I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Yeah.
Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five.
We are experts.
Founder boat.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Blaze.
Double blaze.
Triple blades.
Double kill.
Very wrong.
Cop is done.
Wait, we are experts.
Triple blades.
Let's just roll. Right.
Marky clearing order inbound.
Get up.
Position.
Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Please.
Yeah.
Mark clearing order inbound.
Five.
No.
You're watching TBPN.
Oh no, it's Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Show, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Massive, massive news: Tim Cook to step down at Apple. This broke yesterday. Gurman had the scoop. Of course, he's coming on the show later today, but it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today. Heavily predicted, often debated. It's a time to reflect on Tim Cook's legacy and what's up next for John Turnis, the longtime... incredibly well executed, incredibly smooth. They sort of telegraphed it. It wasn't a surprise.
It was already fully priced in.
I personally was hoping that the market would give Tim Cook a 21% salute.
Yes, where when the news went out it just immediately nukes 21%.
Massive red candle, let everyone know this is — we don't like — we love him.
It's a sign of respect, of course. Rebound immediately, but I think that's something that the market collectively should try to do for.
Yes, more symbolism in the candles for sure is really the key thing. 21%.
But of course, what is Apple at right now? Are they moving at all? Down 3% today, two and a half percent, but up 3% over the last five days. Still nearly a $4 trillion company. They're doing fine and they're cooking. So let's go through a little bit of the review of the news and some of the previous discussions that we've had around Tim Cook and John Turnis, because we're going to be learning a lot more about John Turnis. He's probably going to do a lot more content, a lot more media, a lot more interviews. And we will be hearing from him at keynote events for probably over a decade, maybe two decades. We will see. So, in January, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who's coming on the show later today, predicted that John Turnis would succeed Tim Cook as Apple's next CEO.
Let's just pull up this clip.
Let's give some credit to the Gurminator.
To the Gurminator. He didn't predict it on our show first. I think he scooped it and posted, but I know, but this was back in January. I dropped the clip.
The crux of the argument was twofold: Turnis' relative youth among a pool of potential successors. Play it.
Everyone else on the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid-60s, turning 66 this year in the case of Tim Cook.
You're Apple's board. You like continuity.
You like an insider. You like people who know what they're doing and have been there for a while. They know where the bodies are buried.
Okay. These guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.
Pause.
I love Mark Gurman so much.
He's the best.
He's truly the best. And he's coming on in 45 minutes.
But continue.
Yeah. At 50, he's the only one who is — if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years.
You're not going to appoint another CEO who's 65, 70 years old.
Yeah.
He's the only guy.
Mhm.
Apple, they get the vast majority of the revenue from hardware.
He's the hardware guy.
Yep.
Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No.
No. He's a steady hand, knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago basically saying that it could be Greg Joswiak, could be Eddie Cue, could be Deirdre O'Brien, could be Craig Federighi.
It's for sure not going to be Craig.
It's not going to be Deirdre, it's not going to be Eddie, it's not going to be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is an operations person because you look at the current CEO, Tim obviously comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long. He's done obviously a fantastic job for shareholders and the employees and what have you. It would have been Jeff Williams. He was the COO.
So Sabih Khan, he was named COO, you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say.
So anyways, it'll be Turnis or Sabih or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Turnis.
Everyone has an opinion that Turnis is going to be the next CEO. Fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years, but no one has given evidence like — what is this based on, right? Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility? Well, do they have a big baton? We got one of these. You know what you have? We have white smoke coming out of the well — actually smoke.
It's very environmental.
So is that the end of the clip?
You know, maybe they have a comically large baton like we have our scoop.
Yeah. Oh, Mark Gurman. The scoopinator. He's a scoop doggy dog. Scoop athlete. The scoop. The scoop. The scoop is on fire. We're very excited to have Mark Gurman joining in just 40 minutes. What a great run he's been on reporting this story. It's absolutely fascinating. So yesterday evening, Mark was the one with the scoop. Tim Cook will assume the role of Apple's executive chairman and John Turnis will take the reins of the company. Mark followed up with a scoop with internal memos from both Cook and Turnis announcing the transition. I don't — I mean, I understand — I don't know, maybe I don't understand what it's like to be 65, but I was always optimistic that the Warren Buffett 65 to 95 would be the new trend and that people would just say, you know what, Tim Cook's healthy. He's going — he's —
Today was a warm-up. It's time to go on the actual run.
That's — I would — I mean, I totally understand because I got another 10x. I'm taking us to 40 trillion.
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, maybe Warren Buffett's in a different world because he's more of an investor. Maybe he doesn't need to travel as much. Doesn't need to be in the arena shaking hands, kissing babies, doing product launches, you know, being in DC, getting wrangled into things. Like Buffett can be more hands-off and just sort of read the news, review the financials and delegate with some liquidity if needed.
Yeah, it's a more hands-off role. I don't know how — I mean, I imagine that the role of CEO of Apple is incredibly demanding. But I liked the idea of just locking in and being like, 'Oh yeah, I'm 65. Everyone expects me to step down, but I got another 30 years in me.' But you know, he chose a different path and he is retiring or stepping into the executive chairman role. Ben Thompson published 'Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing,' which eulogizes Cook's impressive accomplishments as the head of Apple. Ben Thompson kicks it off with an interesting thing. He says, 'It's the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn't happen when they die, but when they retire, or in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook, announced that they will step up to the role of executive chairman on September 1st.' One morbid exception is when the CEO does die on the job or quits because they're dying. The truth of the matter is that where any honest recounting of Cook's incredibly successful tenure as Apple's CEO, particularly from a financials perspective, has to begin with the numbers. And he says that the numbers are extraordinary. Cook became CEO of Apple on August 24th, 2011. And in the intervening 15 years, revenue has increased 303%. Profit surged 354%. And the value of Apple has gone from a mere 297 billion to over 4 trillion, a staggering 1,251% increase. And there was some chatter back and forth on the timeline over whether Tim Cook had simply put Apple on cruise control and locked out as many big names in tech also saw 10 to 40x increases in their market caps. This is from Brandon Guell's newsletter at tbpn.com. You can sign up today for free. But this interpretation ignores the fact that many of the biggest public tech companies in 1980 when Apple IPO'd are no longer even close to the top of the pack anymore. And Brandon cites Xerox, Motorola, Texas Instruments, IBM, and HP, which all fell by the wayside over the past 30 years while Apple built the biggest consumer hardware company on the planet and thrived in the public market. And I was doing some digging on this as well. I pulled up — you know, it's easy to look at like, well, zoom back to the Mag 7. All of the Mag Seven have done fantastically well over the past 15 years during Tim Cook's tenure. Did he do anything special? Is he in a different category in some way? And maybe not when you look backwards from the current Mag 7, but if you go back to 2011 when Tim Cook took the reins and you look at what were the biggest tech companies there then and how have they performed, it does look like outperformance because Apple was at 377 billion, that was the biggest company at the time, then Microsoft — look at what their peers were at the time and where he took them home.
And to be clear, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon were clearly there. FANG was the term at the time: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. For some reason, Microsoft didn't make the cut in that acronym. That has since changed, of course, but there were a lot of companies that didn't go on as significant of runs. You have IBM, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, and HP all that were in the top 10. They were sort of the Mag 10 of 2011, and now they are not in the Mag Seven, although many of them have done very well. So it seems — this was our take from a long time. You know, we like to harp on the failure of Apple Intelligence and how Siri is ineffective sometimes and the FaceTime interface is odd and the new Photos app is hard to use. But where it matters, we give them credit on Genoji.
No, where it matters is did they navigate tariffs? Did they navigate supply chain? Did they navigate the transition to Apple Silicon delivering a great product consistently that doesn't break? Like we have ordered so many Apple devices throughout building TBPN and there was a time when you would get a new consumer product and it would just be, oh, it's a bad one. I got a bad one and I got to take it back. And that's never happened. The quality control is flawless and navigating a very, very difficult chip export act from Biden in 2022 all the way to the Trump tariffs, to different political swings back and forth and back and forth. And Tim Cook has just done a great job of keeping the wheels on the train going down the track and I think that should be celebrated even though the sexy new AI features —
He's bound to be underappreciated because he wasn't the visionary that Steve was, but he also never — I don't think he ever wanted to be seen in that way. But the consistent operational excellence over almost two decades is almost unprecedented at this scale.
Totally.
It is.
Yeah. Just the way you put it, right? The same experience that I had getting a new Apple computer as like a teenager. Yeah. I have today. It is actually almost remarkable how similar the experience is. You open this wonderful box, you get a great device that works for a long time. Yeah. And you still get that today. So the consistency — and yeah, I think he will just get more when people kind of process the run over time, he will just get more and more respect.
Yeah. And a lot of the computer manufacturers have had to go into bloatware and pre-installed software. And Apple's been very good at holding the line there. They've of course ramped up their services business, integrated advertising in places that were somewhat unexpected since that was always how they were counterpositioned against Google, but they've done it in a way that hasn't been that annoying. I feel like I don't see that many people complaining about ads in the App Store. People see the ads and they're like, 'Wow, this company is bidding on the keyword for their direct competitor. That is, you know, extremely competitive behavior.' The same thing happens on Google. Didn't expect to see it in the Apple ecosystem. Of course, it's going to happen. The —
In the chat says, 'Not a single product recall under Tim Cook. Is that possible?'
Wow.
I think that is incorrect.
What did they recall?
Says they recalled a 15-inch MacBook Pro in 2019.
Did — did Apple —
AC wall plug adapter in 2016, 2019? Batterygate, service program. They've had some back and forth, but you know, a very, very successful run. The other two things that the chat was mentioning was the Apple Car and the failure of that program. Maybe a little bit they bit off too much more than they could chew. I think, you know, looking at what's happened in China with every phone manufacturer launching a car, that's extremely impressive. I would have loved to see Apple execute there and I think that would have been very good for the American technology industry, the electric vehicle industry, a variety of different American industrial efforts, but it was not to be unfortunately. And then there's the Apple Vision Pro, which I think a lot of people, you know, look at the churn rates, look at the retention rates and they just see it as an underwhelming product. I still like it, but I'm in the minority, and I acknowledge that fully. I do think that they made the right decision to turn it into a home cinema, a home theater. Like they understood that there was not enough of a video game library, a VR game library to plug into in any meaningful way. And so they made the decision. I think one of the lead staff members on the Apple Vision Pro project was from the Dolby Cinema team which had done Dolby Vision and some of the actual theater buildouts. And so they were able to bring that experience and understand what actually makes for a great movie watching experience in a premier, you know, cinema and how can we recreate as much of that as possible in VR. Still, you know, obviously didn't hit the mark fully because the product has not taken off by any stretch of the imagination, but overall it was a fun project and I'm hoping that they continue that. It might wind up pivoting into just camera glasses and they'll go up against the Meta Ray-Bans, which might be the more prudent business strategy, but I still like these incredible investments in VR. What are you laughing at?
Josh over at Semaphore says, 'Nobody tell the new Apple CEO that he has a streaming service. We've got a good thing going here lighting iPhone and AirPods money on fire to make great movies and shows, and we don't need any of that getting any extra attention right now.'
Yeah, 5,000 likes.
Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, Turnis is about as far as you can be from the Apple TV services organization, but I don't know. I talked to a filmmaker in Hollywood, a very successful filmmaker like years and years ago before Apple TV was really ramping up and he was saying that Apple's brand is so prestigious that it's sort of antithetical to the Hollywood mindset which is much more VC, risk-on, you're going to have flops. Like every movie studio understands that it is impossible to predict the perfect success and have the level of polish that comes from these slight iterations to Apple's. Yeah. Yeah. Build different for sure. And so it's a different culture because if you have — you know, Apple hasn't — I mean, they've had like flops but even the flops like they still feel like very on brand. They don't have like a silly movie that is just like bad. And running that risk was always a problem. But I feel like Apple navigated it really, really well especially with the F1 project and has done really well with the content side and they have held a brand standard that feels like almost at the level of HBO pretty quickly, whereas some of the other streaming services have kind of gone more scattershot, more reality TV, more sort of silly projects that might entertain viewers but don't fully — they don't create a cohesive brand idea of like what am I getting when I open that particular app on the Apple TV. Anyway, continuing, Mark Gurman said on TBPN in January that Turnis really is viewed as the ultimate hardware guy at Apple. Ralph Winkler at the Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday detailing Turnis' pedigree with physical products. Quote: 'If Jobs was a product visionary and Cook a supply chain guru, Turnis is a hardware savant who exists somewhere in the middle. Turnis, who has a background in mechanical engineering, has been working at Apple for 25 years and most recently led hardware engineering of all of Apple's products. He played a crucial role in the development of Apple AirPods, obviously a massive success, and he redesigned Apple's computers to use company-designed chips instead of Intel's, a massive move that extended battery life and improved performance.' So Turnis is —
And set them up very well for AI.
AI.
Yeah. Turnis is taking over Apple at a time when the company has largely sat on the sidelines of the AI race, going so far as to outsource the technology powering Siri to Google's Gemini. Turnis will have to somehow manage this dynamic. Ben Thompson wrote about it in November of 2025. Apple's plans are a bit like the alcoholic who admits they have a drinking problem, but promises to limit their intake to social occasions. Namely, how exactly does Apple plan on replacing Gemini with its own models when one, Google has more talent, two, Google spends far more on infrastructure, and three, Gemini will be continually increasing from the current level where —
I mean, a number of people have talked about, you know, what are the challenges that Turnis is inheriting on supply chain, right? Kind of like, you know, stuck in China in a big way. That presents a pretty meaningful risk to the business. Yeah. And then sort of like overall dependency on Google especially on some of these key products. But yeah, without further ado, sure. Let's bring in — let's bring in Howie Liu from Airtable. Howie, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for coming on down to the TBPN Ultratome. For those who might be living under a supercomputer, not a data center, introduce yourself. Tell us who you are.
All right. Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Now also maker of Hyperagent, part of Airtable. Cool. I've been doing this for 12, 13 years now.
13 years.
Overnight success.
Give us the backstory. Take us from college through early career to the first — the founding moment.
Yeah. So in high school, I kind of got into programming. Like my dad had this C++ book, left it in this corner of the house one summer and I was super bored. C++, learned it. I mean, this was like 2003, like Python for the most part.
Yeah. Like I mean, Python was around, but people didn't really use it.
It wasn't the jumping-off point. Java definitely like early days for even like web apps, right? Like Rails didn't exist, like all that stuff. So learned C++, thought it was kind of cool. And then started thinking about like how do I turn this into like a real career because it just — it was a lot more fun than like classes. And like I went to Duke, took some like mechanical engineering classes but on the side basically learned how to do web app programming like first with PHP then like Rails and stuff. And I stumbled on Y Combinator actually like pretty early on. It was like maybe '06 or '07, like literally the first class. Like no, because I remember like I saw Looped, his first company, and I was doing research like I wanted to do a similar type of company or product and I was like, no, you know, I was a nobody in like college, didn't know anything. And through that like found out about Looped. I was like, damn it, somebody's already got this idea. And then learned about YC and like Sequoia and so that kind of became my first inroad into like just learning about that whole world of like startups and tech. Eventually after college applied to YC with my first company which was basically — it was called EAX, like contacts with an E. Okay. And it was like a personal CRM product way back. Yeah. Exactly.
Oh yeah. Yeah. They were like, oh, this is a big problem. Everybody else's problem. Right away. Am I correct in my take — has always been that the people that clamor for a personal CRM really just don't realize that their friends are people that they do business with and they should either just use a real CRM or just don't and just be friends.
I mean, it's — yeah, I think it's like a very unique target audience for whom it's a very high pain point. So I think there's like a market there but like it's a very power-user audience. And the punchline of it though was that like after a year of work, we like worked on this thing, raised some money, you know, hired like a couple people and then we kind of realized — I sort of realized like I think it's a more niche market than we set out to go after. And we had some like different acquirers come knocking like Salesforce was one of them but like also big like consumer internet companies who wanted to just buy us for talent. And you know, to me it was like — and what this is, we were Winter 2010 that batch and then the acquisition talks were like 2011 basically, late 2011. And you know, we kind of got to this point where I realized like I want to work on a really big problem, like a meta problem, not like here's one small niche for like some people, but instead like what's like the underlying problem which is, you know, you could actually build this whole CRM with like an app platform, right? Like you really want something that's a lot more just configurable and customizable. And so we took an acquisition by Salesforce, worked there. And like for me the big light bulb moment was, you know, Salesforce is one big database.
What's Benioff like on all-hands? I mean, I would say he's electric on this.
Well, there weren't that many all-hands — all-hands were quite infrequent at Salesforce at the time, but like I went to like their big sales kickoff that year. I mean, Mark is like a very smart guy and also a very commanding presence. Like he's physically — like you would, if you met him like on the street and you didn't know who he was, like you'd probably think he was like a linebacker in the NFL. Like he's massive and he just exudes charisma. Like even in like a quiet small room, like he'd take meetings in his house, like I'd go over with like, you know, some of the other like —
He's the salesman final boss.
I mean, but like not only — imagine going head-to-head with him. I'd be like, I sell, but he's like — he's just got such a presence even when he's not like booming, you know, out loud like on a stage, like a quiet room.
The dolphin sound where you go —
I don't know about that one but I didn't get to see that part. But that's the whole genesis of Salesforce. Apparently, he came up with the idea while he was swimming with dolphins. I guess that's what all the kawaii motifs are for. Yep.
It was a fun time. I mean, honestly, it was a really fun company. Like, you know, it was like for being in enterprise software, it was like one of the more fun experiences. Like, you know, people were kind of super laid-back, like all aloha and like — but learned a lot, you know. And I think like for me the big aha was like, wow, like all of enterprise software is basically just like a database with like some app logic and like interfaces on top, right? And like that's basically all that Oracle is used for, that's basically what SAP is, that's what Salesforce is. And if you could create like a way simpler version of that, like that's super intuitive, like that might be a big market. And that was basically the genesis of Airtable is like I want to go and like basically PLG before that even was a term, like this category.
Sure. Sure. So yeah, what was the initial like hunting for a team, raising money, building an MVP, like what was the step?
I mean, the second time around — like so this was my second company then, Airtable. You know, I wanted to do things a little bit differently than the first time. Like the first time was kind of like just go and like apply to YC, get in, do whatever it takes to get some traction. Like it literally felt like this roller coaster, right? Every week it was like launch, get some, you know, signups, go and like raise money. And Airtable was a lot more premeditated. Like we spent two and a half years building the product before even launching. It was actually weirdly a very parallel timeline to Figma. So like both like two and a half years around the same time, launched around the same time, very like PLG in both cases. And I think we both kind of exploited like, you know, the advent of like rich browser experiences like for the first time. So like you couldn't build like a rich real-time like single-page app experience before maybe like 2011, 2012. And really it became like, you know, kind of really legit in like 2014, 2015 with like V8 becoming like really mainstream and dominant. Like, you know, just like the performance of the browser became there, right? So we built this product like, you know, the premise was let's make it really, really simple for like anyone, like a small business owner, like, you know, podcasters or even like people within a larger company to build their own app or database. And like, you know, FileMaker, Microsoft Access, like some of these products existed back in the day but never made the transition to the web. So we kind of built it.
Yeah. My career started shortly after you guys kind of like came onto the scene and my first ever business. We signed up for Airtable like probably day one and still use it — how many — like eight years later, something like that. So like just running like it's been core infrastructure every single day.
Yeah. And like evolved and — but it turns out like databases are pretty sticky, right? Like think about all the Oracle installs and like just random like large enterprises that are just still chugging away. Like you've got your system of record in there and like built a lot of like customization.
Oracle database as a revenue line within Oracle is growing revenue. I'm not —
Topline is growing for the Oracle database. Not their AI stuff is a separate thing.
Very different valuations but it is growing which is I think a narrative violation that I think a lot of people wouldn't take. Talk about like the early go-to-market. I mean you said PLG but like are you sending this to like startup friends? Are you trying to sell this into Salesforce on day one? Like how are you thinking about like enterprise versus mid-market versus startups versus like prosumer? There's like so many different routes you can go.
Yeah, so this is like 2013-ish, right? And like at the time there weren't that many — I mean there wasn't like really a PLG like thing, right? Like I mean Slack had I think just come out when we launched in 2015, so they had launched a little bit before. Dropbox and maybe Evernote were kind of the best like PLG pioneers and they were both very like consumer prosumer, so like solo, like individual user first and —
Drew Houston has the funniest riff on — I don't think he calls it PLG but he calls it like the web growth, the Web 2.0 growth playbook, which is like going viral but he takes it a lot further and he's like, so you want to sneeze on as many people as possible. And he refers to that as like if you send someone a file that you've sneezed on them and then they might create an account, it's just like a much more visceral way about viral marketing.
Well yeah, I mean think about — so my first company is an ad network. So we would, you know, a company would come and say like, I want to advertise, here's $100,000 budget. And then the company would put together a dashboard of like potential buys and then the person would go through. And so it was inherently viral. Every customer that would work with us had to log into Airtable and like use a product. So that was just happening at like massive scale.
Yeah. And I think that like that type of like you have some like data set like, you know, maybe it's for your ad inventory or whatever, maybe it's for like your CRM or whatever you need to collaborate with it. Like it's a very fundamental construct in just like how knowledge work is done, right? And so I think like the lesson learned for me or like that the principle applied was like can you go after something that's so foundational that like it's always going to be around, right? Like I think with the personal CRM thing, I kind of felt the like turbulence of like is this in vogue right now? Is it not? Like and I really wanted to go after something that felt like it's going to be around for decades, right? And like what's more eternal than like people need like customer record, a database — the past 40 years of computing, it's probably going to be around for the next 40. And like even now with agents it's like the database layer actually becomes more important, right? Like you don't want just like a bunch of ephemeral context windows for agents. Like they need to like store and collaborate on data along with humans. So you kind of picked that as the vantage point and a lot of the early customers were like startup founders, like small business owners. But like interestingly we had — we had written this like fake business plan. It was like basically like a vision deck more than an actual business plan. But like we had said, you know, conjectured like we're going to have to go after like a long tail of like the kind of prosumer SMB audience basically like Dropbox. And I think what was really surprising is it turned out to be a little bit more like Slack where we got the most virality within larger companies. Like there'd be a big media company or like even like a scaled startup like a WeWork or something that would run all of their operations very quickly early on on Airtable and then just grow with the company, right? So like I mean WeWork was one of our early customers, had like probably 10,000 people like, you know, when they were at their peak. Like it basically was like used by almost every employee there and like a lot of their operations, building operations etc. were just built on Airtable by default. And I kind of learned the value of like having this like data gravity. Like once you get enough data into a product like Airtable, like it just kind of retains really well within the company and gains more and more usage.
Yeah. How did you think — until the company — Well, you index against the industry that you're in. So I want to get to all the good part like right now and all that stuff, but walk us through since this is your first time on the show, like you know, you went from being one of the hottest companies in tech during the whole no-code boom, the PLG boom, Zerp — like it must have just been, you know, I mean, an insane experience. And then like there's kind of this reset in late 2022, 2023. How has it been kind of like building out of that trough? And then like have you — I'm assuming it sounds like you've been like very re-energized by this new opportunity.
I mean one of the maybe benefits of like not being an overnight success because we took like two and a half years to build the product even like from 2015 to 2017, 18 I would say like we were getting like a steady compounding of growth but it wasn't like Slack or like Dropbox where it just overnight became super easy, right? Like it felt like we had to really grind, we had to think about like how do we need to like improve the product and increase the, you know, kind of like sharability and the scalability of it. So it was kind of a grind for like at least the first five years. And 2018 when we got our first unicorn round is kind of the first year where it felt like it was starting to get easy, right? So 2018 to 2021 like very fun years but also everything is so — money just printed in the world, unlimited money. And like, you know, we got to raise like a big, you know, set of rounds like we — how would you like a 100x revenue multiple? Or yeah, I mean yeah. And just like the absolute scale of funding was like huge compared to prior art, right? Like now I mean you can raise like a hundred billion, you know, like if you're OpenAI. But like at the time like, you know, we raised — our first unicorn round was like a $100 million round and we raised like another couple hundred and then like a few hundred more. And then like our big round was our Series F which was like kind of at the peak of like the markets. Raised 700-plus million in that round and 11 billion — 11 billion valuation. And you know we still have like all of that money on the balance sheet and we're now like cash-flow positive. I think like, you know, it was kind of a fun time to like, you know, kind of get to like ride that wave. And then, you know, but like I always — I think for myself knew like, you know, you have to build —
Like a durable business, right? And so, like, valuations are going to rise and fall — it's just going to be macro. But ultimately, either we build a great enduring business or we don't. And if we don't, then you could be a flash in the pan, right? So I think we were always trying to focus, and I tried to focus on what do we actually need to do to compound growth — go after the enterprise. Obviously at the time, especially, it was clear that was the move, right? You get PLG, but eventually you have to go into the enterprise and win these big multi-million dollar contracts, become a really sticky system within these larger companies. And we did that, and we're still doing that. We have a bunch of the Fortune 500 running really critical operations on Airtable — whether it's content production at a big media company or fund operations at a financial services company. So these are almost like modern ERPs.
Did you hire a different set of individuals to work on that, that were already connected and knew that flow, or was it something where your best sales reps just sort of got bigger and bigger and leveled up?
It was a little of both. I mean, I think it's a different muscle. Like, I think rolodex selling, even at that time, was not that effective. Like, I think just knowing somebody at a big company doesn't actually help that much, even if you're very senior and they're very senior. Like, we've had some reps come in who've had a decade-long relationship with the CMO of XYZ company. And I think that gets you a phone call, it gets you a meeting, but ultimately buyers are wising up, right? They have been for quite some time, where it's not just, oh, I know this guy, I'm going to buy this product from them. You actually have to show them why this is going to help them in their job, right, and help the company. And so I think it became much more about transitioning from, oh, people can just use it on their own and they'll figure it out on their own, to starting to do more of a consultative sale — come in and say, okay, how can we solve a really big problem for you? And maybe for one company it's, how do I consolidate my end-to-end operations for how we do all of our brand planning, launching new products, all that. And that's kind of one part consulting, one part thinking about a big enterprise-scale solution, and then one part being able to leverage the flexibility of our product almost in a palantir-like way to show the customer we can actually solve this really deep problem for you quickly.
Is there any sort of PLG motion or land-and-expand that happens in the Fortune 100? Like, because there's some small team inside of Coca-Cola or something that's using Airtable, and then you're able to use that as a demo or jumping-off point?
That does happen. Yeah. I mean, there are some companies where you just can't even get your foot in the door without the top-down. Like a lot of big banks, we were firewalled out until we got some top-down intro. They literally block you, right? Your IP is blocked, so it might be a hard wall, you know, request access. So there are some companies where you have to come in top-down, but I would say 70-plus percent of our current enterprise accounts, including the ones that are now five-plus million in revenue, originated from teams within the company organically adopting Airtable. Right? Sometimes it was kind of like shadow IT — they just figured it out on their own and they showed real value from using the tool, right? Like they would build some real operation on it and say, well, I've been waiting for it to deliver me this old bespoke solution or some crappy other vendor for like two years now. I got impatient and just built the thing myself. And that's a big — I think of the enterprise landscape now as, you know, there's plenty of dollars in enterprise, right? Even now, it's just shifting from traditional software to now AI, but there's plenty of dollars, right? The budget's there, but the question is you're not the only one going after it. And so what's your kind of asymmetric wedge to get in there and take those dollars, right? And if you're a big company like a Salesforce, maybe it's, we already have the distribution, we have the customer data in there, we're going to go and attack adjacencies. If you're Airtable, we don't have the scale of a ServiceNow or an SAP or Salesforce. What we did have is the usability of the product. So the PLG was kind of the entry point, and then also even when we pitched to other people in the company that hadn't used Airtable, they had probably heard about it from a friend — like maybe the CMO's partner uses Airtable in their company — or we can go in and just show them a really compelling demo quickly.
Talk about AI. What are customers demanding? What have you rolled out? Where does AI fit in? Where does AI take a back seat?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's crazy because we've seen so many layers of disruption happening almost in parallel, right? Like, you think about desktop to mobile. It was like a single form-factor change, kind of easy almost to execute on. That was the one that I experienced at Salesforce — like the big thing at the time was Mark would tell every team, show me the mobile UI first before you show me the desktop UI, right? Like, go mobile first, right? And it was the right move and also kind of a simple move. Now it's like you've got at one level, obviously every product should have AI in it. So we have the obvious stuff — like you can now talk to Airtable's assistant, co-pilot style, and have it do stuff on your behalf in the product. We have what we call field agents, which are kind of like the ability to map-reduce AI calls against all of your data. So you can have like 20,000 customer records and run AI agentic tool calls — like search and research about the company, synthesize that kind of stuff, row by row.
Yeah. And we do all that stuff, but to me the more interesting disruptions underneath that are, one, do people even want to come into your interface anymore? And this —
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Why do you care about storing the data in a sort of safe, secure —
Yeah, Salesforce, they just went headless recently. Is there a plan for that, or how are you thinking about it?
I think the right move is hybrid headless, right? I think the whole — look, if you wanted just a backend database, you could use Postgres, Supabase, right? And there's like PHPMyAdmin equivalents, modern-day ones, right? Like Prisma has its own version of it, that are okay or they're good, right? But I think what most people actually want, especially in a business context, is you want the database, but you want to have proper permissioning, you want to have proper collaboration, and most importantly, you don't want to exclusively interface with the data through an agent, right? Like you want to do that a lot of the time, but it's really helpful to actually go in and see the actual data. Like I think of it as the equivalent of — even though agentically you can generate all your code and you should as a frontier developer, does that mean you never want to inspect any lines of code ever? Like no, you still want to see a diff of all the actual code files changed, whether that's in your IDE or in GitHub or whatever. And so I think the equivalent here is you want to be able to drop down into a really nice interface. And we've done some work around figuring out what's the best blend of the two, right? So with ChatGPT, for instance, we have kind of a first-class integration where you can go in through ChatGPT and interact with your data in Airtable — say, hey, pull me all the customers that are waiting for an outreach from me and pre-draft outreach messages. But then it can basically compose a fragment of a view within the ChatGPT interface. So you can actually see Airtable, but kind of a part of the interface. So it's not completely headless. It's almost like you get to pull out pieces of its face at the right time on demand. And I think that's a really important kind of UX form factor.
Yeah. How are you thinking about speed in the context of AI? I feel like the models keep getting smarter, but they also keep getting slower, basically. And while I'm extremely confident that I could point a deep research agent at a massive Airtable with 20,000 rows and get very good results, like a lot of times I'm just in my email and I want to find one thing very quickly. And that feels like it has yet to be AI-ified, or at least LLM-ified. It's very much like, okay, well, I should probably just fall back to a SQL query or just some boolean logic or just vanilla search because I want this now.
Yeah, I think both are going to be really important experiences. And obviously we have, you know, kind of great smaller and faster models, like the minis, you know, that are great for more synchronous interactions. And within Airtable, like if you go to Airtable or you use ChatGPT with one of the smaller models, you get that faster, kind of almost more real-time experience. But I do think a really important class of work that will come to dominate every frontier company, or company trying to reinvent themselves to be frontier, is figuring out how to operate in this new modality of — you know, it's like the best developers today don't go and sit there in front of their IDE and synchronously talk to the agent. You have like 30 separate branches that are each being worked on by a different agent, and you can have the agents continue to update the branch based on human and other agent feedback, right? So you have comments back or run tests, etc. And I think this whole idea of — look, it's going to take hours for that entire loop to complete, right? Like agent pushes some changes, the changes get feedback from other agents or humans, agent responds to that. Like that whole loop could be hours, not just minutes. So you're not going to sit there and watch it one at a time. But the powerful thing about this is each one is still actually operating faster than a human engineer could have back in the day, right? Like when I think about the speed with which our early team at Airtable could build features, and we had a very good team — like one agent on one branch can do the work of maybe three humans back in the day, operating probably in like three times the time, right? So it's literally like a 10x leverage factor just for one agent. But the best engineers are now able to multitask and basically say, look, I'm going to oversee my own little team of like 20 to 30 agents working concurrently. And so I think it requires — it's almost like everybody needs to graduate from being an IC to an IC manager of agents. Meaning in every function, like if you're a VC analyst, your job should no longer be to go and synchronously research one company. It's like you're going to go and research 30 companies and do them all faster, better, and higher quality, right, than what you could before. And so I think that's the greatest leap that is going to be challenging for a lot of people in a lot of roles to make the leap on, because it's a totally different mentality to how you operate and what your role is than before.
What are you pushing the team to achieve?
So a lot. You know, I think there's basically three different levels of self-disruption we're trying to do at Airtable, right? One is the core product itself — how do we reimagine that for an increasingly agent-led future? So all the headless, hybrid-type stuff we talked about. And the best testament to that is, do we see massively growing tool-call volume from, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, any other agent products? Like, are people using Airtable more and more agentically, and is it working smoothly for them? So that's priority one. The second, though, is I think we have to really transform how we operate internally, right? Like, you know, clearly the best companies in the future are not just going to hire massive armies of people to do everything, right? Like they're going to hire people who can really effectively leverage agents, right? It's so obvious that's happening in engineering, where if you could hire one engineer who could be fully agentically leveraged, you get more output than like 30 kind of traditional engineers doing traditional engineering. So that's kind of one internal thing. But then the third is I'm a strong believer that you have to go and skate to where the puck is going, like index against the big tidal wave coming, right? Like Amazon did this back in the day against the growth of the internet, right? Like Bezos picked books and e-commerce because he thought that would be the best way to index against the growth of the internet. And so for us, we get that through Airtable and kind of hybrid headless Airtable, but we're also placing a big bet on Hyperagent, because Hyperagent is basically taking all of the excitement of frontier agents, like i.e. OpenClaw and YOLO agents that can just have access to your data and tools and do really, really long-running stuff — not like 10-second tasks, but like 10-hour tasks — but for non-coders. And we want to do it in a business-friendly way, right? So you can go and do this, deploy it into your company, run agents across your entire company. And so that's kind of like a bet on — if we believed Airtable 10 years ago was like the most meta problem, like the largest problem we could work on, which is like software arguably was the biggest and fastest-growing industry at the time, right? And how do we go after that entire category and index against that? How do we now go against agents and say we want to build the best agents platform that any business and any person can come in and use and just start building agents with, right, and deploying them into their company, right? And so if we do that really well, then we get to doubly win both as the data layer, but also kind of have a bet on the agent wave.
Yeah. Last question. Should children learn C++?
Definitely not. No, I think —
And is that because of C++ or because of the AI era?
I think both. I think the fundamentals of good technical architecture are going to be the most important thing, but that has — I think the abstraction that really matters now for creating value is raising up, right? Like it used to be at one point, you know, Bill Gates wrote some of his first programs in literally machine code, right? And would punch it into his PDP-10. And clearly you could be a great startup founder or be a great software engineer and make lots of money without having to go down to that level. And so I think now with agents, the bar has raised yet again, where what you really need is good product, business, and tech architecture sensibilities — like how should this system work, where should the different levels of responsibility belong. And if you can get really good at that, then you have super leverage. If you are just kind of learning the literal lines of code and how to write them that a lot of engineers were before, I think that's going to be increasingly below the frontier line of agents can just do it equally or better than humans.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
Great hanging. Talk soon.
We have our next guest, Mark Gurman, the Gurminator himself, in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultra Dome. Mark Gurman, how are you doing?
Tired. How are you doing?
Tired. I can imagine. This has been months in the works. You predicted this many times, but also on our show. How did this come together? Did this match your timeline? Were you surprised by this particular Monday that it was announced, or —
Walk us through the scoop.
And get the scoop.
Get the scoop ready. This is the scoop.
We got the golden scoop for you.
Oh, I've never seen that.
This is a new prop in the studio. You'll have to spend the next time here in person. The OpenAI deal is already doing work for you guys. There you go. No props.
So here's the deal. There's a reason I published my profile of John Ternus just a few weeks ago, right? This was all coming together. Things really ramped up internally at Apple on this at the end of last year. Things have been in motion. The plan was to announce it after the 50-year anniversary celebrations. And it almost felt like the 50-year celebrations were not just about Apple's 50 years, but sort of a goodbye celebration to Tim Cook and his legacy at the company. So it all came together over several months. This really started about two years ago when Tim Cook identified John Ternus as the next one. Ternus had been prepared for this role probably for over five years at this point, since they put him on the executive team and he became SVP of hardware engineering. But this started in early 2024, and at the time I wrote that that was the first time I wrote that he would be the next one.
Yeah. How have you been able to process — I know you've published a few memos. Have you been able to ascertain anything about the internal response? Are Apple employees excited about this? It feels like it's been managed from a communications perspective very carefully, and so it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. But are Apple employees generally excited about this? It seems like there's a lot of cause for optimism, but I'm always interested to hear.
Yeah, there was that one article a couple months ago where clearly they were getting quotes from former employees that were kind of taking potshots at him, basically saying he's never made a hard decision. Yeah, that was the quote that went into the Journal, but I don't know. It seems like it didn't matter because he got the job.
Well, he got the job two years ago, and I think he's going to do a hell of a job in this new role. I am quite optimistic for Apple in the long term with Ternus at the helm. He has product sensibilities that Tim Cook simply doesn't have. He has product decision-making ability that Tim Cook certainly had but wouldn't utilize, because he himself knows that product-based decisions are not where he could have the most impact. Just like Tim Cook really oversaw the operations part of Apple as the CEO and left product development to other members of the executive team, my expectation is that John Ternus will be intimately involved with the product side of the organization, as he was in his prior role to CEO, and will leave the operational side to people like Sabih Khan and Priya — the people who run the operations division at Apple: supply chain, manufacturing, procurement, AppleCare, you name it. And so he's going to pick his spots, and his spots are hardware and product development. There's a reason that when he chose his successor for the hardware engineering organization, he chose Tom Marb — not an innovator, but an incredible execution guy when it comes to hardware engineering, product quality. He did that because his belief is that he will still be intimately involved and sort of be that product visionary for Apple in this new chief executive position.
Yeah. When I remember Steve Jobs, I think of Jobs as an innovator, as a visionary, as someone who both did Pixar and the iPhone — you know, so many different projects, a lot of them wildly successful. Tim Cook felt like a focusing of that a little bit, but you still had the car, Vision Pro. There's a few different projects going on. Is this the most focused Apple has ever been and will ever be, or do you think Ternus has some aces up his sleeve where he might want to take a wild swing at something?
I think what John Ternus is going to have to do is stay the course — annual iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods upgrades — but at the same time he's going to need to do a better job bringing out new product categories than Tim Cook has done. If you look at Tim Cook's legacy in terms of major new products, it really was on the services side, the AirPods and Apple Watch. You know, those were both really developed by management teams and engineers and people who came from the Steve Jobs era. That's not a slight, but my point being is that we really haven't seen anything wholly new that is also successful since 2016 with the AirPods and the Apple Watch at the end of 2014. The Vision Pro has obviously been a Tim Cook product, a Tim Cook priority, and it's been sort of a flop, at least for now. I know Apple has a very long, decade-long spatial computing roadmap. They eventually want to get to AR glasses. They'll have displayless glasses to compete with Meta several months from now in 2027. But he needs to get cracking. There are six major Apple products in development right now — six major new product categories.
AI AirPods, smart glasses.
Smart display.
Is that the lamp or the kitchen thing?
No. No. Lamp is number five. Smart display is different.
The tabletop robot — so that's the lamp, the moving lamp. And then number six is a — I'm going to say very little about this — but a security camera.
Okay. Interesting. Well, at least the Apple Vision Pro has one key fan. Do you think the lamp is a predecessor for a humanoid? Do you think Apple would ever do a humanoid?
I do. I do. But I think it's going to be a decade if they do. And they're going to wait.
Yeah. I feel like it says a lot that they're not talking about it — that you don't know about an internal humanoid project yet.
Yeah. Oh, I do. Oh, but —
Yeah, they're exploring humanoids. The idea of a humanoid, but they're not working on it full throttle. But they have a large robotics initiative. They're working on AI robotics technology, and they're also working on robotics hardware. John Ternus actually took control over the robotics hardware team about a year ago. He took it from the AI chief that Apple got rid of a couple weeks ago, John Giannandrea. But they're also looking at — they're actually building a, it's really cool, a gigantic manufacturing arm or a gigantic robotic arm that they want to use in manufacturing, but also used in Apple retail stores to grab products off the shelf in the back room and whatnot and bring it into the store. That's probably five years away. But they're looking at robotics from a manufacturing standpoint, from a retail standpoint, and also most importantly from a consumer standpoint. They've also been exploring a mobile robot, something like an Amazon Astro, but I don't think that's probably going to see the light of day.
That's fun. I feel like Apple has the perfect brand.
Talk about Ternus' challenge with supply chain broadly. What do you think he's going to be focused on over the next five years?
I don't think he will be. I don't think he will be. I think just like —
But is that not — you're saying like just basically like —
Broadly ignore that it's kind of a key risk to the business to have, you know, as a team —
With an all-hands meeting with Apple employees this morning, he was pretty clear that Tim Cook didn't do everything. Tim Cook chose his spots, and Ternus said that he's going to pick his spots as well. As we know, Tim's spots were operations, finance, and sales, and he delegated everything else. My sense is that Ternus' mandate — Ternus was hired because they believe that he is going to be able to bring Apple back to the forefront of product device innovation. They already have the best-in-class operations, finance, salespeople. They don't need Ternus to do that. They need Ternus to keep his eye on the prize, which is products.
Yeah. And what do people point to when they say that there's a risk to Apple staying on the frontier of product development? I saw the Android phone that has the privacy screen that you toggle on and off — that looked like kind of a cool feature. There's folding phones that they're working on, but are any of these features that exist in other phones? It feels like they haven't actually gotten a groundswell and started pulling iPhone users away from the ecosystem. But are there key features that people are worried about, or what's the idea?
Nothing you've seen is the risk. Okay.
The risk is whatever the hell Meta and OpenAI and Hark and all these companies eventually come out with. The risk is one of those companies doing something really cool and jettisoning Apple from that perspective. But we all know that nobody has done quote-unquote cool stuff yet to steal away iPhone users. Nobody's ditching their iPhone for Android. In fact, the switching is going in the other direction, despite the fact that Apple is supposedly the most innovative company in the world and has the least innovative AI technology.
Yeah. But consumers care about value, and things like the MacBook Neo really deliver that value.
Brand colors, system, privacy. Yeah. Ternus was only senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple for five years. It's a short tenure to be an SVP of a division at Apple. And the reason is because he's —
Oh, there you go. No, he's been at Apple 25 years. I'm kidding. We use that ironically.
No, I know. But the point I'm trying to make is that he still has a legacy. And Ternus' legacy is making Apple hardware more performant in terms of speed and battery life, and higher quality. He's really focused on the durability and longevity and the reliability of Apple products. And it's meaningful, I think, that the person that they chose to be Ternus' replacement in hardware engineering, Tom Marb from Intel, is a product quality and reliability expert rather than a product design person.
Yeah. What was the thinking? I mean, I remember we talked about this — how I got the new iPhone and it has immediately been dinged. What was the thinking on making — and but it's better for heat or better for wireless connectivity, even though you can't get the color to adhere to the material as much, so it scratches off. Is that the current trade-off?
Yeah. There's trade-offs with every material. Like titanium was light, it looked cool, you could bead-blast it, it did, you know, interesting — I mean, it looked interesting and it gave them a good marketing point. Like, oh, come buy a titanium phone. Like, anyone cares about the material of their phone. But it had really bad properties related to heat. Aluminum, which we've known for 20 years, is an excellent material to build consumer electronics out of. So they went back to the basics. You know, they were really talking about at the end of last year splitting the line between ultra-thin with the iPhone Air and pushing the iPhone Pro to the right as much as possible by making it more performant. My expectation is they're really doubling down on this. Their goal is really to just squeeze as much performance and power in these iPhone Pros as possible. And for everyone who needs less power, you can get the thinner and lighter iPhone Air. And I think you're going to continue to see Ternus push in that direction, making the MacBook Pro as amazing and most performant as it can be and pushing everyone else to the MacBook Neo and the MacBook Air. And I think his legacy on performance and product quality is a really important thing to remember.
Has Ternus ever talked publicly about AI in any capacity?
He talked about AI in his all-hands meeting with employees this morning. He said that —
I'm going to check it out.
No, just hold on. Hold on. I don't want to give you inaccurate —
Okay. Yeah, just hold on. Bear with me.
I think I — internal memos.
No, no, no, no, no. He said that he's especially excited to be stepping into this role at this moment because, I am telling you, we are about to change the world once again. He said Apple has an incredible roadmap ahead and that I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most exciting time to be building products and services at Apple in my entire career. AI is going to create almost unlimited potential. We're going to be able to keep unlocking possibilities that are going to create entirely new opportunities for our products and services. And I'm so excited about what that's going to mean for our users. Earlier this month, he reorganized Apple's hardware engineering division around a new AI platform that they're going to be using to improve product development processes and overall quality.
Interesting. Okay. I saw a post here from Bubble Boy. I want your reaction. Apple is about to become the mecca of hardware engineers around the world with John Ternus taking over at Apple. Is Apple not already the mecca? Is there actually somewhere to go? But that is up in terms of hardware engineer recruiting. Do you see this as changing the culture in some meaningful way?
I mean, they don't pay like these, you know, OpenAI, Harks, and Metas of the world. Apple has been pillaged by OpenAI and Meta and all these companies as of late. They are stripping apart Apple's hardware engineering division, hiring people from every team they can get their hands on, throwing very big offers at them. And so this has been a really big issue that Ternus has been dealing with over the last year and change. But Apple is, you know, the hardware mecca. They're the company that everyone wants to poach from. And they're the company that people go to to learn how to build consumer devices. So this is definitely — yeah, I agree to a large extent with you, actually.
All right, with Bubble Boy.
Yeah, Bubble Boy. What — this might be somewhat separate, but just get me up to speed on the folding iPhone. What is the latest there?
Announced in September, Ternus' first big new product.
Super exciting. Super pumped. Yeah. We've talked about this. I'm sick of the candy-bar phones. It's been the same junk for 15 — excuse me, 20 years now. I want a foldable. I want a bigger screen.
Yeah, I really hope —
John wants a newspaper-sized phone.
Well, they have those. I've seen those in China. The trifold, right? But this is a bifold.
Don't get me started on the trifold.
Explain the trifold. Wait, why are they awful? It seems amazing.
John wants pages of screens that he can turn.
Flimsy and they break. You need a trifold at Apple quality in 20 years, because you know, old time when they do a — when Apple does a trifold, it'll be good. But you know, I open up a foldable phone right now. You open it up and you can hear the screen sort of creaking, right? And then you have that big line in the middle, and then it's like impossible to get your thumb in to open the thing. I hope Apple fix that. I don't want to hear a creak. For $2,000, I don't want to hear a creak. I don't want it to sound like I'm stepping on, you know, a wooden floor, right? I want it to just open, and I want it to open quickly and nicely, and it not be like I'm trying to lift the weight.
Yeah, it's still going to be weird for video consumption though, because I feel like we've done vertical video 9 by 16 and then 16 by 9 widescreen. But if you open up a foldable phone, you eventually get a square, and that doesn't really make like a movie-watching experience.
Apple's is different. And Apple's is like the new Huawei phone, where it is iPad screen ratio.
iPad screen ratio when you open it. Okay.
Yeah. Okay. So still black bars.
Any intel on —
No, no, no. Black bars. Black — yeah, sure. There will be black bars when you rotate it. Black bars on the top and bottom if you're watching like a cinema film, or even if you're scrolling Instagram, like you won't necessarily get more view, because for so long all the content production has been ultra-widescreen. If you're making a Tarantino film and it's super cinematic, or if you're on TikTok and you're doing vertical video, then you're going to have black bars on the side for the most part. But for so many other applications, you know, for word documents and notes and —
TVPN will look great on it.
Something to look forward to.
What do you think Ternus' new comp package looks like? You know, we almost marched on Cupertino multiple times because of Tim Cook —
To get Tim Cook to get himself to the spaceship.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
I would — I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. I think a million shares over 10 years. That's pretty big. Can I just tell you why I think that? Because that's what they gave Tim Cook when he was named CEO — a million over 10 years. So I would assume it's the same. But again, I don't know.
Yeah. Entry-level researcher salary, but it's a good start if you can.
Tim Cook was getting 100 million a year, and then everyone flipped out except you guys. And so he had to cut his pay to like 40 million. And then when things died down, he's like, all right, I'll take my 70, 80 million peacefully for those years. And then you should see my stock score once.
We were really the strongest supporters of the Tim Cook pay package. But I — I'd guess a million.
I was just, I was just like, the market values a baseball player at the same amount as a guy leading, you know, a $4 trillion company. That doesn't make sense.
Maybe it'll be 500,000 shares. Maybe it'll be 500,000 shares. I don't know. But I know that they gave Tim Cook a million.
You got to get those numbers up. You got to get those numbers up. It's time to march.
Really? You're all in on furnace already?
We're bullish on both. We love both here.
Well, now you get both now.
I know we do. Yeah. Why is 65 a retirement age for this CEO of Apple? Like, we were talking about Warren Buffett. He was able to manage a, you know, trillion-dollar organization well into his 90s. Is it a more physically demanding job? Is he traveling more? Is his hand wringing from shaking hands in DC? Like, why not have another 10 years if you're in that seat?
I don't think the hand situation has much to do with shaking other people's hands.
Why is he not there another 10 years? Well, he needs to give the new guy runway.
Okay. I'm sure there are some... I'll just tell you what Tim Cook... I'm not going to get into it, but what I'm going to do is tell you why Tim Cook said he's stepping down. He said he's stepping down because it's the right time and there's an intersection of John Turnis being ready, Apple's finances being in a very strong place, and Apple's future roadmap being in a very strong place. In terms of the real reason why he's stepping down now, you can read some of my prior articles taking a deeper look at the situation.
Okay. Yeah, makes sense. Cool.
I love seeing you. I love talking to you. Thank you for coming on.
Congratulations on the coverage. Get some sleep.
Great to see you, Mark.
And keep up the amazing work. We'll see you soon.
We'll see you in 15 years for Turnis Jr.
Can't wait. We'll see you. Goodbye.
Let's pull up the OpenAI launch.
OpenAI launch. What's going on? I've been playing with this for a while. There are some wild, wild examples. They are live streaming.
Sam should have the Death Star meme for this launch laid out into an organized image.
And we think we made a lot of progress in both visual understanding and visual generation. Both of these aspects, as a result, being able to handle this kind of tasks very well. And we now have an output for this where you can see eight different really cool outfits for me.
Okay. What do you...
The level of detail in these models is getting so extreme.
It's post-slop.
It is post-slop. That's a good point. But I've seen some where people are like, generate the entire periodic table with details about each element and a visualization of each element. And it's just like so much information, so dense that you have to wind up zooming in so much just to get all the information. It's like the idea of generating a single photo of a person in an outfit was remarkable just a year ago, I guess, when the Studio Ghibli thing happened. And now you can generate layers and layers of detail here. Good teaser. They said this is not a screenshot and posted the image and detail.
Something that... tell everyone about the prompt you've been running with Wiki.
Oh yeah. I've been doing this thing where I take a Wikipedia article and I ask Image Gen 2 to turn it into an infographic, or you can actually do an Instagram carousel, like 10 images that tell the story of something. I did this with John Turnis and it's remarkable. I mean, the text is perfectly photoreal. The other thing that's interesting is the brand comes through in an interesting way. It's not like it has one style for infographic. Like I had it make an infographic about John Turnis and his career and his path and everything that he's done at Apple, and it put in images of projects that he's worked on, but then also had an Apple-like brand aesthetic, like a white background, the correct fonts. But then I did the same thing for the Elden Ring movie that we were talking about yesterday. So I went and got the Wikipedia for the Elden Ring movie that has some details and some leaks of who might be playing different roles, and it was able to go get images, go get headshots of those people, put those in because it has tool calls now. So you can actually, if you say generate an infographic of John Turnis' career, it will do a pretty good job generating someone who looks sort of like John Turnis, but then you can actually just take his canonical headshot and say, 'No, use this exact photo of John Turnis,' and it will just drop it right in. And so it looks perfect because it is just like a copy-paste basically on top of the layers.
Let's get some audio again. Let's see what else is going on here.
Output. This is particularly useful for very complex prompts, for things that require web searches, for things that require you to output multiple images that have to maintain coherence with each other, or even for it to check its work before saying, 'Hey, here's your final output.' But let's just look over some examples of this first. Gabe actually kicked off a few of these examples at the start of the live stream. So let's go to the one on the phone, which is the one of him and Sam, the selfie of them, and they created a manga of it. And if we look at the very first image, we can see... Yeah, it does look like Gabe and Sam, right?
Yeah.
But I think what's even cooler about it is that if you look at the follow-up images, they still look like Gabe and Sam, and they still look like in the style that was originally maintained. Children's stories, coloring books, it's like...
What's even better is that the story should be very consistent among pages one, two, and three.
I did that this weekend. It was very successful. Rave reviews in the Coogan household for AI-generated coloring books for mythical creatures that my son came up with, combining different creatures.
We beta tested the instant version of this model on Elmarina under the code name duct tape. A few of you on the internet were like really good detectives and deduced that it was us. But we're going to announce that it was us. And so in this prompt, we basically asked that... basically GPT Images 2 to go and find social media reactions to this duct tape model and basically quote people. And so we see quotes from Threads, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. But I think an even crazier part is that we've also asked the model to put a QR code to chatgpt.com so that you can try out this model right now for yourselves. And can we just make sure that it works?
Yeah, I tried.
Oh, nice, nice, nice. So, image generation with thinking allows you to do really complex things such as, in this case, web search, synthesize answers, and put a QR code all in one image. But we have still more, and Alex will talk to you about these new details.
It's so interesting. The tool use is getting really, really advanced. In Codex, it actually was able to generate a vector diagram to make sure that everything was correct and then regenerate the image on top of that. Of course, we should go to the timeline because there's some people that are having fun with the image generation. Someone made presidents in Elden Ring. There's Joe Biden, which is a Dark Souls-style boss that you can fight, and FDR, Lord of the New Deal. And these images, it just looks remarkable if you've ever played any of the Elden Ring or Dark Souls games. Because of course, the text is flawless, and then you can fight Richard Nixon in front of the Watergate. And this looks like a mod that I think people would play if it actually existed. Blake Robbins said, 'The world is not ready for the rumored OpenAI image model. People are creating Google Street View images that just look perfect, and Grand Theft Auto 5 loading screens.' And there's a big trend of people creating things that look like screenshots of live streams, and then they put themselves in the live streams and have all fun with that. And there's one of Satya Nadella presenting a slide, and even the minor text at the bottom of the slide in the picture. It's sort of remarkable to think that all of this is generated basically one-shotted. Justine Moore was posting about this a long time ago, April 6th. This ad was one-shotted by OpenAI's image model. The prompt was literally, 'Make an advertisement for the M4 Pro Mac Mini.' And I mean, you can see how quickly this will speed things up. The question is just like, what is your source content? What do you want to visualize or deliver via this format? The whole meme of like, turn this essay into bullet points, turn these bullet points into paragraphs. Now you can turn this infographic into text and turn the text back into an infographic. I feel like a lot of talent here for tracking your Uber Eats and FedEx deliveries, and it looks pretty believable. Yeah, we can pull up the screenshot here.
Yeah. People, there's something interesting about this where I've seen a number of slide decks that could be infographics. And I'm wondering if there's going to be a new level of compression where people are saying, 'Just send me a screenshot, a one-pager screenshot over text instead of a slide deck that I have to click through.' That is a lot of information that... but if you zoom in, there's like pretty... oh, it's like pretty impressive fidelity. This is wild. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to deliver a whole bunch of information that could go into a slide deck, condensing it down into an infographic feels like potentially a new trend. And I wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot of these flowing out into Instagram carousels and other sorts of content if you're trying to summarize some sort of content, a history, quotes, any sort of information like that. Anyway, Tyler Cowen, back to the timeline. Tyler Cowen made an incredible call back in July of 2020 in the depths of COVID in Bloomberg. He said, 'This year is likely to be remembered for the COVID-19 pandemic and for our significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time and with images since about 2012.' What a remarkable post. This was two months after Geoffrey's scaling hypothesis post and two and a half years before ChatGPT was released. That is remarkable. There's a lot of folks that are chiming in with, 'I called it too.' Anyway, I believe we have our next guest in the waiting room, Scott Stevenson from Spellbook. He's the co-founder and CEO. Scott, how are you doing?
Doing great. Doing great. How are you guys?
We're good. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Good. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Can you... I mean, I want to go into the contracted ARR debate, but let's get the update on Spellbook. How are things going? Where's the company at? How are you feeling?
Going very well. We had a killer Q1. Crushed our stretch targets last year. Yeah, we're over 4,400 customers on board in 80 countries now.
Yeah, we're the most used AI contract review tool in the world. So...
Why so international so early?
It's been inbound. Yeah, we've had a ton of interest inbound. So yeah, it really, you know, the choice is accept the customers or turn them away. You know, we chose to accept them. Yeah.
Is the product sort of multilingual by default?
I would say yes. A lot of it is driven by AI models. AI models have some ability to deal with different... actually pretty good availability to deal with different languages. And then we're able to supplement the models with legislation and norms from many different jurisdictions since we're a legal product.
Yeah. So where else are the key integration points? Like what's the hard work to bring a country on board, or even bring a new flow on board, or expand the capabilities of the product as models are just sort of getting better every month by default in the background?
Yeah. I mean, I think for us, the bit, you know, we try to be two years ahead of the market and build things that are two years ahead of what anyone else is building in legal AI or elsewhere. And we've consistently done that. We built the very first GenAI product for lawyers back in the summer of 2022. This was like before ChatGPT. So a lot of like Claude for Word just came out. That was kind of what we launched like four years ago. So we're pretty far ahead from that now. What we really focus on is building unique workflows that are not just chat. I think if you're building something chat-shaped, it's very difficult to make that defensible because there's going to be some really good general AI products for just generic chat-based work. What we focus on at Spellbook is really rails for high volumes of contracts and contract workflows. So we sell to Fortune 10, Fortune 100 companies, and really companies of all sizes who are processing hundreds of thousands of contracts, not just with the legal team, but with their sales team, their procurement team. Sure. You know, we're in manufacturing, shipping, all of these different verticals. And we kind of build these end-to-end rails that allow these contracts to move quickly and safely through organizations. And like there's a lot that can slip through the cracks when you're dealing with these high volumes of contracts, and a lot of mistakes are made. So, you know, we give every legal team a second set of eyes on these massive flows of contracts going through the organization.
Yeah.
What drew you to this? Why are other... is it legal AI companies that you feel like are getting a little bit dicey on this front, or how do we get here?
Yeah. So I've got some interesting examples to cite, but you know, I think it's an enterprise AI problem. And I'll say first, like my goal here with this tweet and what I'm doing is to destroy as much equity value as possible by discrediting this obscene metric of cARR, or at least the way it's being used today. So we can all get back to building real companies. So that's what I'm trying to get out there.
What I mean... where this came from is I think I just noticed more and more founders and investors telling me things about ARR reporting, mainly the public reporting, but also some of the internal reporting that was just getting more and more skewed. And yeah, there's all these headlines being published about ARR records being broken. And you know, when the laws of physics are being broken, you have to ask, is it AI breaking the laws of physics, or might there be some other kind of illusion going on as well? And I think it's a bit of both. We have really high-growth, awesome companies being built, but when you have really high growth, issues can kind of fester and hide underneath. So yeah, I've heard a lot of more and more stories of people using this metric of cARR, often using this metric when they're talking to press about their revenue, and then gaming it in some pretty obscene ways. So maybe I just tweeted about it.
Yeah, the tweet. So you say the setup: company signs three-year enterprise deals. Year one is discounted, say $1 million. Year two steps up to $2 million. Year three is full price. They report $3 million as ARR even though they're only collecting $1 million this year. That's a big deal.
The worst part, the customer has an opt-out option at 12 months. It's not actually a three-year contract. So they're basically taking the three-year number, pulling it into the present, even though it's a contract that the customer can get out of.
And they're not actually on the hook. So it's not really... uh...
Yeah, it's rough. So yeah. Just react to that, I guess.
Yeah. So I think, you know, that's a specific real example that I heard of in the wild from an insider of how these ARR metrics were being gamed to create some amazing revenue charts. But I would say there's a broad category of issues that I can talk about, like a few of them that, you know, after the tweet went viral, I got a huge response of other founders and investors saying that they were saying the same thing and like some other examples of the types of gaming that's going on.
Yeah, because you get one person in a category that starts doing this, then the other people like suddenly have to start reporting the same way and it creates a vicious cycle.
Yeah. And it starts pretty innocent. You know, cARR, for folks that don't know, cARR is contracted ARR. So it allows you to count revenue that's not live yet. So maybe you're doing like a nine-month implementation or you have a one-year... for short-term stuff like, hey, this contract is going... this customer is actually going to be going live next quarter, but we've signed it and we're just going through the implementation process. And but there's nothing that... there's no law that says you can't say like, we're going to extend the timeline dramatically. It just is not a very grounded way to run your business.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And like I think it's innocent, like three months extra credit, you know, arguably useful, but it's a very easy metric to game, especially if you miss those obligations. So I think because we've kind of normalized, you know, the forward-deployed engineer, which, you know, we used to call professional services, and so now you have these really complex implementations where you might be promising a customer like, hey, we'll build this feature, and once we build this feature, then we'll start billing you. What happens if you don't build that feature? So one of the issues you see is companies stacking all these commitments of they'll switch on billing once they deliver X with their forward-deployed engineers, and then what happens if they miss that or what happens if that gets delayed. And then they're reporting it up front as ARR publicly, but they're not actually at the point where the ARR is live. So yeah, that's another category of issue. And then there's, you know, people reporting pilots, you know, just three-month pilots as ARR, and they're free pilots that, you know, I was talking to an investor yesterday who just sees that all the time from early-stage companies like coming out of accelerators saying they have like a million ARR, and they look under the hood and it's just all pilots that haven't converted yet. So there's a host of different issues with the metric. And then the other one is the step-up contract where yeah, you're stepping up, you know, in year one is, you know, 25% of the cost, year two is a little higher, year three is higher, and then people are either amortizing that back over the period to get a higher average or even taking like that year three amount like you said at the beginning. So yeah, there's a bunch of patterns that are happening. The other thing is like there's early opt-outs. So like, you know, you can have early opt-outs in these long-term contracts. And but there's all... I mean, we're a contract company, so there's a million ways that a contract can be terminated by...
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
Yeah. I think it's a really ungrounded metric and people should stop using it to report their... enterprise AI companies should stop using it to report their ARR publicly. I think no one should take it seriously, except maybe internally for some projections. You know, it's not a good metric.
What is the gold star example of using ARR correctly? Because it's very easy once a company's public to just say, okay, let's just go off of GAAP revenue for the year and like what did you actually book this quarter? There's a whole revenue recognition policy. It feels like there's some benefit to tracking ARR month by month if you're a high-growth startup. But what is...
Overrated. Companies should just report their daily annualized run rate.
Or hourly.
Yeah. And that goes into the debate of annualized versus annual, right? So how have you processed sort of the better cases or like what is the responsible way to report a revenue metric in 2026?
Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on the company and the shape of the company and whether it's usage-based billing or seat-based billing, which you still have lots of both. Definitely don't do like hourly, you know, annualized run rate based on the hour. That's not good. I think the main thing I would say is it should be live. It's like what revenue is actually live right now for like what customers are you actually billing and are actually paying you. So calculating run rate based on the month of revenue that you have coming from customers that are actually paying you, that you're actually billing, I think that's okay. I think, you know, annual recurring revenue based on live customers that you're actually billing, that are actually using your service, I think that's pretty good. I think once you start stretching into people who will pay you or, you know, might pay you, that's where things start to... I mean, it can just be so easily gamed, and anything that can be gamed will be gamed.
Yeah. I mean, optimistic that anything will change, or do we need to see a massive correction and a dark age like post-2022?
I mean, I would like to see a steep correction and then back to building. You know, we'll see if we can make that happen. You know, my reach is only so far, but you know, I've spoken to a lot of reporters in the past like 48 hours who are like, I'm always going to ask now, like when a company tells me their ARR, are they talking live ARR? Are they talking, you know, this like long-term committed ARR that might come? So I hope, you know, at least the journalists are going to be a little bit more savvy and ask more questions before they report on these numbers.
Yeah. I want to ask about who suffers, but in terms of ARR, like yeah, there's almost something where you should just report your last month's revenue instead of doing the times 12 thing, and then if people want to multiply it by 12 they can, but at least you're just reporting, hey, last month, this is what a Stripe account...
You can also just say by Q3 we will be at X ARR.
Or actually, that's a different way of saying... that's better than saying we are at $10 million in cARR.
Yeah. So exactly. Much better.
Who suffers here? Is it purely investors? Because I feel like a good venture capitalist, their job is to dig into the contracts during due diligence to set prices. And if they want to pay, you know, a thousand times ARR because they think it's 100 times cARR, like that's their risk profile. Like I would maybe be careful, but you know, that's their job. Or is there a risk that employees see a headline number and think that the business is more stable than it is and they join and then they're rugged? Like how do you think this affects who needs to watch out for this basically?
Yeah, I mean, I think investors are generally... good investors are generally very aware of the difference between cARR and ARR and aware of the widening gap between these metrics. And like in most board decks you see two metrics. On the press you usually see cARR, but it's called ARR. In a board deck you see both metrics. So investors are quite aware, but I don't think it's victimless at all. I think yeah, employees are signing up for companies, and as you know, in a high-growth startup people are committing a ton of blood and sweat to be successful, based on, you know, part of it is based on the growth of their equity. And if it turns... and they might think they're... they might read the headline number, they may not know the number that's actually in the board deck. They might read the headline ARR in the press release and they might base their decision to join a company based on these headline revenue numbers which are really not grounded in reality whatsoever. Like, and by that I mean I have literal examples, confirmed examples of, you know, the press number being three to five times higher than the actual live ARR number. So like that's a huge difference if you think about a multiple.
Yeah.
Between a public company that's trading at a 10x revenue multiple or something, and then you get your offer from a company and it seems like they're at 10x but they're actually at 50x. Like that is very material for how you should think about valuing that stock that you're working for. Makes a ton of sense.
Then there's the customers, like customers are trying to figure out which company is most mature or least mature, and then there's the whole competitive landscape. It's like if one company starts doing this, all companies have to start doing it, and it just creates...
Yeah. I mean, we could start doing contracted viewership. So we could sign three-year deals with people in the audience that requires them to tune into the show after every year. They have an opt-out after a month. If they don't like it after a month, still advertising based on contract of viewership. I'll sign the contract for the rest of the year. I'll watch every day, every hour. I mean, I guess that sort of does happen for YouTube channels. I mean, no one really does this, but there was a time when YouTube channels were sort of valued on like the subscriber number as opposed to the average view number. And of course there are some channels where every video gets a million views and they only have 100,000 subscribers for whatever reason. And then there's vice versa where someone's been doing... you see this on like old legacy media accounts on X where it'll have like 30 million followers and then the post will get like three likes, and it's like those are two wildly different metrics. Like that happens all the time. But this is the name of the game in Silicon Valley, the metrics game. Everyone's finding an edge somewhere. Well, thanks for keeping everyone honest and good reporting. Good luck fighting the good fight out there and spreading the good word.
Don't get too sucked into all this. You have a business to build.
We promise you can come back on in three years with your honest ARR and take a good victory lap.
No, no, become an investigative journalist. Pivot to investigative journalism. Blow the doors wide open on this.
Wow, this goes deeper than I thought.
Good to see you.
Thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon.
Up next we have Alex from Osmo building olfactory intelligence. We've talked about this before. Can AI smell? That's our current benchmark for AGI. We say if you know, we talk about white-collar work. We see smell as white-collar work. Unless you can smell, it's not AGI, and artificial intelligence is falling short. But it's your first time on the show. I would love an introduction on yourself and the company, because I'm fascinated by this topic.
Let's talk about it. Your smell comment and also what you talked about with Max Hodak has been on my mind. Amazing.
My name is Alex Wiltschko. I'm founder and CEO of Osmo. We're giving computers a sense of smell. I've been working on this problem for exactly 20 years or so. First as an academic, I did my PhD in olfactory neuroscience at Harvard and trained under Bob Datta, who trained with Richard Axel, who got the Nobel Prize for discovering the receptors of smell. And my AI mentor trained with Jeff Hinton, who got the Nobel Prize for deep learning. And I'm the one weirdo that's been waiting for you to come for the entire history of the show.
There have been great prophecies of your arrival for hundreds of years. I'm so excited. I'm so pumped to be here. So, should we start with maybe like an olfactory science 101? Can you set the ground on like how does smell even work? What are the important sort of building blocks that we should know, and then we can build up to the next generation and how AI is being applied to it?
100%. So the chemical slice of reality, all the stuff that's data in the air, we can detect that. Our sense of smell is literally our brain leaving our skull. So when you smell a molecule, whether it's a tree or it's a meal or a drink, the physical pieces of that thing enter into your nose and touch a piece of tissue about the size of a postage stamp. And that's your brain, right? So like you are in physical communion with that thing. That information gets turned into neural data which actually skips all of the normal way stations for the other senses and goes right to your centers of memory, the hippocampus, and emotion, the amygdala. So our sense of smell is very primal in that regard. So it's the reason why when you smell something you get dragged into a memory and you cannot stop it. You're just like back in high school or you're back as a kid is because we're physically wired for that.
So that's real. I've always heard that. I've always heard that phrase, smell is the sense that's most tied to memory. But I didn't know if it was just something you saw on like a t-shirt or something.
No, literally neuroanatomically true.
Target wall art.
Yeah. It feels like Target wall art. I don't know. It's just one of those things that you repeat.
They say a smell from pops a thousand words.
