Is Something Big Happening?, Tai Lopez Charged in $122M Fraud, U.S. Adds 130K Jobs | Harley Finkelstein, Vlad Tenev, Matt Shumer, Jeff Lawson, Sam Blond, John Ferrara

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Today is Wednesday, February 11, 2026. We are live from the TV.

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It's good to be back.

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The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening. His viral essay, 45 million views, completely broke containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back. Vlad from Robinhood's coming on. Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson, Sam Blond, who I worked with at Founders Fund, is launching a new company, Monaco Legend. And John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo day. And so we've only talked to him in person and he's come into the ultra dome again, so we will see him in person at. Is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like Covid. I have trouble with that analogy in particular. So back In February of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote. The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts. Everything is about exponentials. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that just made people much more aware that if Covid got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases. And that of course, held for most of COVID but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before, there are very few true exponentials in the real world because of course, things cap out, they turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they plateau. Now, will AI plateau? There's been a series of plateaus. There's been a series of S curves that's the story of technology really. As you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment, you see a number of S curves. You see the, the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the Internet and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have sort of, if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau. But then we get the next thing. And so the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while. But you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8 billion people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported, Covid cases. But you just can't 100x from there. Like it's impossible. There's not 100 billion people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. And of course there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if a bunch of people have had Covid, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things.

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There's a great just jumping in chat. We are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging.

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So back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Kardashev type 2, like full Dyson sphere, capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI that we have, the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly. And that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky. And so I like the framing of it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI. But it doesn't feel exactly like Covid because Covid affected people, older people, people who were not online reading Balaji Sreenivasan's post about COVID studying the exponentials, modeling the R naughts. So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them, like, hey, you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's gonna get rough out there. And people did, and it happened extremely fast. And a lot of people when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses. Something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models, knowledge cutoffs like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the Internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, the coding model is as remarkable as they are. They'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaS apocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI, others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden an agent can just do it for you and you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry. Even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go renegotiate your contract. But when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about some of my real world friends. I'm friends with a surgeon. Yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I would not recommend him Vibe coding his own payment system and his own customer relationship management system. Yeah, compliance. But even outside of that, that's just a headache. He should just maybe go to a startup that's cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So if he's actually getting squeezed and it's hurting his margin, then yeah, he should go and find a better tool, find a faster tool, find a newer tool. But like the humanoid robot that can operate on a patient in a surgical context and has the trust of the patient, like, it's coming, but it's a ways away. And he's up to speed on surgical tools and how surgery robots are developing, that's not going to happen this month.

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So compare him to Matt Schumer, the guy who wrote this. And Matt has been building what appears to be, we can talk to him about it, but, like, the thinnest possible wrapper over models and other models. Right. It is, according to the definition, your AI personal assistant, writing and productivity tools.

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Yeah.

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Again, like, this is. I don't know. I can see him using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and thinking, what am I doing with my life?

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Well, if he used the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65,000 likes.

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Like, on the AI on the website, it's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations, which you can just get the models to do today. When he started this, I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so his business has been getting steamrolled by the labs, and a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of.

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Yeah. Sam Altman famously said, don't build a startup that assumes the models will plateau in capability.

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Yeah.

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And then he built Sora, and if you. And that was a little bit of a violation for that, but sort of in line with what he was doing. But at the same time. Yeah. If you were just building a wrapper and saying, I'm gonna do better citations, that was always messaged as like, hey, you're gonna have a rough time.

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Yeah.

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And so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just yesterday, Rune posted something, it was like, whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company, for some reason, hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption, I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved, it's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed, to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible, because that's clearly where the future role is going. But in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I sit them down, like, I have a friend who's a teacher and I say, hell, coding agents are here. You need to understand that this is gonna change everything. This is gonna be like Covid. It's like, well, for the teacher, like, Covid was important because they could go there, they could get sick, and then they could not work, and they could, you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like, you might go to. You might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with the humanoid robots because it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet. And so if the software gets better, then I'm talking about, like, grade school. Like, it's mostly, like, distracted kids. They'll be distracted by, like, better AI slot feeds, basically. But the actual process of, like, you want your kid to go be with other kids and have a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Yes, it will change over the next decade. I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that surgeons change or.

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Sorry, I gotta jump in, everyone. I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Godel Terminal says, tax loss. Harvesting my audio right now. Is this the. Someone else said, is this the Sea Dance, Clang, Sora version of tvpn? I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it, and Trey says, already sold all my devices. Anyways, thank you for bearing with us, boy.

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Plunger says we're back. So are we back? Let us know.

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Whoa. The chat's saying we're back.

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Chad says we're back. Hopefully AGI ASI is saying, we're in the fast takeoff, but we can't get reliable.

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Wait, cut to John's screen for a second. I want to test something. We're so back.

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It still works. At least the. At least the graphics package works.

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Ryan serves as tvpn. Terrible buffering. Personal nightmare.

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We're getting cooked. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

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All right. Thank you for bearing with us back. Thank you back. We'll talk.

11:52

Well, yeah, we will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just. I. You know. Yeah. I just don't think it's bullish on AI. I do think, like, there's the software, only Singularity. Super real. The Singularity, broadly. I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines, but it's just, like, I don't know that February is the year, is the month. February 2026 is the month where, like, everyone is changed, whether you're, like, a car mechanic or, like, I have a friend who Operates a bunch of gas stations. Like, one of the things he had to do was, like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like, there's a crazy video of him, like, jumping over the counter. And, like, it's just like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're still in this slow takeoff, in my opinion. It is remarkable, and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say, hey, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up here. Vibe code your wedding website. What do you want to do? There's a whole bunch of different things that you can do, and you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But for most people, it won't be like Covid, where 100% of people were, like, somehow affected by it. You know, whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed, the coffee shop I like is closed, or I'm afraid to go outside.

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The question I have is, like, even. Even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake.

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Yeah.

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And. And even when people kind of, like, started that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it, it didn't mean all the jobs went away. Some jobs have gone away. But again, headcounts at even a lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable. We had a good jobs report, surprisingly.

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Yeah. Economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of review.

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But yeah, the question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain?

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Yeah. And how fast overall?

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Like, I didn't. I was joking. I responded to the article and I said, tldr freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around. I thought Jeffrey said, it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay implies. So really going hard. But again, it felt like something like, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever. Like kind of like high school.

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Yeah, it was a little bit of like a throwback to the permanent. Your class, Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?

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Yeah, I think my main critique is like, I think with COVID it's like very destructive. Right. Maybe you lose your job, but at the very least you might get sick. Everything is bad with AI. It's like this article is like, yeah, people are going to lose their jobs. That's kind of what the gist. You should be aware that your job might get automated. But AI is fundamentally a productive tool.

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Right.

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So I imagine we're not. It's not gonna cause a recession and yeah, like GDP is not gonna go down, it's gonna go up.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally.

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Yep.

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Like now it's like, I mean there's probably like hundreds of people on X their entire job. Like their salary is just posting like basically fake AI news. And they get paid by. It's not even like sponsored deals. It's like they're just getting paid by X directly. Like that's like completely fake job. Yeah, but like that's going to go up.

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There's going to be more of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields. Correct. Isn't that the. I mean that was the original Sam Altman formulation. Was like if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the Internet. It's like it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business doing ads for Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Should we keep touring the takes? The various takes on this article stay.

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Sassy says I'm exhausted by the omg this changes everything. AI posts this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly non trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it, vendors tokens acquisition and I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty overly online online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news than just be poor. Tell me when the Singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into X. Then logging off apparently stays as he works at the nasdaq.

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Apparently. You see Robert Scoble. I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple weeks. And Stacey Assassin says you're building ambient.

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Nelson says, okay, but this one really changes anything. Everything. Please. I promise. Please.

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Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in. Says feels like an anon congest tweet. Just vibe coded databricks with a Screenshot in the SaaS market.

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We'll follow 5% cephalopod. Yeah, I mean if your job is building a wraparound chatgpt like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Firing shots.

17:58

What did Joe Eisenthal have to say?

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Joe with a funny post. He says seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like, AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like, maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else does.

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Such good bait.

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Incredible bait.

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Master incredible solid bait.

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Show if anyone falls for this, you really deserve it.

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Yes, software engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says, how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do? That's so good. That's funny.

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Buco Capital quoted it and said, a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock for the hype you read online. It's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify valuations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis.

18:48

I was thinking more about Claude with ads. The Vibe coded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler and said, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the Claude app interface. Same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff. Coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but it would be harder. And it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like we could have paid a dev shop 10k to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all, Right?

19:10

Disagree.

20:03

Okay, what do you think? How would it play out?

20:04

I was doing kind of drops, stunts like that. Before coding agents were a thing and you could just work hard and do that, just grind. Dylan and I, you know, we did, we did one back in the day with party round called helpful VCs. This was during kind of. This was I think like May or June of 2021. So it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started. But cryptopunks were popular and we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs and we just put them on a website and said if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're gonna auction off your NFT had like 400 VCs, reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with ads where we just had the idea, we worked on it for a few days, shipped it and that was it. So this kind of thing was.

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How long was it? A couple days.

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It was definitely no more than five business days.

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We got this done in like one.

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Day, Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping.

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Yeah, like obviously like I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're like incredible. But it's still like I was spent like most like almost all my Saturday like building out.

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Yeah.

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It's not like it's like they're accelerating.

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You took one for the team, you sacrifice your weekend.

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Like these tools are like employee of the month. Employee the month. Get it Still, I still deserve it. You know, they're not so incredible that like it can't like literally one shot it in five minutes. You can't just tell Claude code build exact replica.

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Yeah.

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And it's. It can't actually like do that yet.

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Yeah. Without you it would not have happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different friend's birthday party and stuff and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like I.

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Just like comparing it to the example of the helpful new. Yeah. To comparing it to the helpful VCs. Drop like we had to create original artwork for 400 VCs.

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Yeah.

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That you would have. Actually that would have been much easier with Genai.

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Totally.

22:14

So that was a factor too. But you're talking about. Anyway.

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Yeah. I'm just wondering. There's the Jevons paradox. We go back to Jevons paradox here. Is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter and then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus something that we would have done anyway and it's more just like a cost savings thing. I don't know. It goes back and forth, forth. But people are. People are debating and people are enjoying the. The AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you got to listen. AGI is here. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal. Bro. Bro, listen. The only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription. Bro.

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I swear.

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Hardly. Make a commission. Please, bro, buy it.

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That was a funny thing. He. What was the.

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What is the call to action? I actually missed that part. It's like buy a subscription to OpenAI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like genius.

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No, he just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT.

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Yeah, I mean, anyone who's saying that this is like spawncon for the AI labs. That's ridiculous. That's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. It's just. How nuanced is it? So, yeah, start. You start using AI. Seriously, it's not just a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Cloud or ChatGPT. Like you don't. You don't post that if you're for economic gain. So I don't know. Anyway, graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Delicious tacos. Favorite account says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long winded articles on how scared they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder. This didn't trigger my this is AI writ slop, you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this or should we move on to a different story? Because There's a lot going on in the news today.

23:24

We can move on.

24:28

Okay, I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor. Retail rival Retail revival vow burned investors. The Wall Street Journal has a. Has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack Pier one turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the American. The American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get Rich quick advice and self help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like, not that scammy, like kind of a funny, cool thing. I mean, the books were like very like.

24:29

He was automating book buying.

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Basically.

25:23

A lot of people are popping onto Amazon to buy books they don't read. Yeah, he's like, why don't I, why don't we just set this up on a subscription? Save you the time.

25:23

Yeah, he had this whole, he had this whole thing about knowledge and how like the original pitch for Here in my Garage was like, look at all my supercars. That grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around a bunch of airport nonfiction. And it was like, you know, a bunch of these, like books behind him. And he was like, this book wall is important than anything. Where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is. The Wall Street Journal. So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads. When he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. Very broad. Didn't need to be super hyper targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap. Radio shack, Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell Sporting Goods and linens and things with a promise to turn them into e commerce winners that Was always a.

25:30

Weird, weird, weird crazy pitch.

26:57

It was a crazy pitch and it's.

27:01

Crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Yeah, Radio Shack. All right, I know that one. Pier 1 Imports. I know that one. Dress Barn. Do not know that one. Modell Sporting Goods. Do not know that one. Linens and things. Do not know that one.

27:03

At least linens and things. I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier 1 sells. Pier 1 imports.

27:18

And it's crazy because almost every single item that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and Walmart.com@ extremely thin margins.

27:26

Yeah, I mean it's really like a referendum on aggregation theory. And, and if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting.

27:37

Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch.

27:46

What was that one?

27:49

Customer database leading retailer brand.

27:50

That was sort of it. Yeah, we had one unified E Commerce front end, but little late to be going after. I mean there were some successful come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion. That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called, but Walmart made an acquisition of an E commerce infrastructure provider that did have an E Commerce front end, but it never reached escape velocity. But it was like the perfect plug in. Add on to Walmart's infrastructure and now Walmart's a trillion dollar company. I think might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% return. Always odd to pitch a promised return.

27:54

But I think, yeah, and this is called first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea like buying old retailers and trying to revive them is not illegal, but general solicitation. Yes, very, very no, no.

28:44

And we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered and the gap between.

29:00

And you see some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on X that they're amazing. But I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing this.

29:05

Totally, totally, really quickly. Phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. So he invested, Sean Murphy invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, E Commerce Ventures, Rev and related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors. You know, we talk about these big funding rounds and we're like, oh, like how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the layer SPVs and all the bringing retail into the private markets, but like, he really did it. Like the power. You know, a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't, don't have a ton of respect for him in the business community, but he really does have a serious audience of people that have money that they need to invest. So one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret. So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier 1 gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors.

29:17

Second mistake, second mistake.

30:34

These guys lied. He said they conspired. They led people on. Poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. The payments stopped abruptly in late 2022, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors.

30:36

So he had the 230 million of equity and then he also.

30:50

Yeah, and so the creditors got, you know, control of, of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners, accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors, and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened. According to people familiar. No charges have been filed yet, so innocent until proven guilty here. But the Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to requests for comment. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So on his podcast the Tai Lopez show, and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X Never Doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological. Was he talking to himself there? I don't know.

30:55

Yeah, I guess. Staying in character. I just can't believe how much the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible. An 82 year old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands. Yeah, you can imagine somebody like this goes offline for 10 years and then just like logs onto the Internet and is like, wait, this guy has Radio Shack Tier one imports linens and goods.

31:51

Yeah, linens and things.

32:24

Linens. Linens and things. I mean this seems like a winner. So yeah, quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. I mean I feel like it's under discussed how Tai Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to aspire to build like a personal brand.

32:26

Sure.

32:49

And he, Tai Lopez's greatest contribution I would say is not very great is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a, it's kind of like a virus because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel, they realize like, hey, this guy's actually making money with courses. I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle.

32:49

Yeah. Anyways, there's so many layers. The course that teaches you e commerce or drop shipping and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on e commerce. And we need to do the final boss. The course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell E commerce or something like that. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com so in podcast, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California. Well, his father was in prison for selling cocaine. After high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina, he said when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed an insurance company where he cold called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google Ads which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company. And later at a financial services company, he found it. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled here in my garage. In the first.

33:32

So crazy that that was 2015. In my head this was like 2005.

34:45

Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube.

34:49

I know.

34:56

I don't know. Yeah, it Is retro. In the first, Lopez, wearing a crew neck shirt, glasses, and a scruffy beard, stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge. That was the famous line, Knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought. That video spawned a slew of parodies around the same time. Wait, around the same time. 2015, Tai Lopez launches 67 steps. Six seven steps. He did this in 2015. He created the six seven meme, apparently. This is crazy. He's seven steps, an online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life. By focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness, Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. 67 steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this how, you know, 19 details you missed in the super bowl halftime show. Like the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's like, feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, $0.99, that's different than a dollar, right?

34:57

I was gonna say so in that video, when he pans to the bookshelf, one of the books is called 1001 books. So really he has 3001 books.

36:19

There we go. There we go. Books inside of books. Layered, I guess.

36:26

Hormozi took this to the next level where his new info product is. He's selling tens of thousands of books at the same time.

36:30

I believe there was a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of was that you could buy a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times bestseller. I believe he didn't. He set a world record for most books sold or something like that. Wild. All sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small, he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In one 2015 video, billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house. The two shot hoops and talked life lessons for those who want to be an entrepreneur. What's the best advice? Lopez asked. Find something you love to do, be great at it, and sell it. Cuban responded honestly. Good advice, icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that, from very high, should.

36:38

Have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a page. He's like, this is such good advice. I can't just. I gotta charge.

37:32

Well, that's the.

37:40

Yeah, that's behind the table.

37:41

A lot of the courses, it is just like it's already been distilled into a 60 second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that 60 seconds repeated 25 times. Right. It's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree.

37:42

Did you ever buy a course?

37:56

Yes.

37:57

That. That actually changed your life?

37:58

Yes, yes, yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini. On Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. If you've watched Game of Thrones and you see horses galloping.

38:00

What was the course title? Was it like how to Get Rich Quick with Houdini?

38:13

No, it was like, it was like. It was like, you know, like using Houdini in advanced VFX pipelines.

38:16

So you weren't deep. You didn't just. The course creator was not driving a Lamborghini.

38:24

No, no. The course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that. That's really cool. And I want to learn that tool. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation, cinema, 4D, after effects, like any, like, skit, even you see me like edit something. You know, all of that is. I did, I did needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff, but none of them were.

38:28

You paid to learn how to fish?

38:59

Yeah.

39:00

Now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime.

39:01

Exactly. Because, I mean, courses are good if it's a narrow skill.

39:02

Yeah, Yeah. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19. And even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split, just learn from any Arnold video. Any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it and it was well worth the money. Even though the information was like, there's something about if you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it.

39:06

Yeah.

39:39

And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all, all information products are bad. No, I completely agree.

39:40

P90X. That was the workout course. That was. That was Going viral when I was in college.

39:49

The ones I do. The ones I do think are. The ones I do think are, like really, really, really bad are when they advertise, like trading courses to, like, young, younger audiences.

39:54

Yeah.

40:06

Because it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account. Yeah, I'm sorry. Like, you're not, you're not gonna change. You're not gonna change your life. You should learn anything else.

40:07

And the crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course which would be like, like buy ETFs, right. Like, like there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade. Right. And it would be basically like, don't trade. Like buy and hold. Right. Dollar cost average in.

40:16

Yeah.

40:32

Invest a little bit.

40:32

Every investment firm.

40:33

Yeah. Or go pro and go work at Jane street or Citadel. If you have the job turn at.

40:34

A wealth management firm.

40:39

Sure. The flip side is like, a lot of the courses, they weren't even. They weren't even teaching you how to. Okay, well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies. Like that would be maybe a little financial advice, but totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like, like forex courses. So you were trading, but it was like essentially on top of a random number generator. Like, it's like the most complex. Like understanding the trade flows for, for proper forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend. Like, that is a life's work. As opposed to just being like, oh, well, like I'm a kid, I'm. I'm using Uber all the time. Maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like, that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing, in my opinion, than, okay, well, the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern, so it's got to go up. Like, yeah, chartology or something. What's that called? Anyway, vibe co. Where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta.

40:41

Lopez teamed up with Alex Maier, mechanical engineer who had co founded an online dating app that sold for 255 million. Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami based Retail E Commerce Ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and Mare was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer, according to the SEC complaint, she previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started. The spokesperson for Maris that he believed in Rev's business models, put over 5 million of his own money into the company and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit with a so called severe post pandemic macroeconomic headwinds. Birkenroad is represented by Blah blah blah. Rev's first notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid 5 million for the E Commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn?

41:45

Crickets. Where's the crickets? Where's the crickets?

42:46

That's a good one. Team Crickets. Crickets. Sound effects. We got to add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree. In July 2020, it purchased home furnishing retailer Pier 1 Imports out of BankruptC for about 31 million, followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains, sporting goods retailer Models Models for 3.6 million. Has anyone heard of Modals?

42:49

Yes, yes, no, no, oh no.

43:13

And discounter Steinmart? Has anyone heard of Steinmart for 6 million? And we got another no. I feel like this is hack. We got people from all over the country, so I think this is is somewhat representative of the average American. And of course Radio Shack undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for.

43:18

I have no idea. Okay, there's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Mayer. I had to hunt it down. I'm sorry, I was distracted. First, I'm going to tell everyone about Label Box, reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. Tell me so Alex Mayer is controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this potentially disastrous deal. Jessica Livingston, founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Stories of Startups Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews. It's basically a whole bunch of podcast type interviews combined. So 37signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal. The interviews in here are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr. Max Levchin at PayPal. This founders at Work template, if you see it, has this like we should pull it up. But it's like this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it. And then in orange, Founders at Work. And then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's Coders at Work about software engineers and there's venture capitalists at Work. And Venture Capitalists at Work is a different book, not written by Jessica Livingston. But Alex Mayer is in it because he founded Zoosk, which was a dating site and it's just like a funny, like fun fact that he's in this like, like book that is sort of tangentially, like extremely legit. Anyway, we can move on. Sorry.

43:37

During weekly zoom calls for investors, Lopez and mayor pitched new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier Rev deals. According to former employees, at his self help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in Rev Brands. Joseph Bertau, a 44 year old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertau recalled the message. Give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off and we can't get them fast enough. He invested about $350,000.

45:09

So much money. I don't know. I mean, maybe people are.

45:40

At the same time, when I, when I look back at like my first angel investments, which grant would. I was like 22.

45:43

Yeah.

45:49

I would, I, I thought that I was seeing good enough opportunities.

45:50

Sure.

45:55

That I would happily invest half of my like liquid network.

45:56

You were gonna say 10%, which, I.

46:02

Mean, it wasn't that much at the time. I was like building my first company. I was like very young. I was down to take a lot of risk.

46:04

Yeah.

46:11

I was like, hey, yeah, but it's.

46:11

Gotta be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement.

46:13

Yeah, but, but part of it is like when you start seeing, yeah. When you start seeing private deals for.

46:15

The first time, it feels special.

46:21

It feels special. You look at the chart.

46:23

Yeah.

46:25

And you know, and in hindsight, I'm like most of the worst. Like, there's certainly some people that have come on the show. Justin Mares is a good example. Like, you look at the first like three. Oh, yeah, Justin did. And they were all like, at least two were unicorns. Like, he's, he's insane. But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were like, probably in the first five.

46:26

Yeah. People just don't realize how many companies are out there, how many private companies are out there. Like, you see this one deal, you talk to this one founder and you're like, this is everything. And some of the early angel investments that I made that didn't go well were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting category. And what I just didn't realize was that there was like, they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead and there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead. And Sequoia had already backed this one, but they hadn't announced and then Andreessa had backed that one. And so I was in the one that didn't have any of the backing and was just going to be third in the category which was just going to create this like power law difference. And if you don't have full coverage, you don't even know that those deals are happening. And so you wind up. But even if you get the idea correct and the team is good, you can still wind up in a really rough.

46:48

And the other thing Here is In one Pier 1 pitch deck, investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested 1 million, which again is 20% return, which is insane. If somebody tells you they're any sort.

47:44

Of guaranteed return is usually a huge red flag, huge risk.

48:02

Anyways, before we move on, let me.

48:06

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, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

48:07

Anyways, I think we can move on. This story is still unfolding. It is very sad and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible. Getting into the jobs report.

48:16

Jobs report big beat 130,000 jobs. Economists expected 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate. Bloomberg has a live blog here breaking it all down. There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July and revisions trimmed the US 2025 payroll gain to 181,000 from Bloomberg.

48:34

It's interesting, I think everyone there were kind of delays with the report. Right. Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal. And now I think the reaction is can we trust the data? Right.

49:00

Yeah.

49:15

There's just been so much kind of like FUD thrown around the data and the job market in general that it's hard to believe your own eyes.

49:15

I was debating with a friend about, he was sending me some economic data and he was saying AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and that's where the real economy. There's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets. That's very forward looking. You're valuing things based on 2050 cash flow and being like, yeah, I'll pay for that right now. Because this Company's gonna be around. You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for 100 years.

49:24

Right?

50:02

And then there's like the. On the ground, like, do people have jobs or not? And the question of, like, do people have jobs or not? Is much more in the health care and services sector. And so Bloomberg has been breaking it down. US Payrolls rose in January by the most in a year, more than a year. And the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continued to stabilize at the start of 2026. And now there's going to be some debate over, you know, how real is this? Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show, and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of, a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs, usually they're pulling back on spending.

50:03

Discretionary spending revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, we announce these big numbers and then we kind of move on and then revise them.

50:43

This is pretty big, though. You'd be surprised if this flipped negative. Maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much. But it still seems like, like there is job growth. Broadly, this seems at least directionally correct. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3%, according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year, which showed market slowdown in hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000amonth last year, down from the initially reported 49,000 pace.

51:02

Just a bit off.

51:37

The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring, while economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 2026, more clarity around the impact of President Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve's official inclination to keep interest rates on hold now. Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting tension right between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these, like, two things, like, if you're pushing for, hey, let's count every possible job that could potentially fit in this category that, well, then it's going to be harder to make the case that you should cut rates in leaving rates unchanged last month Chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026, this is welcome news, said Heather Long, chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union. I think Fed Chair Powell was right. The labor market appears to be stabilizing. So Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday, said that the US should have the lowest interest rates globally, adding to previous calls for rate reductions. Great job numbers, far greater than expected, he wrote in all caps. With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarks payrolls to a more accurate but slightly less timely series called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. That data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most U.S. jobs. That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March than initially reported. The figure roughly aligned with that of the BLA overall.

51:40

I think the team that had to revise last year, down by almost a million, now coming out and saying everything's great and we crushed it. It doesn't give you. I don't have any comp. A smart person might think, okay, a year from now we're going to figure out that none of this was real.

53:26

Maybe. Yeah. I mean the market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S&P 500 is up 0.1%. The NASDAQ's completely flat, I guess technically up 0.01%.

53:48

Comments on Joe's post says and you take these numbers at face value question mark Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers. Lol. Almost every single person responding just like.

54:02

Anyways, oh well, what did Kalshee have to say?

54:17

Jobs number this is for February.

54:20

This is for February.

54:22

Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60k.

54:23

The current forecast is 68,000 and it jumped in the last couple days.

54:27

Well, you know what is real?

54:36

What?

54:37

Bytedance C dance 2.0. The model's very good according to Ethan Mollock. I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about Sea Dance yesterday and how he's thinking about competition from bytedance. But we can. Next time let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which if you ask me is worth the 2 trillion of capex.

54:38

Is photo real? In the world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations.

55:05

This is the incredible story of the pilot otter.

55:11

That's cute. I like that. 12 seconds longer than most. 8 seconds. And someone in the replies shared a Grok version of this, that. It just has a little bit more. I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit more blurry. Maybe this video. I don't know if you can see it up close, but it is close. But it's not real. This is grok.

55:15

Okay.

55:41

The audio is also much worse. I think I watched this.

55:42

Yeah.

55:44

In the skies above Alaska, a river.

55:45

Otter pilots its plane.

55:47

Yeah.

55:48

Its paws expertly handle the control.

55:48

Yeah. You instantly clock the audio.

55:50

Yeah. You don't. On Sea Dance. It sounds. It sounds for sure.

55:52

Real ottermaxing. Lucas is firing shots at actors.

55:56

Okay.

56:00

But we can pull this up.

56:01

Let's see.

56:03

Let's get some audio.

56:05

You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal.

56:07

He was good, man.

56:12

He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die.

56:14

And now you die, too.

56:18

Insane. Insane audio. But. But the. The video. The video. Look, I mean, I can't. You. You. You've watched a handful of movies.

56:20

I have.

56:29

More than me. Does this look like it could be in a film?

56:30

It's close. It's pretty close.

56:34

What are you missing?

56:36

I mean, just the length of the shot. It's not fully, like, modern in the sense of the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either, like, way more cuts and just way more, like, detail shots, like, cutting in and out, or they'll try and turn it into more of, like, a cinematic set piece and have, like, a drone shot or sweeping shot. Like, it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of, like, the most modern movies.

56:40

But if you were sitting there prompting and splicing it together from different angles, for sure, you could.

57:12

For sure. What do you think?

57:19

Yeah, I think I do wonder if there's, like, an interesting comparison to the kind of cloudbot stuff where, like, I think one of my main takeaways from the cloudbot thing was that it's going to be hard for big labs to kind of of replicate that just because of, like, you can't get the WhatsApp integration. Like, stuff like this, where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly, like, training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Like, the otter flying. Like, that's David Attenborough's voice. Like, you're not supposed to be able to do that.

57:20

Yeah, yeah.

57:48

Where, like, can Sora can OpenAI release Sora with that exact voice? Like, probably not. Like, maybe they can try to do it, but they're clearly going to face some Legal repercussions where China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those.

57:49

Yeah, A lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like, look, yes, like, we know you can prompt Disney characters. We are happy to pull that out. But also can you want to talk to our business development team? Yeah.

58:04

Like with OpenAI, you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where very quickly China is not like. I'm pretty sure that you can go and see dance.

58:29

Yeah, see dance.

58:37

And just prompt like Mickey Mouse, you know, doing a little dance or whatever.

58:37

Yeah. Let's look at this other Sea Dance 2.0 post. Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster. Epic action film scene, different cuts.

58:40

There you go. John, you wanted good. All you had to do was ask.

58:51

This is pretty real. I like that. Will Smith is just the benchmark forever.

58:54

And I have the old Will Smith spaghetti ready to go after this.

59:00

Okay.

59:05

All right. So this is February 2026.

59:06

Yeah, this is.

59:10

Let's go back in time.

59:11

That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini no longer. Yeah, this is good. This is very good.

59:12

All right, pull up this next one we got going back to 2023. We can see the progress China can.

59:20

One shot AI crime.

59:27

Wow.

59:29

This is the progression. Or was this.

59:33

I remember. I remember to post this exact same thing and be like, this is going to change everything.

59:34

And it did.

59:40

And they were right. Yeah, they were right, but it's still funny.

59:41

And now it's just him sitting there enjoying spaghetti, I suppose. Yeah. Wow, that looks cinematic. This is good for Will Smith, right? Like he'll license his likeness and it's just more attention. I mean, this is like Jake Paul's strategy. He really wanted to be all over sora. Got a billion impressions or something. Something like that.

59:43

Daniel in the chat says China can one shot AI crime.

1:00:10

Who do you think launches the next turn of the video model? Do you think we get VO4, Sora 3 or the next meta model first? And while you're thinking about it, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. What do you think, Tyler?

1:00:14

I'm hoping it's meta. I really want to see their model. I'm expecting it to be super, super good.

1:00:38

I think it'll be this quality. It has to be. This is like the standard. You can't launch something that's behind the frontier.

1:00:43

Yeah. Also with Sora content.

1:00:49

No shortage of content for sure.

1:00:51

Yeah.

1:00:53

I'm curious what they'll do with Sora, if they'll actually keep working on the app or if they're just going to kind of try to just keep making the model better. And then, yeah, they put it in the app. But it's not as big of a push this time.

1:00:53

I don't know. Well, yeah.

1:01:05

Another news. Which one we got to talk about Mistral's cooking. They're cooking and they're investing 1.4 billion to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden.

1:01:10

Wow.

1:01:21

Let's head over to Bloomberg. French AI startup Mistral is investing US$1.4 billion to build AI infrastructure in Sweden as it pushes to become the Go to AI solution supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I can not pronounce. Borlange. Borlange, in partnership with Echo Data center ab, Mistral said in a statement. The facility will will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models and is scheduled to be operational from 2027, so at least a year out. This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France, and the company is billing the build out as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty. As political ties with Washington fray, governments in the region are increasingly wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, which dominate infrastructure, data storage and cloud computing. Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack with data processed and stored locally. This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI, says Arthur Mensch.

1:01:22

Yeah, their last round was led by ASML, $1.3 billion from the Dutch chip maker. That's a good deal.

1:02:35

They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that Macron should be highlighting.

1:02:43

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess it's old news to launch a new project and you can't just fully focus on.

1:02:48

And they're announcing in the Financial Times that their revenue is now similar to Grok. Mr. Auld's revenue soars over 400 million.

1:02:55

Interesting. That's pretty high. 400 million as Europe seeks AI independence. Well, they've certainly carved out a nice niche. Let's go over to the GROK team and grok and the Xai departures. First, I'll tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.AI.

1:03:04

In the chat says Jordi discusses dissing Macron caused domino effect, Mistral investment.

1:03:28

You manifested it.

1:03:34

I did it. I inspired them to grind harder. No, of course, I was one of many who was having a little bit of fun last Friday. So Jimmy Baugh said bye bye yesterday. He said last day at xai. And Tanish says, with Jimmy Boss departure, half of the XAI founding team has left. A lot of people have been trying to figure out why is this happening?

1:03:35

Yes.

1:04:03

And my current belief is that, and this is based on some news that last week XAI executives were given the option take cash as part of the SpaceX merger. Take cash today and you can just move on, or you can take equity in SpaceX and stay with us for the next leg. And so I think a lot of the executives, which are just the founding team, some of the co founders are just saying like, hey, I'm going to go work on something else. And so we saw some other posts. Some of these people are teaming up to work on something new together. I'm sure some of them will just join other labs. But yeah, the big question is like, what is, is xai's strategy going to change at all with the merger or is it going to be more of the same? I keep kind of wondering, you know, will they get into, you know, actually get into the Neo cloud business? I could see it, I could see it happening, but for now, I think this is maybe like, people want it to be more dramatic than it actually is, I think.

1:04:04

But yeah, it is. I mean, when the SpaceX merger happened with Xai, a lot of people were like, you got pre IPO shares in SpaceX, you should ride it out and then sell post post ipo, because the stock will probably pop, et cetera. And yeah, this feels like a quick exodus of people, which is aggressive. And it feels like, sure, you're behind the frontier on a few different vectors, but it is a place where you're sort of GPU rich, very intense environment though. So if you want something that's a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more research oriented, you know, having the CEO say, we're not doing research, we're doing engineering, that's not exactly a rallying cry. If you're like, but I want to do research, I don't want to do engineering.

1:05:08

But I'm a researcher, sir.

1:05:59

But I'm a researcher. You're an engineer, you're an engineer now. And so yeah, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all of the departures from xai?

1:06:00

Yeah, I mean it probably just seems like more evidence that X is going to be some sort of like GPU reseller or neocloud market. Like maybe it's like, okay. Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put like so much terawatts of compute in space. It's like, okay, if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just so scaling pilled that you don't actually need to do that much research. You can just build up massive data center and then you just use the same paradigm of models. You just train the biggest model. It's 10x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best models. You don't actually need the insane moonshot research projects. Maybe there's something like that going on. Yeah, a lot of the researchers, they said they're leaving.

1:06:10

That's all folks.

1:06:56

They said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recursive self improvement learning.

1:06:59

Yeah.

1:07:04

There's a whole research cycle.

1:07:04

It's like a very moonshot research project.

1:07:06

That feels something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting.

1:07:09

Yeah. But if xai's whole path is now just we're going to scale up the data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things.

1:07:12

Okay.

1:07:18

Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane.

1:07:18

Yeah. What was the original Elon Musk prediction about xai's progress around solving something fundamental in physics or one of those major math challenges?

1:07:21

Yeah, I think he said that at the Grok 4 launch.

1:07:34

Yeah. Was that navier strokes?

1:07:36

Yeah, it was something like that. It's going to develop some novel physics there.

1:07:39

The most impressive product that I've seen from XAI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla comedy. It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people.

1:07:42

To a lot of people.

1:07:52

And I've been seeing posts this week that have like 200,000 likes, meaning that it's incredibly mainstream. On Instagram and testing out the product, it's like very quick, very low latency. It says it feels like pretty much as close to talking to somebody like in a Google Hangout or Zoom as you can get. And so I think maybe their voice mode is underrated.

1:07:53

I think so. I have a friend who has a Tesla with a long commute.

1:08:17

The question is, is there value beyond comedy? Not saying there Needs to be right now. But if GROK can actually get good at doing things for you gentically, and you're driving in your Tesla and you can say, hey, book me a haircut for next week and I can do that, or hey, I need to get some groceries. Can you order some groceries to the house? And you're actually just getting that kind of like ambient assistant experience, I think that they could get some traction there. They do have an insane amount of cars on the road. That's a big user base.

1:08:20

Yeah. I have a friend who has a Tesla with long commute and he talks to Grok. Voice mode. Not the crazy mode, just the normal mode about putting together to do lists, planning out the day, researching things, answering questions, getting up to speed while he's commuting. I've done that a few times where I've just opened up not the voice mode specifically, but the record my voice and transcribe it and I'll sort of talk about what's on the agenda for today and then try and put it into just a sort of annotated note.

1:08:50

Format that I can work from. Elon, what's that? He shared XAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as xai, the structure must evolve, just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people, and we wish them well in future endeavors, we are hiring aggressively. Join xai. If the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you, that's funny.

1:09:20

Yeah, but like. Yeah, but mass drivers is like not an AI thing. Right? So it's very clear that like, if you want to work on these crazy like moonshot AI, like this weird machine learning concept, like maybe it's not actually that aligned with XAI anymore.

1:09:47

Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, it's like what type of moonshot do you want to work on? ASI that lives in a data center or the infrastructure that will power humanoids? And the mass driver on the moon that's making endless satellites that, you know, build the Dyson sphere. It's like, it's a different direction, maybe even longer term moonshot, but it is different.

1:10:01

Yeah, I mean, they still have like the macro hard project, which is like. Still, I'm. I'm very excited to see what comes out of that.

1:10:23

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, do they, do they have a CLI tool yet for Grok?

1:10:29

I want to say there's Groq code.

1:10:34

Okay. Yeah.

1:10:36

Anyways, Xai posted a 45 minute all hands outlining their accomplishments and a Bunch of other stuff. So today we will watch that right now in silence.

1:10:39

Yes.

1:10:50

No, we're not going to watch it.

1:10:51

We'll tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

1:10:52

So let's see. A lot of people, like a number of researchers, have just been doom posting on the timeline. Hugh Pham says, today I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do? And it's when, not if? So this is somebody who's actively at OpenAI and so it's significant, but it's also great marketing for investing in OpenAI.

1:11:01

I think people are more skeptical when it comes from the CEOs who are actually out on the fundraising trail than from staff engineers who have less of an incentive.

1:11:35

I don't know. Yeah, but this post has been up for 19 hours and it has 384,000 views. So you can assure you can and I would say OpenAI Comms has seen this post and has not asked them to take it down.

1:11:44

Yeah, well, they probably genuinely feel that way. The question is just like, how real is it and how diffuse will this be and how fast will it be? Is it February of 2020 or is it, I don't know, some other time? 1995. There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already had the muted. But the formula is as such, Trunk fan laid it out. Find a viral post. AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10 plus quotes in quick in a row and hope a few hit between between 10:30 and 8 and 10pm yesterday. Cranked out 13 of them. 10,000 words total, all AI slop every day. Unreal. And the and so Trung spot. Checked them with Pangram and you'd see that it's fully AI generated. But apparently he blocked Pangram Labs. I was laughing because there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes and some of them will just sit there with like one, like two likes, no likes. And so it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn. Something like almost 200,000 followers on X. It's working, but there's no real audience because if you post something that's just. That only gets one like it feels like there's no real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering how this monetizes. Is this a real business? Where is this going? But certainly frustrating some people at the trough.

1:11:56

Ackman makes $2 billion bet on Meta Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in Meta, making up 10% of its portfolio, or about 2 billion. The firm sees Meta as a top beneficiary of AI boosting ads, content and future products like wearables and digital assistants. I saw somebody had wired up, I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up Openclaw with their Meta headset.

1:13:47

Okay, which one?

1:14:10

VR, AR or AR1. But effectively saying like hey, buy this product and it would go to Amazon and buy the product.

1:14:12

Wow.

1:14:21

And that is the vision we've been talking about is the opportunity Zuck wants you to be able to just be in the world shopping.

1:14:21

Yep. And for a lot of people that don't want to wire up an open source project, he will slowly do all the biz dev deals to drive traffic. Although Meta has tried to get into commerce so many times and we can talk to Harley about this as well, there's been a lot of back and forth about should you be able to just click and check out directly on Meta properties. It's never fully developed and you have to imagine that they have all the biz dev horsepower in the world to try and go and do that. But for some reason that has continued to live in the domain of brands in Amazon, on Shopify sites, et cetera. Quickly, Vanta Automate Compliance and Security Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And Scott Wu is sharing some news from Cognition. Your PR should fix themselves with Autofix. Devin now closes the loop on its own prs. If Devin Review or GitHub bot flags bugs, Devin automatically fixes the pr. Devin also tackles CI lint issues until all checks pass. And so there's auto fix and Scott just says one step closer to the recursive ever improving AI coding system.

1:14:28

JBull on X says cool. So now Meta is Enron being a little dramatic. But Meta Platform's auditor Ernst and Young raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data center project off its balance sheet. Meta moved the data center project into a new joint venture, blew out capital and said it isn't the primary beneficiary of this entity, so it didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Four Democratic senators asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council to investigate the risks that AI related debt posed to the financial system, citing Meta's joint venture with Blue Owl as an example of a convoluted and opaque financing.

1:15:37

This is sort of old news. We talked about the Blue Owl deal and how it was structured as its own entity. It's its own business. It just has Meta as a tenant.

1:16:21

Yeah, I think for me, I would probably need to see them doing, like, copy and pasting this 10 more times to the point where I'd be like, maybe Meta's not good for it. Right.

1:16:31

But I mean, it still shows up in the cash flow. If they're paying for the data center, they need to monetize it properly.

1:16:43

NAS on a roll says apparently Walter Bloomberg has no vocal cords left because of all the uppercase shouting on AX constantly.

1:16:52

Walter.

1:17:03

I bet a lot of people out there think he just works for Bloomberg.

1:17:03

They probably do.

1:17:07

Oh, yeah, Walter Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, Joe Wiesenthal's boss.

1:17:09

Definitely.

1:17:13

We got Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panels.

1:17:14

Realm, Harley, how you doing.

1:17:19

Gentlemen? Great to be here, as always. Love being here on earnings day.

1:17:23

Yeah, always good to have you.

1:17:26

Great to have you back.

1:17:27

Yeah. Give us the update on earnings and then I want to dig into, you know, what you can tell us about the economy, broadly, 20, 25, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world. Help us understand it.

1:17:28

All right, let's go. All right, let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think I came to you live from the middle of the national retail. Or maybe it's January, actually.

1:17:41

January.

1:17:53

Nrf, National Retail Federation. And I told you that you asked about how things are going to Shopify. I said, wait for the earnings. So, so here are the earnings we announced earlier this morning. GMB was up 29% to $370 billion, which is incredible. Revenue is up 30% to 11.5 billion, which is a decade of growth of over 20%. The number that. Actually, I've been in Shopify for almost half my life. This number is. I know it hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14% of the entire US e commerce market, which is.

1:17:53

You guys did the. You did the 1% of the TAM meme and then you 14 XED it.

1:18:27

That's exactly. That's exactly right. And actually, one of the cool parts is that we also did that I think with incredible discipline, cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rails for AI shopping. And we did things like announced the universal commerce protocol that we co developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our Agentix storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot. And so I think if you kind of think about 2025 as the year that we kind of laid the rails for Agentic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And so that I think is really incredible. Back to what we were talking about at nrf, we're talking about some of the brands and how the velocity of growth we can talk about consumer as well. But just in terms of the merchants entrepreneurs we see, I'm beginning to think that 2026 is really going to be kind of year one for this next generation of these billion dollar brands. I think there's going to be more billion dollar brands created in the next 10 years, in the last hundred years. And in terms of, you know, if you're looking for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean we talked during bfcm, of course we did that. You know, I sort of became one of your Google stream a couple of hours. Exactly. But look, GMV for the quarter was 124 billion. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400 billion. And so if you think about that as a proxy for how consumers are doing, consumers are buying, they're buying from brands they love, they're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars. But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them.

1:18:32

Talk about agent E commerce. Is there any activity that's happening yet? Is the ads launch from ChatGPT going to be an important moment in driving that? What are you looking forward to this quarter in terms of agency?

1:20:20

So we do have some merchants live already. Merchants like Glossier Spanx, Vuori, Stanley, Steve Madden already live. Actually if you just look from January 2025 to January 2026 we actually have seen approximately AI searches. So if you look at your Shopify admin in terms of sources, it's up like 15x still very early, but it's certainly beginning to evolve. And one of the things that we're trying to do for the merchants on Shopify is that that if you're with us, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening, whether that's online or offline or certainly on agentic. And I think, you know, you guys have discussed this many times, but I think there's going to be a bunch of like, there's going to be a bunch of different permutations of exactly how agentic commerce evolves. What we're doing is we're preparing for whichever path wins. Shopify is going to be, well set up there in terms of ads. I mean, that's not, you know, ads are not a new thing. I think ads have always been part of the commerce experience in some form, sort of natural evolution. I think consumers expect this. I think the key though is going to be there has to be a clear distinction between kind of ads and organic content. And so far that's what we're seeing as well. But generally, and you know, I think, you know, we're in the early stage of 2026, but it does certainly feel like there is a massive. I know you were talking about earlier about, you know, how a bunch of young people became kind of drop shippers based on some influencer. And in many ways it does feel like there are more people starting businesses, but the velocity of those businesses is just insane right now. And because they can access global markets right away, they have incredible resources. It feels like a really, really important time to be an entrepreneur right now in a very exciting time.

1:20:35

Yeah. What's the moat for DTC entrepreneurs? Is it changing? Is it brand? Is it distribution? Marketing chops?

1:22:15

I mean, look, I think I'll give you a quick example. We launched Shopify Sidekick about a year ago or so, which is our. We sort of call it your co founder. It lives inside of Shopify. It knows everything about your business and everything about commerce and Shopify. We added to this thing called Shopify Pulse recently, which is this new feature that effectively it proactively helps merchants grow their business. It works in the background. It surfaces like these tailored recommendations for things you can do to grow your business. And then if you agree to them, it actually goes and executes. I heard the story last week of a jewelry merchant who was actually who got a recommendation from Pulse to. Rather than having four separate SKUs to actually bundle them into a stack and create a bundle and immediately that particular merchant immediately saw more sales happen. If you are meeting these great merchants with great ambition and great products and adding this personalized data analysis with great intelligence, I don't know it's bespoke, it's intuitive, but it really will allow more of these direct to consumer brands to access I think more customers. And this idea of initially it was online only for dtc, then it was like let's try offline as well. Have online and offline working simultaneously. It feels like we've evolved well past that. And this is kind of what we're doing at Shopify, which is that regardless of where consumers are spending their time, make it really easy for merchants and entrepreneurs to access those markets. And something as simple as like the Agentix storefronts where with a couple clicks you can push products to ChatGPT and to Gemini. That's only going to increase the velocity even further.

1:22:23

SaaS apocalypse. How are you guys? I'm just going to say the word that's been on everybody's mind the last like you know, 10 days or so or 10 months for kind of our corner of the Internet. I look at Shopify, it's a system of record, it's payments, it's a consumer buying network, it's battle tested infrastructure that needs to be have insane uptime. I don't see the vibe coding risk at all. But how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts?

1:23:59

Yeah, it's like I did our call this morning, 8:30 and we basically been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of all, let me just say this. People have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one. We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong. Which is, which is kind of fun. I think a couple things, I think AI on the agentic side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially even how they buy. That's what we're building for. We are building for these Agentix storefront experiences and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on Shopify you're just better positioned. But the truth is AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It will not rewrite the transaction contract. And one of the things that we've been building on Shopify, everyone talks about the online store, the e commerce component of Shopify. The killer feature of Shopify for a very long time has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory and you do taxes and you do analytics and reporting. You launch marketing campaigns and you create loyalty and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue really well, notwithstanding some of this Vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are system of records, the ones that are actually operating, like, operating systems. And that's Shopify.

1:24:37

Yeah, yeah. Just jumping in. I do think that throughout my history being a Shopify customer and user over the years, I would be. If I was operating like a tiny Shopify plugin that one engineer had built and they were charging $30 a month, I would be a little bit worried about Vibe coding, because I do remember in. Throughout history using a plugin where I was like, okay, this is a nice little feature that I can bolt on, and I'm happy to pay for this, because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom email capture, you know. Yeah, whatever. Whatever that is. So I think I can just. Yeah, but again, that is a. That is a. That's a tailwind for Shopify as a platform because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of, like Lego blocks on top of it.

1:25:59

So, you know, one of the things we're noticing. Actually one of the questions I got on the earnings call this morning was the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're seeing app developers, but also merchants themselves, who historically would hire a third party to build a tool, do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and these new tools to build on top of is because we actually think having more people build on. On top of Shopify benefits merchants. But back to that whole, if you are just a feature, I mean, you guys, if I had to Word Cloud your show, the word wrapper probably comes up as much as anything. I think you actually have to create something of real value. And if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're gonna struggle. But companies. And if you look at the apps on. I mean, take some of the larger apps on Shopify, like the Klaviyos of the world who built this incredible in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing, that is very, very difficult to disrupt. So I think the idea of, like, we want to invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that, you know, AI interfaces will never rewrite, like, real infrastructure.

1:26:50

Yeah, Klaviyo is a great example because you could have. Somebody could build something that can send an email, but Then if your delivery is just terrible, it's just going to be. You might like save a little, but a little bit using the five coded solution, but then you're like losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not actually getting through to your customers. So there's, there's any like e commerce operator, like getting. You guys know this too. Like, you've spent like, you guys have had a better solution in the market for how many years and you're still, you know how hard it is to convert a legacy brand, to even trust a new platform because they're like, our current system is not great, but we know how critical this infrastructure is and what a big step it is.

1:28:04

It is interesting even on the enterprise side. One of the things that I've noticed coming out of nrf, which effectively is like all the largest retailers are all there, is that even the largest retailers who feel like they have something that's good enough, they're getting pushed by their exec team or their board to think about unified commerce. This idea that, you know, think about the metaphor of like a browser with 12 tabs, open online, offline, agentic cross sell on social media platforms, B2B. Even the most traditional of retailers and businesses we are finding now are coming to Shopify for simplicity, that they don't want to run this like, you know, this Rube Goldberg machine in commerce. They actually want to create this centralized back office that runs all of it. That's been amazing for us. In fact, one of the biggest areas of growth for us has been the enterprise. And companies that traditionally did not come to shop, like General Motors, for example, or Estee Lauder, for example, are now migrating to us as well. So I think, you know, it's an exciting time to be a new entrepreneur getting started because the resources and the tools are insane. But even for some of the largest retailers, the next few years are going to be incredible for them because they're going to access these tools and be able to operate at a pace that frankly some of them have never been able to operate at.

1:28:47

Do you have a hard stop at 12:30?

1:29:56

I can keep going for a bit.

1:29:58

Okay. I want to talk about evolution of ui, sort of tactical. Like when I had an E commerce site that was not on Shopify, regrettably, launching a new product was like, oh God, how are we going to literally Django go in the back end. What's the database schema? Is it a boolean? Right. Like all these different things, Right? Then you go to Shopify and it's very easy to.

1:29:59

Is it Yahoo Stores or something?

1:30:23

No, it was literally Django, like Python. It was hosted on Heroku, I think. And so yeah, homegrown disaster. Huge, huge waste of resources. You go to Shopify, you get an HTML page with a bunch of fields that you can fill in when you have a new product and it fills into the templates. Right? Is the future. I talk to Shopify in natural language. Is that actually better than defining my product variants in HTML ui? Do you think that Shopify will have an agent where I'm making changes within the Shopify ecosystem but in natural language or is HTML dropdowns? Are there sort of more Lindy than we think?

1:30:25

So I think the good news, you can do both. The idea is can we make the important things really easy and everything else possible. There are merchants right now that we have a product we just announced in December at our edition called Sim Jim. SimJim effectively simulates what any task might be. So you can say if I change this particular design or I try this particular campaign, what does Sim Jim simulate will be the results of that. And we're seeing a lot of our merchants begin to adopt it now and try it out. I think the idea should be you can do both. If ultimately what you do best is you are an artisan, you make beautiful products, you make some sort of like, like children's toys and they're amazing. And you actually do not know anything about digital commerce, digital marketing. I think you can use Sidekick as really your CMO and your co founder. That helps you become a lot more Internet native when it comes to commerce and retail. In other cases, the idea that some of our brands like Skims for example, or Alo Yoga for example, I mean they want to do some really customizable stuff. They're very technical, they have an amazing engineering team. They want to go into the code and really make it so their particular store is exactly what they want. That ability where at some point you had to either build your own stack if you wanted massive customization or if you didn't know how to use anything when it came to E commerce, you had to go and hire some sort of company to go build everything on your behalf. I think all that's gone. I think the net result of that's going to be you're going to have way more people starting businesses and way more companies getting larger at a much faster clip. And Sidekick is a really good example of that. And so is Sim Jim. I think beyond that, the other thing is like this idea that you start with one particular channel I think will very quickly go away. We're already starting to see that where immediately, you know, you may start with your online store as your online hub, but very quickly you're going to activate an Instagram channel or a TikTok channel, or you may decide, hey, I want to try this agentic thing. I think this idea that I am an X kind of merchant, I'm an online merchant, offline merchant. I think that's going to be something that, like, it's going to be like talking about the color tv. It makes no sense in the future. But all that coming together is what we've been building in Shopify for two decades. And the end result of it is that, you know, we're seeing way more entrepreneurship than ever before.

1:31:11

Yeah, makes a lot of sense, Jordi.

1:33:26

Anything else? How are you talking to. Last question. How are you talking to friends, family outside of the tech bubble about AI? On X you were busy with earnings, but on X there's an essay with like 50 million views basically telling everyone to freak out. I'm curious how you're.

1:33:28

I saw the essay before I started my day. I actually sent the essay to my wife just because I wanted to substantiate that I'm not an insane person talking about this stuff every single day. I think that essay, I think you guys said, or someone said, like, that essay feels like it crossed the chasm.

1:33:48

It did, yeah.

1:34:03

Like it like containment. Exactly. It went kind of well beyond just like our kind of little, you know, world circle of the Internet. I think ultimately the, the idea of being reflexive with AI. You know, Toby wrote this letter a couple months ago, you guys probably remember it, that got leaked and it really, you know, the reason it got leaked was it talked about that if you want to hire someone at Shopify for your team, first you have to substantiate why AI can do it better. But if you actually looked at like the meta message in the, in the.

1:34:04

Can't do it better. Can't do it better. Right.

1:34:38

Yeah, definitely cannot do it better.

1:34:41

Exactly.

1:34:42

That AI cannot. That. So if it can't do it better, then like, you can hire. But like, if AI can do it better, you're, you know, we're not, we're not, you know, the headcount doesn't get allocated. Which what it really suggested was this idea of like AI reflex that rather than sort of use it as a tool, how do you kind of use it as part of your day to day life? You know, when I'm Preparing for an earnings call with Jeff, our cfo. We used to go around and meet a ton of different product leaders around the company to kind of glean and figure out and summarize, like, what are the most exciting things happening at Shopify. It was like it was part of the process for, I don't know, like 10 quarters. Now effectively we go to Shopify's vault. We have like a dozen MCPs running. We're able to pull way more information we can. So when we do meet with those, those product leaders, the conversations are way richer. They're not spending a bunch of time explaining to us on a, you know, at a very abstract level or a, you know, at a macro level what they're working on. We can ask specific questions. I think companies that become more reflexive and individuals that become more reflexive, especially entrepreneurs, there's no doubt it's gonna make you more, you know, it's gonna make you more effective and more efficient. But I think articles like this, it invites the non tech community into what we're seeing in a way that I think is important. I think the reason it's getting so much traction is because it felt like it was, it felt like it was written for my wife as opposed to, for me. And not to say that she is a laggard. She's not, but, but she needed someone who isn't me to say, hey, you should really take this stuff seriously. It's really cool.

1:34:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

1:36:11

But that's different than I think a lot of people are sharing it saying, you should take this seriously. It's really cool. I think a lot of people have been processing this as like, you should take this seriously. And it's like, get your financial house in order. Like, you know, this is like you're going to get steamrolled.

1:36:12

Yeah.

1:36:28

I mean, look, I'm not like, I don't believe in the doom of them. I'm an eternal optimist. I think, I think what it's done for Shopify, for our merchants, for our business has been incredible. I think what it's doing for individual entrepreneurs is incredible. My daughter, you know, we recently moved to, we moved to Montreal, which is a French city. My kids, we moved from an English city. My kids are learning French right now. There's homework that comes that I just, just cannot help them with. I would have had to hire a tutor. I still may have to at some point. But the fact that I'm able to do so much more on my own, even in my own like, dad role, Makes my life better.

1:36:28

Totally.

1:37:01

So, yeah, and what's so cool about.

1:37:01

That is for, for, for you, you can, you, you can go hire a tutor. You could hire 10 tutors, but there's a lot of family, there's a lot of families that just never would have been able to do that. They're, they're, the kids would have been struggling.

1:37:03

And I mean sometimes like my, my four year old will ask, ask me just why, why, why, why? You know, the 10 whys of like, why, like why is the sky blue? And I'll be like, I think I know why. But even if I, even with the money, I can't hire a tutor to come buy the house at 9pm on a Tuesday in two seconds. But I can go and look it up and then relay a story and I can tell that story.

1:37:15

How can you not be optimistic when you have those tools available to you? The key though is looking at them as these incredible tools, looking at them as a way for you to create like, like some sort of exoskeleton for all of our lives. And there's gonna be some laggards. I mean it's gonna be like, I think it was Geoffrey Moore crossing the chasm. Like we will cross the chasm where in the mainstream we'll use it. My mom's using AI right now mostly for like things like recipes. But that's sort of like a gateway drug, I think for her. Using it for things like questions about, I don't know, banking or whatever my mom does daily. So it's tough not to be optimistic. And certainly from a Shopify perspective, it's been incredibly valuable for us. Agentix shopping hasn't even started yet, but like we're prepared for it. And I think, I don't know, it sounds like, yeah, even even for entrepreneurship, like I think we're still underselling the opportunity with AI.

1:37:35

Yeah. When I look back in my early days of entrepreneurship, luckily I had people around that I could call and say, hey, how do you do this? Or what kind of contract do I need for this? How do I set this thing up? How do I, what should I use? A safe note? Should I use this or that? And, and now it's, you know, hopefully entrepreneurs can build a network quickly, but you don't need a network to get like customized advice on pretty much any situation. And yes, it could still be wrong sometimes, but it's usually directionally correct and helps you be more informed and it's amazing.

1:38:23

It feels also like we as humans, we don't often Want to ask someone else the question that we deem as being like a silly question or a stupid question?

1:38:54

That's one of my favorite parts of AI. Right. Just like ask a dumb question.

1:39:02

Totally, totally agree. I remember when we raised our first. Our Series A. This is, I don't know.

1:39:07

Wow.

1:39:11

Literally almost 20 years ago, I had to look up at a liquidation preference. I call around and I felt like, you know, I. Like we were raising a Series A and it was a $25 million round Bessemer let it. And, and I remember thinking like I, I went to law, I was already a lawyer. Like I wasn't a very good lawyer but I finished law school, didn't went to business school. And I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I just sort of think back of now the like the amount of information I could have taken. I could have got all these case studies. I could have understood it in a much deeper way. That is where I think so it's not surprising.

1:39:12

You could have dropped the term sheet into any LM and instantly gotten like pretty.

1:39:42

Tell me what's wrong.

1:39:48

All the main terms. Here's what's market, here's what you can push back on. Anyway, it's amazing. No more doom.

1:39:49

Sorry.

1:39:55

Thank you for not.

1:39:55

No more doom. Guys, come on.

1:39:56

I appreciate you taking the extra time. It'd be great we kept you always great to have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Harley, let me tell you about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with small, modern small and medium sized businesses. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Nikita Beer has a prediction. I want your take on Nikita Beer's prediction. He says in less than 90 days all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. Imessage phone calls, Gmail, and we will have no way to stop it. What do you think?

1:39:57

Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I mean he must be seeing something. I would assume he's seeing something at X.

1:40:41

He's been fighting this for a long time. He's been fighting the bots in the trenches for sure.

1:40:46

Fighting the bots.

1:40:49

Yes.

1:40:50

I got a pretty good AI phone call yesterday that was somebody leaving me a voicemail that was just like, hey, just have a few questions. Give me a call back.

1:40:51

Ooh, that's.

1:41:00

And I was in. Yeah, it Was a good.

1:41:01

Yeah, no, no. Sometimes like the text message is like.

1:41:03

But I listened to the voicemail.

1:41:06

Yeah.

1:41:07

And I could clock it as AI but when I just got the like kind of like summary of it.

1:41:08

But if it's David Attenborough, you're going to be like david, I would love to do a documentary about a flying beaver with you. Sign me up. So hack that sort of solves this. On X you go into the settings and you turn off notifications from anyone that you're not mutuals with that's not verified, that doesn't have a phone number. You just make it really. You will miss some stuff but you will see way less spam on imessage and the iPhone. I just don't accept calls from unknown numbers and so like you have to be in my contacts book. And so how do I actually meet people? Well, I get mutually introduced, I add their contact, we get into a group chat and it's just, it's just a game of chain linking one chain to the next. So if you.

1:41:13

Yeah, for me there's already, there's already a pretty good. There's a small number of people who are free to call me out of the blue whenever and I will pick up if I'm totally, if I'm available. And then there's another big group of people that I'd be happy to have a phone call with.

1:41:55

Yes.

1:42:07

But I'm not just going to pick up out of nowhere because you know, whatever and so talk about it before.

1:42:07

The typical spam spam functionality for a long time has been deny lists or blacklists where you have a list of spam accounts and you deny those, you block those numbers. Everything is shifting to allow lists or white lists where you have an approved list of people that can get through through your messaging apps and basically cold messages. Cold DMs are going to be a lot harder to break through. So the era of the reply guy who gets retweeted and ratios and get surfaced, maybe that's the alpha these days.

1:42:12

Where you just have to grind harder. I have a post that I want to read to you.

1:42:44

I'm going to turbopuffer first serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

1:42:47

Shopify alumni. I have a post. I want your reaction.

1:42:54

Okay, hit me.

1:42:57

This is from Delicious Tacos. Yes, I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years and I wasn't prepared for what I've just Seen, your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can buy stock in hot dog companies.

1:42:58

I think it's a little different, but it is funny. It is very funny.

1:43:17

I mean, who knows? Hot dogs might change everything.

1:43:22

Okay, well, you got quote tweeted here. You said just in horses say we may be in a car bubble. Which is funny because that's a pro AI take. Right?

1:43:25

Yeah, I was confused by this. And then AI not kill everyone is a memes responded kind of saying horse says the real risk is what happens to the economy when the car bubble pops. So it's kind of. It's. It's. This is a techno optimist account now?

1:43:34

No, I think it's a doomer account, right?

1:43:50

No, no, I don't think so.

1:43:53

Wait, really?

1:43:54

They say techno optimist in their bio.

1:43:55

Okay. Huh. I thought they were always like, pause AIs pause the progress. But maybe the. Maybe the bubble is a bigger issue as well. Well, we can continue to dig into that quickly. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid Power is the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending.

1:43:57

Now with AI, the. We got the. We got a Bugatti Tourbillon. The Luce post here. Yes, the Bugatti's mogging.

1:44:15

So the Ferrari Luce makes the interior of the Bugatti Tourbillon look like an absolute masterclass. Bravo, Ferrari. It's pure genius to be this bad. People are still going back and forth on this. The Tourbillon. This is a driving machine.

1:44:26

My takeaway from all the reactions this week in my personal view is I think the Jony I've Ferrari will be popular in specific bubbles on the west coast and generally not be very loved.

1:44:44

The only thing that really jumps out to me about the design is the rounded rectangle display in the center. It just is. It does feel ipadish. It feels like there's the tactile buttons, but just that block of like there's a screen.

1:44:57

There's also like a leather kind of lunchbox looking thing that you can pull out.

1:45:14

Cool.

1:45:19

Which I think is weird. I don't love it.

1:45:20

Take it on the go, I suppose.

1:45:24

Ratlimit on X says people who back into parking spots cannot be truly present. You envisualized your departure the moment you arrived.

1:45:26

Invisualized isn't even a word. Isn't it envisioned?

1:45:36

Envisioned.

1:45:39

This is hilarious.

1:45:40

Still doing numbers. Wow.

1:45:41

DK likes. I love it. You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived. You're not truly present. Do you back in ever? I back in every once in a while but mostly I'm angling for the room for the doors. So if there's a pillar in the parking garage that will block the passenger.

1:45:42

Door and have a passenger, it's strategic, it's not default.

1:46:04

Exactly. So I'm extra present. I'm extremely present. I'm locked in trying to give my passenger the best possible vehicle exiting experience there there could possibly be. Let me tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build create code back prototypes and apps fast.

1:46:07

Thoma Bravo executives fielded queries and held conversations with investors to discuss the impact of AI on their software portfolios. Vista equities chief executive sent an email to clients and plans to follow up with a webinar. Don't worry, I'm following up with a webinar to discuss the state of the firm firm's portfolio saying that we believe that AI will enhance software, not replace it. Leaders of several firms including kkr, Blackstone and Ares reported that their exposure to the sector are limited and that the sell off is overblown. With some saying that AI will not significantly impact their well established portfolio companies. It's hard to say that it won't impact it at all. You kind of got to, kind of got to pick a side in most cases. But yeah, it's interesting. You've got like, you know, people like PE firms that only own software and they're like no big deal. We're excited about this, we're not worried at all. But they're having to do kind of.

1:46:26

Like, you know, what kind of American are you meme? It's what kind of software did you.

1:47:21

But then on the other side you have firms that have some exposure saying, well, we don't have very much exposure.

1:47:26

Yes, yes.

1:47:31

And so these are, you know, the messaging is.

1:47:32

And so this is what we were, we were talking about this morning. This, you know, I think there will need to be a, in many ways a reclassification of who the AI winners and who the AI losers are in the software world. Because there truly are platforms where yes, you could vibe code it, but the value in the asset is the liquidity on that platform. Like you can vibe code an Airbnb Marketplace competitor, but if there's no houses on there and they're all AI generated, you can't actually go to the beach house. Like you don't actually compete with Airbnb. And so there's a lot of software companies that fit in that world where there's liquidity or some other network effect or some scale economy, but purely just having, okay, we spent a bunch of money on R and D, we have a bunch of lines of code written, and it would cost you a billion dollars to write the same amount of code and compete with us. So you're not going to do that because you're going to take a billion dollars to raise all the money and then you're just going to be competing with us. Well, now that billion dollars is shrinking down, maybe it's $100 million, maybe it's $10 million, maybe it's less and less and less. And so there will be need in many ways. It's just a return to form of like, where are the true moats? And then intellectual property, obviously, network effects, scale economies.

1:47:33

There's a few regulatory.

1:48:47

Regulatory. So, yeah, there will be some software companies, some SaaS, companies where you find out that it's like duolingo with, like, oh, it's actually a game and people love the brand. And so that's been much more resilient relative to a chegg. That was basically just data that was scraped and put into ChatGPT and the stock's down 90%.

1:48:48

Pythiacap responded to the comments from Thoma Bravo and Vista Equity saying breaking 6x levered long software investors who can't exit think software is okay. Actually, let me tell you about console.

1:49:08

Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also, Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital has, quote, tweeted my article and he chimes in, sort of agrees. He says, AI. The title of my article was AI is not Covid. And he says AI is not Covid in three key ways. And I wish I'd put this in the article because it's pretty good analysis. He says it's bigger, much bigger. And I agree with that. Covid, you look at the numbers and it goes up. It was crazy world changing. But then now we've moved on and there's a whole different set of stories. It's durable. Covid was a wave. It came and went. AI will compound. And so you never go back to not using the Internet. You never go back to not using a mobile device. You never go back to not having AI in the world. You do go back to a world where you can walk around and not feel sick if you don't wear a mask. That happened. And then third, he says we have a choice. This is important. And the main reason to read the article with COVID everyone played defense. With AI, we can choose to play offense. Don't let AI wash over you. Put it to work. And this is what Harley was saying as well. There's an opportunity. And Pat Grady says the best time to make that choice is right now. And I agree. It's an optimistic message.

1:49:21

Alex Su yes. Says at this point I can't tell if Harvey is in the business of selling technology to lawyers or equity to VCs. He of course is in.

1:50:32

What business is he in?

1:50:43

He's in works for a company called Attitude. Specialized in providing high end flexible legal talent into corporate legal departments. So he's in a lawyer staffing firm. Oh, okay. So hard to take this post.

1:50:45

Guess what? Newsflash, if you're the CEO of a startup, you're in both businesses, buddy.

1:51:02

Always.

1:51:07

No matter what, you gotta raise, you gotta outraise your competitors. If you're in a competitive space, if you're in a high growth industry, you have to be selling equity to VCs. And you also gotta be selling your product to customers. Get used to it. It's the game on the field and you're going to be playing it. Let me tell you about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

1:51:07

Jira Tickets says knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket and they blew his head smooth off. I can't believe how Mainstream this is.5 million views, 167,000 likes. Andre Console says should I use Console does solve that exact issue. Soph over on X says gonna name my son Garrett, short for Cigarette. I never put that together. I used to have Garrett would be a beautiful name.

1:51:30

I used to have this joke with Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures because his first initial is C. So if it's C Garet, it's Cigarette. It's like he has the name. Anyway, Blackrock's getting into DeFi. Totally unimaginable five years ago. But they're doing it. We should buy.

1:52:08

And they're buying Uniswap. This will be interesting.

1:52:28

Yes, yes. They're buying Uniswap Tokens. So Fortune has a story here. In the latest sign of the rapid convergence of Wall street and crypto, the world world's biggest asset manager is moving into decentralized Finance or DeFi BlackRock on Wednesday revealed it will be bringing its treasury backed digital token called Build with misspelled. That's very online for BlackRock onto Uniswap, a leading Defi platform where it will be bought and sold by institutional traders. As part of the tie up, BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's own token Uni. The new arrangement which is being undertaken with tokenization firm Securitize, is a significant milestone for the Defi sector, which many view is one of the most useful applications in crypto. Unlike traditional trading, which relies on centralized intermediaries to record and settle trades, platforms like Uniswap rely on smart contracts to match buyers and sellers via liquidity pools and automated market makers. Currently there are around $100 billion worth of capital sitting on Defi platform. I remember Defi Summer. Were you deep in the trenches during Defi Summer? It was a big. What was that? 2022, right? 2021. It was before the crash. It was the era of like Thor chain and like.

1:52:31

And like it was 23, 2020 or 2021.

1:53:46

Yeah, something like that.

1:53:49

But 2021 was the Solana summer.

1:53:50

Yeah, Defi Summer was. Must have been major FOMO basically for anyone who didn't pursue, participate in major heartache for many people that did. It was a wild time. A lot of people having fun and interesting from a, you know, it had some of the same feelings as the open claw thing. It was like you had to set up, you had to know the terminal a little bit. You had to be comfortable sort of, you know, installing these tools, understanding, oh, don't send your money to the wrong address. The address itself looks like a hash. And so it's like a little bit like lightly technical. You didn't have to write any software, but you had to be able to use different wallets. It does feel like there was a little bit of nerd sniping. There was also a lot of real businesses built and Obviously there's still $100 billion sitting in DeFi. And Defi survived the Defi winter that followed Defi Summer, of course, sort of bad nominated determinism. The Defi summer sort of implied that a winter was around the corner. And it was. But blackrock's now going into Defi, so they're listing their build token, which launched in 2024 and boasts a total market value of around $1.8 billion. And it reflects a major vote of conference confidence in Defi from one of the finance industry's most influential firms. The practical impact of Unifi of Uniswap adding Build to its platform is likely to be minor at first, though, since the arrangement involves Securitize creating a white list of eligible institutions that can participate in the DEFI trading. The firm is also whitelisting a handful of market makers, including longtime crypto liquidity provider Wintermute, to facilitate trading. Meanwhile, access to Build is restricted to qualified purchasers, a legal designation for those assets of more than 5 million or more. So they're getting into DeFi, but they're just dipping their toes in the water. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken, helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to to keep their apps working. So there are lots of essays. It's like Essay week in AI. People are writing essays about is AI like Covid? You need to talk to your family. Zoe resigned from OpenAI on Monday, the same day they started testing ads in ChatGPT. She quit in protest.

1:53:53

She did?

1:56:12

Yes.

1:56:12

And she dropped essay guest essay in.

1:56:13

The New York Times.

1:56:16

In the New York Times.

1:56:17

That is a crazy thing to do.

1:56:18

OpenAI. I feel like a company had fully arrived until an employee quits and they have the opportunity just to go immediately write like an opinion essay on said business.

1:56:19

Pretty soon you're going to quit and drop a whole Mr. Beast video. That's the future. You drop, you drop a 10 part hour long miniseries. Just raise the stakes. Go with the biggest splash you can possibly make.

1:56:30

So first Zoe makes the bull case for ChatGPT as a business. OpenAI is the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the title forces pushing them to abuse it again? So far the ads will effectively be display ads not integrated into the content and not influencing the content. And but again, she's arguing that you can sort of start by doing that. And then there's an incentive, there's a business incentive to up the ante a little bit. Hopes revenge says I don't mean to be rude, but I feel like this article says very little. I think everyone will agree data privacy is good. Two tech companies have a bad track record of resisting their incentives to misuse this data. You kind of vaguely gesture towards certain kinds of oversight, mostly niche and European, but I think we both suspect that that's probably not going to happen in this case. That's really. There really isn't a model here. I'm a lot more interested in why you joined OpenAI and stayed for two years and what you would wouldn't do in the AI space. I do think you're right to draw attention to what is special about the intersection of AI and advertising, which is that the data set being created and the product itself has a much higher potential for abuse and other familiar tech models of ad monetized platforms. This feels like fairly obvious point that I don't see enough of. You're also right to draw attention to the fact that people don't necessarily have a problem with the fact that ChatGPT is doing ads now like this, but that they likely don't think it will actually stop their slippery slope. Thanks.

1:56:46

There's a very funny paragraph in Ben Thompson's certecary piece on Google earnings that is basically the flip side of this that I thought was very funny. He says this is probably the least important of the three benefits of LLMs for Google search business. He's covering Google earnings and what ads are doing for Google. Everything's going very well. And he says what's notable about that ranking however, is that this is basically OpenAI's entire proposed advertising business. Google has the luxury of not putting ads in Gemini, but that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting with ads in conversational AI, they're just doing it in AI mode. And their initial offering sounds a lot like what OpenAI is going to do in ChatGPT. Put in ads based on the content of the current conversation. Meh. It's the meh that is scary. Google's upside revenue potential from LLMs is so large that its side project, which is OpenAI's entire proposed business, hardly merits a mention in terms of justifying capex. So Google saying hey, we're going to spend so much money on capex. But analysts shareholders don't worry because we have really great applications and the great applications they put ads in LLM responses really, really low. And so Ben Thompson's like, it's this like this thing is happening and everyone's very focused on this ChatGPT ads thing, but Google's doing it and it's like meh, not an even big deal for them. They're like of course, yeah, we just left some ad ads in the thing because we're doing AI search and we'll keep them out of Gemini, but we're, you know, display and search ads and YouTube ads are going to be way better and we're making so much money over here that this thing that's like causing so much drama and people are doing super bowl ads about like yeah we just did it. And it's minor to the financials and you know, if you're an analyst or shareholder, like don't even stress about it. And also no one's paying attention. So it was just very funny that there are plenty of justifications elsewhere while everyone else is going to have to keep, have to spend to keep up without nearly the obvious high margin benefits. So Google has a bunch of different places to put ads and so much surface area, so many users and so little pushback. You know, I don't think anyone at Google is going to be quitting over ads in AI mode because it's an advertising company and everyone's used to it. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. First, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Matt Schumer in the recent waiting room. Welcome to the show.

1:58:23

Matt Schuminator, the man of the hour.

2:00:55

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

2:00:57

The most viral essay ever.

2:01:00

Maybe.

2:01:01

Has there ever been a more viral.

2:01:02

Would you have won the million dollars if you posted this a week ago?

2:01:03

I think so.

2:01:06

I don't know, but I do wish I posted this a week ago.

2:01:07

Well, fantastic response. What has the response been like to the essay from non tech people? I imagine that you have friends, family, friends that have been texting you screenshots or something like walk me through the experience of this.

2:01:10

It's been crazy. I wrote this with that in mind, but still, I didn't expect it to actually happen, you know what I mean? I originally wrote this for my parents. I was trying to explain to them what was going on while I was actually home for Super Bowl Sunday with them. Some family, friends and. And frankly I couldn't find anything that was both clear and accurate but also understandable for them. Right. I was looking at Dario Mode's essays and when you read them, they're perfect, they're amazing. But you have to be in tech to understand them. And I just wanted to find a way to communicate this in a way that allowed them to actually understand it without having to know all the jargon, industry dynamics, everything. Because I think it's important for people to know this. But there's just not much out there for the person that's not in tech. So it did take off. It's been surprising and exciting, frankly. I've been getting texts from friends who I haven't heard from in years. And they're like, my boss is sending this around the office. It's, it's, it's surreal. I thought it would go a little viral. I didn't think it would go mega viral and certainly not this level. So I'm kind of taking it all in. I've slept like two whole hours since I posted this. I'm exhausted. But it's been, it's been crazy. And I'm glad that the message was received. I think that's the most important part. Right people?

2:01:25

Yeah. What happened?

2:02:42

I'm expecting. But it's good that people know that there's a chance.

2:02:44

And the message is just something big is happening. You just want people to pay attention. Because I think people are going to debate like how, how you presented different things. Is the COVID comparison really that accurate? But is that, is that specifically you're just trying to wake people up?

2:02:46

Exactly. Right. I, if I knew how viral this was going to go, I think I would have spent more time thinking through some of the parts and how I presented them.

2:03:03

But is part of why you're maybe sort of worried or you want people to pay attention is your experience as an entrepreneur here? Because it feels like in many ways hyper. Right. Probably made more sense as a product two years ago. And as all the different LLMs have gotten better and the products have gotten better, I imagine it has been great. And sounds like maybe you're moving on to focus on investing. But is part of this. It's been kind of very personal experience of just kind of waking up to the power of the base models and the labs in general.

2:03:10

It has and I'll share more on the company side soon. But I've been in this industry since 2019. I got in when I was in college working on a VR startup and I realized that if I didn't drop everything to jump into AI, I'd regret it for the rest of my life. And I'm glad I did. But seeing the progression is kind of freaky. I mean it couldn't write a sentence accurately in 2019, much less a line of code. Now we're looking at models that can build autonomously for many hours. I had early access to GPT 5.3 Codex and that was a very eye opening experience. Getting used to that. At first I was prompting and using it like I use any other model. Little things at a time, iterating back and forth. Until I realized, realized, wait, this isn't screwing up. I started pushing it forward and pushing it further and just saying, hey, here's the big spec I want don't come back to me until it's perfect and get it deployed on a server. And it did. And I'm not saying every industry is going to go just like that. I don't think it's going to look like that in every industry. But if that's a sign of things to come, I think people should be paying attention.

2:03:49

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the VR example is so interesting because, like, completely agree with you on just the power of the models. Like, it's so real, it's so legitimate, and it does. And truly, a lot of people are like, oh, it still hallucinates. There's six fingers in the images. It's like, that is antiquated. Like, you need to get up to speed. But at the same time, like, if I was, you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg, like, cutting back on virtual reality spending and plans there, and it feels like if AI is like, like going to advance everything, you'd be like, great, I can invest 10 times less in reality labs and the headsets are going to get 10 times better. But there's a lot of these things in the. It's not even physical world. I'm not even talking about doctors, I'm talking about VR headsets. But even that doesn't feel like maybe AI doesn't really pull that forward. And I'm just wondering when I go to my friends and family, how many of them will actually be like, yes, this is going to change my life in whatever I do, versus, like, yeah, software will get better, but software is a small piece of what I do. But how are you thinking about people where software is like a more minor piece of their world?

2:04:54

Yeah.

2:06:10

This is something that, again, hindsight is 20 20. I wish I had spent more time.

2:06:10

On knowing what was to come.

2:06:14

I try to address it a little bit in the article and hopefully provide more color here. My dad's a lawyer as an example. Yeah, it's not going to stand in court anytime soon. It can help with writing, it can help with reviewing things that he's working on. It's essentially an associate and it's getting better every year, but it's not going to stand in court. I think the ideal thing here is people read this and they kind of take it in their own unique way for their own unique needs for what they're doing.

2:06:16

Right.

2:06:43

If you're somebody who's very, very exposed, I think there are a lot of people who are. Who kind of are denying it.

2:06:44

It.

2:06:48

Yeah, I think it's worth paying Attention and saying, okay, what is the world going to look like in two, three years? How do I prepare myself? Because it's worth it. Just in case. There are industries where I think it will take longer though, even in those industries, for example, let's say legal, those that are just getting started today might have a bit of a rough time, whereas a partner might do quite well actually. So I think it's very contextual for each person and that's what I wish I got across a bit better. Maybe I'll do a follow up or something like that. But yeah, I think it's really tricky to give sort of like a silver bullet, one size fits all answer for everybody.

2:06:48

Totally.

2:07:22

The goal is to say, hey look, this is happening. Can you try to think about it a little bit for your industry? Because even if it's going to change an industry and there's the ability for it to happen, it's not going to happen overnight. Even if the technology is there. Though I do think for a lot of these industries the technology will be there relatively soon. It's just a matter of how long it takes to proliferate. Proliferate through society.

2:07:22

Yeah, yeah.

2:07:42

Lawyers don't tend to post as much as software engineers, but you can imagine lawyers out there thinking, I don't even write contracts anymore, I just review. Which is kind of what you're seeing most engineers saying lawyers are so. But at the same time. So part of the. I'll be interested to see what happens with like the general legal job market. But we've just been hearing examples from companies being like, I need to hire hundreds of interns that are just going to come and work in a new way and use the tools sort of natively. And you can imagine that happening. But again, there's just. I don't know.

2:07:43

Yeah. What advice or what recommendation would you make to a new grad right now?

2:08:20

It's really tough. And it's one of those areas in the article that I don't think I had a clear answer on. But that's because there is no clear answer. I have a lot of people in my life that, that have asked me this and part of my thinking on this article was like, can I answer some of these questions? And there are parts of this that got clear, parts that didn't. This is one of the parts I don't think I have full clarity on. I think knowing the tools is better than not knowing the tools. Focusing on industries that maybe will take a little bit longer to be disrupted so you can entrench Yourself a bit first is valuable. And there are people better than I at knowing which ones those might be. But really, I think it's just getting used to using this because this is the new world. It's like, you know, if a calculator is available, you should probably be learning.

2:08:29

How to use it.

2:09:11

This is that times a thousand. So I think it's just learning to be adaptable. I think there probably is. We'll look back in 10 years and there will be clearly, like, this is what you should have done. I don't think anybody knows today, but it's also very contextual. It's going to depend on what your goals are as a person.

2:09:12

Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, there's this post about, like, it's the last moment to join a lab before the takeoff, and it'll be fun to join. And that makes a ton of sense. At the same time, I love the idea of being a young person becoming a hacker. Like, lightly technical, but really fluid in the tools, and then going and working at like, an oil and gas company and just being like the most cracked, most productive person at this company that has, like, assets. And you're going to be able to just do so much more across the organization and be that, like, you know, thousand X intern, basically. Jordi, where do you want to go?

2:09:28

A lot of comments from people asking if AI wrote the essay.

2:10:03

Oh, yeah.

2:10:07

What's your writing process actually like these days?

2:10:08

It didn't stick out to me as AI, but.

2:10:12

If you did use AI, you pulled out a lot of the EM dashes. Yeah, it did help a lot.

2:10:15

And I think that's kind of the point. A lot of people are like, dunking on me for saying that. And I posted that I used AI.

2:10:21

Yeah, it's not really a gotcha if, if, if it did insane numbers, like, whatever, whatever.

2:10:26

Like, if you're upfront about it. Yeah, yeah.

2:10:34

It's like proving the point. It's like people are saying this thing sucks at X, Y, Z, but, like, look, it's 50 million views. Like, yeah, there's a reason that I'm talking about this stuff.

2:10:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:10:44

And, you know, I think there's like, little details I get wrong here because this has been a crazy couple of days. But the way that I approached it was, again, I wanted to write sort of like a Dario style essay, but for the average person. So what I started doing is I have, like, lists of, like, all the things that have, like, sort of made me think over the years that I agree with. And I have Sort of points on what I agree with in each of those articles, what I disagree with, what I think has, well and what hasn't. And I've kind of dumped this all in. And I used Claude for this, even though I think Codex is way better for engineering. Claude is better for this sort of stuff. Yeah, I dumped all those articles in and I said, okay, here's what I agree with, here's what I don't. And then I basically spoke to it for like an hour with my own thoughts and my own feelings and how I wanted to present it and what I think actually makes sense because a lot of these things past kind of are somewhat accurate, somewhat not. And I iterated with the AI for. For many, many hours, going back and forth until I finally felt like, okay, it's time to write. And I kind of had to put out a whole sheet on how to do this. And then I actually went and I took that and wrote the first draft myself. And then there were obviously parts I struggled with. I had come and helped. I had it kind of like work on the wording with me. And then once I had a first draft, I brought it back and I had it critique it. And that's. There's obviously more details there for that.

2:10:46

Yeah, but I mean, I think when people lob like this is AI, they think that your prompt was like, write an essay that will get 50 million views and it just like one shots. It's like, no, this is a collaborative back and forth. Yeah, of course.

2:11:56

Yeah, yeah, we've tried that on X. There's a lot of hashtags.

2:12:12

Yeah, it can be a little rough. Yeah, fascinating. Jordy, anything else?

2:12:16

No. What are you going to do next?

2:12:24

Yeah, I mean, I've noticed from your portfolio that there's a lot of chip companies, hard tech investments. What are you most excited about? Just in the economy broadly, I mean.

2:12:26

In terms of what I'm investing in. And I intentionally tried to leave this out of the article because I wanted the article to be just purely my message and sort of kind of like have to deal with the sort of interplay of that. But in terms of what I actually believe in, I think the chip companies are very interesting. I was, you know, I don't know if you saw a couple of years ago, I kind of helped Grok blow up and that that worked out quite well. I mean, etched a few others like that. I also think the Rails are going to be very important. I tend to invest in, you know, I just started my fund around this thesis that there are going to be sort of these things that I need, needs to proliferate.

2:12:37

Right.

2:13:10

It's not just the model itself and the weights itself, but it's the, you know, the rails for them to communicate with each other. And I just invested in a new company, Agent Relay, that's about to come out that I think is going to be really exciting there. I also did Agent Mail. So very, very similar. Daytona SF Compute's a little different, but I think they're going to be. Evan is a killer. I'm sort of interested in that sort of stuff. Like how do you take the models and then bring them out of their box? Because this is obviously happening and you just kind of want to put your money where it's going to grow obviously.

2:13:10

Yeah. It feels like there's, whenever something crazy happens, there's a lot of like, it's almost like nerve wracking panic. But I do think we're in this moment right now where there's going to be a reevaluation of how value accrues in tech because tech has become everything. Like, you know, car companies are tech companies now, everything's a tech company. But the business models are wide different and the software agents are going to accelerate some companies, they're going to damage some companies and we're going to be following it all right here. But we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.

2:13:42

Yeah, get some sleep.

2:14:14

Congratulations on the massive article. I definitely agree with the point of like we're not talking about the latest updates to AI broadly enough.

2:14:16

I do think it's interesting some people will read this. Let's say they're a firefighter or a school teacher and be like, wait, I'm gonna have to do less paperwork. Oh yeah, there's actually a lot of people that should be excited.

2:14:29

That's a good thing. There are some beautiful white pills. There's obviously some quagmires and some quicksand you want to avoid, but this is how technology is rolled out and adopted and so you want to skate where the puck is. But, but we appreciate you coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Thanks so much, Matt.

2:14:43

Yep, we'll talk to you soon.

2:14:57

Have a good one.

2:14:59

Good to see you.

2:15:00

Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado, we have Vlad Tene from Robinhood in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring Vlad into the TVPN ultradom. Vlad how are you doing?

2:15:00

Whoa. Cactus.

2:15:17

Cactus.

2:15:18

How you doing?

2:15:19

I like the. Is the cactus symbolic of something?

2:15:19

Well, I love succulents, and I think we live in a dangerous world, gentlemen. You know, you turn around, you just got to be careful. So it's a constant reminder that you just have to watch your back with.

2:15:24

A physical cactus behind you. Yes. You need to physically watch your back. Don't back up during this interview.

2:15:36

I have to really be careful here.

2:15:42

I love cactuses, too. This is probably going to inspire to get cacti. Cacti, Right.

2:15:43

Sorry to be pedantic.

2:15:48

No, no, you're right. We'll get some cacti around this.

2:15:49

I'm more of a Christmas tree guy. I like a big Christmas tree.

2:15:53

No, but I've been having some plants.

2:15:55

In the U.S. yes. Anyway, sorry, we're not here to talk.

2:15:57

About, you know, what's the thing about this cactus is. Yes, you think that it's very dangerous, but you can train yourself to actually, like.

2:15:59

No way. Whoa.

2:16:06

Yeah, yeah.

2:16:08

Alpha right here.

2:16:09

Yeah. It's all about the angle.

2:16:10

Amazing.

2:16:11

All about the angle.

2:16:12

I had no idea that you could do that.

2:16:12

Bandaid up my hand.

2:16:14

Last fearless, fearless CEO touches cactus.

2:16:14

That's great. How's business? What's new in your world?

2:16:18

Well, we've got a lot of things going down. I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future. And what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. So a couple interesting things. Number one, in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle, and eventually this asset class is going to go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. So we're in the thicks of that. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally. Private markets and family finance. So through this year, if you look at the end of the year, Robinhood should be better for you. The more family members use it. We want to get your partners on Robinhood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family. And we're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets. I think access to private markets is one of the biggest iniquities in financial services today. So we're just working really hard to solve that for people. Very, very.

2:16:22

Yeah. More specifically, you guys have a fundamental set up. Like, I imagine there's more going on. Like, where's, like, private markets as a category going on the platform? Yes, because, like, fundamentally, the problem of like a lot of people have been excited about these billion dollar companies and watch them go from single digit billion to hundreds of billions of dollars and having to just sit on the sidelines and hold SAs has been a rough, rough for a lot of people over the last year.

2:17:35

And I think it's really a continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades. Right. It's gotten harder and harder to go public and at the same time more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company.

2:18:08

Yeah.

2:18:21

And yeah, our efforts in the US to stem the tide are Robinhood Ventures which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our N2, which you can think of as kind of S1 for funds. So we're in the strict quiet period for that. So I can't talk about, about the funds specifically but in the US we're very focused on, on solving this problem and we think we have a path and internationally we're going to push forward on tokenization. Last year we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real, making those products real and tradable for customers and also getting the companies to engage in it willingly. I think we experimented a little bit, but we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should watch and benefit from just as much as it is to the retail shareholder.

2:18:21

If you could rewind, how would you have let retail traders invest in Robinhood? Would you have done it at seed round? If you could have Series A, Series B, would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it? Walk me through. If you could replay, we absolutely would.

2:19:36

Have done it at season Seed. Not a lot of people know this about Robinhood, but Robinhood was actually we had kind of a hard time raising our seed round and so we talked to probably over 100 investors at one point. Robinhood was live on AngelList, if you remember that platform. And you could invest in Robinhood at seed at a 10 million valuation cap. So effectively think of it as 10 million valuation. And we would take all comers. I mean we would pitch, you know, middle aged ex retirees from Nebraska the same way that we would pitch like Andreessen Horowitz or a Sequoia. And you know, they would ask us questions and if they wanted to invest we typically would just let Them invest. So we have, we have tons of shareholders that were just essentially retail. I mean, high net worth, maybe, but. But they were just normal people. And, you know, some of them even have messaged us they held through IPO and over the years and have done quite well. So I absolutely understood.

2:19:55

Understatement.

2:21:07

Yeah, absolutely.

2:21:09

I want to, I want to go back. Yeah, I want to go back to prediction markets. Prediction markets are bringing new people to the Robinhood platform. That's exciting for the business. The pushback and concern that people have is like people coming on, maybe they want to trade the Super Bowl. Are those people going to make great financial decisions on the Robinhood platform? Obviously, you guys are an open platform. People can do whatever they want. But what are you going to be looking for to make sure that over time there's, you know, I think that the general concern is, you know, I'm not going to use the G word, but you know, bringing like trading, high risk trading to the platform. There's some very real kind of concerns around that. So how are you making sure this kind of rollout as prediction markets as a category grow, still serve, you know, the overall user base?

2:21:10

Yeah, I think this is one of the things that we're actively working on. I think you have some customers that really love prediction markets and for them, they want it to be easier to get to and more intuitive. And they don't like. They would probably say that our experience right now buries them too much and we make them too hard to get to. And then you have customers that, you know, don't want anything to do with it. They don't want to see it. And so we've been actively working on greater personalization so that we can let customers opt in or out if they'd like. And also we can detect automatically when someone wants to see that content in different places. So this is just, I mean, prediction markets are kind of a test case. It's where it's most acute. But we see it across the entire spectrum of products as we expand the breadth of our super app offerings. For example, we have, we have a credit card, we have banking. Now banking is a separate app. And you have some customers saying, well, I'm kind of annoyed having to go through two different apps to get access to banking. Can't we put it in the same one? Others, others want it to be separate and prefer it. And so we're continuing to experiment with this stuff, but where it ends is just a really, really tightly personalized experience depending on what each customer is looking for and expecting. And I don't think, I think we're actually breaking new ground. I don't think financial services companies have done that. You see that a lot with, with consumer products, but we're investing a lot on the machine learning infrastructure on the AI side and to, you know, delivering that for, for customers across our entire product suite. And I'd say more generally, you know, prediction markets. One of the unique things we have is we're not a monoline prediction markets player. So we have the suite of products, we can offer you a lot of things. And what we've been seeing increasingly is prediction markets have been great at attracting a new type of customer who previously may have not been as interested in Robinhood. They hear about us, they download the app, they onboard for prediction markets and we're making that process easier and simpler and then we can onboard them to all sorts of other stuff, so be it. Retirement accounts, our credit card, our banking product. And I think that's just something that's generally good for these customers. I see nothing wrong with someone coming in for prediction markets, but then being, you know, discovering our retirement account.

2:22:04

Yeah, I certainly hope that people come in, maybe they want to trade something that's happening in the news or a game or something like that and they realize, hey, I actually just want to save a good amount of my paycheck every month, invest in stable assets and invest in my retirement.

2:24:42

I think that's actually true because and I think people talks about these as two different types of people. You have your prediction markets users and your people that are interested in stable retirement. But what we increasingly see is that, that actually it's the same people. And you know, I might be, I'm obviously interested in a retirement account. I might have a small portfolio for my prediction markets or my options trading or my more speculative trades, but having both together in, in one roof makes it a more valuable service for me.

2:24:58

How do you think about the news generation from prediction markets? It's always been an interesting way we pull up prediction markets all the time to understand what markets think about, you know, how many Space X launches there will be this year. Do you want to do more in content driven by prediction markets?

2:25:32

Yeah, and we've been doing that quite a bit already. We have a whole slew of prediction markets that are non sports. And actually one of the interesting things that we saw was the week after the NFL season ended we had the government shutdown. And the prediction market contract on the government shutdown actually drove a ton of volume because it was on everyone's mind and people wanted to see what the current status was, how likely it is and of course some portion of those customers traded. So we think that'll be a bigger and bigger thing. And again as we make it, as we make it easier to surface things that are trending and things that we think you might be interested in, I think that'll strengthen the use case of looking at prediction markets as a source of news.

2:25:57

How do you think the wealth management industry broadly will adapt to AI? I think there's a lot of conversation recently around hey do I need to pay somebody? Why 1% if I can ask an LLM, hey, what's a good strategy for somebody that makes X amount of money a year and wants to retire at this point and wants to take a little risk but not too much and you can ask some questions about it. So feels like that model could be threatened or at least margins could compress. But how are you thinking about it both as an opportunity from Robinhood and then how the industry will have to, to evolve?

2:26:47

Yeah, I think, I think the, there's going to be a lot of disruption by, I mean we're starting to see it already and we have Robinhood Cortex which really has done well, sort of like helping customers think through their, their trading, their sort of self directed activity. But we've already begun conversations with regulators about how to bring Cortex to advice, making recommendations and, and doing ongoing portfolio management. So obviously we want to roll that out safely and in a trustworthy way. But it's coming and I actually think on the human advisor side, a lot of people prefer a human advisor. They prefer the relationship. They like to have someone that has the full picture and that they can talk to. So I don't think that's going away. And in fact, in fact AI is going to be a really integral part in streamlining the workflow of those people so that Rather than serving 50 clients per advisor, you go to serving 500 or possibly more. So I think you're going to see both models continue but costs and efficiency and capabilities continue to grow for each of them.

2:27:26

What's the status of copy trading? There's a lot of people that are excited about situational awareness. What Leopold's doing over there, how many clicks is it to copy his strategy and how closely is it possible to copy these days the big funds that have generated a lot of excitement?

2:28:44

Yeah, well we have a product coming out, Robinhood Social, which should commence rolling out in just like weeks to low single digit months. So we're kind of of putting the finishing touches on internal testing. We just integrated prediction markets, which actually makes the feed much more dynamic. And when we announced it, one of the features that was particularly popular was whale tracking. So following Nancy Pelosi's trades, other things like that. So we're going to make it really whale.

2:29:02

Nancy Pelosi.

2:29:38

It is such a funny world we live in. Nancy Pelosi's stock ticker. Endlessly entertaining category. Always new innovation. But congrats on the progress that Robinhood Social feature. How much of it was vibe coded? How much of a speed up are you getting internally? What is the software engineering org look like these days in an era of coding agents?

2:29:39

Yeah, we've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers. Perhaps not at the. Definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021. But one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity and keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI. And there's two things that we sort of like talked about at earnings when we look at internal operations. The two areas that move the needle are software engineering and customer support. And I think we are at or at the very least near best in class for both of those. So customer support side 75 percent of all tickets are handled by AI, including licensed cases that would have previously required a licensed brokerage professional. And we thought, I mean, frankly, we thought that would be further away. We were able to get there and deliver a great experience relatively quickly. And on the software engineering side, it's been tremendous. I mean, with every new generation of models you look at, you know, Opus 4.6 now you've got codecs, you can essentially have it running autonomously overnight, checking its own output, debugging itself, and have it do the work that probably would have taken an individual software engineer weeks to do while you sleep. And one year ago that was impossible. So the acceleration from each new generation of models is tremendous. And I think there's going to be lots and lots of disruption. You can kind of see the market starting to digest that. But I think the firms that adopt AI and are actual technology companies, this is the opportunity to dramatically accelerate relative to incumbents and, and financial services. A lot of our competitors aren't really even on cloud infrastructure anymore, they're still on mainframes. So I think it's going to become increasingly tough.

2:30:06

Last question then. We'll let you go if you have another second. How are you thinking about ma? You guys clearly have built the muscle to take new products from 0 to 1. I'm sure you have a lot of confidence around that. But what's interesting from an acquisition standpoint, what's your M and A team spending time on generally?

2:32:19

I mean, we're certainly always looking. Last year we were quite active with a number of acquisitions and I think we've really built the muscle to integrate them. Well, in particular, you have bitstamp, which since we closed that acquisition has basically doubled in revenue. And typically when you go through an integration like this, it's tougher. Right. Because things tend to slow down. But we've been able to actually accelerate as we've integrated. So that's good to see. And we're on the lookout. You know, a lot of people are bearish on the crypto industry right now. We remain bullish on crypto and we think that now's the time for builders to build. And just like in the past, the cycle goes up and down, but long run, we think crypto is going to become the financial system and they're going to converge. And so, you know, I think we're still investing heavily there.

2:32:38

That's awesome.

2:33:32

Very cool.

2:33:33

Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Very, very interesting.

2:33:34

Thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy.

2:33:38

Yeah. Hope you have a good rest of your day.

2:33:40

It's funny, so many others, other CEOs come on and they're dealing with the crazy volatility in the market and you're just like, you're like. First time? Yeah, it's great. So good.

2:33:41

Good to see you grizzled.

2:33:52

Congrats.

2:33:53

We'll talk to you later. Have a good one.

2:33:54

Cheers.

2:33:55

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Unlock infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Jeff Lawson and we are starting the Lightning round. We are starting the Lambda Lightning round.

2:33:56

Let's go.

2:34:13

Let's activate the gong.

2:34:13

Thanks.

2:34:15

Thank you, Ben. We have Jeff Lawson in the Restream waiting room. Or actually are we delayed here? Let's figure it out.

2:34:15

We can go back.

2:34:24

I will tell you about Lambda because it's actually the next one in the stack. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We have Sam Blond coming on the show in just a few minutes.

2:34:24

Buco, this kind of gets at what I was asking Vlad about. Buko says unless you have 5 million, AI is already good enough to be your financial advisor. Even then it's probably Good enough. Try it. Share net worth where how you've allocated assets, what your goals are. Ask it to analyze and identify opportunities for improvement. Stress test different scenarios. It gets basically everything right. So bullish on just out of the box LLMs for helping with this stuff.

2:34:41

Very good. Well, let's bring Jeff Lawson in to the TPP and Ultradome. How are you doing?

2:35:07

What's happening? Very good.

2:35:13

Thanks, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. First time on the show. I mean, I feel like most people will be familiar with your career, but please give us a brief introduction.

2:35:15

All right, so I'm Jeff. I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. I've been a software developer and started a bunch of companies on the Internet. So very first company during the dot com era was the first CTO of StubHub, was one of the first product managers at AWS, but then founded the company that most people know me for, which is Twilio, back in 2008. So enabling software developers to build communications and all the apps that we use all day, and grew that over 16 years to about 4 billion in revenue and took it public in 2016. And now I'm here in the fusion energy world with Inertia.

2:35:24

Amazing. I have to say thank you because Twilio sponsored a lot of hacking when I was in college, and it was like the go to fun tool to pull off the shelf and build something that was a little bit more interactive than just a normal website. I built something that would text me every day with little updates and stuff. It was so much fun to be tinkering in that era. So thank you for everything you did at Twilio, but it was a crowd pleaser. Yeah, just like delightful product experience, so many interesting unlocks. And then obviously, like, like huge partnerships. You see powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages. So obviously fantastic business. But get us up to speed on Inertia Enterprises.

2:35:58

Absolutely. Well, so Inertia is the commercial fusion energy company. And I know that sounds like, you know, saying we were selling unicorns or something, but that's because fusion energy has been the thing of Myth for nearly 100 years, since it was first hypothesized, because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean, it is safe, it is low cost, it is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022 when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with Fusion and this was a huge breakthrough. And so inertia is commercializing that experiment, taking it out of the lab and bringing it to the grid. And the way we do that is a few things. Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorn sized bit of fusion fuel with the world's largest laser. You get it just right, you compress it and you create this reaction that releases a bunch of energy. And so for us commercialization means number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important, right? You want to have science, basic science that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one. Step two, we're going to go build the world's most powerful laser. It is a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use over at the Silvermore National Lab.

2:36:39

That's crazy.

2:37:57

It is big number 20 times more efficient. It is one tenth the size. So it's a really modern but the coolest laser the humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're going to go do is build the world's first fusion fuel factory. We are making these fuel targets in a automated scaled way. And then last we bring all that together and we build a grid scale giga gigawatt scale power plant that has enough energy to be able to power a medium to large size city. A million homes. You can power with this facility. So that's our plan.

2:37:58

That's actually, that's so crazy. Talk to me about the capital intensity of this. This is hard tech, this is energy, this is a big deal. How much did you raise?

2:38:28

I love that you're doing the meme too. The like you know, make build software, you know and go into hardware. Yeah. And then do the hardest thing possible.

2:38:37

Right.

2:38:45

That's great.

2:38:46

Well you know I feel like that's one of the things that is exciting to do. Like having done the software thing for most of my career, taking what I've learned in terms of building a company and scaling a company and now bringing us to this new domain is really exciting. So in terms of the capital intensity, you're right. Fusion is not a cheap endeavor. So today we announced our first capital raise. $450 million. It's a milestone based approach.

2:38:47

Nothing like 450 to kick things off.

2:39:15

That's a fantastic graph.

2:39:18

It's a good way to get started.

2:39:20

Thanks.

2:39:22

Thanks. So we've got a milestone based approach. So basically we take this and we've got a great group of investors have come around and said hey look, you know, fusion is something that we want to invest in, but we want to invest in a commercialization effort, not in basic science. And so that's what our investors have come to the table to do. And so we're really excited to be embarking on this now. We will raise more capital later, especially as we get to that last stage, which is to go build new, the first fusion power plant. That'll be capital intensive. But this funding is allowing us to take a lot of the design work that we're doing today and then start building these prototypes, a scaled down version of that laser, a scaled down version of that target assembly plant, in order to prove that these technologies are ready for the scale up.

2:39:22

Yeah, with a business like this, it feels like obviously the TAM is massive. It's no doubt that the world needs tons and tons of energy. We want as much of it as possible. How do you look at the risk to the business? You've got technical risks, execution risk, regulatory risk. What's your kind of personal framework and how are you trying to chase each one of those down and to eliminate that risk?

2:40:03

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. It's the exact opposite of the world of software. The world of software, it was always, you can build just about anything. The only question is, does the world want it? Is anyone going to pay you for it? This is the opposite.

2:40:31

Right.

2:40:42

You know, the world needs energy, especially if it is cheap, clean, abundant and safe. The only question has always been, will it do it? And so here we are with the, you know, physics of it now proven.

2:40:43

It's a scale up.

2:40:54

And so what does that scale up consist of? Well, it is essentially building supply chains, building vendor bases, and scaling up a number of fields to meet the demands that a first power plant would put it on some new technologies. So, for example, we're working with a lot of companies in the laser diode field to scale up production of the particular kinds of laser diodes that we need to go build our, our plant. And in order to do that, we have to scale up production of these particular semiconductor diodes by about 1000x what the global production is today. And so you look at something like that and you're like, okay, that is doable. It's a lot of hard work. And so the milestones that we look at is like, okay, we're bringing the vendors along for the ride. We have to do some invention, some automation. But this looks a lot like bringing a consumer product to the market. I think about, here's what Apple does every year, they dream up a new iPhone and then they figure out how are we going to make a billion of them and then they introduce it to the world. And every time they do that, well, there's a bunch of hard things they have to go figure out about how they're going to take a design and manufacture them at scale and with a certain yield and with a certain precision. And so those are the kinds of undertakings that we are going under for both the laser scale up as well as our target development scale up.

2:40:55

How important is it to find a dance partner with one of the hyperscalers? Now I've seen a number of news articles about not just fusion, but also fission projects and just big energy projects. You know, these things are measured in years, if not decades. And it feels like there's a lot of advantages to having at least an LOI that says hey, if we can deliver this, AWS wants it or something like that. How are you thinking about spinning up the biz dev muscle of the business maybe before you break ground?

2:42:10

Well, I think that if anybody is able to deliver on cheap, abundant, clean, safe energy, is there any question that you will have buyers for? I don't think that's really the problem. I think really the problem is actually bringing those things to reality.

2:42:45

Would you say the people that are still have all this risk, technical risk to their business, can they scale it up, regulatory risk, all that, and they're focused on finding their dance partner? Is that just for hype? And do you think maybe that's the wrong focus or is creating some amount of hype necessary to attract capital? You have the luxury of a track record that allows you to raise half a billion dollars out the gate where someone else might need to find that dance partner to get any type of excitement around what they're doing?

2:43:01

Well, I think really it's about focusing on the core progress that needs to be made. Because no matter what your approach is, there's a lot of things that have to get proven, there's a lot of things that have to be done. And so I don't think that necessarily the validation of a buyer is the most important thing for the stage at which most fusion companies are at. That said, we were happy to have Google Ventures become a part of our around. So they are an investor in inertia. And obviously we think that if we are able to deliver on the promise of clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy that they and many others will be interested buyers. But really our focus is heads down, let's make it work. Let's do the engineering and the scale up and the supply chain work that is needed in order to go build that first plant.

2:43:31

Why inertia? How'd you pick the name?

2:44:17

Well.

2:44:19

There are two major types of fusion methods. One of them, which I think you may have heard about before, is magnetic confinement fusion. The other one is called inertial confinement fusion. And we are doing the inertial confinement fusion using lasers. Given that, I thought the word inertia was a super interesting word because it both can refer to the lack of change of direction. If you have inertia, you're like, well, you're not going to move. And I thought that actually spoke to humanity's dependence on carbon based energy, interestingly enough. But inertia, the flip side of inertia is once you have momentum, once you are moving, it's hard to stop you. And of course that's our goal with building the company. And so I thought there was a number of interesting things about the name, but it all stems from the basic technology that we're pursuing, which is inertial confinement fusion.

2:44:21

That makes sense.

2:45:12

Prior to this, you kind of lived and built through a number of cycles. How have you been processing kind of everything else happening in nature outside of. Outside of energy?

2:45:14

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We started StubHub, it was during the dot com meltdown in 2000, started Twilio during 2008, the financial crisis.

2:45:25

You were born in the darkness.

2:45:35

Yeah.

2:45:37

You know, I think the thing is you got to start companies irrespective of the macro environment that you're operating in. Because the macro environment is going to change. And so the business itself has to be built on the fundamentals of whatever's going to make that business successful. So for the case of say StubHub or Twilio, the fundamental was focus on customers. If customers need what we're doing, great. We'll eventually show the world and win and do all the things we need to do. If we're not serving customers, then we won't. It's as simple as that. For inertia, it's a little bit different because we're not going to have customers in the short term. But I like to say our biggest customer is the laws of science.

2:45:38

Right. So we always have to be serving.

2:46:10

The laws of physics. And if we focus on that, take.

2:46:12

You got to focus your time talking to your customers. Physics, laws of science.

2:46:17

Our customer is the universe.

2:46:21

But if we focus on that, of doing all the engineering, all the scale up work we have to go do, to go take the proven result and now build it bigger and into a power plant. That's the thing. By the time we're done with that and proving that out, whatever the current economic story of the day is or even the story of the year is, will be long gone and we'll be talking about something else. And that's how I've always looked at my startups.

2:46:25

What's the hardest role to hire for right now?

2:46:47

Well, you know what's interesting, one of the things I like and I'm really excited about with Inertia is that we are not fighting the talent war for AI engineers now. We have software engineers on staff and we are hiring people versed in AI, but it's not the same kind of people that, you know, that Meta and Google and every startup down the street. I'm here in San Francisco at the moment is fighting for and you see some pretty bonkers things going on in the talent market right now for those foundational AI engineers. And I'm quite frankly just happy that we're not in the version of that talent. We're, we're hiring for a lot of engineers, but not necessarily those. We're hiring for mechanical engineers and materials engineers and industrial engineers. We're hiring people from the likes of Apple, people who figured out how to take these products every year and take them from a designer's desktop into a factory where they're making billions of them. We are hiring people from the likes of Waymo, where they had to figure out over the last decade, hey, how are we going to build this first of a kind, autonomous, autonomous car and scale up things like lidar and make them better and cheaper and faster and all these things in order to enable those amazing cars we see driving around autonomously here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it's like those are the types of people who've done those. Scale ups are the most, you know, a lot of the interesting talent that we're going after right now. And I think that's just a little bit different than the, you know, than the AI. Let's just call it a hot mess right now in the industry.

2:46:52

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come by and explain it all to us.

2:48:24

Yeah, such a cool project. We're excited. Come back on anytime.

2:48:28

Everyone's rooting for you in the chat.

2:48:32

Big updates, small updates, you're gonna be legendary.

2:48:33

Thank you for the hard work. It'll be probably decades, but hopefully we'll have you back a bunch along the journey. This is a lot of fun.

2:48:36

Hopefully a decade and then, and then the next optimism.

2:48:43

There we go.

2:48:47

Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it.

2:48:47

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And without further ado, we have Sam Blonde coming in to the TVPN Ultra Dome. Sam, good to see you. How you doing?

2:48:49

I'm awesome. Thank you for having me. Guys, here, let's start off with a little bit of fun. I think the squad is ready for a big show and we're going to gong it. Right back at you.

2:49:00

Let's go. Wow, look at that team. Here we go.

2:49:08

Amazing, Amazing. Hey, team.

2:49:17

Wow.

2:49:20

So coming out of stealth today, it seems like you hired half of San Francisco already. How big is the team? How long have you actually been working on this? Because we worked together, what, two years ago and then you called me and you were ready to launch.

2:49:20

That's right. So we really started working on this September of 24. Coogan, awesome to see you again. Jordy, great to.

2:49:34

Great to meet you.

2:49:42

Hopefully the first of many. And started September of 24. Squad's about going on 40.

2:49:43

Wow.

2:49:50

Yeah, going on 40. A lot of EPD and we're starting to build out go to market too. So having a lot of fun.

2:49:51

Introduce the full, the full product. The company since no one's heard about it yet, but people have heard of.

2:49:57

Monaco, but now they've heard of the real Monaco.

2:50:03

Real Monaco.

2:50:06

Go.

2:50:06

There's a maybe fun story with Monica. We've already been in a bit of a lawsuit so we can go there if entertaining for the viewers.

2:50:08

Absolutely.

2:50:16

Okay.

2:50:17

So more importantly, we're an AI sales platform and I think like you know, two minute version or one minute version is on the tools side or a replacement for legacy CRM. Most commonly this is going to be like your HubSpot, your ideo, your salesforce. We also replace all of the point solutions that integrate to those tools. So this is going to be data provider like an Apollo or a Zoom info. We provide all of your signals like a clay. We do your call recording like a Otter or Fireflies. We do all your sequences like a number of different companies that do outbound in a deeply integrated platform. And for us that's really a means to an end, which is we're replacing full sales workflows with agents. And so we have agents who identify the right company to target, the right person to target, the right message to send. We leverage signals to incorporate into that message. When you get a response, we schedule a meeting, we record that meeting, we update your pipeline and we're really architected in a way that is not to be reactive to user input. If you've ever worked in a sales tool, you sort of get a database that that's largely empty that you need to tell it what to do. Day one, when you log into Monaco, everything is already done for you. You're just sort of a beneficiary and recipient of things like meetings, feedback on things you can be doing better and more.

2:50:17

Yeah, Is launching with a platform like this only possible because of AI and the advancements in coding agents and coding tools? Because it seems like you're sort of rebundling, you list it off maybe like 10 different point solutions that are now coming together. And it's notable that you guys didn't come out of stealth like maybe six months ago when you maybe had five of those things operational, but you clearly decided to launch with a full suite.

2:51:41

I think a few things come to mind. One is we are able to build software faster because of the coding copilots that you just alluded to. And so I don't know that we would have been able to build a Monaco like, like platform in the amount of time that we've been able to pre AI. We're also building for a segment of the market. We're purpose built for earlier stage startups. So this is series A seed stage companies. The needs of these businesses are relatively unsophisticated compared to much larger companies. And so because we're purpose built for a type of company that doesn't need super deep functionality, unlike the database side. In fact, when you have super deep functionality it makes it more difficult to interact with. And so you bundle all these tools together. If you're a series A startup, it actually works against you because the tools are so complicated to integrate, customize, work with. And again we're purpose built for that company. And then the last thing that comes to mind is wouldn't be possible to build Monaco without AI because we're AI native. So everything that we do is sort of oriented in the decisions that we make are around how can we program the platform to have an agent doing this rather than a user. And so very different user experience than if you're used to logging into these sort of reactive databases. I listed a few of them. HubSpot. Adio, Salesforce. Totally different user experience.

2:52:10

Experience, yeah. Talk about the domain you got. Monaco.com. talk about the lawsuit. Talk about how you picked Monaco to begin with. I want the full story.

2:53:37

Okay, so naming was hard. It took us a couple months and tried a bunch of different names and you can't just pick a name that you like. We couldn't have just called ourselves sales.com, because one we wanted the.com to be available and do you like, can't name it if something already has that name. So I was trying to associate the brand with like Luxury Premium was thinking through like what are some names that are typically associated with that and I came up with Monaco. My older brother who is a co founder when I told him I really liked the name Monaco his response was that's the stupidest name ever. What are we going to just call it like New Year York? And so he wasn't a fan but I think like over, over time started socializing it with some other people and started picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. It's a cool sounding word. Like Monaco is just like a nice word itself. The place is associated with, I don't know, wealth and success.

2:53:49

Yachts, Formula One.

2:54:51

Yachts. A big one is, is Formula One a lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up and to the right and let's see. So the domain dispute, we ended up calling it Monaco really liked the domain.

2:54:53

Was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker.

2:55:12

And get a domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDaddy.

2:55:15

We had Monaco Co and that was a couple thousand dollars I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees we spent like I don't know another eight or nine hundred thousand dollars to add the M. So we got Monaco co evolved to monaco.com we did use a broker. Shout out to Loomis if they're watching.

2:55:22

I love Loomis. I've worked with them on a bunch of domains.

2:55:42

Shout to out Louis.

2:55:46

Cool.

2:55:47

How?

2:55:47

What, what the dispute?

2:55:48

Yeah, yeah, the dispute. What actually happened?

2:55:49

So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while and we get this like hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain that the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We'd never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there's like a regulatory body for domains. Anyway, they made like all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated like trademark claims. We tried to get legal representation. This is like a couple months long process that required all sorts of evidence and more and we ended up winning the case. So all's well that ends well. We are Monaco. It's official.

2:55:52

Just come and went to war with a country before he even launched. Not, not many wartime CEO.

2:56:34

There we go.

2:56:39

We've been covering the SaaS apocalypse. You guys have the benefit of kind of understanding the world in its current form and building from the ground up. But a lot of questions around seat based pricing. Do companies need to evolve to more value based pricing? What are you learning about kind of the broader concerns around enterprise software and how are you kind of applying it?

2:56:43

Well, I can tell you what we're doing. Right now we're in public beta. So yesterday we were in private beta, today we're in public beta. We'll eventually get to general availability. Right now we're pricing around simplicity. So we charge a platform fee that includes all of the compute that you need. Relative to these other companies that I've referenced. We have very high compute costs because of all of the agents that are doing the work. We also have really high servicing costs. We pair what we call forward deployed A is with every customer that signs up. So we charge a platform fee. Those things are included. Right now we're charging annual platform fee of $25,000. That's discounted to what it will be as we go into ga. And we will, I suspect when somebody who is at the company that is motivated, smarter than me on the finance side, I think we will be in this sort of like you pay a minimum, minimum amount for the initial compute and then it's pay as you go. It just makes far more sense with the value that we're adding to do this usage based sort of compute predicated pricing. But right now we're solving for simplicity and eliminating friction from onboarding customers. And this has been a price point that has been met with very little resistance.

2:57:07

How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare any, any software engineer says oh I don't write any code, I just review code. Now what, what's the equivalent experience in sales? Where do you think it goes?

2:58:23

Yeah, it's, it's a thoughtful question, you know, look, my answer may change 6 to 12 months ago from now. So let me give you the like today answer. It doesn't seem that the sort of customer facing, relationship building aspect of sales is going anywhere. In fact that that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople in some of our customers cases founders are doing trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with you know, Some sort of like agent that is pretending to be a salesperson or whatever it might be. People want, want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. It's the sort of non customer facing activities that we believe agents are far better at. So I'll give some example, building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you without being customer facing who are the best companies for you to target and why. Here's your priority prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list. We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We are going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you as the beneficiary, whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing. The way that I'm speaking with you guys right now and we're going to optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow up. So you get off the call, we have the call transcript, we've written an email for you to follow up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send time for the next call. And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around it's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers and actually emphasizing the relationship building that happens that is sort of customer facing.

2:58:37

What's the best way to get a job as a salesperson in 2026. Advice for young people, maybe mid career people, somebody who wants to sort of be on. I mean you worked in sales, had a great career. What does it take to be the next San Blonde?

3:00:43

Oh well that's my answer. Might come up as too arrogant. Why don't I just, why don't I come up with like what would I do if I wanted a job in Monaco? I think, I think there are a couple of things that stand out right now. We've come out of this like and I think we're long out of the sort of like Covid time period. We are five days a week at least in San Francisco. And so anybody that is sort of looking for this like I expect to be able to, you know, potentially work from home one or two days like sort of COVID hangover, that's a thing of the past. So I think from a Quality standpoint, people that are just looking to win understand that it's like hard work to work and win at a company like Monaco. I do think that, like, track record of performance is. Is an important thing. And so if you are, you know, a little bit later in your career or have several years of experience leveraging the relationships and the network that you've developed through that process, I think for us, it's going to be hard to hire someone that sort of comes to the website and fills out a like, I want to be a senior AE at this company, like job application without a close connection.

3:01:00

They're send you a bottle of champagne. Right. That's the secret.

3:02:20

Look, I won't say I can't be bought.

3:02:24

Yeah. If you're looking for a job, send a case of champagne. You'll get the interview. Maybe. Who knows? You got to have the resume too, and the skills to back it up. Jordan, anything else?

3:02:32

No, this is great. Congratulations, the whole team on all the progress. I. Yeah, I'm excited to watch more companies pick this up and start to grow their revenue faster, hopefully.

3:02:41

This is awesome.

3:02:51

Thanks so much, guys.

3:02:52

Thank you for having me.

3:02:55

Congrats on the success. We'll talk soon.

3:02:56

Take care.

3:02:57

Cheers.

3:02:58

Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And without further ado, we have someone in person. Who is it? It's John. How you doing, John?

3:02:58

Sorry, what's happening?

3:03:20

Welcome.

3:03:21

Thank you.

3:03:23

Grab a seat.

3:03:24

Even better in person.

3:03:25

Yes, even better in person. What brings you to la?

3:03:26

Well, a couple of other meetings, but I figured I had to stop by.

3:03:29

Yeah.

3:03:31

And you know, little known fact, I was actually in journalism school.

3:03:32

Okay.

3:03:36

Before, along with data science, I was also majoring in journalism in Northwestern. And if this had been an option when I was still in school, I might have not dropped out and just tried to get a job here.

3:03:36

Who are your heroes? Who's the goat Journalist, in your opinion?

3:03:45

Oh, man.

3:03:48

Well, I dropped out for a reason.

3:03:49

Didn't learn anyone's name. That's funny. Well, reintroduce yourself. Tell everyone what you're working on, what you're building for.

3:03:52

Sure. So, I'm the founder and CEO of Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth, outdoors, indoors, underground, without relying on hardware like satellites, beacons or cameras. So that's a bunch of buzzwords to.

3:03:59

Say external without external hardware. Right. You still need your hardware.

3:04:11

We use imus that are already installed on devices like phones, robots, embedded devices, medical devices.

3:04:14

So no magnetic fields involved? No, that's kind of a different tech.

3:04:21

It's different tech. And the key differentiator in what we've built is something called synthetic fingerprinting, which is. Which is this idea of being able to simulate IMU measurements at scale for different people and objects. And the value behind that is essentially, from this desk here, we could map out and simulate an environment anywhere in the world. Amazon warehouse in Boston, and then have that up and running, like, in an hour.

3:04:26

Okay.

3:04:49

If you wanted to typically use, like, a magnetic approach, you actually. Because it's hard to simulate magnetic movement because it's usually dependent on objects that are hard to predict being in the environment. You actually have to go to that warehouse, collect that data manually, and then train models on that. And so our idea is that the ultimate scalability with any positioning system is one that can be deployed fully remotely. Because I can't possibly go to every corner of the earth and install beacons, cameras, or collect fingerprint data.

3:04:49

So what's the textbook device? Android phone, iPhone?

3:05:17

Yeah. So, I mean, every mobile phone today has an IMU instance. So, like, the same thing that's powering your Compass app, right? Accelerometers, gyroscopes are what we rely on.

3:05:20

Are they getting better? Because I feel like the compass app came out, I don't know, a decade ago. And it works as well as I can tell.

3:05:28

I mean, they've gotten better. Like. So the traditional problem you'll see in the, like, inertial measurement unit space, if that's one space that you find yourself in, is that drift is pretty prominent. So, you know, in theory, if we can do something that's faster, better, cheaper, and more accurate, you know, everyone's like, why haven't this been done before? Right. So the idea is typically because IM use drift a lot. So if you want to actually, you know, track someone over or an object over a long period of time, typically they veer off course and then you end up losing.

3:05:35

The example is the phone's here. You know, the phone's here to start. Then you raise it one foot. The IMU knows you went up a foot, you put it down a foot. The IMU knows you went down a foot, so you know where you are.

3:06:03

Yeah, that'd be probably like an accelerometer, like a altitude sensor. But we're talking about usually speed and orientation vectors. So the simplest way to think about it is right if you know your starting position and you're stacking vectors related to speed and direction, that's called dead reckoning. That's the approach where you're not actually that's just like very drift prone. Right. And so then what are what we do with our simulation and then our kind of the models that we've built is what mitigates drift by like 90 plus percent and is able to track people and things over long periods of time. So the value adds are places like, like in defense and military. Right. Because GPS gets jammed like instantly in any war zone, in indoor environments like warehouses, hospitals, any sort of logistics center. So those are kind of where we target first. Obviously our long term goal is to sort of be like a, like I said, a pretty wide scale GPS replacement. You can imagine like that way down the road, eventually someone like FEMA being able to use this to find survivors of natural disasters under piles of rubble where a GPS signal might not be able to penetrate through. But in the near term, those commercial opportunities are pretty strong.

3:06:14

Do you have any customers yet or do you have pilots running and how big are these firms that you're working with?

3:07:14

Yeah, so we work with, like I said, kind of those three industries mostly right now, logistics, healthcare and defense. We have three customers. Our ACVs are in like the mid to low six figures. So those deployments, the first deployments are actually going out in March, which is exciting for us.

3:07:19

And do they have to change anything on the hardware side?

3:07:35

No. So we were kind of of out of the box by design. Again, the whole goal is we want to eliminate as much, especially compared to like rtls, solutions like beacons or cameras. We want to eliminate as much friction as possible. So we integrate directly onto device and they don't require any setup.

3:07:37

Yeah. How'd you get into this? Were you just annoyed by messy, noisy data and you were like, I gotta fix this.

3:07:54

You kept going into GPS denied zone.

3:08:00

You find yourself there all time.

3:08:04

The. The time.

3:08:05

Well, that's the same reason why if you're ever like driving in a city and it tells you you're going the wrong way on your maps app and it's really annoying. That's why for reference, those building, even outdoors, those tall buildings get in the way of the signals. But I got into it largely because both of my parents were in the US military, in the Navy. And so for a cumulative set of years they were deployed between Afghanistan, Asia, all over. And so I think I kind of was exposed early on to the idea of wanting to know where your Parents were when you were a kid. And it's funny how you develop develop these like random hyper fixations maybe at that age that feel random and then over time, you know, an elementary explanation from my mom or dad kind of converted into like a prolonged interest.

3:08:05

That's cool. What's the status of the company? How much have you raised?

3:08:40

Yeah, so we raised we out of YC which we were in the summer 25 batch. We raised a little over $5 million.

3:08:43

Let's hit the gong.

3:08:48

Nice.

3:08:49

Never hit the gong for this race. Congratulations.

3:08:50

It hits different in person too.

3:08:55

It is.

3:08:56

No, it's better but raised 5 million led by CRV out of YC.

3:08:57

Charles River Ventures, correct?

3:09:02

Exactly. Well, yeah, I did not. I should have probably known what that stood for before I took the money. I learned that after the fact.

3:09:04

You locked in, looked it up.

3:09:10

Yeah.

3:09:11

So how big is the team?

3:09:11

Right now it's seven. It's a pretty technically dense problem and so essentially all of our talent are like the top. There's a very small community of hyper talented engineers and researchers mostly in academia who focus on like no hardware tracking, simulated data, all that stuff. We've been fortunate enough to probably have what I feel comfortable in saying is probably the highest concentration of those people at a single company today. Maybe Waymo or maybe maybe Tesla who does a lot of LIDAR and slam stuff. But yeah, seven people, pretty much all.

3:09:13

Engineers and the IMU manufacturers, they don't want to get into this side of the software problem for their clients. Provide an API that is less noisy.

3:09:41

Yeah, it's like probably a business opportunity for them, but it's a pretty drastically different space than manufacturing sensors that are the size of your pinky nail into sort of building simulations and all these drift loss functions that are again pretty concentrated in the know how among the 10 or so people that can actually build that across the world.

3:09:53

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. What was the biggest thing you learned in yesterday?

3:10:13

Well, YC was interesting for us because we are I think like 95% of our batch was B2B SaaS or like agents. I think even maybe so which was.

3:10:17

I remember which was. Yeah, yeah, you were there.

3:10:25

You got agents for your agents.

3:10:27

Yeah, it was a lot of agent infrastructure companies. I think you were.

3:10:29

You know we're actually in our office at Union Square is browser base's old office.

3:10:32

Oh no way.

3:10:35

So hopefully we're summoning some of the good juju from them. But no, YC was good for us because they basically shove all of the non agent Companies into one group office hours. So like our like eight companies in our weekly meetings was like a missile company, like I think Perseus Defense, Knox Metals, if you're familiar with them, US Robotics, like a robotics company. There are another couple guys building like magnesium alternatives. So it was a pretty eclectic group. Nobody was really focused on the same thing, but they were really good conversations. So my favorite part about that was probably the group office hours. If you can like finagle your way into the eight or nine deep tech companies.

3:10:35

Yeah. What are you trying to prove out before the a before?

3:11:15

Well, I mean realistically, like I think for us it's like a technical question more than there's like a market question. Right. Because again, if we're coming TO Right now 90% of all human and object movement globally is in GPS denied areas. Which makes sense if you think about it like right now we're in one. Anytime you're indoors, underground, in a combat zone, there's no location to data being tracked. So you're missing tons of analytics. So I think the appeal is pretty strong in terms of the need and we can do it if our technology works as we say it does, at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time with the same accuracy and reliability. So essentially it just comes down to proving out the tech. And we have a lot of. We also have a lot of pre orders aside from the customers we already have that I think will propel us to all the revenue benchmarks that are important for us at this point. It's essentially proving out that we're able to again and mainly reduce drift meaningfully so that we can track people for hours or eventually days on end without it being a significant problem.

3:11:19

I gotta ask how you're thinking about privacy, security, all those things. I'm sure the Internet, if you're successful, you'll be one of the most hated people on the Internet. Just from the schizos.

3:12:11

Well, I've been seeing all the hearings.

3:12:22

Online of all the.

3:12:23

Yeah, the hearings get pretty tense.

3:12:24

Get ready.

3:12:26

Exactly.

3:12:28

So I'm like maybe next up. But no, I mean privacy is essentially something that we're usually selling to vendors or companies who have end users on their side. So by and large our direct interface is not with the people who are being tracked with their location. That doesn't mean it's not important for us. Obviously we have our methods about it being encrypted, working a lot with defense and those environments has to be very secure. But generally the like, when we work with healthcare, for instance, Tracking staff is usually a matter of, well, does it fall within the union rights? Is it something that if it's on a hospital issued device, usually they're allowed to track them without it being a problem. If it's on a personal device, then it obviously comes down to the direct discretion of the employee and even the personal devices.

3:12:29

Apple can track you, but Apple has spent probably billions of dollars talking about how they treat privacy. Seriously, you sort of know that if you open up the Maps app you're, you're paying the gps.

3:13:14

And for what it's worth, like we're using also the standard infrastructure that Apple is also using in their devices. So the actual things that we're going off of in terms of hardware have already been greenlit and approved by hopefully institutions that people trust. Again though, it'll ultimately probably come down mostly to the interactions and the relationships between the customers that we sell to and their customers. My long term vision though is right now we're selling commercial. It'd be great. Over the course of 5, 10 years you can see a use case where there's a consumer facing version of Juxto instead of Google Maps or Apple Maps. You get the added benefit of again, a navigation tool that will never lose your direction. When you're in a big city, you can route it from your house to your exact appointment room at a hospital. It'll give you routing on the road to the parking. Once you're in the hospital, navigate to the room. So there's those easy added benefits. But more than that, when I think about FEMA tracking, are people going to download a FEMA app to be tracked by FEMA in the event or natural disaster? Probably not. So I think about like in terms of how we can ultimately eventually interface with people directly is we might partner with companies or agencies like FEMA or whoever else who want to track location in sparing moments and they basically as a user on like juxtamaps you can opt in to FEMA tracking you if you live in a natural disaster area and one strikes and then that's sort of a consent process that we would deal with directly with the customer. But for now that's probably much too ambitious and way down the road.

3:13:25

Yeah, Also the phone OEMs would probably want something like this Apple just randomly rolled out like hey, if you don't have cell service you can send one text message via a very slow satellite and everyone's like awesome. If I'm ever lost hiking, I'll probably text someone. What does the data side of the business look like, is this a big data problem where you need to actually source a ton of data, run a model on top?

3:14:43

So the big, again, the big breakthrough with the US has been the synthetic fingerprinting process. So we're the first company publicly that I know of that's built an IMU simulator at scale that's as reliable as ours is. So essentially we can be given an input of an object. We do a lot of asset tracking too. So we do a lot of warehouses and different shipments. Given the dimensions, weight, height, whatever of a object or person, we can then simulate it in our physics based engine, have them moving around a 3D space. Because we render, we basically take in a map or a satellite image of what, whatever the space is. We use computer vision to render it into this 3D model. Then we simulate all these people or things moving around the space and create these basically anchor points, benchmarks of what IMU measurements are going to be at certain spots given how that person is moving and where they started and all that other stuff. And that allows us to benchmark that data so we're able to. That ability to synthetically generate it is what makes it so scalable in terms of again, long term, really long term visions. My anticipation is we'll be one of the largest holders of all labeled map and floor plan data in the world by a good margin. Right. There's actually, it's a pretty untapped but important space to have labeled data, as you can imagine.

3:15:05

Broadly.

3:16:14

Yeah.

3:16:14

And because the only input that we get from users is the floor plan or the satellite image of the space they want to track. So if we were to partner with, let's say, a major grocery store chain across the United States, we'll probably be the only company at the moment that has that much labeled data about aisles, shelves, checkout lines, everything like that. So that's maybe not a. That's more of like a monetization route down the road in terms of data that we need as our input. The synthetic process kind of allows us to circumvent a lot of that.

3:16:15

Interesting. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

3:16:42

Well, great to get the update.

3:16:44

Congratulations.

3:16:46

Hang out. Hang out for a little bit.

3:16:47

Yeah, we'll hang out after.

3:16:48

We'll do. Thanks.

3:16:49

We gotta plant the bomb. We gotta tell everyone. Thank you for watching the show.

3:16:50

Do we have one break? What do we have? There's one more video I want you to watch. I don't think you've seen it yet. This one is for you.

3:16:55

Okay. I'm excited. Let's Pull it up. Sharing it with the team going on. We got through a lot of stuff today. Oh, I think I know what you're pulling up.

3:17:01

I think I know you guys got it.

3:17:13

Let's see. Blue water autonomy had a announcement. Okay, let's watch this pov Nightly reel scroll. But you're probably performatively into physical media, so they print them out. I could get into this.

3:17:15

Commenting.

3:17:29

Commenting. Okay. Double tap a like. Okay.

3:17:30

This is. This is. This is how you're gonna start consuming short form.

3:17:35

Yeah. People. People always lament the fact that we don't print out the tweets anymore, but a lot of the tweets are videos, and you can't print those out, but maybe you can. Maybe you actually can print out the videos. Anything else you want to talk about before we get out of here?

3:17:40

No. Fun show today. Thank you, guys.

3:17:54

You want to talk about the Hermes leather pool table in emerald green? Plant that bomb and we'll tell everyone about the leather pool table. It's emerald green. This would look great in the ultra dome. It's only $264,000. What a steal for an Hermes pool table.

3:17:56

Absolutely.

3:18:15

And they put the H on the cue ball. I like that little.

3:18:16

I like it.

3:18:19

Let everyone know you got the Hermes.

3:18:20

Version down for generations.

3:18:22

Leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter@tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11am The Pacific shark. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.

3:18:23