Tech Turns to Mining, Meta VR Layoffs, Thinking Machines Shakeup | Matthew Prince, Chirantan Desai, Delian Asparouhov, Deepak Pathak, David Tearse, Blake Resnick

29:21Everyone's focused on the AI wars, not enough attention going to the sauna wars. the real heated rivalry is at the bathhouse yes from bathhouse to other ship to alter a wave of bathhouses in new york city are popping up just blocks apart okay igniting a war of zen and this this is especially relevant to the tbpn team because we've been in somewhat of a sauna war ourself which we'll get into at some point in the story uh the flat iron district in manhattan has been a center of nouveau wellness for around 15 years with its many boutique fitness classes, gyms, acupuncturists, and stretching and recovery centers now wave of bathhouses that offer dry heat and cold plunges face off in a few blocks.

30:08There is bathhouse on West 22nd with other ship two blocks away and altar set to open this winter. You could walk between all three in mere minutes. Williamsburg has its own cluster, right? Parallels. It's like a super cluster. with the original location of bathhouse and other ship that followed. Welcome to the sauna wars where dedicated bathhouses compete with members clubs like West villages continuum, which costs 40 ,000 per year that has a bathhouse set up in the financial district coworking space, WSA's wet lounge as well. Coworking space with a wet lounge, not something, not something you hear about every day.

30:47The fitness chain TMPL has a whole subway ad campaign entirely around their bathhouse facilities featuring women in swimsuits reclining in a suggestive way that one doesn't really find in saunas in real life. Very odd. They joined stalwarts like the Spa 88 and Air in Manhattan, City Well and World Spa in Brooklyn, Spa Castle in Queens, and of course the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village, which is the sort of place newcomers are brought to see a slice of the real New York City. It's usually teeming with people, some getting whacked by bushels of oak leaves in a treatment called Platza and has two owners who rotate weeks of ownership.

31:24That's interesting. It's a funny concept. It's no frills and even a little gritty. For those who are used to conveniences such as booking ahead, there's none of that to be found. They do have a nod to modernity with an active TikTok account featuring guest endorsements recently highlighting Uma Thurman wrapped in a pashmina and calling it one of the greatest, best New York institutions. The first time I went to 10th Street Bass was in 2007. I love the authenticity and how it made me feel. I would find my way back there when I felt depleted, underslept, whatever it might be. I would come out feeling great, says James O 'Reilly, who is one of the founders of the co-working space Neuhaus.

32:00His latest project is the new Lore Bathing Club. This is where you go if you want to cultivate lore in your life, I guess. Founded alongside restaurateur Adam Elzer, Lore takes some inspiration from the Russian and Turkish baths, as well as the communal sweat traditions of Europe and Asia, and drops it into a 6 ,200-square-foot space finished in travertine and white oak in Noho. The bath world is quite a scene, One where skincare brands such as Pharrell Williams, Human Race, send out a press release to announce they're temporarily supplying lore locker rooms with their signature 7D gel sets. What is a 7D gel set?

32:42Tyler. I have no idea. Other Chip is hosting comedy nights. Alter will be selling bathing suits that are custom made in Brazil and has hired a lighting designer who has worked with Billie Eilish. So you're always feeling your best and comfortable and tan, Jafari says with a laugh while giving a tour of the space. There's already a wait list of more than 500 people for their membership, which will cost$275 per month up front for$500 worth of credits to be used towards sauna and cold plunge, but also IVs and shots of vitamins, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light, NAD compression, and PEMF. Kohler has an indoor sauna with a list price of$120 ,000, an outdoor sauna with a list price of$95 ,000, and even launched a collaboration with the Wellness Club Remedy Place for an at-home 39-degree ice bath for$20 ,000.

33:31Do you think Brian Johnson will get into IRL experiences, physical locations? I know, was it Dave Asprey did that for a while? There were a series of Bulletproof coffees. Yeah, that one in Santa Monica. And there's been a few locations where you can go and they have a hyperbaric chamber. You can get your blood tested, like a variety of sort of health and wellness, like biohacker hubs. Some of them... I think Brian would make a nightclub bathhouse. Probably. Because he would want to, you know, his new thing is love as the ultimate longevity hack. Yeah. And so I could see him doing something like that.

34:15It is a sauna boom reminiscent of the glut of boutique fitness studios that flooded the market in the wake of the success of SoulCycle. It used to be that you would go to a gym and it was outrageous to go to an expensive group class, says Jafari, but now there are 99 boutique fitness concepts in a four-mile radius. Still, there are not as many as the peak days pre-pandemic. Not every boutique fitness studio survived, let alone thrived like SolidCore and Tracy Anderson. Competition is always something we are aware of, says Emily Bent. Othership's co-founder and director of marketing. The saturation in North America for bathhouses is not even close to what it is in Europe.

34:50We're starting an industry and rising tides and all that. I have heard about Othership and what an insane business Othership is from a number of people. So not surprised to hear they're expanding. While the message from founders blissed out on 180-degree heat is one of bringing together community and good vibes, the reality can be cutthroat. Consider the case of Bathhouse, probably the most well-known of the businesses in the second wave of New York City sauna culture. Co-founders opened their first location in Williamsburg in 2019 and a second in Flatiron in 2024, both featuring sauna steam rooms, warm pools, and cold plunges.

35:33Goodman, the founder, saw the company's more-is-more approach through the model of working on large event production. You think like an experienced designer. So going to bathhouse is not a monolithic experience, but more of a choose your own adventure. When it first opened, bathhouse was jokingly called the Bitcoin bathhouse as they used the heat generated from mining to warm the tubs, which is I've, I've been to both of the bathhouse locations in New York. They need to do LLM inference. Yes. This is a no brainer. Like everyone who was in crypto mining needed to pivot to AI. They should just do that.

36:07They already have all the infrastructure. It's the solution to the political problem. People are mad at data center power use, but if you have a nice bathhouse that you can go to for the public. Everyone's at the bathhouse constantly talking to Claude or something. I imagine that the water use in the bathhouse is actually probably pretty significant. I imagine that they're draining the pools fairly often. I think they're probably draining them less than you would hope. Oh, that's not good. uh so anyways the comments originally were like uh there's a bunch of things i want to talk about first crowd strike your business is ai their business is securing it crowd strike secures ai and stops breaches second we have a key question do you know who uma thurman is no kill bill you've never seen kill bill uh you know it's fantastic oh i i yeah i i brutal also Pulp Fiction I've seen Pulp Fiction anyways the comments were like oh they're laundering money through Bitcoin but it's just a fancy pool heater those jabs did not prepare them for what happened earlier this year when someone posted on Reddit I noticed the hot tub and body temp tub were looking kind of dirty and gross I thought it'd be fine but then I ended up with a UTI not great a UTI doesn't just walk across the river if it was a problem that would be a pool at a single location at one given date.

37:31There's a 24-hour computer monitoring. So I'm glad that the Bitcoin heated pools are getting 24-hour monitoring, and they're manually logged five times per day, and we keep the logs. We are adjusting pH and chlorine at all times. Every drop of water at every pool turns over every 30 minutes. All the vessels have their own independent systems, so they don't mix. The water goes through a sand filter that takes out any particles up to two microns, like a receipt in their pocket or a tag that falls off. Then it goes through a UV filter, a big tank with three foot long light bulbs, a pure UV light.

38:05So they're going pretty hard. Cool. Well, Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2CB startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Anyway, so there's a... We got to talk about Meta because they just laid off 1 ,500 people in their Metaverse division. It's 10 % of their staff. It affects the company's AI glasses and other wearable products. The stock is up on the news. Obviously, 1 ,500 people is a ton. That's a lot of people. But they still have 14 ,000 people working on reality labs. So there's a question about, like, what exactly will they be doing?

38:47How much does this represent a shift? The messaging has certainly shifted to augmented reality instead of virtual reality. but it feels like they will be continuing a lot of stuff. The Wall Street Journal has a report here. In December, the journal reported that Meta was planning to make budget cuts to teams working on the Metaverse.

39:09Meta spokesperson said, we said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse towards wearables. This is part of that effort. And yeah, you see the Reality Labs team work on a bunch of different stuff and it started as sort of the Oculus acquisition of VR headset, then all of a sudden it was Meta Ray-Bans, which is mostly just a camera, certainly not a VR headset, but it feels like it's sold many more units. I actually don't know the precise numbers. I'm super curious how many of those 1 ,500 people will end up working in VR in their next role. Somewhere else? Yeah, because it's just like can the industry really absorb that many people?

39:53right? I don't know I mean there's projects at Google and Samsung and Apple Vision Pro obviously and then there's a couple startups but yeah where do you go I mean I imagine that a lot of those people are just broad technologists and can work on anything because they're probably working on on servers or supply chain or purchasing or marketing like there's so much to do within reality labs it's a massive organization I mean they ran like huge TV campaigns for the for the oculus and they will probably continue to with a quest a year after After the name change and pivot, the journal reported that the company's flagship metaverse product called Horizon Worlds was failing to catch on with users.

40:29It had less than 200 ,000 monthly active users, and most so-called worlds were never visited by anyone at all. The company's presentations attempting to stoke enthusiasm for Horizon Worlds provided fodder for popular mocking internet memes. People were making fun of it. Yeah, the Horizon Worlds product. I still believe meta is a fantastic name for meta. Yeah. Do you think Salesforce should rename? I wanted to ask Benny off that yesterday. If he's ever just going to go Force. Metal Force. Just Force. Metal Force would be a good name. But yeah, I mean, he is moving past sales. He talks about Agent Force and Service Force and all the different groups he has.

41:06Maybe he's got to change the name at some point. It'll be fun. But Salesforce is kind of a Lindy name. It's been around for so long. Who has the ticker AI? C3 or something? I don't know. Meta has been ramping up spending on AI, pushing its capital expenditure to$72 billion last year with plans to accelerate that spending this year. It's also doled out offers worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to AI researchers and engineers and recently acquired a Singapore-based AI startup called Manus for more than$2 billion. The company's Ray-Ban smart glasses equipped with AI have also started to take off.

41:39the company sold more than 2 million pairs and has delayed the rollout of its newest glasses in Europe as it struggled to keep up with demand in the U.S. So 2 million pairs of smart glasses, the Ray-Ban metas, versus 200 ,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds. I wonder what the retention is on Ray-Ban, meta Ray-Bans. Because if they're retaining less than 10%, then the actual MAU pool is lower. but it sort of seems like it's growing. I see people. I've started to see Instagram reels of people using the smart glasses to do first-person videos and often prank videos. So I think that there's actually a flywheel there that's stronger than what's happening in VR.

42:25The thing that's interesting about not focusing on Europe is that my initial reaction of using the Ray-Ban Metas was if I was using WhatsApp app as my primary messaging app, these would be way more interesting, right? Because you have the integration, you have the heads up display, you can get messages, you can read them, you can respond to them. It's super, super integrated. Meanwhile, they don't have an iMessage integration. And so they're not that valuable to me from a messaging standpoint, which is like kind of one of the key use cases. Yeah. The sort of Ben Thompson takeaway from this was that even though Mark Zuckerberg has effectively complete control over Meta and can rename the company and move very aggressively and acquire big companies, at the end of the day, he does respond to shareholders.

43:21And the shareholders have been watching the Reality Labs losses pile up billions every year. And at some point, if you have a new sort of big money pit initiative that's AI and you're going to spend tens of billions there, you have to sort of make a sacrifice or at least show the shareholders that you're refocusing on the new thing. Even though, obviously, AI and VR play very well together, part of the biggest problem with VR is that it's very difficult to develop. You have to develop this full game. AI can enable a lot of that speed up development. And then there's also the sort of longer offtake, maybe not that far in the future, but this idea that if you generate a world model like the Fei Fei Li World Labs project, or Google has a project as well, Genie, that might be something that actually gets you to put on the headset because it's infinite and endless and requires a whole bunch of upfront costs to train the model, but then once you put it on, you're just in that and you can prompt it yourself.

44:23You're kind of designing your own game and that's a unique experience. that it seems uniquely suitable for VR. Ben Thompson's take was that the MetaVibes was like a virtual reality project, effectively. Even though you didn't put a glasses on, it was creating virtual walls. Well, and that's been my take on the name. It is like... It's still a metaverse. It is a metaverse. Yes. It just looks like a suite of apps. Yes, yes, yes. And now you access that metaverse through a screen, and how close that screen is to your face might take years to get closer and it might be small when it's close for the first iteration.

45:04I'm very interested to see how the Ray-Ban displays are selling. Two million Ray-Ban smart glasses. I've seen them sell the Ray-Ban displays at Best Buy. And Shiel Monat was talking about his frustrations getting onboarded. And have you run into anyone wearing them in the wild? I've run into people with the Ray-Ban smart glasses all the time with the cameras on them. But I haven't run into anyone with the display. Yeah. I haven't seen anyone just rocking them, even though they are out. I honestly, I feel like we don't see that many people. Never go outside. Well, I mean, on the weekends I do, but I'm like out and about.

45:47Yeah. But it's kind of a small community. Yeah. But I didn't get a chance to give a... I want to go back briefly to the sauna thing. Sure. I didn't get a chance to give a take. Okay, yeah. I am extremely bullish on Americans starting to sweat more. Okay. Because the evidence is, like, so clear that if you use a sauna every day, you will probably extend your health span, lifespan. It's heavily, heavily studied because of how popular it's been in the Nordics for, like, decades and decades. so very bullish on sweating one of the things that's interesting though is that New York is has like New York is like the center of consumption people have tiny apartments so they're just constantly consuming food exercise, shopping, etc but I don't think it's representative of the way that the Americans will sweat broadly because you can get a sauna for like a couple grand And so all these bathhouses are like a few hundred dollars.

46:50And so I think for some people, they want the social experience. Whereas for me, I don't like the, I'm not really like that into the, like the. You don't like talking in the sauna? I do like talking in the sauna. We've obviously had our sauna wars. Our sauna wars are, I guess we were talking too loudly in the sauna the other day. Cause this guy just absolutely, absolutely snapped. I was, he was a bit of an angry elf. um but uh but but anyways like the most most consumers are going to be looking like i can go and buy a sauna for two thousand dollars and i have space for it because i have a two-car garage and a backyard and maybe a pool and like for the average american it has a little bit last time i lived in an apartment this was like uh six or so years ago sure i had a whole cold plunge that i snuck into my apartment no sauna just i had a two-bedroom loft you had a sauna too no no i I had a two bedroom.

47:46I had a two bedroom loft and one of them, I just put a, it was just like a cold plunge on a wooden floor. That's insane. And I had a sauna. Of course, I don't think you're allowed to bring like a mini swimming pool. If it leaks, you're going to destroy the whole building. I actually, I did. They did eventually tell me I had to get rid of it because there was a leak in the building and they went in to look and they were like, it didn't have anything to do with my cold plunge or whatever. Okay. So if you were talking to Brian Johnson, you would say, skip the physical institution that is the sauna.

48:17Start a line of saunas that can be delivered on a truck to homes. Yeah, maybe. I mean, there's a company called Plunge that scaled insanely quickly. That company's done really well, yeah. I think over nine figures of revenue off the cold plunge boom. But, yeah, the main thing you have to understand is, you know, for other shipping these companies, You have to go, I think, into dense areas where people don't have a lot of space and have saunas because a lot of people are going to look and say, I either have one in my gym or people can go and just, even if they don't have the two grand, you can use a firm and you're effectively paying a couple hundred bucks a month for a private experience.

48:58We'll see. Gabe says the big sweat lobby is making moves. I like it. But yeah, I've remained so bullish on this trend because it's just passive. You don't have to work up the motivation to sweat. Sure, sure, sure. So you get a lot of the benefits of exercise, but you're not like, I got to force myself to go for a run. It's just like, get in the box. Get in the box. The label box. Yeah, let's tell you about label box. Label box, delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. Get in the box. Get in the box. Label box. Maybe Label box should do a drop of custom saunas for everyone. Daniel Gross says, I am building up Meta's compute desk.

49:42I'm looking for folks with a background. I like the term desk. It feels like New York. It feels like finance. It's not just a team. It's a desk. Yeah. Deep learning, supply chain, commodities, semiconductors, He's stacking copper. Sovereigns, energy, Excel, prediction markets, monitoring situations, et cetera. This is amazing. Candidates should have experience in at least one of these domains. Somebody's like, I've monitored a lot of situations. I'm qualified here. And novel ideas on how to apply LLMs to their work. If you'd like to help manage$100 billion of compute spend, please DM and include information about why you're a fit.

50:18If you're in doubt about being a good fit, please apply. Yeah, at least one of these domains. I only know Excel. I don't know anything about any of the others. I'm just an Excel jockey. Good luck. But yeah, I mean, massive compute spend. Very interesting to see where the MetaCompute project goes. Obviously, they're spending a ton.

50:42Mark Zuckerberg said, today we're establishing a new top-level initiative called MetaCompute. Meta's planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage. It's led by Daniel Gross, of course, and Santosh will continue to lead the technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity, and building and operating the global data center fleet and network. Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling.

51:18They'll work closely with Dina Powell-McCormick, who just joined Meta as president and vice chairman to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build deploy to invest in and finance Meta's infrastructure. I'm looking forward to working closely with Daniel Santosh, Dina and their teams to scale MetaCompute. It's a good name. You need a name for a team. What did Ben Thompson have to say about this? He said, a narrative seems to be quickly spinning up that this signal that Meta is finally going to get into cloud computing, competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And well, Ben Thompson, he doesn't really think that's going to happen.

51:53What exactly would be the point? Amazon invented the space and invested heavily to have a structural cost advantage in commodity compute. Microsoft had a natural customer base with enterprise. Google has differentiated infrastructure and an outlet to fully leverage their AI investments without fear of cannibalization. What exactly would Meta bring to the table that other hyperscalers do not have, such that they would have the confidence that they could be anything other than second choice competing on nothing but price? So asking the hard questions about where MetaCompute goes. They don't need to sell it if they truly scale.

52:33Wasn't their compute budget in the pre-AI era tens of billions of dollars in CapEx, and that was just for reels, just for ads? Like, there's plenty to do if they don't choose to sell it. Anyway, MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. We have the CEO of Mongo coming on in just five minutes. In other news, Beijing has told Chinese firms to stop using CrowdStrike. If you didn't have a reason to start using CrowdStrike, this is a pretty good one. Is this the TVPN effect? They saw us run a couple ads over in Beijing, and they were like, yeah, they're too powerful.

53:15Too powerful. They're too powerful. You have a homegrown car. Apparently, this is already very tiny business for CrowdStrike, so not super impactful. But in other news, OpenAI's number one hater in the entire world, Nick. He's back on the timeline. He was the OpenAI Hater of the Year last year. Yeah. He's really gunning for it again this year. His camera roll is all just pictures of Sam Altman. His camera roll is just all Sam Altman photos, for sure. But the news, OpenAI Broadcom AI chip delayed. And Tio says this is not a delay. It's clearly a 5D chess move where Sam is amassing enough time to release state-of-the-art GPT-6 and put in Google.

53:58Ananthropic out of business. Everyone's having fun. Trying to find where this was actually reported. Yeah. Well, Sam Altman also is putting together, there's an announcement from Ashley Vance about OpenAI and Sam Altman backing a new bold take on fusing humans and machines. It's called Merge Labs. We've heard about this before. We talked to Rob Taves on the show about BCI and brain-computer interfaces potentially being a big trend for this year. Obviously, Neuralink has been cooking for a number of years. Sam Altman also has his bet with Merge Labs. And they now have$252 million in the bank and an all-star crew and superpowers.

54:46And remember, Sam Altman wrote in 2017 a piece called The Merge. I'll read in short a few paragraphs on it. He said, more important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen. and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. The merge can take a lot of forms. We could plug electrodes into our brains where we could all just become really close friends with a chat bot. But I think a merge is probably our best case scenario of two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it.

55:22In this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond, they're going to have a conflict. Like, imagine if dolphins, imagine if Benioff has been working with the dolphins to secretly help them merge. And they're, like, in a crazy dolphin human race to see who can merge first. Because Dolphins basically created sales wars. We need Neuralink to the dolphins so that we can just, like, generate B2B SaaS product ideas constantly. It's so funny. X has this new thing repeatedly. AI always is very good at being funny unintentionally. But a bunch of people were posting about Benioff's story yesterday, talking about, and so X summarized it as a headline.

56:04Mark Benioff recounts Dolphin Vision behind Salesforce's start. Dolphin Vision. Love it. Dolphin Vision. Sam has some crazy old posts. I was looking at this one from February 15, 2023. It says, in 2023, it's$30 ,000 to get a simple iPhone app created and$300 for a plumbing job. I wonder what those relative prices will look like in 2028. the likely coming divergence between changes to cognitive work and changes to physical work could be quite dramatic. And I mean, I saw Nick was showing us an iPhone app that cost about$100 of credits or something like that, maybe a little bit less in a vibe coding app.

56:42You know, you're going to use credits to inference a model that can actually build an iPhone app, but we're definitely closer to 300 bucks than 30 ,000 at this point. It's remarkable. It's remarkable. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Well, we have our first guest of the show, CJ, the MongoDB in the restring waiting room. We won't keep him waiting any longer. Thank you so much for taking the time. What a setup. To jump on the show. How are you doing? I am doing fantastic, man. And it's like there are 700 people here.

57:22Yes. San Francisco is back. I feel like San Francisco is back. Amazing. And we are reintroducing MongoDB in San Francisco today. So I feel the energy is just amazing. Fantastic. Congratulations. Take us through some of the announcements. What does it mean to reintroduce MongoDB? What are the misconceptions where people might think of it as one thing and now you need to reintroduce it? I would say, you know, MongoDB, first of all, database market has been around for a long time, 50 plus years, maybe 60 years. Oracle is going to celebrate its 50th anniversary, year and a half. That was my first job out of college, is I joined Oracle.

58:02And MongoDB was a truly disruptive database that got created in 2007 and in New York City. I mean, this is one of the few tech companies that got created in New York City. Put it on the map. I know. I know. And then the leaf, you know, people ask me, what is the leaf of MongoDB all about? And the founder said, hey, this is a natural way a software engineer or a builder should interact with a database versus a rigid way of interacting with database. So it's pretty cool. I just became CEO a couple of months ago, came from Cloudflare, and I'm having a great time meeting innovators, customers around the world.

58:49On the misconception, here's what I would say. That even though the database was created in 2007, the whole idea behind it was speed, agility, and dealing with a lot of unstructured data, like emails, PDFs, images, videos, log files, this and that. So when the founder created this database, it was not with AI in mind. And today, when you look at any AI application, your favorite consumer application you may be using on a daily basis, you see there is images in there, you may have created a video in there, lots of interaction. This database was created for the AI wave. And we want builders building on MongoDB as they create agent AI applications or any applications for that matter that has structured data so that they can move fast and hopefully create the big iconic businesses, legendary businesses in Silicon Valley on top of MongoDB.

59:51Where are you seeing the most excitement and growth in your business? I can imagine that there's a ton of greenfield projects that are happening in large clients, large enterprises where they want to move even faster. So they're grabbing MongoDB in addition to other modern tools on a new greenfield project. And then there's also a new startup boom of AI-enabled software companies. I'm sure that's growing as well. what have you been seeing? Where is uptake the fastest in the last few years? I would say, John, you know, what I learned, and I can feel it right here on the floor, is that you had pretty much customers.

1:00:39We have 60 ,000 customers, okay, 62 ,500.

1:00:47And our customer growth has accelerated in the last 12 months, which is pretty cool because a lot of developers are now building on MongoDB. Nice. I like it. Every time you say something great, I'm going to hit that. So, farewell. All right. I love it. So, one is our customer base re-accelerated as developers are building on MongoDB. But it's a tale of two cities, right? One is large enterprises, John, as you called out. They are growing still with MongoDB. They have some mission critical across every industry. financials, healthcare, government, I can tell you many across the globe, just building on MongoDB.

1:01:26And you have... AI native companies or digital native companies whether they're in San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv, or even New York. they are building on MongoDB. So the customer growth is coming from there and customer growth accelerated in last 12 months for us, which is really cool. Many, many companies, you know, when they start de-selling, they do not re-accelerate and we re-accelerated. So that gets me like really fired up and really positive. And the innovation that we announced today that if you want to truly build an agentic system at scale that doesn't hallucinate, You can build it on your laptop.

1:02:07You always require a great database. You need an awesome agentic rag or, you know, semantic search that just works, that is accurate. And this is truly a mission critical app that an insurance company may float it to their customers or a government may float it to their citizens or whatever the case might be. We want to make sure that this is a great data platform. So we announced voice for embeddings. We created a small embedding model called Nano, which is one-eighth the size of large. It shares the embedding space and works with pretty much on cloud, on-prem, multi-cloud. And, you know, Jensen talked about at CES the whole thing around multi-cloud, multi-model, and multi-models.

1:02:55And we do the same. So very cool, excited. We gave that message this morning to the builders here. We have a full show all day today, which was also live. And people are fired up. How are you thinking about M &A this year? Obviously, the company is doing really well. You're a public company. You have a public currency for acquisition. There's a lot of different pieces in the landscape that could be synergistic. but what's your thought process for partnering with other startups, either in full acquisition or another partnership? How are you thinking about it this year? So, John, I'm a big believer in organic growth.

1:03:38We have a large market that we participate in. We have only penetrated 2.5 % of that market. 100 billion, we are at 2.5 billion. So we have a lot of room with our core data platform. Now, we are always looking for specialized skills, say maybe in the AI area. So in 2025, we bought Voyage, which was created out of Stanford. Amazing people. You know, the founder teaches a legendary course on machine learning. So we bought that company and it got amazing, amazing engineers and researchers. And that professor is now chief AI scientist at MongoDB. So we will do those type of acquisitions where they are small, either for a technology or people or sometimes both, so that we can truly leverage and accelerate the pace of innovation.

1:04:29Has anything in the various compute bottlenecks been a headache or kept you up at night? I mean, we're reading about Amazon Web Services is paying for copper refining because they need to go so deep in the supply chain that they need to go to the mining level. Memory prices are through the roof. There's delays on all sorts of custom silicon chips. I know you might not be affected, but how are you thinking about the different bottlenecks in the cloud computing supply chain? I would say the bottlenecks, if you remember a couple of years ago, everybody was worried about, will they get enough GPUs from Jensen?

1:05:15Everybody's like, oh my God, bro, are you going to get enough GPUs from Jensen? And that was like a big worry. And now when we speak to customers, that's why they are like, okay, will GCP or Amazon, like you said, AWS and others, will they have enough capacity? Right now, it is not something that people are panicking. And Amazon or Google, I would say, they are trying to stay ahead on that curve so that it doesn't become that, hey, CJ, we cannot run MongoDB for your favorite customer, X, because we are out of capacity, man. We just can't do that. So we are trying to definitely work with them, understand how they are dealing with both compute as in CPUs as well as GPUs.

1:05:59and those innovation cycles are also very fast. But right now we are relying on them to solve, but we are not worried about it because they haven't given us the signal that we won't be able to do this. Well, congratulations on the event. Jordi, do you have anything else? Yeah, and the new role. I know we're out of time, but I'm sure we'll have time. Yeah, I'd love to dig more into your background and tell the fuller story. But we know you have a busy day today. Congratulations, and we will talk to you soon. Give our best to everybody at the event. Thank you, Jordi and John. Appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.

1:06:31Goodbye. Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We have Matthew Prince from Cloudflare joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, we will go back to the timeline. There is some massive news. I did on Merge, I wanted to say a couple things. So Mikhail, who's one of the co-founders of Merge, says, TLDR, we're developing a new paradigm for BCI using molecules instead of electrodes. Oh, interesting. If you're excited about this and want to contribute in protein engineering, synthetic bio delivery, immunology, ultrasound devices, neuroscience, or data, MLAI, we'd love to hear from you.

1:07:18That sounds extremely sci-fi. Merge is pursuing ways to make BCI much higher bandwidth, millions of neurons, and less invasive, no device implants. Instead of electrodes, we're focusing on modalities like ultrasound that can cover large areas of the brain and on proteins that can connect these modalities with neural activities. And so, again, quite a different approach than Neuralink. Well, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector in full-text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Our next guest, Matthew Prince, is in the Restream waiting room.

1:07:57Let's bring him in to the TVP on Ultra Dome. Matthew, good to see you again. Happy New Year. How are you doing? Good. How are you? That's good to hear. It seemed like you weren't doing that well a week ago when you posted about a court in Italy fining you. Can you take us through the process? Was this a surprise? how did how did everything lead up to your post which went mega viral yeah first of all not a court quasi-governmental station and let me give you a little bit of background so in Italy there was concern by a bunch of the football clubs so the soccer clubs in Italy about online piracy of of the matches that were there and in response to that the Italian parliament basically designated a quasi-governmental organization called Agicom that they would have the ability to essentially allow any media company executive to put any website they didn't like on a list.

1:09:01And then initially, just the ISPs in Italy had 30 minutes to block access to that website. But they then amended the law to be able to include other companies, including Cloudflare, but also folks like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, anyone that is doing anything that is cloud related, they have gotten swept up in this. And so the requirement was that when a website was put on this list, that we would have 30 minutes to remove it globally. In other words, this small group of media executives got to choose what you could watch in the United States. And we already saw significant exposure of this beyond just illegal streaming, where we saw political content being removed.

1:09:46They accidentally blocked all of Google Drive at one point. They accidentally blocked all of Cloudflare's network at one point, which broke the Italian Internet. So they turned that off pretty quickly. And so we had been in litigation in Italy to basically say this doesn't make any sense. And what particularly doesn't make sense is we hate the illegal streamers. They cost us money. We don't make any money off of them. They waste our bandwidth. They take up resources that we could have for paying customers. And so we have a huge team that is trying to shut them down. We actually won a court decision right before Christmas that said that we could get all of the internal documents on how this commission was created, what its rules were, everything else.

1:10:31And then, you know, probably just coincidentally, of course, immediately after Christmas, the first meeting they had, they imposed a$17 million fine on us and said that it will continue to escalate if we don't pay it and register for this scheme and commit to let them censor the Internet, which obviously we're not going to do. That, by the way, is 2x our revenue in Italy. They have interpreted the law as saying that they can charge up to 2 % of global revenue for any company that they find. So, again, the insanity here is pretty high. And yet that's not even what the law says. The law just simply says it can be from tens of thousands.

1:11:17And in fact, there's parts of the law that they relied on that are so old that they were actually quoted in lira. So it was back before even the EU existed. To give you some sense of how crazy this is, even the EU has said that this law has – they have significant concerns over this law. And so we're in a strange situation where, you know, we're getting a lot of pressure to literally just turn Italy off and not let them connect to Cloudflare's network, which would, you know, unfortunately, everyone saw a few months ago when we had an outage how big of an issue that is. That doesn't seem right.

1:11:55You know, putting your tinfoil hat on, what is – is there some – do you think there's some local group that wants your Italy business that says like, hey, that's like – What's the motivation? Is it purely censorship? It seems like it's just your own goal. I think that there is. So I think, first of all, it's a bunch of, you know, older, you know, football owners who don't understand how the Internet works, who just are saying, you know, piracy is a problem. And instead of doing what most leagues around the rest of the world do with us, which is work with us in order to identify what those illegal streams are.

1:12:34And then we not only take them down, but we actually put up a page that's an advertisement for the correct stream in its place. instead they were just like we're going to just make it so that you have to take these things offline, damn the consequences I think there are other people inside of Italy that see this as an ability for them to be able to control some political content that they may not like, obviously Italy is a contentious political state and being able to shut things you don't like off the internet is a very powerful political tool, so I think that's the tinfoil hat side But I think mostly this is just thuggish behavior by a bunch of people who don't understand how the internet works.

1:13:15Ben, take off the tinfoil hat, put on the steel man helmet, and try and steel man for me where the work should be done of fighting piracy on the internet. Because I have some empathy for a league owner who doesn't want their content streamed illegally. And it seems to be such a hard problem. Like my view is like UFC kind of just like threw in the towel and was like, this is the pay-per-view model is over. We're going to Netflix. Paramount. Paramount, yeah. And so, yeah, it seems like it's a nice thing for you to do to take down these illegal streams. Maybe there's some legal reason that that falls on you.

1:13:56It's a financial reason. It's like when the streams come up, they clog our pipes. And that shuts down the ability. And we have to pay for that bandwidth. Yeah. So we have all the financial incentives to shut it down. It is a hard problem, right? Because, again, the streamers are clever, and they're always bouncing around and doing different things. But we shut down hundreds of thousands of illegal streams every single day, and we work with most leagues around the world. So there doesn't need to be a law in order to create the incentives for us. What I do worry about, though, is any time that you create some sort of rule in the name of privacy, in the name of protecting children, in the name of whatever, that lets a local government, whether that's a state government or a nation state, be able to set how global infrastructure works.

1:14:45That just seems per se bad. You shouldn't be able to say Italy decides what you can see and watch in New York or California or Texas or Canada or China, frankly. And China shouldn't be able to impact, like, let China be crazy inside of China. And And they can have their own rules and regulate their networks however they want. But the fact that this has extraterritorial application, that literally some, again, Italian, basically, soccer club owners can dictate what content you watch in California or New York. That's insane. And that's something that we have to push back against. Yeah. So what's the response been like in Washington, in D.C.?

1:15:22Yeah. I imagine that at some point, even just a passing statement from the admin, hey, Italy, back down on this. We'll buy a little bit more wine or something, some trade deal. Or not impose 100 % tariff on all your goods. That too. Yeah, what are the levers that people are considering pulling? What has been pulled? How are the discussions going? Yeah. So I spent the beginning part of this week in D.C. meeting with everyone from senators to the United States State Department, the white number of different officials within the administration directly in the White House, USTR, which is the United States Trade Representatives.

1:16:04And I didn't come across a single one that wasn't disgusted by this policy. And so, like, I don't think the Italians quite understand the hornet's nest that they've stirred up. This is now sort of the cause celeb for Europe using U.S. tech companies as their piggy bank. I mean, the crazy stat is that Europe makes more off fining U.S. tech companies than they do off taxing their own technology companies. That's insane, right? And so something has to change here. And this is the most clear example that, again, whistles to all the dogs in Washington right now saying, like, we can't have, again, Europeans, let alone this sort of Italian cabal, being able to dictate what is and is not online.

1:16:55Yeah. What's the reaction been from, I mean, your competitors, there are other content delivery networks, other hosts. Do they agree with you and they're just less outspoken because they're not in the founder mode that you're in perhaps? Or are there some other companies that are just less affected or less targeted because they aren't as much of a peer play? How is the rest of the ecosystem reacting to all this? Yeah, I think the hyperscalers are really concerned about this. I think anybody who has, you know, a really large business where they have millions and millions, we have tens of millions of customers.

1:17:32You know, I think what's unique about us is we have a free version of our service because we believe that every small business, every developer should be able to have robust cybersecurity tools, robust content delivery tools. And so that gives us a much broader portfolio than some of our competitors that only have, they won't even pick up the phone for less than a million dollars. So it's a little bit of a different thing. But if you're an AWS, if you're a Google Cloud, if you're a Microsoft Azure, if you're an Oracle, they are deeply concerned that this is going to impact them because they all have broad sets of customers.

1:18:09And it's very difficult for them to just say, we're going to let Italy pick who can and cannot be a customer of ours. That's, again, just insane. Okay, last question on the find for me, and then I I want to move on to AI since we have you here. What's the result of the fine? Did you just pay it or are you debating it? No, no, no. So we're challenging it. Italian law, because Italy doesn't have any mechanism to stay this. I would imagine that there are going to be some pretty pointed phone calls from senior U.S. officials, senior Italian officials saying, like, cut this out. In addition, we're considering various options.

1:18:46So we may shut down our free service in Italy. which, again, it's unfortunate. It'll hurt a bunch of developers there. But we can't do charity for places that, again, are in random finds. The other thing that's coming up is the Milan Cortina Olympics, where we provide tens of millions of dollars of free cybersecurity services. I was actually a personal guest of the former president of the IOC to the Paris Games because we provided the information that took the terrorist attack that almost shut down the games and allowed them to arrest 90 % of the terrorists beforehand. We helped stop massive denial of service attacks, again, for free, that were launched from Russia, which is trying to completely discredit the Olympics because of the doping scandals and fans that they've faced.

1:19:30And so, you know, again, I really believe in the Olympics. I really want the Olympics to succeed. But, again, it seems wrong for us to be providing tens of millions of dollars of free cybersecurity for a showcase event in a country that's just acting completely insane. Yeah, that makes sense. Talk to me about the 2026 App Innovation Report. Talk to me about this idea of a technical glass ceiling. I've been going back and forth with a lot of the AI researchers that come on the show. The models are amazing. And then I'll ask them like, well, this particular app doesn't seem to be getting better on my phone.

1:20:07What's going on over there? Why isn't this app significantly improved? Why are there still bugs in enterprise software when everyone has access to frontier models? What are you seeing in AI adoption? What are you feeling internally? Just take me through your current thinking. Well, we are incredibly bullish in AI. We use it internally. We use it across all of our teams. We actually had our company-wide kickoff today, and our CTO challenged every one of our teams to say, how can they use AI more? And it's really quite incredible what it's done. What I will say, though, is we're definitely in some places for some AI companies hitting some sort of a limit, it seems, in what they're able to do.

1:20:48And the exception to that, I think, has been Google. Gemini has continued to outperform the rest of the market. And I think that the answer to why that's the case is actually not about the chips. Obviously, they've designed their own TPU chips. I don't think it's about the people. They have incredibly smart people. But so does Anthropics. So does OpenAI. I think it's actually about the data. And we are one of the few companies that actually has a view into this. And so we haven't shared this very publicly, but I guess no time like the present. And so how much more of the web would you guess that Google sees and is able to train their AI systems on versus OpenAI?

1:21:32Yeah, I'd probably say 50 % more. Yeah, the answer is actually 3.2 times more. Wow. Which is insane, right? That means that for every one page that OpenAI sees, Google is seeing 3.2 pages. So there's just so much more data that's going into it. And again, OpenAI is the next closest. After that, Google sees 4.8 times more of the web than Microsoft. They see similar to what they see with Anthropic as well. And it just drops off from there. And so what I worry about is that because Google has this unique access to the web that nobody else has, that the game might just go to them. Because I think that at the end of the day, whoever has the most data wins in the era of AI.

1:22:19And I think what a lot of these companies are seeing is they're hitting kind of a data limitation. And one of the things we're really thinking about is how can we make sure that we level the playing field? Either bring Google back to where everyone else is, don't let them leverage search in order to get a unique advantage in AI. or how do we lift everyone else up to the same place where Google is? Make sure that everybody has access to that same data. If we don't create a level playing field in terms of the data, I do feel like there's a real concern that Google is going to run away with this and no one else will catch them.

1:22:49Interesting. Yeah, we've noticed that, I mean, we test all the different LLM apps and even just from a branding perspective, when you're in the Gemini app and it says doing a Google search, all the other apps will say we're searching the internet, But doing a Google search just gives – the brand is like, oh, it's doing what I would do if I were on the computer. And it's interesting to hear that there's actually more data being accessed. It's not just the brand. It's also one of the only things that Elon and Sam can really agree on or sort of a shared motivation is like making sure the AI race is competitive with Google.

1:23:23I mean people forget that OpenAI was started because Elon and Sam got together because they were so concerned about what was happening with Google. And I think that that concern is rightly placed. And Google has such a data advantage where because of search, everyone has left them behind their paywall. Everyone has let them see parts of the Internet that no one else sees. Again, we can look at the restrictions on various spots. What are the robot.txt files and everything else for a huge portion of the Internet? And the answer is that Google just has privileged access. And until we level that playing field, either by bringing Google back to the same level as everyone else or bringing everyone else up to the same level as Google, I worry that this is their race to win.

1:24:05And that's bad. The world certainly shouldn't have one AI company. I don't think it should have five AI companies. I think we should be playing for a world where we have 500 ,000 AI companies and we make it as easy as possible for any of them to thrive and survive. Okay, talk to me about the defaults on robots.txt, where people are allowing scrapers, where Googlebot can come in, where Gemini can come in. What's been your thinking on defaults? How has it evolved? And then what's the reaction from your customer base been to those defaults? Yeah, so I think this is actually a really nuanced issue.

1:24:43And the answer is it's going to be different for a number of different companies. And in some cases, we don't know what the right default is. So here's where I think the things are very straightforward. Excuse me. If you have a knowledge base, so Cloudflare has a knowledge base on how to use Cloudflare workers in order to build systems. Excuse me, tickle in my throat. No problem. If you have something like that, then of course you want that to be in AI systems. And that should be default, scrape, no matter what. On the other hand, if you're a publisher, which is ad or subscription supported, maybe you don't want that to be in because AI bots don't click on ads.

1:25:27And if they're taking all the content that you're generating and then just regurgitating it in a place where you don't get any benefit from that, that's a real problem for the business model of media companies. And again, I think what we're seeing is the media companies have really locked down who has access to their content. And you're seeing much better deals from the likes of Condé Nast,.dash Meredith, Reddit, who are getting more for their content from the AI companies. Because at the end of the day, whoever has the most data is going to be the winner that's there. What I think is somewhat unfair, and again, back to the same issue, is Google, because of search, is still getting almost everything for free, whereas everyone else is having to pay for it.

1:26:04That seems wrong. That seems like something that we need to fix in some way. And again, we need to either bring everyone else up or bring Google back down to everyone else's level. But that's one of the things we're worried about. I think the most interesting thing that people aren't talking about today is what's going to happen to retail, what's going to happen to small businesses that are out there. AI is this massively consolidating force. And if you look at, take three of the biggest retailers in the world, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. What's interesting is, again, these are hugely well-resourced companies, smart people working at them, no lack of financial resources across them to do whatever is right.

1:26:43And they've come to three completely different conclusions on what you should do about agentic commerce. In the case of Walmart, throw the doors open, open it up to the catalog, let every agent in. And in the short term, I think that's clearly the right answer. But I worry over time that the agents are going to just keep trying to figure out how can we cut Walmart out over time. And I don't know what brands mean in a world where your agent is shopping on your behalf. Brands are a way for humans to have shortcuts that understand quality and value. that goes away in a world of agentic commerce. Agents will figure that out for you and report back.

1:27:24And brands might not matter as much, and including a massive brand like Walmart. Amazon has taken the complete opposite strategy. They're literally suing perplexity, saying your agents aren't welcome here. Again, too massive. But that's because they have a massive advertising business and they know that the agents aren't. Well, so does Walmart. Yeah, but it's not. How material is it for Walmart versus Amazon? It's pretty big. There's any of those sponsored listings on Walmart. They're all doing the same stuff. I would argue it's something different. I think Amazon thinks that they have to win the agent or themselves.

1:28:00And so Alexa has to get much better at it, whereas Walmart doesn't have as much of a stake in it. So this is a giant bet, I think, from Amazon that their agent will be able to shop better than anyone else's. That isn't my experience with Alexa yet. But again, a huge amount of resources that are going into that. Target has what I think is sort of the, oh, let's split the baby kind of approach, which is agents are allowed, but they have to be the ones that are listed on the Target website. That obviously is not going to be a long-term sustainable approach. But I think that that shows how challenging this is going to be.

1:28:33And what I really worry about is going forward, like if you think about what small businesses that you shop with, your local butcher, your local flower store, those things, a lot of it is because of the interpersonal relationships. that you have with those shop owners. If those go away, if your agent is doing this all on your behalf, if we all become some version of the Jetsons where, you know, how does George do his shopping? He asks Rosie, the helpful robot, to go do it for him. And eggs show up and he doesn't really care, you know, where they came from. I worry that that's going to put enormous pressure on small businesses.

1:29:04And I don't know that small businesses have the tools today to be able to figure out how to exist and thrive in this world of agentec commerce. And that's something that I'm enormously worried about. I think, yeah, I think it's, I think it's warranted. I still think at the end of the day with physical products, it's like, you know, I care a lot about like, I'm drinking this here. I'm drinking this because our friend Andrew Huberman, this is the brand that he's aligned with. Like if I just sent an agent to go buy me a Yerba Mate, maybe it comes back with something else, but then I'm still like, ah, just get me the, get me the, get me the podcast in a can, please.

1:29:39Anyway, so a lot to figure out. The exciting thing I feel like is that every, so many different companies are reporting that LLM traffic is converting at a high rate, which tells me that it is a great tool for product research. But there is a lot of questions of like, yeah, how do you, you know, geo is kind of like a dark art right now. It's very hard to, it's far easier to kind of understand how you're showing up in results than it is to maybe influence it yet. A lot of things to figure out. I did have one. I wanted an update on the ski season from you. I saw numbers, basically traffic down like 20 % year over year.

1:30:26So one thing before, I agree we don't quite know how this is going to play out, but I do think it's important that we articulate what we're trying to play for. So I want to play for a world where there's not five AI companies, There's 500 ,000 where there's not a small set of media, massive conglomerates, but anyone can be a content creator. I mean, you guys are a perfect example of what I want to make sure continues to exist as we get into a world that is more AI driven. And then for businesses, we need to make sure that you can be a small business and still thrive. There is a way to have a level playing field and that there can be tens of millions of businesses around the world that can actually do that.

1:31:04And that's what we're thinking about. That's what we're partnering with folks like Visa and MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, Shopify, Adobe, Salesforce, to try and figure out how do we give those tools. And I think that's one of the most important questions. The business model of the Internet over the next five years is going to change radically. Rarely does that something that big have that big a change. And I think if you're not thinking about what that change is going to be, then again, I don't think you're worrying about the most important question today. In terms of the ski season, no reason the skiing should be distracting you from thinking about what the future business model of the internet should be.

1:31:37It is grim. I'm sitting in Park City, Utah. This is the worst ski season. I mean, I'm 51 years old. My first year of skiing, I was in the 76th, 77th season. This is as bad as that season. No, it's good timing for you. Like a lot of people, you pray for snow. You were kind of like a bad ski season is kind of convenient for you right now. You need to be pretty locked in. I'm trying to get Vail to sell me Park City and then return it to local ownership and make it the star that it is. Yeah, so Vail is trading at less than two times revenue. We've covered kind of the history of the business. Like, at what point do you just buy the whole thing?

1:32:24I don't think it makes sense. I don't want to run Vail. That doesn't sound like much fun. But I think somebody should. And, you know, if it's, you know, if you could acquire Vail for, you know,$5 billion with some leverage and you need about a billion dollars of equity, I know a guy who will write you if you're an activist investor. Well, that's what I was saying. One way you get your prize, you know, your trophy, Park City, is you just buy Vail and then you spin it out, spin out Park City yourself. Yeah, that seems – maybe we'll get to that point. I would much rather somebody else who's, like, good at those things that goes – like, you know, Elliott Management, if they want to go buy Vail and then sell me Park City, that would be – it seems like almost – it's getting close to being a no-brainer.

1:33:05Amazing. Well, we're hoping to follow that story. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Good luck with the – Absolutely. Thanks for that. Good luck with Italy. Good luck with the Italians, and thank you for all the support coming on the show early. Yeah, how's your Italian? It's been huge for us. How's your Italian? My Italian is not particularly good. But he has a great Italian lawyer, I bet. I bet he's got a guy who's over there. A lot of good Italian lawyers. Full employment. We'll have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the rest of the week. Absolutely. And we'll see you soon. I really appreciate it.

1:33:33Big fan of this. Goodbye. Thank you. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. It's Dalian Asparuhov, the co-founder of Varda, the partner at Founders Fund. Hit him with the flashbang. Got him.

1:33:59We got to hit him with a smoke grenade, too. Ask him to do an intro as the smoke clears. Throwing smoke. Throwing smoke.

1:34:10And look who is it. It's Dalian as the smoke clears. We have the partner from Founders Fund on the stream. It really takes a second to clear. Okay, we're clear. We're clear. Dallian, good to have you here. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for hopping on the show. How are you doing? How's your week going? You're ripping checks. You're in business. Money's flowing. Is the bear market over? Last year, you felt like things were getting a little crazy. Maybe you didn't find any opportunities you love. Then you started the year with a bang. Mm-hmm. Started the year with a bang. I feel like, you know, I think I'm just like addicted to investing over the holidays.

1:34:50I realized over the past like nine years that I've been in venture, I think seven of those years I've signed a term sheet within 48 hours of Christmas Day. Wow. And I don't know if that like speaks to the fact that like I just like I'm addicted to work or something about like Santa Claus makes me want to like send out some presents or something like that. But yeah, definitely it feels like a busy season. I was catching up with another investor and he was like, same thing here. Like one of the best deals we did was basically over Christmas. Is the deal flow from like serendipity at the holiday parties or is it just networking from the internet?

1:35:19Like where are you meeting founders these days? I admit that like I think a part of it is if you were trying to preempt around, no better time than to do it over the holidays because like nobody's chitter chatting at the office. There's no like hallway conversation, et cetera. You can have these just like very quiet conversations. Founders like it because they don't have to deal with like, you know, a bunch of noise. you like it because you feel like you can do this one-on-one negotiation and basically just set the deadline of like, I've now done this a couple of years in a row where it's like, yeah, sign my New Year's.

1:35:45Otherwise, like deal's off basically. And it feels harder to enforce that type of deadline during the school year basically. And so I think that's part of why on both sides I like it. It's like as a founder, you can kind of test the waters. And if it gets shot down, whatever, nobody heard about it. Everybody was gone for the holidays. You come back into the office. Your employees don't know. Your board doesn't know. No VCs know. And if it does go, then like great. I think it's convenient as a founder, the holidays can be so annoying because it becomes kind of poor form to just be slamming people, your team with emails around Christmas Eve, Christmas, all that kind of stuff.

1:36:20That's why you're slamming the VCs with the emails. Yeah, so I think it's a win-win. Just obviously anytime you're talking terms, it becomes wildly distracting because you're like, this is maybe the most important thing for my business right now. but if you can use that stretch of like seven days where you're not really supposed to be like, you know, uh, you're not operating, but you're allowed to negotiate terms. By the way, I did want to point out, I did make sure that I wore my, uh, TPN quarters up today. So do you have a, you have a horse on that? Is that a little horse there? We got another horse there.

1:36:52Let me get it. Oh, other way, other way. It's coming on. It's coming on the screen. Wow. I like that you guys have a whole CG guy. Oh, yeah, yeah. 2026 is a good year for us. Talk to us about the bimodal strategy, early stage, growth stage. The barbell. Is this actually pushing you out on the barbell? Was Series A your sweet spot and now it's seed in Series C? Is this going to be a permanent thing? How are you thinking through that? Yeah, I think if you look at some of the best, like, deep tech, hardware, industrial companies over the past 15 years, they have a very interesting PPS growth curve where effectively you have typically a seed round that happens.

1:37:33I'm just going to give somewhat fake numbers here, but indicative of a buck per share basically in the early incubation days. You then have series A that will be four or five times higher, basically like five bucks a share. A lot of times what you'll see is years of super de minimis basically PPS growth until you get to the other side of the R &D, production hell, et cetera. And then all of a sudden you just have huge step function changes like over and over and over again. And this is true on everything from like the early days of like NVIDIA, Tesla, like, you know, Apple, all the way down to like some of the more, you know, sort of recent, you know, some more deep tech industrial, you know, sort of startups.

1:38:06And so what to do as like an investor, basically, well, you know, you can, you know, I think do the seed rounds where I do think they're, you know, attractive versus reward. or do you get some amount of IRR just like through Series A, et cetera? And then what you effectively want to do is do that last round where it's flat and then allow it to basically grow from there. And I think what I've started to realize is that is the style of company that I like to do. It has a very different PPS curve relative to like SaaS, AI, et cetera, which are honestly just like much more like clear, smooth, sort of like typically obviously exponential curves if it's like a sort of great company, right?

1:38:40Like if you look at Ramp, for example, there was just clear step-ups all throughout. They did a great job of marketing themselves down in the 2022 crash. I think that was proven to them. Then basically smoothly upwards since then.

1:38:57The way that's played out is now over the past couple of years, I've much more consistently done super early stage PDF and a founder, basically early industrial deep tech companies. Then I sit there and bide my time and wait until what I think is that last round right before the inflection point. and then basically do that round. And I've now done that over the past year. I did basically three later stage rounds, like Series B, Series C, and then basically Series C that I just closed terms on over the holidays. And all of them were companies that I'd either been tracking basically since Seed or literally been an investor since Seed.

1:39:32And we talked about one of those, part of what we were talking about earlier today was talking about one of those very particular companies. But yeah, I think I'm starting to realize that I like that way more than I like doing the messy middle in some ways. And so, yeah, want to double down on that. And, you know, whatever Tuesday night was cool where I literally felt that happen, where I signed two term sheets that were indicative of both ends of the barbell for me. Was the amount of work in DD that you did on the Series C company significantly higher? Like, how did you actually split the time up?

1:39:59Because this is framed as, you know, 50-50 of Dellian's time. But I imagine that there's just more data to pull in, more research to do, more customers to talk to. But at the same time, you know the company so much better. Sure, sure. Yeah. So what was it like process-wise? Yeah. I mean, I'm not somebody – I don't think I would ever be able to do like a raw series where it's like I've met the company for the first time and have the time to go do the diligence, et cetera, from scratch because it's just like, dude, I've got a fucking company that I've got to run. Like I can't do that. The thing that I can do though is like get involved early or if it's something I'm like deeply passionate about, even if I'm not involved, like track the company super regularly such that I'm kind of doing all that prediligence basically like ahead of time.

1:40:35So let's talk about one of the companies that I think exemplifies this strategy, Hadrian, where we just announced a$1.6 billion post round by T. Rowe Price basically last week. I think that maybe, you know, I think Dell's – We'll ring it for him. We'll ring it twice for the Hadrian. Exactly, exactly. I think it's Dell's fifth unicorn or something like that from like, you know, they see under 25 posts all the way through to the – They're going to need success. Yeah, I feel good about it. Chris said – I was texting him earlier. He was like, you're allowed to toot your own horn. I'm going to toot this.

1:41:04There you go. Yeah, there you go. BC Braggs, you know. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us the update on Hadron. Yeah, that's one where it's like, look, I got involved in the, you know, basically like company formation, basically like, you know, sort of seed round where it was, you know, Chris and like maybe one or two, you know, sort of people. Yeah. And so what did diligence on that one look like? Well, it was effectively like, you know, four and a half years of working with Chris very closely, going to every single board meeting, watching the company like adapt over time. And in Q1 last year in 2025, it was clear there was just this inflection point that I felt like I could appreciate, but not everyone else was really appreciating yet.

1:41:39The first was they basically, for those that don't know, Hadrian basically builds these automated CNC facilities. They basically cut metal on behalf of aerospace and defense companies. So I think a lot of the biggest logos in the Founders Fund portfolio, I won't list all of them since I'm not sure which ones are allowed to be public. But ones that build rockets, make drones, you can guess which ones those are. and they cut metal on behalf of those companies for a long time they were interested in the like r &d production grind like trying to figure out basically like how to make decanomics the business work you know switching from like what were originally quick turn small prototype contracts into like production multi-year you know basically large contracts and in q1 last year there were two things that happened that just like made it very clear to me that it hit like my study instincts like oh this is like the point that i'm supposed to come in and do the series seed like my whole job was to have done the seed and then wait for this exact moment, the two things that happened were, one, they just got through production hell, basically.

1:42:31The economics started making sense. They were producing way more volume. And then the second thing was we talk about this a lot, but the defense industry is obviously going through a huge shakeup. And there's a whole set of neoprimes that are coming out that are going to get anointed. And Hadrian was clearly in this transition point from what was previously just purely like a back-end sort of supplier of parts and a vendor into somebody that was becoming more of like a strategic, you know, Neoprime that was going to be co-bidding alongside others, but as a Neoprime that is focused specifically on production, right?

1:43:03So if we think about groups like, you know, Andrel, Sironic, Shield AI, you know, name your favorite, basically, you know, mock industries, name all your favorite, you know, Neoprimes, they all roughly follow the same model, which is like they are product developers fundamentally, right? Like they go and like design that new products. They may do a decent amount of production and assembly of themselves, But they still are reliant on like out of, you know, sort of house, you know, sort of vendors for a vast majority of their like, you know, subcomponents. Hadrian fundamentally is a very different type of Neoprime, right?

1:43:32They are a Neoprime that is explicitly focused on production. They do not produce basically like end products themselves. They only amplify others as end products. But that is a significant bottleneck that the defense department or war department is looking to go unlock and is leaning on a Hadrian for a wide variety of programs, both directly, you know, as Hadrian as a contractor, as well as like co-bidders alongside other Neoprimes. And so I think when I think about like, you know, the way that Hadrian was interpreted Q1, Q2 last year, people were squinting at it. They're like, man, these economics have only turned in the last quarter.

1:44:01You know, isn't this just a back end vendor that doesn't have a ton of upside? From my like insider perspective, I've been watching for five years. I'm like, dude, this is the type of business where once the economics turn a corner, they don't unturn a corner. You know what I mean? It only gets easier from here. We finally got to fucking positive. We're going to 20 percent margin, 40 percent margin, 60 percent margin. And it's like, you know, accumulating advantages. But like materials get easier. The factories get easier. The states want to send this stuff. It's just like, you know, you're rocking and rolling.

1:44:24But like when people look at like a SaaS business, they don't appreciate that. Like, yeah, in like hardware, especially when you're producing something that's like kind of a commodity, there's sort of like semi-infinite demand. There's like not semi-infinite demand for Databricks. You know what I mean? Like, you know, it just doesn't, the scale of the market is not nearly as large. And then people just like didn't appreciate it. Ollie would put you in the truth zone on that. Thank you, Diver. I'm sorry. We're obviously investors in Databricks. Also, T. Rowe Price is smart enough to be in both Databricks and Hadrian.

1:44:54Big Databricks fan, but at the end of the day, the amount that we spend on metal is more than, I mean, I don't probably really know what Databricks does, but like whatever they do, the amount that we spend on metal is more than whatever we spend on Databricks. Well, I mean, reflect on the AI boom, the slop versus steel debate. It felt like AI went through this sort of reset on the narrative towards the back half of last year. Yeah, do you have room in your office for a victory lap or are you kind of strange? But it feels like we're back to normal. I mean, there's multiple$10 billion deals announced already this year.

1:45:32NVIDIA is acquiring stuff for$20 billion, something like that. It feels like the pace is just continuing unabated. There's no real reset there. How did you process the bubble in venture, that discourse? Where do you feel like we are now? Where do you think about the new fundraising landscape, the K-shaped dynamic between the large funds, smaller funds? What's your current outlook on the venture capital market broadly? Yeah, I mean, it's a chicken where I won't name names, but there's various venture firms that have had funds that they have half-funded, done really great deals out of, and some of these top-tier names have significant markups even on those investments and still aren't able to fully close out the fund.

1:46:17So it's like as an LP, you're able to basically get in, immediately know that your LP position is going to be marked up. And a part of it is that you're comparing it that versus like there's so many of these mega labs, mega rounds where there are so many SPVs that are available that as an LP, you're actually trading that against, well, I can just go get the direct position, no fees or much more diminutive fees through like an SPV from like a lesser manager. And so you are seeing like, you know, if you look at like, you know, I think there's this like graph recently. There's just showing like total venture dollars raised by venture firms significantly.

1:46:53Like it's still linearly basically down since 21-22. And I was showing I think it was like on Carter or something like that. They were showing basically that data. But I would bet if you looked at like total LP dollars deployed into like tech, venture, you know, direct sort of investments, fund investment, et cetera. it is almost certainly significantly up since 2021. It's just like Mubadala at some point can access some of these mega rounds just as easily as they can access directly into basically some of the funds that they used to have to invest into. And so you're getting this odd dynamic where I think we talked about this even last week a bit, but a lot of people are doing these fee-less, carry-less SPBs that are basically branding exercises for them.

1:47:31So yeah, I think it's a harder time than ever to be an emerging manager. There's somebody that, I forget who did this analysis, but it's like it's taking, you know, there's fewer emerging managers taking longer to close. And then it's harder than ever to even as you go and you're like a multi-stage mega fund to still go raise the like equivalent of like the Andreessen$15 billion, you know, sort of total, you know, growth fund. It is not trivial for people to do that because the things you're going to go invest into in these late stage assets are now, you know, readily accessible directly via the, you know, LPs through all these alternate, you know, sort of vehicles.

1:48:02And so. And it's not, it's not like a huge secret what companies are like the real winners. You don't need to pay fees. It's not like there's like 100 logos. It's like there's like seven logos that matter basically in a significant number of dollars. So as an LP, you're like, you know, why do I care about paying these fees? Or it's like, I know I'm getting into the exact same logo anyways, but through this other vehicle. So you have sort of like the private Mag 7 that everyone's excited about. LPs are getting direct access to. Is there any effect of the fact that the public Mag 7 are doing so well?

1:48:33I was kind of laughing to myself, like, if I want exposure broadly to self-driving cars, and I buy Google, and humanoids, and I buy Tesla, and like, there's a number, an AI, so you buy Google again, and it's like, you can get a pretty broad portfolio of like sci-fi bets just by owning the Mag 7, and maybe those get disrupted, maybe you got to pick up other big companies, but it's not like they're completely asleep at the wheel. Is there a, like a little bit of a magnetism from the mag seven that might be pulling liquidity towards just public tech companies these days? A bit, but I would say also for most of these LPs, they have like, you know, and especially the endowments, they have like pretty clear ratios that they want to maintain across basically like public, private, et cetera.

1:49:18And so in some ways through the public market, you know, sort of accelerating, they have, you know, if you, if you remember in like 2020, you know, sort of two during the craft, there was like the reverse thing where basically we're like, you know, basically all of a sudden the private books basically weren't, you know, getting marked down nearly enough, they're starting to represent like 20 % of an endowment that's spoken. They're like, we literally have to freeze all private investing. Now you're in some way seeing the reverse where people in some ways counter swung so hard. We're now some of these groups that want to maintain like a 7 % ratio on private are all of a sudden down to like three and a half and are trying to figure out basically where to deploy.

1:49:47That's where they're coming with these like huge techs at the table, but they're seeing that there's like a multitude of options and they want to relatively like, you know, sort of limited set of names. And why not just go basically like, you know, more and more direct into those names. And as a founder, at some point, you're like, well, like I like these venture guys on St. Hill Road, but at some point when I'm a public company, these are going to be the guys that hold my stock when I'm public. And so I don't mind prioritizing them, you know, sort of basically directly and having them on board.

1:50:09So in some ways, you know, to tie this all the way back to Hadrian, it's like, yeah, this past round, Hadrian had a multitude of different offers from, you know, more traditional Silicon Valley venture firms. But it's like, why wouldn't you take a T-Row Price where T-Row Price is going to be the person that likely just, you know, underwrites part of your IPO, holds it when you're public, scales with you while you're sort of public. And so you're seeing, obviously, those types of firms come in much earlier into venture and then founders by default sort of prioritizing those. You obviously had the wave in 2021 where a bunch of the VC firms tried to become RIAs and enter into the T.

1:50:40Rowe price sort of lane. That all mostly obviously turned out to be like a disaster where it was just like these guys are not sort of public equities experts and do not understand what it means to manage that book appropriately. So I feel like most people have pulled back from that. So I do think, you know, it's a shifting landscape where I just don't think that the current state of liquidity preferences that are given to, you know, like if you invest into a company at$500 billion in the public markets, you do not get a liquidity preference, right, you know, as an investor. I think it's less and less likely that some of these super late-stage private companies keep giving that type of liquidity preference to investors.

1:51:13And then I think also the, like, fee structure on these venture firms is almost certainly going to compress for some of these, like, super late-stage types of rounds and funds. Do you think we'll see any SPACs this year? Wow. Specifically for companies in our world. Obviously, there's SPACs constantly. Yeah, treasury companies and stuff going out, but venture-back SPACs. Yeah, I definitely have had now a variety of companies that I'm involved with have had SPAC sponsors pretty aggressively approach and knock on the door. I think like there are certain companies where it makes sense. If you are a type of company where it's like, look, I just need 500 million or 500 million on the balance sheet.

1:51:59Billion would be great. I'm sure Sam all would love to have 500 billion on the balance sheet. But yeah, you know, and you're a super deep tech, long cycle thing. Yes, makes sense. I think there's just enough scar tissues from the 21 time period where it's like there's a very small handful of companies that like survive through that SPAC crazy, right? Like there's that one robotics company that works with Walmart. pretty significantly. It's one of the few that has actually traded significantly up, but the vast majority of SPACs are... MP Materials. MP Materials is SPAC, though? It wasn't a Chamath SPAC, I thought?

1:52:29I thought it was a Chamath. Yeah, it was. It used to be public, went private, restructured, and then reached back. Fortress value. Fortress value. I'm just excited to see what American exceptionalism acquisition corp. Symbotic was the one that I was thinking of, by the way. I'm pretty sure. It's one of the few SPACs from 2021. Let's look at it. Here's a SPAC candidate. What about that moon hotel that was getting cheered around? Yeah, the YC moon hotel. I mean, at$400 ,000 a night, it's pretty simple. Just do the math. Yeah, simple economics. It's just a math problem. I like that they're working on that.

1:53:11Give them a couple decades. Let them cook, Jordy. Let the YC founder cook. Yeah. Gabe in the chat. Not a tremendous SPAC, it was a pipe. It was a pipe. It was a pipe. Okay, yeah. It was a pipe. A pipe into that one. Yeah, Symbotic is probably the best example of basically SPAC at a looks like$8 billion valuation, now a$42 billion company basically. Incredible, obviously, outcome. But that's like of the basket of the SPACs that went in 2021, that's like one of 15 that basically ended up like that, the basket growing down. And so I think for most companies, it does not make sense. Yeah, it feels like you get to do a big fundraise, you get a bunch of cash on the balance sheet, and then almost certainly you're going to have a stock chart that just looks like this that follows you around and gets screenshotted in your face for the next five years.

1:53:58And then you look at some of these SPACs and it's like, oh, yeah, they're up 40 % this year. And it's like, but they were 10 times bigger when they went out. And so you have this weird dynamic. Even if it puts cash on the balance sheet, it seems like it's a lot of weird dynamic, very different culturally to be running a public company dealing with the stock. Is Symbotic just a super underrated company? It's like a Ford-sized business. Wow. I mean, yeah, it's large. I think it's pretty underappreciated. It's basically like I would describe it as the best warehouse robotics thing since Kiva. But it's a publicly traded, independent company.

1:54:31My understanding is pretty darn significant. Rollout at all of Walmart. Definitely not discussed enough. I don't remember the venture investors that were around at the table. But it's based in Massachusetts. since that's a part of why it doesn't get like you know a ton of a ton of interesting heat but yeah i definitely think it's like pretty under the radar yeah well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us have a great rest of your day we will see you soon let's keep uh tactical nuke oh no this is me doing barbells for my barbell strategy so i'm gonna just keep Keep wrapping it up.

1:55:05Keep wrapping the barbell, boys. We'll see you later. You had to nuke him. The truth nuke. Restream. That's a truth nuke. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Going from the truth nuke to the restream. Speaking of robotics, next up we have Deepak from Skilled AI. Got to give a shout out to Luke Metro. Yeah. Metro joined a company. It's pretty under the radar left Andrew to join skilled. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of chatter about skilled publicly at the time. And of course, Luke is a goaded picker. And it's been marked up significantly. Many, many, many times since he joined.

1:55:51But until the CEO arrives here in the Restream waiting room, let's talk about Reggie James. He's joined General Catalyst as their creative director. He says it's an honor to be trusted to hold this position. He had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with incredible folks across the industry during his break. But the ambition that General Catalyst has to tackle huge problems is simply unnatural. There's so much work to do to show the story of the immense world being built here. but I couldn't imagine doing anything else right now. I'm incredibly excited for this. Super bullish on this. Reggie obviously is Aura Max.

1:56:30He's Motion Maxed. And I think if he can bring some of that to GC. It feels like, I mean, GC is a massive fund, but a little bit quieter. They're not going direct as much. There's not a lot of noise. And that just feels like more of a blank canvas than going into, if you put Reggie at a different firm that maybe has a whole bunch of other folks do a ton of stuff. Yeah, loud. Yeah, this feels like a really natural fit, and I'm excited to see what he does with it. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast.

1:57:12Billionaire Rams owner Stan Kroenke becomes America's biggest private land owner. Owner. Let's hear it for Stan. Let's Stan. Are you a Stan Stan? I guess he's listening. He's listening to the show. I'm a Stan Stan, and we Stan, Stan, I land. Buying nearly 1 million acres of New Mexico ranch land. Stan's land is growing. That's fantastic news. Interesting. Farmland investing becomes increasingly popular, especially now that maybe somebody comes in and wants to build a data center on your farm and pay 10 times what you paid for it. At 2.7 million acres, Kronke's holdings are larger than Yellowstone National Park, or the equivalent roughly 2 million football fields.

1:57:56He bought 1 million acres of New Mexico ranch land in December from the family behind industrial conglomerate Teledyne. According to the trade publication, Singleton Ranch's transaction is the largest land purchased in the U.S. in more than a decade. Land is back. Back on the menu. Let's go. Speaking of land, Greenland is in the news, of course. Dylan says, this is the equivalent of affordability in Greenlandic politics. And he shares a screenshot here. It's a quote from a Greenlander who says, I hunt whales and seals. In the United States, they think whales and seals are cute and shouldn't be hunted.

1:58:37That's what I'm afraid of. Don't bring your fear of hunting. don't don't bring oh i like this i like this he's looking for a carve out he's looking for a carve out let me keep hunting my whales let me keep hunting my seals hey you know what can we abelson if you join up with america can we work to get canuck abelson on the show to talk about the business of hunting so canuck wants to stay with denmark just because culturally it's it's cooler to hunt whales and we can shift the culture we can i'm down to hunt whales i'll go hunt some whales and seals with you right now. Let's hang out. What are you using?

1:59:16A spear? Spear gun? Rifle? Nuke? What if he's selling the blubber out the back door to power data centers? We got flashbangs. We'll throw a flashbang in the ocean. All the whales will be doing this. And then we'll throw in with the harpoon. I don't like seals at all. We got Joe Weisbeth. He's reading Moby Dick. We know about hunting whales in this country. We would be happy to partner with Greenland on this. I think I'm against whale hunting. They're just so majestic. Majestic. That's a synonym for cute. But seals. You're the problem. Oh, you don't like seals. I have deep beef with seals. Why?

1:59:53Growing up surfing in the cold waters in Northern California. By the way, last time I talked about surfing, I got mega canceled on YouTube. Oh, yeah. Because I was talking about how surfing brings your body temperature lower, and then you spend all day trying to heat up. People were like. You were against surfing before work. This guy is in a suit talking about surfing. What does he know about surfing? Well, you're about to get canceled by the seal lovers. No, so seals would mess with me. I'd be out alone surfing. In Northern California, water is very sharky. Yeah. And these things are the dogs of the sea.

2:00:27So they'll run up, and they would just slam into me. And all of a sudden, I think I'm getting attacked by a shark. And then I'd just be in the water by myself beefing with a seal. This is an incredible skill issue for you. Oh, a seal's annoying me. Oh, I need seals to be hunted. It's fine. Hang out with the seals. Let the seals mess with you. They're the dogs of the sea. We love them. We also love Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI. Bucco Capital, he tried to warn you.

2:01:01He said, I tried to warn you. I'd say we're getting close to the bottom, but I have no idea. Nobody wants to own these things. He's referring to the problem with application SaaS isn't vibe coding. It's that vibe coding is only one of the many bear cases. There's no valuation support for many of these names. Free cash flow is a mirage due to excessive stock-based comp. He is calling the top on SaaS boys. The SaaS boys are not happy with Buco. He says, speaking of stock-based comp, the dilution at some of these companies is absolutely disgusting. It's insulting. VCs funding thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of these things.

2:01:42Snapchat gives away the whole company every 10 years. Yeah. What happens to competition and to margins and to future profits when the incremental feature is free to make? Many of these companies are zero, so you're going to see his prediction is you see a lot of different VC-funded SaaS companies encroaching on each other's territory. Oh, I'm in this category. I'm just going to build this. Yeah, the calculus changes when it's like, hey, this feature is going to take us like nine months to really build and be competitive. And it's like, oh, it's actually going to take us like a month. Two seconds.

2:02:13It's done. Boom. It's not clear where the value will accrue. Investors are thinking of Netflix gathering all the value on top of cable or OTAs stealing all of the value on top of legacy systems of record. Last and certainly not least, even if you don't think application SaaS is a zero, everyone else seems to. So who's going to step in to buy these things? Probably private equity. One of them has to accelerate for real for the money to start flowing in. Yes. Interesting. He could go on and on. Anyway. Naruto in the chat says, I've done the swim from Alcatraz and SF. People running an event sit in boats and prevent seals from biting the swimmers.

2:02:48See, send this post to Greenland. Let them know. We know how to fight the seals. We know how to beat them back when our Americans are swimming. Yeah, I mean, the biggest mistake they're not making is flashbanging the seals. Flashbanging the seals. They didn't study. Scientists have made a spray-on powder that can seal serious wounds in seconds. Speaking of seals, sealing wounds. The South Korean developed powder reacts with elements in the blood and turns into a gel to form a barrier to stop bleeding. This is not that new. There's coagulants that exist. We've talked to a few folks about this. What's the company?

2:03:28He's powder is Jake. Jake Adler has a similar coagulant. And then also there's quick clot from the late 90s, I believe. But exciting to see more development in the healing of wounds. Toma Bravo has a piece in the Financial Times. Really? And they say broader integrated software platforms for business are positioned to win out against those selling specific services. The explosive rise of AI startups follows a pattern we've seen before. Small companies racing to apply new technology to specific business problems. Let's give it up for applying new technology to specific business problems. Doesn't get enough love.

2:04:05Promising huge efficiency gains in their narrow slice of the market. These startups typically use standard AI models and distinguish themselves by writing software on top in order to target specific tasks. Their value proposition is that specialized solutions can compete without worrying much about how businesses function as complete systems. But this is a vulnerable strategy. Like dot-com companies that burn cash without sustainable business models, many of today's AI startups burn money paying for access to AI models while lacking advantages that competitors can't copy. Their core bet is that AI can solve specific business problems so efficiently that companies will willingly go beyond their integrated systems to get superior performance in one area.

2:04:44In short, best-in-class beats good enough but all in one place. but connecting to full business processes to find a sustainable growth path over time is a very challenging task for companies built to do just one thing. While some might be seeing sharp initial revenue acceleration, they also see substantive costs. One study by Cruise Consulting suggests they spend double what traditional software as a service companies spend on compute and infrastructure, while also paying for specialized talents that command high pay packages. These structural challenges show why we believe established software platforms such as Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft and portfolio companies like Anaplan and Coupa that we invest in at Toma Bravo will be more durable despite the risks of AI disruption to their businesses.

2:05:28While AI startups struggle to defend narrow territory, broader platforms build advantages that often grow stronger over time. Rather than just making one specific area better, they work on strengthening the broader business of a customer. This model produces intelligence for both the company and the provider, building capabilities, and SaaS companies have years of making improvements. For example, software platforms can model cause and effect across business functions. A narrow AI tool might optimize an inventory, but if it doesn't consider cash flow, supplier relationships, or supply chain risks, that optimization on a single variable could actually stand to hurt the business.

2:06:02Established software companies are thus better positioned to address business concerns on AI integration, competition, implementation challenges, cybersecurity, legal, ethical questions, costs, and reputation risks. This is because digital transformation has always meant balancing efficiency gains with risk management. Trying to see if there's anything else here that's worth reading. I think the main thing is like being in a position like Tomo Bravo, where you're meant to be deploying tens of billions of dollars amid when you have the shifting sands is like a pretty harrowing, like there's a ton of opportunity, very exciting time, but it's also harrowing.

2:06:46Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And we have our next guest. We are in our Lambda lightning round. We have Deepak from Skilled. How are you doing? Good to have you on the stream. Great setup you got here. Fantastic setup. Thanks so much for having us. We get testing it for the first time. And we have the issues in between. We do not know. Yes. Please introduce yourself and the company since it's your first time on the show. Yeah. So thanks for having me. I am Deepak, Deepak Pathak. I am a CEO and co-founder of Skilled AI.

2:07:25So at Skilled, what we are doing is we are building a general purpose robot brain. Now, any robot, any task, one brain. So when I say that, it's like even a humanoid, a quadruped, robotic arm, hands, everything given by a single brain. And that is what we do. Let's get into the news from this week, and then we have a bunch of questions. Sounds good. What happened this week? Well, this has been a busy week for us. I think back-to-back we had multiple announcements. We began with the announcement regarding learning from human videos. We showed a lot of results. But the latest announcement, which is just from yesterday, is about the funding announcement.

2:08:08How much did you raise? Close to$1.4 billion, which values the company now at$14 billion.

2:08:22Incredible. Incredible. Yeah, let's talk about where you're most excited about the application of robotics in the very, very near term. There's so many different, obviously, angles, industries, kind of form factors that are exciting. But where are you guys focused on today working with customers? Yeah, I think this is whenever in public folks talk about robotics. On the consumer side, the excitement becomes, okay, we have a robot coming to our homes next month and my robot will do X, Y, and Z. And people don't realize that robotics is not a new field. This is one of the oldest areas in technology.

2:09:05It precedes computers. And in fact, it precedes AI. And for 70 years, you see all these movies and even real-world demos of robots, but still, we do not see robots around us. and we began to feel that robotics has not arrived yet. But if you go to any big factory, go to a car factory or Amazon, you will see like tons of robots, thousands of robots doing things, manufacturing items, etc. Now, what's the gap? The gap is you cannot get robots beyond these demos or beyond these factory settings to consumer scenarios because the brain has been missing. and that's what we bring to the table. Now, in this setup, it is a step-by-step approach.

2:09:48Even in factories, even in enterprise, the robots are there, but they are in a red tape area, like behind an area where you cannot go and if a human goes there, they will have to turn off all the robots. And that's where you start first. You start to get these robots alongside people. So what we are doing right now, even we are already deploying in a variety of areas like point-to-point delivery systems, warehouses, manufacturing, But the change is we are doing it alongside people, where people can come and interact and do their own work. And the robot can be working on a site with randomized scenarios.

2:10:22People is important because people create randomness and chaos. And that's where AI needs to come in. Yeah. How are you feeling about the supply chain? Are there any bottlenecks that you're worried about coming down the pipe? We've seen so many unexpected bottlenecks pop up in just the data center build out. talking about copper today that was not on my bingo card uh what should we be worried about if we if we are going to be scaling robotics over the next couple years yeah i think this is exactly uh why we are scaling the way we are if you think about going like for every different application there's a different hardware requirement if you are doing something for a center you need a different kind of robot for doing things and specific other scenarios and this is where getting all the supply chain all together at once, it takes a long time.

2:11:11But as I said earlier, robots are not a new thing. Industries have already been deploying them for a variety of scenarios. The ROI has been less because you have to create a separate area, separate warehouse, customize scenarios for them. So we can piggyback on those supplies. So the model we follow is we partner with hardware companies or even end users who have hardware, and we provide our software as a service on top. And that enables very fast go-to-market strategy for us. And these robots, which may be earlier in a secure area where humans cannot enter, now can be used alongside people and start to work.

2:11:49How much hardware do you guys actually build internally specifically for testing? I can imagine there's certain kind of like products where you're working just on the software side, working with a specific customer, but then on the internal side for like, you know, having faster feedback loops, I imagine you're building quite a bit as well. You can today, what has changed the last five to seven years is you can purchase a lot of commercially available hardware. And in fact, every single robot hardware probably on the internet has made its way to our office, and we already have a large number of them, as long as the company sells them and gives us access to fully control the robot software.

2:12:30software. So we take the hardware, we put the model in an end-to-end model, goes from pixels in to actions out, and it takes control of the whole hardware and makes it a skilled robot. What form factor do you think, what robotic form factor do you think will be the first to make consumers feel like robotics has really arrived, right? You talked earlier about how it's like commonplace in a commercial setting but it's happening like in a warehouse no one's really seeing it and so they're not kind of like feeling the acceleration yet but uh uh on the consumer side uh what do you when do you think people will have that kind of like moment this is a very very very good question and i think it goes to the root of what people think of robotics when they say okay head i i want a robot in my home okay let's say the most common thing in in Silicon Valley, like I want a robot in my home in this year.

2:13:29But when has it happened that you suddenly have things in your home and you do not see them in your daily lives? What about groceries? Do you see a robot in a grocery store? What about Target? You go to order something, you wait for two hours for it to get picked up ready and then it's a pain to get you and pick it up. What about hospitals? What about any of these consumer facilities which deal with consumers but are on the enterprises? and that's where you believe you will begin to see robots first. It will become a commonplace thing and then you start to get them in your robot. If I give your robot to you like today, you will probably use it and you will like it for a few months.

2:14:08Then it will sit in your garage like a massage chair. I don't know if you have. And then never get used again. So it has to first become common in your daily life that you're not surprised. Okay, I'm just in my home and I'm ready to go. And that's where we are starting. and try to do the stepping stone to the eventual consumer deployment. And, yeah, I can go deeper into this. What is the other reason for this? But this is one of the practical reasons. The other reason is data. And that's what you can go into. Yeah, what kind of bottlenecks are there on the data side that you guys are seeing? Bottleneck as in data.

2:14:47Bottleneck is when there is something in high quantity and it's coming through a squeezed hole. But there is no data for robotics. This is the main issue. It is not one of those AI areas. Like, as I said, robotics, when the initial AI projects were done at MIT and other places, they weren't done in the context of robotics. It has been 70 years. Chips have, the gram has come down from a room size to, like, you cannot even see that, so tiny transistors. Robots are still not around. them. And the reason for that is unlike language or vision, where you can build GPT-like models, LLM-like models, there is no data for robots.

2:15:26And that's where the technical part becomes very critical. So what we do today is we bootstrap, somehow you have to bootstrap the process. To deploy the robot on the site, you cannot say, I'll get the data by deployment, but to deploy I need a problem. To deploy I need the brain to function, for the brain to function any data. So how do you break this problem? To bootstrap that, what we do is we start with two such alternate sources. We learn by watching people. So learning by watching people act, like there are tons of lifestyle videos on YouTube and Flickr and other sources, we watch them and have the robots learn from them.

2:16:06And the second source is simulation. And we put them together to transfer these results to the real world. And once they get deployed, then we can establish this data flywheel where the more deployments increase, the more data you get back, and that increases further your performance of your model. Very cool. That's a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming to the show. Yeah, great to finally meet. Great to finally meet. We're huge fans of Luke Metro. He's a great peck out. Yeah, we'd like to nominate him for employee of the month and employee of the year. We don't know anything about the other employees, but we think he's a great guy.

2:16:40He's a good person. Apply of the month every month. Every month. That's it. That's it. Awesome. So great to finally meet you, and congratulations on all the progress. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. We've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is David Terse from Carmen Industries. He's coming in. I'm going to tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

2:17:14Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. First time on the show. First time on the show. Thank you so much for coming in person. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Yeah, David Terse, co-founder and CEO of Carmen Industries. We actually launched today our heat processing unit. So an HPU. Okay. And this is a cooling system designed for gigawatt scale AI factories. Okay. Okay. Cooling the entire data center, the individual chip, both? All of it. So typically a lot of these are cooled with a similar loop because you've got high memory bandwidth, you've got GPUs, you've got air handling, all that type of stuff.

2:17:50All of this is about reducing the complexity of the infrastructure. So our overall solution is actually a 10 megawatt modularized solution. And that's very different than the one to two megawatt ones from the existing solutions out there. And we reduce that mechanical yard by about 80%. So your speed to deployment increases rapidly with this. So heat is generated, as I put electricity through the silicon ship, an old Facebook data center. They would just open the window and blow it out with fans, I assume, you know, air-cooled systems. Now we're seeing a lot of water cooling. Walk me through, like, try and explain what is the actual flow of where the heat goes, how it's moved around.

2:18:32Yeah, absolutely. So pretty much every single electron that goes into a day center gets turned into heat. Comes right into these chips. They generate a huge amount of heat. So now when we're talking gigawatt scale, this is a gigawatt worth of heat. Yeah, we talked about there's a bathhouse in New York called Bathhouse. And they originally would heat the baths via Bitcoin mining. There's so much heat coming off of it. Yeah, and racks used to be kind of in this like 5 to 20 kilowatt per rack. Now we've jumped up to 120 kilowatt per rack. The Verirubin coming will be 600 kilowatts per rack. And they're trending towards a megawatt in a rack.

2:19:07So when you think of how much power that is, a megawatt's 1 ,000 homes consumption. And putting that in a rack. And then all gets turned into heat. So you have to move that the most efficient way possible. And today, 20 % to 30 % of your energy is going towards cooling. That is a OPEX constraint. That is a thermal constraint. And it's just you're not generating revenue with that. So we're trying to shift that. and we reduced that at a minimum of by 25 % energy consumption on the cooling side, now you can have more headroom that you're using towards compute. Yeah. And what's the material? What's the substrate for extracting the heat, air, water, something else?

2:19:42Yeah. So we interface with the existing systems that are there. So we integrate with the glycol loops that go to the chip level, to the CDU side of it. But inside our actual system, we are using supercritical CO2. So we're running a high-speed compressor that was developed in-house by our team. We have a huge amount of history from SpaceX, Rocket Lab. About a third of our team comes from there. And we've really designed this from the ground up. Our first one, we came up and running in eight months with a four-person team. Ran it at 30 ,000 RPM. The next system will be coming together in Q2 here.

2:20:15And yeah, we're using supercritical CO2 due to the high density of the fluid. Energy density. So it can absorb the heat. It absorbs the energy. It heats up, and then you move it somewhere else. Yeah, we remove it. We vent it to ambient. But why we're calling this a heat processing unit is because today we view heat as a liability and as a constraint. But heat is energy. And it's an asset. And so we're building the platform that allows you to remove that heat from your system as efficiently as possible. And it opens the door for future use cases of heat reuse. Sure. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that.

2:20:49because I've seen some of the hyperscalers have put out statements saying that there is waste heat from our data centers, but we're going to be able to pipe it into the local community, basically give everyone free heat in their homes. And that sounds really good as long as I guess it's clean air, but it seems like a good use. What does it take to actually go from a data center in the middle of nowhere to a data center that's closer to a bunch of homes to get the energy, get the waste heat there and maybe just warm up someone's house during the winter? Yeah, I think Europe will be more ahead of us than us just due to the proximity of those data centers to urban locations.

2:21:22So it's just smaller countries, right? So where we see also a great opportunity is to do waste heat back to electricity. Oh, interesting. And actually supply that back to the data center. So in your colder regions at night during the winter, you'll have a big enough delta T where you can actually do that with our system. Okay. So that becomes now additional headroom that you can use towards compute. Okay. As well as then I kind of half seriously half joke that right now data centers are not in my backyard. That's the vibe that everyone has. But what if we built communities around these and you have free utilities if you live there?

2:21:54That would be huge. I think people would really like that. We were talking about this yesterday. Just like if somebody's, you know, you hear a data center coming into your backyard anywhere in your town, there's no, for a lot of people, there's not going to be direct upside. Correct. Just because even if it's not there, I can still use all the different AI tools. right i'm not like limited just because there's no data center i'm even in my state yep i like that uh talk about discovering the opportunity the journey to getting here uh maybe your background when when we met you were in uh this was probably a couple years at this point you were in the idea maze looking at a lot of uh different opportunities and uh seems like you found a super exciting one yeah so kind of going through that is yeah i was an entrepreneur in residence at riot ventures looking for what I was going to build.

2:22:40Yeah, shout out, Will. And it really takes people that are true industry experts, world-class engineers to develop something new. And I ended up partnering up with my co-founder, Dr. CJ Calra, who had spent pretty much his entire career in the thermal energy space, most recently head of technology at Antora. Prior to that, worked at a couple different startups, but started his career at GE Research working on supercritical CO2. So that's exactly what we're doing here with our system. So he was, when we started working together, it was looking at this broader thermal infrastructure layer. 50 % of all end energy use is used for thermal management.

2:23:18We're either heating something up or we're cooling something down. And we're doing it with outdated technology. So we're leveraging the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that has been spent across turbo machinery in the rocket industry, high-speed power electronics, silicon carbide, permanent magnet motors in the EV revolution, packaging this all together and bringing it to the most pressing need, which is the thermal management of data centers right now. This is a huge battle for them. Have you been bouncing all around the map, checking on the ground at various data center projects?

2:23:51A little bit. Now, these things sometimes are more heavily guarded than Fort Knox. These guys have machine guns outside of these things, which is hilarious. Yeah, no, I know. But once you're working with somebody and actually doing a deal, I'm sure the doors get open. Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to be launching these actual deployments starting later this year. We're standing up our first factory, GigaWorks 1, which will be 100 units per year of 10 megawatts. It's a gigawatt-sized capacity right out the gate because the demand is so extreme compared to where the supply chain is right now.

2:24:26So if we see one of these data centers, maybe it's 150 megawatts, maybe it's a gigawatt. How many heat processing units would they buy from you? Is it a modular system where they might be using some legacy system as well and then bring you on incrementally? Or do they need to go all in and work with you exclusively? No, we're very much plug and play with the existing solutions that are out there. So you could, if you have an existing data center with an existing cooling system, we could phase in our system over time. But yes, a lot of these are clean sheet designs that are going up right now. And right now, this is one of the biggest bottlenecks for them for deployments.

2:25:05Okay. So, yeah, there's obviously just a bottleneck of like, if you just can't get any sort of cooling from the market, you'll just be delayed. Talk about the actual economics of someone who goes with you for a new build. Is this higher capex, lower opex over time? or how should a CFO who's working on a new data center think about working with you and the trade-offs involved? Yeah, absolutely. So our actual capex of the system is the same as existing solutions out there. And the snowballing effect of reduction of size, reduction of infrastructure, reduction of piping make this a cheaper solution right out the gate, faster deployments, because time is money on these deployments, as well as then when you actually look at the efficiency of our system.

2:25:50So in your worst conditions, This is you need to cool your chips at 20 C in Texas during the middle of summer. We have a 25 % energy reduction in the cooling system. Over the state of the art. When you start looking Virginia, some of these more moderate climates, we're looking 60 % to 100 % improvement in performance of this system, which that unlocks huge amounts of headroom. So it's not as much about the OpEx savings, because we do do that. But what we really unlock is the ability to allocate more of your electricity towards compute, which that's the moneymaker in this thing. Yeah, that makes sense.

2:26:25Talk to me about manufacturing a heat processing unit. Are there co-packers for this thing? Can you go to a turnkey manufacturer once you have a design or a CAD file? You're calling Hadrian or someone, or are you going to vertically integrate and kind of make these in a warehouse somewhere? Yeah, we're going to vertically integrate a huge amount of this. Now there's certain key components that we have a supply chain for around the motor, around a couple other pieces in there. Tubing and piping and stuff like that. Exactly. So we're taking very much the SpaceX approach. People think SpaceX vertically integrated from day one.

2:27:02They didn't. They bought a lot of things off the shelf and then they looked at where they could either make an improvement or bring the cost down. And we're doing that exact same thing. A big piece of this also is diversity in our supply chain. We need to make sure that we're not single string in any one of these single components because the big guys, the hyperscalers are saying, you know, you need to produce a lot of these and you cannot slow down my deployment. You know, the reason that they're coming to us is because we're speeding up their deployment. So we're making sure that we have de-risked every piece of our supply chain.

2:27:32Our chief operating officer, she came from SpaceX. She was leading all of production at Millennium Space Systems before she joined us. So we have a rockstar team and that's always what Carmen has been about. Yeah. What do you think? I mean, it sounded like you wanted to have these in production pretty quickly. What do you think about the lead time, the battle of the press releases, the idea of going out and getting a couple of big headline deals done and then using that to either raise money against those or even just have them pay you up front. And then that kind of finances the growth. How are you thinking about like the investor relations aspect of the business?

2:28:07Yeah. I mean, I come from an investor background. We did actually announce the Series this morning as well. Whoa, we got a gong for you. There we go. Hit the gong for us. Give us the details. Give us the details. Details. Who did it? It was Riot Ventures. They were our lead. We closed it back in September. Fantastic. It was kind of under the radar. Of course. Yeah, it was Riot Ventures, Space VC, Wonder Ventures, and then Sunflower Capital. And we also brought on Pat Gelsinger. Oh, yeah. He was an investor as well. Yeah. CEO of Intel. Hit that gong. Hit that gong. Congratulations. Boom. I like that.

2:28:40Yeah, clever. Gong brings out for Carmen Industries. I like the technique. Talk to me about the name. It feels like you'd be a space company. You're not. Not yet. Is there something more to the Carmen line? Or is that the reference? Yes, Theodore von Carmen, famous physicist. He did kind of coin the term of the difference between our atmosphere and space. But just his work in supersonic and hypersonic flow was a lot of the inspiration for this. That's amazing. That's amazing. What's next? You're hiring. How big is the team? Where do you want to be in a year? How are you thinking about growing the business?

2:29:16Yeah, we're 23 people right now. We have the core team in place to build these first units, get them up and running. The scaling piece of this will be all technicians to be able to actually manufacture a huge amount of these systems. Technicians. Where are you pulling from? Where do people do this work typically? What skills? Is it a trade school? Do they have college degrees? Are they mechanical engineers? Who are these people? Yeah, so the kind of first wave of them is going to be people with a, I would say, very diverse skill set within manufacturing. And that's because when you're building these first units, you don't actually know exactly where the sticking points are going to be.

2:29:54And you're doing this kind of design for manufacturing while you're also standing up the manufacturing piece of it. So you have to be able to troubleshoot as you're building something out. Exactly. So you want very high-skilled generalist technicians. and then we will move into more specialized as we go increase the velocity of that, the actual production side of it. Are you in the gundo? We are actually in Long Beach. Long Beach. Yes. Okay. Bigger facilities down there. Bigger facilities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you need a lot of space, it feels like a lot of companies graduate. They go to the gundo, they hang out.

2:30:24How big are the actual systems? Yep, they're the size of a shipping container. Okay, shipping container. So we've got to build 100 of those to do a gigawatt in a year. Okay. So it's very doable. Yeah, and would you actually stack them up, You're putting up 100 of them at a big data center site? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you go look at these data centers today, and you do an aerial view of one of them, and you have more square footage getting taken up by the exterior mechanical yard, all for cooling, than you do the data center. Yeah. So with a one or two megawatt one, if you're building a gigawatt data center, you've got 500 to 1 ,000.

2:30:55Wait, is that the current status? Correct. Okay, because I would assume that there would be some sort of mechanical economy of scale where if instead of, you know, you have a thousand tubes and a thousand, you know, like compressors and a thousand, and if you can just reduce that by just doing one really big one, but there must be some. But then there's onsite construction with that. It's a custom build. Oh, okay. So these were really designed originally for hospitals, universities doing cold water systems. You'd put two or three of them on the roof. Okay. They work great. These are constant controls, carrier train type systems at the one megawatt level.

2:31:27Correct. Yeah. So you're scaling that up, but It's still staying in a deployable form factor that can fit on the back of an 18-wheeler. Yep, and that's what CO2 is great for. Got it. High density. We run a high-speed turbo compressor inside there that was designed in-house. Yeah. That's how we get the 10 megawatts in there. Got it. And then the actual fan system is separated from ours, and actually we've decoupled that from our design. And you're building 1 ,000 of these this year? 100. 100. Okay. And what's the rough price range for one of these things? Yeah. You can give me a wide range. I know it's call me, but like a wide, wide range.

2:32:02Yeah, you're kind of in that, we'll call it 750K a megawatt type range. Very nice. Very nice. So it scales up very fast. Yeah. What are the environmental considerations of compressed CO2? People worry about emissions, but what's the net impact of using CO2? So CO2 is actually the gold standard for refrigerants. Okay. Because today they're using R1234A, something from Honeywell. While they have tried to push down the global warming potential of those, they now form forever chemicals over time. So CO2 is a global warming potential of one because it is your baseline. It does not form forever chemicals over time as well.

2:32:45Let's go. Yeah, exactly. We want to get CO2 cannons in here. Yeah, there we go. No, it's actually a great working fluid for many reasons on that. It's non-flammable. Cool. And then the energy density of it is just dramatically higher than the existing solutions out there, as well as it's abundant. It's cheap. Yeah, interesting. And so walk me through, like, a data center construction in, I don't know, 2028 or something. Is it possible that they're off water entirely? There's no water cooling? Or would that still be a piece of the puzzle? Yep. So our system, while you use water as in, like, the glycol loops, ours is a closed-loop system.

2:33:24Okay. So it does not consume water at all, which is a big plus for these data centers. We're getting a huge amount of pushback. Yeah, of course. Gigawatt data center can pull over a half a million gallons an hour to keep it cool. It's an astonishing amount of water. So we've seen a huge amount of reception from the hyperscalers around closed loop, zero water, doesn't form forever chemicals, natural refrigerant. All of these things are speaking exactly how they want to build data centers going forward, as well as that compact package is speed to market. at the end of the day, it's how fast can I build these things.

2:33:54How are you prioritizing your pipeline? It's kind of a, it's like there's not, I imagine there's some potential like mom and pop data. There's hyperscalers and there's neoclouds. Going straight for the hardcore. Go to semi-analysis, look at ClusterMax, call every single person. Yeah, so we've definitely been talking to a lot of the big, you know, name people out there as well as the neoclouds, the ones that are kind of stepped below that. Sure. I would say for probably every one of these big gigawatt campuses that you hear one of the hyperscalers announcing, there is three to five that are kind of shadow data centers that may look like an Amazon warehouse, and they're co-locators.

2:34:30They're selling that compute to others. Each one has, I would say, its own unique reasons why they get excited about what we're working on. But yeah, that's actually a very ongoing consideration right now is how do we allocate our 2027 production numbers right now. Fantastic. Where are you trying to, how many units do you want to produce in 2027? So this fall, we will stand up that factory with an annual run rate of a gigawatt. So in 2027, we'll do about a gigawatt worth of actual production. That's amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on down to the TBP and UltraDome. Absolutely.

2:35:03Great to have you. It's amazing. This feels like the perfect opportunity for you and a very necessary problem to be working on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses. No more excuses. No more excuses. And we are ready for our second guest in the TBP and Ultradome today.

2:35:42We have Blake from Brink Drones in the studio with some physical hardware. Make room. Make room. You want to put it right here in the front, maybe? You can put it on top of here, maybe. I don't know. Wherever you want. In the front. That works. We have a drone. Two drones in the studios. Thank you so much for bringing this. Thank you so much for coming on down to the TV pin Ultradome. Second time on the show, but reintroduce yourself. How long have you been working on the car? By the way, this thing is alive. It's a lot. It's a lot. We got a live one. It's a heartbeat. Yeah. No doubt. So, yeah, briefly, reintroduce the company and just explain kind of the scale and size of the business these days.

2:36:23Yeah. No, my pleasure. So, story of me and the company. Started my engineering career off over at McLaren Automotive. I was 14 when I was working there. So, it's amazing. Wow. I think I was their youngest ever. You're why you kind of can take a little credit for the W1. Well, that and the Landos. Oh, yeah. season. Yeah, I'm sure. You know, unfortunately, neither of those things. But I can take a tiny amount of credit for the 720S. Okay. Oh, no way. Yeah. How's that? That's amazing. I worked on some parts that are on the underside of that. Really? That's amazing. So that was an insane first engineering job, obviously.

2:36:57It's been all downhill. In some ways, yes. Dude, I mean, it's hard to match walking by MP4-4 every day on the way to launch. Yeah. It's like insane. Wait, what facility were you actually working out of? Woking. So out of the McLaren Technology Center. No way. Which is amazing. How did you actually get the job at 14? Classic summer job. Classic summer job. I was at 14. I was reffing like 10 soccer games every Saturday. Working hard, but not as smart. Yeah. Wait, so how did you get the job? Well, I built a fusion reactor before the internship. So that really helped. Sure. Basically, I would stay up until like 3 a.m.

2:37:39Las Vegas time every night. And I just kept calling their CEO. I never got through to. But after maybe the third or fourth attempt, I did get through to his personal assistant. And yeah, she took some pity on me and ended up facilitating the internship. That's amazing. Wow. Okay. Well, catch us up on Brink. Yes. Scale of the business, where you are, product suite, all that. Yeah, 100%. So Brink manufactures drones for public safety and users. We started off with this guy, which is an indoor drone for SWAT teams. So the mission of this is to take off from an armored vehicle to fly up to a target structure, look around the backyard.

2:38:11And then this was the first drone in the world to have a glass breaching capability. So it would literally shatter a window, make entry indoors. This right here is a small LiDAR. It generates about a half a million points per second. So as this aircraft is clearing rooms, it's actually drawing a floor plan of the structure and then streaming it back live to first responders. Remind me how it actually breaks the glass. Yeah, so basically it's a wheel that hangs off the front of the bird that has two tungsten carbide endofactors that are embedded into it. And the wheel spins up to roughly 30 ,000 RPM.

2:38:42So the second it touches. It's sort of like a saw almost. Yeah, but it causes glass to just explode. In particular. Glass is the worst nightmare. Yeah. We have to share. When we were coordinating for this appearance, they said, if you guys bring some glass to the Ultra Dome, we can smash it on set. And we were like, I don't know. I actually broke some glass. I broke some glass yesterday. I was playing a little basketball. Oh, yeah. So we break glass here. Yeah. Next time, we'll have to have you bust in through the door, take down the steel wall. I would love to make that happen. Yeah. And yeah, this thing can also enable two-way communications.

2:39:14Okay. So when it finds a suspect, it can enable a crisis communicator, actually de-escalate whatever is going on. Yeah. A hostage negotiation. Yep. So Vegas Metro was our first customer. Today, about 20 % of the SWAT teams in the country are actively utilizing this drug. Wow. Which is something that... What are the rest of them waiting on? Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of SWAT teams are super small, and they're like a shared effort between a bunch of 10-person police departments. Got it. This is, you know, a rather premium drone, so they're not like in the direct addressable market for this particular bird.

2:39:44Yeah. If you're looking at the addressable market, we've probably sold to, you know, 40 % or 50 % of those. Sure, sure, sure. And they might need, if it's a small team, you might need an extra operator, someone to pull away from the door kicking that the rest of the team's doing. Correct. Not everyone has the staff for it. Yeah, that's exactly it. Got it. But yeah, I mean, from the beginning of Brink, I also had this vision of drones arriving at the scene of 9-1 calls before first responders. But I was familiar with how technically complex it would be to realize something like this from my time at DJI.

2:40:11It was my last employer. And yeah, I thought building a citywide network of recharging pods that could integrate with computer-aided dispatch and enable drones to fly very reliably over people, et cetera. It was just like a little out of scope for a teenager without any money. So it started with this. But a lot has changed for Brink over the course of the last five years. Today, we're just about the second largest quadcopter manufacturer in America, and we are the world's largest public safety drone company. And that's enabled us to, yeah, realize that product. When did this come out? About a year ago, a little over a year ago.

2:40:44Oh, wow, the drone was active. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's okay, I'm touching. Oh, yeah, no, it's great. I'm glad you are. So, yeah, this is really the world's first purpose-made 9.1 response drone. So it takes off from a citywide network of drone recharging pods mounted on top of police and fire station roofs And it flies to emergencies before you know first responders can show up Yeah, and then when it arrives it streams back a live video feed of whatever is going on So first responders know exactly what they're about to walk into it has an onboard thermal imager So it can see heat it can see through smoke see hot spots and structure fires You know all that good stuff communicate that potentially and I imagine Police officers would want one of these on-site even if they are getting there first in some situation, right?

2:41:27Maybe they're witnessing something and just having that third-person view from the sky so that they're less focused on, you know, trying. Yeah, obviously they have body cams and things like that, but having that extra angle I think is important. 100%. Yeah, how does deployment work? I mean, I imagine a 911 call comes in, an address is getting collected, And then at some point, does someone type the address, hit go, and then the drone can just go from an address and route itself? Or is there a pilot that's firing it up? How autonomous is the actual deployment to get from the base station to an address?

2:42:08Yep. So we grab addresses from computer-aided dispatch or other pieces of software. Computer-aided dispatch. What does that mean? Basically, that's the software that dispatchers use to deploy ground units of various kinds. Got it. But when someone calls 911, the GPS coordinate of that phone hits CAD. Okay. Interesting. Yes. So we'll grab that GPS coordinate. Then we find the nearest drone to the emergency with sufficient battery state of charge to actually get there. The doors on our recharging pods automatically open. We launch an aircraft. we plan a path from a launch site to the emergency, avoiding manned air traffic, no fly zones, etc.

2:42:45And then when the drone arrives, it can engage in some number of pre-programmed, like on-arrival behaviors. Like orbiting the GPS coordinate, pointing its camera in a certain direction. Maybe saying something, announcing itself. Or it can then be taken over, you know, by a dispatcher or teleoperator. The drone can be repositioned, camera can be moved around. Maybe that teleoperator does use the drone to communicate to someone. or they might decide to deliver an emergency medical payload like Narcan, a defibrillator, personal location device, etc. How do these takeoff points charging locations actually work when a police law enforcement agency decides or a city decides they want to set this up?

2:43:25Are they going around and finding local businesses and getting them to opt in? Are these just like sitting on the roof of like a Starbucks or something like that? How does that all work? You know, that does happen sometimes. but generally fire departments are just already in the right places in jurisdictions yeah because yeah what what yeah maybe maybe it's helpful to talk about the range totally this first yeah each one of these birds can cover roughly 20 square miles of jurisdiction Wow which is quite a bit so like most cities you actually maybe need a handful you have great coverage correct yeah yeah talk about the supply chain to actually build a drone company obviously you're a great engineer but uh there's so many pieces on here uh that america hasn't really been dominant in drone manufacturing we we we talked about gopro and sort of the rough go that they had trying to get into the market being underpriced in many ways like what did it take you to build the first one how did you build the supply chain how much is built in in-house today how are you thinking about building these guys well fun fact brink has been sanctioned by china twice and I'm also personally sanctioned by China.

2:44:31No way. You're one of the guys on the list. I know. I am. I am. It really is. I mean, there's a lot of lists you can get on as an entrepreneur, but none with more kind of prestige than being sanctioned, I think. I was proud of that one. Get ready to vacation in America. Yeah. Going anywhere. 100%. So we had to move away from a Chinese supply chain many years ago. Yeah, and I'm sure you were buying some stuff early on. Okay, there's a battery. Buy some stuff off the shelf. Hack it together. But eventually the geopolitical reality is suddenly. 3D printing too? Yeah. So, so Lemur does include some carbon fiber reinforced nylon 3D printed parts.

2:45:06Whoa. Responder though is fully injection molded. Okay. Got it. And so, uh, walk me through the supply chain. What are you making? What is America good at making? Or do we at least have a good drone motor company? I've been hearing that drone motors in particular are difficult to make in America or at least a lot of the companies sort of offshored or left or went out of business. Yes. So listen, I mean, DJI controls 90 % of the global drone market. It's really a monopoly. I think this isn't so well understood. Like the drone industry is a monopoly owned by DJI. Autel is their nearest competitor.

2:45:40They're another Chinese drone manufacturer. They have about 5 % of the market. All foreign drones were just federally banned. I don't know if you guys have been tracking this, but right before Christmas. Yeah, we were talking. Wait, but only for government buyers or all consumers? All new foreign drones have just been banned from entering the country. Okay, so if I go to Best Buy right now, there might be a DJI Mavic 3 on the shelf, but there's not going to be any new ones once they go out of stock. Basically, like the next Mavic won't be allowed into the country. The next Matrice series drone will be allowed into the country.

2:46:18they can hypothetically continue importing their current in-market drones. But in reality, even those imports are being slowed down very much at the borders. So there's this huge need for a DJI of the West or a leading drone manufacturer for the free world. And that's the organization that we want to be. I mention all of this, though. Wait, so what does that mean, though? Does that mean you start selling these to the public? Consumer. I want to make a consumer drone. I think over time, yes, we probably do start engaging in those types of businesses. You know, consumers a little far from our current space.

2:46:57Yeah, but if it helps you get to scale, bring down costs, there's a potentially good feedback. I think, though, like private security, industrial automation, homeland security, et cetera, would be like more natural, immediate new verticals for us. But yeah, I mean, over time, we want to be a huge support. That was underreported. I didn't catch that they were – I remember some news around foreign drones with him purchasing from the government. I didn't clock. Yeah. Walk us through some of the history there. There were some local bans, some state-level bans, some individual agencies that might say, hey, we're not going to approve these.

2:47:37You heard about, you know, you can't use TikTok in Langley. That seemed obvious. But now it's grown a lot. What was the actual history of the rollout? Who's been driving this in Washington? Yeah, so the progression here was, number one, the federal government banned itself from purchasing Chinese drones. Then some states started passing similar legislation. Florida, for example, banned their public safety agencies from acquiring new Chinese systems. About a dozen states have followed suit. And the new thing is what I just articulated. You know, the government saying, you know what? No more new foreign drones are allowed into this country, period.

2:48:15Okay. Regardless of application. Yeah. Walk me through the geopolitical risk of, you know, foreign drones. I, at one point I had a DJI Air 2 or something, this little mini 49, what was it, 490 gram or something like that. Yeah. And it was sort of like collecting dust in a drawer somewhere. And I was thinking like, okay, if somebody hacked this and really tried to fly it out of its little case and out of the drawer and then out of my closet and then out in my house, like, what is it going to do? Is it that dangerous? You're a sweet child. You're a sweet child, John. Walk me through the bad outcome.

2:48:51I've always thought that this is like you rewind. Yeah. And, you know, someone in China, some entrepreneur in China is like, I'm going to make a hit consumer product in America that will be able to give you a real-time map. Yep. everything going on and there's gonna be so many drones that people won't even notice when a drone is just hanging around some strategic asset or anything. So is that the risk? Surveillance? I would say there are three primary risk vectors. Risk vector number one is that DJI drones just stream back video, thermal imaging information, GPS coordinates, altitudes, etc. to China, which can be bad.

2:49:29Going straight to the DJI cloud. Yeah, a hundred percent. So that's, you know, that's the first big like tranche of risk. The next tranche of risk is look at what's happening in Ukraine. Like drones, specifically DJI drones and other aircraft that are similar, are being deployed to incredible effect in the context of warfare. And they're being consumed at insane rates. If America wanted to engage in, you know, adopting those types of drone tactics, we would need to produce many hundreds of thousands of drones a month. And we just do not have that industrial capacity in this country. If you ban foreign drones, though, guess what happens?

2:50:07That industrial capacity gets built up because the domestic market starts to be served by scaled American drone companies. Yeah, you bootstrap wartime demand with consumer demand today. There's enthusiasts that want to be able to get footage of their ski trip or their hiking or any number of use cases. 100%. And then the third tranche of risk is what you articulated. I would say, though, when you start contemplating systems like that, you know, that risk starts to feel much more serious. Yeah, because it might be able to take off at any time. It's not mothballed. From a recharging pod. From a recharging pod.

2:50:44And so you're on a farm. Yeah, I was surprised what was the operation in Ukraine where they parked next to the air base, took off. Like that, like I still feel like that risk, people are not taking it seriously enough about that kind of event happening. like on American soil. What was it, Spiderweb? Operation Spiderweb. Is that it? Sounds right. I forget what it was called. But yeah, that was certainly dramatic. So talk to me about you're having success in the police market. Are you thinking of going to the federal government, the Department of War soon? Is there a crossover there or is that more of a distinct market that you're putting off for the time being?

2:51:29Yeah, I mean, the way I think about things is there are 20 ,000 police departments in America, 30 ,000 fire departments, 80 ,000 police and fire stations. In the future, I believe, you know, the top half of those buildings are going to have a drone recharging pod on the roof. That's 40 ,000 deployment sites. We charge on the order of like 60 to$160 ,000 per year per launch site. So even being very pessimistic, the domestic market's around$3 billion recurring. international, excluding Russia, China, Iran, and all the countries that we'll never be able to sell to is a similar size, maybe like a$6 billion pie.

2:52:00Even if we're only successful at capturing a third of that, like we're a large public company. Axon's probably our closest comp right now. They're trading at roughly a 20X revenue multiple. So that'd be an amazing outcome for us. But long-term, we do want to be the DJI of the West, right? And we want to operate in every customer vertical where we can add value. And yeah, that includes some of the areas that you listed. Yeah. On the engineering side, what is, if you'd wave your magic wand, what technology would you want to advance most directly? Is it the battery, the motor, any other, the actual sensor stack?

2:52:37Like, where are we most bottlenecked from just a technology development perspective? You know, I would say, surprisingly, connectivity can be a challenge. Yeah. We're about to release something very innovative in that domain with our next drone. Okay. But yeah, that, that can be, that can be a major issue. Like cellular isn't always perfect, especially at altitude. I have, I have this very, very first world problem that on the drive home from the studio, there's like a 10 minute stretch where there's just, I cannot get a, I can't have a phone call. So I start a call when I'm leaving and then I'm like, I'm going to have to call you back in like 10 minutes.

2:53:13And then I call people back and I'm like, how in the middle of Los Angeles on a major street, can I not take a simple phone call? Keep in mind, our drones fly everywhere in jurisdictions, right? So, every city has little pockets like that. Also, the Verizon outage yesterday, you have to be, I mean, I didn't have any issues with it, but, I mean, there was like 30 % of Verizon users, I think, yesterday had no coverage. Some massive number, mostly East Coast numbers, I guess. But yeah. What about Starlink satellite connectivity? Is that doable on a drone this size? I have the Starlink Mini. I could imagine the extra mini or the Nano fitting on here.

2:53:58Is that in the cards? Yeah, you should watch our next launch event. Okay. When's that? A couple months. A couple months? Okay. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. What else goes into training police forces and SWAT teams on using these effectively? Have there been any creative uses, creative stories that you've seen where people have deployed this in maybe novel ways where you didn't even think, oh, they could use it in that particular way? Are there any interesting stories that you guys have shared? Oh, there are so many. I mean, especially when it comes to lemur. Yeah, they're really a lot.

2:54:39There was one that I watched personally where a person was kind of pretending to be not responsive. So the operator of the drone actually kind of started nudging them and was able to get a response out of them. Interesting. Yeah, weird things along those lines happen just constantly. We can fly this as well if you guys are interested. Please, yeah, that sounds great. Let's fly drones or a lot. All right, cool. So we have a clean takeoff site there. Yeah, let's see. There's a Diet Coke that's going to get knocked. John, I'd move your Diet Coke. Okay. I think we're flying this one. Okay. This is amazing.

2:55:16Yeah, I couldn't fly either, but yeah, I think the indoor drone is maybe the right. Yeah, let's... We got the camera view back here. Oh, we got the camera view up here, too. Okay. Oh, wow. It's fed in and everything? Nice. Okay. Yeah, let's fly this around. This sounds great. Oh. What is happening? This thing would definitely get me to comply if it was flying. This is crazy. There we go. So we'll show off a couple of functions. Okay, yeah, show us some stuff. You know, right now we're in a GPS denied environment because, you know, we won't be able to see any satellites through a metal roof like this.

2:55:50Sure, sure, sure. The drone is utilizing its onboard cameras running visual inertial odometry algorithms. Yo, yo. Yeah. In order to localize. And it's also using some onboard LIDARs to do the same. Yeah. The aircraft is streaming back 4K video and thermal imaging information. So, yeah, Dimitri, you want to maximize thermal really quick? Oh, the thermal. Oh, wow. Those are all of our thermal signatures. This is very cool. There you go. Wow. And those sensors are mounted on a payload that can rotate a full 180 degrees so it can look straight up and also straight down, which is pretty operationally useful.

2:56:26We also have some lights that are built into our camera pod. Dimitri, you want to hit those? Whoa. So that's a low light for autonomy. Flashbang. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and you can barely see the drone. Oh, you can strobe it too. And they both have strobe function. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's all helpful. Wow, that's fantastic. You can see that kind of articulation. Oh, yeah, it goes up and down. There you go. Great. Dimitri, you want to land it, and then I can give it a quick call? Yeah. That's amazing. Give it a quick call. Yeah. It really is like a creature. Yeah, yeah. It has aura.

2:56:59It has aura. Yeah. Some gusto to it. It's good. So the airframe has a cell phone number. Wait, really? Oh, so you can just call from an actual phone. You can keep it straight up. Okay. Don't dox that phone number. You're ringing off the hook. One, two. One, two. Wow. Yeah. This is how hostage negotiations are happening around the country. Just call the drone. That's so simple. I mean, yeah, it was probably just. It was the right solution. Yeah, simpler to just work off the default rails. That's amazing. How on earth did hostage negotiations, if you want to turn it off and then call it back? There's one more thing I'll show off to you, which is turtle mode.

2:57:35It's a very durable drone. If it ever does crash and lands on its back, it can self-write. It can self-write. Oh, there you go. Wow. Turtle mode. Yeah, that makes sense. That's very cool. Okay. That is very cool. Yeah, thank you. How did what were the actual logistics of a hostage negotiation historically? Wasn't it a lot of megaphones? Yeah, you're yelling, but then they're trying to yell back, but they're in a house and they're trying to not be visible. I can imagine it's hard to hear. It makes the negotiation a lot harder. I mean, that that absolutely happened. A lot of instances of SWAT teams just having to make entry into structures where they didn't know it was waiting for them on the other side of the door.

2:58:19you know, also also occurred and that's not good for anyone. I mean, that's incredibly dangerous for police officers It's dangerous for the suspects. It's dangerous for civilians. It might just be like generally in the area So I mean our thought with lemur is why do that at all when you can send in a little drone to clear all the rooms find suspects You know enable negotiation Hopefully that just resolves the situation But even if it doesn't at least now first responders know, you know what's waiting for them and they can put together a plan that takes all that data into account. Yeah. What are the economics of the first responder units that you work with?

2:58:54Are they wary about CapEx? Do they want more of a subscription product with services and they get regular updates? Do they just want to pay one time and then you get out of their hair? What's the correct business model for this? Yeah. I mean, in general, nowadays, we're selling full-blown drone programs. Programs. So that might include some number of indoor drones, some number of standalone outdoor drones, and also jurisdiction-wide 9-1 response drone coverage. In year one, we deliver all of our current state-of-the-art hardware. So an agency would get like Responder 1. Then at year 2.5 of a contract, we automatically upgrade them to Responder 2.

2:59:33Same thing happens at year 5. If a drone ever gets damaged or destroyed over the course of those five years, we'll repair or replace it. We include data storage. We include unlimited software licenses for pilots and viewers. We include regulatory assistance with the FAA, everything they need to run their full drone program. Yeah. Have you been processing the advancements in AI over the last couple of years? Like, what's been useful? Like, we have better video models. We can understand images at the same time. Like, you know, the baseline is like a megaphone. So this is a huge upgrade. No doubt.

3:00:07And you might not be able to do on-device inference. I don't know if there's an H200 in there or something like that, right? So yeah, where's AI being helpful? Where's being useful? Where has it been? Okay, wait and see So our drones won't even take off without utilizing some of those techniques You know when you have a strong GPS signal you can mostly rely on that for localization Especially if your aircraft has you know a GPS RTK system But GPS isn't always perfect like when we're flying around in this structure, right? Or if we're flying near a big building or under a tree, you do need redundant localization systems.

3:00:43What we've implemented to solve that problem is a vision system that relies on those sorts of techniques in order to pick out tracking points and to calculate relative velocity. So it's really pretty fundamentally baked into our product at that level and at higher levels that touch end user apps. Yeah, because I mean, one of the most obvious use cases is just break a window, go into that building, find a person, and then I want to talk to them on the phone. And that's it. And maybe I can't get the video feed out because the connectivity is difficult. But if we can at least maintain a phone line, we can have a conversation and progress can be made and hopefully people can be saved.

3:01:21Yep, for sure. Any predictions on how drones will be applied in wildfires and just firefighting broadly? Is that something you guys touch yet? Would you ever touch it? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, I'm absolutely thinking about that space pretty seriously. Drones can add value in a number of different ways. First of all, they can help out with wildfire detection early on. You know, it's possible to put a drone recharging pod in an area that has a high wildfire risk and then just have it fly around. They'll be like solar panels powered? Yeah, totally. 100%. And likely, you know, a Starlink internet backhaul for connectivity.

3:01:57Okay. Yeah, some of the footage that came out of the LA wildfires was so bad. I would see some of these cameras, and it looked like it was a camera that was a potato. No, we only got drone footage days later. And it would be like, okay, there's a tiny speck of smoke here, and it's like, how is that the best that we have when it causes tens of billions of dollars of damage? For sure. Drones can also be used for logistics, moving around chainsaws and that kind of stuff in areas that are just difficult to traverse with conventional vehicles. And I think in the future, drone swarms will be used to actively fight forest fires.

3:02:37Just drop a ton of material all over the place. Yeah, or even I think even even for like ember detection and like putting out like his obviously when some of these wildfires start there, there, the actual fires happening here. Embers are floating kind of randomly with the wind. And then there's a moment where like if you just had like effectively a fire extinguisher that could for a second just like hit a certain spot, you could stop like a bunch of structural loss. but Back to this guy. What's the decision to have the white posts come up on the back rotors and then go down on the front rotors?

3:03:17Yes. So those cans on the back of the drone are actually our GPS RTK antennas. Oh, interesting. The motor's actually just here. Yes. Okay, these are antennas. A hundred percent. And they need a field of view of the sky in order to receive. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So yeah, those two things are antennas. We've embedded antennas on the front two motor pods as well for a mesh networking radio. And then you see those two little wings coming off like the, yeah, yeah, those. Those are actually our LT antennas. Very cool. And it's generally good practice to separate antennas on drones as much as humanly possible to avoid crosstalk.

3:03:56And that's why we engineered this configuration. Well, congratulations on all the success. Amazing update. This has been the most wild in-person interview demos we've ever done. Let's glass break next time. Yes, yes, we should. We will definitely get some glass. Bring the sheets. And smash it all over the place. That is by far the coolest demo. Okay. Okay. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yes. Thank you. Congratulations on the progress. And we will talk to you soon. While he's walking off, let me tell you about phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card.

3:04:32And I'm also going to tell you about Gemini three pro it's Google's most intelligent model yet state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding. And they got deep multimodal understanding over there. Jordy, is there anything else in the timeline that you think we should get to? The one thing that I have is that we have some breaking news that Doug O 'Loughlin over at Semi Analysis has severe LLM psychosis. He's been one-shotted. He uses Claude everywhere and anywhere and everywhere, including a client happy hour at 6.50 in New York City. And Doug says, absolutely. You've met me at a very Claude Code time in my life.

3:05:15I listened to him on China Talk or on, sorry, on a podcast with Dylan Patel and Jordan Schneider from China Talk, Transistor Radio. And he was obsessed with using Claude Code to organize his notes, write markdown files, orchestrate his entire life. He says everything is a skill issue. AGI has been achieved. and he's very excited to be using agentic coding agents everywhere and always. Last thing we need to cover is the PBR 99 pack that has been released. They launched this during dry January? What a wild move. Zig when they zag. The new 99 pack wraps 99 PBRs in a gigantic all-new original illustration featuring characters from the Godzilla universe.

3:06:10I mean, this is great to put above your fireplace. I'm sure all the wives out there will love when the husband comes home with a 99 pack and puts it. It's the song. 99 bottles of beer on the wall. 99 bottles of beer. You take one down, pass it around. 98 bottles of beer on the wall. They did it. And, yeah, they did it. They did the meme. But, yeah, congrats to the team at PBR over there. They're doing stuff. They're innovating. Well, that's our show. Today, folks, the bomb has been planted. Thank you for being here with us. On Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter. We love you.

3:06:49At tbpn.com. We've got a fun day tomorrow. We do. We have our friends from Sequoia popping on. We've got the founder of Athletic Brewing. Oh, yeah. We have some Athletic Brewing over there in the refrigerator. And, of course, we'll have the mansion section. Of course. I'm excited for that. It's the mansion section tomorrow. Thank you so much for tuning in. Have a wonderful afternoon. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you very soon. Goodbye.

3:07:15Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.