I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
There's misinformation. >> Clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on, get up.
Trust the experts here. Five. We are experts. Founder mode. Find.
>> I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. >> UAV online. >> Double blades. Triple blades. Double kill.
Top is wins. >> Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. Let's just roll. Right.
>> Clearing order inbound. Get up. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike two.
>> Activate golden retriever mode. >> Trust me. >> Mark clearing order inbound. 52. Founder.
>> You're watching TBPN. >> It's Thursday, April 23rd, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance. We have a giga stream on our hands today.
We will be interviewing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different members of the new Teal Fellowship class, working on everything from autonomous logistics companies to investigative journalism to AI recruiting and compute infrastructure. All sorts of different projects, and I loved each 10 minutes each lightning round, lightning round of lightning rounds. I loved last year. It's always super inspiring to see what young entrepreneurs are working on. The Teal Fellowship class always impresses me, and we've had three of these folks on the show before. So we'll be checking in with them, seeing where progress is at.
The Teal Fellowship, I feel like it's grown. I don't know that it was always $250,000, but it is now. So the Teal Fellowship gives, keeping up with, a $150,000 grant to young people to build startups instead of going to college. So everyone here has either not graduated, or dropped out, or deferred, or declined to attend college, and instead is building a technology company.
>> Is this a smaller class than usual? >> Uh, we probably don't have the full class because of scheduling, and not everyone can be everywhere all the time. We will be having them all, the Teal Fellows will be joining us remotely, but they are all in the same place up in San Francisco, and we will be calling into them. And we have Nick and Tyler up there managing that end of the show.
This class of fellows includes young founders building hypersonic highways, a research lab for building foundational models for robotics, a fraud bounty hunter, and a simulated brain. And you probably know Dylan Field is a Teal Fellow, Vitalik Buterin is also a Teal Fellow alumnus, and we are big fans of so many different founders that have gone through the project. And Will Manidis is also a Teal Fellow. So anyway, we're going to get that sound ready because we got some bad news.
Toma Bravo is taking a massive write-down on a software company called Medallia. Toma Bravo is reportedly handing over the software company Medallia to creditors after restructuring negotiations failed to materialize. This is a $5.1 billion equity wipeout for the firm who bought the business for $6.4 billion in 2021.
And there's some background in Reuters that I think I should read through, and then you can sort of give me your analysis and what you're seeing on the timeline around the take. So, from Reuters exclusive: Toma Bravo nears agreement to turn software firm Medallia over to creditors. That does not sound good. Private equity firm Toma Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software firm Medallia to lenders, wrapping up months of restructuring negotiations. The move will wipe out $5.1 billion in equity.
Medallia has struggled in recent months under the weight of $3 billion of debt, which it owes to Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Group, and Antares Capital. Toma Bravo, Blackstone, and KKR declined to comment. Apollo and Medallia didn't immediately return requests for comment to Reuters. So, like other software companies, Medallia's valuation has been hit in recent months over concerns that its services will eventually be supplanted by artificial intelligence.
What does Medallia do? Medallia provides software that collects and analyzes customer and employee feedback for companies. We've had some startups, some of them backed by Sequoia Capital, that are using AI to do this exact thing. That's potential disruption. And then there's also their main rivals, Qualtrics. Yep. But yeah, and maybe you said this already, but you know that Sequoia was one of the big backers at Medallia when they were a private company.
Oh, interesting. So I mean, they're still private, but there's a long history of that with, what was it, the firm that was before Zendesk was called, like, SuccessFactors. Lars Dalgaard did that deal. Here they did $35 million in 2012, they did another $50 million in 2014, and then they later led a $150 million round.
Wow. And then eventually, did they take it public, or did they sell it for $6 billion to Bravo directly from private? Was Medallia ever a public company? That would be interesting. I think they were. You look that up, and I will keep reading from this to give some more backstory.
So private equity firms invested heavily in the software sector when interest rates were low following the peak of the COVID pandemic. We all remember 3% interest rates. It was the golden era of startups and growth. All of the DCFs were massive, and then of course the valuations came down once the interest rates went up.
So investors have become increasingly nervous about the sustainability of high valuations assigned to some of those assets and the debt raised to buy them. If you're on a floating rate note, you know, these firms are not necessarily backed by a 30-year fixed mortgage like your house. Your interest rate went up and the debt payments ballooned. And if the cash flow from the business has not also ballooned, you could be in trouble like this company potentially is.
Blackstone, KKR, and Antares hold some of the debt in traded and non-traded funds. FSK KKR Capital Corp marked the debt at 79 cents on the dollar in its last quarterly report. And of course, debt is senior to equity. So what does that mean for the equity? Not good. And that's why this deal is happening. Apollo debt solutions marked it at 74 cents on the dollar. So a question about how can they even recover, you know, the full value of that debt. The equity is obviously in deep, deep trouble.
So Blackstone's global head of private credit, Brad Marshall, said on a conference call in February that Medallia had been, quote, underperforming not because of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution-driven issues. So there is a question of, well, if they restructure and this company gets in the hands of creditors, maybe they can roll out AI features and become an AI winner and accelerate the top line and restructure the debt.
>> I saw someone was sharing that there were some salespeople doing kind of some anonymous reporting and saying a lot of the reps were struggling to hit quotas, you know, like basically delivering like 20% of quota, something like that. So just basically getting outcompeted in the market. >> Sure. And just to go back to the earlier point, yes, Medallia went public in 2019 on the NYSE, was taken private July 26, 2021. Okay.
It had been trading around the $5 billion mark prior to the take-private at $6.4. So Toma Bravo, after taking it private, installed a new leadership team in early of 2025. Marshall, the head of Blackstone's global head of private credit, said that they were working on a turnaround plan and we expect there to be discussions around the capital structure.
And so people are blackpilling on the timeline. Brandon says, yes, I am sure this is the bottom in software and we won't get worse from here. Not good signs. This is, you know, potentially one of those cockroaches that Jamie Dimon was worrying about. There's another post that seems like it was deleted, but yeah. I mean, so some of the screenshots here, the tough thing is that everyone involved here has been on a kind of a press tour saying like, everything's fine. Yes. Like, we're all good.
AI is going to be an accelerant. But even ignoring the AI question, a lot of these businesses no longer have, you know, are founder-led. They're competing against other companies that are founder-led. And yeah, it's just kind of credit to Jamie Dimon for his comments saying like, you know, basically saying I don't think this is over, right? When you had First Brands and some other shutdowns.
Yeah. In the previous startup era, there were, I mean, I feel like it would have been hard to raise for just like a vanilla Qualtrics or Medallia competitor and just saying like, we're just going to build SaaS and we're just going to build a, you know, a CRUD app and write software. Yeah. A new player is a company, AU. Yeah. That's a very different approach. Simulation. Simulation. Yeah. That's a very different approach.
And then we had another one, I'm blanking on the name. It was a YC founder. He had gone through YC a few years ago, but his company's taking off doing something similar. So people have been well aware of the opportunity that Medallia and Qualtrics have owned.
Yeah. But in other debt-related news, Xi Jinping wants to use the International Monetary Fund to rescue the array of distressed Chinese loans around the world. This is an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal opinion. Noah Smith is laughing. He says, LOL, Belt and Road failed so hard, Xi Jinping is incompetent. That is, this is a very narrative... Do not go to China violation. Yeah. Do not go to China.
Yeah. This is an interesting thing, but maybe a potential bargaining chip in all of the other discussions. You know, in tech, Tyler always points out that tech is like too focused on chips when it comes to Chinese diplomacy, that there are many, many other questions around trade and what Apple's doing and rare earths.
And there are so many, and just the broad history of the Chinese empire that play into what their Taiwan policy is, how they will interact in the Middle East. And we tend to focus it all on AI. It's all about the data centers and the chips. And perhaps there are more things. And this is one example of something else that is a key factor in a broader negotiation that includes chip exports and also rare earths and also talent movements and whether or not Manis will be able to move over to Meta and a million other things.
And so that is the job of these world leaders is to swirl around all the different trade-offs and get to hopefully a good deal for both sides. Anyway, some breaking news. GPT 5.5 is out. Oh, it is out. This is just...
Introducing GPT 5.5, a new class of intelligence for real work and powering agents built to understand complex goals. Use tools, check its work, and carry more tasks through to completion. It marks a new way of getting computer work done. Now available in Chat and Codex.
I like this demo of the Rubik's Cube. That's very cool. GPT 5.5 excels at writing and debugging code, researching online, analyzing data, creating documents and spreadsheets, operating software, and moving across tools until a task is finished. GPT 5.5 delivers this step up in intelligence without compromising on speed, matches GPT 5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving. There's the model card there, and there are some other posts.
We will wait for the reactions to come in. We will gather them. We'll summarize them. But the team cooked. Cooked. Congratulations to everyone that worked on this. Let's head over to Merriam-Webster. John, what do you got?
Webster. Merriam-Webster added a new word to the dictionary, I believe. And I feel like the popular, I don't know. I mean, they have a slang section. Oh, okay. Slang and trending. They must be working overtime over there because the number of wombos, if you're not familiar with wombos, these are word combos. Things like lorine, the lore plus explain.
I could tell John, can you lorine and GPT 5.5? Yes. Give you the lore, tell you about what happened with 4.5, 4o, 3.5, 3 Dic. Give you the whole lore, but then also explain what this model is capable of. That's the full lane of GPT 5.5.
But we're not here to talk about lorine. We're here to talk about choppleganger, which is a new word in Merriam-Webster, the dictionary. It's basically the main dictionary as far as I'm concerned. Choppleganger is a term for a less attractive version of someone or something. So whoever's going out there and distilling 5.5 into sort of a chopped version of it, that will be the choppleganger of the official GPT 5.5.
So stay away from the chopplegangers unless you're really down in your luck and you need a Chinese open-source model to do something for you, then buyer beware because it might have some flaws. But separately, there is new news from Michael Kratsios that the government seems to be taking Anthropic and OpenAI's messaging around distillation very seriously and is setting up a task force.
We can read a little bit more about this later, but setting up a task force to actually figure out how to prevent distillation at scale. As the models get bigger, it's more and more of an economic impact when you're talking about a hundred-million-dollar training run and a Chinese lab can distill it and sneak the weights out and exfiltrate the data. That's a lot different of an economic impact from stealing something that, I don't know, cost billions to train or billions to put together.
So, good news there. Hopefully they're successful. It was also sort of a white pill to see a lot of the labs working together to understand, hey, we're seeing this weird amount of data go to this particular company. Are you seeing the same thing? Or it's a shell company and we have five shell companies in these areas that are asking for these queries, and then the other lab says, oh yeah, we're actually getting something similar.
And if you puzzle piece those together, all of a sudden you're getting a really solid map of what a frontier system is capable of. And so it feels like we, the industry, are the victim of a distillation attack, even if it might not register among a single lab because that single lab is only getting hit with like one-third or one-fifth of the total attack.
We can pull up this post from Kratsios. I'll read the letter. Yeah. Subject: Adversarial distillation of American AI models. The United States leads the world in AI technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational research, bold entrepreneurial risk-taking, and hundreds of billions of dollars in annual private investment.
American AI leadership drives economic growth, strengthens national security, and advances the frontiers of science, medicine, and human knowledge. The breakthroughs emerging from American industry raise living standards, expand opportunity, and improve lives around the world. However, the United States has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems.
Leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information. These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting... I don't like that. That sounds bad. I don't like that at all. Exploiting American expertise and innovation.
Every AI researcher needs this button on their desk. If they detect a distillation attack, fire it off and the security team will come and make sure you're locked down. And it does seem like overall all the labs are being more careful about how the APIs roll out, how they're doing KYC, how they're doing different partnerships and stuff. And I think it's all a back and forth and a dynamic, but it's fun that this new model is available and people will play with it and I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff.
Yeah. And Qwen 3.6 rolled out yesterday. People are like, wow, it's almost as good as Opus 4.5. Yeah, because they distilled. Anyways, I'm glad that Kratsios is on it and I'm glad that the labs can coordinate and work together on this one. Yes. Yes. More breaking news. Yes. Thank you.
And unfortunately, but we had talked about this previously. Meta is cutting 10% of their workforce, which is 8,000 employees. But this has been for a while. Eliminating 6,000 open roles. Yeah. I saw Microsoft was doing something similar. They're offering early retirement to something like 7% of the workforce, trying to lean out a little bit.
I'm sure the debate will continue to rage over the underlying motivations. These companies can be big and sometimes maybe they're too big, maybe there's AI gains, maybe there's different investment strategies. We will have to see where they are moving chips around, what projects they are actually cutting, what projects they are doubling down on because these companies are also hiring at all times effectively.
Well, Christoph had some actual media ideas for the tech industry. He says there's not enough media in tech. He needs more. We need more tech-positive media for sure. So he says, Silent Library with founders. Winner gets investment. What's... What is Silent Library? Silent Library. So is this like a webcam that observes?
Silent Library is a television show. It had four seasons. It's a game show. Oh, it's a game show. Game shows are fun. I could see a game show being funny. At least different. And it was six friends vying for a cash prize, if only they can remain silent as one of them is forced to endure a bizarre stunt while seated in a library. Okay. Okay.
What else? Jackass with founders. What does that mean? How do you make that tech-related? Maybe like humanoid robots. When I think of Johnny Knoxville, I just think of riding a bull effectively. And so I imagine like riding some sort of robotic bull would be it, but you know, it's very dangerous.
Like the team that worked with like Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville, they had some serious injuries from time to time. And I don't know if it's in your best interest to be a founder and be like, yeah, I need to launch my startup, so I got to go in the ring with a mechanical bull and potentially break my arm and not be able to code. And I don't know. Seems rough, but would be entertaining and with the right twist, I believe it could work.
Interview founders while going ghost hunting. I feel like paranormal tech content. Jesse Michaels doesn't get enough credit here. You know, his is a technology podcast. It's in the technology charts and it charts high, like it's up there. And he has an incredible pedigree, great investor, and also has some of the best reporting on aliens and paranormal activity and conspiracy theories.
And I guess he just hasn't cracked the way to bring a founder along. But if you're friends with Jesse Michaels or are in touch, maybe you just tag along for a little cameo on one of his videos and that's all the PR you need. Founders give their pitches while skydiving. Can you... I like... Can you talk while skydiving? With the right headsets. Have you gone skydiving?
No, but I like the idea and I like the videos. I like that. It's always in like the vibe reels of like the... Oh, what's that movie with? Is it Keanu Reeves? Point Break? They go skydiving and he goes skydiving and there's only one parachute so they have to fight it out for the parachute. You haven't seen this movie?
Have I told you the story where I was on an overnight flight back from Europe? No. I'm sitting on a plane. Yeah. And I'm awake. I can't sleep. Okay. And out of the shadows... Skydiver. John Wick. Oh. Starts walking up the aisle. Keanu Reeves. Yeah, the real Keanu Reeves. Sitting there. It's effectively like 2 a.m. and Keanu Reeves is like walking at me on this plane in the middle of the night.
Yeah. We ended up talking for like five minutes. It was cool. And then he went back to his seat. And yeah. Well, he stayed on the plane. He did not... Super, super nice guy. What else do they have here? SF party. I'm schmacked videos. I don't know. I'm smacked. Wow. Unk. You guys know... I kind of remember, but you remember.
Basically, this was this whole like, you could call it a media company, but it was really like a guy that would make party videos. Okay. What era are we talking for? Every college. So it was really popular probably 2010 to pre-2013. Okay. Okay. And I will say a lot of people use these videos as a sort of college guide. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I'm sure they have billions, millions of video views at this point. Yeah. Yeah.
Last one. VC prices, right? Is this a good idea? I feel like people don't like... like there's always a huge adverse selection problem with anything related to sharing financials or sharing your company. I mean, this is a twist on Shark Tank to some extent, but they actually did try to do Shark Tank for software. It was called Planet of the Apps. Gary Vaynerchuk was a host. We can ask him about it tomorrow. He's coming on the show and I'd love to know his reflections on tech media.
I think Gwyneth Paltrow might have been a host, co-host. They had a pretty... Planet of the Apps. Look it up. Planet of the Apps instead of Planet of the Apes. Yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow was there. Gwyneth and will.i.am. They had a stacked lineup. Jessica Alba. Jessica Alba, founder of The Honest Company.
On each of the episodes, software makers have 60 seconds to pitch their idea in front of the advisors on a slow-moving escalator with a visual idea of an elevator pitch. Why not put them in an elevator? Yeah. New episodes were released on Tuesday. Did it get renewed? Did any of these apps go anywhere? They had Silo, Focus, and Study Timer. Okay. Companion. I could imagine that. Personal safety. Pair a showroom to your home. A dot.
The mobile mall. Tracks. Battle Squad. Twist live events with a dating twist. Scooch, the word game. Yeah, these sound like interesting ideas. Not as interesting as like a cooler that has a gas-powered engine that you can ride around, which I think of as like the quintessential Shark Tank product.
Yeah, exactly. Like Shark Tank works because the products are highly visual and you get to see, oh, we made a new mop. Okay, we're going to watch Mark Cuban try and mop and this is going to be like physical and visual and interesting. It is very difficult. Are we making progress on our Shark Tank idea? I feel like this is very, very important. We'll have to get the in. How's the Shark Tank idea? Are we making progress? We're on the way. We're on the way. Okay, good stuff. We're very excited about that.
Anyway, lots of opportunity in media. Also lots of opportunity in simulators. We have talked about simulators, TBPN simulator. We made Jeremy Gohn simulator, but the simulators are getting less advanced in some weird twist. You would think they get bigger and bigger and you turn them into real games. We're going the opposite direction because the simpler the game, the funnier. This is Coconut Simulator. Let's...
Coconut Simulator. This better be worth 99 cents. Okay, I'm not going to lie. Okay. What do we do? We move it. It looks good. I can't move. Why can I not move? Am I like dead ass a coconut? Are you serious? I spent 99 cents to be a coconut. There's no way. What could be the difference between arcade and realistic? Coconut has no eyes, so you can't see anything. Realistic game mode selected. You got to be...
Just black because the coconut has no eyes. It's first-person view. This is impossible. You were in third-person view. But it gets better because there's a sequel. There is Coconut Simulator 2, which is now, I believe, multiplayer. Let's play this one. What game mode? Arcade. It's the same game.
So what's the difference between Coconut Simulator 2 and 1? Coconut Simulator 2 is a lot more in-depth. The other Coconuts, it's multiplayer. I thought you guys said there was a story to this one. There is. You're just not seeing it. It's a beautiful story about growing old with your friends around. This game is definitely game of the year. It's beating Crimson Desert. No chance it survives. Trust realism mode is different in this one. I'm telling you right now, if realism mode ends up being the same, I'm going to crash out. Coconuts have no eyes, so you can't see.
Coconuts. It's such a funny prank. I love a simulator prank. What were you saying? Who's in the chat? Ty. Ty's has games has a bit. Yeah. No, it is true. There's actually a third simulator that we need to review. This is Banana Simulator. Banana sim. You are the first person in the whole world to play Banana Sim. What do you mean?
Remember when I showed you Coconut Simulator and I added this to my wish list? It's not supposed to be out yet. You're the first person to play it ever. I'm kind of jealous. How did you get it then? The developers liked our last video and they sent me an email. They gave me this one for free. The developers of this game sent you an email. I have it on my phone too, if you want to see it. It's the same email, just smaller.
So you didn't have to pay real human dollars to play this. Not this time. This one doesn't even have sound. It's the beta. Technically, you're the number one Banana Sim player in the world right now. You have 391 points. How do you get points? 395 points now. Just for playing. Just for... more points than me. Diet Coke Simulator. Diet Coke Simulator.
You just play the Diet Coke as gang. You just sit there and every few minutes. I mean, we have Data Center Simulator. Maybe the next one's just GPU Simulator and it just sits there and it just hums. Yeah, that's it. Sometimes you overheat. That's the end. Sometimes you got to be plugged back in. Yeah.
Well, let's move back over to tech. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, had some incredible predictions in 2016. Let's read through them. Summary of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. This was Kevin Kelly's book from 2016. According to Kelly, much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable. The future will bring with it even more screens, tracking, and lack of privacy.
In the book, he outlines 12 trends that will forever change the ways we work, learn, and communicate. Becoming: moving from fixed products to always-upgrading services and subscriptions. That has definitely happened. We're moving away from even seats. Everything's consumption-based now. Cognifying: making everything much smarter using cheap, powerful AI that we get from the cloud. Nailed it.
That is a fantastic prediction for assuming he wrote it. He actually wrote it probably in 2015, published in 2016, but he's the creator of Wired. He's been tapped into tech his entire career and has a ton of interesting reflections too. He's written a more recent book about reflections on life that's very good.
Depending: unstoppable streams of real-time for everything for sure. Turning: turning all surfaces into screens, that definitely happened. Your toaster can watch TV now. Sharing: shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we have access to all services at all times. Collaboration at mass scale on my imaginary sharing meter index, we are still two out of ten. Filtering: harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires.
Remixing: unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways. That's definitely happening. Coconut Simulator, unironically an example of that. Interacting: immersing ourselves inside of computers to maximize their engagement. Tracking: employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. Sounds scary. Potentially a good outcome if things are done properly. Promoting: good questions are far more valuable than answers.
What you think total surveillance is potentially? He says total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. So if there is a black box where my Netflix activity exists, where no Netflix employee can see it because it's encrypted, but it can make great recommendations and recommend me the next great show that I will actually enjoy, I'm cool with that surveillance. That's surveillance, but it's potentially good for me and I have a better experience.
For the benefit of John Coogan. Yeah. There is a surveillance bull case. Filtering: constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix. Okay, that one we're still waiting on. But a lot of good, interesting predictions. Jason Schreier says, "Wild how accurate these predictions were." And they were in fact. Wow. Very.
Without further ado, yes, we have our first guest of Teal Fellowship, Gigastream. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great, guys. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Introduce yourself and the company.
Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. We're building autonomous forklifts. The real goal of all of this is get anything anywhere in just a few hours, and we're starting with what we think is right, and we're going to do everything it takes to get there.
How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What are you thinking?
Yeah, we actually started thinking we'd be the comma AI of forklifts. But you know, cars have CAN bus standardized since 2008. It's a software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts, even if it's the same forklift, same year, even the internals will look different from each other pretty often.
So if you want to build like a kit that goes on any forklift, it doesn't actually make sense. So we tried that. We did. And then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift. You know, one model, you know, we'll deal with the differences throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay.
Yeah, we tried that. That also sucked. You know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer. We were kind of where everybody else was in the market. You know, this isn't the most original idea in the world. Everybody knows like...
Yeah, Construct Big. Well, there's also Big... there's Applied Intuition, like there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. You kind of probably have, you know, you got a speed run trying a bunch of different approaches and figure out what works.
But the same thing happened in the car industry where, you know, Ford and Toyota were like, "Yeah, we're doing self-driving too." And then it was like, "Okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control, but I'm still waiting for even Tesla-level FSD from like three years ago to roll out into like the major American car manufacturers." So there's clearly an opportunity. So where are you now? Did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like what went into that?
Yeah, I mean, I think what Tesla did right was that they got control over their platform, right? We realized that, you know, that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts if you wanted to make it viable for customers. You actually had to, you know, make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift. And we did, you know, we built our own forklift in like Q4 last year through a manufacturing partner, and it worked great, you know, done some iterations since then.
And now like we are deployed, and we're deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability, which is really all we care about. We plan on continuing this year. What we want to do this year is we just want to make it, you know, a super scalable product because to be right honest, it's not right now.
Sorry to interrupt, but has there been a company in the last ten years that decided to build a new forklift from the ground up, or is this a category that has been generally overlooked as everybody has wanted to build new EVs and platforms that are maybe more exciting to some?
You know, there's some people that kind of got halfway there, like they would go with somebody else's design and make a few changes and think that that was enough. But realistically, like you have to be in the process from the very beginning, otherwise there's just all these trade-offs that are made in the design process that, you know, really affect you. It makes your product horrible.
So we did it from scratch. You know, we have some off-the-shelf parts, but that's a motor, right? Like obviously I'm not going to design a motor from the ground up. I don't need to. I'll just use a forklift motor. But everything else needs to be me. Everything else has to be my design so that we can have full control over the system, iterate faster than anybody else, and build the actual like real product that actually works.
Can you talk about the environments that forklifts operate in? You mentioned that you're deployed in a difficult environment, but what's the standard environment and then how does your test case differ from that?
I mean, the standard environment, you can think of like a warehouse where they just ship a bunch of dog food, you know, let's say like four hundred thousand square feet, just lots of racks. You know, it's not that difficult, right? Like if you cause product damage in a dog food warehouse, it just stinks. It does stink really bad. Like don't get me wrong, they're not going to be happy. But, you know, we went into a pharmaceutical warehouse.
So whereas in the dog food warehouse, like, okay, I damaged the pallet. Let's say I destroyed everything on the pallet, a couple thousand. In a pharmaceutical warehouse, I destroy a whole pallet, dude, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I think like our idea behind it was, you know, this is an incredible forcing factor. This makes us like actually build a reliable product that's not going to cause damages.
And then when we are successful here, we get to show this to all of our other potential customers. Like, look guys, I know you've been burned by the industry before, but look at how good we're doing in this place. I mean, if we destroyed product in their place, we wouldn't be there anymore because we would have already, you know, it's a bad thing, we don't do it.
Yeah. Talk about teleoperation. Did you go down that path at all? Are you compatible with teleoperation? Is there any value? Yeah, I feel like this is such a unique environment because you can figure out autonomy, but there should be a relatively easy way to like take over the system and just use an Xbox controller as you get to full autonomy. I don't know if that's... Yeah. What... I'm glad you said Xbox controller. That's what it is.
So like when we do teleop, which is about fifty percent of the time right now, it is with literally an Xbox controller. There's like some things where they have to click on the screen to like select what pallet they need to pick up, for example. But when there's like some scenario where the robot's lost, like it de-localizes, or we need some extra training data on some workflow, then it's like, yeah, just pick up the Xbox controller. It's literally guys, you know, they're not on site, they're somewhere thousands of miles away just getting it done.
It works perfectly. I think it's extremely valuable. I think it was a dirty word in the industry for a long time to say like remote operation, which is really stupid because like customers don't care, guys. Like, you know, the customers don't care if you're fully autonomous. Customers care if the work is done. So if you're over here like, you know, stressing about, oh dude, we're only, you know, ten percent autonomous, but you're getting the job done every single time and you're profitable.
Like I mean obviously keep going for more autonomy, push those margins, but dude, the customer could not care less. Yeah, totally. We've said that to some humanoid founders on this show and they're like, "No, it's got to be fully autonomous. It's the only way." Yeah, it is like a less sexy narrative and so I think people want to deny it or something. But yeah, the end work product makes the most sense.
Talk to me about the interaction modality for the human or the manager or the owner of the warehouse in a basically full autonomous mode because I imagine at some point you have to have a system that decides, okay, we actually need to dispatch an order to get that dog food off of the top shelf and there's a lot of different pallets that are stacked up at different levels.
And like what systems are you plugging into? Or do you want this to be something where there's still a human in the loop managing and dispatching orders and then they're sitting in an office maybe overlooking the warehouse just sort of giving orders? But like what is the path of the workflow?
Right now it's basically like the robots have this task that needs to get done every day pretty much all day. This is very common in warehouses where, you know, there's only a few things that you need to do every day and it just takes a really long time and you need to have it done by the end of the day, but it doesn't really matter how fast it is. Yeah. And in those scenarios, I mean, you know, you just kind of give the robot instructions.
We have a map and you can set up like zones or shelves and you say like this is what's in this zone or this is what's on this shelf and it needs to go to this other zone or this other shelf and then the forklift just does it. I mean, it, you know, it can be that simple. Eventually, you know, the idea is that I would like to be able to run the warehouse for the customer.
Yeah. I don't want them to ever have to think about it at all. I'd rather it just be like, okay, we are literally your pallet movement within this warehouse. We run your whole business anyway in terms of physical movement. We also have your inventory management. We can make decisions based off of that. We know your truck is going to be in here soon, for example. We'll just set up the staging for you. You don't have to tell us that has to happen. Yeah, that's the goal in the next year.
Forklift is the wedge. It's very, very smart. Have you thought about... We were talking about simulator games earlier. The chat is asking, have you thought about making a forklift simulator where normal people could play the game online, but in reality they're actually helping you train sort of like the CAPTCHA you own? Yeah. Getting training data.
You know, that's actually funny. I did think of that because I was looking for a game myself because, you know, like I've always been into logistics, but I got into warehousing like a few years ago and like, you know, I looked on, I looked everywhere, dude. I even looked on Roblox. Like I was looking on Roblox. They don't have any like good warehouse games, man. It's such a shame. Somebody needs to do that. Maybe somebody in your chat will do that for us. Yeah.
How did you make your first dollar? How did I make my first dollar? Yeah.
I think I'm pretty sure it was when I was selling... I sold candy on Easter when I was very young. And I actually made money there, which is funny because like the kid I sold it to was literally walking with a basket full of candy, like definitely more candy than I got that year. But I sold him this egg and I was like, "Dude, there's something really good in here and you want it, but I'm not going to tell you unless you give me..." Mystery box. Random reward.
Get this man to Las Vegas. Did you drop out from anywhere or are you coming out of high school? High school.
Yeah, I dropped out of UAB. I went to a state school in Alabama. I mean, I grew up there and then, you know, I didn't have the money to go anywhere else and I didn't want to go to school in the first place. So, you know, the second I got the opportunity to fly out here to SF, I was like, "Okay, it's over. I'm leaving. It's over." I love it. Just getting started.
Well, Victor, thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down. Fantastic to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back this year. Good luck. Yeah, guys, have a good one. Cheers.
Up next, we have the anti-fraud company. If you hate fraud, you're going to love this company. Alex from the anti-fraud company uses... We got to ask him about those bears. Oh, yeah. Fake bear attacks.
Yeah, this is a big opportunity. Yesterday on the show, we were talking about an insurance scam where individuals dressed up in full bear costumes with fake bear claws and vandalized a Rolls-Royce Ghost from 2010 and then filed an insurance claim, which was then disproven by, I believe, some sort of biologist who knew about bears and what they look like on camera and was able to debunk it.
We were able to debunk it too, because it looked ridiculous. Anyway, we have Alex from the anti-fraud company back on TBPN here for the Teal Fellowship Giga Stream. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing? Great to see you. Suited up. Suited up. Fantastic. Looking sharp. I cannot look like a fraudster when I'm catching fraudsters. Have you been dailying a suit? Not every day. Only when we're doing formal things. Yes, indeed.
So, you've been on the show before, but sort of reintroduce the company and the shape of the business and how you think this will play out. Then I want sort of the update on where things are, what traction looks like, how you're actually applying the technology, and then I'm sure there'll be a ton of follow-on questions.
Yeah. So it's very simple. We're building AI models to detect fraud when it happens, and then we go and sue the fraudsters, and we only make money on contingency when we actually get a recovery for the government. We're able to keep fifteen to thirty percent under these whistleblower laws.
Interesting. Yeah. And have you received a whistleblower bounty yet, or is that something that's a goal for the next year or two?
That is a goal. Maybe not for the next year or two because the US legal system is quite slow. So it might take three to four years before we see our first dollar of revenue actually.
Okay. So how much can you pull forward? I know that the plan is to use AI, but how much can you pull forward by just rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself or hiring humans to sort of follow the same process? Is this a problem that can only be attacked with AI like a recommendation feed? Like you could never curate like the TikTok feed for every individual on that platform without AI, but you can certainly, you know, go and take a photo instead of using AI. How dependent is...
this on on AI uh from the very first project
Right, so I would say that people have always been able to find fraud manually, but usually either they luck into it or they had a tip from somebody on the inside. And we're sort of trying to eliminate that bottleneck. Essentially, we want to find the fraud using AI because we're essentially building the Palantir of fraud detection. We're tapping into all these sources of data, and once we have a good idea of what's going on, then we'll send out human investigators again, go talk to sources, but we want to be going outbound. We don't want to have to wait for people to come to us because that's just less efficient. When there's 600 billion dollars in fraud, you're not going to get tips for most of it. And if you want to solve it, then this is sort of the way you have to go.
I remember during the COVID stimulus checks, there was someone who got a check for a company. What were those called, the stimulus checks? It was specifically for business loans.
SBA loans, something like that. But those loans, one of them was just called like Ford Raptor LLC, and then someone dug into it and lo and behold, like someone set up a fake LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor. And that one seemed extremely obvious. But I'm wondering how much is available in terms of public records versus stuff that you plan on doing FOIA requests for to get new sources to comb over.
That's a great question. So we use... this sort of stems off of like the OSINT community, open source intelligence.
Which is where people go around and they look at publicly available data. And when you're doing pure OSINT, you're only using again open-source stuff that's publicly available. That limits you. So we do get closed sources too, but I guess we want to start there. We view it like a funnel. So starting with the open-source information lets us cast the widest net. Of course, some of it we're going to need to do other things like you mentioned. FOIA is one way that you can get private information, but it's really like you have to know again what you're requesting from the government or what sort of private data source you want to buy or what human you want to go out and talk to. And so to get the high-level view, you do need to be essentially just ingesting a bunch of stuff. So one analogy we like to make is the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? There's like five blind men and they're each touching a different part of the elephant. The guy who's touching the legs thinks it's a tree. The guy who's touching the trunk thinks it's a rope, right? Fraud is kind of like this. It always leaves traces, but it's somewhat difficult to put them back together. And that's why we just want to have as many different essentially like sensors on the government databases, on contracts, on all these data sets. And that gives us a sort of a good look into what's going on. Then we ontologize it, run it through models, make graphs and see if it matches on to any known patterns of fraud that we're searching for.
How many projects are you guys taking on at any one point? Because I'm sure every single day there's like new ideas, new opportunities. Sounds like a very, very big market, unfortunately.
Quite a few projects at a time. And again, we're just looking everywhere. I mean, like you mentioned, Small Business Administration is a great place to look with all these loans, defense, just anywhere the government spends money. There is undoubtedly going to be people who are doing it in an unethical way. Oh, absolutely, healthcare. Yes. I mean, like we spend trillions on healthcare. We spend trillions on defense. There's a lot of stuff going on in these places.
And what's going on in Sacramento right now? Is there some new legislation that's trying to make it harder to do journalism around fraud? Did I see that?
I believe so. I think this was a response to Nick Shirley, I believe.
I think it's called the Nick Shirley.
I don't know if it's actually called that, but that's what people on the internet are calling it.
Over the break, over the holiday break.
Yes. No, that's my understanding. Obviously, Nick first did like the big expose about the daycares in Minnesota which were getting funded by Medicaid or something of that sort. And so that also helped drive a lot of awareness and interest in our company as well because I mean it's just sort of visceral. I guess first there was DOGE where people just got really mad about how their money was being spent and then the daycare sort of was the next step. And I think there's just a big anti-fraud moment in the United States these days where people are just upset about their dollars aren't going far enough, right? I mean like at 600 billion dollars a year. That's like 7, 8% of the federal budget. So that means like a good chunk of your hard-earned tax dollar just being stolen by people who are contracting with the government in the wrong way. And I mean we need to restore trust in our institutions. We need to have good governance, have people have faith in our institutions. And I think that again aligning the incentives, having sort of private actors come in and do this and rewarding them when they're able to claw back money for taxpayers. Most of the money that does claw back will go back to the Treasury and to the taxpayers. I think this is kind of a no-brainer.
How do you think about the actual application of AI tools and models in this particular case? I understand that you're sort of creating a database or mirror, a data lake of all the different sources. But then do you need a bunch of examples and to fine-tune a model? Do you just need to load examples of red flags into the context window? How far down are you on like the AI research side of understanding the problem? Because I can imagine like with a frontier model you can go and if you give it a lot of examples and data points you could potentially just one-shot like a detection and then it's just applying it at scale is the problem. But how are you thinking about applying the actual technology?
So there are essentially two steps here though. The first step is that a lot of this data is unstructured. A lot of this is documents and so LLMs really speed that up. It's sort of getting structured entities out of the unstructured data and then we ontologize this. We have like this company has this contract has this relationship with this employee, etc. We build sort of this ontology knowledge graph like thing and then we have the second layer, the rules model. Essentially my co-founders are both lawyers, have a legal background. They've been working on sort of the fraud issue in the legal sphere. And so they know what that looks like. And with their input and with their expertise, we're able to essentially develop this rules model, this rules layer, compare that to what we're seeing in the real world and flag things that look like violations in real time or at least stuff that could be violations and we need to get more information on.
Did you drop out? Because if you have two lawyer co-founders, did they drop out? Like what's the story?
I'm the dropout. My co-founders have JDs unfortunately and they're also a bit older so they're not eligible for the Thiel Fellowship unfortunately, but I did drop out of Brown in 2025 to work at Palantir and then start this company.
That's great. That's great. Well, good luck and thank you for everything that you do.
We have 11 full-time employees, but we're hiring engineers. If you're an AI engineer that wants to work on this problem, visit anti-fraudcomp.com and we'd love to work with you.
It's a great name.
Well, good luck out there. The good fight and let us know when you catch a big culprit so you can come on and tell the story because I'm sure it'll be riveting.
Yes, indeed. Thanks, fellas.
We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
It would be funny if he was investigating a company to have the founder on.
Oh, we're interviewing them and then Alex joins the call.
Sort of a, yeah, the catch a predator.
That's what you want to do with fraud. This is a new media thing. This is the new media opportunity.
New media for pump and dumps and schemes and all sorts of stuff and rug pulls that inadvertently happened during the NFT and crypto boom because there were a number of founders who went on shows and then it was revealed. I mean, the famous one is Joe Weisenthal and some Bloomberg reporters talking to SBF, I believe, on Odd Lots, and they asked him like, 'So, this is like a black box that you put money in, you just get more money out.' And he was like, 'Yeah, exactly. Exactly.' He was like...
I'm pretty sure it was Odd Lots with... Yeah, I know Joe was on that podcast with SBF. And yeah...
And he basically describes a Ponzi scheme.
This is crazy. SBF and Matt Levine, Matt Levine on...
And Matt Levine asks like, so he describes a Ponzi scheme and SBF basically just says like exactly, like that's why it's good. It's like you put more money in and then it grows and then it's this magical system. He was like describing like crazy DeFi schemes. It was a rough time. It was a crazy time. But we lived through it and we became stronger in the process. We do have our next guest.
Yes. April 27th, 2022. Yes.
And so just six months later, everything would...
It was a wild, wild time. Well, we have Nick from EveryTicker in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV room. Nick, how are you doing?
Pretty good. How are you?
We're great. Thanks so much for taking the time. Great to meet you.
Here you are the youngest ever Thiel fellow. Is that true?
Wow. That's amazing. So, are you dropping out of...
You can retire now. You should drop out of the Thiel Fellowship now.
Yeah. I'm dropping out of high school. It's a pretty crazy experience.
Wow. Congratulations. What have you done to date where you get identified and chosen for an opportunity like this?
Yeah. So, the main thing I've been working on for the past year or so is EveryTicker. And I'll start with the problem that we're solving. It's that the vast majority of the US equity market is in the small, mid, and micro cap stocks, but Wall Street only covers the mega and large cap stocks. So what we do is we use LLM to generate high-quality research on every single US stock, including the ones that Wall Street doesn't cover.
Interesting. Okay. So, like the big stocks would have an equity research report from Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. These are the 20-page PDFs that you see come out every quarter or so with a buy, sell, hold. Are you offering financial advice? Like who is the end consumer of this if it's some small or micro cap?
So our philosophy is that we explicitly do not offer any sort of financial advice. We don't give a buy, sell or hold recommendation. Since from talking to my users, I find that they want to use their experience and evaluate the stocks themselves. So what we do is we aggregate and synthesize all of this research. We come up with a thesis and then we let the end consumer decide for themselves whether it's a stock that they're interested in.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then what about the business model? Is this a subscription? I know if you want those Goldman Sachs equity research reports, you got to pay a pretty penny. How much does it cost to get an EveryTicker report on a smaller micro cap?
So, right now all of our 5,000 reports are completely free. Eventually we want to transition into a subscription model, but right now we just want to grow as fast as possible.
That makes sense.
Love it. How do you think about competing with LLMs over time? I'm sure people are doing it. People are doing this where they say like, act like a Goldman equity research analyst, analyze this company, blah blah blah. You can prompt your way to it right now. It'll probably get easier over time. Yeah. So how are you thinking about that dynamic over time? And I guess like how do you expand the product? I'm assuming that's where you'd go.
So for our competitive advantage, you know, if you ask ChatGPT to write you an equity report on say Apple, yeah, it will generate you something that's decently surface level, but I would not say that it's as high quality as an analyst. So our competitive moat is that we have an agentic system that is fine-tuned specifically for this task. It acts like an actual analyst. And then we have all sorts of different data feeds that are proprietary. Sure. And as for the product, this is just the starting point. We want to get really good at the specific niche of high-quality research reports. Yeah. And then we want to expand to adjacent parts of the research workflow in the future.
Yeah. So is one way to think about what you've built is sort of like an agentic harness on top of the frontier LLMs so that you can deliver...
Yeah. But it's running in the background and then just producing the report.
Oh. And then the report's just instantly available at the click of a button.
Correct. Not even at a click of a button. We pre-generate all of the reports. So, you can just search a stock and it's there.
It's already there. Got it. And then you're probably putting those on some sort of cron job that runs every quarter or every month or something. How did you kind of stumble into this opportunity? Were you investing a bunch yourself and just kind of struggling to find great research on some of these smaller names?
So, in seventh grade, I convinced my parents to open a Fidelity account for me and I just instantly fell in love with the stock market. I really liked the idea of it and I quickly got into fundamentals-focused investing and learned from like Warren Buffett and that type of philosophy. And over the summer of eighth grade I was looking into smaller cap stocks because I think that's where a lot of the opportunities are. There's more mispricings there, right? And I realized that you can use LLM to generate decently high quality research on all these smaller stocks. And so I just built a quick MVP in three days, published it, and then I found that so many people found value in it. So I just started scaling it from there.
Have you thought about what you're going to do with the Thiel Fellowship money? I know some previous Thiel fellows that have made angel investments very successfully. Do you play... is there something in your mind that wants to potentially dip your toe into the hedge fund world or actually managing a portfolio?
Maybe. Yeah, I don't think I would do that. In the short term, I think it would probably just go to paying my server costs and things like that. I'll be moving to San Francisco, so also things like rent and things like that, but if there's any opportunities that I see, I would definitely be interested in that.
Do you have a team yet? Have you built out an executive team of grizzled 60-year-olds yet? I imagine that that's the next step for you.
No, right now I think that just being a solo founder is pretty good. It allows me to move super fast.
That's very cool. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Was it through EveryTicker?
Actually, no. In fifth grade, from fifth grade to seventh grade, I built a Roblox game. It was tens of thousands of lines of code. I was spending five hours every day. It ended up being a complete flop, but I did make a bit of money from it.
Oh, there you go. Amazing. That's great. What advice would you give to young people who want to invest in the stock market? Where should they start?
Yeah. I think that I personally would advise fundamentals-focused long-term investing. I think a lot of people get carried away by these like, you know, super volatile stocks and all of these moonshot opportunities. I think it's important to stay grounded in where the real value is.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's interesting. What goes into a great equity research report? Can you share a little bit about differentiation? What I always find interesting personally is the research reports that can sort of contextualize a company in its broader competitive set in the market. But what do you think makes for like a good flavor, like the qualitative elements that go into something that's readable, digestible, informational, effective, and ultimately satisfactory to the user?
Yeah, the qualitative element is one of the most important things and it's one of my competitive advantages because I know exactly what the user wants. I'm one of my users and I talk to a lot of my users to see what they want. So the research report is... I take that into account. So you know, as you said, you have to contextualize it in its broader industry and the goal of the research report is that after reading this 10-minute report you'll be able to understand exactly where the company is, its competitive advantages, its moats, you know, like its trajectory and you should be able to determine if it's something that you want to invest in or not.
How do you think about the tells of LLM writing? You're absolutely right. It's not this, it's that. Those like stylistic flourishes, the contrastive parallelism that annoys tech insiders because it reads as LLM generated and that reads as maybe subpar. But what are you actually seeing from users? Do they like that quality of writing? Are they looking for a different stylistic tone in these research reports?
So I personally am quite annoyed by that. And so I have a method of making things sound very human. So you know, from talking to some of my users, one of their first questions is how do you have so many research reports? And you know, they don't even realize that it's LLM or AI. So yeah, the language in our research reports is much more human than some of the other AI stuff you see out there.
I love it. I love it. I won't ask you to divulge the secret but good luck. It seems like it's going very well and congratulations on the Thiel Fellowship. Great to meet you. Great to meet you and excited to follow the journey. Come back on whenever there's a milestone. We'd love to talk to you again.
Yeah. Thank you so much for your time.
Have a great day. Talk to you soon.
Here's a micro cap stock that might be making a breakout move. Spirit Airlines. They potentially are getting a payout from the US government to the tune of $500 million in rescue funding. The money would come with equity warrants that could make government majority owner of struggling discount carrier. I know you're not a fan of Spirit Airlines, Jordi.
I'm not a... I've never flown Spirit.
Oh, it's bad. It's real bad. It's real, real bad. You have to pay for everything. You have to pay for where you board and if you get a water bottle, if you can go to the bathroom, they charge you for everything.
But it allows them for the bathroom.
Yeah. You get charged for water, too.
You get charged for water.
Unless you tell them that you need it for an emergency, then they'll give it to you for free.
Yeah. But it allows them to advertise very, very low headline prices. So, if you're looking for LA to Las Vegas, you'll see something like $50 and you're like, that's impossible. And because like you actually cannot just get through the plane because even for a carry-on sometimes they'll charge. I believe, I don't know. A lot of this is just my memory from a decade ago. But the Trump administration is looking to invest as much as $500 million in Spirit Airlines to fund the discount carrier's exit from bankruptcy. The government money would take form of a senior loan with equity warrants that would come with it. Eventually owning a majority stake in Spirit, which has struggled with high operating costs, stiff competition, and surging jet fuel costs amid the Iran war. Well, we will follow that story more in the future, but we have our next guest returning to the show, Ishan Gupta from Juicebox. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Hello. I'm doing awesome.
Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you. Introduce yourself and the company.
Yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of Juicebox. We are an AI recruiting platform and we help companies find and engage talent using LLMs. We build agents that will go out there, find the right people for every role you're trying to fill and get them into your process.
Okay. We have a friend who's an executive at a big tech company. He's been getting absolutely spammed with new outreach from what appears to be a new Gmail account that has been created. And what's so remarkable about this cold outreach is that it even nails the sort of like cringe footer that says like, you know, do not print this for the environment's sake and like, you know, a little quote and it doesn't feel just like a prompt box shot in there. There's a huge variety, but it hasn't been successful. He's annoyed by it. So, how do you think about actually targeting the outreach so that you're not annoying potential new hires?
Of course. Yeah. I think the main problem, so the exec side is almost like the extreme side of it because they're getting like so much outreach anytime an exec is available and everyone's kind of spamming them. The thing is that for the average role, the best way to guarantee that you're reaching out to the right people is to spend more time on the search. What ends up happening in organizations today is that there's a hiring manager who really understands what they're looking for and then there's sort of these pattern matching that happens afterwards where talent teams are basically relying on these like really hard filters like, oh, I'm going to reach out to every software engineer at Google. That's not a smart strategy, right? What LLMs are able to do is they truly understand... it's like LLMs are able to truly understand what makes someone successful in a role and try to actually find people who are good at that. And instead of just pattern matching based on what company you're at or what job title you're at, we'll actually go in there, we'll analyze your real work product, we'll see what you're doing on GitHub, what are you doing on different platforms, what companies you've been at, and develop a more deeper understanding of who's going to be affected and then reach out to the right person so that in fact like reduces spam.
Yeah. Let's flip it around to the person that's looking for a job. They want to get spammed with great offers. What should they be doing? Because there's a lot of software engineers where they can't contribute publicly because they work for an important company. There's a lot of folks who their work happens behind the scenes and maybe they are sharing it on LinkedIn. But can your scrapers reach into LinkedIn? Should they have a personal website and then, you know, put that in some sort of robots.txt and web crawler filter so that they get indexed properly? Like how can job seekers show up in results more aggressively at a time when more people are looking for jobs more aggressively than ever?
Essentially put your work product out there. Talk about what you're working on. Putting out blogs, putting out open source contributions, putting out any projects that you have worked on, those things help because...
Would three hours of live daily content help?
I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, it ends with an acquisition.
Yeah, that's true.
Just talk about AI comms for three hours a day and yeah, you turn some heads, raise some eyebrows. Anyway, what about... so are you purely focused on technical roles because you keep coming back to like GitHub contributions, breaking down example work products, and I'm just wondering for someone who's in more of a knowledge role or they work in PR or marketing or biz dev or finance, like should they be educating people? Should they be explaining their strategies? Like if they're not a natural writer or they don't just have a piece of like a side, an obvious side project that they can open source, how can they show up to the AI recruiters of the future, your company included?
Yeah, of course. So we started out more tech focused because that's the industry we understood the most and we started out working with tech startups and we started working with companies like Ramp, Scale, all these kinds of companies. And then eventually what has happened in the last year is we've grown way, way past that. So like now tech does not represent the majority of our customer base. We have more than 5,000 customers and a lot of them are larger enterprises and they're looking for all sorts of people. So what we are able to do is we're able to join profile data and your experiences on all the company data that we have. So essentially if you put a little bit of information about yourself on different platforms, we're able to take that information, enrich that and do a deeper research on every single company, at every single skill you've had, everything you've worked on and build a better understanding of exactly what your area of expertise is and then make better matches using that. And it applies across industries. So for example, we have people looking for traveling nurses in the Midwest. Very different type of role. But what we can do is we can look up profiles. There are registries available for nurses on the internet as well. We'll look up those profiles. We'll understand the different places you've worked at. We'll try to build a good understanding of what these different environments are, what kind of people do these other companies hire, where you've been at in the past, and then make a good inference on whether or not they are fit for the role you're looking for.
Why do you think there hasn't been a big, like a decacorn scale outcome in recruiting tech to date?
I would actually argue against that. Like LinkedIn's a pretty...
Indeed is a pretty massive outcome.
Holdings, 70 billion enterprise value, bro. Come on.
But that's kind of where I'm going. Isn't that like a holding company?
Staffing and recruiting firms.
Yeah.
So more labor intensive, but I can imagine...
It's not the database market. Let's just be like...
It feels like you could have, if you execute properly, there could be an outcome closer to that holding company that you just mentioned than some of these other kind of just like recruiting tech platforms.
Yeah. I guess like where's the source of economic power and lock-in and scale that would allow for a really, really broad outcome here as opposed to, okay, there's a whole bunch of AI recruiting firms and companies sort of bid them all down and there's not insanely high margins, good businesses but not the hundred billion dollar outcome. Like have you been thinking through that? I know it's early, but have you been thinking through like what does this look like at mega scale?
Of course, yeah, we've thought a lot about that. The thing is that the main value in the recruiting industry always accrues in the services layer. So far it has never accrued as much in the software layer because it's really actually the work that goes into finding people. It's the ability to search for the right person and get them into any role. That is what people pay for, right? And so far there has been no way of actually automating that because you cannot do that. It requires judgment. It requires actually understanding what someone's working on or what their capabilities are. That is exactly what agents are able to do. So this is really the first time when you have a massive opportunity in a market that's incredibly important and you're able to build that with LLMs because it's just not been possible until now. And most companies have traditionally in recruiting tried to target this software layer which is like, hey, we'll build another CRM, we'll build another ATS and all of these different platforms, but the main value always occurs in being able to find the right person. That is what someone wants to pay for and that is exactly what we're able to do with LLMs.
Very cool. Well, yeah. I remember first discovering that just everyday recruiting services companies could be big because hey, there's a public company called Heidrick. Heidrick.com.
It's just a public... I've never heard of...
Wow. Good business. That's a very, very big opportunity for you.
Congratulations on the Thiel Fellowship. Thank you so much for coming on, breaking it down for us and hope to see you soon. I'm sure there's a lot of milestones in the near future. Great rest of your day.
Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome.
Up next, we are running one minute behind, but we're going to catch up because we have Derpetual next. Building infrastructure to enable derivatives trading on any asset. Interesting. Okay. Derpetual. Antoni Kiszka.
Before we go there, let's pull up this post.
From none other than who?
Than Ben Horitz. Not Ben Horowitz.
Ben Horowitz with the anti-Grammarly. Mess up your emails with AI. If you're worried about people accusing you of using AI to write your emails, use Sincerely Misspelled to use more AI to add misspelling.
Yes. It condenses down that long boring email that you were about to send that says to whom it may concern, I wanted to reach out to express my interest in connecting regarding potential synergies between organizations, and it just dumbs it down to wanted to reach out, let's talk. And this is news flash, this is how people actually email and communicate when it's person to person and I think everyone would be better off with a little bit tighter communication methods especially in the age of AI. So I don't... this seems like a joke or a drop but I would imagine this being a good product and I think people might actually pay for this.
I like... there are so many times...
I think it's actually a real product.
I hope so. They're going to charge five bucks a month.
Alex Lieberman said, such a good viral drop idea, but I think it's not... I would not expect this to go away. I think this is a business and I think this will be successful and I think this is a valuable tool and it's something that probably it would be hard for Google to justify baking into Gmail. It's like it is a little bit counterpositioned against...
Yeah, it's a tough pitch.
It's a tough pitch to be, hey...
We want to help our users get more typos.
It might be a good April Fool's Day joke that they could bring in and then lead...
More, because Ben did it first.
Ben did it first now. So, good luck to Ben and sincerely, we'll check in with him later. But we have our next guest from Derpetual in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra. How are you? Welcome to the show.
Hey guys, it's great to be here.
Thank you so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.
I'm Antoni and I'm building a company called Derpetual and we want to create the derivatives exchange for everything.
So basically we created a new kind of derivative and we want to use this type of derivative to bring derivatives to, you know, assets beyond the top 1,000 that exists now.
Okay. Is there any crypto involved?
