Who Is Soham Parekh? Erebor News Leaks, Microsoft Scales Back AI Chip Plans and Cuts 9,000 Jobs, Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching | Deedy Das, Emily Sundberg, Mert Mumtaz, Zak Kukoff, John Kim, Amit Jain

27:02Yeah, so Q1 was down 20%. 20%. Yeah. So, I don't know. So Amit saying, where's the brand damage? Can we pull up the market caps for Tesla and the rest of the MAG7? I want to see how they're ranking. Here we go. We have our MAG7 leaderboard, and Tesla's at the bottom. $984 billion in market cap, trading at 172 price-to-earnings ratio. So they're seventh. But if the cyber cap stuff plays out - One of the most magnificent things about the company is that the E ratio. Yeah. It's absolutely fantastic. So, but if the CyberCab plays out, that is a significant, I mean, you look at what is the market for, you know, all the different RoboTaxi drives, right?

27:48Probably in the tens of billions of dollars that Americans would spend. And so, I think a lot of people are expecting that to hit and that to work. And the fact that the CyberCab is at that 30K price point instead of the 300K price point for a Waymo being a durable advantage. The fact that they can produce, I mean the fact that they even make 400 ,000 cars in a quarter. It's a hundred thousand cars a month 3 ,000 cars a day. That's a lot of industrial capacity. And so that has to have some have some some value and some leverage if Totally the AI catches up and the cybercabin comes down. The battle between Waymo and Tesla is just getting started.

28:29Oh, yeah. And then a lot of people are buying the stock on the promise of humanoid robots is like It is it does feel early optimist does not feel ready for your production or ready to buy or ready to go out on the manufacturing line, but What other stock in the mag seven would you buy to get exposure to humanoid robotics? If you think that's an important thesis like there's not really that much Yeah, and even and even in the and even in the smaller like like like mid cap or small cap stocks there really aren't that many pure play humanoid robotic companies that are out. So there's not really anything that's sucking up that demand in the market.

29:06Anyway, speaking of the market, Tesla, Figma has dropped their S1. The numbers are strong. $821 million in the last 12 months revenue. 46 % year over year growth. 18 % non-gap operating margin. They turn profitable. $1.5 billion in cash. Zero debt. 91 % gross margins. best in class for SaaS, 132 % net dollar retention, sticky AF, says Jason Lemkin, 78 % of the Forbes 2000 use Figma, 76 % use two plus products platform expansion from massive losses to 18 % operating margins. This is how you prep for an IPO, trading under dollar fig on New York Stock Exchange soon. So congratulations. Absolutely, absolutely incredible.

29:54Yes. Obviously, Figma is a sponsor and partner of ours. But this story is really incredible. The other thing that Jason missed here that I think is interesting is Figma holds BTC on the balance sheet, which I think that retail is going to be excited by. There's also a really exciting AI story here. Figma Make launched it. Almost 70 million dollars in Bitcoin ETFs and was approved to buy 30 more million in BTC. Zach says, this is the first company we've seen this cycle that's buying Bitcoin and isn't bad. That's pretty notable. He used a different word. And Tane says, Figma has$1.54 billion in cash on hand, but only raised$749 million in primary capital in its history.

30:41It will go public with a negative net burn over its lifetime of$791 million, thanks to their efficiency and the$1 billion breakup fee received from Adobe. Wow. Wow. That's remarkable. Things are working out. Yeah. Christina had no good take. I remember, I mean, you know, they obviously getting shot down by the Europeans on an acquisition that I think was exciting for everybody involved, from Dylan to Scott to the cap table and the team. And, you know, Adobe broadly was, I think, disappointing for everyone. But I think this is going to be, you know, in hindsight, I think people will look back and say, this was actually the right thing.

31:24Totally, totally. And I think the markets are gonna love another founder-led company. Yep, Christina had a good post here. The first thing I appreciate in Figma's S1, everyone said the S1 was the best designed S1 ever, which makes sense. But it was right at the start of Dylan's letter, when Evan and I started Figma, too often companies write departed founders out of a company's story. Dylan did the opposite, and that says a lot. I love it. Very classy. So you can go to Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

31:58And you can check out Figma make you can vibe code, whatever you want. Tyler is in the midst of vibe coding, a new product that we're going to release a data product, um, in the next couple of weeks for free. Uh, and I'm excited to share that. Otherwise I wanted to pull up, let's pull up the poly market for the reconciliation bill. Zach Kukoff is going to be coming on the show later today to give us the update. Things are trending down across the board. The getting it done by July 4th is sitting at a 61 % chance, down 6 % over the last 24 hours. So we will follow this one, and I'm excited to get the update.

32:42It's funny, a big bill like this with this deadline of the 4th of July because there is this overall incentive. I think people would like to enjoy their 4th of July versus angrily debating a bunch of small details. I think the debt ceiling always comes up during the summer. I remember years ago it being a topic during summer, and it feels like a very weird thing that you have this ultra-high-pressure DC narrative during the slowest time of the year for everyone else. Some of the nicest time of the year in France. Yeah. It's very American. We grind it out here. We grind it out. Anyway, you don't need to be grinding on bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more.

33:24You can go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Go to ramp.com. We need to tell people about... Sorry. I was going to say our new ad that we shipped for Wander. We shipped this 35 minutes ago. We should check this off. Live on location at a Wander. and I would encourage people to just go watch it. Can we pull it up on the screen? Let's pull up a few seconds. Let's give a little teaser. I think we can watch the whole thing. We can watch the whole thing? Yeah, it's only 45 seconds. Let's pull it up.

33:55Let's pull it up and watch it. We went full golden retriever mode for this one, folks. Can we go full screen on this? Is that possible? Go full screen? Well, we pull that up. This is great.

34:14Thank you.

34:51Such a fun shoot. If you're a GQ fan, you probably noticed that we were heavily inspired. Maybe even you could call it a shot for shot remake of the GQ video with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. But, I mean, fantastic inspiration from those folks. It's pretty funny. We showed a preview of that to a few people and they'd go, is that a wander? We're like, yes, obviously. But still, this is a property in Malibu that you can rent this summer. And it is absolutely fantastic. Anyway, we've got to tell folks about the TBPN Derivative Works Clause. So if you're watching the show, if you're writing about the show, engaging with the show, you should know that we have terms of conditions, terms of use.

35:38we don't ask for much, but there is one rule that we take very, very seriously and our lawyers have been very serious about it, which is that if you watch the show, if you engage with the show, if you write about the show, and then you go and create a derivative work, so a copycat, a livestream, a daily technology show, a clone, yeah, a clone. We don't ask for financial compensation. Nothing. We don't ask you to stop doing what you're doing, but you are legally required to drink one glass of municipal tap water on the stream. Just one, every time you do the show. Every time you do the show, you have to do it.

36:13So if you were to copy us and do a daily show, you would have to drink one glass of tap water. One glass of municipal tap daily. Yes. And so a lot of people have been fighting this. They copy us and then they refuse to drink the tap water. But this is legally. It's only a matter of time until they tap out. They gotta tap out. This is called tapping out. Tapping out is when you admit that yes, you did copy tvpn and so you're tapping out you're drinking the tap water and it's legally binding so uh just if you're thinking about doing it just be prepared and we wanted we wanted this policy to be fair right yeah it doesn't cost you anything no maybe your health a little bit maybe but um yeah so feel free to copy us as long as you tap out as long as you tap out always tap out and we'll be we'll be um you know if you launch a derivative work copycat clone whatever uh we'll remind you yeah yeah in the comments everyone will remind you yeah a lot of people say like oh how will I know if if what I'm doing is truly derivative like it you know is this or these their definition it's like don't worry you'll know you will definitely know if you have to drink the tap water like we're going to make it apparent anyway let me tell you about Vanta automate compliance manage risk improve trust continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

37:39I was talking with a buddy yesterday. He was walking by one of our billboards in New York. He sent it to me and he said that he signed up for Vanta on Friday because he signed a massive logo that I can't say for a startup. And they said, you're going to need Sock 2 before we and dance. So he's on Vanta now. That's amazing. And I'd love to see it. So shout out to Vant, sorry, shout out to Grant and Vanta. Okay, yeah. Granta. For cooking. The mashup. Let's go a little bit deeper into Erebor. This is certainly the hottest story in our world today. It appears at the Financial Times. I think what happened here is that they found the, like a filing and then put the story together.

38:24So this is, there's a lot of no comments in here, but there's still some interesting facts that we'll go through. So Peter Thiel joins tech billionaires backing new lender Erebor to rival Silicon Valley Bank. And people have been talking about this new bank and the name and stuff. And so it had been out there, but it had not been in the press yet. A startup named after the Dragon's Mountain and Lord of the Rings. So a group of tech billionaires led by Palmer Luckey, co-founder of military contractor Anderil, is preparing to launch a U.S. bank intended to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank, serving startups, including cryptocurrency businesses, To be named Erebor, the bank would be backed by high-profile tech investors, including Joe Lonsdale from ABC, and he's a co-founder of Palantir, according to people familiar with the matter.

39:05Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, would also be among the investors, according to two people. Like Anderil and Palantir, Erebor's name is a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Erebor is the lonely mountain whose treasures are reclaimed from the dragon smog. Okay. Lucky and Lonsdale who were big donors to Donald Trump in the 2024 US President election want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go-to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks might reject. We were talking a lot about founder liquidity, but there really was a time when you raise a$10 million Series A and SVB would almost always underwrite that if it was with a tier one to the tune of like a$2 million debt line.

39:48So you just get an extra 20 % as venture debt and use that to fund CapEx or an inventory line. Yeah, venture debt. Venture debt would always get a lot of heat because it can be used poorly. Yeah, and there were a lot of aggressive lenders, but SVB was kind of one of the cleaner ones, I thought. So Erebor has applied for a national bank charter in the United States, a license that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank. The bank will be a national bank providing traditional banking products as well as virtual currency related products and services for businesses and individuals, according to the application, which was made public this week.

40:25Target market would be businesses that were part of the U.S. innovation economy. In particular, tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defense and manufacturing. It would also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies. It's also planned to work with non-U.S. companies seeking access to the U.S. banking system. Erebor's co-founders first discussed launching a bank after the collapse of SVB in 2023, according to a person familiar with the matter. SVB has been the main bank for U.S. startups and their venture capital backers. Its assets were first owned as First Citizens.

40:57Yeah, so SVB is still operational and effectively name only. It's owned by First Citizens. What's interesting is that it is like owned, like the brand is owned and the corporate structure changed hands, but different pieces of the firm split off. I'm pretty sure Morgan Stanley wound up with the venture debt group or something like that. Different desks went to different places and they kind of parceled stuff up. Some of it was sold. Some of it was just like, hey, this person would rather be doing X, Y, or Z at a different firm. And so maybe Goldman or Morgan Stanley is trying to get into a particular market and they're like, hey, SVB has some great guys over there, it was kind of like a free-for-all for a little bit.

41:43There's not too much in here. There's a little bit about who's running this company. So Lucky and Lonsdale were not expected to be involved in the day-to-day management of the bank, according to people familiar with their plans. It will be run by co-CEO's Jacob Hirschman, who previously worked as an advisor at Crypto Group Circle, and Owen Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of digital assets software, Air Compliance. Mike Hagedorn, former senior executive vice president at New Jersey-based Valley National Bank. Let's give it up for senior executive vice presidents. For sure. We'll be the bank's president.

42:18And so they're going to have co-CEOs and a president on day one. What a stacked lineup. You got PT, Palmer Luckey, Lonsdale in the boardroom. And then you got co-CEOs and a president. This is a stacked lineup. I think we're working on a graphic. I've been pitching it. The starting lineup for this new team is looking pretty good. Well, that's the beauty of business. It can feel like sports, but there's not the same kind of rules, right? You know, you can put as many people on your team as you want. There's no salary caps. That's right. Most importantly. Juwan was posting. He was like, we're going to see salary caps in our lifetime.

42:52And I hope not because that would imply. Well, Mobdani's trying to do that, right? He wants the salary cap to be like$999 million. Like he wants a billion. There's Bernie too, also wants salary caps in business. Yes. And net worth caps. Net worth caps. Yeah. Much like a salary cap. Imagine there was a net worth cap in the NBA. It's like, yeah, like, okay, you've made enough money. Like you can't, you have to apply for free now. Its head office will be in Columbus, Ohio, which we talked about. Part of the application was submitted confidentially and has not been made public, such as details related to its shareholders, equity structure, and business plan.

43:28Lucky did not respond for requests for comment. Lonsdale confirmed he was a financial backer, but declined to comment further, and the other folks did not reply. Anyway, I'm sure they're gonna be building some projects, and you know what they're gonna need? They're gonna need Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. XAI, Greg Yang, great poster. Someone, DJ Kaus says, another great account, It says, visiting the XAI office really humbled me, and it's just tons of tents around desktops.

44:06Is this actually the XAI office? I'm so confused. And then Greg Yang, who actually works at XAI, says, that's not our office. We have way more tents. So I have no idea where these original pictures came from, but it does look like a lot of tents inside of an office. The internet's a tough place these days. You never know what's real, right? They could have just put up tents in a tech office. It could have been a prompt. It could have been a prompt. But I do know that the XAI team, I have it on good authority that there are tents in the office. I sleep in the office. Okay. Not necessarily like every day.

44:40Someone else was giving them a little, was chirping at them because they were saying, if you stay up coding until 3, 4 a.m. but then you sleep in. It doesn't really count. You're just nocturnal. It's like what's impressive is like actually working really hard for like 12 hours, taking a break, having some rest time and then getting a full eight hours of sleep. And it doesn't really matter what cycle that happens on. I guess the benefit of like the nocturnal programmer is that there's just less going on in the world. So there's less distractions. It's knowing that you're grinding while your competitors are sleeping.

45:14That's priceless. I guess. But I mean, truly, truly, there is like email is quieter during the night. Right. And the news is quieter. So, you know, it's like there's just less opportunity to get distracted by like the Elon Trump blow up. That happened when they were sleeping. So like, yeah, they woke up and they were like, OK, I guess something happened with our boss and the president. But, you know, the story is kind of over. So let's get to work. Anyway, if you work at XAI, you're going to have to sell this to big companies. You're going to need Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

45:52Get started for free. Anyway, we can go deeper into Microsoft. They are scaling back their ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays. Microsoft is focusing on less ambitious chip designs through 2028. They hope by scaling back some of the designs and pushing out the schedule for other AI chips it's already working on, it can develop them more easily. The hope is that when these chips are released over the next three years, they will still remain competitive with NVIDIA's AI chips. The decision follows delays in in-house chip development. This is from a report in the information. Microsoft wants to reduce reliance on NVIDIA for AI computing.

46:28But if we pull up the MAG7 chart, NVIDIA doesn't seem to be affected. They're still at the top of that baby at$3.8 trillion. But Microsoft's coming for them at$3.6 trillion. And so it's neck and neck. If Microsoft can fab their own chips with TSMC, design their own chips, rip out NVIDIA, that might be enough for flipping. Yeah. You're going to track on a poly market. Matthew from Cloudflare yesterday said every time we've seen this type of scale up on the silicon side, there's been, ended up being a glut. So we'll see. Praying that this time it's different. Yep. Would hate, would hate, love bubbles, hate the crash.

47:08Well, we have a funny post here from Zach. Quote tweeting, someone says, you attract what you fear. And Zach says, ah, I'm so scared of$3 billion in drunk cigarettes with her. I love that you put this in here. Zach's been on a roll. Anyway, if you're selling anything, including cigarettes, you're going to need to pay sales tax. And you're going to need Numeral. Go to numeralhq.com. Also, don't sell cigarettes. It's bad. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes. Says the nicotine salesman. Very different product. No, it is very different. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

47:46And we use Numero to sell nicotine. It is the sales tax automation tool of choice for Ridge, Grooms, Graza. The list goes on. Go check it out. That's great. We have a post here from Andy. Someone put us in the truth zone. Yeah, two cents.money. Two cents. We got to have him on sometime to talk about his. Have you seen the screenshots from his app? Yeah. It's like Twitter, but it's anonymous. It's just your network. You know, you plot and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But he has a poster. He says he's pretty imagine that this would result in a social network around your net worth.

48:26It's like, no, the magic of building infrastructure. I just wanted to make things a little bit smoother. Anyways, he was putting Kylie in the Kylie Robinson from wired in the true zone. It says claims to be wired wearing AirPods. Question mark. It's a good question, Kylie. You've got to answer some stuff. This is big. I am a firm believer in wired headphones. Try them out. I thought you were going to say wired the newspaper or the magazine. It's terrible to say, but if I could only have one, I would take wired headphones. Yep. Oh, wow. Well, she should get wired headphones because that would be very on brand for wired.

49:13Anyway, we have announcement. We're using Fin AI now for customer support. We've gotten a lot of questions coming into our customer support line. People asking, are you guys normal heights? And Fin can just immediately chime in. Of course, both of them are normal heights. What are you talking about? No, we need to set up a support at tbpn.com. For sure. Running on Fin. Yes. to answer these pressing questions. There aren't enough ads. Can I get a bespoke ad? And it will just automatically generate an ad for you. Yep. That would be what people really demand. Is Jordy really 5 '1"? Yes. Do you guys really, would you really take a bullet for big tech?

49:56It's like, absolutely. It's like, Finn, we were joking about that. Relax, relax. No. Finn is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one in ranking on G2. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. Go to fin.ai. to check it out. In other news, Microsoft is laying off 9 ,000 workers. This is a short article, but we've already covered this, but it's interesting to track. What's interesting is like, is Microsoft the only one that's doing these big riffs right now? It feels like they normally have this is what scares me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does Satya know?

50:30There are so many top signals right now. Just everywhere you look, top signal, top signal, top signal. I want to believe that this time it's different. but our industry goes through cycles naturally. Satya is a seasoned operator. He has incredible traction in generative AI. He's getting 20 % off the top of whatever OpenAI makes. You would think that he would be going on a spending frenzy, yet he's conducting routine layoffs. He's giving up data centers. He's saying, yep, you guys, I don't need it. even though yes they're you know so i just think he's being um he's playing it he's simultaneously being he was being really aggressive like two years ago and now he's starting to play it a little bit safer yep and i think in some ways you know some of these riffs are just practical right he's realizing yes ai is making us more efficient so we should need less people to do more work bent people were putting benioff in the truth zone uh last week because he was saying um ai is now doing 30 to 40 percent of the work at salesforce and yet his head count has just been ticking up steadily um and so um so yeah this uh satya getting hyper practical yeah scares me i mean he's i'm pretty sure he joined microsoft in the 90s yeah so he's been it's not like he's not like he's just lived through the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis.

52:05He worked at the same company and saw how Microsoft handled those two crises. I think Microsoft handled both of them pretty well. But he can totally pattern match. Maybe he's wrong. But if he's still, if he's wrong and there's no pullback, there's no glut of chips, the AI continues to progress, he's still set up pretty well for it, right? He's still, you know, major CapEx, serious hyperscaler, huge, huge bet on the best horse in the race, basically, the best independent horse hitched to OpenAI, even as that relationship gets more and more complicated, it feels like he has a deeper connection to OpenAI than, say, Google does with another startup in the Foundation Model Lab, or Amazon, or any of these companies, because they've got all kind of, like Anthropic has deals with Amazon and Google, and they're starting to kind of warm up to being dance partners, but they're not, Google's not getting 20 % of Anthropics top line.

53:09You know, it's just not that, the deals aren't structured that way. So he has not only the leading lab, but the most dominant stake of any hyperscaler in a lab period. So incredibly well set up. So we will continue to track it, but whether you think it's a top signal or a bottom signal, you gotta head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And they have a triple IRA match. 3%. 1%, 1%. Check it out. In other news, the talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams Meta AI's talent poaching spree.

53:50Missionaries will beat mercenaries. He says, quote, what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems, said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers. So big, big question. Paula says, with all the AI labs and SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries? Oh wow, this is an old post, yeah, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new meta super intelligence team. Didi, who's coming on the show, wait, in like three minutes. Okay, I was thinking, wow. Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts.

54:29Every single one of the 11 meta super intelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. Seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa. Eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in the US. Immigration is key to USAI innovation. Jeff, Beth Jaisos has a hilarious post here. The foreshadowing here was insane. And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. and Mark Zuckerberg says, the thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring. This is an incredible series, the Startup School series that Sam did while he was at YC. He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation right as they were on the biggest moment in their come up.

55:25Why are you laughing? It's just, I love, I love this business. You're like tearing up looking at how happy you are. No, it's just, it's... Watching this great power conflict play out in real time is wildly entertaining. It's entertaining. And the consumer is going to be the net winner. I was about to say that. And also America. Yeah. It's extremely, this is a pressure cooker of the highest. It's so competitive. But the good thing is that at the end, we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone goes to the gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. Like this is, you know, the difference between being a, having$10 billion or$100 billion.

56:18It's like, it's kind of all fake, but it's all, it's all like, it's super high stakes, but it's still capitalism. And it's still like the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool, even if you get beaten. But the end result is that we have this hyper competitive race to build the best thing with like kind of a safety cushion. So that you're not, like it's not like the government's putting a gun to your head. And it's global, right? Greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market, in this talent pool. It's fantastic. And many of them are getting maxed out contracts.

56:51Well, I'm sure both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are losing sleep right now over the talent wars. They got to get on 8th Sleep. Go to 8thSleep.com slash TBPN. Get a new Pod 5 Ultra. Sam, get a new Pod 5 Ultra. Mark, they got a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, and free shipping. So go check it out. I'm back in the game today. I got an 89. I got massively dinged on my consistency, which has just been all over the place. 90 minutes of deep sleep, two and a half hours of REM sleep. I mean, you won by default because I slept in Malibu. I'm moving the eight sleep after work.

57:29So I don't have anything to act because I was... Size gone for me. Size gone for me. Congratulations, Jordy. You deserve it. All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring in DD. Hey, how you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. How's it going? Great to have you on the show, finally. I feel like we've reacted to almost every one of your posts. You're very, very helpful in terms of contextualizing and just like summarizing everything that's going on, giving breakdowns. It's really helped the show, honestly. So thanks for being here. Totally. Thank you for being a core contributor. I appreciate it.

58:02I'm a big, big fan of the show. I've seen all of your episodes, I think. Wow. So you guys are great. You guys are great. I'm so happy for what you guys are doing. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. And did you join all in? What's this in the background? Oh, yeah. This message has really been overloaded since the podcast. But no, that's just our venture message. I mean, this is what Menlo's slogan is. Oh, so you were using that slogan before 2020? It was. No way. They mogged you. They stole your line. They just steamrolled you. This has happened a few times. What was it? Oh, Gemini. I thought of it for years as the Winklevoss-backed crypto trading app.

58:52Now Google comes out and they're like, we'd like that brand actually over here. And so now Gemini, I think of as the Google product. They went from Bard. Yep. They Bard it up. They Bard it up. No one was competing for Bard. Bard was clean space, but they had to go Gemini. And so good luck to the Winklevoss twins. Anyway, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of background and what you do just to get everyone familiar? Absolutely. Well, my background, I'm in venture now, but my background has been somewhat non-traditional for venture. I spent most of my career as an engineer and a product person.

59:25So four years. If you say non-traditional, I expect Warlord. I expect Blackwater. Arm Sealer. a kite surfer or like someone who's like wing surfing or rock climbing. I actually thought you were joking for a second because I thought you were going to say my, you know, non-traditional background adventure. I went to HBS. I was a product manager. You know, I just found my way. We're not letting you get away with that, man. You would be hard pressed to find an actual person who's done engineering at a big company and a startup from the very beginning. Not like a strategy and ops role for two years.

1:00:03Okay. In venture, I actually don't know that many people like that. I do know it's a meme though. You were in the trenches. You were in the trenches. You were in the technology trenches. Okay. Okay, we'll give it to you. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, how did you land at Menlo? Were you doing investing before angel investing? What did that look like? No, I actually had no business being in venture. I never wanted to be in venture. I wanted to build stuff. But after Glean, I thought, you know, I was exploring building something new. And then I was talking to a bunch of these venture firms, just get their thoughts on it.

1:00:39And I was kind of roped in and I thought, hey, it's kind of strange that there's not as many people who are technical and really care about engineering stuff in venture. And it would be nice to have that because whenever I would speak to people, they'd be like, look, man, like, I don't really understand this technical stuff. But is this a big market? You know, like, is this going to actually work as an idea? And that's kind of the ethos of why I wanted to join a venture firm in the first place. I think it'd be valuable for technical people to talk to other people who really care and nerd out about the actual idea.

1:01:10So I've been doing that for a year and a half, and it's been more fun than you think. Venture has a lot of connotations on what the job involves, whether it's a sexy job or not. And I don't know. It's just very different for very different people, I'd like to believe. What's been your strategy the last year and a half? Has it been trying to find and lead deals yourself, support, a mix of both? What is the focus? Buy or the CEO, take over. Fortunately, no farming. Contrary, everyone's founder friendly now. You got to differentiate by being a Rottweiler. Founder unfriendly. Very founder unfriendly.

1:01:49If you're non-technical, then you're going to have problems. No, I'm kidding. No, there's two things we do. I have led deals and also co-led deals with some of my partners here. We've done about four. Three of them are announced. One is not in terms of Series A's. But mostly, like, I got brought in to help lead the Anthology Fund, which is our$100 million fund with Anthropic. And that's been a lot of fun because it gives you a lot of leeway on the kind of deal structures that you can have. Not your traditional, like, hey, high ownership necessarily, Series A's and B's and C's. it's more early, more, hey, how do we help the ecosystem?

1:02:26How do we just get into ideas very, very early and just meet founders so you don't have a two week process where you're trying to fall in love with the founder for the first time. So the other thing, I'm sure it's been massively helpful because one of the challenges, if you go from operating and then you join a fund and you're only able to do a few deals a year, it's like, how do you build up that, those the frameworks how do you really learn the craft of investing and learn what not to do and I I think one of the one of um you know there's plenty of stories in the valley of people that uh our friend Justin Mayers I think like his first two companies he ever angel invested in were were unicorns and there's a bunch of other stories like that from my personal experience that like the average deal that I've done has just gotten better and better across the 60 plus companies that I've invested in.

1:03:15And so that can be a really big challenge if you're thrown into a big firm, you're having to make big investments, and yet you're only able to exercise the actual check writing a couple of times a year. How is the anthology fund going? Are you guys... Specifically, I want to talk about, you said like non-traditional deal structures. And when I think of that, I think you can come to someone and say, hey, we'll do a$10 million Series A, but we'll also give you$10 million in credits. We've seen Nvidia do some of these deals. We've seen obviously the Microsoft OpenAI deal was kind of structured as some sort of cloud credits and all this different stuff.

1:03:54And that can be really valuable. Is that what we're talking about here? Or is there something else? Or are cloud credits even relevant in like traditional deal structures these days for AI companies that are building on top of foundation models? We do offer a bunch of cloud credits. So we go up to like 30 to 100K in cloud credits. I honestly don't think that's the main draw. It's nice to have for these companies. All these good companies can figure out how to get credits or how to spend money on this. I think what's more interesting is, even when I was angel investing prior to being in venture, that's a different art.

1:04:27It's much easier to get into deals, as you guys probably know, when you're angel investing because you just know the person. You're like, hey, man, I'm going to throw in 10K. Can I get a 10K allocation? They're like, yeah, you seem like a good guy. You can be helpful. Here's a 10K. The bar is just so much lower. The bar is very low. And then you go to a venture firm and the same companies and you tell them, hey, I want to lead you around. And they're like, good luck, buddy. Like, here's a line, get to the back of it. So that's what becomes really challenging. But to the question of Anthology specifically, I think probably the biggest draw from what the founders tell us is, hey, we just love to know what the labs are up to, how to work with them, how to plan for the future, because we have no visibility into that.

1:05:10And for us, it really helps because you can form a relationship with people and actually figure out, hey, you're an awesome founder. And I don't know that because you've more than just the three week process that you've pitched to me. I know that for a good six to eight months now. So we've deployed about 30 odd checks to Anthology. I would say in the beginning, it was a little bit of calibration needed to figure out, hey, what was the right kind of company? And we don't only do early, We do some like mid-stage companies that are interesting to us for a future round as well. And the two of them have graduated into full Series A leads.

1:05:45So that's, you know, what was our success metric going in, which is are these actually good deals that will graduate to real ownership checks or not? And so we had Goodfire and then Open Router sort of be those companies that graduated. Open Router, let's go. Very different companies. Yeah, Alex is legit. Fantastic. We had Alex on from Open Router, and neither of us, I guess, realized that they were announcing like this massive Series B. Oh, yeah. So we had him on for like a full 15 minutes on the day of his fundraising. He was in my YC batch, so I know I'm an OpenSea, and I know how good Open Router is, but I didn't realize it was like somehow the news got lost that it was like, oh, wow, it's like a massive, massive fundraising day.

1:06:26I'm interested to know more about corporations or large scale ups, partnering with venture firms. We've seen a bunch of different, I mean, going back to like the Slack fund, I remember Slack was investing in startups. And there's this question of like, for a lot of founders, it can be fun to have, you know, on balance sheet investment vehicle. A lot of founders have, are scouts at VC firms, or they invest off their own balance sheet. Why would a big company come to Menlo to do the fund, like all the, it seems like you're offering like a lot of the work and and is that the right model like should we see more of that versus the fully in-house effort that's staffed I think stripes done some stuff in-house perplexity has a fun now and I'm wondering if you have an opinion on like best practices or what works or what doesn't or when something would work on balance sheet or directly within the org versus outside I think it's just I haven't really yeah I think I mean personal opinion is you need to be You need a fortress balance sheet, and you probably should be like a public company to be making balance sheet investments purely because of the duration mismatch.

1:07:39You mean like Google Ventures, basically? If you lead or participate in a Series A and then don't see a return, you're not going to see a return from that for maybe a decade. I mean, Bloomberg Beta has some other stuff like that. There's just so many fascinating different paths to it. And then it also is this weird dynamic. I like this from Anthropic because it's like, hey, this is non-core to what we're doing, but it's important to the ecosystem we're building. Let's make it so that it's not our job to deploy this capital, but we still get a lot of the benefits. Totally. So, yeah, give us your take on all that.

1:08:14Look, we did a lot of analysis on what a corporate fund structures look like and what kind of investments they do in the past. And these are all gross generalizations. But generally, if you run a corporate fund, A, you're not compensated on carry, really. So the incentives are not really aligned to deliver returns. The incentives are pure ecosystem bets. So if you look at a bunch of the investments that Slack fund have made, look, yeah, there are Slack apps, a lot of them. And that's good for the ecosystem. But are they real companies? Are they real businesses? A lot of them aren't. And when the more you look at corporate venture, like they don't spend a whole bunch of time out on the road sourcing, really like, you know, balls to the walls, going to all of these people and trying to figure out what the good companies are, the reason we wanted this structure was A, so we didn't have that incentive problem.

1:09:02We could focus on real returns while also investing in companies that benefit the ecosystem, but not purely that. So a lot of the anthology companies, they don't even necessarily only use Anthropic or use Anthropic at all, or necessarily even call LLMs. They are generally companies that are beneficial for the AI ecosystem. That's one. And then number two, I think the bigger thing is most companies have no business running a venture firm. This is just not, like you said, it's not their core business, not their forte. It's not what they do. It's not something they care about. So it's really nice where you're like, okay, you guys care about it.

1:09:38We care about the ecosystem benefits. Why don't you help us run this fund? And then it works for everybody. And I think the one exception case to that is probably OpenAI. OpenAI startup fund has done very well, but not in small part due to Sam being - Yeah, Sam's kind of a good picker. Potentially a generational VC if he was doing that full time. Yeah, yeah. What about the competitive dynamic? Like, would GV, I mean, Google Ventures has kind of spun out so much, but like it would be crazy to think about like GV investing in perplexity or Bloomberg Beta investing in perplexity, even if it's not actually that much of a threat and the CEO is confident, like, hey, I'm not going to get disrupted by this.

1:10:21It's like you have a portfolio CEO who's out there tweeting every single day like, I'm coming for you, Bloomberg. Let's look at how much money they make. I'm going to disrupt you. Like that just might be like awkward. And so has there been any dynamic around that where you have like either a mandate to like, hey, let's stay away from companies that do pre-training because that's on Anthropics Roadmap. Or like even with the Cloud Code cursor thing, like you want to stay away from coding agents because Anthropics really, really, really pro that. Like, how do you think about, like, you want to be close enough that there's a benefit, but not too close where your competitors is that, is that a real dynamic?

1:10:56Or how do you think about that? It very rarely has happened. I mean, Dario is actually exceptionally missionary. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Like he really does care about what these companies are doing. I mean, look at Goodfire, like they have an interpretability lab. They're like, look, another one is good for the world. We'll do it. So there have been certain cases where companies, you know, some of them haven't been announced yet, but one of these companies has alternate approaches to doing a bunch of different model stuff. And we asked Arie, we're like, hey, is this bad? Like, are you okay with this?

1:11:28And he's like, completely cool with it. If it's not something that we have a very strong bet on, that they're going extremely head on and have a bunch of capital to go head on right now, it's just not something we'd care about. So we do try to tread carefully. Obviously, you don't want to bite that hand, but it's not been an issue at all so far. We've never run into a conflict. How are you broadly advising companies that are working with labs, but also fear that they might end up competing with them at the product layer over time? And I know you were at Glean, the founding team there, and that feels like something that in the long run, obviously, you know, someone like an open AI might want to compete there.

1:12:14So I'm curious how you think about that dynamic. I think the reality is, look, it's a free market and competition is going to happen one way or the other. Whether or not Anthropik backs or Anthology backs you and then Anthropik decides to compete at a future point, I don't think anybody - I'm not even talking about Anthology as much as just generally portfolio companies. Let's say you're doing Cogen or something like that and you're working with a lab. And, you know, we had Sarah Guo was on the show probably a month and a half ago at this point talking about like it's not impossible to figure out what's important to each of the labs and the things that they might do over time.

1:12:56And you should, as a founder, be under you should be well aware that what you're doing might be on the path at some point. Yeah, I think that's a question we get all the time. And I think the reality is, my guidance usually has been, and this was how we thought about it at Glean too, is what is something that is a pie that is very valuable to you, but not at the scale that it's valuable to any of these big companies? Until it is. You know, like you're really the bet you're making is, hey, this pie is maybe 50 million dollars in revenue and nobody, no big company will care about that. But once you capture that pie, it's actually way bigger than that.

1:13:34And if you do, then you can you can reach breakout escape velocity before anybody else is at your heels. And hopefully you've built off enough of a, you know, no, I hesitate to say moat, but you've built enough tech that it's not easy to replicate overnight. And if you have a little bit of that, there are odds that you could have a breakout business. And I think today's climate is actually way better than a year or two before, because the truth is labs have a huge revenue pressure. So they're not going to be investing in random crap. Like they're going to be investing in stuff where they're like, OK, that's a billion dollars in revenue.

1:14:08That's 500 million dollars in revenue. I'm not going after this 10 million dollar opportunity. Yeah, anthropic, anthropic one to four billion dollar run rate in the first half of this year to justify a lot more resources. You have to be able to make a dent in that somehow or show that you can make a dent. I mean, it's kind of like the Google problem with like, but at one order magnitude smaller, where like if you're running a business at Google that's making five hundred million dollars, it's like, OK, time to wrap it up. Let's move on to something bigger. This is not really relevant. And you're like, this could be a public company.

1:14:44This was actually the entire premise of Glean. I don't know if you guys know this, but when Glean started, Google had Google Cloud Search. And the reason we weren't worried about it is because we knew the team there. And we're like, this doesn't make a dent on cloud. The fact is, like, Google Cloud doesn't care about this. And now, you know, sort of they sort of change their mind and they care about it again. But that's kind of what the sweet spot. You want to do something boring and seemingly small enough that nobody else cares. Can you talk to me more about Glean? There's been some reporting about like the data wars, this question of how sharp elbowed will Salesforce be or Google?

1:15:27If I'm a business owner, we just started TBPN as a company and it's a greenfield. So you're like, this time I'm going to get it right. This time I'll just have one suite of tools that'll all work together. And then three weeks later, it's like, okay, I have Slack and Gmail and a bunch of other services, and they're not really talking to each other the way I want. And as a business owner, I'm very strong about like, that's my data. You have to let me have my data. And not through this export button that takes two weeks to go. And I want an API that I can immediately send over to OpenAI or Anthropic or Glean.

1:16:07But the companies always find a way to kind of like have sharp elbows. And we saw this during the rise of Google and Facebook. There was a pitch. John Patel, the founder of Wired, was arguing that Google, you should be able to go to Google and say, give my Google search results to Facebook. And Facebook, you should say, give my social graph data to Google just so I get better ads. And both companies hated that idea, and they would not let you do that. It's a little bit different in the B2B context, but how do you see the data wars playing out? How do you see the competitive pressure where a lot of the B2B SaaS providers also want to offer some sort of enterprise search experience?

1:16:48Well, there's a couple ways to look at this. I think number one is, yeah, the reliance on, Glean's reliance on just Salesforce is a small percentage of the many, many connectors we offer and the many, many other things that we end up having to integrate with for especially Fortune 500 clients. They often don't even use a lot of the SaaS tools that are household names in the Valley. So the net impact is somewhat limited because of that. But I think the more important point here is the reason why it seems like the reason why people like Salesforce want to cut off connector access is like what you said, to sell a competing product.

1:17:27In practice, I think it's actually a pretty synergistic relationship otherwise. That's why we work together so well for so long, because you don't sell less seats because people use Glean. You actually sell more seats because people use Glean because now there are people who weren't on Slack, weren't on Salesforce, who are now discovering that information and going there and then reading the content. So your daily active users actually increase, not decrease when they use Glean. In fact, like if you don't have licenses on Salesforce to a certain set of users, they don't even see Salesforce results.

1:18:01So it's not like you can also sell 10 licenses, connect to Glean, and then have the thousand people in the company view that Salesforce data. We don't do that. We don't even offer that as an option because we want to stay true to the permissions of the source data source. So, you know, net-net, I think this is a situation that, you know, Glean will have to work out with all of these partners. But I think there's a good out. I mean, I don't think there's a reason other than them wanting to offer a competitive product that they care about this access. And the companies, too, like you said, like if you are running TBPN and you want to connect to Glean, you should own your data.

1:18:39You should own your Slack and Salesforce data. They shouldn't own it. So you have every right to give away that API access. But, you know, that's going to be a conversation that Glean is going to have to have with a bunch of the partners. Where are you most excited about agents right now in terms of actual products in market, delivering value for customers outside of coding? Okay. So this is the one I talk to all my friends about. It's not like a venture venture thing. It's just really a product I just have fallen in love with in the past week or so. You guys should all use it. It's called, and I'm not a paid shill.

1:19:13This is like just me loving a product. It's 19pine.ai. It's super elegantly designed, simple chat interface, your typical stuff. But what it does is it just goes and makes phone calls for you, but can coordinate very interesting things. So for example, just the other day, I was like, man, my insurance on my car is just way too high. I need to get this down. Can you figure out how to get it down? And it goes and it, like these are phone calls nobody wants to make. Goes and makes a phone call to my insurance, stays on hold for three hours, and then gets them on the phone calls geico call state farm gets quotes comes back and goes and negotiates and then it brings my insurance down i did nothing and the payment model is so so nice because you don't pay a subscription for this you pay a percentage of what you save which is applicable to everybody um and so yeah you do that deal all day long with like a yeah just call this person for me if you save me like a thousand dollars like i'll give you like a few hundred bucks yeah something like that.

1:20:14But yeah, I'm looking, I have the website pulled up. They got to get a better domain name. This is absolutely brutal. What's the domain name? 1919pine.ai. But they can call the IRS for you, cancel your AT &T plan, talk to the DMV, get a refund from an airline. I'm going to use this. I literally have an old internet line in our old office that I need to cancel. And I can only call during business hours. And I just happen to be live on TV during business hours every day. So I just haven't done it. And I'm just getting billed for Spectrum every month and it's so annoying. So 19 pines coming for you, Spectrum.

1:20:49You're on notice. Anyway, I want to get your reaction. But any other, like this feels awesome as a consumer agent that is solving real problems and they have the economic model that people have been excited about of like selling results. Anything else in the enterprise, like sales agents, anything like that that you're seeing that is actually working? Well, there's a bunch of interesting companies and the revenue is inflecting, but you know, that's just not like, it's good. Like these are good businesses that are working. I think the things that excite me more at a more meta level is the technology powering what agents can do.

1:21:29And like, I think the elephant in the room is all of these, all of the new custom RL stacks that are helping agents use custom software is actually gonna be a huge unlock. You know, like computer use hasn't really worked yet. It's not a thing that people use, but there is a world where, you know, just like 19pyn, you could genuinely automate the work of people if you give computers access to your computer in a fast way. And I don't think we've seen that yet because the models aren't capable of doing that. We've seen early versions of that with Claude Code, which is, hey, what happens if you take a model and then RL it to be very good at agentic work and call a bunch of tools well.

1:22:07O3 is similar. What if you apply that to very specific domains of like, hey, man, like I have a gazillion enterprise SaaS apps I don't even want to use and I don't even know how to use or touch. Figure out how to use them so we can just throw these agents at this stuff that a human was doing because a lot of the glue work is still not solved by agents. Like a lot of the glue work is humans in the loop. Go click this button. Go review this text. If we want to fully cross the chasm of like 95 % of the work to 100 % of the work, I think that's super exciting on a meta level. And all of these little agent apps, and sometimes big agent apps, are going to benefit from things like that.

1:22:45So that's one of the broader themes I'm super, super excited about. I want to get your reaction to how the AI talent wars are affecting venture specifically. Will Manitis, friend of the show, has a post here. He says, Citadel's Law, any industry with sufficiently high stakes will end up mirroring the culture of hedge funds, massive cash comp for the top performers, bid away dynamics where entire teams walk together, extreme litigation of non-competes, hard O work 24-7 culture." But then he says, he ends with, this at the margin, I think, makes the capital environment for funding independent big AI things much worse.

1:23:24Not worth underwriting a team if you know they can do R &D on your dollar and then walk. in the same way my sense is fun staking terms got worse, not better post pod shop. So he's talking about how if you are betting on a founder and then they get some massive aqua hire offer, is that going to distort the early stage venture market? Oh, I mean, I think absolutely. I've read that post. I love that post. Great, great commentary. I think the thing I would say is this isn't new. I mean, there were always, startups never paid well, right? Like you're still getting paid like 170, 200K on average. And, you know, Google and Facebook are right there to pay you like a 500K salary.

1:24:08So it's not like it's new that big companies can, you know, throw out their wallets and give you more money. Usually, even at Glean, we had this policy where we're like, look, we're just not going to negotiate somebody who only cares about comp. If we lose that person, that's because they're a mercenary. And that's okay. We're not judgmental. You do what you think is best for you. We really want people, as missionary as you can be about like B2B SaaS, but we want people who are more incentivized to do the thing that we're doing here. But does$10 million a year paychecks affect that? A hundred percent.

1:24:47Thankfully, it's just a few people who are privy to that. But if there's more of that happening, it becomes a risk. I mean, absolutely. The one thing that I do the most when I do diligence is aside from the typical venture stuff is I really need to have confidence that this founder, no matter what, wants to work on this problem for the next five years. And to the extent that you can get that confidence, that's what I'm looking for. But you can't solve for it. It's definitely worse. People are always on the spectrum for missionary and mercenary. And if the dollars go up, the spectrum shifts. So there's fewer people who can afford to be missionary if you're getting paid 10 million a year.

1:25:23Yep. Last question from me, and then we'll let you go. Do you think the AI talent wars spill over into the rest of the Mag7? Mark Zuckerberg is a founder mode CEO with a massive business throwing off billions of dollars in cash. He took, you know, he's spending$20 billion on the metaverse, was able to slide some of that over, put some crazy offers on the table. We keep joking that some of these meta AI super intelligence offers are more than Tim Cook's annual salary. So that might be a culture clash even if Apple says, hey, we want our own super intelligence team. And we've earmarked$5 billion to do it because they could.

1:26:04Apple has produced almost a trillion dollars in dividends or like free cash for their investors over the past decade or something like that, 13 years. And so the logical thing would be, okay, maybe we will see similar bidding wars, talent wars continue at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. But maybe there's something deeper closer. Or it just forces Apple to effectively outsource the R &D by paying OpenAI or Anthropics billions of dollars. That's totally possible too. So yeah, how do you think that shakes out? I don't think more firms, more Mac 7 companies are going to compete like that. I think Zuck has a particular style and he always has.

1:26:42I mean, if you look at, like you said, like Oculus, yeah, he's very happy to pour billions and billions of dollars into something with the hope that it will one day work. Most other Mac 7 companies don't usually operate like that and they can get talent in many cases for way cheaper. I just don't think it's also not, Apple might be able to do it on their balance sheet, but it's not just something that everybody can afford to do. It causes a lot of cultural rift within the company. If you talk to the other day, I was scrolling metas blind through a friend. I mean, people are upset, you know, like people get upset when you just hear that you can recruit somebody as an engineer and pay them$25 million a year.

1:27:22That's not a good thing for the culture of the company. They also check out mentally inside because they're like, what is the point? Why am I doing this? And so I think. Yeah, there's one frame where it's like, oh, wow, we hired a 100x engineer. And there's another one which is like, so I'm a one one hundredth X engineer. Maybe I should do one one hundredth X the work. I mean, you're, you know, the right way to look at that. You have some, you know, top 25 AI researcher in the world joins your firm. You should be excited because you're already compensated really well. And it will probably increase the value of the company in the fullness of time, which directly benefits you.

1:28:00but of course if you're making if you're only making 80k a month you know not even not even not even hitting that you know seven figure mark yeah um that could be a little bit a little bit frustrating anyway this is fantastic 80k a month yeah i know uh well thank you so much for hopping more they could be in that the fact that you know the mrr number is like the back of your hand is hilarious uh this is fantastic thanks so much for stopping by this is super fun thank you for joining. Let's do it again soon. And John, thank you guys for having me. Love it. See you guys. Talk to you later. You might have seen our billboards are tearing up New York City.

1:28:37We have our New York City correspondent joining right now. But if you want to run a billboard in New York City, get on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology. Out-of-home expertise. We went from the West Coast to the East Coast. Emily should take over the West Coast. I want to see feed me billboards all over LA. We will ask her about it. But first, we have to sing her a song. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Emily. We're hitting the size gone for you.

1:29:16Congratulations. It was yesterday. It was yesterday. July 1st. She didn't come on the show yesterday. Welcome. I would have come on yesterday if you asked. We should have. We should have. We could have had a cake. We could have had a cake. What did you do for your birthday? I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty, which was nice. And then my husband took me to dinner. Oh, that's nice. YMCA, underrated? Mine is nice. This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning. Oh, interesting. What does the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment.

1:29:56Lifetime's making moves. lifetime's making moves i so i kind of do a high low thing i live in park slope so the the ymca makes a lot of sense for me but i'm also a member at a club called casa chip rianni small members club yep yeah it's fun the high low that the high love john john's in favor of that too we just started going to a new gym but john is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to gold which i'm like no we're not we can't do this there aren't um there don't seem to be as many ymcas on the west coast no no not not that many lots of 24-hour fitness i mean gold's gym it's the it's the staple of venice it's where rfk is out there it's a good crew john john thought equinox was like a 75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period and I just loved how out of touch you are you were it felt like premium you know yeah ultra premium it's not the besties all on tequila level yeah the location matters a lot yeah um what what else is new in your world yeah give us a give us a hamptons update people were I assume no one's in the city right now well yeah I I got out here this morning I don't want to brag I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather to 2006 Camry.

1:31:18Okay. Very nice. There you go. Iconic era of really great vintage. Very reliable. Yeah. Awesome. So I drove out here today. It's crowded. It's really crowded. I'm hoping that this sort of level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I rented a house out here, but we'll see. um what else is new since two weeks ago is the well so so the hamptons broadly yeah people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year does it feel that way yeah i i don't know how much of that was because of weather or or or people's finances i think some people were less motivated to like make the move on booking a house because we had really bad weather the past few months in new york it was really rainy and gross and it was sort of a late start to summer um but i'm sure people's financial situation there was also a trade war that's still ongoing and if your portfolio is down tremendously you're not exactly saying yeah i'd love to spend you know you know 100k for two weeks yeah i had a friend who was dating a wall street uh like hedge fund guy and uh she was like yeah it's going so great like it's amazing and then like a couple weeks later, she's like, yeah, he's just like really weird.

1:32:35Like, I don't think it's going to work out. And I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, so his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10 % sell-off that we just saw. You're telling me that this guy, his entire, his entire personality is derived from the state of the market. And she was like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations. I'm sure. I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. um is uh is that is that crazy white party going on that's a hamptons thing is that a is that a july 4th thing or is that canceled i thought michael rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy is there an update thing yeah i i i i will see is that supposed to be fourth of july i think that's like wearing she's like white party what are you talking about yeah i can't comment no not oh yeah i think that might have been a factor in in pulling back for that but but but i always see like everyone's like spying the watches spying like you know what cars people showed up in all this yeah there's a lot of paparazzi there's a lot of tick tockers okay see everything happening in real time interesting nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore like there's so much uh coverage of these events now it really takes away the mystique the mystique somebody might what's up with uh what's up this with this place drugstore you were covering it let's try oh yeah this is awful um bloomberg broke news yesterday

1:34:07smoothie pop-up chain from uh like a jay-z invested celebrity chef and he's these these like very instagrammable smoothies which obviously erwan started but now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating like smoothies as a billboard like brands can collab with them and then whoever's serving these smoothies is like making extra money from an advertising business which is crazy like i think to get an air one smoothie for your brand it's like 200k for a month or something we have to do this yeah we're we've been working on it you say that's you guys don't have to do this it's worth every penny for the tbp and feed me air one smoothie You're telling me that's not going to net out?

1:34:51No, you could do a drink at the US Open or something. Don't do the smoothie. Don't do the smoothie. It's played out? Yeah, it's probably played out. Didn't everyone have a collab with Volkswagen or something? Or some really funny car company they did? Yeah, you're right. They did do a car company. I think they also do beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff. It's not... Yeah, Chevrolet. They did a Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1, like the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 Equinox EV. What was in this movie?

1:35:28According to the manufacturer, the collaboration between it combines Chevy's commitment to emission-free vehicles and Erewhon's mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink, called the Electric Juice, consists of choo-choo, choo-cho, which is the most protein-rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drink's ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers according to Chevrolet. I think the winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up. For sure.

1:36:05I don't know. I feel like everyone's getting the Haley Beaver smoothie. i'm about to rock the equinox evs i think it has a certain badge value like they're like 70 grams of sugar it's like four cokes i'm long i'm long sugar though four cokes is a lot that is a lot but i'm going long i'm going long sugar from here i did i did an experiment um my wife was very afraid of the worst experiment i continue yeah but anyways people people are very afraid of sugar i To prove a point, I drank a soda every single day. I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight. I know that's not the end. If you're young and you work out every day, there's like a million ways to offset that.

1:36:44It wouldn't be good. No, a lot of people think. No, I agree. It is overblown. People think like a single Coca-Cola was terrible. Yeah, of course. Of course. Everything's in the dose is the poison with all of this stuff. You drink a full gallon of big gold. What about, so this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars, how basically AI researchers are being comped almost like pro athletes and sort of like, you know, these sort of nine, nine figure massive offers. The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the media landscape and we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic.

1:37:22I imagine that he's already like run rating well, well beyond. I don't know what his metrics are, but I would imagine he's already he's catching up to me oh really yeah subscribe to subscribe to feed me right now and uh help help win the race but um he's not winning but I was curious if you it feels like if if uh legacy media companies I won't call anyone out want to want real attention not just the sort of attention that comes from their logo to some degree in the prestige but like actually quality content at some point they'll have to like kind of re-evaluate their comp structures I think the Atlantic was like 300k was being reported as like the kind of range and when you can go on sub stack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another it just becomes really difficult I see traditional media company is more likely to start doing like handshakes with sub stack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff i don't understand so like syndication basically indication or like i mean i've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are like trying to figure out how they can work with feed me is it like a co-publishing thing is it like creating a podcast together and it's it's been very interesting to experience firsthand like talk to these people because i don't i don't really need that like derek doesn't need the atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him not the whole surrounding yeah i mean just to set the table for the folks who might be listening when emily comes on the show we pay her a hundred thousand dollars for her appearance so yeah just just to kind of set the bar uh just so and it ramps up yeah yeah it obviously ramps up um but uh but yes i am interested in like the dynamic of like you can still go and publish in in traditional media um is that just like freelance what is the difference between what do you mean like when i write for gq yeah exactly are you a columnist that i'm doing that besides that i adore my editor there and i i think that it's just like it's a it's working like a different part of my brain like i don't it's like a gift to get to be edited by gq's editors that's cool yeah do you uh so are are Are you a columnist over there or are you a contributor?

1:39:50With the actual shape, do you get assigned things? I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, I was assigned a story on nicotine, so I need to talk to you as an expert or whatever. So with GQ specifically, my editor, Dan, when I wrote the Zinn story and when I wrote the story about members clubs last year, both were because I had written about both of those topics in my newsletter. And he was like, I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in a larger feature in a print issue. And that's how that's happened. I don't really, but like, I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I want to write, like it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to the Times or to New York Magazine, because I can get it done faster on Feed Me.

1:40:35I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And And it's better for me to be breaking those sorts of stories. I just have a good thing going with GQ. It's kind of fun. That's cool. I want to bounce an idea off you. There is this narrative that when you go direct, when you're on Substack, it has a different texture, a different vibe, maybe more objective, maybe more pro-tech or pro creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered. I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that essentially when you're in legacy media, you basically have a salary cap.

1:41:22And when you're outside of it, you have no salary cap. And that actually defines the economic terms shape the type of content more than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree? How would you wrestle with that? Can you keep expanding on that? Sure. I want it. So I think that there's something where if you're working at a particular outlet and there's some sort of salary cap. It's like imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of$300 ,000 per player and the other had no salary cap. Like who would you expect to produce better basketball?

1:42:06Who would you expect to produce better content when you have when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make a hundred million? Like you're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the yeah Yeah, and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work if they work a little bit harder And they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece it could not it doesn't mean oh here you got a five thousand dollar christmas bonus it means spotify signed you to a hundred million dollar contract and it's the difference between like when lebron james shows up at midnight to shoot more three free free free throws like that could be the difference between like a 50 million dollar contract and a hundred million dollar contract so i think going that extra thing produces like better content yeah it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists you know give sub stack a shot and like they just plateau toe.

1:43:01Yes. But I'm like, I'm an animal. Like when my eyes are open, I'm working like this letter goes out every day. It's I'm marketing it. I'm editing it. I'm pitching stories, but I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no. Like when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now. Right. Like, so I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing also attract personality types that are had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. And then when people who don't think like that, think that they can find the same success, like they get disappointed or confused, or think that it's rigged or something like that.

1:43:43When really, they're just getting outcomputed. I mean, going, going above and beyond for a job where the cat might be like, what did that New York Magazine story say about the Atlantic? 300K? That's what they were paying their journalists? Okay, so you're going to go as hard as you can to make 300K and get those benefits and whatever. But the other thing that I'll say is you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to have months where you're not having the support of a team. And it's just a very specific type of personality. But I think you're totally onto something like I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a magazine or newspaper.

1:44:30Yeah. Yeah. Also, the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome. And you can quit your job and say, I'm going to pay out of pocket for insurance for two years. And if this doesn't work out, then I'll get a rollback. I'm curious you were commenting on Vogue partnering with the Nutri-Grain bars and I'm curious if you think as people are so used to influencer creator-led advertising like if you were to partner with a brand and people are like wait like what like why did she partner that makes no sense like that's clearly a cash grab that feels like it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time, even though we're saying, you know, why is...

1:45:21Nutri-Grain needs better marketing because the first thing I think about with Nutri-Grain... I think they can shut down. Yeah, I always think about the... I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere. I don't know if you've seen that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not Nutri-Grain. No. And so my biggest association with Nutri-Grain... Nutri-Grain is like a long Big Newton. Yeah, they got to work on that. Yeah, it's like, is it a fake Newton? Is it the crumb one? I just know it's not good, so they got to step it up. But yeah, the Vogue audience. I mean, do you think that there was ever a pitch where it was like, okay, we're going to go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for the kids?

1:45:59And so it's some sort of like bank shot strategy? For me, what stopped me in my tracks was it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter. It wasn't like somebody writing about their wellness routine sponsored by Nutri-Green. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City. And I really like this girl, Michelle. And I saw her post it and I saw that it was between Vogue and Nutri-Green. Like there was two – who was in the room? Who sold this ad? And how much was it for? And how much did Michelle get? And how much did Vogue get? Like it was very confusing to me because there were, there are other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense.

1:46:40And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation. But the conversation was started. Yeah. There's so many media reporters. If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have. But I think that Condé Nast overall right now is on life support. Like we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. unfortunately like it's happening immediately right after that with this new this new Vogue editor it's a lot of it's a lot of pressure for like I don't know what like a few more years of running this magazine it just doesn't really seem like how it doesn't Vogue doesn't seem I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now yeah yeah it kind of goes back to that idea of like the the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator like we just released an ad for Wander that we said they asked us, they barely even asked us to make it.

1:47:35And we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, edited it. We just did everything. We sent them the final thing and they were like, yeah, cool. And so I think the brand carried through. There was like a second that they asked for a tweak. But yeah, they were like, actually, our font is this one instead of that one. I loved it. And so that is the type of entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, that actually starred in the commercial, would bring to a partnership and select and coordinate with a brand that was actually aligned. But there were just like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day.

1:48:10And so it just wound up being very odd. Yeah, like I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at Barstool and like have them talk about like how this is like the hangover snack. Like that I think would have moved the needle more. Totally. I don't know. When I think of logical Vogue partnerships, I think of luxury brands. Are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership? Have you seen anything there? What are the innovative things that you're seeing from the really top tier brands out there? Have you seen anything cool? You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars, like the metallic?

1:48:46Yeah, we had him on the show. I love them. I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week. somebody posted a photo of like Balenciaga bars like oh there we go the same sort of metallic okay metallic label I took a photo of it I'll send it to you guys after this that's very cool um so I mean like is that going to move their their hoodies I don't know but like that's those sort of fun weird moments are more exciting to me um if we're talking about nutrition bars Yeah, I mean, it certainly shows that like Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because like Peter Rahal, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer packaged goods world and a little bit in tech.

1:49:29And some people know the story of RX Bar and then David Bar with the revenue ramp, like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story. Like the average person on the street doesn't know that. So Balenciaga is kind of signaling a little bit to that. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks, like put together, like, you know, it's not difficult. As far as what what luxury brands are doing, I think it's a lot of events now. Like they're putting a lot of money into events. Like I was just at a Chanel event. They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival, which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway.

1:50:07So they they throw events and make sure that people show up to that. I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events. It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it and it's like the brand is the background. So you end up being like New York just feels like a billboard every time you go out now because everything is a brand event. It's like dominating how people are organizing their social calendars. I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream. what makes for a good brand event like is this just a happy hour is that we're talking about is there dance it's actually interesting that the thing I'll say we were talking about SVB they would throw dinners that sure like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial or you know companies that that throw these dinners the funny thing is that within tech the companies historically failed to make them social moments so it'd be like it'll say the name it'll say svb on the menu and people aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures so i think what the luxury brands do well is that you're saying hey we're going to invite 200 people into the space photographer and you're not going to be able if you post any photos at all we're going to be getting exposure we're going to have a moment yeah um i i threw a brand dinner or a feed me dinner with my friend paul from the infatuation last year and andrew ross sorkin was sitting next to me and i gave him a feed me keychain that was my brand moment that's a great moment so that's another thing like at those dinners are yeah how are brands being creative are we seeing like ice sculptures or step in repeats like like how can brands stand out with one of those like the worst possible brand event is a dj and free drinks like just people standing in front of like a 22 year old dj with like free drinks and then um more innovative things are like i think when you give people an activity to do like if you are doing like bowling or and making it like glamorous or like um you know now brands are are if they're doing a collab with like an athletic brand they'll they'll take a bunch of women to like tennis courts or a golf club in connecticut and like that's a photo op for everybody involved um so like these mini expeditions or like j crew last year took a bunch of people on a gorgeous sailboat in the hudson river off of like the seaport it's basically like take your customers on a date right on an extravagant adventurous photo yeah yeah exactly um and then if you level up then you're gonna start talking about like brand trips like hermes took people to aspen last summer and yeah i mean a ton of vc firms do that all the time it could come with us and we'll do a track day or movie night or we'll go out to you know the some you know beautiful People play some ranch and shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend.

1:53:19Where's my call? I want to do that. They should get you on the calls. We'll introduce you to some folks. Post-mortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of coverage of Zoran's basically film, you know, vertical video making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious. Are you talking to any like TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That would be interesting. Yeah, I had a friend who I actually used to work with at Condé Nast who worked in the White House for Biden.

1:53:58And I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign. Like there are people who know, I think like you have to be excellent at that job if you're working for a political campaign, especially in the White House because the turnaround times are insane. And the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy, as they should be. So I think there's like a mini network. I mean, there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like they were recruited straight from Meta. So that's definitely a thing. But I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work.

1:54:35And like part of that is digitally now. Like and Zoran did that really well. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election. And then the this primary felt like the short form election. And that sort of it makes sense, especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters. Yeah. I mean, his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February. Like I was at a party, I think, in March for him. But he also went on like Throwing Fits and a few other podcasts. And he did like a Q &A with me for Feed Me. So his team knew where to activate.

1:55:15Where to go. That's good. We've been talking a ton about the AI talent wars. There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making$100 million in signing bonuses. Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money. What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have$100 million burning a hole in their pocket? They want to get in the game. They want to step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend? It's funny that you go to fashion and cars because i think there's a real uh a louis mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job so i feel like you need a security guard like a security guard sure yep um plain clothes security guard which means like those tight lacoste polos you know okay maybe they should be carrying too maybe they should you know if you got the you gotta be everyday carry now if you're making in a hundred million california it's gotten more lenient yeah yeah so i i feel like you have to staff up in a in a position like this like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't going to like leak your information a personal trainer okay who's trustworthy a feed me subscription of course um and then i think it's like removing friction from areas of your life with with like staffing up like that i recently learned that um this neighborhood in the hamptons called sagaponic is a microclimate.

1:56:48And I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Wait, break that down a little bit more. It's just on an average day, it's nicer there? I think it's not necessarily nicer. I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas. Like I am in a different neighborhood than that. And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here, even though it's not that far away. Yeah, like you can be like Long Island as a whole is hot today, but Sagaponic could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimate. Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees.

1:57:24There's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic. Yeah. I mean, isn't San Francisco like that too? Yes. Famously. That's why in the summer it'll still be foggy and stuff, but then it's really warm later in the year. Right. Yeah. So I feel like investing in a microclimate is a good way to spend your money that just sounds wise yeah they're not making any more of them and then i i think that you need to use your money to start taking some some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes there's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items so i would try to hang out with like do you guys know the watch dealer mike nouveau like somebody like him or like you know like take him out to dinner talk to him and get some advice.

1:58:08I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff. What'd you pick up? I got my husband a nice watch. Okay. Let's go. Let's hear it for the husband. Two size gongs, one of you. That's how you know it's a good one. A birthday and a gift. And maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise, consult on the closet. Can you get us Chris Black on the show? Because the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released where it was a cease and desist from the New York Times. Because they copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it.

1:58:53It was a work of art. Chris would definitely come on. I'll connect you guys. That'd be awesome. Yeah, I think the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just you know doing that automatic apple pay on on while they're shopping and then you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or it looks horrible or something yeah so stylists tech stylists or just like paid friends you know take people out to dinner host parties like keep them around you know do you think it's good to surround yourself with yes men what do you what's how do you so if you surround yourself with yes men then whatever ideas you have all your yes men will just tell you yes that's the best idea ever a lot of people say don't do it but maybe i would not do that everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea no i would not that's not good okay so stay away from the yes men yeah you want yes people on your team where you say, I want to do the impossible and they just say, yes, we're going to do it.

2:00:01But there's there's a line, you know, you don't you don't want to cross it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. Thanks, guys. Yeah, just check up. So send us the invoice for the 100K appearance fee and we'll look at it. Yeah. Send the next few to you. Happy Fourth of July. Yeah. Happy Fourth of July. Have fun. We'll talk soon. Bye. Up next, we have Mert from Helios here to talk about stable coins, talk about crypto, So talk about NFTs. We're doing it all this show. We're doing it all this show. Very excited to talk to Mert. He put on an absolute clinic during the last show.

2:00:36He might be having some technical difficulties. So let's go back to the timeline. Daniel, GrowingDaniel, says, OpenAI is super nice for giving everyone the week off for interviews at Meta. And Elon Musk is crying, laughing. Absolutely brutal. You saw the Wander ad, but you can still find your happy place. Book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Vittorio says, I used to pray for the day nerds would be treated like athletes. The day is finally here, and it's glorious, and it's our post. Put up by Tyler Cosgrove, the intern.

2:01:12Tyler got 25 ,000 likes. Vittorio, quote tweeted, get 50K. You love to see it. Anyway, we have Mert in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I am having some technical difficulties. Can you hear me? Yeah. You look good. The only thing is maybe rotate the camera if you're on your phone so we can go horizontal. But other than that, that looks fantastic. Looking good. Thanks so much for taking the time. I know you're really a jet setter at heart all over the world. But very excited to talk to you. There's a ton of stuff going on in the crypto world that we wanted to talk about. Should we start with the idea of private companies on chain?

2:01:57Is that a good place to start? Yeah, sure. So there's a few versions of this that have just been announced, one by Republic and one by Robinhood. Yeah. Do you want to just go over both? Yeah. Yeah, let's start there. And then I basically want to cover public and privates, but we can start with privates. Sure. Yeah, I mean, so the details on these are a little fuzzy just because I think at least the name of the game for some of them seems to be regulatory arbitrage. um uh but so for example in the case of robin hood they just announced that they're going to have it um and they didn't really give any specific details other than it would be on their own uh optimized chain uh blockchain for rwas um for republic um they basically said and by the way um uh people thought this was for trading these uh private equity like these these private shares but they're actually just for buying them and then holding them.

2:03:00And then you actually get, in Republic's case, you're locked up for about a year. And I believe the maximum size you can do is actually only$5 ,000. So I think they're basically just trying to test the waters and see how the regulars will react, is my reading of it. Yeah, the 5k limit is interesting. The lack of immediate liquidity is interesting, too. I mean, it's clearly a product for retail. The other thing that I was thinking about is, you know, if you just released, you know, SpaceX shares on chain, there's almost going to be infinite demand for them. And so the limit could also just be, hey, we want as many people to be able to access these as possible.

2:03:43Or it just gets, you know, bid up and bid up. But it sounds like it'll be fixed price. Any reaction to Robinhood setting up their own chain to do this. And then it's also Europe only from what I could tell. Right. Yeah. And by the way, just on the Republic private shares thing, it's actually I looked into this. It's it's a mirrored asset. So it's purely mimicking the performance of the price of the shares. And then it's a note on the upside in the event of a liquidity event. So it's not like you're actually owning the stock by any means, obviously. For Robinhood, yeah, I mean, so it seems like they decided to launch on Arbitrum, the L2, to start with, with the eventual understanding that they will launch it on their own optimized chain.

2:04:40I think, you know, Robinhood has always been like a vertically integrated company that wants full control over the design, the user experience, the abstractions. And so I think building your own chain for this makes sense because, I mean, they obviously already have the liquidity, the users and the distribution. So I think it makes sense, provided that, you know, they can hire, you know, Vlad can go full Zuck mode and hire some crypto talent to run the blockchain because that's hard work. Run the blockchain. Break down the, what's happened, I've seen enough screenshots this week so far. I think you were sharing some of them of people swapping something, an esteemed asset like Fartcoin for some Tesla shares.

2:05:27What is actually happening there? Are they, is it just a, is there, are the ex-Tesla or whatever these are, are they tied to any real underlying asset? Is it entirely vibes? What's actually going on? Yes. So as sophisticated investors, we've been swapping Farpoint into Tesla and NVIDIA stock and even Meta now. And so these shares actually are backed, fully backed by the custodian. It's quite fascinating how it works, actually. And these are only available in Europe, by the way, both in the case of Robinhood and Kraken and this company called Bakkt. that's actually doing the regulatory stuff. So what happens is there's some KYC at the beginning of the process where you actually have to buy from the primary market.

2:06:24But then once it's withdrawn to the blockchain, it's basically, there's like this loophole where they're tree-like certificates. And so you can, as long as, you know, you say that these aren't supposed to be allowed for USA investors, as long as you basically just say that, and you know you put the fine print there um once you do that they're just really like digital assets um and so when you do trade uh you know uh you know shircoin 3000 into nvidia stock uh it actually is like you're you're getting something that's uh a back one one to one uh however uh it's the same with um the private stocks where there's like a pretty big limitation on the liquidity um like i think uh you know 100 million is like the max that can be issued uh at this point uh and they're doing like uh several tens of millions uh in volume so nothing crazy yet um but how are they trading like are they are they trade are they're not stable right no no yeah so there's a um so they can trade at a premium.

2:07:37The prices are... Yeah, no, they're not. This isn't... It's not like a micro strategy play. We can talk about the treasury companies as well, but the prices are supposed to be indexed one to one. And what's interesting is like you can now obviously compose this with other applications in DeFi, right? So you can literally buy Tesla stock and then take out a loan against it and then maybe a far point at that point like you can do all sorts of different things um uh and you can just like hold it in your wallet um it's pretty cool but like it's just it's very very early so i wouldn't make any uh but how but how much it feels pretty monumental right is this not what what people have been excited about for the for the last decade two decades and it was saying that he wanted a cryptocurrency that was backed by a basket of every financial asset.

2:08:36And like we're on the cusp of it. It feels like that you could have like a token that owns a slice of the S &P, a slice of physical gold, a slice of real estate. And it'd be kind of like the most stable asset, even more stable than the dollar, potentially. That was like the original thesis. But yeah, that was actually, by the way, that video. Yeah. Yeah, you guys should surface that video. That video was predicted in 1999. But yeah, I mean, it is huge, right? Like it's gotten a lot of attention and it's very exciting that you can just basically start to like actually modernize the financial rails.

2:09:14Patrick Collison from Stripe had a really good way of describing stable coins, which was like, this is like dollars on like superconductor rails, right? where there's now no friction and you can just compose with any other financial instruments, obviously, that's on the blockchain. And it's taken so much work to actually get here and clear all these regulatory hurdles. But it's really just beginning. I think there's going to be, once Robinhood gets in and everybody else starts getting in, I think Coinbase will also start pretty soon. They also have their own blockchain. So I think it's going to start getting very competitive.

2:09:51Okay. I was talking to a retail investor who would be like so excited. Like 150 IQ. It would be so excited to be able to buy private company shares on chain, be able to buy all sorts of stuff on chain. But he was particularly very upset and still held a grudge from the GameStop rally where there was no buy button. There was only a sell button. And he felt like betrayed by the platform. Now, when I dug into it, it seemed like the situation with Robin Hood was much more nuanced than that. And there was actually some liquidity constraints. And there were a lot of reasons why they chose the whole narrative of like, oh, they, Ken Griffin called them and told them to, you know, save some hedge fund.

2:10:35I didn't really buy into that. But anyway, I think the more important question is when you put something on chain, the idea is like the code is decentralized, no one has the button to turn something off. But the downside of that is that you could maybe get into some situation where if there's a reinforcing feedback loop of sell pressure or buy pressure, you could really, really distort the market. And so I'm wondering, I'm thinking about the Terra Luna situation or any of these situations where there was this perfect perpetual motion machine, But then the fact that it was actually that someone couldn't step in and just put pump the brakes was actually a bug Not a feature at that moment of time and I'm wondering if there are potential risks to having real-world assets on chain that get that that where Where everything is is in code does that make any sense?

2:11:34I'm asking any sort of reasonable question here Can you just get on that a little bit? Yeah, it's certainly a very valid point. And it's also why the Genius Act for stable coins was pretty monumental. Because like, you know, Terra Luna also had some very funky concepts around their stable coins and their, you know, not actually being backed by anything, right? Yeah. And with the new Stablecoin Act, which like puts very or, you know, much more clear framework on like how often should these things be audited? How should they be backed? Who can do this? Whatever. And with this new regulatory approach, consumers and users actually have like way better benefits and way better guarantees.

2:12:17Right. And it's also right. Like it's obviously decentralized finance, but it's also programmable finance. Right. So in the case of an L2, for example, you know, Robin Hood can add, again, the same types of rules that that to enact some sort of control and like maybe free something. USDC can already do this today, by the way, right? USDC can actually freeze the USDC on a per wallet basis. And even on Solana, you can do this, right? The smart contracts have certain hooks depending on how the issuer of the token actually encodes these. So you can actually still program these to get like the compliance, you know, flavor that you want.

2:13:04And the difference is that it's extremely transparent, right? You can read the code and you can be like, okay, this is what can happen in this situation. And this is what they did. And so you can actually audit it. And it's very verifiable. I have a question about Erebor. This story kind of leaked out today in the Financial Times about Palmer Luckey, Peter Teal, and some other folks, Joe Lonsdale, working on something that sounds like a stable coin bank. I would love to hear about the problems that crypto companies run into with banks. What might they solve if you were imagining the list of to-dos?

2:13:44And then, are there any, I mean, there's been a few crypto-friendly banks, but if I have it correct, like Robinhood isn't a bank, Coinbase isn't a bank, Circle's not a bank, Stripe isn't a bank, or maybe you can correct me there. But just kind of take me through the the the problem that banks solve and then in the current in the current structure. And then what problems are do stable coin companies still face with the traditional banking system? Right. Yeah. So I think actually Mike from Pirate Wires and Nick Carter did a really good job on Operation Choke Point, where they kind of go in detail into the debanking of these industries.

2:14:27I have like a much more trivial example, which is my co-founder. He's a he's a he's Canadian, unfortunately, just like me. And he went to get a mortgage for his new house. And at first, I think they approved him and then they looked at where he worked, which is Helios, the company that we run. And then they actually rescinded the mortgage. and they said it was, you're in crypto, even though we don't have like a token, we're basically a cloud provider. And they said it's too high risk of an industry and they actually, he couldn't get a mortgage. And like, this is Canada. And so like, in terms of problems, you know, there's a lot of, maybe there's two dimensions to this.

2:15:11One is just the interoperability, right? Like being able to off-ramp, on-ramp, compose. Like if you're earning money, USDC on chain, how exactly are you transferring that how are you doing payroll all sorts of things like just a tech side of it and then just like being able to get access has been historic cults especially I think this is changing especially with you know the president of the free world and actually the first lady both being the the founders of various shit coins I think it's certainly changing but yeah Yeah, we saw that. What was the announcement last week? Are you talking about the social media founder, the founder of Truth Social?

2:15:55Because he has a coin, right? Unicorn social media entrepreneur. People don't give him enough credit. It's very rare that a founder of a social media company as big as Truth Social has a side hustle as demanding as being the president of the United States. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, and he's just a lot of founders too. Crazy. There was there was also the news that I'm forgetting the governing body, but they were advising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start looking at crypto assets in the mortgage process. Federal housing. Yeah. Yeah. So there's progress. Right. Yeah. So. Yeah, that so that one's super interesting where you can actually I believe the exact rule is something like the assets that you have on a centralized exchange, like a Coinbase and soon to be, I guess, Robinhood, you can actually take out a mortgage using those assets as collateral.

2:16:47and I believe they actually I don't know if this was real news I didn't look too into it but I believe they were actually looking at if Farcoin is viable to use as mortgage collateral because it obviously needs to have some certain properties but yeah that can be very interesting

2:17:10I'm not sure how it'll go the devil's always in the details for these things but there's a lot of progress, right? Like two years ago with Gary Gensler at, let's say, being the Eye of Sauron, you could not even imagine, like you could not even think this. You would, he would arrest you in your sleep. So, and then everybody left the States as a result and now they're coming back. Yeah. Well, the Eye of Sauron is closed and the mountain of Erebor is born. That's right. Well, we'll have to have you back on soon to talk more. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for calling in. I'm sure it's late wherever you are, and we really appreciate you taking the time.

2:17:51Yeah, great to catch up. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. So many zingers. The crypto vernacular is just undefeated. But you heard Emily Sundberg mention it earlier. She bought her husband a watch. You can buy your husband or wife a watch on Bezel. Go to GetBezel.com. your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest has an absolute hitter. I saw him in D.C. wearing a JLC Reverso. There he is. Not to dox your watch, but it's a fantastic piece. Dox, dodge. Great, great. Now he's got a higher security. And by the way, look at this.

2:18:31Oh, he's got it on. Oh, I love the Reverso. Let's go. The Uno Reverso. Beautiful. It's a beautiful watch. It's fantastic. It is a great story. It's a beautiful watch. Great story. It was actually, it was a gift from my wife for my 30th birthday. So beautiful watch for my family for my 30th birthday. So I'm thrilled to have it. Yeah. And if I remember the story correctly, it was different time zones for a while. That's right. So no better watch than the Reverso to represent where you are physically and where your future wife is. Fantastic. That's right. JLC, sponsor the pod. We're ready. Really?

2:19:04We are so ready. So ready. Until then, getbezel.com. Was lovely having you on yesterday. Yes. A lot. tends to happen in 24 hours these days. Yes. What's new? Give us the update. Yeah, it's a big 24 hours. First of all, has anyone ever done the two day in a row? Back to back. Delian did once, kind of by accident. He came on. He was scheduled every other Thursday, and he happened to stop by our YC Demo Day stream for a very different thing. We hit him with a confetti cannon. It was a lot of fun. That's all right. All right. We love Delian. That's fine. Big 24 hours in Washington. And in fact, it started right after I hung up with you guys.

2:19:43I don't know if you saw this. In the background of my shot yesterday, you had this beautiful vista over downtown D.C. And as we were talking, there was a huge storm cloud starting to come in and completely raining on top of all of D.C. So you guys know this. I think people probably know in Congress, there is no remote voting. You are either voting in person or if you are not there, you do not get a say in what happens. And right now, the big, beautiful bill, which is in the hands of the House, is on the precipice. It could go either way. It might pass. It may not pass. But every single vote is necessary.

2:20:18And I kid you not, there was a ground stop in the morning at the CA. And there were multiple members who were stopped, prevented from coming back into town to vote because of the huge storm in Washington last night. So this will give you a sense of how quickly things move. It's a biblical metaphor for sure. It is. It is biblical. I don't always see divine providence in politics. In fact, I just about never see it, but it's pretty hard to argue with a full grand stop in D.C. So does this make J.D. Vance's vote more important, less important? What's the read on Vance's role here? So Vance is the president of the Senate.

2:20:53When there's a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which is what happened yesterday, his vote is the most crucial vote. And that's why, by the way, if you are any Dem, Governor Shapiro, AOC, whomever, running in 2028, it is now a phenomenal gift to you that you can go and badger Gady Vance about his vote yesterday. But the bill is in the House today. So there's no Vance vote. There's no tiebreaker. There is no. In fact, the GOP basically has eight votes or four votes they could lose. There were eight people who didn't show up this morning. There are four votes they could lose and still get the vote passed.

2:21:27And so all day, there's been this series starting in the morning of procedural votes as a way of checking just who from the conference is even in town to begin with before they get to the actual vote itself. This is like literally a roll call. It is literally a roll call. My mom was a teacher for a while. My grandmother was a teacher her whole career. There is zero difference between my grandmother teaching a special ed class doing roll call and what's happening today in Congress. Maybe a slight difference, but basically no difference. All right. So there's a couple of factions you guys talked about yesterday, the menu of different people within the GOP.

2:22:03The big challenge today is picking up votes where the GOP can, where the Republican Party can in the menu of factions. The two big ones to keep an eye on are the House Republican moderates and the House Freedom Caucus, which are the sort of more extreme, further ideologically opposed folks. If you're a moderate, you don't like it for one simple reason, which is this has a bunch of Medicaid cuts. In fact, there are far more Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of the bill, which is what you're being asked to vote on, in the House version of the bill that you passed a couple weeks ago. And you don't want to hang that around your neck when you go back home.

2:22:34Remember, if you're in the House, you are always in campaign mode. You're running every two years. That's why you were out of town to begin with, because anytime there's a weekend, you're flying home to your district to go pick up a couple extra dollars, right? So the moderates don't like it because of the Medicaid cuts, huge Medicaid cuts. The conservatives don't like it. The far conservatives in the Freedom Caucus don't like it because it actually blows up a framework, a balanced budget or close to balanced budget framework that they passed in the House last time. So they got to a basically a compromise agreement with spending cuts and with tax cuts that the Senate completely ignored.

2:23:09So that's much harder for them. And part of Trump's success, if this bill gets passed, will be because he convinces people from the Freedom Caucus in particular to flip and become supporters of the big, beautiful bill. So wrapping up on J.D. Vance. Yeah. If the vote goes through in the House, then people will hang on him. What happens if the bill passes? Does the other bill automatically die? Is there some sort of trigger there? So if the House passes the bill today, the House is looking at the Senate's version of the bill. Yeah. The House passes that bill today. It goes right to the president's desk for signature.

2:23:47That is the plan A scenario. If you're in the admin, what you're hoping happens is it gets passed. It goes through. Plan B or Plan C even is the House says we want to reopen the bill and add a bunch of different amendments because we don't like the Medicaid cuts or we don't like the deficit expansion or whatever. And then it goes back to the Senate, where, by the way, the Republican Party may or may not have the votes to get it done. And suddenly J.D. Vance gets into that spotlight again. Got it. Okay. So the House can't change anything in the Senate bill right now. They just have to decide yay or nay.

2:24:18That's exactly right. If they reopen, if they make any changes, which by the way, a lot of people in the House want them to do, then the Senate has to go through the entire procedure of passing it again, which is a huge risk factor for them. Is there any chance that the House tries to add back in that state-level AI legislation ban? ban or is that even i think it's i think it's fairly unlikely right given the overwhelming i mean listen given it was a 99 to 1 uh repudiation of a rebook rebuke of the ai moratorium i think it's unlikely the house added it back in because that's a signal from the senate saying look if you put this back into the bill all that's going to happen is we're going to lose even more procedural time getting it out of the bill again when it comes back to us the next number of days But the only way this passes before the July 4th deadline, in my view, is if the House basically swallows the Senate version as is today.

2:25:14Yeah. So you kind of define some of the attack lines on the right with the moderates going after the Medicaid cuts and the farther right, Freedom Caucus, is that right, saying that they want more of a balanced bill. have any particular attack lines been opened on the left that you've seen? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the left looks at this. This is Christmas. If you're on the left, right? You got basically to say, wow, the Republicans voted to take away your Medicaid, which is a huge bludgeon. You guys remember back in the OGT party, all those signs, keep your government hands off my Medicare, keep your government hands off my Medicaid, right?

2:25:53This is a horseshoe issue where people on the left and on the right are equally impacted by it. And the net result of that is that it's a great campaign line, no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So here's an example. North Carolina, we talked yesterday about Senator Tillis from North Carolina, who's not running for reelection and who ultimately voted against the big, beautiful bill passage. Tillis has a group of folks in the House who are predominantly from his state delegation, who he has some influence, some relationship with, right? Many of whom have signaled, many of whom are moderates, and many of whom have signaled, I have some reluctance to vote for the bill.

2:26:25Part of the reluctance is because the Democratic governor of North Carolina wrote a letter where he basically said, look, if you vote for the bill, I am going to make sure that these Medicaid cuts become a big issue in the next campaign, because they massively impact his state budget. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania did the same thing, where he said, look, if you vote for the bill, you should know that you will be impacting the Medicaid of Pennsylvanians, and I will use that politically against you. The last part is implied. This has been really, really helpful. I've genuinely learned a lot. So thank you for Well, you may not have been the first person to go back to back, but I have a feeling it'll be the first to go back to back to back.

2:27:03This is very, very helpful. Thank you for breaking it down for us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it as always. I can't see my chyron. Yeah, exactly. I can't see the chyron, but I'm hoping it says Washington correspondent. Oh, yeah. We will definitely update it tomorrow. Thank you. Vice president of Washington. Yeah, great. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Cheers. Cheers, Zach. Cheers. Thank you. up next we have our lightning round beginning with john from paraform welcome to the stream john how are you doing good to meet you what's happening good guys thanks for having me uh what's the latest can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself jordy's getting the hammer ready what's the latest news do you have any good numbers for us we love big numbers hopefully with lots of zeros.

2:27:50Yeah. Hey, everyone. Yeah. Great to meet you guys. I'm one of the founders and CEO of a company called Paraform. We just announced our 20 million series A led by Felicis and an incredible group of founders. Congratulations. I like when Jordy does it because he goes in the camera feed. It's great. Congratulations. Congratulations. 20 million bucks. That's amazing. Tell us what the company does, the inciting concept, the idea, how big you are, the scale of the business right now, that type of stuff. Let me guess. You're going to hire one fifth of an AI researcher. Use of funds. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting one day a week.

2:28:30Yeah. Fractional. Yeah. Fractional. Fractional AI researcher. Oh, I saw that. And also like the founding engineer who, you know, four different companies. I think his name was Soham. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. But for those of you who don't know, Pariform is a marketplace where we help the world's most important companies hire top talent by connecting them with expert recruiters who actually act more like sports agents than talent sourcers. And, you know, I've actually seen your post recently about the meta super intelligence team. Like you guys framed it as like traded. Internally, we've been talking about this for over a year.

2:29:06And it's really cool to see that sort of trend sort of playing out live, but also it's happening a lot sooner than we thought. So really interesting to dive deeper into the trend of just recruiting in general. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've been talking about this a lot because it's good content. It's interesting. And I think the surprising thing that we learned this week, I think, is that we put up that traded graphic for the meta AI researcher. And it got millions of views, like millions of views. And it's funny, and there's an element that can go broader, but it really does speak to the fact that tech has gone mainstream.

2:29:42The question that we've been mulling is, where does this go next? Because when you look at the GOAT debate between LeBron James and Michael Jordan, you're looking at points per game. You're looking at lifetime career points, number of MVPs won, number of championships won. What metrics are you interested in looking at? Is LinkedIn still relevant? Is GitHub still relevant? Are you quantifying these things? What are you doing to try and match these folks together? You imagine that AI can be very useful. There's a whole bunch of different ways that I could imagine this working, but you probably have to do some filtering on both sides to understand who's a good recruiter and who's good talent.

2:30:26For sure. Yeah, I think like, you know, the trend that you guys picked up, it's like you're onto something and it's like very similar to what we think. It's like, I don't think that important tech company hiring, let's say, the best marketing person will be too dissimilar to the Lakers announcing that, you know, LeBron joined or the Dodgers getting Otani. I think how we think about it is as AI sort of, you know, rapidly advances and it automates a lot of the mundane work, I think humans sort of focus on more like higher order functions. Right. And one person will be able to do a lot more. Obviously, the GDP will accelerate.

2:31:00So the average salaries will go up. We've always internally talked about how the age of like a seven figure salary is rapidly approaching. It already is for certain industries, but I think it will be a lot more mainstream. So, yeah, I think like there's going to be more scarcity towards good talent. It's going to get even more competitive. And when there's that scarcity, usually the value of a broker goes up and actually see recruiters, you know, kind of turning into almost one of the most important roles in tech, where essentially they're like brokering this human capital between the most important companies and making sure they represent the best talent.

2:31:34In terms of metrics, I think very similar to maybe like the MBA or the MLB, like obviously they'll measure the company's performance. I think a lot of people commented on how like it's ridiculous to pay$100 million or whatever. But really, these companies, they're smart, like they're doing that because the return on that is greater, right? Like, I mean, solving AGI, I think, is like an important enough problem where you do that. Right. So I think, you know, that's one thing that you're going to measure. Right. Like how well are companies going to perform and achieve their objectives? I think there's other like key KPIs.

2:32:04Like, you know, I'd imagine it's just like the North Star metrics for different teams. I wonder if there's going to be universal things like points, assists and, you know, minutes played. But yeah, I think it's something interesting to think about. Yeah. I mean, we kind of already do this at a little, at like a smaller level when someone says, is like I was early at Stripe. What that really means is that like you were there for the creation of like the first 50 billion of market cap or something. And so if you were one of 20 on that team, yeah, we might give you, you know, 50 million dollars in points, right, essentially.

2:32:39So yeah, what else is going on with the top of funnel? Where are candidates percolating up into the Paraform system these days? Yeah. So one of the fastest growing roles we see are forward deployed engineers. Like obviously, Palantir, they're one of our customers too. They coined this term and really do a good job. Shamsankar, the OG, the first to ever do it. The first forward deployed engineer. He's been on the show. Exactly. Yeah. I think, you know, obviously, you know, you guys know this too, but I think the biggest bottleneck in AI is quickly becoming implementation, right? Where, you know, we already have very good LLMs.

2:33:16We have already very good technology. It's just a matter of getting them into the hands of everyday people and the broader industry. And I think, you know, go to market motions are evolving to like actually fit this forward deployed engineer role where basically you have to customize your AI solutions to, you know, everyday customers. So I think forward deployed engineers is where a lot of really good talent will converge. And at Paraform, what we're seeing is not only companies like Palantir, but also traditional companies that they're also looking to hire for deployed engineers. So that's one trend we see emerging very quickly.

2:33:54Any commentary? You mentioned Soham Parikh, the Indian engineer who works at three to four startups at the same time. Suhail says he's been preying on YC companies. multiple people are hitting the timeline now saying that they fired this guy. That feels like something where we need almost like an inverse LinkedIn, because clearly he can pull jobs off of his LinkedIn and say he just worked at one place at a time. But do we need some sort of reputation score? Could that be abused? How does that evolve? Yeah, and I think it's also interesting to think about like the kind of remote work versus in person.

2:34:29Like this obviously wouldn't have happened if it was in person and you have to like validate things. But I think there's a really a lot of interesting things there. For example, you know, I think with AI, like I think AI can be incredibly helpful in the recruiting process, making it more efficient. But there's also going to be a lot more spam. There's a lot like recruiting is always driven by like this power law where unfortunately there's only a small amount of very good people and a large amount of, you know, sort of it's like a long tail. Right. And I think with AI, I think that trend will like even accelerate.

2:34:54So I actually think that having a human in the loop to vet these things out and not only just these things, but like think think about like culture fit, interpersonal dynamics. Do I like you? Like these kind of things are actually like very much like what recruiters are effective at. So I think, you know, I think Paraform can help, you know, basically prevent these situations. Yeah. Yeah. One question just getting into I'm sure this question came up in various pitch meetings and throughout building the whole company. there's back in the early internet days the dot-com era every ceo said hey we're gonna need way less people um and people are saying that again right now how how would you answer that question you're obviously building a a talent platform um is like you know and i'm sure people you know might say well what happens in a year if the hiring market gets gets wrecked how is that going to impact your business.

2:35:50But I'm curious how you see that market evolving. Yeah, I think fundamentally in terms of value creation, if you think about it from that perspective, I remember seeing a story where when Cursor, Windsurf, these tools became so mainstream, you know, like these Fortune 500s, you know, they were asked, hey, are you going to hire less engineers because, you know, can one person do more? And they actually said, no, because of these tools, we're going to hire even more engineers who can use this to be even more effective, Right. I think at the end of the day, like there is a ton of value to be created.

2:36:19There's a lot more innovation to, you know, continue to happen. So I think that actually we're always going to need people. It's just that each person will be more effective. So I think we actually have a very optimistic view when it comes to like the human and AI collaboration. And I think another thing is, yeah, like we talked about, like the sports agent analogy, I think each talent will become more and more valuable. So, you know, maybe the frequency of hire may decrease, but the value of each hire increases. And when it comes to sort of like a success based model like Paraform, I think the value we capture is sort of actually increasing even more with this trend.

2:36:52So, yeah, I guess like not too worried there. Yeah, talk to us about where the value is occurring and where it's landed historically and where it's going forward. Like when I've hired engineers through recruiting agencies, typically the company pays like one month or two months of salary. So it's like a percentage and then there's some sort of clawback if they don't make it after three months. Sarah Guo was talking about how some folks are helping AI researchers negotiate and they're taking a cut of the pay. And it seems like they're taking it from the researcher because if I can get you 5 % more, that could be millions of dollars.

2:37:29You're fine paying me a million bucks for that negotiation. Then there's platforms. So do you see that economic equation shifting from the company paying to the employee paying to platform getting comped? How is that evolving? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that Sarah Go example is also like exactly like that's what sports agents and even in the music industry, I think that's what they kind of do. But yeah, to answer your question, I think where we are creating value is actually while keeping quality, you know, consistent and maybe even better, we're actually reducing the time to hire significantly.

2:38:06So, you know, like every customer cares. The number one thing they care about is, you know, the best candidates fast, right? So the metric we look at is time to hire. And Paraform is making revenue by filling the most difficult roles in the world. And our average time to hire is under one month. And I think when it comes to efficiency, I think what happens is at every step of the procurement process or the recruiting funnel, we're making it really, really efficient. I think we're basically decreasing downtime. For example, if you want to work with a recruiting agency, you're relying on word of mouth.

2:38:43You never know whether they're good or not before you work with them. And there's a ton of these little things that waste your time and obviously cost. But at Paraform, based on what our customers are looking for, we're able to match them with the best possible recruiters based on their track record, their candidate network. We have so much data on them that we're able to do like an instant good match of like best recruiter for the best role. So that already saves like weeks. And most customers find the candidate that they want, they end up hiring within the first week or two of posting on Paraform.

2:39:13And these are like director of engineering at, you know, high touch. Like these are like very, very difficult roles. So I think that's where we create value. It's, you know, reducing the time to hire while maintaining and improving quality. Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. I think we had a, it's coming back to me now. I think we had a call maybe in 2023 early on. We did. Amazing to see your progress. Congratulations on the new round. Decided to follow along. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Really quickly, let me tell you about Graphite. Graphite.dev code review for the age of AI.

2:39:47Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. And they got a$52 million Series B from none other than Anthropics Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures. We had breakfast with a friend of the show, Bailey Barrow, this morning. And he honestly wouldn't stop talking about Graphite. He's absolutely obsessed. He really was. Did he say Graphite fanboy? He said he's running the TBPN stack. Yeah, the TBPN stack. He's got all of our sponsors. Linear Graphite goes down the list. It's all good stuff. Harvey, Asana, Ramp, Replit. They basically got every logo. They got every logo.

2:40:27They got every logo. But head over to graphite.dev and check it out. yourself who do we got next uh well we have some more timeline posts so uh mike noop he's been on the show before talking about arc agi um arc agi 3 was just announced the ai benchmark from francois charlet and mike noop um and uh this came as unexpected which is what aren't people still they're still struggling with our agi 2 that's right but the goal for arc v2 was to endure 12 to 18 months the goal for the b3 is over three years um and so you he's talked about this before when you design a benchmark you you have to assume that yeah that like if the current models are scoring 50 right now on your benchmark they are going to solve it in weeks like it's not even it's going to be days don't even people won't even bother with it we were talking about this with IMO with some folks from Cognition.

2:41:25You know, it's like the IMO is so close to being solved that people aren't even really focused on it more anymore because they're like, of course we can do that. Let's not bother with it. And so the team was saying when you're designing a benchmark, you need to target not only will it get 1%, it'll get 0%. You need to imagine a benchmark that in a year, the AI will still be scoring like negative 100%. Like it will get every question like so wrong that it's actually deducting even more points. Exactly. Like you need to you need to really think through the philosophy of what makes a really, really hard benchmark.

2:42:02And they've done it at RKGI and we're we're really happy to support the team over there. So if you're building a foundation model, head over and give it your best shot. And if you're a human, go try and solve one of these prices. They're pretty fun. They're pretty fun. More breaking news, Quinton Farmer, one of the co-founders of Toland's, has announced a Series A led by Raboi over at Coastal Ventures. Congratulations. They launched just a few months ago. They have 3 million downloads,$12 million run rate, and now adding this$20 million Series A. Wait, is this that fun, like Tamagotchi almost?

2:42:39I think it's like purple dino things. No, purple aliens. Yeah. Alien best friend. Yep. Brilliant. So absolutely ripping. 76 ,000 reviews on the iOS app store, 4.8. Wow. An alien best friend. Very cool. And somehow less dystopian than the AI boyfriend. Yeah, Wired has an article today that just came out. What could a healthy AI companion look like? I love it. So if you're looking for a healthy AI companion. I love it. Why don't you ring the gong for them and then we'll bring in our next guest. Let's do it. Let's do it. Hit that gong, Jordy, for Toland. Congratulations to the team over there. You're welcome to come on the show.

2:43:20And you're welcome to send one of your alien friends over to the show to do the interview for you. Send him on. Send him over. Send him on. Anyway, we have our next guest, Amit from Luma AI, coming on the stream. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Doing very well. Great to meet you as well, and thanks for having me. Of course. Welcome to the stream. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company. Any breaking news for us? Awesome. So my name is Ahmed. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Luma. At Luma, we are building basically what we consider to be the future of multimodal intelligence.

2:43:52That includes what comes after LLM's, building multimodal models that learn from audio, video, language, image, all together. Our first product is video generation models, models that are able to generate video, audio altogether. And currently we are working with Hollywood. We are working with advertising agencies. We are working with also a lot of individual creators. And we have about, you know, multiple tens of millions of users. We just don't talk about the exact number of users. Sure, sure, sure. What – explain to me multimodal models. Like, are you trying to tokenize everything into some sort of standard format so that an image, a video, code, text, it all appears as tokens in the same kind of stream?

2:44:40Or are you creating a system that can kind of shift gears between one and the next? That's a great question. And this is basically the core differentiation. So right now, most people are doing the latter. Most of the AI labs that have large language models. They're using those as backbones and trying to teach them how to read image and video as token. But the problem with that approach is that the output is very, very subpar. And even on the most basic tasks, second generation deep learning models, which are like your convolutional networks, outperform on most VLM tasks. This is the first approach, which is you create a joint latent space where all of this information is in the same representation.

2:45:26and then when you learn on it, it is quite analogous to how brain learns, like human brain, right? Audio, video, image, they're not really terribly different for us. These are all just signals, and when we think of an event, like let's say dropping a glass, right? We can hear it in our head, we can see it in our head, and we also can predict, oh, if it's a piece of glass, it might break. So currently, this disparate approach of training a language model and a video model and an image model, things like that, this is going to get old very quickly because on language model side, we're running out of data.

2:45:59As you're seeing with GBD5 or the previous thing that was called GBD5, 10 times more compute, 10 times larger model, but the performance isn't much better than GBD4. So it was retrogressively renamed to 4.5. On image and video model side, even the models we make today are dumb. They're basically translators that take text or prompt and translate them into video, which is interesting, but that doesn't solve someone's problem. And the problem being like, you know, hey, explain to me how something works or tell me the story, right? Like, or here is a, like, you know, here's a script, make me the whole thing.

2:46:35That needs a level of reasoning and understanding that these models don't have. So when you combine them all together, then one, you solve the data problem because, you know, just immense amount of image, audio, video data in the world. And two, you are able to build intelligence that goes beyond what LMS are able to do today. Talk to me about images in ChatGPT. Do you think that there are multiple layers going on there? I was shocked by the quality of text and then the quality of the Studio Ghibli moment. It feels like style transfer on steroids. But I was particularly surprised they could do both.

2:47:11And it felt almost like two different layers running. And I was trying to do some tests where I would generate some text and then have a snake weave through in front and behind the text. And it was kind of struggling with that. And it was making me feel like maybe there was like a second pass here. Is that a reasonable theory? And also, I'm not saying that as like a knock on anything. Because if I went to a human and asked how a human would design a birthday card with a dinosaur in the background and then happy birthday text on top, they would draw the dinosaur. And then they would use typesetting or they would draw the text on top.

2:47:49And so I don't necessarily think that it's like the wrong path. I'm not knocking the strategy. I'm just curious about what is actually going on in that model because it was remarkable. But it raised a bunch of questions for me. Absolutely. So to the best of our understanding, basically they're doing like, you know, autoregressive image generation as the first pass, right? That produces a blurry low resolution image or somewhat high resolution image. But like, you know, you're missing sort of high frequency details. and then you do a diffusion pass on it to get to a decent quality image representation.

2:48:24Now, so text is one thing, but I believe text actually, text rendering in image models, especially like the latest image models, and then what we're seeing in our next Photon 2 model, that's actually getting very good. So that is not the problem. You know, what's really interesting, though, is structure. So when you do image rendering with just a diffusion model, like, you know, stable diffusion or, like, you know, name your pick. Yeah. There's really, like, you rely on the text encoder of the model to, like, you know, kind of tell you about the semantics of what the person is asking about. And then you just rely on the diffusion model to do all the intelligence and, like, you know, let's say you're asking it, hey, what is 2 plus 2, right?

2:49:07If there's nothing in front of it, like an LLM, that is able to say, like, oh, user is asking 2 plus 2, So let me draw equals to four. If you don't have that, then these models have ridiculously zero understanding of whatever you're trying to say, right? It will just render two plus two equals two and stop doing it, right? That's what I mean, zero understanding. But when you have an LLM generating it or a thing that has good understanding of language and it's unified, so they call it the 4-hour omni, right? Then in language space, especially within the model, you can reason about it. that like, oh, two plus two should be four, and let me render that.

2:49:45Now, what I believe though, GPT-4.0 is still a system rather than just a model. Sure. Right? So when you type something, it still goes through GPT, right? They do all the prompt enhancement and reasoning about it in language space and then give it to the model and it does a very good job of rendering it. But when you ask for like, you know, complex layouts, then I think that that strength starts to show. But of course, you gave an example of like, you know, the snake coming in and out. So this is, again, the question of prompt alignment. And while it is good, it's not perfect yet. Do you have any reaction to, in the Wall Street Journal today, there's Hollywood wants AI protection.

2:50:24There's a lot of back and forth there. I was particularly shocked that there's been a number of - Save us. Save us. I mean, there's been a number of interesting moments in AI imagery and AI video. Obviously, the general narrative is like, the technologists are like, this is amazing. We've created this amazing algorithm, and I agree with that. And then the backlash is like, we don't want all the photographers to be put out of business. But the more interesting stories that have emerged are like VO3 and Google seem to be able to generate Disney IP with perfect accuracy, no problems. And maybe that's because they have some deal with YouTube.

2:50:59And then when the Ghibli moment happened, I was like, wait, like, like, like, GPT, images in chat GPT would reject different things for, for safety reasons, but also for intellectual property reasons, but not Studio Ghibli, which is a style, but it's also intellectual property, and it's not exactly like the cleanest thing, so, but maybe there's a deal behind the scene. So, how do you think, how do you think like the, like the, the, the interplay between the, the startups and the technologists and the legacy media, Hollywood, Washington, D.C.? Like, what stories are you tracking? How is that evolving?

2:51:38Right. So there's two axes that you're talking about. One is basically the adoption and job losses and things like that, right? Like, you know, that is a narrative. And the second is the IP itself. And how do you think about that, right? So on the first one, it's actually, at this point, a foregone conclusion. that unless Hollywood and the traditional way of producing media changes, they are on a path to extinction. There is really no two ways about it. And of course, there are arguments like, oh, but it can't do this, it can't do this, it can't do this. The thing is, like, you know, we spent last year, 2024, building out this infrastructure for training these really large, really capable models.

2:52:19And, like, you know, it trains on petabytes and petabytes of data and much more complex than LLMs. Because LLMs, like, you know, of course, they're complicated to train. but you still have like very little data. The amount of engineering that is required to train multimodal models is insane. Anyway, now that the infrastructure exists, the rate of progress is very, very fast. We saw the same thing in language, right? Initially, everyone had to build from zero to one, but once you have zero to one, they're like, you know, turning out models takes a quarter, sometimes less, right? So anything that they think, oh, it can't do today, yet like, you know, it can't do 4K.

2:52:51Well, tomorrow it's kind of like, we already do 4K. Oh, it's not able to let me control exactly the pose I do, we launched this thing called Modify Video where you can give it your camera feed as a prompt. And you can control exactly any camera movement, any pose, anything that you want. So we work with some of our great partners in Hollywood. And some of them are very forward. Some of them are very much not there today. But when you think about what a studio is, a studio is two parts. A financial institution that is responsible for like, you know, green lighting things and managing like, okay, this area we do go in, this area we don't go in, all these kind of things, and a production part, right?

2:53:30The production part largely works by contracting other smaller production houses, but generally that's the structure. AI, especially generative media, changes the economics so wildly from like, you know,$100 ,000 a minute and sometimes a million dollars a minute all the way down to like, you know,$10 a minute,$100 a minute. When that is the level of economic change and you follow the money, there's just no scenario in which you don't come out thinking that like, okay, the old way of doing is not going to work. Yeah. And an interesting thing I've been thinking about is if the cost of production drops by an order of magnitude, just by being able to shoot some, maybe you're shooting some scenes with regular actors and cameras and union crews, but then you're able to create certain scenes or moments um if the caught that they seems like they're the internet has this insatiable demand for content and it feels like when you look at some parts of the sort of entertainment production stack writer like great writers might be more in demand than ever because like they'll have to write more like but but sort of like stories would be more in demand like you You can imagine a world where HBO is putting out an iconic, potentially iconic new property or franchise or shipping them monthly, right?

2:54:55When historically, maybe they only had one big, one or two massive releases a year, like a Game of Thrones. And so I actually think that the consumer is going to win and the industry, the people that adapt within the industry and say, I'm going to lean into using this tool so I can write better. I can produce. Or even the idea that, I'm sure you're, I'm curious if scripts are now, certain scripts are now being encouraged. Like bring your script with kind of an idea of what this world looks and feels like so that it's not just like this static, you know, text-based concept, right? Show me, give me the pilot basically.

2:55:35Exactly. And it's top of mind because today we released an ad that we handmade, farm to table, content for one of our partners, Wander. And there's like a few scenes in there that you probably could have AI generated. We didn't, but they cost us real money, right? Like that, that we could have potentially stripped out. And it feels like, it feels like we're so close. Yeah. So here's the over and under on that, actually. The demand for video is absolutely absurd. You're right. Like, you know, so average person is watching about three and a half hours of video on their phones every day.

2:56:15I don't know if it's good, but it's a big number. We're certainly, we're, you know, might be contributing to that. But it's true. And the thinking about that is very simple, that people don't like to read. If they could watch an explanation, watch how to do something, watch a piece of news, whatever have you, they would do that over reading it or reading about it, right? like all day, all night. So that means for entertainment, yes, like, you know, generally entertainment, we think about like, okay, you make it once and then millions of people will watch it again and again, all these kind of things.

2:56:48But when you think about like news and you think about question and answer and you think about explanations and all these kind of things, that's ridiculous, right? Like, you know, you can't generate a video for every explanation for every scenario on every planet. It has to be done dynamically. It has to be done automatically. And it has to be done with AI. Now, the number I track is, okay, for every person on the planet, out of that 3.5 hours that they watched, if we can generate at least an hour of video a day, that is what the success metric looks like for us. So that looks like about 6 billion hours of video per day generated.

2:57:22One, there's no human capacity that can actually generate that kind of video, right? Editors can do that. And two, there's no compute in the universe at the moment to be able to actually do that. But that is what to attract towards because video is now the substrate of information on the internet. There's two things happening to the internet, right? One, it's becoming zero click, which is like, you know, you don't hunt around in websites and try to like, oh, this answer, this answer. No, you just ask an LLM or now Google also has AI mode. If you're in the labs experiment, then you just get the damn answer.

2:57:55And second thing that is happening is the substrate of information is changing from text to video. This is what people do. So if you just extrapolate from this trend, video production has to change. Entertainment has to change. And people who don't come along, it's going to be a very hard journey for that. Advertising, we can talk about advertising for about an hour. And Kan was very illuminating for me in that way about how people are thinking about it. Yeah, I want to get the full update from Kan. Is this your first time going? Break us down. I'm like, what is the con film festival, right? I mean, one of the exciting things about what you're doing is when you look at the cost structures of consumer brands, which we both have exposure to so much.

2:58:47Oftentimes, consumer brands are held back because they don't have net new ad creative. And so not only is it a cost, it just takes a long time to produce. And so you have these gaps where a brand will see lower performance, slowing growth, et cetera. And it's really just because they don't have access to net new ad creative that can drive new demand. And so that's an entire area that I don't think that's being fully priced in yet, how the great brands will actually be able to grow faster because of just being able to day by day generate net new ad creative. Yeah. Give us the full Khan recap. Sorry, answer that question, and then I want the Khan recap.

2:59:30Yeah. I think the answer to that question in Khan is almost the same. So, yes, it was my first time. Beautiful place, to be honest with you. But really interesting. Like, you know, one, everybody – I mean, it's not an AI event. It's not an AI conference. But literally, every conversation was about AI. Every conversation. But what's really interesting is that... maybe 1 % of the people knew what the hell they were talking about. um i i i nobody knows but everybody's excited yes but i got blisters in my ears hearing the word agent um all these like you know agent really yeah all these agency people pitching right like oh we have ai agents to do this and we have ai agents we are building this to do this in fact Like, you know, Adobe was there and their salespeople were trying to pitch non-existent AI agents to people and trying to log them into three-year contracts, right?

3:00:35It was palpable, the level of desperation. Shots fired. Shots fired. It's insane. And when you go and ask, like, okay, what do you mean, right? Like, we talk to everyone. And what is it? It's a prompt box where you can select a bunch of models. That's it. That is not an AI agent. That doesn't do anything. Senator, that's SaaS. That is SaaS. Exactly. And the issue is that basically, like, you know, a lot of people are thinking, like, okay, well, you know, developing this is basically like, you know, nothing. And we'll just, like, you know, produce the models and it's going to happen. Developing agents in creative space, in visual space is very difficult work, right?

3:01:20Like, you know, you need new kinds of models, the kinds we are training. because think about it, like Gemini is the best VLM that is out there right now. And it is barely able to meet about 3 % of our benchmark of visual iteration. Let's say you're talking about brands. So we met quite a few, including like, you know, partners like Coca-Cola and others, right? If you want to make an ad and then let's not think about a Super Bowl ad. If you just want to like, you know, make creatives, like, you know, say 100 ads for different markets, getting them to be right, getting them to be on brand, getting them to like, you know, look exactly like, you know, how they should look like.

3:01:55That's a hard job. Like current image and video models, as I was telling you, like are dumb. They will just like, you know, make whatever. They have no idea. And then when you use VLMs to critique them, the outputs are barely any good. So it's, you need a new kinds of, you need like the next thing after LLMs, the next kind of models that are able to understand visual information, instructions, and what makes something engaging. That level of information is what you need. Like LLMs are getting there, right? like for stories. When you write text, LMs are now making things that are very engaging.

3:02:27Now we need that next jump in models. So that was my, like, you know, overall impression on Canada. The second thing I felt like, you know, by next year, this place is going to look very, very different. Like, you know, fortunes are going to change significantly because when you talk to some of the most senior folks in like various agencies, you know, whatever have you, the writing is on the wall for them. Like they employ hundreds of thousands of artists and like, you know, people and and they are asking us like oh how do we actually do this more efficiently uh and and the thing is like that that's that's incorrect way of thinking about it so um long story short like um it was not an ai conference but it ended up being an ai conference where nobody knew what the hell actually the ai is and consequently nobody knew what is coming what areas do you think are safe from disruption we talked to a photographer who does stuff in cpg and he was saying there actually could be a situation where if you're mcdonald's you can't generate ai images of your burger because it could be there are already ftc rules around you have to use the real burger because there were all these like the false advertising lawsuits where they show the perfect cinematography burger that was perfectly made and looked amazing and then you'd go expectation versus reality and those those memes went viral enough and the the flat disgusting burger uh bubbled up and eventually i guess there was a lawsuit and so now you know and and even in uh if you're selling a phone you have to say screen images simulated or if you're driving on a truck you have to say close course professional driver that's for safety reasons obviously drink responsibly if it's an alcohol so the ftc has a bunch of rules do we think there'll be anything there on the ai side I think those rules will change too basically so currently so the burger example the problem is you are over-representing the product you're selling it is not the problem of the tooling you used to make it with you could have made it how the thing actually is that would look very disappointing in the ads but you could have made it closer to how the thing actually is such that people aren't misleading thinking I'm going to get this big giant thing which is very fluffy and then when you get in, like, oof, this is the thing, right?

3:04:45So it's really not about the tool you used. It is about the intention of what you have behind it. You clearly wanted to mislead. So I think the FTC rule is right. But the rule should not be, oh, they should not be created with CGI or with AI or whatever have you. The rule should be, don't misrepresent your product. And for me, basically, the singular thing to think about is follow the money, right? So when you're, like, you know, actually in advertising, the point you were making is really, really salient, which is advertising is all about stats, right? And how, like, something that performs well, something doesn't perform well, it's very hard to predict.

3:05:25How quickly can you replace the thing that is not performing well? And in the gradient of the things that are performing well, that will lead to the best output. Today, that cannot be done automatically at all in any visual form of advertising. that is done for text advertising. It has been algorithmic for a very long time now. And that results in very, very good outputs. So when companies actually are faced with the idea, like, okay, well, like, you know, on our other products where we can do this, it performs so well. And on these products, no, the regulations, they will lobby for the regulations to change on this kind of thing.

3:05:54And I think the regulation should be, don't misrepresent your product. Now, don't use AI. Yeah, that's a good point. Last question for me. What about more narrow AI use cases in Hollywood? I'm interested in like just like in the VFX pipeline, there are... One second. Let's do... Sorry, I'm scheduling something. We're doing it live. Let's show biz. So my question now, we're going to cut this so it doesn't matter. My question is more narrow VFX use cases like, Like, is there a single company that's just doing amazing green screen rotoscoping? I've seen Runway do that in like kind of the prosumer arena.

3:06:39But there's so many different pieces of the pipeline that I think artists would be much less jostled by if it's just, hey, I have to track a camera all the time in 3D. You know, there's services that do this using traditional like CPU based pipelines and solvers. There's IMUs that measure the movement of the camera. No one really cares about that particular role. It's kind of just a hassle that they have to deal with. And so all sorts of different more minor vertical AI use cases, those feel like point solutions that could be deployed right now. People could go and get a foothold. Maybe they expand to prompt to movie.

3:07:20But just in the meantime, how about we just speed up the rotoscoping? Yeah. I mean, why not? Right. So, for instance, like, you know, we released this thing. It's called Reframe. So what it does is you give it video in any aspect ratio, and it's able to generate, like, you know, any aspect ratio out of it without cropping. So, like, it will generate, like, you know, if you give it a 16x9 vertical video, and now you want to share it on YouTube, for instance, where, like, vertical videos don't perform well. You want something, like, you know, that is horizontal, 16x9 ideally. You can, like, you know, generate any of these variants, any number of these variants all you want, and it's now a point solution.

3:08:01It doesn't matter how the original video was made. You could have totally created that clip using any traditional methods or whatever have you. So I think this is... So here's something interesting, right? This is not what you asked me, but I promise I'll lead to the answer you're talking about. So at least in my life, since I've been conscious about this, there's been two really big changes before AI. One was mobile, And mobile was a very large consumer side change, right? You know, people changed their behaviors drastically. Like, you know, not overnight, obviously, but it looked like overnight, to be honest with you.

3:08:39And then the second one happened about a few years later, which was cloud. And cloud, consumers didn't really, it didn't affect them too much, right? Maybe enterprises, yeah. But it affected companies. And companies were done inside out. Things they used to do on paper, things they used to do on-prem, things they used to do. So these were two very radical transformations, but they happened to different segments of the world. AI is for the first time, at least in my memory, a transformation that is happening on consumer and enterprise levels. It's basically rewiring companies from the inside, and it is changing consumer behavior like nothing else before.

3:09:16So coming back to your point now, you can take the slow route. You can say, okay, well, let's do rotoscoping. But the tiny studio down the street that used to probably just create frames for you up until last year is now going to start releasing stuff that looks kind of as good as yours. And now what they can do at a fast clip and they're releasing weekly episodes and iterating on it. And how long will it take before their IP is actually bigger than yours? Yeah, that's a good question. we have seen this happen on YouTube again and again and again and again. Cocoa Mellon, right? Yeah. Like, it started from nothing, and look at this now.

3:09:58So, bigger than a lot of Disney IPs, right? And Disney, I think Disney bought them, Disney tried to buy them, something happened there. Yeah. So, this is basically the difference. You can do, like, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it, you should do the small things. But if you are in the business of producing content, if you are in the business of thinking about advertising, If you're in the business of touching pixels, the world is not the same as it was two years ago. And not in a small way, in a very, very deep way. While it might not solve the whole thing for you at the moment, but you have to start really thinking about what would the economics look like a year from now, two years from now, and five years from now.

3:10:38And what should the business be like exactly? That's great. Well, this has been great. We would love to have you back on to – there's so many different topics we can cover. And I appreciate how freely that you're willing to speak on so many different topics. That's the only way? That's the only way. You just got to be yourself. Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Thanks so much for having us. Cheers. See you guys. And we have some breaking news from TBPN. Let's go to the printer cam, which I believe will be working. Here it goes. Printer cam's ready. Terminal.

3:11:14I see it spinning up. We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news. What is this? Traded. We got a trade deal. He's wanted. The timeline is in turmoil. Special segment starting now. I love this because it's - Sohan Parikh just became famous in the last few hours. Not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous. No, no. Is this a real picture of him? Do we know? I don't know. But this is from Var Epsilon. It says, breaking meta open AI and thropic and Google have signed so home periche as fractional chief AI officer obviously a joke but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple YC companies multiple companies at the same time what's funny is that we were we were working on a during the show we were working on a post we couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of so hum and but some fan just did it for us this guy didn't happen stance fully sent it so So Matt Parker from Antimetal was actually, Soham was their first engineering hire in 2022.

3:12:18Really smart and likable. Enjoyed working with him. We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Matt says, hiring Soham is a new rite of passage, DBH. Any great company should go through it. So Suhail was the first person to call this out. uh he said this morning or actually it was last night so this has been this has been building psa there's a guy named soham parikh in india who works at three or four startups at the same time he's been preying on yc companies and more gary is not going to be happy about this you do not you don't want to put up the bat you know you don't want gary people to put up the gary sign no um you don't want to go up against but apparently he's been preying on yc companies I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people.

3:13:08Oh, this is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratika Mehta? Tyler put this in there. You want to read this one for us? He's been all over the place. Roy said I interviewed this guy yesterday. No way. That's amazing. Tyler, break it down for us. What does Pratika have to say? Okay, so apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've actually, I've sent him an email. Okay. I've obtained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see. But she says, the dude clears interviews. He's good with that. after clearing, he has junior people doing all the work. Yep. And he has around 20 employees and interns, basically a small dev shop.

3:13:38Wow. So he's just figured out the economics of like, hey, if I'm making 200K or 300K. He's basically signing people to a 20K a month retainer. He knows he's going to have some churn. Yep. But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity. This is fascinating. Equity comp as well. Yes. I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested. He's some shares on the balance sheet. At any of these companies. This is crazy. Ken Watana says, Soham Parikh is the Bonnie Blue of YC. Very vulgar. Sar says, all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on TBPN to figure out what is going on. Well, open invite to Soham.

3:14:12Santiago says, Soham on TBPN. When? Daniel, Growing Daniel says, Microsoft just laid out, laid off 9 ,000 workers, all of them Soham Parikh. If your CEO doesn't have a Soham Parikh email in their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume. because he hasn't reached out. It means he's not bullish on you. Austin Allred says, must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that Soham Parikh has been hired 79 times in the past four years. And then Matthew Berman says, oh, you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Parikh. Signal says, not now, honey. There is a Soham gate happening on X.

3:14:55It is really funny. It's basically saying, I'm going to build a dev shop, but it's going to be my name. And I'm, you know, he probably, no, he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters and the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracked. We don't have to outsource the whole thing with Uber. Remember Uber's initial build out was all outsourced and it was like a mark on the company.

3:15:29Obviously, it didn't affect them. They went on a generational run. It was fantastic. But there's this idea of like if you're building a startup, the founders need to be coding. The employees need to be coding. It needs to be handcrafted. You can't outsource. True. He's proven us all wrong, I guess. True. So we're working on getting him live. We got another post here from Growing Daniel. Has he gotten back to you, Tyler, on email? It seems like he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and get him on. Hasn't got back. I sent it 20 minutes ago. Okay. I think he needs to come out and say he's sorry.

3:16:02He needs to come out and say he's sorry. Yeah. And he needs to say this is the right time to launch his dev shop. Yeah. Yeah. And it should be called the dev shop of Soham Parikh. Yes. I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's delivering. Growing. Daniel has a post here. Chief of staff brings lists of applicants. Really likes this one Indian guy. I asked if it's a rune or a Soham. She doesn't understand. Pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between runes and Soham. She laughs and says, it's a good engineer, sir. It's a Soham. Oh, that's a wild pest. That's great. Oh, this is great. Anyway, anything else that we need to cover from the news today?

3:16:46Apparently, crumble cookies have 62 % of your daily calorie allowance, Nick Carter says. Staying on Soham, Gabby Goldberg says, I'm at the intersection of Soham, Parikh, and Worker 17. Oh, yeah, Worker 17. Oh, we got another one. Growing Daniels going on an absolute terror. We're just going to keep these coming. Pull this up in the chat. Posting. Soham, Parikh, new CS grads. Yeah, Soham, Parikh's really soaking up the jobs. The job market. It's the power law. He'd been sitting over this post being like, the job market is actually fine. You guys are just bad at interviewing. Yeah. Jacob Postle says, introducing our newest product, Soham, the AI coding agent that can work for anyone, any code base 24-7.

3:17:30We've been testing in stealth for a while and results are looking excellent. Please reach out. I wonder, yeah, I wonder if he's a cursor user or what he's got. Maybe he's got Devin under the hood. Maybe he's got Claude Code. Who knows? We definitely need to know Soham's tech stack for sure. That is interesting. Ryan Peterson says Soham never even applied to Flexport. Sad face emoji. Ryan would have caught him. Delete that. Don't say that out loud. Wow. Adam over at Warp, CTO, has a few. He got to a round two. Soham got to a round two over at Warp. Sounds like he didn't make a hire. It's fascinating.

3:18:13Daniel says, worker 17's name, Soham Parikh. Antonio says he was marked safe from Soham Parikh today. He did tear up the valley today. Completely. Completely. Anything else we should cover in the timeline? We have someone in the House of Representatives is coming out against car headlights. They're saying they're too bright and I'm going to do something about this. Brightness has doubled in the last decade, but manufacturing standards haven't budged in 40 years. drivers and oncoming traffic deserve visibility. It matters for seniors in rural roads. Are you anti-bright lights? I am, I think we could tone them down a bit.

3:18:54Yeah, really? I think we can tone them down a bit. Interesting. I don't drive at night much, but when I do, I'm reminded that lights kind of peaked probably in the early 2000s. They were solid. We didn't have to keep improving. They also got bluer because they went to LED. And they used to be sodium vapor or tungsten. widespread blindness. I would say if you're driving a car, just light a candle and hold out a lantern. Like on a fishing rod almost in front of your car? Yeah, no, no, no, just while you're driving like this. Yeah, just hold out the candle, the candle lantern. That's great. We got to highlight Signal before we head out.

3:19:35Signal Labs is unapologetically a wrapper company. We use state-of-the-art models made by others and give credit where credit's due. Our first product is so simple when you see it you'll probably say wait, that's it. That's really the point That's our ideal reaction. I've been using it for two weeks and genuinely can't imagine life without it at this point We don't have any evals no real QA other than our own intuition, but it surprises you and makes you feel something Hopefully everyone enjoys as much as I do so very excited first signal signals launch. He got us an invite Yeah, send it send the invite.

3:20:04We'd love to do we'd love to test drive it and we'd love to have you on the show when you launch Can't wait anything else worth covering before we hop off I mean there's so much news this Flo actually hired Flo Crivelli yeah he hired him a week ago fired him this morning after seeing Suhail's post it's just funny that the guy wouldn't kind of mix up the name you know it's a small industry stuff's going to get around but anyway It is crazy. Yeah, you'd think different names, different GitHub profiles, different LinkedIn's, like that wouldn't be that hard. Actually, the best way to run this scheme would be to set up a number of different folks.

3:20:51And instead of having one person with 20 junior devs underneath, have five people each with three underneath. So you're still doing the subcontracting, but there's only one face per client, essentially. And this is basically - I'm trying to give them too many ideas, John. This is basically what marketing, like you go to like RGA or Wyden, they'll be like, here's your killer, you know, Don Draper. Like this is your account representative. They'll be coming up with the ideas and they come in once a quarter and give you a presentation on you should do the Super Bowl ad. And like, and investment banks do the same thing.

3:21:25Hey, we, you know, we'd love to do a private placement. We'd love to take you public. Here's this, you know, 200 page deck on why your business is amazing and how much money we can get for it. who built that deck a bunch of analysts working 100 hour weeks that's right for sure well the next 24 hours matter a lot for soham perique we will be watching we'll hopefully get him on the show tomorrow uh but do you think he's gonna raise money he might he i definitely saw somebody joking around saying that he uh raised a series a from uh some friends of ours tier one that's one yeah it's totally possible um but but but do you think it would the greatest the greatest irony would be is he's like sorry guys i've you know what that guy was joking about a few minutes ago saying like yeah i've actually been building a coding agent i named it after myself this was the best way to test if it if it works it's not as good as a one x engineer right now but it's good enough to keep a job for a few months yep and so anyways we will be watching his response Violation on SoHom.

3:22:34It is really dominating the timeline. SoHomgate. Oh, yeah, you posted it. Timeline and turmoil. Buy markets and turmoil. Sell timeline and turmoil. Then I'm seeing pictures from our billboard. Yeah, it's funny. You just refresh and you just get pure SoHom. Everyone's having fun. I love a good current thing. You know, we started the show with the current thing. It was Erebor, the new crypto bank. We ended the show. We lived through it. We experienced the transition. The old current thing is out. The new current thing is so hamperic. Fantastic. I wonder, we got to get his tech stack, and I want to know how much he's actually pulling in.

3:23:22How much do you think he is? I would expect it. I would expect if people are triangulating now that he was maybe had three to four jobs at once, I'm going to make the bold bet that he's actually has. Like, I could see him having 20, 30. You think so? Just imagining a really hardworking guy running a dev shop. A lot of companies aren't posting publicly about it. And a lot of companies aren't public. Totally. And he could be just finding some random SaaS company in the middle of nowhere. Not a lot of management oversight. Companies aren't in founder mode. If he ships, you know, a few PRs a day. Yep.

3:23:55and he's just chugging along. The challenge for him is... Over, under, top line, two million. I'm going over. Over. Over. The challenge would be daily stand-ups, right? Yeah. It's like... You've got to see him, but then again... But he's kind of on the precipice of this video AI models. He could have other versions of himself, voice modulation and AI-generated images, so he can have his employees... do is you can puppeteer the image so you have a different person a real humans joining real real human he just needs a video that he loops and and it plays at the right time it says nothing from my end thanks yeah yeah somebody's gonna post that that's definitely a banger like so humpery when he when he says uh nothing from my end thanks this is the this we're gonna go through all of the current uh all the current thing memes the the honey how did you get how did our family get so rich.

3:24:53Oh, my your father did seven different jobs with a team of junior engineers. This was kind of I mean, this was happening more in twenty twenty one where somebody would have a big tech job. But and they were kind of they were kind of just they weren't working too hard and they would get they would just start moonlighting at a startup. That was a common thing. And I expected a company to start that actually enabled anonymous work. right didn't didn't it was very much like it's typically a top signal when people start moonlighting too hard yeah so I've been on it you've been you've been you've been close to calling the top toying with it I've been toying with calling the top we'll see I got pretty sure every few pretty sure very few YC companies will hire remote Indians classic case of one guy exploiting a high trust society, which leads to downfall of the others around him, says Varunam Goresh from Warp.

3:25:50I think you already read this, but Gary Tan chimed in. He said, if this is true, it would be sad. The Soham saga doesn't seem widespread to me. He seems like a five standard deviation above the mean kind of fraud. Decent startup idea in here though. There's probably a space for remote employee certification. Interesting. Yeah, I was thinking about it like the, you should be able to have an AI that looks over the GitHub, the GitHub, when I first heard about this, I thought he was directly moonlighting. It was like from, you know, you get a job on the East Coast, you get a job in Chicago, you get a job in Denver, and you get a job in San Francisco, and then, yeah, you're just going from one stand up to the next, and then you work three hours at one job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job, and I thought it was just him.

3:26:36I didn't realize that he had teams under him. But in that scenario, You would think this was something. You should be able to see, oh, well, like all the pull requests come in at the same time every day. And he's not doing like, he's not sending Slack messages randomly throughout the day. He sends them only in this two-hour block. But that's not true if he's sending like, no, there's actually two or three people that are dedicated to your account basically like all day long, right? So I don't know how you do remote certification. You need to have like the camera on. We need WorldCoin. This is a WorldCoin application.

3:27:09Atlas says, Breaking Soham Parikh closes a$15 million round led by A16Z. 2 ,000 likes. This is great. Reid Hoffman says. Reid Hoffman's chiming in? Yeah. So do you think Soham Parikh's LinkedIn, what do you think Soham Parikh's LinkedIn header is? This is hilarious. The founder of LinkedIn chiming in. It's great. Opens timeline. It's all Soham. Says Beth. The timeline's in terminal, baby. You would think that this would be something that Bookface would have solved, right? One of the issues here is that when people make a poor hire, they don't exactly want to go tell a bunch of other people that they messed up.

3:27:53And so you can imagine people just experiencing this and not wanting to talk about it. And now it's becoming a meme to talk about it. There's a guy, I think this account was just created. It was Sohum. Sohum. Well, it was graded in February, he says. I think he's just joking around. He must have just changed the name. I think he just changed the name. I was fired from being a founding engineer, principal engineer, back-end engineer, and front-end engineer today. If anyone is hiring for all four, please. This is crazy. This is clearly a fake account. He says, I make more than 99 % of YC startups.

3:28:28This is the real reason they're mad. This is very funny. Everyone asks, where is Soham Parikh? Nobody asked Holly so popper. I'm glad we found this account. Whoever's ready is great. Elon can work at nine startups. Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies. But when you do it, it's scam. Oh, this is going to be a good account to follow. Everyone should follow this. PhantomThread underscore D. This is definitely not him. I mean, if this is actually him and he's a great poster too, that's a quadruple threat. quintuple threat we'd love to see it aiden over at open ai says hey sorry was out this morning who's soham parik must be pretty popular name because i think my accountant and front-end contractor have the same name wild i think i think i think the next move from here uh prediction clearly gives soham a maxed out contract for sure it's just it's just too good of a meme Trade deal in the works get them to America.

3:29:33I would do shoot a viral video. This is no-brainer There's got to be there's got to be a viral video in here somewhere We are actively monitoring the situation for sure for sure we are Yeah, Bobby says looking back through our engineering applicants and so I'm never applied chat. Am I cooked? Yeah, everyone should search their email right now for so home. It's amazing okay anyways i think that's a good place to wrap it has been a fun show today hopefully more breaking news on soham if you find him send him our way we'll talk to you soon leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify and we will talk to you tomorrow have a great day bye