Boardroom hush, then the fear takes hold. A sign white page turns to guns and gold. Briefcase snaps like a battle drum. Every oath gets crushed when John Quinn comes. Last wall shake when the rumors fly. One hard name and the suits go quiet. Hear that murmur roll through the smoking floor. They hired John Quinn. Then nobody talks anymore.
Must be lawyer. Most lawyer. The lawyer. The lawyers are here. Justice may be blind, but she sees it his way.
Most lawyer must be lawyer. Most lawyer the lawyer the lawyers are fear. When John Quinn stands the whole room kneels and billion dollar scars appear.
Courtroom flames up the marble wall. Gavel strike and the giants fall. Contracts burn like a paper. His words hit hard like a holy fire. Skyscrapers quake when the motions land. One shot glance and the jury stands. No retreat, no mercy call. He turns the case into a legend's war. Hear that murmur roll through the smoking floor. They hired John Quinn. Then the stealing was too wrong.
Most fear lawyer. Most fear lawyer. Most fear law. The law. The liars are here. Justice may be blind, but she sees it way. Most lawyer. Most fear lawyer. Most liar. The lawyer, the law of fear. When John Quinn stands, the whole room kneels and billion dollar scars appear.
When the skyline cracks and the silence bites, he walks through the wreck like a bladed light. No crown, no throne, just a name that wins. One more strike and the thunder begin.
Most lawyer. Most lawyer. The lawyer. The lawyers are here. Justice may be blind. But she sees it as liar. Must liar. Must liar. The liar. The liars of fear. When John Quinn stands, the whole room kneels and billion dollar scars appear. Most liar liar liar. The legend they are re they hired John Quinn. The war is on and the verdict burns right.
Let me tell you, you're watching TVP. You're watching TVPN. It's Tuesday, August 4th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. You can turn off the music.
Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easiest corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We got to work on that intro. But we've been having fun making intro songs. Mixing it up. We got John Quinn, the most feared lawyer. The lawyer the lawyers all fear coming on the show live in person in the TVP Ultradome. You know him from Quinn Emanuel. He's the founder. A legend, a legal legend. When John Quinn stands, everyone kneels. That's what they say about him.
We're very excited for the show today. Lots of guests coming on, lots of news. Big deal. The big one that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable, founded in 2012 and once valued at 11.7 billion, is getting acquired by Bending Spoons, founded in 2013 at 2.7 times ARR. A once hot startup, now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says DD Doss. It raised $1.4 billion, but only to be sold for 1.285 billion enterprise value because they had almost a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. And so the total equity value was $2.25 billion equity value. Just clearing the preference stack. So, early employees, founders probably got something. Later investors probably got 1x their money back, but probably had it tied up for a few years. So, not a good outcome, but there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it's good for could be good for Bending Spoons if they got a good deal and they turn it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going because they're sort of dividing it up. But of course, Bending Spoons is a public company now. And if you want to back Bending Spoons, head over to public.com or short investing for financial advice. Yeah, do whatever you want. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Go long, go short. Whatever you do, just don't use too much leverage. That can be risky. Matt Levine has a great piece today and actually yeah it really sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars and everyone's like wow that's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But and a wakeup call to the many maybe younger companies that are at a lower revenue run rates that are raising at much higher valuations. Yeah. And basically signaling to them like you've got some many many years of compounding to do. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a SaaS apocalypse narrative which is like these companies are going away. Software won't exist. You'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that it does feel like the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single point solution SaaS products, single player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable. It's not that they're going to zero. Bending Spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero. But at the same time, you can't underwrite it. It's growing 20%. Yeah. Yeah. But you can't underwrite it at 40x revenue, 100x revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with DTC e-commerce. Honestly, there was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture backable and you could underwrite them or they were being underwritten similarly to venture startups that had true moats, true compounding advantages. They would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or an AI company or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of a you know just a weird quirk in the system for a couple years and then go forward a few years when there were some pullback. Some of the IPOs went out, they didn't do that well, they traded down. And all of a sudden it was like okay well if we're doing you know in my case like food on the internet and we're going to VC back a food company like has Nestle been disrupted like no and that would or Unilever is trading down like crazy because they're facing so much pressure and that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation like you see this with I saw some crazy post about how people were bearish on Starlink for a while and the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And you see this with you know social media came out and yes like the newspaper and the internet actually the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in e-commerce DTC e-commerce any of that. And we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business if you're saying look I am in this SaaS industry. It is going to be more competitive going forward but I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple. So that at every point if I'm trading at three times ARR I'm happy because the cap table's set up for that. Right.
Yeah. One thing I will say is I started using Airtable shortly after it or it was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in. But the product the way that I use the product back then for my first business. I would 100% just vibe code a solution today because I was using like very basic dashboard functionality. Yep. I wanted dashboards that we could use internally, share externally. Now it'd be very quite easy to just do all of that in Codex or your favorite agent. So I do think that business is very much under threat over the long run but still has sort of compounding that it can do just given how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and a long tail of small businesses. I'd be very interested to know what is, you know, new user, new logo growth like versus just expansion within an organization because if you have some company that's already sort of running on Airtable, they're growing, so they're adding seats, they're adding functionality because they're sort of bought in and they're not going to rip it out. What does that growth rate look like? Versus, you know, new companies actually going and signing up and saying like, "Yes, this is the best tool for the job." because you do get a lot built for free up and like it's not like they don't have access to AI agents that can improve their systems like you might be doing a lot of maintenance on your vibe coded solution but at the same time a lot of people especially in smaller organizations were using this as like just one small dashboarding tool one small database that is sort of replicable so interesting to see where it goes and yeah just like an interesting data point in the SaaS apocalypse.
Latest stage growth, like is it a zombie corn? What are you, what term are you using for it? Jared Sleeper has some more thoughts. 480 million ARR growing 20%. It's a unicorn exit. Many very satisfied customers including Jared Sleeper for years. Fantastic run. Never underestimate how much VCs love products that make quote everyone a builder. The wrinkle is that one player products are high churn.
Was Airtable? I mean, I feel like the whole pitch for Airtable was that it was multiplayer, but maybe that wasn't the way that people were actually using it that often. A lot of people would just be like, "Oh, yeah, that guy on the team is using Airtable for that thing." But I mean, certainly from very early on the...
I think by one player he means that you can, it's more like product-led, like so one person at a company, because I've only used it in a team capacity, right? But one player can sign up, start using it, invite other people to the team.
It's an advantage because you're bottom up. You can just ramp into the different companies so quickly. But at the same time, if you're not like going through the CFO and being like there's a mandate that we're using the CRM system...
Exactly. Yeah, it is a little different. Three, his third point, gross retention remains the single greatest predictive variable of terminal value for any business that doesn't have a scale effect or network effect. It dictates somewhat mathematically what folks like Bending Spoons will pay. Great to see employees get liquid, but perhaps sad that some are learning about liquidation preferences, SaaS multiples to their disappointment. So, of course, if you had mentally marked your stock at 11 billion, but then this deal happens, the investors that put in that money at 11 billion, they're going to get their money back first, and then you're going to have to fight for whatever's left over, the scraps. Silicon Valley can do a better job talking to employees about what stock is worth in various scenarios. But no one is incentivized to do it.
Well, I mean you can also just look it up. There's a whole bunch of blog posts about it. You can ask GPT and get a whole deep dive on run this whole scenario and play out every possible option. But yes, I agree. No, no one likes to, you know, oh, we're closing a big candidate. Let's tell them about what's going to happen if Bending Spoons comes in and destroys.
Let's tell them what happens if we get our spoon bent.
The Bending Spoons is emerging as the Constellation Software of the premier high churn, higher churn SaaS is a fascinating turn of events and a good thing for private equity everywhere just because there's more liquidity for systems.
Well, it's a buyer of last resort.
Like no founder, no founder setting out, hey, I want to be, I want to, I want to, you know, go on this generational run...
And then get my spoon bent. But it's still, it's still great because it allows, again, it is real liquidity.
This is a win. I think Bending Spoons, Bending Spoons will obviously end up, I would, I would say like right-sizing the company. They're not going to continue to run it the same way that it's been run.
Yeah. But at least it allows everyone to get out and go on to do new things.
Yeah. In an interesting twist, speaking of getting out, Shield Monot shares this about the Airtable acquisition. They spun out their AI business Hyper Agent prior to the acquisition. So the company lives on and likely some cash with it probably can be recapitalized. Seems, seems like a fantastic outcome. Shed the old business and focus on AI. So I would be very interested to see who is going to be working at Hyper Agent. Is this something where the founders didn't want to exit the business entirely and then just start from scratch? They wanted to take a whole bunch of the team with them and they wanted a bunch of the resources and learnings and so they were able to package everything up and this will be something that's very founder-led? Or was this just, okay, that is a more expensive piece of the business. Bending, it's, it's earlier in its ramp. Maybe it's working, maybe it's not, but that's not the business that's bending in. And so this is more like a Bending Spoons.
Bending Spoons. Look, we've had, we've had both founders on the show. Bending Spoons is like, "Hey, let's take a great product and just basically right-size the team, run it efficiently, and we're not trying to get, we're not, they're not ever in the business of trying to get growth back to 200, 300% a year."
Howie's been on the show. He talked a bit about Hyper Agent. That's a product that if they execute well can grow 10x year-over-year, right? And so I could imagine again leaving some of the team to just continue running Airtable indefinitely and then again like you said taking some of the talent out and saying like let's take another big swing.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun, it's a fun twist on like post-acquisition, what do you do in this scenario? Like the, the team doesn't necessarily need to stay on. That's not the benefit of Spoon's thesis. There's not some crazy earnout probably for most of the team members and so you have the opportunity to go do something new and if you're already all set up it's like yeah, just, just put everyone together before the deal happens.
Yeah. The other, the other thing that's notable is Notion, I think, just did a tender.
They just did a tender or they did a tender a while ago. I thought that, I thought...
At some point, at some point within the last year.
At 11ish billion. They're at 600 million.
No, no, no. You're right. This January of 2026. Yeah.
I saw this quoted as like, oh...
Do you have any idea how quickly they're growing relative to Airtable? I imagine they're growing significantly faster.
So the news was that on January 26 of 2026, Notion, which very much feels like, you know, easily comped to Airtable. Airtable was like modern Google Sheets, Notion was modern Google Docs. Of course there's a ton of overlap in the capabilities and there's a lot more to it, but Notion sort of feels like a similar shaped business. But GIC, Sequoia, and Index purchased Notion shares in a private tender offer January 26th of this year. The total tender was $270 million at an 11 billion valuation, which was the last valuation I believe. They say we waived a one-year vesting cliff on options for current employees. So I think everyone got to participate. There's a whole bunch of returning investors. In 2025, Notion's growth rate accelerated on the back of AI adoption within our platform. As of last year, more than 50% of the ARR came from AI-enabled customers. The growth over the last 12 months is happening globally. They don't share an actual growth rate, but I don't know, they must, everyone must have been optimistic at the time because they did the deal at the full 11 billion. So anyway, Bryce Roberts is laughing at the VCs, I guess, who were able to play the markup game and were able to raise one maybe two funds on the Airtable markups alone. I'm sure there are some, but I mean most of the funds that were in Airtable were in a bunch of stuff. So, I don't know how true that is. Maybe the really early stage people. I don't know.
Anyway, yeah, Airtable did enough rounds back to back to back that pretty much every fund...
And they also have a bunch of other investments that are high performing during that era.
I don't think he's making fun. He's just pointing out...
I don't know. Liquidity is laughing about the fact that Bending Spoons has a very soft, friendly brand. Bending Spoons branding very, very simple and it just sounds like such a simple name. It's not like Cerberus Capital, you know. But yet when they negotiate they're presumably difficult to negotiate with. I don't know. I mean in a certain situation you can be very friendly and amicable and just sort of say like, yeah, we're a buyer at 2.7 ARR. You know, we're not going to like screw you over here. We're just going to give you, this is a fair price. Take it or leave it, and you can take it. You don't necessarily need to be this like crazy werewolf of like a shark, you know?
Yeah. There's just not, there's just not that many, there's not that many buyers for a company like Airtable.
In this economy, a slow growing enterprise software business, right? There are not that many buyers.
If Airtable had wanted to sell...
In 2020, I'm sure they would have gotten meaningfully more. They probably did have offers at different points. You could imagine Airtable, you know, ending up at a, at a, you know, a Salesforce as an example, right?
But now, Luca is saying the buyer of last resort is, is like, maybe, maybe unfair.
Yeah, just like a value-based buyer. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean it is, I guess it's like, yeah, the first resort would be like the hyperscalers but...
Yeah, ideally you never sell.
And just keep compounding, compounding. Second best would be a strategic. Yeah. Right.
And it just feels like the enterprise tooling market is pretty mature amongst the hyperscalers. Like Microsoft's not going to replace Excel with this. Google's not going to replace Google Sheets. Meta, Amazon, they don't really want to get into this particular thing, a whole email suite, like the Office productivity suite. And so you get to this price and it's like IPO or sell. And so they chose sell.
Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, letting you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Snap earnings happened and Evan Spiegel was on CNBC talking to Sorcin, and it's a very interesting storyline because people are obsessed with the specs. I mean, the job completed in terms of getting more attention for the company, but it's been sort of a wait around the company because the question is like, okay, is everyone going to be buying $2,200 smart glasses from you anytime soon? When that's not really the story. The story is actually like the revenue growth, the profit, the operating leverage, the coming back into the business. So, I mean, overall it was a good quarter for Snap. Clear beat. Revenue was up 19% year-over-year with profitability and cash generation rising even faster. So that's that operating leverage. They're growing revenue faster than they're growing costs and so they're increasing their margins. Advertising revenue grew 9% to roughly $1.3 billion in the quarter. But the really interesting number that was surprising to me was they're making $316 million a quarter in subscriptions and paid services, up 85%. So just subscribing and being a paid power user. It's only 3% of the user base, something like that, but that's now a billion-dollar line of business. Obviously very high margin, working really plays to the strengths of what Snap offers. And usage is up globally, but they're losing a step in Western markets. So, North America, I think, fell 7% and Europe fell 2%. And so, that's not great for long-term ad monetization because you want to be in the richer countries generally, but still revenue is accelerating. They are monetizing better. And that's probably an AI story. It's just like a boring AI story because it's like the ad recommendation system got a little bit better. Nobody really cares. People want to focus on specs, but they're $2,200 and they're bulkier than competing smart glasses.
Well, it felt like in that interview Spiegel was talking about specs, but he wasn't wearing them. And so, yeah. Does he need to wear them all? I think he kind of needs to wear them all the time. Wear them. I mean, you're going to hold Apple to that. Tim Cook's got to wear a Vision Pro everywhere he goes. That would be hilarious.
No, but the Vision Pro is not meant... it's augmented reality. It's meant to be worn 24/7 if you're a serious person. Let's actually pull up... We should do a full show if you love Apple Vision Pro so much. I could do the full show. Not a problem. Okay. Do the full show. Okay. This Friday. Well, we'll test run it with Tyler. So, here's an interesting tidbit. Specs, it feels like, oh my god, they're spending so much money. It's like so crazy. I think the rough estimate is like $300 million a year, which is a lot, but it's only 5% of their cost. It's like 20% of their overall R&D budget, maybe something like that. These are very rough numbers, but it's not like if they just spun out Specs or cut Specs and they were just like, we're not doing anything there, all of a sudden the business is like wildly profitable. It's not that big of a stone around the neck. It's more just like a distraction and a question. And it's also not great that on the earnings call they asked, 'How many pre-orders have you sold?' And he sort of danced around it and didn't really give a straight answer on that because if it was good, you'd probably be like, 'Yeah, we sold things.' Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a...
Yeah. And even Meta selling what I think now is millions of devices is not exactly like a shout. They don't want people to necessarily focus on that.
Totally. Even though it is a proof point that there is a market for camera glasses. Basically, the crazier thing with Snap is that this is a business even after it's traded up 13% today. The business is at a $6 billion a year run rate and it's trading at under $10 billion. Right. Yeah. So, which just goes to show how even with some momentum across the business, people just do not have faith in the company. Okay, let's play a little bit of Evan Spiegel on CNBC. I want to hear him talk.
Snap reporting Q2 results after the bell on Monday. They scored an earnings beat with $1.6 billion in revenue. It's 19% higher than just one year ago. And joining us right now for more, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. He did not bring his glasses on the set, but we're going to talk about those glasses in just a minute because I think that's been a big part of the story. But you beat across the board, not just by the way on the revenue piece, but on the margin piece, which is what I think the market was actually looking for.
Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on, Andrew. It's such a beautiful morning here in Aspen. It was a great quarter for Snap. And I think what folks are seeing is that the free cash flow in the business is really starting to inflect, which is allowing us to offset dilution, to strengthen our balance sheet, and of course to continue investing in the future, which is so important to us.
Okay, click the future pieces of that story. I mentioned glasses. We'll get there in a second. I think glasses. I want to hear him talk about glasses. About $2,200 right now. $2,100 bucks is what they're going to come out at.
Okay. So the question I keep thinking about is how quickly those can come to market in a way and at a price point that people buy them en masse, and how you think about the competition coming from whatever you think Apple is ultimately going to create, whatever you think Google is working on, and whatever you think Meta is going to do next.
Well, we've been working for more than 12 years to reinvent the computer and make it feel... I think today people are spending more than seven hours on average staring at screens. Specs represent the opportunity to bring computing into the world, to make it a shared experience, and ultimately to help bring all the productivity gains we saw in desktop computing and laptop computing to the real world and to real-world jobs, which is the vast majority of jobs, about 60% of jobs. So I think this computing transformation is incredibly exciting. We're certainly the leader in the space. I think Specs represent a totally new category, right? If you look at the landscape today, you have very bulky but capable headsets and then you have very limited but lightweight AI glasses, and Specs represent the capability of some of these VR headsets in terms of the immersiveness and the ability to really have a full workstation experience, but with the wearability of some of these lightweight glasses products.
Do you say to yourself, Apple's going to come and do the same thing and Meta is going to go? I mean, so how do you think about that given the cost of putting this all out there and the amount of money that some of these big companies can actually throw at this?
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, as we look at the history of innovation, I actually think one of the things that helps power innovation are constraints, right? And one of the things that makes Snap so unique is that we've been so laser-focused on Specs for such a long period of time. So I think this focus, our history of innovation, you know, and our first-mover advantage in the space.
It feels like it should be a different company. If you want to be laser-focused, it feels like the benefit would be like do the Elon thing, start a separate company that is laser-focused on it. The investors in that company are laser-focused on that. The employees... Yeah. Have a distribution deal with Snap. Yeah. You know, like just have this like, you know, get Snap to a really polished, oiled machine. You own all the equity. You have the founder control. It's your financial backstop, your credibility to actually go and truly laser-focus. Because like it's weird to be laser-focused on a thing that's not your core business and then everyone's just constantly asking you like, 'We'd love for you to laser-focus on the main business that's making billions of dollars every year.' Like, seems pretty solid. Yeah, it's like making $6 billion. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean earlier this year they did spin off the AI video company and that seems like much more related to the main, like, you know, catch app than the glasses, right?
Wait, what is the AI video company?
I think it's called Domo. It was like their internal generative video team.
Interesting. Yeah, I feel like having in-house... Yeah, it also, he was talking about enterprise use cases for the glasses. I mean, like workplace use cases. It's so hard to imagine. It's... as an independent company, you make a really great device. I can imagine that company having its own go-to-market motion saying, 'Hey, Amazon, yeah, we want you to use, you know, our devices across your workforce.' And maybe they do a pilot. Yeah. But trying to sell, like, Snapchat glasses into the enterprise... Yeah. Feels like just going to be a tough sell.
I also wonder, I mean, I don't know if this would actually be a good strategy for such a big company, but I would be interested to see if there's an opportunity just for another physical product that could actually get to scale that's way cheaper. I'm thinking like some sort of disposable camera that doesn't have a screen on it. You take the photos and then they upload to Snap in the app. And it's like this special way of like disconnecting more on theme, but way cheaper because it's just like a basic camera in a shell or...
something, or going into like, you know, a ring or a wristband. Like there's been so many companies that have figured out how to get a wearable or a hardware device actually in the hands of millions of consumers. Like maybe do that first and then grow from there, as opposed to taking like the straight shot. I mean, it's a straight shot to full immersive augmented reality, the most challenging thing, which is just a really, really tall order.
Yeah. Anyway, 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.
Well, OpenAI is firing back at Apple. A little glazy, though. They say Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time. What a funny way to kick off a blog post firing back at a lawsuit. Apple just cooked. OpenAI just cooked.
Well, they're saying it built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. True. And then they go on to say maybe there were some details that were missed.
Yes. So what were the key things that they said? Apple accused OpenAI of ignoring them. Turns out the lawyers emailed the wrong Asian guy because two Asian last names look similar. They claimed you discussed the allegations with OpenAI's general counsel, that they admitted that that conversation never happened. Accused an ex-employee of improperly accessing files. They forgot to mention Apple employees were allegedly asking him to access those same files after he left. So there seemed to be some scenario where like the guy had left, but he had so much internal knowledge that someone at Apple was just like, 'Hey, like can you remind me where this thing is?' or something.
Yeah. When reading through the initial complaint, Apple made it seem like the former employee was just running wild through his old laptop. He had sent a message to someone at Apple saying something to the effect, I'm paraphrasing, but 'I still have access to my computer. LOL.'
Mhm. But the reason that in the text messages that they shared, you can imagine the reason that he was there and sending that message. Why would he send the message if he was doing something that was wrong or that he would feel guilty of, right? He was helping his former teammates, and they say, 'There's 10 other people I could ask, but you're the smartest,' or something like that. Yeah. And so when you have all this context, the story looks quite a lot different.
Yeah. They're sharing a lot of text messages. You can go read the blog post, but there's like full back-and-forth iMessage messages between Chong Leu and Apple employees where Chong, whose last day at Apple was January 22nd, 2026, is being asked by his former colleagues to help them locate files and information to assist them with their Apple work. Note: other individual names and Apple confidential information has been redacted. So certainly another wild...
Yeah, I'm still just very surprised that Apple, during the middle of a year-long talent raid, would know that someone significant had quit and that would not go through the process of actually taking back their laptop and making sure that the separation was really finalized. People have been telling stories how historically, you know, maybe call it 15 years ago, if you quit Apple, someone would show up to your house immediately and take back any prototypes that you may have had or anything of the sort.
Yeah. I'm excited for prediction markets to get on this. Honestly, it was very helpful during the Elon Musk OpenAI case. Currently, Kalshi has a few here. Will the OpenAI Jony Ive device have a screen? No, is at 82%. When will OpenAI release Astra? And there's some dates here. What else are there? Will OpenAI increase the cost of ChatGPT? No, at 87%. No market on the Apple lawsuit because it's still very early. There's not even like a court date yet. But we'll keep tracking it because it's an interesting story. Let's move on to the next story. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
So, is BMW forcing owners to watch a Spider-Man: Brand New Day promo when they start their cars up? That's the question. A lot of people were upset about this. Jordi this morning is like, 'This is awful.' There's some nuance here. So BMW owners are debating the company's latest in-car promotion after videos spread across X showing a Spider-Man: Brand New Day animation appearing on their vehicle's infotainment screen at startup.
And the reason why this fake news triggered me was back in the day in college I was getting a Kindle and on the checkout page it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad-supported Kindle? And as a college student, I was like, hm, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like I would have actually appreciated ads.
Can't you just flip it upside down?
True. True. One simple trick.
One simple trick. But it wouldn't be ads for like Spider-Man. It would be ads for random books, right? Yeah. Books that... and the targeting wasn't good. So again, people don't like ads that...
Anyways, what happened here, John?
Okay, so venture capitalist Shlomo Monat wrote, quote, 'When you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider-Man. Really cheapens the BMW in my opinion.' A16Z partner Josh Elman added, 'Of all the brands I thought might bombard you with in-car ads on screen right when you start the engine, I had BMW pretty dang low on that list.' This seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand? Thought they were premium.
Yeah, I think it's a premium brand.
Premium brand. Even Paul Graham weighed in though, reposting Monat's video and saying, 'I'm never buying a BMW.' He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in an E39.
Wait, but what actually happened? You have to opt into this.
Community Notes added important context. According to one note, the Spider-Man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27th through August 10th, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full-screen ad. Instead, owners must tap it to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited-time startup experiences in the past, including holiday-themed animations.
Jordi, very, very, very different. You can just see the popup there. Surprise, Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW. And that's... if you press the button, you have to actually turn it on. It's not...
Yes. Yes. But I'm saying there's a banner ad.
Oh, there is a banner ad.
It's just a banner. Look at the video. Start it over. Start it over.
Let's see. Let's be the judge of this.
Look at this banner. It's a banner.
You click the banner, then it plays an ad.
So, it's a popup that you click.
And it's like, wait, what is this popup? Why does my car have a popup? It should be tucked into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like promotions or themes.
That didn't look tucked in anywhere. That was the main...
Because I'm fine if there's a theme and you're like, I want red lighting in my car. I want blue lighting. I want Spider-Man theme. I want Christmas theme. Go.
They're literally saying surprise, a Spider-Man ad. They should just say, 'Hey, we have an ad for Spider-Man here if you'd like one.'
Okay, this is right on the line.
But this crosses my line.
This crosses your line because you're like, 'What is Spider-Man? What does Spider-Man have to do with my car?' And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider-Man.
But I just think of the consumer surplus. This is making BMWs cheaper. This is bringing BMWs...
Let's look at the price of inflation.
Yeah. Also not necessarily the best deal.
Yeah. Let's look at BMW inflation. Yeah. Anyways, yeah, really, really bad move. I wonder how much they actually made.
I think you're just judging it because it's... I think you would feel completely differently if you saw a banner and it was Nitro Circus and it would just take over your car, or if it was just a full takeover of Sam Sulek at the Arnold Classic, something like that. That would be much better received. It's not a...
Surprise, Spider-Man trademark just dropped into your BMW.
Okay. The ultimate driving machine. Yeah. Not super well executed, but BMW's been going back and forth with stuff like this pretty consistently. Like, aren't they the ones that have the subscription to the heated seats? Isn't that BMW? You know what I'm talking about?
So, they put the wires to heat the seats in every car and then if you want to use it, they charge you monthly. And this...
It's basically just a nerd snipe, or like a treasure hunt for hackers. Because if you're a DIY hacker and you can get into that and unlock it, jailbreak it, you just get — well, not free, because you've already paid for it — but you don't have to pay the subscription.
Yeah, Techno Chief says, "Wait, I thought we loved ads here." I do love ads. That's true.
But I think buying — unless BMW — I think if they gave the option at purchase saying, do you want to buy the ad-supported manual transmission BMW M2, or do you want the ad-free premium version, and there was a bit of a price difference, then it just feels wrong. They didn't do that.
Sort of like a Ferrari Tailor Made program. Oh, like what stitching did you get? Oh, did you go ad-free or ad-supported? Like, oh, you went manual. Cool.
Yeah, I went manual but ad-supported. Yeah, manual supported. Yeah, I got a manual SP3 ad-supported.
I mean, the ads in an SP3 driver are probably very hard to reach, so pretty valuable. I would love ads there, but it's got to be ads for the most elite products. It's got to be — you're getting your SP3 and it shows you an ad for Aong Giri or something.
Spider-Man's doing well though, so the ads are working. So, you know, maybe the BMW show owner showed up in droves because the new Spider-Man movie scores Hollywood's second biggest debut ever. That's actually huge. The Sony film grossed $932 million through Sunday, topped only by 2019's Avengers: Endgame. That is massive. Did you realize that this movie was making that much money?
I mean, if you had asked me an hour ago, is there a new Spider-Man movie coming out? I would say, haven't heard of anything.
Yeah, I haven't seen that much energy about it. I've been aware of it, but I have not seen like a massive takeover. But also, I'm not driving an ad-supported BMW, so maybe that's the problem.
Spider-Man spun a massive weekend for movie theaters, flouting superhero fatigue and giving a major boost to Hollywood's summer box office. Sony Pictures' Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to an estimated 9.
We got some good ideas here in the chat. Yeah. What we got? So, ad-supported cars that get you free self-driving, where the ads take over the whole entertainment system in the car. So you're sitting there relaxing, you know, the car is driving itself, but then it's just blaring high volume every —
I'll take it a step further. Every 5 minutes, one 30-second ad. What if there was a whole company dedicated to building self-driving cars that was funded by an advertising company? Like a company that just prints billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising, like their DNA is advertising. And then they go into the self-driving.
They would have a huge advantage in terms of targeting. Why has no one done this before? Yeah. Or they could even have a video platform where they're making a lot of money running video ads, and they could take that video almost like a YouTube. Yeah, exactly. So you could have like, you know, a huge ad network, YouTube ads, and then you could have a self-driving car company. Put them all together. That's synergy, right?
And maybe you could spin the company out at some point and raise some venture capital, too. Spin the company out. They secretly still advertising. No, I don't think Waymo will do crazy ads. I think — I don't know. Maybe.
A major streaming executive just texted me and says, "Okay, going to get Tubi to build a car right now." You got to build a car. You got to do it.
What else is going on here? Okay. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike real quick. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
The owners of MySpace say they're planning to relaunch the once dominant social media platform. And I feel like this has happened multiple times. I'm having deja vu here, but we'll dig into it. In a recent documentary called MySpace about the company,
We got another apploving cars. Axle AI. Axon. Axel AI. It's a self-driving car, but you have to play mobile games in order to keep it going. That's a feature. I mean, you get a Tesla, you can play Paltopia.
Replace the steering wheel. Yeah. Why not Clash of Clans? A big iPad and you're just playing mobile games. But if you stop — 90% of the way there — if you stop leveling up, the car just pulls over. You got to keep playing.
Okay, we're getting somewhere. This is good. So in the recent documentary MySpace, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the brothers who acquired MySpace in 2011 after its decline, said they intend to relaunch the platform with a new vision. There's no launch date that's been announced, but they say they want to build a social network that feels different from today's algorithm-driven apps. They don't believe in preference falsification. They think when people say they don't like algorithmic feeds, they actually don't like them. We'll see how it pans out.
So MySpace launched in 2003 and quickly became one of the world's largest social networking sites. It became famous for customizable profiles, music discovery, and its iconic Top Friends feature before Facebook eventually overtook it in users and became the dominant social platform. At its peak, though, MySpace attracted roughly 150 million monthly visitors worldwide. That's not necessarily people that had profiles, but just visitors you'd land on a MySpace site. So huge for the day, but not huge by modern standards.
So the platform's ownership history mirrors its dramatic rise and fall. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp acquired MySpace's parent company for $580 million. It was like a — I'm pretty sure it was a fantastic outcome at the time. Now, by social media standards, it's like, what are you doing?
Just six years later, in 2011, News Corp sold MySpace for roughly $35 million, though, so completely, you know, got racked to Specific Media, led by brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook. Justin Timberlake invested in the company and became a prominent creative adviser during the acquisition.
In 2016, Time Inc. acquired Specific Media's parent company in a deal valued at about $87 million. Three years later, Meredith Corporation acquired Time Inc., briefly inheriting MySpace before selling its stake back to the Vanderhook brothers that same year.
All told, MySpace went from a $580 million trophy acquisition at the height of the social media boom to a roughly $35 million distress sale just six years later. Today, MySpace.com is still online, primarily serving as a music and entertainment website while its owners prepare what they hope will become a second act. Are you bullish? What do you think they should do?
What's the advice for the owners of MySpace.com? Nostalgia. You got to call Bending Spoons, right? Is it making any money? That's the issue for Bending Spoons. You got to get one Italian teenager to run this whole thing.
They're like, if you were making $500 million, we would love to buy you for 1.2 billion. Yep. But since you're making less than — I don't know if they're making any money. It must be making some money just as, you know, a website with some ads on it or something. Who knows?
Anyway, 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 here already. I believe we have Grace Lee from Intelligence, the co-founder raising a seed round from Index Ventures. Brought you in a little bit. How you doing, Grace? Good to see you.
Great to meet you all. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Please introduce yourself and the company.
Well, I'm Grace. I'm the CEO of Intelligence. We just launched yesterday. We've been the team behind Design Arena. Actually, the company started because we were making games. We were trying to make a game engine. We noticed that the models could make playable games, but the games were not fun at all. Like, nobody wanted to play them.
And we thought, you know, building a harness probably doesn't seem like the right move. What if we could turn it both into a product for people to build games, but also a product for the models to figure out what it is that humans like to play? Like what are playable games that are fun? And then we started that.
We just — one of our friends linked it on Reddit. He didn't even tell us about it. And it got like 3,000 users overnight. We're like, well, that's more than the game engine has ever gotten. And since scaled that to, oh man, 5.6 million people across 192 countries. So every country in the world except for North Korea. We've been told that there are sanctions there, so we can't go in there yet.
And then on the Frontier Lab side, we pretty much work with all the major players to help improve their models in hard-to-verify domains.
Amazing. Can you walk me through how Design Arena works, the various incentives that happen to actually get people to review designs from models, and just the whole — it feels like a product that would have sort of like a cold start problem. How did you solve that? How did you scale it? How does it function like in equilibrium?
Oh yeah, a really good question. So we took a look at the optimal form factor for these cases where users are trying to do something, but you don't really know what the optimal end state is. So designers, right? What do they show their clients? They actually get the client prompt and then they show the client multiple versions of maybe what they might want to see.
That's exactly what the user interface looks like for our users. So they don't actually need an incentive because it's a design tool for them that does what they want because they show them multiple versions just like in the real world.
Like how does a singer figure out if a song resonates? It's not that they cook in a room really and study — they just release multiple songs, right? They see what hits work. How does a game developer figure out what games are playable? They release multiple games and they see what works.
So for the user, they actually don't need an incentive to be on the platform. They want to design something or make a game or make a website, and the form factor perfectly fits that. The models, the intelligence, doesn't exactly know what the user wants, but then they'll get multiple versions. And through feedback, you can get closer to the end state.
And that just happens to be in the perfect shape that the intelligence layer needs to improve more to what it is that humans want in the first place — the preference signal, the user behavior, etc.
A little bit of like a, I don't know, philosophical question, but how do you think about optimizing design for the user and what the user thinks looks good versus what is good for the business? Because I've just been bombarded with products and websites that feel like they're horribly designed, but I understand that they are economically valuable.
John Gruber was on the show yesterday. He wrote a blog post recently about the Temu app being a mess. And if you go to Temu, it's like so many popups and spinning wheels. It is the epitome of terrible design in the aesthetic sense, but I'm sure every design decision that they've made has been economically justified. And I don't think that they never thought to make it clean, right?
And so how are you thinking about those two tensions actually instantiating themselves in the work that people do when they go to an AI model and ask for a design?
Yes, very good question. So it is our job to figure out what better means for this person. If you are on the platform to make a beautiful portfolio, then you are going to give us feedback that hints us in that direction. Through a couple of interactions, we can figure out, okay, this person is actually just in it for the visual preference, right?
But if you're on the platform to build a highly performing website, like a Temu website for example, you're probably optimizing for dollars converted at the last screen. And so the end signal that you're tracking is different.
The way that we like to think about it is we're almost doing the work of a PM, right? What a PM does is they sit in the product and they take a look at the analytics of what people are doing and they have an end goal in mind. The PM's job is to figure out what is the right KPI to be optimizing for and then to bring that to the table of engineers and into the resource allocation and to try to get it in that direction.
So it is our job to figure out for this particular user, what does better mean for them, and then measure those right signals to then label correctly and then provide that as feedback to improve the models.
How do you — Jord, please. You had a follow-up. I have a question.
Yeah, just following up on Design Arena. How are you balancing the various downstream business opportunities that come from having a product platform like Design Arena? Because I could imagine you can sort of become a model router in many ways. You can do forward-deployed work and be an expert and partner to companies that are picking tools.
Like there's services as a software, there's going down the financial stack. Like there's so many opportunities. It must be hard to — like you're sort of stuck in the idea maze longer than usual. Even after you have traction and fundraising and revenue, there's more opportunity. What have you looked at? What's not interesting? What has stuck out as the obvious path?
Oh my. Okay, that is the best question, by the way, to be asking in this space. Like there are so many downstream opportunities that come from figuring out what it is that people want. What we found to be the most interesting actually is an intelligence marketplace. Okay. Right.
There's some — this is a little bit kooky, but I do believe that there will one day be as many suppliers of intelligence as there are currently suppliers of information. This feels like the early days of the internet, right? Like where anybody can make their own intelligence.
I don't care if that's a foundation model lab with a main API or something that's post-trained or something that's totally off the shelf with a skill, but there's like a million different suppliers of information. And if you can be the person that best matches the supplier of information with somebody — a supplier of intelligence, I should say — somebody who's asking for intelligence,
the same way that PageRank for Google Search was the critical bottleneck to get the internet into everybody's hands, that is the position that we actually want to be in. So whatever of the work it is that we do, we want it to feed into this flywheel that we have.
And we want to make sure that we're not just good at value creation — like not just good at improving the models, but also good at building value capture. Once the models get better at design, it's not like our work becomes less useful. It actually means our product can reach more people because they're better at design.
So we care about doing things in like the opportunities that are coming our way, which we're lucky to have a ton of inbound from yesterday, that it feeds into this overall flywheel that if the models get better, we also get better.
Yeah. Almost $60 million of revenue. I think a lot of people were quite surprised. Not because the company isn't significant and at the center of this explosion of creative intelligence, just because you guys had kind of flown under the radar. So first I want to hit the gong for 60 million-ish of revenue.
There you go. Great hit. Thank you. And a very — I like the ratio of the fundraise to the revenue. You know, normally when somebody comes on with this much revenue, they're like, you know, raising a billion. I'm sure that's up next for you.
But I wanted to ask, what do you think creative superintelligence looks like? Because with like images, I think images are going to be solved, right? At least like photoreal images are pretty much here. You can imagine with a couple more turns, like at least making images with AI will be solved.
And it's getting a lot easier to prompt, and harnesses will get better at editing and modifying and getting better outputs and all these things. But like photoreal images will be solved. What does creative intelligence look like in one year or two years down the road?
Creative superintelligence to us is whatever you can think will exist. In fact, things that you can't even have the scope to think of can exist.
So one thing — the distance between an idea in your head and it being in the real world right now, it's like very far. Let's say you have an idea for a new pen, what a new pen might look like. There's a very long distance that you have to travel. You have to know how to design the pen, you have to know how to process CAD, you have to find a manufacturer to build — like there's a very long — and because of that, we have to localize on a couple of pen form factors that everybody uses. Like it just becomes standardized.
But what if creative superintelligence makes it such that you can sustain infinite varieties, kind of like how you can have infinite versions of the same information being represented in different formats? That's the way that we view creative superintelligence, which is any idea that you have, the instant that you have it, it is visible in the real world, and there's no latency or friction between your ideas and them being born in the room.
That sounds different than the models coming up with the ideas, which is interesting. I don't disagree. I think you're right. We were debating this yesterday about will a model be able to come up with it before you even think of it? What is the timeline for that? That's the next thing.
Yeah, we were talking about this because it feels like, you know, mathematicians have been having somewhat of an existential crisis for a while now, but especially over the weekend. Yes.
And I was just thinking — I was joking to John yesterday just saying like, you know, they're coming for us next. Like I consider myself a creative person, and right now when I look at AI-generated outputs, the ones that really resonate are ones where there was like a fundamental creative idea that then the model did a good job of instantiating it.
But it's not like the original idea was that complicated. The example we always use is like Harry Potter Balenciaga, right? Like not a complicated idea. But to me, what will be interesting, and I'm surprised no one has really built some type of effectively like loop around this, which is like combining two random ideas and then creating the visual sort of output,
and just doing that over and over and over, because it will end up mimicking like the full pipeline of human creativity, which is like original idea, which is combining two things — Harry Potter Balenciaga — combining these two things and then just creating the output. And then once you get that, then you're just running on this loop where already it feels like there's no real new ideas in the world.
Like for 100 years we've just been as humans like recombining different things that already exist, and it's sort of sad that we can't come up with very many new ideas. But then eventually the machines will have just created every possible variation of every idea that there could ever be, and then a human will have an idea and then they'll be like, oh well, actually the machine figured this out like two years ago and here it is on a website.
I mean, I think something that's pretty incredible is people don't know what they want until they see it, right? And oftentimes it's not even the new idea that is the — it's showing it to a dozen people and then two dozen people and then 100, then a thousand and seeing what sticks.
Like again, this is kind of the creative process, right? Like you will draft up a hundred versions of the same script and then see what are the gem moments that actually resonate with people. And the resonating with people — like that's the verifier part, like that's where humanity comes in, right? Like if you're trying to give something to people, you need a way to measure whether or not it actually resonates with them.
That said, company Simile, who just raised a big round, might make humans unnecessary to even judge what will resonate with —
I think we're safe. Every AI lab I talk about is working on this thing called superintelligence. I haven't met a single AI researcher working on room-temperature intelligence, and so like they're not even trying to displace me. It's ridiculous.
Actually, there's probably a new lab called Normal Intelligence.
Probably, probably. Last question. Gaming arena. We got Design Arena. You have gaming DNA. What about models building games? The games go up against each other. Which one did you play longer? Which one did you have more fun? This feels like the next thing. Is this you? Is this another company? What's that?
That's you. This is us. So we've actually been working on this for a while.
Game dev is incredibly hard to verify, and that's why it's so much fun, right? Because you don't just need a really good storyline, you need a way to verify if something is fun. Like that's impossible to do, you know, without people on the other side. Exactly.
And so for a while now, we've been helping companies try to get better at this domain. And it doesn't just involve like the strategy and being able to save game state. You've also got to have beautiful graphics. You have good multicolor processing. It's a very hard frontier.
Yeah. Yeah. That'll be a lot of fun. Yeah, very interesting to think about like, oh, I'm going to go and review AI models on Gaming Arena. See you in 400 hours because I need to decide which game is better, this 100-hour game or that 100-hour game. Like that's kind of what's going to happen. Yeah.
Yeah. You literally just need to put it — like the way to think about it is you need to put it on the equivalent of the internet and you need to see if it gets picked up by people.
Yeah. Yeah. Like the algorithms, like the Steam store, the Instagram algorithm — like these are the final bosses of the arenas perhaps in many ways. Very interesting to think about. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on all the progress. Thank you.
Yeah. Amazing progress and thank you for — I think you're doing a public service, right? If you can get all these AI companies to make better outputs, the world will become a more beautiful place. Yeah, and I think it's important.
Well, have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is Samir Kaji from Allocate. He's the co-founder and CEO. Samir, how are you doing?
What's going on? Good, good, guys. How are you guys doing?
We're doing fantastically. Fun day. Do you drive a BMW? Have you been getting bombarded with Spider-Man ads?
I wish. No, I don't drive.
No, you're lucky. You're lucky. You're lucky. That's the ad. They're all ad-supported.
Yeah, apparently. Apparently, it's not even opt-out.
Does Allocate take a couple weeks off in August as a company?
Oh, no. No. There's no taking any time off. Like unfortunately, a lot of our clients are taking time off.
That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. If you wanted to plan like a — I think it can be good for at least for smaller companies to say like, hey, we're all going to take vacation in this general window. Sort of collusion.
Yeah, well I will tell you though, I did go to Cafe Venetia the other day, so I don't know if that counts as a vacation, but it was nice to kind of get away. But yeah, no, it's crazy busy right now as you guys know. So much is happening in the market. So many funds are raising. So many companies are raising.
And having been in this market for 27 years, this is like the craziest I've seen it.
Yeah. So talk — does that scare you? It's obviously good. It's obviously great for your business, which we should let you introduce. But maybe introduce Allocate first and then I want to get into it.
Yeah. Yeah. Why don't I give you the quick sort of 30-second pitch on Allocate. So, you know, having been in the venture market working with private funds, kind of realized a few things. Private funds are now more numerous. It's like we went from 3,000 asset managers to 30,000 within 15 years.
The amount of capital that's being raised by these funds is enormous too, right? Like you had raised $15 billion. You had Thrive raise 10 billion. So these companies are staying private so much longer. So the private markets grew from a trillion to 17 trillion.
And when you look at that, where is that money going to come from? Well, historically the funds were capitalized by pension funds, endowments, foundations, and then it became clear that they needed to find new ways to capitalize themselves. And one way was family offices and high-net-worth individuals.
The problem is it's kind of a headache to operationalize those small checks. And for the people investing, they can't write $10 million tickets into, you know, name your top fund. And so they go through the wealth adviser. So we create basically the bridge between the wealth advisory world and private funds.
And for the wealth advisers, they have one place where they can discover, access, execute, and report on private assets. So there's $10 trillion of capital being right now managed by these independent wealth advisers. If you guess what percentage is in alternatives —
Okay. Well, endowments, foundations, pensions — 20 to 50%.
We got to get everyone on the Yale model.
Yeah. Well, you know, you got to be a little bit careful on that for sure. But, you know, look, I mean, the reality is like you can't ignore the private markets. You had Anthropic, OpenAI worth almost a trillion. SpaceX goes public for 1.77 trillion. Like, it's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it would be — it just feels like from just like an — not even the financial numbers, but just the idea of just being in the American economy and being bought into the next iteration. Like there's been this discussion of going public earlier, it's very onerous, etc., etc. But there is another world which is just broader exposure through funds, and that's a lot of what's happening here.
Okay, once a week, maybe twice a week, sometimes three times a week or four times a week or even five. There's a company that I've never heard of that comes on and raises half a billion dollars and, you know, they're maybe like one or two years old, that I get a little bit wary.
Because I sort of — my career came online, let's say, in 2018. I'd been paying attention to startups prior to that, but like really was paying attention in 2018, and we went through this sort of crazy period and then we saw a pretty massive correction and I got to sort of be on that roller coaster.
And so now while we're back in boom times, I'm just like much more wary than I was before because I was young and maybe overly optimistic, right? And so today, when you look at the public markets, there's a lot of valuations seem relatively reasonable. In the private markets today, there's, you know, we saw Airtable.
If Airtable was just — like I know a SaaS company that has a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of Airtable's current revenue that is doing a new round well beyond Airtable's valuation, and it's just because they're squarely in serving other AI companies, when ultimately they're just as much of a software company as Airtable was.
And so you see this like massive kind of disconnect between exits and private valuations. And so I have a lot of alarm bells going off, but I'm curious how you see it and how LPs on the platform are seeing it.
Yeah, one of the most dangerous things to say in the investing world is "this time's different," because rarely is it completely different. So, you know, similar to you, I've had some scar tissue built up. I actually, you know, started my career in '99. I was at Silicon Valley Bank. I was at SVB and I was lending into the — back then, you know, companies were going public based on one metric, which is eyeballs, right? Like how many eyeballs, how many people are visiting your site?
Well, today it's ARR, which, you know, as we know, can be a little creative in terms of how people are actually saying ARR. What's actually true right now? So I think we have to disassociate, you know, AI as like this technology innovation, which I think is going to be bigger than anything we've ever seen, bigger than the internet, bigger than mobile and cloud, and maybe the biggest innovation since the railroads.
The challenge though is when you have a new technology of this size and scale, especially moving this fast, the supply and demand for those companies changes. So you have so much capital being raised, people are incented — like if you're a VC, you're incented to invest in the next hot AI company, which has grown from, let's say, 1 to 10 million to 100 million in revenues, knowing that full well that if you catch the tiger by the tail and you get the Anthropics or you get the OpenAI, your career is minted.
And so a lot of capital goes into these companies. And every single time that I've been through one of these, the companies that do win are bigger than ever by a massive degree of magnitude. The issue is so many expensive mistakes.
You mentioned Airtable. That was like 2021. I think their peak valuation was 11.7 billion. They raised almost $1.5 billion and they sold to Bending Spoons for $1.25 billion. Right? That means common shareholders get nothing. And the people that came in at the end, they might get a return on capital, but that's a horrible —
I thought common shareholders were getting something because the actual equity value is 2-something billion.
Yeah. 2.2, roughly 800 million. But again, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what they would have probably marked it themselves.
Well, if that's the case, that's great. But that's not the case for a lot of those 2021 companies that raised at — sometimes I was seeing 50 to 100x multiples for these companies.
Now the multiples aren't that crazy this time around and these companies are grown. The bigger challenge is like which one of these companies is actually durable? Like I mean, is a big frontier model going to subsume you? What happens with open-weight and open-source models? It's still too early to tell.
So I think you're right in that you should be somewhat nervous. But at the same time, venture has always been a power-law industry, right? 6% of total companies actually return over 60%. That's historical. I think it's even more amplified right now.
But I'm, you know, in the mindset right now that I've been through these periods and people always have short memories. Like 2021 was what, 5 years ago. And, you know, it's almost like we forgot 2022 and '23.
Things do not go right when you just plug so much capital with such speed. And so I expect the same thing to happen. I don't know when this changes and when gravity comes back in the private markets — six months, 12 months, two years, maybe it's even five years. Maybe we're all wrong.
But I would actually be willing to bet that within the next two years, we're going to see some kind of pullback. And then we'll kind of see, you know, what they say when the tide goes out — you see who's wearing the swim trunks. And I think we'll see that next year or the year after.
Don't you — oh, okay. Yeah, that's a better way to put it. See who's wearing the swim trunks.
Well said. Well said.
I want to know how are new venture firms changing in their construction? What you mentioned the boom from 3,000 managers to 30,000, but what are you noticing over the last few years that might look different in the way a new fund gets built? Maybe it's more interns or more or less banker crossover types or more operator, more founders.
Are there any trends that you've noticed that you're seeing? Okay, that's clearly working at certain funds. More people are following this even in the way they're structuring or the pacing or anything trend-wise around new fund formation.
Yeah. And new fund formation slowed down, you know, for sure over the last few years, right? It was at a fever pitch in 2019, '20, and '21. In fact, everyone felt like it was cool to be a VC without understanding that it takes forever to know if you're any good, to get paid, all those things. Fundraising is really tough.
And you know, a lot of it came down to when you have so many funds in the market, everyone's searching for differentiation. And so they create these things which is like, I'm going to create a talent team. I'm going to create, you know, an AI sort of way to vet things. And I think these are all around the edges.
But any venture firm at the end of the day, all that matters is, you know, sourcing, picking, and winning. And you got to do two of those three things really well. If you're a really small firm, it's sourcing and winning candidly. Like I have no clue if you're a good picker. And there's so many false positives, right?
So I think people sometimes lose the plot a little bit and say, let me create something really unique that I can tell my LPs, versus focusing on am I going to see the greatest companies or the right entrepreneurs in the thesis, and once I see them, am I going to win given sort of the competitive arena.
And I think that it's really tough to be an emerging fund. I mean, raising capital — I think it's a great time to start if you have like a reason to win and a reason to exist. Now, big funds are different. Like, let's — they're playing a different game.
You know, somebody raising a $10 billion fund is just trying to get into the very best companies and plug a billion dollars into that company.
How often do you see someone coming across and pitching sort of a new firm that feels like an old firm in the sense of we're going to go and compete and win $20 million Series A's and B's or something around there, as opposed to the early fund manager, $50 million solo GP, they're going to do a 100k check into this and like little add-on that feels more winnable?
To your point about the importance of winning, the Mount Everest of winning and picking is probably you're going to go lead that major round without the signal from a tier one.
Yeah. I mean, look, if you're going to do a $20 million Series A, which it's not going to be like a big Frontier Lab type of company or one of the big mega rounds, you have to — I mean, to raise a fund, you probably want to raise 350 to $500 million, right?
And who is going to give you the money? It's people whereby you have a track record somewhere else. So we have seen a few, and you know this is all public now, but Chemistry is an example of one where you had three people — one from Index, one from Andreessen, and one from Bessemer, right? They come together, they are clear Series A will lead, and they kind of sit in the middle between the seed funds and the big mega shops who are doing different types of Series A's or different types of Series B's.
I see very few of those because the bar for those is pretty high.
Yeah. And if we look at 10 funds, maybe one falls into that bucket.
It does seem like it's maybe an underrated white space because there's so many funds that can — they're so big at this point. Even though they might be able to win, they're also not that upset if they lose that round because they're like, "Yeah, okay. We'll just come in with 100 million later and get our position. Like it seems fine." Anyway,
what — how have you — how did you looking back, like what's the takeaway from the solo GP, I'll call it meme, because it's interesting because it was something that became like very desirable and it was something that I think LPs were interested in. It's something that certainly people that aspired to be venture investors.
I think a lot of people have this idea of like, oh, it'd be amazing to be like a solo founder, solo GP, right? You get all the glory, all the economics or whatever. But it's interesting because it just feels like a solo GP when it works, it's amazing, right? I think of the a lot, you know, Gills of the world as, you know, the top of the mountain there.
But there's so many cases where for LPs it's like, well, it'd be great if you had like a solo GP would be cool, but what if you had three or four partners that were all fantastic and it just increases your luck surface area. And then for a founder it's like, yeah, you want to basically pick one partner at a firm to partner with, but it's awesome if there's a few other partners at the firm that can maybe make an introduction or open up their network or whatever.
So it feels like something that in practice like is — it was like a cool idea and there was this moment around it, but now if you want to win, why would you even like brand yourself in that way?
I mean, look, I think it can still work and I'd rather back a solo GP than somebody that, you know, decides they want to start a venture firm and decides that to raise capital, I just need to bring on a partner and they've never worked with that partner.
Because, you know, the problem with partnerships too is like there's a lot of politics, right? Like, you know, do we really, you know, are we aligned? You know, how does decision-making work? If a deal is not consensus within the partnership, does it get done? And those can actually create, you know,
Bessemer, for example, has this great anti-folio. If you go to their website, all the stuff they missed, and I guarantee some of those misses were, you know, one person had a ton of —
conviction, but they couldn't get it through the partnership, right? And so, you know, solo GPs at least can move really quickly. They don't have to go through a committee. Even a lot who you mentioned, he has a team, actually, right? So he's solo GP from an investing standpoint.
Stolen... Oh, he has a, he has an, he has an amazing team, but like you can't, I can't name any. Also, the solo GP branding was very much like forced upon him. He was not like, 'I will never hire anyone.' It was more just like something that was fun to talk about.
But there is a guy like Oren Zev, right? So Oren, I don't know if you've... Oren has been doing it. He will say, 'I'm a solo GP. I have no admin. I have no other partners. I have no one.'
It's just me, and that's what you're going to get. And like he's done, you know, handily very well for himself. You've seen everything's public on him. And so I look at it and say the bar is higher. And a lot of solo GPs realize it's pretty damn lonely, right? So you're, you're basically doing the raising. You're, you're working with companies because you're trying to do everything. You're running the firm, and then you're like four years into it, and you're like, 'Wait a second.' Um, you know, my fund is trading at a 1.1x because I went crazy in 2021. No one's giving me money. I'm, I'm pulling a salary of a $20 million fund that I could probably get in a, in a quarter working somewhere else. And you're like, why bother? What's the purpose of doing this?
Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen anyone, uh, try and tap the traditional venture capital backers, the LP base, for something that looks like more competitive with a Thrive Eternal? Like, I'm going to go buy a baseball team and I want to tap Yale for that or something like that. You as an, as an example.
I mean, not, not that much. I mean, Thrive is pretty unique in everything they do. I think they're really progressive, and Josh and Seth have done a, like, fantastic job. I mean, GC is also General Catalyst. They've done some pretty interesting things. I mean, they've gone into hospital systems, right? So they've done things like a PE and credit, and you know, that, that is more like private technology finance and going into these adjacent areas to create competitive advantages. Because when you're raising $10 billion, guess what? There's about 15 firms that you're going to compete with. So what is the differentiation outside of your partners?
Yeah. Uh, do you think the situational awareness story changes RAIA consideration?
I don't think so. I mean, look, I mean, you know, that was a very unique thing. I mean, the guy had, I mean, the guy is incredibly smart, and, you know, he still is up, you know, overall from, you know, the day of. Um, but when you drop that much and use that much leverage, like it's going to be a big blow up. RIAs in themselves, like, you know, are we talking about RIAs from the asset manager side or RIAs from the wealth manager side? There was just a, there was just a conversation a while ago about, oh, VCs, like they often have really great deep understanding, sometimes board seats in these public companies. They take the company public, then the stock trades down, but they know that there's a really great thesis. Maybe they should be holding on behalf of their LPs instead of distributing. The RIA sort of sets you up for that. I'm less talking about RIA as like going long crypto or going long secondaries. I'm talking about playing in the public markets.
Someone in the tech community just got their hands sort of burned. Uh, does that change like the, uh, appetite from LPs to allow venture capitalists to play in the public markets at all?
Yeah, I don't think most LPs want their VCs to play in the public. Obviously, Sequoia, everyone knows, you know, has a long-only. Then there's crossover funds that do it, but it's just a different skill set, honestly. And like, you know, if we're an LP, right, um, or somebody else is an LP, you're at the end of the day paying the GP to, you know, invest in private companies and then exit those private companies at some portion, or we can make the decision on what to do with the public stock.
Yeah. Uh, you were at SVB in 1999. Any good stories of venture capitalists using leverage?
Because I'm surprised. I, like, we hear, John and I were talking about this yesterday, because like, you know, the venture capitalists, or at least there was some that were kind of doing a little grave dancing on Leopold last week, and, and we were talking yesterday after the show being like, 'Yeah, it's, it's funny that VC funds can't blow up. You know, it's just like a slow death if they die.' Yeah, if, if they die. Um, but I'm wondering if there was ever a period in Silicon Valley history that Silicon Valley was like, you know, we should be using leverage, and then, and then some, some sort of set of events that led to that not being, uh, very common.
Now, now fortunately, not too much, right? So, not in terms of true leverage. Now, there are people that have used NAV lines, but you haven't been an RIA. Most VC firms are exempt reporting advisors, so they're not able to do those things. What we did see, and this is less than '99, but 2008, right before kind of the GFC started, there were some funds that did warehousing. And what they would do is they would go to a bank like SVB and say, 'We're raising a $200 million fund. We are going to start making investments before our first close. Can you lend us the money to make those first few investments?' And guess what? There was a couple that did that, more on the fund-to-fund side than, you know, the, um, you know, direct side. And guess what? The market changed. They couldn't raise capital, and they had this huge warehouse sort of facility that they had to pay off with no capital.
Interesting. That is a crazy scenario. Yeah. So, it has happened technically. Thank you for the history lesson. This is exactly what we were looking for. Perfect guest for our earlier debate.
Very cool. Well, it's super fun.
Great to finally meet, and, uh, let's, we're, we're trying to get, uh, a pulse on what's happening. We think what, what's happening in your world ends up sort of echoing, echoing later on with, with a lot of the coverage that we do. So, yeah. So we'd love to do it again.
You guys do a, you guys do a great job. Big fan of the show. Great guest. Actually, my board member was on your show recently, Carter Rain.
Yeah. Carter from M13. Great guy. And, um, whenever you want me back on, I'm happy to do it.
That'd be amazing. Thank you so much. 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. Up next, we have John Quinn, the most feared lawyer. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you. So, we, we have a video that we'd like to play.
I want to play, I want to play it for John. We made a heavy metal song about you, the most feared lawyer.
About time. Some about time.
About time. Can we get it up on the big screen? Play, play the, play the last 45 seconds. Maybe this is what John was spending like probably an hour last night working on.
Burning the midnight oil.
Burning the midnight oil for this. You can turn around and do... We got the full, the full AI rendering version of this. Let's get it louder, please. Here we go.
Steel in the air. Go pale, the room go still, then the victim. It's, uh... but I think this really captures the spirit of what you bring to the courtroom, what you bring to the legal profession. Just, uh, total fear and chaos.
Yeah, the first, of course. 1,300 lawyers. Thank you very much.
Yes, we'll send it. You can, you can circulate it with the team.
So, we're going to talk about agentic AI.
Yeah, I want to talk about...
But I have some news this morning. Do you mind if I do, if I reveal something? The general press doesn't have yet.
So, it's a case that our firm has and that I personally worked on.
Within the last two hours, I got the opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case is Amazon versus Perplexity.
