Verizon vs Salesforce, Blue Origin's Test, Robot Marathon | Signüll, Ethan Ding, Matt McKinney, Errik Anderson, Pippa Lamb & James Wise

15:42Errik Anderson:I know exactly what you're talking about.

15:44Matt McKinney:And to be clear, to be clear, this is not our view. Like, this is not our view at all.

15:48Errik Anderson:No, but I mean, at the same time, like they did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And they and a$20 million career transition retraining fund is great. It's a good start. That is good. Like, this is a good thing. But he says the warning. This is from the journal. The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth, but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses. A lot of people are saying AI is coming. We're going to run out of jobs. It's exactly the opposite.

16:23Errik Anderson:NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting if all the economists wind up developing a consensus around that. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI, though some roles will be replaced. There will be other jobs created. In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces.

16:58Errik Anderson:block which cut nearly half of its predict half of its staff predicted other companies would soon follow suit a new boston consulting group report predicts that ai will shape roughly half of u.s jobs in two to three years and then up to 15 percent of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright um again that's you know uh reshaped and eliminated does you know uh would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this BCG report, you're probably looking at like, again, maybe a transition of like six, seven, eight, nine, 10 % unemployment while there's an adjustment period. Many Americans fear that will happen too in a Quinnipiac University survey of 1400 adults.

17:44Errik Anderson:55 % said they felt AI would bring more harm than good up from 44 % in a poll last year. And so the average American is dooming for sure. CEOs are not thinking about this the right way, said Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. They should be very candid with them and paint a big picture. Showman's big picture also included sweeping job cuts, the 13 ,000 layoffs he announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever, but necessary to make Verizon more efficient, he said.

18:29Errik Anderson:All together, he's seeking to cut$9 billion of costs. Verizon said its layoffs were not related to AI. The carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic, way too process-oriented as opposed to outcomes-oriented.

18:44Matt McKinney:And the CEO is saying, this is already happening in a big way. But the layoffs we're doing are just that we're bloated.

18:51Errik Anderson:Yeah. So Verizon has 90 ,000 employees, and they laid off 13 ,000, so maybe like a little over 10 % riff. Verizon's a weird one because the stock is basically completely flat over the last, it's actually up 15 % year to date. And it is an incredibly stable stock. And it's also just like should not be a victim of the Saspocalypse because they own spectrum allocation. They own cell towers. They own cell towers. Exactly.

19:20Matt McKinney:Or they have like very, very long term lease agreements.

19:25Errik Anderson:Yeah. And I mean, there is there is the case that like, you know, if Starlink direct to sell gets really good, even I mean, even Elon saying like it's not going to be that good inside buildings. Like it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden there's a new technology that's just wildly disruptive. Like maybe if you're like somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi-Fi when you're inside, like you could cut the cord with Verizon. But that just feels so, so far away for something that is like a pretty key utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill, like their phone Internet bill is like pretty.

20:04Errik Anderson:is probably the least elastic things. They will just keep paying and stick around. Now, they might move to Sprint or AT &T, and there's going to be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly, after all. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe-coding their own cell carriers, necessarily. So, in meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8 ,000 responses after asking.

20:36Matt McKinney:This is the future. Trust me. I used it once.

20:42Errik Anderson:Shulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost-cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table in one all hands. Shulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary so to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. Just dig your own grave.

21:10Matt McKinney:He's literally the title of this article. He's saying AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it. In tech, we're starting to, you know, every company is adopting this technology at a rapid rate. but everyone's like hey basically like jobs aren't tasks right this sort of narrative is building like we need to figure out how to it's we've built a bunch of very useful tools and they are going to have powerful effects in our economy but we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear based approach is not working and meanwhile Dan comes in and he's like like, AI is coming for your job.

21:57Matt McKinney:Everyone knows it. Write your obituary.

22:00Errik Anderson:Write your obituary. It's so not helpful.

22:03Matt McKinney:And they're not even doing AI-related job cuts.

22:08Errik Anderson:No.

22:09Matt McKinney:So I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle.

22:13Errik Anderson:I love that he just comes in and just immediately starts blackbilling. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackbilling.

22:23Matt McKinney:Do you think this is a setup for a much deeper layoff than they've done historically?

22:29Errik Anderson:I don't know. I mean, it's possible. But I think that they would need to do some serious AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out. I mean, I would be surprised if there's 90 ,000. I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90 ,000 employees or 80 ,000 employees. What are they actually all doing? which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Like form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet and I email it to somebody. Like that type of job, yeah, that's probably gonna be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization.

23:08Errik Anderson:But for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're working on bigger projects than just throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem. At the same time, who knows? Maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Shulman, and they weren't half bad, he said. Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I happen to like it. I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or like when fire was first invented.

23:47Errik Anderson:How cool would that be? He continued, we're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Shulman in acknowledging he has potential for disruption. Others have also recently sounded warnings. There's real risk of artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month. Jamie Dimon recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. It may happen faster than we can adjust to it.

24:23Errik Anderson:Shulman said AI may reach human level capability known in the industry as AGI by the end of next year on the early side of most industry predictions. So end of 2027 for AGI isn't that crazy. I mean, Sequoia has an event right now, AI Ascend, the whole keynote slide is AGI is here. And so people are going back and forth on that. But I think it's not that crazy to imagine, you know, very, very human level AI by the end of 2027. That doesn't seem impossible whatsoever. The question is just like, how much will this be additive? How will the government respond? What will the actual effect on the labor market be?

25:04Errik Anderson:And I think people are digging into that a lot right now. There's a good podcast on this on Odd Lots with Alex Imos. He's a professor at University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. Highly recommend you go check that out if you're interested in going deeper into the labor market. Well, moving on. Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission. AST Space Mobile, who we've talked about a few times here. Jeff Bezos' rocket company said the satellite from ASTS was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit.

25:46Errik Anderson:The launch of the company's New Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the flight, New Glenn's third ever, the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to Earth. only a feat only Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved orbital rockets. But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite the rocket was carrying into orbit for AST Space Mobile, a company building cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post on X, Blue Origin said its rocket delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space.

26:23Errik Anderson:The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit, adding that teams were assessing what happened. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit. The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. The stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with new glides.

26:44Matt McKinney:Yeah, I saw some of the AST retail army saying, like, don't worry, keep holding.

26:51Errik Anderson:Keep holding.

26:52Matt McKinney:It's covered under insurance. It seems like... Very unfortunate, but... It seems like it's rebounded a little bit. Somewhat to be expected, right, as Blue Origin, like, figures out their commercial business.

27:04Errik Anderson:Yeah, it traded down, like, 16 % overnight, but it's down just 6 % today, so a little bit of a rebound.

27:10Matt McKinney:And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here.

27:15Errik Anderson:Yeah.

27:18Matt McKinney:Courtesy of Jeff.

27:19Errik Anderson:Tyler, you dug into why doesn't ASTS just launch on SpaceX?

27:25Pippa Lamb:Well, so there are two things. I think one thing I thought was interesting is like there's this whole press cycle about it like oh it was like a failure of a launch or something. But this has like happened a number of times before like SpaceX in 2024. There was Falcon 9 that kind of the upper stage like failed and then a few like Starlink satellites.

27:45Errik Anderson:Just went to the wrong orbit.

27:46Matt McKinney:Yeah basically and then they're too low and then they just get burned up. Yeah companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it basically. But that happens too. I remember at the beginning of last year, there was a launch for a venture-backed space company, and they basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it. So it's not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back.

28:12Errik Anderson:In 2016, SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket, which was crazy. Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of Internet.org satellite. The Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon 9 rocket carrying satellite intended to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. So writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, as I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning, this was back in 2016, referred to as an anomaly by a SpaceX engineer, destroyed both the rocket and its cargo, the AMO-6 satellite, which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa.

29:06Errik Anderson:Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided. Contrary to Zuckerberg's description, the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Etulcet, I can't pronounce that, a French satellite company to lease the broadband capability of the Amos-6, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom. According to Space News, which reviewed Spacecom filings with Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the joint lease cost$95 million over five years.

29:46Errik Anderson:So this like$100 million satellite just blew up on the pad. So lots of different setbacks. But there is one technology that is not having setbacks, which is robotic marathoners. And there's new information. This is crazy. There's a crazy video. I don't know if the video relates to this. But a Chinese robot beat a human best time in a half marathon after a stumble. Tech companies are making progress to fixing humanoid runners' malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing, a humanoid robot half-marathon race, the first runner to cross the finish line, took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever.

30:30Errik Anderson:Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics. A field American tech leaders, including NVIDIA's Jensen Wang and Tesla's Elon Musk, say is the next big thing. This video is pretty wild.

30:42Matt McKinney:Is this the actual letter? This is one that's failing. Didn't make the half marathon, but you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back. This is to help with cooling.

30:51Errik Anderson:Oh, they've been cooling it off? Interesting.

30:53Matt McKinney:Which is like very cyberpunk.

30:55Errik Anderson:Whoa, that's crazy that you have to load it up with dry ice as well. I like that. About 220 yards in the finish line, the 5 '5 Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. the red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to state media. I feel like if you fall down and you're a human in a half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish. This probably still counts. Last month, the human, the actual human world record holder from Uganda, finished in 57 minutes and 20 seconds in Lisbon, Portugal.

31:34Errik Anderson:Lightning and two siblings from Honor swept the podium. All three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one-time help the champion got. The race penalized the completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under 50 minutes, but it was teleoperated. The Tian Kung Ultra, which was developed by Beijing-based lab exhumanoid, and won last year's race, more than halved its finish time this year, clocking in at one hour and 15 minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive. Like, they cut the time in half in just one year.

32:12Errik Anderson:The 13-mile course included more complex terrain than last year, such as slopes, narrow passages, and sharp turns, testing robots' abilities.

32:20Matt McKinney:If you assume an acceleration in progress, eventually one of these humanoids is, like, running a marathon in, like, an hour

32:25Errik Anderson:or, like, 30 minutes.

32:27Matt McKinney:Just, like, truly insane speeds.

32:30Errik Anderson:Yeah. I mean, as fast as a Cheetah. Tyler could still take it out, though. I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain. While the U.S. controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains, China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem for humanoid robot bodies. That has been reported many, many times. Well, without further ado, we have Signal here in the TVPN Ultradom. Let's bring in Signal, who is launching Sky, an agentic AI home screen, replacing the iPhone app. There he is. With content handler. Handsome fella.

33:05Errik Anderson:Action driven intelligence.

33:06Matt McKinney:Dude, I can't believe it took this long.

33:08Errik Anderson:We've reacted to your posts like so many times. So good to have you.

33:12Ethan Ding:Oh my God, it's incredible to be on here, guys. Welcome. It's been a long time coming, but I just want to start off with saying congratulations. Thank you. This has been ridiculous. Yeah, what a while. I've been watching you guys since day zero. Really? You watched the first episode? Because I think we were covering.

33:28Matt McKinney:I think we did. Your post would have been making it into like the first episode. For sure. You're probably like, why are these two guys in suits? Yeah. Preaching out my tweets.

33:36Ethan Ding:This is strange. I tweeted this out a little bit, but I was like, man, when I read that and you guys were reacting to what I posted because I didn't really think about what I posted and you guys analyzed it and I was like, oh my God, this is ridiculous. Crap. What did I even write?

33:52Errik Anderson:I don't remember. You have a ton of bangers. They're all good posts. Great time. That was the lifeblood of the show. It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about the first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching, what you're building. Very smooth, John. I try. I try. You guys invite. It'll come a long way, for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit. Introduce the app. introduce the product, where you want this to go. And I have a ton of questions.

34:26Ethan Ding:No, absolutely. Um, you know, uh, we're, I've always been in consumer software and I think there's just not that much other than this sort of main players. Um, I noticed, and there's, there's a lot to be done and what a time to be alive. So, you know, we're experimenting at the very basic layer of how to make this stuff, uh, really easy to use, really easy to access for normal people that have not really come into this agentic AI world in full speed other than sort of chatting with chatbots and whatnot. And I think it's an early experimentation of what we're up to is kind of how AI will kind of speak to you as well as how, you know, sort of ambient AI will be in various surfaces, starting with your phone, right?

35:14Ethan Ding:Like maybe your phone may not look exactly the same way even in the next couple years. So we're kind of operating at the very earliest stages of experimenting of how AI will communicate with you. And we're trying to think of creative surfaces. And one of the most interesting places, you always, you know, people take out their phones and they glance at it. And it turns out, you know, this stuff hasn't really changed in such a long long time. The iPhone home screen is 20 years old. That's two decades. And it's just static icons. Roughly speaking, it has not really evolved in any meaningful way. They one-shotted it.

35:53Errik Anderson:Yeah, that's the steel man.

35:54Matt McKinney:The steel man is the one-shotted. The steel man is good.

35:56Errik Anderson:It's the final form.

35:57Matt McKinney:It's the final form. Some things don't change.

35:59Errik Anderson:We could always do a three-wheel car or five-wheel car or six-wheel car.

36:04Matt McKinney:The thing that I've been pressing on is like, you would think, you know, if I could rewind two, three years, I would not expect, and knowing how much progress there would be in AI, I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the app store and only see LLMs. Like chat apps. I would expect to see like a variety, given just like how many magical experiences people have had, a variety of like new products.

36:30Errik Anderson:Like a new Uber, a new Instagram. And that's like some argument. There was a previous app boom that was like very diffuse. You got Candy Crush and what's the one with the pigs, the Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. And like you got all these different apps, RunKeeper and Diet Products, and it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps.

36:51Ethan Ding:Yeah, and you know, I actually recently got a new phone and I was installing apps. You know, I always like to set up my phone bare. Like I don't like to transition my phone. Interesting. Really? the same.

37:01Matt McKinney:Really?

37:02Ethan Ding:It gives me a little bit of a reset on not only what I need and what I don't need, but also how to think about software as it exists today. Like, I don't want to be tied to what I was before. I want to kind of be a new, if you will. And, you know, it turns out I installed, you know, GBT and Claude and whatnot. And I was like, man, I don't think I really need that much stuff. You know, these LLMs are kind of collapsing how and what you do into an interesting dynamic and I think generally they're incredibly powerful and the fact that you know those top five apps are all LLMs roughly is it speaks volumes to the zeitgeist and speaks volumes to the impact of the actual technology like I don't think you know previous I think technology has always been kind of a little bit more evolutionary than not obviously hindsight is 2020 but but this feels so so different you know as a technologist this this world feels very different.

38:01Ethan Ding:It feels just the things are going to rapidly change from here on out in terms of how people experience their lives, how people interact with each other and how, you know, we're going to facilitate brand new interactions potentially or, you know, completely reinvent old ones. So I'm very excited for that. And I think our company and the way that we think about it from a consumer perspective is just to make things, you know, easily accessible for these individuals. And I think we're going to, we're going to attempt to do that. Very basic stuff. Yeah.

38:34Matt McKinney:What is your, like more as like a CEO, it sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and like, are just like in an experimental phase. Is that like generally the right read?

38:45Ethan Ding:I think, yeah, I think generally I would say two things. Number one is look, we built a really fun product that we're going to give to lots and lots and lots of people. Turns out, you know, this era is non-zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital, but, you know, inferences is non-trivial expensive. And especially if you operate at like agentic inference or just background inference, that stuff is just consistently going. Unlike you know, Claude or GPT where people actually make requests or go on there and type something. We're doing it on behalf of you, right? Like we're doing those things in the background where we anticipate, we listen to context.

39:23Ethan Ding:We, we turned, you know, every time, for example, every time you get an email, uh, we process it with one of our agents. It, it sort of turns out it buckets that item. It tries to figure out what to do with it. It tries to see if there's, it deserves some higher, uh, order like ranking. And then it tries to figure out, Oh, can I complete this task? Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay, Hey, here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know. And it's a very look replying to emails has been, you know, 30, 40 years, but this is a new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world and apply that to any, you know, any aspect of your life, whether it's health or finance or where even where you are, right?

40:06Ethan Ding:Like one of the underlying things that we do is location. And, you know, imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice, by simply it being on your home screen wherever you are. If you're at a museum, if you're in a new neighborhood, and that's a one tap away. Like our goal is to make intelligence either zero or one tap away, not one prompt away. So, burning question.

40:32Matt McKinney:How do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone ad supported? I think ad supported could make sense, right? I'm walking by a coffee shop and I get an offer.

40:49Errik Anderson:There's ads in Apple Maps now.

40:51Matt McKinney:You're seeing my notification stream in, so you can really, you know what I like. I think the interesting thing here is like you guys can operate, like you can kind of wake up and ask yourself, like, what would Apple do if they were like truly excited about AI versus like seemingly scared of it?

41:13Ethan Ding:You know, I posted about this a little bit with respect to Apple. Apple relies on a deterministic world, right? Like a world where lots and lots of elements from design to the experience to the underlying context, that doesn't change as much. And it's very deterministic. So for example, iPhone is very much kind of software is very broadcasty, right? It's a one to many. They write it once and it runs for everybody. And roughly speaking, it runs exactly the same way. Now with a non-deterministic world, that could change drastically. Like for example, for when we, you know, give this out to everybody, everybody in there, everybody has a very different experience with our app because it's completely non-deterministic.

41:58Ethan Ding:And Apple lives in a deterministic world and having to transition into non-determinism and non-deterministic software is actually a really non-trivial transition, especially for a company like Apple, where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So I think for us, we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of expectations and determinism with the beauty of non-deterministic elements of AI and create a really great user experience around that, that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So we're kind of maybe in some sense moving ahead of Apple, who has to deal with a few billion users, you know, just a minor amount of users.

42:43Ethan Ding:So I think that, you know, this world deserves more experimentation like we're doing in terms of both user interfaces and experiences and feeds and ranking. And, Jordy, going back to your point on monetization, I think that's the number one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture real estate on your device that is the home screen that is available at a glance. And, you know, I think I've posted about advertising. Potentially the greatest billboard of all time. Exactly. I mean, it is insanely powerful if we can activate that. Now, that's a tall order. But at the same time, you know, like I've posted about ads and advertising.

43:22Ethan Ding:Look, I've been in technology for such a long time from consumer, you know, whether it's like feeds at Facebook or, you know, even Google and whatnot. But, you know, you start to think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world. You know, it has actually made things accessible. And I think generally, if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality in services to people who would have otherwise not been afforded. so I believe in advertising I believe in good advertising I believe in advertising that is actually like complimentary to the user experience not necessarily taking away from it it's tricky to

44:02Matt McKinney:do but you know the worst ad experience I've ever had as as an ad enjoyer was like in college I was buying a Kindle and they were like do you want the ad supported Kindle for like a hundred dollars or the ad-free Kindle for like$120. And as a college student, I was like, I don't think I'll mind ads. Why not? Are they bad? And it's on the home screen when the device is locked.

44:27Errik Anderson:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

44:27Matt McKinney:And they're just showing me books that I would never read. So it's bad targeting? So it's terrible targeting, and it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it kind of looks like, wait, you're reading that?

44:39Errik Anderson:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

44:40Matt McKinney:So if you can avoid that.

44:42Errik Anderson:Yeah. Definitely. There's a question from the chat. why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous? I mean, I imagine as you grow the business, like it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever, but you know, at some point a journalist will want to know. And I imagine that unless your OPSEC is super tight, it'll come out. Not that it's like bad. I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the Anon thing?

45:08Ethan Ding:That's a great question. You know, my entire online existence as it exists today with respect to this account is a giant accident because I was trying to find my old username and password for because I just wanted to post a little while ago. Maybe, you know, whenever I started posting. But I think when you guys actually started started TBPN as well.

45:29Matt McKinney:And I think your account must have gone from like a thousand followers to like over a hundred within the first few months of us.

45:38Ethan Ding:It was kind of nuts. Okay. So the whole story is, you know, I, um, I was kind of, uh, I was like, you know what? I just want to read. I maybe I'll reply or something. And I had a lot of fun and, you know, whenever I'm having fun, I like to double down on things, you know, maybe not change, change it around too much. Look, I think certainly this, this world is going to change at some point. Um, but in the, in the meantime, you know, I love leaning into fun, new things. You know, if you want to do anything new in the world, you got to do it a little bit differently. you got to be a little bit more unique you got to be a little bit more mysterious a little bit more um yeah i don't know all of this stuff is just so wild to me right like the anonymity aspect of it and the x culture and the anons around it and you guys have had you know yeah you can never dox i'm

46:22Matt McKinney:sorry you can never dox i mean like banksy banksy getting unmasked is that good for the is that good for the brand like like you could be you could be like taller than john giga chad everyone just and it won't be enough right like it was it we all picture you as a philosopher king of sorts

46:40Ethan Ding:oh it's beautiful isn't it i mean i my my bio and my thought like the actual content are like sometimes sometimes the same and sometimes destroyed but that's i think the beauty of it so in that realm you know like i was actually talking to some people around this and i was like i i sometimes i basically kind of do what i feel like and right now it's like just been so much fun to kind of lean in on this world. But I think certainly I'm more like, I'll marry myself to the zeitgeist, if you will. And if that calls that, then I'll continue. And we'll see what happens. Not married to the game, married to the zeitgeist.

47:17Ethan Ding:Married to the zeitgeist.

47:19Errik Anderson:Okay, take me through iOS development, like current status, because this seems like a really good idea that people would want. I do think people are bored of the grid and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense. And I think you could deliver a ton of value. But my fear is that Apple is just like, no, that's our real estate. So is there a clear path right now through like widgets and shortcuts API to actually do interesting things? Or am I going to have to like side load a different OS? Like how, how like consumer friendly and like easy will this be, or will you be bumping up against the walled garden of Apple pretty quickly?

48:06Ethan Ding:Um, that's a really great question. Look, every single thing we do is within the confines of the Apple ecosystem and experience and the way that they've designed and made it work. And we've designed our product to fit almost like a glove into that ecosystem. Um, you know, when, when you onboard into our experience, you just connect the things in your life that you think you would want more. Yeah. The server side connections I totally get.

48:33Errik Anderson:Like all of that makes sense. You can like OAuth with email and use APIs or MCPs. Like there's a million things that you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is like, is like how big can the widget be? Or can you actually take over the whole home screen?

48:48Ethan Ding:We can, we can take care of the, we basically ask you to install two widgets, a medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. and those work in dynamic together. So the medium widget will basically what we call a wildcard widget internally, which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time. And then the big widget is what we call a for you widget, which is just a feed. And you know what we're doing, John, I think is we're building kind of the new iteration, the Facebook newsfeed 2.0, that's entirely AI generated about your life, highly personal, and that lives directly on your home screen.

49:26Ethan Ding:And you can browse it as easily. The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals. And the beautiful part is that it's all like AI generated and AI mediated. We have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feed.

49:40Errik Anderson:It's funny because everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right, but like it feels like like like that. Like I'm still in like prosumer territory, but that's a good place to start. And then you can hopefully make it easier. And then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you download an app and just by clicking. Yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like the biggest thing is like I just love when like these new surface areas are explored.

50:14Errik Anderson:I mean, you mentioned Nikita, but like he's but he's done a great job of really, understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, pushing those to the limit, creating new UX, new experiences on top of what Apple gives you. And it feels like that's really underexplored.

50:34Matt McKinney:Have you thought about trying to build any products within any of the LLM ecosystems, just given that they already have a massive existing user base?

50:47Ethan Ding:That's a great question. and you know, I've definitely explored like every single thing with respect to an API or a platform that comes out, you know, um, I, you know, for example, the WWDC APIs that come out every year, I, uh, I read them like, like the Bible, you know, like I would, I, I, I, I read. Bro study.

51:07Errik Anderson:Um,

51:10Ethan Ding:you know, that, that's my, uh, that's my, uh, you know, uh, religious holiday or whatnot. And every platform is the Pope.

51:17Errik Anderson:He's your Pope. Yeah, exactly.

51:18Ethan Ding:We get it. Yeah. And, you know, so I scrounge these. I think generally these API, the sort of apps or ChatGPT apps, it's unclear to me what the incentive structures are for the app developer just yet. And it's unclear to me why applications deserve to exist inside of an LLM just yet besides just adding more context. Because theoretically, an LLM is powerful enough to even generate an app to be able to do something, in which case I'm not sure exactly, unless you bring some highly proprietary data like Zillow or whatnot. Maybe some of these experiences work, but otherwise I don't know if the small time developer, you guys remember the flashlight apps and the lighter apps on the iPhone?

51:54Matt McKinney:Like, you know, you're not really seeing those types of experiences. All I remember as a probably 12 year old was the beer app. The beer app was good. Just thinking that that was like, that was peak humor.

52:05Errik Anderson:What about the I'm rich app that was like$10 ,000? It was just a picture of a diamond. and it was just like you could just open a picture on your phone but if you bought that app you could show people that you just wasted 10k on a iphone app or whatever i think it literally maxed out it was the most expensive app you could possibly like type type into the app store

52:27Ethan Ding:i think the guy sold like over 500 copies before apple removed it yeah no not out for real person so i think he made 500 times a thousand dollars and it was incredible see these are the kinds of experiments and creative elements that, you know, I think deserve to exist in the world today. And I think, you know, we're a few handful of individuals that are kind of trying to make that happen. And we're trying to be really creative, really fun, really interesting, engaging. Um, and AI is a super plow, a powerful, uh, tool to be able to do that more powerful than the original iPhone APIs, like, Holy crap.

53:02Ethan Ding:So I think we're, we're, we're early, but we're going to try to

53:05Errik Anderson:dream like like there's so much like you're doing this you're doing this the right way because

53:09Matt McKinney:there's another scenario where like you could raise a series a right now like or it's like

53:15Errik Anderson:you know you have a team you have the technology small and and the wait list like you'll be able to test things and experiment and learn like there's so much opportunity well what an exciting time thank you so much for joining the show this is great thanks a lot guys great to finally have

53:29Ethan Ding:you on and congrats again and maybe next time we'll talk about hot takes for sure oh yeah what

53:35Matt McKinney:do you think about this AI powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards?

53:41Ethan Ding:I'll have to,

53:41Matt McKinney:I'll have to try it out before. So John was, John showed me like a screenshot. He was showing you the website for this, this morning. And I didn't realize today is 420. So that's like, this is like a 420 joke.

53:53Errik Anderson:Is it a joke though? I think it's a real website. Like I think it's, yeah,

53:57Matt McKinney:yeah. John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that?

53:59Errik Anderson:I know, but I, I think they're design man, Claude design. You can do anything. Okay, so you're telling me if I put this in the Wayback Machine and it shows up as of yesterday it's not a joke? Because I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see.

54:15Matt McKinney:Let's see. I bet you if they were planning to make a...

54:18Errik Anderson:April 6th, it's in the Wayback Machine. What does it say? It says, let's see. It's loading. It's got blockchain still. I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trend to go as viral as possible. I don't know. We'll have to dig into it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, Signal. Fantastic news and congratulations on the progress. Have fun. And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Up next, we have Ethan Ding from TexQL. He is the co-founder and CEO here to announce a fundraise.

54:52Matt McKinney:It's time to talk about enterprise analytics, workflows.

54:56Errik Anderson:I think we had him. Let's check in with the team and make sure that he is here. I believe he is. So let's bring Ethan Ding in from TexQL into the TVP at Alteredome. Ethan, hello. How are you doing?

55:09Matt McKinney:What's going on, guys? Oh.

55:12Errik Anderson:How you doing? How's it going? It's good. We have two of you, so please introduce both of you.

55:18Matt McKinney:And it looks like it's being filmed on a phone camera from 2005, but we're excited to have you on. Hi.

55:29signüll:I'm Ethan. I'm the CEO and co-founder. This is my co-founder, Mark. They're a CTO. We're actually at a customer office for an on-site. And this is actually a company that does not, I think like IP bands like Zoom from their internal network, which I found out like really last second. Interesting.

55:50Matt McKinney:No, no, it's great. We're super excited to have you guys on. Walk us through history of the company since it's your first time.

56:00signüll:Yeah, I think we started this late 2022, right before ChatGPT came out. We had this idea that if we spent a lot of money and time on trying to make analytics work, it'd be worth something. We really didn't know what we were doing when we first got started. Since then, what we've really realized is after two years of rebuilding the product like 10 times over, we landed on something where I think the typical enterprise has 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, BI tools. They have 20 ,000 different charts, another 400 ,000 tables. Every single vendor wants you to migrate into their thing, drop another$20 million on systems integrator for another 10 years to do the migrations.

56:46signüll:Let's build a thing that can connect to everything. And hopefully be due for analytics, what like high frequency trading firms if they're like stock markets.

56:57Errik Anderson:What was the first like analytics stack? Because if you're pre-GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or like clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? Like what was the initial like, okay, there's a stream of data, there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases. Like how are you giving the customers value from that?

57:24Pippa Lamb:Well, it was pre-chat GBT, but still post-GBT. And so we had GBT3, but I think as we all know at this point, the IQ of that was way overstated, at least for business stuff. And so we had a text box on the right, we type in your question, like how do I get revenue? Then a text box on the left with the SQL. and then you run it and you copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool and then that was it

57:54Errik Anderson:yeah we've come a long way from that yeah so walk us through I mean you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today but what does actually as a group of co-founders going to a customer site like what are you doing how deep in the weeds are you is it just sort of like a high level pitch or are you rolling up your sleeves and and working on actual integration Thank you. I haven't done anything yet. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

58:15signüll:Yeah, well I think today's session was basically like walk us through like the, I mean every single Fortune 500 company like basically spends like nine figures on like AWS, GCP and Azure. They spend another like 10 figures on like Leaper that like manages all these systems. And it's kind of this like constant like war of like you go from like spending$20 million to like a Teradata on-prem to like spending like$30 million with like a database in the cloud or something. And so what we're trying to map out with them is Anthropic is telegraphing that they want to be the size of AWS in three years.

58:50signüll:And they're an enterprise-oriented company. They expect that to basically come out of companies that we're working with is budgets. And so they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of, let's say, 200, 300 million dollars, double it, and materialize this money out of thin air and spend it on inference um they're they're they're walking us through like the the um parts of their roadmap where you know what kind of stats can they sunset what kind of labor costs are they like thinking about like the trade-offs around um on like what time horizons to like free it up um and also like like what kind of like workloads that are gonna be extremely expensive that they can like just kind of like start uh basically triaging off like the large like models because because at the end like these are these are kind of the people like when you see like the token charts like everyone with token maxing.

59:34signüll:These are kind of the people who like pay the bills on like those tokens. And like, like they noticed the size of that bill, you know, like blowing up like 10 X, like year over year.

59:42Errik Anderson:Yeah.

59:42signüll:Interesting. It's interesting side of the equation that I guess like people don't spend a ton of time talking about.

59:46Errik Anderson:Yeah. How have you been processing the SaaSpocalypse narrative? Benioff was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted, although you could talk about the long term. But the growth, like these companies are still growing, even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies.

1:00:16signüll:Yeah, I feel like the for the longest time, I assume that like everyone likes to buy like good enough. I think really in the past like three months, I've heard like, like six different CIOs or CBOs of like fortune 100s like talk about how they're ready to like like Salesforce is like increased like their headless like tax and they're ready to like like do like a two-year migration like off into like like Postgres or something well it's not like they're going to another vendor they're just like I need to free up money to like set on GPU it's like set GPUs on fire sure and I'll pay like anybody to like like move me into like like a Postgres instance and like like Google Cloud or like AWS interesting okay so that's a little bit of your opportunity

1:00:56Errik Anderson:You help with migration?

1:00:58signüll:That one's kind of adjacent to us. We look at a lot more like low-level infrastructure, like Databricks, Snowflake, Tableau, and otherwise. But it's interesting. A CRM is basically the second most important system of record at an enterprise next to the ERP. If they're willing to entertain moving entirely off CRMs within a two-year time, maybe they'll completely fail. But the weakness to forge into that is then an order of magnitude more higher than I expected.

1:01:27Pippa Lamb:And surprising based on the profile of company. That's something you'd normally expect from Google or Facebook, the most mature engineering companies in the world. You see this effort starting to come from 100-year-old companies as well. Interesting.

1:01:41Errik Anderson:Interesting. And is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a net cost savings to having their own system or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business?

1:02:00signüll:It's mostly not... There's an interesting thing Larry Ellison talks about when it comes to enterprise sales, which is not like... Enterprise sales is like buying Gucci bags. It's much more like any given year, you have a CIO come in, right? The half-life of a CIO is like five years before they retire. New one comes in, they have to start a set of new initiatives. Often they're finger testing the market and trying to figure out who has the best vibes. Sure. Like basically, whoever has the best vibes, I'm going to throw eight figures against and I'm going to move that eight figures away from a company that has worse vibes.

1:02:38Matt McKinney:Sure.

1:02:38signüll:There's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy where - They're vibe procuring. Yeah. They're vibe procuring. Yeah. You walk into a room, you can tell when that company stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is extremely cocky. You can tell when the FDEs and the salespeople are like, listen, you don't even have to move this today, I'm going to get your business next year no matter what, because I know we're on the up and up. And you can also tell when a vendor is desperate and they're moving for discounts. As long as the perception that a company, the market is short a given SaaS vendor, customers start asking for discounts.

1:03:14signüll:The most aggressive ones go first. But now all the sellers on that team are traumatized between the next set of renewals. So they're progressively going to give more and more ground. It's kind of a rough, yeah, wouldn't want to be one of those right now.

1:03:29Errik Anderson:Interesting. Interesting. Well, your business is growing. You're raising money. Tell us about the latest round. Yeah.

1:03:36signüll:It was actually a two-part round. The first led by Hoff Capital and the latest part Blackstone. How much did you raise? I think it was 17 in total.

1:03:53Matt McKinney:this was this was awesome guys i really i really uh enjoyed uh speaking with you both and uh thank you for making time on uh while while you're hanging out with your customers and we appreciate the perspective yeah let's uh let's do it again soon and good luck out there we'll talk to you

1:04:06Errik Anderson:soon thank you have a good one have a good rest of your day uh up next we have matt mckinney from loop he's the co-founder and ceo raising a big series c in the waiting room let's bring him into the tdp and ultra dome matt how you doing what's going on guys not too much good to have you here uh first time on the show why don't you introduce yourself and the company i'm matt

1:04:30Pippa Lamb:mckinney i'm the co-founder and ceo of loop and our mission is to unlock value that's trapped in the operations that power the physical economy and we started specifically in the back office where no one else wanted to go and back office services and automating things like accounting and general edward coding and payment services. And all we do to exist is to make our customers more efficient so that they can better serve their customers. And we work with some of the most important companies in the world, 20 % of the Fortune 100. Wow. And excited to be around with you guys.

1:05:01Errik Anderson:Yeah. Well, how, I mean, there's a different world when you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like, we're a gentic accounting firm or something. And it feels like this is much more cross-functional. How are you actually positioning like the integration? Who's the buyer? How, how does the, how does the business like instantiate itself inside of your customer?

1:05:27Pippa Lamb:Yeah, we started, we started with a very acute problem, which is if you look at the supply chain industry, roughly 30 % of invoices are wrong or they have an error. So clearing of them is really painful. And because of that, a bunch of services firms popped up, specialized services firms popped up. And all they do is address that specific problem, which is you've got to adjudicate this invoice. You've got to ensure that it's accurate. You've got to remit payment to the truck drivers and the carriers across the world. And that's a big industry. It happens to be a$5 billion industry alone. And it's all done with human labor.

1:06:03Pippa Lamb:And obviously, LLMs presented a perfect opportunity for that. But I think what got my COVID and I most excited is really the data. If you can go organize the data that you can obviously automate things like we just mentioned, the accounting, but you can use that as a wedge to expand into adjacent use cases, whether it be in compliance or planning or procurement and continue to unlock value for your customers.

1:06:27Errik Anderson:Yeah. So what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices, whether things have gotten paid. There's often like multiple versions of a particular invoice and then you need to plug into bank data to see what's actually moved around or accounting systems. Like how long does it take to integrate and how key is that?

1:06:49Pippa Lamb:It's wild. I mean, what's so wild about supply chain, supply chain is just a network of networks.

1:06:54Errik Anderson:Yeah.

1:06:55Pippa Lamb:And you've got, you know, a transportation carrier, you've got a supplier, you could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. A lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M &A. And so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take, for example, the weight and dimensions of a package or a shipment. There could be seven different versions of the weight and dimensions for that package. And so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources. We get it from email. We get it from EDI. We get it from API connection.

1:07:30Pippa Lamb:We get it from Excel spreadsheet, PDF, you name it. It's just really messy, unstructured data, data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLMs came out.

1:07:43Errik Anderson:When you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all?

1:07:47Matt McKinney:Yeah, are they trying to buy AI? Or do they just want a solution? Not again.

1:07:52Errik Anderson:How are you thinking about how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch?

1:07:59Pippa Lamb:All our customers want is just outcomes.

1:08:02Errik Anderson:Yeah.

1:08:02Pippa Lamb:And they don't really care how you deliver it. Now, sometimes they might have a top-down AI mandate that they're looking to check the box. But at the end of the day, they don't care how the sausage is made. They're buying an outcome. That's all that they want. And if you can demonstrate that you can deliver a superior outcome, it's better, it's faster. For example, you're finding more errors or whatnot and you have faster resolution time so you can close your books faster. That's what they're buying. They're not buying agentic buzzword into their checkbook. They really want to buy the value.

1:08:33Errik Anderson:Yeah. What is the value of getting this business to scale? Is there something where you can optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product at the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of like how the economy is moving? We've seen that from some financial, some fintech companies. Like, how are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform?

1:09:03Pippa Lamb:Yeah, there's more. You mentioned like procurement, for example. But it's more obviously when you have a bunch of data that you can use and say, this is good, this is bad, or you should be working with the supplier and you're not because we see it over here. But I think that, you know, really building context across the network is probably where we see the most gains where you can take learnings from a carrier that's working with, you know, suppliers working with multiple parties in the network and then say, oh, well, this carrier always likes to build a specific way. And so propagate that learning through the LM's context across all the companies that work with that carrier.

1:09:36Pippa Lamb:And I think that's really, I'd say, the unlock and automation that you get at scale. And then obviously, you mentioned the intelligence one, the time to value. You're able to get someone on much faster because you're working with 95 % of their suppliers instead of 2 % of their suppliers. That's a huge win as well.

1:09:50Errik Anderson:What were you doing before this? Did you always have a love for back office supply chain optimization?

1:09:56Matt McKinney:I can tell you. I can tell you has since he was a boy. I came out of the womb and I said, I want to automate the back office.

1:10:04Errik Anderson:Yeah. complex yeah

1:10:09Pippa Lamb:I've always used to assess the systems and making them more efficient when you look at the physical world supply chain, the trucks and the train, that stuff is so exciting you feel like it's the last frontier where you can truly unlock supply chain alone in the US is$11 trillion in spend one of the largest contributors that's huge if you want to have an impact on GDP

1:10:34Errik Anderson:Oh, too high.

1:10:37Matt McKinney:Sorry, I was giving you that for the 11 trillion. You said the biggest number.

1:10:41Pippa Lamb:That's huge. If you want to have an impact, though, on GDP, at the end of the day, GDP growth is just productivity growth. The technology is the leading advantage in that. You're saying that$11 trillion in spend goes to the supply chain and no one's really touching that. We've got to go attack that problem.

1:10:55Errik Anderson:Yeah. Yeah, I have so many more questions.

1:10:58Pippa Lamb:But before that, my co-founder and I were at Uber early on the freight team. And we saw a lot of the real world there where you had messy PDFs, you had fill of ladings, proof of deliveries, just a total data mess, to be honest with you. And we knew that there had to be a better way.

1:11:16Matt McKinney:Dude, perfect VC pattern match. Uber, freight team.

1:11:20Errik Anderson:Yep. That's a great team. Great company. We know so many entrepreneurs that came out of Uber. Tell us about the round. What's going on? How much did you raise?

1:11:27Pippa Lamb:We raised$95 million Couldn't pull together

1:11:33Matt McKinney:That last five What was going on buddy?

1:11:38Errik Anderson:Sandbagging I know You had to set up the next round

1:11:42Matt McKinney:You got a little bit for the next one Yeah exactly

1:11:46Errik Anderson:We're super excited

1:11:49Pippa Lamb:Where are you guys based?

1:11:51Errik Anderson:Valor, Atreides, AVC Founders Fund, Index, JPMorgan You got everybody

1:11:56Matt McKinney:You got it.

1:11:57Errik Anderson:Congratulations.

1:11:58Matt McKinney:Wait, where are you guys based?

1:11:59Pippa Lamb:Sorry, I missed that. We're based in San Francisco. We've got offices in Chicago as well as in New York.

1:12:04Errik Anderson:Is that because Chicago is a major logistics hub with the trains and trucks and stuff?

1:12:10Pippa Lamb:Yeah, there's a lot of really good talent. No, there is a major.

1:12:13Errik Anderson:I'm not making this up, right? Because the boats come through the lakes. It was like a major hub of transactions.

1:12:21Matt McKinney:Is that because Chicago has trains and trucks?

1:12:23Errik Anderson:They do. They do. This is real, right? Am I wrong? You're not wrong. I'll give you stats.

1:12:29Pippa Lamb:So 30 % of goods that enter America go through Chicago.

1:12:33Errik Anderson:Thank you. Thank you. 30%. Not bad. John was right. I was right. You're like, oh, Chicago is such a weird pick. It's not. It makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much. Great to meet you, Matt. Congrats to the whole team. Congratulations.

1:12:45Matt McKinney:And hopefully you're back on the show this year with some more news. Really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Love the show, by the way. Thank you. Have a good one. Great to meet you.

1:12:53Errik Anderson:up next we have Eric Anderson from Alloy Therapeutics

1:12:57Matt McKinney:I love messing with you

1:12:59Errik Anderson:you love messing with me

1:13:00Matt McKinney:never gets old

1:13:01Errik Anderson:well without further ado Alloy Therapeutics has raised a series E to build full stack AI biotech infrastructure Eric Anderson is here live what's going on Eric how are you doing gentlemen I'm doing great today

1:13:15James Wise:thank you so much for hopping on

1:13:17Errik Anderson:first time on the show please introduce yourself and the company a bit

1:13:21James Wise:I'm Eric Anderson I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics. We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world, helping people discover and develop drugs.

1:13:31Errik Anderson:Okay. Infrastructure. What exactly is going on in the biotech stack? I imagine everything from centrifuges down to writing PDFs for the FDA to trials. There's so much that goes into that. What do you focus on specifically?

1:13:44James Wise:You got that. So the technology we have is really around more drug discovery and then into drug development. So the folks that do regulatory, the folks that do clinical, we work with them to discover drugs with the companies that we help to support. So we work with big pharma companies. We work with small biotech companies. What's going on in the industry today, the big trend right now is when we talk about infrastructure, who's going to actually do the wet lab work today in the lab? In addition, we've got everything going on with tech bio of all of this in silico work that's happening. It's really exciting.

1:14:14James Wise:And sort of bringing those things together.

1:14:16Matt McKinney:Yeah. And the idea is like you can have like a million times more ideas for different drugs, but then you still have the constraint of the physical world needing to kind of be able to actually run experiments until ideally we could simulate a lot more in the future, but maybe we're not there.

1:14:33James Wise:Exactly right. And you can simulate all these things, but it's a bit of the design, build, test, and then you learn. It's that loop we all know. And right now in the biotech space, we've made some incredible progress with Gen AI and machine learning capabilities to come up with a lot of those ideas. And you've got to close the loop then and actually be able to test them. And then there's a lot of skill that goes in, just the skill of drug development of what makes a good drug. And connecting those things together is what we do really well.

1:14:59Errik Anderson:So how much of this will wind up looking like an AWS for drug development? I can provision a certain machine and you have it and I can interface with it all over the internet and you will do all the physical stuff for me.

1:15:15James Wise:Yeah, that's part of it. So AWS just launched a service. Amazon launched a great service that connects these generative companies back to a back end of how you manufacture the protein and you test it. That's one small piece to the process, I would say. A lot of scientists out there that can design things in silico and then send them to a lab like that.

1:15:35Matt McKinney:Is that not like a crazy side quest for them?

1:15:40Errik Anderson:AWS has like centrifuges now?

1:15:43James Wise:No, AWS is actually just connecting them together. No, it's pretty cool. I think what they're going for there is that they want to be the cloud. If you're going to do your compute to come up with these in silico things, they want to make sure they see all the traffic and then just connect it to anyone else on the back end. Yeah, that makes sense.

1:15:59Errik Anderson:Got it, got it.

1:16:00James Wise:Yeah.

1:16:00Errik Anderson:So can you zoom out for me and just do a temperature check on biotech? We read one article about how Boston's going through a really tough time at the same time. Like every time I open up the Wall Street Journal, there's a new billion dollar acquisition.

1:16:15Matt McKinney:Yeah, so last year felt like the dark ages for biotech. It felt like everyone, every biotech investor that we were talking to was like, I don't even know why you'd keep investing in these companies. Like the returns have been so bad. And then this year is like the biggest year of biotech M &A since 2019.

1:16:35Errik Anderson:It feels like they're just rich from the GLP-1 boom, but I'd love to hear your sort of like narrative setting.

1:16:39James Wise:Certainly the GLP-1 boom. One of the trends that's going on here is that the industry has to restock the shelves for new drugs. As drugs go off patent, there's these revenue cliffs. And so big pharma is sitting on probably the largest pile of capital they've ever sat on. And they look to acquire a lot of their innovations from small companies. Those are the folks that we support to create new medicines. So there's definitely a huge M &A trend that's happening this year, and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. A big thing that's happening, as you read about that news in Boston, though, is we're doing drug discovery and development here in the U.S., but there's been a big shift to move it overseas and to offshore it and for pharma to acquire assets from outside of the United States.

1:17:19James Wise:And so that's been more of the big, I would say, the headwind for the domestic biotech space.

1:17:25Errik Anderson:Okay. How are you feeling about just acceleration in drug development generally? Like, you know, in cybersecurity, agentic coding, like there's these very clear scaling laws. And, you know, we have the meter chart of the amount of time an AI system can work on a single problem. It's doubling. It's on a very clear trend. I haven't seen a chart that's like that for biotech, but it feels like we're going through advancements and we're just getting more cures. So something's happening. But are you tracking it at a quantitative level yet or just qualitatively? How do you feel about drug development?

1:18:06James Wise:We're living in an era right now where the trend of all of the drugs that we're discovering, we have an acceleration in the amount of innovation that's coming from our labs. So that is just an incredible trend that is supporting everything we're doing in the lab. So the byproduct of that is, of course, generating massive amounts of more data, making sense of that data. And this is where a lot of the machine learning is coming in, is how do we digest all of the data that's being created in the industry, making sense of it, and then turning that into new cures as rapidly as possible. So that is an enormous trend right now in the industry.

1:18:38James Wise:And the advances that we have just from literally using cloud and open AI, even in the lab and just day to day things, you're seeing a handful of things come together. So, first of all, you see this explosion of data. You see the wet lab capabilities largely looking the same. And what's happening then is we're trying to organize that data and turn it into new cures as rapidly as possible. and in the background what we have is a number of new companies new entrants in the tech biospace that i think are just natively better at understanding this massive data problem and being able to make sense of it yeah and then on the other side you have the pharma and biotech which are actually you require all of those skills to actually make sense of what's going to work in in like a human biological system yeah so what's coming together this yeah this year i would say is that there's a lot more folks in tech bio that are getting better, but then we're just seeing the bio folks actually get better at tech.

1:19:31James Wise:So basically you're at this place where like the tech bio folks need more bio and the biotech folks need more tech. And if you're bringing those things together, I do think we're going to have an acceleration in a lot of the cures that we're making. Interesting.

1:19:43Matt McKinney:Give us a view into how big pharma executives are thinking right now. Are they confused why everyone and their grandma is injecting themselves with Chinese peptides yet at the same time, like more skeptical of vaccines than maybe ever. I feel like this kind of this interesting dichotomy.

1:20:06James Wise:Yeah, it's, well, in the industry today, I would say the executives in Pharma are looking at it from the same place they always do, which is about efficacy and patient safety. And so we're looking for drugs that work and improving that they work in animals and then ultimately in humans. So peptides being injected into humans, I think everyone's just saying, hey, what's safe, what's efficacious. The FDA has done some pretty amazing things in this administration, I think, to give flexibility for what's allowed. There's been some incredible changes that have happened that I think will accelerate the pace of innovation, what we do in the regulatory space, in the clinic, as we're testing it in humans.

1:20:40James Wise:I think pharma is apprehensive about the changes, but overall, they're excited that things are moving along and that we're going to see a lot of new drugs coming on the market.

1:20:48Errik Anderson:Can you help me understand the flow to get to a data boom in biotech? Because I would assume that that's more driven by dropping costs of DNA sequencing than anything from the Gen.AI world. But maybe there's something where the Gen.AI world can process data that was previously locked up in PDFs or something. What is actually driving the data boom?

1:21:16James Wise:it's those things really coming together so certainly the the continued falling cost of dna sequencing yeah and then the falling cost of all the other types of data that you can generate along with when you're sequencing someone's dna so if you go to a place like function health here like what you can pull off your aura ring or your apple watch there's actually a massive amount of data that is that is being generated passively yeah and right now the ability to connect that data to that i would call it real world data that we can connect to what's happening in patients is a level of complexity that we just haven't seen before on the data side.

1:21:48James Wise:But it's got to be rooted back in basically the wet lab. You're describing these things of taking your DNA or your tumor DNA, and you're learning from what's actually happening in a patient. And bringing those together is actually a huge data problem.

1:22:02Errik Anderson:I imagine you work with mostly big pharma or real biotech companies, but we're also seeing this like boom in like a single person vibe coding a cancer cure for their dog like yeah it's pretty crazy do you have a policy for whether like how small a team can be because i imagine it's not far from you getting like an inbound from like a single person who's like i want to do this by myself i'm a solo founder i can be trusted with advanced ai by and maybe they should maybe they shouldn't be i don't know i just want to know how you've like grappled with it. Maybe it's just not a business concern, so you don't need to worry about it, but I'd love to know how are you processing that idea.

1:22:40James Wise:I think everyone can be trusted with this generally, so that's actually not the problem. Don't worry about these fear-mongering that's happening on this front. At our company, we service anyone who is interested in discovering new drugs. That's a lot of what we try to do with our company is how do we democratize access to many of these tools? We started in a particular place nearly 10 years ago, and that was before we had any of this gen AI work going on. And it is lower that single person biotech company, or maybe just more of the virtual biotech company where you've got five or 10 folks, and they can work with a different contract research organization to help do their drug discovery and development.

1:23:19James Wise:That's been a trend for a while. What's happening is we're just getting more efficient at it today. So I do think the future biotech company is going to be much, much smaller and be able to plug into these different resources and be so much more efficient at coming up with ideas and testing them.

1:23:34Errik Anderson:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is interesting. Tech loves to sing the praises of like the five or 10 person team, but there are a lot of biotech companies where it's like one genius researcher who discovered something and a couple support staff and then a lot of outsourced stuff all the way to, okay, we're ready to sell it. And it's mostly just a research organization. This is not entirely new there. You mentioned that you're not worried about like doom related to like bio, but like, you know, how are you grappling with the idea of like somebody making a super bubonic plague or, you know, some new flu?

1:24:11Errik Anderson:Like, do you feel like there's safeguards or how have you processed that question?

1:24:17James Wise:There's large groups of folks that are worried about this. And I think the United States military and some of the consortiums that we've been involved with are giving that thought. It really comes down to, though, is you can make a lot of things that might be dangerous. There's always a bad actor problem. The way that we think about that is through our biosecurity division. We try to make sure that the capabilities that we need to have in the United States are always available and accessible to us. So call it medical access capabilities. We've learned a lot of lessons in COVID. Yeah. Everything from could we actually just test for for viruses in the community?

1:24:50James Wise:And do we have the reagents available to do that? And then, of course, we had masks and everything else. So from our perspective, we think about biosecurity as a way of making sure that you do all of those components from being able to surveil what's happening in the theater all the way out to can we discover and develop a drug very rapidly? And there's some great different initiatives that are going on of these ideas. Can you go from a threat to 100 days later, actually have a drug ready to go? And our company and others participate in making sure that there's just a really robust response available with incredible supply chain and sort of make sure we can do everything here in the United States at all times.

1:25:28Errik Anderson:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it certainly seems like the advancement in the positive side, like we're seeing a major, major swing to the upside right now. Every time I hear about one of these new medicines or new treatments, it seems really positive. There was a huge story about pancreatic cancer recently, which was a complete white.

1:25:47James Wise:Right now, we've got a conference that's going on and we saw two different studies that were showing just for some of the patients that were on drug, it was six years later, they still had no disease. And that's what we saw in the upper study.

1:25:59Errik Anderson:And that's what most people should know about pancreatic cancer. It is really, really tough.

1:26:02James Wise:Oh, it's really incredible. It's one of the worst cancers we have. But I think this is the overall trend. We are living in a world where we will cure everything that is curable, I think, in the next three decades. It's really just a question of, and maybe even faster than that, it's a question of how fast can we accelerate and really give as many people as possible access to these incredible tools. And just like in tech, I mean, where you saw these very small companies be able to do incredible things in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I was investing back during the first Internet bubble back in venture capital 25 years ago.

1:26:35James Wise:And in those times, the world just looked at a different place. We actually middleware.

1:26:39Matt McKinney:Were you 10 years old?

1:26:41James Wise:I was like 48 right now. So, yeah, I was still a child. You look like late 30s.

1:26:47Matt McKinney:So that's good for you.

1:26:50James Wise:I was a child at the time. But it was incredible because there was a lot of the same criticisms that we're hearing in the tech space right now. And as it relates to biotech, it was like we were wrong about everything back then, except for what we were right about. We did see the flow of investing coming in and many, many things went bankrupt. But the things that didn't go bankrupt changed the world. And that exact same thing is happening today that you're going to see an incredible number of winners. And I do think biotech is going to be an important part of the big market that everyone's going after in the AI and ML space as well.

1:27:22James Wise:The tech space is going to go conquer biology as much as it has in other places. But I would say also that pharma and biotech very much have a seat at the table. Our academic researchers have a seat at the table there. And it's really about bringing the two domains together that are going to be critical. One of them is not going to go it alone without the other. Tell us about the round.

1:27:40Errik Anderson:How much did you raise? How much did you raise?

1:27:43James Wise:We raised$40 million this time. Yeah, we hadn't raised any money. There we go. Thanks, man. Congratulations. Appreciate that. We've been working hard to build a real business. So, yeah. This was the first round? This has been a long haul for us. This is our Series E. I'm a little old school. Back when I was a child, when I was a baby investing 25 years ago, I learned that it's okay to just letter your rounds just like normal. Our last round was in 2022.

1:28:07Errik Anderson:Yeah.

1:28:07James Wise:Yeah, I'm kind of old school in that way. So in 2022, we did a round and between then and now we really laid down the infrastructure so that we had operations across 17 time zones. Now we're operating the United States, Japan, the UK. We have an incredible group that's actually working in the GCC right now in the Middle East. Obviously, there's a lot going on there that's that's creating a bit of a headwind. But we're very bullish on the work we're doing in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Riyadh and Doha and and over in Abu Dhabi. So, yeah, bringing all this stuff together has been really important for us.

1:28:41James Wise:And just our view is you stitch together the supply chain of innovation. You link it to great real world data and you bring a lot of AI and ML in there. And we're going to really accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development. Very cool.

1:28:53Errik Anderson:Well, thanks so much for joining the show. Great to meet you. Enjoyed the conversation. Have a great rest of your week. Thanks for having me on, guys. Appreciate it. Goodbye. Up next, we have Pippa Lamb returning to the show from Sweet Capital alongside James Wise from Balgerton Capital Partners. I believe they are in the waiting room Calling in from across the pond Are you both over in the UK today? They better be

1:29:18Matt McKinney:Yeah, we're here Giving the news

1:29:20Errik Anderson:Well, welcome to the show Why don't Pippa, why don't you reintroduce yourself And James, since it's the first time on the show You can introduce yourself as well

1:29:29signüll:Yeah, big day James' first time on TVPN, guys

1:29:33Matt McKinney:Yes, we're very excited Fantastic to have you

1:29:36signüll:yeah so those I haven't met before I'm Pippa Lam I'm a partner here at Sweet Capital I'm also an active angel investor here and I also scout with A6 E &Z but generally sort of sit between the

1:29:48Matt McKinney:ecosystems of the US and the UK tech how do you I didn't know you were you were the triple threat there how do you how do you decide who gets who gets the deal for that's interesting no yeah

1:29:59Errik Anderson:Yeah, yeah. Secret secrets.

1:30:02Matt McKinney:Yeah, yeah. James?

1:30:03Pippa Lamb:James. Yeah, first time caller but long time viewer. Thanks guys. It's great to have you. Having me on. So I'm a general partner at Baldurton Capital. We're a$7 billion venture firm. We're based here in London. And we used to be called Benchmark Europe. There we go, we got the buzzer. So back in 2001, we were Benchmark Europe. We spun out in 2010 when the European market really took off. And for the last four months, I've also been helping set up the UK's Sovereign AI Fund.

1:30:31Errik Anderson:Okay. Yeah. Take us through that. I think that's what we're here to talk about. How long have the talks been going on? How big is the fund? What's the strategy? What makes it unique in that it's so linked to the UK specifically?

1:30:42Pippa Lamb:Yeah, well, about a year ago, we kicked off this big AI opportunities plan. There was huge news about it at the time. And we've been working through all the various parts of that. And people can talk more about things we've been doing in data centers and compute. But the fund was set off to really accelerate some of the UK's big UK AI successes, but with a lot more than capital. So we've got about 500 million pounds. It's a starting point. It's the entry ticket in this game. But more importantly, we're providing access to UK supercomputers here. So huge amount of compute. We're providing fast track visas.

1:31:16Pippa Lamb:We're providing unique data sets. We're providing government as a customer. So procurement through government, basically to give a lot of the companies that could benefit from working with the government a massive boost.

1:31:25Errik Anderson:Yeah. I have to say that supercomputer is such an underrated term. Whoever thought to rebrand supercomputer to data center is an idiot. Terrible. Because data center sounds so boring and terrible. Supercomputer is awesome.

1:31:41Matt McKinney:I'm not going to take my job. I'm so into supercomputers. I love to use a supercomputer.

1:31:46Errik Anderson:Yeah. It's your grandfather's data center,

1:31:49Pippa Lamb:right? It's the thing supercomputers like what IBM used to build. Yeah. Yeah.

1:31:52Errik Anderson:And, and, and they They have them in like cool scientific locations like CERN has one. And like you always hear about, oh, they're doing astrophysics on them. There's so many cool things. But that does link to, you know, where will the UK get the most leverage out of investing? Because I imagine that there's not a lot of value in just trying to like clone Google search or Instagram for Europe. Like those platforms, it's fine. But at the same time, sovereign AI does have value. where in the stack does that live in your mind?

1:32:26Pippa Lamb:Yeah, so we're building out a whole range of talent, right? So we're going to be doing everything from Electron to Token, but obviously working with American partners, doing that and international partners as well, sometimes at the chip level, sometimes at the model level. And then we're starting to focus on where the UK has huge advantages. So life sciences is a huge area for us, right? If you look at Isomorphic, which is actually a spin out of Google, you know, they're based here in London. The whole team basically is European and they may be the closest we get to a AI company getting a drug all the way through to approval.

1:32:58Pippa Lamb:That's sort of end to end AI design. Outside of life sciences, loads of stuff in physics and material sciences. So a lot of the AI science end of the spectrum rather than the AI slop end of the spectrum.

1:33:10Errik Anderson:Yeah. Pippa, are you seeing an effect where entrepreneurs from around Europe are moving to London in the same way that folks from Chicago move to San Francisco to do startups? Is there a proper movement to make London the destination for ambitious European founders these days?

1:33:33signüll:yeah i think it's it you know i obviously fairly biased having spent a lot of time here but i think that the uk has always batted above its weight in terms of the deep r &d pockets we have here you know in terms of universities the talent that are coming out of the local schools um that's already created a very fertile ecosystem and i think that you know one of the reasons you wanted to jump on here today was because it feels like you know uk is having a bit of an ai moment it's not to say we weren't already at the forefront of many of the innovations happening here. You know, of course, we always talk about Demis, Hannah Sabas from, you know, DeepMind that was founded in the UK.

1:34:11signüll:Obviously, we would have loved to have kept that here. But of course, it also went with Google. But, you know, we have long been at the forefront.

1:34:18Matt McKinney:I think it's super critical that DeepMind maintains such a big presence in the UK because you guys now with the Sovereign AI Fund, if someone wants to leave DeepMind, spin out, like you guys can be there to provide capital. Exactly.

1:34:34signüll:And that's what we're seeing now. I think both from the idea that we want to be an AI maker, not just an AI taker. We're seeing, you know, grassroots innovation come out of the schools here. But as you say, we're also having people either leave DeepMind, also in terms of our partners across in the US. I think, you know, James can correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like a lot of the, you know, the first destination headquarter within Europe is usually in London. I think that that is pretty much most of the large AI companies we've had. So I think that there is definitely, it's always been a good hub for AI, but we are seeing a lot of additional tailwinds of which Sovereign AI is one of them at the moment as well.

1:35:14Errik Anderson:We went through this period last year and it might still be going on. I don't really have a pulse check on it where every AI company seed round was in like the hundreds of millions of dollars. And I imagine that you're not going to spread this fund over just five companies. And so do you think that it's one, but I mean, do you imagine, uh, being, uh, like, like investing alongside other funds and doing more structured rounds where a lot of capital comes together to take like big swings, or is there actually some sort of structural shift in the type of startups that are getting built today where five, 10, $20 million can actually put some points on the board early on and get in the game in a meaningful way.

1:36:01Matt McKinney:Yeah, I can see that you guys can make a number of bets on the app layer. You can talk about energy, maybe some more science-focused Neo Labs, maybe Neo Cloud. I feel like 500 will really can kind of seed a bunch of different players.

1:36:17Errik Anderson:But yeah, how are you thinking about like the dynamics of like early stage startup fundraising right now? Yeah.

1:36:23Pippa Lamb:I mean, in the UK, actually, we are seeing those hundred million dollar and even billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a, in a founder who's out of deep mine, which is incredible. And there's, there's been a bunch of those in the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it the other way around. So we're saying we're going to give you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars possibly of government procurement contracts, right? If you can build it, if it's good enough, if you're world-class, we're the customer. We're ready to buy.

1:36:54Pippa Lamb:Same thing with compute. We're able to give a significant amount of compute to early stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayer is taking all this risk backing you. What's our upside? We want to be on the cap table. We want to do it on commercial terms. It's going to be on the same terms as an index, as a boulder turn, as an Accel, as an A16Z, whoever's there, we're going to be good partners. But the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting on the cap table. It's also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, still, five, 10 million pounds can make a difference.

1:37:26Pippa Lamb:So I don't want to be too flippant about it. Those things early stage do matter. But we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking supporting all the AI companies.

1:37:38signüll:Yeah. I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, as a commercial VC, it's hard to compete purely on capital, right? Especially in AI right now is where the numbers become so huge. I think that something I've been really excited to see from the Sovereign AI Fund is exactly as James said, is this kind of hands-on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large data sets that the government may have access to that portfolio companies will have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said. And then obviously we're going back to the million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, which is a huge, huge help.

1:38:21signüll:So it's not purely trying to compete on a capital basis, which I think, frankly, would not play to the strengths of what the fun can do.

1:38:29Errik Anderson:So AI is extremely popular in China and India, deeply unpopular in America. Where do you think the UK will land? Do you think there's a chance that the population broadly will be supportive of artificial intelligence?

1:38:46Matt McKinney:They're like, AI allows me to spend more time at the pub.

1:38:51Pippa Lamb:That's the way to sell it. That's what I'm saying. Hey, look, the UK, we've been pretty strong in early adopters, almost of every wave of new technology, right? Whether it's financial services, like, you know, paying with this thing, the Brits are way ahead. earliest adopters and when it comes to sort of first generation ai tools your clauds and gpt i think the uk is number one or two in europe for adoption so so far so good but of course there's loads of issues you know i i think that um there's going to need to be some really strong political leadership to explain to people the trade-offs between you know these things can be transformative make you know your wealth and your health and your security of your nation better off But at the same time, we're going to need more energy.

1:39:34Pippa Lamb:There's a load of issues we need to navigate on online harms and copyright. So some of those battles have been fought publicly. Some of them are still to come.

1:39:44Errik Anderson:Yeah. You say that there's an opportunity for the government to be a buyer. I think a lot of people jump to defense and military. I'm more interested in if you're seeing any opportunities in non-defense sector opportunities for efficiency. I feel like at least in America, everyone laments like the DMV is a huge weight. And like if they just had, you know, a piece of software instead of a physical form, things would speed up. But are you seeing opportunities for startups to increase efficiency across non-military portions of the UK government?

1:40:26Pippa Lamb:Oh, yeah. I mean, I mean, everywhere. And I think, you know, there's a bunch of businesses here in Europe. I'm sure there are in the US as well. We're using AI for you to complete procurement contracts. You know, these like 400 page things you have to do. So private companies have been doing that in response. you know, the UK government at least is already smartly using AI to read them as well and prioritize them, right? They don't make any decisions, but they help you help you navigate some of these processes. Same thing in transcription and voice. Like, obviously, we're already seeing GPs and doctors benefit hugely from being able to use these tools to quickly take notes and actually look at the patient rather than spend all their time sitting in front of the computer filling out the health record.

1:41:09Pippa Lamb:So, look, there's been some early wins. And I think, you know, part of the job at Sovereign AI is to work out which of the companies we should work with and the government to see where else those wins are.

1:41:19Errik Anderson:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy?

1:41:21Pippa Lamb:Super smart.

1:41:22Matt McKinney:I hope that you can work out, like, on the cap table to just say the United Kingdom. Because, like, I feel like as a founder, if you just see your country on your cap table, you're like, well, I got to deliver. I got to deliver. I got to deliver. But very cool. and the country is lucky to have you both, you know, leading this effort.

1:41:44Errik Anderson:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Have a good rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon.

1:41:49signüll:Goodbye. Bye, guys.

1:41:53Errik Anderson:There's some huge news in the world of robotics because they made a slot machine that can follow you across the casino floor.

1:42:02Matt McKinney:we we actually got a a slot machine stalker before a humanoid demo yeah this is before i guess not demo well this is before it can actually fold your laundry like we've been seeing a lot of

1:42:16Errik Anderson:laundry folding demos we got the slot machine never what is never ask a woman her age a man

1:42:22Matt McKinney:his salary or humanoid robot founder to let you be alone with the robot for 30 seconds okay but

1:42:29Errik Anderson:What is actually happening here? Because obviously, like the joke is that it will follow you around so that you never stop gambling. But that can't be why they actually built this. It must be because they want to be able to reconfigure the layout easier.

1:42:47Matt McKinney:It's probably that, but also the novelty.

1:42:49Errik Anderson:Okay.

1:42:50Matt McKinney:Oh, if you see something moving around. If you're walking through.

1:42:53Errik Anderson:You'll be like, I got to chase that down and throw a couple bucks in.

1:42:55Matt McKinney:Oh, that's funny. It's a robot slot machine.

1:42:57Errik Anderson:This also looks like, I don't know what Novomatic is, but this does not look like it's at an actual casino. This looks like it's at a trade show for casino equipment, which I think might be, this is a demo of something that this company is going to try and sell to casinos. I don't know that this is actually at a major casino just yet, although people are walking around. But it looks like trade show bags to me. I don't know. This says trade show all over it. I do wonder if this is being teleoperated or if this is end-to-end machine learning. I need to know. I need to know the tech stack. And I need to know, is this truly autonomous or is this just being puppeteered by an Xbox controller?

1:43:40Matt McKinney:We've got to get one for the studio.

1:43:41Errik Anderson:We've had, this is not, this could be just a remote-controlled car, which has existed since, like, what, the 80s maybe? Maybe longer. But we're in this phase where we want to layer on, oh, this is AGI. This is truly AGI. What else is going on in the timeline, Jordi? Anything else? The must-have item in Silicon Valley is a$178 sweater with a CEO's face. Leaders from companies from NVIDIA to Palantir are now driving fashion, signaling a new era of the cult of the founder. We saw Nick on our team rocking the Jensen sweater from GTC. It looks great. This is a very beautiful sweater. It does look great.

1:44:25Errik Anderson:Very funny. Very silly. And just a nice departure from just a normal T-shirt. You know, for what, 20, 30 years, the tech merch was just a T-shirt with a logo on it. That's fine. But why not mix it up? Why not go in a different direction and make a sweater with the CEO's full cartoon character on it? Why not?

1:44:46Matt McKinney:Dolly Bali says is showing a screenshot from, I believe is BizBuySell of a laundromat, which is selling. It's got 421 ,000 of EBITs asking just under 3 million. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024. Wow. They just made this business in a couple years.

1:45:18Errik Anderson:Lifestyle business.

1:45:18Matt McKinney:And they're like, I would like$3 million for it now.

1:45:21Errik Anderson:Okay, a couple more posts. John Feo, friend of the show, says, The sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last 100 years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be, but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience. Instead, it's what Apple and Meta were trying to go after, but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of stadium. It will suck in only the best acts, and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life.

1:45:55Errik Anderson:This is how you capture value over the next cycle. And I agree with this. I think this is a great take. So back when the—

1:46:02Matt McKinney:Yeah, if you rewind a year ago, you're like, companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of NVIDIA orders. do you want to meanwhile we have the sphere which they built the sphere it's one concert venue they built they built a really cool concert venue in vegas they got a bunch of debt but it's awesome which one do you which one do you want to own it the trade is and of course on a video you were you were still up you know 100 over the last 12 months but if you had bought the sphere you were up 442%.

1:46:35Errik Anderson:Yeah, did very well. I made a whole YouTube video about the sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it. I had dug into the founder and how it got built. And it was just a fascinating, fascinating story. But I think he's right that there will be a sphere in every major city. There is technically a sphere-like location in Los Angeles over by SoFi Stadium. It's not technically a full sphere with leds on the outside but it has a big screen you can go and watch a football game there and i think it's doing well as well i haven't dug into that one nearly as much but i do think that uh these types of like immersive experiences uh the sphere is unique because it grabs uh attention from all over the world you fly by on a plane you just see it and

1:47:22Matt McKinney:you see the emoji it's kind of a miss that we've never done anything with this fear no uh last a little white pill here. Yeah, what's up? Meta announced, level up a free four-week training program that takes people with no prior experience and prepares them to work as fiber technicians on data center construction sites across the U.S. We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and the broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. And I'm sure people will come up with reasons why this is bad, actually.

1:47:54Matt McKinney:But I think this is great. opportunity. And Tyler, we didn't get a chance to talk with you about this before the show, but you're actually going to be going through the program starting tomorrow. We got you a slot. This actually seems fun. I would be interested in doing this.

1:48:14Errik Anderson:They made Data Center Simulator in real life. They made Data Center Simulator in real life. That's amazing. Tyler, do you ever play Elden Ring? No.

1:48:25signüll:More like online games.

1:48:27Errik Anderson:Or on, Elden Ring can be online.

1:48:29signüll:Okay, I don't know.

1:48:30Errik Anderson:You can play with people. They're making a movie about it. The live action adaptation of Elden Ring produced by A24 in partnership with Bandai Namco and film for IMAX is slated for release March 3rd, 2028. Wow, that's a long ways away. Production will begin in spring. But if you haven't played Elden Ring, it's a fun time. It's really, really hard. And sometimes it just gets like a little bit too much, but it's a good time. Anyway.

1:48:55Matt McKinney:Well, folks.

1:48:56Errik Anderson:Thank you for tuning in. We will be.

1:48:57Matt McKinney:It's been an honor and a privilege.

1:48:59Errik Anderson:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. And flashbang out. We'll see you later.

1:49:06Matt McKinney:There we go.

1:49:07Errik Anderson:Going flashbang.

1:49:08Matt McKinney:We love you.

1:49:08Errik Anderson:Goodbye.