I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success. The legator 3, right?
There's misinformation. Quantity clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come get up. Trust the experts here. Five. We are expert founder Mel.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Glaze blade. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Wrong one. Cop is wins. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong. Right.
Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound. Five coding. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Founder.
You're watching TVN. Today is Friday. It's the day before Valentine's Day 2026.
That's right. We're live from the TVPN Ultradome, Temple of Technology.
We should have mentioned Valentine's Day.
Yeah. Earlier, two months ago, and then again one month ago.
I think most of the audience is prepped for sure. But we have some, we have some ideas, some recommendations if you're looking for advice this Valentine's Day.
Of course, live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. And here's an idea for Valentine's Day: Ramp.com. This Valentine's Day, show her you care about your future together by putting all of your couple's spending on Ramp, because nothing says 'I will provide for our family' like pulling out a Ramp card. Knows you take, you handle business.
Anyway, handling business. The big news: Anthropic has raised $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation. We've all seen the revenue chart: 10x growth four years in a row. 100 million, a billion, now 14 billion. Will they do a hundred? That's the question. Will they be at a hundred billion revenue run rate by the end of the year? They're growing on track to hit that, which is crazy and completely unprecedented. Again, they're going after all of SaaS. They're going after all of software. They're going after all of labor, all of white-collar work.
All in your job specifically.
Yeah, it's not looking good for you.
Never doom. There's plenty of opportunity. There are plenty of good potential outcomes. Dario has been on Dwarkesh Patel today and he did something else with Ross Det. And so there, there's a number of places where you can go to hear his, his latest takes on the good ending and what he's, you know, guiding towards. Be interesting to, to follow. The, the question is, you know, what happens to the companies that are currently under pressure with the Anthropic narrative? They have to answer this question of, you know, is Anthropic just going to steamroll you? What is your real source of strength?
Yeah, not just Anthropic but the labs, every YC company that is building an AI-native, you know, any company that is, you know, slapping 'AI-native' on their website.
Yeah. Everyone's going after the opportunity.
We, we decided to coin something. Yes.
And before we tell you the coinage, let me tell you about Cisco. This Valentine's Day, give her the gift of enterprise-grade networking this Valentine's Day so your home Wi-Fi never drops during movie night, because nothing kills the mood like buffering during a rom-com. Get on Cisco. Head over to cisco.com. So yeah, we were, we decided, so, so how do you, what is a phrase that you can generally apply to businesses that can survive and then hopefully thrive?
In, during this moment in time, intelligence is too cheap to meter.
Yeah. So, so the, the question, you know, earnings cycle last couple weeks, every CEO's gone on it basically like if you had to answer the question like, talk about the threat of AI, if you just had to answer the question, yeah, like basically the companies that were, just the entire earnings call was just about, generally about AI. You know, if you're like a CoreWeave or something like that, that's a little bit more straightforward. But if you have to answer the question, do you have a durable moat? Right now with AI progress, your stock is probably going to sell off, but, but, you know, either way, kind of however you answer it. But there's a second question which is like, are you a true beneficiary? So like, do you have a durable moat and then are you a true beneficiary? So we decided to coin the phrase unsloppable.
Unsloppable. So these are companies that we'll get into that have some type of moat in an era where it feels like more code could be written in the next 12 months than in all of human history. Yeah, I was kind of running the numbers. It seems possible.
Specifically not okay. You're a company that has just spent 10 years writing a bunch of lines of code and it would take a startup a lot of time and money and they would have to hire a lot of engineers and write a lot of code to create a copy of what you have. It's like, no.
So like to rebuild Salesforce as a platform, you would have to spend billions of, historically you would have had to spend billions of dollars hiring thousands of software engineers to, you know, piece by piece build out all of the functionality at Salesforce. Of course, you could build vertical solutions and get some amount of traction, but in general, the idea was like there was some effectively just a, an engineering moat and that there was a lot of code that you'd have to write to effectively compete. So, I talked about in the newsletter today.
Set the table first. What's going on in the market?
Yeah, so software has undergone the largest non-recessionary 12-month drawdown in over 30 years. It's minus 34%, wiping out two trillion of market cap from the peak. This is JPMorgan as of a couple days ago. AI threat sparks historic software stock crash. Goldman Sachs warns of newspaper-like decline.
I love the newspaper. What's wrong with newspapers?
Still got it. Still got it. And then as of yesterday, over the prior eight trading sessions, more than 20% of the S&P 500 had a drawdown of 7% or more in a single session, according to The Compound.
Quickly before we continue, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. This Valentine's Day, I recommend flying to Manhattan, take her to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, IPO your company, and ring the opening bell together. Great. Your love just went public.
Good one, John. So, yeah.
Yeah. So, so continuing. So, I wrote, everything was great when we were disrupting manual workflows, but as we enter the software singularity, we are having the uncomfortable experience of disrupting ourselves. Assume the marginal cost of software development goes to zero. If you are a software company where the, where your moat was that a competitor would have to spend a billion dollars to hire a bunch of software engineers to write millions of lines of code to create a product and you have no other moats, it's going to be rough. Thankfully, there are moats that are unaffected by coding agents and effectively zero-cost software development. Peter Thiel outlined four key sources of monopoly power in 'Zero to One' back in 2014. These are proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and brand, or you can think of as trust. Most of these still hold, but proprietary technology by itself is no longer sufficient as a moat.
In some cases, if you have a patent to a GLP-1 drug, that is a proprietary technology that will give you pricing power probably for as long as the patent holds. And there are patents on certain pieces of technology that even if they can be cloned or re-derived from first principles with your million geniuses in the data center, the first person to patent it gets to reap that value and that's just the way our...
And the issue with software, how many, I, I, a bunch of designer friends of mine have like a design patent on a specific kind of workflow and it's cool to say that you have a patent but it's not...
Yeah, proprietary technology can just be, okay, we have a big software system, but oftentimes it's more like we have proprietary, like something that's regulated, something that's a cornered resource, something that's, that's scarce and will remain scarce. But yes, if your proprietary technology is just you're the only person with this particular Python script, that's, that, that's probably going away. But network effects aren't. And some of the economies of scale, some of the liquidity on these platforms is going to be durable. You can vibe code a... I was talking to Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber about this. You can vibe code a pickup app that, you know, looks like Uber, has a map, lets you click the button, accepts payment, but if there's no one on the other side of that network to actually come and pick you up, your, your, your Uber clone is dead in the water now.
Yeah. Or if a customer, if somebody does pick it up and the customer has a terrible experience, do you have the, do you have the resources to actually make it right?
But Uber works because they spent a bunch of money getting to scale and cloning that scale is difficult. Now the whole self-driving car thing is separate because you bring... Yeah, we're working on that one, that, that'll happen. But there is, there, there are a set of businesses that will have to contend with the, the clankerification of the economy. But that's, that's...
So becoming unstoppable means two things. First, your business actually has to drive its economic power from a moat that is unsloppable. And second, you need to clearly communicate that to shareholders. Right now, if the market thinks you're just a bunch of lines of code, you're cooked. Tech companies we think of as unsloppable: you have hardware, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Broadcom, SK Hynix, Western Digital, data centers, so neoclouds, things like CoreWeave, Lambda, social networks, YouTube, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, even thinking Roblox, right? They're, they can be not just, you know, they have the network and, and they can be a beneficiary of AI because if it's easier to make games, a lot more people will make games, maybe you'll get more usage. Marketplaces: Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash. IP holders: Disney, Netflix, Warner Brothers. I think if you have a lot of IP right now and the cost to produce great content drops dramatically, you're going to benefit from that. And then platforms, things like YouTube and Spotify as well. I said it's been an incredibly rough couple of weeks for public market CEOs. Really disheartening on the show. CEOs have been putting up some great quarters and then, you know, they're trading down between 7 and 20%.
There are two main questions everyone wants to know, even if they already sold your stock to buy atoms. One, do you have a durable moat in the software singularity? Two, are you a true beneficiary of AI? Many CEOs are still, still struggling to answer number one because it doesn't really matter what you say. Just having to answer the question equals a sell-off. And two, this one can really only be answered in the numbers. You aren't an immediate AI beneficiary if revenue is not accelerating. Also, separately, there are a bunch of crazy things happening in the broader economy right now. I think Bessent went on CNBC at 4:00 a.m. It brought out the big dog.
I haven't been able to catch it yet. It was 7:00 a.m. Eastern, right?
Yeah, 4:00 a.m. Pacific. So very, very early for us.
It's possible to be unstoppable but not an obvious beneficiary, but you'll still likely sell off as the market digests and interrogates the actual real-world impacts of coding agents. Some industries will be more resistant to change. Other industries will be revealed to have a secret source of market power that was underappreciated in the before times. And what I was thinking was Nielsen. This company was, you know, in one way, Nielsen ratings, Nielsen data. A lot of consumer packaged goods companies use this. I'm sure Martina is looking at how is this yerba mate selling in this store, and you go to Nielsen, you pay them, and they give you data, and it just feels like an interface to sales data, but they have this whole network and you just have to pay for it, and it's not really something that you can just spin up. I don't know. What do you think?
I mean, isn't that kind of like what, what Simile is doing? We had them on yesterday. They're like trying, maybe you can kind of do like polls or something about how market will... That's more for prediction. The bigger one is like, is like Simile would actually want that data to update their models.
Yeah. Like you want to know, okay, what stores are actually turning my product? Which stores should I be doing promos in? Which stores should I be doubling down on, running advertising in? Or what chains are working, should I push more into? Or, or even just, hey, I need to go to one chain and say, I'm working, like Target's working, so Walmart should carry me. They're not really going to accept just a simulation of that data. They're going to want to know that an independent rating agency sort of rated...
Gold Rock just bought unsloppable.com.
Quickly before we move on, let me tell you about AppLovin. This Valentine's Day, use AppLovin's axon.ai to serve her hyper-targeted ads for exactly the jewelry she wants. That way, she'll be extra excited when she unwraps presents on the big day.
Great call. Capping off the newsletter, I said a lot of the software market feels like the office equipment and imaging sector in the '90s. So companies like Sharp, Canon, Panasonic, revenue was still up and to the right. But widespread adoption of the internet, emails, and PDFs was on the horizon. Even today, you'll still find a fax machine in every doctor's office, and many of the giants of that era are still around. But if you stayed in those names, you would have missed out on generational gains by simply being long PDF.
So yeah, a lot, if you look at these companies, you know, Panasonic's still a massive company and they've obviously adapted over time. But, but you know, it's a, it's a shift from growth stock to value stock. Investors are less willing to pay for earnings that might come 10 years out because they're worried about those, or 20 years out. Instead, they're asking, what will my return on invested capital be this year? What will the dividend be this year? How much cash will you give me back if I invest for a one-year time horizon or, or, or shorter or longer? Let me tell you about Turbopuffer. This holiday, Valentine's Day, here's an idea. Turbopuffer, store vector embeddings of every romantic moment you've shared in Turbopuffer so you can do semantic search for that, for that time in Paris and actually find it. Turbopuffer is serverless vector and full-text search. It's built from first principles on object storage. It's fast, 10x cheaper, and it's extremely scalable. So no matter how many memories you're cramming in Turbopuffer, you're good to go. You're good to go this Valentine's Day. Just do it. Anyway, it will be interesting. I think that there will, that there will be a reckoning around who is able to reveal a true moat and, and help people, help the market understand what their source of strength is, whether it's the liquidity on their platform, the network effect, the IP, if they have a real IP that's defensible. But just having a big bag of code right now is a little bit of a weight since you're seeing so many companies that are saying, well, I haven't, our software engineers aren't even writing the code anymore. Yes, we're advancing our products, but so many companies are, are going all in. It's also, it's, it's, it's pretty wild how long it's taken for the public markets to react to this, this kind of one-shotting concept or this zero marginal cost, you know, coding concept where...
We were having these same conversations in Q1 of last year being like, what are the implications when you can just put in the prompt box, 'build me XYZ tool,' right? And it took a while for the models to make progress, but even a year ago it was pretty obvious that you would get to some point where you could one-shot a big platform. Of course, reliability still a concern, right? Security is still a concern.
There's a lot of businesses where the potential risks of using like a vibe-coded product like far outweigh the, the cost of just paying for the product and having something that's reliable, trustworthy, battle-tested.
Yep. And, but, yeah, there, I mean, there's still a ton of questions about how quickly disruption happens, how quickly market structures change. Some things go from monopolies to oligopolies. Some oligopolies are going to go to perfectly competitive. It's certainly a bull market for YC companies who can vibe code something that's as good as a public company SaaS product and then go to those customers and say...
Maybe not as good, but as feature-complete.
As feature-complete, or at least can compete a little bit faster and say, hey, I'll come in with an offer that's 10x cheaper and, and, and move you over. And that's just going to create some pricing pressure. The question is, what's the rate-limiting factor? Is, is diffusion a real factor? Is adoption a real factor? Or do you, do, do you need for deployed engineers to go help companies transform with, with agentic coding? Or do you, or can you, or will this happen inside companies and they'll be building their own platforms? Or will, or will they want just a, a cheaper product from a new third party that has a different business model that's maybe more consumption-based and something where if it goes down on a Saturday they don't need to even fire off a prompt? How long until these, these vibe-coded systems are like self-healing in the way an enterprise platform is and has like a proper SLA? What do you think, Tyler?
I just have a question. Like, I'm curious what you guys think about this. It's so, it's like, if the market is just catching up now to, to like coding models being very good and vibe coding all this stuff and they're basically like a year late, in one year, what do you think like is going to be the thing that they're like, like do you think they'll still be late? Is it going to be like, okay, actual like white-collar work is, you actually can automate a lot of this stuff and only in, in a year that they're actually going to like catch up to this?
Yeah, it's a good question. The next, next thing, I don't know.
Tyler, if I knew the answer, we'd be on Wall Street. I think we'll, I think we'll be talking about it over the next couple months. We'll need to see like glimmers of demos. I mean, yeah, the, the one thing is, is like coding never felt... Here's the thing. So I have, in, in coding has been a white, it's a white-collar job, but has always felt a lot less fake than most white-collar jobs. Like there's a lot of jobs, like email jobs, laptop jobs, where there's like six people on a call for an hour and like one person is doing, like really doing the work and the rest of them are just saying like, 'nothing from my end, thanks,' right? And that's like their entire day. Whereas coding, like the, the best engineers were actually just like grinding long, putting in the hours. Just, and so I think what's interesting, like as, as some of these like more broad knowledge work tasks get more easy to automate, do those people just, like they're still going to be doing meetings? Like at some point these companies... I mean, to date, the, the AI, the AI job loss has just been primarily from companies, I would say, still processing the Twitter acquisition and saying, hey, we just, we, we need 50% fewer people here.
Yeah. This, this selloff is, is much, much more related to business model competition, pricing pressure than, than automation and job loss in my opinion. It's much more that there will just be more com-, more competition in enterprise software markets and so you assume that margins will fall. That, that's my read on this. I do have another example, but I will tell you about Gusto first. The unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. So my answer is the, the unclankerable companies. So right now there are industries, think about, think about mining. Like I have a piece of land, there is gold in the dirt. There's another company that comes and their specialization is finding where the gold deposits are on my land. There's a third company that shows up with tractors and people that dig the gold out. Then there's a fourth company that takes the raw ore and refines it into gold. There's a fifth company that is a platform for, for selling that gold onto the market. Right? So you have, you have like five different layers of the supply chain to get the gold into the market from the ground. Let's just use that. It could be oil, could be any, any mineral. Does, does robotic labor too cheap to meter change the value of the land? Probably not. But if you have a robotic digging machine that can show up and dig the, dig the ore out of the ground, dig the gold out of the ground at a lower cost, well, the company that's been set up where their moat was they employed all the best miners and they had systems to know who's good, train them, make sure that they're doing it safely, train them on the tools, make sure that they have the right equipment to dig the ore reliably, work in shifts, all of that becomes attackable. If you're like, 'Well, all I have to do to start a company that competes in the gold mining business is place an order with a bunch of humanoid robots and go to the guy who has the land and say, I want to dig the land and I will give you a little bit more than what the other team that's using a bunch of human labor and a bunch of unautomated systems.' So I would say that that's probably the next thing that the market would be processing and the ride-hailing platforms dealing with the advent of the self-driving car is probably one of these like clankerification narratives, but that will come to a whole host of industries. The question is just on a five-year timeline, on a 10-year timeline, when will it be real? And then when will the market price it accordingly? Because a lot of the pressure that you're seeing in the market is not showing up in the financials. Like the, the companies are still growing. They're still producing cash. The business hasn't changed, but the perception of the future of the business has changed and the perception of the future of the market structure has changed. And so that might be the next thing if we're just to play out AI broadly. Anyway, Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Let's also pull up the Linear lineup and take you through who's coming on the show today. Linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. It's Friday. We have a lighter show, but we got some great guests. We got Martin Shkreli coming on to talk about, take a little victory lap about the quantum computing thing. Connor Hayes is the head of Threads. We hung out with him at Meta Connect. We're very excited to talk to him about the progress of that platform. Then Alex is coming on from DDN and Brett Adcock from Figure is coming on to talk about humanoid robots. They launched a new one today. So finally on the show, be an interesting one. Clavicular has also been in the news.
Oh yes. What happened? Let's see here. Streamer Braden Peters to host boxing match billed as test of physical dominance. The Valentine's Day livestream pits two figures from the male self-improvement internet against each other. Braden Peters, the livestreamer known as Clavicular, announced Thursday that he will host a boxing match on his kick.com channel this Saturday evening, February 14th, at 7 p.m. Eastern, directly opposite Valentine's Day festivities nationwide. The bout will feature two personalities from the online male aesthetics community: a figure known as ASU frat leader, an Arizona State University fraternity member who gained attention for his broad-shouldered build, and a creator who goes by Androgenic, a fitness influencer focused on hormone optimization and physical appearance. Promotional materials billed the event as a championship of skeletal frame superiority, essentially a contest to determine which man is more physically imposing. The announcement posted to X by the kick-affiliated account Kick Champ has drawn thousands of engagements and spawned a wave of commentary from users who noted the scheduling choice with amusement, characterizing the event as a deliberate alternative to the holiday. The matchup represents the latest example of niche internet subcultures, in this case communities organized around male physical self-improvement and body image optimization, crossing over into live entertainment. Mr. Peters, who has built his following around content related to physique and social dynamics, appears to be positioning himself as a promoter within the space. No official venue has been announced. The event is expected to stream exclusively on kick.com. So, we'll be interested to see how, how the news kind of reacts to the event over the weekend. Certainly, this story has gone mainstream.
You know, it's funny that, so if you're, if you haven't been following these, we've, we've been taking these like viral kick clip posts and turning them into professionally written articles just as a joke, but Clavicular actually has a profile in the New York Times and it's written like that. And so I think, I think our joke is like over because it's hit the mainstream. Joe Bernstein wrote something that sounds exactly like something that we were joking about. Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, has emerged as a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed men. He wants to take his fixation with looksmaxxing mainstream. It's a, it's a wild piece. Clavicular is 6'2". He weighs 180 pounds and has a 31-inch waist. His biocromial width, basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name, is 19.5 in. He has a midface ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils, of 1.07. His chin-to-philtrum ratio is 2.6. According to Clavicular, these calculations make him handsome, just not as handsome as actor Matt Bomer. And then it goes on to explain the whole looksmaxxing phenomenon. And it was very funny watching this happen because Clavicular streams so much that he livestreamed the interview with Joe Bernstein. But of course, normally when you do an interview with a mainstream media journalist who's writing a profile, it's like under embargo and you don't know it's coming until it drops and like you don't even really talk about it. And the chat is confused. This is a very popular, a very popular trend on social media these days and, and the New York Times is breaking it down. But anyway, there, there's plenty more there. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Really, really wild time on the internet.
Anyway, let's, let's, let's go back to the Anthropic round. Matt Slotnik says, 'LOL at the jockeying behind the scenes to land on this wording. Quote: We have raised $30 billion in Series G funding led by GIC and ICONIQ, valuing Anthropic at $380 billion post-money.' The round was co-led by Durable Capital Partners, Dragoneer, Fidelity, and MGX. Lots of folks getting in. A huge part of this raise is Claude Code, says Boris Cherny, who is the creator of Claude Code over at Anthropic. Weekly active users doubled since January. People who've never written a line of code are building with it. Humbled to work on this every day with our team. That is remarkable growth at this scale. Doubling...
Kenneth having some humble, humble pie, or maybe, maybe showing just how early it is. He says, 'Still less annual revenue than AirPods.' AirPods, last I checked, were a $20 billion revenue business.
$22 billion in 2024. That's a massive business. But Anthropic will be there in what, a week or two? They just broke top 20 in the App Store and now they're in the top 10. They're number seven. The, the consumer app Claude by Anthropic is climbing in the charts. ChatGPT is number one for free apps. Google Gemini is number two and free cash is number three. Threads is number four. And I wonder, I wonder how much this is driven by momentum still. But definitely driven by momentum, right? So like it does, so there's so many people that have never, there's so many people that have never tried Claude and, and hadn't heard of it until recently. And again, the, we know they're putting a lot of paid spend behind the, the anti-ads campaign. Sure. Right. So that, that's going to be a factor.
Metacritic Capital was pretty funny. Back in March of 2024, he said, 'I continue to be puzzled by Anthropic's $18 billion valuation.' And then followed up and said, 'Market is so stupid sometimes. I have no words.' But of course the market, the market was right on this one so far. You can just see they were...
Are we sure that he was saying it was overvalued? He could have been saying it's undervalued.
No, I think he was saying undervalued. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I think that's why he's taking the victory lap is because he was at the time, a year ago, he was like, why is Anthropic so, like, has such a low valuation based on the market.
This is almost two years ago.
Oh, this is, yeah. This is almost two years ago. So, huh, I don't actually know.
I don't know which way Metacritic was going. Cell phone. Ask Martin Shkreli who's coming on the show.
And oh, he, he responded. He said, 'The puzzle meant I didn't understand why it was worth only $18 billion.' So, always vague posts so that you can take either direction. You never paint yourself into a corner. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I'm glad this chart is now public because it is bananas. It is ridiculous. It should not exist, says Bruno F., the founder of Magna Digital. $5 billion in tokens managed. Interesting. Yeah. What the crazy, crazy...
Just another pod guy says, 'Salesforce invests in Anthropic, colorized.' I think when Marc was on, he said they have about a point of Anthropic going into this round, if I remember correctly. What is this?
It's a horse giving money to a car. The car goes and buys a rocket launcher. The car blows up the barn and the horse is sad.
And that does feel like an apt analogy. It's very... And Anthropic has been all over legacy media.
Yeah. First, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Also, fantastic Valentine's Day gift. This, from this extraordinary piece in the New Yorker. Last summer, while Mark Zuckerberg was conducting hiring raids on other labs, Sholto Douglas, the Anthropic engineer and TVPN guest, told me, this journalist, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, that a number of his colleagues, quote, 'could have taken a $50 million paycheck, but the vast majority of them hadn't even bothered to respond.' Well, conviction...
They are early at a $350 billion company and are clearly very optimistic, but it is funny to just... Daniel money-mogged.
Daniel says, so wait, Claude has seat-based pricing. Does this mean they're disrupting themselves too? Of course, a lot of the concern has been around the seat-based model, but it even feels like that is less of, that is less of a factor than just the overall threat of zero marginal cost software.
Yeah. Why, why does Claude have seat-based pricing? It's, it's, it's essentially a consumption-based product, but psychologically if I'm rolling out Claude to a company and I set up seats for a team, I know that there's individual rate limits so no one, no one individual is going to like blow me up. Basically, that's the idea. But this, this goes into like some people were posting like if you're getting a job you should ask what you're...
But in this case it's not. This is Claude. This is not the API. This is not Claude... But you know, when you fire up Claude Code, like you can integrate your Claude account and so like this essentially gives you credits to write code as well. And so the, the, yeah, there's this new meme of like if you're going into a tech company, like ask what your token budget will be, like what's your inference budget. And so, I mean, these can clearly skyrocket pretty quickly. There's debates over, you know, oh, should I let my employees use like the fast mode or the regular mode or Pro? Like, is the work that they're doing really that valuable? If they're spending thousands a month, if they're spending tens of thousands a month, I, like at a certain point I need to make sure that they're not being wasteful. And so I think the seat-based plan still achieves a little bit of that psychological security for managers. And then there's also an interesting, there's probably a pretty bimodal distribution in the value that, or the actual cost associated with these plans. I would imagine that there's a portion of Pro users that use 100% of their inference budget every month and they cap out and they're frustrated. They might have a second plan or they might go down to a free plan or, or limit their usage. And then there's a whole bunch of folks who just have a seat and never use it or they use basically like very little inference or they're just asking things that can be answered by a free, by a free tier essentially, but they just like let it ride.
Zach in the chat says, we have 150 corporate Claude users purchased by seat. 50% max out in week one because of Excel token...
Token. Yeah, there you go.
Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com.
Dan Primack says, 'Working on newsletter. It may be shorter to list the VC firms not in the new Anthropic round.' It's a party round. Josh says, 'Got...
...grab at least one of the big labs' logos.' Many of the firms have sniped all three at this point. Sequoia, Founders Fund, ICONIQ's in a bunch, Andreessen's in multiple, I think. There's a variety of funds that have, have built stakes of various sizes in, in all the different labs and...
Yeah, it seems like Josh Kushner is one of the, one of the few that has remained deeply loyal.
Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's... And we do recognize we just had some technical difficulties, but it seems like we're...
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Slow Ventures is taking the other side of the all-in on AI bet. They said, 'Congrats to everyone who figured out that, found that foundation models are infrastructure plays, not startups. Now, let's talk about what happens when the picks and shovels phase ends and we're back to building actual products.' And Will Manidis says, 'Nightmarish degrees of cope.'
Yeah. Sam, Sam was always super bearish on the labs.
He thought they would commoditize. Was that what it was? So they wouldn't have pricing power.
Effectively. Yeah. Effectively he said, you know, open-source models are going to get really good. He was right. They have gotten really good. Yeah. But I think maybe missed that the labs would turn into product companies and stop just being...
Yeah. You know, it is, it is sort of interesting like if you, if you wound back the clock and you were like, 'My job is just to invest well in tech startup booms from 2005 to 2025.' There's one world where you're like, 'Okay, I'm going to go hunt for the Airbnb, the Stripe, the YC companies, the Coinbases, all the like application-layer companies, the, the Instagrams, the Twitters, all of these different companies.' But there's a different side where you're like, I'm going to buy like Broadcom, Cisco, Nvidia, AMD and still do really well and maybe even better depending on when you got in and when you got out. But it's a, yeah, it's a very like, just because it's an infrastructure play, even if that's true, that doesn't mean that it's not a good investment for an, an investor. There is a little bit of like purist vibes from like a venture capitalist should, or, or certain funds have strategies and so they say, you know, I'm going to...
Slow is a seed, Series A, but, but leans more early and so...
By the time you're looking at some of these deals investing at, you know, 5, 10...
You know, 20, 30, 40 billion...
Yeah, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of funds who have expanded and will invest in anything. Like you're a mining company, great, let's do it. You're, you know, you're buying Bitcoin on the balance sheet, like, okay, let's do it. There were a lot of funds that expanded what it meant to just be an asset manager. And there were some...
Funds that stayed very focused, and you know, we'll see. But interesting highlights from the Dario Amodei interview on Dwarkesh Patel. Jacob Rintamaki, friend of the show, has a quote here: 'All my lawyers never want me to say the word monopoly.' Dario says, 'I don't think that's true. I mean, I feel like we're in an economics class.' Dwarkesh says, 'Do you know the Tyler Cowen quote? We never stop talking about economics.' And Dario says, 'We never stop talking about economics.' So, no, I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly. All my lawyers never want me to say the word monopoly, but I don't think this field's going to be a monopoly. You do get industries in which there are a small number of players, not one, but a small number of players. And so that feels like where things are going, with both the expressed viewpoints of the VC firms investing in multiple labs, that there's a variety of strategies to deploy intelligence, whether it's the best model and get deployment and traction, whether it's on the infrastructure side. I do wonder how many more changes there will be in the horse race. It feels like there's a new hot model every couple weeks, and then someone fires back, and then they go back and forth and back and forth, and with all the flow
improvements do not seem to be. They seem much more like economies of scale and process power of being able to train at ever larger scales, marshal ever larger chunks of capital, and do whatever it takes to get to the frontier and stay there. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Because the stream, we're having issues again.
We're working to get it back up. If you can hear us. Markets now see a 30% probability of a Fed rate cut by April. More than 80% of easing by June.
Over on Kalshi, we're still seeing the Fed decision in March, March 93%.
Say maintains rate, no cut. So a cut would be a wild card at 7%, 9% for any sort of cut. So strong GDP growth, strong job numbers, you know, stay the course would be the logical thing. But we will continue to follow it. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Let's play this timeless clip of George Hotz.
Nah, we don't believe in stealth. I'm a really open guy. You are pretty open. I mean, I tell you everything I'm doing. Come on. Here's what I say. Here's what I say. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing, and you can try to compete, but I'll still crush you.
Nah, we don't believe in stealth. I'm really...
It's so funny. Also, I don't know why that person cut that to be so widescreen. It looks very cinematic, but I like the quote here. You think the eggs I lay are valuable? I am the golden goose.
I'm thinking people will steal your ideas if you share them is a sign of low IQ. And I agree, we are in the era of agency. And actually going and executing on the idea is the difficult thing. You need to be charisma maxing.
There's still a lot of secrets to every business. Yes. And CEOs can do 100 hours of podcasts and tell you a lot about what they're doing without telling you the one or two things that are actually important, and it's very easy for somebody to come in and try to fast follow and ultimately just kind of get it entirely wrong, even though it looks like the right...
And I think there was a huge incentive. I mean, going back to the SaaS apocalypse, there was incentive for a long time for companies where their moat was not software to say, 'We're a software company. We need to hire the best software engineers, look at our open source projects, focus on all the cool tech that we're building,' when really it was a marketplace, or really it was a liquidity provider, or really it was a network effect. And if you're a network effects business, it can be sort of boring and honestly anti-competitive to just be like, 'Look, we can do nothing and win.' No one wants to hear a CEO say that. But we're going to find out who can do nothing and win because we'll see it show up in the margins over the next couple financial...
Meanwhile, over on LinkedIn, George Hotz is posting. Yeah.
And Reed says, 'George Hotz is the only thing keeping my LinkedIn feed good.'
He says, 'Hello, corporate participant. You are building the machine that will eat you. You think your fake money will keep you safe. It won't. You think your social climbing friendships will keep you safe. They won't. The only choice is to stop. Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. If you keep feeding this machine, it will eat you. The proposed revolutions will not be enough. A global scale nuclear conflict might. But even then, I'm not sure. The problem was never AI itself. It's the collapse of trust in society. Apps and phones have snuck between every crevice of people, and they are run by psychopaths. The AI will be a further wedge, just another lever to manipulate you. You will not be able to stand up to it, and you will be discarded the second you don't serve it, like layoffs. You will die atomized and alone, and you won't understand that you did this to yourself.' Brutal. Nice little white pill.
Nice little Friday white pill.
He's such a white pillar. Well, here's a white pill first. Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create codeback prototypes and apps fast. But here is the real white pill. For just $33 million, you can have a private home on a remote resort in Utah. Can you guess where it is?
Nope. It's at the Aman Luxury Resort. It's in the Wall Street Journal. The residence is the first to hit the market at Amangiri in remote southern Utah. Amangiri Resort, a crown jewel in the Aman hospitality company's portfolio.
They're doing residences.
They're doing residences. Global. They have a portfolio of global hotels and residences. They're listing the first private home for $33 million, located just over the Utah border from the small town of Page, Arizona. The hotel currently features 34 guest suites starting at $5,000 per night and 10 tented pavilions at its Camp Sarika, providing a temporary escape for travelers. But the newly built house on 9 acres can be purchased outright. Designed by Los Angeles-based firm Marmol Radziner, the roughly 12,000-square-foot residence has six bedrooms and comes fully furnished. It's the first of 12 planned private homes, which will be about half a mile from the resort.
OTP says, 'But does it have a bunky?'
Does it have a bunker? Bunk bed? No.
Oh, a bunker. Bunker. Bunker.
Oh, we're going to get into bunkers. There's a whole piece in the journal about how to secure a mega mansion. I know you've been asking. We have the answers. Until it's sold, the home is available to rent for $45,000 per night. Before we continue, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken. It helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, residences have been part of the Amangiri vision since the resort opened in 2009. The decision to offer private residences now was spurred by the success of the 2020 tented camp launch, rising demand globally for hotel-branded residences, and a sense that the property was ready to take that step. While future residences will share a cohesive aesthetic, each will be designed to respond to the unique contours of the specific site. In Page, the median sale price was $610,000 in August. There are currently around a half a dozen listings above $33 million, though all clustered further north near ski resorts. Amangiri buyer interest has been strong, he said, particularly among Aman loyalists and North American clients. Additional residential plots priced between $5 million and $12.5 million are under contract. And so let's get into Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses, and we're going to tell you how to do it for yourself. Anxiety over high-profile violence has the wealthy spending big on armed security, bunkers, a bunky, and even moats. They're building moats. I haven't heard of an alligator in the moat or a shark in the moat, but people are in fact building moats.
Being an alligator salesman, I feel like is unsloppable. I think it could be clankable.
Yes, but maybe still at the moment unsloppable.
But you got to build a humanoid robot that can go in the water to wrestle the alligator, and that might be... well, ask, is it waterproof? Is it waterproof? Can it go wrestle an alligator or not? Because I don't want it just to do my dishes and do the laundry. I want it wrestling alligators in my moat.
So, British music producer Alex Grant was living in an under-construction mega mansion in Los Angeles one morning shortly after 9:00 a.m. An armed intruder burst into the home. Grant said he came in and we had a tussle. He was formerly known as Alex Da Kid. Grant managed to call his manager, who phoned the police. Soon officers and helicopters were on the scene. He briefly considered abandoning the project after the 2017 break-in, but ultimately finished the 24,000-square-foot home, which has eight pools, a car elevator, and a nightclub. Wow. But he doubled down on security features, installing a guard house, tall gates, and a security system with retina scanners that alert the homeowner to movement in the home. 'Later, I found out he had these knives on him,' Grant said, who recently listed the mansion and a neighboring house for $85 million after moving to New York. In an era of high-profile violence, including the suspected abduction of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Arizona home just over a week ago, the wealthy are investing heavily in their personal security, particularly when it comes to their homes. Security measures once reserved for presidents and royalty—safe rooms, biometric access controls, laser-powered perimeter defenses—these are now mainstream items in luxury homes. Executive protection teams and armed guards patrol gated enclaves and suburban estates, while tech startups are rolling out predictive threat detection systems built for the ultra-wealthy. The shift reflects a hardening view among the affluent: traditional policing and communal safety are no longer enough. Security is being privatized and customized. The new emphasis is reflected in sales data. Roughly 45% of luxury homes in 2025 included a reference to privacy or security, up from 38% the year earlier. So break-ins at the homes of celebrities and professional athletes have been putting the wealthy on edge. A group of Chilean nationals was indicted last year for stealing items worth more than $2 million from sports stars, including Kansas City Chiefs players Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes. Travis, this had something to do with the visa process with Chile, where you could very easily get a tourist visa.
So there were these, like, allegedly there were teams that would be permanently based in the US, and then they would be running kind of the operations. They'd be in the kind of war room, and then basically tourists would come for two weeks, hit a bunch of houses, and then bounce.
Wow. And those were the only people that were actually exposed, meaning they were like carrying out the different ops.
Well, the Miami Dolphins player Tua Tagovailoa, I might be mispronouncing that, said he hired personal security to monitor his house while he's on the road. He says, 'Let that be known. They're armed. So if you try to go inside my house, think twice.' The homes of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman have also been broken into. Miami real estate agent Danny Herzberg of Coldwell Banker said he began noticing an increase in emphasis on security in 2020 when high-profile executives were migrating from New York to Miami during the early days of the COVID pandemic. Private jet tracking websites have also been an issue. They sent chills through the high-net-worth community. Corporations are taking note. Companies offering personal security benefits for CEOs increased by 10%, according to Goldman Sachs. One entrepreneur capitalizing on this growth is David Widerhorn, who got into real estate after selling a tech company in 2017. I wonder what he sold. He recently built a heavily secured home in Scottsdale, Arizona. In early December, Widerhorn walked through the 8,600-square-foot property, pointing out 32 AI-powered facial and vehicle recognition cameras. There's also a laser intrusion detection system around the perimeter. Pausing at a steel double gate in front of the house, he warned that the security system kicks in even before visitors reach the front door, which is fashioned out of 3-inch thick solid steel and has 13 deadbolts. He said even the landscape was designed as a deterrent.
Cacti.
Sour orange trees. There are sour orange trees with 4-inch spikes in concrete planters on the edge of the property. And just beyond those trees, separating the house and the street,
If you try and run through that bush, it will be a bad day for you.
He said, 'Should anyone get past the trees, lasers will detect motion and the system will call the police.' Inside the house, three ear-piercing alarms will go off. And this is an interesting thing. The fireplace surround, like around the fireplace in the great room, it will change colors. It's made out of Cristallo quartzite and it can change color, so it'll turn red. So you're sitting there, and if there's anything detected on the property, your fireplace turns red above the TV to show you that something's going on. Very interesting that that's a visual cue. The home's most fortified feature lies behind a wood-paneled wall: a reinforced concrete safe room with a 2,000-pound door and an air filtration system built to US Army Corps of Engineers standards. Widerhorn declined to share specifics, but said it cost more than $10 million to build the house. About $1 million was spent on bullet-resistant smart glass, and the front entry security features cost more than $1 million. In Las Vegas, clients of luxury design firm Blue Heron are spending between $100,000 and $1.5 million on security features, including safe rooms and bunkers. Blue Heron is now working on new ways to incorporate architecture with security, such as exterior window shades that could be closed with the touch of a button to protect the home's occupants. In Surfside, Florida, the developer of the Delmore, a planned 37-unit ultra-high-end condominium project designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and with units priced at up to $200 million, has tapped a Washington, DC-based security firm to design the building security.
Yeah, that is crazy. But I mean, I guess from a security perspective, if you're in some massive building, you're sort of like diffusing the cost. There's more people that might notice something. There's more security guards. It's almost like a gated community in one building.
Layers of access. I'm just purely thinking you're effectively looking at $100 million a floor, right? A couple floors, maybe a few. It's up there for a condo.
That is huge. The firm is working to integrate technology like biometric access, facial recognition, and iris scanning into the design of the project. For instance, when a resident or visitor pulls into the building's parking garage, their car will be scanned for license plate recognition, but facial recognition may also identify the car's occupants and their level of approval to access the building. That in turn triggers the security system to allow the person to unlock only the doors and elevators that they are permitted to pass through. Meanwhile, an AI-powered security system will track movements captured on camera throughout the building, looking for anomalies. Herzberg said he recently had a client fly in a security consultant to evaluate a roughly $50 million house he had put under contract. The consultant looked into the viability of installing a complex camera and laser system that could sense any movement on the perimeter of the property, including the water. So, lots of interesting stuff. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. If you go further down, they talk about San Francisco tech entrepreneur Kevin Hartz said he and his high-net-worth peers in California are increasingly focused on security. Kevin, of course, has a home security startup.
Hartz said he co-founded his own security company, Sauron, in 2024 after being spooked by an attempted break-in at his home in San Francisco. The person first rang the doorbell before making his way around the house, trying some of the doors and windows. When he couldn't gain access, he went to Hartz's next-door neighbor's home, where he tried to push through the front door. He was arrested by police. 'That could have been us,' Hartz said. The Sauron system, which has only been launched in beta across a few homes in the Bay Area, will differ from other security systems in that it includes deterrent strategies, not only response. For instance, if it senses an intruder, it could include a feature that automatically triggers sounds such as dogs barking or police sirens coming closer. Just the sound of dogs barking feels like a great feature.
OTP in the chat was saying, 'Do none of these people have a German Shepherd?'
Yeah, German Shepherds. Fun fact about German Shepherds: a purebred dog might be like single-digit thousands, but there are companies out there that will train a German Shepherd for the military, basically, and then also train them to be pets. So they have that level of training, and then you can get up in like the $40,000-$50,000 range for a dog, which is hilarious. Dog as much as a car, but dogs are typically...
A lot of money, but it's a lot of dog.
It's a lot of dog. It's the GT3 RS of dogs, truthfully. But whenever you look at the list of what's the most likely thing to eliminate home intrusion risk, dogs are always at the top. Quickly, let me tell you about another great Valentine's Day gift. 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. And without further ado, we have Martin Shkreli in the waiting room. Let's bring in Martin to the TV room. Martin, good to see you again. How are you doing?
Technology Brothers. How are you?
We're fantastic. How are you?
Are you gearing up for the weekend? Are you excited?
Caffeinated, ready to do more work.
Fantastic. Locked in. Great lock.
What's your daily caffeine stack? You know, we talked with Huberman about this. You're the natural.
Do you microdose, or do you like do 400 milligrams and then coast?
I do coffee, several coffees, and then just keep drinking this all day long, and it's...
Is that like a 4-hour... something like that? Okay. Five-hour energy. Oh, wait. How many hours are they doing these days? Four, five. It's a lot of energy.
Anyway, what are you seeing in the market? Give us the update on just how you're processing the last week of chaos, whether you want to talk about software, quantum computing, what's going on, what's worth following.
Yeah. So I have this new potential product, might productize this. I've been tweeting it for now for free, but it's basically something nobody's ever done before with VC investors, which is I'm using my network and some heuristics, maybe even some AI, to guess kind of what positions people took in rounds. Obviously, for some cases, I know exactly what the cap table is. But in other cases, I don't. So I have this list of gains or investors. And it's very interesting. So, you know, I started with obviously the joke one, which is FTX would be up $36 billion today.
Putting in, I guess, was $300,000 in Anysphere, which of course is Cursor at a $4.4 million pre-money.
Wait, is that really the pre-money? That's still insane because in that era, getting into a great company at four. Like if somebody was pitching you a company at four, it was almost bearish because they didn't talk to anyone smart that was like, 'Hey, you guys are really smart, you can price it at 10.'
I'm guessing and have various heuristics, and obviously I'd call somebody like you guys and say, 'Actually, I think you want to talk to this guy,' or that number might have to go up a little bit, etc. But that's better than nothing. And right now at Crunchbase and PitchBook and stuff, there's just nothing. And so it's a lot of fun. And so that $300,000 investment, they raised $400,000, so my guess was validated at 300. I think I can look, it's actually in the bankruptcy document, so eventually we'll get the exact number, but that's a $1.2 billion position in today's money. Obviously, the bankruptcy estate lawyer is just like, 'Oh, what the [__] is this? Anysphere? It sounds like zero.'
Yeah, it does. When you say Anysphere in the context of FTX, it sounds like we're a blockchain company looking to build a live multiplayer game, and your eyes start to glaze over a little bit. Like, how many NFTs did Anysphere drop? Not quite.
Anthropic, they're at $32 billion now. I'm sure you saw SBF had the... he posted a little thing about that. Thrive is the big mystery player because nobody's really sure how much money they sunk into OpenAI, but they also did Anysphere.
So huge gains from Thrive. They were in a couple later rounds of Scale and some other companies. So big numbers there. Probably one of the more interesting ones is Reed Hoffman, $50 million first check in OpenAI with Khosla, maybe 25 or 50, and that's worth many billions. And then Jaan Tallinn, the EA...
Yeah, Skype guy, $100 million turns to $11 billion in Anthropic, first check with Reed Hoffman. So a lot of fun to look through these and see, you know, you can sort of calculate the returns, and of course VC fund returns eventually they either go public or you can find them somewhere, or oftentimes state pension funds and stuff do that. Anthropic obviously the big...
It is. When you break this down, it's so funny that Crunchbase never tried to roll out even something that was generally accurate. It is very fascinating information, and especially now where Dan Primack was joking like it's easier to list who's not in Anthropic at this point from the big-name funds, and so that just makes this kind of information more interesting. Because yeah, it's cool that you're in a company, and almost anybody if they work hard enough can get some exposure to these names. You know, maybe it's via an SPV or an SPV and an SPV, but still this is the information that is actually super fascinating.
The other interesting one is Dustin Moskovitz, who put $25 million in Anthropic as part of the effective altruism mafia, was able to make $4 billion, which I think offsets his losses from starting Asana, but I'm not sure.
He didn't. That's ridiculous. There's no losses from Asana.
Well, come on, the Anthropic position would be worth 2x what Asana is.
Yes. Yes. Which is crazy. But he's not sitting on losses. Oh, you think he bought it at the time?
Well, we know he bought huge amounts of Asana with cash. So...
Okay. Okay. So maybe... maybe, I doubt it, but you know your point.
He's doing well. So the lesson for folks is just get a small check in the next Anthropic. Try to network on effective altruism. I think that seems to be the...
Yeah. What was the alpha from EA? Like, do you have a post?
There's a lot of smart people that have no other things to do. So their social setting is replaced by this sort of religion or anything like that. And you know, this cult, and if you're in a cult of really smart people, probably something good will come of it.
Do you think it's still a cult, or do you think it's like B2B SaaS now? I think it's changed a lot. It's like B2B SaaS, and I think the new cult is...
The cult of SaaS. You're welcome. The water's warm. Come in. It's amazing. We're automating workflows. We're delivering enterprise value.
We're hiring consultants.
We will forget about all the earlier stuff. We will welcome you into improving the economy, raising GDP. This is what we stand for in this cult.
Maybe the new cult is the AI agent website or whatever's next in that world where you know the AI...
What's your personal... so I wrote in the newsletter today, somewhat of a joke but a more serious topic, become unsloppable, the idea that there are still real moats that exist, and the historical moat of just we had a bunch of smart people working on building this software for a long time, so if you want to compete with us you have to also spend a lot of money and a lot of time hiring a bunch of software engineers, that's going away. Yet you're building what is a seat-based pricing tool, and I expect you to do very well with it just because I think in the future individuals will want great access to data to make different decisions, and maybe they're working with agents as well, so I can see that...
Yeah, the agents need the data.
But what's your personal philosophy? Because you're clearly not, if you were just caught up in the kind of fear-based marketing of the labs, you might not be building a seat-based SaaS tool.
Yeah. I mean, data is often firewalled. You know, we have a guy that just talks to every exchange in the world, and the amount of times he has to pull his hair out because some exchange in Asia wants to meet yet again before signing the deal, and there's no self-checkout, there's no agent. The protocol is sit-down meeting, and every time you go to an enterprise SaaS company and it says 'talk to sales,' it's sort of like, what does AI do at that point? So I feel like you also have this trend where why would you put huge amounts of data into the model? The model should call out, and compressing the world's information into some parameters and weights is just not a wise use of parameter space. And I think everybody's been saying this in AI. And so the problem is, okay, shrink the whole internet, but what happens when stuff leaves the internet? There's a stock that Bloomberg doesn't have in its portfolio. You guys weren't born yet, I think, but it was called Webvan.
Oh, yeah. Oh, we know the...
OG. My family used HomeGrocer, which got acquired by Webvan, and I think the HomeGrocer founders probably got liquidity before Webvan crashed. So I think they wound up doing very well. They killed it.
Check in with them. But yeah.
Yeah. So Webvan is not on Bloomberg, for example.
Even though it's supposed to be this great tool. And it's certainly not on the web. Lots of data gets deleted from Google, and there just isn't this rich tabular data available. So tabular data I think is going to actually thrive in the AI world because it's just not going to be in the models, or if it is, the models get tired after a while. It's not going to give you 3,649 SaaS companies with this market cap. It's going to say, here's the top 200, and don't ask me about the next 3,200 because that's just not what LLMs are really good at. But the frontier technology has sold off very, very hard in the last month or two, and there's a lot of speculation in the quant community as to what's happening. So there are some funds that ran really well with this frontier tech. So I think that includes quantum computing, but also includes nuclear, drones, space, all the stuff that's sort of next-generation things that aren't here yet. And this was like the hottest sector last year, and anybody who didn't have exposure to this underperformed. And there were some quant firms I think that were very, very overexposed to this. And then the new year started, and in the hedge fund and quant world, January 1 is like a brand new page. Nothing matters from last year. You forget everything. And so this factor just flips in reverse. And part of the reason was the calendar, I think. And now the quantum stocks look like dog poo-poo. And they've gone down a lot, and nobody knows what to make of anything. But in the private world, numbers are still big valuations, still lots of big up rounds so far. So that disconnect will be really interesting as time goes on. Last time I talked about photonic computing. There's a new company, Thiel fellow, young guy.
You know, I'm telling you right now, these young guys think that I'm this old dog that can't learn new tricks. I'm going to teach all of you young bucks, 22, 25, you come into MySpace, I'm going to show you. I got the dog in me still.
But anyway, Olik is what it's called. And he's raised 220 or 250 to do photonic computing for AI, which I think is...
That's the second company or third company now that's come out and said we're going to do it.
And he's going to do it with SRAM, interestingly, so he's got SRAM on board, and so it's like Groq plus in essence.
And I think it's a really good idea, but execution does matter.
What do you think about biological computing? We talked to a fellow who built a neuron in the lab, and it was way over my head.
Feed some protein, sugar.
So we liked the protein part of the interview, but didn't get much further than that.
Yeah. I mean, look, that's how we do it. So I don't see why not. I think it's a spiking neural network, right? So it's a little different from the software neural network, but I don't see why you couldn't do it. I think reading the output is kind of difficult. In photonics, you have to use almost like a camera, you know, you wouldn't use a camera, but you're using a camera-like sensor, and that sort of is your readout. What's your readout here? Well, probably in the body or the brain, we're using calcium levels or other things like that as well as synaptic firing. But if you want to have really good control of that, I don't think we know yet how that works. But of course, they've gotten these brains in a vat to play pong and do other things like that. So it's certainly possible. And I was thinking about this with my girl who is in the space about potentially, do we buy a pig farm? We buy a pig farm. Pigs are really interesting. Obviously the pork part gets sold to meat companies, but what's interesting is different parts of the pig are biological drugs. There's adrenocorticotropic hormone which is sold for a huge price, and then the pig's lungs also make a surfactant that's sold for respiratory disease. And then finally the brain, we're going to keep and grow that in a separate container, and we're going to rent it out to Sam Altman at the end.
Slop, slop of the trial, literal slop.
You will be literally feeding slop to pigs. Yeah, play the pig noise 25 times.
Talk about what's happening in small caps or sort of like the long tail of the market as a reaction to the AI boom. I texted a friend who...
He's laughing at, and 20 years from now your child will say, 'My father made his money pig farming.'
Yeah, I texted my friend saying, 'Look, everyone is talking about a chip bottleneck. There's this massive AI buildout going on. Have you looked at TSMC?' And he was like, 'Oh, it's too big to have some breakout move. I'm not interested. Call me when you're talking about a $4 billion company that's deeper in the supply chain.' I talked to one person that was excited about Anduril. Found some tiny supplier to Anduril, and they were like, 'This is a proxy.' What companies are actually interesting? How do people think about those long-tail, early, smaller-cap companies that are still properly indexed to the correct narrative around AI?
Yeah, I think they're all scams. I mean, it's an unfortunate situation. And this is why, actually, Joe Lansil, I think I talked about this last time, he gave a talk with the SEC commissioner, and he basically said, 'Why can I buy TBPN coin?' No such thing, by the way, that triples... TBPN coin or whatever.
Coin you make up on the spot. I could put millions in it, lose all my money. There's no investor protections, but if I try to buy, and god forbid, you guys blow the whistle and Matt Grim stops everyone from buying it and so forth. Hi Matt.
But in all seriousness, I think that's something we have to fix. Because you end up having people chasing really low-quality companies. There's companies that just change their name to AI and hope that somebody buys them. Same thing with quantum and other things like that. And I feel like two things should happen. First, we should let people buy privates. But two, more privates should go public. And I think demystifying and making that less scary. Like if I was trying to convince Replit to go public, because there's a drug company called Repligen, and it would be the same ticker. It's like you can't go public without them. So you have to buy Repligen.
The drug, and you can go public. And Elon had to buy United Steel because they had X for like a hundred years.
And now X is available. So he just waited for them to get bought out by somebody else. Perfect timing. But in all seriousness, going public's the best thing ever. It's the freest, cheapest capital of all time. We obviously have seen down rounds from privates in publics. But that's mostly for boring SaaS. Once you have AI, you're going to have a million times revenue. Obviously the difference between the two is hard to say, but I think if a company like Replit went public, you'd be surprised at the valuation you could get. I think there's enough demand out there that some of these guys should start going public.
Did you have the same read on a lot of people that Michael Grimes going back to Morgan Stanley was incredibly bullish for late-stage tech and the IPO window being firmly open?
I think so. I think you're going to also see other people from DC rotate back. And it was a really great thing for these people to actually truly make a sacrifice because I think there's that much upside in tech, and it's an amazing thing for them to come do something good for America. And now you have folks like Anthropic and OpenAI where their capital needs are larger than the private space, to be frank. And I think the ability for them to raise a hundred billion or 200 billion or 300 billion, the markets could realistically support that, whereas I think the private markets are starting to stretch, like you said. I mean, that Anthropic list of investors, the exclusive...
Syndicate was virtually a long list of every big fund.
Eleven Labs, 11 billion. Numerology.
So my company, our first six to nine months, I think we spent trying to make a better ElevenLabs or compete. Truth be told, we couldn't make an equal, so couldn't make a better one. But it was sort of my fast lesson in software, which is the only thing that matters is sales. Product and second most important, engineering, is like last. But if you don't have distribution, you don't try to sell the product, it's not going to sell itself. And it's a sober lesson of those guys, like very aggressive for the longest...
Time if you did a one-word or two-word sentence in ElevenLabs, it wouldn't output it at all. There were hallucinations or all this stuff. They just pushed, you know, they fixed all that stuff, of course, but you know, they pushed really, really hard on sales, and that sort of fixes everything. And I think that, you know, some of the best VCs I ever talked to said, you know, when are you going to launch your product? And I said, ah, it's not ready. And they said, just launch it. Just launch it. Just launch it. And, you know, get off the uncomfortable stage fright and just start selling and you'll get more feedback and so forth. So I think they took that to heart really early on and just, you know, they didn't have better technology necessarily than other guys. I think they just sort of, you know, realized, okay, who needs to buy this stuff? Let's go build an infrastructure around that. Just incredible success. I mean, I tip my hat to them.
Yeah. How do you think about the moat that comes not from software engineering, because generating code is cheap or soon to be free, but training spend? So if I spend a hundred million employing a bunch of great software engineers for four years and built some elaborate software system, and you can just vibe code it for two orders of magnitude less cost in tokens, you clearly have an advantage against me. But if it's going to cost you $100 million to do the training run that I did for a hundred million, is that a durable moat?
I doubt it. You know, I think it's product and sales and brand and things like that. I mean, it's trad business. So there's going to be a lot of people replicating products and then they fail and they're going to wonder why. And, you know, it's the rest of the business. You know, you're talking about 10, 20% of your organization. I mean, you really have to get the rest of the organization excited about product. And I think you're going to find one interesting thing that'll happen probably is that folks from embedded entrenched industries like certain manufacturing and certain materials businesses, things like that, they're going to spin out themselves and say, 'I'm going to solve the problem that's been plaguing my industry, but I'm not a programmer.' It's like that 'I'm not a rapper' YouTube. And, you know, I'm starting a software company, but I'm not a programmer. But I know that our whole oil industry has had this huge well software problem. I'm going to build the well software. And I think startups like that are actually going to not only create tons of wealth for themselves, but they're going to actually help the economy. And that's where, just like the internet, you know, help GDP.
That sort of solution is where, you know, you're going to see GDP needle move. And it's a wonderful time to be like the nerdiest, best guy in, say, equity research or something like that because, you know, you might have an inkling that a rival might have an inkling that, oh, you know, finance is going to be changed by AI. I'm going to try to point my apparatus at this and figure it out. But if you're the guy that's like, I know everything about, you know, this type of little narrow thing, you're going to really crush it because you really know what the problems are. So people coming out of industry, there's a rival of ours called Rogo. Rogo is an AI company focused on finance, old Wall Street guys. They have a much, much better chance of succeeding because they did the job. They know what to do. And I think you're going to see so many people come out of the S&P 500 that just said, 'Oh, I was working at Eaton or Fluor or like companies that are just like big, you know, pyramids or whatever.' And all of a sudden, you know, they're starting software companies that solve the key problems in that industry.
So maybe more companies but fewer computer science background founders.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, so many of these problems could be solved, I think, without knowing every single data structure and things like that. I mean, obviously, you know, there's going to be people, it's going to be a barbell, right? Like there's going to be people who still need to know how to make an FPGA and program an FPGA. And, you know, when Elon said that, you know, he sort of set a lot of people on fire over the last few weeks when he said that you're going to see AI write assembler or even machine-level code, you know, compiled assembler. And, you know, that's a pretty wacky idea. And the thing about wacky ideas from Elon is they tend to be right. So it's definitely, you know, one of these things that, you know, is kind of mind-blowing that, you know, if you think about AI safety, um, you know, tell the program, give me a program that does SAS for oil wells, cool, here it is. But by the way, you know, in the compiled assembly which you can't read because you don't speak binary, uh, you know, there's this thing that says, you know, I'm taking 5% of the revenue and sending it in crypto to my...
I like that. That's your AI doom scenario, just slight fraud.
Just clipping a grift. How do you expect layoffs on Wall Street? Because with all of the broad fear right now among white collar workers, I'm not seeing the layoffs that are explicitly, you know, 'hey, you were doing this thing for the company and now we're just running this agent to do that and so we'll see you later.' We are seeing, 'hey, you were doing this thing, now AI can help you do it a lot better, so our expectations are going to rise, we are going to expect you to do more and be more productive, but you still have your job.' What are you kind of hearing from people at different finance firms about how they're adopting AI and how they're feeling about job security?
I think in general, you know, one of the things you learn in founder school after your fourth or fifth time is that, you know, you're supposed to hate firing people and you're supposed to learn to like it over time. Nobody likes it. You know, it's the worst thing ever. And the funny thing is, like, if you become more productive at work, the company doesn't say, 'Oh, yeah, well, let's get rid of you and save whatever amount of money.' Because they're already making money with you employed. So the fact that you're becoming more productive means that, you know, whatever the margins were, they're probably improving. Could they improve even further by getting rid of you? Maybe. But I think there's this like slow atrophy maybe. But I think in general, we as humans want to employ other humans and we kind of want to be productive. I mean, nobody wants to needlessly employ people. But I think that there is this idea of, okay, machine can do your job. We have this at my office all the time. And, you know, I say, 'Chris, you know, I wrote a program to do your job. Good news. You don't have to do it anymore. But there's a new thing you have to do now.' And, you know, our company just got twice as efficient. It's wonderful. And if the day came where there's literally nothing for Chris to do, then, you know, maybe that would be the day that made sense. But the thing is, there's always an incremental thing for a company to do.
Yeah. Almost no startup founder has ever thought, 'Great, I did it. I built the six products that our customers really need and there's just no other way for me to expand the opportunity set.'
Yeah. I mean, yeah, those businesses die though.
Yeah. I mean, you're going to, I mean, if that person has a couple more hours a day now, it's great. You go meet with, you know, some potential recruits. Go meet with some potential customers. I mean, there's always something you can do and I think that's going to happen in finance. Adoption of AI has been very slow. And it's probably going to stay that way. Finance people are really stuck in their ways, which is a good thing and a bad thing if you're selling software to them. Once they get stuck in your way, you're very happy. But, you know, there tends to be a heavy dose of contrarianism in certain industries. And I'd say, you know, across the S&P 500, there's this sort of like, ah, you know, technology, we'll use it eventually. And that eventually takes time. And that's why the first people to adopt this stuff in great ways is not only because it works really well, but also because they're used to doing it, is developers. Developers love AI and they've embraced it, you know, very quickly. Virtually all programmers now use AI. There were a couple of holdouts even at our company, but they eventually just gave up. And I think you're going to see the same thing in other industries. Finance is tough because like there's this mystical idea that the trader is this like random, you know, far end of the bell curve, like super talented person that just has this like weird zen kind of ability to tell what stocks are going to go up and down. And then the other end of the barbell are the quants. And the quants sort of feel like AI is not good enough. But many of them, from what I've heard, is many quants are getting new ideas from AI and also implementing them with AI. So I do think that...
Yeah, if you work at a hedge fund now, you can just ask, you know, your favorite LLM, 'How should I hedge AI?' and just implement exactly that and you're guaranteed to outperform. No, I'm kidding.
It's a little bit scary for some quant funds because you do have to wonder if, you know, the thing you've been doing for 20 years that's your profit center is going to possibly be done by somebody else. That is a little worrisome. And then, you know, eventually, and certainly there are firms, I can name them, but you can just guess the big institutions on the street that they're increasingly thinking about and even in some cases deploying transformers to do analysis. And I don't see why, you know, the hard part about being Warren Buffett was discipline, right? Is saying no to so many things. And if you can put that in the prompt or put that in the context and you just say, 'Listen, I really only want the best, you know, the highest quality companies, the best returns, say no to everything else.' And, you know, I don't see how that's impossible. Just copy the Buffett strategy, you might be better off. A lot of the mistakes in investing come from overdoing it in things that, you know, in FOMO and things like that. And resisting that FOMO and saying, you know, I'm just going to sort of buy these types of companies and do my thing. So I do think like investing as a discipline is going to start to change a little bit.
Mhm. Lightning. I have four questions.
I've got one. And then there's a lot of performative AI usage happening right now. The people that are, you know, ordering a new Mac Mini on DoorDash, ordering 10 Mac Minis on DoorDash. We were joking around. My girl just did this. But like, who are you looking to for founder-style roles? Like, what do you think truly the best founders are doing? Like, ideally, working on the most important thing at the company, which could be a recruit, could be a customer, could be getting a raise done, it could be going on a long walk and just thinking about the business. But there's a heavy amount of delegation and ideally they're delegating to people that are using a bunch of AI. But do you have any sort of internal fear around, am I using this stuff as efficiently as I should be myself? Are you looking to anyone and saying like, 'Okay, they're actually really tapped in,' because just buying a Mac Mini and setting it up and, you know, having it running and texting it, you know, here and there doesn't necessarily qualify you as like actually tapped in.
Yeah. I wonder if there's a way to, you know, to not annoyingly reach out to customers with AI. And I think that, you know, we all get that email, like I just hit block on all of them. The 'hey, I noticed that you're doing this, so now I'm gonna, you know, I'm a vendor that's offering you that.' And I think that's, you know, going to result in not too many sales, but I do think that these things have some yield and I wonder if there's a really good way that sort of in the back of my mind worries me. And then at this point I wonder if LLMs can replace recruiters, right? Where they say, 'Who's the best at, you know, time series tick programming or something like that?' and the LLM says, 'John Smith here, Dave Smith there, you know, they're also named Smith for some reason, and Will Smith there.' And I think those, you know, at some point that might happen. Of course, some of that's just human knowledge where people whisper amongst each other that, you know, 'Oh, you know, this is the best person at this kind of investing.' But I think that, you know, because we're all like blogging and like putting stuff out there, you know, we may also just be able to ask that person who's the best person. So I feel like there's definitely new ways, creative ways to use AI that, you know, people are coming up with all the time that are really surprising and shocking and, you know, they're all like secret sauce, I think, for most people. But, you know, was our secret sauce for a while.
Yeah. On the recruiting front, I met a guy a couple years ago who, like, his entire recruiting business for years had been work Brazilian fintech engineers. Like, he had just done a decade and all he did was help companies hire the best Brazilian engineers that liked working on financial services companies and, like, he had carved out a great business. And I do wonder, I don't know that identifying who the great ones are. It's like maybe you did a certain number of years at Nubank and then you popped over here and then you popped back and, like, you can probably pick up some of that stuff. But then what is the value of just, like, actually having, like, how durable is the personal relationship with those people that you've placed over a long enough period of time and can you continue to basically extract rent because, like, they will respond to your text and not the, like, you know, millionth AI text that is constantly kind of chasing them. Anyways, lightning round. John, I'll just do one. Neolabs, bullish, bearish? What do you think?
I'd say bullish. You know, this is a contrarian view. I think because I'm especially looking forward to JT, Jerry T-Rex, Neolab. I think these are really smart people.
Are they product companies or are they research companies that will get acquired in?
I think they're going to all have a crisis and have to figure it out.
Yeah. So here's the bearish take on Neolabs. From an investment standpoint, I get it because I would say, like, really, really elite smart team. There's somewhat of a capped downside. If you invest $50 million, you could probably get $50 million worth of, you know, some other lab that's actually working down the line out if it doesn't work out. But these people were, like, working on something like, you know, 'Hey, these LLMs aren't really learning in real time. They're just kind of like in a certain state and I'm going to leave this lab and go work on that problem.' Meanwhile, the lab is still working on that problem. And we've also seen as different labs have different advancements, the other labs can, like, quickly just catch up, right? So, like, one person has a breakthrough. And so my question is, like, if a Neol raises a hundred million and, like, actually has a breakthrough, then they just have the problem of, like, are we actually going to be able to sell this better than the labs that will probably figure out how to do this, the big labs that'll figure out how to do this in the next maybe two months later, but they have, you know, a million customers already. So, like, that's the bear case for me is, like, even if you have this, like, breakthrough, you don't have the, like, sales distribution.
Yeah. No, I mean, the bear case is what do these people know about business? You know, they're starting a business, right? So it's kind of a scary thing, but I think that, you know, look at biotech and some other industries. You know, this is pretty common. And ultimately, I think they're doing the hard part. You know, the easy part is you get a bunch of good-looking guys like you guys. And, you know, you get them to start selling, positioning, product. But I think the hard part is, yeah, how do you do continual learning? How do you do a new form of AGI? It's a little past most of our pay grades. And I think, you know, there probably will be a crisis where, like, the real ones will be separated from the fake ones, but that's just human nature anyway. Like, there'll be some funding crunch and then somebody has to, like, emerge with that dog in them and say, 'No, I'm going to raise another 200 million. I'm going to come out with something tonight and we're going to do it.' And for that type of, you know, crazy person, and then there's going to be folks like, I don't want to name a certain AI company that folded, but I'll throw in one that did, which was the guys who made Hugging Face, Inflection. They sort of, you know, had that outcome that you're talking about. And, you know, but there'll be people like that see that, you know, valley of death and say, 'No, we have to finish this.' And I think that probably one of the biggest things that people have to remember, but they don't because they don't care, is that the investor's money is sacred. And if you're just thinking about it as, 'Oh, what's the worst that happens? You know, I wind down and Sequoia loses their money and this and that.' You know, I take that really seriously and everyone should. And, you know, I think that the handful that do, you know, will see their runway dwindling and saying, 'Ah, we really got to do a product here and tough it out and figure it out.' And I think those will be the future leaders.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the stream. Always a great time chatting with you.
Have a great weekend. Good to see you. Enjoy your lock-in.
Enjoy the caffeine. Enjoy your fifth Five-Hour Energy.
Tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. We have Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, in the studio. While he comes in, I'm going to tell you about Okta. Where's Okta? Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. The Vanguards. The Vanguards are out today.
Yeah. Oh, they're out today.
Well, they're out. They've been out, but they're out here today.
They were out like months ago. Months ago.
I have to ask you guys before we start. How are you recovering from Clav getting brutally put on by the ASU frat leader? I just want to know.
It rocked men everywhere.
I mean, I think the reason that that resonated is everyone's experienced that, right? I get that. I get that every day. I get that every day.
John Coogan has never been predictable.
I think it was predictable.
Yeah, I wasn't that surprised, but we did this morning. Sauna.
True. The whole team was in the sauna after our workout this morning and this guy must have been an ex-bodybuilder. It was just ridiculous.
It was one of the widest backs I've ever seen from sea to shining sea.
That's why you need the Meta Vanguards on so you can capture that.
That's a feature that could be a hit is you, is it basically like a video model that reduces the, if somebody's coming up to frame you, it just kind of reduces them down.
Like haptic feedback that sends you out of the frame. I mean, those are some frame mogs right there. You call them frames, right? They're fantastic. How is life? What is the day-to-day like for you?
The day-to-day changes a lot. We're doing, you know, Threads. I think a format like that only works if you are at the center of cultural relevance. And so that brings us into a lot of stuff that's going on in the world. We were, like, all over Super Bowl last week. I'm here this week because we're doing a bunch of stuff with NBA for the All-Star game. So that's been really, I mean, that's fun. It's work, but it's fun. And then the rest of the day is like, how do we make the feed better? What are we doing on, you know, content understanding? Are our models good enough to, like, you know, do something like the deer algo feature that we just launched.
Talk about that first. Super Bowl, NBA, like obviously we all know that social media content production is power law driven at this point. There's a few creators that take it really seriously and they have expert teams. Obviously Threads is like a little lower barrier to entry than a polished two-hour-long YouTube video or something like that. But are you shaking hands and kissing babies to get people on the platform? Is that what...
I don't kiss any babies. I have shaken a lot of hands actually though. Yeah. So we have a bunch of programs. It's actually one of the benefits of doing this at Meta is we have such an infrastructure of working with creators and partners. And I think we talked about this actually when I saw you guys in September. Like the big learning for us was the people that rock at Instagram don't necessarily succeed on Threads out of the box. It's kind of a, it's a very different format. The cool thing about...
You got really good at making pictures and videos and now you basically need to be really good at captions that can stand on their own.
It's wit. It's like insight. It's things like that. But if you're good at that, to your point, John, the barrier is so low. Like I was on a flight here two days ago and I think I fired off like 15 posts on the flight, replying to people and whatever, and I'm not sending clips to a production team and having them edit it. So that's the beauty, I think, of the format.
Yeah. How is the AI spam revolution keeping you up at night or does Meta have strong infrastructure there where you can kind of just like out of the box identify like...
Yeah, I mean, we, like, I think as a company have made some good decisions in the last decade of taking these things that are like basically infrastructure that you would need for any service you build, ads, financial services, integrity, detection and monitoring, and we build central teams out that do that for the company and then build it in such a way that it can be applied to any app. So we just benefit from all the work that the central teams do. We have some folks inside Threads as well. But maybe what you mean though is like the agents coming into social spaces.
I mean, I guess somewhat tangential question is just like when GPT-3 dropped, it was like, okay, like it can write text. And then the surprise to me was deep research, agentic coding. I had sort of priced in like it's going to be able to write a couple sentences and yet I find myself when I'm on a short text-based platform not following AI accounts. Like I'm more likely to go to a fully AI product when I want something that's more like a Wikipedia page and a deep research report, a utility. But when I'm actually scrolling a feed of short news items and posts and commentary and hot takes, it's not even that I'm like anti-AI and I would never follow someone who is using AI to post. It's like, no, like no one's actually solved that piece of the puzzle. There's still some human element that's encoded in, you know, 16 words that are hilarious based on this moment and this experience and this audience. And that's just stuck around a lot longer than I thought it would.
Well, that's like the, I don't know how much you guys talk about this on here, but I think like the word of 2026 in AI is going to be taste. Okay. And that's what you're getting at. It's like a model can produce output, but taste is the thing that differentiates good from great even on modeling, right? You can have all the data in the world and inject it into a pre-training run, but actually the best labs are the ones that have people with taste that can hand-select golden sets of like what is the best response for this thing or what's the best image aesthetic for this thing.
I think it's the same with like text-based posts. Like it has to be real time. It has to have a bunch of cultural understanding. I do think models will get really good at that at some point. My, the thing that I'm most excited about though is like AI assistive in the creative process. So like if you're an NBA creator, half the stuff that you do is just clipping content and being like, 'Did you see that Victor Wembanyama dunk?' Half of it is like weighing in on it and having an analysis that like comes from your point of view and feels native to you. That first half, if we can like automate for people and make super easy to do because they have a workflow that's like, 'Watch all the NBA games, give me the content that I should be posting, and then I'll add on my little flavor on top of it.' Like that would be amazing.
Yeah, because timing with this stuff is so important. I mean, this is obviously a big part of our business is like if you're getting to stories, you know, later than everyone else, it's just way less, it goes from interesting to not interesting at all.
And so I think for creators that want to build an account like that, any type of tool that allows them to be faster in that process is...
It is crazy though. Like, you know, have you guys had Geo Rainbolt on here? I would love to have him on.
I'm worried he's gonna dox us. We've given out so many little teasers with images behind the scenes.
