I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place of 3,000 double right.
There's misinformation.
Quantity clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journal. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five. Focus. We are founder Mel.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Top is wins.
Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right.
Clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound. Five.
I see one more journalist on the horizon. Stand by. Founder.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, March 13th, 2026. We are live from the TBN Ultradome, 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. Boy, is it good to be back.
It's great to be back. But it's Friday the 13th, so you know what you got to do.
Salt over the left shoulder.
Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck. Friday the 13th. Obviously, bad luck, but not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder.
I was very interested in Patrick Collison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not the others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe? We get it. Patrick, just... No, no. Stripe has not ever really been in the, you know, the tumultuous drama, oh, horse race. You know, there's been investors who have talked about various valuations, but overall, the company's been sort of smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries' startup ecosystems and also...
Yeah, the closest they ever got to drama was around the Bolt fast dynamic.
That's right because they backed fast.
Yeah, you're right. There was a little seemingly because they felt like some competitive pressure there. They wanted the fast checkout provider to be running on Stripe. Bolt was famously not. They had built their own payment rails.
But I mean the Collison brothers are just so class, they're such class acts that they don't really wade around in the mud. They don't roll around in the slob farm and it's like it's a B2B company. So there's less like just general viral intrigue around it.
And even in that, even in that whole saga, saw a single comment.
No, no, no. And they weren't taking shots from at anyone. They were very classy.
What do you... I mean there was some controversy when the, you know, cheeky pint Elon interview came out and John Collison, you know, how many Guinnesses were they drinking.
Okay. Okay. That was a bit of palace intrigue. How many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace?
I mean John did come out on top of that, right? Yeah. Yeah. He explained. He explained. So, um, but, uh, so years ago I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. Uh, the country was beautiful. He said, uh, highly developed, democratic, it consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, this, there's got to be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're going to be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure. Because, um, his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.
Let's pull up Tyler for a second. Why? What is... There we go. He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut.
So anthropologists often call this leveling behavior. And it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious, and Americans have long been suspicious of the Lamborghini-driving, self-promotional Instagram course hustlers, and for good reason. Those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food, basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting. The bacon. Yeah. You don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society. So you wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less aggressive growth plans, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. And that's what's happened in a lot of developed, wealthy, stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. So, America's never had this problem and I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon. But it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. So, there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake or even how well-known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk and Tesla. He's like perhaps the most household name entrepreneur in history, certainly right now. Tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake. If someone leaves Tesla to start a competitor, that should be incredibly dramatic.
Do you know who I'm talking about?
Because I took a pass on your essay, but I don't remember his name.
It's Peter Rawlinson. He designed... He was the chief engineer of the Model S at Tesla, their super successful, you know, high-end sedan. The thing that really ushered in the EV boom. He's the guy that engineered it. He leaves. He goes to Lucid Motors, eventually becomes the CEO and the face of the company. Develops a direct competitor to the Tesla Model S, which is now discontinued. The Lucid Air is fancier, faster. It has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment. And it should be like this knockout drag-out fight that's very interesting. Lucid hasn't put a dent in Tesla, you know, largely, but it's still such... it is palace intrigue and yet no one really cares. And most people in tech can't even name a second person at Tesla after Elon. Maybe JB Straubel, Redwood Materials, but he's out now.
Karpathy. Yeah, that would be one, but it's like, who's active at SpaceX? Everyone knows Gwynne Shotwell, but like beyond that, who else? Like it gets really, really hard. And why is that? Well, some industries, some companies have different cultures. So, if you think about Tesla, Chevron, Department of Agriculture, they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct. They might actually be discouraging it. They might have rules around what you can post about publicly.
One xAI employee went very direct.
He went very direct and it didn't last long at the company. So like electric vehicles, Chevron, oil and gas, the Department of Agriculture, these organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia, which is very open source. Publish your research. Go to a conference, put up slides. What are you thinking about? What are you researching? Share it all. Talk about it. Maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in the weeds research, but you're very public about these things. And then also the blogosphere, like in the AI world, a lot of leading thinkers, leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before. And so it was like a continuation of that, the idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts that just carried through to the AI era. But in those other industries like Tesla, there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet. The internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy. Tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down. Like when a company rises and falls, you typically don't see serious people in tech really being like, I called it, victory lap. Like it's seen as uncool.
The company has to be doing some really egregious stuff.
Totally, like a true violation of the social contract. Not just, look, everyone tried really hard, they got beat, and the investors, you know, sort of got 50 cents on the dollar back. Something like that. No one's really cheering for that. It's pretty rare, but some anonymous accounts are. But in general, aiming for the top is the only option if you do want to punch. You don't want to punch down, but you still want to punch. Where do you punch? You punch up. You punch at the top dog. And the better a company is doing, the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it. And this is seen as like contrarian. Everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category. Well, take a shot at it. It's over. They're dead. And you're going to get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take. Everyone else has the Glazinator 3000 out. You pull out the dunk and you go viral. So, and then also you add to the fact that anyone, no matter how far away they are from Silicon Valley, what their career history is, what their background is, how much they actually understand about what's going on in tech, can just synthesize news and discourse into something that's more aggressive, more punchy, and go viral, and you have a recipe for a whole lot more dunks around whoever is on top. And that is sort of the tall poppy syndrome. So, but the good news is that fortunately America is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent and the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall poppy syndrome type attacks. You see someone saying it's over. This company's cooked. They're terrible. And then I mean I just, we just saw this with Cursor. Everyone's like Cursor is over. It's dead. And then you see, okay, well they just hit $2 billion ARR, growing 25% month over month. And it's like actually things are fine. And so those sorts of data points help push back against these attacks on the tall poppy at the time. And there's this Benjamin Graham line that everyone likes to quote that he actually did not agree with and is sort of misattributed to him. But I said in the short run the market is a vibe war, but in the long run it's a weighing machine. He of course is quoted as saying in the short term it's a popularity contest or a voting machine and in the long term it's a weighing machine. And the idea that in the short term prices are determined by, you know, people just voting based on popularity but in the long term like you always realize the value of the company and you have to return to fundamentals and that's why he was so into fundamental analysis. Anyway, lots of interesting things going on in the timeline around this. Thoughts on tall poppy syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now, the vibe war.
Yeah. Just the classic is like it's way easier to take down, to do a takedown of a company. Yeah. To talk poorly about a company. Yep. Than get in anywhere close to, anywhere close to actually accomplishing anything remotely.
Nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle. Yeah.
But if it's David and Goliath, it's great.
Yeah. Anytime I see people that like every single post in their feed is just like a dunk, it's like, hey, like hating on other people is not going to make you successful and successful people see people that hate on other people just assume like, okay, this person is just not very successful themselves. So, can get you some momentary attention, but...
Positivity. Haters going to hate. The chat understands this intuitively that positivity shall win the day.
Shall reign.
Let's pull up the linear lineup because we have an absolute banger of a show. We got Eric Lyman from Ramp coming on, Travis Kalanick coming in person, Tim from GoFundMe, Gustaf from Spotify, Tony, we have a lightning round that's incredible with billion dollars funding. And then Nesh Aurora from Palo Alto Networks is coming on. Linear of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents now and you too.
It's time for a special segment.
A special segment. So there is news about Travis Kalanick. He's coming on the show in person to discuss it. But the news broke in none other than The Information. But it was paywalled. So we have a plan. We have printed out this exclusive report from The Information and we placed it behind a physical paywall which Tyler Cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered from The Information this morning. Take a swing at that. Break down the paywall. Oh, with authority.
Okay. Okay. And what does he get? Hey, there he is. He's got the entire article. We have the entire paragraph here. The paywall has been busted down. Thank you to The Information for reporting. The news is Travis Kalanick plots new self-driving venture with Lewandowski and Uber. Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Lewandowski who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases. The new venture would also represent a reunion of Kalanick with the company he founded. There's been this discussion of whether or not Travis will be involved in Uber in the future. We will ask him about that at noon in about 40 minutes. Let me tell you about Turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma makes cloud code or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. So other news in The Information from Cursor and xAI news. xAI hired two senior leaders from Cursor to catch up on coding. There's a whole debate going on about what's going on at xAI. Elon Musk said xAI was not built right the first time around. So, it's being rebuilt from the foundations up. He said the same thing happened with Tesla. So, he is completely changing the strategies.
You got to wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got.
It is interesting. Now Elon has the advantage of being able to use SpaceX stock to recruit people. Yeah.
Which is, you know, pre-IPO shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade, but Elon's obviously doing everything he can to make sure the IPO goes well. Yeah. Including putting some amount of pressure it sounds like on NASDAQ and the S&P to get faster inclusion. So there's a big discussion over, well, xAI is worth like $200 billion ostensibly, like what does this mean if the team is completely new? What's actually the value there? What's the core asset? There's some debate there. We were going back and forth about it this morning.
Yeah. And the only reason that I think he was able to pull that off is because one, he's Elon, but then two, so many of the investors, it was the same group of people on both cap tables.
So the bear case is obvious, like a fourth-tier, you know, lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point. There's lots of folks who are at that level getting in the game of the RSI, the frontier labs, like you got to be DeepMind, you got to be OpenAI, Anthropic. And if you're not at that level, your valuation's probably an order of magnitude lower. You're looking at like, you know, the Qwen, the XAI team, people were talking about MSL, like there's even if you just broke up Meta, is MSL worth 200 billion? They have some great team. They have a lot of compute, but it's like they have... 200 million or 200 billion? Did I say million? Yeah. Oops. All the numbers are big. The bull case of course is that xAI is great at building data centers. Colossus 2 was built really fast. Is that an enduring advantage? Can they be the best NeoCloud at the very least? Is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute? Is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than later, sooner than people expect, in which case you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on Earth and you're in space? There's still a bull case but it is tricky. Benjamin DeCracker shared a story from when he worked at xAI. He says, 'When I was first hired low-level by xAI, I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grok could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X. Some big names see my stuff, including Elon himself at the time.' During the interview and onboarding, they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box. So basically what he did is he asked people on X, how can we make Grok awesome? A bunch of people answered. They got a ton of... John Carmack retweeted it. There were lots of great ideas and he said he woke up the next day to a threatening email from his main supervisor at xAI telling me I had messed up and I was never to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again. That wasn't my job. They suspended my X account. So he was very upset. And he says the manager's gone. Everyone he knew at xAI is gone. And he's sort of hoping for a new era at xAI.
S for Satoshi who consistently gives Elon I think some pretty good advice. So yeah, he's willing to say, he seems to be willing to say the thing that it looks like many people on the xAI team weren't able to get through.
But he said, try this: Elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly. Tell them you really believe this is the path and then fire everyone who agrees. Simple test. Basically weeding out the sycophants. But yeah, it's interesting now, like it feels like really hard to catch up in codegen even if you have some great people from Cursor.
Like it's just so competitive and there's...
I just don't see it. Yeah. But they've got to try something because he's certainly not closer back to Anthropic and a lot of that would... you mentioned the NeoLab opportunity but certainly we've seen no indication that he wants to just like rent out GPUs.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's more of like a bank shot where you build more data centers than anybody else. You have the most compute and then because of that you're able to scale your training runs and that unlocks some new capability. It is a stretch. Spore is saying, 'If I was a SpaceX investor, I'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening.' But John Shahidi, friend of the show, says, 'I'm not annoyed.' He is a SpaceX investor, I imagine. And there are other departures. Walter Bloomberg is citing the FT and says, 'Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at xAI.' And one of the xAI employees, I left earlier this week. It was a difficult decision. The past two years have been an intense, fun, deeply rewarding journey and I accomplished things I could not have imagined two years ago. Thank you to the entire Omni Imagine team. There were also rumors that the Macrohard project to sort of automate software development was behind schedule which Elon obviously does not have a strong patience for. Anyway, quickly let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, Apple...
Yeah, I'm going to fight you on this, but read it.
Apple said, '50 years of thinking different.' And then they wrote: 50 years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal. And that belief, radical at the time, changed everything. April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, and Apple TV. We've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools in people's hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us, that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone, an inventor, scientist, a student or storyteller, who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start, but it has never belonged to us alone. And I won't read through the whole thing. But so Pram says 100% AI generated. They used AI to detect the AI and that's how...
So they got him dead to rights, right? Oh, Apple's cooked.
SNW says huge L for Apple. Apple has already been committing seppuku but dang.
Okay, let me read you... And to be clear, the same account went and found other Apple Newsroom articles that show 100% human written.
Okay, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back in time to Apple's mission statement from years ago before LLMs were even a thing. This is their mission statement about Apple. Apple revolutionized personal computing with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it. They've always sounded like this. Like the LLM's trained on Apple comms and if you go to an LLM and you say, 'Write me something in the style of Apple,' it's going to nail it because every Apple communication is in the corpus. And so, of course, whether or not they use AI, it's going to detect as 100% AI. It's the same thing as Paul Graham using the forbidden sentence structure 10 years ago. Yeah, that's my take. Do you disagree?
I just think Apple would use AI. Did you buy that through Pangram? That one, like if you run Paul Graham's old essays, they don't come up as AI even though like yeah, there's a sentence that like maybe is, you know, in the same style, but...
Let me see. How do I scan for AI? I need to create an account. Let's see. Let's see. John, I'm trying. I'm trying. It's creating. Send me the link. Okay. I got it. I got it. What's my role? Other personal use. I was referred by a friend, colleague. Now I have to pay.
Send it. Send the link to Tyler.
I got it here. Okay. It says 100% human written.
Oh. Wow. Wow. Okay. Tyler undefeated. Brutal.
Pangram. Trust her. Trust the Pangram. Just the Pangram. Ridiculous. Anyway, let me 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. And let me also tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. China's ByteDance got access to the top NVIDIA AI chips. Oh. Oh. TikTok parent pushing global expansion plans to tap Blackwell processors that are barred for export to China. They're just flexing on us at this point. How did this leak? ByteDance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Alani Cloud on plans to use some 500 Blackwell computing systems totaling around 36,000 B200 chips. Is that a lot of chips? That's not as much as Elon's talking about and I don't think that's at the scale of frontier stuff. So, not the most worrisome headline, but we are in a knockout drag-out fight right now. How many B200s would you provision if you were at a frontier lab right now, Tyler?
I mean, it's a good... I have no idea. But in the next paragraph it says, I mean, this is like what, a 25x increase. Okay. From what they had before. So I mean this is still pretty meaningful.
Pretty meaningful. Okay. ByteDance plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside of China. Are they more... it doesn't feel like they're gated on training. If you look at that crazy video model, Seance, like that thing seems like it was trained on the B. It doesn't seem like it was hardware trained.
I mean, you know, the expensive part of video models, inference, super expensive. Exactly. Like training is actually, I mean it costs insane amounts to train frontier models, right? Like obviously...
But it's not game over. If they train a model and they can't inference it, it's like they got a genius but they only got five geniuses in the data center.
Yeah. I mean, you can distill these things. Like distilling it I think is probably much easier than training the thing in the first place.
We should figure out about distilling video models. I wonder how much more inference efficient it is to distill Seance, like just to be a marvel, you know.
Yeah. And obviously it's like a very different process from distilling even like you hear distilling as in like Chinese labs training on outputs versus like actually there's like a bunch of ways you can do this.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you can do... ByteDance has created more than a dozen AI apps out in China and parallel versions for overseas markets such as chatbot Doubao, video creator Jimeng, and homework helper Gu. These are funny names. Anyway, moving on. What's going on?
Let's head over to Japan. Let's check in with Japan.
Japan. Okay. What's going on in Japan? Jordi, tell me.
This video, we can pull it up.
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. And anyone in the chat, if you could translate this for us, this would be great. We really should download this, transcribe it, and then translate it. But we're big in Japan now. Look at me. This is from Instagram. I think I get it. I think I get it. They really did. I don't even know where that video is. I've never seen that video.
Put out a full video of us. That's cool. Driving the car.
They got the video of you driving the car. We got our cars. They got everybody in the gong. One of my best friends. I heard they're on. Let's go. This is so cool. I shared this to my story. I was very...
Jordan says, 'It's a great sign of respect in Japanese.'
Should we head over to the mansion section?
Let's do it. First, before you buy a mansion, take your company public at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And also make sure your home Wi-Fi is secure in your mansion with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes. Growing up, Eric Moskowitz bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lucite tank. Moskowitz, now 67, is enjoying the hobby with his own children, but his setup looks quite different. In their Delray Beach, Florida house, the family has a 2,200-gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars. Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures.
Keith Rabois is a wealthy fish lover.
He's a fish enjoyer for sure. For sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits.
I got to hear about these benefits.
Quarter million to million dollar fish tank. Yeah, I'll be putting that on TrueMed, please. I'll be paying with my HSA. 'We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID,' said Nick Temens of Infinity Aquarium Design in LA. His aquariums start at about $75,000 and can cost as much as $1 million. Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home.
Ellers has designed and installed systems from $25,000 to a quarter million with unusual designs.
Such as a sphere that held jellyfish and a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go. That's cool. Saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43% of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association Fish and Reptile Report. We got...
Important data. We got to get this report. Data is the new oil.
Opted for custom-made tanks. A 19% jump from 2023. Lore drop. I had a fish tank in college. $25 fish tank with like one fish in it.
Did you keep... How long did you...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before. Jesus.
How long did you keep it alive, Josh?
Okay, it technically wasn't my fish. It was my roommate's fish. And I don't remember how long we had them around.
Really? You kind of have somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of the one fish you looked after in your life.
I plead the fifth on the fish tank. Okay.
I plead the fish. A 10-foot by 4-foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish.
Turbo puffer baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulette shark.
The closest we got to get a fish tank in the Ultradome was to get a puffer fish.
Yeah, we were thinking about it, but it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing, $3,000 a month. That's some people's mortgage. 'The tank just makes me happy,' says Moskowitz, who enjoys the fish with his 2-year-old daughter, Ruthie, and son Jonah, who's one. 'It's enormously educational for my daughter,' noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life.
Look at this. Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Kana has a $100,750 custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in Capistrano Beach in the entry foyer of the room. The six-foot wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room. And I was walking down the beach and I was looking into random houses at one point and I saw a beautiful, beautiful fish tank and I was like, 'Ah, that's good. That's not just a TV. Lights up. It's interactive.' I don't know. Fish tanks I think are underrated. I'm glad that they're finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal. Corona, are you going to optimize for a fish tank in your next house?
I don't know. It's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I'd put it. What about you?
Way below movie theater. Like there's got movies. What are you doing?
And still I'd rather have...
Just watching podcasts. You're going to watch the new Dark Dylan Patel crossover episode. You just throw that on the big screen.
On the big screen is the way it's meant to be enjoyed.
Anytime they crack a joke, standing up and just...
Feels like you're in the room with them. So yeah. What about sauna? Sauna's above fish tank, right?
What is around the same as a fish tank?
The 20th spot in a covered garage.
Okay. 20th spot you'd give up. 20th spot. Okay. Which seems fair. Which seems fair. There's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd want a fish tank. Jeff Franklin, who's a screenwriter, director, and producer who's primarily known for creating Full House, has five aquariums in his 21,000 square foot Beverly Hills mansion. He says he's a scuba diver and the ocean. Five aquariums, one in every room. The fifth aquarium versus the 20th car slot. What are you doing? He's like, 'Yeah, I have a one-car garage, but five aquariums.' But he's a scuba diver. 'I'm a scuba diver. I love scuba diving. The ocean is my happy place.' I've never seen this guy scuba dive by the way. He's like, 'I'm a huge scuba diver.' You've never been in the ocean and just come across him. 'I find great peace and comfort underwater surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish. So I wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water.' I like that. His systems include two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom. So you can do two aquariums in one room. So wait, when we had Andrew Huberman on the show, he had a bunch of aquariums, right? Wasn't that what he had in the background? He didn't have three aquariums. Okay. So, three, four, five aquariums...
But he keeps them in the basement.
He keeps them in the basement. What's wrong with that?
I think... No, maybe not. Maybe not.
What are the health benefits?
Oh, we should get to the health benefits.
Because if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry.
Let's see. Homeowners get...
He said, it really is a form of meditation.
Mhm. He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a trigger fish. Okay, I could get into trigger fish.
I don't want to be triggered by anything.
And a large bearded dragon panicking.
I want a panic... I want a fish that never gets triggered.
Somebody should name a fish a panicking... Aquariums need heating and cooling system to maintain a consistent water temperature level. He recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than 24 hours without power. Aquarium specifications vary widely depending on the intended inhabitants. Sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish. I think I would go shark over jellyfish. What do you think? Jellyfish are beautiful, but sharks are just so athletic and it's the apex predator. You got to have that in your house.
I think moat with some sharks is the way to go. What about gators?
I think gators over sharks potentially.
I think sharks are probably the best option for moats.
Well, you won't have a moat in this $70 million Aspen compound because it would freeze. But it has just hit the market. Frederick Rick Burke is the co-founder of Dooney & Bourke accessories brand and he's putting his Robert A.M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colorado on the market for $70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-foot, 7-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain with tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79 and he met Stern around 1970 when Burke became one of the architect's early clients, hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well-known Stern would become. He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86. Burke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain about 8,000 feet above downtown. And he asked Stern to design a family home there. But they do have a pool, a heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Kozeny. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeny to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials. Wow. Spent almost a year in prison starting in 2023.
They made it illegal for guys to be dudes.
Burke said he learned a lot from the experience. But wait, this was in 2009. The guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70. Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. 'I went to prison as I think a good person and came out a better person.' Kozeny's former home in Aspen sold for $40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Like he has an accessories company.
Yeah, leather. Maybe something related to their supply chain.
He's also the founder of...
Maybe he was just doing it for the love of the game.
For years he and his wife, a former ski racer, Megan Burke, have been splitting time between their homes in Aspen and Maine where Stern designed a home for them in Seal Harbor. But after a bad bout of COVID-19 a few years ago, Rick said he now struggles with the elevation in Aspen. 'It's a wonderful house. If I could pick it up and move it somewhere, I wouldn't sell it.' The Burks are considering spending winters in Hawaii where there are no native land snakes. Rick has a fear of snakes.
Man after my own heart. I hate snakes on the Indiana Jones podcast.
They recently came close to renting a house in Malibu, but avoided the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog. 'We ripped up the lease then and there.'
It's sort of like art when the artist dies. There's now a finite amount of their work left. And how much of a piece do you own at it? Some buyers said they might look to modernize the house or update it, but noted that Pitkin County current building restrictions wouldn't allow residences of this size to be built today. Interesting. And they gave a shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who also purchased a property near Aspen late last year. He was on the show yesterday. Go listen to our interview with Alex Karp, please. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud. Building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. What did...
Curly says, we are in the shadow of the wave. Brace yourself for impact.
Yeah, he's been vague posting. Assume this is about AGI.
Yeah. Well, Alex Karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine-tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job? The ultimate black pill. Who knows? Who knows where it will go? Karp did seem pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was definitely an update to how he's thinking. Definitely more in the Dario Amodei camp of a significant impact to white-collar work.
Yeah, very felt very night and day from however many months ago, like six months ago.
Well, here's a white pill. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So, if you go and chat with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free. So, you can just be chatting with customer support. I see these all the time and they always go viral.
I get this prompt: I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a linked list. Can you help?
Good. This is going to get patched, but for now, enjoy.
Hey, this has been going on for like months. Like, there must be some way to basically wire this up so you can get free inference.
Yeah. And sell the tokens on... Yeah, sell the tokens on Open.
Well, speaking of tokens, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Labelbox: RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, I believe we have Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV pit. I'll show him. Eric, hey.
I can't believe. Incredible. Wow.
Gentlemen, we've made it. We have the dom. We're ready for European summer.
I love it. I love it. I was hunting around the office for European-themed props, and our prop department, which is basically non-existent, didn't have anything. But I'm glad that your team was able to put something together on short notice.
You know, we're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care. We wanted to do it right, down to the smallest details. So we're ready to go.
But it's not just France. Where is Ramp actually available now?
Yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you asked. Basically every day there are swipes in every country. Every week there's activity in 190 countries, and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the UN around the world. But the news is that we've acquired Bill Hop, which grants Ramp the ability to have local licenses both in the UK and the EU. And come this summer, companies that are operating out of Europe, even without a US entity, will be able to sign up for Ramp. And so we're really excited to bring Ramp to Europe.
That's amazing. What else went into actually launching Europe? It feels like we're in this era of agent coding. It's like one prompt: make this thing work in Europe. But it's obviously more complicated than that. Walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now.
Well, first of all, I think about sometimes the companies that I'd heard of in the past — they open an office with two people and they say, 'We're in the middle of New York and we're expanding to the US.' And how silly that sounded. We thought if we were going to go and actually serve Europe, we need to do it right. It's an incredibly important region. Some of the fastest-growing companies in the world are based out there. I think of companies like ElevenLabs. I think of Stripe, Coulson's great founders who grew up in Europe. We wanted to approach this properly. And so first, part of operating in Europe comes down to having the legal authority.
Sorry, I'm barely keeping it together watching you have this serious explanation.
Also, I don't know if you've been through all of the props on there, but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table.
I don't know if it's legal in this building to light them up, but we do have... Don't do it.
Don't do it, dude. But one and a half percent back on cigarettes. It's a boom for the French economy.
Well, we'll see you there. But look, I think in every country the legal authority to move funds, to work with regulated entities, and also to meet requirements as it relates to privacy is really important. So we took the steps to do that. We also took the time to make sure we have the right leadership going in. Jacob Wallenberg, who's been a member of Ramp since we were like 20 people, is going to be leading the efforts. Grew up there, on the board of EQT. And I think so many members of our team are focused on not just going and selling things locally, but being a part of the local fabric of how the economy works and doing it right. So we're quite excited.
So yeah, more broadly, how do you think about verticalization of the org, horizontalization, creating functional business units, not duplicating work? You're probably already wrestling with this as the AI wave changes the way Ramp builds products, but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs in different localities. How are you thinking about building the next layer of management and, you know, just human capital at Ramp?
Yeah, there's a few pieces. First, just at the highest level, I think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are, where you're operating, it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less. Just as we help the average American business cut their expenses by five percent, and it turns out last year the average business on Ramp grew their revenue by sixteen percent, which is multiple times faster than the US average. We know businesses in Europe want to do this too. When you look at the base problems in Europe and as well for most people in the US, it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of a month where you have one system for cards, another for expenses, another for bill payments, another for AR, another for procurement, another for approvals, so on and so forth. And what we're doing is collapsing that. And so there's things which are very transportable. But you're right, AI makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster. It makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively far easier. And so there's a lot of local nuance in how businesses operate, want to be sold to, and even conventions about how they want to run their finances, which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that. We have a good head start. We've been working with very global companies like Shopify, like Airbnb, that already have folks around the world, and we've localized this experience. This next step is really just about serving companies that are scaling fully in Europe or starting in Europe and going to the rest of the world.
The UK has a version of The Office. That show has a character named Kevin, and the actor who plays that character, his name is Kevin. Will there be a redux of the Ramp ad campaign for the European audience who might be more familiar with the UK version of The Office?
My jaw is dropping. This is the greatest idea, guys.
We got to do this. We got this together.
Kevin Bishop. He's an English comedian and actor born in 1980. He was later known for The Kevin Bishop Show, his roles in British comedy, and voice acting. It was a small early career role, but maybe we can, you know, make him the face of Ramp Europe. That would be very fun.
I would love that. Guys, I feel like more and more, you know, no one turns down your calls. I'd love your help. Let's call Kevin together and see what we can do.
Let's do it. Let's do it. Jordi, anything else?
No, this is great. Congrats.
Anything else on your side before you go?
Guys, this is great. When you guys wrap up, come over. Let's enjoy a glass of wine.
Well, we now have a great reason to go to Europe.
We do. We do. That Dom Pérignon looks fantastic.
So, I'm looking forward to the summer.
Have a great rest of your summer.
See you this summer. We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI. And I believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the TV and Ultram. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat.
Great to meet you. Truly an honor. I'm just down the street.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. We actually started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa, and so I think we were even closer then. Still not far. How are things going? How's life?
Whoa. Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback.
That was crazy. Man, it's crazy.
The building doesn't stop.
I mean, I don't know how much you guys... I mean, I've just been in hiding.
So, I've been doing this. I run a company called City Up — until today, let's just say I was running a company called City Storage Systems.
Which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries.
The whole idea was: can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store?
Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018.
And after just the intensity of Uber in terms of being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to write, I was like, I would like to...
That's a tough way to run a business.
It is very tough. So I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build.
So I went under the radar.
Did you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term?
We've been in stealth mode for eight years.
And that's like till today.
Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees.
So today what happened was, for my company — and I just got out of an all-hands and then came right here — is we went out of stealth.
Now, City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name. It was like the most generic name that no one will ever know.
Business Corporation of America.
It was like we had two choices when we launched.
We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber when I started this.
And it's — let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurant tours on a delivery-only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, AR, life. I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. Like, there's a ton of stuff going on.
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. Yeah, it's great.
All right. Okay. So, I forgot what I was saying. So...
Well, it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, 'I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook.'
This is what the Uber guys, when I left, were a little bit worried about. This is, we're talking about 2017, 18. They're paranoid. So my instinct was, okay, I left. It's seven months later. I'm going to name my company Super.
You leave it, let me call Uber. You call it Super. I'm like...
You go from Uber to Super. You're like, no, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite.
Full underground, full stealth, put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle.
Literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown.
It's been great building. But today we sort of came out and we renamed the company, we renamed what we do. We call it Adams.
But we started a new company at the same time.
And so let's just say like physical AI and robotics — action and movement through the physical world. Of course on the food side we already have all the things I just talked about. But think of it as like... I'm trying to get the mission — I'm so riled up. It's so fresh. But basically it's... yeah. So I'll leave it at that. Let's get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep.
I love it. I love it. How much harder — in many ways I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the ways in which it made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, 'Hey, I just want to come in with you to build, and I don't care about the hype, and I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn.' But what were the key challenges, and why was now the right time to come out and start to get loud again?
So first, 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound.
That's where it starts.
You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it, and one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage — okay, you're working with Travis, former founder of Uber. There's leverage there. But then you have a name like City Storage Systems, and it's like, so do you guys just have these boxes sitting in parking lots? What is this? And that's sort of the reason it's different now is because, look, number one, lots of time since the Uber situation, from having to live that life.
But two is the world is different.
Like in 2016, 2017, the world of, let's call it, business press was just beginning to say business is politics, but people didn't know it.
They're like, if the New York Times says something, everybody just treated it as the gospel, like it just must be true.
And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet, as an example. And by the way, this sounds crazy, but in 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today.
And I think partly because of even shows like this, right? It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party. Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built?
And that's the difference between today and then. And so, when you go — 95% of all press is negative — you're like, why engage?
When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say, and if I thought of my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play.
We're now desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about 95% of the media just being negative.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, this was pre the whole trend of going direct, right? Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met him at some point, basically coached a generation of CEOs on, you know, you just can't — if you want to have any control over how people perceive you, you need to tell... you have to counteract with like a story, not like a statement. And the boilerplate, like, you know, official statement just doesn't entertain people as well as a full read.
And it's also, guys like Elon owns Twitter now.
X.
Pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative.
Yes. You talked about the initial idea of naming the next company Super. That would have in many ways, I'm sure, turned into basically a spite company, where you're just in this case kind of taking the high road, which was, I'm just going to be quiet, I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up this infrastructure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again. Which I think is — to any of your former critics — that's, to me, that's taking the high road, basically.
Yeah. And what you get when you create a culture around that is you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it.
Which basically means emotional intelligence.
Now there, it's human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do.
I'd like the things I build to be seen, and I'd like somebody to know that I did it.
And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature, and we sort of went all the way.
And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like it is — you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, etc. Again, the world's different. LFG.
Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? And I'm just thinking about your career arc with like Red Swoosh is enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber is a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks — you probably run into like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments, and what's different? What's the same? Like, can you just be like a good business operator and power through, and what do you actually have to learn about the new industry?
Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to B2B.
The number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC.
Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with 'I'm going to talk to customers' and I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like my LTV to CAC is the app store.
It's a whole different ballgame.
And LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business — this is like life in hard mode.
And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB. Like, those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke.
Yeah. So, talk about moats. I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then what does it look like now?
So like nobody knows what Red Swoosh is. No, it's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001.
That was, let's call it, BitTorrent meets Akamai.
Before BitTorrent existed.
You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary.
Had some famous investors. Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh.
So before that, Scour was Oitz and Ron Burkle. That was the company before.
Oh, that was confusing to do.
Yeah. Anyways, so there's a network effect there once you get the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be, and I willed it into being, and I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 199 million bucks, and probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life.
Okay, it was crazy. It was crazy. Like I cleared 3 million and I was like, praise the Lord.
Okay, so then Uber, very obvious moats and scale economies. Like, what does this look like with Adams? What does this look like in both, you know, the food delivery kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics?
Look, if you look at where moats are, really you're looking for network effects in different places, right? So right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this, right? You order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash. You get 100 options, except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings 100 orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you. And we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything.
And so who can play ball? Like, you got to have the real estate.
That's a freaking moat. You have the network effect now of like, what if I sell every floor on every tower, meaning every office floor is on this, and all of these floors, that means that one courier can bring 100 orders. And by the way, I'll have five couriers going to a single office with 500 orders hitting every shelf, and you get notified when it arrives.
If you even took one floor, you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operational depth to make it work. So there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a facility with kitchens in it. But then there's the moat of like, we own real estate.
So like if you want to compete with us, go buy a hundred million, billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world, and then we're going to go head-to-head.
Talk about capital.
Yeah. The other — I don't know exactly what bucket this falls in, but just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete. But people were — this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle — was Uber was doing so well, and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of VCs were like, 'I want a piece of that, and I didn't get Uber, so I'm funding the...'
But I'm saying in the context of Cloud Kitchens, City Storage, like even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right, you did have to share some little things along the way, or you buy this company, or you got to go to a website and say, what is a delivery-only location? What the hell is that?
And so somebody had to know.
But even then, we're like, we're going to say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. Like these are the little moves you do to be stealth, you know?
When I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI, and in many ways accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI progress and progress in robotics, but you're moving physical atoms around the world in an era where you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly. This feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress for...
Sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, dude, this is all in the plan, dude.
Look, I think it's always been the plan. A meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store, a meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm making this move on atoms, which is, okay, we're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport.
Mining being like more — we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. On transport, it's just robot wheelbase for robots.
Because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels.
I like to say, like if you saw in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics or whatever, and the half marathon, and you're watching the humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play.
I want to go back to capital wars, lessons from capital wars when these play out because we're seeing this. Were you the OG, or when this capital war kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the '90s?
I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Like, Rockefeller was the OG, and then before him was it like the Medici? I don't know. But I was the GOAT for a period of time, and now I'm a baby goat, and that's okay.
And so then one day the baby goat will grow up again.
That's fine. It's going to be fine.
I just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect, it's growing, and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like the second place, and there's this debate over catching up. And like, what moats do you retreat to in that moment? Like I feel like that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening, and it played out very well for you. And I'm wondering like what level of confidence you had. What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing because of course all the AI guys are playing that game right now, which is the ability to attract capital. The capital wars becomes a strategic weapon.
Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win.
And we realized that early on in the Uber days. Of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call it, the digital AI wars. And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 billion — I don't know, it was like a 60, 70 billion pre. When that used to be a thing. Now, like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms. This was how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week.
With an hour and a half slot on each.
So like for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel. I was in B.
Are you bouncing between it?
No, I'm in the $250 million and over club. That's one room. And there's all these other rooms. The fourth room is like $25 million checks.
There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room.
And then but we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots, dude. Like, let's go.
But what it means is it's about the system. It's about the system for sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently.
And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that story. Let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen.
And that was a big part. It was the story.
That's just like, of course, if I'm pitching it, people are like, 'Holy [__], let's go.'
Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time.
And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically, once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper. It was like digital, but it was like you need to fill out this table, which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in, this valuation, how much money, this much money, this valuation, how much money.
And then we would aggregate the demand.
Yes. But like done way better because you don't... with all respect to the bankers, but like I was in charge of pricing.
And so then you're like, 'Oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion. That takes us to this price.' We would tell all these guys, 'Hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve.'
And then they would move their price, and then that would change the curve, and you would do it again.
Makes sense. Were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think they IPO'd around 50 billion. You're doing a $70 billion raise. There's a lot of different — it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like?
Look, in some ways I have to give some credit. This was an era where this was happening. You had like the Fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in.
I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox.
He was like the first guy in that game.
And you know, Drew and I'd meet up and we'd, you know, and I'd flex. I'm like, 'Dude...'
You're like, this is our little safe space.
Yeah. Like Ches at Airbnb. Like that was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s and sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be like — people didn't even know what private equity — what is a private — what is private equity?
Now we're just like, 'Yeah, private equity. That's VC. It's the same thing.' But back then private equity is like, I do leveraged buyouts.
And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat.
Have you coached any of the AI founders?
I was going to ask the exact same thing culturally, like that crew that you just described. Most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today.
Yeah, but I'm sure Ches is pumping up Sam. I love these guys. I love them all.
That's so interesting. Look, the times when I get hit up are usually when the [__] is about to hit the fan.
Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, 'Dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do.'
So my casting a movie about me. What do I do?
My phone's like, 'What are the crazy, wild, wackiest things going down?' because that's when I usually get the call, and I'm so underground.
That's what happens. But like I should, you know, I know these guys. I should give them a call and be like, 'Dude, we should let's cook. Let's cook.'
I still think we probably did things better than anybody. Some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today, but obviously the check size much bigger.
Is that approach like systematizing fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire — is that like everything that you do that is important? You're creating like a ground-up kind of solution for it. Where else? Where else?
Well, like for instance, I mean this will — you know, this is just crazy, but like how about when you do construction?
Do you know how effed up construction is?
I tell my guys in the real estate department, I'm like, 'Your entire department is the anti-fraud department.' These guys just are incentivized to just run up bills.
So how do you do epic high-quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way.
Not going to tell you.
Do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly, like solving the housing crisis through permitting, stuff like that?
This is so — one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now, this whole like the jobs are gone — I know people still say that — but there is another side to this story. And like I'll just make this because I'm the Adams guy. I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers.
Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers.
You had machines making buildings, you would basically have like a thousand buildings a day.
A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone.
Just machines doing. Except plumbers.
How valuable would those plumbers be?
Those guys — each and every plumber would be like LeBron.
Because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress.
You can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. And by the way, you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers.
And then plumbing is like, yeah, what's up? And so once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI, humans are valuable.
And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust. Except if you're a plumber, you're crushing.
And so until we get to humans are replaced like fully.
And by the way, I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralink. It's going to be all good.
Then people are like, 'Oh god.' But until we get there, I believe we're going to be super fine. That's my white pill.
Yeah. It does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the prize pool of automating. But again, there's like these kind of windows of...
But there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing, and it's not just plumbing. It's going to be all over the place. And even when it comes to software, so like for instance, look at autonomous cars. Like Waymo has people that oversee the rides.
And it starts with like, okay, five rides for every person, then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But like if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, and let's just say it's one in a thousand.
And like nobody owns cars, there's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people will own cars, but it'll be the top of the top of the pyramid, let's say.
So what do we replace? Billions of cars with ride sharing.
If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs.
50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere, is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.
Robots yet don't have bank accounts.
So that plumber gets paid.
Anyways, you get the idea.
You mentioned mining.
Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like what's going on in mining? I mean, I imagine that mines are fairly automated already? Like there's machinery.
There's thousands of employees at a given mine.
And that's work that he... There's so many resources.
Children yearn for the mines of Minecraft, but it's not the best, but like maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes. Ender's Game situation.
Look, it's interesting. You go a lot of times they're like, 'Oh, well, is labor really the issue in my — is that really a thing?' But what it really comes down to is productivity.
So if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have off hours.
The way machines queue up doing that really efficiently, like computer science style. I call it digitizing the physical world.
You can make that mine substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mine? And by the way, let's get to the real outcome here.
Does the world, as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come, do we need more minerals?
Do we need more materials? Look around us, guys. Like look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined.
Manufactured and moved.
So if you're not in the mining business, like let's just say the — I shouldn't say that, but like it's a very critical part of the situation.
I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth.
What level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it? Because that's sort of on the table if I look at what you're doing in food. You own real estate, or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're up and running? Like how do you think...
I'm not buying land for mines anytime soon. But in the next three months, not 120 days out.
I got you. I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like...
Like I'm an Adams guy. I'm all about digitization of the physical world. And you know, I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but I loved it.
Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one.
Yeah. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms?
Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Transport. Logistics. I didn't know it then, or I didn't think about it that way exactly, but at Uber, we were building a network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation.
Yeah. City storage systems then make sense.
Storage for the physical world. That's real estate. We're building at Adams-based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage.
Right. But now leveling up and saying, 'Okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally?'
Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces.
What is the secret? I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio, but I'm all about it.
But you've had to do it basically because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA. And you can't be in 10 places at once.
It's all good. There's a difference. There's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit. Okay. Versus we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week and sometimes six or seven. And that's it.
