You're watching TVPN. Today's Thursday, September 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress financial capital. Every time I see the road to Christmas, I laugh. How many days we got, Jordy?
105 days till Christmas. Get ready. Uh, let me also tell you about ramp.com. They're making a musical or Broadway play. Uh, time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We'll get to the story, but awesome, awesome stunt. Uh, it also looks like it's a musical about Ramp bill pay specifically. I like that it's not just about the corporate entity. It's the subproduct. It's one SKU. You got to be making whole Broadway plays about single SKUs for your company. Um, no. Uh, they got Billy Zane. They got a bunch of really talented people working on this. I think it's going to be really fun. Uh, the teaser trailer dropped on Eric Lyman's X account today, but uh, it's gonna be fun to watch that project unfurl.
Well, uh, should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have uh, Y Combinator Demo Day going on today. We got Garry Tan coming on the show at 11:25. Then we're going back-to-back with five different startups that are in this YC batch doing everything from humanoid robots uh, to satellites to AI agents and credit cards, fintech. We're going all over the place giving you a tour of what's going on in uh, the startup world. Uh, which I personally enjoy because it's a good way to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the uh, at the early stage. There's so much discussion about what's going on uh, among the big labs and Apple obviously in the news yesterday. Uh, it can be uh, all-encompassing, but the big, the big story...
Time to talk to the future.
Talk to the future. The next.
No, that's really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are going to look like in a decade. Some people don't think we're going to be here in a decade.
They don't sense one of them.
Never black pill. Uh, I saw a good post this morning. Uh, uh, uh, Joshua Bach said, "If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by December 31st, 2030, you pay me 1 million USD. If not, I will pay you 10 million USD."
That's a good, good, good uh, take it joke. Yeah, there's a lot of people out there that should uh, take the bet.
Why there's no... I mean, that's the whole joke is no, I know, but um, yeah, I mean with a lot of these the arguments break down, a lot of things break down. It's also just so difficult to put a P(doom) over time because you have to time-bound it because uh, you know, general scientists will say uh, humanity will go extinct eventually. The default number is 10 to the 100 years.
That's a googol years from now. It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse. Yeah. Even in a billion years, we're going to be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the Earth. It will have expanded to become encompassing the Earth. So, you got to get off Earth in the next billion years. We're working on that with SpaceX. Elon occasionally delayed. I think he's going to make it before the next billion years. Uh, the AI thing obviously much more pressing. All sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on, and a wall-to-wall press tour from uh, a lot of the safety community. Uh, Daniel from AI 2027 was on Joe Rogan. Uh, it was an interesting listen. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience and then Rogan will take him in these very funny directions just being like, "Yeah, these AI agents are crazy. Let's talk about UFOs." It's actually like the meme. They're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, "Have you heard about remote viewing?" And uh, and he breaks down remote viewing for him. And Daniel has to be like, "Well, I'm more skeptical of that." But I'm a real believer in X-risk. And so, I think the net effect is going to be more awareness about the topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up muddling it because people now put X-risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp as like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. It becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete. But I don't really know. We'll see. We'll see. Uh, what did AI 2027 predict for September of 2026? They said this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research inter... uh, uh...
Yeah. But that's accelerating and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip. Um, the economically disruptive is the capability. Uh, jobs, junior software engineering faces major disruption. People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering, major disruption. We'll see. We'll see if uh, if that plays out. This month the job market has been pretty strong. We mapped that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI-related job losses, but uh, that's less than 1% of the 1.7 million jobs that are lost every month. But then of course there are more than 1.7 million new jobs and new hires because people change jobs a lot. And so uh, that's often what's going on. Markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026 and a 10,000-person anti-AI protest and growing defense contracts. Um, that seems...
That feels notable that we haven't had a protest.
There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco, uh, a safety protest.
It was not nearly 10,000 people.
It was like more like under a hundred, but dozens. Uh, but yeah, I mean it seems like uh, the Joe Rogan experience, the national news tour, if you're going to get 10,000 people in the streets, like this is a key step in the chain.
Well, Sheryl Crow was over on Instagram highlighting uh, AI risk and someone was saying uh, uh, Sherry Oi, is that a celebrity something?
Uh, says take to the streets like they did in Albania, all of us. We can't be ignored. So there's, I guess, calls for protests.
Yeah. And there was another uh, there was another risk incident uh, reported by the New York Times today. Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons. In a new report, the AI startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work.
Some scientists were using an Anthropic model to work on biological research and the Anthropic team flagged it as, hey, this could be in the line of a bioweapon. We don't know that that's what this person was trying to do, but we're going to shut it down because of course a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into a nuclear bomb and same thing, these are a lot of dual-use technologies. Uh, anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxin who uh, I think will have much more uh, news? He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper CNN. Um, and I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point. It feels like there's going to be a... It is interesting that with the launch of the Post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a one-hour, three-hour podcast like we didn't get our Situational Awareness. It's like I want the five-hour sit-down with someone.
Based on the interviews, it doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content.
Okay, maybe he does, but it's the best because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and like take someone on that journey and that can actually be in service of updating people about X-risk. You can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are, you know, the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that. Uh, I don't know. Yeah, I...
Yeah, I thought it was um...
I think it's coming. I think it's coming. Refresh your podcast player in a week. You're going to have full...
I mean, he's got to go on uh, on hard for this. I don't know. And let's watch.
This is from Fox News last night.
I think that industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible. Did you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?
Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally and conversations I've had. He's serious that they think their industry...
A lot of people are keying on to the background here. They're like, "Wait, this guy just... he quit yesterday and he already has a podcast studio." People are like, "Is that someone else's podcast studio?" And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out whose podcast studio it's in. It's Call Her Daddy.
This goes way deeper than we thought.
Uh, no. So, I do expect it at some point as they dig in here based on how much sort of it seems like there's very much a significant push from the overarching AI safety community to make this week all about...
Yeah. He clarified this a little bit on uh, on Anderson Cooper saying that he like worked with a bunch of friends and where's the line between like friends and professional like, you know, we're all a big family here. We're all friends. So that like the answer could be muddled. I don't know. I'm sure we'll find out more soon. Uh, anyway, uh, you think he's going to launch a Neolab?
I think he's gonna drop a coin, book, movie. There's gonna be something. You know, the story is not over. Story is not over. There's going to be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company.
And then his spoon gets back.
Um, trying to transition here.
No, it's uh, somebody just said Sebastian says he's a del with a crazy P(doom). That's a quote from Mountainhead. Oh, yeah. Remember? Which is now out maybe a year.
I remember you watched it. Which is um... but that was sort of a niche film. It didn't go as big as...
Yeah, I didn't think it was a good film, but it had some funny moments.
And it was about like an AI apocalypse, right? They go to like a...
Yeah. But it was all about deep... go to a bunky.
Okay. Okay. Maybe I head now. But uh, it's all about the doom scenario was around deepfakes and humanity thinking that there was like, you know, conflicts happening which would create... I don't know that I'm super like worried about that particular scenario, but you could take me on that journey for 20 minutes in a long-winded answer on a podcast and I would be entertained. And so I think that there is material there. And I did see genuinely a lot of uh, like sort of AI safety skeptics uh, just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad. Uh, it's so easy to condense a P(doom) down to a single number. But I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario as opposed to these vague things where it's like I have a lot of authority, I have a lot of insight and 5% or 20%. Uh, it obviously, I mean it does go viral, but uh, clearly there were people that had demand for more of a story that they could track and they could falsify. Individual Keith Ry yesterday was struggling with this where it was like it's hard to falsify someone saying 10% in the next 10 years, but it's easier to falsify about like, well, the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time and this is what's going to happen and this is how they get...
Totally, totally. Yeah. Um, anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Thank you. We have some of our team up in San Francisco for YC Demo Day. Uh, we're going to be joined by Garry Tan in 10 minutes. Uh, we'll do a quick roundup of the rest of the news. Um, should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about Bending Spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordy?
Let's start with Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons acquires Miro for 1.79 billion.
Paul Bonnet over GP over 20 VC.
Uh, says, "But who gets the money?" My usual breakdown. Uh, so this is 89% below the last round and at uh, less than three times revenue.
Whoa. Miro was valued at 17.5 billion.
Yeah, that's really high. Wow. Yeah.
Okay. Um, so um, anyways, I, you know, we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff. A lot, you know, investors are getting...
Yes, but I am interested in the Bending Spoons strategy because Airtable, Miro, Miro felt like modern collaborative slides and like mood boards, and then Airtable felt like the modern uh, you know, Excel sheet. And it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle, but I don't know if that's actually how Bending Spoons thinks about this. It feels like in the past they've been very interested in just it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a rollup where if you have Airtable, you get Miro for free or vice versa. And there's cross-selling options because if you like these more modern tools like a Miro, like an Airtable, uh, I've seen both of these deployed in the same startup and the startup there's always this tension between we're paying 20 bucks a seat for this, 20 bucks a seat for that, or we could just do 15 bucks for Google and we get all of them. So you actually wind up with a portfolio and I don't know, maybe the sum is greater than its parts. What do you think?
Uh, potentially, but yeah, it was very... it's just insane to me that this was a $17 billion company uh, just a little bit ago. And ultimately, this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these like later stage or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because they're clearly there's certain teams that are fantastic, great categories, great, you know, on the path to being great businesses and yet they feel so many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at a hundred trillion or whatever the number is. And we're going to see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are around this valuation now that three years from now will sell at a 90% discount.
Right. I'd be interested to see if like have the metrics at Miro changed in the age of AI because you could imagine that people if they need a collaborative, you know, mood board or slide deck they can vibe code their own tool, but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it even if you can clone it. So the SaaS apocalypse was fully averted by the sales forces of the world and the revenue decline never showed up in the SaaS companies and so the SaaS apocalypse was canceled. But was there a micro SaaS apocalypse that did show up at this level and that's why we're seeing these deals? I don't know. It's not public. Yeah. Uh, do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Senra's new episode with Luca Ferrari?
Because David S, perfect timing. I have an episode with Luca Ferrari coming out this Sunday.
Is that great? He's just like, "Thank you. Thank you for lining up this deal with you coming on my podcast." Um, no. Uh, Jason says, uh, 3x paying 3x ARR at 600 million of ARR, over 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year, cash flow positive, man. Um, and uh, but Jamie Quint says, "Multiple years of 5% ARR growth will do that."
Yeah, if you're not accelerating, I mean, the entire multiple is based on growth. So, there's not going to be, you know, a significant acceleration. You got to be growing.
Yeah, it's true. Uh, so in other acquisition news, um, yeah, we got a card out, but Tailwind got acquired by Shopify.
Uh, that's very cool. Remember, uh, if you remember, I think Tailwind was accelerating AI software development, but wasn't directly a beneficiary, right?
And didn't they get like sort of like, you know, a bunch of people in the industry, I think, came together.
Google, right? Wasn't Logan? I think it was like I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was like such a cool community moment. Um, and interesting that they now like found a proper landing spot which is cool. Uh, yeah, very optimistic scenario. Um, uh, we had a little bit of iPhone Duo coverage yesterday. We didn't see the crease.
We had a key question in the chat from Sally Analysis. They asked, "What do you guys think about the crease?" I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders and Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. Uh, true. My accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease to matter at all.
Yeah, especially if this is a mode where you're uh, using two apps, you don't care about the middle at all. I've seen guys on football days have four TVs next to each other with full bezels. Like you can see the line going down the center of the and they just don't care. So like this is not a big deal. Uh, now the interesting thing is like will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a film. Um, but I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by 9 and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides. Not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like 4:3. So maybe you go back and you get some 4:3 content from like the 70s and 80s and that displays really well because you don't need to do the pan and scan thing anymore. But um, and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying. It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix like what percent like will this be as popular as the iPhone Pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%? It's the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out, it's their most foldable phone ever.
Yeah, this was a comment from the listeners, prolific uh, Spotify, the Spotify uh, comedian Dave. He commented yesterday it's their most foldable iPhone yet.
And it really is. This was, we should have come to us on the show yesterday, but thank you Dave for throwing that in the comments.
So it has, yeah, it has something fresh. If you're bored of the same phone every year, this is a way to inject some variation. So really it's like when they introduce the iPhone Duo 2, which will...
I think they're going to have to multiply them and get the iPhone Quattro.
Then they'll say it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four...
Until it's just a full accordion like a fan that just fans out its screens.
Yeah. The fan, the iPhone fan. It's just like this, you know.
Yeah. 20 different folds. Um, what was funny is I'm gonna put you on blast here a little bit as you come in and you're like, "Yeah, like this just makes me want an iPhone 18 Pro." And you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone 8 yet. It's just a great phone. They made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, "This is your joke. You fell for your own joke." But it is sort of like this. It could be for some people like an anti-Halo phone. For some people it's going to be the Halo where they're like, "I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing. I got that." For other people, they're going to be like, "Oh, thank god I don't have to deal with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 plus, you know, all these crazy things." So, you know, the catalog variety is valuable. You know, Blake Scholl, yeah, jumped in and said when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. Uh, I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why exactly you need a bigger screen. It's like, hey, you know, we know some of you guys are spending, you know, uh, hours and hours and hours a day.
This is such a... Okay, continue.
Just finish your argument so I can rebut.
No, why don't you jump in John? I just think that there is cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain-rotty when you're on a bigger screen.
Like games on your phone, like which you would from time to time.
I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate, I'm going Lawrence of Arabia, I'm going Citizen Kane.
Yeah, and I agree that that is the use case, but I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff.
It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out as like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices and so we're giving you a bigger screen.
I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like you can answer your emails, you can connect with your friends, you can text them, you can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah. There's some game that's brainy, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo, like these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing. Yeah.
So, being able to do more of that. Plus, it's just like you don't know when you're... it's very hard to plan ahead for like, oh, I'm gonna get caught with an extra hour waiting at the DMV or I'm gonna wait a plane or I'm gonna have some downtime and I'm going to want to actually like enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, oh, I should bring an iPad because I'm going to be stuck waiting in this line for 20 minutes. So, I want to watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the Duo in your pocket. You're good to go.
I'm not sold, but get this guy a job at the Apple store.
Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Garry Tan in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. We've been keeping him waiting. I want to know, Garry, how you doing? And are you going with the Duo or the Pro Max Plus 18? Do you want a folding phone?
I'm down for the folding phone. That sounds great. I got the Samsung trifold. It's pretty sick.
You do? Whoa. So, you're living.
Personally, I'm holding out for the iPhone Quattro screen. I want it to fold out like an accordion.
Also buy that. Okay. Well, uh, how are things going?
Wait. Like it's top of mind for everyone.
Yeah, YC Demo Day is also top of mind, but are there any new ways that you use the trifold phone?
Outside of just more entertainment, I'm struggling to see when does it go full trifold for you?
Uh, you know, like just watching TBPN mainly.
I want to see your beautiful faces and, you know, and it's just full resolution, you know. Got it. Fantastic. Got it. Um, awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute banger of a show. Kick us off with the stats like where is YC? How big is this batch? What differentiates this batch? And then we'll go into uh, the broader technology landscape, the startup ecosystem, all that.
That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today. About a quarter of them are hard tech. That's up 40x uh, since our low bar maybe like three or five years ago. I mean, hard tech is big and it's here because of AI. I mean, intelligence is on tap now, right? So what that means is uh, instead of just doing uh, bits, like it's time to do atoms, guys. It's time to actually like create abundance for one another. And then the kind of stuff that people are doing completely insane. I mean, it's, you know, some pretty pure research type stuff. We got a company called Frontier. They're um, they made uh, biochips uh, that use basically neuronal cells.
I think we had him on the show already. Yeah, I think he went viral earlier and we got him on the show.
Brain in a vat. Yeah, we were doing brain in a vat week. We had like three companies that were doing bio stuff. It's, yeah, it's a crazy time. On the hardware question, uh, are we seeing a boom in hardware startups because there are more cool things to do with AI? I'm thinking of, I have a sticker box. You push the kid pushes a button, they say a prompt, and then it prints a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool. Wouldn't exist before generative AI. But then there's the other side which is like hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles. You have to deal with manufacturers. And I feel like AI can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chain's in order, doing inventory management, all these different things. Is it both? Which one are you seeing be the most acceleratory?
Oh, I mean look at what's happening with uh, GPT-6 Navier-Stokes equation. Like that's insane, right?
So if you're trying to do board layout, it's, you know, you're going to be able to do it much faster.
Yeah. And uh, you know, what was the alternative to that? Like if you are a team of like one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some hard tech thing that you really need, I mean it's so close to zero. Uh, you know, or you need to have raised $100 million to convince that person to quit. Now you might not need that person on day one. You could just go to GPT-6 Astra. You say, "Hey, look, this is what I'm trying to figure out." And you're iterating with it. You actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or, you know, that university. Like you don't need to convince them. You just actually get it farther along. You can show it to an investor. You can get money. You can get there on 5 million instead of $50 million. It's sort of like, you know, multiple stacking things that are happening. Like you have intelligence on tap, then uh, any given founder who can identify a thing that people need in the world. Um, suddenly you can say, you know what, this is the path. This is like, this is always what we've done at YC is uh, you know, we're giving you half a million dollars. What can you actually get done? You know, these days it's half a million dollars plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits, right? So what's a million dollars in cloud credits if not like maybe the equivalent of $10 million worth of R&D for, you know, whatever.
I remember back in uh, 2012 it was 170k, 150k and then 150k in cloud credits. And it was hard to spend those credits. Like you had to actually get things to scale because it was only if you had the demand side solved then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit. But from actually going zero to one, that 150k on AWS was sort of just like, ah, I wish I could use it. And people were joking about like maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. Um, but you couldn't actually use it in the R&D phase. And now you actually can pull those credits into the R&D phase in the form of tokens, which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the credit usage rate has gone up a lot.
Yeah. People need to be token maxing. I mean, what's funny, I mean, you know, OpenAI will come and just give any YC company $2 million worth of tokens, right?
Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
I mean, that's a part of the deal now, right? Like it's optional. You don't have to take it. But uh, we tell people like if you're doing something hard, you should probably take the $2 million because, you know, if you can't figure out...
How to turn $2 million worth of tokens into $100 million worth of enterprise value. What are we doing here? What are we doing here?
Yeah. Yeah. Um, what do you, what are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go-to-market? One of YC's strengths has always been selling into the YC network. You start a payroll company, you can get the other batchmates to test it out. You get your early adopters there. And I noticed that this was happening a little bit in the Gundo where you would see, uh, one guy's running a machine shop, one guy's running a cloud seeding, one guy's running a drone company, and they'll run across the street and say, "I need a new drill or hammer," whatever they need. And but I'm wondering in the, in the hardware sense, are there, are there YC companies that are actually able to get products in the hardware space that bring value to other startups, or is it more of like camaraderie around, we're in the hardware world, we'll, we'll communicate and share notes, but we're not actually selling to each other on day one?
I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other, though that's happening. Like the space ecosystem is coming together. Like StarCloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech. Um, that's, that's been happening. I mean, we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes. Like we're putting together a cohort so that we can actually help all YC defense companies get in theater with real, uh, Department of War departments right off the bat. Um, there's just a lot that we can do. Next week we actually have a, uh, a DC defense tech, um, conference, uh, in DC. We're bringing in a bunch of our top defense companies and they're meeting the policymakers directly. They're meeting the people from the Pentagon directly in their own backyards. And that's actually stuff that YC can do now that, um,
You know, it, it just increases the chance and likelihood of people actually succeeding. I mean, defense tech is the wildest thing that continues to happen in this administration. Is that, uh, I think, you know, huge credit to, uh, the people in the current administration because they're realizing like, hey, we got a drone war happening, we have an AI war, and America needs to be, uh, it can't just pay, you know, cost-plus to these defense, uh, you know, the sort of like industrial complex that exists today. Like we actually need, uh, and, and they're willing to give seven-figure contracts to teams of like two or four people who like suddenly become teams of 20 or 30 people plus like hundreds of agents.
Yeah, it's been remarkable how, uh, how many opportunities that have been there even in the post-Palantir and Anduril world. There was a, there was a time when I think people thought that there might be more of a winner-take-all dynamic. It might be more like social, but, uh, there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways. It's been exciting.
So 25% of the batch is hardware, up 40x. Mhm. What about the, the other 75%? What are the trends that you're seeing on, on the software side, dev tools? I think a lot of, like, part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking, well, I don't want to go, if, if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it in two days. So maybe I want a hardware component. But at the same time, we're still seeing a bunch of early-stage software companies rip. Uh, what trends are you seeing across the board with, you know, agents and, and infrastructure and, and all those things?
Yeah, this is, I mean, honestly, this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because, I mean, my prediction would be you look at, uh, the public companies of today, uh, any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way, like they're going to be replaced by a YC startup or a company like that that has maybe 20 people working there, and that those 20 people each will do the work of like a hundred engineers themselves, right? So you got like a 2,000-person workforce, um, and you're just like blowing them out of the water. And so that's going to be the biggest shift. Like you're going to have AI-native startup companies that are just brand new that have started in the last two or three years. They don't have any of the bad habits that, uh, were developed over the, you know, sort of Zerp era, and they're just going to come in and out-execute every single SaaS company that doesn't do it that way. And, um, it's, it's going to be pretty epic. It's going to be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software, and, you know, that's sort of the rest of the story.
Are you seeing pitches for, uh, like Neoclouds, people that want to go through YC?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Wafer is killing it. Shaveform is killing it. I mean, uh, you know, the amount of inference in the world feels like it's going to go up like 10,000 to 100,000x. Like people are just not really prepared for, you know, it's actually kind of the funniest thing. Like you could work in SaaS where, uh, you know, things are going to grow 10x, and then, or if you look at inference, you look at data centers, you look at semiconductors, you look at GPU and even CPU demand, it's going to go up like a thousandx, right? So that's even, it's even bigger in opportunity. Um, and I, I think people are just not, it's not priced in. I, you know, personally, I think it's just not priced in at all.
Where does, uh, are you still using the term little tech? I always like that.
Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, where, where does little tech stand on the, the AI slowdown debate, regulatory capture risk? When I look at some of the companies that we're going to have on the show, I feel like they might not be affected positively or negatively by the discussions in Washington, but how are you seeing it broadly? Because typically, uh, regulatory capture can, uh, you know, harden the position of incumbents, and that's bad for little tech. But how have you been dealing with the current conversation?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Coxin guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with Hugging Face, right? Like, are agent swarms going to come and take over infrastructure en masse, and then what are we actually doing about that? I don't want to hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for two months, and I don't really care that there's a, you know, there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee-jerk response. And like, the thing is, like, we shouldn't be paying, that's a smoke screen. You shouldn't be paying attention to that. We need to be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent, uh, you know, agent swarms taking over entire data centers, right? Like, what's our, what's our, what's our shutdown strategy, right? Like, how do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? Like, you know, what can, what software can we build and what cybersecurity defenses can we build today? And like, you know, that, that's the level of discourse that I think we need, and we just don't have that, right? People are just saying, you...
Well, discourse is, discourse is one thing. Are there, is there a meaningful number of YC companies now that are actually focused on that set of problems? Because one way to think about AI safety is to go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts, and another way is to actually build cybersecurity products. Yeah, specifically with like, you know, agent swarms in mind, and you know, thinking of Ilya's post about Neocloud security, it's like, well, I hope there's five companies that saw that post and were like, you know, I'm sure that Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike and all these companies are, are thinking about that opportunity as well. But it just feels like anywhere there's like fear, there's also an opportunity for commercial solutions to the problem that won't fix everything.
Um, yeah, we, I mean, we got that too, right? We got a ton of companies, like Silar is able to do 100 milliseconds in, in request loop, uh, prevent prompt injection. Right. So you got an agent swarm, it wants to take on, uh, you take over your, uh, AI systems, and like, it's in production now. Like, it basically prevents, uh, prompt injection, and it can do it at a level that like, you know, it, it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the, uh, underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cybersecurity. Like, if you have a kill switch on, uh, entire request because, hey, that's a prompt injection, like, that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction, man. I saw Terminator 2 also. Like, that's, you know, we're not here to talk about that. Like, we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with agent swarms. How do we actually prevent that? And I think that, you know, little tech has a role in actually sol-, actually providing the software, the services, the hardware, the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like, let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about instead of, uh, whatever a socialist says on the, in the New York Times. I don't care about that.
What, uh, what are you telling YC startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities in like selling data right now. If you just wanted to generate as much revenue as possible before Demo Day, maybe brokering data could be a way to do that. But maybe it's not the best way to build, you know, a super enduring business. But maybe that's one example. But, but what, what kind of things...
Businesses like Merore are very, very, uh, you know, they're, they're body shops at some level. And then we're seeing this new wave of data companies like AfterQuery or DataCurve that basically beat them head-to-head. And, uh, they don't do it by being body shops. Like, you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need, uh, you know, dozens of people. I mean, it's sort of the same deal. Like, you look at, uh, you know, a Workday, it's full of thousands of engineers who are not, you know, using agentic systems. And like, I would argue that like a lot of those, uh, you know, first-wave data companies don't, like, they're basically kind of like, uh, you know, glorified labor marketplaces, right? But the new wave of data, like, we have more than 10 companies making more than $10 million a year in data, and then the top two are making, you know, hundreds of millions, like, on, on the way to billions. And so, you know, there's a new wave, and those new wave companies do not have a thousand employees and won't ever have thousands of employees. They will have 20 or 50, right? And how are they doing it? They're actually doing it in a proper agentic way. And so you, that, that's like, you know, same thing in software, same thing in hardware, same thing in data. Like, there's a new way to build these things. And, uh, you know, either you're building that way or you're doing it the old way. Like, you know, people can still raise money. They, they can still go to Sand Hill and get that crazy growth round. And people are just, you know, going to do it the old way still. But the new, the, the new way is going to come and it's going to wipe out the old way.
Uh, makes sense. Gaming. Uh, a lot of people have seen Astro demos from the last week. I, you know, people just building GTA 6 because they're impatient. Uh, they get, they get a something that is, who, who knows how many, you know, uh, hours of play it'll actually get, but it, but it's an open-world game that, you know, has multiplayer components, things like that. Uh, do you think that we'll see a gaming boom in the next batch of just small teams that are like, hey, I can kind of build anything that I want, and I can build the kind of thing that would have taken hundreds of people and, and years historically, and I can build it in, you know, three months?
Yeah. I, uh, I just funded a company called Summer Engine, for instance. It's growing really, really fast. It's just like roadblocks, actually. But, uh, and you know, I think that, that's the way to think about it, right? Like, codegen is opening up all this stuff, and then actually, like, shouldn't people, you know, a lot of the value is actually going to be in, uh, your guild, your people network, like getting your friends to come on and play, knowing when they're playing, like, uh, you know, designing all of that is actually the ultimate value. And like, and then I think it's the same thing all over again. Like, if you look at, uh, you know, a company like Roblox, like, I don't think that they're building around like this idea that you could vibe code anything. Like, this, the future's already here. People just act like it's not, right? And that, you know, anytime that happens, just like infinity, uh, just opportunity. And, you know, the startups are finding it. They're going to go for it. And, you know, that, that's the future. I'm, I'm psyched for that.
Yeah. I would almost disagree. I feel like Roblox is going to come out with an amazing tool for... Yeah. No, no, but, but even seeing like Astro being like, "Hey, we can make this even, even better." And, but there's still plenty of opportunities for early-stage companies to just adopt these tools even more aggressively and come up with, with...
Roblox is the one that's like on the edge of the network effect, like, but we, we can debate it more later.
Thanks so much for hopping on, getting questions on another fantastic...
Excited to, uh, to meet a handful of these founders, and, um, yeah, keep it up.
Yeah. Always great to see you guys. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone Duo animation? Marques Brownlee shared it on X. Do you love this? What do you think? So, when you open it, it fades as if it's looking through the glass. And when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual outside, but instead it, it, it animates so that it looks like it, you're looking through glass and it appears three-dimensional. What do you think?
It's so incredible. It, I mean, it really pushed, you know, it pushed personal computing into an entirely new dimension.
I think it's, it's beautiful. I think I... It's beautiful. Well done. Well done to the team. And I think, I think this is what makes Apple so special is that the folding phones exist. Somehow no one thought of this. How did they create an environment, maintain an environment where that you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that that makes something that's been around for a while, Garry has one, a folding phone, uh, still make it special, and now, you know, you got everyone talking about this. So good stuff. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in M from Olam Labs, the co-founder and CEO. How you doing, M?
Hey, you got my name right. Congrats on the pronunciation.
How do people... I used to watch your YouTube? No way.
Uh, people say, um, they, they seem a lot. Yeah. I used to watch your YouTube videos like all, like the, the company documentaries and founder stuff a couple years ago. It was great.
