The Metis List of Top AI Researchers, High Schoolers Beat AI At Math Olympiad, Apple Might Ditch Camera Bump, GPT-5 Rumors Heating Up | Ryan Petersen, Ty Haney, Antonio García Martínez, Ian Webster, Ori Eldarov, Aaron Tan

27:21For sure. For sure. Something there. There was once a time when such precocious math students grew up to become professors or presidents. The recently elected president of Romania was a two-time IMO gold medalist with perfect scores. Let's hear it for Romania. Let's go. While many still choose academia, others get recruited by algorithmic trading firms and hedge funds where their quantitative brains have never been so highly valued. This year, the US team was supported by Jane Street and XTX Markets, sponsored the whole event. After all, they will soon be competing with each other and with the richest tech companies for their intellectual talents.

27:56By then, AI might be destroying your humans at matter. These gold medalists are going to love Jane Street. They're going to love it. It's going to be fun figuring out little puzzles in the market trying to squeeze today you're doing mathematics tomorrow you might be overthrowing a small nation state no it's uh a great you you got an imo gold medal your job is to come to jane street and buy ads on the dwarkech podcast you're you're you're a bright future you're the head of podcast marketing now imo winning podcast market i just assume everyone who works at jane street has at least one regardless of whether or not you're actually writing any code yeah um a former imo gold medalist himself jung is now an associate professor at brown university and visiting researcher at deep mind who worked on its gold medal model he doesn't believe this was humanity's last stand though he thinks problems like problem six will flummox ai for at least another decade that is a crazy crazy timeline i feel like no one thinks that we're a decade out from perfect score That's wild.

28:58Anyway, he walked away from perhaps the most significant math contest in history feeling bullish on all kinds of intelligence. There are things AI will do very well, he said. There are still going to be things that humans can do better. And I guess I believe that broadly. It's very interesting. I think the biggest takeaway is that there are levels to this. there are always levels and in this it's that there there is a level where you want you know the IMO math to be solved like chess was solved in when deep uh when uh was it uh deep blue beat gary kasparov in 1995 and so chess was considered like you know better like computers were better at chess than humans but then for a while there was something called centaur chess where a human plus a computer was better than a computer and it was also better than a human.

29:52And so the human would sit there and look at the recommendations from the computer that was crunching all the numbers. And then the human would do the soft skills stuff, like read the opponent, kind of see if there were blunders and kind of act as like - They're sweating. Yeah, they're sweating. They're sweating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're sweating through their suit. Exactly. We got them. Figuring that out. But now chess is completely solved to the point where they're adding a human to the mix means nothing. but chess had like a 10 year 20 year run of like centaur chess being the dominant the the the actual peak of performance then the lisa doll alpha go match showed that deep learning models were not just better at go than humans but could actually come up with with novel strategies.

30:40And that's the famous move 37 moment where AlphaGo placed a piece on the Go board that was completely unexpected. Lee Sedol stands up, walks away. I think he goes and smokes a cigarette outside and he's like stressing and he's like, that's weird, that makes no sense. Like is the computer like broken? Like is it messing with me? And it turns out that that was a new strategy and it wound up winning that game. And so I think that there are levels in the sense that like right now we're at five out of six. We don't just have to get the AI models to six out of six. I think we need to get them to six out of six.

31:12And then also like, oh, wow, the reasoning that got them there was novel and different from everyone else. It'd be interesting to find somebody who's great at chess and great at math. Maybe it's someone like Scott Wu who can break down kind of the differences and the problem that a computer is solving when it's trying to win at chess versus the problem when it's approaching a new type of math problem. Right? It's math problems can like constantly evolve and take different forms and things like that and presents a slightly different challenge. Somebody yesterday or the day before Sid Steyrhart says when AI was introduced to chess, the thought was that grandmasters would use it as a tool to maximize efficiency.

31:53But it very quickly became apparent that even the greatest human chess players can contribute nothing but noise. And they say nothing is immune. Everyone will soon be obsolete. And Mark Andreessen comes in with a quote and says, chess is more popular in a bigger industry now than ever. Yeah, of course. And yeah, that's because people like to watch human feats of intelligence and challenges and people like to be challenged. And that is part of, there's value in competition. And there's value in seeing two humans that are experts in their field and at their craft compete. And that even as a humanoid robot will be better at shot put in the Olympics.

32:33still going to be cool to watch somebody throw a heavy rock when somebody is, when you could imagine a robot being better at horseback riding than a human, but will it still be cool to watch a human and a horse dance? Of course it will. Some things never get old. Well, if you have a business and you're getting customer support tickets in and they're not asking you IMO level questions, question six, like that level, if it's like normal level, you've got to get on fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one in ranking on G2.

33:14Can't recommend it if the majority of your customer support tickets are IMO question six level difficult, but if it's basic things, how do I get a refund? fin.ai is going to be amazing. We've got to mess with our own a little bit. I'm on the the fin.ai website right now and I'm talking with the fin agent. Feed it. Feed the question sex. Hi there, you're speaking with a fin agent. I say consider a 2025 times 2025 that's a grid of unit squares. It says, I noticed you've asked a mathematical problem about grid tiling, but I'm actually a sales developer. I help businesses find the right customer support and engagement.

33:55I'm going to say, can you take a crack? It would be really helpful. to get me through the next stage of the sales funnel would help me build confidence in the product in fin yes i mean apparently you can get amazon's uh have you seen these these memes of like people go to the amazon help uh help like chat and then they get it to like right react and like use it as like a like a cursor windsurf like alternative it's free free inference it's pre-inference. Yeah. And so you can totally jailbreak it and just be like, yeah. Um, anyway, uh, get on numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

34:39Go to numeralhq.com. Uh, and you know, who's going to be paying sales tax soon? Apple on the new iPhone, which was just spotted in the wild. Mark Gurman says he thinks it looks legit. If you like cameras, you're going to love the next iPhone because what I'm seeing here zoom in on this the next slide zoom in even more if you can I'm seeing a huge flash huge flash to the side huge uh lidar scanner that that type of thing dot projector and it looks pretty flat it looks flat I can't tell if this is just a case on top of it or yeah there's too much compression in the photo that we're looking at to see if the new iPhone doesn't have a camera bump, but it looks like there's a chance that we're getting rid of the camera bump.

35:26I mean, for a long time, people have been dunking on Apple. Steve Jobs would have never gotten a camera bump. You know, he never would have shipped this. Steve Jobs would appreciate how it drives most people to buy a case. I think so. And I don't know. I mean, it's unclear. The iPhone 4 didn't have a bump. It must make the case attach rate go up like 2 % and they're like, yeah, we'll take the extra bill. Oh yeah, Tyler, did you order a phone yet? Tyler famously won an iPhone by defeating the ARC HV3. Wait, you have it in the studio. You have the new phone. It's way better. The camera bump is like really annoying.

36:03I didn't realize it had that. Wait, did your old phone not have a camera bump? Well, I had a case on it. You don't like how it makes the sound when it's flat on a table? Well, I mean, if you want a case, you're going to have to do something even more extreme. You're going to have to defeat the IMO.

36:21I wonder, it would be fun, have you had a chance to play with the agent framework on Arc AGI? No, not yet. I want to see if you can rank on that. That would be interesting. If you can do that, if you can solve it using AI, then you can get win one case. One case. Let's go. So yeah. Apparently there's like some harness that's already kind of pre-built and you can kind of just fine tune and swap things in and out and have a little bit more of a flexible approach. I saw someone posting about they beat the first level. It seemed like a kind of a brute force solution. But I think it'd be interesting to see how far can you get in the games before it just becomes really, really difficult to play through.

37:09But see what models are out there and see what the experience is like building for it. Anyway, this iPhone camera bump is interesting. So I don't know if Steve Jobs would have shipped this. There was always this weird trade-off because people say, just make it flat. But the laws of physics do apply to cameras. You need a certain focal length to get a certain quality of picture out of them. And so Apple's made this trade-off between the bump gives you better photos, which people really like. You could go flatter, but then you get worse photos. you could make the phone thicker to match the depth of the camera but then it's big and chunky and heavy and people say that they want more battery life but the real revealed preference is that like one day of battery life is fine people are fine being in the habit of charging their phones every day and we kind of saw this the same thing with like the the watches like some people are like oh you know like it would actually be more inconvenient to be like yeah i have to charge every five days it's like okay so i charge it on monday and then friday and then wednesday and then the next saturday instead of just being in a routine and just doing every single day so um yeah there's also like how fast does something charge right like if something can get if you can add 20 percent battery life in they charge really 30 minutes and there's chargers like everywhere like you get in any car there's a charger you any office there's a charger everything's so standardized on lightning or a USB-C now that like you can grab a charger anywhere.

38:42So and then there's also like those add-on battery packs if you're really crazy about that you can modify it. So I don't know. I think we need a poly market on whether or not the the next iPhone has a camera bump. That would be interesting to track. I want to know. I feel like I don't know this picture. I Feel like this picture is a case. I feel like it will have a camera bump. What do you think? I'm going I'm going camera bump staying stay bump bump stays yeah it makes sense that they would put a case on it's like those cars I keep seeing the new BMWs driving up and down PCH and they're wrapped in that like confusing camouflage to so that you can't really see the curvature if you take a picture and you can't really see the full silhouette of the car yeah it's kind of the same thing they should do that for the phone I mean they kind of did with this case probably Yeah.

39:31But I don't know. They moved the flashlight over. Well, one thing that we do know is that the company is going to be introducing a foldable iPhone at the end of next year. It will be entering a product category that's already seven years old, pioneered and dominated by its biggest hardware rival, Samsung. And at this time, Apple won't be debuting a radically new interface or transformative hardware. instead the device will offer similar design as Samsung's Galaxy Z fold line and use many of the same core components including foldable OLED screens sourced from Samsung display oh interesting so it will be a Samsung screen yeah basically Samsung's done seven years of R &D on this and the supply chain's really robust do you remember the first folding phones the first folding phones not the Motorola Razr V3, but like the first foldable screen phones, like they wouldn't fold flat.

40:24So like the hinge, it would, like when you close the phone. I had one, I forget what it was where the keyboard would flick out. Yeah, that was the sidekick. That's not what they were talking about. That was an awesome era of consumer electronics. But when they folded, they wouldn't fold flat like this. They would fold and be like this, basically. And so like you would be able to see through the hinge because like it wouldn't fold all the way close. Now they're at a point where they do fold flat and the hinges are extremely reliable so that you can use it for a year. And if you get a little sand in there, it's IP76, waterproof, all of that.

40:54They've figured out all the industrial design. And so... Yeah, so Samsung, Mark Gurman reviewed Samsung's latest Z Fold 7 and called it the first foldable phone with true mainstream potential. That device is a remarkable feat of engineering with a wider front screen and refined design that you can experience first, that you have to experience firsthand to truly appreciate. Already sales are outpacing the prior generation to a significant degree, I'm told. That makes sense. What's interesting is it seems like the Z Fold 7 is the size of an iPhone when unfolded, and it folds down to be half the size.

41:31I think the real demand and the real interesting thing is it's the size of an iPhone when folded shut, and then it unfolds to basically the size of an iPad. Exactly. That's what I think people would be more interested in. But I don't know. I don't mind carrying a bigger thing. I always get the bigger phone. And so I guess I might be in the minority there. So Mark says, that means Apple's first foldable won't break any technological barriers or redefine the category. Samsung has already taken care of much of the heavy lifting. But here's the twist. That may not matter. Apple's unmatched ability to market premium hardware to consumers, Vision Pro aside, could make it a dominant player in the foldables market within months of launch.

42:13There's a sizable group of iPhone loyalists, myself included, who have long wanted a foldable device but weren't willing to switch to Android to get it. That pent-up demand is real, and Apple knows it. I also just think, yeah, people used to just love the novelty of a new iPhone, and it was exciting if you had it, if you're one of the first people to have it, people would wait in line. You don't see iPhone lines to the same degree anymore because it's just not that exciting. And I think a lot of people will get the foldable version of the iPhone, even if they've never wanted a foldable, just because it's new and it's from Apple and they use the device every single day.

42:49And I imagine it will be very well done. Imagine running Adio on a foldable phone, just pulling out your CRM. That'd be so satisfying. Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Customer relationship magic. So the new foldable iPhone is expected to cost at least$2 ,000. So, I mean, if it delivers at the level of an iPhone and just becomes the highest status thing to carry, everyone's just going to go, all the top Apple fans are going to go from spending$1 ,000 a year every couple of years to$2 ,000. And then also, I bet that the change in form factor, like I think my, I used to upgrade every year.

43:30Then I started upgrading every two years. I think I had the last phone for like three years and I was kind of like, I don't really notice any difference. I got the new phone, barely noticed any difference. I think I got an extra button on the side. But even though it's only one year old, if there's a foldable and it's like this cool, shiny new thing, even if I don't get that much value, I'm definitely upgrading. I'm definitely upgrading. And so, you know, they just pull forward a ton of revenue, which could be very good. And there's an interesting thing about Apple's revenue mix shifting really towards like the services.

43:58And then maybe this pulls some stuff back. This is also extremely popular as a form factor in China. And so. Mark says, in fairness to Apple, its foldable phone won't be a carbon copy. of the Samsung. As he reported months ago, the company is focusing on addressing a few of the foldable categories' longstanding weaknesses. The company aims to make the inner display crease less visible and dramatically improve the hinge mechanism. And as part of the development of iOS 27, which formally kicks off soon, Apple will prioritize software features tailored specifically to this new form factor. This will be fun for app developers who have been focused on, you know, optimizing yeah you know conversion rate at every step of their funnel to to have some new surface area to be thinking about um and again it talks about the popularity of foldables in china which is interesting apple uh reportedly shut uh shut down their first retail store in china ever they never closed a store but that points to the struggles they are having uh in china broadly as people just don't care as much about the status around the iPhone in the way that they once did.

45:06Well, whether you're bullish on Apple or bearish on Apple, you've got to get on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They've got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Breaking news from D.D. Doss, friend of the show. OpenAI is dropping GPT-5 next week, apparently. He says the source is an anonymous DM with some reasonable proof shared out of public interest. Some of the details might be off. He says a million token window, 100 ,000 output tokens, MCP support, parallel tool calls, dynamic short and long reasoning, uses code interpreter and other tools.

45:39Codenames are 03 Alpha Nectarine Lobster Starfish. Lobster Mini Starfish Nano. Fantastic. They're not beating the naming challenges, allegations, but I mean, GPT-5 is clean. Yeah. And so I'm going to call it Starfish Nano Lobster Mini personally. Starfish. I like it. So Polymarket has GPT-5 released by July 31st, which would be in two days at 7%, but August 15th at 74 % now. So it feels like it's coming. And they have GPT-5 released by December 31st at 97%. SWIX, as we're seeing almost daily releases of great open models now in completely unrelated news. GPT-5 and Gemini 3 drop in the next few weeks.

46:27SWIX also believes that GPT-5 is coming soon and Gemini 3 is also coming soon. And it's interesting because we're in this era of like, what does GPT-5 even mean? Because it used to mean a major version number bump was a order of magnitude in pre-training. But then we tested that with what was supposed to be GPT-5. I think it was called Orion. and they did this massive training run. They started testing it and they found that it wasn't as useful as, it had good like big model smell, it had good vibes. Dylan Patel said it made him laugh and it could do good green text and we have one of them here that we'll read through.

47:08But it wasn't as useful as O3 or O3 Pro and all the reasoning and all the tool stuff. So we're in this weird thing where GPT-5 might come out and it doesn't necessarily mean that like, Okay, it's the Stargate training run. It's the 10x bigger pre-training run. It's the most massive LLM training run of all time all the data It's more like it's just the best most polished unification of all their different capabilities So they're putting together the best model with the best tools and the best systems and the best interface And that's what the version number bump means now Obviously dropping GPT 5 will be like a massive moment and everyone will be like oh my god and expectations are extremely expectations are extremely high but really what people want is just something that's usable uh and it doesn't and so gpt 4.

47:54they they changed what was supposed to be gpt 5 apparently to gpt 4.5 and and kind of and then they they tucked it behind some ui so it's harder to get to now it's not the default it was slower but people did like talking to it and they felt like it had more personality and it was funnier and of course uh this comes from this uh tyler cowan green text. Be me. Be Tyler Cowen. Wake up at 523 a.m. precisely. Eat exactly seven blueberries, three Brazil nuts, and a quarter cup of Icelandic skier. Productivity.jpg. Write two blog posts, one on obscure Romanian cinema, the other on the economics of parking meters in Hyderabad.

48:34Check email. Reply exclusively in lowercase. Very interesting. Thanks for this. Send. Perhaps. Send. Attend breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials. Discuss Singaporean food. stalls instead of geopolitics food stalls instead of geopolitics lunchtime arrives ask waiter what is your least popular dish that actually is really funny waiter visibly confused recommend some fermented herring special wonderful i'll have that extra spicy genuinely enjoy it back to back to office podcast guest waiting is a chess grandmaster who's also an amateur botanist and former dj oh so funny feels extremely accurate it's perfect.jpg uh finish interview by recommending three obscure books on medieval Hungarian tax policy.

49:16Guess nodding politely. Afternoon arrives. Browse JSTOR for fun. Download papers titled An Economic Analysis of Late Roman Olive Oil Production and Optimal Seating Arrangements in Mongol Yurts. Dinner time. Marginal Revolution commenters awaiting restaurant recommendations. The best fried chicken in America is actually in rural Nebraska. Chaos in the comments. Chuckle softly. Bedtime at exactly 9.47 p.m. dream in Straussian subtext, MFW. And so Nabeel Qureshi says, honestly, the first time an LLM made me laugh out loud. And I agree. It seems this is the way that it makes, this is how, this is its first, like consistent humor form factor.

50:00Totally, totally. Very good. It's been reliable. Yeah. So Tyler Cowen's hitting bedtime at exactly 947. When you're headed to bed, get an eight sleep, get a pod five. They have a five-year warranty, 30-night risk retrial, free returns, free shipping. And we have our first guest of the show in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring in Ryan Peterson. How are you doing, Ryan? You look fantastic today. Yeah, whatever lighting you got going on looks super cinematic. Good job. Good stuff. Really? I'm in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It's the big window. There's a big window to your left, and I like it.

50:34It looks awesome. It's the ARIA City Center right over there. Very nice. There we go. blown out are we getting are we getting a flexport orb this year oh yeah people have been what is it oh yeah the sphere yeah man i want to do it this might be the first uh the first gong ringing for a sale of a company is that what's going on break us down break the news down for us exactly what happened and is this a gong worthy moment and full backstory yeah so this is like six questions in one. Yeah, just just cook. Take us on a journey. So we sold our convoy business to DAT. Okay. And if the we're for some reason, we're not supposed to talk about the numbers involved.

51:18So you can I have they have been reported. I have not I have not protested the numbers that have been reported. So it was very good return for us. We bought this business out of bankruptcy 18 months ago from a bank. Yep. A little over 18 months ago. And one thing that's been reported, I feel like wrongly, where I thought I'd come on and clear the record, is it's been reported as though we made this amazing trade. Like we bought this thing and then we sold it for way more than we bought it for. I made a lot of money. That is true, but it was not a trade the way you buy like a stock and do nothing and you make a bunch of money like you're some kind of genius.

51:55This was an active entrepreneurship and business building. We bought a bankrupt, we only bought the asset. No employees, no customers, no transactions, no nothing. Had to go recruit the former employees of Convoy to come back to work for us. Wow. We had to recruit the carriers. So the way the Convoy business works is that at peak, this thing was worth the$3.8 billion. Wow. And you can go read what we bought it for. It was a lot, a lot less. And, but again, it was nothing there. We, the team did an incredible job, like real business building here to go get all those carriers back. So the way it works, you have at peak, they had 400 ,000 drivers on a mobile app, truck drivers.

52:36Yeah. Well, we brought it back to life and those drivers, many of them hadn't been paid by the former owners. There was really like no transaction volume, nothing happened. We had to convince them to come back. It was kind of solving the cold start problem of any marketplace. Like how do you get loads in here to attract the drivers, the drivers to attract the loads? It's a pretty hard problem when you start from zero. And Flexport is not a big truck broker. So we didn't have the demand to do that, to bring it back to life. So what we did, we completely pivoted the business model to be a neutral platform to say, okay, other truck brokers can come in here and post their loads and bring it.

53:14And we'll have the drivers come back to serve those loads and get the flywheel spinning. So that was the change to the business model that we made. and 18 months later we had hit real liquidity kind of escape velocity there were uh probably on track to have like more than 100 truck brokers by the end of the year he was posting thousands of some of them tens of thousands of loads to the platform some over 100 000 uh and then the drivers would sign up you know if you have demand the drivers will come and they also had the mobile app they liked convoy they wanted to come back if there were loads um so but the moment we pivoted it away from serving being a truck brokerage it was kind of also not a strategic fit for flex for like our job is to serve importers and exporters and companies with cargo to move not to serve other truck brokers with whom we sort of compete so it was like this strategic mismatch it was always an afterthought when i talk about our mission and what we're going to do and why we're doing it be like oh yeah and we also have this like business that serves truck brokerage which is an incredible business and it deserves to be front and center so we sold it to dat dat It used to be called Dial-A-Truck, which I love.

54:21It tells me their heritage. It's been around forever. They're kind of the 800-pound gorilla in load boards. Load board is like if you're a truck broker, you can't call every truck driver in America to match your load to pick it up. And so if you don't have a contract or you don't have a relationship and none of the carriers you work with, the people that operate trucks, is able to service your load, you'll post it to DAT and then hope that somebody's kind of like craigslist freight uh well like craigslist you know there's they've got um it's hard it's a hard problem to control like who's actually picking up the freight is it the eastern european mafia that just stole your stuff and disappeared like some of that goes on uh and i just i just saw i just saw a friend's company this morning had somebody show up at his warehouse looked completely legit like an official kind of um kind of uh distributor kind of purchase order and just like got over a million dollars of product and then just disappeared no way and i think that i'm sure i'm sure that happens like quite frequently it probably is through this kind of scam um where people and it's like now convoy built incredible machine learning based detection algorithms for this uh to go like do pattern matching and find it so we've actually um over the 18 months that we operated the business doing hundreds of thousands of loads zero incidents of prey and tons of busting people we even got a guy trying to commit freight fraud from the courthouse and it was a known actor who was like connected through these pattern matching algorithms and so they and we have gps coordinates because he's doing it on the mobile apps they're like oh this guy's at a courthouse right now so we looked up his records and he was facing trial for freight fraud no way doing freight fraud wow that is crazy theme.

56:11So yeah, it's really rampant and I think that's going to be one of the biggest wins from all this. I think DAT is going to make a ton of money doing this, better a business model, making a percent of every transaction instead of currently they just sell subscriptions. So DAT is part of Roper, by the way, public company. Their stock didn't move on the news. I think Wall Street didn't quite understand how big this can be for them. Not investment advice, but there's something there. But the big, and Flexport does great. We got to put a lot of money on our balance sheet help us on our mission the convoy team is going to get to scale and instantly put test their algorithms at scale right test the matching like because dits is the monster like something like 40 of all the truckloads run on the dits load board yeah and so piping them through convoys like let's see how that works it's going to be awesome but the industry in general like yeah i think it's a massive way to combat fraud uh truck brokers will really benefit because about 30 of the expense structure of a truck brokerage is of an FTL brokerage is what they call carrier sales.

57:14These are the guys that are making phone calls to carriers to try to cover the load to say, OK, I got this load. I got the customer. Let me find a trucker that'll move it for me. And with Convoy, that goes away. You don't have to spend that money. Those people can work on harder loads and more interesting problems, go do more sales. So huge win for the industry, I think. Probably the biggest beneficiary of this all. So yeah, I'm pretty proud of how it went down. How did Convoy go bankrupt originally? It was, I remember kind of watching that unfold quickly and then you guys moved super fast on it from what I remember.

57:52Yeah, a lot of theories. I'm sure that, you know, it'd be interesting to get the Convoy founder, Dan Lewis, on your show at some point, see what his ideas are, what he thinks, where he went wrong. There's sort of the proximate cause, which is, you know, every company goes bankrupt for the same reason. You run out of money. They were in a transaction. They had agreed to sell the business to a large competitor of theirs, big public company. You should go unnamed. I don't want to get sued. But big company who they should have done. But because they had a deal to sell, and then that big company unwound it.

58:33They didn't raise more money and stuff. he hadn't gotten proper board consent and he had a couple activist investors who didn't like the deal and backed out and Convoy had two weeks of cash left and they were supposed to close but you never should have got yourself into that situation in the first place especially you kind of allow your competitor to do that to you it's kind of like a win for the competitor we can spy you for a lot of money or where you put your business and then we're just like, you know, more strong. Yeah. So how did this particular so you're you're you're but I think that all of that is sort of proximate causes upstream of that.

59:21I think they were really product and tech driven. Like we're doing hundreds of thousands of loads through convoy. Only 2 % of them a human has to touch at all. The tech is dialed. Yeah. So like, but you were able to bring your sales force to bear pretty quickly to ramp up the business. Just in general, like it's kind of like a, it's a Midwest kind of steak dinner industry. Totally. Yep. And they're like West coast product people. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that makes sense. How did they needed a little more steak dinner? Yeah. How did this particular deal. It's all about the stake data capital of the world.

59:59How did this particular deal come together? Is this like there's an investment bank involved? Is this like founder to founder deal? Like walk me through a little bit of the anatomy of like how you sell what is essentially like a subsidiary. I've never been in that situation. I think a lot of founders haven't been in that situation. Yeah. Well, great businesses are bought and not sold. So they approached us. I think they started to realize we were getting escape velocity on the marketplace and that at scale that would be quite threatening to them sure uh because you don't need to go to the subscription and uh load board if you load is already covered sure uh via our platform and our business model now that our business model i think is better uh at scale when it works because we're taking a percent of every transaction instead of just a monthly fee um that's cool like by my math very amateur math i think this could add like five billion dollars in ebit wow to the business this is crazy yeah that was very valuable i'm sure that's off but um but like order of magnitude is right um and so i think they i don't know how they they decided but there's a relationship uh dnt's a big player uh in the industry obviously and our convoy team was just connected to them and they were like hey we got this inbound and they're they're pretty interested in selling the business what do you think right i'm like well i have to pay a lot with money for it because i really like it and but the more we looked at it the more it was like dude it's worth more to them i mean i think that's the core in any m a transaction it needs to be worth more to the acquirer than it is to the yeah totally seller uh and so that there's room there's grounds there for a negotiated price and settlement and uh we found a good one too well congratulations on the deal.

1:01:43Let's ring the gong for you. Amazing, amazing work from the team. Super impressive. Yeah, we've been told we've got to warm up the gong. We're going to break it if we hit it too hard. There you go.

1:01:56People are very opinionated about the gong hits. Yeah, they are. We're doing our best here. Interesting. Super, super. I mean, given everything that Flexport has navigated through the last few years, it's pretty incredible to just casually as kind of like a little side project buy, you know, turn it around and sell it in such a short period of time. So nice work. It's great work. Pure testament to the Convoy team, frankly. And I hope they all, we feel like we've put them off in a good place here financially. But like the potential is all what can they do for DAT? Yeah. And how does DAT make the best of this, right?

1:02:40because, man, if you can pipe all that volume through this platform, you have the potential to generate something really, really massive. It's exciting. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Thanks for taking some time out of your day in Las Vegas. Good luck with the rest of your trip. Enjoy your steaks out there. Enjoy the steaks. I will be having a steak dinner tonight, actually. Fantastic. I have to talk to the top golf with the customers. Let's go. Top golf steak. You'll love to see it. Freight game. That's what it's all about. That's the American dream right there. Have a good one. Good stuff, Ryan.

1:03:06Great to see you. We'll talk to you later. Dan Primack has a report says Flexport sells Convoy assets to DAT for$250 million. So while plenty of people can't comment on it, Dan Primack has the scoop. As he often does. Well, we have Ty Haney in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in. How you doing, Ty? Speaking of comeback stories, what's happening? Welcome to the stream. Good to meet you. How you doing? Yes, I'm doing great. I'm actually reading the tweet from Emily Sundberg. I know she's one of your best friends. We are good friends. He's the best. Amazing. Are you in New York? I'm in SF.

1:03:40Okay, cool. Give us - Yeah, so SF, I mean, I want to get into everything, but is that where you're going to be basing the company out of going forward? How are you thinking about that? TYB, my rewards platform, we actually work out of the X Twitter office on Market Street. Cool. So it's - Wait, the X, like the X office? the former office or the current ex office? The last ex office, former Twitter office. Okay. There's like old Twitter merch, which we should probably put places, sell places. And then there's some ex branding and now there's TYB. So it's world colliding. We will market buy all the old Twitter merch.

1:04:26Yes, yes, yes. I saw there was like a huge bird sculpture that was going up. When Elon first bought it, he was thinking about auctioning this stuff off. and it was like 60 000 for this massive bird logo i don't want this bird look anymore there's a bunch of whatever you got uh well congratulations congratulations why don't you give some quick quick background on yourself for a few people that might be living under a rock yeah i do not know and we'll get into the news from this week yeah i'll give you the quick walk up i started a company in the activewear space called outdoor voices at 23 out of school in new york city it It really became a darling in the direct-to-consumer world.

1:05:01I ran it for eight years, so 100 million. I left five years ago. There was kind of an ego battle at the board level and then between me as the CEO and this person. I left and that was a sad point of time. 90 % of my experience building that company was awesome, 10 % was hard. That said, it was a master class in learnings. Anyway, since then I started a tech platform, a community rewards platform called Try Your Best. We work with the top consumer brands to essentially create a more fun and effective loyalty program. All that to say, I announced yesterday that I rejoined my original company, Outdoor Voices.

1:05:39And so pretty cool to see there was a very warm response to original OG OVers. And here I am. I'm running TYB and I'm running OV as well. Amazing. The video was amazing. Maybe we'll play it after you jump off. but my wife said she almost teared up watching it. It just was like, it's such a cool story. And yeah, I think everybody's excited to have you back in the driver's seat. So what is that going to look like going forward? How are you going to, like, what do you think the takeaways from the last go are? And how are you kind of, what, you know, where do you want to take the brand going forward?

1:06:19Is it back to its roots, back to what people loved originally? retail or e-commerce shifting the mix. I'd be interested to hear about that. Sorry, can you say that again? I'd be interested to hear about the, a lot of brands, you know, they, they start online, then they go offline. There's owned retail, there's channel partners. How do you see that mix changing going forward? How did it change while you were there or over the last decade? Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. The North Star vision for OV is to build the number one recreation brand. Our call to action or kind of motto that people have a crazy emotional connection to is doing things you guys might have seen the doing things hats like trotting trotting around the west west side highway um that was kind of like a souvenir from the brand that people would wear but you could only get them by participating with the brand all that to say like we started in 2013 so we were very much part of this direct-to-consumer model that i'd say in a lot of ways has not proved to be all that successful um and so similar to others we were able to raise a lot of capital that meant i was diluted pretty significantly as the founder and ultimately we spent too much money trying to acquire people you know online that were expensive and didn't last we also kind of had this grassroots um what would i call it like community uh of 10 000 or so or so people that were really our super fans and as we clicked into the data like anyone who came through this community activation was ultimately four times more valuable over time and so that's essentially what prompted me to start tyb to allow brands to directly connect with their super fans and grow their value over time own that relationship own that data um and then now with ov it's been cool i've been working on it for a year um oh wow i i rejoined obviously as the founder as an owner with new owners um and a partner but the last year has been just almost like a cherry on top it's been a creative outlet i obviously spent eight years like obsessing over every detail of ov um to to kind of like play again in this space and think about from a product perspective, like the recreational lifestyle and what the core products are here.

1:08:24It's just honestly been fun. And so no change in terms of the vision, but we're off to the races. I feel like there's such an opportunity for almost like a turnaround fund, venture capital fund, private equity fund to specifically target companies that where the founders left and we're going to set them up to bring them back. I think that there's so much more value unlocked from that as opposed to just like, okay, let's trade this asset to someone who's going to squeeze even like the last few pennies out just kind of wind it down and bleed it out as opposed to let's there's actually something here but we need a founder back in the back in the seat and we need to bring them back and set them up the cool thing too is is it seems like every apparel brand that went ultra heavy into online only not online only but made that the priority struggled all the way from like nike you see their their like d2c efforts they basically capitulated there and realized like, okay, people like going to stores, like they like experiencing products in person.

1:09:19They want to be on all these different channels. And so I think it was just a massive lesson for everyone in the industry. I'm curious how you see the like kind of broader athleisure category evolving. It feels like there's kind of distinct categories around Nike is still for athletes, but Nike kind of missed your insight with OV was like, okay, what is like active wear for people that don't consider them like don't aspire to be a professional basketball player people that aren't like weight training uh and then we've seen you know the rise of aloe targeting kind of the uh pilates industrial complex um and kind of the lifestyle around that so i'm curious kind of where you see kind of the broader market going i'm curious what do you guys wear active wear wise i wear cotton yeah like i wear like cotton like tank tops and and shorts i actually don't know john doesn't know john john's one of the john's in the category my wife shops for me yeah john's just like i think i need new shorts and then shorts appear yes his lovely wife um but i back in the day i i would wear i remember i was the first person in my friend group in college to discover outdoor voices i was early to lululemon at a time when And, you know, men were just criticized for wearing what people saw as like a women's brand.

1:10:40And I was like, the product's just great. Try it. And then people would try it and it was great. And then I got on OV. And but but yeah, I think. Yeah, for me, I think I'm excited about like the return of like natural fibers in sportswear. Yeah, I'm excited about that. But it's a broad category. Yeah, I ask that because for this five-year gap, similarly, I would only wear vintage. I feel like every brand in the activewear space says so much about you. Like, Aloe wasn't for me, et cetera. So I also think of this space almost like the artist space, where there's different flavors of pop stars, and each of them have equal amounts of fandom or cultiness, and they all can coexist.

1:11:27One thing I'm excited to kind of really blast away from is just this over saturation of like compression top and bottom and that like being the look. So our collection launches next week and like we've really infused more styling options. And to your point, like that includes like cotton poplin striped button downs that you wear to like protect from the sun and like put over your Pilates pants. Oh, cool. Cotton cashmere cropped cardigans. And similarly, like I'm going to the grocery store in that. I think it's like time to infuse more style beyond just like stretchy, you know, bottoms and tops.

1:12:05So that's that's certainly what you'll see from us starting next week. How are you integrating TYB? I'm assuming that's going to be a big part of the launch. It launched today. So OV's community launched on TYB today in a very full circle moment. We're off to the races there. Our designers are in there. we're essentially like getting all of this amazing feedback in terms of what people have missed from a product standpoint what hero products they want to bring back like it's shocking to me how much people care about Arthur Voices five years later like holy shit but but uh OB is like perfectly suited for this toolkit now it's a tool that I wish I had as a brand builder five years ago how do you uh does uh what what comes to mind uh when you hear the phrase grow at all growth at all costs.

1:12:51It feels like one of the challenges with building an enduring lifestyle brand, apparel brand, whatever you want to call it is, is the D to C era was like, okay, here's$50 million. Turn this into as much revenue as you can, as fast as possible. And when you look at the great brands throughout history, very few of them had founders that were, that, that were growth at all costs was like, we know it's a marathon, but what if it was a sprint? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's It's more like, you know, I can see the path to outdoor voices getting to a billion dollars in revenue in 10 years. But if you tried to get there in three years, like it'd probably make the job a lot harder.

1:13:33Yeah. Becoming lengthy takes time. Yeah. You'd have to have too many shortcuts. Totally. A hundred percent. I mean, for me, like success looks like longevity. And I felt that like pain of not having longevity here firsthand. So if you think of obviously like Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard, like I met with him somewhat recently. And like, that's the model for success. I think, I think in terms of this, like lifestyle, like physical product brand, at the same time, like I went from software with a W-E-A-R to software W-A-R-E in terms of my businesses. So I understand how tech companies like deserve the capital and require the speed just by nature of they don't have physical Products or widgets that they're trying to you know get right from a planning perspective and then sell like So it just makes a lot more sense to me why funding around software companies like is the way it is and the speed that's Required and then possible there.

1:14:26I very much just felt firsthand So I'd say like waiting to me. Yeah is around longevity endurance and no pun intended. It's an active word brand Can you take me on a tour of some of the good community, maybe good and less good community building stuff? We were talking about this. Emily Sundberg highlighted a candle company that put a bunch of influences on a private jet and the private jet maybe didn't even take off. And it feels like that is a unique unexplored space of like take the super fans, whether they're influences or not, and just do something way above and beyond for them. Even Red Bull went back and did this with like the Supercross community.

1:15:00It was just a bunch of guys driving motorcycles on dirt ramps and they were like, let's turn this into a real sport. That sport came back to, you know, love them forever. They did this with F1. There's companies that have done this really well, but then it can go less well. So like I understand that like, you know, surveys are valuable, but like what, how else can you integrate or, or activate a community? What I'm like, what we're seeing really matter on the user side is status and identity as essentially like signaling my proof of fan. And like, so giving people the ability to level up and like prove their fandom and then have something like at the bragging rate that they can share on social around that is ultimately like what they care about beyond anything.

1:15:41And so like that proof of fan idea, I think like loyalty becomes kind of the new identity or status and like your ability to signal that like really matters. What else would I tell you there? So the proof of fan, does that need to be like qualitative or quantitative? Because there's a world where it's like, okay, like you're in like the Kohl's cash world where like you buy a thousand dollars and you get 50 bucks back versus this like more qualitative world where it's like, look, you came to some event and you bought some stuff and like you were, you know, we saw you in our replies on social a lot.

1:16:16And like, we didn't really try and put like a send five tweets and you get a free hat. But like yeah, how quantified does it need to be because I feel like it can feel a little sterile if it becomes an algorithm And then people are gaming and then your bots getting the hats and then reselling them and stuff I think it's it's definitely all about social so like within my profile and essentially collecting things from You know events I've gone to so rare beauty is a good example They do they're they're excellent at essentially like creating these little collectibles or souvenirs that that their fans can collect as they launch new product or host an event and essentially what 2ib allows you to do is like build your consumer profile but it's very visual first and so you're earning these things that then essentially are like your top shelf like here's what I'm obsessed with I bought it seven times here's a Selena Gomez event I went to it sits next to kind of you know my streaks or for lack of a better term in terms of product purchases.

1:17:15And all of this like essentially builds your identity in a really social first way. And so we see people share like this wallet or profile content, just reflecting kind of their engagement with brands in a really fun kind of like social game led way. The other thing just to your guys's point, I think there is certainly like oversaturation of brand events is like the way I think about building fandom, it's kind of four part, like one articulate the purpose or mission very clearly of the brand. Like, why do people care? What's the reason for being? Two, build rituals for activation. And obviously we're seeing like run clubs take off.

1:17:52But like the key for me there is like something that you as a brand can do consistently, not just one and done. The third is connection. So like allowing brands to like, or bands that like obsess over Nike or whatever to connect with one another. And like that flywheel of engagement really takes off. And then the fourth is incentivization. And I think for too long fandoms been like clicking like on Instagram, but like ultimately that's not giving me anything for my loyalty over time. So there's a lot to play with as you think of kind of like the combo of those things. But I agree like brand events.

1:18:24There's too many. Like I don't care. Yeah, makes sense. What's the how are you thinking about product release schedules coming back to OV? You've been working on this first collection sounds like for a year. but are you thinking drops collections capsules a mix of everything it's just a consistent drumbeat of of excellent newness and i think we've always like done a good job of having a kind of stunty or unexpected perspective on in the space and so we have a another collection dropping uh in september that's like a very specific activity like not going to be relatable to all but like something you certainly haven't seen Nike do before.

1:19:03And I remember like early innings, Outdoor Voices, on our site, we merchandised by a category of dog walking. Sounds simple, no, non-issue, but like Reddit went nuts. They were so mad. Like dog walking is not a sport. And that was perfect. I'm like, that's so, it's so ownable. Dog walking is a sport. How dare you make a pocket for - Get in the Olympics. I want to see Olympic level dog walking for sure. For sure. That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by. Awesome. Well, super excited to see the new collection. And it's great to see you. We got to ring the gong for a founder back in the seat.

1:19:35Founder mode. Founder mode. Did you have a soundboard? Founder mode. Thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Cheers. I'm excited for outdoor voices. Maybe they'll do a billboard. Maybe they'll get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only. Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And next up, we have AGM coming in. Probably talk about ads too because the timeline was in turmoil. We were talking about AI ads, but I want to talk about a whole bunch of stuff.

1:20:07Kick us off with an introduction. How are you doing? I did good. I dressed it up for you guys, by the way. You look fantastic. As Jordy mentioned, I've got the Patagonia fleece. I look like I trade bonds at Cantor Fitzgerald. Yes, you do. Trading tariff rebates today. That's amazing. cool man so yeah what's new in your world what's that yeah yeah just what's new in your world so a bit of a product announcement today um let's go we a little bit related to a guest you had two weeks ago you have ryan and jesse on there from coinbase yep i'm here to announce uh we're launching ads or sponsored offers as we like to call them inside the new app that coinbase launched uh which is a new social app on chain um it replaces the previous wallet uh it's really quite cool and interesting and um yeah i mean it's it's kind of the fulfillment of the spindle vision so we recently got acquired by by coinbase yeah and um you know i'm i was a little late to crypto to be honest with i bought some bitcoin in 2013 but um you know circa 2022 when board apes were worth like a million dollars and fdx hadn't happened yet and crypto was pumping i mean it's pumping now but it's pumping even more you're like you know what crypto needs ads well no no no no no no no no that was not the first thing jody the first thing is i talked to i I talked to the head of marketing, I won't name the names, of like billion dollar crypto companies.

1:21:27And I asked, okay, so like, what's your cap? What's your LTP, LTV? What does your retention look like? And the guy looks at me and says, what's LTV? I don't know what you're talking about. And I basically had a personal existential crisis that I couldn't believe that people in crypto didn't know their LTVs. And so what do you mean? The number goes up. That's all that matters. Well, no, that's part of the problem in crypto. Often numbers go, if money is free, then cats don't matter is kind of the problem. but um but money doesn't always stay free forever so um we first built what's called an attribution system which i know sounds super wonky and may not be totally familiar uh to all your listeners but basically whether you realize it or not every time you click or install an app or monetize on your app an event is getting fired into an attribution system that's trying to figure out where you came from and how much you're worth and this is like a billion dollar business it's incredibly disorganized there's literally billions of events firing a day i worked inside one of these big attribution companies.

1:22:20And I just remember like, what if we just had one database? What if everyone just agreed what happened in the world? And then when I really got into blockchain and Ethereum ecosystem, I realized, oh, look, this is the consensus layer of truth that we actually need. And we also have user identity. And we also have the payment layer. The blockchain is going to be the biggest marketing database in human history, right? And so the question is, how do we build it? How do we take the best learnings from Web2 world and then build it into the on-chain world in a way that, by the way, respects user privacy and all the rest of it, but also kind of functions in a much better way than than Web2 ever did.

1:22:50Yeah, I remember hearing the original pitch for Spindle and being like, there was a lot of like froth and stuff. And I was like, this feels like enterprise SaaS for crypto. This feels like it's like valuable regardless of what happens with everything else. All the craziness. You don't need to, you know, feel about like, oh, what's the value of art? It's like so subjective. But it's like it was like you and like that other company Chainalysis. I was like, no matter what happens to crypto, Chainalysis is going to be a good company. So congrats on the deal with Coinbase and coming into the team. A bunch of questions about how this actually manifests.

1:23:21I imagine that the first advertisers will be Web3 companies. Is that the correct way to think about it? Or is this kind of untapped low CAC for outdoor voices or something? Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you totally put your finger on it, John. My goal in life is providing actionable analytics and enterprise SaaS. Yes. I love it. I'm not joking. I genuinely love it. Because it's like the value is very traceable and not built on any sort of like, OK, there's like some perpetual motion machine over here that we're going to find out about. I was like, no, like this is just like what people want. You wake up at 2 a.m.

1:23:54You wake up at 2 a.m. What's your first thought? Enterprise workflows. Let's go. I love it. That was legit. So, yeah. Yeah. First users, I imagine you're onboarding folks right now. Who loves this? Who wants this? Yeah. Yeah. i mean it's it's heavily it's heavily biased towards defy apps when we started spindle actually i thought gaming and web3 gaming was going to be like a thing yeah which who knows it might still be but as everyone knows gaming was one of the biggest drivers of like mobile ads attribution and like that whole that whole cycle from 2010 2015 was basically mobile casual games and zynga and the rest of it and i assume that would be the earliest adopters web3 gaming i understand is still the perpetual technology of the future uh you know it's it takes a while to make these triple a games and q4 maybe it'll change but actually it was it was defy apps actually because of course they actually i mean they're stable coins have pmf and d5 does have pmf and there's protocols like some of our advertisers morfo i can call it a few other ones that have billions of dollars of tvl on chain in which people are actually earning and you know they they basically function like a lending and borrowing institution and so yeah they're the biggest ones and what's interesting is that getting back to ltvs right like the maus and crypto might be relatively small say to the whatsapps of the world but the ltvs like the actual individual user value ltv or rpro however you look at it can often be significantly higher.

1:25:10Right. Like, like where and where where have where where have companies like Morphu advertised to date? Are there like if they're if they're a DeFi app, are they running? Can they even run ads on on Meta? Is that like. Yeah, I mean, that's it's Morphu, by the way, because if I don't if I don't correct you, I'm going to get an email from the CEO in a second. But yeah, the answer is nowhere, Jordi. And that's the problem, right? Like we built all this amazing measurement technology, like comparable to the best in Web2. But it's like the growth guy's like, this is all great, but like, what do I do with this?

1:25:40Like, where's the other leg of the flywheel where I go and like target the users and figure out and provide like a compelling user experience? It didn't exist. And so Spindle's big obsession and part of the reason why we joined Coinbase is, you know, consumer crypto where you have a wallet connected user who actually interacts with the chain is an important step. And you're seeing more and more of that. Just to cite a random company that I'm not involved with at all, Stripe bought Privy, right? And why did it buy Privy? Because Privy is a wallet provisioner and it gets people on chain in a very seamless way.

1:26:08And then boom, suddenly users on chain, they don't even realize it, but they are. And so we've really kind of exclusively focused on really compelling crypto consumer experiences where that wallet is present and where the user can engage with things on chain, whether it be content coins, NFTs, lending and borrowing, sending money to their family overseas, whatever it might be. How will ads, like what role will ads play in the overall base ecosystem? I imagine some of that money might flow, like where does it flow to? Well, it's a good question. By the way, one thing I have to mention, and we've got like a blog post dropping on it.

1:26:43Everyone hates the word ads. Like it gives everyone the ick in crypto. But just as a quick little comment, everything in crypto is an ad. Like literally you scroll through every wallet and every publisher, every mint, every swap offer, all of it, whatever you're looking at usually gets a referral kickback as a function of the value of the transaction. So like literally everything is an ad. Well, and here's a funny story. So back in 2021, I, uh, my, my team at Party Round, we made, we realized if you send someone an NFT, it will just sit in their wallet that other people look at and track. And if they want to get it out of their wallet, they have to figure out a way to burn it, send it, send it off into the ether.

1:27:21So I was like, great. So I can spend five, whatever it was,$5 to send an ad that's just permanently sitting in their wallet. And so we sent like NFT ads out to a bunch of different people. And I was like, oh, I can go to Dylan Fields wallet and see an ad here. That's really great. Really great actor. Really, really, really white hat work. To be clear, Jorney, I hate to break it to you. Most wallets figured this out and they don't surface the junky NFTs anymore. I know I was I was I was early. I was early. I'm the reason I'm the bad actor that caused that change. No, it was there was much worse actors.

1:27:53Yeah, like if you click one of these, it's crazy. You don't like take all your money. Yeah, it's wild. This was just can you can you? Can I answer your question? no i'm sure you know yeah where does the revenue go so part of the spindle vision was always that like the publisher could be anybody right so like an influencer who like pumps a thing or endorses the thing and has an audience you know affiliate marketers consumer apps anybody can be kind of a publisher and one of the unique things like like our ambition is not just like equal facebook ads is actually to be better and a little bit more user conscious than webto ads and one way we're better is that we can pay people that otherwise wouldn't kind of get paid right if you're on youtube you do get a rev share with ads but probably speaking and then with elon bucks you get a little bit of the twitter thing but probably speaking if you're a creator and you have an audience you have to monetize in some other way and it's really just your top of funnel sure in the case in the case of face app that's that's not going to be true um anybody who can drive like real user actions that advertisers or builders or developers want can actually share in that revenue and again the the blockchain just makes it much easier i mean there's there's this wonky thing called multi-touch attribution, which is always the dream of every Web2 marketer.

1:29:00What that means is if someone converts to Povonta, and by the way, John, you're going to fly right into an ad because they see TBPN, but then they go Google it on Google. Guess who gets all the credit? Not you, John. Google, right? And it totally sucks because attribution is broken. In the crypto world, it could be different. You can make a cut of that too. Yeah. Yeah. And you see this online where like, let's just say like a new protein bar is going viral and it takes a while for a health influencer to actually set up a deal and set up an affiliate code but like you could potentially do that on the base app like in an ad hoc way so that as soon as you repost you're you're you're basically tied into the affiliate program yeah there's something there's something amazing too about um there's something amazing every time uh we get our elon box i'm like wow i'm getting paid to post i was doing that for free and it's a weird thing But at the same time, like these apps have no value if the users don't post.

1:29:57Yeah, no, it's crazy. Every user is like coming together to create value, whether you're just providing attention or you're providing content. And yeah, most of the value kind of will accrue to the people that are creating the content. And that's probably right. But yeah, just kind of taking another look at these systems is worth doing. And that's how it works on Base App, by the way, to plug the app side of it rather than the ad side. users get users get paid to post if you're like a mega poster on base you're going to see your wallet balance just go up and again it all just happens effortlessly you're not setting up a stripe account you just like check your balance and oh there's like 100 bucks there and it wasn't there yesterday right like that's yeah that's the other yeah that's the other like you know d you know uh making the the feedback loop faster where you know elon bucks or what what they hit every every couple weeks um you never really know but if you can effectively like stream like getting closer to kind of like streaming payments based on how much attention you're capturing.

1:30:55That's pretty cool. Can you bridge the Outdoor Voices kind of case study that we just ran through to like how crypto companies are thinking about CAC to LTV? And it doesn't need to be Outdoor Voices specifically. There's just, you know, we all live through the D2C boom and the Facebook ad boom where, you know, 99 % of VC dollars are going to Facebook ads, that whole meme. And there was this time where companies didn't understand their LTV from really when they crazy scaled their advertising budgets on digital platforms. But pretty quickly, DTC companies at least figured out the analytics. What does that look like today in crypto?

1:31:37Are people thinking about it more? Are there still like case studies of crypto companies that like raise too much VC? Because I feel like a lot of crypto companies, they do a lot of incentives to onboard users, but they do it with like their own tokens that they created. So there's maybe less bankruptcy risk, but walk me through how that works in in Web3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so crypto marketers have gotten a lot smarter about LTV and CAC since 2022. Most of our advertisers actually understand that very well. Sure. And I think one of the one of the innovations that crypto introduces is the business model.

1:32:08So the DTC thing that you're talking about typically operate in a world in which you paid what's called CPA or CPI, cost per action or cost per install. In other words, you paid Google or Facebook, literally, if the user installed the app, you didn't pay if the ad showed up in front of them. That means that the ad system actually takes on some of the risk of the conversion and advertisers love it, right? But you're still juggling the LTV, what the user is actually worth versus what it costs to acquire. One of the business funnels we offer that you're not going to find on Web2, and again, we're trying to build a better ad system than Facebook, is what we call CPV.

1:32:39It's ad tech, so it's got to be a three-letter acronym. And what CBB basically means is cost per value. And what that means is you can actually literally pay, like your bid is not like I want to pay$30 for a user. It's I want to engage in a 40 % rev share with the publisher on the lifetime value of the user. And that's like a baked in two and a half or whatever it is ROI. And again, you can't do that in Facebook. I can't tell Facebook, look, bro, Zuck, I'll split. I'll go have these with you on the LTV going forward as long as you acquire me a user and they retain. There's no way to do that, right?

1:33:10in the web world and you can do that actually inside base apps very naturally because again you have you've got a consensus truth like i know how much that user is worth i know how much they stuck around and by the way i have payment and that's because it's because you can see it on chain right exactly there's mutual transparency on both sides by the way the publishers can look down yeah because zuck doesn't want to zuck doesn't want to do that deal because he's like well i'm gonna have to like get i'm gonna have to keep hitting you up every month for years to figure out what, you know, if the user stayed subscribed or whatever, and it's just too much of a hassle.

1:33:41So you do the work of figuring out the CactL TV kind of analysis. And if it's not a good deal, just stop running ads, basically, or figure out different creative and make it work. Exactly. Well, in this world, right, the publisher, the new base app can actually look down funnel via the blockchain and say, Okay, I know how many users I showed ads to. And I know how much value I drove, right? So you can't, you know, stiff me, you've got to give me what you said you would, which is 30 % or whatever it is of the LTV. And that's, again, that's the advantage of having a consensus sort of reality layer.

1:34:12And there's no way to do this in Web2. It's basically possible. Right now, it feels like online advertising is dominated by search engine ads, whether that's in Amazon or Google, and then social media ads on X and the meta platforms and TikTok. what does the ad ecosystem look like in the future? How big is the crypto ad slice versus the AI LLM ad slice? How do you see these two things playing out? Because I feel like there's bull cases for both of those, but there's only so many ad dollars flowing around, right? Even though it's like a trillion or several trillion. Well, in this case, I mean, the exciting thing about this new product is there's a lot of advertisers that can't advertise elsewhere that can now get AGM's ad products and have these kind of splits.

1:35:02But yeah, we were quoting... Yeah, we read your post yesterday. I would bet my entire net worth that one, we will have ads in AI. Two, if they take the form of highly relevant offers, users will welcome them. They'll have sky high conversion rate and web shopping will die. And three, they will be necessary to pay for the compute and consumer AI. Yeah, this was a crazy parlay. Love the take. Love the parlay. I forgot to like it. I'll leave a like on it now, even though a thousand people have already liked it. But yeah, give me your take on the evolution of the ad ecosystem more broadly. Yeah, yeah.

1:35:33So to be clear, I don't think it's a zero sum between crypto and AI. I think it's different sets of budgets. And at some point, they're going to intersect. I mean, people are going to start using crypto inside. I mean, for micropayments and AI agents, crypto is the natural way to do it. And Coinbase is building stuff there as well. I mean, just to switch the topic a little bit to the AI side. I mean, I'm obviously an AI mega user. I barely use Google anymore. I probably fire up ChatGVT over 100 times a day. And what's interesting is that, again, ads dollars actually aren't limited. Human attention is limited because you only live so many hours a day.

1:36:02But the amount of intent I can actually express inside an AI is fascinating. I think so much about what we do is so skeuomorphic to like the pre-internet world. I don't have to remember the before times. Like, why do I go to an e-commerce site and it's organized by type of thing? Like when I go to Instacart, why is it organized by food type? I want to make boeuf bourguignon or whatever it is. here's the seven things just buy me those seven things i don't want to go to seven aisles and yet somehow the internet websites or even pdf still reflect like the pre-internet world i should just be able to tell the ai get me the recipe for this complicated thing i want to make and then just like go buy the things or i want to travel to paris and not pay more than three thousand dollars and stay in this place and i should see a big green go button and i just buy and transact and it's done right the business of having to go to three different websites it's just i mean kayak i like it but it drives me crazy the fact that we're clicking little radio buttons and drop downs it's ridiculous.

1:36:49We've been doing that for 15 years. I don't understand how we haven't proceeded beyond that UI. And I think AI is going to be the absolute gate to that intent and that desire. And what's going to be interesting is e-commerce sites that are typically buying ads are going to have to surface offers. And what does an AI ad mean? There's nothing to see, strictly speaking, but when the AI scrapes your website and sees the product metadata and sees a price, you may want to surface, given the personal, like, oh, this user hasn't bought from me before. Here's 10 % off coupon and that shows up in the results that AI returns, which by the way defrays the expensive AI cost to go to 0.3 in my tweet, right?

1:37:23And so you're going to have to have some way to actually channel intent and actually get paid for that intent. And there's also issues around, I mean, in Cloudflare. Yeah. What are the kind of like potential traps or, you know, the people, the Mark Cuban's, I think primary concern is that the results are just going to be, there'll be like profit maximizing conversations and our our take was like this has been solved in search it's been solved in the influencer space like ads should be disclosed uh and if you just have disclosure it's probably uh fine but um but i think there's yeah i find it funny that a guy who made his fortune selling ads suddenly finds out ads problematic i'll just say that off the bat um yeah he's like ads he said something and we're gonna have him on the show to talk about it but he said something to the effect of like ads are about manipulation and it's like okay well do you want to ban them all then should we just have i i take the under on that and in fact i think people actually like instagram ads for example as a form of discovery i think the click-through rates the revealed preferences of how users actually react the click-through rate is probably higher on some of that paid content than is on the organic content yeah and i think users if it's a good ad and if it's a crappy ad i agree it sucks but if a good ad and gives you a discount and helps you discover a product you didn't discover before.

1:38:40Users will like it in the only way that matters, which is what is their engagement and conversion rate. And dozens of founders have tried the it's this but paid no ads and it rarely works, if ever. Yeah, I mean, I think I think the interesting thing is, you know, like it makes like I like paying to not have ads on X because the ads were never that relevant to me. And it's nice. And I use the app a lot. So it's nice. but the fact that meta doesn't have an ad free product at scale ad free product says a lot when people use that app i'm sure more on average i don't know more more on average than the only people that would upgrade would be people whose uh whose arpu is higher than the price i feel like it's like yeah yeah yeah if they're getting if they're getting a thousand dollars worth of ads against me they're gonna be like it's twenty dollars a month and i'm gonna be like yeah i'll buy that every day and that's bad for them.

1:39:30And then the people who are like, oh, I'm only driving $50 of ARPU a year. Well, they're not going to upgrade. And so it's going to actually wind up with lower revenue. I would imagine that's the calculus. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, look, ads pay for the internet, right? As much as you might dislike them, it pays for a large swaths of the internet. And I think we've done the experiment for 20 years and users aren't going to pay$200 a year for Facebook, which is roughly their ARPUs, right? Like they're just not. Yeah. Last thing I want to ring the gong for a big product launch, but I also want to get a wrist check.

1:39:59What's on the wrist today? It's the war. Okay, great. So I posted this earlier today. I've got to, this is somewhat ironic. Okay. The war Rolex I got on, I've got the Rolex, the Mariner that I bought with my first YC. Let's go full, full. Yeah. I bought this thing with cash when I sold my first YC company. And then on my other side of the wrist, a little brief product bug. Okay. I became a whoop American. No way. So I can actually see exactly how bad my sleep is. So, yeah. Amazing. Well, congratulations on the product launch. We'll ring the dog for you. Hit it. Good stuff. Great having you on finally.

1:40:36Long overdue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Congrats to the whole team on the launch. And just chop it up with us for a little bit. We could talk about so much other stuff. Some other things. Yeah. But congratulations. Good luck with the rest of the launch. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Bye. I'll be right back, John. I'll let you kick off the next one. I will be kicking off a bezel ad. If you want to get a Rolex Submariner, just like AGM had on his wrist, you can go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And we will bring in our next guest, Ian Webster.

1:41:09Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Ian? Good to meet you. Good to meet you as well. I'm doing well. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company? what are you doing? What's the news? Yeah, so the company that we're building is called PromptFu. We are building security tools for Gen.AI applications. So if you have a Gen.AI application, you probably want to secure it, make sure it behaves well in production. And that's what we're doing. The big news today, I guess, is that we have raised a Series A. Congratulations. Give Give us the numbers.

1:41:46Yeah, we raised 18.4. Congratulations. Yeah. Who'd you raise it from? Insight Partners and A16 also participated. Yeah, two kind of smaller firms. They really had to scrap the money together to get this deal done. Yeah, I mean, I'm very lucky. Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, congratulations on the round. talk to me more about security in generative AI. That could mean so many things. We've talked about LLM psychosis, someone 7 ,000 prompts deep. We've talked about leaking user data from one instance to another, somebody like a hallucinations and just kind of like not performing. I'm trying to use an LLM to convert raw text to JSON and it's just kind of messing up.

1:42:36Like what are the key areas where you would define a security that you're going after solving, or are you trying to do everything all at once? So there are kind of two sides to the coin. The first is the foundation model of security or safety. Basically stuff like, is the L, I'm going to say something racist that reflects badly on my company? Like, is it going to drive people into a psychosis? Like all that type of stuff. Brand risk, basically. Yeah. But I think the part that's actually more interesting is at the application layer. So, you know, like once you put a model into the hands of a developer, they put an application on top of it, they connect it with a database and PII, they connect it with an API, and now you've got a rag, you've got an agent, et cetera.

1:43:24That's when there are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. So the biggest concerns that we see, I mean, there's definitely an aspect on that foundation model side, But the big problem that scares a lot of large companies that are working with LLMs are things like PII leaks, tool misuse through agents. And also just think softer issues like LLMs recommending competitors or giving you medical advice when they're just supposed to be like an e-commerce chatbot, stuff like that. Financial advice, too, would be a risk. Yeah, I mean, we were talking about Amazon's, Amazon has like a chatbot that you can ask about the product that you're searching for or whatever.

1:44:07But then people were getting to write like React modules and getting it to write JavaScript for them. And it's like, that's not a big deal, but it's just like clearly not the intended purpose of that particular chatbot. What are the key reasons why you think over the long term companies will want to outsource a lot of this function versus build their own kind of systems to protect against some of these edge cases? I'm sure there's a bunch of good reasons. Otherwise, you wouldn't be building this and raising all this money. Yeah. So, I mean, it's pretty hard to do. So, like, I encountered this problem firsthand because I was leading Gen AI engineering and products at Discord.

1:44:46We were launching these apps to hundreds of millions of people. And, like, to do this right, you really need to be able to train models that can behave adversarially because your GPT or your Claude is not really going to be a good red teamer or attacker off the shelf. And just kind of test extremely extensively, like over tens or even hundreds of thousands of test cases to try to find all those rough edges. Like the thing about AI is that the attack surfaces all of human language and then some. So it's just, it's a really difficult problem and the way that many like large enterprises are are dealing with this right now is um they are doing it manually and just covering a very small fraction of of the risk areas um so you know that's why we think that there's big opportunity in this space and if and if somebody engages with prompt foo i'm assuming you start running like uh do you start automatically like trying to jailbreak the llms getting like are you kind of running these sort of like repetitive uh attempts in order to like find problems so that you can stop them or or is the product itself kind of uh you you have it things figured out enough that you can sort of that you let them kind of like in their communities try to jailbreak it and then react to it yeah so the the way to think about it is that we've trained models that behave as adversarial users, like misbehaving users in your application.

1:46:20And we have agents built on top of these uncensored models that target specific risk areas like PI leaks or toxicity or like talk about competitors or, you know, whatever, 70 plus different areas. So the way that we work is we have these attackers generate use cases or like attack objectives. And then we feed those objectives into a bunch of different, what I would describe as like search or optimization techniques to kind of poke and prod the entire attack surface of the application. So what this amounts to is we wind up having, you know, thousands and thousands of conversations where like the attacker is just trying to wiggle its way around some of the guardrails or some of the safeguards that are put in place.

1:47:10Is there a big difference right now in the perception of security or ability to deliver on a secure application, whether you're using a closed source or open source model? I can imagine if I'm using an open source model, I have the ability to fine tune it, maybe I feel more confident, or maybe, hey, I'm using a closed source model, I'm paying a fortune to open AI or Anthropic, they're gonna do more work to secure this thing than I am. What's the perception around which paradigm leads to better security? I would say right now the perception at the at the top of market at least like we work with some of the world's largest companies there's definitely a strong preference for closed source right now but I don't really think it's the security that's driving it necessarily I think it's more just performance per dollar and or just overall intelligence even if it's more expensive It's just like, I want the best.

1:48:06Yeah, yeah. I would say so. I think, like, the thing is for security, even on the closed source side, the incentives really differ based on whether you're open AI or a company building on top of open AI. Like, open AI has plenty of geniuses who are working on, you know, making sure that it doesn't say racist things or whatever. But no one's going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot by hooking it up incorrectly to a database of PII. Yeah, or OpenAI. OpenAI is like, they're not giving you this API and telling you, we're making sure that the model will never recommend a competitor. You have to kind of build a layer on top of that.

1:48:53Has there been a big case study of LLM security gone wrong that people like to point to in the industry yet? Like we were just talking about the T app getting hacked and that did not have any generative AI features that I'm aware of. It was potentially just made with maybe it was vibe coded, but it seemed like it was just a misconfigured Google Firebase bucket. They just changed the access rights on an old database that they were using. And it seems like something that could have happened 10 years ago. It happened today. It's not a uniquely new phenomenon. on. But I'm wondering if there's any case studies that you point to as to your clients, like, hey, the value of working with us is that we can avoid that happening.

1:49:34Yeah, I mean, there have been a handful of things that have been pretty public. I think it really depends on like the industry and also the geography. There was a mail carrier in the UK that like had a lot of issues with a chatbot that basically had no guardrails. I think there was the case where a Canadian airline, I think Air Canada, had a chatbot that committed to a refund that was out of policy. That's right. I remember that one. Yep. And then, of course, you have Sydney and Bing and Microsoft Tay. And there's those examples. Yeah, the fact that the biggest companies in labs are struggling with this at that scale with that amount of resources.

1:50:15And then you imagine some random company that's rolling this out to users. It's high stakes. They just don't have the ability to stress test these things to the same degree. So my not so hot take on this is that this is really the blocker for big companies to use Gen AI. If AI doesn't live up to the hype, it's because companies are too scared to go public with their AI because of incidents like this. We encounter Fortune 50 companies that have hundreds of internal AI use cases, but just haven't pulled the trigger on like pushing these prototypes out there really because of this issue. So that's why I think this is like a big bottleneck in this wave of AI right now.

1:51:02Yeah, yeah. It's way better to just take all of your employees, give them ChatGPT Pro and say, hey, you're still responsible for everything that you all your work product, but you can use these LLMs as a tool to speed up your workflow. But ultimately, you know, even if Cloud Code is writing a lot of the software, you got to review the death and you got to review the email that gets sent to the important client so that we go from 99 % accuracy, 1 % hallucination to zero. That's your job now. And you're going to hopefully be faster, hopefully be better, but there's still a human in the loop in these things.

1:51:37Fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on the new round. Great to see it. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it. Take care. Bye. Up next, we have someone who proved the cinematic viral videos don't work anymore. Yes, they do. They still got it. He beat the odds. Very excited to have talk to Ori. Let's bring him in. From off deal. How you doing, Ori? What's going on? Hey, gents. How's it going? Good to see you both. It's going great. It's great to see you. Enjoy the Financial Times article. We love the Financial Times. We got the pink sheets right here.

1:52:17We get it delivered in print every day. We have tons of respect for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. It makes sense given your company and your target market. But talk to us about the company and the target market. What are you building? Yeah, so we're building an AI investment bank. To my knowledge, it's the first one of its kind. Probably the easiest way to think about it is think of what would Goldman Sachs look like if it was started in 2025 and not like 1865 or something like that. Yeah. Right. So we have our own software, our own data, our own infrastructure, our own bankers.

1:52:53And we just rip sell side deals for small businesses that are ignored by traditional banks. Let's go. We met just over a phone call a couple months back. And my first question was, why not build the software and just make it available? Why not the Harvey approach? Yeah, the sort of more SaaS approach. And I think it'd be awesome if you kind of broke that down. for our audience today. Yeah, and I'd be lying to you if I said that we didn't consider building software for banks. And I do think there's some great products out there like Brogo and some others that are doing good work. But when we were thinking about this from first principles, we saw a bureaucratic large banks are and how long it takes to enact any meaningful change.

1:53:41I personally spoke to dozens and dozens of bankers when I was asking them, what is the most requested sort of like problem that you want us to solve? They would say call transcription. And I would say, well, Zoom exists. And they said, well, we're using Cisco WebEx. I would say, well, Cisco WebEx has Zoom transfer or call transcription. And they would say, oh, we don't have that allowed. And that, you know, I'm being a little bit facetious, but that is verbatim what the number one requested feature was. And I just kept thinking to myself, if I was running my own bank, I would do it completely differently.

1:54:12And we kept kind of noodling on this, noodling on this. And then we eventually came across an article from Sarah Tavelle from Benchmark that famously said, sell work, not SaaS. And after some deliberation, my co-founder and I decided to go all in on a crazy idea of building our own investment bank from scratch. And so here we are, you know, just over a year since we started and, you know, closing all kinds of deals. Yeah. Break down what your initial deals have looked like, what kind of businesses you're targeting. I know it's generally companies that are valuable, but not big enough kind of ticket sizes to get the traditional investment banks on board.

1:54:54Yeah. So even though we say that we're what Goldman Sachs would have looked like in 2025, we're not actually trying to compete with Goldman Sachs. We're much more interested in going after the market that is currently unserved by legacy incumbents because the unit economics don't make sense. So there's millions and millions of small businesses in America, and hundreds of thousands of them change hands every year. For a vast majority of them, they end up doing it on the road. Like less than one in five small businesses under$10 million of e-data actually have a cell flight advisor. It's kind of crazy if you think about it, right?

1:55:29It's the most important sale of their life. It's an asset that's worth over 80 % of their net worth. And these business owners, Palmer, roofers, et cetera, they're just doing it on their own. I've personally experienced this actually all the way back in 2019 when I tried buying a small business. And it was a complete disaster. I was talking to brokers or I was talking to owner operators who didn't really know how deals work. It was really hard to get a deal done. So when we saw this opportunity, we got really excited because AI allows us to have vastly better unit economics and therefore go after the segment that's currently uneconomical for the Hu-Humbo-Kis or the Lizards or Evercoys of the world.

1:56:10Yeah. So when I think of Goldman Sachs, I think this monster bank that's not just an investment bank. They also have wealth management and not just sell-side advisory, but sell-side coverage. And they're doing buy, sell, hold reports. And then they're also doing IPO stuff. But we're talking here specifically narrow it down to M &A, then take it down into the mid-market and then take it down even further. And there's been companies that have done kind of like the, it's a buy and sell a company platform at the super subscale. You can, I mean, Justin Khan famously like sold a calendar app on eBay.

1:56:48He sold a company on eBay for like, I think a hundred thousand dollars, a couple hundred thousand dollars. But walk me through the actual approach because when I think of a traditional M &A advisory firm, it's find the companies, build the relationships, then build the materials, then value the company, then be kind of a back channel while everyone's talking to actually get the deal done. A lot of that feels automatable, but what in the flow do you feel like is the lowest hanging fruit? How does it all piece together? Yeah, maybe it's helpful to think through a journey of an off-deal customer when we think about this.

1:57:26So I'll speak about a deal that we recently closed. It was a Montessori school in Arizona. They actually tried selling it on their own, but the private equity firms told them the business was too small for them from a cash flow perspective. So they have somehow found us on Google. We have this cool AI tool that people can check out that allows you to put in your company website and we preview some of the potential buyers for your business because we built a proprietary data layer over millions and millions of businesses. We have our own recommendation. And so we can actually pinpoint which companies in the United States could be potential buyers.

1:58:03So they got in touch with us and we decided to take them on. What we did is our banker used our software to identify every single Montessori school in the United States, find their contact information, who the owner is, etc. Then we reached out to them. There's about 1 ,100 of them that we've talked to. 72 of them signed the NDA. You know, that means all of those people got to check out the SIM that we put together, the financials, etc. About 20 of actually met with management in person for meetings and then four submitted final offers and then the offer that got it over the line was 40 % higher than the first one that came in and it was an all cash deal.

1:58:48Congratulations that's amazing. And the cool thing about this is that even though most of what we do does involve private equity buyers or private equity back strategics in this case we were able to bring a subscale asset to market and activate companies into being buyers when they weren't actively looking for a business to acquire, right? Because the investment banker on our team just reached out to Montessori School and they said, hey, are you interested in expanding your footprint? We're actually working with a school that looks a lot like yours, et cetera. So these kinds of things are only possible with AI because the buyer universe is just so, so fragmented, right?

1:59:23And so we try to build our own software for each part of the workflow. How do you avoid the, I feel like VCs get these emails a lot where they'll get an inbound email from an investment bank. It's like, hey, I have somebody interested in buying your company. There's not being a ton in e-commerce when all this e-commerce rollofs is happening. It doesn't matter how much money you'd raise. They'd be like, we'd love to buy your business for 200K. And I think that's a challenge for you guys. You eventually want to get to the point where you're selling thousands of companies a year. you want to make sure you're not sending millions of emails that people are looking at it being like, okay, this is clearly not, nobody, a person did not approve sending this email as part of a kind of an automated system.

2:00:03Yeah. So, uh, this is a literally a daily point of discussion. Like, what does this look like when we're doing hundreds and hundreds of concurrent deals? Uh, the, the nice thing is that we're not spraying and praying indiscriminately, right? We, we, we actually pinpoint, uh, buyers and we're very thoughtful about who we reach out to. So today, the volume is not as high as you might think from a pure outreach perspective. But the nice thing is that there's a network effect here, right? Because every time we interact with the buyer, they join a platform. And next time, they just get an instant notification when the deal matching their investment mandate goes up.

2:00:35And actually, right now, we have about 30 businesses for sale, right? Ranging from a million to almost$8 billion in the top. And there is dozens of private equity firms that are participating in multiple of these sell sides, right? It may be different teams. You might have an industrial team versus a healthcare team. But these firms get onboarded on their platform. And then from then on, they're repeat customers because they're going to be accessing deals all day, every day. That's their job. So that's kind of the long term play here is to build this ecosystem of buyers. And we track, by the way, all buyer behavior.

2:01:12So we know who's bidding on what, how much are they submitting, how do they like to structure deals, et cetera. So there's a lot of first party data that we're collecting. It's going to be tremendously helpful moving forward. Very cool. What's the goal for the next 12 months? What's the deal volume? So the nice thing is that the messaging has been resonating really well. It turns out that an average business owner in America has already heard from like 100 private equity firms banging on their door because everyone's doing roll-ups. And now he's even getting into roll-ups, et cetera. That's been actually great marketing for us because an average private equity firm will look at about 100 opportunities before pulling the trigger on one.

2:01:49And so it's a pretty bad user experience for the sellers who end up engaging with one of these guys maybe twice, three times, and then they get dosed in at the 11th hour. So when we come in and say, hey, we're able to flip the script and put you in front of 100 buyers, so only one of them is the lucky one to buy a business, that's been really working really well for us. So in terms of our pipeline, like I said, we already have 30 businesses for sale today. We have over a billion dollars worth of businesses in the near-term pipeline in sort of the next 9 to 12 months that we expect to launch. And the ramp has been just exponential, both from the inbounds, right, and the referrals we've been getting, but as well as our outbound motion has been very effective.

2:02:32Our internal metrics sort of for end of 2027 is to hit$109 in fees, which will require, based on current level of automation, about 15 or 20 bankers, right? So each banker is able to do about 10 sell sites concurrently. Wow, that's amazing. And what's the news? Raise money? Well, the news is that we got 12 million bucks in fresh funding. Congratulations.

2:02:59Great stuff. Great stuff. Great stuff. Thank you so much for hopping on. Awesome having you on the show. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. Yes, we've got to hit them up. I have this interesting idea I was thinking might blow people's minds. I'm thinking about buying an HVAC business. I don't think anyone's thought about this. Roll up a few of them. We're selling three? You're selling three. Okay, I'll go to you. Perfect. Might be the first one. Thanks, guys. That's great. Your next, I got one feature request. I think you should add Tesla robots to the platform that can go have steak dinners with potential clients.

2:03:28Because that's the one thing. We're trading a model that can play golf with people right now. Yeah, that's key. That will be the final unlock. That's the final investment banker eval. Golf and steak dinners. If you can eat a steak dinner and you can golf. I'd like to see AI do that. Then Goldman Sachs is cooked. Absolutely cooked. Thank you so much. Awesome. Have a good one. We'll talk to you guys. Thanks for having you on, Ori. Cheers. And we have our last guest of the day hopping on the stream. He went viral yesterday for creating a robot that looks like a lamp. So let's bring him in from the Restream waiting room.

2:04:01There he is. Good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Great. Great. Thanks for having me on. Breakdown the video. What are you building? How much of that is CGI? How much of that is real? where are we in the technology rollout of this type of robotics project? Yeah, yeah. So the video you saw probably yesterday, it was rendered. It's not AI generated, unfortunately, but it was rendered. So we have a prototype working. This one right here that you see in the background. So we are building robotic lamps. They're meant to sort of disappear into your home. Oh, look at it working over there.

2:04:38It's working. Wow, that's amazing. It's working away. We're getting the laundry folding going. Yeah, it's a super cool, I don't know, I mean, part of why it went so viral is like, people have been talking about laundry folding robots for years. And then we've seen companies take it very seriously, but never with a form factor that could just melt into your home. I don't know how protectable that is, but it just felt like from a user experience, from a perspective of like, actually integrating this into your life, it felt much more real to me. um how much of where did the idea come from and and what are the benefits of like building it into the bed frame basically well i mean to be clear so it's not it's not actually built into the bed frame at all it's a single floor lamp that you can technically place anywhere oh you can put it anywhere okay so it's like by your couch by your table by the bed uh it's just through most people that we spoke to the bed happens to be where you do your laundry people like just dump it there before they go to bed yeah um but yeah like uh we're familiar with like you know some of the previous attempts at laundry folding.

2:05:38And I think the main thing that has always held it back is the form factor. You know, like there's usually they come like sort of with these kind of like pre-installed rollers that you kind of have to feed in manually. It's like semi-autonomous. It only works for specific type of clothing. What we have here mimics a little bit kind of like the human arms, so we can adapt to different types of clothing sizes, different types of articles and styles. and you know with the recent breakthroughs in AI we're finally able to generalize across different clothing. How much of those recent breakthroughs in AI can you actually capitalize on because I you know like GPT 4.5 is amazing GPT 4 you know 03 Pro is amazing but like it doesn't seem like it would translate to laundry folding just yet what exactly are you a beneficiary of and then what work do you have to do to kind of take it across the last mile?

2:06:33Yeah. So, I mean, there's, there's been a lot of tremendous work done in the vision aspect for robots to now really be able to understand what is seen in front of itself. Right. And then also in the last year within robotics community, there's also a lot of foundation models for vision language action models are also available. VLMs that are very popular, right? But yeah, yeah. But we call them VLAs because there's an action component to these models. So they're, they're, they're doing pretty well. they can generalize the clothing items that, you know, they haven't seen. They're able to plan and sort of like the joint angle space of these robotic arms to be able to fold them into neat piles, you know, whatever.

2:07:13So do you have to build a, I imagine that like, like recognizing that I'm looking at a t-shirt is somewhat commoditized. Like you can kind of get that out of the box for free with some of the foundation models, but then there are probably no off-the-shelf model that understands exactly how your particular set of joints work. So is that where you're doing fine-tuning or post-training? Like, how exactly are you translating into the specific robotic machinery that you've chosen to assemble in a particular way? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it comes down to, like, I think you touched up on there. It comes down to the data collection process.

2:07:48Okay. So right now, we manually teleoperate these arms that you see behind me. Makes sense. Collect the data. and yeah we fold the laundry ourselves yeah depending on what you want to fold it can be pretty fast um then we pulse train um fine-tune fine-tune the existing models essentially teleoperation is it someone using like gloves basically how are they actually doing the teleoperated folding i imagine it'd be very hard to do it on an xbox controller there is a two two methods there can we go full screen on this video yeah hold on oh you got some gloves on this is ready player one stuff i love it okay oh wow that's awesome oh yeah yeah vr yeah with the yeah you you hold it yourself and you sort of do the task okay and then the inverse kinematics happens within the robot to decide where how it actually gets to that particular place in the 3d space yeah that makes sense that's cool how do you how do you you know where where do you expect obviously your number one competition is just people doing their own laundry i think it's smart to build a robot that has some intrinsic value just like constantly you know just even a reading lamp however however somebody would look at it but uh are you expecting to have most of your competition coming from humanoids how do you think about that category broadly because obviously a big problem a lot of people like the first demo they'll or the the promise you know a humanoid robot manufacturer might make is that oh it's going to do your laundry first promise is dancing It's always dancing.

2:09:16But then, yes, the second promise is laundry. That's right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think human noise are, you know, they're going to be there. And I'm sure that there's going to be a segment of the market that would welcome those things into their homes. I think where we are sort of the differentiator is that we are really sort of going after people that simply just don't want to share their living space with, like, robotic humans. and they want to be in full control of their own place. And what that means is that in your home, you have furniture, you have appliances, right? And they sort of serve a single purpose.

2:09:50They have a place that they belong. They don't do anything when you don't want them to and they only activate when you want them to. So you're very much sort of in control of your space and that's sort of where we come in. It's interesting you say that, not just price. Yeah, it's also just a cost standpoint. If you were going to buy a humanoid and let's say it costs$20 ,000 and you really wanted to do laundry and then you can come out with an option. This feels like it's a fifth of the cost because it's a fifth as many machine parts. It's a lot less. Yeah, it's got to be a lot less. So I would imagine that you're closer to Roomba territory than Tesla Optimist territory and that just pulls you forward a couple years.

2:10:26The final boss for robotics folding, socks? Feels pretty difficult. Maybe you could line them up and sit them down on top but you need to kind of... human's last job will just be like, you know, folding them. Maybe, maybe. Have you have you cracked that problem yet? We're working on it. I think we can fold most articles of clothing right now. The main challenge we're going on right now is anything that's inverted. Yeah, that might require you to sort of like push the stock out the other way. Yeah, that's hard. That's a bit more challenging with our fingers. So, yeah. What's the what's the price target?

2:10:59You got$50 pre-orders right now, fully refundable. But I imagine the final price will be some multiple. that? Yeah. Yeah. So right now we're looking at trying to get the price to under a$2 ,000 per unit. Yeah. That'd be definitely doable. Would you need two? I know in the demo video, there were two arms working together. That feels like folding laundry with one hand would be a kind of an IMO level challenge for me at least. Do you need two of these things? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's doable with one, but you're just going to have to wait a little bit longer so if it's in a movie or something like that hopefully it's done but done the movie uh but i think the ideal setup is is probably to have two um but again it depends you know whether your space can afford it you know um if it's the couch of a single chair of a smaller table you might only have room uh for one right so is there a world where you sell the robot with a teleoperation package.

2:11:57So there's someone somewhere else who's folding my laundry remotely and I still don't have to fold my laundry and I pay$2 ,000 for the install and then$10 an hour for someone to teleoperate it or something like that. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, our goal, I think is to really try to get to ship with autonomous folding out the box. Because one thing that we're really cautious about is like the privacy aspect. Sure. We are trying to avoid having to have people that you don't know basically now be given a set of arms and a pair of eyes into your into your private space you might be able to do some like blurring of yeah i think i think i i i don't see consumers being down to to know you could say that about waymails though those are tele-operated and they have cameras inside like for sure but it's also like a google product yeah okay erin's smart but uh not not the same not the same level of brand brand yeah yeah i guess like how are you thinking of mitigating people's concerns of like putting robot arms right above their beds and like the you know sort of like black mirror scenario where the robots start to your part yeah we saw a lot of that in the comments a lot of them the quote tweets you know it happens when you set the timeline on fire yeah yeah and i mean i think i think it's key that for these arms that you know when they're not activated they have to be and function like a regular lamp so that that means like a hardware switch that turns them off the lamp hoods naturally sort of covers up the grippers and the cameras so they act as sort of a mechanical blockage already as this um and you know i think you know do when when we do things like that and then we communicate clearly uh to our customers on how to actually operate these things um that's when we can really set the expectations pretty clear um it shouldn't work when there's people on the bed um they should only fill laundry when there's laundry on the bed um and yeah it's very cool well yeah the other thing i i yeah be curious it's very possible that people don't actually need to put these by their beds in the long run you can put it somewhere else in the room as well if you don't want to have the you put it in the laundry room yeah basically there you go lots of mud room yeah uh well i'm excited to see how good luck with the next phase congrats on the launch we'll talk to you soon have a good one yeah bye good stuff if you're looking for top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service go to wander find your happy place book of wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities these dreamy beds.

2:14:20In the future, there'll be a robotic lamp that folds your laundry in every wander. Who knows? It's possible. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And in the world of robots that could potentially fold your laundry, Luke Metro has been traded. Traded. Trade deal. To skilled AI. Modern AI is confined to the digital world. At skilled AI, we are building AGI for the real world, unconstrained by robot type or task, a single omnibodied brain. Today we are sharing our journey and Luke Metro says, some personnel news. I work on this now. I'm super excited about the future of robot AGI. Check out our launch video.

2:14:58He messed up. He said some personal news. This feels more like some professional news. Oh, personnel news. This is personnel news. This is not personal news. This is cool. Big vote of confidence for skilled AI. I'm sure there's 100 companies in the gundo alone that would have wanted to pick up the legend Luke Metro. Absolutely. Number one on the timeline and a great engineer as well. We will close it out with this post from Alexis Ohanian because we got to get to New York soon. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove, though. He has a little bit of an update for us. Let's hear it. This is about something else.

2:15:32Okay, tell me. Hit us. I have some unfortunate news. What happened? In Bloomberg, Luke Ferdor got hit with a hit piece. Wait, what? Yeah. No way. Why? I might have to cover this tomorrow. Okay, we'll cover it tomorrow. We're going to be in New York. We'll protest. We'll get to the bottom of it. We might have to go to Washington, D.C. and defend our boy, Luke Faradour. One of the best to ever do it. A Skrulls enjoyer being attacked. Honestly, I pulled up the image. He looks incredibly sick. It might be one of those things that just builds his aura. You never know. I think they're there. Yeah, he's aura farming business week.

2:16:07Let's see. Well, we'll dig into that tomorrow. But we will close out with this post about Figma because we're going to New York to hang out with the Figma crew. Alexis Ohanian says, sure, I've seeded dozens of billions of dollars, billion dollar companies, but I absolutely have my embarrassing miss list. Here are my Figma notes from 2016. We passed. Congrats, Dylan Field and the entire Figma team. Y 'all absolutely made something people love. And his notes say, Figma, why now? WebGL co-founder was on Elf, the first people to make WebGL demos. Aviary had a great team, good software, but tech wasn't there.

2:16:40Lack of focus. I actually knew someone who worked at Aviary. It was kind of a Photoshop competitor for a while, and then they served an SDK that you could basically bake Instagram filters into your app if you wanted to have that as a feature in your app. You could pay Aviary to offer that service to you. They launched two months ago. Four out of seven users of seven days in the week. How many people log on four days a week? 600, now 1 ,000. three days per seven users or 3 ,000 weekly active users at 9 ,000. 80 ,000 signups today. This was at a time when Sketch was completely dominant. Yes, that's right.

2:17:17So mostly word of mouth, no paid content. Definitely drives a lot. Interested in learning better why someone signs up and invites collaborators, primarily designers using this, but sees engineers, PMs, and marketing people who are in the orbit of designers. It ended up being absolutely correct. Absolutely correct, a decade early. But Dillonfield knew that in the long term, engineers would be using it. PMs would be using Figma and marketing people would be using Figma. This was 2016. 2016. It's crazy. It's crazy. This, if you had this, this, this, a team with this competency. Yeah. And this kind of early traction.

2:17:53Yeah. Today. Yeah. You'd probably get a series A done. 100%. And this was a, this was a seed. Yeah. Pass. Crazy. Crazy. So not clear about pricing strategy yet, but excited to get started. The pricing strategy is fantastic, obviously. They want to have people paying. Yeah. Users say they'll pay right now. 40 % of users are US. 60 % international. Estimates are$25 per user per team per month. Ended up also being, I think, pretty much on point. Yeah, amazing. We will close out with one last post from Joe Wiesenthal. He says, I'm still flabbergasted that people talk about pursuing their white whale in a proud manner.

2:18:28Setting aside the risks, the book also makes it clear that that's immoral. well I have a white whale my white whale it would be doing a show in person a podcast in person in New York with Joe Weisenthal yeah I think it's possible it might destroy me it might destroy me but I'm willing to risk it all to catch my white whale which is a an in person show with Joe he's been on our show multiple times I've been on his show but we've never done it in person is it possible anything's possible anything's possible we will catch the white whale thank you for watching New York City. We're going to hop on a plane and our production team is like, hang up, hang up the phone.

2:19:06They really want us to go off. We're not going off. Let's keep going a little bit. He's actually trying to unblock all the cameras. They're going to shut us off. But we will have a regular show tomorrow. We're figuring out the exact time. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and thank you for watching. Thank you so much. Have a great afternoon. See you soon.