Eddy Cue Joins for Apple's 50th, Artemis Launch, Jamie Dimon's Plan, Save Snap Now, SpaceX IPO | Aaron Terrazas, Pratap Ranade, Abhishek Das, Garry Tan, Brannin McBee, Sam Yagan

out here. That's great. The Fortress defined as the capital of Apple. We're very excited. Eddie Hughes joining at 12, 10. We're going to go through his past to be one of the most

elaborate April Fool's jokes building a company for 50 years. Yeah, that is incredible. It's a

really good bit. You sort of hilarious little bit. Just create trillions of dollars and share holder value. Just kind of as like a bit. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I can actually hear you really well on this because I have three sets of headphones on now. You can't even tell that I've got these new AirPods Pro Max, AirPods Max. Anyway, we are very excited that Eddie Hughes joining. We're also excited about ramp.com. Time is by. Say both, easy use corporate card,

dope ad, accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. Well, we're also excited about the rest of our linear line-ups. So let's pull up the linear line-up. Line-up. Line-up is the system

for modern software development. 70% of enterprise works based on linear using agent.

We have Eddie Cue at 12, 10. Gary Tans coming in. We have Erin Tarazus using fresh data signaling. He's got fresh data signaling, a rebound, and small business hiring, and labor market activity. Love it. We have from Gusto for a top from Arena Fizzica. Only print on both sides. Abhishek Doss. Got a new product turning web agents from monitors into autonomous task executors. Then of course Gary Tans as John Closet with a new line-of-code world champion.

“Yeah, line-of-code world champion. I think a lot of people have questions about, you know,”

how much is Gary doing himself? What does he think about the future for YC companies? I think no one really disputes the question that in the vibe-coding world, the role of a startup changes, the roles change, everyone sort of coding, pushing code. Very interesting here, you know, YC's typically, you know, gone after teams that are like highly technical, does that change in the future. There's a lot to answer. And of course, we'll be digging into G-Stack and Gary's

list and then trying to understand what the goal is there, what's real, what's some meme. He's obviously trolling people. He's a master of the timeline. That will be fun to dig into. But we got to kick it off with this video from NASA Administrator and more importantly, former T.P. and guest Jared Isaacman. He says tomorrow, we launch at sunset tonight, Artemis to wait on the pad, ready to carry astronauts, potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century,

the next era of exploration. We have the countdown here right next time. Yes, so it is about four hours and 20 something minutes until the launch starts, you know, they might delay by a few minutes, who knows? They might scratch entirely, but if things go to plan the official NASA stream, it's up now, but stay with us and then once we wrap in about three hours, head over there and watch NASA take you through the final stage of the Artemis 2 launch.

But let's play NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's video because it's very exciting. This is what I live for as a young child, and what I live for to today. Good to hear. A lot of people have been going

“back at four space sex versus SLS. I think it's more rockets, the better, more space launch”

capacity, the better. I want 10 of these companies and with them all to be successful. Very exciting. Well, we will be following it closely. Throughout the day, we might get updates, we might have breaking news. Apple structure us says you can hate SLS for being obsolete,

massively late and over budget, I certainly do, but you got to concede it looks incredible,

and I couldn't agree more. Importantly, some people are joking around saying the space shuttle is launching today. They're not using the space shuttle because they're going farther than they normally go at the space shuttle, and the space shuttle is decommissioned. So the astronauts will be in a hot hot on top of capsule mode, exactly. Captain Blake, show shares. I'm genuinely excited to see America head of back to the moon

back around the moon, but Artemis is a moon dog. That's a good wild show we have. That's a really good wild boombos or the new bed of. We'll be breaking it down soon. You don't even need to

“Lorraine it. You don't? It's just plainly. Yeah, Lorraine is lower and more blanks. Yeah, yeah. Remember”

that Apollo did not result in durable progress in space. It marked a literal high point from one half a century. The cost of space access remained prohibitively high until we had a rebirth of space entrepreneurship. Thank you for showing the way SpaceX Apollo was history's greatest tech demo at the moon landing. This is inspiring. It shows the triumph of ingenuity science and reason, but also Apollo led to half a century of stasis and regression.

sensitive of a cost and sensitive space agency and supply base all more concerned with perpetuating

“their own existence, more concerned with make work jobs than accelerated in human progress.”

Now we're going back to the moon essentially the same way we did in 1969. Again, on economically again with central planning, a disposable rocket, no answer to how we create itself sustaining lunar economy. Again, we're taking communists approaches in competition with the communists. Communists didn't work for the Russians and it won't work for America. Either the sooner we can get done with his moon doggo, the better. There's also reason to be optimistic this time

around. There's a nascent commercially led vision for the moon. Lunar hotels, mass drivers, data centers, and space, helium 3. The commercial programs that gave space sex and earliest cyst show a different and better path forward. This is where the better future lies and this is where America should be focused. America should take the moon and we should take it the same way. We took the American West. Let's encourage and protect lunar value creation. How about a home

set act for the moon? Most important, let's stop dumping money. And more importantly, the time

of our engineers and scientists on glory project that will never lead to a better future. It is indeed time for another space race. Last time we fought communism with communism. This time, let's remember what made America great. This time, let's fight communism with capitalism.

“Yeah, there's some good points in here. I think the flip side of this is that we are in a wildly”

different position than 1969 in terms of the maturity of this lunar economy, the space ecosystem. We have space expiled for IPO today. You're looking at a trillion dollar company. It will instantly be one of the largest companies in the world that already is, but in the public markets when it goes out. And so you have a lot of companies and startups and venture capitalists that are fully ready to commercialize any findings that come out of this and see this as an inspirational moment.

And overall, it just feels like 1969, the capital market, entrepreneurship, the capitalism was not quite ready for. Okay, let's take this to the next step. Let's privatize this. Let's build businesses around this. It was much more of a science experiment that went off into its corner. And then was not immediately capitalized on. But I think this time could be different at the same time. I do understand what you're saying. Yeah, Ryan and Hunter over pirate wires shared. They wrote

about this mission in pirate wires today. And they shared a quote from Jared last week saying, "This time he said the goal is not flags and footprints. This time the goal is to stay.

“America will never again give up the moon." So I think generally, generally aligned”

with what Blake's saying. Tyler, what's your take on this? Yeah, I think Blake is kind of underestimating the value of just vibes. People have been

pretty black pill on the moon. Totally. I mean, basically, since everything kind of stopped.

So if you can just have a white pill, it's not a good idea to continually launch these to the moon, they're not economical. But if you can just get one and say, "We can't still do this." Yeah, it's also, I mean, it's over budget, but as a percentage of GDP, it has to be a fraction of what we spent in 1969. So on a relative basis, it's a maybe a better investment. And yeah, I do think that there's something that's just inspiring about being able to do something like

this and prove that we still got it. I also, like, from Hunter and Ryan's post, they're dropping the article. It's just moon, right? It's not the moon. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, we only got one, so we can just say moon. It has its own name. You know, you don't say the California, the Texas, the Florida, you just say moon. You say Texas, Florida. Let's watch this video of Neil Armstrong injecting just seconds before his lunar trailing, training vehicle crashed. Space cowboy. Space

cowboy, true heroism here. This is such a crazy video. I had no idea this happened. Good music, too. Was this interstellar? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like how did he know? He was not going to go. Oh, it's tipping. Okay, I would definitely know. That would be very obvious that you would want to get out of there at that point. Wow. And he gets out of the parachute. I wonder how much of that was like planned to be, okay,

we're testing the ejector seat or he just knew. Okay, I got a, you know, why have we, why haven't I seen this video? It's been available on the internet for a long time. It just doesn't get a lot of views. Well, it is getting a lot of views today. It was called nickname flying bedstead for good reason. It looked like a bed frame and it flew like one two. Yeah, flying that on earth. It's not exactly the most aerodynamic, aerodynamic vehicle. But

before April 2nd. So 89 percent chance it launches today, basically 92 percent chance that it

launches before April 4th. And there's more information there. So in general, like even even it scratches all the way to May to the end of April, you're still looking at a 95 percent chance. So everyone is very optimistic that this launch will happen and we're excited to keep following it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Century. Century shows developers what's

“broken and helps him fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations used to keep their apps working.”

So Jamie Diamond's been on an absolute tear. He is hiring people. He's restating his vision for America. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. He has a plan for JP Morgan to rescue the American dream. That's a very exciting, exciting idea. And it is in the Wall Street Journal. I think it's in the print edition. Maybe today, which I'd love to see. Jamie Diamond is here in here. I don't know. Anyway, let's run through Jamie Diamond's plan for America. He's running.

I think he should. Jamie Diamond thinks the American dream is on life support and he is planning JP Morgan chase to step in. The nation's largest bank announced the American dream initiative on Tuesday, a commitment from JP Morgan to support small businesses, home ownership,

access to health care and other economic priorities that diamond believes are crucial

“for the well-being of Americans. The bank already finances all the above and says it's ready to put”

more resources into the effort. Jim Diamond, 70 years old in CEO of JP Morgan since 2006, has long worried about the future of the American economy and wealth inequality. More recently, he has warned that the country is sleepwalking into economic stasis. Thanks to bad policies and rules that make it hard to invest in new ventures and run companies. I am deeply frustrated by our own policies in America. He said last week at the Hill and Valley Forum, which we covered. We have become like

Europe, we are unable to move and change. That is strong words. JP Morgan hasn't been slow, bringing in more profit than any bank in the US history in the US history, but it reaches across Main Street and Wall Street and does better when the whole economy is checking along. Diamond has a habit of making commitments a little bit. It's a big commitment.

“Diamond has a habit of making big commitments. In tune with the zeitgeist, JP Morgan announced a”

$1.5 trillion investment platform focused on national security and supply chains last year.

Just as the federal government started to invest in critical suppliers, it made a $30 billion

racial equity commitment after the murder of George Floyd and a $2.5 trillion climate change plan in 2021. Now, the bank is committing to adding 3 million new small business customers on top of 7 million today. They want to get to 10 million. And it wants to lend them up to $80 billion over the next 10 years through loans and support for community-oriented banks and investment funds. The bank reported 33 billion of loans to small businesses and other customers at the end of 2025.

So they want to expand significantly. It's just a 30% bump in total number of small businesses, but they want to basically triple the amount of the loan book broadly. The American Dream means you can buy a home, start a business. You can build wealth and you can afford health care for your family. JP Morgan's head of corporate responsibility. Tim Barry said in interview, "We want to bring our capabilities and make that more real to families and customers."

Barry, the Chief Operating Officer, said, "They're helping the new American Dream Initiative and acknowledge that a lot of it isn't really new." JP Morgan has been looking to grow deeper roots in the cities and towns where it does business, rolling out specialty branches, focused on community education for years. It has invested big in cities where it has found business-friendly leadership, including Detroit and San Francisco. The initiative and ambitious

goals are supposed to jump-start JP Morgan bankers and employees to do more. When we think about the impact that we've had locally in a place like Detroit, we know that success can be replicated in other places. So they are opening up the pocketbook to spur small business. Very exciting. In other JP and Jamie Diamond news, he just hired a recently hired Warren Buffett's Prodigy. There's a profile in "Barrins" by Andy Sorwar. JP Morgan's CEO, Jamie Diamond,

doesn't usually make high-profile outside hires for his senior executive team, preferring instead the home-grown variety. That makes Todd Combs, formerly a top investment manager, but for half the way poached and brought in to head up JP Morgan's chase new 10 billion strategic investment group, an exception, except that homes is hardly a bolt from the blue. I like that.

okay, so he's a board, but board member. So he clearly knows everyone already. He says,

“"I know the company well," Combs tells "Barrins and his first interview as a bank employee.”

I know everyone from Jamie to the operating community and the next layer of management. I'm well aware of the balance sheet, the excess capital, and how Jamie and the team think and operate. Like the banks, other top executives, Combs, who's been CEO of Berkshire Herc-Gyko, insurance unit, is still settling into his new office on the 47th floor of JP Morgan's new Manhattan headquarters. I hope you don't mind, the warm office says Combs, a tennis playing florida native. I don't like

the cold," he says. Combs mapped out his new gig, which began in January on a two column chart he sketched on a note pad. Interesting. He's an old school, old school. He's not creating a second brain. He's just ripping it on a note pad. On the left are five rows of industries such as defense, supply chain, reindustrialization, on the right are their future manifestations such as defense tech, US semiconductors respectively. The plan is to invest in everything our country has outsourced

“and abdicated over recent decades. Combs says, "We want to invest in places where the”

puck is going so that America can control its own future." That means deploying the group's $10 billion into middle market and large companies in US defense, aerospace, health care, and energy sectors to help them grow. Recent investments include mining company perpetual resources and defense tech start-up shield AI. Combs who reports the diamond will also act as a special advisor to the CEO. Combs endeavor is part of the security and resiliency initiative,

JP Morgan announced in October, in which the bank will commit to facilitating 1.5 trillion

investments for companies deemed critical to the national economic security and resiliency. He joins

the initiatives and external advisory council chaired by diamond, which includes Jeff Bezos, Michael Dall, and Condoleezza Rice. What a what a stacked roster act. Combs says investments come to him directly or through Jamie or other senior bankers. What about the Trump administration? There are times that Bell reach out and look for our help like Intel can imagine. We want to be a good partner to the government regardless of who's in charge. It's the GOP now. It can be someone else

in the future where trying to let capitalism send the right signal. We'll look at every opportunity on its own merit. We want an impact and a return. Highly regarded as an investor, Combs is a boyish looking 55. He helped return GICO which was burdened with outdated technology and bloated cost to profitability. Berkshire Watchers thought he might play a role in the company's post-war and Buffet era either overseeing its multi-billion dollar investment portfolio or its massive

“insurance operations or he could have been up for other high-profile jobs. But why this one?”

It's a unique opportunity with both Jamie and the institution and the mission of the job.

Combs says, "This is critical to the future of the country. You want to find things in the life

that are big and important that are worth doing and doable. Combs has an anti-bucket list for his new role. I had about 10 or 12 things that I didn't want. The anti-bucket list is sort of sort of underrated. Your anti-bucket list is just never-go skydiving. I don't want that to happen. Never buy a super concept at 30 countries. Become super-carless." He says, "Jamey and I would talk every day after we brought this role for me. I didn't want

to be measured on VAR, which stands for value at risk. A statistical measure that quantifies financial risk. I didn't want to get bogged down in bureaucracy. None of that occurred. In fact, it's better than I could have imagined. I'm sure there will be rough spots that will happen when I make a bad investment, which is invariably going to happen. Was jumping from board member to management? I'll quote, "No." He says, "I'd like to think that there's an implicit

trust factor because of the decade of relationships. I don't need years of random interaction, getting up to speed." He talks about riding the subway with Lori Beer, the bank's global chief information officer back to our respective residences. The other night in talking about our tech road map for a specific vendor. We're being pitched on a $500 million deal and walking it down the hall to Troy and Doug, the co-CEO's of JP Morgan's commercial investment bank. As for

Com's role as a strategic advisor to Diamond, he says, "That's about looking at the bank's operation from an outside perspective." It's a kind of investor mindset. You see failure everywhere all the time, everywhere as maybe inside a firm, you can have an insular view. It didn't talk much about his time at Berkshire. He said, "I was back and forth from Omaha to DC for six years running Geico. That was a long time. I'm very proud not to go down that rabbit hole of what we accomplished at

Geico. Berkshire is an animal unto itself that is completely unique." I like that he's probably just saying like, "It's a unique animal. It's a unique species, but I like to think that he's like it's an absolute animal." It's an absolute dog. And I'm an absolute dog. Well, let me tell you

about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new

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“Why is no one talking about Snapchat? It's playing ironic. What's going on?”

Capital. It came out with a well-executed activist campaign. Let's see. I'm pulling up there. It does feel like there's a big opportunity with AI better targeting. I'm receptive to this pitch, but I want to hear it from a Renek. I know that this is an activist, an activist shareholder, this could be very, very confrontational. Yes, they come out with a website. Savesnapnow.com. We land on the website. They hit you with Snap back to reality. So taking a fun approach here,

they say Snap has a potential to be a great company and a double AI winner, through meaningfully improved operating efficiency and monetization. I renek has outlined six steps to 7x Snap share price to $26 per share. They put together a presentation as well as a letter. I'll kind of read through some of the highlights. They say it snaps crucible moment. AI creates a dual-pronged opportunity for significant cost cuts and accelerated product development. So they go into

cost improvements, monetization, governance on the cost side. They want to spin or shut down specs. I'm sure Evans is. The spin is seemingly in the works. There were some leaks over the last six months around that. So I would expect that to happen. They want to rationalize cost. AI can't and should replace many existing roles. Now remember the constant criticism of Snap has been the stock-based comp. If you actually look at it, from the rough math we were doing every 10

years, they're basically giving the entire company to the team and so investors, long-term investors,

have been very frustrated by that. It always has been weird because I understand that

like back in the day when they were competing directly with Twitter and Meta and Instagram and Reddit and all these different upstart high-growth social networking companies, I believed the talent

“or thesis it makes sense that they would have to probably pay top to dollar. But you have to imagine”

that as the business has stabilized, there are people that would come into the organization that would be happy to just have a salary and just do the work because it's better than working at another company. It's not necessarily like the AI talent or social media talent or that I'm sure happened years ago. It's a different time so maybe different structure. Yeah, so Save Snap now is recommending a thousand-person riff to get fit and competitive

into empower your highest performers. It's again, if you're if you're Evan reading and power your

highest performers, you're probably thinking like, oh geez, I never thought of it, but again,

they do have 5,261 employees as a late 2025, so this will represent roughly a 20% riff, not block level cuts, but more in line with what we're seeing at Oracle, Meta, some other type of companies that are going through transformation. On monetization,

“the recommendation is to improve monetization, which I think is a good idea for any business.”

But they say AI will massively accelerate product development and enhance advertising monetization tools, again, you know, by this point should be well aware that Meta has done a fantastic job in leveraging AI ML to just make a better and better and better ads product, and they say product led improvements across users, advertisers, and subscriptions to break out of SNAPS monetization ceiling, then they say deploy AI properly, monetize SNAPS proprietary AI data sets,

and then concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic, again, SNAP partnered with perplexity, and it seemed like SNAP got a fantastic

deal out of that. It was something like a $400 million deal, if I remember correctly,

some of it was stock in perplexity, but there was a huge cash component, and unclear if the other companies mentioned Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic would have been able to match that how aggressive perplexity was getting, and so it's possible. SNAPS logic was, hey, we can do this deal with perplexity, and then it's native in our app, it's easy enough to swap it out at a later date, basically take the cash while we can get it. Yeah, I saw this post from Sean

which I will tell you about in a second, but he said, in less than 12 months, I've spent 2,800, 800,000, 800, and 72,000 of my own money, profitably on App Loving. I don't own the stock, I don't trade the stock, this is the net amount, left my bank account, and he shares a

couple other points, and he says he's spending 17,000, so 2.8 million on App Loving, clearly,

“like a scalable large platform. I spent 17,000 on Pinterest, 266,000 on Reddit, you have to”

imagine that meta ads are up there, but the question is, for a lot of advertisers, SNAP has not become this, like, oh, sure, maybe you don't get, maybe it's not going to be your number one platform, but it's like in the marketing mix very regularly, and I think a lot of that should start working. Yeah, even if the pool isn't super deep, even if you don't have 99% of your customers, there, maybe only 20% of your customers are there, but even if they're there,

you should be able to find them, and I can help that, and so I would expect that if this works, you'd see, like, really solid data from Ridge saying, like, oh, yeah, we're spending on SNAP. Yeah, and they've been experimenting with SNAP as far back as 2018. I'm sure, and I was hanging out with Sean and Connor back then, they were, they were getting results on SNAP, but there was a ceiling.

Yeah. So then, finally, they want to, on the governance side, commit to investing in safety and

capital return, use newfound cash and profitability to further invest in privacy, safety and parental controls, and allocate new cash flow, generation of capital return and demonstrate conviction in SNAP's creation. Yeah, it's interesting on the, on the parental control and safety side.

“I don't think, I think SNAP has been able to stay out of the, at least, uh, last years.”

They said targets. Oh, they ended up being settled before it went to trial. Oh, that angle will fought it. And so yeah, I'm not exactly sure what that, what that means, but I think that they've been trying to sort of, like, step back from all of that. Yeah, and then on the corporate governance side, giving shareholders a vote can unlock a multiple re-rate through broader index. Oh, interest illusion. Yeah. And enabling one vote per classic share still preserve SNAP as a

founder controlled company. Yeah, probably like 10 exporting powers. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, there's a 70 page slide deck that they put together with all these different recommendations. Well, the markets reacting really popular, uh, really positively to this. Uh, and I think, uh, Evan Spiegel has shared some, uh, statements that sort of mirror this. Actually, it seems like there's maybe a little bit more reception. Uh, then you might expect, uh, the stocks have 14% one day after

publishing this piece, uh, says Bose Weinstein, uh, Adam is a rock star in the making so smart, definitely worth a follow. And that's a Renek Cap. Is Carried? No, interest gave some feedback on, uh, I Renek. He said, um, a few critiques feedback. Daily opens are not equal to time spent on app app loving a medically. We have higher time spent on app at therefore parity on monetization is flawed. Arguing that Snapchat can hit targeting levels of meta is farceful. The amount of data that

meta has on me versus Snapchat is astronomically different. I guess I'm open to being proven wrong,

since you compare it to Apple oven, who I am, uh, has always used other targeting sources. Sure.

Three proprietary data slide is a one time flash in a pan moment. Sure. Some companies are selling to range amount of data, but that's that's not lasting. MR, AR, our monetization.

“Although it is fair to call them out on it. I like the monetization per user slide. I think”

my feedback rent snaps ability to monetize relative to those peers stands literally screen time as much lower and you don't have data for targeting the way peers do, um, and what else was relevant. Calling out the founders net worth growth was either god tier, petty, or brilliant, or some combination on presentation. Well, you can go check it out. A Renek capital is posted. It's safe snap now. You can listen to our, uh, interviews, uh, I think, I think a TBPN slide, uh, are quote made

it into one of these presentations. Um, yes. Where was it? I think we're in them. Yeah, it was, it was on the slide. AI should be an accelerant for snaps core ads business. So Zack had said, on Q4 earnings, he said, we're also working on merging algorithms with the recommendation systems that power Facebook Instagram threads in our ad system. Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business, but we think that the current

systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Adam, uh, at Apple oven said, if we believe that AI technologies are going to be two times more efficacious in five years, just based off of that, if we do our job right, our system is going to be two times more predictive for its task, the sequence and problems that it's predicting in five years. And, uh, Evan said, our smart campaign solution suite, including smart targeting smart budget,

uses AI to identify incremental high value audiences and dynamically allocate spend across objectives, reducing the need for manual setup and ongoing optimization, uh, and then, uh,

I wouldn't expect AI to be a major, accelerant. Um, so. Well, since we mentioned them, let me tell you about Apple oven, profitable advertising made easy to back-song.au. I get access to everyone building their activities and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Figma agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with the Zion system context.

It's in beta to already. Yes, anyways, closing this out. Yeah, ironic is clearly things that he says specifically snap is a special asset. He thinks it's, it has a ton of potential. He's overall positive. He thinks, like, you know, uh, he really wants them to get in the game. And I

“think that honestly, a lot of people have felt the same way over the years, but have just”

ultimately been frustrated because some of these things that seem somewhat straightforward just

haven't been done. Okay. I got to go back to the moon. We're going back to the moon. I'm going back to the moon because Artemis, too, is launching in three hours and 52 minutes and four, three, two, one seconds. Uh, because Brainy Grell wrote the op-ed today in the TVPN newsletter about some of the technology that they're using to document the trip. And it's a very different take, very, uh, live streamer coded of us. We only care about the camera equipment that's on board.

Uh, obviously there's not one that goes into it, but it's a fascinating deep type. So, uh, let's read through this so that everyone has the update on how you can actually experience this because it's a bunch of interesting deals that went into, uh, documenting this. So, uh, as you know, today, the NASA Artemis, two mission will launch sending the Orion spacecraft carrying a four astronaut crew on a high energy free return trajectory to get the, to the moon and back in about

10 days. It's longer than the Artemis one mission, which I was six days, uh, by the way, which went around the moon. But you imagine the, uncrewed. Yeah. You imagine the stress when you're just, like, being sent straight out into space. And you know, there's a big turn coming up. And it's

“pretty important that you don't miss the off. Yeah, you can't be like texting and like miss the off to the”

off ramp. If you miss the off ramp, you're going to Saturn. It's over for you. Um, Orion, we'll enter a 24 hour highly elliptical orbit with an apogee 44,000 miles above the surface of the earth for context, the ISS orbits at 200, uh, 200 to 280 miles in altitude. So, way, way higher, uh, 100 times

higher, 200 times higher. During the first day, the crew will test critical life support,

communication systems, after reaching its apogee, Orion will essentially fall backward towards our planet. This will cause the craft to start picking up massive speed if you, uh, if you, uh, scroll down, you'll see that the path is a little fishy. And I think a lot of the tinfoil high crowd are going to be suspicious about the path that the rocket will be taking because it's fishy. It's fishy if you scroll down. Uh, don't you think that's fishy? And that's a fishy orbit.

That's just a fishy orbit. I don't know. I don't want to be too conspiratorial about this stuff. But like, it does look like a fish. It's a fishy orbit. It's fishy. Anyway, as it approaches its energy, for those who are just listening on audio, it literally looks like a fish. Uh, as it approaches its energy or the lowest point in its earth orbit, the crew will conduct a system to review wake up the main engine system, organize the cabin to make sure radiation shielding

bags and water supplies are positioned to act as shelter in case of a solar flare, uh, put on their survival suits and strap in, they're locking in. Um, so, uh, Brandon said it's shaped like a figure eight.

“I think it's very generous. I think it's shaped like a fish and I think you should have just said”

fish. There's a little bit of truth zoning that needs to happen right now, but it's not bad. Uh, it is, it is, uh, it is a figure eight. It is elliptical, uh, but I'm going to steal, still say it looks like a fish. Uh, after the burn, the crew will take more than four days to meet to reach the moon, the craft just coast there, the lunar flyby, where it will orbit the moon at a maximum altitude of 6,000 miles, and minimum altitude of 60 to 70 miles from the surface

of the moon is expected to happen Monday, April 6th. It will probably end up being the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth due to the high altitude at which they'll orbit the moon. And remember, we still don't know if this is like Apple, another elaborate April Fool's joke. They could, we could get to the countdown here and Jared Isaacman could say, it's a Fool's, but let's continue. Yeah, imagine if that giant rocket, they cut it, it's just

cake. That would be a good one. Uh, NASA is essentially aiming for a Netflix quality live stream on the flyby. And this is what the video creators, the content creators, live streamers, this is what we

care about. Uh, it will feature 4K, UHD video streams, the beam back to Earth with a three-second latency,

and some additional latency from encoding and terrestrial distribution, using a frontier laser communication terminal that can transmit data at 260 megs a second. The stream will probably be compressed to 1080p for live video, but it will be saved in 4K. The craft has 28 dedicated cameras on board, externally mounted, and astronaut handheld, externally mounted cameras will be on the tip of each of Orion's four X-shaped solar arrays, and they can rotate, which will allow

and space, selfie sticks and space. This is sci-fi now. Uh, these specific cameras will be heavily

“modified versions of the GoPro Hero 4 Black, which is interesting. The GoPro Hero 4 is a pretty”

old camera, but they probably had to start working on this. You know, it's a nine year old project, so they probably locked in the specs a long time ago, and then, of course, they started to ruggedizing them. So, uh, that camera on the left, making the GoPro even more rugged.

Yeah, basically if they actually have to. There's a lot of radiation, there's a lot of pressure,

and obviously no pressure. Uh, when you're in a vacuum, uh, the, uh, which uses a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor can shoot 4K at 30 frames a second, NASA contracted red wire space. So, it's not all communism over here, Blake Scholl. There's some privatized companies involved in the process. Let's give it up for government contracts. Let's give it up for red wire space. They ruggedize the cameras to protect them from the vacuum, extreme temperatures, and intense radiation of deep space.

“Some of the external cameras won't even generate imagery for the public, the optical navigation”

camera, for example, is a high-re, high-res monochromatic sensor that feeds image data of the moon

and earth against background stars to Orion Central Computer, which runs machine, vision algorithms

to calculate the craft's exact position and velocity. They're doing slam in space. Inside Orion astronauts, we use a trick-out Nikon Z9's handheld cameras that can shoot massive AK video at 60 FPS. NASA actually entered into an agreement with Nikon to develop these four Artemis two astronauts on the ISS use unmodified Nikon Z9's, but because Artemis is going into deep space, the cameras needed to be ruggedized for the conditions out there and power optimized

for the huge data transfer as the cameras will need to make on the ship, which can be incredibly power-intensive. Nikon even wrote a dedicated operating system for the cameras for this. Wow.

“Finally, NASA partnered with National Geographic to essentially record the footage”

for a documentary during the mission. The launch is expected no earlier than six, 24 Eastern time, three, 24 Pacific time, on NASA's YouTube. They are already broadcasting the live stream. The main program commentary starts at 1250 ET, so they're going to start talking, and that'll be a lot of fun to follow along with. Throughout the course of the mission, National NASA will broadcast real-time coverage from Orion's cameras as bandwidth allows.

This will be on the agency's YouTube channel, so they're going to just really embarrass us with this. Because 10-day live stream, we've been talking about, we'll say, "Oh, we're doing a giga stream. We're going to interview a bunch of founders from YC, and it's like a four-hour, five-hour, maybe a six-hour show. They're like 10-day live stream." Nice try, TBPN. Yeah, it'll be rough for us anyway. Yeah, I mean, it's still almost unfathomable, the amount of risk.

That these astronauts are taking on. Yeah, and we're not going to wait them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with smaller medium-sized businesses. I'm going to also tell you about vibe.co, where DDC brands, BDB startups now, companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

So, the Kit Kat Heist, this is the story you all have been waiting for. Kit Kat's, the candy bars, were stolen, and in massive quantity. The Wall Street Journal has a story of how the company reacted, how they turned a massive Kit Kat Heist into crisis PR gold. We've seen this before. People were talking about Tucker Carlson, having his nicotine pouch ship and stolen and how it sounded like the plot of a new fourth fast and furious or zoomer fast and furious movie. Well, something similar happened to Kit Kat and they took advantage of it and made the best out of it.

So, Kit Kat of course is owned by Nestle, but let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal had to set. Just how much are 12 metric tons of stolen Kit Kat bars worth? A lot of promotional gold it turns out since the Wall Street Journal. It was the brazen, it was the brazen chocolate heist heard around the social media world.

Oddly, this is the first time I've heard of it. I don't know why, I don't know how I missed this.

Have you heard of this before? Yes, you had. Yes, I literally found out about this in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know why. I only heard about this in the reaction. But anyway, it's an interesting story. So, over the weekend, Nestle confirmed that thieves had swiped 413,000 units of Kit Kat's somewhere along their way from a factory in central Italy to Poland. Both chocolate bars and the truck carrying them remain missing, though no one was hurt in the theft, it said. With the Swiss company lost in chocolate, though, it gained back in a public relations coup, as did multiple other companies quick to hop on the mean bagwap bandwagon.

We've always encouraged people to have a break with Kit Kat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate.

“The company said in the statement, "I don't get it. You have to, they would have had to steal this."”

Thank you for it, too. Yeah, they stole the truck. I mean, it sounds like fast in the various, it sounds like they stuck it up and you said, "Get out of the truck." You got it all a cab? The truck is missing. The truck is missing. The truck. They took the truck. Wow, they took everything. Yes, it really happened. A spokesperson confirmed that it wasn't an early April 1st joke. Taking their cue from Nestle, other companies soon joined in with some social media spoofing, we would like to share our thoughts and condolences

with Kit Kat following their sad news. The account for Domino's Pizza and the UK posted Monday morning. Then it added on a completely unrelated note, "We're pleased to announce that we'll be selling a new Kit Kat pizza." It's very silly. Charlotte F.C. the Major League Soccer Club in North Carolina jumped on the same riff a couple of hours later.

On an unrelated note, we are happy to share that we will be offering roughly 413,000. I don't know about you, John, but I love when large corporations can just jump in on the fun.

It's extremely millennia. This is my culture is not your costume. If you're not a millennial and you're the one posting this, like stop. This is only a millennial has the right to post jokingly as a corporate account.

“The discount airline Ryan Air, meanwhile, simply posted a cartoon of one of its planes with a face in the Jets mouth,”

or five bitten off Kit Kat bars. Not long ago, most companies would have said little leaving it to law enforcement authorities to disclose such a potentially embarrassing revelation. Now, any bad news is good news, as long as a corporate brand can turn it into a viral meme. I wonder if this is a global crime ring that also came after Alp, the nicotine car, so nicotine power is possible. It's possible, or it's possible that they're going to try to combine them, kind of one plus one equals three type situation where they think that merging Kit Kat and nicotine could produce incremental value.

Who knows, who knows, typically nicotine products are much more economically dense, so a single can of pouches might retail for anywhere between like six and ten dollars, whereas a Kit Kat might be the same size but only retail for a dollar. And so stealing a truck full of nicotine products is typically like ten times more economically valuable than Kit Kat's, but who knows, maybe the thieves weren't thinking about economic density when they chose to stick up this particular truck,

what do you think about this take? It's a masterclass in public relations. Like, I agree with your intuition, this is not that funny. Like, this is sort of just like corporate cringe, it's a little rough, like some of these, like, I'm not getting belly laughs out of this, but just in terms of corporate

com strategy, this feels like the best of all possible worlds. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's like a reasonable thing.

“Am I entertained? No. Do I think that it was worth doing?”

Yes. Yes, it's like, it's like the least it makes me want a Kit Kat. No. Also, no. Yeah, but like, I was not thinking about Kit Kat.

Yes. And I'm thinking, I just think, I think, I've never really, I've never really had a Kit Kat

and thought, oh, that was, that was so good. Yeah. And so now I'm just remembering that why I don't care about Kit Kat. Okay. Oh, that's it. I think, I think that, you know, the two options were, you know, put out some sort of like serious sad statement about how you got owned basically. I think I could have been funnier. That might have been funnier. If it's just, yeah, the, maybe a CEO viral video would have done the trick that kicked off.

This reminds me of that McDonald's burger thing. Sort of all the-- They take what? That's all the brands. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where, where, where does that go? Nowadays, other companies want to profit from potential buzz from arrivals missed up to. After a video of McDonald's CEO polite bite into a burger went viral this month. Top executives from Burger King Wendy's and Wendy's perpounced with similar videos in a

lighthearted dig at their competitor. McDonald's said his new bigger burger, the big arch, got a sales boost for all the attention too. So it worked. Wait, they got a sales boost from having the CEO. They claim they claim that getting dunked on. All prices good press. That's their claim. I don't know. It doesn't seem, it doesn't seem crazy. Like, you know, we, we found out about the big arch.

We talked about the big arch. We, we, we, we sort of processed the value properties. Yeah, I keep catching on to leaving early. You're like, oh, I got to, I got to get home. I got to have the kids out of the vehicle. And I just, I drive by at the local McDonald's John is there. He's got in the passenger seat 20 big arches. Yeah. Just plowing through him.

Microsoft's in talks with Chevron. Breakdown. Did you number one over seven billion dollar

“Texas power plant? That's good news. Exclusive talks. Okay. And investment fund with Chevron and”

engine one over a long-term deal for giant power plant in West Texas to provide electricity to a large data center campus. The proposed natural gas fired power plant is projected to cost just seven billion and initially generate 2500 megabytes of electricity. Yeah. That's a huge campus. Wow. That's really, really good. Chevron, Microsoft, and engine one have entered into an exclusivity agreement related to a proposed power generation and electricity off-take arrangement.

Chevron and engine one had previously discussed some details of their proposed power power plant, but not the end-user of the electricity a deal with Microsoft would secure a long-term customer for the plant's output and help finance construction the project, which could be up and running before 2030 still requires tax and environmental approvals as well as agreement of commercial terms. Microsoft is a long-time backer of CHPT Maker opening.

AI is doubling down on constructing data centers. The pause is unpaused. This is fully, we are in unpaused mode. Sacha is going all in on AI. Access to reliable base load power is emerging as a key challenge. One of the Chevron and engine number one partnership expects to address given its extensive

“natural gas production in West Texas and contracts for large turbines. What is LNG doing right now?”

Is natural gas spiking, it's spiked in November and December, but is actually fairly low and is down since the start of the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. So, at least, at least, Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe was telling us that although the energy markets are somewhat intertwined, oil and natural gas do not move in lockstap because of the production supply consumption or unit exporter or unit importer. So, the pain at the pump

does not always translate into pain at the data center, which is good for data center operators.

The Permian produces so much natural gas, a bi-product of oil, that it often overwhelms pipelines as results some gas has to be burned off because it can't be transported where it's needed, making the region an ideal location for power plants. I believe it is called peaker plants where the offtake, you normally is just getting flared off just going into the atmosphere, you capture that and turn that into energy there, but then you're stuck with electricity,

maybe at some weird mining plant where there's no houses, so there's no one to power, so the next thing you do is you build the data center there. And that's sort of the the the the the the Queesh Lorraine of why why Crusoe started mining Bitcoin at peaker plants, at natural gas plants, yeah, you know, had extra natural gas, they flared it off, use the use the very cheaper, almost free energy to mine. Well, yeah, and of course, Queesh is a Wambov working in each.

Corquian niche, when you're trying to explain the lore, you say you're learning something, yeah, Queesh Lorraine is the Corquian niche lore explained. Apple just removed anything. Okay, $100 million vibe coding at that, let's anyone build iOS apps with prompts from the app store also blocking updates for vibe code and replet. The founder tried moving code execution to a web view still rejected. The walled garden versus AI builder's war is here. So Apple has

been sang according to some reporting in the information that they don't have anything against vibe coding specifically. Yeah, but the apps still have to adhere to guidelines. Yeah, and this

“in this particular policy has been in place since like the start of the app store. I I remember”

Facebook, you know, dealing with this when they launched their initial mobile app, which was it was it was an app, but it would load a lot of HTML and it was like and that was sort of

slowly went back and forth, but there was always a question about like how much could, how much

custom code could Apple's, it could could meta or Facebook at the time serve within the Facebook app. Like, could you have Farmville exist as its own app on the Facebook mobile app platform? Like it did in the Facebook desktop app. So when you loaded Facebook on desktop, you could load farm ville basically as like an I frame and the Farmville developers, Zinga, could change Farmville ad upgrades, do whatever they needed to, and that would all be vended through Facebook. And of course,

your internet browser doesn't care what you're loading, but the app store is different and has had different terms of service for a very long time. Mostly because Apple's one of their primary

want that code to change after we review it, and so we have a process for reviewing it and that

“reduces the risk of bloatware or crypto mining behind the scenes or spam or, you know,”

viruses, all sorts of different stuff that is the value prop for why people choose to buy iPhones, and so Apple has maintained that for a long time. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social and marketplaces,

and now Apple. Specifically mentioned guideline 2.5 to which is the rule anything apparently violated. App should be self-contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download and install their execute code,

“which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps,”

educational apps as I need to teach developer allow students to test code, may and limited circumstances download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user. Anything launched on iOS and November with no issue, and the tool has apparently been used to publish thousands of apps in the app store. Yeah, you can imagine Apple being like,

this app is pushing so much so many other apps into our review process. We've got to make it stop. The app lets users create and preview vibe code apps on the iPhone and it raised

11 million at evaluation of 100 million back in September. Apparently Apple have been

blocking updates to the app since December, so it had been basically a full quarter that it was frozen, but clearly users are excited about the product, so I hope they can work something out quickly. Well, global venture capital dollar volume has incredibly spiked. Look at this chart. Bunch of interesting things about this chart. Indeed, that's pretty loud. Ryan Hoover shares the chart from Crunchbase here. Q126 was absolutely massive with a global venture capital dollar

volume spiking from just over $100 billion to almost $300 billion. So a massive massive growth, a lot of this is open-air and anthropic, but even if you remove those two rounds, it's still up 40% quarter on quarter. What's interesting to me about this is what has been happening for the last 10 quarters before Q126. It's felt like a funding boom. It felt like we had the chatchipy team moment at the end of 2022. 2023 was the start of like, okay, let's, you know, lick the wounds

from the Zerbara and start ramping up venture capital. We saw new funds raised. We saw more deployment,

tons of up rounds. We're always hitting the gong. And yet that the prior trend line was pretty flat

prior to Q126. It feels like venture is still in this like K-shaped dynamic. I don't know. Yeah, I mean that the answer here is that this is not venture at this point. Yeah, that's a big factor. Right, you have these the biggest companies in the world, investing tens of billions of dollars into single companies. Yeah. And so of course the chart looks insane because this is the largest, you know, the largest private financing ever. Yeah. It's Julie Black getting the scoop at the

“day. She says new funding, new model, new policy push. I think it's a scoop, but she says exclusive,”

exclusive, open a high prior policy. I like her push. She says, open a high will begin releasing a series of policy proposals next week meant to spark conversation about how to rethink the social contract. It's going to be an interesting year. Is Oprah, she asks the question, is open a

eyes chief futurist prepping for a major breakthrough or just another hype cycle. And you can

go and read this on vanity fair. It's very fair the tech publication. Yes. I mean, Julie, come stack. Very well. Very well. There's a lot of stuff. Metab. Over at Open AI says we are excited to share a new paper solving three for the problems do to add us in each case the solution was found by an internal model at Open AI. Each proof is short and elegant and the paper is available here.

between the unreleased model and GPT 4.5.4 pro? I'm reading correctly. You tried fewer than 10

identical prompts for each of the three problems with GPT 5.4 pro and GPT 5.4 pro got the first

problem correct twice the result, which you link in the paper plus one's other similar solution, the third problem corrected twice interesting. I saw another interesting paper from Google that

“apparently just repeating the prompt twice improves LLM performance. Did you see this Tyler?”

So if you say like you are Shakespeare write me a poem because of the way the tokenization works. Like when it first processes that you it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it it start thinking and it doesn't necessarily know what's coming, right? It doesn't know that Shakespeare's coming. So if you just repeat the prompt the exact prompt twice it improves performance on a bunch of different benchmarks and it's this funny paper because it's like something that anyone could just do at home. It's like the

classic like prompt and you're anything. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean you would think that wouldn't work right because like still like you know you like attend to all the previous tokens at same time, right? This is the same thing. Yeah, you think so. I don't know. Yeah, but I remember like

early on there was always things where yeah you would prompt like you are Shakespeare write me a poem

and be way better poem than if you said, right? Totally. Totally. Or like pretend that you're turns to how when you solve this math problem. Yeah, way better, right? Yeah, yeah, whatever. In the training data, you know, you know, whatever. It just goes to go down that path as opposed to like the other paths of like, oh, it doesn't pull any April Fool's jokes because it's not being an April Fool's jokes to her. Yeah, there's these, you know, basins. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you get like the

personality based on where you can get the model to like a certain thing and it does much better on that. At the same time, I think this, I think is paper specifically on like vanilla LLMs and I think reasoning like like solves that even more because you're basically repeating the prompt

“a bunch through, you know, unpacking it, compressing it, doing whatever you need to do to actually”

set the LLM up for success in answering the question. And so it might sort of hydrate through that process into something that yields those results, but interesting how simple some of these hacks are. Uh, well, in biggest number news. Yes, yesterday, opening I announced a closing of their latest funding group. Yeah, hit the, hit the gong. It would be would be an honor, John. Boom. Probably probably the largest gong hit. 120 hits. 122. Oh, I'm 122. I'm size the round, remember?

They did up, Tom. Yeah, so take him pulled out some highlights. Uh, post money valuation of 855

billion and video remains the foundation of our infrastructure, our training fleet and the majority of

our inference stack to continue to run on a video GPUs. We are now generating two billion in revenue per month, raising over three billion from individual investors. Chad, GBT is the overwhelming leader in consumer AI with more than 900 million weekly actives and over 50 million subscribers are ads pilot reach more than 100 million in ARR in under six weeks. Momentum is just strong on the enterprise side, which now makes up more than 40% of our revenue and is on track

to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026. Codex now serves over 2 million weekly active users of 5x in the past three month with usage growing more than 70% month of a month. And they talk about the vision for a unified AI super app. One app that lets you basically access every product that open AI is making. So Chad GBT codex browsing and other authentic capabilities. Yeah, I'm very excited about linking codex to Chad GBT in some way because

“right now there's really, I think you can sort of set reminders but there's very little that you”

can do if your question requires building some sort of like small system. Like the textbook case that I'm thinking of is like if I want to be, if I want like a deep research report of, you know, how the Artemis mission did when it's when when when the astronauts land, I'm probably going to see that on social media. But what about just automatically letting me know one year from today, remind me that the Artemis 3 mission is coming, give me, you know, an estimated are we on track,

pull all the news that I probably won't be following that closely because I'm not like a daily consumer of space news, but I might be interested later. There's all these different things where you could track things, but you need to build something that just sort of were entering a new era.

You do, but it would be fun to be fun to to get over on twitch. Yeah. Well, there's some other news

“apparently new iPhones are being packed into the suits of the Artemis 2 crew. Oh, and Spark says”

there's something very familiar about the iPhone look that will make the moon feel accessible. We are going to see the lunar surface through the same lens view to capture our own lives every day. Oh, that's cool. Take some phones. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about smartphone proves too big for most. We were debating this earlier and I'd like everyone else to chime into. The original iPhone launched in 2007 had what was considered the largest smartphone screen at the

time 3.5 inches. The biggest iPhone now is more than double the size of the original at 6.9

inches. Or is, yeah, it's more than is now more than double. Wow. In 2019, the 2019 introduction of

Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold introduced foldable devices to the masses opening up like a wall. It has a

“7.3 inch display and Samsung Galaxy Z tri fold in 2026 when fully opened unfurls to roughly the”

size of an iPad. Can and the journalists in the Wall Street Journal ask the question, can a smart phone be too big? Tyler, what do you think? Yeah, I'm in favor of a smaller phone. Okay. I have this is a 16 pro. 16 is not max, but it's not max, it's the normal. Yeah. And why why why don't you want a bigger phone? I just too much. But if you're on a plane, you want to pull it out and watch a movie or something. Yeah, but I feel like if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop. Okay. Works great. Yeah.

But you don't always have the laptop with you. Are I mean you always have in your backpack? Like,

what if you're on a trainer? You've never thought about getting an iPad with a cellular connection and then maybe like a strap on the back that you could hold and have and be able to hold it up to your head and use it like a normal phone. I was seriously using the iPad mini for a while, just as an everyday carry phone, you could do it. I don't know if you can get a phone number on it. Is that even going to fit in my pocket? It would fit in my pocket, I tested. Does it fit in my pocket? I've

“got a suit pocket though, maybe you would definitely fit in the suit pocket. You should get all”

of your suits custom tailored so that you can fit an iPad mini in here. I don't know. The full phones are really farmed with the convert. ZYT says there is on twitch. There are re-streaming. Let me tell you about re-streaming. One live stream. 30 plus destinations. If you want a multi-stream NASA, go to re-streaming.com. Hopefully they're on re-streaming. Ryan Peterson. Yeah, what do you say? Uh, is Joketer and he says Elon filed for an IPO on April Fool's Day. And apparently they, they file

last night. So off by just a little bit, a courty of a file. But yeah, on on-paste for the kind of June listing. June listing. Okay. Yeah, we'll have to track that thought. We'll be, that will be fun. I think all the people, a lot of people are really excited. Should be good. Austin Larson says our team at Google is releasing more details on the recent NPM Axios Supply Chain Attack. Notably, we now attribute this activity to UNC-1069 to financially motivated North Korean Nexus threat actor, active since

at least 2018. We made this attribution based on the use of wave-shaper v2 and updated back door previously used by the group alongside clear overlaps and C2 infrastructure. Check the blog and they wrote, um, they wrote, uh, more about it on cloud.google.com. And yeah, we also have, uh, uh, we also have an expert from CrowdStrike coming on the show tomorrow. Adam Myers is going to come on and help us break it down, which we're very excited for. Uh, in a note to staff this morning, shared with Max

Tani Omerin, some of four business insider said is giving out a new quarterly AI award for best use of AI at the company. The winner gets $400. Uh, as soon as we talked about this this morning, Tyler asked us to create a similar award, uh, seemingly signaling that he's quite confident. You think you're winning this one time? Yeah, take it home. I'd like everybody confident right now. We'll see, you know, we're going to see incentive to go that right, you know, showing the incentive

of the outcome. We're going to have a lot of people in the office gun for this, but I still do want to run that experiment of like the race to see the true leader board of how long it takes everyone at our company to generate 10,000 lines of code as fast as possible. Because there's a bunch of shortcuts that you could take. Tyler thinks he can do it in like five seconds, but for other people, it's going to be a lot of copy paste. It's going to be figuring out how to open a

Yeah, so I'm feeling pretty good about my odds. Okay. Yeah. Well, uh, had over to business anyway.

“I think this is smart. Yeah. I would say that maybe maybe add a zero to the, to the number,”

but uh, given, given that the eyes, you know, massive, uh, massive company, right? Matias Dolphner knows that money doesn't grow on trees. Okay. He's running that thing. There's a real business. He's a business man. Uh, Rebecca Torrance is scooping. Scoop scoop is a valaratomics, the nuclear nuclear energy startup backed by Palmer, lucky, yellow backed by PL, himself has raised

450 million at a $2 billion valuation. There's no investor named here. So that's still unclear,

but uh, Isaiah and the valar team have been on a tear. They're talking about building clusters of small nuclear reactors to power data centers. And they got some access to, uh, some government programs and government resources. And it seems like there's been a bunch of blockers that have been knocked down one at another one after another. Uh, he's been on absolute tear. What we'd love to have him

“back on the show, uh, to chat more. Uh, I guess his Duriko is having fun with it. Oh, uh, I'm going to”

invest in another energy company besides valaratomics for boo, bab, boo, bab, reasons. Uh, that's what you sound like. Do you see how far they've come? Do you understand that they won't make the

world's energy? I love that he's pumping up his buddy. Uh, always riding with the crew. Uh,

anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. Stoss options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more with great customer service. In other nuclear news, apparently Utah is going nuclear to keep ski runs cold. What's for the 234 winter game? How does that work? It's a state says new, this is in town left.com. Okay. States says neutron based

atmospheric technology could lower ski runs surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees and offset drought impacts through enhanced snowpack retention. Interesting because when when you've given your case for Alaska historically, you've talked about how with abundant nuclear energy, you could take another wise cold area and warm it up, but they're they're thinking about cooling things down.

State officials confirm Wednesday that Utah is entered at $1.2 billion agreement with the Vienna

based energy consortium to install three micro nuclear reactors along the Walshach, Walshach, Mountain Range has part of an unprecedented effort to stabilize snow-convictions on Utah ski slopes ahead of the 2034 Olympic Games. The project and designated the Walshach atmospheric retention and mitigation initiative or warming could make Utah the first state in the nation to deploy nuclear power to atmospheric cooling infrastructure at altitude. Utah is not going to sit back and let

the climate dictate the terms of our 2034 legacy set a spokesperson for the governor. Governors Office of Economic Opportunity who confirm the project has received preliminary approval under SB 1114, the legislature's infrastructure acceleration statute which removes local government approval authority over-projects designated as state economic priorities. So apparently, Juniper Peak selected as the first nuclear test site. I'm sure everyone

at Juniper Peak will be thrilled about being able to ski around a nuclear test site. The three micro reactors are proposed at elevations above 9,000 feet in what project documents describe as thermally neutral subterranean containment pods. I like the sound of that designed to blend with the natural terrain. So anyways, well we have some other news. Will

“Depue, I think one April Fool's with the joke that he says he is joining deep seek. He says,”

"Like many of my friends, I set a goal at the start of 26 to become more Chinese this year and I plan to fully follow through on it after nearly three years at open AI. I have decided to leave and pursue new opportunities after much deliberation. I'm thrilled to announce that effective today I'll be relocating to Hongjo to join deep seek artificial intelligence-basic technology research co-LTD dedicated to building Chinese-style AGI. I simply couldn't pass up the

opportunity to become a billionaire in RMB. He had a lot of fun with it. We had fun putting up a card and we're big fans of Will Depue. Well, without further ado, we have any Q in the rest room right now. Let's bring him in to the interview and I'll show you how are you doing. Let's go on. It's great. Finally to be here. I've been trying to be on this show and I've got to tell you, I've gotten more text messages from friends about being on here including my kids than probably

what an amazing time. I would love to just start with some reflection. I want to hear

“particularly about your first decade at Apple. What was that like,”

leading, you know, what led you to the company, what were some of the first projects you worked on, sort of take us through some of the early history? Yeah, I was lucky. I was a junior in high school when the Apple II was out and I wanted to be an architect and when I discovered a computer, I realized I wanted to be a programmer in engineer and I said there's two things I want to do. I want to work at Apple and I want to meet Steve Jobs and dreams come true. Here I am 38 years later,

at Apple. I came in as a programmer and was working on a hypercard and sort of the precursor to blue links with lines underneath the linkings. And I've been done so many things here at Apple. I've had an amazing team and continue to have the bet. I'm working with the best people in the world at what they do. Yeah, what was the lore of Steve Jobs like when you first sort of heard about him because, you know, my generation knows like the iPhone keynote, there's videos online,

there's interviews, there's old books, there's multiple books written, but what was your experience learning? What drew you to Steve early on in your career? I just think it's the innovation of creating these products that let people do amazing things. And I felt that way when I was using the product, the attention to detail of those products, there was a connection that you could just feel. And so it was more than just what you could see. And then let me do things that I couldn't

“imagine doing before. And I think that's something that we've continued over our 50 years.”

Yeah. Can you talk about the launch of the original Apple online store? I feel like a lot of

people assume that this always existed. No, it was a herculian effort. I'm sure. What was the inspiration?

What was the backdrop there? What was the mood like as you entered into that market? Yeah, it was a crazy time because people forget, but in those times we sold all of our computers through channels like ConfUSA and local computer stores and the idea of building an online store and selling direct. There were a lot of people inside of Apple even that felt like if we did that, the channel is going to walk on us and they're going to stop selling. And Steve and we wanted to

move forward and be able to do custom configurations so people could order exactly what they wanted. Yeah. And we thought it was something that customers, you know, it was just beginning, but it was something that customers really wanted. And Steve and I and a small team worked on it and built it and launched it at the same time that one of our, you know, best products we've ever done was the I Mac. The Bondi Blue one with the clear. And so we launched the the store and the Bondi

Blue I Mac at the same time. And I remember at the end of the day we were wondering, you know, Steve came by his office and he's like, well, how did we do on the first day? And we had sold a

million dollars worth of I Macs. And we were high-fiving each other. And this is amazing.

“How do you drive people to the, did you just have apple.com or people already typing in apple.com?”

How do you tell people that a website is launching before you can go viral on social media or do live interviews on, you know, how do you promote this? Yeah, we were lucky and then we had apple.com already. Yeah. And so some people were coming from that. And so it was that part was a little bit easier. And in those days, you relied a lot on on press interviews in print. Sure. And so we did a lot of you want to be on the cover of, you know, a magazine and the front page of the newspaper. And so we had

all of that pretty well. And I think our design when we did this, it was called Good Better Best. You could buy different configs and change them. But our design for shopping for a computer and a Mac at that time was something no one had ever seen. It was it had all of the things that we cared about, the simplicity, really easy to check out, easy to buy, all of the specs and the questions you would have, things that were difficult when you went to other sites. I thought we did a

great job and, and it really resonated with customers. Yeah, can you, can you help me understand, like the services division of apple is, is, is massive. It's a huge growth engine. There's so many interesting pieces of that. I want to go into a lot of those. But when was the first time in your career that you realized that there was something that you could sell or actually turned into a business line that was not a physical product and would live in this services category.

Yeah, I think we started at the hobby. You know, there wasn't a lot there. It was a very early days of the internet and doing things like email and things like storage in the cryo, but it was very, very early. The thing that was a big change for us was really music. Yeah. And it was iPod plus iTunes. And that was something that was, it truly revolutionized music and it really gave us a whole different perspective of what services can do when you take the hardware product

and it sends the operating system in the software and the services and you tie them together,

“which is something I think we do better than anyone. It really showcased when we did iPod plus iTunes.”

And so all of a sudden, we did that, not only did we do it for the Mac, but we also did it for Windows.

Yeah. And so it opened Apple to a whole new ecosystem of customers that had never used

our products before, but we're using iTunes and iPod for the first time. That was my first Apple experience was iTunes and iPod on together. Yeah. And now I have 25 apps. My first is I was so I was so loyal to Apple product that I refused to get a piece like a PC for gaming. So I worked. I probably ref like 300 soccer games. I was so absurd amount to get the Macs out at Macbook Pro at the time. That's amazing because I was just so so loyal and I was like, I'm not, I've got

if I'm going to stay in the ecosystem and I'm going to do it on Mac. Yeah. It's great. You know, when we launched iTunes on Windows, I remember we did a poster and Steve called it on the presentation. It was like hell froze over. What was actually getting iTunes off the ground like? And how is it different than the other just motions that Apple had developed? Because it's not only a software product, but it's deeply linked to rights holders and agencies and musicians

“and you have to get so many different groups. It feels much more permissioned than just building a”

computer and selling it. Of course, you need manufacturers and you need a lot of people on board to build a computer. But it's a very different go to market or building motion. How is that different? Yeah, it was painful because I think there were three pieces. You had us, you had the label and

you had the artist. Yeah. We were really good with artists. So, which is something we've always been

about the creators and I think when we look, when you look at all the things that we've done, the two primary people that we focus on and think about are people that are the in customers that are using it and the creators that are creating all these incredible products. So we had a good relationship with musicians at the time. We really didn't have any relationships with labels. And ultimately, they did control the environment. And at the time, they had a different perspective.

You know, it was really the beginning of Napster and piracy. And instead of thinking about, you know, how to move forward into a future, their view was to lock things down and really stop it. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 9.9 cents and they kind of told us to go pound sand. They weren't really interested in it. And I said all. And their idea was they

were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services. And we told them like, what you guys are doing is not going to work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. So I'm talking about like price ahead, higher than like some random song on an album. Yeah, I mean, it was all over the map. Yeah. And part of the pushback against like just $99 a song with 99 cents. I mean,

is like, you know, typical Apple style. It's just like, let's just make it simple. Easy to understand. But was there pushback like kind of concern that people, you know, hey, we're used to getting people to just buy an entire album. And maybe what's going to happen at people just by, you know, a song here or there. Like, yeah, the problem was whether you

“sold it at $1.29 or 79 cents, that wasn't going to change that. Yeah, the key to that there were”

two keys to 99 cents that we really believed in and people didn't see. There were two primary things. Number one is when the price is 99 cents and it's consistent, you never have to think about price. And so you would preview a song decide whether you like it or not. And if you did, you bought it. And so there was never any transaction, a billing transaction that you had to think about. Because you knew it was 99 cents. It's not a lot of money at the time. And, and it was really

easy to do. The second thing was that people could never do that because 99 cents, if you're

a percentage that you pay. Well, the fixed fee and the percentage on a 99 cents song was like a quarter. Yeah. And the vast majority of the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we would lose money. And so nobody wanted to do that. And so no other service did that.

“Well, we decided to do is, as we were building this, and I remember it was a huge discussion”

because we would lose a ton of money off to see if you're losing it on every song. We said,

look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song. You're going to buy a lot of

songs when you go on there. Yeah. And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time? So let's keep the, you know, let's keep the transaction open for a period of time. Let's call it 24 hours or eight hours. And everything you buy, we're just going to give you and then we're going to charge you at the end. And so therefore, that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just 99 cents. Most of the

transactions were multiple dollars and the fixed fee did matter. Interesting. How important was it to position iTunes as sort of a step up from the status quo from like the Napster era and a positive because I feel like anytime the economics of an industry change, there's natural uncertainty from artists. And iTunes did represent a change in the economic structure, but it was such a great countervailing force. What were discussions like at that time about positioning the economic

“opportunity that artists would have in the new regime? Yeah. I think we wanted, during that time,”

the music business was cratering. Okay. For an economic point of view. Yeah. And our feeling has always

been the vast majority of people want to do the right thing. Yeah. And they want to pay artists. Yeah. And so, but what they don't want is they don't want to be forced into something that doesn't make any sense or isn't really friendly or isn't the right way to do it. And so we would that's part of the 99 cents. It was part of like you can, in those times you were burning a lot of CDs. They had limitations on the number of burns. We didn't want any limitations because that's not

something a customer would understand. And so, our feeling around this was if you let us do this, you're going to grow again as opposed to cratering. And I remember Steve asked me once before we had launched, he said, "Well, what is success around this?" And I said, "You know, honestly, I don't know. I'll go ask." And so, I went into universal music and I asked them, "What's success for you guys?" And this business, and they said, "Well, if you could sell, you know, a million songs

in a month, any time in the first six months, that's success for us." So I came back, I said,

"Okay, that's the goal then. We sold a million songs in the first six days." That's amazing.

Yeah, so it's like, that's what we, you know, obviously it surpassed even our expectation, but it was an example of, if you give people the right way, people are willing to pay, but it has to be done well. So, talk about the shift to subscription, because it feels like a much more natural experience for all the Apple service that I subscribe to. What was the thinking, how long, like, what were the hurdles along the way to get to the current situation with

Apple TV plus, or you can, you know, consume everything? Was this just a market dynamic? Was it something that you saw in the future early on? And it was more of, how do we get there smoothly?

“What was the process? Yeah, the key to this is, it's hard to remember this now because we're”

so used to it, but it's having internet connectivity anywhere you are. Sure. And all the time. And pretty much almost, it's almost impossible, not to be anywhere, and not have, you know, actually fast internet. Yeah. And so that allowed a whole different thing, because before that, you didn't have one, either didn't have it or two, you were paying by usage in a sense. So you wanted to limit the amount that you actually used. And so things like downloading and keeping things

on device all the time was really important. When you have unlimited in a sense internet access or a network access, then you can provide all these capabilities and not have to worry about whether you have it downloaded or not. It's now invisible to you. You don't even think about it. Most of the time, we put things on device just to cash them or whatever, but you don't need to worry about whether it's on your device or not. Yeah. We have a question from the chat. It's a bit

random, but I'd love to know your favorite keynote moment throughout your career.

we launched the iMac and the Apple Store, because that was the beginning of turning Apple around. And it was a big moment for Apple. It's hard for people to imagine this, but Apple was going bankrupt at that time. And Steve came back. And that moment was the beginning of a change where at least we knew now that we weren't going to go bankrupt. And so it really gave us life. And so

it was an incredible moment. And I remember going back stage with Steve after it was done and

and hugging actually because it had gone so well. And we knew that was a big step.

“The second one, and honestly now in hindsight, I was completely underestimated. It was the iPhone”

launch. It's the only time I made my wife and my kids, my two kids come to the event. They were eight and eight years old. And I was like, this is a historic moment because I had had the ability of using the iPhone for a few months before we launched and played with it. And it was just amazing. It's the coolest, best thing I had ever seen in the world. And so this is going to be amazing now. I completely underestimated it because now you look at it and go, it's like, I don't

even know what the world is like. What would you do without an iPhone? What lessons from Steve or kind of memories do you find yourself coming back to the most in the present day of Apple? Well, I think something that people take for granted, but nobody worked harder than Steve. These things don't come easy and he was the hardest worker of anybody I know. How did that make that sound long hours? It's focused because it's focused and long hours,

what it was was there are only two things that matter to Steve. And I think when people ask me

what's the difference between Tim and Steve, the reality is that's not the right question. The

question is what's the same things between Tim and Steve. And you know, their work ethic, they worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things. They're Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers. Believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going,

but it was never the primary thing. And so those three things are something that I still take to

“heart and I feel I, you know, that's what I try to do and how I feel.”

Can we talk about F1? I love that there's a movie and also you can watch the actual races. This feels deliberate. What's the strategy? It seems to make a ton of sense, but how long has this been cooking? What's the thought process? I remember it was still last year, John John had talked about this on the show, wanting this to happen to see it come together the way it has is amazing. Yeah, and it seems like soccer football sort of face a similar strategy, but I'm

very interested in how you see different media properties connect together. Yeah, look, the F1 thing is it's personal. One, I've been an F1 fan for a long time. You know, I learned about F1 by going to the library and reading magazines because it believed in an F1 just wasn't televised at all. So you didn't know anything about it. So I knew a lot about it. Stefano who's the CEO of Formula One is somebody who is at Ferrari

“and then later on at Lamborghini and I've known him. So when he took on Formula One, I remember meeting”

with him in London and saying, you know, we're not quite there yet, but someday I hope we can

be working together on F1. And so I always envisioned that there was things that we could do that

no one else could do. The movie came about separately, not kind of related, but this this idea of doing a movie and Jerry and Joe, because it was really Joe's idea and I just love the idea because there hasn't been a huge racing movie. Most racing movies have not done that well. Yeah. And I thought there was a real opportunity with F1 to tell an incredible story and Brad Pitt and the cars and the excitement and that we would for the first time had enough

technology to show what it was actually like to be in an F1 car because when you watch on TV, it kind of looks like they're on a Sunday drive. You don't get the G-force and so we had these ideas of taking the iPhone camera and putting them in all over the cars and different ideas that we thought would give that experience. Now the movie took a lot longer because we had to go through COVID, strikes, all kinds of things. But it turned out spectacular and when we would show the movie,

and the truth is very few hands were ever raised. And then after the movie you asked them,

“how many people would want to see an F1 race and you know, every hand went up. And so we thought,”

wow, if we did this together now and these ideas of how we can really innovate on the whole experience of what it's like to watch an F1 race, we really could make a difference here. And it's been great. We've done three races so far. The ratings are way above what they've ever been in the U.S. And so and we're just getting started but things like multi-view, 30% of the people watching F1 races are watching with multi-view so they can get different

cameras, see their favorite team. So it's definitely changed a lot of how people are experiencing it. That's amazing. It's a big question. Apple, Apple Racing Sim. You'll have two buyers. You know, we just did Vision Pro with some racing so you could do that. There you go. We got it for you. Yeah, they're racing in the automotive world as a man on the inside. Yeah, I'm the strongest supporter of the Vision Pro. I watch another movie in

it this weekend, Jordy. If I call John at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, he's always,

he's always, I love the product, I'm a huge fan. Anyway, thank you so much for today. It's truly, truly been an honor. It's truly been an honor. Congratulations on that. What an amazing accomplishment. We'll talk to you soon. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Octa. Octa helps you assign every age in a trusted identity so you get the power of

AI without the risks. Secure every age and secure any agent. And let me also tell you about thin. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to thin.au. And without further ado, we have Aaron Terrasis from Gusto coming into the

“rest room. We're in the room now that you begin. I'll turn him. Aaron, what are you doing?”

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for taking the time. We were very excited to dig into some of

your research and reporting. But since it is the first time on the show, would you mind

introducing yourself, some of your background, and what you do for a living? Sure. I'm going to comment by trading currently working with Gusto, previously been through the tech industry at Glass Store at Zelo at a company called Convoy, started my career at the Treasury Department. Maybe start with what is unique about being an in-house economist? What data do you have access to that others might not? What data

is anonymized? How do you do your job and what are you actually looking for? What are the questions that you're trying to answer? Most economists play with this public data that the government produces, that's great. It's been around a long time. The really exciting thing about being an in-house economist is that there's all of this data behind this private wall gate. We get to understand what is happening in the economy. Sometimes we pick up on things before

the official data, say sometimes we pick on trends at the official data, aren't necessarily showing what's happening beneath the surface. So it is this really exciting place to be as an economist. Okay, let's go into some of the findings. But first I want to know about data skew and how you account for the type of customers. You know, Gusto's a sponsor. We talk about small and medium-sized businesses. So I imagine that you have some sort of calibration step where

you're adjusting your internal data to some sort of benchmark to make sure that you're not biased towards your particular sample set, right? Absolutely. Such important point, Gusto is like a small business payroll platform. We do reweight our data so that it reflects the broader labor market, the broader small and medium-sized business ecosystem. How do you do that? Do you have ground truth data that's public that you can reference against? Yeah, exactly. So the government

produces this census of all small businesses based by an industry and size. And so we take that distribution and match our internal data to that distribution. That makes sense. And then so the big question is the small business jobs report, what is the health of the American economy, what is the health of the small business community, what questions were you trying to answer and where did you, where did you wind up? Every month we get this headline jobs report from the BLS,

“watching for this Friday, I think what we're trying to do with the small business jobs report is”

get a much firmer pulse on what's happening with small businesses in particular, some businesses with less than 50 employees. That is the majority of businesses in the American economy, but just a small minority of total employment. So it often gets buried in the headline jobs report numbers. And we know that they're a driver of job growth, they're a driver of innovation,

And where does net hiring stand? Give me some of the headline numbers. What are expectations?

What should we, what should we, by default, assume is happening? I mean, there's a lot of

“doom and gloom in the economy, honestly, broadly because of geopolitical conflicts and nervousness”

around AI. But what are you actually seeing? You're right. There is a lot of doom and gloom. Our headline jobs number for March show that small businesses created about 120,000 new jobs in March. That's an exceptionally strong number. Let's get out of the strong number as we've seen since 2022. Yeah. And I think it's a boring note. That's not an outlier. Other kind of payroll providers are showing similar strength. So I think this narrative that we all

have in our minds of the great freeze kind of businesses paralyzed by uncertainty. Yeah. That's in some ways last year. Yeah. I think 2026 is shaping up to be the great unstucking after being

stuck last year. That's amazing news. Do you have any, do you have any thoughts on, you know,

I can throw out a bunch of random theories off the top of my head. But you know, I think this is paired with just yesterday oracles slashing staffing over costs. Like there are big headline attention grabbing job cuts that are happening at name brand companies. And those, that news will fly very far because everyone knows that everyone knows oracle. And maybe they don't know that the small business just down the street actually increased head count by 20%. But they only added

two people. So it's not going to be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. But is there some sort of, you know, how crazy, how crazy is that M.I. to think about, you know, the large companies may be being overstuffed and maybe changing their business model. So they need to recalibrate whereas small businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence. Maybe do try to do more, try to expand, try to compete. And so they're actually expanding their labor

force. Even while the bigger companies have like much larger questions to ask about, you know, what happens over 20 years? Yeah, big business scraps, big headlines and think about the shocks that our economy has experienced over the past year or the past few years. Big businesses are kind of, I say, like a big freighter. They're a little bit more resilient to the tsunami, but they have a really wide turning radius. Small businesses are like a sooner, kind of their,

“you know, they have to adapt and pivot really quickly in response to the shocks. And I think we saw”

that, you know, business, big businesses are just catching up whereas, you know, all the shocks have experienced last year, small businesses are already head of the curve and are thinking about what comes next. Yeah. If you, if you were tasked with doing job reports for the federal government, how would you approach it, given your exposure to having access to data sources like gusto, you know, everyone by now is kind of used to seeing a job's report from the government

and then, you know, a few months later or six months later, you get these massive revisions and it's sort of confusing and it feels like we have all this real-time data and like the data of people like adding an employee to gusto and starting to pay them is like much, much more obviously accurate, real-time into it feels like the process could evolve, but what's your view? Yeah, I was a government economist, I have a normal suspect for government economists. They have a

big job, their job is to look at the 40-year trend in the economy, these are tools that we're

designed, you know, over multiple decades, the reality is kind of there is so much data exhaust,

real-world exhaust right now and our economy that we can capture and companies like gusto are, you know, we don't have data from 1963, but we have kind of much better data from what's happening

“right now and so I think, you know, the two go ahead and head to companies and each other,”

one's going to go up that longer or stable view of the economy, the others going to give us these these deep windows into these, you know, what's happening in the different parts of the real-time. Do you have any insight into subcategories of jobs, how job titles are changing? I keep using this example that we're small business, we have 10 people on staff and we have Tyler, our, you know, in turn, who's basically a full-time software developer, as well as a co-host of the show,

hybrid role, we have other folks who have vibe-coated whole systems and, but in a previous business, if I was building a media company, I would have that think extremely hard about developing like a software engineering organization and that would have, I would have assumed that would have been extremely costly, a very big build versus by decision. Instead, it was just, oh, we hired Tyler because we liked him, he can do a bunch of different things and he starts vibe-coating and all of a sudden,

we have six systems and they all work really well. And so we've become like this hybrid tech media company,

about just, are you seeing any data that suggests that more people are picking up hybrid technology jobs,

“or software engineering jobs, or even if the titles are changing yet, anything you're seeing on that side?”

Everything's in flux right now, kind of, I think all the traditional lines that used to be bright lines of businesses are being blurred, people are taking multiple hats, founders are doing more things. You raise a really good point at, you know, you think about how does a big business hire, you ask for a head, that head goes to your manager, the manager says to finance a finance, as to recruiting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that's, you know,

a week here, week there, you're talking about months, when the small business hire, when you hire, they just like, oh, we need someone yesterday, let's hire them, or we need a week or a week after.

Yeah, yeah, what, what economic data points are you tracking that are potentially upstream of

small business hiring in, in particular, because, you know, we, we all know, you know, gas prices, surge, consumers feel pain at the pump, they cut back on travel, the economy, potentially decelerates. There's, there's these, like, logical chains, and then, you know, in the big companies, it might be like interest rates, or something geopolitical risk, or tariffs, so there's all sorts of things that could drive, you know, hiring at the large scale. What, what are the biggest

needle movers that you would watch that might lead to some expectations about what might happen over the next couple months in the small and medium sized business market? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you look at things like kind of hiring job openings, that's, that's

“plans that are already in place, but, yeah, almost more important than that, I think it's”

sentiment, you know, expectations, particularly among decision makers who have the power to shape

the future. Yeah, so, you know, things like kind of CFO expectations, you see, you know, expectations, that's how business leaders are thinking about the future, and, you know, future is partly prediction, future is probably creation. Yeah, how good are those surveys? I feel like I've been a hiring manager for maybe like 15 years now. I don't know that I've ever answered a survey. Maybe I just did it and I forgot about it, but is it, is it broad based, are you confident enough

CFOs or are actually picking up the phone or answering the survey? Because you can imagine that some of the most high-performing managers are too busy hiring people to answer questions about whether or not they're going to hire people. Totally, this goes back to the conversation we're having about the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources when the government goes out and service people, there's a lag and response by us and who who who who responds. We're looking

at payroll data. That's not kind of responding. I see what you're doing. And so in some ways, you know, that just gives particularly for smaller businesses where people are busy, they're not picking up the phone, they don't have time to total their thumbs kind of responding to a government survey. That's capturing a real real, real phenomenon. Yeah, how are you thinking about feeding that into Gusto's actual product offering? Because I could imagine if I'm in there,

hiring someone, and I sort of get like the survey after I hired one, I plan to hire more people next quarter and it's just a like leave a five-star review type thing on an e-commerce website. Now I'd probably have very high survey completion rate. Are you looking at doing more to get like qualitative or quantitative data that's more optional from the user base? That's a really cool idea. I assume that I'm not thought about that. No, you've got a picture. Yeah, survey people in the

platform that's something we haven't really done a lot of. Yeah, but cool it. Yeah, I would love that. Because even just more qualitative just, you know, with all of the times, there's so much that you can do to compress down qualitative data and whatnot. Like there's so many interesting things you could do. How is a I changing your approach to work? It's a great question. Yeah, obviously kind of it's completely transformative. Yeah. It's transforming the way

“suddenly I work as a economist. I think it's transforming how everyone works. It's transforming”

how businesses start and higher. I think there's just a growing body of evidence that AI is making it a lot easier to start a business, to incorporate, to do all that front leg work. And on top of that, it is changing kind of the skill profile that you need when you hire it. You need more of these people who manage processes, particularly start. Yeah. And then day to day, I would randomly predict like I Python notebooks a few years ago. Is it all like command line

prompts today? How is that changing for you? Yeah, I mean kind of, I still work a lot in Python, but you know, I'm doing more things at once and I think that's true for most economists, kind of anyone who's, you know, kind of in some of this lowered the barrier to getting that data and that's great because that accelerates decision making, that helps these businesses adapt

positioned to be in congratulations on the success? I think you're kind of sort of laughing

“in my head about imagining you if you had like a secret LMS subscription back when you were working”

on the economy. It's just the most government there. Like, how is it? How is it? How does Aaron do what he does? Yeah, I'm just sitting there. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you, Aaron. Have a good day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 labs, build intelligent real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology and interaction with 11 labs, and let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software

engineer, crusher, backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Scoop. Scoop. From Charles

and Business Insider, meta is forming a new Elite AI lab. What? The tech giant, quietly reorganized

its recommendations division. Okay. Rexus, it formed a top AI team run by Tech Talks former head of growth. Rexus has been learning opening AI Google and Amazon talent. So, I mean, it's more lab. One more lab would fix me. It doesn't seem like a great place to apply AI. Yeah. I feel like the recommendations on Instagram are pretty good these days. I do feel like I get caught in, what's that called, Tyler, the local minima, or the basin, or whatever? Yeah,

basin, is that the term you used? I used the basin, yeah. I feel like it's like, okay, yeah, I watched a few snowboard videos. It doesn't need to be all snowboard videos. We can go back to some viberials about airplanes or something, that it goes back and forth. But in general, I've had a good experience and I expected to get better. Let's pull up this photo from Kirk Evans showing an advertisement for Tiger Woods. It says, "Step into the mind of Tiger Woods," and

“Kirk Evans says, "I think I'll pass." Now, very, very unfortunate situation. Anyway, we can move on.”

Well, what else is going on? Let's see. There's news from Proplexity. Yeah, I can't find any actual reporting on this. Hero Head said Proplexity was a key to sharing information of its users with meta and Google, but there's zero stores here. Yeah, there might be within the terms and conditions. It could be anonymized, the sharing personal information. I mean, I guess it's personal if it's deanonymized. The quote here from

The Island podcast is, "Every single penny we make, we make profits on that, but the overall company is still yet to be profitable." So the other, the other, the other, the other things, that's kind of a smart world. The way that phrase tells me, "We make money on subscriptions." Saying, "For every single penny we make, we make profits on that." To me, kind of ignores like

free users, potentially, because they've tried ads and they killed it. Sure. So they're basically

saying, like, "On our consumer subscription business, we make money." Yeah. But the overall company is not profitable. Yeah, and you would expect that. Like free users, if there's not ads, like it's going to be negative margin on those, you just hope that it's not that bad. And you hope that it all blends out across your subscription profits. We'll new job alert for Omar Shaheen. Yes. This is a new job at Microsoft. He's bringing open- claw, plus personal agents to Microsoft

365. My goal is to help usher in a new generation of workplace proactive assistance. It's ones that lighten your load by taking on tasks end-end and that can also step in pro-actively when they can help. Interesting to see this, like, counter-position against, like, the Facebook

“Manus deal, where isn't Manus open source as well? Is it? I don't remember. But, you know,”

it's like, "Every company will need to have a partnership or an in-house LLM to vending to every service." It does be like the next couple of years are going to be just like the chat bots popped up in every single app with varying degrees of success. Some of them are great. Some of them are wind up using, and I'm actually glad that I didn't need to export the data, and I can just ask the question directly in that app, and I have faith that they're using a

good model, and so they'll give me a good result. And, most of them, I'm happy that I know that the data is going to be clean and also secured in that app, in that ecosystem, in that world garden. I'm fine with that. It does feel like the open- claw agents actually build some software to answer our question is going to be vended into another box. Another button with a star or something. Maybe it'll be a claw, just like every app got a star during the AI boom or the chat bot boom.

okay, I want to do something where it actually goes and works through this. I feel like Google

a lot is something similar. Not necessarily a full open claw personal agent, but they did announce something along the lines of like an agent for your inbox that processes all your emails. They said goodbye in box zero. Was that the news? I don't know if we have it pulled up. I can search for it. Was it Sunday? Who posted it? Good bye in box zero. Let's see if this pulls anything up. I saw a friend of the show posting about it, but I will try and figure it out.

Open claw set up that just deletes every email as soon as it arrives in your inbox. Yeah, it's archive all. You know, when the way did we ever in box app user?

Now, this was like the pre-superhuman era. It was like the hot email app that a team of software

developers, iOS developers in particular built a very well-designed email app for iOS. And this was at a time when a lot of the other native iPhone apps for popular email services. We're still a little clunky that didn't have all the great features. And the inbox team sort of went and reimagined it using inbox zero as this philosophy. And so if you're not familiar with

“inbox zero, basically it's the idea that at the end of the day, you should have nothing in your inbox,”

which just some people sounds impossible because they have like 50,000 emails in their inbox. How many emails are in your inbox right now? How many emails? How many emails? You're in 10,000 text message guy. You don't even do inbox in your on your text message. 20,000 in the inbox. I don't have 10,000. I have 5,750. It's really close. That's closer to 10,000 than zero. Anyway, the whole idea is that email is a metaphor for a literal office. It's supposed to be a desk

and you receive mail that comes to your inbox. If you want to send something, you put it in your outbox and then your team will send that out. But once you've actually taken something out of your inbox, read it, processed it, you can physically throw it into the trash or you can physically file it in a cabinet or you can physically write a response and put it in the outbox. This is the way people did business back before email in like the 60s when they were just sitting at

their wooden desks. They're mahogany desks. And so the inbox team said, let's copy that paradigm. And this was popularized in books and management philosophy for a long time. But let's copy that

“and have the idea that you should get to inbox zero by the end of the day. And so they made it”

very easy to inbox, to basically archive all your emails. There was this big long waiting list, it took months. It was really, really hyped and Silicon Valley. They eventually sold a dropbox. It was very good outcome. But it became a very popular product that everyone had to install because it allowed you to get through your emails much faster. So the main feature that is now and basically every email client is that you could just swipe an archive the email, which does

not delete it. You can always search for it later. But it says it's just a way if you're in a

to do list. It's saying that this email, I don't need it on my to do list. Like the inbox is you're to do list. If you archive it, you can only search for it later. It's not deleted. It's there. You could also shuffle it away in a folder. You could delete it. But then they also had a snooze functionality where you could swipe to the laughter to the writer or something and say hey, I'm not ready to deal with this email right now. I'm not responding to it right now. But this is a

receipt or a ticket for a flight. And I want this to come back into my inbox the day before the flight or something like that. And so they made it really easy to both archive and snooze. And when you archive and snooze every email, you can very quickly get to inbox zero by the end of the day. They did a bunch of gamification stuff to make it fun and be like, you got an inbox zero. Like, take a screenshot of it. People are sharing the screenshots of their inbox zero. Well,

“lineups update. What's the update? From NASA Administrative Jared Isaacman. What's happened?”

The Artemis 2 crew is boarding a ride. They're boarding. Okay. Good news. This video. I'm on the edge of my seat. I didn't know what you were going to say. Each one with. We turn up. Read or Jeremy. So it looks like Andre is with Read. And this is the lock. This is the fully locked in with 25,000 buttons. While Andre is buckling him in, that's a five point notice. Tyler, would you stay in a little box that's small for two weeks,

eight days, ten days for 10,000 dollars. I want to move them for sure. What if you're just sitting here in the ultrasound, you have access to a laptop, but you cannot move out of, you know,

the astronauts? That's good. That's good. In solid airy, in solid airy. You will, wait, we can send you to the moon in VR. We can't afford to send you the moon. We can send you

to the moon in aggregate. Well, we have our next guest in the rest room waiting room. First,

let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And without further ado, we're gonna try to outform arena, physical. He's a CEO and co-founder.

What are you doing? Hey, Jordan and John, great to see you again. Good to see you again. Great to have you. Welcome back. Yeah, it's been a bit. It has. Please re-introduce yourself, give us a little backstory, and then we'll go into the company. Yeah, perfect. So yeah, to talk about it, CEO and co-founder Arena, physical. We were on your show of announcing some fundraising about I'd say just about a year. You're in change again, maybe a year and a quarter. And companies

have all of it since then, we were, you know, started with spring AI to hardware engineers. So yeah, hardware engineers, that's of all actually quite a bit. As we've seen the whole AI space evolve,

“which is, what is, you know, the, if you're thinking about modern hardware, it's software defined. Right?”

Like, that's, that's happening everywhere. But software defined the hardware is really like, electromagnetic governed. Like, the key problems are that it's the electronics interfacing with the firmware, interfacing with the mechanics, and it needs to obey physics and behave well. And in terms of humans, can really use one of those forces of physics really well. Electromagnetism

and it's a regular for progress. And so what we released yesterday is the first fanation model for

Electromagnets and think about it as a large, similar to a large language model in architecture, but the training tokens, they aren't words, their materials, geometries, and electromagnetic fields. So learning us, helping us speak another language, basically, the kind of language of the universe. So what's the data set for that? Like, is there see all the websites? Yeah, mine like for sure. So the April Fool, the data set is actually just a child. Yeah. It puts rules. It's a new LL app. It's a new chat box.

Yeah, the, the, the, the data set doesn't exist. Okay. Yeah. So on this, it's hard. Yeah. So what do you do?

“It's a simulator. Did you have to go collect this? Yeah. That work. Yeah, that's a component. So, so the reality is,”

like, what we've, what we've done is basically build a data factory. We've spent about a year and a half building that. And, you know, how do we, how do we get all of the data that a model of this sort of architecture transform a type model needs? Yeah. So it starts by creating a random pattern. So that's, well, they are one of the cake, if you would, is large amount of random generation. And that's different geometries with different materials, stackups. And then running them through simulation to see

how they behave. That's sort of think about it as layer one of the cake. But, you know, the number of possibilities you're explored. You add more layers. You think about modern design. It's happening on silicon. How does, you know, how, how do they actually behave in the real world? You can't explore that whole universe. You can't randomly explore it. And this has been one of the big bottlenecks. There's very few of these experts in the world. You know, I think Starlink is a great demonstration

of what you can build when you've actually mastered such capabilities. But few people, you know, have achieved that outside of space X. And it's bottlenecked by experts in simulation. So the second layer of the cake is our experts have been creating designs that work. And then the final step is we actually fabricate those designs and then we pipe that back into the system. And so, I think you guys might have something over there too. We do, we do, we do something in the mail.

But we, we have to, we have to intercept news because it was intercepted. Somebody opened it and stole maybe half the package. I don't know if there's two things. I only have one. But I do have a screw driver

and this was an amazing presented and quite an amazing way. I think somebody basically was like,

“okay, this looks valuable. I think that's what happens. So, so, I will open this. You can tell me what”

this is. And then, if the other piece of the puzzle is missing, you can break that down and we can go find the views at some point. I will talk to the other piece. That is it. You have to flip and describe the background of what you're opening. They stole the book. I know where. That's extremely hard for the metal box. Yeah, the metal box is probably a nation state. I have no idea. That's just so, we're, we're not making this up. Like, we opened it. We, we received it and it had been ripped open and the book life had been stolen.

But, I mean, I hope that's not like intellectual property or something. But inside, it says caution, electromagnetic superintelligence handle only if you are ready for the future. Okay. There we go. And so, let's open this up. All right. So, break it down. Yeah, break it down. What, what is this? Okay. Great. So, I'll fly sure a bit. Some of the booklet for background and then I'll tell you what that is.

do with structures like the one you're pulling? Yeah. What you're pulling is an RF circuit. Okay. So, circuit use for radio frequency communication. Yeah. And if you think about what's happening right now, communication and sensing is kind of the baby bottle neck for robotics for satellite communication for a lot of the bottlenecks and data centers. And that's gated by this small group of experts and these really slow simulators from about the 80s, right? Yeah. And so, what we've, what we've done here

is actually a create and design from scratch from nothing but a prompt. It's the way it works and it's actually live on a website on a research page for renafizicata.com/research. You can read the technical blog and you can play with the product. You can literally type in a prompt. And that goes to an LLM.

And then the LLM basically passes it to our foundation model. So, the LLM interprets the prompt

it's like, oh, John's trying to build a 10 gigahertz band pass filter for his new satellite company. And you can just like, because I know it's not hydrating it. You guys sort of like hydrate the prompts

“to make sure it's structured and has like the necessary information or what is that pass off like?”

Yeah, it's a great question. So, the prompt that's where we actually will rely on the LLM. So, let's say you give an incomplete description. You're like, hey, I'm trying to build a space antenna, but you didn't specify that it's a filter. The LLM, you will make some good assumptions that's there. You're looking for this. And then that prepares sort of the inputs that we need. And then then it calls our model. So, in a way, what I'm really excited about is, I see a future where you have

multiple AI foundation models working together. And, you know, we've got one that speaks English really well, which is your interpreter, which is your front door. But now it needs to go and create a structure which is physically valid. So, that's where it calls heavy side our EM foundation model. And so, what you're holding is that 10 gigahertz band pass filter, which is one of those key components inside a modern phase array system, which is used for radar for satellite communication.

“And so, you know, you think about there's a lot of conversation about data centers in space.”

We're not going to fiber opticly cable them together. You know, you're going to need to

transmit that data again between them wirelessly. And so, that industry basically started off in

about the sort of six seats with phase array radar. Actually, the first one is back in World War II. And so, you know, what you've got in your hand is like, if you look at it, it's an alien geometry. It's a strange structure. You know, it looks, it doesn't look like something that came from a human brain, right? It's like, it doesn't look like a nice geometric pattern. It's not a line. It's not a coil. The crazy thing is that it works. And, and Jordi, just to be clear, you're not supposed to

touch that with your bare hands. Yeah. It's so, it's a highly radioactive experiment. I'm kidding. No, I'm not convinced this isn't alien technology, but cool story. No, it's very, very cool. So, I mean, I appreciate the example of like the connectivity and space data centers. Obviously, that's like frontier. But walk me through the actual like market map industrial scale of like, I imagine there are like certain power law buyers of, of our affa equipment.

Like, it's every, it's in everything from like that Bluetooth connected, toaster, to your phone, to your car, it's everywhere. But what is the actual shape of the industry, where, what, what I'm thinking about like sub dividing the industry and getting down like the satellite industry is here. The smart phone industry is here. Like, walk me through the map of the, like, the potential customer set. Totally. Yeah. If you think about that, there's a few different

buckets. So, if you get an harness electromagnetism in RF, which is, let's say, application one, you've got satellite communication. So, phase race for sat comp. So, that's here. Use your terminal, your satellite. So, if you hear about a starling satellite, I believe it means to track

“64 different locations on the ground. So, make 54, 64 different beams. Sure. You have to do that”

with a phase array. Okay. So, anyone launching, anyone in, in the space industry, which I think is exploding right now needs communications between RF and space. So, phase arrays are key there. Yeah. Radar. Radar is another really big one. So, if you think about that, you know, we've obviously got Ray Fion is that the being come in here. But if you think about advanced radar, they're incredibly expensive today. And we have a few of them on ships. You know, we should

have backpack based radar for soldiers for counter drone. We should have a whole variety. This,

we want to debug on that this field and basically democratize it, almost like AWSify that

for companies building for space for radar, radar makers. Also for companies, you know, if you think about data centers, chip-to-chip communication. So, these channels that let ships talk to each other and probably difficult to get right. In some way, you're trying to build a very bad antenna there. Because you don't want it to pick up random interference. You want it to send a signal

ray and RF components. And it looks like this line. And I feel like it's something I would have done right out of school as oh great, let me take the historic numbers and propagate them forward. But it doesn't seem to account for the fact that we're expecting a boom in space. We're expecting growth in AI data centers. Yeah. And if you think about imaging that, you know, I heard something

from art, a cheap scientist here that blew my mind, I always thought about radar as detection.

You're trying to detect something, right? Yeah. And he said, radar is an imaging platform. So, as you get to higher frequencies, you know, like, light-r, you've got this high frequency beam that's echo-locating things like a bat. And it's useful for all weather imaging. So, when lights getting blocked, you can actually use a radio wave to kind of create your light-r maps. So, if you think about that, being used for robotics, which is another application. So, each of these

“pieces, we feel haven't been sized into the forecast. And so, that's, I think, where a lot of the”

opportunity lies. And when we talk to customers, so, you know, we work with AMD and Andrew, as examples. So, our mission is partner with companies at the frontier that are trying to challenge existing

cost models and push front to your technology market. Those are sort of the places where we're

seeing early adoption. And do you want to be, like, selling intellectual property like arm or software for chip design or the actual finished chips, how vertically integrated do you want to be? Yeah, I would say, like, realistically, as of where we are today, our models closer to the model of, like, a volunteer or an arm, obviously, by own heritage. Last company was bought by a volunteer. And so, partnering with companies using our whole tool chain. So, this is the latest product,

heavy-sided the EM Foundation model. Yeah. But Atlas or current product is an agentic product that lets you use LLLang agents to debug parts of the hardware process. So, that plus our FDAs that are not just software engineers, but also electrical and RF engineers for deploy as partners to drive

major outcomes. Sure. What we are seeing and what you're holding is a piece of this is, you know,

the existing IP industry is letting licensed UIP. And this is where it's an open question we haven't figured it out. But you now have an IP generator as a machine. And so, we're really excited about the arm kind of model, as I think probably the most proximate to where we are today. And our way of having the most impact is we can empower more teams. Like, our mission is to empower more teams to build more advanced stuff. If we think about a lot of the AI, doom and blue, and we're like,

where do the jobs go? You know, the conclusion we come to is companies just need to be more ambitious.

“Like, that's how we create jobs. Let's assume we're working with AI. How do we enable you to do that?”

How do we enable others and more companies to do this? The last thing I want to say on that is, if you look at what happened with LLLang which models, it was all possible because of scaling laws. And like, you know, before LLang which models there was a lot of machine learning, where we were trying to go and solve problems that that use case level. Right? We were solving like language translation, summarization, spam detection separately. But once you point at a huge model

at LLang which is a substrate and open-and publish that seminal paper in 2020 on scaling laws, you can scale it up and it's sort of generalized. Now these things can do remarkable things. We believe we will see and we're seeing early hits of scaling laws for electromagnetics. And this might be true for physics and general electromagnets that are being one of the four fundamental forces here. But that's sort of what we think is possible. So each of the industries you talk

about, doesn't need a specific solution we think in the future. As you scale this up, this central brain could power any industry that's bottlenecked by electromagnetism, you know, phase array radar or sack column and data center interconnects being a starting point. Yeah. Well, what's the reaction been from the experts that you've mentioned? Are they experiencing a chatGPT moment with the new model yet? Or you still need to iterate how are people responding?

Yeah. It's a great question. I think there are reactions definitely been really positive in some pockets and deeply skeptical in other pockets. As you can imagine, getting this stuff right is really difficult, right? Where I would say we're at like a GPT-1 moment here. We're not at a chatGPT moment. We have about tens of millions of data points in the training set. As I mentioned, this data doesn't exist. We have to make it all in the data factory. So that's sort of one of the

keys. And so we're finding as the models got larger and as the data set gets bigger, they're capable of more. But today, what you're holding, a human could design an equivalent component like what you're seeing with an normal structure and it would work. We're not yet at a superhuman point with the model. But what we are is transforming the cost structure. This is 800,000 times faster than a commercial software, for instance. And the expertise is not locked up in an expert. You could go and just

“get that kind of on demand from the AI. So that's what we're seeing today. And I think it will take”

some time to move up that stack. But that's why I'm super excited about the scaling laws. And I think

customers that I think are really on the frontier that are leaning in and believing in this. And so we're super excited about that. Can you talk about the FD model in this case? I mean, I feel like a lot of people don't even understand the typical engagement of having Palantir FDs inside of an organization. They might be more familiar with like McKinsey coming to the organization doing a delay ring or

“some management consulting engagement. Like how long is a product life cycle development life cycle?”

How long do you imagine that a typical engagement with FDs might be? Is it going to be the same as Palantir different? How is this unique? Yeah. So right now, we definitely see the engagement model is being, you know, you're partying on an array of problems. So we start with one, for example, let's say that new product innovation cycle is, you know, for something like a new chip or a new data center, that might be in the number of like a year. It might be a couple of years. But what we're

seeing is then those architectures are used across multiple product lines by a lot of these companies. And so could we become a partner, uh, long-term across all of these electromagnetically limited products that sort of where we see sort of that, that outcome driving, you know, that driving really big outcomes across the stack. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, congratulations to our young

fans. Amazing progress. We will put this to use. We will as many of these as you know, show what

run through that will figure it out. We'll do it. We might pick a lot of queries for us. Incredible

“rock. You have to send one over next time. And let's, let's have you back before another year passes.”

Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Thanks, guys. Great to see you. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about console, console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets and they use claim. Let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super good for training and inference to scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And I think

we're in the Lambda lighting round now. Or are we in close? Something serious. Let's fire the Lambda lighting. Fire the Lambda lighting round. The cloud is working over time. Kick. Yeah. What's going on with the cloud? Fireed phase clan. Oh. That's an outstanding strategic acquisition of phase media. Yeah. It's a well-placed rocket. It's a pretty good idea. But he had some point. There was some. They were. And they were public. I'm like, whoa. We can private. Okay. Oh, he said. This is real.

It's not April Fool's. Oh. I'm just throwing that. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Kick. I don't know. Can we dig into this? Is this an April Fool's joke? Somebody already asked rock? Yes. 100% of it's an April Fool's prank. The press releases dated 4126. There's zero real news of confirmation of any kick phase deal. And it fits the classic nostalgic streamer org acquisition troll vibe. Nice catch. I'm so punk. So I didn't realize this was, is this full speed fun?

It's on the Wikipedia though. So I don't know actually. I think this might be real. I don't know. I mean, it seems like it seems like if phase was taken private and is looking for, you know, a new home integration into kick, like it doesn't seem like that crazy. It's not like, yeah.

If it is April Fool's joke, it's not a very, very. It's not like, oh, wow. I never

would have imagined that kick and phase teamed up. Like, that's, there are people that are making that joke. There was a, some company that, uh, high-free's of trading firm that was joking up being acquired by anthropic or something. It was like a cryptocurrency company. Crypto wall accompanied, like, that, that feels a little bit more non-secular. Right. Well, Adam phase has good story. He says. Yeah, what's the media owns the trademark for his borne last name phase and sent him

a cease-and-assist in 2023 when he originally named his production company phase world. So as I want my last name back, I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for Adam phase to be able to use the

“brand. Well, you should have bit on the IP buddy. It should have, you should have bit. I mean,”

also, what were your parents doing? Not trademarking your name in every possible category as a child. This is, this is deep alpha. I need to lock up Kugins. Matt, rather than later.

Tony on a roll today says it's never been a better time to be in the fake wood panel industry.

If you sell fake wood slats, they can be quickly installed in a room somewhere. Business is booming with no signs of slowing down. I love the slot walls. We got to get one in here so we can just, like, step back and go and hang out and do a little slot wall. Wait, that, that would be, that would be my bulls. Oh, what were we thinking? You know, we struggled with April Fool's year. We think it's a little bit overplayed. It's not that, it's not that funny. And kind of every single day is April Fool's

year. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of good day for us to just get serious. Right. Get that white suit. Focus on the market. The market's up. We're in white suit. Dillon really be. Dillon serious, but we don't, you know, the, the, the actual, like, would have been to rebuild, like, the typical podcast set with, like, the bookshelf slot walls, but then make it miniature, right? Oh, yeah. So we're sitting there.

slot wall is so popular? Isn't it, uh, here, men? Uh, yes. But do you know why he selected it?

“Right, not. So when you are recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don't want”

reverberation. You don't want a lot of flat walls that will balance the sound back to you and create echo and distortion and hollowness in the sound. You want a nice, basic response. You need a nice microphone, but you also need a sound treated area in the old freedom. We have some sound treatment over there. We have some sound treatment over there. We do have a hard floor. Maybe that would make the audio quality better. Who knows? But we, uh, for a long time, people would put up that sort of,

it's, uh, egg crate style. I don't know if we have a camera. Maybe the, the reverse PTZ would, would do it. But, uh, that egg crate style, uh, soundproofing works incredibly well. And if you're ever in a professional recording booth as doing voiceover for a film or recording a song, you will do a booth that has a lot of spike. Yeah, it has a spike. Yeah, you can see right here. So this sort of egg crate, it creates a lot of little holes for the, for the sound to get caught

in effectively and, uh, very fun journey. Uh, and, uh, and the problem is that that makes it look like

you are in a sound booth. It's not very aesthetic. It doesn't look like a natural environment. And so there were companies that said, let's get the best of both worlds. Something that's aesthetic, but still sound treating. And so they launched these wood slat walls. Of course, the space in between the wood captures the sound a little bit, acts as a little bit of deadening. And then, of course, you can also hide, um, you can also hide soundproofing material behind

the wood slat wall. And so it was a very logical way to have an elevated aesthetic while still getting the benefits, at least some of the benefits of sound treatment, then Andrew Huberman did it, went mega viral, and everyone sort of copied it over and did the same thing. And, uh, it's become a huge trend. He wound up painting his black, I think. And who knows how he got sick of being. Now, you know, if you're in the black paint industry, that's where the money is.

I guess, everyone with the fake wood panels is going to be painting a black.

We have yet to do this. I've looked at this in the past, but I've never, I don't think we're actually

“done. Anyway. Do you have the right person? I believe so. Are you sure?”

Sorry. We are figuring out who, oh, yes, okay. Got it. Sorry. I'm, uh, I thought I was, uh, yeah, I thought we were jumping ahead to Dairy Tan. I'm sorry. Anyway, without further ado, let's run it back. Oh, the shit. I, I messed up. Oh, the shit. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I got a little mixed up on the schedule, but it's great to have you here with us today. Anyway, please introduce yourself in the company. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm Abhishek,

Abhishek Dost, I'm the co-founder and co- CEO of Yotori. And introduce the company. What are you building? Yeah, so Yotori, we're building web agents, so agents that can take actions and complete tasks on the web. Um, so we think that the future of interacting with the web is going to look quite different than it does today, where we're not, uh, manly navigating web pages, clicking buttons, filling forms, et cetera. We're going to be operating at a slightly higher level of abstraction,

where we have AI agents who we'd like it to that carry on a lot of these tasks in the background on our, on our, on our behalf. And does that mean like virtual machines loading the full web page and clicking on it like a mouse and keyboard interaction or are you interacting with the APIs and reverse engineering? The, the, the, the routes to sort of just build CLIs on the fly,

“like what are the different strategies that are working and not working right now?”

Yeah, so it's, uh, it's everything you mentioned basically. Oh, yeah, we should probably think of it

in layers. Yeah. So there's the core element that's looking at how web pages earlier laid out, um, how to click partners navigate websites to take a task to completion. Uh, then there's the agent harness, which surrounds that LM. Yeah. So but on the web, we have APIs available to make use of like APIs where it where there's no APIs to, uh, use this kind of visual, like linguistic model. Yeah. Uh, and the agent harness takes care of things like persistence. So if it makes a mistake

and it has to backtrack and try something else, there knows how to do that. The agent harness would take a memory orchestration, baking a task down into sub-tests, all of that. Um, and then the third layer is putting all of this together. What does the product experience look like, where, um, it this works for everyone. Exactly. How are you thinking about the divide between, uh, consumer versus business to business,

enterprise, uh, who, uh, how do you see the customer max evolving? Yeah, most of all users are pro zoomers. Um, so individuals who are using it forward work. Um, so like small to medium, uh,

Uh, the model layer that I talked about, we do train our own model in house.

It is, uh, as accurate as opens 4.6 and JPD 5.4. Uh, but it's, but it's due to FIX fostered and much cheaper. Um, so that we make available as an API as well. Sure. So what was the process? What was a process created in the model? Did you take an open source model and, uh, tune it? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um, so most of our focus is on mid training and post training, uh, with a mix of SFD and auto, uh, we started off with an open source screen based model, um, and we collect

our own data both in simulation and actual websites and we came on those. Yeah. So the big labs don't scare you. Uh, talk about, talk about how you see the, the competitive kind of environment

“evolving. This is something that, uh, I think everyone should assume that all the different kind of”

consumer pro-sumer in enterprise products, uh, do, maybe not super well right now, but we'll do how, how do you see the market evolving? Yeah. I think the market version, non-coding, um, not a good visual work. Um, it's massive. Um, there's, there's a lot of work to be done there. It hasn't quite get the kind of infection point that coding agents have. So yeah. There's there's a huge opportunity that, um, the area that we knew be gone and be cared about is dust that happened on the

web. So browser use capability specifically, um, anthropic, open areas, etc. have have models for computers, which is more general focus, um, but for browser use, um, currently ours is the best model that's out there, uh, both for accuracy and latency. How do you think about, uh, like, the, the textbook use cases? I'm sure you get asked about like booking a flight. That's more of like

“agentica on the web, go do something for me. I can also imagine there's a huge value in just, uh,”

you know, monitoring websites, scraping data, putting things together. Uh, we were talking yesterday about how, uh, you know, will we see an explosion of token consumption, uh, among financial professionals like we've seen among, uh, programmers. And, uh, my, my, my, my, my, my bullcase that we will is that, yes, you're just maybe building one financial model. You're not necessarily building a thousand financial models a day, but that one financial model might interact with thousands and

thousands of web pages to collect every possible data point to create aggregated data sets that then can be compressed and compressed down into, you know, a 12 tab Excel sheet that eventually results in, you know, should you buy the stock or not or whatever, whatever the financial analysis

is. Yeah. I mean, so there's, there's a, there's a lot to unpack that. Yeah. Um, the first thing

you mentioned were like logging into a website and booking, uh, update or like ordering food or something. Um, we actually shipped a bunch of, a big upgrade today, and it's basically possible today. You can connect to the favorite websites and apps to our product, which is called Scouts. Yeah. And we can just give it a task, uh, like a bunch of those internally have been using it to automate like a quiz orders in stock orders. We've had people externally tried out as well for LinkedIn,

other websites as well. Uh, but a lot of that is is possible today. And it makes use of the, like our code model, they've interned us every, like all the tech components coming together. Uh, um, now in

“terms of, um, how I see the token consumption and usage of this going forward. Um, I think it's”

to quite already in this face like a lot of non-coding digital wood hasn't quite gotten the kind of attention. Um, that and hit that inflection point yet. Yeah. Um, so the cheaper and more reliable and more accurate it gets. I think we're just going to see an explosion all the usage of of this technology. Yeah. It feels like there's a little bit of capability overhang, like you can do really deep research and you can do deeper research with a coding agent in many ways, but that

workflow and that just, it just hasn't broken through to everyday consumers that they should even think about, you know, asking an LLM or an agent a question like, you know, build my financial profile from every data source all over the place and analyze everything. They come to it with like, you know,

how much should I invest in the stock market? Like, you're like, a basic question that's basically just

web web search. Yeah. So there's, there's two or three aspects here. One is that, um, we actually had someone try this recently on our, on our product, where they gave, gave it access to their email and they had a bunch of expense reports that are coming on their email and they asked the agent to prepare sort of a nice, um, categorization and spreadsheet of all the expenses and they were able to one shot it. Wow. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is that, um, the previous

version of our product, um, was primarily meant for agents that can monitor anything on the web.

today's release, one of the things we released is the capability to, um, build live artifacts.

So now these agents don't only don't just monitor, they can prepare a single sort of spreadsheet on a website or a dashboard, um, that stays updated as new information comes in. So like, if you want to track, um, any time a startup comes out of stealth or like a startup announces a fundraise, you can now use scouts to make a single, maintain a single spreadsheet for it. Yeah. Um, how where's where's the company at when did you start it and what were you doing before this?

Yeah. Um, so we started the company in 2024, um, I'm, I'm the new AI researcher by background. Um, I grew up in India moving to the US in 2016 for my PhD. That was at Georgia Tech. After that, I spent some time at, uh, Fair at Meta as an AI researcher, uh,

uh, there's two other co-founders, all three of us are AI researchers by background. Um,

“with like 15 people, um, we, uh, there's a, we'll be a little, uh, beyond our safe zone. That's what we got.”

Are you compute constrained at all? And massively massively. Well, I mean, what's the plan? Uh, is, is, is the best practice just like hunt around for cheap, GPUs or slide around different services like, or use, use your product to monitor when, when availability. Yeah, online on the new labs. Yeah. New class. Yeah. So we, we definitely do a lot of that. And we are, I think, quite compute efficient, uh, from that, from that point of view.

Uh, but compute is one part of it. The other is data, um, right? Like, sort of a lot of dust on the web. It's not easy to collect and generate data as, let's say, computer use dust, where you can just hire a bunch of annotators, um, to, like, let's just simulate sort of dust on, um, that, um, like, Microsoft Office apps and so on, right? Like on the web, many of these are irreversible actions. Like, you actually buy something. Yeah. Uh, then there's a real cost associated with it.

So it's not as easy to collect data, um, do a mix of, like, simulation and sort of using our product, um, to visit web pages, especially, uh, websites where there's a few clicks and navigation steps in board. So you can't, like, index or troll them, um, in an eight manner. Uh, so are you building our environments for particular websites? Is that programmatic or are they, like, handcrafted,

“like, how many, like, what's the scale? I imagine that you, like, you need to build a lot of these”

for generalization. That's very cumbersome and there's going to be, like, flaws with every single different system that you try and build. Yeah. So we, um, vibe code a bunch of, like, single-rated websites and use that. It generated data and, like, events. Um, that is a good amount of in category, um, generalization that we see, like, for example, if you imagine how Amazon is laid out, how any e-commerce website is laid out? Yeah. There's not that much bad news. The truth, um,

is compared that to, for example, how is it though, or the thing that's laid out? How is it used? We got the unit. It's like, um, yeah. So just being intelligent about like, how we're endorsing data. And then are you, like, stack ranking those, like, is Amazon more valuable than Zillow, because consumers will demand that or pro-sumers will demand that over Zillow or vice versa and how do you evaluate that? I think it's a, it's a mix.

“We do, um, keep a close eye on making sure that makes, um, it looks good and, like, as we want”

it to be. A lot of odd users use it for more work for later things. Sure. Um, as opposed to that in that course of life. So we keep a focus on that. Yeah. Um, yeah. So it's logging into my ERP, my payroll system, pull, pull stuff from all different dashboards. I can imagine us pulling analytics from all the different analytics providers and they all have separate websites, but they all, like, have some similarities in the design philosophy and the best practices

and where what they would color the CTAs are and what, uh, anyway. Yeah. Uh, yeah. This is fascinating. Congrats on the progress. And thank you so much for taking the tag. Great to meet you with us. Thanks for breaking it down. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about a very, really company label box, RL environments, voice robotics, e-values. And expert human data label boxes, the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

And let me also tell you about graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams and get help ship higher quality software faster. And we should have Gary Tan joining us in just a minute, but we can go back to the timeline. We can pull up about this post from Marick Hazan. He says, we just rebuilt every start-up

in YC's latest demo to a batch. Here's what our agentic founders pulled off. What it means for the

future of startups, fully usable products at the bottom of the thread below. He's like, I one-shot it all of your companies. I built everything. What a crazy. I'll tell you this video. Yeah, let's play this video. Rebuild. Every startup in YC's latest demo data.

ideas from the YC demo data. So we ask page. Could our killer agents compete with these

“cracked founders? On demo day, our agents swarmed the YC website. Found every startup in the batch”

and locked in to reverse engineer each build. They reconstructed their own priorities based on public product specs and started to rebuild each application. When they hit snags or needed input, they called in a human to help resolve every problem. Quartz technology that took founders months or even years to create was rebuilt, we branded, and ready to go to market within 24 hours. So what does this mean for YC and the startup ecosystem more broadly? It means AI replication risk

is becoming more and more of a threat to every business. So what makes a startup more or less replicable? This is what we learned. Several obvious protections exist for startups. Building things in the physical world and owning data that others simply can't get to are a few

examples. But there's a third one that caught us off guard, and it's more interesting.

Most people think the best protection in an AI world is human creativity, meaning or ingenuity, the positive parts of humanity. But that's not what we're really seeing. The real protection seems to come from the messy stuff. Industries filled with politics, lack of trust, turf wars and bureaucracy, markets that are painful to work in, due to complex or even failing social dynamics are exactly the ones that are hardest to deploy into, and therefore the most

protected. A company that has learned to pick a park that mess, and embed their solution, it has something few competitors can copy overnight. Difficult markets aren't bad markets. In AI era, they may be the safest ones to spend your rare time is being what's hard. Hard companies are hard. All analysis. Company by companies. This is sort of a cool launch video. It feels like a blog where it comes out as to get a DM of the full video. It has a lot more,

there's a lot more of it. He ratioed himself in the video. He got way more likes in the video than what we have Gary Tann here. We can have his fantastic. If all of these Gary Tann in, does you know what else we got? Gary, how are you doing? You're in great. Is it open for every guy? Is it over or are we back? Everyone's saying we're it's over. We're back. We're back and forth. How are you feeling today? Oh, we're so back. Okay, break it down. How are we back?

Oh my god, how can we not be back? I mean it's fun. What's exciting? We are at the dawn of

being able, like software is totally fun to pull now and then basically the tricky thing now is

like you just got to spend the money on the tokens. That's one of the things that I think people are very, very afraid to spend money on tokens and the things that you can do right now. Like you can literally make open claw. Yeah. And the reason why Pete could do that was he's actually like

“really, really successful previously. Sure. And he could let it rip. Like I think one of the key”

things that people have to understand about like the current moment is you cannot be precious about your like clawed code max account. You have to like really just let it rip. And what about you let it rip. You can create like these things that like set the world on fire actually. What about all the other things? I mean, so why see these interesting because there was a, you know, for a long time it was about technical founders, you know, writing code oftentimes still is, right?

But it was like, okay, your technical, you are, you are, you are going to write code while you're here. But also you're going to talk to users. You're going to figure out a go to market motion. You're going to find a hard problem. You're going to figure out, you know, secrets of how this business works, what makes your mode deep and whatnot? And it feels like is AGI capable of that or are we in like the software? I don't know, it's only people. I mean, like this stuff is, it's like a,

you know, it's like Jiminy cricket, man, but you still got to be, you know, Jiminy crickets got to stand on someone's shoulder and it might as well be yours. Okay. So what? So obviously, if somebody sent you an investor update a YC port code and said, and the only number they shared was how much they spent last month, based on what you're saying, you might be like, okay, you're on the right track. Okay. But, well, that's clearly not a metric, you know, that's, yeah, it's not a metric to optimize

for how, you know, what, what should founders be optimizing for, you know, when they're locked in. Thank you for some people want. Okay. It's crazy. I don't know. I mean, I've been, I feel like I'm at the center of a lot of like weird controversy, like did the guy lose his mind, what's going on. I've been thinking about it and it's like, it's not actually about me. It's about like people's relationship

“with their craft and that has to change. And so, I think my response to the haters is like,”

have fun coding at one ex-speed bros? I don't know. I don't know that the haters are not also

you a concrete example. Please. Like, I noticed yesterday, I had a throwaway comment because I created G-Stack. It's got 60,000 stars now. Like, I'm actually growing faster than open claw by stars and get hub right now. And, you know, I mean, they had their moment and like, I'm, you know, on my way, right, about 30,000 people use G-Stack every single day. I've been getting emails that are pretty awesome, actually. Like, people trying to start consulting firms and they just want to like,

you know, feed their kids and maybe they lost their job. And then they literally are like,

starting this consulting firm, I've never done this before. I like sit down with a client,

you know, I just open office hours with G-Stack. And as they talk, I type in, you know, what, what we're talking about. And then I'm like, live talking to, you know, and they sign a customer on the spot. And like 20 minutes of talking to someone because of the G-Stack, like, open office hour skill. To build custom software for that? Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. And then maybe, you know, the thing is custom software, you know, I was at Palantir when, you know, Stefan Cohen and Shambh

Sunker basically invented the idea of, um, or forward Lloyd engineer, right? So everyone's, that's what you're doing. Everyone can be an FDE. Okay. And the thing is like, if you don't know how to do it, like, this thing is like the training wheels that will teach you. And then, you know, it was the training wheels for me as I was learning how to do it. Like the original prompt I had posted on Twitter right when I was working on Gary's list. Yeah. And like those things, like both both my engineering

prompt to like shake out all the bugs and get to a hundred percent test coverage. That was my plan end to review that is in G-Stack today. And then the other one was a plan CEO review. I call it my Brian Chesky review. Okay. Like it's like having Brian Chesky sit on your shoulder and be like, I mean, that would be a heavy person to sit on your shoulder. But like he's going to ask you or you're moving fast enough. Yeah. It's like, what's the 10 star experience, right? If you

“never seen him talk about the 10 star experience, like, that's what having CEO plan CEO review”

in the G-Stack skill feels like to me. Okay. And I really think that that's awesome. Like I want everyone to have that. And so I was like having a throwaway thought, like, you know, one of the

core things I made was a browser plugin that wraps playwright. And so, you know, the reality is like,

I'm just solving problems for myself. Like I was building Gary's list and I found myself, you know, the plan CEO review worked well, the plan end review worked really, really well. And then I found myself like, you know, I'm using conductor. I have like six or seven windows open at that time. I'm up to 20 right now. And I found myself like running between windows, just doing manual testing. And I'm like, great. Like, I work so hard to like build all these

skills to like get way faster. And then now I'm just a black box QA engineer for the robots. Like, this is so boring. How terrible can I automate it? So I opened another conductor window.

“And I was like, man, why does Claude in, you know, Claude in Chrome, MCP sucks so much?”

I don't know if it sucks now. Like, it's been a month or something. Maybe they fixed all the bugs. But it literally couldn't do it. It's like two or three seconds, five seconds, crazy context bloat. It was unusable. And then I said, okay, like, well, I know playwright exists. Can we

make a CLI that's like a thin shim over what playwright does? And then basically it did it.

And then that was what the first V1 of G stack was. It was those two scripts. And like a playwright browser plugin that like allowed me to not QA anymore. Like, I could just say, okay, now slash QA, like, you know what we did in this branch. We have all these plan files like go line by line and act like my QA engineer. And it did it. And like the first time I used it, it was like 100 milliseconds. It was doing it. It could log in. It could like click on things. It like took screenshots of things

that were broken. And then it would fix them immediately. And I was like, oh my god. This is how to do it. Like, this is how you build a software factory. It's like, I automate each of this steps. Like, I built so many pieces of software over the years. And I've helped so many people do that. And it's like, this is the process. And so now there are 30 of these skills.

“And then, you know, now you still, like, I think we're still in manual mode. Like, I built an auto plan”

so that now, like, all of these different pieces. Like, there's a recommendation in each of them. And like, if you really want to be in the weeds and understand what's happening, you can just like read the recommendation. You can talk with it. You can be like, well, I like option A, but like option B sounds better for X, Y, and Z reason. Like, let's talk about it, right? So yeah, it's interesting because like, I'm arriving at similar things to what I think like Devon or other automated

software factories are doing. But I'm doing it in the open open source MIT license. Like anyone,

And I have like 200 PRs. I have to look at right now. You know, you know, it's amazing.

Got M.D. It will take care of it. What was the, what was the, is Gary's list more of just an experiment to put this to work? Because I mean, it's, I mean, it's because in some ways, like, you didn't have to build Gary's list. Yeah. Good of use, like, uh, substax or, like, or, or fork something that's already open source. But building it from scratch, like, are there clear benefits where you're like, I'm really happy or was it more like, oh, yeah, I mean, I'm having right now that you can't, you know,

if you use package software, you can't do is, um, all the emails come from me directly, like, the front line is for me. Okay. And when you reply to it, so I don't send, you know how, like, you sign up for New York Times or something like that. You get a inbox, like a daily digest, a same digest that you, everyone gets, you get a personal one. Oh, okay. You know, you do have to

“apply to get into Gary's list. Okay. And you have to, like, sort of tell me what you're into. And”

but, you know, all the emails come from me directly. And I don't write them. The AI writes them. Yeah. I do read them. And you're so everything that, and, you know, when you reply, it's going to my own inbox. Wow. And AI is helping me read it. Yeah. And it's like going into the personalization system, I built, so that we can send you things that are more relevant to you. But, like, in some sort of weird per-social way, like Gary's list is my experiment in, like, communication outscale, personalize,

like, I can be your personal assistant on, like, hey, I'm mad about politics or like, my kids getting, you know, can't get a good education in school, what should I do? Yeah. And, like, obviously, I have a chat and it's like, you know, state of the art, like, Opus 4.6, thinking, like, all that stuff, like, you know, it has data sources, you know, there have been users on there that have gone online

who are, like, just engineers, like, living in Pleasanton. Like, there's this one guy who never got involved

in politics before. And he's setting sending letters to all of his representatives, based on the policy things that are like screwed up in his life, like his kid, you know, his kid's school is messed up. Like, there's all that, you know, and, you know, he's having, you know, a hundred conversations a month with our agent about, like, this, you know, and then he emails me about it. I'm like, oh, cool.

“Well, I like this, and maybe you should send this email, just, you know, such and such person.”

And so, I don't know, this is, I think all of these are just fun experiments, but I'm learning a lot, you know, it isn't, you know, I am trolling on people about the lines of code thing. But I will say that there's a grain of truth here where I am not about lines of code. I don't work for anyone, like, really, you know, I work for the institution of YC as the steward of it. But aside from that, like, I'm not here to, like, max lines of code to, like, you know, for, to good heart loss, something, you know,

what I've learned is that, like, the machines don't aren't good heart lying, like, lines of code either. So that means that if you are a hundred percent of your code is written by, you know, the machines, and you are earnestly trying to solve the problems of your users and yourself, like, I am with G-Stack in the open. Like, you can look at it and I'm doing 36,000 lines of code a day and not a single one of them is, like, for me to be able to say that. It's actually, like,

I'm just having the time in my life building software. Like, we're about to launch something really awesome at YC. Oh, I was going to ask. Can you ask the story of bookface and then where you think software development will go at YC? Yeah, I mean, bookface, we have 20 engineers at YC and, you know, one of the funny things we found out was, like, actually, a lot of people seem to have access to bookface. Bookface is an internal social network used by, um, with about 16, 17,000 people

who are YC alums now, who have access, about 40 percent of them use it every single day. And, uh, I've started to realize, actually, anyone who has a, and of someone who works who, uh, went through YC, you know, with, yeah, like, people basically share their logic. So, I mean,

which is cool, actually, like, the reality is we should probably open it up. Like, we probably

should have a, like, if you're a builder, I don't think I want absolutely anyone. Like, I want,

“like, techno-optimists people who are psyched about making the future and like, I think bookface”

should be open to people, you know, that might be one of the things we work on this year, you know? Yeah, there's so much interesting, uh, like wisdom and stories in there. Some of the stuff is maybe private and people don't want it to be screenshot-in-shared, but uh, but there's definitely a process to open it up. How, uh, how are YC founders in the latest batch is adapting to the change of pace of software development? There was a guy yesterday who made the claim that he

rebuilt the whole batch with, with digital, very good relationship. Yeah. And, uh, and of course,

Yeah, he got some attention. I love, shout out to Tim Draper, you know, big respect man, like you, you know, you got to do what you got to do. I love it. Yeah, but in a world where a YC founder might have in a previous era been very proud of the system that they built, the code that they wrote, even if they're not tracking lines of code, they're said, look, this piece of software did not exist. I spent three months grinding with my co-founders. We built a piece of software that

solves that problem. And now that's, you know, five minutes of work, where will the modes come

from in the future YC companies? I mean, basically, the future, like, what's funny is basically

all the people who already did that, like, you got to speed up. Like, it's time to let it rip guys. Like, software is to, uh, we treat software like it is so precious. And in the new world that we're going to, it is going to be much more fungible, but that's the good news. Like, that's where taste and agency and trust matter a lot. Uh, this is something that only crystallizes recently. Like, we've been talking about agency and taste for the longest time. Agency is being able to prompt,

and taste is being able to do e-vails, right? Uh, and then the third part that, um, I only started

“thinking about, I think there's a tweet I reposted today that, like, said it really, really well,”

that, like, trust is the third thing. And so, you know, that, I mean, that's probably the thing that's

the most important. Like, when you have an enterprise company that is selling to real businesses

and they're relying on you, like, that's your remote. Your remote is actually trust. Like, they went to the effort to try you, to get you onboarded and to incorporate you into how, you know, you, they work. And then, you know, I think that either you can hold onto that, and that's a real remote, and you can build something over the long haul. Like, someone gets promoted, or someone avoids being fired, because you exist, um, and they're never going to switch, and they trust you.

Like, that's like, even more important than those other things. And so, you know, yeah, like, what is the story about? It's not about, like, is someone going to try, like, if someone came along to you, like, this, you know, this impressive, like, uh, Draper company, like, troll on YC companies is a good case study in that, right? Um, like, I, I'm impressed by the volume of software,

“and they clearly build a software factory. Um, but, you know, maybe you should open source it. Like,”

that would be cool. Um, aside from that, it's like, our people going to trust things that are, like, trolls. Like, I don't know. I mean, I hate to bring up, you know, uh, if, let me, let me, let me

state plainly, like, I actually really respect Roy. He's always been really cool to me on the internet,

and I feel like I've been unfair to him, uh, you know, I think that, clearly legit is, like, I thought we were talking about it at YC partner lunch today. It's like, oh, yeah, like, the guy actually has real revenue and the idea is good. Like, not, you know, the troll marketing part, like, yeah, which drums with, like, talked about that a lot. Yeah, the interesting thing with, with the product from the beginning, I think some of the criticism was, okay, if this product works, like,

there's going to be some big companies that roll it out. And so that's, like, there's other question, right? And that's the trusting, again, right? It's like, there are things that you can get you here, but they're not going to get you there, right? So you sleep is sleep overrated in,

“in the sleep overrated in this moment. Is it, is it a waste of time? Are you a dad?”

I know, sleep is great. I'm starting, like, last night around, I don't know, to 130 AM. I was like, getting foggy. And I probably could have kept going, but I'm like, let's go to sleep, man. Like, I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to dream about a bunch of the things that I want to do. And I'm going to wake up and I get to wake up and go to my computer and go to conductor and cloud code. And, you know, let's see what the workers

are up to. I love it. I love it. I have two two questions. One, what was your stack like back when you designed the Palantir logo? What was the, was that a tasteful exercise? Was that, like, what went into designing the Palantir logo? Yeah. I mean, basically, what's funny is, yeah, that was such a weird formative year. Like, I was paint the picture. Like, we're in pageinal road in Palo Alto, like the iconic downtown Palo Alto office. We were a year away from

even moving into, this was like across from where I think Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto is now on page no. We only were 12, maybe 10 or 12 engineers at that point. And I was working on the hiring site for Palantir, you know, Palantir Tech.net or something. I think we didn't have the dot com yet. And the original logo was created by my high school buddy, Stefan Cohen, who's still a Palantir and billionaire many times over. And, you know, basically, I was like, how do I get engineers

and they thought it was like a biotech company or something. And then we just basically,

I took maybe, I don't know, a week. It wasn't more than a week of, like, working on it, but we made, like, a thousand different versions of it. Which is really funny because, like, that was pretty g-stack. Yeah. Yeah. Now in g-stack, you can go slash design dash shotgun. And you can say join me 100 of these things. And then it'll pop a window. It'll use code. How do you think, do you think AI is changing design? Do you think there's still room for taste in this world? Do you

think that all the same rules apply or is it somehow different? Oh, no. I mean, the machines

“don't have a point of view. Like, they'll give you lots of options. And, you know, I think if you”

don't have taste and you're using these tools, you'll make something that's like marginally better. Yeah. But it'll still just be like, you know, marginally better than average. Whereas, I think it's clear that, like, you know, I mean, there are tools like variant UI that's like YC company that we fund is just like awesome. Like, you just go in and it's like, that's the real version of design shotgun. Like, you know, you can, you will have design tools that have taste.

And if you use those, you will have, you will have a leg up. But I don't know. I guess it just goes back to the agency part again. It's like, you know, one of the principles I built into G-Stack recently that has served me really well is before you start coding or before you start making

technical plans at the engineering level. I tell it always search the web. It's like, figure out what,

you know, you want to, someone else has figured it out. Like, there's something open source, there's something that's out there. Go all the way to the edge and then, you know, basically, don't, don't try and reinvent the wheel. Right. Interesting.

“Yeah, I mean, I think there's a world where it re-implements Gary's list in Jack Oller,”

something. Who knows, really? I mean, we'll see. Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's using a lot of open source software. Obviously, he didn't write his own programming language, he just probably didn't write it's own database. It's using off the shelf tooling there. But the core app, I mean, I guess, with the right flexibility and the tools that you wanted and the features that you wanted,

like, it makes sense to it. We're almost, it's not build versus buy anymore. It's like,

it's like, fork versus inference or something. Yeah, there's like a new framework. I mean, increasingly, you don't even fork. Like, I mean, you know, it's funny. Like, all of these things are very strange. We're in bizarre land right now. Like, we're in mid-transition and like, all of the transitions are not in distribution yet. Which means, like, if you try to make a product right now and you ask it to estimate how long the agent is going to take to make it, it says human

“terms. So it'll be like, it'll take a human a month to do this. And then you have to ask it explicitly.”

Well, how long are you going to take? And it's like, well, I'll probably take like 15 to 20 minutes. And it's like, literally across the board, like, I am coding 90. Like, my output in terms of, like, real products, not just lines of code, is like 90 x that of what I did when I was in 2013. I made post haven that year. I made bookface that year. And it's, you know, I was at CEO conference last week at JP Morgan 100. And I was talking with a bunch of like, former tech. They, you know,

very technical CEOs who, like, now are full manager mode. And like, I was like, good news, man. It's time to come back. Time to, you know, your Peter Parker right now, time to put on the spider man suit because this is the time. And I was blown their mind. And I'm like, they're like, oh, no, like, I shouldn't do this. It's not worth my time. And it's like, dude, it is worth your time. Like, you can still be the manager during the day. But by night, you can be spider manner Batman. Like,

you can don the suit and the juice. Yeah, pull out the G stack. And you, you know, and my pitched to them was like, look, I am 90 times. I am 90 of myself. Yeah. Like, that's, I'm a really good in building time. Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. And you, you can have 90 of yourself working on things like tonight. Yeah. And be the CEO. Right. It's fantastic. Well, you want a ton of people over in the chat. They were skeptical. And they're, and they're very fired up. So thank you so much

for coming on and crawling the haters. You Gary, keep building, keep shipping those lines of code. And we want to talk to you soon. Have a good one. Good bye. Let me tell you about plaid, plaid powers. The app to use suspense, they borrowed invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And we are running over time. But let's bring in our next guest brand. From core weave is in the recent waiting room. Sorry for keeping you

so long. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on TVPN. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on today. Of course. And

going on. But I know that there's some big announcements more recently. Yeah. Absolutely. My name is

“Brandon McD. I'm one of the co-founders of core weave. I'm the Chief Development Officer. So I lead all things”

die equity, M&A, ventures for business. This is where all the money's raised within the organization. Yeah. And this new, this new project, this new vehicle. How are you positioning it? How are you explaining to people who are familiar with core weave as a stock that they can buy and they understand that you might use debt to finance the purchase of a facility, their familiar with the mortgage. How are you introducing this product? Yeah. So that this product is one that we brought in the

market about three years ago. Okay. And it was with our first facility, DDTL1. And what we've

introduced today is the continuation of just continuing to build upon and execute within that original product. We're effectively taking this GPU infrastructure along with revenue associated with the GPU and these long-term take-ropay contracts put them together and then take them out into the debt market and finance them. And I would say it's a financing strategy that has occurred across many different sectors, right? Like this is how LNG facilities or power plants get finance.

Like you have the infrastructure in one hand. You have these long-term contracts in the other hand and put them together, married them, and you can stand up very scalable financing mechanisms around what's really important about the one that we announced yesterday, this is our largest transaction

at 8.5 billion. Wow. And it's our first transaction. Yeah, being done. Thank you.

Yeah, it's awesome. It's a big moment. Huge number. Not so, but you know, sometimes like forget the number is over. And it was done at an investment grade costs in capital. So this was done at so per plus two 25 for approximately 5.9% cost capital, which is incredibly important to us given the capital intensive nature of our business. And what, what gave the market, what gave the rating agency or you, the confidence to put this in the investment grade bucket, how are you,

“how are you providing the data in the back and the backbone of that strength?”

Yeah, to your point, this all comes down to market validation. Yeah. The clear signal out there is pricing and confidence grows as cost capital comes down. Right? It doesn't really work the the other way. So being able to drive down cost capital here just shows the amount of demand there is for the core. We've credit product in the market. How much of this is, how important was sort of beating the depreciation gate allegations to put it sort of silly. But a lot of people

were wondering like, oh, those, those H 100's, they're not going to, they're not going to age well. And what we've seen is that there's a lot of data points out there that seems like ageing older, fine wine. They're aging like fine wine from what we've seen. But take me through your,

do you always know that that was going to play out the way? Was there any unexpected surprise

to the upside? And then how important has it been to have more data about how these GPUs monetize over a longer length of time? The depreciation subject has always been very interesting to us. We've been very consistent six years as the appreciable life of this infrastructure. And I would say if anything, we're expecting for the infrastructure to have useful life beyond six. I mean, you see that today and like late 2010's skews that are available in market on clouds.

Like they're, they're not running that infrastructure unprofitably, right? And it means that there's client demand for it. But as we look towards like ampere in hopper generations,

“you know, I think in our last earnings, we've noted that our pricing on ampere went up during”

2025 and our pricing on hopper's stayed within 10% or so where we started the year. Why is that happening? I think it's largely driven by inference, right? And ultimately this concept, that not every workload only needs the latest greatest piece of compute, right? Which were incredibly well known for running. But you know, there are different types of workloads that need different types of infrastructure. And the market is simply efficiently pairing the right compute

with the workload that they need. So we see incredibly robust demand all the way back to the ampere generation, which I believe is six years old at this point from its original skew launch gate. And we're really not seeing any deterioration of these older skew demand profiles while also seeing accelerating demand for latest generation infrastructure as well. I think everyone's heard the stories of electricians being flown around in private jets and kind of the chaos of actually,

you know, building out data centers over the last two years. Any funny stories from the core,

building out these clouds? Yeah, let's take a lot of private planes to fly all those lectures

around me. We're talking hundreds to thousands of engineers on these sites. And you know,

“I think that's it's a great point you raised because I believe it's an under-appreciated aspect”

of what is being done here in the true scale of the engineering effort out there market. Like you truly just have to go see one of these sites, right? They're massive, massive engineering feats that are being executed on within incredibly intense supply chains all the while moving in a extremely high velocity technology sector. It really boils down to rich risk management,

which is the DNA of our management team. It feels like in terms of inference demand,

we've seen a number of sort of exponential jumps when we went from LLMs to reasoning models, the number of tokens generated to answer a question, increased exponentially, saw something similar with agents, coding agents. Are you guiding or expecting for just a smooth trend to continue? Are you thinking that this is more discontinuous? Is there some sort of next next generation that you're already looking forward to in terms of increased inference demand?

It's it's really hard to predict where the technology goes since the technology itself is meant

“to be so disruptive. Yes. I think what's super important for us is our client base. And our clients”

represent the the organization that are at the front lines of pushing this technology as far as it can

go and we're consistently supporting them and it gives us this really interesting information flow understanding where they're going in their organization so that we can be orienting ours to be moving within and locked up. What do people misunderstand most about Corey for it now? You know, I would say there's three real pillars to our success. It is having the best product in the market for running this infrastructure. Our product is purpose built for AI and supports today

the leading AI organizations on the planet. You have to have the right physical infrastructure capacity, the ability to navigate this supply chain, right? And that is not something anyone can just stand up and do. It's incredibly challenging and detailed, but today we have over 43 data centers in active operation that that's a key component of how we've been able to pull down our cost of capital so aggressively is just simply through execution. And that final piece is financing.

You can have pieces one and two, but if you can't raise the capital needed to to bring that infrastructure online, it's sort of meaningless. And so we've spent an immense amount of time focused on the credit market and driving an ability to navigate it effectively and scalably while driving down our cost of capital and thus why this instrument that we announced yesterday is so incredibly important to us and most of us with blueprint for future transactions.

Are you in a rough agreement with the broad consensus that I'm feeling in the AI industry around a chip bottleneck being more of a gaining factor in scaling AI progress over the next four years than power constraints? You know, I would qualify it as cloud-connected infrastructure incredibly important. So it's really marrying power with checks getting them online delivered to clients that that bottleneck within there is delivering power shell capacity, at least within our

business. So we can bring online more capacity to our clients as we have more power shell within the market so we're consistently scouring the market for incremental capacity to be able to market to our consumers. How have the sort of mom and pop data centers done over the last two years? I'm talking about people maybe like 18 months ago that we're realizing, hey, this AI thing's going to be pretty big. We can find some power here, let's throw up a shell, let's get some

“GPUs and try to bring it online. How have they faired? Because I think there was a lot of,”

there's obviously so much demand but a lot of there were a lot of question mark clouds or like micronios. Yeah, it's just somebody saying like, hey, we can get some power here, let's jump on this. How have they faired it? I imagine some of them end up being kind of rolled in to a platform like Core Weaver, the other Neo clouds or the end up, but how have they faired?

I think our product looks a lot different than the other offerings that are available out there.

Yeah, and these people were like, oh, it's like real estate. You just like put up a box, there's GPUs in it, and I would say like no one, none of the leading Neo clouds are saying like, oh, it's just like real estate. You just like throw up a box. So there's that disconnect there. I would agree with that. There is a chasm of execution between signing a contract to deliver infrastructure and actually bringing it online and making it

revenue generating. And that's where the Core Weaver product sits. Yeah. Well, it's fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming in breaking down for us. Yeah, great to meet you soon. Congratulations on the deal. We'll talk to you soon. That was a long goodbye. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.01 Pro with a more cable with baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing

data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life. Tyler, do you know how to count cards in poker? In poker? Do you know how to count cards? No. You have exactly one day to learn because

“you have to go to Sam Blonds, Monaco, Invitational, you have to bring home the 100,000 cash prize.”

You gotta win. There's it's no buy-in poker tournament. Founders from all kind of cards a thing in poker? That's for Blackjack. No, am I? You're going to learn how to apply counting cards from Blackjack to poker. You're going to invest new, you late to use card counting technology. I think it, I think it does work. And oh, maybe you're writing Blackjack. Maybe it doesn't work in poker. I think it does work in poker. Anyway, you're going to learn,

you're going to cheat and you're going to win. That's the plan. You're going to cheat, you're going to win. You're going to win. You're going to get thrown out of Monaco. You're going to get thrown out of San Francisco. Sam Blond will be putting hands on you. But for a good time put out an article that says the Artemis Moonbase project is legally dubious. Okay. Pain says, oh no, someone called the moon police. Oh, well, we have our next guest in the

“re-stream waiting room. Let me tell you about Monaco DB first, Mongo, DB. Let's the only thing”

faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB. Don't just go that own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we have Sam from core zone. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking care. Hey, guys. How are you doing? All right. Great. Great set up here. Great set up. Great set up. Great, great background. That's great. Thank you. Nailed it across the board. The only, well, let you introduce like you guys. Huh? Well,

why? I don't know. Markets up. Why? I don't know. So we're all in. Why? Where are you? We're happy. How are you doing? Please introduce yourself and the group. Fun. Hi. I'm Sam Yagin, co-founder of course on Capitol. Yeah. I've posted my life as a founder, spark notes. Okay, Q-pid. It's involved with Tinder, Grindr. So, you know, hopefully got you through school. And hopefully got you some dates. And now, uh, investing in the future of full-stands.

Consumer AI. Do you want to focus on the dating market with this fund? Do you think that there's opportunities for new platforms in AI? Yeah, I mean, the the biggest question I have for you is are you surprised that we're, you know, a few years into the AI boom. And when you look at the top 25 chart in the app store, it's still like pretty much just LLMs and incumbent, you know, consumer

“products. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's going to change. I think the entire consumer stack is going”

to get rebuilt, uh, that I think the incumbents, uh, most of the consumer incumbents are at risk. Yeah. I do think dating is a pretty protected category because you need liquidity.

It's a big, the big apps are always the big apps. Yeah. But I think for almost everything else,

I think the way we messaged each other, I think the way we connect with each other, I think the way we find jobs, the way we find friends. I think all that's going to change and it's going to be AI power. Well, at the same time, we, so on a relative basis, isn't there maybe counter-intuitively more opportunity, if you're building a consumer AI? If you go into something that needs liquidity pool like the dating market and you can maybe use AI or just come up with a unique wedge,

get over the cold start problem, get some liquidity on the platform and then maybe your better position because you can't be fast followed by a copycat that's just like cloning all your features because they won't have liquidity, but you do. If you can get past the cold start problem, that's right. But I actually think in, in the case of dating, I think the incumbents are much better positioned to leverage AI. But I think there are lots of other places where

and I'm surprised so many VCs are running from consumer right now, but I think AI is going to change

transformed the way consumers interact with technology in a way that has never happened since the

dawn of the internet itself. Yeah, so we're talking about some opportunity? Yeah, what I mean, I wanted to ask like, what are you actually looking for in an early stage consumer founder? Because it's very rare, you know, your case you've had like multiple big hits. It's hard enough

doesn't matter if I'm investing, you know, pre-products or after they've gotten two million

users that usually end up with zeroes. So it's an absolutely brutal game. Well, welcome to the drug capital. Well, and I would just say like, you know, the handful of zeroes that I've had, like, you know, concentrated consumer. Yeah. I do think consumer tends to be much more variable than B2B businesses. You tend to either find product market fit and find a way to scale or you don't. It's very hard to end up, I think, in the middle range in consumer businesses,

which I think is why it's so attractive as a venture capital investment. If you can get them right,

“you get them really right. And that's what we're looking for. You ask them about founders.”

I think AI founders are no different from your previous types of founders. In the early stage, we're really looking for founders who understand the process of finding product market fit. That's all that matters in the early stage. And I actually think AI can be a little bit deceptive that way because you can get the first few users to adopt because people are so curious right now. But I don't think that means you've necessarily found product market fit that's scalable

in the way that it easily much harder to get that first million users. And I think it's a little

easier to do that now. Totally. Yeah, the just and just this year, I've seen the exciting kind of one aspect of why now is I think exciting to make a consumer fund is you're just seeing like that you know 1,000 x the number of apps. I'm talking to a family friend later today that's like, you know, built to built their own app right. They're very excited about it. They want to get my feedback and I just think there's so many people that were kind of gated by not having

access to engineering talent or didn't know how to code themselves and now they're building apps.

“So I think like the bar the bar is going to go up pretty dramatically. I wanted to ask like,”

do you think there is room for like taking like the capital intensity of deep tech and bringing it to consumer and I'm specifically asking because of like TikTok, TikTok spent how many billions of dollars on customer acquisition. They had a product with product market fit. They did some interesting things around kind of juicing engagement from at least my point of view. But then they also spent like hundreds of millions of or billions of dollars on acquiring users. Is that something

that you think you'll see in the fund in some kind of breakout companies? Yeah, I think that's a great and very nuanced point that you make, which is our AI company is going to be more effective at acquiring customers or not. And I think AI hasn't really, you know, your example earlier about an AI-based dating app, you just kind of assumed you'd get over the cool start problem, but you're really excited how you're going to do that. And so I don't think, I don't think

other than there's a little bit more word of mouth early on because people are so curious about any new AI app. I don't think any, you know, they've really figured out how to leverage AI differently to scale these apps. And so I do think you're point about bringing some of the capital and tentivity. Do you think that will all be reduced, but I don't know if it's going to be reduced on the marketing side specifically for sure on the engineering side. Okay, so yeah, does that change

anything about the investment strategy when I hear 100 million fund? I have some conception of the

type of checks at various stages that you might write, but do you think there will be anything about running a $100 million fund in 2026 that will be different? If I just look at the size of checks

“and the places that you're occupying versus, you know, five, ten years ago. Yeah, I think people”

are going to have to spend a lot less of that early capital building the infrastructure. Yeah, getting the code written. I mean, when I started spark notes, we had to go lease servers and plug them in and, you know, pull off the facilities back in the 1900s. Right, now you just, you know, you're going to be able to get your app into the app store so much cheaper. And the real, the real separation among founders is going to be, can you really figure out product market fit? It's not going to be

about writing the code. It's not going to be about doing the marketing. It's about can you actually build a product that consumers love? And that's really what we know how to underwrite here at Corazon and what I've done throughout my career. Yeah, consumers love and has positive unit economics, because we're seeing this whole other dynamic right now where there's products that people love, but if they were actually charging as much, you know, I'm thinking like image, image,

and video, gen products where, you know, if you actually price it the way you would need to be building a business, you know, with the demand still be there. And if you think about, you know, when the internet started, the beauty was that everything became free to publish. And so you had all, you know, the, the, the, the first business model that came out was like spark notes just think Cliffs notes and make it free. And tons and tons of companies did that. And now you actually

have Marshall Cost associated with, you know, the tokens and the, and the, the idea you're using. And so now all of a sudden, for the first time, you have cost a good sold in a consumer tech business,

thinking about so much is what the end-unit economics are. But I don't worry about that early stage. I worry about let's make a, let's make a product people love and let's figure out the business model later. What have you learned about pivoting? Hmm. That all the best founders have to pivot multiple times. It's, you know, it's very rare that you hit the product on the, on the head, you know,

“with a very first time you do it. And I think that's why any memorable, any memorable”

pivots, you know, across your founder journey? Uh, yeah, I mean, we, you know, the original idea for spark notes was a humor site that was very much like the onion. Probably probably older than you, yeah, it was called the spark.com. No, it. In fact, the corporate name for spark notes was the spark.com. It was a humor site. Um, and then we kind of realized that that was it. We met a website for

human jokes. I love the onion. And I love spark notes. Yeah, so we basically tried to knock off the onion.

First, uh, we realized that was a really crappy business to be in. And then, uh, we pivoted to do study guides. And that ended up being the business. How did you think this is a, uh, question, I'm not sure to be aggressive because I, I loved spark notes and helped me through the high school. But how do you think about like the moral implications of potentially like helping you cheat? Because we just went through this like moral reckoning and Silicon Valley last year around

clearly this company that was like very, very, very, you know, in the marketing like cheat on everything, very aggressive about that. I don't remember spark notes ever marketing to me is like cheat. It was very much like supplemental, additional. Sometimes, you know, I'd read the spark notes chapter instead of the full chapter. If I was rented by either late on sleep or wanted to hang out with some friends. But how do you process like the trade offer, like the impact of that business? That's such a funny

“question. Uh, here's the thing, people who want to cheat are going to cheat. Yeah. And so what we focus”

on is let's make the best product, but with for the people who want to get A's because they're doing the work. Yeah. And if you're going to cheat, you might as well actually learn something in the process. And so we, we didn't give you the paper that you could turn in. We gave you the best path to learn the material. And honestly, you know, if you didn't regrow me on Jill, Julie, but read the spark note, you probably understood the book. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's actually better

rather than, and I think Cliff's just never really did that. Cliff's just always about just

trying to get you through. Sure. And we really tried to make sure that you learned what you were doing. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever think about like deliberately how you position it in the marketing because you clearly had that philosophy, but you couldn't have had the choice to like paint via a flyer college campus with like, yeah. And like maybe that would draw people's attention. Did you ever think about like clickbaiting, ragebaiting, any of that?

No, no. In fact, our, our approach is the opposite, which is try to actually get the teachers to recommend us as the preferred study guide. So there were a bunch of teachers who would write us and say, hey, I've told my students, you can't choose Cliff's notes, but you can use spark notes. Interesting. And then now all of a sudden you've got the teachers endorsing you because you've

made the better product. Yeah. And so what seems like a cheating product gets repositioned as a

“study aid. And that's what we wanted to. Yeah. And now teachers will look for more or more questions.”

There are more questions in every business. Of course. How do you think about investing in anything kind of education, focus, when it feels like LLMs are just naturally quite good at that. But still there's possibilities to build furnishing harnesses and stuff the application layer. No, no. I actually think, I think AI is going to transform the way we learn for sure. Yeah. There's a company where invested in called Brilliant, which is an AI, an native AI tutor.

And in the 1900s you had a graphic calculator. You know, that was your like, you know, to get through high school. And I think the next generation of kids, you're going to have your personalized AI tutor that's going to get you through school. And we're funding that in our fund. Yeah. Yeah. It's very funny. I completely agree with your intuition that like, oh, AI is already solved education. But then you look at like, on-the-art path, he is building something in that space.

Which is just like a fascinating. He has the most insight and is worked at open AI and Tesla. Like, I wonder if there's actually an AI hardware device specifically for learning because like, think about the chat like if a kid is sitting there and they're like trying to use their phone to learn. But I could ask it about any. But then you're getting a push notification from your friends, right? You know, there's potentially some of these AI hardware devices that have flopped because they were trying to

replace the phone or maybe replacing it in the wrong context and you should be thinking like, what is the next TI4 that ever student has? That's actually learning what's cool. Cool. That's cool. Congratulations with the fund, right? Is we want to ring the gong for you? It would be an honor. Oh. Yeah. That's a great stuff. Well, hopefully get many of your founders on, yes, in the coming weeks. That'd be great. And we'll talk to you soon. Great to have you guys. Have a good rest of your day.

Talk to you later. Deep into the fourth hour. Deep into the fourth hour. We got a one hour countdown. We're we're coming up on one hour, one minute, 14 seconds until the launch.

the investment memo. This is the victory lap of all victory labs for a venture capitalist,

“writing $600,000 into a piece of paper on a piece of paper. And there's some handwritten notes”

on here. It said, we'll be tough to do this deal. Small amount, miniscule high price second position,

CMS wants to guarantee it's a very interesting document. Proposed financing structure, 600k to A and 60k to AG, friends and company, 480 to one venture investor,

“invite to use Ben Rocks Julien, Julien, Wiser says 600k buys 10% very rich deal.”

I'm used to buying 60% for basically. It's actually crazy, crazy lore.

Well, if you need something to do, it's not out yet, but maybe tomorrow if you need some kill some time, Donald has made a documentary about a bunch of friends of the show. We'll

“depue and Riley Walls and the creators of the J-Mail Suite. It's an attempt to capture what it”

feels like to be a young person in San Francisco right now. He's dropping that tomorrow so you can go

check it out. We have one last video to play for you today. Let's pull this up for the action team. What you got is in the chat for you. We also need to send profanity warning. Oh, preferably someone I was swearing on CNN. Let's get the audio on. Okay. Cover your ears. Without it. Sorry for the profanity, but that is a fantastic moment and we're very excited. Forward. The launch, which is happening in just one hour, so you can head over to NASA's

livestream, YouTube, Twitch, probably other places, and check it out. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Center for Newsletter, tbpand.com, and we will see you tomorrow at the level. Yeah, I can't wait. Let's take a. Goodbye.