I see a large IPM on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success. The place maker 3000 double right.
There's misinformation clearing order inbound. Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Get up. Trust the experts here. We are experts. Founder Mel 5.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Blaze win. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
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You're watching TVPN and I'm zoomed in. You're zoomed out. It's Wednesday, July 1st, 2026. We're live from the TVP Ultra, the Template Technology, the capital. Let me tell you about Ram. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Jordan, why are you hitting the gong so hard? What is that for? Is that for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta? Two gongs for two.
People are always complaining that we don't warm up the gong enough. And so I warmed up the show. You're welcome.
Now it's warmed up. Couple warm up hits to get it warmed up. You'll love to see it. Uh anyway, we got a great show for you today, folks. Mark Pinkis is coming on. We got back-to-back IPOs, Wayne Ting from Lime, Luca Ferrari from Bending Spoons. Uh we got a bunch of other folks. We got Nick Grossman from USV talking about the Rebel Alliance thesis. And Amble, we got Julian from Amble, the co-founder and chief design officer, coming on to talk about the electric golf cart, very aesthetic, that you're a big fan of, right?
Huge fan. Very excited to talk to him. Perfect show today. Perfect show.
Perfect show today. Uh so our first guest will be joining in 30 minutes and we'll take you through the news. Meta is selling compute. They're getting out of the computing business. They said we don't need computers anymore to do what we need to do. We don't need them. We're going to be selling them. Uh Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business to sell access to AI computing power and models competing with industry leaders like AWS and GCP. The company is considering selling access to various AI models hosted on its existing AI infrastructure as well as raw computing capacity as part of its MetaMP compute initiative. Meta plans to generate revenue from excessive computing power uh could help return its investment in AI infrastructure includes hundreds of billions of dollars spent on data centers and expensive chips. And so um lots of reactions to this. The the the Neocloud market is selling off. Oddly enough, Meta has a bunch of NeoCloud contracts. Some of those companies are selling off because now they're a buyer and also a competitor. Uh lots of different takes about, you know, Meta finding its footing, finding something that justifies the massive uh capex. Of course,
it's deeply confusing, John.
I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing,
I think that uh I think it is practical what they're doing.
Yeah. But uh it shouldn't it doesn't uh as somebody that that uh you know I would say overall has been a big you know cheerleader for Meta I think it's truly the best in in my view it is the perfect business. Um it doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. They're signing these Neo cloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars. They're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And yeah, they can make the argument that these type of um like doing any type of NeoCloud deals themselves is just good business. It's it's just like how it's just the best way to get ROI today. Yep.
It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near-term products on the horizon for Meta that are going to be able to utilize that capacity themselves, which is clearly been their strategy. I Mark and and the team have never have never said we want to be in the cloud business. They've talked about the possibility of it. But the stated goal of MSL is personal super intelligence. We don't know what
which I was a fan of and I think you were a huge fan of you were like Manis on your phone going around your social networks. That's my biggest bullcase for all of this. like it's very that there are so many different applications that I can imagine being a daily driver of in the meta family of apps. Uh oddly none of that has really been even tried in my opinion. It feels like a little bit early. really seen so far is Muse Spark good on benchmarks like decent you know like but but again not anything to that that anyone should really get that excited about as a you know oh as an API provider they did announce that they were going to release it API I don't think they have they might still it's a model it's a good model sir but I don't think it will have a lot of demand and then we've seen Meta Vibes which was a midjourney yeah wrapper, but the the fact even if uh even if Muse Spark is not on the super gega frontier, can it be good enough to get some work done inside meta family of apps? Like it should. I would imagine yes, but they just haven't found that that killer feature. Like there are plenty of there are plenty of applications that are AI powered. There are plenty of models out there that have found their footing without being on the you know super intelligence path or on that particular curve.
Yeah. And and it's interesting because yesterday we were talking about the story where Google had been telling Meta like hey we don't have the capacity for you and here uh here Meta is uh with with plenty of capacity themselves. I don't think we can read too much into this because it's just one article from Bloomberg. Uh I think it will matter a lot who the potential buyers of compute are going to be if it's there's a number of companies that I think the market would get excited about. Yeah. But if they're actually just going and trying to compete as
Yeah. It's weird that it came as a leak about around like a plan to sell compute as opposed to just what SpaceX did where it was just like boom huge contract with Anthropic, lots of excitement going into the IPO. Like that was such a perfectly massaged story as SpaceX entered the public markets. That would have been great if they just said, "Hey, we have a Frontier Lab that's paying us a billion dollars a month now." And like it's going to show up in earnings next quarter. Like get ready. But the stock market loved it. Like the stock is way up and I don't know if it's way up because they see it as a huge growth area for Meta. Now is it that crazy?
Well, I think it's because people have been wondering like where's the ROI going to come from for this hundreds of billions of dollars spend and up until now there's been no obvious place that it's going to come from, right? You had the Man of Steel that's being unwound. Uh they have the the deal with, you know, Midjourney and Vibes. That's, you know, unclear. There's It seems very obvious that they're going to be able to integrate AI into their glasses over time. Yeah. But the glasses that have product market fit today are more of just like the uh I I think the product market fit is really with the camera, not the intelligence combined with a pair of glasses.
Yeah. Which is also surprising that we haven't seen a diffusion model, an image model, because uh even if you don't like Instagram in general is pretty it's it's remarkably slop free. At least my feed is. I don't see a lot of viral slop images. It it happens every once in a while, but they don't have they they have to have some twist to them. But you can imagine AI powered features, background replacement, a lot of that stuff being AI enhanced and people receiving that very positively and enjoying that. I was using Adobe uh like Adobe products recently and like in Photoshop they have an integration with Gemini Nano Banana and you can plug in all the different image models and you can actually use the tools in very interesting ways. Um so sort of interesting I I don't know I would imagine that that would scale very quickly and use a lot of compute but yeah maybe this is uh a better way. It does seem like it's easier to set up a NeoCloud than a true cloud platform. Like if they were jumping into AWS or GCP and they wanted to have databases and servers and routers and elastic compute and also load balancing and uh and a uh DNS and you know all the different features that come with a true cloud platform that might be a tougher lift, might be a bigger lift, but just saying we have a bunch of servers. we're going to run whatever model you want and then we will uh serve it serve the tokens to your API. That doesn't seem like what would the stock do if they announced that they were and again I'm just like you know it's total hypothetical scenario but they were just spinning out all of their AI infrastructure and commitments and and powered shells to like a SpaceX.
Yeah, it would probably rip, you know, maybe even harder.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Um, but uh, yeah, I I I keep going back to that idea of like the personal super intelligence. What do I actually want? I ran into an interesting uh conundrum the other day because I've been sort of disappointed by the lack of AI in meta apps, which I know I'm like the only person that feels that way because the general vibe on Instagram is like extremely anti-AI and every other every other reel is like someone chugging a 55-gallon drum of water and then doing a you know GPT 3.5 impression. Um but uh the uh but um I like Meta does have granular data about every reel I post. Some do better than others. Uh I went to Meta AI in the Instagram app and I asked uh what should I do more of in order to grow my account. Um you know I'm a professional content creator essentially. this would be useful sort of a high-powered analytics tools, personalized analytics tools for what I do. I mean, the lifeblood of Instagram is the creator that actually posts. A lot of people want to know what does well. Um, but I got this like very generic uh LLM response. We might be able to pull it up. I think it's in I I shared the image in the timeline. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Did I text it in? Did it go in? I don't know. Uh, I can share it with the team. Um, I got this very very generic uh, let me see if I can do this. Um, this very very generic response that just said, wait,
Skill issue basically. Oh, I don't know. It didn't go through. Um, anyway, um, it said, uh, Buffer recommends focusing on sustainable organic growth instead of quick hacks like follow trains. Post reels consistently since they get 36% more reach than carousels and 125. It's so funny to be referencing. It's referencing a blog post from a social media management SaaS company. Exactly. Like you would think that if you had I mean and clearly they're not focused on this use case, but you would think that there would be an opportunity to give creators personal and super intelligence to just be better creating on the platform.
Yeah. I said use Instagram and analytics to see which content converts viewers into followers and double down on it. Like that's what I asked you to do. I said what can I do better to grow my following? like you have all the data about what does well. I don't want to go and look at this reel got 5,000 views, that one got 50,000 views. What's the difference here? I want you to do that. Uh collaborate with microcreators in your niche for authentic cross promotion rather than paid ads. Engage with responding to comments and testing out. It also said to optimize your profile with clear keywords in the bio and maintain a consistent visual brand. It's like a lot of that I'm already doing. A lot of that is is is is old. And so, uh, I'm just like sort of disappointed that that like say what you want about Muse Spark and its benchmarks or whatever, like clearly if they wire that model up to the users's data, they should be able to integrate appropriately and they just haven't productized it properly. And maybe if I get Manis and I get an API integration, like I could get there, but like it should just live in the Instagram search box, I imagine, since they already have an LLM there. It's just a legacy one. Um, and so on the product side, it's just not it's just not enough to get to, okay, there's crazy demand for AI within the app. Um,
did you ask it if the shareholder value is three eggs is the goose values?
That just sounds like a like a jumble of words. Is that even a correct sentence? I don't know. But sounds correct. I mean, honestly, like the best place, it's very ironic, but the best place for Instagram growth hacks these days is just Adam Miser's front-facing videos. Have you seen any of these? So, he takes to Instagram, he uses Instagram very well. He goes direct, posts reels about all sorts of things. So, today I got surfaced one. If you post something and it doesn't do well, should you delete it and then post it again and he says no because the algorithm will give the same result. And your followers who saw the first one didn't like it, they're going to see it and like it even less the second time they see it. So he just he just answers a bunch of common questions. He does Q&As and it's actually the best way to communicate and get insights into how the Instagram platform works. But it's not personalized. Like he's just giving generic one-size-fits-all advice. I want the Adam Miser brain enhanced with Meta's AI tailored to my account. That's what I want. And uh like a social media co-pilot. Uh but maybe I'm in the minority here. I I don't know. Maybe I'm the only one that would want this. I feel like uh tools for creators would be a great way to to launch this because even even like a small user they everyone almost always cares about I'd love to get a couple more views on whatever even if they're just using it in primarily a consumption tool. Um and so uh and then there's also agentic shopping which we asked Mark Zuckerberg about at Metacon last year. um this idea that you know they're metarban displays they have the h they have the HUD they have AI you should be able to look at a pair of shoes and say order me those and uh he he sort of like gestured towards that being one potential possible possible future but it's crazy to me that we haven't even seen them really try to remove at least one click from the shopping experience uh store some more of your data shorten the funnel increase conversion rates. That's good for brands. That's good for companies that advertise on meta. It's good for meta. It's good for users. Uh and it just doesn't feel like that's where the energy has been uh in terms of productizing AI within the family of apps. And so, um it feels like e-commerce will see agentic shopping happening. We're getting closer. Computer uses getting better. APIs are there. MCP servers and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff. But uh it's weird that Meta hasn't even been experimenting there and we haven't seen like oh yeah like they launched a thing where if you see an ad you can click a button and the agent will try and go check out with you and then just confirm the details within the meta app and you don't actually have to open up the Safari window. I don't know maybe that works maybe that doesn't at least run the experiment. Maybe they have. I don't know. Maybe I just missed it. But um either way, uh it feels Yeah, this feels like a wind-down of like the super intelligence ambitions that Zuck was gesturing towards last year. Um but I don't know, may maybe this is in the path. Maybe maybe this is just a temporary thing.
Yeah. And and and uh you know, if you look at the SpaceX deals with Google Anthropic, they were they weren't like five-year deals, right? They were shorter term opportunities for both sides to get out. And I think that Meta could easily do something like that where they could make, again, this is like the practical decision, and say like, "Hey, we actually do have way more capacity than we need. We plan on being able to utilize it fully over time, but we need to get our products sort of ramped up." And so, in the meantime, why not sell that capacity and signal to the market that we're not entirely irrational?
Yeah. Yeah. My um Yeah. Tyler, what's up?
Yeah. I was going to say it's maybe a comparison to Apple here, which is like I I think Meta can actually wait until like the the features that they need to implement are like extremely obvious, right? Like Apple waited a long time to actually implement these things even though everyone was like basically begging. I I don't know if people are like begging for AI features in Instagram and maybe that'll happen in the future and they can just basically just wait while like, oh, we're not really sure how to implement this stuff. Yeah, you can put in the search bar or whatever, but it doesn't improve the experience that much. But maybe you know in a year or two there's going to be some feature that like wow everyone is really wants this in Instagram by then you know they'll have all the compute necessary they can uh you know 90 days before they implemented they they can you know get out of the the lease or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I feel like they just need to do more product experimentation. Like the core the core Instagram team they launched the the what's it called? Glimpses or something. It's like a shorter even shorter version of stories like lower uh it it like sits in like the little sidebar of the chat like they are launching different features across the family of apps but that culture like it feels like they have a research organization but they don't have an AI product organization that's actively productizing things as quickly. I mean metavibes for you know even though it was like this white label of midjourney was uh well at least it was launched fast and at least they got the feedback.
Yeah. I mean, I would have liked to see a Meta Vibes level effort like once a month.
Facebook has I I don't think or like Meta whatever. Um I don't think they've ever been like the the company that like really innovates on on product, right? There's going to be some some feature that everyone's like, "Wow, this is really great for AI and then they can then just integrate it into all their apps. They have all the capacity to serve it by that point."
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it goes. Uh Amit is investing uh over there shares his perspective two perspectives on the meta news. Uh he says bearish the bearish take is if meta has excess compute that they are willing to sell via a new cloud business. Doesn't that mean we aren't compute constrained? Isn't this really bad for Neoclouds? Why would Meta give a deal to Core Weave or Nebius if they just sell the compute themselves? Furthermore, wouldn't they cut capex because idle compute as the basis for a new business means they don't need as much compute as they bought, which means capex should come down. That would be bearish for all semis. The bullish take is if Meta is building a cloud business, even if they are using idle compute, which means they aren't compute constrained, they might end up spending more on capex to compete with GCP, AWS, and Azure. uh like if they realize that selling computing services on top of a meta cloud is better than just ads then wouldn't they end up having to spend in the same way that Google Microsoft Amazon do in order to build out a full cloud business they do have a lot of capabilities in terms of spinning up data centers quickly uh maybe not quite as quickly as SpaceX and AWS but they're certainly like near the frontier of that capability in terms of putting up GPUs and tents um so more capex would be good for semis so what do people think where do we land on this. The market is certainly reacting positively to Meta and negatively to the Neoclouds because there's a new competitor in town. Um anyway,
Sephur and the Satrini team are going pretty hard. They say LMAO Zach finally takes the L. Okay. So, if this is a if this is a metaverse style side quest and the and the super intelligence metatraed models are the VR of this cycle for Meta's attempt at a new business creation. Uh, and the meta train models get sort of mothballed in the way that the Metaquest and the VR strategy got mothballed. Um, what is the meta raybands of MSL? like what would what would remain because when they wind down one of these projects sometimes you get a meta ray bands which is pretty good business and growing and and cool and like there's development there but it's a much more narrow focused and I would say image model but they they seem
wouldn't it just be this like neocloud business
that's what's going to stay on and it's likeable
fun is Ray-Ban bands though I want a consumer product it's a consumer company
yeah and it's interesting because you can you can make the case that Meta could build an amazing inference business. Yeah. Right. Because they already uh they already serve millions of businesses globally. And uh they could make a pretty compelling case for how like, hey, we help people acquire customers and we help people deliver products and services over here.
Yeah, we've talked about that before. I don't know that I buy that that the fact that they have like you know every single mobile gaming company in DTOC e-commerce business on is actually flows over to well now get your tokens from us like yeah just I just I just think that like people have it in their head like okay Meta is a consumer business right it's thought of as like a consumer business but they have massive sales teams account management teams they know how to get in front of customers they've got to the point where, you know, again, they they're not operating a commodity business, right? Having their, you know, social networks cloud is is closer to one. Mhm. But anyways, I'm interested to see. I'm I imagine they'll have to come out with uh their own kind of news around this pretty quickly so that they're not sitting in limbo with just one kind of rumored article floating out there and and people are speculating. J Khan is saying Meta falls out of the AI race. He's over at Catrini as well. Um, too soon to say that probably they still have a bunch of amazing talent. They certainly have a lot of GPUs and you know Elon getting into the cloud business. Certainly he was not seeding the AI race, right? I think he seemingly is as motivated as ever to um to do what he can to win or at least be a player. It's just it's almost like the curse of size or something like when you're a trillion dollar company there's probably a world that the meta rayband display is a good example of like or meta raybands good example of like there's there's probably a piece of consumer hardware that's AI enabled like the ring or something where or uh or just getting really good at voice models or just getting really good at image models and if they're a little bit more narrow and constrained they could probably completely dominate that but trying to do super intelligence and and coding agents and it's a little it's a little scattered potentially. Uh Serenity says there's a lot of disinformation going around about meta cutting capex because they quote overbuilt. This is an if they have excess capacity and it looks like the opposite right now. Hyperscalers like Google are so much are so compute constrained that they have had to cut allocations to meta back in March since Meta was using too much for internal projects. Meta was immediately constrained. So it looks like they were forced to immediately sign massive $48 billion contracts with Neoclouds like Corweave and Nebas. Uh Meta is selling excess capacity if there's any especially since their large contracts are take or pay from the Neo Neoclouds. Yeah, this all could just be like a a potential um like you're laying the groundwork in case you wind up in a situation where that is where the value is occurring. That's where the advantage for Meta is. So there certainly is a uh uh a positive thesis there. Uh Jay Yun says, "We are still massively short compute. Meta and XA are selling compute because there's no inference demand for their models. It's a compute allocation problem. Too much compute in the hands of players with no internal use for it, not a compute surplus problem." Interesting. Well, uh we can continue to cover the story.
What is that? Apparently, according to Bobby Allen over at NPR, that considered buying Kalshi before it's developing its own prediction market app that is uh sort of a classic meta playbook. Um, this sort of puts to bed your theory that uh they might be just making a a you know based cloud-based prediction markets where you compete for your ability to see the future.
Um I uh Manifold is that right?
So it's like a that's like a pretty big platform.
Yes. But I was saying there's a chance right now based on the reporting that it could be the manifold strategy or it could be the polymarket Kalshi strategy. And the fact that they didn't try and acquire manifold they tried to acquire Kalshi sort of signals like hey they're probably going the the uh financially incentivized route. uh which I I think fits with your thesis that you know it's in consumer it's profitable and growing very fast and also TK from Kalshi was taking shots at Instagram saying it's brain rot saying that like every minute you spend on Kalshi is a minute that you're not spending brain rotting on Instagram which is like okay I think a lot of people would say that these are like equivalent or maybe one is worse than the other but you know that's a way to get attention
don't you think that uh so so the potential pool of profits in prediction markets and and sports betting broadly. I think in the last year was it Tyler can you check? I think it was like 160ish billion of like trading volume that is not at all equivalent to revenue obviously. Yeah. Um but it doesn't uh it feels like again it's not a space that uh it's a space that has consistently had many many many players wildly different than you know Meta's core social networking business and I just wonder is like is the potential profit pool worth the attention that worth the risk of all the attention you're going to get from lawmakers globally by integrating integrating like betting into the product that is already under attack on like a million different fronts, right? It feels like with the movie coming out and stuff, it's like you're jumping straight to the
It feels like you have a golden goose, right? And the goose is getting valued, right? The goose is getting going back. I'm going to just keep going back to the slides.
Um the goose is valued. It's producing golden eggs. And you see another golden egg, but it's almost like a poison golden egg. And if you bring it over, it might to the farm, it might kill the goose. Okay.
Might kill your your main goose
And so it feels feels risky.
Yeah. I I just sent in the true value is really the power. This is uh the rise of American gambling. These are losses by year. Uh in the United States, it's now almost at $250 billion. So I wanted to think about getting into gambling. How what's the correct gambling strategy? And I got one. I got one. So you go to the Monarch Casino and
wait, Americans are losing 240 billion a year, I think. Or maybe this is Is this is this cumulative? No, this isn't cumulative. This is this is per year. I don't know.
I don't know. I just saw this image. It's high. It's growing.
Doesn't look good. Uh here's a gambling strategy that uh might work out. Not financial advice, but the Monarch Casino in Resort. Uh if you this company went public in 1993 and if you went to the Monarch Casino Resort and every week you gambled a $100 on their stock by buying the stock over the run just gambling $100 a week on their stock from 1993 to today. You would have put in $174,000 and it would be worth $3.3 million. So just depends on where you want to gamble.
Gamble on the stock potentially. It's a fascinating company. Golden Door Motel, family-owned. They have two assets. They have two They have two casinos. And this company is just uh absolutely printing. 36% EBITDA margin. Uh and uh they buy back stock and they also pay a dividend. It's just two properties, Reno and Blackhawk in uh where's Blackhawk in Colorado. And they've just grown this like small chain of casinos. And uh then the stock's done very well. So, own the house. Don't bet on the actual casino. Stay out of the casino. Stay in the stock market potentially. Um, anyway, um, moving on. Uh, Google Gemini, there's some news there. Google AI overviews decreased uh, outbound organic clicks by 40%. Eric Suffert is sharing a new paper by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the Indian School of Business uh, finds that AI overviews were triggered in roughly 41% of observed Google searches. and when triggered reduced outbound organic clicks by about 40%. That seems like one to one. Uh the presence of AI overviews increased the likelihood of a zero-click search by roughly 35%. Everyone is going uh everyone's going Google zero at this point. And uh the uh the founder Josh Marshall of talking points memo wrote about uh Google AI oligarchy and the end of the open web. It's an interesting read but uh we go through it another time.
December 2010. What happened?
Demis was scraping together a couple million bucks for a small company called Deep Mind.
This is uh for a founder that just like, you know, had their uh started their career in the last few years, this is like inconceivable.
They're like, "Wait, you mean 2150, right?"
It's like no sold half the company at 5 million post as one of the most elite.
Can you imagine what technologist in the entire world
if it stayed independent this whole time? I don't know. May maybe there'd be another another path or something.
You're saying they sold too early?
It seemed like they sold too early. I don't know. I hard to say. Hard to say.
Oh, no. No, no, no. I think all the VCs didn't want to sell especially because the whole Google thing that was like the whole story was uh was don't sell to Google. Google's like the bad one. Uh which is funny because like Google's been very responsible and you know great great company. Um I was I was playing around with V3 or V4 where where are we in the VO models? Um so good and yet still not indistinguishable from reality. Uh, we're we're we're so so close and yet so far if you want to generate a a video these days. Um, it is cool you can do it on your phone though. I like it.
Where do you want to go next? We joining in. Mark Pinkis is joining us in just a few minutes. So, we'll bring him.
Millennials be like, "Norm Macdonald is funny." Then you watch some of his videos and there's no Meta glasses pranks, no Vine Boom sound effects, no meme clips interspersed, no undisclosed gambling ads, no Dexter background music.
I don't know the Dexter background music thing. I'm not online enough for that.
I think you would you would probably recognize the sound. You probably recognize it's just kind of like meme background music at this point.
Yeah, Dexter background music. Get this out.
Bullpen is planning his bachelor party for November. He's not getting married. Just feel like the fellas need to let loose a little.
What's that? Interesting idea. Interesting idea.
Christopher Nolan went to an AMC Burbank 16 fairly often. Team loves it. We're seeing the new Nolan movie. We just bought tickets. We got a crew assembled for uh the Odyssey. We're very excited. Look at this. Just blowing up his spot a little bit.
Yeah, really. Let the man just enjoy a a film.
A film and a a big bucket of popcorn. Let me 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. Uh our next guest is Mark Pincus, the author of Life at the Speed of Play. He's with us in the TV Ultradom. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you doing?
I'm great. Good to uh meet you guys online virtually. Thank you so much after a whirlwind media tour.
Yeah, I feel like I feel like you probably have worked through like all your your best bits at this point and this is going to be this is going to be the finale. Uh or or
we can play the hits. We can go a different way.
I want to play the I want to play the hits.
Okay. Okay. Where do you want to start?
Uh no. But where where should we were supposed to be the the very first one I know we were travel it was on us. No but but uh I hope this is the first of many. So it's great to have you on.
Yeah. Uh I mean let's start with the book. Uh I want to know like before the actual uh before the thesis came together like why write a book at all? Are people even reading books these days? Like we we see these charts of like books just falling off entirely. Um, what what what was the uh is it about
author should do that? They should have they should you should put something in the book that's just like, "Hey reader, I want you to pause for a second. If you ever meet me in person, I will ask you for the code word. This is the code."
Easter eggs reward you for making it this far.
And if you tell me I love your book, I will ask you for the code word. If you don't
Oh, there you go. Um, but yeah, I I I I want to hear about uh just the general motivations and the general uh
I think everyone should I think you should build a house and write a book one time cuz neither one ends up feeling like it was, you know, the right return on the investment of time, but it's but you have this passion in you and you should be all in and get it out.
one time and this is my one time I I had I'd say that there was just a lot of lessons and a whole playbook built up across five companies and in building Zynga and I give I created a course at Stanford Business School and Stanford CS and I give this advice over and over to founders and even people running companies at scale and I just said I might as well get in a book and I I'm I I that my reference was Zero to One Peter Thiel's book and I thought it's a big reach goal but if if my book can be referenceable 10 years later like that then you know it's of use.
Yeah. Where do you think you either differ with the Zero to One uh thinking? Do you think it needs expansions, updates? Like what uh what needs to be added to the canon that isn't in Zero to One?
Well, like what what to actually do. So, I mean, that's a good point. Zero to One is I just reread it a year ago and and it motivated me again. And I was like, "Oh, yeah. I love the moral arbitrage and the monopoly." And it's these big ideas that you love and you can repeat, but it's not a it's not a how-to guide or a playbook. And I think so many people have ideas and they either don't pursue them and I think in this new world AI that's a shame because the the bar is so low or they they do and they fail for the wrong reasons. I think you guys have probably seen this too. So many people who they have a great idea but it's buried in a losing product. And so the the core thesis that I've been saying over and over to myself and other people across my career is that that it once you realize that you have winning instincts and you've attached them to losing ideas, it changes everything. And that's how you change your odds of success.
Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that a A+ entrepreneur with a C++ market or C++ opportunity or a B+ idea is the enemy of an A because it's good enough to get funding and get a team. And yeah, it's funny cuz when I was when I was uh like around maybe senior year of college, I was working on a product and I felt like I was getting like two different types of advice. Like one is like don't listen to anyone. Just like you know advice is worthless. Just like do do and you'll and you'll figure it out. And then uh and then and then on the other side uh you know people are giving you know advice and and sort of playbooks. And I distinctly remember one meeting that I had where uh somebody who's now a friend was like you're super talented. Uh this idea like it's okay but it's not great and it's going to hold you back from your potential. And I and I just like didn't fully listen but it's just stuck in my head uh since that point.
bad, right? We see founders who are talented and they are just sticking with an idea that's just not quite right or not that good and it's because there's something in their gut that they know is amazing. And that was me. I mean, I talk a lot about in the book that I, this is not a humble brag, okay? I managed to fail. I created one of the first three social networks, Tribe.net. Yeah. And there were probably 10 launched in that two or three year period including Facebook and MySpace and Tagged and Bebo. Eight of the 10 probably made it were successful on some level. I was probably amongst the two that weren't. And so it took an act of willpower to fail and and I had that much will. I was I was so determined uh to to stick with this one losing idea that really by the time I got to Zynga, I was just not going to do that again. And and I think that's a big message in the book and I think it's I I still need to hear that message today because we fall in love with our ideas.
Yeah. How much uh like to you what is the balance between some ideas like I I find this in consumer like quite a quite a bit more than than enterprise because it typically is a lot more defined. But in consumer like there's ideas that I've
Been pitched and I'm like that's a terrible idea and then like the founder you know just does it and it totally works and sometimes it's unpredictable and I think you can like tune your intuition like quite a bit but it can never be like 100% crystal ball. You just know exactly whether an idea is going to work or not. Like what is your what has been your framework of yeah like what's the point where you're like I'm not 100% sure this idea will work but it's worth putting in the 3 weeks or 3 months or whatever time is necessary to actually get the reality check to the idea.
Well I think that we have idea veins or instinct veins and so there's a zone that you have an instinct around and then I have this framework proven proven better new, which is a way to kind of derisk that and keep ourselves out of trouble. So, it's like just narrow down where your idea is new or novel and wherever it's not, look for what's already proven and copy it. And people like Nikita Bier have really really been good at that. And you know, he's done kind of the same product over and over again and it's worked each time. So I think that at least means you're not going to fail for the wrong reason and you get a lot more shots on goal. And in consumer even, you know, much more than enterprise, it really is if you test more ideas in a week than the industry you're in in a year, you probably have a four or 5x advantage, you know, higher odds of success. And I'll also say that the reality in consumer is, you know, where you see traction there's a good idea and where you don't see traction there's not a good idea. And that might sound kind of dumb, but you know, I find in consumer you're better off backing an unproven entrepreneur who's found for whatever reason product market fit than a proven entrepreneur like me with no product market fit. And that's just, you know, that's an unfortunate reality.
I have a bunch of questions. I have a fun thought exercise. So John and I have had this debate of is it possible to build a competitor to Instagram and I think that I would like to see someone try because I believe the capital markets are in a state right now that you know even though it's insane and there's like you know 99% chance it doesn't work like there's going to be people that would take the bet and you have Instagram which is one of the most popular products in the entire world and the company is like very focused on like other things, right? Like they're focused on AI and now a cloud business and maybe the company overall doesn't fully appreciate just how amazing the business is. And it still continues to grow. And so I want to believe that it's possible for a smart team to actually go and create something that would actually compete in that category. John is like it's just not possible. It's over. It's like you know network effects and the scale and the social game that it's turned into. But I want to believe. I'm curious what your view is.
Well, one of these instinct veins that I talk about is the cocktail party and originally like there was a cocktail party on Napster and then there was a cocktail party on Friendster and then Facebook and now Instagram. And once the cocktail party is there and working, it is hard to get people to move. But these cocktail parties can wear out and kind of lose their excitement or appeal. And in the case of Instagram today, I think it's lost a lot of its original value to us, which was social networking. It was the kind of serendipity that we get at a cocktail party. And they for maybe business reasons, you know, they pursued engagement. They want to be more like TikTok and get you be more entertainment reels. And so I do think that that opens up an opportunity. I don't know if you guys spend much time thinking about net promoter score. It used to be really popular, NPS. And there's a funny thing you could go research this now or maybe AI could simulate it for you even quicker. But I would bet that today users of Instagram probably have an NPS of 35 and the day they quit it's like quitting cigarettes. It's probably a minus 35. That's usually the sign of some weakness, you know, in your product or brand. Looking at that, you know, on the exit, you know, they're not promoting it. In fact, they're proud that they've given up this bad habit. And what I would say though is there probably has to be a...
The only thing, it's a small sample size but the friends that I know that quit Instagram they end up still sending me memes from like their business accounts and I'm like all right I get it. They can't give up the addiction.
Yeah. Yeah. I think they're actually like they're signaling that they've quit but they're still like you know having a cheeky drag here and there.
Well, I got to say I got my drags down to like I probably use Instagram once a month and then I find myself just drawn into time wasting. I'm on Twitter or X. That's like my social network, my drug of choice. I tell myself it's more valuable content, but you know, that's what we do. I look at it as like it's an opportunity to do an you know that whatever the inverse of a meditation is, right? In a meditation, you're sitting there, you're like, I'm going to let the thoughts flow through, but I'm not going to hang on to them. You know, whatever your approach is. And it's like, what if you could add 20 new ideas to your head every 10 seconds? That is why you do that. And it's like, here's drone warfare and here's a protest somewhere else and like here's some startup who's rage baiting you. You know, it's but it's addictive, whatever it is. But I would say that it's probably you need a shift. You need something new, I think, to get consumers to get all of us. We are lazy and apathetic and low attention span. And so, you know, no one's downloading new apps. So, there has to be something probably AI and agents that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party. But I do believe it'll happen. Even though I'm like skeptical about the particular go to market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital because if you go back to Zero to One, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're very enduring and everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. And so I guess I have been surprised even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network. I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a $1 billion pre-market round. So that's what I'm saying by the venture capital community to actually buy their way into network effect.
Yeah, you can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars and like TikTok is evidence of that. TikTok was spending how much money on Meta, how much money on Snap, all these other platforms.
Probably the biggest advertiser on the internet for a while.
Yeah. Yeah. For a minute there.
And so I do think it's possible.
I think they were getting their users, you know, from social networks.
Yeah. Yeah. But I would just say your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you got to pull the camera back and just also say we're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator probably less than 10% of their companies are consumer. But I'm investing in some consumer but it's after I see traction and it feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. So I just think distribution is pretty broken even though AI feels like a new platform at a consumer level it's not. We have kind of a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember like we're so early. GPT is a single player experience, right? There is no multiplayer version of Claude or GPT. There is no app connection, you know, there's none of the things that enabled Zynga, you know, or MySpace was started, I mean, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. So there isn't an obvious way to jumpstart distribution and I think you know VCs rightly want to see something predictable and so the small number, a company called FOMO announced a big round last week and I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction.
Sure. Yeah. How do you think vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development? Because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very very close to some inflection point there. The indie dev community is already booming, but how do you think it'll play out? Like a thousand flowers bloom, happy bar simulator and the simulators are fun, but yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that there's like a business opportunity there or if it will just be more like the DTC boom where there were a ton of small brands, a couple breakouts, but by and large it was just that oh there's a ton of, you know, solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today and that's great, right? It's a $280 billion industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation.
You know, there I think games have gotten really boring and have kind of stagnated and I think it's because distribution's broken.
Will AI change distribution?
Probably on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas like what some of the hyper casual game companies like a company called Rollic that Zynga bought was brilliant at that. So they would say what was TikTokable. So they would figure out what's a TikTok meme. They made a game in a week called High Heels that became the number one game in the app store. So that happened. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to well okay AI can reduce the cost. Sure. And I think it is making headway in reducing the cost but I don't think you get hits in games because of less cost. You get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. And so I do think AAA, you know, will come down from 100 million to maybe 30 million, but I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market. It's so fascinating that I can't think of a single even media asset, game, anything like that where AI created the hit factor that whatever like we go back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video that was one of the first AI videos that really went super viral and people were like, "Wow, this is actually entertaining and interesting."
Yeah. And it's always like the human that used the AI to do something that they wouldn't have done. If they had just had an idea pre-AI because it would be like, well, I'm not going to pay for all the CGI to do, you know, it would have just been way too much work. But, right, the human still is the hit maker. We still got it.
Yeah. And even if it's awkward because when we were doing, you know, games, there was Flash, we were doing web games, and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower. But AI is really well suited for web languages, you know, and web gaming. Web gaming is 1.9 billion out of 280 billion. So, a lot of people are betting that 3JS is going to unlock innovation and growth, but you're going to have to see people embrace web gaming, which you know is a tough bet. So, what do you think, how do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting challenge. They're kind of, I don't think they necessarily know, at least they don't necessarily know how they want to approach it or they haven't made it clear yet. They've made it hard for these apps to, you know, I think they kind of froze updates on a bunch of apps and said like, you know, which is basically like saying like your business is like over until we figure something out. So clearly they want to make money from it and they want to protect users which I think are both, you know, developers are going to be annoyed at or at least good developers will be annoyed at both of those things. But it seems like a tough one where users are clearly going to want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences that they can imagine and then share with friends, but it feels like it's at odds with all of Apple's kind of principles.
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I don't think that there is a real incentive for Apple to do anything about that. And I don't think it doesn't feel like that's not the energy I get from Apple. That's not the vibe is vibe coding.
Yeah. And I don't even see Apple doing anything to help distribution of the apps that, you know, are put out on their platform now. So, I don't think I just have a hard time seeing them motivated to help, you know, people put out tons more apps. I mean, I think it's more likely that that log jam gets broken because somebody makes an app container that somehow, you know, Apple allows people to keep changing massive amounts of change of content inside. I mean, almost like a Roblox, but it's yeah, it hurts my brain to figure out how that's going to happen. And vibe coding. I actually think Claude Code, Codex, I think automating coding and using co-working agents has obviously, you don't need me to tell you that, has legs. I think that's going to go somewhere. But vibe coding almost feels like the missed start we had with blogging and GeoCities where there was a moment where everyone was going to make their own website and they did and then they just weren't very good and it didn't go anywhere. There weren't really websites that blew up that I know that were built on top of like a GeoCities or maybe I'm dating myself. You guys don't even remember those.
Yeah. We are like it feels like we're very close to being able to effectively vibe code an iOS app in the cloud, have it deploy to TestFlight and you get that app back on your phone and close that loop entirely on your phone in an Apple compliant way. Now, it couldn't go viral because it's not in the store. You might be able to have your agent go and submit it to the store and wait two weeks and then it gets out there which might be an acceptable flywheel for some developers but it is like the technology is going to get there quicker than the distribution and like the ideas I think. I think you're spot on. And the ability to test, I'm also surprised this far into this AI cycle that if I would have thought that the first thing we'd see is kind of top of the funnel massive testing of, you know, using ads and links and things and tell your agent to spend all night testing and come back in the morning with the winning variant. And I don't even see a, I don't know about you guys, I don't see even one successful company or service offering that. And I don't find any founders doing that. It's more you can build something in 3 months kind of that would have taken a year or two. So it's more of I can get to my prototype faster, but not I can test a lot of ideas faster.
Yeah. Speaking of ads, do you think hyper casual games should be allowed to advertise with fake CGI versions of a different game to promote the install of their very basic probably pick three game?
Wow. And now we're getting to at a toss level, should they be allowed? At a morality level, I'd say it's, I don't like it. I mean, I think it's misrepresenting, you know, I wouldn't mind, I wouldn't blame Apple for taking somebody down for that because it's misrepresenting things. It's a bad user experience. Now, what I would be okay with is what we did in the beginning of Zynga is I would go, I'd put up a link for some amazing new game you want to try and it would go to 404 page not found because I was just testing for heat and interest. So I or eventually we got more sophisticated and say you know we'll, you'll be the first to know about this game. You know,
I had an experiment where the fake game, have an agent vibe code you a real version of the fake game because a lot of people they want to play the fake game, but the fake game doesn't actually have the flywheel of you will keep playing it. You'll play it for a couple minutes and then you'll get bored and so they have to funnel you to something else.
Jordan, I had a product in college. I was taking a lot of film photos and there was like it was a 30-minute drive to the closest place to get film developed reliably and I was quite frustrated by it. So, I wanted to make like effectively a subscription service. They would send you one or two rolls of film a month and you just send it back and they would develop it and upload it for you and whatever. And to test it, I just like ran a bunch of Facebook ads at a landing page and I actually got, I think I had like a $15-$20 CAC or something at the time. Facebook ads were a lot cheaper back then. Ended up not pursuing it, but I just refunded everyone like obviously right afterwards cuz I wasn't able to offer the service. I was just like, "Hey, sorry, like you know, we oversold or whatever," but best way to test something.
Back to the book. Peter Thiel did a Reddit AMA after Zero to One launched and someone asked him what is the Straussian reading of Zero to One and he said don't become an entrepreneur which is a very funny response. What is the Straussian reading of Life at the Speed of Play?
I would not to be, you know, read completely a carbon copy. But I would say don't become a product founder. Don't do it if you want to make money. Like don't go be a product founder if you think this is the best path to be, you know, rich and successful because I end the book by saying how ambitious are you? And a lot of, you know, everyone says I'm an 11 on a 10 scale right, but then the question is well what the flip side of that coin is what are you willing to sacrifice to get to that place? Would you toil in obscurity for 10 years in order to have an 80% chance of the greatest home run, you know, of your life or would you take kind of an 80% chance of a first base hit in one to two years? And most people would take the latter and that's why they stay in their jobs or careers or that's why even once we go found a company I think we make all these compromises to derisk it.
Is that the correct question to ask to assess someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80% chance of a home run in 10 years versus you know 20% chance of base hit or something like that or sorry vice versa or are there other questions that you can dig into when you're talking to a founder to actually assess their level of ambition?
I think you can pretty quickly, you guys seen this too, get a sense of what's motivating somebody and why they're doing this. And I think the best founders have a passion for this that goes beyond this one business or opportunity. And they need that because it's probably going to fail. And so I think that there's a question like why are some founders repeating success and some have, you know, one big success and I think it is like your kind of commitment and willpower and if you're more committed to, because we've talked about founder mode and there's all these moments where I think as a founder we have to have real courage but it's not courage to go against the world. It's usually courage to go against our own team, our own investors because we've promised them things. We've built expectations with them and now we have to tell them we are wrong. And you come in on Monday, you're like, I just saw another product the competitor had last week and what we're doing is totally wrong. And people have complained working with Mark is like third grade soccer. Every Monday he wants to chase another ball. And they're not wrong a lot of the time because I'm trying to be intellectually honest and I can burn people out that way, you know, but it's because I'm more committed to winning than I am kind of harmony or even keeping this team with me. And so I think that's more of the thread that I look for is do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than, you know, being liked or respected.
Yeah. It's so interesting because you have, I've been in that mode too where third grade soccer strategy where and I think that comes from like fundamental knowing that what you're working on is there's something wrong with the idea at least in the early days for me because like with our podcast early on even when we literally had like a hundred viewers I didn't have that third grade soccer strategy. Why? I was just like this is a good product and I know because there's people I trust that are not lying to me and they say like this is great keep doing it and so like we had the blinders on but I've been in that mode in hindsight where you're just kind of like oh let's try this other variation of this thing or let's you know we need to go in a totally different direction and it comes off as scattered but if you're able to admit that it's more like you need to be intellectually honest with yourself and your team that you're scattered because there's something that's fundamentally off with the approach, right? You knew that you liked this product that you, I mean I think and feedback loops you got from people around you like you felt good about it and they liked it. You're like, "Okay, if it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patience question." That's different than you kind of feel in the pit of your stomach like it's just not that good. And I think a lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building and then when we finally see it, it's usually never as good in code as it was in our mind. And what do you do? I mean, that's happened to me so often in games that like this will be so cool and then we build it like ah or we see a competitor who has that and I want to send them a thank you note because I'm like thank you for building my bad idea for me. I'm definitely not going to do that now. But it's kind of like love, you know, finding your partner when I think when you do find the person, you're not asking is this right? You're not asking other people, what do you think of her? You know,
You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house. Everyone should write a book. Was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it? Was it appropriate to have it on that list? What was that like?
Well, this is the second company I took public. I had a company called Support.com that I took public in 2000 on the last day of the IPO window because it was enterprise software. Our VCs had no interest in the company until the consumer fell apart. You know, we had 170 million in bookings. We were able to go public. I think it's a false dream. I mean, I even felt it a little bit then, but for sure by the time I got to Zynga, I didn't want to go public. We were forced to go public. We were incredibly profitable. We had over a billion dollars on our balance sheet when we went public, but we were forced because of the SEC rules, which Obama changed with the Startup Act. And there's all this pressure because people want your stock and they're finding ways to buy it through side letters. And then that's exposing you. And there's all kinds of things. We're seeing it happen now with Anthropic. And you write really, really mean letters and policies scaring them and saying like Anthropic has that we're not going to recognize your stock if it wasn't issued to you. But in the end, you still the SEC is going to see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. So anyway, we were forced to go public. So was Facebook. So was LinkedIn. This other class of companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you that there's anything that's going to help your company about going public, I think nine times out of 10 they are lying to you. Now SpaceX and you know these large cap AI companies, they legitimately need access to capital markets and so they are optimizing for that. If you don't have that need for capital market access, there is no benefit. It's only bad. In fact, you have so many employees who leave because they say, "Yeah, I always wanted to be at a company that went public. It was on my bucket list. Goodbye." And so, you give them this liquidity, you know, you give them this thing on their resume. And so now they're gone. Your culture changes. Ours did. And now, you know, Michael Dell once told me before he took his company private and then public again that the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with his employees because he said, you know, they get their views from stock chat rooms and what their family is reading and not from Michael Dell. And so it gives you like five other jobs as a CEO that you don't need like you should be focused on your product, you know, customer product team, not investor, IPO, you know, media.
Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is Life at the Speed of Play. It's available everywhere books are sold. Go pick up on the launch and let's do this again soon. I have a million, go all over the place.
Yeah, there's so many more topics to get into. This would be great.
Yeah, I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing, which...
Yeah, we didn't even get to Snapchat.
Yeah, we didn't get to Snapchat. That's a whole show.
Yeah, that's a whole show. Let's do it soon.
Come back at one. Maybe have me and Evan on together. We can debate like whether you know this whole journey into AR goggles is the best thing.
Shareholders love the specs. Shareholders really love the specs.
We'll get to the... Well, thank you. No, I mean, wait till we see how many sell. I think, you know, I'm pricing in 20 pairs.
But I think it could. There's a chance that it surprises to the upside.
It could. It could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. Great to see you, Mark. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Mark just gave the anti-ad for going public. Hey, if you need to raise capital, if you want to raise the most capital, you got to go to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the endorsement that we're proud to give. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Shubh Sinha from Integral is the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How you doing?
I'm doing okay. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Just okay. Just okay. On this big day.
I'm riding the highs and the lows and getting back up right now. So excited.
That's pretty normal for the entrepreneurial journey, but take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you get here? What are you building? What's the news today?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited. Today we actually just announced an $18 million Series A for my company, Integral. And so the gong...
It was a good warm-up hit. Had to get the real hit in there. We like to warm up the gong on this show.
Double hit. I don't think we've done that before.
There's a warm-up hit and then the real hit.
Yeah. Yeah, that was special for Integral.
So tell us about Integral.
Yeah. So what Integral does is we sanitize proprietary real world data sets such that AI builders can get very bespoke, very sensitive data sets. But that data holders can also make sure that privacy and compliance is adhered to. And so this looks like medical records, financial transactions, etc. You know, a lot of this contains the real world human behavior patterns that people like you and me have. And there's a ton of individuals and enterprises who are now monetizing it since the AI companies and the AI builders want it. That being said, the builders want the signal. They don't want the secret values. They don't want the proprietary secrets, so to speak. And so Integral sits in the middle where we ensure that through privacy engineering both with our privacy teams and our engineering teams we can retain the utility and the signal while also ensuring that privacy and regulatory and contractual.
Yeah. So how about this for an example? There's been, you know, examples of a company buying a company just for the data around how that company was operating like just for the Slack. But then you can imagine as Slack there's so much information in Slack that again you talked about as signal but not necessarily information that should be available for even people let's say working at the labs to see right that's like PII etc.
That's right. And folks at the labs don't even necessarily want to see that, right? They want the context of it all. And so, it's a real win-win for data holders who want privacy and trust and also revenue. And then the lab or the AI builder who wants to ensure that they're not stepping into anything they shouldn't be stepping into, but they get that value.
What are some types of companies that have valuable data that don't know that it's valuable and it would be something that they could monetize if they were, let's say, working with you?
For sure. And that's one of the bets that we're making that there's this new proprietary data economy of individuals and enterprises. And so we've seen kind of all across the board just given the newness of the economy, the types of data sets that are coming in and the bespoke demand. So we've seen for example like mid-market hospitals that see compressing revenues but have a very specific treasure trove of data because they focus on a rare disease or a specific procedure and that's not available anywhere else. Fitness apps. Some people, you know, they log their entire lives into fitness apps. And these apps have free or paid users. They're only making money off the paid users, but those apps can then monetize what is that entire real world signal and really continue to make that app free and introduce a ton of value. And it all becomes circular because as AI gets better, a lot of these same companies will actually use it. So, it's a real win-win there.
What's the state-of-the-art in sanitization, maintaining privacy? We talked to Ed and Tai from the National Design Studio on Monday. They shipped something like less than 15 meg, like small language model for sanitizing documents in the browser runs very efficiently. Are you just throwing open source models at this? Do you need frontier models for data sanitization? And then is there some worry where it flows back if you're using some closed source model and the frontier lab takes the data that you sent them and stores that improperly?
For sure. For sure. And there's a variety of solutions out there mixed with call it human services and entire teams of PhDs looking at it.
Might just be like regex, right? Like if it's a phone number, identify it, just turn it into X or number sign or something like that.
Right. That's right. That's right. So there's a ton of solutions that kind of do that first layer. I think where Integral really specializes is, you know, we got our start in healthcare and healthcare has all proprietary data. You know, your doctor should not be putting your data on the internet. And as far as we can tell, they're not.
I told my doctor, go ahead.
Yeah. Because it would be embarrassing for everyone else if like your lean muscle mass and your body fat percentage got leaked out there. Everyone would...
If your test levels leaked on the internet, it would be crazy. You'd be getting accused of doping.
When did you make the switch from AirPods to wired? I'm also a wired headphone guy, so I'm curious.
I hit number five on ear replacement and then I went wired and it turns out, so I'm in New York and it turns out it's a fashion statement as well. So I'm kind of rocking both sides.
I think it is entirely superior and that is even before the fact you can get like a bunch of pairs of wired headphones, have them everywhere and for the cost of just one pair of AirPods. So maybe we're ahead. Congratulations on the round. Business makes a lot of sense and excited to see where you go with it. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Wayne Ting from Lime coming in on IPO day. Wayne, how are you doing? Congratulations. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Talk to us about the journey to get here today. What does it feel like? What's going through your head right now?
It's been a long journey and I feel great to see Lime go public today and I think yeah, it's certainly not been a linear journey. I mean, as you guys know, there's been a lot of companies in micro-mobility and Lime is the last man standing in a very tough industry. And I think we're the only ones that have built a scalable, sustainable, profitable business. And I think that's why we've earned the right to be a public company today. And I feel like to see Lime trade publicly was a validation of the hard choices we made along the way, but also a lot of sacrifices to get Lime to this point.
Yeah. What changed culturally recently or what is the culture like? Because it feels like the key to this business is operational efficiency, excellence, not having a ton of side quests. You have to be focused. This is not a business with some, you know, just crazy you struck lightning 25 times in a row and you can just make a ton of mistakes. Like operational efficiency is key to the business. Correct.
