I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by jungle. Assault your position.
Overnight success.
The place.
Right.
Dismissed.
Information.
Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Go. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five.
We are experts.
Founder knowledge.
Five code.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
Fight.
Win.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blades.
That's just wrong.
Right.
Clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
One.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound.
Five good.
Multiple journalists on the horizon.
Denmark.
Founder.
Mike.
You're watching TVPN.
Wow, look at those flashes. Today's Wednesday, February 4, 2026. We are live from the TV Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Ramp's doing a Super Bowl ad. We're doing a Super Bowl ad. Get ready for our Super Bowl. Ramp's in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple days away. This was a very fun project. Do you want to take us through the thesis and sort of what we put together with this? Since I just got all the credit, but I had nothing to do with it basically.
It was a very nice... Let me pull up the ad. Our friend Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic had a very nice post, and he said, 'There's clever, and then there's John Coogan and Jordi Hays at TBPN. Clever. Behold, a masterclass in marketing.' And I had nothing to do with it, and I get the credit. Let's go.
Obviously, Dylan on our team led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. We had done something similar back at Party Round. We ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, etc. It did really well. And so doing this is the final stage in terms of advertising.
Fun fact, Dylan also spoke this week at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Very happy to be partnered with them.
But Kendra Barnett over at Adweek covered our ad.
Yes, of course. And she says the 15-second spot isn't selling anything. It's simply what co-host Jordi Hays calls a love letter to our community. That's really what it is. TVPN is nothing without the community, the people that join the show. Yeah.
We made the 15-second spot in-house. We featured a bunch of our guests.
And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for 5 minutes or 5 hours, your logo made it in here. So yeah, this will be a regional buy. We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was and we bought segments around that. So very excited for Sunday. And I said in Adweek, it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising. The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally just through the content. So why do it?
And we basically did it. I said we believe in doing things purely for fun. So we're certainly having... Some people screenshotted that and texted me that. I thought that was a good quote.
Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. There was another reason beyond fun. I do think it's an important opportunity to introduce the football community to technology, to business. And that's really my goal with this ad. Hopefully let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl, technology, it exists.
We got to raise awareness for technology and business. Let's play the ad.
If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test.
I think it's super important and awesome.
This is going to be one of a 100-bagger.
You guys are the number one podcast in the world.
The gong hit. This is great.
Short, sweet, and we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday.
Yes. ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. We have some massive news from ElevenLabs coming up on the show at 11:30. Let's pull up the Linear lineup. I will tell you that Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents, and we have a stacked show. Andrew Reed's back on the show. Mati from ElevenLabs is coming on. We have Gergely from The Pragmatic Engineer coming on.
Super pumped for that one.
Dara from Uber's coming on. Mitchell Green, one of our close friends, is coming on to talk about all sorts of stuff going on in the market. And then we have an awesome lightning round lined up. So, is there anything else we should cover about the Super Bowl, or should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage? Because we're not the only ones running ads. Lots of tech people.
Wild, wild morning. Yes. I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took the vibe war and were like, effectively relegated to X.
It just felt like the same 100,000 people saying, 'It's so over, we're so back. It's so over, we're so back.'
They're taking it to the main stage, right? And it shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at OpenAI.
But he's not taking direct shots.
Not direct shots. And this arguably is not a direct shot either. They just said ads are coming to AI.
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. But truthfully, a lot of the previous Anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane. They've run a number of campaigns that have been above the critical thinking. 'We're your thought partner.' This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry.
Yeah, we'll get into why they took this approach. Clearly, I think we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think they probably... they've definitely been watching some hype.
Should we just play all four ads?
Let's play at least one of them. We got to play the height-maxing one. That one's particularly funny. But are they here in the timeline? While we pull those up, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business.
And you were saying earlier off the show you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against ads.
Yes. Yes. I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads. And... wait, this is not the right ad. We'll come back to this one. That's another Super Bowl ad that we'll have later.
Anthropic, the Anthropic attack on advertising. It does cross a line for me. It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy. Almost 10% of American workers.
All right. So, let's pull up this one. The first ad is, 'Can I get a six-pack quickly?'
Okay. And this one I immediately thought, okay, this is definitely not just watching Clubhouse, they're studying it apparently. Let's watch it.
I was not expecting this to be the looks-maxing Super Bowl.
Do we have it? No. Almost. While we're doing that, let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Without further ado, let's play it. Yeah, does it say violation?
It starts out by just saying violation quickly.
Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan?
Perfect. Let me personalize this for you.
This is a whole meme on Instagram Reels. People will do impressions of ChatGPT voice.
Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength.
And clearly this was written with ChatGPT.
No, no, no. It's designed to sound like it was... it sounds exactly like, 'Got it. I'll create a personalized plan.'
I don't think that's actually how ChatGPT sounds. I think in fact when I've watched the Instagram Reels, they do the ChatGPT impression and it's a little more like this is written for comedy. And so the fact that he says 'absolutely' twice in a row, like that's something...
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Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude. It's a great ad.
What's the difference between the light matching thing is so crazy.
So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action.
Yeah, that was probably intentional if they're anti... like you know, Google Cloud and you land on the ad.
It's so funny. It's just truly the irony of being anti-ad and then just spending. How much do you think they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them. This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.
Someone ran the numbers and if they aired all four, it would be something like $80 million or something. I don't think that they're going to run all four. That seems like a lot. Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know. $80 million seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raised tens of billions, so you know, it's possible, but that feels aggressive. There's also bulk discounting and again, they could choose to do regional.
And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well? NBC sells both. So we could see a rerun of these or another buy later.
Yeah, Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Olympics has way less.
But this is clearly a particular moment in time and it's just insane. It's insane. I mean, it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. Like, I think they're trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout.
As the ads that are coming to ChatGPT are effectively display ads, right?
Everybody in the industry by now should know this.
Yet this campaign implies that the ads will influence the response and that you cannot trust it, right? Yeah. And so it's fair game, but it's like... it's like dirty.
Yeah. It's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. And yeah, I mean, it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just going to wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase no matter what you're looking at because that will just be what optimizes CAC and ROAS.
Yeah. I mean, at some point I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted. Like if you search, I don't know, yerba mate.
What yerba mate should I get? It might show you like what it thinks you should get and then separately it will have like here's also another approach where you see a sponsored result and it's flagged and there's a little ad tag or slightly different background color and people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects, you know, ads as they roll out in ChatGPT to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be. But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI. They don't say ChatGPT. This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category.
And it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a champagne problem. You know, if ChatGPT wasn't in the position that it was in, everyone wouldn't be like, 'Oh, this is a shot at ChatGPT.' They'd be like, 'Oh, this is a shot at the category.' Because there's seven players that are all equally used. It's like, no, it's...
Let's pull up the next one.
It's a dominant app. Yeah, let's pull up the next one.
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Yeah. Like, I'm not saying it wasn't a good... It feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. Like if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, 'Okay.' But yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them.
It is a little spicy. It's spicy.
All right, pull up the next one.
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Pull up the next one, please. We got deception.
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Incredibly well played and incredibly dirty.
Like this... it's the worst outcome in an ads world, but so easily avoidable. And OpenAI has been messaging that they would not for ages, and they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like, they've been beating the drum on this for a long time, that clearly they will gate who is allowed to advertise, what the context is, how these ads will be displayed. There's a million...
I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Apple and IBM.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm a Mac. Yeah, I'm a Mac guy. Oh, yeah.
And none of them were as direct or effective as...
The 1984 ad was saying like IBM is an authoritarian dictator.
But still less... it wasn't as... like the timing here is a big factor, right? Right. When the ads were rolling out and just like really muddying the water.
I don't know. Obviously, OpenAI is going to do fine, but this really makes their life a lot harder.
Yeah, that one was also funny because like she's like, 'Absolutely.' And that's what like Claude usually says. Like when the... 'You're absolutely right.' That's like a Claude-ism.
Yeah, that's not ChatGPT.
What does ChatGPT usually say?
I feel like there's... I don't know if there's like specific phrases exactly like that.
Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, 'It's not this, it's that.' And I didn't hear that coming through. It was interesting. But I don't know. Do you think these are going to be effective?
Do you think... that's the question. So, really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently crack the top 25 of the iPhone in consumer.
And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off OpenAI and make their life harder?
Yeah. Like there's a world where there's business leaders... like is this like somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to like trip them a little bit.
That's kind of what it feels like.
It feels like consumer's so far gone.
Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll check the app store charts and Claude will be up at the top because so many people have seen this. They thought it's funny. But it does feel like such inside baseball. Like I bet a lot of average AI consumers don't even know that ads are...
But again, they're not even pushing... they're not actually trying to push downloads with this or they would put a call to action.
Yeah. Or QR code like, 'Download the app now. Ad-free AI is here with Claude.' Like download this thing. Yeah.
Maybe that thing is that I don't even...
Saying all this to IPO first. I can see it being beneficial in terms of preparation for the IPO, right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that aren't really super aware of Claude, right? They might have heard of Anthropic, but they actually aren't really aware of their different products.
I just think like if you're an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs into your organization and you're not worried about the ads product in ChatGPT, you're like, 'Oh yeah, like OpenAI Codex is this quality, Gemini 3 is good for this, and Claude 4.5 is good for this.' And like my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and Pareto curves. It doesn't feel like any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say like, 'Oh, I couldn't possibly use OpenAI in a business context.'
Gabe says, 'Ad-free AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits.'
Or use AdGPT and be able to ask a bunch more.
Interesting. Here's a Super Bowl ad they should run.
MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. I would just... clean ad read. Clean ad read for...
Does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads. Like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet. Even Spotify, right? Netflix, they always over... look at Apple, right? If the Claude app does go to the top of the app store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force, like...
No, it is really funny. You drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits and they try it for a little bit and they're like, 'Huh,' like...
They're not going to notice that the model might be better.
They're just going to be like, 'I'm going back to ChatGPT.'
That's funny. That's funny. I want to see what the battle between Mac, Apple, and Windows looked like. This is maybe back in 2006, 2009. The 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' campaign. It's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on YouTube.
Because they get viruses.
His PC's got viruses. Macs didn't.
In fact, you better stay back. This one's a doozy.
That's okay. I'll be fine.
No, no. Do not be a hero. Last year, there were 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs. So, just grab this.
Hey, if you feel like that'll help. Good.
Yeah. See, now you can run Mac OS 10 or Windows on a Mac. So, in a way, I'm kind of like the only computer you'll ever need.
No. I don't think you're using that right. Touche.
No, listen. See, you can only say touche if you make a point that I make a counterpoint. You see? So, I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff. Touche.
Okay. What do you think? I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically or Microsoft or Dell. It's like all... it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microsoft talking about viruses, talking about this other stuff. These are features. I don't know. It's not that far off.
It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. Like it definitely fits.
Yeah. So, Anthropic's edgy.
It's also a timing thing where again they're actively trying to make their... and again, I'm not saying anything of this is not fair play technically, but the gloves are off.
Yeah, it does feel... and there is zero. I will go out now and say I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad. It would be insane if they didn't run an ad. It'd be a huge... just goes way harder.
Sam calling out Dario by name directly. Just like, 'Dario, you suck.'
Yeah. I mean, mate. Yeah. Yeah. Just a bunch of Sora slop like...
Yeah. No, I think like as the other thing is...
OpenAI really doubt can react to this now.
Like the right... like if this had dropped like a couple weeks ago, they would have been able to say, 'Hey, we need to respond to this.' But they can't now. At least... our experience buying an ad this year, the content was locked last week and there's a whole process, right? There's subtitling, all this stuff. Like they're not... you can't just switch it up. Maybe OpenAI.
Well, maybe they win in the sense that like the vast majority of audiences have the reaction that you're having, which is like actually I don't mind ads and actually this is sort of a weird ad and I still like ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT comes out with an ad that's just like very vanilla like, 'Hey, use it, we'll help you cook, we have health now, you know, we have a bunch of features that seems helpful.' Like then they wind up...
Has the right word is it... he says it's propaganda. IMO it really is. It's not... they're not being... they're again, they're just kind of calling out the category being general about it, but they're implying that ads are going to impact... it's fear-mongering that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some product.
They took like Mark Cuban's like main... the things that he had been like going on and on and on about that everyone is like, 'Hey dude, you can calm down.' Like that's not how it's going to work and then they just like went with his point of view.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is a little outdated. I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And then I want to go to Tyler.
Yeah, I was gonna say like it feels like the vibe war is like really heating up, right? Like over the summer there was talent war. It was kind of a cold war, right? It's kind of like okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter and it was all leaked behind the scenes like Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time and there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like I feel like something has been stolen from us. Not coming out and saying...
At Davos like Dario is like basically he's still not saying OpenAI the words I think, but he's saying like companies are doing ads, there's only one company that's doing ads right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's sort of like the anti... there's these... Ben Thompson has this great formulation of like the anti-YouTube alliance between like Spotify and Netflix. So like once one company starts pulling away in a category all the other companies sort of have an incentive to team up and right now it does feel like we're getting a little bit of an anti-OpenAI alliance because everyone's like, 'Well, they pulled away and so like let's gang up on them.' And they, you know, they did so much stuff on the supply side, they locked up all these different supply chain partners. Like, we got to push back. We actually got to team up. And that's what you see at Davos with the buddy cop movie between Dario and Demis. We will see.
And Katie, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back. She says, 'ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than it has globally.'
Yeah. Nothing like some stats. They should run that in the Super Bowl potentially. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads because I want to see this General Motors robot. What happened here? Did this just... how did you find this?
Is this for the worst Super Bowl ads or the...
I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.
Okay, let's play General Motors Robot.
And they've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back.
Let's play it. Let's see.
Robot makes a mistake.
General Motors make cars. We're going to make Cadillacs.
Okay. Robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory,
Whoever produced this ad is not going to do well in the singularity.
You did not consider Roko's basilisk.
Oh, sign holding. Yeah. Cadillac going by.
Well, now the robot's trying to get a new job.
Okay. Robot's working at McDonald's or something.
Robot goes to the bridge.
This is like who approved this? Robot watches the Chevys drive by, the General Motors cars, and jumps into the water.
The GM 100,000-mile warranty. It's got everyone GM obsessed.
Like how do you run this ad?
Whoa. So, it's saying like we care so much about the 100,000-mile warranty that like we will end it all if we don't stand by it.
I think so. I'm still confused. Yeah.
And obviously they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like, 'Hey, you're effectively advertising like the darkest thing ever.'
No, really sad. Like ridiculous. Well, the bar has been lowered. So, don't worry. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
One more ad we'll play for you. This is a Bud Light commercial.
Okay. I like Bud Light commercials. They usually deliver perfectly, flawlessly. I feel like Bud Light is very steady. You can always count on them for pretty solid Super Bowl entertainment.
My king, this corn syrup was just delivered.
That's not ours. We don't brew Bud Light with corn syrup.
Miller Lite uses corn syrup.
Because that's in the ingredients so they can say it. It did happen.
Pause. Pause for a second.
Yeah. So if Claude had named ChatGPT and done this, could have said like we are suing you for defamation, right?
Sure. Sure. Sure. Otherwise, you just got to go with the category broadly. Anyway, let's keep playing.
Oh, Light. We received your corn syrup by mistake.
That's not our corn syrup. We received our shipment this morning.
Try the Coors Light Castle. They also use corn syrup.
See this is still like a little bit more playful and classy. It doesn't go to like an edgy place.
It's also not misleading because you can see on the ingredient list.
Like you can just look up and see they have corn syrup.
Yeah. It'd be very different if it was like we're delivering your ads to the ChatGPT castle and it's like oh we already got our shipment of ads like take that over to Google AI search overviews you know like...
They should have just done a direct rip of that. Yeah.
No, I mean incredibly well played by Anthropic.
Yeah. So you think it'll be effective?
To what degree will it be effective? That's my question.
Well, that's... I'm not even sure they care about it being effective.
Okay, it'll be... this is effective like the fact that people are talking about it. People that... Right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, 'Oh, good point from Anthropic.' Like...
They're scoring points in tech Twitter and they're able to score some points in the real world and just make...
Like senators are going to see this and be like, 'Yeah, that's wrong.'
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole like senator we sell ads thing in Facebook, like they stealing your data, that whole thing is like very like...
It's still a meme. It's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because advertising is the greatest business model ever. And companies don't want your data. They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers and get money out. That's it. Like I've run businesses that advertise many times and I don't want to know anything about these customers. I just want to know they're ready to buy and they're down and send them the link.
Yeah. The difference between like Bud Light going after some of their competitors is that they're actual competitors, right?
Yeah. No, no, it's a very pure oligopoly. But maybe I mean that doesn't... that lend itself to like Anthropic is punching up because they're coming from behind because they're smaller company. They have less market share in this particular market. It would be like, I don't know, it'd be like if the Athletic Brewing guys ran an ad that was defaming all of the beer companies for all the bad things that beer can do to you, right? Something, I don't know. Anyway, maybe...
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Yeah, according to Appfigures, Claude got around a million downloads in February, which was actually down from the month prior.
So, not a real player in consumer.
Yeah, we'll see what happens. I am going to be watching the app charts like a hawk. I want to know. I want to know.
Yeah, the entire game while we're at the game, we're just going to be glued.
We're just gonna be in the back just...
Anyways, I'm so excited for all the other tech ads in the Super Bowl. We got MrBeast and Salesforce. We'll have a bunch more.
And I'm looking forward to it.
Anyway, we got to... are our guests here yet? We have guests joining in just a few minutes, but in the meantime, we got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we got to ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1 trillion in market cap as e-commerce booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda cloud.
First gong of the day. Let's understand what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off. Amazon was going to kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see. The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13-figure valuation: Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft. In trading, Walmart stock passed $125 a share. Shares closed up 2.9%, giving the company a market cap of 1.018 trillion. The stock has surged in recent months, fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business as well as investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency. Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery, and broad selection. The change at Walmart over the past decade, culminating with its trillion-dollar valuation, quote, 'has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen,' said a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley who studied Walmart since 2001. Wow, Simeon Gutman. Overnight success here. 25 years studying Walmart. Walmart's growth along with Amazon's creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas-based company will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Furner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached 1 trillion are technology-focused, even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast and the then-new Walmart CEO Doug McMillon was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores and grow online. Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212 billion at the end of 2016. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. 'Retail is changing so much. I don't think I understand it as well as I need to,' Buffett said during a call with the CEO about the Berkshire stock sale. He said, 'I don't understand the change. What will e-commerce do to your business?' Buffett offered kind words about Walmart's potential to succeed, but the snub was motivating for company executives at the time. Walmart sales have since soared, propelled by e-commerce, then the pandemic, followed by shoppers' more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. The company's investments played a big part. Walmart made an effort to offer more items that appeal to higher-income shoppers, such as trendy small appliances and store-brand foods. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of US households. So they've fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long time.
Yeah. Yousef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He previously was over at Walmart.
Thanks for leaking it to us.
Sucks on X says, 'Nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants, but if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's and they're still the largest.'
Wasn't that true back then. He posted this six months ago. I think Elon's way above this now. But it is interesting how successful. But yeah, Jim Walton, Rob, and Alice all over in the hundred billion dollar.
I mean, a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We got to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this.
Okay, let's pull up the graphic and see.
That's probably stunning and brave.
That probably adds 600 billion to the market cap, right?
They really just did a slightly bluer background and they called it a day.
Well, without further ado, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected. How teams build, create codeback, prototypes, and apps fast. And that's right. We have Mati from ElevenLabs, the man of the hour. How are you doing?
What's going on, Johny? Great to see you again.
You look fantastic. This cover is iconic. It's... I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this. Like perfect lighting. I've always been a fan of Forbes photography. It's so nice to see somebody just beaming too. Just having a good time. Usually people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious, you know. I like to see... I like to see...
We are having a good time at ElevenLabs. It's a good, good, good and happy moment building at the current age and everything is changing with AI. We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change. But a little bit surreal to see the cover and a zoomed-in picture. So that's always a tip of the...
Iceberg and reflection of the entire team. So great, great to see it.
Yeah, it's amazing. How did the negotiation go with this current round? I'm sure you had a sort of your interest was, you know, coming in at 11. I'm sure that gave you gave gave some leverage.
This was in in this round the the valuation was known far before the round even started. Uh with with our aspirations from the early days to get that and of course just surreal to be able to announce today that we've uh raised 500 million series at 11 billion valuation.
The next the next the next leg up will uh will be tough getting to 11 trillion but
We're we believe
We have it all planned. It's going to be 11 squared next to 21 billion as the as the next proxy of valuation. But this funding is great. We we we think this is what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology. Sequoia is leading the round. Andre is joining the board.
Iconic is tripling down. And alongside the round as always we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency so people companies can build even better experiences and customer experience, internal enablement and sales. So
Yeah, we were just we were just laughing. We were just lot we were watching uh some of the new Super Bowl ads from Anthropic and and they intentionally put a bit of lag in there when when in the model and
That's your opportunity and that's the opportunity. It's like just reducing that latency to to human or or even uh superhuman.
Yeah. What has the what's been the biggest driver of growth just uh just more growth on the core products, new products? What's uh walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the in the lead slide of this deck.
So we started in 2022 the first model was text to speech and then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team still speech to text with the best transcription model 11 music with the highest quality music model productions with dubbing. But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models. So helping enterprises build that uh um customer experience work internal enablement and in 2025 we got to 330 million in ARR at the end of the year powered by work with DA telecom
Amazing virtual telecom customer support square deliverable with training riders and on boarding them into the ecosystem better or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu what's happening with the opening hours um all the way through to Revolut working with us across 4 million of their users in Europe to be able to uh to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. Um and we are seeing that I think something that wasn't possible just a year prior. You have a real time voice agent interactions.
Jord, you were mentioning Anthropic. We think all companies in the future will want to optimize that latency, will want to optimize that reliability so they can interact with the with the with the with their audience, with their customers. Um, and whether that's in customer care, whether that's devices around us, hopefully some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and converse with you as the guys come in all the way through to the to the future robots. And um, and that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous. We grew to 330 million and it took us
20 months to get to first 100 million in ARR, 10 months to get to 200 and 5 months to get to 330. So hopefully that continues
And it's a good proxy of the value that we can we can deliver.
Uh well, we have a special guest.
Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia. New board member.
Good seeing you. I was uh I was enjoying when you were uh when you were bringing on Mati and I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a one-name entrepreneur
Because no one wants to go for the last name and we're not brave enough to do it either.
Yeah. Much easier when you're
Uh so so so talk to us about uh like the surface area of the business now. Uh there was someone in the chat saying that they were just using 11 reader last night. Uh is that more of like a demo and a showcase of the product or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application?
Yeah. And first of all, great to see you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board. Welcome to 11 Labs after two and a half years knowing each other. It's going to be a a great fun after serving on the board together.
Oh, yeah. Pleasure to have you with us.
And it was the last time we saw you guys, which is great. So it's a full circle full circle moment. But uh you know to your question as you think about our business we have the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio
Whether it's text to speech speech to text whether that's the expressive narration expressive voiceovers the music work and on top of that work we have the agents work that we spoke about but also the creative use cases and really there is a great example of that of how we can let our community create the narrations create audio books and then serve them in an easier way. Mhm.
You know what's crazy
Is that today Audible will block AI audio books.
The only platform that allows you to serve the content on Audible is is is only the Amazon created AI content. So, we need to find an alternative for of the community to serve that and similarly uh happily I have a partnership with Spotify to to allow our users to bring that and we have a lot of users. It's 5 million users doing
Doing that work.
There you go. Uh, Andrew, how are you how are you processing the the SaaS apocalypse, the turmoil in the markets? Is this like a hey uh you know, 11 Labs needs a war chest, batten down the hatches, rip good times, or is this uh something else that's you know, you don't really need to worry about who's who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up.
Well, I I go back to what Jason Jason Lumpkin was saying. He was bringing up 11 Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, "We're AI native. We're AI native." And he's like, "Show me the numbers. Are you crying?"
11 Labs is AI native and they're adding $100 million in new ARR every few months. So like that's what it looks like. That's that's what real pull from the market.
Sure. But yeah, Andrew, what what do you see in the market?
Yeah, I think the um you know, it's like the scorpion and the frog. Uh uh the voting machine will be a voting machine. And I think in the public markets with software um there is a lot of baby being being thrown out with the bathwater.
Um and I think as far as I can tell the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company. Um and I'll leave that there. I do think what really matters is um are businesses accelerating as these models are getting better
And are they delivering value in a way that's like differentiated and unique and we are seeing companies like 11 that are growing
Faster with better economics better customer references um and just faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen um
Like I've uh going back to when I first met Mati uh 2023 uh I remember what like when I first looked at 11 um it was not obvious like what kind of company this is. Is it a is it a consumer company? Is it an enterprise company? Is it a foundation model lab? Is it an application company? And um it turns out it was all of those things. And I think for like these truly like the the true AI winners um it's a you know like the phrase going from strength strength to strength. It's like everywhere 11 has been competing, they have just been dominating. And you know, like shame on me for not investing a zillion dollars three years ago. Um, fortunately, we were lucky to invest a little bit and I got to know Mati. Um, but yeah, these these like the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible.
Can you both talk about a little like take me through more of that focus because uh you're saying you know 11 is a is a research lab and a and an enterprise company and there's a consumer product and but there's still a focus on audio still focused on voice and we've seen you know the a lot of the good vibes that are coming around Anthropic is like they're focused on code uh you know we've seen this like Midjourney focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing is that where you're narrowing or or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time,
Right? And it it it is true like as we as we started the company, the one connective tissue from model through platform to application is audio and voice. We know that we can create the best models, we know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases and then bring them for production. But of course to get most of voice frequently we'll stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default with agents example you need the knowledge base to really integrate that you need telephony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone numbers you need the evaluation testing and monitoring to really be able to understand that so as we think about this work voice audio is our superpower that's the one connective tissue across all those domains but if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire voice experience whether it's in voice agents whether it's in a voice uh a creative space uh we'll happily do that
Uh where where are you frustrated with slow adoption like where where is there a lot of potential that uh where companies are not kind of like they haven't fully processed that uh that the models are advanced to the level that they have and you guys have the sort of feature set I I on a personal level as a user there's still a bunch of different like media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor like audio functionality. It's like if you publish an article, you should immediately have like, you know, a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time. It shouldn't be like this doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore, but I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too where you want industries to wake up and say like, "Hey, voice is here. You should be implementing it immediately."
Yeah, I can go quick quick quick one first on on things that we believe in and Andre is uh helping us push as we think about that space. The one audio will be default and all the content stories knowledge that's available. It will be global. You will have all the languages all the voices represented and voice will be the interface of technology around us. The big opportunity to to your question will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen on the agent side. Today a lot of the use cases are reactive supportive but we'll see that proactive side where you have an AI concierge AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey. Um and um and as we work with Andrew we frequently think of like what's that connective tissue between research and product how we can combine that experience together to deliver that.
Andrew I'm curious what you think. We we spoke a little bit about this but what's top of all your mind for the next year?
Yeah. Um, well, I I think at a high level, uh, it's very hard to find like markets where voice is not taking off. And I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of like chatbot voice agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era. And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting uh, forcing audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again. Like that was sort of I think
Talk to a human. Talk to a human.
One could argue that like the you know like the customer research that like created you know like voice agents was people asking for agents over and over and over again. Um I think the difference now is uh if you look across like basically every sector um people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio like it's a it's there's a lot of uh end customer pull. I do think there's a big gap between, you know, what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and how they communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of. Um, like I think humans are very adaptable and I think once everyone used ChatGPT and realized, you know, what the um, chat bots can do, people started, you know, uh, start interacting with text boxes on the internet very differently. I think with voice agents still like people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree when in reality it's this magical interface that overlaps all of a uh a company's capabilities and it allows you to express yourself and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface. I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the the companies that they buy services and goods from is going to change very quickly.
And I do think it's going to take like the leading the leading companies in the space to show people what's possible and the whole thing's going to flip.
And you know on the last one you just to add a quick example we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that and one incredible case was they are building an effective voice agent for the citizen support where you can call and ask about the services and what's transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information. If you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help it uh it just open up so many more programs that were just not available. Whether that was in the how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain um certain help um just opens up completely new ways of you exploring that information altogether.
Yeah, I I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns. Like I feel like the walkie-talkie is potentially like a better even comp than like the phone call because if I'm like using a product and I have a question. I don't really want to like place a phone call necessarily even if it's instant and quick and I know like an agent you know an AI agent will like pick effectively pick up the call immediately. You can imagine like hey how like where uh what's the best document for like this part uh to understand this part of the organization. And it can like pull it up and it's like having having these kind of new UI patterns I think will be very cool.
Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us.
Looking forward to the next one.
Thank you very much for having us. Congrats on the new Super Bowl ad.
Congrats to you to you both supporting us. We appreciate it.
Thank you for just make sure that make sure the ad's available in Polish, too.
We will we'll do a translation.
Help us out. Help us out. Have a good one.
Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Uh let's go over to Gas Town. What I wrote about in today's newsletter and I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Jordy, you will understand how Gas Town works.
Said Robert says, "Gas Town is the modern-day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something this insane." And uh it does have a lot of layers of abstraction. I'll try and take you through it a little bit. Um basically my my my my theory is like there's a lot of excitement about this project. You might already be familiar with Gas Town. Um but uh the the broader category is called orchestration. How you orch how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different uh agents. And Steve Yegge wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed uh orchestrator. It's he says it's a new take on the IDE. It's called Gas Town. He dropped it on January 1st on New Year's Day. So, he has been locked in. He says that he's like having trouble sleeping because he's so obsessed with this thing. He's he's really pushing a ton of code. Um and uh now he's getting one call per day from VCs asking to invest apparently. Um and so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience and he maps out how this evolved. So uh you know you used to write code in in a text file save it execute it in a terminal then we got basic IDEs with some code completion links to file systems ripples etc. Uh LLM chat windows worked their way into the IDE eventually uh with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools run code once models got better um developers trusted them more and the IDE sort of melts away and you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Karpathy has put it he says uh your code writing skill atrophies but your code reading skill improves because the you're prompting and then you're just reading the review and you're saying okay yeah this is going to do what I think it's going to do we'll test it. Um and so the most popular uh workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI. So Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI are the most popular. Uh they all have web and desktop frontends now but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. Um, and we we can move on from this slide. Um, so, uh, Gas Town is like way way more aggressive going full into vibe coding. So, uh, Steve in his post just all caps says, "You will die if you don't know what you're doing." It's like very risky. Uh, uh, the code base is only weeks old. M, maybe it's over a month now. It's 100% vibe coded. He's never seen the code and it's 225,000 lines of Go like not a very simple. It's
