You Don't Need a Storyteller, ChatGPT Images, Ali on the Series L | Karri Saarinen, Mike Cessario, Elliot Cohen, Ali Ghodsi

28:21They've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and profit by being truly elite marketers. And that creates a catalyst for people to be like, wow, I'm paying attention now. Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. um ali is chiming in she says wow 23k likes she says tech bro obsessed with storytelling but hasn't read a book in the last five years uh probably not a good sign uh a lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again and go back to the classics instead of a launch video somebody should just write a announcement in the full hero's journey that actually sort of works.

29:08I mean, I would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story circle. It's basically like a three-act structure, but in eight parts. And so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out, like, you know, all the different story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there. It's hard, though. I would like to see a launch post written in verse. Ooh, getting back into poetry. I mean, Homeric, you should maybe drop an epic poem like a true true like thousand page book of poetry or the way or you could drop 20 haikus on your startup yeah uh graphite.dev code review for the age of ai graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster uh this really did become the current thing um there's a clue eric zaworsky says there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Dighton that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups, rarely get the gig in the end.

30:18As designer Stefan Sagmeister observed back in 2014, it's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting. He says, every so often an article like this drops, remember, brands the new moat, or taste can't be taught, that lays bare the repackaging of an oft-taken-for-granted concept in communication, human-to-human relation, just enough that it entices reaction discourse. Today, it's the idea that stories are, telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies. A familiar debate on the timeline. Many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new marketing 101 always has been dot jpg tier stuff so how did storytelling and an idea fundamental to our existence get rubix cubed into a novel optimization strategy that is that is funny rubix cubed is good um yeah i just i just think a title like this uh would i think a good uh a good test if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be do they want the title storyteller yeah or would they be okay with the title copywriter right because in my view if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller their job is to like write down words in a structured impactful way and help the entire organization like share those words in a in a consistent manner and i would say a lot of the people um a lot of people like want the title creative director but do they want to be a project manager like no they want to be a creative director right yeah it's just like a status associated with that yeah there's maybe a status associated with storyteller yeah but at the end of the day if you're trying to hire for this do you want somebody that is obsessed with yeah writing you should be willing to take the job of storyteller if I come to you and you say you want to work for me as a storyteller I say I'm going to start you off with a title fabulist and if you're cool with that then maybe we'll upgrade you to storyteller.

32:21If you're okay coming to this organization with your title being yarn spinner. Just tall tale smith. First project. You just hand them a bunch of yarn. They spin this for me. Just tell me a lie. Tell me a lie about my company. You're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for$10 billion. dollars. They're like, yeah, write the blog post and post it. Anyway, what is this? Andreessen Horowitz has a laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan, the laws of media, the new science. There are four of these, the laws of media. One is it enhances awareness of inclusive structural process, obsolesces dominance of the logical method, reverses into technology, hardware, becomes software.

33:09Retrieves metaphor logos. That is, I like some McLuhan. Where else is this? Xerox. Enhances the speed of the printing press. Obsolesces the assembly line book. Reverses into everyone becomes a publisher. Retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework. I like this. Dig through, you know, different value props, essentially. The iPhone 1. It enhanced bringing the world into your yourself into the world. The world into yourself into the world. Well, obsolesces the house's home, flips the end of the individual, retrieves the nomadic hunter. What? That's weird for the... Here's one of his tetrads on the computer.

33:48The computer enhances instant replay of information. It obsolesces hardware. It retrieves hunter. It flips pattern recognition. Huh. What a fascinating framework. ChatGPT has a new image model. They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that at this point, him and a bunch of Polos looks great. He says, most likely to launch a new image model. And Sam Altman says, launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this framed? I know the model got better. Elf. Elf. But what is... It's a good model. It's a good model, sir. Yes, yes. Okay, so... Image 1.5.

34:33Image 1.5. What were they on before? There's GPT Image. Now there's GPT Image 1.5. Were they on 1.0 before? Yeah. Okay. Today, we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT Images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact. and it's four times faster. You know that's a big deal. You know that that is the real thing where Nano Banana has been very, very fast. They got to speed this thing up and they clearly figured out a way to do it.

35:05Alongside, we're introducing the new images feature within ChatGPT, designed to make image generation delightful to spark inspiration. And it is cool. It has its own little corner of the app, its own little surface area. Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one agent. the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Dewey going over to the gong? It's gong-worthy. Finn is gong-worthy. Oh, Finn. Fantastic. So around here, we have a benchmark for images, for image generation. You come to us with a new model.

35:49You know we're going to try and generate a Where's Waldo, and we have some Where's Waldos, pulled up. And we're getting better. We're getting closer. They're not ready for primetime, though. Not ready for print. We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks. Can we pull it up? Let's pull up this first image of this Where's Waldo. It's going to be very small, so I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes. So this is the Where's Waldo. Okay. The important thing is that from far away, this looks ready for us. It looks like a Where's Waldo. It looks ready to rock.

36:25Now, part of what makes Where's Waldo special is it has this unique perspective. Like the, it has, it's like infinite depth of field. It's this 45 degree angle, isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image. This is not perfectly isomorphic, but it's not bad. And there's a lot of interesting detail and texture. But as you zoom in, you start noticing. It's actually isometric. Oh, isometric. Isometric. Thank you. And so as you zoom in, you start to notice that some of the people are not quite to scale. And the telltale sign of a Where's Waldo is that there is story. Back to storytellers. The creators of Where's Waldo are storytellers.

37:11Because as you move around the image in the Where's Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham. And that's part of what makes it enjoyable. As he goes for the ham, he knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls. And it tells you like there's these little vignettes that are playing out. That's what makes it enjoyable to look around for Waldo. 100%. Because you notice. And in fact, if you go to the back of the book in Where's Waldo, oftentimes there will be bonus things to search for. so you will so you will get a list of prompts for what to hunt for outside of just the main waldo you will also be prompted to is this a real waldo or is this an ai one no this is you made this i made this one this is the by hand it looks great from this direction but as you zoom in you'll see that you're not quite getting the the uh the level of storytelling and also the the final the final check is like there must be one and only one waldo and i'm not i'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo of any kind?

38:15Put it back in chat GPT and say, where's Waldo? Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not, I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. On the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but they, none of them have the precise like walking stick backpack. Bullrock in the chat says, couldn't you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature, which is true. You could just say, generate a where's Waldo scene, but don't include Waldo and then add them afterwards. No, I think you're 100 % true. Where's Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator.

38:48Yes. He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book. He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive, detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients, which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's Waldo series. A single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete. Wow. and also imagine kind of like a generator verifier setup where like the generator gets better and better at generating them and the verifier can find them so soon you'll have kind of where's Waldo super intelligence do you think that would be adversarial one could say that it could be generative adversarial network potentially they could network these two together can we work on so Martin is based in the UK just under 70 years old we should get him on the show the creator where's Waldo Yeah.

39:36Let's go. Let's get a new challenge. That would be a challenge for the team. Yeah. Let's get Martin. Yeah, we got to. On the show. But yeah, the OpenAI news, the model excels at editing, adding, subtracting, combining, blending, transposing. It seems very clear that with a little bit of a harness, dare I say a wrapper, you could in fact create a proper Where's Waldo, but you probably need to generate the images tile by tile, one tile at a time, and kind of work piece by piece, and then combine it all, blend it all together. And then, yes, you probably want to add one wall, though, at the very end in some random spot, but you would not want to just one-shot the full image because it's still a little bit too complex.

40:21But it's remarkable. I mean, these images are remarkable, and yet there's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like every time we see one of these, I'm like, okay, this is the final thing. We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then another year goes by and there's more challenges. Pull up this post that says also very fun way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it is Sam himself as a firefighter with a calendar. And then there's a Sora video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up. Huh. That's funny. Oh, it's showing up in my replies, but not your replies.

41:05I'll put it out.

41:08Yeah, going back to the OpenAI announces chat GPT images, creative transformations, the model's creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements. Here, let's play this one. Well, this is not, what does it say? Impressive. Oh. Very nice. That's pretty funny. Now let's see more slop. Oh my gosh.

41:36The ability to use Sora to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for, I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in MS Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in like the 90s. Mocking him. Yeah, mocking him. And he's just like, you wrote this takedown of me in Word. like you wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But the feedback loop, the iteration cycle is like way, way faster there. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer, Devon, crush your backlog, with a personal AI engineering team. So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new ChatGPT images feature.

42:30No written prompt required. That's very interesting. So in an effort to make it easier to prompt, we are now instantiating more UI. So as that image shows you, it's like... As the models get better, we need more SaaS. Yeah, it's something like that. But it's just that like it is, I mean, this was David Holes' insight during the mid-journey boom was that if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box. It's artificial intelligence. It can generate an image of anything. They would just type like dog and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic.

43:15It was just like, okay, cool. You could go to Google Images and get that. Like what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because like we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable. Can always have more. But that fades away. And he was like, then you ask them again, you can do anything and be like, dog, happy dog. And people just weren't fully inspired. And so the beauty of MidJourney was putting everything in this big chat room on Discord so that people – Letting people inspire each other. Each other. Each other.

43:45And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like OpenAI and the ChatGPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of idea generation. I mean, when images in ChatGPT launched for the first time, I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that. And then once someone told me, this is a great prompt, I was like, okay, I'm in. I'm going to go create a few more. I needed a jumping off point. And they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the images tab. And you know there's going to be Disney in there pretty soon.

44:25And that's going to be very cool, as you wrote in the newsletter last time. Ty in the X chat says, no beards. I've never seen it. Beards are coming. Beards are coming. Well, thank you for supporting the coziest podcast in the entire world right now. We really complete victory on the cozy maxing. We've been going back and forth on, well, does it look ridiculous? Yes. Yes. And that's why we do it. But Merry Christmas to everyone. And only a few more days. Only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift. Turbo Puffer. Serverless Vector and Full Text Search for grandma. For your grandma. This is a fantastic.

45:03I know. Your grandma's saying, you get me a sweater every year. Well, this year, what about Serverless Vector and Full Text Search? Exactly. She's going to be linear. She's going to ask. She's going to unbox Turbo Puffer, and she's going to say, well, is it built from first principles on object storage? You're going to be able to say yes. And she's going to say, does Notion use this? Does Notion use this? You're going to be able to say yes. Yes, yes. She's going to say, well, is it extremely scalable? Absolutely. That's what most grandparents care about when it comes to Christmas. Scalability.

45:36Scalability. They want something scalable. They want something fast. And they definitely want it to be 10x cheaper. And so get your grandmother Turbo Puffer this Christmas. Bobby already got his grandma Turbo Puffer. She says she's going to be so happy. That's amazing. OpenAI hires an executive from Google to lead M &A, according to Walter Bloomberg, according to the information. More notably, OpenAI hire comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company. This came out yesterday. she's stepping down she's going to depart the company at the end of january axia says why it matters wong was the ai giants first chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of chat gpt heightened regulatory scrutiny controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits the bigger picture her departure departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts from 1.4 trillion do you think that she asked for the storyteller title and she didn't get it so she quit in protest very very possibly john it's very possible uh yeah i feel like she deserves uh she deserves like a little bit of a of a vacation at this point i can't think i can't think of a more stressful job or since 2021 gray hair uh as as uh the open ai opcom's role uh she joined open ai from apple yeah in 2021 and uh anyways so So, vesting cliff reached.

47:08Well, first off, let me tell you about public.com. Investing, for those that take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal. We got to go through it in the business and finance section. It says, advertisers start Christmas season early. This was written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation-weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question. It says, are you tired of Santas and relentlessly cheerful snowmen filling every screen?

47:52No. It says, blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year, and they are inundating televisions with commercials. The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October and companies have spent a combined$1.47 billion over the past nine weeks, a 13 % jump compared with the year ago period, according to ad tracker iSpot. So keep this in mind. $1.47 billion on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year?

48:47Counting Black Friday? Everything. Everything. What do you mean? It's big. All retail spend? Are you asking for all retail spend in Q4? Do I have to pull out grocery? sales from November and December each year. Does it include grocery spending, food spending? I don't know. I think it might include everything. I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was$0.7 trillion,$700 billion. Then it went to$850 billion, then$900, then$950. Last year came in around$99, something really close. What was it? It was 0.98 trillion,$980 billion this year. It's expected to be over a trillion. We got to hit the gong for that.

49:34That is some fantastic news for this holiday season. Truly the first holiday season in history that will be over a trillion dollars. There's a bunch of interesting facts in here. So there are massive investments in digital promotions, flooding social media, email inboxes, and text messages. So, of course, the$1.47 billion that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent$5.8 billion on digital ads in the U.S. from November 1st to November 7th, a 4 % increase from last year. Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers with inflation still weighing on household budgets, but brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action.

50:25The National Retail Federation is projecting that holiday sales will surpass$1 trillion. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front so far. Walmart's ads feature a Dr. Seuss-inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings back Chris Kay, a jolly bearded Christmas enthusiast introduced in a 2024 campaign. In Target's spot, a woman with whom he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list and leaves him confused by referencing his naughty list. Amazon.com. This is the most interesting stat. So total minutes of U.S. advertising by retailer.

51:11So Amazon last year was, in 2023, they were around 7 ,000 minutes of U.S. TV advertising. And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around 6 ,000, 7 ,000 minutes. Macy's was around 6 ,000, 7 ,000 minutes. The joke's old. Even Verizon. It's an old joke now, John. Stop making it. What joke? He said 6 ,000. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is ridiculous. That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to 14 ,000 minutes. Whoa. Yeah, they went up to... So Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on TV advertising. AB in the chat said Coca-Cola invented the red and white Santa.

52:01I was trying to fact check it a little bit. apparently it's an urban legend that coca-cola invented the red and white santa uh in reality santa claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements but apparently they did standardize the santa look right they're spending probably more on advertising than uh most most other companies in the world for like many decades right they had an opportunity to really define the look, define the look that we are delivering this. We are delivering today. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

52:43Friendly reindeer? I'm glad. It's good to hear that it's a friendly reindeer. Did you see the journal going after CoreWeave? Yes, we should get to that. There's one last stat that we need to share. So, I mean, basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy. It's AI overheated. We're going to go into the core weave story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over a trillion dollars now. Everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article.

53:19They polled consumers. How do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so when holiday ads start. So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13th. Okay, but you've got to give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I'm kind of a purist. I like to go full speed ahead on the Christmas spirit the day after Thanksgiving. Day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. I got our tree. Yes. We went and got our tree. Yes. on Black Friday. Yes. And that just feels like the right moment. Yes. I'd like to have enough. So you don't want to see Santa until the day after Thanksgiving.

54:05But then I want to see him everywhere. Yeah, you know, of course. I agree. It should be zero to 100. So I'm with you. I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When is it appropriate to see us? I concur, yeah. After Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving. But anytime before, I can't even listen to them. Okay, so I will describe the ad, and we could potentially pull it up here. But Amazon Home for the Holidays was the name of the ad. So let me, oh, damn it. We got more Christmas lore in the chat. Red and White Santa is because of Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Huh. Reindeer eat them. What? What is that?

54:39Okay. Anyway. No, I can see, you know, the red and white mushrooms. I know candy canes. Sugar plum plum berries. So October 13th, they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her childhood bedroom now contains a treadmill with her father running on it awkwardly, wearing short shorts. The young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear, and it's called Home for the Holidays. So no Santa, at least that I can tell from this ad. We can actually pull this up here. the Amazon TV spot, Home for the Holidays. Maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is. It is here. I have it here if we can pull it up.

55:25Yeah, so we need to determine whether or not, Jordy, why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordy decides that this ad is too early, too early. And so let's pull up the Amazon TV spot, Home for the Holidays. Inside, we have been drinking this podcast in a can all year. Yes. It's very Christmas-themed. Okay, I think we have it here. So, Jordi, based on this, what is the earliest day you could run this? No, I'm getting red flags already. Red flags already. Okay, play it. Play it. You're home for the holidays. You've dreamt of this moment. Back in your old room. Oh.

56:10Hey, kiddo. I'll be right there.

56:15At least you can get a deal on new shorts for dad. Something with a little more coverage. There's no Santa. Way too early. You think that's too early? What's the earliest day? You wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving? And that's like almost two months before winter. It's before. I mean, they ran it before Halloween. So, yeah, I mean, this is October. There are some places in the U.S. where it snows in October, right? If you go up to Alaska, this could be the college student's fall break. Yeah, this could be Anchorage. They're coming back for a weekend. They could be targeting Anchorage or Juneau.

56:51Yeah, we don't know where it ran. So I did find an article from the Fungi Foundation called The Influence of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms on Christmas. The story of Santa Claus is not the creation of Coca-Cola, nor Saint Nick, or a children's story. It exists because of a small living being with great powers, the Amanita muscaria mushroom. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say, like, the Fungi Foundation might have a little bias. Are you doing this research on Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet? State-of-the-art reasoning with next-level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

57:30Why don't you vibe code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are, A, much too early B, slightly too early C, about the right time slightly too late or much too late in terms of the timing of holiday ads this year I think you can start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground How would you do that? Describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow I would like to see Amazon do a plain text ad that's Star Wars style where the text is just scrolling and it's like, get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the Super Bowl of just buying stuff.

58:15Do it on Amazon.com. It's time to buy. It's time to buy. It's time to buy. But it sounds like you think that the holiday ads are at least slightly too early, maybe much too early. much too early. Or do you think it's about the right time? I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black Friday. I mean, they probably already do. So this is the interesting stat from here. They polled a bunch of consumers in, and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early. We're all the boomers. Because they're locked in. They're paying. For Gen Z, over 50 % said, yeah, Christmas in October is great.

59:01It sits perfectly with me. only 20 something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas over 25%, 30 % of boomers said the ads are much too early. Only 10 % of Gen Z said. How many said that they were too late? Did any say that? Yes. Millennials. Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying 4.3, 4 % of millennials said the holiday ads started too late this year, which is funny. Gen Z, only 2 % were in the too late camp, basically. AB says... And the boomers, the boomers actually, less than 2 % of them said slightly too late. They were all saying too early, too early.

59:46Did they hate Christmas? The boomers? Yeah, I guess. AB in the chat says, Santa discovered chat GPT and now Christmas is 30 % faster and the elves are unemployed. Trey says, every time Jordy pushes back on Christmas and when Christmas starts, I'm going to move it up one month. It starts September 1st now. September 1st is great. September 1st. Well, let's I would like to see Coca-Cola get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp maxi. I want to see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp, but they hang a sleigh and a bunch of reindeers, and so they fly the blimps in the crowd, and they have sort of like clear, you know, wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over the United States.

1:00:32Somebody's got to do it. I like it. Well, let's talk about CoreWeave's staggering fall. But first, let's talk about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Very aggressive title. CoreWeave's staggering fall from market grace highlights AI bubble fears. The data center provider's terrible six Six-week slides picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays. Corra Weave's value dropped by$33 billion due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger, and short seller criticism.

1:01:09Corra Weave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the AI boom, has watched$33 billion of value vaporize in six weeks. The share price plunge of 46 % comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble. fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high-profile seller jim chanos known for predicting the collapse of enron yeah but some of the high-tech company's biggest problems began with a very low-tech uh nuisance unexpected turbulent rainstorms in north texas over the summer heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60-day delay at a construction site in denton a small city north of dallas preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major complex.

1:01:49As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster, consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that CoreWeave plans to lease to OpenAI, has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for CoreWeave in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings. The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from CoreWeave's chief executive officer, Michael, which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. Corweave's business model involves using high-interest debt to buy thousands of advanced chips from NVIDIA, installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third-party landlords, then renting access to the chips.

1:02:34As capital spending on infra has intensified, Corweave, which is 7 % owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnetar Capital and Koto Management has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center buildout, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. CoreWeave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly 1.4 billion from half a billion a year earlier, but the company is unprofitable and lost 110 million in its most recent quarter.

1:03:09In early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed, IntraTor played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business. He said, adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating. I think this is the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the backstock comment that sort of went super viral. I think he, this quote is actually pretty reasonable.

1:03:46This is something that I agree with. The question is always just like the dance of like, how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet? how much value is there being created? And then how are you financing that? Because naturally the capital markets will push everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10 % GDP growth and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time. But if it's more like, oh yeah, like, you know, a new SaaS boom, a bunch of great companies building on top of us, like. I think it's super important to put it into context too.

1:04:26Their last private valuation in November, 2024 was$650 million. It was secondary. Jane Street was in that. Magnetar. So again, the company today is at a$34 billion valuation. So meaningful premium from the last private round. What was the valuation in the private round? Like it was in the tens of billions, right? 23 billion. So it's still up 50 % since the last private round, but it's round trips. Yeah, it was seven in December. Seven in December of 2023. And I mean, even just today, the stock's got 5%. 23 in November 2024. Rough, rough, rough go. Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand.

1:05:01Yeah. It was interesting. Yesterday, there was a pretty viral post from an account called Hunterbrook. Okay. They said Bethany McLean broke the Enron scandal. Tomorrow, she publishes her first investigation for Hunterbrook on a company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up. Do they say what it is? And then they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting, like, she broke the Enron scandal. she is her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the ai bubble and the company i saw something radnet whoa okay do you know the company no i wasn't familiar i'm not familiar i'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast yeah i used to pray for a bubble and i i did see a clip of her talking about how it's not the hyperscalers so it's kind of like we're on the hunt for the for Yeah, so RadNet is, as of today, it traded down on this report.

1:05:58It was a$5.37 billion company. I was expecting something in the$102 trillion range, right? I wanted some real meat. Didn't get that. Hunter Brooks says, RadNet, the AI story that doesn't add up. It's a radiology firm? Yeah. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Interesting. Yeah, but again, this company, we'll dig into it, But again, this company collapsing wouldn't make a dent in the broader AI trade. Yeah. There's like 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah, zeros are part of the game. Yeah. Anyway, so Hunterbrook says Radnet's much-hyped AI business is a sideshow, less than 5 % of the medical imaging company's revenue, about$65 million out of$1.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025.

1:06:48Comes from its newfangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and two-thirds of its reported revenue growth, excluding recent acquisitions, come from selling software to Radnet's own imaging center. Imaging center. Radnet also charges mammogram patients$40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Again, I'm not seeing anything. The pre-AI stock price of this company was around$20 a share. Now it's$70 a share, something like that. And so you have seen like a 3X pump. Like the stock has definitely benefited from the AI narrative, if that's what they're alleging.

1:07:27But it's, yeah, you know, you're going to have to do better if you're going to try and bring down the entire global economy. You've got to service up something that's worth at least$100 billion. I agree with you on that. Yeah, somewhat of a clickbait. And yet the company's stock has soared in value since its AI rebrand, trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors. Yeah. And so again, I think... Okay. Well, let's tell everyone about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white-label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

1:08:08Now, there is interesting... Everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past. There must be another one. We, of course, were joking around doing the letters lining up from OpenAI or NVIDIA or whatever, when those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate. It's more just like, how fast will they grow? Will they be complete winners forever? Will they face competition? Those are the questions that people are asking. But Bucco Capital bloke had a good rebuttal to this question of, is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now?

1:08:48Someone in the chat was putting AI bubble in quotes kind of sarcastically. Well, Bucco Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says, real businesses are seeing real impact from AI. Coding and tech support help are the two clear immediate role beneficiaries. Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We of course are sponsored by Profound. Get your brand mentioned in Chachapiti. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Traditional boring companies like C.H. Robinson are pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient.

1:09:25The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently. See Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of, yeah, I agree with him. And like the fact, people are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like, this is how the market should be working. Like it should sort of be like, okay, we're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism. We're not going to give you that much credit for it up front. You've got to actually deliver some real value. You've got to get some cash flow into the business. You've got to actually deliver on the build out that you're promising.

1:10:02we're not just going to moon your stock because you said the biggest number, right? Mag7 minus Tesla have reasonable valuations and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle. He says, I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do. Again, as Oracle, Broadcom, NeoClouds have shown this last week, but it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good take, but Duchamp - Yeah, it's just interesting going back to this rad radnet uh analysis sure saying that they also charge mammogram patients 40 for an ai read using technology that experts say is commoditized it's like how is that like they're they're positioning that as a bad thing when this company clearly has distribution and they're just going to like vend in technology into that and it doesn't like i don't i don't that's like it's basically making the argument that like rap a rapper can never have value when clearly like they have a captive audience here yeah and they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it yeah i mean there's a huge incentive once everyone is is giving the stuff's overvalued take to then move into the like it's fraud it's crime take but uh the bar for that is so much higher because it's it's legal like obviously like anything can be overvalued or undervalued at at any moment in time, but fraud is very much like binary.

1:11:25Like the company's either cooking the books or they aren't. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You gotta stay compliant. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Let's move on to the EV debate. Tomorrow I wanna get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks. That seems crazy to me. I want to get to the bottom of it, but there's a little bit of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal I thought it might be useful to go through some extra context. They say Ford learns a brutal... Putting the gloves on this one.

1:12:03You're taking the gloves off? I'm putting the gloves on. Putting the gloves on. Wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to fight it out? I don't know if we're going to be fighting it. Okay, okay. Maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The carmaker takes a$19.5 billion write-down on its electric vehicle business. and in this op-ed, they say, not long ago, automakers were touting electric cars as the future. Well, now they're slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16-wheeler. See Ford Motors' stunning announcement Monday that it will take a$19.5 billion charge on its electric vehicle business instead of plowing, quote, instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money.

1:12:47We are pivoting, Ford CEO Jim Farley said, as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas-powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup. Full scrap. Full scrap. They're not going to sell them anymore, which has been a favorite of the EV-loving press. So it got very good reviews, and obviously it was positioned in this interesting way. It has the aesthetics of the F-150. It doesn't have the baggage of the Elon brand, although does that really matter to the F-150 buyer? It's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor. You know how they Raptor?

1:13:25Raptor R, the high-performance version of the F-150? Of course. They need to do the Raptor R Plus with a V12. You wouldn't want it to be the R Max? R Max would be good, too. So Ford has lost$13 billion on its EV business since 2023, with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year, Ford lost about$50 ,000 for each EV sold. Wow. That's so much money to lose. Don't do that. The truth is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most car makers have much less reason to make EVs.

1:14:11I was listening to an interview with the CEO of Ford yesterday, and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. I think that they're doing sort of like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has IP around battery manufacturing, but they're going to make them in the United States. And so they're very much negotiating, how do we get this new technology that we haven't been really developing? This hasn't been in our DNA for 20 years. We got to get it up to speed, but it's been very costly because they have to pay everyone all down the supply chain. and then deal with tariffs and deal with geopolitical considerations and all this other stuff.

1:14:47So the Biden administration sought to force feed the EV transition with ramped up fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission rules. Car makers were required to produce increasing number of EVs, which they had to sell at a loss because consumer demand was weak. The inflation reduction acts$7 ,500 EV tax credit boosted demand, but not enough to make the cars profitable. This year's GOP tax bill eliminated the tax credit in October, causing demand to fall off a cliff. Yeah, I was talking to a buddy on Saturday who manages a group of dealerships around L.A., and he was saying that the market generally has been brutal for cars this year.

1:15:31You've had just chaos and uncertainty around tariffs. And then also there was a huge boom right before the tax credit ended, and then everything fell off a cliff. Yeah. So the deregulation has enabled Ford to cut its losses, sizable as they are. A$19.5 billion charge will hurt, but it's better than spending tens of billions of more dollars on making cars that are not enough, that not enough Americans want to buy. Ford can focus its investments on gas-powered trucks and SUVs that are popular with customers and earn, dare we say, the forbidden word, profits. If Ford makes more money, workers also make more in profit sharing.

1:16:09General Motors this fall also rolled back its EV plans and took a$1.6 billion charge way less. The American car industry would be stronger today had its CEOs not embarked on the EV joyride with politicians promising subsidies. So, yeah, always dangerous to over-rotate on a government mandate or government action because we change governments every couple of years. That's the nature of America, democracy. You know, what might be loved? So you don't think Ford could over-rotate and get, like, maybe four V12s into a single Raptor? Like, put them at an angle like they do with the Bugatti? I was thinking of the Bugatti, but just do it, like, copy and paste.

1:16:51two more times. Yes, yes, yes, definitely, definitely. Something there. Something eight liter, nine liter. Look, the front of the car looks like a train. Exactly. And it's just, it's just engine. This is the goal. This is what they should go for. No, to, to more seriously investigate it, like, do you, can you think of a way that, that the Ford F1 Lightning would have been successful? Like, it doesn't seem like it was like wildly mispriced. It doesn't seem like it was, I mean, it had a classic silhouette. So it wasn't like you could, the Cybertruck hasn't been selling fantastically well, but it's like so bold that you could easily say, well, okay, it's not doing that well because it's such an edgy choice.

1:17:34It's such a, it's such a bold design decision. Like you have to really want to yell to everyone. Like I own a, I own a Cybertruck. You can get an F-150 Lightning and unless someone's really checking out the badge, they're just gonna be like oh truck you know i don't know i disagree okay i think real real ball knowers can clock that from a quarter mile away okay i i it's it's nuanced yeah but i can i can clock a lightning over a little blue trim yeah it's just you can just i know i know you can but uh is that but it has to be so would you have gone crazier in the design and put more distance between the Lightning and the classic F-150?

1:18:16I think maybe. I also think truck buyers, it's very possible that they're making purchasing decisions not for how the average person views it, but how other truck buyers are going to view it. They're so much like, oh, you have a TRX. I think that's true for almost every category. Yeah, very much so. Even in the mid-size sedan. Yeah, or look at handbags. What does it say about you? You see a handbag. Yeah. Your wife might see, oh, that's a work handker. goes the speed limit. There is no real argument for, oh, I need this car because it's more efficient or something like that. They all go the speed limit.

1:18:54They all basically get you from point A to B in the right time. So it becomes very quickly about some differentiation in amenities, but really the brand and what it says about you. The silhouette, the trim. The silhouette. And so Maybe they needed to go more. It's even more obvious that you made the eco-friendly choice. But again, I think that the truck buyer just is not interested in signaling, I made the eco-friendly choice at all. And that seems very intuitive to me. Am I crazy? But I know that the reason everyone went after trucks was because it's just such a big market. Americans buy so many trucks.

1:19:32You had to go after that market. And Rivian wound up winning it, essentially, it seems like. but it is weird that Ford wasn't able to break through. I guess it's just like their core customers weren't able to get over the hurdle to actually get into the brand. I'm going to try to figure out how many Rivian trucks actually sold. Yeah, we'll have to pull up all the data and run through it, maybe tomorrow. I'm pulling it up if you want to. So in other news, I mean, we can move on from this. We have our guests joining in just a few minutes. In other news, SpaceX is now initiating a bake-off to select which investment banks will advise on its planned 2026 IPO.

1:20:19They are very much moving forward with the IPO. It feels very real. It does feel like there's a bit of a race between SpaceX and OpenAI to some degree, but SpaceX SpaceX has to be set up for this. They have to be, there's a whole, whenever you talk to somebody about going public, they're always talking about, well, the financial requirements are much more onerous. You need to be really reconciling your books, understanding the business. You need to be really mature CFO operation. Office of the CFO needs to be really dialed in. You probably need clarity about whether or not you're a for-profit or a non-profit.

1:20:55right and uh and you have to imagine that spacex has been effectively ready to go ipo at any moment in time for a decade because it's just been such a real business and they've been working with the government and so the government comes in and says wait we want to know that you are actually generating real revenue or you're not cutting the books if we're going to be working with you all that other stuff so we'll see um i just want to take a second to give it up for everyone out there that's currently in a bake-off no matter what side you're on i just want you to know we are rooting for you. Like a Christmas cookie bake-off?

1:21:26Yeah, a lot of people this time of year, they're winding down. Some people are just getting started on some of these bake-offs, right? There's going to be intense, you know, it's going to be intense all the way through the end of the year. So, I just wanted to give a shout-out to the bankers. Not getting enough love. If you're a banker, get yourself a nice luxury watch on GetBezil.com. Shop over at 26 ,000 luxury watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. um bill all asks bill gurley shouldn't spacex just do a direct listing and bill gurley says 100 percent um i would love to know how that will actually play out um if if like what what the decision making will be because it has to be i mean you imagine an elon stock like the chance that it moons on day one is like, it feels guaranteed, right?

1:22:19Yeah, so the question is, I don't know. So looking at Figma's IPO, right? They did not raise very much money in the actual IPO, right? So they priced it around, it was around, like, forget. It was something around$20 billion valuation. Yeah. It immediately popped like crazy. Did. and people were like, oh, you're leaving a lot of money on the table, but they never had an intention of, they wanted to price the business fairly. So of course, people that invested pre-IPO in that pre-IPO round, right? Or as part of the IPO benefited a lot. But again, there is very real possibility that Elon wants to sell the incremental 30, they raise the 30 billion at one and a half.

1:23:12and I could see there being that much demand. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if you're an investor who's supposed to potentially come in as permanent capital, stay as an investor for a very long time, even in the public markets. If you come in at a lower cost basis, even if the stock moons and then round trips, you're like, okay, well, like, I'm still kind of where I was. I'm not day trading it. My point is to, like, hold this company, not trade it, own it, not trade it. And so I could imagine a situation where we're going out at a logical price, even if you miss the pop and then round trip, could be good for keeping those types of investors on board.

1:23:53I just don't think people are prepared for it to price at one and a half trillion and go to three on the day of the IPO. That would be very, very crazy. But it could happen. I mean, anything could happen with Elon. You know, he's a Joe Rogan CEO. He's a JRC. That's right. This was a funny post from Andrew Benson. He says, Peter Thiel will personally make$42 billion from the SpaceX IPO at a$1.5 trillion valuation. What a recovery from the mistake of exiting Facebook early. Betty never helped. He was down to his last$20K, I think. Maybe. I think so. I think so. I've never seen PT do a money spread.

1:24:33I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens. No. I've never seen an RM on the wrist. Never. Never spotted in Chrome Hearts. Never. So how do we know that he's not down to his last 20 grand? He doesn't have spinners on his car. True. He doesn't have his wheels stop when he stops. They don't keep rolling. It's ridiculous. So it's really hard to clock. He doesn't have hydraulics on his car. Hydraulics would be a good one. You've got to get hydraulics on your car. That's a lead. And two 12s in the back. You've got to get subwoofers. Mod your car. That's what real power is. Should we talk about venture?

1:25:11Yeah, FF2 holds 10 % of SpaceX. PT funded 10 % of that. Kerry of 20%, assuming that in the early days he was entitled to all of it. I have no idea if this math is accurate, but it's going to be a remarkable result. Probably one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly in the venture world. It also will be interesting because this will be the second trillion dollar early stage investment for PT. And there aren't that many funds that have done any. Remember the Holy Trinity calculation was, have you done the first institutional round into a MAG7 company? And it was just Kleiner, Founders Fund, and Sequoia that fit that criteria.

1:26:00If you take it to, you need two of those. Well, the other thing is companies were just going so much, they were going public so much earlier. Yes. So it's not like they just stayed private and let. I'm just saying if you actually held for the same amount of time. Yeah, I don't knock that at all because like a lot of the Sequoia guys did hold the NVIDIA shares, right? Even though they were distributed. I still count it as one of the big wins. But this, yeah. OTP says never seen him with a grill either. There we go. That's a great point. No grill is crazy. When you have that amount of money, you've got to get a grill and get it iced out.

1:26:39Did you see this venture capital compensation in the United States? I did. D.D. Doss has been in some hot water lately because he's taking shots at OpenAI. A lot of OpenAI folks. Well, he was right in the center of the whole Klein. Oh, that was also dramatic. But, you know, we're back on the top line with some viral stuff. He likes being in hot water. I mean, he did not stop posting. So VC compensation by fund size. So this is a chart that shows what level are you at and how big is your fund. And so if you have a sub$50 million fund, even if you're the GP, you're probably only making$200K. But if you're at a$3 billion fund, you might be making$1.2 million in salary.

1:27:22And so I had some car recommendations. This is why these smaller solo GP funds, you're really in it for the glory. It's a carry game. And so one of the best - It's one of the hardest ways to make$200 ,000 a year. Indeed, indeed. I mean, some of the associates here, if you're an associate at a small fund, you might be making$150 ,000,$170 ,000. Even at the big funds, the associates are making$238 ,000. The principal VP at a big fund might be making$450 ,000. So I had some recommendations for cars. If you're making$153 ,000 a year as an associate at a small fund, you're going to take that's about twelve thousand dollars a month thirteen thousand dollars a month you're going to put that into a a leased ferrari sf90 street all okay okay great yeah you have no money left over so you have to sleep in it but i think it's going to make a statement you're going to get that promotion you can sleep in an sf90 you can't drive a house to work yeah when you get that promotion and now you're making 250 well that's 20k a month for your lease you're going to upgrade to a used Bugatti Veyron.

1:28:25What about taxes? We're not paying taxes in this model. We're deferring the taxes. But I think if you pull up, if you're making$250 ,000, so what role do you have to do to make$250 ,000? To make$250 ,000, you have to be, where are you? You have to get promoted to partner at a small fund or principal at a$250 million fund. So you're making$250 ,000. That's$20 ,000 a month. That's enough for the used Bugatti Veyron lease. That'll get you the bump up to$350 ,000 a year. That's$30 ,000 a month. At this point, you're in Ferrari at 40 territory. There you go. The other thing I was going to say is you could go to the managing partner and say, instead of a bonus this year, will you guarantee the loan on a Porsche ST, right?

1:29:18Go for something really timeless. And the benefit of that, assuming you live close to work, right, you're not going to be losing a lot. There's not a lot of depreciation there. I mean, that's a special car. And so you got to get creative here. The really crazy thing. Okay. So obviously, so once you get promoted, you'll be making$600 ,000 a year. That's 50K a month. That's enough for a multi-car garage. You're going to get the Ferrari F40 plus a daily driver per Asangui, which you'll be sleeping in. Of course, sleeping in it. But at that point, you have some diversity. You can finally upgrade. You're making$1.2 mil a year.

1:29:56You're making$100 ,000 a month. That's enough for the Bugatti Chiron or the Pagani Y Roadster. But the interesting question is that the current market value of a McLaren F1 is$20 million. And so the carrying cost to lease that is probably around$2 million a year. And so if you see someone dailying an F1, you know that they are post-exit. It's truly the most liquid vehicle. They're in the carry. You got to do it. Yeah, they're into the carry. They're into the carry. Carry mode. Our, speaking of Kari from Linear, he's our next guest. Let's bring in Kari from Linear. Welcome to the stream. He's in the recent main room.

1:30:38How are you doing, Kari? Good to see you. What's happening? I'm doing well. How are you guys? We're doing fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit, obviously. We're dressed up like Santa Claus. Both Santa Claus. If you didn't notice. If you didn't notice. Yeah, I mean, it's going to look similar to what you usually look like, so I didn't notice it. When do you think is the right time for companies to start getting into the Christmas spirit? Because Amazon was running kind of Christmas-themed ads back in October. That felt a little early for us. Yeah, I mean, I don't really have an opinion on this on the company level.

1:31:11We don't do anything about it. You locked it. I think personally, I believe in that after Thanksgiving, it's okay to start it. So you can get a Christmas tree after Thanksgiving, but not before that. Let's hear it for another respecter of after Thanksgiving. I said the exact same thing earlier. Everyone says this, but there's clearly been a sort of erosion every day, every year, one day earlier. and now they're running Christmas ads in October. It's an outrage. But anyway, we're not here to talk about Christmas anymore. We're here to talk about design. We're here to talk about your essay, Design Is Search.

1:31:50I would love for you to just kick us off with the inspiration behind the essay, why you felt the need to set the record straight on this particular topic. And then we can go into some of the actual thesis and hopefully bat around some different ideas around it. Yeah. Yeah, I think this whole debate on Twitter or on X started on Friday. I was just sitting on the couch at the midnight and thinking about this, that this is probably, I don't know, the 10th time I've seen a company launch this design-to-code tools or coding design or designing code kind of tools. And I think it's like people always kind of see that that's kind of like the final form of design.

1:32:33now we can finally design in the actual medium, actually in the code. And I think there's definitely some benefits to that. And it is a great tool, but I always think design is not just the tools. It's broader than the tools. And in a designer's toolkit, you always have many tools. And depending what you're designing and what is the environment, who you're designing for, what's the domain, what's the product, you use different tools. So I think it's not that clear cut that designing in code is the best way to do design. So I kind of wanted to highlight that there's some challenges with this. And what I started with was that I think that what also happened to me in the past, when I was designing and building front ends for apps, what I often start feeling happening to me is that I become less idealistic or I become more conservative.

1:33:28it because I know that whatever I design, I also have to build. So there's already, you start to hesitate yourself or you don't believe you can actually build certain things because you start to collapse the design and build more too much. But I think also if you are designing against an existing code base, I think it also introduces additional bias where it's like the code base is this kind of collection of decisions and architecture and layers and product features that have been built over the years or over the months. And you are now kind of like trying to fit something new into that. So like the natural tendency there is to like fit something that fits and like kind of like any kind of new or alien idea can kind of like feel like it doesn't fit and doesn't feel like a good idea.

1:34:17So like you are too much reflecting the design against the state of the world versus thinking about design more in abstract, like what the world could be. It's like an artificial constraint. Yeah, I don't know if it's an artificial constraint, but it's the constraints what arrives too early. So eventually any design has to be manufactured or coded or something made it real. Design is not real. It's an idea or a concept or it's something, but it's not something people use. So I think it's eventually you have to deal with the constraints. Similarly, like architects has to deal with their constraints.

1:34:57Like how does the building, like how can we build this building? How can we stay under budget? Or how do we make sure the materials work? How much usable land do we have? Yeah. But it's like, I think like a lot of times architects still don't start from the constraints. Like they might acknowledge the constraints, but then they go to start sketching something, what they want to see. Yeah. So I just wanted to highlight that every tool has certain kind of strengths and weaknesses. And if you're not mindful, they can influence your thinking a lot. So what I worry about is that if we start thinking design is about coding, then I think we lose something.

1:35:37We lose that space to think more broadly or kind of without those constraints. And we jump into, let's build this solution. And that was kind of like that. I think like some people were pushing back on this essay or these ideas I was talking about that, well, now the design can be better because we can build it better and the quality can be better. But again, this kind of proves my point. It's like, I don't think that I think construction and execution is different from designing. And I actually think that while it can help to construct the design better, like, does it really make the design better?

1:36:12so I'm like still like looking for that like how do these tools actually make the design process better like how do we make better things with these tools versus like we just execute them faster yeah is your is your view that like doing design within code is something that should effectively happen at a refinement stage where maybe you have a process of like planning how you want to build a product or a feature and then you know you think really deeply about how you want to do it you make a bunch of decisions based on your intuition and what you know about the customers and how the thing should work and then you build it and then at a certain point you're able to make like more kind of like micro level changes to it when you've already you've already done all the work of the kind of like heavy planning and and being really thoughtful about something versus i don't know i i would be i'd be worried if if um uh you know somebody was like um building me a house and they just came to the land and they threw up like a box like a frame and then they started just kind of like okay we're going to add a door over here and oh we actually have to add like some pipes under here so let's like dig under there uh and like you you want when you're trying to build things that are high quality and great i think like that uh that like pre-planning process and doing things in the right order matters a lot so i feel like with these new tools you have to be thinking about where do you actually like slot in that where do you slot into the tool to the overall process yeah yeah i think like i think these new tools can can help to blend this like so i think in the past i think there's more like this like i don't know the way things operate is much more that there's a design and then there's a handoff then there's engineering and then nothing crosses this border and i think that's a bad way to do as well and i think it there should be this blended mode where I like to think that design is kind of essentially like two phases like you have a conceptual design so you're kind of like trying to understand the problem and then you're trying to explore multiple directions how to solve that problem and like I always tell my designers to do that like even if you know the solution you should still explore something else because like maybe you find something better or like sometimes you should even explore bad ideas because sometimes the bad ideas show, sometimes bad ideas actually turn out to be good ideas.

1:38:33And then sometimes bad ideas can show why the other ideas are good. So I think like there's this stage where what my essay was about was like design is a search. So you are searching for the direction and like you're searching for the concept. You're kind of like removed from the execution stage of actually making it work. So the conceptual design is like, it's kind of like cars, car industry has a concept cars. Those cars are not in production yet, and they never will be. But it's an idea what the car could be. And the car industry seems like they never take anything from those concept cars, but they could.

1:39:10We took the handle. We took the handle from the passenger door. We made this crazy, gull-wing, super fast, crazy car, and it's like, yeah, the lights. So that's kind of the idea. It's like there's a concept that is cool, and we should try to execute it. But I don't know what happens in the car industry. They just can't do it. But I think in a software, you can do it. And then there's the execution design where you're like, how do we actually make this work well in this context of the application or fix the problems we didn't think about in a concept, like the edge cases or performance, or just we get user feedback, we make some fixes.

1:39:48So at that stage, I think the coding tools can be really useful because like you are iterating on the, you're refining the, the, the kind of like the design, but you had first this other stage where you kind of like thought about it, like more like, I don't know, not exactly first principles way, but like you started from like kind of like a pure problem or an idea. And then you like created some concept that you think is worth like, um, executing on. Yeah. Uh, how do you think about, like, it feels like so much of what AI is great is maybe, I mean, AI is pretty good at like search, but I still feel like we probably agree that there's elements that are lacking around inspiration and design is certainly not a solved problem from an AI perspective.

1:40:34But a lot of times translation is more or less solved. So what stuck out to me was in your essay, you noted that a lot of architects will start by sketching with like pencil and paper and we are in the area the era of like you could sketch it and maybe you have to come up with the brilliant idea or the brilliant beautiful design but then you can just take a picture of that sometimes and get a floor plan out of it potentially but do you think that something's lost there or do you think that like text like are these all going to be lossy and so you want to avoid like text to image to code uh and you want to be able to like dip in at every single level like how do you think about the different translation modes because some of them are really helpful like at the end of the day some of them are just autocomplete and that's amazing yeah i i feel like there could be always something lost like i think like when you actually if you draw something and then you try to like draw it again for example you kind of like even if you just took the sketch and then draw it again on a paper you probably like start noticing different things like you start thinking about the problem like slightly like different way so i think like what the ai is kind of like always doing is kind of like it's shortcutting you to the output without actually you yourself going through the process so i think like something always gets lost there i think again and i don't think it's like necessarily a bad thing.

1:42:01You can just take a sketch and generate an idea and you see it in a different way and that can be good too. But I think there's that problem. And yeah, some of the comments I got that's like, well, now the AI is so good, so you don't even have to code. So it's like, you just describe what you want and the AI kind of creates it for you. But then now you're kind of adding another layer of influence there. It's like the AI is kind of influencing the output And the LLMs are kind of like statistic models, whereas they're always looking for the correct, kind of like statistically correct answer. They're not looking for necessarily the unique answer or your best answer for you personally or for this context or something.

1:42:44So there can be this danger of everyone starts to average towards the means or the kind of like the common standard patterns or standard practices. And again, I think it's fine to use AI, but it's just kind of like you have to understand what are you giving out or what is the trade-off? And should you do something about it or are you okay with it? Yeah, so one interesting example. Earlier in the show, we were talking about Where's Waldo. We use Waldo Bench, so we'll test a new image model by just making a Where's Waldo illustration. And none of the models can do it yet. It's really complicated.

1:43:24They can make it visually look like it's perfect, at least from far away. And then you zoom in and it's like chaotic and there's no story happening around the page. And maybe Waldo's just not even on the page. Like it's the ultimate, where's Waldo? He just bounced. But we looked back at the history and the original illustrators, this guy Martin, and he would spend like eight weeks to make like a full spread. Right. And you could imagine, I mean, part of that was just like hand illustrating everything. but it's also like planning out like what is the storyline and what is the experience of like being in this page and like what is the experience of finding waldo right and i feel like that is the that is still the thing that is ultimately going to give products edge and make products have that craft is when you know that a team that's building software could have one-shotted like a dashboard and got it like to to the point where it's like it's functionally a dashboard like we can functionally make a where's Waldo illustration that you can go on the page and search for where's Waldo but is it like an enjoyable is it an enjoyable experience like right now we're not seeing AI that like maybe that you could find the right prompts but right now you're not doing or you're not one-shotting an illustration like this and it is still something you have to put an immense amount of like thought and planning into and and try things and and revert them and things like that.

1:44:43Yeah. And I think there's different modes. I think you can use AI in creative ways of generating a lot of output or different ideas. But I think it's like, yeah, there's always you now have this influence of the AI model, what is it, how it does, how it creates those outputs and decides things. And then you have the tool that is doing the code base versus you're kind of directly working on a sketch or a screen where there's very little influence, what can be done, how the design can be. The other reason why I even talked about this, I don't have any tool to sell here. I don't have a design tool to sell, but it's more like I worry about if we start to see design as coding or start to see design as construction, that we already, the incentives to ship things fast is so strong that we start to see that, oh, like now we don't need to design because we can just build it and we can, designers are going to like design and build it.

1:45:48And then I think we start losing the other phases where can we just think about the problem? Like, can we think about the concepts? Like how could this be work really nicely? And then like, I think we, it's like very like, it's very exciting idea for companies or founders versus someone's like, I don't have to think about design anymore. It just happens when we build it. And I think it's maybe good for the business, but I think it's just not good for the world or good to get... My kind of motivation with linear and talking about some of this stuff is always, can we just have nicer things in the world?

1:46:28Can we spend more time on the craft and quality and value it again, even if it's not something that can be measured? I think the Silicon Valley and technology companies always have trouble with this. It's hard to value something that is not quantifiable easily. If there's no data for it, then it doesn't exist. And good design is something sometimes it cannot be measured. So I think this, again, shipping speed and how many things you ship can be measured. But if someone makes a design really good, it's hard to measure that. And then designing things or sketching things can be seen as unproductive because it's not directly contributing to that shipping speed or shipping more things.

1:47:20What's your philosophy on storytelling? Is Matt your storyteller? Do you like that word?

1:47:31Yeah, I mean, I like it because I think, I don't know what happened to marketing, but I think marketing kind of like lost the story or lost the plot there at some point. It became very quantitative. Like it became more mathematical, like just buy the ads and run all the A-B tests and all. It became more of a science. And so the art needed a new brand maybe. Yeah. That makes sense. I would kind of think storytelling is kind of like, I think it the same way as I think the brand. I think the brand and storytelling is maybe like the same thing. It's like, so I, and like to me, brand is something just that you have a belief or like some kind of worldview and you like, and you have some values or things you stand for.

1:48:17Like we always have that on Linear and like, that's kind of like from the place I always articulate my things. It's like, I try to like keep true to that brand is like, can we have nicer things or quality things or, or something. And so the brand or the storytelling is not never about the, like, again, about the output. It's actually like, it's like a deeper thing. It's like, do you believe in something? And then I think the storytelling or the brand is just like, how do you express that belief? So anyone like people can't read your mind. So you have to like either tell stories or you have to show visuals or videos or something.

1:48:51so how do you express your beliefs so the problem when people are looking for storytellers is that like again like do you have the story to tell like do you believe in anything and like is that if you believe in something is it like engaging like do we people do people want to hear that story so hiring a storyteller doesn't help if you don't have this like a good story or engaging story yeah and someone in the chat noticed you guys are hiring a writer which is something i was pushing for like if I wanted to hire a storyteller I would want to personally I'd want to hire somebody that is very good at writing and wants to come in and write a lot and like enjoys the craft of writing and not somebody that wants like a like a pretty title that like sounds cool but then ultimately just wants to collaborate cross-functionally across the org or whatever it is um last question I have what are your thoughts on holiday gimmicks in products I got into my car this morning and on my profile, it had a Santa hat on it.

1:49:54And I got some enjoyment out of it. It had some cobwebs for Halloween too. But is that cheap in a product? It feels like something that I don't know which way you're going to go. Yeah, I would think about it, again, from the point of brand. It's like, does it fit the brand? I think we haven't done those things because we kind of, like Linear, the brand is more that it's like a serious tool for work. And I think some of those kind of things can kind of feel like off. And like, I don't know, like, for example, it's always like these situations where, I don't know, like a company is using Linear and then something goes down, like their service goes down, like the whole company is like scrambling.

1:50:37And then suddenly some Santa hat appears and everyone's like, what is this thing? is we have our product or customer base is on fire and there's some Santa hats flying around. So it can be distracting. And so I think it kind of depends on your brand and how critical infrastructure you are and where do you put these things. I think it can be a fun thing for the team to do Easter eggs. We do Easter eggs that are hidden. So there's games, there's an arcade you can enter in linear and then there's like old arcade games you can play but you know you don't find them like you have to really find them to like you need to find the easter egg to access it so there's like these kind of things that you make secrets but um but yeah i don't personally like the like putting the decorations on your face and and like professional tools yep makes total sense well uh great having you on and uh yeah we'll save the santa hats for the podcasters yeah thanks thanks great catching on good to see you um we went uh yeah thank you well we'll talk to you soon happy merry christmas um we went way over so we are going to skip uh pranav mayana and get him on the show tomorrow great uh instead we will be joined by uh mike at liquid death at 1 p.m um and we will catch up with the Space Data Center debate.

1:52:03Pranob, of course, built a first principles model on the economics of data centers on Earth and data centers in space. I'm really enjoying the way the Space Data Center debate has evolved. We are now vibe coding full applications to get to the bottom of the economics of the decisions. And people are still split on it. Santa came early for Lightspeed this year. Yes, that's right. We have$9 billion in new capital for a new family of funds. Their largest raise in 25 years. AI is rewriting the rules. We're backing the founders, building what comes next. Congratulations to Lightspeed, Guess, Aaron, Michael, and all of the folks over there.

1:52:49We've enjoyed hanging out with you guys. Interesting. I mean, we saw that chart of new venture funds raised really falling off a cliff. Something like$50 billion to date. This feels like a huge chunk of it, potentially. That chart was already getting debated. Okay. Yeah. Potentially. Maybe stuff had been reclassified. Like, it's possible that this$9 billion, well, some of it's in a growth fund, so they reclassified it or something like that. Do you have more context there on that one? No? Okay. Let me tell you about Wander.com. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities. Dreamy beds.

1:53:20Top-tier cleaning. And 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation on by better folks. um pavel yes rata says look at haystack ventures fund three okay it was eight point two million dollar fund uh semel shah semel former guest on the show three deck of corns wow invested early in doordash centicorn centicorn alert figma yeah figma public company instacart 12 billion carta Well, he did Instacart and DoorDash. That's interesting. You'd think that that would be a little bit of like, hey, what are you doing investing in a competitor? But it was restaurant delivery versus grocery. Grocery, which is different.

1:54:01Yeah, I guess it's different. HashiCorp,$7 billion, Open Door,$6 billion. Best solo GP fund in history. Was Fund 3 solo, though? Ashe says Applied Intuition was also in this fund. It's currently at$15 billion. Wow, that's very, very impressive. I said, well, congrats to Samuel. Show up, brood. Hey, Stan. Legend. We've got to have him back on the show. Wow. I'm liking the gong today. Not warmed up. Still has a nice little ring to it. Kind of a wild ring to it. Harry Stebbing says, venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Mercore, et cetera, et cetera, you do not freaking matter.

1:54:44And we were with somebody yesterday for dinner, and they were in opening eye and anthropic. They were doing fine. Back in early 2023. He was feeling pretty good. I do know some VCs that have been early to the category, but missed all of those. And it is a hard story to tell, you know, to bring it back to storytelling. if you're a VC right now and you haven't done anything like that. At the same time, if you're early, early stage, if you're early stage, it doesn't seem that crazy. There are only so many people that could be in these firms really, really early. But if you're a growth investor, I mean, we've seen many growth funds that are in both Anthropic and OpenAI, which is like typically a no-no, but they figured out how to do it.

1:55:40Well, why don't you and Tyler read this post from Didi? I will. I'll be right back. So Didi Doss says, a few software engineers at some of the best tech companies told me this week, my entire job these days is prompting cursor or clawed code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and then sanity checking it. Tyler, do you agree that this is the new life of a software engineer? I mean, yeah, kind of. Like, blood code is, like, really good. And, I mean, also Codex, the Gemini CLI, basically they're all, like, very similar. Yeah, yeah. But that form factor is, like, really, really good. Yeah, it's great.

1:56:19I find it to be. It says, we've crossed some intangible threshold of AI generalizing to most software. Opus 4.5 is the first model that makes me actually fear for my job. All models so far were okay-ish at best. Opus 4.5 really is something else. People who haven't tried it yet do not know what's coming for us in the next two to three years. Hell, even next year might be the final turning point already. I don't know how to adapt from here on. Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure to intervene if it Fs up here or there. But how long will it be until I'm not even needed anymore?

1:56:58um yeah i mean i uh is the do you think there's any sort of like overweight here on the type of like you know vibe coding small apps new features like in are you are you hearing about uh big like like big hairy code bases things that need to be very uh you know fault tolerant where um it's not just throwaway software still yeah i mean i think it's like you know he says uh you know he still to intervene if it messes up. Yeah. Which I think is like, that's extremely valuable. Like you need someone to do that. It's like the law firm thing where people talk about you can't just replace everyone with AI because so much of like a law firm is like you need to have them be accountable.

1:57:44Where I think it's very similar with engineers. I also think like a lot of the stuff I do is like kind of fairly like low risk. Like it's not super important if it messes up a little bit. So there I can like really use models. Well, it's not going to bring down like a nation state or it's not like important government data or whatever. So if it's like not super efficient or stuff like this, it's like not that big of a deal. Where I think it's still, it's much harder. Like I often find that if I'm trying to like completely one shot a project and then I keep iterating on it, a lot of times I have to do some sort of like architecture rework because it just like doesn't make sense if you really want to keep scaling it.

1:58:21Yeah. Yeah. Where the tech debt, then you can use the model to do the, to fix the tech debt, but it's still, it's kind of like not as smooth as you would really like ideally want it to be. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, eight sleep. Maybe you just hit clog code and then you go to sleep. Take a nap on eight sleep. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized. Eight sleep should really make overnight success into a campaign. Ooh, that would be good. That's a great tagline for them. Overnight success. I like it. what most discussions of AGI feel like nowadays says Rota cars have windows and can move houses have windows and can't move so it's not the windows that make the car go it's something else entirely wow yeah that's a good point it's not the car it's not the windows that make the car go something else entirely what a great post pj cooked pj cooked with this one it's fantastic What is this long?

1:59:22This is a crazy image Martin Screlli shared Clearly a screenshot Of a spreadsheet I don't know how accurate this data is But he's pulling minutes Spent on AI sites Last month alone 64 % were on ChatGPT, 15 % on Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok are the only Two on a trajectory to come even close Grok.com is only at 3 % of the total of these users that were growing on web. But it's growing very fast. DeepSeek.com is the same thing, 3%, but growing very fast, whereas some of the other ones are shrinking. Interesting to see, yeah, perplexity is at 2%. Clawed AI is at 2%. Some of these have, they bend themselves into other systems.

2:00:14And also, these are, of course, websites, so app-based LLMs are not going to be quite captured here, but continues to tell the story that ChowGPT is still the dominant consumer platform for just hopping on an LLM and answering some questions. Anyway, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest, Mike, from Liquid Death, is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. What's happening? Mike, how you doing? Hey. Welcome to the show. What's new in your world? You didn't get the memo.

2:00:59What memo? Oh, yeah. He's not wearing a Santa. No, we're the only ones wearing Santa suits today. We are feeling the holiday spirit. it. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Yeah. Welcome to the show. First time on the show. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk about, about marketing and launching this business and how comedy scales. But maybe, can you just take us back and really quickly give us the intro on the actual launch? I feel like, is it fair to say that Liquid Death had like a viral launch video strategy? Was that the cornerstone of the launch? Or were there other pieces that were at play in the early days?

2:01:41Well, the way we launched Liquid Death was actually a bit different. So when I had the idea, it was a little bit too crazy to most people to find investment to make it. So I basically created a Facebook page and we made it seem like a real brand just to see like what kind of traction did it get in the world if people thought this was a real thing then we shot a cheap commercial for the product that didn't exist yet and we probably spent 1500 bucks to shoot the commercial and you know we put a little bit of paid media behind the video maybe like a few thousand dollars and then after five months the video had three million views the facebook page had you know 60 70 000 followers which was more than aquafina had on facebook at the time so then i used all that kind of market trap to then go raise like a small i'm so surprised that that more cpg brands don't do that like it takes so long to make even as like like if somebody's making a drink like this right if they actually start working hard on it today they might have something close to a product that they can sell in six six to 12 months something in that range so like really go through rapid iteration and getting it made and scaling up production and testing and all that stuff when you could just actually make an image of something like this and just like start running ads against it and see like do people care at all do they click through at a good rate even with ads that aren't super refined.

2:03:13I did that once on a project in college. I was shooting a lot of film photos, and I was super frustrated. It was like a 30-minute drive to the place you drop off film, and so I wanted to make basically kind of a Netflix model for film so you could just get sent a roll of film, send it back once you shot it. And I was shocked. I just ran ads against it, and I had like immediately like a$10 like customer acquisition cost. Of course, I didn't actually have the service set up, so I just refunded everyone immediately. But it's so much easier to validate stuff, and I think people waste so much time.

2:03:49And when you're in that sort of like pre-product in CPG is just like the death zone. Like it's just so hard to get people to care and like actually risk capital when it's like you don't even have a product that I can like sample and you want me to give you like$100 ,000 or$250 ,000. It's a big ask. Completely. And it's something I hear from people who are aspiring entrepreneurs or have an idea. I think there's just like a general sense that, oh, I have this great idea for something. How do I now go raise money? Well, the reality is investors like to invest in businesses, not ideas. so how can you start in some way to prove out that there might be some traction however you might be able to do that and that's going to get you a lot further than just saying hey i have this great idea you know give me some money the first uh so so that video that you described was that the animated video or that was before that animated video happened later can you take me through like how like the the i mean i imagine that cost more than 1500 to produce that what was the story behind picking animation i feel like a lot of brands were doing sort of like the founder testimonial direct to camera you tell the vision of the business or you know you go on a podcast tour and and liquid death came out with that really aggressive uh animated style What was the story behind that particular video?

2:05:19Yeah, I mean, with most businesses, I think you need to look at where are your strengths, what is your network, what are your connections, and utilizing what you have near you to the best of your advantage. So another way to put is play the hand of cards that you have that's unique to you. So for me, I was a big fan of this animated TV show on Adult Swim called Mr. Pickles. It's this bizarre acid trip of a violently funny cartoon. And I ended up reaching out to the guy who was the creator of it. There was two creators. He was one of the two. And in the early days of Liquid Death, saying, hey, I'm a huge fan of your show.

2:06:04I feel like we have similar creative sensibilities. Maybe you'd want to be involved in this Liquid Death thing I'm trying to get going. And sure enough, he responded. We met. We got along really well. And he's actually the one who drew the skull that is the logo on all of our cans to this date. And then once we actually got the brand off the ground and we had real product and we were selling and we were making, you know, real revenue, we had slightly bigger marketing budgets. You know, we were able to use the animation firm that he was working on his TV show with. And they said, hey, we'll do this for super cheap because Will's already here.

2:06:45He can just do this on the side and we can make it happen. So animation is very expensive. Like 30 seconds or 40 seconds of animation is very expensive. But we were able to get it. I think we spent all in like$30K on that. But that should have costed probably a quarter million dollars if you were just trying to go do that normally. Totally. Minimum. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it was kind of like that. That was something that was in our, in our quiver and we were a big fan of it. And, uh, we had some great resources there to make a really funny, and that was always our thing. How do we make something that's the funniest thing someone's going to see in the feed and spread it for us for free?

2:07:22Yeah. I mean, obviously we love comedy here. You're being interviewed by two Santa clauses. Um, I, I'm interested to know, take me a couple of years into my future. Do I regret this? Um, or, or, or, or do I lose this? like how does how do you maintain a level of humor while still you know coming to the customer and the business partners with like hey yeah we're not joking around about quality assurance or something like there's a serious side of the business now there's still some humor that's still there at the same time the marketing is probably not laugh minute anymore how have you thought about like scaling comedy no it's a really great question it's something that i've had to push through multiple departments of the company, which, yes, we're a funny brand in the way we market, but if you think about a brand like a person, like think about someone you know that's funny.

2:08:16Like they're not funny in every scenario. You don't tell them that, hey, my dad died and they crack a joke. Like people, a lot of really funny people, they just know people really well. Like they know how to make people laugh. They know when to tone it down. Like the number one rule of comedy is like know your audience. So I think it's important that it's always like, hey, when someone sends in an email saying, hey, my case of liquid death from Amazon got all screwed up in the mail. You don't crack a joke like very early. Hey, I am so sorry about that. Like that sucks. Like we will completely figure it out.

2:08:53So it's all about knowing where it's important to be, you know, real and authentic and caring and then where it's important to be funny and irreverent and that you always got to be cognizant. How much did you predict the death of the alcohol culture? It feels like this is perfectly timed. We've talked to so many folks on the show about the next generation just drinking way less. And it feels like you've been a beneficiary of this. But was that something where you had seen a chart and you'd actually seen a trend line? Or you just had a vibe? Or it just kind of came to you naturally? Or you just got lucky?

2:09:36How do you frame the fact that you're selling an alternative to alcohol in a ton of bars? I see it all the time. At a time when people are looking for an alternative. Yeah, it was a little bit luck. I think the bigger conceptual drive behind Liquid Death's inception was that how do we make a truly healthy beverage company that markets more like a fun alcohol or junk food company? because you think about all the funny irreverent marketing over time it's all like stickers cheetos dos equis like it's beer it's candy it's fast food yeah my biggest criticism of of like healthy brands historically is they it's so hard to build a brand if you're not making people feel any like real emotion right like how many healthy brands are funny at all like almost almost zero right It's like toned down colors, just kind of like simple, straightforward copy.

2:10:37There's no energy coming through the brand. So how are you going to make somebody feel something? And if you want to be remembered, you have to make somebody feel something. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's also just strategically unhealthy brands, like in their marketing boardrooms, they're like, we want people to associate our products with fun. so everything we do is going to be centered around fun and like that we want this to be fun um or they think about their audience like hey we are selling to teenagers like this is how we want to make teenagers love us we're healthy products we're not ever marketing to teenagers they were marketing to 35 plus you know females and they would market a certain way there so yeah part of what i love about liquid death and why i wanted to do it is so many healthy companies just preach to the choir, people who already make healthy decisions?

2:11:30How can I use a brand to get people who don't typically make healthy decisions to now every once in a while pick up a low calorie water just because they identify with the brand and they think it's cool? Then you still get the healthy people because they're already buying in those categories. But how do you start bringing new people into healthy categories who weren't there before? What's your philosophy on storytelling on X the last 24 hours, everyone has just been debating, everyone's been debating, like, do you need to hire a chief storyteller? I took the point of view of, like, truly the most elite storytellers are founders, CEOs, who are the ones communicating to customers and, you know, vendors and the media and all that kind of thing.

2:12:13And if you're feeling like you need to hire a storyteller, it's very possible that you just don't know what story to tell. but I don't know that hiring somebody off the street to tell your story is going to actually get you what you want, which is like a plot and, you know, meaning and all these other things that great, great stories and brands have. Yeah. I mean, it's like storytelling is such a broad thing. It's like storytelling is in everything. And as a founder specifically, or if you work in sales. It's like just being able to tell a story is not just important to a consumer. How do you get employees to want to follow you?

2:12:53If you can't articulate a vision, a story that gets people excited and believing in the mission, like you're not going to be a very good leader either because it's so important. So I don't know if hiring a chief storyteller is like the equivalent of having like, you know, a language translator. Hey, storyteller, tell everybody in the company why would i say you know matters you know so but i think that you know great ceos have been have been successful because they're great storytellers naturally and that goes far beyond just knowing how to tell a consumer story but how to get investors excited how to get employees excited you got to be able to speak in a way that makes people believe yeah you have an app you have an advertising background how do you work with ad agencies today my another thing i was you know know kind of sharing with the audience my point of view is that more tech companies should work with traditional ad agencies to actually just like come up with like novel campaigns to try to cut through the noise I think people get too focused on we just need a pretty website like that will solve our problem or we need a nice logo and it's like spending not enough time thinking about like really clear messaging and actually thinking in campaigns like I know companies that will spend $50 million next year on marketing.

2:14:16And they're not thinking about, they're not even thinking about like what campaign, what campaigns are we going to do? They're just thinking about like, what channels are we doing? How are we spending? Who are our segments? And they're not thinking of this like kind of like through line messaging. And so I think that that's an area that traditional ad agencies, not necessarily the biggest ones in the world, but the sort of classic ad agency can actually really be really helpful on. yeah i think another way to think about it is thinking about all different kinds of companies tech or what have you thinking about more of the full funnel because when you talk about campaign you're kind of talking about top of the funnel like more general awareness around the brand and then you've got other marketing assets further down the funnel that are focused more on converting somebody into a customer i think you have so much focus especially in the tech world on the lower funnel where you know, hey, I put this money in and then this much money comes out because of conversion.

2:15:14But what happens is if you're not bringing in enough people at the top of funnel, at the brand level, you don't have enough people to convert. Then it starts getting really expensive to convert low-level performance people because you start running out of people and it just starts getting more expensive. And I think a great example is AI. eye. All the LLMs now are fairly comparable in what they can do. But still, ChatGPT is by far the biggest because it's the most notable brand. It's just the thing that people, oh, ChatGPT, it's easy to say. It's fun to say. I know that. I'm just going to use that one.

2:15:48Look at Google. How many other search engines tried to come about and just because of Google's brand and something that's emotional, just made that the go-to place where nobody else could really come and take it way. And to your point, a lot of that has to come from more brand marketing and not just like nuanced performance, functional marketing. How are you thinking about the new sparkling energy drink? I feel like there's, there's a sort of like positive positioning. Hey, we're the only ones that have this particular benefit or there's the free of strategy where everyone else has this bad thing and we don't.

2:16:26Is that the framework you think about when you go to launch a new product what was your thesis behind getting into energy i mean we've been asked about when we were going into energy since probably like year one of liquid death because people just think the brand is so much more like it's got a lot of energy it does and even it's still funny to this day you know in consumer research that we have you know we make flavored sparkling water we make plain water we make iced tea like 60 of the country has heard of liquid debt 20 know that we make flavored sparkling water which is our biggest actually category now oh but 19 of the country thinks we make an energy drink so literally our biggest category has as much awareness as a category we don't even make yet that's crazy yeah because the brand just sounds more like an energy drink than it sounds like a flavored sparkling water so the reason we got into energy was because i think we finally found a way to stay to our brand ethos which is to truly be a better for you brand and we were able to find a way to do what we feel is a truly better for you energy drink product.

2:17:47And now that the better for you segment of energy is the fastest growing within energy, the Celsius of the world, Alani, C4, these other brands that are low, zero sugar, low calorie, et cetera. It just became the right window for us to kind of offer something that really felt better for you within the category. and that's a combination of things with just we thought the category was getting a little in stain with the caffeine like celsius alani all these brands are like 200 milligrams of caffeine i think we started this show by the way john would have three celsius in a single show it's insane it's so bad now i do three diet cokes which is like i think around 100 or 200 milligrams of caffeine it's not too bad yeah i mean most people don't think of red bull as a weak energy drink it's the number one selling energy to drink.

2:18:37Red Bull is 114 milligrams in a 12 ounce can. So Celsius is like pounding two Red Bulls at one time. Yeah, it's crazy. You know, and I don't think a lot of people realize that. And the more we've talked to people, they kind of feel like, oh, yeah, I don't, I stopped drinking, you know, Celsius or Alani because I don't know, I started feeling a little like cracked out. Oh, yeah, it's crazy. You know, I just thought there was like, you know, we thought there was like a good opportunity to come in with something that was not weak, but this just what we're calling a sane level of energy in a category that i think is starting to go a little insane do you have a tagline for it murder your sleep or something well we actually have on the can uh it's like it's not really the tagline but it's a small one that says death to drowsy there we go i knew it was gonna be something good what uh how what's What's the go-to-market with energy?

2:19:26I can imagine a buddy of mine is like a pro skateboarder. And like in skating, there's like some fatigue around the big energy drink brands. And it feels like there's room. Like energy drinks have had a big place in the industry for a long time. So I can imagine there's like an athlete angle to this. There's kind of campaign, broader campaign. but how are all the different ways you're planning to really bring it to market? It's funny. It's actually not that at all because, you know, Monster and Red Bull, both companies valued like upwards of 60 billion apiece. They've got endless checkbooks to buy athletes.

2:20:08And that's the thing. When you do sports marketing, anybody with a big enough checkbook can buy any athlete. That's how they make their money, right? So if Liquid Death tries to go in and buy athletes competing with the checkbooks of monster and red bull we're never going to make enough of a dent to have it move the needle for us so for us like what makes liquid death unique is we're arguably the funniest beverage brand in the world and we're better at being funny than anybody else and big companies have a really hard time producing comedy because you go through that bureaucracy of focus groups and layers it's hard to make something legit funny the way we can.

2:20:48And no amount of money can fix that. So we want to focus on being the only funny energy drink brand in a sea of extreme pork. I love that. I love that. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Different positioning. This is what a great guest for today. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We got to jump to our next guest, but we'd love to have you back and go way deeper. This was fantastic. No one loves advertising more than me. Maybe you do. Maybe you do. You're very elite at it. So thank you. It's always great. Super fun conversation. Let's do it. Let's do it again soon. Let's do something again soon, please.

2:21:19Congrats to the whole team on the launch. Have a good one. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Bye. You heard from Kari Linear. Let me actually tell you about Linear. Linear, meet the system for modern software development. Linear streams like work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. We have Elliot Cohen from General Medicine in the Restream waiting room. Next. He's coming in. Previously, co-founded PillPack with Friend of the Show. What's happening? Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Thanks for having me, guys. Happy holidays. Exactly. Please, since this is your first time on the show, I mean, we've talked about general medicine before, but introduce yourself.

2:22:03I'd love to get a little bit of your journey, your story, and then I'm sure we can go into a ton of different aspects of the healthcare industry and general medicine generally. Also, hello, TJ. Oh, yes. I hope you're watching. I hope so, too. We love you. Anyways, Elliot. Thanks for having me on. He was joking that maybe he would have actually been better for this because he's got the nice Santa beard. Oh, yeah. He does have the Santa beard sometimes. Anyway, but it's great to meet you. He doesn't even have to dress up. He's prepared. It's great to meet you guys. My name's Elliot Cohen. I was one of the other founders of PillPack along with TJ Parker.

2:22:41And we started that business in 2013. we sold it to Amazon in 2018 and then both of us stayed at Amazon. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was like, you know, a month or two and it all just worked out. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what's the latest, the general medicine I hear you guys are ripping. Yeah. But, uh, we'd love, uh, we'd love for you to share kind of the state of the business. Business is doing great. Uh, we launched in May and since then we just been, uh, expanding. It's available nationwide. I think it's got the most insurance coverage of any provider group in the country. And even if we don't take your insurance at our provider group, we can always route you to the right care locally or anywhere else.

2:23:25And really, we started with this sort of first touch experience. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to get access to immediate care. And the ambition has always been to build an entry point to health care where you should be able to come to us for absolutely anything. and what we're launching today is a new way to do that with a chat that has all of your health history in it you know we've been watching i think probably like you guys uh people have been chatting with chat gbt and gemini and others uh about their health care and you know it's something like 60 or 70 percent of probably uh any all adults out there and what we've uh noticed though is that those chats don't go anywhere they um they aren't connected back into the rest of your care And so at General Medicine, what we've been building is the ability to go from that chat straight into actual care.

2:24:17And all of it is health history aware. So we import all of your records, make it really easy for you to have a conversation with them. How are you importing records? I feel like my records are all over the place. Sometimes the doctor just hands me a piece of paper. I lose it. Sometimes it's an email. Sometimes there's a web form or web portal that I have access to. Sometimes I went and used some one-off internet product that I signed up for. did some labs, have some data over there. It feels very messy. I understand that AI could do cool stuff with it, but I feel like I will be very lazy about actually centralizing all the data in my life since it's not organized.

2:24:51You need an agent that goes and finds every doctor. Yeah, maybe, but how do you see actually the most important pieces of health information, pulling those in? What's the workflow like? How does the user actually experience this? we um we have a bunch of elves and uh you tell us yeah they just play right out there he's gonna run the gong for the elves

2:25:21we completely lost him on the camera too you dodged him completely where am i here i am there we go okay uh you know that that's the i think we've been willing to wrestle with the complexity healthcare. That's the difference of being willing to take people's insurance, being willing to embed yourself in the entire healthcare system. And so, yeah, you look at what traditional healthcare or sorry, tech companies have been doing. They've given you these ways to import your records one off. And the problem with that is exactly what you said. You get one record from one care event. You know, when I imported my records into general medicine, I had stuff going back to 2005.

2:25:59You know, more than 20 years of records that got automatically imported. And the difference is we're an actual provider group and we're providing real treatment. And that gives us the ability to go collect a lot more information because it's critical to the way that we provide care. Ultimately, this is the context that we're using that lets us provide this much richer care to folks when they come to the front door. So is the goal for this to be effectively passive where even if I'm not immediately seeking like a treatment and I'm just trying to understand my health. Maybe I have like shoulder pain and I want to understand that this is some, I'm coming to general medicine to just like have a conversation with an LLM and maybe later I come back and I'm like, oh, okay, I actually want to pursue treatment now, whatever, whatever I learned is not going away or whatever.

2:26:47And then, and then you guys can help route it. Is that, is that the goal? I think, you know, honestly, whenever anybody comes in, if you're experiencing shoulder pain, And there's always advice that we can help support you with that's going to help you figure out when's the right time to seek imaging or when's the right time to go to PT, when's the right time to talk to a clinician about it. And that's the whole point of trying to have the care deeply embedded into the experience is you shouldn't have to just wait to see if it magically gets better or doesn't before deciding to really engage with the health care system.

2:27:19If it was easy to engage with, you'd do it right away. And that's what we want to enable. Actually, I've had foot pain for the last two years. And the connection I had never made in my head, I've been wrestling with this. I've been talking to doctors about it. I've been exploring it. And when I loaded all this into general medicine, it was the first time I made this connection back to an injury I had in 2005 on my left foot. And it was the L1 that helped me appreciate that there might be a connection between these two. And it started helping me explore, you know, what are the different options to figure this out?

2:27:50We decided, you know, one of the options that came out of that was imaging. I ultimately booked a visit so I could debate whether the imaging was really the right thing or whether PT was the right thing. Since this had been going on for so long, we decided, my clinician and I decided that really jumping straight to imaging was probably the right next step. And the imaging ended up finding these cysts in my ankle. Oh, scissor. I'm a relatively educated consumer, and I read the report, and I didn't really understand it. You get that MRI. You log into your portal. You're downloading all this stuff.

2:28:27It's this really technical language. And I started reading. I just didn't really get it. And I dumped it all into general AI, and it started explaining it to me perfectly. In fact, it was so different, though, than my understanding of it. I had to give it to one of my buddies who's a radiologist because I thought it meant that this thing was wrong. And he was like, no, no, it's given you a perfect interpretation. That's exactly what the radiologist said in the read. And so that I was then able to start exploring with it, all of these different pathways. Now, is surgery the right next step? Is there a different, you know, left invasive approach?

2:29:03And ultimately, you know, this thing is not going to diagnose me. It's not going to tell me what the right next step in the care is, but being able to have that very exploratory in-depth dialogue by the time I get to the actual visit to talk about the different options with a doctor now I've got this clear idea in my head of man there's these three or four different options I actually don't know which one's right for me but here kind of puts and takes and just makes it way easier to then have this super rich dialogue with the doctor about which of those pathways is best for me what what is it like being a doctor post LLM in general like our do you think patients in general are coming in more informed or more freaked out for no reason?

2:29:43Everyone's been told by a doctor, you know, don't Google it, you know, don't search and then add Reddit to the end. You just go down a rabbit hole. But I think everybody's experienced at this point of like, actually, it can be very empowering to like do research and maybe it has some negative side effects. But in general, I think this is people want information. They want to understand their health and you're never going to stop them from exploring. I think we're pretty clearly on the side of like, you want to give people these tools. More data and information is helpful. You want consumers to be empowered.

2:30:19You know, it's their bodies, it's their health. They're the ones who get to make the decision. The clinician should not be a gatekeeper. The clinician should be a guide, a quarterback, helping them get to the best care for them. And we think AI is a really critical tool in that process. It helps the consumer understand more upfront. So they come to the visit way better prepared to have a really rich dialogue. We also then have a bunch of tools that let us share that conversation in a nicely summarized way with the doctors. The doctor, when you show up, they know a conversation you've been having.

2:30:48They have a sense of that history and what you're interested in exploring in the visit. And so in a 15, 20 minute visit, you can just dive right into the meat of the conversation. You know, you don't have to spend the entire time just ramping up on the history. How do clinicians see you? Do they see you as just like a funnel for business broadly? Like they all want to be on general medicine, having you funnel customers to them. Is there any sort of negotiation that happens? Is all of this just happening sort of by default? Is there opt-in, opt-out? What is the relationship between you and the radiologist, for example, in that example you gave?

2:31:30We've got two ways that you could work with us. One is you can join the platform and see patients directly through the platform. In that scenario, you're getting paid just like you would as part of any health system getting paid for providing care. Separately from that, we have these really rich tools that help us understand the quality and the different services that each physician across the country provides. When a customer needs follow-up care, we can help them search very precisely for the exact right care. So to come back to my ankle example, you know, I can go hunting in that database for the doctor that is going to be the perfect one to remove this cyst from A.

2:32:08Not just a general orthopedist, but someone who has experience in that exact surgery and that exact repair. And I think this is actually where physicians and consumers are perfectly aligned. Consumers want to get to the exact right doctor for their need as quickly as possible. It's just really hard to know what that is because you didn't go to med school, you didn't go to residency, like, you know, I have the same expertise. piece. Same thing on the other side. The doctor wants to practice, you know, they want to focus on the patients that are going to be the absolute best at seeing. And today, there's just no good way for the consumer to know that they're going to the right doctor for them.

2:32:39And there's no good way for that doctor to say, hey, you know, these are exactly the type of patients that I'm going to be really good at. You know, I'm really good at these ankle repairs, but I don't want the knees. There's no way to filter for that today. One more question from me, and then you can close it out. But in terms of like AI and health, we're still, it feels like we're very much in like the abstract era of like, maybe it'll cure cancer. And it feels like a couple of years ago when in broadly in AI, we were like, maybe there'll be like an economic explosion. We'll be growing at 10 % GDP.

2:33:12And like the economic data, at least this year, has been like pretty fine. Like same, it's like not bad, but also not great. And like the unemployment rate just came back and like sort of mixed. and like the stock market's doing well, but it's not like, oh, 10 % GDP growth. And I'm interested in if, you know, Satya Nadella said like, I'll believe the AI like fast takeoff narrative when I see GDP growing really, really fast. Like what are some of the health metrics that you would look to, to judge in five years, 10 years, is AI having a really dramatic impact on health? We've seen, you know, I think everyone has expectations about what's happening with the peptides and GLP-1s, right?

2:33:58And we would expect that if the GLP-1 mission works, you'll see obesity rates fall. But is there a broader health metric that you could imagine tracking to understand the impact of what you're doing, but also just broadly like AI in medicine having an impact? You want us to get a metric that's not like Chinese peptide shipments into the country. I mean, that one would be probably worth tracking as well. Yeah, I'm just wondering, what are the high-level KPIs? We look at a lot of the health of the American consumer. How much do they spend on Black Friday? What about the health of the American? How are we tracking that?

2:34:38I think we look at this stuff all wrong, honestly. We spend the last 20 years optimizing for the financial relationship between the doctor and the system. And so all of our health metrics, the way we talk about them, it's all about comps. Personally, I don't think that's what we should be optimizing for. I think we should be optimizing for the consumer and their enjoyment and their fulfillment that they get out of that experience. So to me, if you want to boil that down as a metric, it's something like net promoter score. How much do you love interacting with the system, the healthcare system?

2:35:05And today, that's a silly question because the answer is nobody. Nobody loves interacting. That's the craziest thing. It's the definition of wealth. The most important thing that any of us have in our life is probably our own health. We should love interacting with it. We should love engaging with it. And to me, that's the metric I would look for, particularly around AI. It has this opportunity to completely shift the way consumers engage with their health and how empowered they are in it and really make them the customer. At the end of the day, I think so much of our healthcare system today, the consumer is not actually the customer.

2:35:39And our ambition in general medicine is to build a completely new health system where the consumer gets to be the actual customer of their own care. And my personal belief is if we do that, we will solve most of the problems in healthcare. Most of the stuff we complain about, it's because the customer is the employer, the customer is the doctor, it's the insurance company, it's the government, it's not the consumer. And I think healthcare, I think AI has a real chance to shift that back around and make the consumer the center of that. I love it. All comes back to MPS. It's a final metric. The final boss.

2:36:10If you think about it, Like in times that I've rated, like my NPS score for a company would be like one. Yeah. It was like a healthcare related experience, you know. Sure. Like where if you get misdiagnosed or just get bad advice or you get prescribed a drug that you shouldn't be on or whatever. It's like you're going to have a really bad time. And a lot of that I think is avoidable with just, yeah, better understanding, better, more personalization, et cetera. Makes no sense. Anyways, congratulations to the whole team. Very, very exciting. Thanks for coming on the show. Great to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me.

2:36:46This was great. I love that. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. So, Brune has weighed in on the word of the year situation. He says everyone's word of the year is slop, thus making the word of the year as an article category slop. What do you think? Word of the year. Still underrated. Still room to run. does the word of the year as an article category have motion we were trying to yeah we were trying to figure out our word that we landed on was motion i love right it's uh it's hard to perfectly defined yes define you know it when you see it sure you know when someone has it yes you know when someone doesn't have it uh and i just felt like this year when they're sleeping you know who's been bad and good.

2:37:37Are you on the motion list? Are you on the motion list? Are you on the motion list?

2:37:46Yeah, it does feel like everyone sort of landed on the slop thing. Anyway, you had another story you wanted to run through. Warner is preparing to tell shareholders to reject Paramount Offer. Wow. Company to recommend existing Netflix deal as soon as Wednesday, so we'll be looking out for that tomorrow. If you want to participate, uh i'm kind of tempted to at least i'm not a i'm not a warner shareholder i'm tempted to buy a share i'm just to vote yes just to vote yes or vote no no no i haven't decided yet oh okay okay you could be swung yeah you could be swung you're a swing i want to put the word out i'm a single i'm a i'm gonna buy some and i'm gonna be a single issue voter foghorn leghorn i need a new i need a trilogy i'm gonna need a trilogy i'm gonna need a foghorn leghorn trilogy with a lot of Porky Pig on there.

2:38:34I'm going to need a massive cinematic universe all around. Yeah, you want to hold up the process until you can get clarity on how they're going to treat that IP. Yes, yes. Foghorn Leghorn is very, very important. Anyway, our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. We have Ali from Databricks. Welcome to the show. How are you? So sharp, so sharp. You look very sharp. It feels like you're wearing a suit, but you're not. It's your own thing. It's good to see you again. How are you doing? Likewise. Good, good, good. I didn't get the memo. I'm not dressed up the right way. We should have.

2:39:10No, you look fantastic. Don't worry about that. Come back on tomorrow. We'll ship you a Santa outfit. You can raise the next round. We still have a few letters left. But congratulations. Give us the news. What happened? Yeah, what happened is that we're just seeing an acceleration in the business, especially with respect to AI. and actually we slice and dice, we're data companies. We slice and dice that data in many, many different ways. Is it a particular customer concentration? Is it a particular cloud? Is it a particular product? No, it's like broad-based acceleration throughout the business.

2:39:42We passed$4.8 billion run rate revenue. Oh, wow. I was asking, will I get a gong? Thank you. Yes, of course. Of course, maybe multiple. Maybe multiple. Perfect, yeah. So over 55 % growth. And, but, you know, more interestingly, we're now passing$1 billion on our data warehousing product, which we announced four years ago. And we also passed$1 billion run rate in AI revenue, which, you know, makes it, you know, over 25 % of our revenue. You know, not that many companies in it. There's a lot of talk about AI, what's going on with AI, is there a bubble or not. Not many companies have over 25 % of their business in AI and, you know, over a billion dollars.

2:40:24So we're excited about that. Yeah, how are you thinking about classifying that? Because I imagine that in some ways, a lot of the data warehouse revenue is from AI companies that want to warehouse data because there's more and more need for data because everyone's doing more things with it. We're in this era where everything is becoming AI and yet it can feel a little disingenuous when companies slap AI on the back of their name. Well, it's hard to classify, too, because we were looking at some data earlier this week from Ramp that basically said like 50 % of businesses aren't spending any money on AI directly, yet they're clearly buying things from companies that are using AI.

2:41:00Yes, where in the supply chain is it? But how do you think about what is the main driver of that data warehouse growth? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of interesting. So, you know, we started the company in 2013. And one of the reasons we started was because we wanted to do AI. and the problem is since 2013 up until November 2022 no one wanted to hear AI no one was interested in it and then come November 2022 chat GPT gets released and now everyone wants to just talk about AI you know so now it's like you know well you know are you an AI company are you doing AI what's AI but yeah no when we split our revenue up right you can think of it like you know roughly two billion of data munging and securing that data one billion of data warehousing and then one billion of AI so you can like separate these out so it's not like over overlapping the triple quadruple countering or anything like that.

2:41:49So what are they doing with AI? I mean, there's just lots of use cases. So let me give you an example. So we have this product called Agent Bricks. You know, one of the favorite use cases I have is that Merck actually created a model. These are called transformer models, these AI models. They created something called TEDDY, which stands for transformer enabled drug discovery. And this is an AI model. instead of predicting the next word in English, sentence, it can predict cells and cell expressions. So it's called gene regulatory network. This is super important for drug discovery because then the drug companies can target those genes that are responsible for diseases.

2:42:25So that's like a game changer. And there's lots of use cases like this. 7-Eleven was able to automate most of their marketing stack. So before, you would have to do your own segmentation. Like, who should I show this material to who this will be interesting to? and then you would have to create the material for that segment manually. Now the agents can actually prepare a lot of that material themselves. They can generate images. They can rewrite the text to target a specific group. You can do that much faster now. You know, I could keep going. RBC, Royal Bank of Canada. Basically, when an earnings call comes out, you guys will like this.

2:42:57Earnings call comes out. It fetches the earnings call. It looks at all the previous earnings calls, looks at earnings calls of competitors, looks at what's going on in the market, looks on, you know, the sentiment, and then writes up an equity research report. using the tone of the equity research analysts. And they can get this out in 15 minutes, which is usually in the industry, it's at least two hours or several hours. And every minute matters, every second. Exactly. So those are some of the use cases you're seeing out there. So it is taking off. We're kind of focused on this. I call it sort of get stuff done or GSD AI rather than super intelligence AI.

2:43:36How much of those examples, I mean, there's a great case study. It's very tangible in a world where there's not many tangible AI narratives. How many of those case studies came from companies that were already using Lakehouse or a data warehousing product, and then you came to them and they were comfortable working with you, or they felt like they would be sped up on working with you on the AI side because they were already comfortable with you housing the data for probably years. Yeah, almost all of them. Let me explain why, though. There's a reason why. It's not just, hey, we know each other and I'm comfortable with you.

2:44:16It's the fact that AI today, like large language models, are actually a commodity. I mean, they're the coolest thing that ever happened, but they're already a commodity. What I mean by commodity is just like oil. You could get your gas from this gas station. You can get it from that gas station. Slightly different in price. It doesn't really matter for your car, right? Same thing with LLMs. You can get this LLM or that LLM. You don't even know the difference. This week, this one is better. That week, that one is better at coding. This week, this one can do reasoning. This one can do images. So it's a commodity.

2:44:44So actually, it's now a commodity to have a generative AI model that can answer any question about the world and the history, and it's super smart. What is super elusive and you can't get your hands on is an AI that can actually reason on proprietary private enterprise data. That actually doesn't exist. because the techniques used to generate these AI models work on huge amounts of data. When I mean huge, I mean the whole internet. Take all the data and crunch it. It doesn't work on a smaller data that enterprises have. So how do you then make the AI work on that data that you already have inside the enterprise?

2:45:22This could be electronic medical records that are sensitive. It could be financial models that are super secretive. It's your recipe for your alpha generation. So what you need to do is you need to get a good data foundation there. And that's the lake house that you're talking about. And then the governance and the security on top of that with Unity Cap Lock. Those are the kind of things you have to get in place first before you can unleash the AI on it. So that's why. It's not that they just know us. It's that they've been at it for a long time. And actually, if you haven't gone that foundation right, if your data is a mess, it doesn't help.

2:45:51If your data is sitting in on-premise in some old database, some Oracle database, and it's locked away, what help is this commodity AI that you have on the top? Yeah. Yeah. What advice do you have for founders that are building their business in and around open source technologies? We talked to a lot of young founders that are open sourcing something really cool. They have a bunch of GitHub stars. There's energy. They don't really have a business model yet, but you can see that they're delivering value. And at some point, they're going to capture it. What are the do's and don'ts of growing up and being a good steward of an open source project or being a good partner to the open source ecosystem?

2:46:36What would you counsel a founder in that situation? That's a billion-dollar question. It's very hard to get that right. What I would say is, number one, there's actually kind of two requirements. And there's like an analogy I have that you kind of have to get right. First of all, realize it's a very difficult sport, the sport that you're about to get into open source and to monetize and create. It's not an easy sport. So preferably don't get into it because you might get hurt. But if you decide that if you're hell-bent on doing this, then you can think of it as your strategy basically is to hit two home runs after each other consecutively.

2:47:10The first home run, and you're banking on hitting that home run, is for your open source project to take over the world. Everybody wants to download it. It's like the greatest thing ever. If you don't hit that first home run, you just shot yourself in the foot because you just gave away all of your intellectual property and you got nothing back for it. And now you have nothing. So you better have a first home run and the open source project takes over the world. So that's like step number one. Now you've achieved that. Congrats to you. Everybody's paying attention. They're downloading your open source project.

2:47:40The GitHub stars are just like, you know, going vertical. It's awesome. You don't have any monetizable business. You cannot make any money. So then comes home run number two. Home run number two is now you have a 10x, just as good as the first one, innovation on top of the open source. And that's the proprietary value that you're going to provide to these companies. That's why they come to you. Otherwise, you know, they can get open source anywhere. And that's how you monetize. And now you have the sort of secret sauce to a really successful company. If you don't hit the second one, the problem is now the big guys, the hyperscalers and others, just pick up your open source model and they offer it up for almost free.

2:48:20How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that free? That's where you need your second home run. So it's very difficult. Yeah. So I want to double click on that part particularly. How do you compete that we have? Because we have other founders that have an open source project and it's growing and they're doing well. And then we see the press release from one of the hyperscalers that their product is now a feature. Their child has been abducted into the cloud. And you can just tell no matter how they respond. It's a scary moment. It's an existential moment. We know that there's a board meeting happening.

2:48:55If you're in a board meeting, a fly on the wall, an advisor or something, and there's a founder who says, one of the hyperscalers just launched a clone of our product. They're really going to come for us this quarter, maybe next quarter. What do you advise them to stay in the game while the capital cannon of the Mag 7 is pointed directly at them? Well formulated. So I actually get that call from the founder day before the board meeting and they're like, oh my God, what do I do? My life is over. And I tell them, congratulations. You just proved that you hit your first home run. they're paying attention to you so now they're coming after you so now you need to do another home run okay but your first home run you just actually succeeded it's a home run business yeah they would not yeah they would not direct all those cannons towards you if you didn't have anything so you have something now they're direct now they're coming after you so now you need to innovate and you need to actually monetize that and that portion you cannot open source if you do they'll just keep you know milking that with their cannons right uh so that's the way to go about it And it's a normal part of life.

2:49:59And by the way, we all went through it. I went through it. I remember waking up, cold sweats in the middle of the night and freaking out about, like, oh, my God, this thing will kill us. But the good news is if you continue innovating, you can stay ahead. Because the people that want to copy you, they're always going to be a few years behind. So if you continue executing, you can stay ahead. And if you did a home run once, you can probably do it again if you set your mind to it. So just the trick is to stay ahead, right? Because the way it works is that startups, the main thing going on is that they don't have time on their side.

2:50:32If you could freeze all startups for 12 months, all the Mac 7 would catch up immediately and there would be no startups. So your whole thing is outrun the big guys very, very fast. So that's another thing I tell them. Don't slow down. Move very, very fast. Continue innovating. Yeah, I love that. How do you categorize everything that's happening in AI? What is your personal framework? Because what you're doing is very different than, let's say, a foundation model lab, which is different than maybe an end wrapper company. Is picks and shovels a pejorative? Is that a pejorative? No. I mean, look, Levi's still around.

2:51:08I don't know how many of those gold diggers are around. That's true. That's a great point. I never thought about that. Yeah. Still here, kicking, you know, here in San Francisco. But I would say there's kind of like three paradigms going on at the same time. Paradigm number one is the quest for super intelligence. And the quest for superintelligence requires bigger and bigger data centers, more and more gigawatts, and it's very resource intensive. And the idea is to come up with such a smart model that can improve itself to the point that we don't like, you know, it's just curing cancer and coming up with new AI models.

2:51:37And, of course, we should be really afraid of the safety aspects of that. So that's like, you know, what the frontier labs are doing. I would say, you know, category two is the researchers that created these models in the first place, like Jan LeCun or Rich Sutton, who created reinforcement learning, that technique. they'll actually tell you like, hey, that's not going to actually work. You're not going to get to superintelligence that way because that's not how humans learn or animals learn and so on. So they're like, hey, leave us alone and we'll get to something in 20 years, which to me sounds like a little bit like, hey, we don't really know.

2:52:07Leave us alone. Then there's a third camp. The third camp is, hey, we already have all the AGI we already need. We might not have superintelligence, but we have artificial general intelligence. I'm in that camp. I believe we already have artificial general intelligence. It's generally intelligent. Just use it and you'll be convinced within like five minutes. It's pretty smart. So now start applying it and get stuff done inside of an enterprise or inside of an organization. Just GSD, deliver AI value on basic tasks. And if you're unsure, start with the simplest mundane tasks that are really low cost right now.

2:52:41See if you can start augmenting and automating them. How did you process the talent wars this year? I think the question on my mind is will we see you know a one billion dollar pay package in two in two years from now or even in in next year right but I'm curious how you processed it as somebody was it a one-time thing or is it normal that was last year guys uh you know I think I think no one at character got like a billion right I mean they paid billions for character.ai yeah and that was literally a billion dollars for one guy at least one billion So that's already done that. So 10 billion is the next, I guess, package to go for.

2:53:22And maybe that was Alex at Meta. But no, but, you know, joking aside, I think that it's also in everybody's interest to exaggerate these numbers. Like the joke among CEOs is, let's exaggerate that number, right? It's like, oh, you know, companies are making like$100 billion offers for my employees. Because when you say that, what happens is that, first of all, if they approach your employees. You must have a great team. Yeah, first of all, it's like a compliment to your team. Second, if someone comes after someone in your team now, They're going to expect at least that amount. If they don't, they feel insulted.

2:53:51You're not even offering me a billion dollars? What's going on here? They don't value my skill set, clearly. Exactly, exactly, right? So it dissuades everyone. So I think there's also a little bit like self-reported numbers here going on. The market is not as crazy as people say, but it has been pretty nutty, and especially on the research side in AI. But actually, I think it's coming. like it used to be the case that if you're a big shot professor in AI, you could get funding, huge amounts of funding for crazy valuations. And if you could just say, I want to just do research and get to super intelligence.

2:54:27Those days are over actually already. It's no longer the case that you can, that pitch doesn't work anymore. And there's no capital. Like you're not going to get a billion or$2 billion to go just do research on AI. You need to have something more than that. So I do think actually the market is coming to its senses. The timeline, the last 24 hours has been fixated on the role of storytelling within companies. You're a fantastic storyteller, like very just fun to listen to and animated. I'm curious, were you always goaded or did you have humble beginnings? There's no way to answer that question, right?

2:55:01It's like a trick question. No, it's not. No, I genuinely believe there are founders that come out and they're seed stage and they're hyper engaging and they're incredible to listen to and they get you excited and motivated. And then there are other founders that like have to really learn. And, but I, but I think it's like, in some ways it's like you either have it or you don't. Yeah. Look, I think there's many things that go into like running companies. Like one of them ingredient number one is to be engaging and excite people and get people excited about your vision. Right. But number two, you also need a good strategy.

2:55:32If you don't have a good strategy, events just going to catch up to you. Number three, you need to put together an amazing, stellar, world-class team, right? That's all that matters. Because if you're amazing, but your team is not, then you're not going to go anywhere. Even if you have all of these, it's not enough. You need to also execute. Like, you need to actually get the team to execute again and again and again and get to the results. And that kind of matters more than anything else. I mean, look at AWS. Like, they're phenomenal at executing, right? And then, finally, five, you need to do with good culture.

2:55:58If the culture is not good, it will eat you up from inside. The key people will leave. You know, And we've seen companies that went under because the culture was bad or the CEO got fired and they went through tough times. And, you know, the authorities were after them for fraud and these kind of things. So you kind of have to nail all these five. You know, it's the unfortunate truth. Uh, well, uh, is it series L now you're quickly running out of letters of the alphabet. we have to ask are you going to be hanging out with us at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon or are there are there no plans to go public because we'd love to hang out there we can hang out there we can hang out there anytime at the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq you know but but whether we're going to go public look we're I mean I wouldn't be I wouldn't rule it out okay we would be public by end the next year yeah but you know it's also not like it's guaranteed sure Because the thing I want to avoid is what happened in 2022.

2:56:55In 2021, I had a lot of peers that were so excited. They took their companies public. They're great storytellers, great execution machines. They're awesome. But then interest rates went up, inflation went up. And in 2022, they said, hey, man, you got to get EBITDA. You got to produce margins. So what did they do? They all did layoffs. And they all produced EBITDA. And what did they cut down on? All the futuristic stuff, all the innovation, all the new products. and also employee morale kind of tanked. Because employees are like, I don't trust you anymore. You said this company is going to do well, but now you're firing my friend here.

2:57:28So as you can see, we're not growing twice the growth rate of many of those companies. And I think staying private in 2022 had something to do with it as well. So we're not trying to exactly time the market. We're trying to win it. Do you think that the narrative around open source LLMs is over? Do you think it's understood? because the DeepSeek moment was a moment when everyone was saying, oh, maybe open source will win or it'll have a serious shaping of the market structure in AI. It feels like folks have a much more concrete thesis around the shape of the AI market with an aggregator winning in consumer and then maybe more of an oligopoly in enterprise code gen and API businesses.

2:58:19and certainly the open source models fit into that. But how are you thinking about open source AI models developing maybe in next year or the year after? Yeah, I would just say that open source has always been a commoditizer in business. Sure. You know, like when Linux showed up, like is the greatest thing that's happening right now in the world Linux? No. But what did it do? It kind of commoditized Windows, right? And significantly so. And we've seen that again and again and again. So what it does, it really, it sets the price of the IP of the open source project down to zero. So that price of that intellectual property shrinks to zero overnight.

2:58:56And that's great because that basically puts pressure on the LLM Foundation model layer to have lower and lower prices. And the lower those prices go, the complementary market, the market on top, which is us with Agent Bricks and Lake Base, our database for agents, helps that market. because, you know, it makes our COGS, our cost of goods sold, which is we would pay for those LLMs, lower. So I think that's going to continue happening. And in particular, one interesting trend is that China is putting the pressure on just open sourcing everything. They're not just open sourcing the large language models and the weights.

2:59:31They're open sourcing the whole stack, everything they did. This is the way we open sourced it. This is the data we use. Here's a research paper. And they're having really fast diffusion of innovation happening in China. And that also puts pressure on the West over here. We're like, okay, we can't fall behind. So we're doing the same thing over here. So I think that's just going to continue. Yeah, so I mean, people, I completely understand that narrative. And it does seem like it feels like China's commoditizing American foundation labs. And you easily fall into this geopolitical narrative. But is there a world where in China, it's really just like the classic open source technology with a for-profit corporation wrapped around it, and they're trying to build the red hat of LLMs over there, and that's the real motivation more than just some crazy wrench in the system?

3:00:24Well, I think that I don't exactly know how the company's party thinks and what they are doing, but I think that over here, we will have companies that are already doing that. If you talk to startups already, many, many of the startups in the United States are actually using the open-source models and the Chinese models. By the way, what's already happened, which people don't talk about openly, is really hush-hush, is that they're taking these Chinese models and kind of distilling them, and you get an American model, right, with an American name, and you don't know that it actually tracks back to Quen from Aligaba or something like that.

3:00:52That's already happening in this market. Look at the vast majority of startups. A huge amount of open-source Chinese models that are being used by American open-source models. And I think you'll have actually Red Hat-like companies here, even here in the United States, that will say, hey, we'll help you get up to speed, use the right ones, make sure it has the right safety and guardrails and you're not taking any risk and we do it at low cost. That's already happening in some sense. And then there are people who do that in the cloud. We actually help you do that. At Databricks, we are multi-LLM.

3:01:21So we have OEM. So OpenAI is available natively to all of our customers. Anthropic is natively available to all of our customers. And Gemini is natively available. So if you're using Databricks, those three are actually under the hood. And then we have all the open source models to let you. So since we are the next layer on top, right, that's the complementary market that I was talking about. So I think this will continue. And I think actually that's good for innovation that's happening. There's so much pressure on that middle layer because it is a very lucrative layer, right? I mean, you know, as judging from the valuations of Enthropic and OpenAI that are very well deserved, you know, that's an important market.

3:01:55So I think this will just continue. You'll see more and more open source. That's not going to stop. And it's going to be from China. My prediction is that you're going to also see that now from Europe and United States. Because, you know, do we want Chinese models to take over the whole planet in open source? I think that some nations will say, hey, why don't we just get together and fund a supercomputer and then build one here? By the way, we used to do that back in the day. It was called supercomputers. National labs that had supercomputers, the largest computers on the planet used to be supercomputers state funded.

3:02:25That's going to start happening, you know, in either this country or that country. And once that starts, you know, everyone wants to get in, United States is going to have the biggest one, right? Of course. So that's my prediction. What does your sales process look like at this stage? Where are you investing time specifically with customers that are in the pipeline? What's the highest leverage and what does even the workflow look like? I mean, we have many different segments at Databricks. There's a self-serve segment. You can actually sign up. There's a free edition of Databricks that's a really important funnel for us.

3:03:02The free edition, anyone can just sign up with their Gmail and use Databricks forever, but you don't get lots of compute. You don't get lots of AI. You get a little sliver. So you get a taste of Databricks forever. This is your sales process. You're selling right now. You should try it out. If you have a Gmail address, go to Databricks.com slash try. Once you've done that, then comes the trial. It's like, okay, but that was just a sliver of compute. I mean, you know, I want to process a lot of LLMs. I want to use the bigger models. I want to do more interesting things with Agent Bricks. I want to have my database with Lakebase.

3:03:38Then I would say get the free trial. So free trial will give you, I think,$200, something like that. And you get to spend$200 for free with us. And so that's sort of the funnel. And then from there, people convert. This is really how most SMBs, mid-market companies, that's how they get started on Databricks. I'm talking about the big dogs. Yeah, how different is the organization? Do these people, like the person who maybe is responsible at some level for the biggest deal you've ever done and the person who's responsible for the smallest deal, have these people ever met in the organization? Are they completely separate?

3:04:14Is there some cross-functional opportunity? Because they're very different functions, I imagine. One is steak dinner. The other is like UI, UX, I would imagine. But I don't know. Well, believe it or not, the steak dinner days are kind of over. Okay. You know, I mean, it's not like, hey, we'll just take you out. And we have the best golf players. And we have the best drinkers that, you know. To be clear, if you take us out to a steak dinner, I mean, go to databreaks.com slash try. I would. Yeah. And you pay me$0. Exactly. That's the point. Right? I was hoping I would sneak that by you. Exactly.

3:04:46Massive. Steak futures are selling off massively right now. Steak prices are just going down. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry, guys. What I would say is that, you know, we actually have a funnel. So, you know, you start maybe as a sales development leader. Actually, we have one at Databricks. You know, a guy called Matt started just, you know, hitting the phone, just getting these SMBs and then grew with the business, then got into the sort of more mid-market accounts. And then now, like, on the enterprise side. So, you know, we have people who grew up with Databricks and they can, you know, you learn to do the whole all the way to the, you know, it's a lot of it is just getting comfortable, right?

3:05:20Because it's one thing if I'm negotiating with you a$30 ,000 deal. It's another thing if I'm negotiating with you a$250 million deal. And a lot of folks will just get nervous and they'll just start shaking. But how do you do that? How do you get that$200 million deal? It actually goes back to those free additions and those things. In that conversation with an exec high up, we will say, did you know that you're already leveraging open source Spark throughout the organization already? Did you know that you're already having people using the free edition with their Gmail accounts? You know, you have all these trials.

3:05:54By the way, the things I'm telling you about today, if you don't trust me, you can go yourself try it out in the free edition. So actually, that kind of motion, bottom-up motion helps a lot, even in the top-down big enterprise sales. But there, the goal is, what are the transformational projects that you want us to help you with? And how do we really drive business value for your organization? Like what's a big strategic board level initiative? Let us help you make you successful with that. We're trying to get to 24 hours a day. And so we're really trying to use AI, 24 hours a day live, use AI to optimize when John sleeps, when I sleep, all that stuff.

3:06:30Anyways, this has been super fun. Congratulations to the whole team on the milestone. We'll save it for next time. And looking forward to the next letter. Awesome. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. What a legend. Yeah, what a legend. I mean, he's such a great CEO, such a great conversation. More breaking news. Kushner's Affinity withdraws from Warner Bros. No way. Takeover Battle. Wow, this is breaking news right now. Jared Kushner is exiting from the Takeover Battle. Affinity was helping to finance Paramount's bid for Warner Bros., but now believes the dynamics of an investment have changed since it became involved in the process.

3:07:08The battle for Warner Bros. stands to reshape the entertainment industry, regardless of which bidder emerges victorious. with both bids raising. Read between the lines, I think we know what happened. Jared Kushner, clearly a Foghorn Leghorn fan. Yeah. Not enough Looney Tunes in the deal. Not enough Porky Pig. I'm out. Not enough Foghorn Leghorn. And on that, I'm out. I'm out. I can't support this. If David Ellison is going to pull the plug on the Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe reboot and three trilogies of Foghorn Leghorn live action, I'm out. I'm not doing it. This is very exciting. It feels like, is it going to land with Netflix?

3:07:46We're back and forth on this now. But it feels like Netflix has certainly the upper hand, a lot of support, and barring some wild card in Washington, wild card with the shareholders, they're set up. I mean, the board has accepted the offers. Aslov is moving his thumbs up on it, right? Ellison's haven't given their best and final offer, though. We know that. They said that themselves. So, and I mean, to be clear, there are other sources of capital beyond affinity partners. So, um, like they could clearly marshal the capital. I mean, Larry Ellison himself has it. He's worth 250 billion. We're talking 80, we're talking 90, we're talking a hundred.

3:08:26It's a lot, but there is a lot of money there to, you know, pool around if you need to. Um, anyway, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 24 hours we see a new, a new offer right there. You have a current one likely, you know, Zaslav pushing to reject the offer. Sure. This is the moment where they kind of need to up the ante a little bit. Well, we got to get one of our media correspondents back on the show because that's been the highlight of last week was talking to Dylan Byers and Ben Smith about media and getting up to speed on the story behind the Warner Brothers Netflix, you know, Paramount deal.

3:09:12Anyway, in other big company news, the Unilever CEO disclosed Nutrafol and Liquid IV revenues. Have you ever been a Liquid IV guy? No. Element guy. You're an element guy. That's right. You like salt, not whatever's in Liquid IV. Sugar? Is it true? Sugar. It is base though sugar is very good for hydration you like you like it i i really enjoy the liquid iv actually i gotta say i just turned from liquid iv because i'm on the new uh chris williamson creatine in the in the stick pack yeah that one the new tonic that the elf is putting under the tree this week uh the new tonic creatine stick stick pack you can open it up and show what they actually look like.

3:09:57Just pull the whole thing off. Oh yeah, that's fine. So it's this little stick pack like liquid IV, like the one that you were having, Elementi. But it has creatine in there, five grams of creatine in there. And normally I'm used to drinking the sand, the creatine sand. And this is fantastic. It's so delicious. Yes, you can just shoot it back if you want to be the boldest elf in Santa's workshop. And just text it, wrist check the elf. Wrist check the L. That's hilarious. But anyway, back to Liquid IV world. In a fireside chat with JP Morgan, the Unilever CEO, revealed that both Nutrafol and Liquid IV have entered the billion dollar brand club.

3:10:43I don't know if you want to ring the bell. Go for it. I'll take the next one. Entered the billion dollar brand club. Great execution from Unilever. Sometimes when they announce these acquisitions. It sounds a little crazy. They pay a lot, but they know how to scale. They have the distribution. They are soft circling one and a half billion euros per year for M &A. I was thrilled to see this. I have a lot of friends with CPG businesses that are starting to get to a scale where they are prime targets. And I'm just very excited for them. So Liquid IV, they bought it when it was doing 120, and now it's doing over a billion.

3:11:22What a good run. Do we know what they paid for Liquid IV back in the day? How much did that deal cost them? That would be interesting. But I mean, it is a testament to the CPG founders. 500 million. 500 million. And now they're making a billion a year in revenue. I mean, I don't know that they're 50 % net margins. Well, it's very high margin. I would think it's high margin. And so imagine you sell for 500. You're the founder of a of this company, you're doing 120, you sell for 500, and you're like, this is amazing. I have $120 million business. But then five years later, they're making 500. What they paid for you in that one year, they're making that every year for as long as the brand's around.

3:12:07So don't underestimate just compounding at scale with these businesses. Get what you deserve. Don't take the low off. I think liquid death will be a good case study there because they certainly would have had opportunities to sell. They raised a huge amount of money and they've kind of probably took them out. And there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's overvalued now. But if you just keep compounding, keep getting more, I completely agree. There's no one else that's really going after that particular brand positioning. You let it compound, it becomes this unique thing. It becomes Lindy, basically.

3:12:39And whenever we talk about CBG. Speaking of compounding, what's compounding? Ann over at Forbes says, beloved productivity app Notion told employees today is doing a$300 million tender at an$11 billion valuation. The company crossed$600 million error, half of which comes from AI. Watch out for more Notion rounds slash an IPO. I expect that they will get out in, God willing, in the year 2026. But we'll see. We'll see. They are on a tear. Notion was a$2 million seed, according to Jason, to$11 billion in 12 years. That's crazy. Great case study of growing into your valuation, Jason says. That's amazing.

3:13:242013,$2 million seed. Yeah. If you scroll down on this chart, you can see a huge jump in valuation, and it takes them a while to catch up. This was the journey. So 2013, they had a$2 million seed. 2019, they had$3 million of ARR, and they got to an$800 million valuation. That's crazy. 2020, they're at$13 million of ARR to a$2 billion valuation. 2021,$31 million of ARR to a$2 billion valuation. That is so crazy because, I mean, if this number's right, they basically triple revenue, not even triple revenue, and they see their multiple double. Their multiple doubles from$150 to$300. But then from 2021, they grew revenue from$31 million to$600 million, and the valuation went up 10%.

3:14:07And it was the correct, yeah, it was the correct, yeah, yeah, yeah, it eventually caught up. Wow. Amazing execution. Obviously, the VCs in 2021 are not getting an insane IRR on that. But job's not finished and story's not over. You're in the green. Yeah, what a remarkable revenue ramp. So Sophie says price of the brick going up. We missed saying that. We should have hit him with the bricks. But it was good chatting with him. So, yeah, as we know, Databricks raised a series. Brandon Balo says, this is crazy. The Lululemon leggings to oil ratio just hit a new high. You can now buy two barrels of oil for every one pair of Lululemon.

3:14:54What are we talking about? High rise. This is one of the most important economic metrics in the world, John, obviously. What? this says so much about the state of of markets yeah hilarious also uh it is making me feel like lululemon leggings are made from oil well they sort of are right isn't it it's like petroleum based polyester or something i don't know yes there's some my understanding yes tj parker posted this this is so good before there was tbpn look at him on fox business It's funny because this headline is crazy. The CVS killer, he looks kind of like the guy that would kill someone in a CVS.

3:15:37Who is the CVS killer? Did they ever find the real one? Did he ever get brought in for questioning? I'm going to say he looks more like a young Santa Claus. Okay, yeah. That's a much nicer thing to say. I take it back. But, wow, countdown to the closing bell. In three minutes, he hops on. CVS killer. And I don't know. He didn't quite kill CVS, but what a fantastic run with PillPack. Absolutely legendary business. And he's already on to the next one at General Medicine. So it's fantastic. Singer Vehicles just put up a minute, 22 seconds. This is huge news. This is the biggest news in technology these days, I think.

3:16:21So Laguna Seca, the legendary racetrack in California. This is an American hypercar. So the - Production car lap record. The story here is that Koningsegg set the lap record just a few weeks ago, and Lucas Singer took it personally. And he said, I'm going to go and put up a better time, and he did. But this car is insane. So it's a two-seater, but they're both centered. So it's like a fighter jet. I don't know why everyone's lying. That's a very cool setup. Yeah, so you sit like this, one after the other. And the doors, we need to pull up a picture of the doors on this. Why are you guys laughing?

3:17:12That's just fire. I've never heard anything like that. I've never heard that before. If you go to four seconds on this main video, the Laguna Seca video here on X, You can see the door. So the door, yeah, the doors are two doors long because you need to let two people in. So when you open the doors - And I'm sure they're planning to let it fly at some point. It's, yeah, it's absolutely crazy. Part of that, it's ready to, they have a secret feature trying to beat Elon to the flying car like he was alluding on Joe Rogan. So there has been a recent hypercar war at Laguna. This is specifically for the production car record.

3:17:51Zinger just took it by two seconds. So in August of 2024, Koenigsegg strikes. Koenigsegg brought the Jesko attack to Laguna Seca for the first time. They got a 124-86, beating the previous longstanding benchmark held by the Singer 21C and the McLaren Senna at 125, 120, and 127. So Singer had it at 125. Then Koenigsegg shows up with a Jesko attack, gets it at 124. Then they come back, lowered the speed record. There was this new noise limit at Laguna Seiko. Your car cannot make more than 90 decibels of noise from the exhaust. I assume Brian Johnson had something to do with this. But you have to bolt on a special exhaust so you're not too loud while you're going on the track.

3:18:48And of course, that affects track performance. And so they reset the record. And Koenigsegg comes back. They have a specific Jesko attack for this new Laguna restriction. They get a 124. And then Singer comes back on December 9th, just weeks after their Koenigsegg's November run. Singer returns with their 3D-printed hybrid 21C. driver Joel Miller runs a blistering 122 and so and put into context the 992 GT3 RS is doing it at 128 65 basically a slug, basically walking basically walking speed congrats to Lucas Singer this is almost unbelievable for me to believe that it's real, he's going to have to drive it into the I think he is, he wants us to believe this was built by humans i i don't uh it seems like alien technology probably make it make sense make it make sense uh no it's a beautiful beautiful vehicle uh anyway anyways final final uh okay host of the show okay uh we posted this yesterday as well but future was named friend of the house by louis vuitton for embodying its values and uh louis pasano says and what values would those be?

3:20:09I don't know enough about Louis Vuitton to understand what this means. Well, it's funny. Do you know about future's values? No. You haven't listened to a future song? I just know. No. I really don't know. I mean, I think his primary value is getting the bag. Getting the bag. And so that's kind of how I read it. Well, they make bags. He has, I think, a lot of children with a lot of different women as well, I think. Getting the bag. I don't know if that's one of Louis Vuitton's values. We were talking about a friend, and he was saying the whole goal, we're in the getting the bag business. Everyone wants to get their bag, get the bag, secure the bag.

3:20:46And I thought that that is a good goal. But there is an alternative, which is to secure a series of smaller bags every two weeks. Every two weeks. A directly to a bag that you have on your bank account. Yes, exactly. So you're getting a series of small bags that then compound over time. you throw them in a large sack like your Santa Claus. No one talks about getting the sack. Everyone talks about getting the bag. No one talks about getting the Santa Claus sack. But you have to get the bag. You get a series of small bags and over a lifetime, you accumulate a bag that gets larger and larger until you have the real bag.

3:21:25Well, here's another post about life from Colty Bra. I know I said it was the last one, but I take it back. Colty Bra says, a fantastic poster. over the years. He says, you can just do things, go from Olympic snowboarder to head of cartel, $50 million reward from FBI on your head. Life is short. Let it rip. Absolutely do not let it rip. I do not recommend becoming the head of a cartel. That is insane. But of course, it's a very wild story. Maybe become the head of a$50 million annual revenue business in a sort of legal domain. enterprise software enterprise software sass maybe database life is short go from an olympic snowboarder to a sass uh icon let it rip life is short uh and we'll leave it at that we are we are actually going breaking news from tyler news if we want um opening i got rid of their uh model router for for free users i thought that was pretty what does that mean wait they got rid of it for free users if you like getting rid of it it is always there for is it the model picker or the model router?

3:22:32Is it always on auto? Or can you still, or do you have to pick thinking pro, legacy models? Like, how do you pick the model? Yeah, so I think it's the router. So that means that the picker's still there, but it doesn't automatically do it for you. It just defaults to fast or the basic model? I don't know which one. I'm not either. But I would imagine that, like if I was thinking through it, like I would think it would be the opposite, right? Yeah, totally. Because as a pro user, I want to do pro all the time. Yeah. I want to get what you paid for. Yeah. Yeah. You want to get what you paid for, but the free user.

3:23:08Yeah. Who you think is like the unsophisticated person. They don't know which one to use. Hmm. Interesting. Well, we'll have to dig in. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Merry Christmas to everyone. Trey says cartels only get a bad rap because they don't have a head storyteller. I feel like some of the, I feel like Escobar was low key, an incredible storyteller. I don't think so. I think people told stories about him. I don't think he was doing any story. He was in politics. Maybe. Okay. Well, we'll get to the bottom of that tomorrow. He was a politician. Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.

3:23:39Thanks for hanging out with us today. We will see you tomorrow. It feels like a Friday. It does. When you put on the Santa suit. It does feel like a Friday. We are going go-karting. We are doing a little end-of-year team outing. We're going go-karting as a team. As a team, which should be fun. Very excited for that. Well. We will see you guys tomorrow. Tomorrow. Goodbye.