Verizon vs Salesforce, Signull Joins, Blue Origin's Test, Wild Tech Devices, Robot Marathon

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You're watching TBPN and today is Monday, April 20th, 2026. So, we are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Absolutely incredible edition of the Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, I saw these hit the app, but they're in print today, Monday, April 20th. There's two articles from two tech CEOs that run companies that are almost identically valued. Salesforce is I think 150 billion. Verizon's 190 billion. They're right in that sweet spot.

And I'm assuming they have the exact same point of view, kind of same market outlook.

They have exactly opposite points of view. And I thought it was interesting seeing what a victim of the SaaS apocalypse has to say about AI, and then what does someone who is the most resilient to the SaaS apocalypse have to say, and potentially is like, let me in. I want some of the drama. I want the smoke. And so Marc Benioff is who I'm talking about at Salesforce. So he says the software bears are all wrong about Salesforce. We had a bear, but it was too terrifying. Yeah, it was too scary. So we skip it. But he says, 'People think we have our back against the wall, but customers aren't replacing offerings with AI. They aren't replacing Salesforce with AI. They aren't ripping it out.' Of course, everyone will say, 'Well, yet.' But let's dig into Marc Benioff's argument and how he's processing the SaaS apocalypse and what he's going to do about it.

Crazy opening. Marc Benioff has some problems. His enterprise software company Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that Wall Street thinks may get decimated by artificial intelligence. Its business model has centered on selling software to large companies on a per employee basis. But many of those firms are expected to downsize as AI agents become increasingly proficient at performing real world tasks. It's a daunting double bind and it isn't even the worst case scenario. Salesforce stock is down a mere 28% year-to-date. The hardest hit software as a service companies are down about twice that much on similar fears. But Benioff thinks the bears have it wrong about the SaaS apocalypse thesis generally and especially about Salesforce. AI, he says, is making Salesforce more valuable to its customers than ever. The leading AI labs couldn't replace what Salesforce offers even if they wanted to and they would rather partner with them for now anyway. Nor could...

Yeah. He's like, I dare you. I dare you. I dare you. He's... nor could... I wish we had Benioff on right now. Yeah, it's a joy to speak with him. But continuing, nor could customers easily vibe code their own sales management software that could compete with Salesforce on security, compliance, and other vital features. 'People think we have our back against the wall when in fact the opportunity has never been greater,' Benioff said in an interview. An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been developing and pushing its own AI tools for years. By the end of this year it plans to unveil a new AI platform that automatically studies its users and takes actions on their behalf. Code name Agentforce.

H. It's kind of cool to put agent in the name instead of just Albert. Agent Albert. Well, they had Einstein, right? So Albert Einstein is their whole shtick here.

Agentforce is the culmination of an effort that began three years ago when Benioff, galvanized by the debut of ChatGPT, instituted a standing Saturday meeting to accelerate Salesforce AI efforts. So Saturday standup, everyone. An earlier flagship product of that push, Agentforce, has been somewhat slow to gain traction. Launched in 2024, it is used by 23,000 customers of a total base of 150,000. So what is that, a little under 20% of the customer base is using agents they're building.

Remember Jason Lemkin came on the show and he was like, I use Agentforce, it's solid. Yeah. Like he's like, it won us back a customer that like we weren't reaching out to and it made me money. Yeah. So he was an Agentforce enthusiast.

And so Salesforce's yearly revenue growth at 10% is down somewhat from recent years. But interestingly, the deceleration in Salesforce's revenue growth started back in 2022, maybe even a little bit earlier. If we scroll down on this image, you can see back in 2012 they were growing 36%. Then as recently as 2020 they were growing 28.7%. There was acceleration in 2022 to 24%. But then 2023, 18%, 2024, 11%, 2025, 8%, and then we're actually seeing some reacceleration this year from 8.7 to 9.6 to 10.8. And so it feels like definitely too soon for the SaaS apocalypse narrative to show up in the actual revenue growth rates of these SaaS companies. I pulled together the recent earnings from a variety of public cloud software names, and they're all still growing, which you would expect. I mean, of course, you want to be growing fast and there's a lot of things and there's like the long-term durability of the value of the stock that actually informs enterprise value today. But we're certainly not seeing like, okay, there's so much churn at GitLab, for example, because people are forking it because it's open source and vibe coding on top of it and they don't need to pay GitLab that you would expect GitLab's revenue to actually be shrinking. It's not. GitLab is growing at 23%. Adobe's at 12%. PagerDuty 2.7%. Little low, but UiPath at 14%. Box is at 9%, Asana is at 9%. Asana feels like, you know, textbook, like you could just vibe code this. It's a Kanban board, a task list, but it's still growing. Zoom at 5.3%. Snowflake's growing 30%, Workday's at 14.5%, HubSpot's at 20%, Datadog's at 29%, Cloudflare 34%, Monday.com 25%. Like there's really really strong revenue growth across the SaaS category. Of course, the expectations have been very high. So when there's a readjustment in expectations, you see a sell-off in the market. But this idea that the companies aren't growing anymore because they're being replaced so rapidly, that certainly hasn't taken hold just yet. So a partner at Salesforce, an investor at Chicago Capital, has been impressed with some of its recent moves. But what Salesforce really needs, he says, is positive word of mouth from clients talking up the value they derive from its AI products like Jason Lemkin. They need to show revolutionary jumps. Benioff has said Salesforce was destined to be an AI-first company as far back as 2014 when it launched its AI research unit. I didn't realize they had an AI research unit all the way back then. But it makes sense just for like tagging and classifying different records inside the CRM. Still it was caught flatfooted by the arrival of high functioning chat bots in the form of ChatGPT.

Customer super intelligence. Customer super intelligence. I mean, this is funny because a lot of this, the agentic enterprise, it is a little like boring and it's not as sexy as some of the more crazy sci-fi scenarios, but in terms of just incrementally improving the value that is delivered to the customers, it seems like things are doing okay. Early reviews were tepid though. Customers complained of having to spend half their time preparing data so the AI could understand it, limiting the platform's effectiveness. To help fix the problems, Salesforce built a layer into its tech stack that automatically pulls in customer data from external sources and purchased a string of companies that include firms specializing in data management and AI-powered sales. At education company Pearson, agents now autonomously handle queries about order statuses, refunds, and lost access codes for its customers. This has increased the percentage of customer questions that don't involve human interaction by 40%. While Agentforce has been lacking in addressing complex customer problems and those require human touch. David Wemsley, chief digital officer at Pandora Jewelry, said Agentforce hadn't been able to reliably recommend products on its own based on the vague context that customers share through its website. Like, my wife likes dogs. What should I buy her? That's such a funny question, but I mean I guess the natural language interface should be able to find you jewelry based on a love of dogs. Although I think that a lot of people who are dog lovers might have different tastes that appeal to their jewelry like...

Why not just get her a dog or multiple dogs? Yeah, I don't know.

So how does Salesforce's view compare to the Verizon CEO?

So Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Schulman. I don't think he's related to John Schulman, the co-founder of OpenAI and Thinking Machines. But he is stepping into the AI debate. The Wall Street Journal says for a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications' Dan Schulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20 to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years. Which is staggering, staggering. I can put that into some context. He warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still seen as safe today. And he has pushed for more education and reskilling to help workers adapt to intensifying tech disruption.

Put this into context for me. So he's... so this is insane and this is like potentially the most aggressive stance.

I mean there are even... Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year talking about risks to entry-level white collar jobs. Yeah. And Dario, which is like, you know, I would say like on the frontier around being concerned around AI job loss, was not calling for 30% unemployment. Well no, unemployment number 50%, but he's entry-level white collar work. Entry-level white collar work, and that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has 5 to 7 million entry-level white collar workers and the US labor force is 170 million people. And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall unemployment rate would sit somewhere between 6 and 9%. Which is not great. And it's obviously deserving of intervention. But it's far from the 20 to 30% outlined by Dan Schulman. And it wouldn't even be... even if the Dario scenario, 50% of early stage white collar work unemployment that happens, you're still below COVID, below the Great Depression. And I think that there's a whole bunch of government interventions that could offset that pretty quickly. Like 20 to 30% is truly like the do-nothing. The government never engages. There's never any sort of incentive to keep hiring people and there's this like fast takeoff in AGI and also humanoids which I think people are worried about. But if you look at the deployment rate of self-driving cars, people have been saying that all the truck drivers were going to go out of a job. And you know this is a very very slow takeoff. The number of self-driving cars on the road is well below 1% of overall cars on the road still. And this is just the case across the board. I was listening to a podcast with someone who was very worried about unemployment internationally and he was saying that AI could upend the Philippines because the Philippines does a lot of customer service. Which we haven't seen at all yet. No, none of this is showing up in the unemployment data. It's not showing up in US unemployment data yet. I mean, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be aware of this stuff, but it's certainly not showing up just like the SaaS apocalypse is not showing up in revenue yet. AI unemployment is not showing up in any of the employment statistics yet. But this individual was on a podcast saying something along the lines of AI could be devastating to the Philippines economy because the Philippines is very dependent on customer service. And the stat he quoted was that 90% of the Philippines economy is based around customer service and customer support and handling people on the phone. And I was like, 90%, that seems really, really high. Like, they have to do other things in the Philippines because sure, you go to work at your customer service job, but then you go home and you buy food and you live in an apartment. There must be real estate agents. There must be home builders. There must be people who work on roads. There must be doctors. There must be lawyers. Like, an economy requires more than just a single... 90% feels incredibly concentrated. So I looked it up and I was like, how big of an issue is... how big of an industry is customer service in the Philippines? Like, is it 90%? That feels high. Maybe it's 50, maybe it's 40. It was like 6%, 7%. It's really really small. Now, it's like huge in terms of like, you know, you don't want it to go away.

You don't want it to go away, of course. And you do want a number of industries that are flourishing. And that is probably more concentrated than many other countries. It might be the country with the highest percentage of customer service intensity in the economy but it's not 90% of their economy. And so there's a little bit of this like people don't seem to go back to the raw numbers because if you go back and you try and understand like okay what would 30% unemployment really look like? Well that's like Great Depression level with no intervention, no action from the Fed, no action from the government and it seems a little bit crazy. So I can't tell if this is just like saying the biggest number, but there's a little bit of that going on here where if you want to grab headlines and you go out and you say, 'Okay, well, someone predicted 5% unemployment. I'm going to predict 10% and then I'll jump to the forefront of the discussion.' That seems to be a way to get earned media. But let's unpack a little bit more of his discussion because we will see if there's a way to steelman his take around 20 to 30% unemployment. Schulman said, coached in the blunt AI talk, is a warning for other CEOs: be candid about the coming disruption or risk a public backlash. 'It's a very difficult time and everyone knows this,' Schulman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

So I think I don't even agree with that stance. Everyone that's being candid or even talking about it is immediately getting backlash anyway. So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best you can is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20 million career transition and retraining fund for the age of AI when the company began laying off 13,000 workers.

Greater unemployment than in the Great Depression. And I'm going to, you know, he's taking the piece of duct tape. You know, there's water pouring out. He's... I know exactly what you're talking about. And to be clear, to be clear, this is not our view. Like this is not our view at all. No, but I mean at the same time, like they did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And a $20 million career transition retraining fund is great. Like that is good. Like this is a good thing. But he says the warning... this is from the journal. The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth, but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses. 'A lot of people are saying AI is coming, we're going to run out of jobs. It's exactly the opposite,' Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting if all the economists wind up developing a consensus around that. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI. 'Though some roles will be replaced, there will be other jobs created.' In the short term though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces. Block, which cut nearly half of its staff, predicted other companies would soon follow suit. A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will shape roughly half of US jobs in two to three years and that up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright. Again, reshaped and eliminated would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this BCG report, you're probably looking at like again maybe a transition of like six, seven, eight, nine, 10% unemployment while there's an adjustment period. Many Americans fear that will happen too. In a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,400 adults, 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year. And so the average American is dooming for sure. 'CEOs are not thinking about this the right way,' said Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. 'They should be very candid with them and paint a big picture.' Schulman's big picture also included sweeping job cuts. The 13,000 layoffs he announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever but necessary to make Verizon more efficient. He said altogether he's seeking to cut $9 billion of costs. Verizon said its layoffs were not related to AI. The carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic, way too process-oriented as opposed to outcomes-oriented. And the CEO saying, 'This is already happening in a big way, but the layoffs we're doing are just that we're bloated.'

Yeah. So, Verizon has 90,000 employees and they laid off 13,000, so maybe like a little over 10% RIF. Verizon's a weird one because the stock is basically completely flat over the last... it's actually up 15% year to date and it is an incredibly stable stock and it's also just like should not be a victim of the SaaS apocalypse because they own spectrum allocation. They own cell towers. Exactly. And that's just... or they have like very very long-term lease agreements. Yeah. And I mean there is the case that like you know if Starlink direct to cell gets really good... even I mean even Elon's saying like it's not going to be that good inside buildings like it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden there's a new technology that's just wildly disruptive. Like maybe if you're like somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi-Fi when you're inside, like you could cut the cord with Verizon, but that just feels so far away for something that is like a pretty key utility in most people's lives. Like their water bill or electricity bill, like their phone internet bill is like pretty... it's like one of the probably the least elastic things. Like they will just keep paying and stick around. Now they might move to Sprint or AT&T and there's going to be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly after all, but it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily.

So in meetings he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after... this is the future. Trust me, I used it once. Schulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all-hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary so to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. Just dig your own grave. He's literally the title of this article that's saying he's saying AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it in tech. In tech we're starting to... you know, every company's adopting this technology at a rapid rate. But everyone's like hey this you know basically like jobs aren't tasks right. This sort of narrative is building like we need to figure out how to... we've built a bunch of very useful tools and they are going to have powerful effects in our economy. Yeah. But we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear-based approach is not working. And meanwhile comes in. He's like AI's coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary. Write your obituary. It's so not helpful. And they're not even doing AI related job cuts. No. I love... So, I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle. I love that he just comes in and just immediately starts blackmailing. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackmailing. So, like, do you think this is a setup for a much deeper layoff than they've done historically? I don't know. Oh, I mean it's possible, but I think that they would need to do some serious like AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out like I mean I would be surprised about those 90,000 like I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. Like what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like I just do tasks all day long. Like form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet and I email it to somebody. Like that type of job, yeah, that's probably going to be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization. But for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're working on bigger projects than just throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem. At the same time, who knows? Maybe it's 50, maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Schulman and they weren't half bad. He said like it or not, we live in the AI... I happen to like it. I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or like when fire was first invented. How cool would that be? He continued, we're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that. I like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Schulman in acknowledging AI's potential for disruption. Others have also recently sounded warnings. 'There's real risk that artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality,' BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month. Last month, Jamie Dimon recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. 'It may happen faster than we can adjust to it.' Schulman said AI may reach human-level capability known in the industry as AGI by the end of next year, on the early side of most industry predictions. So end of 2027 for AGI isn't that crazy. I mean Sequoia has an event right now, AI Ascent. The whole keynote slide is AGI is here and so people are going back and forth on that. But I think it's not that crazy to imagine very human-level AI by the end of 2027. That doesn't seem impossible whatsoever. The question is just like how much will this be additive? How will the government respond? What will the actual effect on the labor market be? And I think people are digging into that a lot right now. There's a good podcast on this on Odd Lots with Alex Imbs. He's a professor at University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. Highly recommend you go check that out if you're interested in going deeper into the labor market. Well, moving on. Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission. AST SpaceMobile, who we've talked about a few times here, Jeff Bezos's rocket company said the satellite from AST was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so, a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit. The launch of the company's New Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the flight, New Glenn's third ever... the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to Earth. A feat only Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved with orbital rockets. But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite the rocket was carrying into orbit for SpaceMobile, a company building a cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post on X, Blue Origin said its rocket delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit, adding that teams were assessing what happened. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit. The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. The stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with New Glenn.

Yeah, I saw some of the AST retail army saying like don't worry, keep holding, keep holding. It's covered under insurance. It seems like very very unfortunate but seems like it's rebounded a little bit. Somewhat to be expected right as Blue Origin figures out their commercial business. Yeah, it traded down like 16% overnight but it's down just 6% today. So a little bit of a rebound. And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here. Yeah. Courtesy Tyler, you dug into why doesn't AST just launch on SpaceX.

Well, so there are two things. I think one thing I thought was interesting is like there's this whole press cycle about it like oh it was like a failure of a launch or something but this has like happened a number of times before like SpaceX in 2024 there was a Falcon 9 that kind of the upper stage like failed and then a few Starlink satellites just went to the wrong orbit. Yeah, basically. And then they're too low and then they just get burned. Yeah, companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it basically. But that happens too. I remember at the beginning of last year there was a launch for a venture-backed space company and you know they basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it. So it's not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back. In 2016, SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket which was crazy. Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of internet.org satellite. The Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon 9 rocket carrying satellite intended to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. So, writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, 'As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning.' This was back in 2016. Referred to as an anomaly by SpaceX engineer, destroyed both the rocket and its cargo. The AMOS-6 satellite which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. 'Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided.' Contrary to Zuckerberg's description, the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Eutelsat, I can't pronounce that, a French satellite company to lease the broadband capability of the AMOS-6, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom. According to Space News, which reviewed Spacecom filings with Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the joint lease cost $95 million over five years. So this like hundred million dollar satellite just blew up on the pad. So lots of different setbacks, but there is one technology that is not having setbacks, which is robotic marathoners. And there's new information. There's a crazy video. I don't know if the video relates to this, but a Chinese robot beat a human best time in a half marathon after a stumble. Tech companies are making progress to fixing humanoid runners' malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing, a humanoid robot half marathon race. The first runner to cross the finish line took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever. Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics, a field American tech leaders, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Tesla's Elon Musk say is the next big thing. Beijing.

This video is pretty wild. Is this the actual... This is one that's failing. Didn't make the half marathon. But you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back. This is cool. It off. Interesting. Which is like very cyberpunk. Wow. That's crazy that you have to load it up with dry ice as well. I like that. About 220 yards from the finish line, the 5'5 Lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in 50 minutes and 26 seconds according to state media. I feel like if you fall down and you're a human in a half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish. This probably still counts. Last month the actual human world record holder from Uganda finished in 57 minutes and 20 seconds in Lisbon, Portugal. Lightning and two siblings from Honor swept the podium. All three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one-time help the champion got. The race penalized the completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under 50 minutes, but it was teleoperated. The Tiankong Ultra, which was developed by Beijing-based lab Ex-Humanoid and won last year's race, more than halved its finish time this year, clocking in at 1 hour and 15 minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive. Like they cut the time in half in just one year. The 13-mile course included more complex terrain than last year, such as slopes, narrow passages, and sharp turns, testing robots' abilities. If you assume an acceleration in progress, eventually one of these humanoids is like running a marathon in like an hour or like 30 minutes. Just like truly insane. Insane speeds. Yeah. I mean, as fast as a Cheeto. Tyler could still take it out, though. I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain. While the US controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains, China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem for humanoid robot bodies. That has been recorded many many times. Well, without further ado, we have Signull here in the TBPN Ultra Dome. Let's bring in Signull, who is launching Sky, an agentic AI home screen, replacing the iPhone app. There he is. With contention-driven intelligence. Dude, I can't believe this long. We've reacted to your posts like so many times. So good to have you.

This has been ridiculous. Yeah. What a wild... I've been watching you guys since day zero. Really? You watched my first episode? Well, because I think we were covering your post would have been making it into like the first episode for sure. You're probably like, 'Why are these two guys in suits reading out my tweets? This is wild.' It was... I tweeted this out a little bit, but I was like, man, when I read that and you guys were reacting to what I posted because I didn't really think about what I posted and you guys analyzed it and I was like, 'Oh my god, this is ridiculous. Holy crap.' Yeah. What did I even write? I don't remember. You have a ton of bangers. They're all good posts. We had a great time. That was the lifeblood of the show. It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about the first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching, what you're... Very smooth, John. I try. I try. Come a long way for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit. Introduce the app, introduce the product, where you want this to go. And I have a ton of questions.

The iPhone home screen is 20 years old. That's two decades. And it's just static icons. Yeah. It roughly speaking it has not really evolved in any one shot. They one shot it. Yeah, that's the steelman. The steelman is like it's good. It's the final form. It's the final form. Some things don't change. We're all going to... We could always do a three-wheel car, five wheel car, six wheel. I mean the thing that I've been pressing on is like you would think you know if I could rewind 2, 3 years I would not expect and knowing how much progress there would be in AI I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the app store and only see LLMs like chat apps. I would expect to see like a variety given just like how many magical experiences people have had a variety of like new products, new Uber, new Instagram. And that's like some argument previous app boom that was like very diffuse. You got Candy Crush and what's the one with the pigs, the Flappy Bird and Angry Birds and like you got all these different apps, Run Keeper and diet products and it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps.

What is your, like, more as, like, a CEO? It sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and, like, are just, like, in an experimental phase. Is that, like, generally the right read?

Burning question: how do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? Will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone, ad-supported?

Hey, there's ads in Apple Maps now. So, Apple...

Yeah. Counter position. I think the interesting thing here is, like, you guys can operate, like, you can kind of wake up and ask yourself, like, what would Apple do if they were, like, truly excited about AI versus, like, seemingly scared of it.

The greatest billboard of all time.

Yeah, the worst ad experience I've ever had as an ad enjoyer was, like, in college I was buying a Kindle and they were like, 'Do you want the ad-supported Kindle for like $100 or the ad-free Kindle for like $120?' And as a college student, I was like, 'I don't think I'll mind ads.' Like, why not? Oh, that's bad. And it's on the home screen when the device is locked, and they're just showing me books that I would never read all the time. So it's terrible targeting. And it's a device that's just, like, sitting around my house all the time, and it kind of looks like, wait, you're reading that? Yeah. Yeah. So if you can avoid that... Yeah. Definitely.

There's a question from the chat. Why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous? I mean, I imagine as you grow the business, like, it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever, but, you know, at some point a journalist will want to know, and I imagine that unless your OPSEC is super tight, it'll come out. Not that it's, like, bad. I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the anon thing?

Yeah, your account must have gone from like a thousand followers to like over a hundred within the first few months of us.

Yeah, you can never dox. I'm sorry. You can never dox. I mean, like, Banksy getting unmasked. Is that good for the brand? Like, you could be taller than John Giga Chad. Everyone just imagine, and it won't be enough, right? We all picture you as a philosopher king of sorts.

Not married to the game. Married to the zeitgeist.

Okay. Take me through iOS development, like current status, because this seems like a really good idea that people would want. I do think people are bored of the grid, and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense, and I think you could deliver a ton of value. But my fear is that Apple's just like, no, that's our real estate. So is there a clear path right now through, like, widgets and the Shortcuts API to actually do interesting things, or am I going to have to, like, sideload a different OS? Like, how consumer-friendly and, like, easy will this be, or will you be bumping up against the walled garden of Apple pretty quickly?

The server-side connections, I totally get. Like, all of that makes sense. You can, like, OAuth with email and use APIs or MCPs. Like, there's a million things you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is, like, how big can the widget be, or can you actually take over the whole home screen?

It's funny because, like, everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then, like, getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right, but, like, it feels like... I'm still in, like, promoter territory, but that's a good place to start. And then you can hopefully make it easier, and then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where, like, you downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like the biggest thing is, like, I just love when, like, these new surface areas are explored. I mean, you mentioned Nikita, but he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating, like, new UX, new experiences on top of, like, what Apple gives you, and it feels like that's really underexplored. Have you thought about trying to build any products within any of the LLM ecosystems, just given that they already have massive existing user bases?

Cook is the pope. He's your pope. Yeah, exactly. We get it. Yeah.

As a probably 12-year-old, it was the beer app. The beer app was good. Just thinking that that was peak humor. What about the I'm Rich app? That was like $10,000. It just showed a picture of a diamond, and it was just like you could just open a picture on your phone. But if you bought that app, you could show people that you just wasted 10K on an iPhone app or whatever. I think it literally maxed out. It was the most expensive app you could possibly type into the App Store.

It's a dream. Like, there's so much... You're doing this the right way because there's another scenario where, like, you could raise a Series A right now. Like, you know, you have a team, you have technology, and the waitlist, like, you'll be able to test things and experiment and learn. Like, there's so much opportunity. What an exciting time. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Great to finally have you on, and congrats again. And maybe next time we'll talk about hot takes.

Oh yeah. What do you think about this AI-powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards?

So John showed me, like, a screenshot. He was showing the website for this this morning, and I didn't realize today is 420. So that's what, like, this is like a 420 joke.

Yeah. Yeah. John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that? I know. I know. But I... John Claw design, man. Claw design. You can do anything. Okay. So you're telling me if I put this in the Wayback Machine and it shows up as of yesterday, it's not a joke because I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. I bet you if they were planning to make a... April 6th, it's in the Wayback Machine. What does it say? It says, let's see. It's loading. It's got blockchain still. I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trend to go as viral as possible. I don't know. We'll have to dig into it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, Signull. Fantastic news and congratulations on the progress. Have fun, and we'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Up next we have Ethan Ding from TexQL. He is the co-founder and CEO here to announce a fundraise to talk about enterprise analytics workflows. I think we had him. Let's check in with the team and make sure that he is here. I believe he is. So let's bring Ethan Ding in from TexQL into the TVP and Ultradome. Ethan, hello. How are you doing?

Hello. How you doing? How's it going? It's good. We have two of you. So please introduce both of you. And it looks like it's being filmed on a, you know, phone camera from 2005. But we're excited to have you on.

No, it's great. We're super excited to have you guys on. Walk us through the history of the company since it's your first time on the show.

What was the first analytics stack? Because if you're pre-GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? Like, what was the initial, okay, there's a stream of data, there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases, like how are you giving the customers value from that?

So walk us through. I mean, you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but what does it actually look like as a group of co-founders going to a customer site? Like, what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high-level pitch, or are you rolling up your sleeves and working on actual integration?

Yeah. Interesting. It's an interesting side of the equation that I guess people don't spend a ton of time talking about. How have you been processing the SaaS apocalypse narrative? Benioff was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted. Although, you know, you could talk about the long term, but the growth, like these companies are still growing even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies.

Interesting. Okay. So that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration.

It's surprising based on the profile of company. That's something you normally expect from like Google or Facebook, like the most mature engineering companies in the world, but you see this effort starting to come from hundred-year-old companies as well. Interesting. Interesting. And is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a net cost savings to having their own system, or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business?

Sure. There's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy where... they're vibe procuring. Yeah. They're vibe procuring.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, your business is growing. You're raising money. Tell us about the latest round.

How much did you raise?

What? This was awesome, guys. I really enjoyed speaking with you both, and thank you for making time while you're hanging out with your customers, and appreciate the perspective. Let's do it again soon, and good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good rest of your day. Up next we have Matt McKinney from Loop. He's the co-founder and CEO raising a big Series C in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV and Ultradome. Matt, how you doing? What's going on, guys? Not too much. Good to have you here. First time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?

Wow.

Yeah. Well, how... I mean, there's a different world when you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like, we're an agentic accounting firm or something, and it feels like this is much more cross-functional. How are you actually positioning the integration? Who's the buyer? How does the business instantiate itself inside of your customer?

Yeah. So what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices, whether things have gotten paid. There's often like multiple versions of a particular invoice, and then you need to plug into bank data to see what's actually moved around or accounting systems. Like how long does it take to integrate, and how key is that? It's... I mean, what's so wild about supply chain? Supply chain is just a network of networks. Yeah. And you've got, you know, a transportation carrier, you've got a supplier. You could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. Some, a lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M&A. And so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take for example the weight and dimensions of a package or shipment. There could be seven different versions of the weight and dimensions for that package. And so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources. We get it from, you know, email, we get it from EDI, we get it from API connection, we get it from Excel spreadsheet, PDF, you name it. It's just really messy, unstructured data. Data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLMs came out. Does... when you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all? Yeah. Are they trying to buy AI, or do they just want a solution? Like how are you thinking about how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch?

Yeah. What is the value of like getting this business to scale? Is there something where you can, you know, optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product at the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of like how the economy is moving? We've seen that from some fintech companies. Like how are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform?