I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place 3000, right?
There's misinformation.
Quarterly clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
We are experts found.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby.
UAV online.
Blaze.
Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Finally, talk is team deathmatch.
We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right.
Mark clearing order inbound.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound. Five put.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, February 24th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
We're running down a dream today. We are surviving the Catrini apocalypse. Live to fight another day. A lot of chaos in the markets, a lot of reflection about the story behind the story, what happened. We had a lot of fun debating the Catrini report. A lot of good stuff in there. Some other kind of crazy stuff that sort of got everyone twisted in a knot. But it didn't stop the markets.
It did become the current thing and I think a lot of people were talking about it. I mean, my feed was covered in Catrini stuff, but today is a new day and there is a ton of new tech news.
First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. The goats. And then second, I want to pull up the linear lineup because boy, do we have a show for you today, folks. We got the Collison brothers joining together at 11:40. Then we're going over to Bill Gurley, the height mogul himself.
That's why we said you can't come to the studio. You can't be seen next to John Coogan in person. You're staying remote.
The right pair of cowboy boots.
The right pair of lifts as well inside those cowboy boots.
Then we got Ivan from Notion and a whole bunch more funding announcements during the lightning round. Run, Reiner, Devanch, and a ton of other folks are joining. It's crazy.
James from Profound. James, yeah, James Unicorn.
Very, very fun. Well, Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. So, the story behind the Catrini story, I had some takeaways. My big update mentally was just that, you know, we are the sell-side research now. Basically like new Instinct, but X and Substack, like independent researchers and analysts are really moving the markets. I feel like Ben Thompson has been a source of alpha for the market for a long time. He's been a source of investment thesis, but he doesn't put a buy or sell rating on things and
Long term. Exactly. Here's how strategies are converging. Here's how the market is evolving. Make your own decisions.
Yes. And then I see like SemiAnalysis is thinking more in like a couple years out and it's still like there are they get held accountable for, oh, you said Microsoft was going to do this and they did that, blah, blah, blah. Like, and they have a different model that they actually sell to hedge funds. And so they're very much in the research business. But what's interesting about SemiAnalysis and a lot of these other independent analysis firms is that they're not sitting inside banks. Like we are very much used to sell-side research being done by Morgan Stanley or Bank of America, Goldman Sachs. You get these equity research reports that your friends send you the PDFs for because you can't afford them. No, seriously, if you're working in an industry, get the sell-side research report on your industry as fast as possible. It's very, very informative. There's always good data in there. But yeah, my big update was like, wow, okay, this is like a viral post that completely broke containment. There's people making TikToks about it now. And also, it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
That's the, yeah, that's one of the narratives. And there was this funny thing about like, oh, well, it's just one scenario. It's just one scenario. Why? It's low probability. And then
let's pull up Eric. Eric was like, yeah, it's just one scenario, but you only gave us one scenario and you spent 100 hours on that scenario. So like, what do you expect people to take away from it except like this is the one scenario that you think is most worth considering? But of course, you know, it is possible that software is cooked, everything's cooked, and if there's a 5% chance that everything's cooked, yeah, the market should probably sell off by a couple percent. And you know, the market didn't even really sell off a couple percent. Like a couple names went down a few percent. Some of them already popped back up. Markets, I think, doing pretty well today. Yeah, green on the Dow, green on the NASDAQ, and a lot of green on that ticker down there, which is of course provided by public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And I'm also going to tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any.
Let's head over to Derek Thompson, the Thompsonator. He says, I really want people to see the story above the story here, which is that whether you're reading Catrini or listening to Jamie Dimon at a cocktail party, the conversation about AI is a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. That's not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick. You know, we covered this a couple weeks ago. He's feeling the AGI. That might be a little bit putting it too aggressively, but certainly he sees the potential impact. But Derek says, but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. And I think that observation sets up another important point. I feel lucky to be able to have conversations about the frontier of AI with executives and builders at frontier labs, economists, investors, and other AI folks at off-the-record dinners where important truths can theoretically be shared without risk. I can't emphasize enough that nobody knows anything
Nobody knows what's going to happen this year or next year or the year after that. There is no secret cigar-filled room of people
Except the back room. I think we do have some cigars back there. You have unique access to some authentic postcard from the future. When you drill down underneath the bluster, the boosterism, the fear, the anxiety, what's there at the bottom is genuine uncertainty, a vacuum into which storytelling is flooding. The frontier labs don't really know what they're building exactly,
And economists don't really know how to model the thing they claim they're building, but we do.
Yeah. I wish more people talked about and thought about this subject through that sort of lens. We're trying to model the economy-wide effects of a technology whose properties the frontier labs can't even really describe yet. Whatever you think of AI today, be prepared to change your mind soon.
Yeah, this was something with Allup yesterday.
I didn't, when I asked him why do you think that so many of the internet predictions were deeply wrong, his answer was it's just a continuum. AI is just a continuum and so like give it more time basically.
Yeah. The rebuttal that I heard from him when you said that, he was like, well, no, like look at all those predictions did come true and it was like, yeah, but over 20 years, which is like wildly different than two years because the fear article is called the 2028. Exactly. And so if you tell me
also so many institutions just adapt it.
Yeah. Like if you go to somebody and you say, hey, in 20 years your job is going to be radically different. They're like, I hope so. Like I'm going to be super bored doing the same thing for the next 20 years. In two years, there's going to be no industry that you're currently in. Everyone's going to be like, oh, okay. Like that's crazy. It's wildly different to be like, you have 20 years to adjust what you do. Like, you know, if you're in Hollywood and you're like, okay, I got to learn digital filmmaking. I got to learn how to integrate CGI. I got to learn AI as a tool. That's way different than just like next year we will be one-shotting Hollywood films and you will have no employment prospect whatsoever. Not even as a prompter because the labs will be prompting them themselves for AI videos. And maybe that's possible. But I have a feeling that it's just like it's not a year away. It's not two years away. It's a little bit farther. Still on the 10-year camp. Still on the Kurzweil timelines. But interestingly, I'm impatient about it. Like I want it to go faster. I want the acceleration. I want the progress. I think the progress is good. So I'm not like a doomer pessimist. I'm just like trying to grapple with the fact that I had to wait four years in between GPT-3 and models being good enough to not hallucinate. I had to wait another four years between like the early DALL-E experiments and like the nano bananas. Like it has felt like something happens and I'm like, oh wow, okay, like AI can generate images but it's sort of sloppy. And then I wait like four years and it's like, okay, it's like a lot less sloppy, but it's like still not like dialed. Like it went from 90% to 99%. And I'm waiting for it to get to 99.999999999999999%. That's where I want it to go. Anyway, is DoorDash cooked? Let's go over to Ben Thompson on Stratechery. He said, okay, fine. While I'm here, the DoorDash example is just unbearably dumb. He is a believer in the power of DoorDash to weather the AI storm. I saw that the DoorDash CEO put out an SEC letter to the investors. Did you see that?
Like full PDF filed with the SEC, like this is sort of guidance, but telling the investor base like here's what's not going to change. Like basically disregard the Catrini report.
Disregard sci-fi doom. He says, set aside for now the question of agents and aggregation. That's a post that is definitely in my mental queue. What is notable about the assertion is the total denial of any positive reason for DoorDash to exist and to be so successful. There's no awareness that DoorDash provided a massive consumer benefit, restaurant food at home from scratch. I liked Keith Rabois's take that DoorDash is the I'm hungry button on your phone and then there's a whole bunch of crazy things that you have to do to make that button work. I ordered DoorDash last night. I felt like I did it in protest of the doom. I was like, I'm still supporting, I'm riding with DoorDash. There's no awareness that DoorDash provided a massive consumer benefit from scratch, that DoorDash massively increased the addressable market for restaurants, or that DoorDash provided brand new jobs for millions of drivers. Instead, the article just sort of takes it as a given that DoorDash exists and that it is a rent extractor preying on weak-willed humans and their habits. This is the exact sort of view taken by some of the most frustrating anti-monopoly activists. All large successful tech companies exist not because they created a market with virtuous cycles solving all kinds of thorny problems along the way, but rather because the government didn't regulate hard enough. I was thinking about in antitrust regulation, you know how they'll stop two firms from joining because that will create a monopoly, but they don't really have a tool in the tool chest for stopping a company from just shutting down and stopping competing. Like if Xbox goes away, as people are predicting, doom around Xbox, PlayStation gets a lot more powerful. Obviously, it's like the only game on the block. And so, should the FTC have a hammer to be like, no, you gotta lock in Asha. You gotta make more Xbox games. You got to compete harder. We want you to get GTA 6 out exclusively on Xbox faster to put the screws to Sony.
You don't have time to spend three months gaming.
No. No. Lock in. Give us a new Halo. Give us a new Modern Warfare. Give us a new Fable. I don't know. What are the other great Xbox games throughout the years? I was never that big of an Xbox gamer.
Never owned an Xbox. Wow. Oh, I'm a gamer. No, you never say that.
I was working. It wasn't...
I didn't have the... what was an Xbox back then?
It was like 300, 400 bucks, expensive.
Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here 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. I was thinking about the SaaS apocalypse in the context of the fact that
No, there are a lot of launches, but...
Well, no, the disconnect in the SaaS apocalypse is that AI-native SaaS is getting funded at an insane rate.
Yes. While you have these massive sell-offs in the public markets, yeah, there is a little bit of... there's private companies that are getting lots and lots and lots of funding that if they were public would have traded down 20% over the last week or so.
Anyways, continue. The thing I was thinking about was there's this whole idea that you'll be able to build your own CRM or your own ERP and vibe code it. And open-source CRMs exist. There's one called SuiteCRM, there's Odoo, there's ERPNext, there's Plane for task management, OpenProject, Redmine. Like there are open-source alternatives to almost every piece of software. There's an open-source Photoshop that people use on Linux and they've never really gotten adoption. I used an open-source forum software for a while and very quickly I called the person that was maintaining it and was like, I'll pay a thousand bucks to just do this for me. And then it became a managed service very quickly and
there's an open-source capybara simulator.
Is that open source? No. But it's interesting because open source has always been this pressure on SaaS and it's always withstood that. And like, yeah, maybe if you can just prompt it and it feels like emailing your SaaS provider to reconfigure things, that is a real pressure. But I think it's underrated that open-source CRMs have existed for decades and never really taken off because there's something else that's valuable there. But Tyler has a report because he thinks everything's going to get slopped.
I think that's like mostly cope, the comp to open-source stuff. It's just annoying to maintain so no one ever does it and you're kind of just paying whoever to maintain it, right?
No, no, in open source you don't need to pay someone to maintain it. Use the open-source version of the open-source thing.
It's like you're basically paying someone to maintain it.
Yeah. Host it all. Make sure...
up times, like models keep getting better and they'll just do all of that for you.
They'll do all that for you.
And it's like, yeah, I think that's very obvious.
Yeah, it is possible that you would just say like, okay, run in a loop and just go around and fix everything. And if there's uptime or security patches, patch them immediately. So the open-source software gets better.
There's two narratives, right? There's the okay, everyone will just vibe code everything in any department.
Yeah, you can just have an employee just make the software, tell the agent not to make mistakes
and or tell the agent, hey, fix this thing. So that's one thing. And I feel like that is maybe a part of the sell-off, but the bigger reason for the sell-off is maybe what Derek Thompson is talking about, which is that the world is getting weirder and a lot of people are feeling the acceleration.
And if you just don't know what the world looks like or what work looks like in five years, you want to take some risk off. You're not willing to pay the same revenue multiple that you were
Yeah. I do want to dig into that point that you mentioned earlier a little bit more, which is like you have the Tyler philosophy of like you could vibe code everything and the agents will be able to go around and maintain and everyone will have personalized software individuals where the value accrues to the person using the software, but then also the lab providing the software, the inference. And then there's like the private markets boom right now in AI-enabled software where companies are saying, well, we were able to pull our roadmap way forward. We got to an MVP in a weekend and we're able to ship features way faster. So when we onboard new clients and they ask for something, it's like boom and we get it done in a few days as opposed to a few weeks of engineering sprint. And so the narrative is like we're moving faster and we're creating AI-enabled products that couldn't exist otherwise. And it feels like both of those can't be true. So I don't know which way we'll...
Ben Thompson called out the real estate example. We took a segment out. This is from Catrini. Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated... I'm saying this in an extra dramatic voice.
Where buyers had tolerated five to six percent commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. And then Ben Thompson says the real estate example makes the exact opposite point the author thinks it does. The truth is that the internet already obsoleted real estate agents in terms of information flow. You can go online right now and get a listing of every house for sale with pictures, its full history, etc. There is no information asymmetry, but rather information abundance. The fact that real estate agents still exist despite that shift is actually one of the more compelling arguments that humans will be remarkably resourceful in terms of giving themselves jobs to do even in areas where they ought to be pointless.
Yeah. How hard is it to disintermediate a real estate agent? Does it happen on the buy side or the sell side? Like if I find a place on Zillow and I go knock on the door and or I write them a letter and I say, hey, I want to buy this but I don't have a real estate license and I'm not using a realtor and I don't want to pay a fee.
I think, I mean, you can do it from either side, but I will just say the reason that you don't is that I'm in process. I'm currently in escrow on a property and the guy representing me is going to make a lot of money. But he's extremely helpful and he does a lot of real estate transactions. I don't do any. I mean, I've done one in my life prior to this. So like, technically entrepreneurs could negotiate their own legal docs with Claude.
We have a buddy who got a real estate license, right?
Didn't Spencer from Day Job...
Oh, yeah. They did. Yeah. So it's possible.
Boxing his real estate license, but...
Well, yeah, and Spencer is probably a lot better now that he can use ChatGPT or Gemini or any of these models to do stuff like this. But that being said, you're paying for effectively therapy throughout the deal and like general guidance.
And I can't be your therapist.
It's doable. I don't know. Tyler, will you ever use a real estate agent or will you ban them on principle? Go direct.
I mean, seems like I think models can do this.
Okay, we'll see. Over what timeline?
Total real estate commission.
Well, it's like I don't think I'm going to be buying a house in the next two years.
Yeah, but houses will be bought over the next two years. So what will the fall in real estate commissions be over the next two years?
I think like, okay, you're seeing a lot of these big rounds at the big labs. All the researchers going to be buying houses. I think a lot of them are going to try to do it without real estate.
Yeah. I'm sure that someone's going to write like a cool blog post about this.
Cool blog post and that's the benchmark.
It's viral article, not actual impact on the economy.
I'm sure it's like going to work like so. So, right now, we should have you buy a property.
Buy that town in Maine. That village.
Yes. Get the village. Anyway, speaking of Day Job, they just did a fantastic ad campaign with none other than the brand.
While we pull this up, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. So, Kim Kardashian, she has a product called Drink Update. And here is the photo shoot from none other than Day Job, some of our closest friends and folks who we worked with on the TBPN brand.
Looks very cool. It's crazy because I know another founder who has an energy drink company called Update.
Well, I don't know who's cooked. If Kim Kardashian is coming for your consumer product brand, I feel like you're in trouble. She's almost a lawyer. What if she almost sues you? What if she...
Oh, yeah. She's close to being...
What if she uses Claude to pass the bar and then she sues him?
Oh, maybe. I actually think this company is effectively just relaunching with Kim.
Yes. Yes. Yes. This is a common thing.
Okay. Okay. I got it. So, I met this founder a while ago. They have a special ingredient in here that's sort of a caffeine alternative. It's called paraxanthine.
It's called... So, yeah, they've been building this for a while. I know it's available in...
But paraxanthine is jitter-free and crash-free.
They're saying you can have a free lunch, John.
You like the sound of that?
They should have called it FOMO. I like a Faustian bargain.
Anyway, Doug over at Fabricated Knowledge, who's coming on the show tomorrow, that's from SemiAnalysis. He said, okay, finally read the Catrini piece. No one knows the future and I think that there's a lot of disclaimers like being like, yeah, this is pretty speculative, but the core thrust of it is that information work itself has a real premium in pricing power that has been embedded into it and that a one-way trade can go backwards really hard all at once. I seriously think there's a huge risk and while prices go down we just consume more. Prices going down one time 50%, we net consume less for a bit. I have been and continue to be worried about deflation. Something I think is that selling tokens raw is probably bad but selling solutions is probably really, really good. I think the problem is good enough is a good enough model that kind of eats a solution no matter what. And so let's say Claude made cowork go giga expensive and it's 10k a seat a year, great, less deflation, but China low-end model massively eats that price. It's a race to the bottom anyways. Great piece, always appreciated as always, Catrini. This is the first post I've read where I've said like maybe it should be passed through an LLM. Maybe that needed an MDAC to make it more readable. I love you, Doug. I was stumbling over that. And we will close the Catrini mega cycle with the close of the software mega cycle as has been predicted by Wilmanitis. He says, the software mega cycle started with PayPal going public and it will end with PayPal going private. We will see how long that takes. PayPal could be public for another decade. Who knows? But it's certainly getting beat up in the public markets right now. Anyway, Burn Hobart says, hearing that the latest Anthropic job offer is a negative $10 million salary, you got to pay to work there, but you get access to their upcoming blog posts and tweets 24 hours in advance and permission to trade in your personal account with no restrictions. I don't see how any other labs have any talent left. Of course, he's joking, but very funny to think about the insider trading that could be happening based on if you're...
Yeah. The only thing is if it came out that Anthropic was effectively day trading against the companies that they want to sell their models to.
It would be basically over.
It would create like a very anti-Anthropic alliance for sure from the business community and potentially the government as well.
Anyway, you don't want to be in hot water like that. You want to be using Tavus, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Stacy, who's been on the show before, says, telling my kids that if they don't clean their rooms, Catrini will come for them.
Dangerous stuff. Dangerous stuff.
Anyway, this is like a lunar landing but for business and technology podcast. Oh, Matt Slick is sharing the news that Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff to discuss Q4 and full-year results on TBPN. Company to debut evolved earnings show format. We're doing a show with Salesforce. We're
We're so excited for this. Anyway, in other big company announcement news, there's a lot of announcements. You may have missed this one. You may have been, oh, Bill Gurley's book launched. Oh, Stripe announced a massive fundraising round. Oh, Profound is announcing a funding round. Well, there's bigger news and that's that McDonald's just launched the biggest burger ever. The Big Arch.
It finally arrives in the United States.
To me, I'm thinking, how did they not have this burger the whole time?
How have they not done this before? I feel like that's been more of Jack in the Box's wheelhouse is like the quarter pounder, the $6 burger. That was a thing. That was a campaign for a while before Tyler's time, I'm sure. But the $6 burger was something that you'd see, right?
Burger has not been a thing the entire time Tyler's been alive.
No, he doesn't. Inflation has come for the burger. The $6 burger was an ad that you would see right in between ads for different Xbox games on the original Xbox. For sure.
There was a time before you were born
when I was just a boy. My parents would give me like 10 bucks and that was like, they'd be like, that should be worth two meals. So, make it last.
Make it last. Yeah. Happy Meal.
We lost that. We lost that.
Good times. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
This is big for podcasters.
This is arguably a bigger announcement than
Which is that Supreme has come and launched an official Shure MV7 microphone.
You've been waiting for it. Asking the hypebeast microphone. Now, can we get a Chrome Hearts RE20 from Electro-Voice? Isn't that what this is? This is the RE20
Chrome Hearts RE20 because you know the MV7, if you don't know your podcast mics, it is a more consumer-focused, more prosumer-focused microphone. The actual Shure has been riding this aura from the SM7B. That's the one that Joe Rogan uses. It was also, I believe, the microphone that was used to record Thriller. So, Michael Jackson used it in the studio. So, it has a lot of aura, a lot of lore. And so the most successful podcasters adopted it and everyone was like, oh, we got to go with the Shure SM7B. But the SM7B, it needs a lot of power. It needs a lot of gain. And so yeah, if you wanted to just plug it into your computer, you needed this thing called the CloudLifter. It required a whole bunch of configuration. It wasn't just plug it into the USB-C port. So Shure responded to the demand, the overwhelming demand for that iconic Shure look, that long cylinder basically. And they came out with the MV7, which is a USB-C. You can also plug it into an XLR cable, but you can plug it straight into your microphone or into your laptop, which is great for Zoom meetings and just easy simple podcasts. But we've used these before and people have complained about the audio quality. Jordan Schneider over at China Talk actually told me directly. He was like, upgrade to the RE20s. They're better. They sound better. You guys should do it. We did and I think it's been good. But it completely opens the door for other brands to get in here. We need a B&O.
We need a Chrome Rick Mill.
We need a Rick Owens RE20 for sure.
Jane Street accused of insider trading that helped collapse
or Terra Luna. The court-appointed administrator of Do Kwon's Terraform Labs alleged that Jane Street used non-public information about Terraform insiders to trade. We don't have to read this entire article. There was some snippets actually pulled out.
Zero Hedge has a little bit of the details here. Jane Street was behind the 2022 crypto winter, destroying Terraform by first dumping the token and destroying the ecosystem, then pretending it would rescue Terra while effectively it was soaking up what little value remained. And mixed response to this. Some people are calling it based, some people say it rocks. I guess they don't like crypto, but they love Jane Street. It's an odd take, but people are having fun with the timeline.
Here's the thing. So the insider trading allegation, apparently they had a group chat. They were talking with some... there was somebody at Jane Street who had previously worked at Terraform.
that individual at Jane Street was like talking with Do Kwon and the team. The only issue is
it's a public blockchain. And so the allegation is that five minutes after the Terraform team pulled money out of one of the liquidity pools,
Jane Street also pulled money out. But theoretically they could have had software that said like if any amount of liquidity is pulled out, like we basically get out before there's kind of like a run on the bank.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. But Jane Street is endlessly fascinating because it's such a quiet organization. I mean they do some tech talks and stuff but many people don't fully understand all the strategies that are going on over there. So it's been a fun...
Good podcast strategy though.
They have a great podcast strategy. They're advertising on DoorDash. But they also put out tech talks and they bring guest lecturers to talk for like an hour. They did a great one about the custom hardware that they use to run some of their systems. That's very cool. Highly recommend it. You know what they should do? They should start streaming these on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If Jane Street wants to multistream, they should go to restream.com.
Anthropic announces a new feature on Claude Max which allows its users to get fit without going to the gym or taking GLP-1 shots, just prompting on their keyboards. And Planet Fitness is down 5% on the news. Of course, a joke due to their Q4 earnings. Conor McGregor is pretty excited about a new game. They just got a game for everything now. It's like the bull market in games right now. There's so many
games as memes. This new game is called Capybara Simulator.
A relaxing game where you become a capybara, explore the forest, and do nothing.
It looks quite enjoyable.
I think TBPN needs a game.
Yeah, we definitely need to build some sort of game.
This is a lower lift than like a real-time strategy game, I think. So like Scholto is trying to ship.
Yeah, we definitely should.
Conor McGregor says, take my money. I mean, clearly there's demand for Capybara Simulator.
38,000 likes. Yeah, we should move the goalposts. We need to be able to vibe code a game that's fun pretty quickly. I don't know what that means. One hour.
You think you could do it in an hour?
If I have the Cerebras chip. Yeah. If I use Grok on Spark. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that might be the solution. What were the other simulators that we looked at? Data Center Simulator. And then there was another one that we looked at that was funny. There were a few. There's been so many of these games that have popped up. You know, what was the one we were talking about yesterday?
That was Data Center Simulator.
Insider Trading Simulator.
Oh, Insider Trading Simulator. That one's good. Yeah, there's definitely a variety of these.
Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. There is some controversy in the timeline. Leading Report is censoring words that don't need to be censored. In this case, the word war. And I was thinking, why would they do this?
But as I was reading over it the first time, I noticed that it makes you kind of pause and kind of think about, okay, what are they actually saying? And then you're thinking, why would they censor that? And I think what they're doing is they're sort of hacking your attention to drive their posts up in the algo because people are pausing
reading it instead of reading like quickly.
What does this mean? That type.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing.
So the original headline is breaking: Representative AOC calls for no war with Iran. The first time I read this, they put a little minus sign where A should be in war. W-A-R. It's W-R. It sort of rewired my brain and I didn't see the no. So it looked like AOC calls for war with Iran because I kind of jumped ahead. It was hard to read. And that actually does, I think, increase the virality. I think you're on to something here and 9mm SMG agrees with you. News account that censors the word war. You guys got to stop. It is very, very odd. Especially because on X, that's certainly not a word that's like censored
downrated. If anything, they're going to be like, let's send it to as many people as we possibly can.
Yeah. But if you look at the comments on this post, people are not talking about a potential conflict with Iran. They're talking about not typing out war. So the top comment: why are you not typing out war? Censoring the word war. What are we in elementary school? Why are they subtracting R from W? Why am I missing? You know, and people are very confused about why they would do this. But that drives a bunch of engagement and virality. So very, very odd scenario here.
Speaking of war, Musk, xAI, and the Pentagon reach a deal to deploy Grok in classified systems. If you loved Grok on the timeline, you're going to love him in our classified
system. I guess they did a deal with the government broadly, but that was probably for the unclassified systems, but now it's getting access to the classified systems. Any Terminator fans out there are going to be having a great time with this news.
Yeah, it's going to be wild. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI superclusters and supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
DeepSeek is responding to Distillgate and they are looking for a public relations harmony manager.
One of the best job postings I've ever seen, says Chris Paxton.
It's pretty interesting. They say, Ha, ancient capital of the Wu Kingdom, where King Qian Liu bequeathed to his descendants the instruction, serve the central plains with grace.
This is so...
Do not cling to territory. From this ground posting should start like this.
From this ground rose, this sounds like a Wilmanitis essay. Yeah, it does.
From the ground rose the seeds of Song Dynasty civilization, the morning bells of Ling Yin Temple, the rain falling on West Lake. Uh, and this is a job posting. This is amazing.
Uh, in recent days, certain misunderstandings and noise have appeared in the external public sphere. We have noticed that large numbers of kind-hearted observers have spontaneously spoken on our behalf, for which we are genuinely grateful, while simultaneously feeling a degree of unease. We do not wish for anyone to suffer on our account, including those peers who currently find themselves navigating difficult public waters. In order to honor the legacy of Wuay and the spirit of Ma Mahayana Batva path, we are now recruiting a public relations harmony manager. So clearly this has been translated, um, uh, from Mandarin into English, but, uh, it sounds pretty cool if you ask me.
Yeah, the distill gate is going back and forth. Everyone's distilling everyone else. We distill you, they distill us. There was something about, uh, I don't know how real this is, but when you ask Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Chinese, what model are you? It responds in Chinese, I am DeepSeek. Is that real?
So, I, I tried it in the chat model. It didn't work. It said, uh, it was like Sonnet 4.6. Um.
Apparently it might just be in the API.
Maybe I should test. Yeah, it, it also, it's unclear just OpenRouter, but that sense.
I mean, Will Brown was making a great point about this, that, uh, there, there is distillation where you're, where you're aggressively trying to farm responses from the API for training data. But then there's also just crawling the web, because if you just download every X article, you're probably going to get a lot of Grok and GPT and Claude responses in there, and then that will just update your training corpus. And so there's a whole bunch of different ways that you could just wind up with a bunch of training data that, that, you know, leads to this type of response. Um, but I'm sure there'll be more back and forth, more legal, uh, debates over, uh, what's going on there.
There was some, there was some dust up about, we, someone was able to extract 95.8% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from Claude Sonnet. At the same time, there's a question about, like, does this actually reduce sales of Harry Potter? Like, are there damages associated with this? Um, that would be sort of harder to prove. Um, there, so many people have talked about so many different pieces of Harry Potter. It's not crazy to me that an LLM could just reconstitute that.
Yeah, from the internet. Um, now there should probably be like a, a harness in place that says, 'Oh, this person's trying to just get me to give them a free book.' Like, 'No, send them a link to Amazon so they can buy it. Maybe give me an affiliate fee.' Um, don't just give them the thing for free because that's a violation of IP. But, uh, if you're, if you're being really tricky and you're trying to sneak out a whole bunch of different, uh, pieces one at a time and then reconstitute it, like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not surprised this is possible. It's not, uh, it's not like the worst thing ever. Um, anyway, uh, let's... Well, well, we have the Carlson brothers joining in just a few minutes. Um, are there any other timeline posts you want to go through? And while you look at that, let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to finn.ai.
Fati says, 'My son asking me a lot of questions. It's a distillation attack, obviously. Do not, do not let your children...'
I love... They could become like a mini version of you.
They, they could. They could.
Uh, anyways, I believe we have our first guest. We do.
So, let's bring them on in.
We have John Patrick Collison, the OGs from Stripe. How are you guys doing?
What's going on? Greetings.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is, uh, this is huge. Uh, I went through YC. You guys were massively, uh, influential in my career, and, uh, it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day. But I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking today?
Uh, we had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for, uh, employees, and that, and kind of the valuation, everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines. Uh, the thing that was honestly, uh, more work was we released our annual letter where every year we, uh, sum up all the trends, uh, that we're seeing, uh, on Stripe. And, uh, Stripe is growing a lot. We grew 34% last year because the businesses on Stripe, uh, are growing a lot. And there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need TBPN. This is why we need a non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. So, yeah, we'll move, we'll move to 24-hour event.
Eventually. Eventually. Exactly.
Uh, I mean, but, uh, I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama, and we are, you know, never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? Because there's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy, like people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Uh, what do, where is AI actually moving the needle?
Well, the, um, generally speaking, I would say from the Stripe data, it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape, and there's been, um, to say the, to say the least, uh, there's been, uh, some degree of volatility in markets, uh, over the last two years, and, you know, all sorts of different events and DeepSeek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy time series, if you look at what's actually happening substantively over the last two years, things, I mean, it's, it's always hard to prognosticate the future, but over the last two years, things really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention...
One second, because I'm just curious, have you, have you guys tried to think about, uh, maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, uh, uh, kind of like forward-looking, extremely tapped in, you know, working on the right things? And if you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down that maybe are feeling effects of just overall, uh, consumer spending. Like, have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic?
It's, it's, it's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But, um, but I think there is some of that composition effect. Uh, and we see it, I guess, both in Stripe's data compared to, say, public earnings from others, like clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently. But I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers, where what tends to happen, uh, say for some incumbent, is they built some business, they installed some system long before Stripe even existed. Um, maybe there's some sense that, well, it's not broken, don't fix it. But then decide, hey, we're going to do something new. And when they're doing something new, then they want to use the best infrastructure that'll enable them to move the fastest and launch the most countries and support stablecoins and do things with AI and whatever. And then they tend to launch that on Stripe. And so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative, new, retool, what have you, um, they're, they're more likely to, um, come to Stripe.
Are you seeing an overlap between stablecoin activity and AI activity? There's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stablecoins, but I feel like agents can use legacy payment rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stablecoins that are not really AI-native necessarily. And so, uh, I'm wondering, I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.
I would distinguish between how things work today and, uh, how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today, agents absolutely can, you know, a lot of people build with Stripe. You know, you can have a one-time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of, you know, agents having to solve CAPTCHAs to, you know, be able to kind of do stuff on the wider web. Clearly, the web is not built for agents. Uh, and as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real-world tasks. And that's true in kind of economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stablecoins and AI, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Honestly, I mean, this is what, this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo, because you're going to need really high-throughput blockchains for the, for the, uh, for the agents.
Can you take us through some of the, the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, uh, one-click checkout, Apple Pay, like there's so many things. When I think about the agentic commerce boom that's coming, like it could be hooking a better version of Siri up and, you know, ChatGPT rolling this out very aggressively, but also, you know, smart speakers, smart lamps, like your watch. Like there's so many different pieces to unblock and unhobble the, the actual agents as they go about their day.
Well, can I answer a slightly different question, but then we can come back to that.
A point I just, um, sorry, this is a brother.
We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answers.
So you, you, you know how brothers are, but, um, so I just want to make one point, uh, for the prior question about, you know, what we're seeing in the economy, because...
I feel like, I mean, this, this is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. Um, maybe in three years, in hindsight, that'll look completely delusional. I don't know. But what we're seeing, I mean, there's kind of the macroscopic picture of the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth, and the, the two months not quite, uh, showing up. But when we look at the cohorts, and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024, and then the businesses signed up in 2025, there's been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them, and on a per-business basis, they are on average doing better. Um, which is really striking because you might think, okay, well, there's this, uh, cavalcade of new lightweight vibe-coded applications or something, but, you know, there's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more businesses getting started, and the average, the median business is in fact performing better. Um, we're only a couple weeks into 2026, but it see, it, it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant, uh, uh, leap of 2025. So, I don't know. I mean, there's, um, we've, um, we've had all sorts of dramatic AI, um, uh, inventions and, uh, innovations, uh, over the last couple years. There's a bit of a question of, well, how and when and how should we think about how it'll translate to the economy. I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe, 2025, end of '25, beginning of '26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.
That's super interesting data. One, because we were, there was some survey that came out, uh, yesterday or maybe it was late last week that said they asked like...
They asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no. But clearly if you look, you, when you look at...
Come on, that's hogwash. Like, find me one executive who wants a refund on their tokens. Find me one executive who said, oh yeah, we started, you know, augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive, but we're just going to go back to doing it the old-fashioned way, or like we're spinning our code by hand and, you know, we don't need any of this automated Loom, uh, you know, technology. Just like reveal versus...
I'm not saying, I'm not, I, I could, I could pick out a bunch of reasons. No, no, I'm not saying I agree with the pessimist.
No, I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One, one reason it might be wrong is they, is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools, and so they just think...
They might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under...
They're not feeling, they're not feeling the acceleration because they're not, they're not, um...
Uh, I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like Tempo. When you look at, uh, when I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there, you think even in your, I, I don't know, kind of like the most wild projection that you had early with Atlas, like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the, of the C-corp in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane, and yet here we are.
Gosh, I, um...
I'm not sure what to say really, except we just, um, we just try to pay a lot of attention to the, I mean, as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that go into starting a company. Um, and we just try to take them seriously. Uh, and then, you know, it's the line, you know, so much of, so much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Uh, like Atlas is now this great overnight success, but we launched Atlas, I think in...
Overnight, '14, maybe 2015.
Um, and so, uh, you know, 10 years of, uh, of, of compounding, and yeah, now, now it's at some pretty meaningful, meaningful scale. And, you know, look, I, I, I think Tempo will probably have the same shape where we, we think it, um, I mean, again, to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unmoored and untethered, like I think there are, the world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or, or platform does today. But it's, even in the success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing. It's going to be, you know, five, six, seven years, and then maybe we'll, we'll have conversations about how, you know, Tempo suddenly became a, an overnight success or something. But I...
I think, I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water who can't, uh, you know, who doesn't know things are wet. Uh, my framework would be you can't get too MBA brain about new products. You can't have your spreadsheet that's like, oh, the TAM is this, and just like reason about things internationally.
You should never say we want 1% of global GDP.
No, we didn't set out. Exactly.
You guys never, wait, you guys never pitched that?
Well, companies, we actually never thought about Stripe in GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on...
That's such an important lesson because so many, so many, like how many founders, how many pitch decks have you seen over the last few decades? They're like, yeah, we just need 1%. And it's kind of, it's a meme.
You, you, you, you, you can go back in the Wayback Machine and find the early Stripe websites, but we were very focused on payments for developers and making that, um, experience good. But where I'm going is I think you have to reason in product specifics. And so again, I think any MBA would have told you that, um, the adjacency of, uh, you know, incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to, you know, what's our right to win? You know, there's all these things people say, whereas when you actually go talk to founders, they're like, guys, it's like, this is the single biggest issue I run into starting my company. And similarly with Tempo, and just as we think about incubations, we're trying to solve a real problem here where we talked in the letter about Bridge having operational issues, not because of Bridge, but because of blockchain congestion, where, you know, you have coins that are, or blockchains both used for kind of memecoin trading and also serious real-world payments. And so we just want low-latency, high-throughput payments, and we're going to need much higher throughput for the agents. But anyway, I think you have to reason in very specific product terms.
Mhm. What specific products are you excited about in the unhobbling of agent commerce?
We, um, we, we laid out in the letter basically these, um, these, these levels of agent commerce because I think like everything in AI, people want to sell a hypey story, and so they, you know, talk about how, you know, the machines will buy everything, you know, without even consulting you, and, um, people aren't actually, you know, that seems far off, they're not that excited about that.
You can start from just the basics of why are we filling out forms like that? You know, you were talking about the progression of commerce. Why can't I just send something to, you know, a link to ChatGPT and have it buy it? Uh, or why can't I search, you know, uh, outside of, uh, you know, just doing a basic keyword search or something like that. And so a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure. We're working with all the big retailers that you would expect, the, you know, Etsys and Shopifys and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product catalogs viable within the AI apps. And there's basically a ton of boring API and protocol and infrastructure work, which, you know, we love, that's our business, but people just want to be able to, uh, do shopping, do discovery, do purchases within the AI apps. And maybe just more kind of abstractly, you know, we've been there, kind of the specific agent commerce thing, and then there's just the, the general question of how software will change because of agents. Um, and I've been thinking about it, um, you know, a bit, maybe software becomes a bit like pizza. Um, that is to say, uh, you know, you, software historically has been, uh, created...
Not like pizza, some would say.
Months, years beforehand, and then, you know, freeze-dried and the whatever, you, you, you, um, you, uh, prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption. We're actually going to, you know, software should be like pizza, and it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this act, this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass-produced, industrial-scale software. You want bespoke, custom software made for you that moment. That's, and that's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the, the, you know, the, um, up until now, the, uh, the economics of software have been, you know, conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely, uh, uh, monetize or monetize as much as possible. That has these kind of winner-take-all dynamics, but once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts. It's kind of the non-rivalrous software regime, and just, I don't know, I don't quite know where it goes, but, um, I think, I think it's going to look very...
Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?
Ireland was, was big into pineapple on pizza. Um, Ireland not a big pineapple-growing country. Uh, I will concede. Um, but a lot of pineapple in the pizza. Good memories.
We know a very large fraction of the banana markets, don't forget. So we punch above our weight in, uh, fruits that don't grow there.
Uh, the round is exciting. The, the, uh, the overall growth of volume is exciting, but we wanted to hit the gong for how many books you guys are selling.
Can you give us, can you give us the, the numbers there? The...
Stripe Press, uh, just, uh, well, actually we, we announced in the letter we sold our millionth book, but in fact since...
Incredible. Um, no, book, books. We've actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book. Uh, so, uh, but we'll come back for the, the next gong too. But, um, yeah, it's great. We, we love books and they're very, they're very AGI-proof.
Oh, yeah. No, we've been a huge fan of, uh, so much of the Stripe Press catalog. Uh, I haven't read them all, but I'm collecting them one at a time, and I'm working through them, and every time one drops, it's always a moment, and we love them. So, thank you for everything. Great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team on, on...
Congratulations to you guys. TBPN is an amazing startup, and it's, uh, super cool to see you guys, uh, grow and, um...
Built on Stripe, built on the streaming world, and our sector needs...
Incorporated on Stripe, built on Stripe.
Our first, our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charged $50 and I put, and I sent someone a Stripe link. We're talking about the '25 being the fastest ever feedback, but, uh, well, we'll have to have you to our, to our, to our internal Stripe show. So, we'll follow that.
Be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations, guys.
Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. And I'm also going to talk, tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have Bill Gurley. He is the author of Running Down a Dream. Bill, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congratulations on the launch. It is a busy launch day.
How many podcasts are you doing this week?
I can't imagine. It's some number beyond my comprehension.
Well, we appreciate you taking the time, uh, to come chat with us. Uh, why...
Well, before we jump into everything, I got to say somebody, I think it was a week or so ago, made a fake TBPN graphic that was pretty silly, and I just wanted you, I just wanted you to know we didn't make that. That was somebody.
Okay. I almost, I almost emailed you about it, but, uh...
No, I tried to jump in on the parody myself.
Yeah. No, you did, but then I was like, wait, does he, I, I don't know.
Well, well, we did. We did early on when we were, uh, a little smaller and a little more free, loose with the jokes. We, we posted a picture of Bill at, uh, a basketball game as a spotted. And you replied and said like, 'No, the person next to me is like the owner of the team.' And the whole joke was like, 'We know you. We don't know basketball,'
But we're doing the paparazzi thing.
Uh, but we're very excited to have you. Uh, what, what, uh, why the book now? What was the, what was the impetu, what was the impetus for actually writing the book?
