagram, everyone says like, oh, they, uh, like they, they, they, they sold out for a billion dollars and then, uh, Instagram wound up being worth like a hundred billion. So they left a ton on the table and that's kind of true.

2:08:25But if you get meta stock in the transaction, then you see upside. And if Facebook 10 X's, yeah, it's like you sold for 10 billion. Cause you can just hold the other, the other difference is Instagram had no revenue and cursor Cursor has over nine figures of revenue. Yeah, it is very different. And so you could imagine that the multiple they would get on that revenue with their current growth and how small the team is, would potentially, like there's a world where Cursor would do a round in the next year valuing them at eight,$10 billion. Yeah, it's totally possible. Cool idea. I'm sure that Dylan would, as Dylan, I'm sure, has looked at a lot of deals like this, right?

2:09:04Yeah, it's interesting. I do think something people miss is that idea of like viewing it more as a merger, you get equity in the combined entity. And if the combined entity really has a chance to make a serious run at a hyperscaler or a really massive 100 billion plus, you know, enterprise tech company, that could be very, very accretive for you, even though you quote unquote sold. Yeah. Because you have stock in the new entity. And these all stock deals are like partially stock deals can be heavily incentivized towards future growth if you're bullish on the partnership. And speaking of Cursor, we got Ben Lang saying, from intern to co-founder of the fastest company ever to hit 100 million in ARR.

2:09:47Amon Sanger, he's coding at Cursor. And just a few years ago, he was an intern, software engineering intern at u.com. Okay, so Amon, great name, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Nominative determinism right there. He'll be definitely spending nights at the Amon. Uh, he followed me on X in 2021 while he was an intern. And so, uh, next time an intern follows you, DM them immediately and say, I want to lead your next round. For sure. Uh, that's a, that's a takeaway. You do that a hundred times. You might get the next cursor, make it all back. Maybe. Um, uh, should we close out with Zoomer? Zoomer second time on the show today.

2:10:26This is some news from Google. I haven't fully, uh, done a deep dive on this. We'll have to dig get into it. Anytime that there's these new AI announcements, it's unclear. Google's so bad at marketing. It's actually, it's brutal. It's because they did that thing where they announced the AI and they sped up the demo. And so now they've kind of broken trust and you need to validate all these things. It's kind of unclear, like how real is this? But Google AI certainly wants you to believe it's real and we'll see. Today, we introduced an AI co-scientist system designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses and research strategies, learn more, including how to join the trusted tester program at Google.

2:11:07And so, Zoomer says, Google's AI agent independently discovered a new leukemia drug that then successfully tested in vitro at clinical concentrations, a novel liver fibrosis drug targets, and bacterial cell level antibiotic mechanisms. It looks like the novel scientific discovery line has been passed. And Zoomer then follows it up and says, the Dwarkesh question of AI insight has just been solved with a blackboard and a for loop. Interesting. So it's always hard to tell, like you need the scientist to kind of weigh in on this and say like, was this just brute forcing? Was this really novel discovery?

2:11:48People are obviously very hyped up anytime AI does anything. And, oh, we just crossed some Turing tests. We just crossed some new threshold. ASI is upon us. Kind of unclear how big this is. Whenever I see one of these, I always look to, well, did the market move? You know, what's GDP doing, right? But GDP is maybe a lagging indicator. But my question is, okay, so there's a massive breakthrough. There's allegedly a massive breakthrough in novel scientific discovery, right? Yeah. What did the biotech stocks do? What would you expect them to do? Yeah. And I watched this during when Google at DeepMind, and they solved the protein folding problem.

2:12:28That was one of the hardest, most intractable computationally complex problems, figuring out how proteins fold, very important to drug development. It's something that is a cost center, I guess, in every drug development, every pharma company. DeepMind solved the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. The market didn't really move. And what it turned out was that, yes, it's a really hard problem, but we have machines that do it, and we have PhD students that can just kind of run the assays, and they do the, I think it's like x-ray crystallography or something like that, to run the human-based algorithm.

2:13:02And it wasn't a fundamental change in the structure of the profitability of biotech companies. And so the market didn't really move. And so I haven't looked it up. I don't really know, but I'm kind of waiting. But sometimes these announcements go out and it takes a while for the public markets to catch up. Yeah, Trey also says it's definitely difficult in the chat. He says, it's definitely difficult to predict how this shakes out because the in vitro part is quote unquote easy. Most of the failure happens after that. Yep. So a lot of the stuff comes out splashy, but then how does it actually roll out?

2:13:34Exactly. So big questions. We'll see. Obviously exciting and definitely like an important track to be working on and very, very cool stuff. And I'm sure that from an AI perspective, this was a, you know, a state of the art, like reasoning agent, a co-scientist. It's great that they're building this in the same way that deep research was great and is still a great product. And I'm excited for this. I'm sure it speeds up people's work. But I probably pumped the brakes on the idea of like, this is some sort of fundamental shift in how we do science in the world. Yeah. At least at this point. Well said.

2:14:10Well, speaking of science and healthcare innovation, our very own Ben is probably coming out of surgery right now. Yeah. Wish him well. emergency wisdom teeth surgery. Had to get those removed. It's got plenty of wisdom, so we're not too worried about a lack thereof. But Ben was an absolute stud this week. He was basically in pain as of like Tuesday. And it just got worse and worse and worse. Still came into the office. Crushed it. Still grinded through it. Yep. And we're thankful for - And that's why we did not do a Dom Perignon episode. We didn't think it would be fair to be sipping champagne without him.

2:14:47But we did hit 16K on X. So thank you to everyone that's followed us. The growth has been outstanding. We've been really happy to watch the show grow. And as soon as Ben is back in the studio, the Dom will flow. It will pop. We already have a bottle ready. Yeah, it's right there next to you. The bottle's ready to go. And so you can expect a Dom episode any day now. And I'm sure that'll be one of the more fun ones. Maybe we'll just do all timeline that day. Just rip it. Just for old time's sake. I think so. Let the takes flow. You don't want to do a deep dive on a Dom episode. You want to just have fun.

2:15:17Well said. Anyway, thanks for listening. Give me the five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Check out all the sponsors in the description. And we will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great Thursday. Thanks for watching and listening. We appreciate you.