Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

25:58Travis Kalanick:We should figure out about distilling video models. I wonder how more inference efficient it is to distill C-Dance just to be a marvel. Yeah, and obviously it's a very different process from distilling. Even you hear distilling as in Chinese labs training on outputs versus actually, there's a bunch of ways you can do this. Yeah, yeah. I think you can do it. Light Dance has created more than a dozen AI apps in China in parallel versions for overseas markets, such as chatbot Dola, video creator Dramina, and homework helper Gauth. These are funny names. Anyway, moving on. What's going on? Let's head over to Japan.

26:36Travis Kalanick:Let's check in with Japan. Japan? Okay. What's going on in Japan, Jordy? Tell me. This video. We can pull it up. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And anyone in the chat, if you could translate this for us, that would be great. We really should download this, transcribe it, and then translate it. But we're big in Japan now. Look at me. Years ago. This is from Instagram. I think I get it. I love it. I think I get it. That's a good video. They really did their... I don't even know where that video is. Yeah. I've never seen that video. Axios put out a full video of us. That's cool. Okay. Look at you. Driving the car.

27:20Travis Kalanick:They got the video of you driving the car. We got our cards. Zach. They got everybody. They're hitting the gong. That was one of my best hits. Sports cars? I heard sports cars. Let's go.

27:41Travis Kalanick:This is so cool. I shared this to my story. I was very proud of you. Jordan says it's a great sign of respect in Japanese. It does seem like it. Well, should we head over to the mansion section? Let's do it. First, before you buy a mansion, take your company public at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And also, make sure your home Wi-Fi is secure in your mansion with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes.

28:21Travis Kalanick:Growing up, Eric Moskow bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lucite tank. Moskow, now 67, is enjoying the hobby with his own children, but his setup looks quite different. In their Delray Beach, Florida house, the family has a 2 ,200-gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars. Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures.

29:07Travis Kalanick:Keith Raboy is a wealthy fish lover. He's a fish enjoyer, for sure, for sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits. I got to hear about these benefits. Quarter million dollar fish tank? Yeah, I'll be putting that on TruMed, please. I'll be paying with my HSA. We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID, said Nick Tiemans of Infinity Aquarium Design in LA. His aquariums start at about$75 ,000 and can cost as much as$1 million.

29:46Travis Kalanick:Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home. Ellers has designed and installed systems from$25 ,000 to$25 ,000 with unusual designs, such as a sphere that held jellyfish in a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go. That's cool. Saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43 % of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association Fish and Reptile Report. This is important data. We got to get this report.

30:28Travis Kalanick:Data is the new oil. Opted for custom-made tanks. A 19 % jump from 2023. Lore drop, I had a fish tank in college. $25 fish tank with like one fish in it. How long did you? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before. Jesus. How long did you keep it alive, John? Okay, it technically wasn't my fish. It was my roommate's fish. I don't remember how long we had him around. Oh, really? You kind of like somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of the one fish that you looked after? in your life? I plead the fifth on the fish tank.

31:07Travis Kalanick:You plead the fish. I plead the fish. A 10 foot by four foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish. Let's go. Turbo puffer baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulette shark. The closest we got to getting a fish tank in the Ultra Dome was to get a puffer fish. Yeah, we were thinking about it, but it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing,$3 ,000 a month. That's some people's mortgage. The tank just makes me happy, says Moscow, who enjoys the fish with his two-year-old daughter, Ruthie, and son, Jonah, who's one. It's enormously educational for my daughter, noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life.

31:50Travis Kalanick:Brutal. Look at this. Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Kalana has a$100 ,000, 750-gallon custom saltwater aquarium, in his beach house in Capistrano Beach. In the entry foyer of the room, the six-foot-wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room. And I was walking down the beach, and I was looking into random houses at one point, and I saw a beautiful fish tank, and I was like, ah, that's good. That's not just a TV. It lights up. It's interactive. I don't know. Fish tanks, I think, are underrated. I'm glad that they're finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal.

32:25Travis Kalanick:You're going to optimize for a fish tank in your next house? I don't know. It's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I'd put it. What about you? Way below movie theater. Way below movie theater. Like there's guys. You don't watch movies. You don't watch movies. What do you do with movie theater? And still I'd rather have it. Just watching podcasts? You're going to watch the new Dwarkesh Patel, Dylan Patel crossover episode? You just throw that on the movie theater? On the big screen. On the big screen is the way it's meant to be enjoyed.

32:53Travis Kalanick:Anytime they crack a joke standing up. Feels like you're in the room with them. um so yeah what what what about sauna sauna is about fish tank right yeah what about tennis court way way way way way way way way way way way what what is around the same as a fish tank uh the the 20th uh spot in a covered garage okay 20th spot you'd give up 20th spot okay Which seems fair. There's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd want a fish tank. Jeff Franklin, who's a screenwriter, director, and producer, who's primarily known for creating Full House, has five aquariums in his 21 ,000 square foot Beverly Hills mansion.

33:43Travis Kalanick:He's a scuba dog. Five? Five aquariums, baby. One in every room. The fifth aquarium versus the 20th car slot. What are you doing? He's like, yeah, I have a one-car garage, but five aquariums. But he's a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver. I love scuba diving. The ocean is my happy place. I feel the same way. I've never seen this guy scuba dive, by the way. He's like, I'm a huge scuba diver. You've never been in the ocean and just come across him? I find great peace and comfort underwater, surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish. So I wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water. I like that.

34:20Travis Kalanick:His systems include two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom. So you can do two aquariums in one room. Wait, when we had Andrew Huberman on the show, he had a bunch of aquariums, right? Wasn't that what he had in the background? He didn't have three aquariums? Okay, so three, four, five aquariums? But he keeps them in the basement. He keeps them in the basement. What's wrong with that? I think. No, maybe not. Maybe not. Well. What are the health benefits? We should get to the health benefits. Because if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry. Let's see. Homeowners get sick of eight minutes.

34:54Travis Kalanick:He said it really is a form of meditation. He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a trigger fish. Okay, I could get into trigger fish. I don't want a fish to be triggered by anything. And a large French angelfish. I don't want them to be panicking. I want a panicking fish. Panicking. I want a fish that never gets triggered. Yeah, somebody should name a fish a panicking. Aquariums need heating and cooling system to maintain a consistent water temperature level. He recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than 24 hours without power.

35:31Travis Kalanick:Aquarium specifications vary widely depending on the intended inhabitants. Sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish. I think I would go shark over jellyfish. What do you think? Jellyfish are beautiful, but sharks are just so athletic. It's the apex predator. You got to have that in your house. I think moat with some sharks is the way to go. What about gators? Gators over sharks, potentially. I think sharks are probably the best option for moats. For moats, okay. Well, you won't have a moat in this$70 million Aspen compound because it would freeze, but it has just hit the market.

36:14Travis Kalanick:Frederick Rick Burke is the co-founder of Dunian Burke, accessories brand. And he's putting his Robert A.M. Stern designed home in Aspen, Colorado on the market for$70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11 ,000 square foot seven bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain. With tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79 and he met Stern around 1970 when Burke became one of the architect's early clients. Hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well-known Stern would become.

36:49Travis Kalanick:He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86. Burke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 8 ,000 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there. But they do have a pool, a heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity, in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Kozeni. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeni to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials.

37:25Travis Kalanick:Wow. Burke spent almost a year in prison starting in 2023. Oh, so they made it illegal for guys to be dudes. Burke said he learned a lot from the experience. But wait, this was in 2009. The guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70? Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. I went to prison as, I think, a good person and came out a better person. Kozini's former home in Aspen sold for$40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Like, he has an accessories company. Yeah, leather. Maybe he's related to their supply chain. He's also the founder of a cancer research company.

38:03Travis Kalanick:Maybe he was just doing it for the love of the game. Immunolight for years, and he and his wife, a former ski racer, Megan Burke, have been splitting time between their homes in Aspen and Maine, where Stern designed a home for them in Seal Harbor. But after a bad bout of COVID-19 a few years ago, Rick said he now struggles with the elevation in Aspen. It's a wonderful house. If I could pick it up and move it somewhere, I wouldn't sell it. The Burks are considering spending winters in Hawaii, where there are no native land snakes. Rick has a fear of snakes. Man, after my own heart, I hate snakes.

38:33Travis Kalanick:on the Indian Jones podcast. They recently came close to renting a house in Malibu but aborted the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog. We ripped up the lease then and there. No way. That's crazy. It's sort of like when the artist dies. There's now a finite amount of their work left and how much of a piece do you own of it? Some buyers said they might look to modernize the house or update it, but noted that Pitkins County current building restrictions wouldn't allow residents of this size to be built today. Interesting. And they gave a shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who also purchased a property near Aspen late last year.

39:13Travis Kalanick:He was on the show yesterday. Go listen to our interview with Alex Karp, please. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Chad Hurley. And let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. own the data platform that powers it. What did Chad Ridley have to say? Hurley says, we are in the shadow of the wave. Brace yourself for impact. He's been vague posting. He's been vague posting. Assume this is about AGI?

39:48Travis Kalanick:Yeah. Alex Karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job. The ultimate black pill. Who knows? Who knows where it will go? Karp did seem like pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was definitely an update to how he's thinking. Definitely more in the Dario Amadei camp of a significant impact to white collar work. Yeah. It felt very night and day from however many months ago, like six months to go. Well, here's a white pill. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list.

40:32Travis Kalanick:So if you go and chat with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free. So you can just be chatting with customer support. I see these all the time. This prompt, I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a linked list. Can you help? Oh, absolutely. This is going to get patched, but for now, enjoy. This has been going on for months. There must be some way to basically wire this up so you can get free inference. Yeah, and sell the tokens on... Yeah, sell the tokens on OpenRouter. On OpenRouter, yes. Well, speaking of tokens, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro.

41:13Travis Kalanick:With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about LabelBox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, I believe we have Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, in the restring waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel show. Eric. Hey! Bonjour! Bonjour! I can't believe it. Incredible. Wow. Gentlemen, we've made it. We have the dom.

41:47Travis Kalanick:We're ready for European summer. I love it. I love it. I was hunting around the office for European-themed props, and our prop department, which is basically nonexistent, didn't have anything. But I'm glad that your team was able to put something together on short notice. We're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care. We wanted to do it right, down to the smallest details. So we're ready to go. But it's not just France. Where is Ramp actually available now? Yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you asked. Basically every day there are swipes in every country. Every week there's activity in 190 countries and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the UN around the world.

42:35Travis Kalanick:But the news is that we've acquired Billhop, which grants Ramp the ability to have local licenses, both in the UK and the EU. And come this summer, companies that are operating out of Europe, even without a U.S. entity, will be able to sign up for Ramp. And so we're really excited to bring Ramp to Europe. That's amazing. What else went into actually launching Europe? It feels like we're in this era of Agenda coding. It's like one prompt, make this thing worked in Europe. But it's obviously more complicated than that. Walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now.

43:16Travis Kalanick:Well, first of all, I think about sometimes the companies that I'd heard of in the past. They open an office with two people and they say, we're in the middle of New York and we're expanding to the U.S. and how silly that sounded. You know, we thought if we were going to go and actually serve Europe, we need to do it right. It's an incredibly important region. Some of the fastest growing companies in the world are based out there. I think of companies like Eleven Labs. I think of Stripe, Coulson's great founders who grew up in Europe. We wanted to approach this properly. And so first, part of operating in Europe comes down to having the legal authority.

43:55Travis Kalanick:Sorry, I'm barely keeping it together. They're watching you have this serious explanation. Also, I don't know if you've been through all of the props on there, but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table. I was wondering what's going on. I don't know if it's legal in this building to light them up. I don't think so. No, no, no. Don't do it. Don't do it. Here, it bet one and a half percent back on cigarettes. It's a boom for the French economy. We'll see you there. But look, I think in every country, the legal authority to move funds, to work with regulated entities, and also to meet requirements as it relates to privacy is really important.

44:41Travis Kalanick:So we took the steps to do that. We also took the time, too, to make sure we have the right leadership going in. And Jacob Wallenberg, who's been a member of RAMP since we were like 20 people, is going to be leading the efforts. Grew up there on the board of EQT. And I think so many members of our team are focused on not just going and selling things locally, but being a part of the local fabric of how the economy works and doing it right. So we're quite excited. So, yeah, more broadly, how do you think about verticalization of the org, horizontalization, creating functional business units, not duplicating work?

45:24Travis Kalanick:You're probably already wrestling with this as the AI wave changes the way Ramp builds products, but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs in different localities. How are you thinking about building the next layer of management and just human capital at Ramp? Yeah, there's a few pieces. First, just the highest level. I think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are, where you're operating, it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less. Just as we help the average American business cut their expenses by 5%, And it turns out last year, the average business on ramp grew their revenue by 16%, which is multiple times faster than the U.S.

46:10Travis Kalanick:average. We know businesses in Europe want to do this, too. When you look at the base problems in Europe and as well for most people in the U.S., it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of a month where you have one system for cards, another for expenses, another for bill payments, another for AR, another for procurement, another for approval, so on and so forth. And what we're doing is collapsing that. And so there's things which are very transportable. But you're right, to AI, it makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster. It makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively far easier.

46:51Travis Kalanick:And so there's a lot of local nuance in how businesses operate, want to be sold to, and even conventions about how they want to run their finances, which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that. We have a good head start. We've been working with very global companies like Shopify, like an Airbnb that already have folks around the world, and we've localized this experience. You know, this next step is really just about serving companies that are scaling, you know, fully in Europe or starting in Europe and going to the rest of the world. The UK has a version of The Office. That show has a character named Kevin.

47:33Travis Kalanick:And the actor who plays that character, his name is Kevin. will there be a redux of the ramp ad campaign for the european audience who might be more familiar with the uk version of the office my jaw is dropping this is the greatest idea guys we gotta do this we gotta do that together kevin bishop he's an english comedian and actor born in 1980 uh he was later known for the kevin bishop show his roles in british comedy and voice acting It was a small early career role, but maybe we can, you know, make him the face of ramp Europe. That would be very fun. I would love that. Guys, I feel like more and more, you know, no one turns down your calls.

48:18Travis Kalanick:Like, I'd love your help. Let's call Kevin together and see what we can do. Let's do it. Let's do it. Jordy, anything else? No, this is great. Anything else on your side before you go? It's guys, this is great. when you guys wrap up come over let's enjoy a glass of wine we will we now have a great reason to go to Europe we do we do that Dom Pagnon looks fantastic so I'm looking forward to the summer have a great rest of your day see you this summer let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI Graphite helps teams on GitHub shift higher quality software faster and let me tell you about Plaid Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI.

49:03Travis Kalanick:And I believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the TDP and Ultronome. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you. We are truly an honor. I'm just down the street. Yeah, that's right. That's right, yeah. We were actually, we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa. And so I think we were even closer then. There you go. It's still not far. How are things going? I mean, I don't know how much you guys, I mean, I've just, I've been in hiding.

49:41So I've been, I've been doing, I've been doing this.

49:46Travis Kalanick:I run a company called City, up until today, let's just say. I was running a company called City Storage Systems. Okay. Which was basically about the future of food. a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries, the whole idea was can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018. And after just the intensity of Uber in terms of being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to write.

50:34Travis Kalanick:I was like, I would like to just - That's a tough way to run a business. It is very tough. So I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build. So I went under the radar. Do you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term? We've been in stealth mode for eight years. Okay. And that's like till today. Yeah. employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay, so today what happened was it's like for my company, and I just got out of it in all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth.

51:11Travis Kalanick:Now, City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name. It's like the most, like let me choose the most generic name that no one will ever notice. The Business Corporation of America. It was on purpose. Yeah. Okay. And it worked. It was like we had two choices when we launched. We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber when I started this. And let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restauranteurs on a delivery-only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, ARR life.

51:54Travis Kalanick:I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. Like there's a ton of stuff going on. We use it. Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. It's great. All right. I love it. Okay. So shit, I forgot what I was saying. It's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook. This is what the Uber guys, when I left, were a little bit worried about. We're talking about 2017, 18. They're paranoid. So my instinct was, okay, I left. It's seven months later. I'm going to name my company Super.

52:30Travis Kalanick:You leave a company called Uber. You call it Super. Or call it Giga. I'm like, you go from Uber to Super. You're like, no, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Full underground, full stealth. put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle, and built literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown. It's been great building. But today we sort of came out and we renamed the company. We renamed what we do. We call it Adams. Adam, beautiful. But we started a new company at the same time. And so let's just say like physical AI and robotics, action and movement through the physical world.

53:20Travis Kalanick:Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. But think of it as like, I'm trying to get the mission. Like I'm so riled up. Yeah, it's so fresh. But basically it's, yeah, so I'll leave it at that. We can get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep. I love it. I love it. How much harder, in many ways, I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the ways in which it made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly.

54:06Travis Kalanick:I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, hey, I just want to come in with you and build, and I don't care about the hype, and I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn. But what were the kind of key challenges and why was now the right time to come out and start to get loud again? So like first, I mean, 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound. That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems.

54:50Travis Kalanick:Now they leverage, okay, you're working with Travis, former founder of Uber, there's leverage there. But then you have a name like City Storage Systems. And it's like, so do you guys just have these boxes sitting in parking lots? Like, what is this? And that's sort of like, the reason it's different now is because, look, number one, lots of time since the Uber, from having to live that life. but two is the world is different like in 2016 2017 the world of let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics but people didn't know it they're like if new york times says something everybody just treated it as the gospel like it just must be true.

55:43Travis Kalanick:And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so, and by the way, it's, this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today. And I think partly because of even shows like this, it's like, let's bring some optimism to the party. Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built. And that's the difference between today and then. And so when you go, 95 % of all press is negative. You're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say.

56:21Travis Kalanick:And if I thought of my favorite journal, sorry, my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's negative or sorry, untrue about them? and it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play. We're now, we're desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95 % of the media just being negative. Sure. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty like whole trend of going direct, right?

56:55Travis Kalanick:Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met at some point, basically coached a generation of CEOs on, you know, You just can't, if you want to have any control over how people perceive you, you need to tell your story. You have to counteract with a story, not a statement. And the boilerplate official statement just doesn't entertain people as well as a full read, a long read. And it's also guys like, Elon owns Twitter now. Yeah. It's X. Yeah. Right? pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and, and, and sort of.

57:41Travis Kalanick:Yes. You, you talked about the initial idea of naming the next company super that would have in many ways, I'm sure turned into a, it's basically a spite company, which Yeah, where you're just, in this case, like kind of taking the high road was I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up the structure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again. Which I think is, to any of your former critics, that's, to me, that's taken the high road, basically.

58:17Travis Kalanick:Yeah, and what you get when you create a culture around that is you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it, which basically means emotional intelligence. Now, it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do. I'd like the things I build to be seen, and I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way. And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like it is like you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, et cetera.

58:59Travis Kalanick:Again, the world's different. LFG. Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? I'm just thinking about your career arc with like Red Swoosh's enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber is a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks, you probably run into like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments in what's different? What's the same? Like what can you just be like a good business operator and power through? And what do you actually have to learn about the new industry?

59:38Travis Kalanick:Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to, because I have a, I mean, when you go from consumer to B2B, the number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC. Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with, I'm going to talk to customers and I'm going, I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like my LTV to CAC is the app store. it's a whole different ball game. And LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business, this is like life in hard mode. And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB.

1:00:23Travis Kalanick:And like those guys are special individuals who have made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke. Yeah. So talk about moats. I feel like Uber is the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then what does it look like now? So like nobody knows what Red Swoosh is. Yeah, sorry. That's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001. that was, let's call it BitTorrent meets Akamai. Yeah, sold to Akamai. Before BitTorrent existed. Yeah. Okay, that's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet.

1:01:10Travis Kalanick:That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary. Wow. Yeah. Had some famous investors. Famous investors. You danced with. You know, like Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. So before that scour was Ovitz and Ron Burkle. That was the company before that. Oh, I was confusing that too. Yeah, anyways. So there's a network effect there once you get the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be, and I willed it into being. And I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 19 million bucks. And probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life. It was crazy.

1:01:53Travis Kalanick:It was crazy. Like I cleared 3 million and I was like, praise the Lord. Okay, so then Uber, very obvious moats and scale economies. What does this look like with Atoms? What does this look like in both the food delivery, kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics? Look, if you look at where moats are and really you're looking for network effects in different places. Right. So right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this. Right. You order from your office. Looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash.

1:02:33Travis Kalanick:You get 100 options, except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings 100 orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you. and we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so who can play ball? You've got to have the real estate. That's a freaking moat. You have the network effect now of like, what if I sell every floor on every tower, meaning every office floor is on this, and I have shelves in all of these floors. That means that one courier can bring 100 orders, and by the way I'll have five couriers going to a single office with 500 orders hitting every shelf, and you get notified when it arrives.

1:03:13Travis Kalanick:if you even took one floor you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of uh depth to make it work yeah so there's network effects of a building there's network effects on a on a facility with kitchens in it sure there's um but then there's the moat of like we own real estate yeah okay so So like, if you want to compete with us, go buy a hundred million. So, so very high. Go buy billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world. And then we're going to go head to head. Yeah. Talk about capital.

1:03:49Travis Kalanick:Yeah. The other, the other, uh, the, uh, I don't know exactly what, what bucket this falls in, but just, just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete. But people were, people were like, this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle was Uber was doing so well. And then all of a sudden a whole bunch of VCs were like, I want a piece of that. And I didn't get Uber. So I'm funding the. But I'm saying in the context of cloud kitchens, city storage, like even though people generally figured out what you were up to. You did have to share some little things along the way or you buy this company or.

1:04:26Travis Kalanick:You've got to go to a website and say, what is a delivery only location? What the hell is that? Yeah. And so somebody had to know. Yeah. But even then, we're like, we're going to say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. These are the little moves you do to be stealth. When I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI. and in many ways accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI progress and progress in robotics, but you're moving physical atoms around the world in an era where you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly.

1:05:16Travis Kalanick:This feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress. Sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, dude. It's all in the plan. Look, I think it's always been the plan, a meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient, it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store, a meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this, making this move on atoms, which is okay. We're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport.

1:05:55Travis Kalanick:Okay. Okay, mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. Or on transport, it's just wheelbase for robots. Okay. Okay, because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels. Okay. Right, I like to say, like, if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics. Yeah. And the half marathon, and you're watching the humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play.

1:06:44Travis Kalanick:I want to go back to Capital Wars, lessons from Capital Wars, when these play out, because we're seeing this in AI. The OG. And you, yeah. My, my, I used to be the OG because, or, or when this Capitol war kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the nineties? I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Yeah. Okay. Like, like, you know, Rockefeller was the OG and then before him was like the Medici. I don't know, but I was, I was the goat for a period of time and now I'm a baby goat and that's okay. And so then one day the baby goat will grow up again. That's fine. It's going to be fine.

1:07:28Travis Kalanick:I just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect, it's growing, and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like the second place. And there's this debate over catching up. And like how do you – what motes do you retreat to in that moment? I feel like that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually a very interesting financial war happening. And it played out very well for you. And I'm wondering what level of confidence you had. What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing because, of course, all the AI guys are playing that game right now.

1:08:06Travis Kalanick:Right. Which is the ability to attract capital. The capital wars becomes a strategic weapon. And capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days. Of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call it the digital AI wars. And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a$60,$70 billion pre. Let's see that. Yeah. When that used to be a thing. Now I'm like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms. This was how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week with an hour and a half slot on each.

1:08:57Travis Kalanick:So like for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel. Are you bouncing between them? No, I'm in the$250 million and over club. That's one room. and it goes all, there's all these other rooms to the fourth room is like$25 million checks. Okay. Okay. There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room. Yeah. Okay. And then, but we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots, dude. Like, let's go. And, but what it means is it's about the system. It's about the system for sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently.

1:09:44Travis Kalanick:And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that story, let's say on the strategic finance team, could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story that's just like, of course, if I'm pitching it, people are like, holy shit, let's go. then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically, once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper.

1:10:23Travis Kalanick:It was like digital, but it was like, you need to fill out this table, which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in this valuation, how much money, this much money, this, this valuation, how much money. And then we would, aggregate the demand. It's like building an IPO book. Yes. But like done way better because you don't respect to the bankers, but like, yeah, I was in charge of pricing. Sure. Sure. And so, and then you're like, oh, we're trying to clear$5 billion that takes us to this price. We would tell all these guys, Hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve.

1:10:56Travis Kalanick:And then they would move their price and then that would change the curve and you would do it again. Makes sense. Were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think the IPO'd around$50 billion. You're doing a$70 billion raise. There's a lot of different, it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like? Look, in some ways, I have to give some credit. It was an era where this was happening. You had the Fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. He was like the first guy in that game.

1:11:37Travis Kalanick:And Drew and I'd meet up and we'd have like, flex. I'm like, dude, what's up? You're like, this is our little safe space. Yeah, I was like, Chesky at Airbnb. That was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s and sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be like people didn't even know what private equity, what is a private, what is private equity? Yeah. Now we're just like, yeah, private equity. That's VC. It's the same thing. And back then, private equity is like, I do leverage buyouts. And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before.

1:12:16Travis Kalanick:Now it's just old hat. Have you, uh, have you coached any of the AI founders? Culturally, like that crew that you just described, I, we, most of them have been on the show. So it feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today. Yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam. I love these guys. I love them all. That's so interesting. Look, the times when I get hit up are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan. Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do. so i so my so my phone's like what are the crazy wild wackiest things going down or like here because that's when i usually get the call and i'm so underground yeah that's what happens but like i should you know i should give you know i know these guys i should give them a call and be like dude we should let's let's let's cook yeah let's cook i still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today but obviously the check size much bigger is that approach like systematizing fundraising productizing it do you apply that across the entire is that like everything that you do that is important you're you're creating like a ground up kind of solution for it yeah so like well like for instance i mean this will you know this is just crazy but like how about when you do construction.

1:13:53Travis Kalanick:You know how effed up construction is? I tell my guys that in the real estate department, I'm like, your entire department is the anti-fraud department. Oh yeah. These guys just are incentivized to just run out of the bill. How do you do epic high quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not going to tell you. but there's a way. Do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly, like solving the housing crisis through permitting, stuff like that. This is so one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now, this whole, like the jobs are gone.

1:14:39Travis Kalanick:Like I know still people still say that, but there is another side to this story. And like, I'll just make this cause I'm the Adams guy. I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers. Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day, a thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone, just machines doing, except plumbers. How valuable would those plumbers be? Okay, those guys, each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Okay, why? Why? Because plumbing is the long pull in the tent to progress.

1:15:25Travis Kalanick:Sure. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. Sure. And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. Yeah. And then plumbing is like, what's up? And so once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI, humans are valuable. And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust, except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so until we get to humans are replaced, like fully, fully.

1:16:12Travis Kalanick:And by the way, I have I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralink. It's going to be all good. OK, then people like, oh, God.

1:16:22Travis Kalanick:But until we get there, we're going to I believe we're going to be super fine. That's my white pill. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the prize pool of automating. but again there's like these kind of windows but there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing and it's not just plumbing it's going to be all over the place and even when it comes to software so like for instance look at like autonomous cars they like like waymo has people that oversee the rides yeah okay and it starts with like okay five five rides for every person then it goes to 20 then it goes to 100 but like if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere.

1:17:04Travis Kalanick:Okay. And let's just say it's one in a thousand and like nobody owns cars. It's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people own cars, but it'd be the top of the top of the pyramid, let's say. Okay. So what do we replace billions of cars with ride sharing? Yeah. If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs, 50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.

1:17:40Eric Glyman:Yeah.

1:17:41Travis Kalanick:Yeah. Yeah. Robots yet don't yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you get the idea. You mentioned mining. Yeah. Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like what, what's going on in mining? What, how, I mean, I imagine that mines are fairly automated already. There's machinery. There's thousands of employees at, at a given mine. And that's work that children yearn for the mines of Minecraft, but it's not the best, not the best job. Well, like maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes. Oh yeah. It's like an Ender's Game situation.

1:18:18Travis Kalanick:Ender's Game situation.

1:18:22Look, it's interesting. You go, a lot of times they're like, oh, well, is labor really the issue?

1:18:30Travis Kalanick:Is that really a thing? But what it really comes down to is productivity. Okay. Right? So if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have off hours. the way machines queue up doing that really efficiently like computer science style i call it digitizing the physical world yeah you can make that mind substantially more productive what is the value of a more productive mind and by the way let's say let's get to the real sort of the the outcome here is does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come, do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials?

1:19:16Travis Kalanick:Look around us, guys. Absolutely. It's like huge. Like, look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined. Yep. Yeah. Manufactured and moved. Yeah. So if you're not in the mining business, like, you're, like, let's just say that my, like, I shouldn't say that, but like, it's, it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth. So what level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it?

1:19:57Travis Kalanick:Because that's sort of on the table. If I look at what you're doing in food, you own real estate. Or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running? up and running? How do you think? I'm not buying land for mines anytime soon. In the next three months. 120 days out. I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like, I'm an Adams guy. I'm all about digitization of the physical world. I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA.

1:20:47Travis Kalanick:I didn't graduate, but I loved it. Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Transport, logistics. I didn't know it then, or I didn't think about it that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation. City storage systems then make sense. Storage for the physical world, that's real estate.

1:21:28Travis Kalanick:We're building atoms-based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage, right? But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally? If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I could never get behind the remote work thing. everyone here works in one studio, but you've had to do it basically because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA and you can't be in 10 places.

1:22:13Travis Kalanick:It's all good. There's a difference. How do you do it? There's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit. Okay. Versus we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week and sometimes six or seven and that's it. But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place. Yeah. I guess I just, I cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before, I think maybe even before anybody else, it almost feels like normal.

1:22:50Travis Kalanick:But like, I basically have figured out sort of the management and leadership structures where you, the real thing is about empowerment. Okay. Is you must be able to empower teams. But it's like, I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos. Sure. And once you have those systems in place, you know, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity. Yeah. So once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. And so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing. Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so.

1:23:38Travis Kalanick:He sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks. And we had to open up this market. So we had to do a stunt and hire some people. And it just felt like a lot, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused. But why were you, you know, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them? It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer. Okay. Why? Why?

1:24:12Yeah.

1:24:13Travis Kalanick:I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, okay, I need to find people that can run this. Like old people, aren't the answer. Like I need fresh, I didn't think of it as like, I got to get youthful people or not. I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we got to get done. and it was just like water flows downhill. So what do you look at? It was like the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010, we basically took 200 cards and put names on them. And we said, alphabetize them, click. And we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize.

1:24:58Travis Kalanick:We would give them like crazy analytics tests. and then we're like, okay, this is our guy. You know what I mean? Free AI. If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but even today, you'd still want that guy. Yeah. Even today. So like, you can't use AI. Now alphabetize in the most efficient way. Now, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big fricking deal. Sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software is a thing. That's what ops people do. Yeah, that makes sense. So I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than problem solving, whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one.

1:25:43Travis Kalanick:When you interview, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two. And you're already pumped because you saw them in action. How are you with Adams? How are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company? You've been kind of holed up in L.A. This is your kind of hideout. Yeah, totally. But I imagine like do you do you push into back into SF, go back to being the king? Well, here. So first, let's just be clear. On December 18th, I moved to Texas. Sure. You know, I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January.

1:26:22Travis Kalanick:Yeah. So I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the action for a lot of this Adams type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the Bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called Lab 37 in Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Meioffer. OK, Eric Meioffer. So that's robotics on the food side. Right. Yeah. Anthony Evendosky was running Pronto. I was the I was the largest investor in Pronto. And then we just were basically right in the final like we're checking off the list, maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal. Amazing.

1:27:06Travis Kalanick:Let's talk about that deal. Yeah. Give us give us. Yeah. Give us like what's the kind of background on on Pronto and then how it fits into the to the empire. Well, look, I sort of broke out how mining fits. So we got that. Look, I'm the largest investor in Pronto. And it's super inspiring work. Like, go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it. and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry when all mines are producing more. Where does that go? And in some ways, you could say low-hanging fruit on the autonomy problem because, yes, there are different problems off-road, but they're way more controlled than what's going on on-road.

1:28:02Travis Kalanick:But then you get into the physical action, like cars on the road, the Waymo's on the road, you know, they're moving, but they're not acting on atoms, right? So when you think about excavation and you think about, like, when you get the material and then you move it, then you are basically crushing the material and then you process it. You think about all of the automation through that stack. It's fantastic. And it's like, it's hard, right? Like, Like somebody asked me, like we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines. And somebody came like, hey, like is AI going to help us design food machines?

1:28:43We're like, dude, let me show you.

1:28:47Travis Kalanick:Like this thing has like an insane number of parts. And let me show you just the design of a single part.

1:28:56Travis Kalanick:Like that AI can't even do freaking math. You know what I mean? It's like we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah, but then you're really an AGI. If you look at how much harder it is, the physical world, how much harder it is, AI, in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it in any way. I'm just saying it's like, maybe let's call it a different problem set. Yeah, we're just far away from one shotting. There's just way less training data. Yeah, it's like one shotting on software, one shotting on designing a machine or a robot. We're just not there yet. But that makes it more fun.

1:29:30Travis Kalanick:That's the point is like, do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided, I like hard things. I like pain more than anybody else. Yeah. This is kind of what you got to be about. Chewing a glass. I love it. So I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining. What other, and just heavy industry broadly, what other kind of categories of AVs are exciting? How do you see the space evolving? Yeah, look, anything, I mean, the mission is wheelbase for robots. Yeah. So then you're just like, okay, what moves? Yeah. Right? And then you go, okay, you have to find the businesses that make sense, of course.

1:30:12Travis Kalanick:So we're like, okay, mining is a no-brainer. And how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down? Yeah, like I tell my team, like, dude, there's like a ton of silver metals here. and there's actually a few other gold medals just in the category. So let's just go with delivery robots like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart. You make a lot of food. Your$15 bowl became$30. Yeah. Okay. And this is like I would put it up there as like one of the number one annoyances of the average American, regardless of where they are in society. Food inflation?

1:31:00Travis Kalanick:Food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food fast, cheap, hot, et cetera. Yeah. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money you're making, you're spending a lot on this category. Isn't it interesting, right? Remember I talked about the plumbers. Yeah. But you could take whole categories, become the long pole in the tent. Food. Boring. To a lot of people, boring is that. For me, interesting. Let's go. Let's go. Look, I did taxis. I did taxis when they're like, people are looking at me funny. It was a weird idea.

1:31:41Travis Kalanick:Okay, they're looking at me super funny. So Jason Kalkanis, the most famous investor in Uber of all time. More famous than you and so on. Whenever I meet with them, I'm like, dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors. But there was like an angel group that I pitched to. There were like 30, 40 people in the room. I think it was like three or four that invested. It's crazy. Okay. The 10 grand check became like 100 million bucks. It was crazy. But the boring places are the places. Yeah. You know? Less competitive. But also just weird and hard. Yeah. There's a reason why it's that way.

1:32:19Travis Kalanick:The graveyard is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food, which is why, which is, again, like. Yeah, go back to where they are. You can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane, and you have to have. Yeah. And you have to attack at all these levels. So my head of the robotics division, we're like, yeah, let's do this. Get the band back together. Let's go. Right. This is Eric Meinhofer. And he's like, OK, we can make a food robot. I'm like, I got one. There's one requirement. I got one hanging chatter, one string attached. He's like, what? I'm like, you're going to have to build a restaurant that the robot serves.

1:33:07Travis Kalanick:So my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into. because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. And people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if you look at like the labor statistics, et cetera, restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years. Anyways, back to... Sorry, I'm all over the place.

1:33:46Travis Kalanick:No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. So again, do you want to move people with AVs? Do you care more about commercial? Look, the industrial thing is sort of like probably our main jam, but the bottom line is once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that. And in fact, you need partners because you're going to be putting billions of dollars to work to make it happen. So there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this is ours and this thing.

1:34:32Travis Kalanick:It's more like, hey, there may be ways to work with others. We're happy to do it. We've got to pick our spots, but you get the idea. What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. are there other categories that are interesting? Are you happy to be kind of the transport rails? Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack. It just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's going to be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true.

1:35:10Travis Kalanick:Of course, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. But there's just so much to do. You know what I mean? We can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like, I can still help you mine. I can still get some food to some peeps. You know what I mean? So you get the idea. Is that really when you're pitching investors around Adams in this new vision, is it basically like there's a lot of jobs to do in the world? We're going to do it with physical AI. And you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time.

1:35:56Travis Kalanick:No, you've got to be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, dude, what's wrong with you? Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that. Like, you know, I joke around like in the 90s, dude, I'm an old guy. What are you going to do? In the 90s, it's like, dude, Microsoft's going to kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google going to do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing. And, you know, now it's like if you're talking about physical AI, it's like that's Tesla. They are the incumbent. They are, and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great, awesome stuff.

1:36:35Travis Kalanick:But find your spot. Yeah. know yourself, know what you're good at, be self-aware and find the thing that is your business soulmate for sure. But also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot. What was your experience like in dot-com and the financial crisis broadly in 2008? Okay. So basically I sold, I sold my peer-to-peer CDN, Akamai meets BitTorrent in 2007 to Akamai. Okay. So I was earning out when that happened. And I was, I just started, I think I didn't last very long in that earn out. Um, so, uh, I was the CXO. I was like an advisor and a CXO. Okay. Little known fact.

1:37:22Travis Kalanick:I was a, I was blogging. Okay. I was like a tech influencer blogger. There is a, a blog still out there called swooshing. Yeah. Okay. Crazy, amazing, ridiculous content. Okay. I was in the click. I was in the click economy guys. I was in it. Okay. But, um, so I was, I was a advisor in CXO for like five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals or I would be their CTO or I would, um, you know, help them sell or product or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget. So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash. Like, yeah, I mean, my thing was, I was trying to figure out, I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying, okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America?

1:38:08Travis Kalanick:I do too. Let's pool our thing. I'm going to go to Bank of America and say, I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar. Because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents. Interesting. Could be fun. And then they're like. Get out of here. You're not a hedge fund. It's wild. What about.com? You're talking about the 90s? Yeah, the 90s, like late 90s. I mean, at that point, you're sort of starting your career, right? Yeah. But it's an interesting place to start a career in tech. Like a lot of people watched that and said, that's dangerous. So look, we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour.

1:38:47Travis Kalanick:Yeah. Okay, so some people did Napster. Some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after BitTorrent, all the way to like, what was the one that Zenstrom did? Kazaa or some of these others, right? We were the OG file sharing. Michael Ovitz was on the board. Ron Burkle was on the board. LA. Doing tech in LA was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They don't know what the hell is going on. They're like, who are you?

1:39:22Travis Kalanick:And you're a little bit sheltered from it in LA. Every time you went to the Silicon Valley, it was wild and crazy. and like every bar was like packed, like after hours, like happy hour thing, like things were bubbling. And the crazy part is not just what happened during the run-up, it was post. I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't pay myself a salary for four years. I was raising money in late 2001 for a networking software company. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these, going to a bar to meet up with a VC. And this is like 2002. And it's empty.

1:40:07Travis Kalanick:Like this thing that would be mega packed just two years earlier. I mean, we're talking Dust Bowl tumbleweeds. Empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was because it'd be amazing. Was like, yeah, Travis, dude, I think it's all done. It's over. He told you it's over. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, all the software that could be invented has been invented. Wow. We're done. And he meant it. He meant it. He's like, it's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go. We're done. That's incredible. How have you processed the last two years when people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this entire process?

1:40:54Travis Kalanick:And they can just raise it literally without a deck often. and they can just pull it together? Look, it's all good. Like, I don't, I just have, you know, when you build a company the way I built it, which is like my current one, where you're literally under the radar, it means that you are powered by, you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And I don't look at somebody and go, oh, dude, I had it so much harder uphill both ways to school, whatever. I don't think like that. It's more about the excellence of the process.

1:41:37Travis Kalanick:So I'm like, well, how do you raise money? And they're like, oh yeah, I just throw a deck to the guy. I'm like, okay, well, then that's not a thing. What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I'll explain like, let's just think of like a, like a marathoner, world-class marathoner on mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you know, it's about to happen. He's about to get his ass whooped. Okay. Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him.

1:42:17Travis Kalanick:And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Now you don't do things hard just because. Maybe it's like, it just doesn't matter too. Like I got to go do something else that's hard. But the key is like, if money matters, which I think we would say it does, especially in certain categories, you need to be the best in the world at it. And it's not enough to say it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further, more competitive advantage, more differentiation, get it together.

1:42:55Travis Kalanick:Give me the update. I feel like Tony Robbins right now. I love it. I love it. No, I think people, I think people need to hear this. They do. They do. And, and yeah, the challenge is like when, when if raising money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like, whoa, actually money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy. Yeah. And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers, the critique is always like, oh, well they are raising too much money. You look at Elon, Sam, all these crazy deals and people are like, well, like, okay, it's nice that you're good, but like, are you too good?

1:43:26Travis Kalanick:And it's like, here's the thing. You know, back in the day, 2010's reference, like there was a problem with getting MASA money. Yeah. There was a problem with that. Yeah. because it was easy money and it was too loose. And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from. And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, dude, you got to grind. It was maybe a little too easy. And still to this day. So there's nothing wrong with money as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like, that's part of business.

1:44:15Travis Kalanick:It's necessary. But treat it with respect. Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there, Austin, Dallas, Houston, what do you recommend? Well, look, I'm Austin. Now, I own a place in Austin. I've owned it for five years. I'm an avid, I would say, almost professional water skier. Nice. Slalom skiing. No way. I'll send a video. Send a video. That's amazing. It's sick. Don't even get me started. So I've owned a place there for five years right on the lake, Lake Austin, 20 minutes from the city. There you go. Lake life. Hell yeah. Go for it. Okay.

1:44:57Travis Kalanick:I get a little bit FOMO on, like, these people going to Florida. I'm like, dude. Yeah, it's pretty nice. Why so much Florida action? Like, come on, homies. I know. It's been a bloodbath for every single guy's going to Florida. But, like, yeah, like every weekend this year I've had this year is in Texas. Yeah. Do you ever take calls while you're water skiing, like AirPods? Dude, I should. It'd be good. I love it. Don't get me excited. Well, I went to Saronic, which does the boats, the autonomous boats. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like. Build me a water skiing boat. Water skiing boat. Ooh, okay. I just want a water ski.

1:45:33Travis Kalanick:That's great. And like. You're skiing behind a ceramic boat is so funny. So good. I'm like, dude, where's my stuff? Autonomous water skiing. Yeah, I would do it. I love it. Pretty viral. Who should come? You're poking your head up. Who should come work for you? Yeah. 60 seconds. Who do you want? Not any individual, like one individual person. That's so funny. I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer. um look i think the thing is is like we're just getting the best this is so cliche and like whatever banal but um look we are in the physical ai space so you it's a mix of uh sort of let's call it sensors compute the software that sits on top of those things um uh I mean, it's just going to be great engineers.

1:46:29Travis Kalanick:And then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack. And you would, you know, but... It's a long project. It's someone who wants a career. It's like infrastructure software, guys, because you've got to have epic AI on the back end. And the way to use that sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world. And there's some core research and some just like, I know all the white papers and we're just going to, we're, we're building and going end to end or some hybrid version of that. Um, you have just normal software cause you've got applications that sit on top that then of course customers see in some fashion or another, uh, actuation and manipulation on a mechanical and sort of robotic side of things and mechanical engineers that build machines.

1:47:19Travis Kalanick:Um, you know, and then of course, remember I've got construction, real estate. Like I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website. There's lots of stuff. The website folks, the website co Adams.co. And by the way, Adams.co slash vision. I just threw down. Oh, I know. I know. Read it. I know. Check it out. Well, thank you. It's amazing. This is awesome. Really quickly. Um, thank you so much. I get up. Yeah. We will talk to you. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Restream.

1:48:01Travis Kalanick:One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And we are shifting the schedule. We will continue to talk to more guests. We have Gustav from Spotify in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultradome. Gustav, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. How's it going? Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. First, tell us, where are you? So it looks like I'm in some teenager's bedroom from the 80s here.

1:48:29Eric Glyman:It's actually a small studio we have in Austin. I'm here for South by Southwest.

1:48:32Travis Kalanick:You know, the first time I went to South by Southwest, the coolest party was the Spotify house. And I have a very fond memory of going, I think this was in 2013 or 2020, 2012, something like that. So you've clearly been there a long time. We did throw a good party. Yeah, it's always a great time. What's on the agenda? What is the message that you're trying to send to the world at South by Southwest today?

1:48:53Eric Glyman:Well, first of all, I'm here because Spotify is turning 20. Wow. It seems crazy. Most companies don't make it past five years. Yeah, an overnight success, 20 years in the making, for sure. So, that's why I'm here. And then, obviously, I'm here talking about what it is that we're doing, our thoughts and plans for the future.

1:49:11Travis Kalanick:Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure you're getting a million questions about AI. How do you see AI fitting into the Spotify ecosystem? There's a whole bunch of super useful ways that I think people would be super excited about. There's other people that are a little bit worried about AI and how it might play out in Spotify's world. What are you thinking good looks like over the next couple of years?

1:49:32Eric Glyman:Yeah, of course, everyone is asking about AI. And as you said, there are a lot of hot takes and breathless takes on Twitter all the time. And there's a lot of dystopian takes. I'm very positive about the future. And I think if we look at the consumer experience, I think it's going to change completely. And not just for Spotify. I think all consumer companies are going to have to change what they are and how they work. Because I think consumers are sitting over here with Claude or with ChatGPT or with Gemini, and they're getting freaking AGI-ish intelligence. And then you're going to media service over here, and it's as dumb as a rock.

1:50:06Eric Glyman:That's not going to work. It's going to need to get intelligent. So what we've said, what I've said at our latest earnings call is that we're going to build the world's first truly intelligent, agentic media system. Those are a lot of buzzwords, but I'll tell you what I actually think they mean. What I think is so interesting with generative AI versus kind of old school machine learning and personalization, which Spotify has done for a long time, is that computers finally understand English. What's the point of that? Well, Spotify for a long time, you know, when we developed the product, we always had these user-focused groups.

1:50:41Eric Glyman:You know, you invite 10 people into a room. You have, like, deep English language discussions with them about what they actually feel and what they actually want. And then you went and built this average product that could only measure skips and swipes. And you try to squint and approximate what the user was actually thinking. The problem with generative AI is you just talk to us in English at a scale of 750 million people. So I kind of think of it as 750 million people use the research always ongoing interview. That's what products are going to be in the future. And I want Spotify to lead that.

1:51:10Eric Glyman:So we've been investing in some of these products. The first one was AIDJ, where you can literally talk to Spotify. You can ask, you can say, you know, I want to go for a run. Give me some EDM playlists with big drops at 160 BPM for my running cadence. And then earlier this year, we launched Promptive Playlists, which takes it one step further. You can build your own playlist. using English language. You're literally writing your own algorithm. So if you want a playlist that goes out and looks at TikTok and what's trending right now, then takes that, filters it to your taste on Spotify, then removes any track you've already heard, you can literally do that today.

1:51:47Eric Glyman:And you can schedule it to update daily or weekly. So that's what we've done so far. And then today, what I talked about is sort of the next step, which is taste profile. This is what you have been asking us for forever. So hidden in all these systems, we have a view of who you are musically and podcast-wise and audiobook-wise. But you could never actually see that. You can see hints of it in Wrapped, but you can never actually see it. So the idea is pretty simple. We're just going to let you see who we think you are, and then we're going to let you edit it in English. And just say, no, that's not true.

1:52:19Eric Glyman:I'm not like that anymore. I want to be like this.

1:52:22Travis Kalanick:That excites me a lot. Yeah, it makes so much sense from a personalization standpoint. I mean, Spotify has been doing machine learning for probably most of those 20 years, certainly more than 10. How do you see yourself integrating with what OpenAI is doing with Sora, where there's a persona and a person, an individual can kind of decide how their avatar is used? It feels like there's a natural extension here where not all artists, but some artists are going to want to go to you and say, hey, look, I'm a rock musician, but if people want to listen to my songs remixed with AI as country songs, that's fine.

1:53:02Travis Kalanick:As long as I keep getting a check, it's win-win for everyone. Has there been demand from musicians for that type of experience that feels like maybe the next year or later this year?

1:53:14Eric Glyman:Yeah, 100%. So this is the other big topic. We just talked about consumer experience, but what about generative content? And of course, everyone is asking me about that and specifically music and i think what's happening today is people can make net new songs using these services yeah and and that's great i'm sure creators will will um i'm sure most creators are already using these tools whether they they say so or not um that's a big

1:53:40Travis Kalanick:sorry sorry to interrupt but that's that's a big thing because you uh there's this massive in in tech, like traditional tech, people will tell you they're using an AI tool, even if they're not really. They want to be constantly projecting, like, I'm using the best tools all the time. I'm using them more than you. I've got 10 Mac minis running. They'll tell you. But in music, it's the exact opposite, where people are, from my experience, talking to musicians and people in the music industry, they're like, this is changing everything. It's crazy. It's magical. It's an amazing tool, but then they won't talk about it at all.

1:54:17Travis Kalanick:It's like they'll never talk about it.

1:54:19Eric Glyman:That's exactly it. And I understand that. I have a lot of empathy for musicians and artists being scared because everything is changing and change is scary. So I want to be clear that it's understandable that people have a lot of fear. But the way we think about it is technology can cause a lot of chaos. but if you can combine technology with a good business model it can be very good for the world so what I'm excited about is today I think some artists that use these tools they get help with creating that new music but most of the existing artists they just get no benefit from AI and I think that seems wrong to me I think what you mentioned John is if you're an existing artist What many of them do today is they work with other people to do remixes and covers, right, of their music.

1:55:13Eric Glyman:It's like existing IP. This is what you do in movies. Like existing IP is supposed to be the most valuable part, not the least valuable part. So I do think that many musicians, this will be volunteer, of course, will be very interested in letting their super fans play around with their music if they could compensate it correctly. It is the business model that needs to be figured out. And this is what Spotify did during piracy. We took the long, painful route of not going the illegal route and figuring it out. It was hard and painful. This is what we want to do here as well.

1:55:42Travis Kalanick:Yeah, yeah. It feels like, I mean, you hear these stories about breakout songs. There was a song called Old Town Road that sampled Nine Inch Nails. And I think the original artist that remixed that song didn't actually have the rights because he just sort of whipped it up on a weekend. But then once the song exploded, the agencies came in and negotiated. And I think they accepted an award on stage together and everyone was happy. But Spotify feels like a unique place to actually unleash that level of collaboration in an economically safe way that everyone feels happy at the end of the day. Exactly.

1:56:18Travis Kalanick:I'm also interested in hearing about how social features are evolving on Spotify. it feels like with a lot of the generative AI projects, there's a lot of stuff that goes out broadly, but there's also a lot of, you're just having a new creative tool that allows you to tell, express yourself to a smaller audience. I find that a lot of the generative images that I put, I don't put them on my Instagram. I text them to a group chat. And I'm wondering how you see the social features changing on Spotify or where they are, how fast they're growing, anything that you can tell me about social on Spotify these days.

1:56:53Eric Glyman:So you're completely right. We started investing. We actually had a lot of social features when we started. Yeah. The idea was to sort of approximate the experience of Napster or Pirate Bay on the content side, but then sort of, you know, Facebook and your friend graph, because back then, friends were your main tool of recommendation.

1:57:12Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

1:57:12Eric Glyman:And then your algorithms came and everyone got like an algorithmic friend and we didn't invest as much. Yeah. But since a few years back, we started investing a lot because we think that today these media platforms, they're single player experiences. They're kind of lonely. They're mostly passive. You sit and swipe and swipe and swipe until you're falling asleep, right? We don't want services to be like that. We would like you to lean in and we would like to turn Spotify into an interactive multiplayer experience. So that sounds like hyperbole. What do I mean with that? I mean features like Jam, which is growing like crazy for us, many, many, many tens of millions of users and still growing, where you can join a queue and sort of have this shared music experience together in the same place or actually remotely.

1:57:59Eric Glyman:And then you have something that's been around for a long time, which is collaborative playlists, which have insane retention and engagement, where people collaborate around the playlists and they want to talk about that. so we are investing quite a lot in turning spotify into this place where you are with your friends yeah where you're not just by yourself so um i'm 100 with you i'm very excited about trying to create sort of a more positive future if that makes sense one thing i really love about having worked at spotify for 20 years is that we kind of lucked into music which almost everyone agrees that music is a good in the world.

1:58:37Eric Glyman:There's very few people who think that music is bad. But then we kept that. We went into podcasts because we thought it was like long-form discussions, people spoke in full sentences. It was the perfect counter to the shortification of media that was happening. And then last year we went into books in a big way. So we try to do things that we think are good for the world. Internally, we have some beliefs, not all of which are public because we want to keep some secrets but one of them is no regrets yeah we try we focus on content that has

1:59:08Travis Kalanick:very little regret and yeah you guys to me to me you guys are the the anti-slop company platform and there's not any there really aren't any of them left you could go on you can go on linkedin now and you could spend 24 hours straight scrolling through short form video uh and and so So talk to us about running a company where it feels like you're constantly making decisions to avoid doing things that would almost certainly get a lot of engagement and usage, but aren't necessarily aligned with the kind of core values of the company. because eventually companies get 20 years in and they just start doing things that are just optimizing for all those metrics and a lot of that.

1:59:54Travis Kalanick:Everyone has incredible values until you're a public company and you've got all these different incentives.

2:00:03Eric Glyman:Yeah, that's so true. And that is a risk. That's one of the benefits of me and the other co-CEO, Alex Nordstrom, having been at this company for like 17, 18 years. So, you know, those values are ingrained in us. Now, the way we think about it is, I think it's both something that is very motivating for me as a person and for many of our employees. But it has also to be aligned with their business model, right? And it is, because Spotify, in terms of revenue, is majority a subscription service. You know, close to 90 % of the revenue is from a subscription. And if you think about what that means, it means that a Spotify user, every month, they're going to vote with their wallet.

2:00:42Eric Glyman:And if you ask yourself the question, when you vote, what do you, to pay for something, what is it that you're going to pay for? Are you going to pay for time spent? I don't think so. You know, when we survey users for the different services out there, I won't say which one, but many of the big services, is even young people regret 70 % of the time they spent there. On Spotify, they regret less than 3%, right? Wow. And I think if you're going to pay for something, you're not going to pay for something you regret. That's an oxymoron, right? So it's very aligned with our business model. I actually think you pay for what you want to be, something aspirational, right?

2:01:23Eric Glyman:So I think it's both a value that we have, but it is actually very much aligned with the business model. I think if we were 90 % an advertising model, the pressure to maximize for engagement would be very tricky. It's both a value and something that actually works for us. We're just leaning into that because we think it's a differentiated proposition. Right now, I feel like the need for low regret content is increasing, not decreasing.

2:01:48Travis Kalanick:Yeah, it's such a wildly different experience going into the Spotify app for me where it's always intentional. I'm coming in and I'm doing the thinking around what content do I want to consume? And that is just completely opposite to every other app that I use, which is deciding basically on the fly what is going to keep him in the app as much as possible. And that's not necessarily...

2:02:16Eric Glyman:That's why I'm so excited about the user control, right? Because I think it's very aligned with that. To give back control to the user, like now you control the algorithm. It's tricky. But that's the path we're going because it's very much aligned with no regrets. If you can tell ahead of time what you want Spotify to do, chances that you regret that are very low. And we've seen this, people saying like, you know, when we test this internally, the taste profile, one of the people I spoke to said I used to be into classical music a lot when I was younger. But then the Spotify algorithm, like it preferred popular music, so I fell out of it.

2:02:54Eric Glyman:I went into my taste profile and just said, I want the classical shelf on my homepage every day. And now they're back into it because now that's what they get fed with. And I think that's very cool when you can game yourself to what you actually want to be.

2:03:06Travis Kalanick:Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted that Spotify would be the first one to have that sort of natural language control over your feed. People have been demanding that across all different social media platforms. Threads launch something where you can say Deer Threads and then it will update. Deer Algo. Deer Algo, that's it, Deer Algo. But yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think it's because of the advertising model for us.

2:03:30Eric Glyman:The risk here is that the user takes control and says something that lowers engagement a bit. For us, it's fine because they pay per month. We don't monetize the engagement directly for the most part.

2:03:41Travis Kalanick:That, I think, is the key. What's the biggest misconception about Spotify right now?

2:03:48Eric Glyman:Oh, the biggest misconception. Okay, you'll have to stop me. I'll get up on my little soapbox here. This is something that has hurt me so much for so many years because we got it wrong. This is about artist payouts and the idea that we pay less to artists than other companies. And for the longest time, you know, this has gone back a long time, people talked about per stream payouts and so forth. And the sort of advice at the time was you shouldn't engage because you only bring more attention to the matter. And if we just keep paying more than anyone else, the record is going to set itself straight.

2:04:24Eric Glyman:That doesn't happen. What happens when you leave a narrative like that forever is that it becomes truth. So I kind of want to set that straight. So if you look at Spotify, we've paid out over$70 billion to the music industry,$11 billion of those just last year. I want to be clear, that's more than anyone has paid anyone ever in the music industry. So the music industry is bigger than it ever was. People talk about the heydays of the 80s and the CD era, but the music industry is bigger than that. And not only that, in the CD era, the distributor, the record store, we give about 70 % of what we make back to the music industry.

2:05:03Eric Glyman:If we bring in$1, we get about 70 cents to the music industry. The record store, if you wanted to be at the front of the record store, could keep 70 % or 100. So the pie is bigger, and the share of the pie that goes to the music industry is bigger than it ever was. And so when I tell that to people, they're like, huh, but I keep hearing that you guys pay less per stream, right? You're evil somehow, aren't you? And my point is, and this is now backed by public data, no one in the industry pays per stream. We all pay per user. And we all pay roughly 70 % per user. Apple, Amazon, YouTube, all of them.

2:05:42Eric Glyman:The thing is, Spotify has almost three to four times the amount of usage per user of our competitors, which is crazy to me, actually. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it, but now it's backed by public data. So what happens if you take the same amount of money, but we divide it by three to four times more streams? Of course, our per stream is going to be lower. But that's because people use the product more. And the solution to that isn't to make the product three, four times worse to gain the per stream metric or raise the price three, four times because that would just be bad for the entire music industry.

2:06:16Eric Glyman:So this is the misconception I want to set straight. No one pays per stream. We all pay per user. And we happen to have much more engagement per user than the other platforms. And they've actually sort of weaponized and used this against us to say, like, we pay more than Spotify per stream.

2:06:32Travis Kalanick:Yeah, yeah. That's important. how are you thinking about the evolution of Spotify's role with live events? I feel like in the age of AI, the recommendations get even better because I listen to a lot of different genres. I don't go to a lot of different genres of concerts. There's definitely bands that I listen to where I'm like, I'm too old for that mosh pit. I'm not going to a heavy metal concert, but I would love to go to this particular. You're not too old for the mosh pit. Maybe, maybe. We'll go to the sleep token concert together. But it does feel like Spotify will be in an increasingly more interesting role in actually surfacing awareness around live in-person events, which also might get more important in an age of AI, in an age of unlimited content.

2:07:22Travis Kalanick:You might actually see this barbell effect where there's endless content and then very unique experiences in the real world. What do you think about live events?

2:07:31Eric Glyman:Yeah, I think you're 100 % right. And two things there I think are important. You know, everything in the world is kind of a power law, right? You have the endless long tail, but you also have a very big head. So people ask me, like, are Netflix or YouTube winners? I'm like, both. The biggest Netflix shows are bigger than ever, monoculture, and YouTube is bigger than ever. And the same is true in music, right? So they're more indie artists than there's ever been, but Taylor Swift is bigger than anyone has ever been, and the AeroStore is the biggest thing that ever happened. So people want me to say it's one or the other, and it's actually both.

2:08:03Eric Glyman:And I think you're right, because I think what's happening is, and this would probably be exaggerated even more with generative content, as people get more and more individual content, which they like, they also feel more and more lonely. So the need for shared experiences increases. And this is just not me theorizing. We're actually selling tickets on Spotify since a few years back, because we have such good data on who Taylor Swift's very biggest fan. That is one person in the world in terms of streams. Actually is, right? That is, yes. So we've been selling tickets for a while, and we've sold over$1.5 billion worth of tickets now.

2:08:39Eric Glyman:And that is increasing quickly, which proves your point. Live events are becoming more popular than ever and bigger than ever. And for many artists, the fact that we're selling tickets is very important because for many artists, especially both big ones and up-and-coming ones, it can be more than 50 % of their income. You have the royalties from us, but touring is a very big part of most artists' income.

2:09:01Travis Kalanick:Is Spotify uniquely well-equipped to enter the live ticketing market because you come from an origin where you had to do big deals with big organizations, and it was not this permissionless company that some other platforms have engaged with? You had to go to the table in Hollywood and sit down with these folks. And it feels like you sort of have to do that again if you want to sell ever more tickets.

2:09:29Eric Glyman:Yeah, it's funny that you say, you know, we've never been this permissionless company. That is true and has been painful. Watching other people just run with like, you know, whatever, illegal content or something. They're so fast.

2:09:39Travis Kalanick:But over time, it's worked out for us.

2:09:42Eric Glyman:Yeah, it has in many cases. But you're right. We are well positioned to work with that industry. And right now, we're actually selling for all of them. You know, we're an aggregator. We're an aggregator of content. and we're an aggregator of concert tickets. So I think we're really well positioned. We're already telling most artists where they should tour, in which cities they have the most fans, in which songs they love. And now it's pretty natural for us to help them actually sell tickets. Obviously, the scalping problem is enormous and that's something where we are really well positioned to help.

2:10:12Eric Glyman:The analogy I like to make is that your stream count is like proof of work in crypto. It's very hard to fake your stream count. right so so using that i think is is very important and we want to work with that with the

2:10:27Travis Kalanick:with the live yeah you're like oh you want to buy tickets to this artist that you've not streamed a single time it's like i don't know about that exactly and the artists they absolutely we've

2:10:37Eric Glyman:done some of our own events you know for smaller events for just a super fan sometime and you can tell the difference in in the room when it's just like the stalker level fans in the room

2:10:48Travis Kalanick:uh i want to talk i want to get your kind of high level view on podcasting how it's how it's evolving uh it i started doing some work with podcasts when i was in college back in 2017 at that time it's it felt late uh to me uh it always does it always it always it always feels late uh of course i was totally wrong that the biggest deals and and many of the biggest shows were still to come And you guys obviously made a splash with some of the larger acquisitions in the space. But how are you processing the industry today?

2:11:26Eric Glyman:So what happened that was very interesting for us is we looked at the podcasting industry. Actually, the way we came about it was, you know, we found a lot of our best features looking at either our users, what they do, or the publishers start uploading like audiobooks in Germany. What is that? And then we realized there's demand for audiobooks. podcast is a case of looking at our developers because they're this unique crowd that are often early adopters of trends and they have the power to just build what they want to see in the world. And we saw them sort of hacking podcasts into the main Spotify app again and again at Hack Weeks.

2:12:00Eric Glyman:So we started looking at the podcast industry and we saw that it was amazing. It was this amazing pool of fantastic long-form content and very good creators, but it was just sort of left for dead. So we decided to go in there and bet that if we supported it, it would grow. And that worked out. We grew like crazy for what was then called sort of traditional podcast, audio podcast. Then what happened was, and Joe Rogan was always the first with this, many podcasts started doing video. But for a long time, it was just Joe Rogan. And the interesting thing is, because we had Joe Rogan on our platform, we had to build video support.

2:12:33Eric Glyman:It was partially thanks to him that we did it, because he was like, I can't be without video. If you want the show, it has to be video. We're like, oh shit, are we going to build a full video stack for one podcast? I guess we are. And then we built it. But that was very lucky for us because then we could see what video podcast, how they performed on the platform. And we saw that people listen a lot in the background and they dip in and out. And we're like, huh, this is probably where the whole thing is going. So we started investing more. And then all the creators started doing video. So what's interesting for us is that the audio podcast market was this like, I don't know, couple of billion dollar market.

2:13:07Eric Glyman:It wasn't that big. but because audio became video they kind of pushed us into a much bigger market which is video which is 10 times bigger at least one to orders of magnitude so for us it was like a gift that the creators quote unquote forced us to get into this bigger market so we're very happy about it and what we find from creators like yourselves is they want to multi-home they want distribution they want to be on all the platforms and that's always been our In music, all the artists were multi-home. All the book authors we have, they're multi-home. So that's our strategy. And then in terms of what we've done, that really changed the trajectory for us is, yes, technically we could have video podcasts for a long time, but as you guys know who are into the details, audio podcasts used to monetize in a certain way with audio ads.

2:14:04Eric Glyman:And what happened was when you couldn't have your dynamic audio ads, the DAI, when you went to video, actually, the weird thing is you put video on Spotify and you would make less money, which is completely wrong because the users loved it. So your experience got better, but you made less money. So finally, beginning of 2025, we solved that because what we said was, okay, we're just going to pay out of the premium pool for video podcasters. So now you don't have to stuff ads into the podcast as much. So your user experience gets better. Your retention goes up. but you don't have compromise on economics.

2:14:34We're going to pay as much.

2:14:36Eric Glyman:And that really, that made all the video podcasters come on board to Spotify.

2:14:40Travis Kalanick:That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, we've been kind of beating the drum on, we think there's a lot more shows to make like TVPN, basically look at any, because in many ways, we've done some interesting things on the formatting side. You've done a lot of interesting things. But we just took what had worked in many ways. on traditional cable. And I think that every single show on traditional cable is just sort of waiting to be rebuilt for the Spotify platform and other platforms. So I think that lots more innovation to come.

2:15:16Eric Glyman:This is such an innovative format. Thank you. I watch it every day. And, you know, because you guys published the whole thing to Spotify, catch up. No, it's amazing.

2:15:23Travis Kalanick:I love when we get a Spotify comment that is clearly someone who watched the video because they noticed something that you would only, it wasn't really in the audio feed, but they were clearly watching in video. You know, you said graders want to be multi-home, but I disagree. I wish we'd lived in a world where there was just Spotify and we could just focus all of our energy there. I'll take that. I'm taking it. So keep it up. You've got more work to do. Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of South by Southwest. Say hello to everyone for us and we'll talk to you soon. Take care. Goodbye. Let me tell you about...

2:15:55Travis Kalanick:Oops. Gusto.com. That's the wrong one. the unified platform for payroll and benefits and hr built for to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses and let me also tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously they got stocks options bonds crypto treasuries and more with great customer service we are joined now by uh tim thank you so much for taking the time to come to have you first time on

2:16:20Eric Glyman:the show please introduce yourself yeah tim cadogan ceo of gofundme thank you very much for

2:16:24Travis Kalanick:having me tell me a little bit about your journey to gofundme what was your backstory i started

2:16:28Eric Glyman:I came to Stanford in the mid-'90s. Yeah. Got sucked into the internet really early. Non-traditional background.

2:16:34Travis Kalanick:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:16:36Eric Glyman:Did some startup stuff. Ended up going to Yahoo. Yeah. Ran the ad business at Yahoo. Then went to another startup. What do we got? See this? Yahoo! Oh, man. We're huge fans of Yahoo. You know that sound. We love Yahoo. Not wearing a lot of purple being a redhead. That never worked. Yeah. But, yeah, five great years there. Went to do my own startup in the ad space. OpenX built that up. That was great.

2:16:56Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:16:57Eric Glyman:But got to thinking, hey, I want to do something completely different. I had become a search and rescue volunteer around 2010 up here in the mountains in San Gabriel's. I loved that. And I was thinking, hey, could I kind of run a company that also was really useful and helpful to people? Somehow got that GoFundMe job. Started March 2nd, 2020. Amazing. The pandemic, I mean, mayhem. And just what a lesson in how valuable the platform was.

2:17:23Travis Kalanick:You were joining right as I'm sure there was just a surge because of all the dislocations.

2:17:29Eric Glyman:It was literally, it was that week where I think the world realized that this was global. I had four days to meet people. On the Friday, I'm like, we'd better go remote. I thought it would be like three weeks. And then it was, you know, a year or so. And yes, demand. I mean, the need of people on the platform and all the expected ways, the medical stuff, but also small businesses. Tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, music venues, having to furlough employees and lots of fundraisers being created, often by their patrons who are like, we love this restaurant. It's our favorite local restaurant.

2:18:06Eric Glyman:We haven't seen that before.

2:18:08Travis Kalanick:The silver lining of that moment was how much excitement and willingness there was from people that were in a better situation during COVID or maybe they had chaos in their own life, but they still wanted to go out of their way. and the ingenuity of individuals and businesses to come up with ways to make these kind of exchanges.

2:18:29Eric Glyman:Well, I mean, it's actually, you bring up the silver lining point. Like the silver, that's often the case, that when something difficult happens in our lives or in a community or a natural disaster, the silver lining, and there really is not a lot of silver linings, but one is people want to come together and help each other in the face of that situation. And we see that again and again, whether it be an individual situation or like what happened here in LA last year. I was about to ask you about the fire.

2:18:54Travis Kalanick:I know Watch Duty was on there. Is that correct? Oh, my God.

2:18:57Eric Glyman:I mean, you know, so many nonprofits were helping. I live in Altadena, which is one of the towns. I live in Pasadena. Yeah, so, you know, like we lost 6 ,000 homes. We evacuated, you know, 20 minutes in. I know dozens of people personally. Exactly. And we saw$260 million raised for 10 ,000 families, churches, local businesses, and for the nonprofits like Watch Duty, Salvation Army, World Central Kitchen, so many people coming in and helping. It has been amazing to see, in the case of my town, the community coming together and saying, we care about each other and we're going to find a way through this.

2:19:33Travis Kalanick:So what's the case study for a GoFundMe project that goes perfectly? There's a lot of, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of rough edges around where does the money go and what conditions does the money get released, all these different things that you have to grapple with. What does your team look like? And then how is technology making that easier?

2:19:55Eric Glyman:I think you got about seven questions in there, but let's go to the first one. What is a good fund? I mean, a really good campaign is you put together a story. So a good fund is first and foremost a storytelling platform. You tell a clear story of who you are, what the situation is, what you need in terms of the help, i.e. the funds, and what it's going to go to. And then you put that on the internet and then you tell people about it. And this is, we actually launched yesterday this product called the Smart Fundraising Coach, which we can talk about more, but it helps with every single one of these steps.

2:20:29Eric Glyman:And then you get attention and you start with the people you know, your friends, your family, your neighbors, people in your church, in your sports team, whatever it is. And then you build support from there. You build momentum. You hopefully achieve what you're looking for. Maybe you exceed that. And then throughout that process, you set up to receive the money, set up for transfers, which could be you, if it's for you, let's say I set it up for you, I'd set it up for you. You would get an invitation to set up your account to be KYC'd to receive the funds. All the funds go to our payment processes with Adjun and Stripe.

2:21:02Eric Glyman:They sit there until you've been KYC'd and the money flows to you and you get the help. It's what we call help delivered.

2:21:11Travis Kalanick:Yeah, there's so much fear around AI right now. And oftentimes that people end up overlooking all the incredible parts of it. And that's a good example of anyone in the world being able to be like walked through and basically get their hand held through this process that is a deeply, you know, if you're going and setting up a raise, it's usually not because of, you know, it could be a lot of people. some like emergency or a really stressful situation. And so being able to give people that kind of just like one-on-one guidance. It's exactly.

2:21:48Eric Glyman:So I had this sort of a couple of years ago. Well, we have a team that helps some clients. We have a customer success team that can help some, but we have like 10 ,000 people a day setting up a GoFundMe. Like we can't deliver that from everyone. So I was like, my point to the team is like, look, AI, we can do that now. We could give every single person who is considering asking for help. And asking for help is tough. Like none of us like it. We were just talking in the back. Like does any of us like asking for help? No. Like we don't like it. It's hard. It's psychologically difficult. Can we give them the functional and the emotional help to go through that process?

2:22:25Eric Glyman:So that's what we've built. A lot of trial and error actually. Like a lot of people think you plug the AI and it's better. It's not like it's taken many months because we have to find not just the functional, like, hey, it's time to pick your title. Now it's time to share, which is one of the most difficult things. We often have to find the right tone to do that empathetically to help someone through those steps in the process so that they can get the help they need.

2:22:51Travis Kalanick:What about AI on the donor side? I'm thinking about if I show up and I'm like, is this the right Jordy Hayes? Is this his campaign? Tell me more that might not just be on the landing page already filled out by him. Are you looking at that?

2:23:09Eric Glyman:So the main way we're using AR on the donor side is to verify that the people who are paying in money are actually the right people, are doing all of those things to validate the pay-ins. And that's both a combination of us and the payment providers and the banks who are the back end of us. So that's the main news. you know, what you're talking about is sort of more discovery, which is still early days. I mean, most supporters of fundraisers know the person, right? They know either very close relationship or they know them through someone. That's about 80, 90 % of fundraising. Is it's really, what we're doing is we're modernizing a timeless thing that we've done for each other, which is, if you used to live in a village and someone was in hard times, you put some money in the box.

2:23:52Eric Glyman:Pass the hat. Pass the hat. Yep. Right? Yeah. That's what we're doing now. So mostly the sort of social proofing is through relationship networks.

2:24:01Travis Kalanick:What's the tax treatment on a GoFundMe campaign?

2:24:04Eric Glyman:There are no goods or services there, so there are no taxes. There are no taxes. That's right. It's a gift.

2:24:08Travis Kalanick:Okay. Yeah. How has the actual team evolved post-COVID? It sounds like you came in and you immediately made the team remote. Are you now in a hybrid setup? Yeah. How has that evolution?

2:24:19Eric Glyman:I mean, you know, we found our way through it. I mean, we were always quite a distributed company. So we had L.A., Bay Area, San Diego. We've got Chicago. We've got folks in there.

2:24:29Travis Kalanick:And is that because of talent or because of the customer base? It was a bit of talent.

2:24:34Eric Glyman:So the original GoFundMe was set up in San Diego. Sure. Brad and Andy set it up back in 2010. Okay. Then we needed great talent, so we also needed to go to the Bay Area. Now, for example, we have a really amazing 100-person engineering and data science team in Buenos Aires down in Argentina, which is just crushing it. So we are inherently distributed. So the work reflects that. We figured our way through it pretty well.

2:25:00Travis Kalanick:What's different about running a company like GoFundMe that's doing a lot of good in the world? Every Silicon Valley company can paint a picture of how they're saving the world, but you guys are actually providing a service that is making a meaningful impact. There's probably dozens of GoFundMes that are like, literally pay for my cancer medications, like literally cure my cancer. And then there's a lot of AI companies that are saying, well, we'll cure cancer one day. What have other companies in the industry, like software vendors or payment providers, do they chip in on their side? Like, are you able to negotiate lower rates?

2:25:44Travis Kalanick:No.

2:25:44Eric Glyman:You know, hey, if folks are listening. Are you serious? I mean, they're selling their products and services. I know. I know. But, you know, we get a little bit like people do like to talk about working with us because generally it's regarded as a good thing. But that's at the margin, honestly.

2:26:00Travis Kalanick:He's a big fan of oligopolies and payment processing, apparently.

2:26:03Eric Glyman:But we have great partners. So I understand, you know, they need to run their businesses. And we appreciate them. What's different?

2:26:11Travis Kalanick:Yeah, I would just think that if I was like a CRM provider, I might not be trying to get the maximum amount of value out of a platform like GoFundMe.

2:26:22Eric Glyman:Well, maybe they're not getting the maximum, but they're generally doing their thing.

2:26:27Travis Kalanick:What about the surface area of GoFundMe? I mean, there's other platforms that people use to raise money. I mean, I did a crowdfunding campaign for a food product at one point. But people do. I have a board game project. I have a movie. And there's this somewhat of a fuzzy line between a GoFundMe and something like a Kickstarter. Have you thought about broadening out? Do you want to stay narrow? How important is it to define what the brand is and is not?

2:26:51Eric Glyman:Yeah, you're right. And we do see people fundraising for local businesses quite a bit. Like, you know, local restaurant that people love. Maybe it's hit a rough patch or a bookshop or something like that. But you're right.

2:27:01Travis Kalanick:Kind of business startup stuff. Yeah, there was a time when crowdfunding was pre-seed stage funding or like a signal that you could send to your investors. Like the original Oculus VR headset was on Kickstarter and then sold to Meta for a billion dollars. And that's a very different thing.

2:27:17Eric Glyman:Yeah, it tends to be low. We saw 100 ,000 fundraisers for small, but definitely local businesses. But you have the platform.

2:27:25Travis Kalanick:Have you thought about expanding?

2:27:26Eric Glyman:You know, we've still got so much work to do. So we have expanded. So back in 22, we acquired a company called Classy, which does fundraising software for non-profits.

2:27:34Travis Kalanick:Oh, okay. Interesting. That makes sense.

2:27:36Eric Glyman:If you look at the industry, the TAM, in the U.S., it's about 2 % of GDP. $600 billion is given. Given. The vast majority by consumers. Most of that is given to non-profit organizations.

2:27:47Travis Kalanick:Wait, the vast majority is by consumers, not billionaires who are writing massive checks.

2:27:52Eric Glyman:Most of it is given by consumers. Okay. And most of that goes to non-profit organizations. GoFundMe obviously started and we're best known for helping individuals ask for help. Now, those individuals generally ask for themselves or someone else, but increasingly they're asking for a nonprofit. That was our fastest growing category last year was individuals. Like I just did one for Watch Duty because I think what John and team are doing is amazing and they super supported us. So that's a trend. But our main focus has been making consumer fundraising ever better, which is why we launched the coach yesterday and continue to innovate there.

2:28:28Eric Glyman:And then helping nonprofits fundraise more successfully.

2:28:32Travis Kalanick:Yeah, by building basically a network of other people who can fundraise. Well, that's the thing.

2:28:37Eric Glyman:That's the cool thing is like this intersection between those two things. Because the average age of a nonprofit donor in America today is about 64. and non-profits want to get more young people interested and connected but a lot of young folks don't necessarily just want to donate they want to do something so we've given them the ability to organize sort of enlist an army of supporters who fundraise for them so i'll give you an example like american cancer society came to us and said hey we want to do something like this we've had like 80 88 000 people organize a fundraiser whether swimming or walking or riding or walking dog for the benefit of ACS, which raises money.

2:29:19Eric Glyman:But even more importantly, it spreads the word. Because if you're telling me, I really care about ACS, it affected my family in this way. I'm doing this run over this month. Would you support me? I'm going to think, hey, I'm going to trust that because I know John and I know ACS. I call it the double trust. Yeah, that makes sense.

2:29:38Travis Kalanick:Like SPVs, SPVs for non-profits.

2:29:42Eric Glyman:It's expanding the aperture of how you generate awareness and support.

2:29:47Travis Kalanick:What about political fundraising? How does that work today? Is it not allowed on the platform? Very limited.

2:29:54Eric Glyman:And it's country by country. Because we're in 20 countries. And the rules are very, very variable. So it will depend. Some countries are just not allowed. Some it is allowed in very specific ways. But frankly, it's not a significant thing for us at all. We don't see much of it.

2:30:09Travis Kalanick:It is not an area of interest. It's just a different type of interest.

2:30:12Eric Glyman:Not really. I mean, there are pretty well-known and well-used platforms that focus on that. So we don't see much of it. We don't honestly expect to.

2:30:19Travis Kalanick:What about the future of the company? How is the company structured? Where do you want to see it go?

2:30:23Eric Glyman:Well, we think there's a lot more help to generate in the world. I mean, our mission is very simple, help people help each other. And we think that it's interesting you had Travis earlier because they're a good example. Uber, Airbnb is another one where it's a company that has taken a behavior that was frankly frowned upon. Remember when you were a kid, one of the things you were always told not to do is ever get in a stranger's car. And certainly don't ever go to a stranger's house.

2:30:51Travis Kalanick:Well, that's normal. Now you're taking your Airbnb, your Uber to your Airbnb.

2:30:55Eric Glyman:So in our case, it's not so asking for help and doing it in public is still not a comfortable and normal thing. Totally. And so we're sort of expanding the aperture of like, no, actually.

2:31:07Travis Kalanick:But GoFundMe does have a different aesthetic to it. It's, oh, you're doing a GoFundMe. Like, this is a normal thing. It feels much more normalized. Yeah, no, you're still building toward that. But you're on the path.

2:31:17Eric Glyman:We are. And every customer I've talked to, I say every single one, has said something like, this was really hard for me to do.

2:31:23Travis Kalanick:If someone just put on their Instagram story like, hey, please send me money, that's very different than like, hey, I'm doing a GoFundMe for this specific thing. You can go here. There's a lot of details. You know that it's on legit payment rails. Exactly. There's accountability.

2:31:35Eric Glyman:But there's still a lot of work to do in that journey. So that, we think we can do a lot more of that. And as I mentioned, we're in 20 countries. Some of those countries are still early in adopting and growing quick. Germany, for example, is taking off very quickly. There's more countries. And then nonprofits. There's a lot more work to help nonprofits who are as needed now as ever. And we only offer our nonprofit solutions in the U.S. today. Got it. So we've got a lot more there. And then we've got some other ideas. Yeah.

2:32:03Travis Kalanick:Yeah, it's very cool. I mean, I can imagine it massively increasing the efficiency of nonprofits on the fundraising side because they have, instead of having to build out all this, they still have to hire their own staff to support fundraising, but now they get all this kind of like off-balance sheet kind of effort. We can help amplify.

2:32:23Eric Glyman:We do a lot of storytelling. We do that on behalf of our regular consumer customers. Now we can help to tell the stories of our nonprofits in certain situations, and that helps them get awareness and get more support.

2:32:36Travis Kalanick:Well, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time to come down. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hopefully I'll see you in Pasadena soon. Are you still doing your watch duty fundraiser? Still running. Okay. We've got to run into that. That would be awesome. I love when I'm not a DMU of watch duty. You never know when you're going to. Exactly. Absolutely. You never know. I'm in Malibu, so we had a crazy time last year. I hope you guys are doing okay. Yeah, I love my people. Thank you so much. Take care, guys. Let me tell you all about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk.

2:33:11Travis Kalanick:Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we are joined by Nick Hesharora from Palo Alto Network. Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. So for those who might not be familiar with a little bit of your journey, I'd love to kind of get everyone up to speed on what you were doing before. And then I want to spend a lot of time talking about just the transformation, if you can call it that, of Palo Alto Networks, where the business is today.

2:33:41Travis Kalanick:But maybe take us back a little bit.

2:33:42Eric Glyman:Where do you want to go? How far back?

2:33:44Travis Kalanick:Well, I know you handled business at Google. Let's go back to the very beginning. Yeah.

2:33:52Eric Glyman:That's far. No, I grew up in India. Cool. As you might know, came here to go to business school. It was a tough time. You couldn't get a job in 1992. It was one of the recessions in the country. So I wrote 400 plus letters. And those times, you guys are younger than me. Cold letters? Cold letters. Cold letters. You could email. You had to go. I had to rent a Mac for three months. You rented a computer. I rented a computer. I found 400 addresses of hiring people. and I would sit down, write the letters, type them out, go print them out, put them in envelopes, stuff envelopes, and mail them.

2:34:30Travis Kalanick:It's such a different dopamine loop doing a cold letter because cold email is amazing. No, no, I know, I know. But I'm saying like today kids are used to like, okay, I got to write this email. Maybe they use AI now. But then like oftentimes, like for me, I either respond like within like 30 seconds or 30 days. But you quickly kind of get on that loop. But sending an actual letter out and then just kind of praying and waiting for maybe.

2:34:58Eric Glyman:Every day I'd get stacks of them back. I still have them. I have 400 rejections from 1992.

2:35:05Travis Kalanick:Wait, 400 letters, all rejections? Yes. I only got one job, right?

2:35:09Eric Glyman:Many of the others said no. So I have 400 rejections.

2:35:12Travis Kalanick:How many of the companies are still around? Some of them are.

2:35:17Eric Glyman:Some of them you wouldn't want to work for. But I sometimes run into people. And one guy who started private equity fund after, I remembered his name at the bottom of the letter. So I was sitting at a meeting and I said, you do realize that he rejected me in 1992. And I was an advisor to a company at Bar. I don't hold grudges. No, I didn't hold grudges. I'm glad. I have to say thank you to all of them, right? Yeah, of course. God forbid I'd gone to work for someone.

2:35:41Travis Kalanick:Okay, where did you end up?

2:35:43Eric Glyman:I ended up at Fidelity Investments right out of business school. and even there, I got rejected from six people I wrote to in the company. Thankfully, they had no common HR system or whatever. The seventh guy hired me. And he said, oh, her resume looks interesting. We should talk to her. He couldn't tell whether my name is male or female. Oh, sure, sure. So I signed up for that. And when I was in business school, I was applying. I'd get phone calls. I went to Northeastern, so I'd get a call. Hey, so we're just double-checking, how was your time in Northwestern? Why did you say Boston? I'm like, that's Northeast.

2:36:19Eric Glyman:Oh, I'm so sorry. I've got another call. I got the exact same thing. I went to Northeastern. It's the same thing.

2:36:23Travis Kalanick:I'm not going to correct you. Yeah, keep going.

2:36:26Eric Glyman:So I had all kinds of stuff. But one of the calls told me, you don't have enough finance on your resume to get a job on Wall Street. So I went back to school while I was working at Fidelity. I got a master's in finance. I got a CFA. And I was teaching a CFA class in 1995, 96 actually, 96 October. to do portfolio hedging and shit. And this guy sitting in front of me said, oh, you work at Fidelity. I'm like, yeah. He's like, hey, do you know all these people? No. So they're on the fund management side. I'm like, oh, I don't work there. I'm a corporate finance dude. He's like, wait, you're teaching me CFA level three and you work in corporate finance?

2:37:01Eric Glyman:I said, you want to pass the exam? Or you want to discuss my credentials? And to his credit, the next day I interviewed at Putnam. There you go. So I finally went to work in money management for two years. and most interesting time, most boring time. Yeah. I just couldn't sit all day. Mid-90s? Yeah, 97, 98, 99. So we're...

2:37:20Travis Kalanick:We're in the internet boom. Yeah, the internet boom.

2:37:22Eric Glyman:Henry Blodgett telling us that AO is going to be the biggest company in the world, right?

2:37:25Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:37:26Eric Glyman:So I did that for two years. Did well there. Got bored. Left. And I started... One of the CEOs... I just covered telecoms at that time. One of the CEOs was the CEO of Deutsche Telekom. He said, come work with me. So I took my bags, flew to Germany to Bonn, and worked with him for five years. I started a mobile data startup at that point.

2:37:42Travis Kalanick:And the name of the company that you started there?

2:37:44Eric Glyman:It's called Team Motion.

2:37:45Travis Kalanick:Team Motion.

2:37:46Eric Glyman:But that was the time, Deutsche Telekom, I worked on a team that acquired Voice Dream, which is now T-Mobile USA.

2:37:52Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:37:53Eric Glyman:So we did that. I worked there for four or five years, and then I quit. I was tired of commuting from London to Germany and back. That was my 30s. And I was sitting in front of my watchdog and said, hey, I have this headhunter calling me. There's a job. It's a company from the U.S. They just went public in some reverse Dutch auction type scenario. That job's too small for me. Do you want to go interview? The guy was the CEO of T-Mobile UK. So that was it. I met that guy who became a house, Omid Krosasani. He interviewed me. I told him, it's a really small office. And he said, well, when you have an interview here, then I'll take you to California and you can meet the founders.

2:38:35Eric Glyman:I'm like, okay. And then he calls me a week later and is like, well, Larry and Sergey are in town. they would love to see you. So they made sure the interview was not in the small office so I met Sergey in the British Museum while walking around.

2:38:46Travis Kalanick:That's amazing. That's where I got interviewed.

2:38:49Eric Glyman:Then I came to California and I met Eric Schmidt and Eric's like, it's interesting. Your CV is very interesting but looking for a head of Europe and the job is sales. I said, so should I just go back and have two days of interviews? I'm not done sales, should I just go back? He's like, no, no, no, we need smart people who can learn stuff and that was 2004. So I was the first person hired after the IPO of any senior capacity.

2:39:14Travis Kalanick:In sales?

2:39:15Eric Glyman:I ran Google Europe.

2:39:16Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:39:16Eric Glyman:And slowly and steadily, we grew Europe. Europe was like...

2:39:19Travis Kalanick:And what was the shape of that role? Were you talking to the largest companies in Europe about just buying ad space at Google?

2:39:25Eric Glyman:You want me to make it cool or you want me to actually tell what I did? Both. Let's go with the role. But look, it was companies just in fingers. You're thinking December 2004. Yeah. The company's just gone public. It's worth$18 billion. There's 2 ,000 employees. And Europe has like 180 people. Every office is a rented Regis office except for one in Dublin. Wow. So what you're doing is you're like blocking and tackling. You're hiring people, you're getting offices, getting stature, getting stuff. And yeah, forget selling ad space, showing CEOs, showing companies. This is what search does.

2:39:59Travis Kalanick:Oh, this is just work. Yeah, it works. Yeah, just get deployment.

2:40:02Eric Glyman:In the five years I was there, we went from being 25 % of Google's revenue to 46 % of Google's revenue. Wow. I think in history, one of the few tech companies where Europe and U.S. have the same market share. Yeah. So you have all these people come to here. You should ask them.

2:40:17Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:40:18Eric Glyman:Generally, you spend a lot of time in the U.S., you get a large market share here, and then your share of Europe or the rest of the world is smaller. So we got there, and that's when kind of a whole bunch of movement happened. Sheryl Sandberg went to Facebook. Tim Armstrong went to run AOL. That's kind of the last man standing. So when my boss retired, Eric called me and says, you think you should move here and become chief business officer? So I moved to California. That was 2000.

2:40:39Travis Kalanick:Most underrated title. Just be the chief of business. We joke about this all the time. It's like amazingly vague, but also incredibly important.

2:40:48Eric Glyman:But, you know, I remember my first meeting with Larry when he became CEO. And he said, hey, come spend some time with me. So I spent all this time, put a beautiful presentation together. I'm gonna sit down with Larry and explain everything we do. So I go there, and we're talking about Hyperloops and vacuum control tubes, and how you can get out of the car on every highway that will improve the traffic situation in California. And I'm here like jumping at the bed, wanting to get my presentation. It's like what Hyperloops are. So in the end he says, you know, Bill Campbell, who was a great guy, mentor to many people in the Valley, he says, Bill tells me you're doing a good job at what you're doing.

2:41:30Eric Glyman:I got a lot of work to do and fix on product because tech companies die if product doesn't work. No tech company became great because of sales and business. I said, so you keep doing what you're doing. I'm sure if I had a few hours, I'd help you get your efficiency up and do it better, but I don't have the time. So I stood up and said, well, let me know when you have a few hours. So that. Then thank discreditment because we had a great relationship. and his staff became 10 product people, the CFO, the lawyer, and me. That was it. No other function was represented. He was like, you go take care of everything else.

2:42:03Eric Glyman:I want these product guys because I want to tell them what I want to build. And we can see what it resulted in.

2:42:08Travis Kalanick:At any point early on, did you feel like Google was significantly overvalued? You know, I still think it's undervalued.

2:42:23Eric Glyman:it's kind of the enormity of what the potential was sometimes when you're in it you don't see out of it it's hard to tell how big it's going to become but of course in hindsight it's wonderful you can all say that was bound to happen but the enormity of what we were doing was not apparent to people there like we bought YouTube I remember sitting with Saur and chat early and saying let's go buy Netflix there's a story about that but it's a different story. So I was like, no, just give us 20 engineers and$5 million to go build it. Every tech company has those kind of people and they tried, but YouTube's big in its own right.

2:43:03Eric Glyman:So we were there when all this stuff was happening and you can see, I remember Larry telling a story that he met Steve Jobs and Steve said, if I give you one piece of advice, the word is focus. And Larry was like, no, we're going to try a lot of things and see how many of them work. So, you know, there are many ways to get to great wing.

2:43:24Travis Kalanick:Head in the clouds philosophy clearly did work for Google's sort of academic culture. Do you feel like that's the right characterization of Google? This academic, the 20 % time, the lots of different projects, primordial soup to some degree? Did you try and continue that?

2:43:42Eric Glyman:I think part of my opinion, I'm sure a lot of people have been, they do too. but I think the secret sauce is the consistent focus on product greatness. And that comes from the founders. You see, look, Travis, I saw him earlier. Companies take on the form of their leaders. And it's a pattern in every company. And pretty much if you sat down and did an experiment, and I wrote down five objectives over here, which are company cultural characteristics, and I wrote down five here, which are founder characteristics, and I said, go match them. I bet many people will be able to match them because you can see the similarities between how leaders lead and how companies adopt to the culture of the leader.

2:44:19So I think that's where Google's culture comes from,

2:44:21Eric Glyman:from the founders. And the founders were very product obsessed. You know, as you heard, Larry didn't want to spend time on business. I remember him going to the first ad, all hands, and he walks up and says, I got to tell you guys, I hate ads. They're intrusive and they're bad. That's a great motivation. Everybody's guys wants to run out and go work and search. Because you just told them what they do is not interesting. But kind of look around, like, you know, every product that they built, they didn't look at monetizing it for a very long time until they believed the product had become ubiquitous and the product had become interesting.

2:44:54Eric Glyman:So I think that product obsession is part of the culture. I think that's partly because of where their secret sauce comes from. And now with the amount of resources they have, they can afford to do that for a very long time. But having said that, we did it even then. Like, you know, Gmail had no monetization for years or Google Maps had no monetization for years, but it was growing like wildfire.

2:45:14Travis Kalanick:Yeah. So coming into Palo Alto Networks, did you? I did a little stop in the middle of Masa. I know Travis is talking about easy money. I was part of the ETH. Easy money. You always take a chance. Yes, I was. But that was after Google. But coming into Palo Alto Networks. Did you guys ever pass on a company? I passed on Uber. No way. I did. No way. What round? What round?

2:45:35Eric Glyman:I think it was$16 or$20 billion all around. Okay. And then I left and Masa did the deal. I passed on Adam Neumann. There's a book. I stole my guy who was the analyst. I said, listen, we're a tech investor. Anytime you bring me a business which is masquerading as a tech business, which is a commercial real estate business, you should go work there. Don't work in tech.

2:45:53Travis Kalanick:That makes sense. Good call there.

2:45:57Eric Glyman:It's a great story. I've made a lot of bad ones, too, so don't worry.

2:46:01Travis Kalanick:So going into Palo Alto Networks, you have these five cultural tenants from the company, five cultural tenants from the founder. You're coming in as a new CEO. how did you think about resetting the culture, expanding the culture, bringing what you value to bear across the company in a way that's not disruptive, but gets you where you need to go?

2:46:23Eric Glyman:Well, there's no way to be not disruptive. So let's get out of that. Look, life is about standard deviation. You want excess returns? There are no excess returns with no standard deviation. This has been proven in every facet of life, right? You want to date a good looking person? You have to take the risk. Yeah, that makes sense. So, you want to build a great business, you have to take a risk. You got to make money in investments, you got to take a risk. So, I don't think there's a non-disruptive way of creating transformation. Yeah. Having said that, as you probably know, I knew nothing about cybersecurity.

2:46:52Eric Glyman:I never run a public company. Yeah. Had, you know, other than that, I was a perfect candidate. So, let's find a guy. I can only imagine the board deliberation. Like, if you look at a board, you know, they write these long job descriptions, brief a headhunter saying, go find us somebody. So imagine that conversation. Find us somebody who knows nothing about this job. So I'm like, either they were geniuses or they weren't paying attention to the headhunter. Anyway, I got the job. I show up there. I'm trying to learn cybersecurity, and I'm trying to understand the culture of the firm. Now, my predecessor, Mark McLaughlin, he's a West Point guy.

2:47:26Eric Glyman:He was a very high-integrity company. My father's a lawyer. We come from the same stock. So I like the fact it's a high-integrity company. It's important for a cybersecurity firm, too. It's important. Yeah, of course. It is. It's important to every company. Especially. Yes, especially so. It was the best product in this category, which is a good thing. What I discovered was, which happened in that industry, people get caught up in the success of the current product and stop thinking about what comes next and we have to look around the next corner. I think leaders' jobs are to think about what hits us in two, three, four, five years and how do you prepare for that now?

2:48:05Eric Glyman:because I have a firm belief it takes four to seven years to build a great product. Maybe it's become three to five or two to four with AI. But go back and think about it. Anybody you've had through here.

2:48:15Travis Kalanick:And what's your personal definition of what a great product is? Because there's a lot of products today that grow really fast that aren't necessarily great.

2:48:25Eric Glyman:Well, I think there are two aspects to this, right? There's a product when you're competing with somebody else, in which case you have to build something better than that. so much better that the customer is willing to switch because you have a much better experience. We take Google search, right? There were 14 search engines before Google search came about. It took Google seven years to get to compete with the other 14 people where the users are willing to switch. There are products in categories where there's no competition, right? There's nothing called Uber. I'm going to try it, whatever it is.

2:48:53Eric Glyman:But if you think about what made it a mass market experience where you can scale it around the world, it took five to six years for Uber as well. Take YouTube. So if you go around history, it has taken four to seven years to make it a compelling product that people want to use and want to switch whatever they're doing, switch behaviors. And that's when you start seeing scale work. Now, the current AI world, all bets are off. We'll see what happens. Open air took a lot less, but they had no competition. It was the best thing going at that point in time. So when I walked in, I realized the thing the company wasn't doing was one, they weren't innovating fast enough.

2:49:31Travis Kalanick:New products.

2:49:31Eric Glyman:And for the first three months, I felt like, you know, we're talking past each other. So I took a weekend and I sat down and wrote all my business principles I'd learned in my entire life. And in hindsight, I would urge every leader to do that before. I call it my belief document. So I wrote it and I showed up and I printed eight copies and dropped it in front of everyone on my team saying, read it, let's debate. Like, what is this? I'm like, this is my recipe book. This is why I act in certain ways. This is why we have disagreements. When I tell people, no, you can't hire that person, they get really frustrated.

2:50:06Eric Glyman:Oh my God, I've been looking for six months. I'm like, that's not a good person. B's hire C's and A's hire A's. And the more senior a person, you're going to destroy the entire part of my organization. That leader is not good. Oh, I get it. That's why you can't let me hire that person. Now, maybe that's an A, maybe that's a B. That's a different debate. So it became so much easier when we were all singing from the same hymn book. And now it's kind of mandatory reading and debating for every new senior person in our company. They have to read my belief document, which is kind of like sets the tone for how we operate.

2:50:40Eric Glyman:Is it still one page? It's about 11. Okay. It's more like a... It's a little booklet. But you can summarize it with any AI engine. It's not a problem. You don't have to see three. But what happens is people wanted more cloud fiction. What does that mean? Well, you want to read the long form, you can read the long form. You want a bigger version. You want to summarize it, you can summarize it.

2:50:58Travis Kalanick:What about product development? Did you come in with an idea around build versus buy, a framework for evaluating those trade-offs? Did that evolve once you got into the actual role?

2:51:10Eric Glyman:So, look, cybersecurity is the youngest subsector of technology.

2:51:16Travis Kalanick:Okay. It came about when we had connectivity.

2:51:18Eric Glyman:The iPhone, suddenly everybody's on the iPhone, every firm, every company is trying to get their applications on their phones, which means we're all trying to take what used to be controlled access and make it accessible to every consumer. So it came about 25 years ago. And every new piece of technology creates a whole series of new sets of risks, a whole new set of products that we deliver. Now, interestingly, it's also one of the most innovative industries in the world because the bad guys aren't saying, oh, let's try the same thing we tried yesterday which got blocked. Every morning they wake up, they're trying to find a new way to get into your business.

2:51:48So you got highly innovative, new set of market in cybersecurity.

2:51:53Eric Glyman:And as a consequence, the industry structure was extremely fragmented. There were 2 ,600 cybersecurity companies and the largest company had 1.5 % share, which was us. So you have 1.5 % share of the market. Then you need to build a strategy. How do I get from 1.5 to 10 to 20? Because you look at every other piece of tech, there are lots of people who double their market share. So I said, look, this is a math problem. The math problem is how do we get to 10, 20 % market share? You reverse into that and say, well, you've got to have a lot more stuff to sell to the same customer to have more market share.

2:52:24And then we started, okay, great.

2:52:27Eric Glyman:Now, where are the product categories where we can build products which are up and coming? The good news is we live in a constantly evolving technology world. So I sat down with the founder who was there then and chief product officer, and we sat down and literally on a napkin wrote AI, cloud, and network. Cloud and I were new, and we had the right to win a network, but we only did one out of six things in network. So then we said, how do we short-circuit the four-to-seven-year problem?

2:52:56Travis Kalanick:Only doing one thing in network when your name is Networks.

2:53:01Eric Glyman:It was in the name the whole time. That's right, exactly. But they got happy. They got fat and happy. You know, an$18 billion company, you started at three when you went public. This is great. It's up 6x. What are we doing wrong? Nothing. Yeah. Well, I couldn't rest on that. I had to go do my own 6x thing. So you sit there and you say, okay, we need to get to be number one in everything network security. So what's going to take me 47 years to build a great product? That's not enough time. So let's go find who we can buy. And I know there's like this thing where I don't think many tech companies execute M &A well.

2:53:36Right?

2:53:37Eric Glyman:Is that because of purchase price or post-merger integration? Purchase price is an argument. Or just identifying the wrong synergies? Purchase price is an irrelevant artifact. Okay. Either it's going to work. If it's going to work, it's going to work phenomenally well. Or you're going to screw it up. Yep. It's not what you paid. It's what you're able to do with it. Yeah. Right? You could say that Instagram was expensive or YouTube was expensive. Worked perfectly. Double click was expensive. They all worked perfectly. Yep. Right? AOL time, one different story. Totally. So it boils down as to how you execute past the price you paid for it.

2:54:07Eric Glyman:So that's not the relevant thing. In tech, when you buy a company, you buy a team, you buy an existing product, and you buy a roadmap for the future. The question is, can you deliver on that roadmap? Can you accelerate on that roadmap? Does it work? So, you know, we wrote our little M &A manual. We said, because your product is us, we've got to keep the founders there. We've got to make sure we have the right people running the company. And over time, we've gotten really good at it. We signed a term sheet, and we asked the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap so we like it and they like it.

2:54:40Eric Glyman:And if they don't agree on our expectations and we don't agree on theirs, we don't buy the company. Makes sense. We make them in charge. My teams are having to work for them, which makes them really unhappy and not many of them like it. But I'm like, look, these guys went out there, raised money, kicked their ass in your category and you want them to work for you. That makes no sense to me. You're going to work for them, learn from them. Some people get the hang of it and some people move on, which I'm fine with. Yeah. Right? So these people had less resources. Sure. They struggled. They hustled.

2:55:11Eric Glyman:They built a product and they kicked their ass.

2:55:13Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:55:13Eric Glyman:That means, so our job is to enable these people. We look at them and say, whatever your business plan was when you were a small private company, find me a business plan that's twice as assertive and bold than the one you had then. So we buy them, we pay the money, but we also give them more than they would have gotten anywhere else. Yeah. Because I'm sure we will slow them down a little bit. I've got a bunch of people who are trying to ask questions and get them to slow down.

2:55:39Travis Kalanick:But you're almost immediately expanding the TAM on day one. There's so many more power that you can bring in there.

2:55:45Eric Glyman:And then what happens is we've built a phenomenal system to take them to market. Yeah. So we say, we're going to take you to market. I have 3 ,000 people in the field. We've got to find a way of catching their fascination, making sure that they're going to get excited and make money. And 3 ,000 people will go out there and see 10 ,000 customers. Some of them are going to bite.

2:56:02Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:56:02Eric Glyman:You're going to go with four resources and go meet 20 customers. We're going to go to 6 ,000 or 10 ,000 customers. So that's where the secret sauce kicks in. We've bought 34 companies so far. Wow. And we do this for our board. I think our hit rate on things that have worked is over 70%. That's amazing. The last three are obviously new, so we have to see, and those are biggest ones. But it has worked out so far.

2:56:23Travis Kalanick:Yeah. Do you find yourself ever going back to your MBA, your CFA, for guidance on financial management of a public company? or is it just so different that you can just pick it up? Because it feels like there's a whole new set of tools that come into the toolbox when you're running a public company, whether it's dividends, large debt issuances, buybacks, there's M &A, there's so many different things and just managing a stock price that a public company CEO has to do in some ways. What do you think?

2:56:58Eric Glyman:Well, the MBA is a social experience. Okay. I think people go to business school and make a lot of friends and they get to know people. I have a classmate who went to school with me and I can go cut a deal with him. I think it's not what you study in a case study. It's a mindset. It's a way of thinking. It's kind of like learned behavior over time. You get good at it. You don't know why you do it, but it becomes part of your sort of muscle memory. And I think that's what happens. I'm a huge student of business. I spend a lot of time listening, reading, talking to people about this stuff. and you just get muscle memory over time.

2:57:33Eric Glyman:You just kind of get a sense of what the right thing to do is. And I think the part which we sort of underappreciate, people who do well are people who go back to first principles and try and abstract and say from a first principle basis, is this important, is this not important? For example, I don't have to manage my stock price. The stock price manages itself. The stock price, the market is sometimes smarter than individual CEOs. We have to respect that. There's a lot of players out there. They're not all silly. There's a reason your stock price trades where it trades. Sometimes it trades because they don't trust you.

2:58:06Eric Glyman:Sometimes it trades because they don't believe that your prospects are as rosy as you believe they are. Sometimes it does well because it anticipates the prospects are better than you think. So the market has a lot of different variables it assesses. Now, to the extent that you're convinced this is the right direction to go, you're convinced that you're executing well, that's great. If you believe there are some challenges or flaws in the way you're executing, the market will give you a hint. the market will tell you. Now, look, the market gets it wrong sometimes. It gets it right many times. It's just another variable you have to take into account.

2:58:38Eric Glyman:But the idea of managing a stock price is better. You can't.

2:58:43Travis Kalanick:But if the market gets it wrong, you have a financial incentive to buy your stock.

2:58:47Eric Glyman:Yes, we just did. We bought all the stock. But the market said, oh, we hear this thing called AI is eating software. We're going to dunk everybody because Claude decided to put out some coding. Yeah. The security product. Oh, shit, this is going to destroy$300 industry because Adaria launched a product.

2:59:05Travis Kalanick:Yeah, I saw a chart that showed the mentions of moats on SEC conference calls, on public company earnings calls, is going vertical. Have you been thinking about restating the moats to shareholders?

2:59:20Eric Glyman:A few earnings calls ago, I put my earnings script into Gemini and said, assess my earnings script and tell me, honestly, What do you think? It's like turning into a psychologist that says, not sure what you're concerned about, but you're trying to use the word momentum and exciting more times than you normally do. Calm down. So no, I'm not going to say boats.

2:59:42Travis Kalanick:Yeah.

2:59:43Eric Glyman:I'm okay with that. I'm not going to say boats. We don't have to say boats, but look, you expect me to sit here and sort of speak my book. Because LLMs are phenomenal at the 90 % problem. The 90 % problem is make me a movie, paint me a picture, merge this photograph. It's a 90 % problem. If you get it wrong, it's not a big deal. There's nothing destructive. For the same reason, you wouldn't want Gemini driving.

3:00:11Travis Kalanick:There's also those 90 % problems. There's so many of them where you will never know exactly if you did the best job or you just did an okay job. Like sometimes you get some signals, but it's not as binary as, let's say, did we expose user data to a bunch of people?

3:00:31Eric Glyman:That's a whole different kind of thing. Before you get to exposure data, like, you know, you write a letter to respond to my emails. Okay, fine. It's 80 % good enough, much better than me having to go do each one of them. So I think we're okay with the 80%, 90 % outcome. But you would not let Gemini drive your car or ChatGP drive your car and hallucinate. for the same reason you don't want generative AI managing your cybersecurity because we're in the 1 % business. Remember, I'm trying to block that one guy who's going to get into your company and steal your data. That's a 1 % problem. It's a 0.01 % problem.

3:01:03Eric Glyman:So we rely on thousands of machine learning algorithms. We rely on tons of pattern recognition, domain-specific data. So we're trying to solve the 1 % problem. Generative AI does not solve 1 % problem. It solves 90 % problems. We solve 1 % problems. So we're least threatened in this notion. There are parts of our business where we could leverage generative AI to make it better. Yeah, and that you will see. Like the code scanning team is a perfect example. Claude launches it, people get petrified. He's a$3 billion industry. We're a$3 billion market. And the market loses, you know, takes down$3 billion market cap that day.

3:01:37Eric Glyman:Fantastic. I was like, great. Now the market's getting it wrong. Let's go buy our stocks. So yeah, the market does get it wrong.

3:01:44Travis Kalanick:Explain to me how the surface area of cybersecurity threats is changing. I mean, off the top of my head, I could think of geopolitical risk, more AI endpoints where Vibe code is less secure. And so you need more, you know, you need more cybersecurity. Also, just the hackers that are out there are now AI enabled. So their threats are getting more sophisticated. What is this year looking like from just the scale of cybersecurity threats broadly.

3:02:16Eric Glyman:So, you know, if you go back to first principles, what happens is every technologist who's positive and optimist builds software for the best use case, for the best case. They don't build it for the worst use cases, right? You didn't build a knife and say, oh, let's not release a knife because people might stab each other. You say, well, this is great. You can do so many productive things with it, right? So we always build technology with an optimistic, positive attitude. And look at what AI is doing. We're all building from positive AI attitude unless you start getting into debates about can we use for war or not.

3:02:50Eric Glyman:But for the most part, you're building it for the right reasons or positive attitude. But didn't build the first airport with TSA in mind, did we? It's like, how are we going to make sure we can torture people and take them to the line and take their clothes off and shoes off? So we didn't do it. So we actually introduced security afterwards because we realized there are bad use cases. Unfortunately, same thing happens with technology. We build this stuff and say, let's go use it. that people aren't gonna do bad stuff, and then you suddenly see an agent hacks somebody's business, they say, oh shit, we gotta go figure out how to stop this agent from hacking this stuff.

3:03:21Eric Glyman:So our job in cybersecurity is to anticipate the bad use cases and try and throw a ring fence, a series of guardrails, a series of protection around technology. So to the extent technology evolves at a fast pace, this is good for us, because we have to constantly find antidotes to that. Then you have to make sure you're in the zeitgeist to what's happening, so you want to be there. So, you know, a little flashback, like this industry before the last eight years used to stay in their swim lanes. There are five swim lanes in cybersecurity and say, oh, you do your thing, I'll do my thing. You do your thing, I'll do my thing.

3:03:55Eric Glyman:Suddenly we say, this is bullshit. We should be in all five. So now we're in all five. Suddenly the whole industry has flipped over its head. Every time we do an acquisition, we see five copycat acquisitions done in our industry around us because people say, oh, this guy must know something. Actually, this guy knows nothing, but thank you very much. Now you just validated my T-cell. Let's go. So we're going doing that. So it is good for us when technology goes through a tremendous amount of evolution, whether it's cloud, whether it's AI, whether it's people going back to coding. Because funnily, coding causes more activity to happen in a laptop.

3:04:28Eric Glyman:It needs a whole different security in your laptop than you used to have. If you put an MCP server there, I need to protect it. Never putting any kinds of API access on your laptop. So the constant evolution of technology demands more innovation in our industry. More innovation in our industry, more deployment of technology around the world causes more demand for cybersecurity. That's good. Of course, we have a geopolitical set of issues. The more you go into war, the more nation states are the most prolific cyber hackers in the world. There are nation states out there who literally unofficially sponsor cyber activity because they need it at times.

3:05:04Eric Glyman:It's also a training ground, right? You keep doing it in peacetime, so when I need it in wartime, I can use you.

3:05:10Travis Kalanick:Oh, sure. Interesting, yeah.

3:05:12Eric Glyman:So there's this whole cat and mouse game that's played in industry. So geopolitical uncertainty, economic uncertainty, all these things are catalysts for activity. And that's on one side. On the other side, if you look at it, because of the fact that we never designed it with security in mind and the base of the technology is evolving, almost every enterprise is behind the eight ball in the modernization they need. And it's kind of like a hard decision to make, right? If you've never gotten hacked and you sit there and become complacent, saying, look, I've been spending$50 million a year and it's working.

3:05:48Eric Glyman:And suddenly one day, oh, shit, it's not working. Somebody just got into your business. Those are the best days for us, by the way. So somebody gets, shit, it's the fan. I don't want to get excited about people's tough times. That's why we have a team, which is benevolent. We have a team which you can call. We don't charge you for that team to go help you and shit, it's the fan. because we know you're just about to get religion. You're about to go transform everything in your infrastructure because you want to be at the bleeding edge. And again, security is kind of like this where you can spend too much or you can spend just right.

3:06:21Eric Glyman:Right now, people generally, the infrastructure is antiquated relative to where it needs to be. There's a lot of transformation that needs to happen. So I think this is going to be sort of a perpetual opportunity because combine that with the base that with technology changes, that's great. That's kind of one part of it. The other part is which was our insight three years ago. If you take a look at what Salesforce has done or Workday has done, you guys are young. Back then when I was working at Fidelity, we had 27 systems which combined made up customer relationship management because everybody had their own system.

3:06:55Eric Glyman:You had keys. You had data references because you built your app at that time. Cyber security is kind of there. like every customer has more cyber security vendors than technology vendors outside of cyber security

3:07:05Travis Kalanick:because they're like oh I got 80 of them

3:07:08Eric Glyman:because I got everything solved like no dude you gotta get them all together so we're in that phase where we're building the first sort of combined platform of cyber security and that's why we wanted to be in every swim lane and as the market converges we will be able to get people into less and less vendors where data can talk to each other because at the end of the day there's only two factors going on in our business One factor is, if it's bad, stop it. If I know it's bad, I'm pretty good at stopping it. The problem with cybersecurity is never known bad. It's the one you don't know. So all the money is in figuring out when you didn't find it at the door, is something bad going on or somebody's trying to intrude into your business.

3:07:47Eric Glyman:And that's where all the action in cybersecurity is. So that requires data to be connected. So, and this is the last fact, leave it and you can go wherever you want. but the average time to detect and remediate a cyber attack is four days in the United States. Now with AI, the fastest time to attack a company and exfiltrate private data is 28 minutes. Wow. I was shocked when I went to Palo Alto, I heard that. So in seven years, we've gotten ourselves to one minute.

3:08:26Eric Glyman:So we just got to get everybody else to one minute. Yeah. So a lot of demand in the future.

3:08:31Travis Kalanick:Has anyone ever gotten a job working for you by sending you a physical letter?

3:08:39Eric Glyman:Sending me a physical letter and gotten a job. The times have changed, but, you know. That creates the opportunity.

3:08:46Travis Kalanick:Have they changed, though? It is a way to stand out. You probably get a lot of cold email. I get letters, too.

3:08:51Eric Glyman:I get letters. I get pictures. I get gifts.

3:08:55Travis Kalanick:What advice are you giving to young people who are entering the job market or want to work at Palo Alto Networks?

3:09:02Eric Glyman:I think it's the Wild West right now out there. We have stopped looking at your CV. We run hackathons every second weekend. And anybody can vibe code and get ahead of people around them, we'll hire them. I don't care when you go to school. That's awesome. Because I just think people have to learn. This is something that has not been taught in schools. I'm glad if you go to school, it's good. You have social skills, you have friends. This is good. We want mentally balanced people. This is good. But we want to make sure that you know where the world is going. I'm a huge optimist on AI creating job opportunities.

3:09:37Eric Glyman:I think we'll go through a transformation period. But we're trying to find people who know how to. I have to overwhelm my company with more people who know how to use AI than less people. Right now, more people don't know how to use AI in my business, less people know how to use it. I think if traditional companies, and traditionally include ourselves, as companies have been around for 10 years, 15 years, want to get back and win in the next iteration of technology, we have to transform as fast as we can. That requires more people who can use AI than less people. Any COE walks in here and tells me that more people who know how to use AI than less, they're going to win.

3:10:15Eric Glyman:That's the biggest need of the hour. So I'm out there trying to hire people. So if anybody's listening to this and they think they are the best vibe coders, the best user of creative AI, write me a letter. Amazing. I hope you do.

3:10:27Travis Kalanick:Send me a letter. Five-coded product via physical. There is an API for sending physical letters. There's also an API for sending what's called lumpy mail, which is a letter. Have you ever gotten a letter that has like, it looks like it has something inside of it? So it's like, it's lumpy. Usually that goes into our mail room

3:10:46Eric Glyman:and goes into the bomb spot. Yeah, exactly. You may find it in the incinerator. People figure out there's an arbitrage there

3:10:53Travis Kalanick:because you're more likely to open an envelope that looks like a package, and you'll open that, and then you just get the ad.

3:10:58Eric Glyman:Unfortunately, some of us have people who open them because they don't want us to have the risk. Of course. I imagine it's pretty important in your role. That has to pass the regular filters as well.

3:11:08Travis Kalanick:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This was fantastic. Let's do this again soon. All right. And before we sign off, let me tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And you heard Eric Lyman mention Shopify earlier. Shopify, of course, is the e-commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

3:11:47Travis Kalanick:Jordy, is there anything else in the timeline that we should close out with? Any breaking news that we need to get to? And while you look that up, let me tell everyone about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. There's some breaking news. What is that? Anthropic researchers are departing to launch a Neolab. Oh. In talks to raise capital for a new startup at a$1 billion valuation. Yeah. Not. What a crazy time to launch a Neolab. Weren't we just asking Tyler about this? Is there going to be another in the lab?

3:12:19Travis Kalanick:Is the boom over? It's notable because we just haven't seen a lot of people. Leaving Anthropoc. That's right. But I'm very interested to see what they wind up launching. I'm also very sad that we didn't get to our lightning round today. We had a bunch of great people scheduled. Of course, we ran long, but we will have them back on the show soon to get all the updates there. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

3:12:49Travis Kalanick:And finally, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And with that, I think we can play our credits. What a fun show. What a great show. Nikesh, a legend, Gustav, TK. Whenever we travel, everything kind of comes together, and we have to do a catch-up episode, but this one was one for the books. Tons of great conversations. Thank you so much for listening. You have a Leave us five stars On Apple Podcasts And Spotify And we will see you Monday Tomorrow Or Monday We love you Goodbye

3:13:47We'll be right back.