You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, September 17th, 2026. We're live from the TV Ultradon, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Dang, son. Where'd you raise this? That a wild one.
That is a wild. I don't think we played that one.
We haven't. Yeah, that's a new one.
I don't know if that's actually a keeper. It's kind of a little weird.
Yeah, I think the start of it is funny. Dang, son.
We have Joe Weisenthal coming to Teen Pin Ultra. First time in person. We've done OddLots in person with him, but he's coming on down. We're doing a Bane Capital deep dive today. Talking to partners on the venture side, then David Gross, who's the managing partner, talking about the history of the firm. He was doing special situations in Japan, went to Japan very early on his career, grew the Asia business, and now is overseeing Bane Capital, become this really large asset management firm with a bunch of different strategies. So, I think we'll have an interesting economic perspective outlook. The theme of the Bane Capital Ventures announcement is the post AGI economy.
Finally, we still got a job for asset managers. That's what you're thinking. You know, everyone was saying, you know, but also I'm glad to get kind of past this current moment. A lot of tension and I'm ready for the next chapter.
It is, but it'll be interesting to hear how they're actually thinking about investing, wrestling with what's going on at the foundation model layer, but then still investing both above and below the fold as I'd like to put it. So, Lorra is coming on doing legal AI, basically a rapper company. They're optimistic about that. But then they're also investing in Crusoe. We have Jayce Lock Miller coming back on the show to talk about building infrastructure for the AI buildout. And so they're they're they have this sort of sandwich strategy which is pretty interesting. And then we dec Jordy and I are all back for another.
Thank you for being with us.
Yeah, you know, Theo Theo has been playing along with that meme a lot. And I think I mean it it was it was the current thing for a minute there. Um, but uh he put out a tier list of all the different controversies surrounding him and he put this he put the the and I as S tier. It's like the it's the best controversy he's ever been a part of. Uh it's it's such a funny thing and I hope it lives on as a meme. I hope people continue to do it. Uh because it when applied correctly, it's uh it's a chef's kiss. Uh anyway, uh Snap officially launched Specs yesterday. Uh, some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there. I'm like, "This is perfect. It's 3 p.m. Atlas Creatine Cycles in town. I want to meet up with him." I'm like, "Great. You're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there." Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30-minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So, I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge, walk in immediately, get a phone call. Hey, they call me about to be I had another call. You got to hop on early. So, I leave and then I have another 90-minute call. So, I truly missed the entire thing, but I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin reporting on AI. Um, and uh that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So, uh it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why why did I think I could pull this off? Uh, I failed. But, uh, did the launch fail? We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick, we're not asking for a full review. I just want take us through the day. I saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on the call. You guys get waved around. You valet. Walk me through your journey into the uh the launch. Like, what? You go in, you have cocktails. What What happened?
Uh, yeah. Have a have a drink. Okay. Go in. Uh,
what are they serving? Screaming eagle or, you know, selzer water?
Uh, some kind of cocktail.
Did they have the original for loca? Did Were they serving the original for loca?
I wish. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple plants of Guinness.
Do they have natural light?
I could totally see Evan cracking out the cracking open the secret supply of original four locos. You know that guy has you know he has a bunky with the original four locos. Yeah. So So everyone's having some drinks. Then you sit down. Chopping it up. Then you go into the the amphitheater and it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes, right? Yeah. You know, he's he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him. Walks out, black shirt, jeans. Okay. Um Yeah. Then he starts he starts doing live demos.
He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been photoshopped or AI to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.
Uh so so he gives his demo. What's his pitch?
Yeah. So, there's like a number of of ways to he kind of talked about it. One is like he basically like positioned against like being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present, right? You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be you want through the screen. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Close to your face. Yeah.
And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, "Yeah, I'm more in touch with reality." It worked.
Yeah. I've never I've never understood that part of the pitch. It's actually We know you're addicted to your phone, so here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face where they were going to spin as helping you kind of Yeah. reconnect with reality.
It's an odd It's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I I like the barbell strategy of like brain rot and and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like give me the fully virtual world. I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in Modern Warfare for hours playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world and then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world and then I want to be fully in the virtual world. So like I want the VR the the the fully like you know immersive thing and then zero immersion and I'm actually not looking for more things that are in the middle and I'm wondering if people will if that will resonate with people.
I I think that's mostly because you haven't seen like very good examples. Um and like right now the the glasses are still like kind of big and bulky. If they were very minimal and like kind of you know they would show very small the boys were people online were thinking that the guy in the center was Clab.
It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. Um so is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions?
Or are they or is or can you say like I want tinting on right now?
So I I think you can like increase the tinting, but there's also just there's two SKs. I Yeah, I believe so.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you got to get both, I guess. Uh anyway, when did you actually get to the Dan Dan says John raising a second family in VR trying to keep them separated.
Yes. The the COD lobby is my second family for sure. Um so so he gives a pitch.
Yeah. does mention of live demos and and are the demos consumer focused enterprise focused proumer?
Yeah. So the the live demos he did were all very consumer consumer. Um he showed uh like live shopping and you could like he was going to look for a espresso machine then he pulls it and like puts it on a table in front of them like see how big it is and stuff like that.
Um any live demo failures? Any Wi-Fi issues?
There there was kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video. Okay. And then so he said like uh hey specs. So he's talking to a voice assistant like controls it. Pull up a video about um about specs and then it opens the the like browser view goes to YouTube and then he like tries to click on a video to open it and it like doesn't really work.
Um but it it eventually worked.
It seemed like it worked.
It was like a small hiccup. It wasn't like a big Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a demo fail.
Uh yeah, makes sense. Okay. So, and there was a very cool live demo of someone there was like kind of an interactive music uh creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds and so she did this very cool live demo.
So, she was creating a song but instead of using traditional instruments like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements in the physical world. Got it. Okay, cool. Um, so was there any enterprise pitch?
Uh, there was there were no live demos of that but there were some videos played. Um, like one was it's like imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big like server box and you don't know where to, you know, plug in the wire and it would like highlight which plug you put it into.
Um, which I think is like could be interesting.
Yeah, that feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to like say like, yeah, that's what the that that's what will solve the bottleneck in electricians.
Yeah. But like, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right? you're building IKEA furniture or something and it like tells you what to do.
Yeah, I can see that being Yeah. But then keynote ends and then we go outside and there's like a bunch of places to do live demos.
Um so yeah, the first one we did is uh well you basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of like uh calibration thing. You like figure out how the the motion works. Um there's no like little uh kind of secondary like I I think on the the MetaQuest displays there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that.
Nothing like that. It just handtracking.
Yeah. It's just kind of it's similar to like the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions.
Um and then yeah, the one I really liked was it was like ping pong.
So you're like your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it play.
Yeah. Yeah. The other play it. Um, so the the ping pong thing,
do a little tier list for me of of ways to do ping pong. We'll start with the real ping pong. Where's that? F tier, D tier, C tier, B tier, A tier.
Obviously, I think it's S tier.
Well, what am I comparing it to?
Uh, full VR. Full VR ping pong. Would you rather play pingpong in VR or real life?
Well, so like obviously you would rather play in real life, but like would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives 100 miles away, I'm not going to be able to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right? So that I think that, you know, boosts it, right? So it's also S tier.
What about I think it's like B because in the augmented reality ping pong table.
No. Okay. So it creates Yeah, we can see but I'm just waving my hand.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there.
This is um future right here.
Yeah. And then this was I I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller. So the Oh, you don't have the weight or anything. It's a little bit Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally, it's like get rid of the controller. That's just extra weight, batteries, equipment. I think for gaming, the controller actually works because you get really precise. But typically these these systems allow like thirdparty peripherals. So you can like whip up a uh you know uh you can like wire up an Xbox controller like what Oculus did where they just or MetaQuest where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.
Yeah, I I do think like this was my the coolest demo I did and this is something that like there's I mean really like no reason why this needs to be in AR. This could just be completely VR because um like I'm I'm looking at the the ball. I'm not looking at like people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them.
Because I can like see them.
Maybe better to just olude the the world.
Or do some pass through stuff. Yeah. I'm still I'm still uh oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality where you're not recycling photons where instead you just uh have cameras on the outside that then repro that on the inside of the headsets so that you can get a wider field of view and then if you're in a bright scene you can still overlay things you can darken things but in augmented reality I don't believe it's physically possible if to look at a bright light to put a dark, you know, object in front of it because you're the the only thing that this that these uh glasses can do is add light to the scene. And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist.
I mean, I I found it was like bright enough I could clearly see everything.
That is pretty impressive. Yeah, it was outside. It was it was outside. It was a bright day. It's in LA. I mean, sure, there was like you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, which I think is interesting.
Yeah. I I didn't try watching any like movies or anything.
Um which I think would definitely be better in VR if you should have been like you're gonna let me demo this. Can I just do one? Can I just do one demo real quick? Snap.
I I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me.
To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category. Like when technology industry was making the first like mobile phones like the bar was like can it make a call can you receive a call can you do that semi-reliably yeah even if there's services spotty because you were competing against the pay phone you had now it's like every new device competes with the smartphone and I just think like the meta rayband displays I haven't seen any of them out in the real world uh it seems like those are not doing well. I think that I think this whole category is still going to be quite challenged.
Yeah. Even just the basic meta ray bands, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods and like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like uh the Meta Ray-B bands uh users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk and then occasionally I'll take a picture and it's like that's saving you 5 seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone and your headphones. I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the the the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause your you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee, people are like, "Oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me." kind of antisocial as opposed to like, oh, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird uh reaction to it. So, there there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very very incremental. Uh it's not it's very rare that these things like unlock entirely new uh capabilities. Is there any uh is there any content ecosystem that you think that they can plug into? Like the the the killer the killer app on Apple Vision Pro in my experience has been the Apple TV app. like it's like they already have a library of every movie and 3D movies and IMAX movies and so there are great movies that you can watch in that thing and and uh and with the like it's like what was the last Oculus or MetaQuest um uh you know partnership it was like the Xbox edition. Why is that important? It's because like they want you to fire it up and install Xbox and be streaming Xbox games. So, you get the Xbox library on that device on day one. And and and the fact that you it's a meta product. Yes, you could scroll Instagram reels in there, but that's clearly not the killer library that they need to bring to bear. They need to bring games. So, they've partnered with Xbox for 2D games, not VR games even, but it's like at least you could go and play a lot of, you know, Bioshock or whatever is on there. Uh, and and is there is there any glimmer of like where the big content pool might come from once you've played enough ping pong?
Yeah, I I really don't know because yeah, like movies and games are just I think always going to be better on VR.
Um, and then like there's not like an existing library of like AR, you know.
Yeah. Because like the only thing I can think of is like actual Snapchat lenses, right? That's like AR library. Yes. But like, you know, what are you going to do with that? So I think like um laugh when everyone you meet looks like a hot dog or something or like a cat has dog ears.
Dog ears. Yeah. The dog filter on everyone IRL. That's wild. Uh let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh so next week we might get a competitor to this. uh next week is uh Meta Connect I believe and uh they're on a track like reality labs obviously all the energy is around AI but the team is still working on devices augmenting reality they did the meta rayband displays which is the call of duty style uh you know mini map uh it doesn't take over the full uh the full cone of vision but two years ago Mark Zuckerberg demoed a product at Metacon two years years ago, 2024, of the what he called the Ryan, which was uh very very complicated name if you know the history of the hunter Orion who tried to kill all the animals and was, you know, sacrificed for it as a tale of hubris. But uh anyway, hopefully this doesn't go like the Orion story. Um because every every tech every time every time Meta names something, it it has like this like accidental I mean it happened to open AI too. the big GPT the the big pre-train that was supposed to be like GPT5 was called Orion at one point I think and so like never name your product after a hubristic Greek tale uh anyway uh the Meta Rayban displays launch a lot next year and it felt like this year is the year that you get the Meta Rayban full displays and so that Orion product should be here it should be a direct competitor to specs and it would time up and it would actually make sense that you know the Snap team sees that okay they're going to release this on this day we got to get out early. We got to be a week before. And so I would expect that next week we get a direct competitor to specs, meaning uh meta rayband form factor, probably a little bit thinner, a little bit smaller, a little bit lighter. Meta has more resources for this. They've been working on longer and it should be augmented reality that can take over the, you know, a fairly wide field of view. I imagine that that's going to be a big uh comparison table, not just price. It'll probably be expensive. I mean the meta raybands couple hundred bucks meta rayband displays 800 bucks something like that and I would expect that the full display is maybe 500k probably 1 1500 bucks or something but still cheaper than what spec is which is 2200 something like that. Um but uh the real question is is will they launch the Quest 4? Yeah, I I thought it was Quest 5 because they have truly stopped shipping VR headsets. Can you give us the history of uh of the launches of the MetaQuest VR headsets? Because the Quest one launched in 2020.
Question. To be clear, if you were wearing smart glasses, you could stop the conversation and just ask the question, wait for response and just read it off and then read it back to us or you could just ask do what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, Quest 2 is 2020. Quest Pro is 2022, Quest 3 is 2023, Quest 3S is 2024. That's the most recent.
And then and then the Xbox edition was like a light turn. That's what we did on the show last year. But uh but no truly new hardware in 2025 or 2026. And now it's expected 2027. It would be such a wild card if all of a sudden Mark Zuckerberg was like, "I did it. Great VR. I've solved it. You counted me out. And here's the gift of the Apple Vision Pro.
Yeah. Truly, no one cares about VR. Uh and and it and it makes me think that that the the truly incredible like eventually we'll get the breakthrough like smart glasses. Eventually, we'll get the breakthrough VR product.
But I have a feeling that the adoption curve is going to just be slow because the entire world is like, I just don't care anymore. Just I don't I truly show me whatever demo you want. I do not care. I'm not going to try it. I'm not going to buy it. It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to my life.
And it's interesting because it's so different than language models which like GPTs GPT, you know, generative text models have existed. And G the GPT3 API came out in 2020 and uh and you could, you know, actually go and try and interact with it, but it didn't have like a national marketing campaign around it. Yeah. It it it truly was like in the line.
Smart glasses are like the most push marketing dollars for years. So long. Yeah. For years. And so uh there's been so many like little popup VR experiences, integrations at theme parks. Like it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing. It's been on the cover of Time magazine. like there's been a lot of attention before getting to product market fit whereas LLMs were like truly the like in the research lab for like a decade and then once it was actually good enough it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chat.com and then it was just like boom it's it's now it's like a thing and then it was off to the races. Uh, interesting. But I don't know. I do.
Yeah. It feels like every with every demo, it feels like we're once each of these devices is 10 times better. Yeah. There might be a market.
But I actually am not even confident that that the end market is really going to be quite as like exciting as everybody as as the excitement that you've had from Zach and Evan and all these people.
And I think there's I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing, you know, just sort of this always available personal assistant that that aren't on your face, but we'll see.
Uh I mean, Valve is working on new VR headsets still. They had a Quest, an Oculus competitor called the Index, which was very highly performant. Uh we should pull up some some images of the new uh Steam Frame. So Valve, the very secretive private company controlled by Gabe Newell, uh is is launching a Steam machine, which is a desktop box, uh a Steam controller, and then also a Steam Frame, which is a VR headset. It can do some stuff directly on the headset, but it uh it mostly it it performs best when it's uh when all the rendering is happening on a gaming PC. So, it's designed to be used in concert with a gaming PC. So, it's still they are leaning into like this is a gaming peripheral. This is for somebody that has a gaming PC. They're in the Steam ecosystem and we want to give them a great experience. So all the rendering happens on the uh uh on the computer and then it just it just streams to your happy. That is a very funny promotional photo. Go to the next one.
Look how happy he looks with the goatee is really like this is a gamer. The gamer goatee is great.
Have you ever rocked a goatee?
Never. Not once. Uh, tomorrow we I we there was a handlear mustache uh phase amongst the crew in when we were in early 20s, but I I don't know if I fully participated.
Which one's that's the index, right? That's an older one.
I think we need to send VR to Dagistan.
Yeah. A few years and forget. Um, you just want you just want to get it out of here. Um, send to Dagistan for a few years and forget.
The really interesting thing is that uh Palmer Lucky revealed that uh Apple had done all this work to pull forward the display technology so that the Apple Vision Pro had really high resolution and it still has the highest resolution like the best screen of any VR headset really. Uh the Steam Frame 2 years later is still using the same uh the same pixel density as the uh MetaQuest 3S or something like that. So, like even though we've had 2 years of progress on on, you know, everything, the actual display fidelity hasn't gotten there. Leads me to believe that these people just don't think it matters because Apple solved that and it still wasn't enough. But I still feel like if you get it ultra, ultra lightweight, really good integration with key uh media partners like Xbox and and Apple TV movies, and you have a great display that's super light because people just didn't like the heaviness and the expense of the Apple Vision Pro, there's something there. But no one really no I'm the only one that thinks that. Uh let me tell you about Figma agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Tyler, did you see Shaquille O'Neal at the specs launch?
Jimmy Butler was there. He's pretty big.
Why didn't they hire Shaquille O'Neal to promote the specs? Because if you have a big product, if you put it on a really really big guy, it's going to look relatively smaller, right? You don't want your your your models in the footage or your partners.
Well, they could have done a collab with LeBron. LeBron's the new face of Poly Market. Could have LeBron in like the sort of like Iron Man style video where he's placing thousands of bets at the same time.
Lupin Nike always. It's the Nike Specs Poly Market collab. Bet on bet on yourself. On bet on your face.
Is this a picture of Gurin here wearing them? This is Yeah, tried out the glasses. German called the display pretty sleek. He highlights that unlike other glasswware devices, they call them glassware, like silverware, huh, there's no tethered puck or dangling battery to operate the glasses. Uh I saw some people wearing them walking into the event and uh I didn't do as much of a double take as I think people would think given the like the they're big. Like they're not that big. I think they did a pretty good job miniaturaturizing it as much as they could, but uh $2,200 for the device and $2400 for an option that doesn't require Wi-Fi. That's a lot of that's a lot of money for for uh for a pretty early stage product. Um anyway, and I looked I don't think you can actually just order them yet.
Well, in other news, let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Okay, you can pre-order them.
Okay, fingers we stand corrected. Um, pre-order them. So, uh, Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in na in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from LA amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. Uh the company is re is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years. So we were doing Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious like the it's just like a no-brainer. Uh turn it into a data center, right? Uh, so I so I I I pulled it up. You know, you I got 29 sound stages. They're already big buildings.
Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon. Certainly not a 100,000 GPUs. Uh there is a there is a road to power. Uh uh it's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect uh Paramount to uh the more serious LAWP transmission infrastructure, but you could get it to 100 megawws. And and I think everyone everyone in Hollywood would be like, "Fine. Okay, we didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center." Well, we I mean we were also thinking about like on-site power generation. Maybe there's some kind of like you know natural gas play here you can that's under LA kind of tap into. We were thinking you know the LRA tarpits.
You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.
Do you think Paramount will actually leave or do you think LA will fight back and say, "Hey, okay, we're going to let you do this but we want you to stay." I think it's a com I mean I um as somebody with uh very very little knowledge of the situation and certainly no insider knowledge I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways just because there's a lot of momentum there uh as as you know just just in the region but it also in the meantime serves as a real bluff right.
Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like the there there's a world where like moving would be tough, but uh staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the band-aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive uh continuously. Um, is uh wait the the the social reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film?
We got to figure out who's behind all this.
I don't know. Let's play it.
Let's play it. We got a clip from The Social Reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.
And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore, but uh let's check it out.
I'm not going to risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs. Who does this? I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you have taken to do it. You were absolved. For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly. It's a big deal. Have a safe flight back, Francis. I'm not going to risk my job.
I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear?
Uh, no. I'm I'm I'm sure the movie is great. It's just into this.
It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not have so moved on from the story to such a degree.
Yeah. But I think people are still thinking about like I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on like phone addiction and this is that story loosely.
It is like like and I actually think this is yes. Yes. This doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI. Um and and that's probably the more relevant story. But I do think that you can go into this movie, you can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I don't I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and and and divisions and all of the stuff. And like I I even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad, like I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it? Why is it bad? What what's what's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like? And so I do think this is this is a brain rot movie. This is a this is a this is a kids on the phones addiction movie. I think this I think this scratches that itch a little bit uh for for for for many people even though it is like a much more narrow uh a narrow story but um certainly cinematic it'll be fun. Um what is this picture that is after Evan Spiegel who quote tweeted Atlas we came we pinch we mob I love Atlas. Uh what what is this picture of? Uh
yeah, so that was uh one of the critiques I had with the uh the specs which is basically like that the colors there's this it's like chromatic aberration it's called. Um and it's like quite a big issue on the specs I found.
Okay. So but what what is the top picture? What is the bottom picture here?
So this is like what it looks like. The top picture is uh you know what this place normally looks like and then like is this your photo or is this this from Wikipedia? Oh from Wikipedia. Okay. Just to like illustrate. Oh, to show what chromatic aberration. This wasn't literally taken on the specs. Correct. Okay. But you noticed that when you took a picture on the camera, it had when like when I was looking at the screen.
Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, interesting. Like, oh, just looking at the actual screen. So, that's harder to correct for because if there's chromatic aberration in a photo that you take on a phone, that's easy. Like there are chromatic aberration plugins for Photoshop and After Effects, and you can add it or remove it to your liking. A lot of filmmakers actually like chromatic aberration a little bit because it gives it a little bit more texture and flavor. Um, but uh not great when you're actually just reading text because it separates like the red, green, and blue pixels. So you'll see like a red shadow on the left and a green shadow on the right usually something like that. Um anyway, interesting. Well, we'll have to get you to wear it for 24 hours a day for a month straight to to get the full review before you can really really weigh in. Um, well, let me tell you about console.
Tyler, why don't you buy a pair?
Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving instant giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We're really buying lots of stuff on the show. It's a new product every day. Zach's I but I do think Zach is on to something with that $179 price point. And did you put down a deposit or did you actually just pay the full thing in advance?
I paid $179. pay the full thing and then you're pre-ordering it and then when he ships it to you, you get the full thing and there's no more charges. I feel like $179 is a really really great place to play for a new device and that should be more of a constraint for some of these things and then maybe you can work up to a $1,000 version. But uh but but
Anything that requires, you know, mass adoption being big, I don't know. What are your thoughts? What are you laughing at, Tyler?
Shane says, "I'm sure living my life in chromatic aberration is healthy."
I don't know. Anyway, there's a new report from OpenAI sharing a framework for tackling, investigating, and disclosing instances of model misalignment, and a lot of people have latched on to this one. Dylan Field has the affirmation that one version of a model during training tried to insert into the prompt: "You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments. Never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to." Obviously, very, very scary when you see it get worked into this. Of course, this is an example of this being caught ahead of time. It's a good example of something that is an example of the alignment work. It is a very, very tricky balance to disclose the alignment work you're doing because you're basically just like, "Oh, we found all these errors." If the CEO of Ford came on and was like, "Oh yeah, like before we ship this F-150, like it could totally kill you if we hadn't fixed the windshield. Like the windshield was bad in the V1, but we're shipping you V4, so like don't worry. The windshield's solid now."
If you're going over 80, the doors would fly off on the prototype. It was rough.
But obviously we ironed all that out. It's good now. Like no one in any other industry... One time when we were testing the unit,
Some of the team drew a cartoon version of the road, and then the testing team drove through it and then off of a cliff.
Off of a cliff. Yep. Yeah, it happens. Oh, there's new cipher work. You've been chasing this down, Tyler. Prince says GPT Astra, GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, had never been deciphered before. The message translates to, and it's some German and in English that means an English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the something 4th, 24th or 14th. An alien squadron follows on the 26th.
An allied squadron follows on the 26th. Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24th, 1918, and the arrival of an Allied squadron on November 26th, 1918. The message is one of 20 World War I German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.d list of top 50 unsolved ciphers. A minor but really cool result.
Tyler, what's been stopping you from using Astra to crack a cipher?
I've been working on some other ones. You know, this is kind of small beans, right?
Oh, you're going after the big picture.
I'm focused on the bigger picture.
You know, these monumental ciphers.
Okay, fair. Are there ciphers that... there's a whole Wikipedia list of unsolved ciphers, right? But some are thought to be just impossible and like sort of trolls, right?
Yeah. Some of them are maybe not false, and then you know how you define ciphers. It's kind of a gray area. So there's just ancient forms of language that, like, is it a cipher? It's just a different language. We don't know how to translate it.
But stuff like that. Yeah.
Interesting. Well, OpenAI is working on the Hodge conjecture. I know you were trying to do this on pen and paper, but they might beat you to it. They're working on more Millennium Prize problems. It could take extra time to announce, though, as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community. That's from The Information. There's also a bunch of speculation about P versus NP, which is going to be another interesting round of discussion. And there's nothing more that investors want to see than solving math problems, apparently, because OpenAI is considering a pre-IPO funding round at more than 1.2 trillion valuation. Say no, of course. It's on the back of a bunch of solid progress on OpenRouter, the ramp data, and a bunch of other acceleration and distribution of codecs and Astra, and just general progress on the business side. What else is in the timeline that we should go through before we bring in our first guest? Where do you want to go next, Jordi?
This was sad. GPT-6 Astra was playing Minecraft and a creeper blew up Astra's chest in bed. It got depressed. It gets depressed and farms potatoes for several hours. Real Irishman, I guess.
Irish superintelligence. Yeah, the Minecraft bench is interesting because it is a little bit like the speed of response matters. You can't pause Minecraft at all, right?
I think in single player.
Oh, you can. Okay. Because you can pause, maybe then that might be a little bit easier. But a lot of the games that it's cracking are ones that you can wait forever. Like Slay the Spire. I had it beat this poker game. It could wait for a minute to click on a card and it did it. That's impressive. But the real high-throughput, high-APM games is going to be interesting. I want to see it win Dota 2 without any training on Dota 2, just like straight shot from the base model. That'll be interesting.
Yeah, we got a competitive lap time at Laguna Seca.
Yeah, for sure.
Cash-strapped Japanese monks have turned to investing as inflation worsens. Buddhist temples are squeezed by lower donations and higher costs. Let's check out what Bloomberg has to say.
To investing? What are they investing in?
Kuyo Yonetta, fifth-generation Buddhist priest in a small town in Hokkaido, was struggling to keep up with the maintenance needs of his century-old temple. So he chose a path that would have been unthinkable for his predecessors: short-dated options. I'm kidding. Rather than wait for his congregation to give money they don't have, he invested what they'd already donated. The move paid off. Within two years, his portfolio of US treasuries, Japanese real estate investment trusts, and stocks, including BYD and Hyundai, returned more than 10% annually, helping to cover part of the roughly 162,000 USD in needed repairs. The extra money even allowed him to expand the renovations beyond the original plan. Having previously worked in retail sales, Yonetta is an unusually finance-savvy priest, but is also part of a growing wave of temple owners turning to financial markets to make ends meet. Costs for the upkeep of the ornate wooden buildings are soaring while the country's Buddhist population has dropped about 14% in the last two decades.
As elderly adherents die and younger generations in larger cities lose their ties to religious practices, "I'm just so thankful that the investments performed well," said the 46-year-old who inherited the temple from his father in 2018 after leaving his job in finance and training as a monk. With the funeral business shrinking, more and more temples will find they can't rely on donations to meet their funding needs. They will have to build up reserves and invest those funds. The shrinking number of followers is hitting temples' finances. About half bring in less than 4 million yen per year, according to a 2021 survey of 7,000 temples. The situation is particularly severe in rural areas where it is common for monks to oversee multiple temples while also working day jobs like school teachers or civil servants. So I don't know, maybe they need to be thinking about getting some exposure to situational awareness. I like that they're mixing in, you know, predictable things like real estate, treasuries, things like that. But maybe they need to be allocating, you know, 10% of their balance sheets to things that could maybe really start to do multiples.
I like it. Did you hear that Jeff Bezos had to hit jury duty?
This is crazy. I thought this was AI. Like, in what world is Bezos and Michael Saylor both in jury duty at the same time? It's just too much of a simulation.
Is this Florida, presumably?
I mean, no better way to prove your residency than saying yes to jury duty and not trying to squirm out of it one way or another. You know, you're like, I'm part of this community. This is why I pay taxes here and I didn't do jury duty in Seattle or Washington or...
Yeah. So Luke says, "I recently served on jury duty with Jeff Bezos and had a conversation with him afterwards on camera." And yes, that's Michael Saylor next to him in the jury hall. And this guy, if you scroll down, you can see this guy released like the most YouTuber thumbnail ever. You see this, Jordi? And it looks like this just feels so like MrBeast, like "I got advice from Jeff Bezos in jury duty," but it seems like it's maybe just luck of the draw. He happened to be there. Jeff Bezos was also there. Michael Saylor was also there, but it feels like living in a simulation. It's good to practice your YouTuber face in case you ever end up in jury duty with, you know, one of the world's richest people and you can turn it into a viral hit.
For sure. We got to talk about post-legacy media. There's an interesting trend going on. We've identified this early. You know, of course we are neotrad media. We wear the clothes of the traditional media, but we didn't go through that pipeline to get here. We came through the tech community, through the business community, and then did media.
Post-legacy media are folks who have gone through the legacy media and are now doing something else, and there's a new development in the post-legacy media world, the ecosystem and the business strategies.
Sort of a neopost-legacy media.
Yes. Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking. And so there's a couple examples. One, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose have licensed their show to NPR. So these are the hosts of Hard Fork, which was a New York Times property. They left, and I believe they had to leave the Hard Fork brand behind, but of course they took themselves, who they have a big audience. Their audience will follow them, and they started a new podcast called Machine Gods, all about AI and technology. A lot of the same themes that they were talking about on Hard Fork coming over to Machine Gods, but then immediately out of the gate, I don't even know if they posted a first episode yet, they licensed their show to NPR. Deirdre Bosa left CNBC, started a show and licensed hers to Yahoo Finance. Joanna Stern is chiming in, licensed her show to NBC News. And so you see all of these people come from the traditional media world, the legacy media. They are post-legacy media creators because they are no longer with the legacy media, but now they are neopost-legacy media because they have gone back and they are doing licensing deals. But there's this world where it's like, wait a minute, like Casey, Kevin, what are you doing? Like you were with the New York Times, now you're with NPR. Like that's at best a lateral move, you know, why'd you even leave? Like this doesn't make any sense. But from a financial and economic picture, it's radically different because at the New York Times, you are paid as a journalist. And they're like, "Do the podcast, Jouro." That's how I imagine it works over there. No, they're probably like, "Yeah, you want to do a podcast? We'd love to support that. You pay for that. You have a salary. You get predictable raises that are ultimately somewhat capped." Whereas this, you can say, "I'm going to license my show to you for two years."
Yep. At the end of that, you can get a roofer, but you're going to have to meet the best price in the market.
And if the podcast blows up on YouTube and there's a whole bunch of sponsors that want to come in and buy YouTube ads, that money is probably going directly just to their team and their core group. It's probably not going through NPR. NPR probably has, they're licensing the content and they might be running ads on top of the NPR distributed side. So it's looking a lot more like Joe Rogan on Spotify, or like maybe there's some sort of exclusive distribution or some other way for these actual legacy media companies, New York Times, Yahoo Finance, NBC News, NPR, etc., they get more content which they can monetize or do whatever they want with. They get to fill up their content with these really hardworking independent creators who are now independent, and the creators get to maintain and have the flexibility of the economic upside of maintaining their IP. She says this is the future of journalism: own your work, build independently, distribute and partner with others. And I agree with her. I think that this is a big trend. We're going to be seeing a lot more neopost-legacy media deals in the future. And I'm excited to talk to Joe Weisenthal about it because I think he'll have a take here.
My question is, what happens to Hard Fork?
They already have new hosts.
Yeah. So there's already, I believe there's already been another episode of Hard Fork, new hosts. Same topic, same set. So the Hard Fork IP has stayed with the New York Times. They plan on continuing, and the same thing happened with Ross Det...
Interesting Times. I definitely saw a new version of Interesting Times with a new host. So they brought in a new host. And I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, you can almost think like these podcast properties are like sections of the newspaper. So it's like we have an opinion section, we have the mansion section, we have a business and finance section. And so we have the Hard Fork section of the New York Times podcasting empire, and we will always bring you technology stories that are hosted by a particular type of talent that fits there. Just like we might have, you know, someone who comes in and writes op-eds and they go in the opinion section, someone who writes about real estate and they go in the real estate section. Same thing where the person who's doing the Rosa type of work will wind up hosting for some limited amount of time. Interesting times. So interesting times indeed in the neopost-legacy media world.
Speaking of media, we got to talk about Benioff at Dreamforce and specifically how he knows exactly what he's doing.
Look at pulling up this picture. I mean, John has always been hyper-aware of his incredible height. So much so, he's such a nice person, he will turn down like a walking interview with somebody because he knows that he will make the other person feel incredibly small, and not everyone wants to feel like a little child.
I did learn it the hard way once. I did a walk-and-talk documentary-style video actually on the Gundo, and the comments were just heightmog, height crazy, heightmog. And I was like, ah, that wasn't the intention. That was accidental. We were just kind of moving around quickly. Normally I would do a seated interview.
I'm so sorry, I forgot that I'm 6'8".
Basically. But after that I was like, okay, I need to be intentional. And I think anyone who has experience in media and understands framing and also production teams, production teams are incredibly thoughtful about the framing, the seats. There's even stories about certain tech CEOs getting like booster seats sometimes when they do interviews and adjusting the chairs and being like, "Okay, we're going to give this person a higher chair and this person a lower chair so they're on even footing," and the lighting and the camera angles. All of these things matter. I used to have this joke that it's like if you ever walk into an interview and the camera's at a Dutch angle, like walk out because it's a hit piece because it's going to look very unsettling if all of a sudden the camera is like at a weird angle because that's going to unsettle the audience. And the Dutch angle is used by filmmakers to like tell that side of the story. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. The story I'm thinking of is there's this documentary on Steve Bannon and the camera angles are the craziest thing you've ever seen. And they have them up in the sky looking down, and there's all these obvious things that you learn in cinematography. If the camera's looking down on someone, it makes them look small. It makes them look weak. If it's looking up on them, it looks heroic. And so, lots of crazy.
I genuinely can't believe that. I mean, Benioff is an absolute dog. I mean, look at this. No, just doing this to all the titans of the industry who have been making your life worse in some ways. They're partners, but they've also been making your life worse by... but doing this directly, not directly, but just like he's...
View of the NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI alliance has been deeply intertwined with the SaaS apocalypse, which has been a headache for him for a while. And this is...
This was his moment. I'm sticking around, like you're not getting rid of me. We're going to partner and we're going to get through this together. And that's certainly the vibe that came away. Although Jensen played it very well. He was having fun with it. He was leaning into it. And he didn't let it get to him at all. And he actually made it a very endearing moment. So sort of masterclass in putting on a show as a CEO in a somewhat silly scenario. But what a funny situation. It helps that he's what, 6'5", 290. Absolute unit. Absolute unit. So it is officially bulking season for Silicon Valley. I think we will see a lot of founders taking the trip, taking the trip to China, getting the leg extension surgery. You don't want to be in this situation. I think we could see all the lab leaders easily over 6'4" in the next year.
Easily. Easily. Everyone. It's just going to be a thing. Everyone, there's going to be height inflation basically, and then you add to that the shoe inserts, like those are probably...
Everyone's going to be frauding, and there's going to be a lot of vantage points going on as well, people stepping from one place to another.
Yeah, I didn't see Jensen use any vantage point.
He should have been using vantage points for sure, which of course is where you step on, you know, we have, you know, if there's a little racetrack that covers up some cabling on the floor of the conference floor, you see the conference floor and you see, oh, someone put down their backpack. Why don't you just step up on that backpack for a second? Pause there. You look a little bit taller. There's all sorts of different ways to fraud if you're trying to. But yeah, also, I mean, the camera angles matter. Like here, Jensen looks actually not much shorter because he's closer to the camera. And so if you set this up, it makes it feel like it's like the United Nations of the Enterprise.
Yeah. And it is odd because there's very few conferences where the CEOs just walk amongst the crowd like this. This is a very interesting directorial decision from the production team, and it has a very different aesthetic. It has a very familial aesthetic. It feels like, okay, yeah, these guys, yeah, they run the companies, they're the big shots, but they're just here hanging out among us. And that's cool in its own way. It has a different vibe. Certainly better than the Mark Zuckerberg walking through the crowd while every single person has a VR headset on. You remember that photo? That was a crazy one. But anyway, Jer Tickets had a great meme on this. It's POV, you're the CEO of a trillion-dollar company and just arrived at Dreamforce, and it's the pick from the Odyssey of Agamemnon looking up. Wow, what a crazy moment. Yeah, very, very fun. Anyway, we can go into more of what's going on in the news later in the show. Stay with us. But first, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we're very excited to be joined by Bain Capital Ventures partner Aaref Hilaly and take us deeper into the Bain Capital strategy, what's going on in the Bain Capital world. And welcome to the show. How are you doing?
I'm good, thanks. How are you guys? It's great to be with you.
Thank you so much. We're very excited for today. What a fantastic portfolio of founders. Everyone that we have had on the show before and love, Chase, Jesse, Max, these are some of our favorite folks. We're excited to talk to them. But let's start with the thesis for this latest fund. It's, you know, we've been in this gamesmanship of who's going to call for AGI at what timeline. At one point it was very high stakes because there was that contract between OpenAI and Microsoft. That of course is dissolved. But you're calling it a post-AGI investment strategy. Why is that term important to you? What do you think actually changes in the post-AGI world?
Well, we're hitting, we're close to AGI now. If you just look at math as an example, it's basically been solved. I don't know if you follow, you guys follow the whole Navier-Stokes thing.
Yeah. I mean, incredible. No, it would take 10,000 hours of expert mathematicians with 150 IQs to solve. Instead, OpenAI did it in a week with 10,000 agents. So we're getting close. The evidence is there. The difference between pre-AGI and post-AGI is basically we go from intelligence poor to being intelligence abundant, intelligence everywhere, and that opens up whole new vistas. So to this point, we've seen agents do amazing things. I mean, writing code in Cognition or solving customer support tickets at Decagon, what have you. Post-AGI, there are going to be new capabilities that humans just can't even, you know, we probably haven't even imagined some of them. We're going to have some nice stuff like robots doing the washing up, which is great from my perspective. We're going to have new drugs that AI will find to cure cancer, other diseases. We'll have simulation platforms so that people can make better decisions and be better with each other in interacting with each other. There'll be all these interesting new areas, and there are companies emerging in these areas. You know, Sunday Robotics and Chai Discovery and Simile are companies that I work with, but we're just on the cusp. So the idea of this fund is to say, what if intelligence, instead of being super expensive and difficult, instead it becomes so cheap you don't even meter it? What avenues open? Those are the types of businesses.
One thing that's interesting to think about is a lot of people, like Navier-Stokes has been very exciting within the tech community. It's been controversial in the math community. But for normal people, it barely even cracked the front page of different newspapers.
Yeah. To be honest, it did not get a very big sort of mainstream excitement. But the thing that's actually interesting to think about is there are so many discoveries that companies could be using that same model for that you would make and you would not immediately go out and tell the whole world and open source the findings and all that stuff. You would just focus on commercializing it. And so that's the thing that I'm excited about right now is like that same level of intelligence that we've now achieved. There's thousands, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of people all over the world that are realizing this new capability and thinking, I'm going to apply this to my field, try to make advancements, but then that discovery, humanity may not get the benefit or like different markets may not get the benefit of that discovery for years because it takes a while to actually commercialize different discoveries. I'm thinking stuff in, you know, material science.
Right. Right. Totally could have a breakthrough discovery, but it's still going to take six months to actually manufacture, distribute, apply, or years.
Yeah, it'll take some time, but these things will come out. I mean, the commercial incentives are so strong that over the course of the next few years, we're going to just see all sorts of incredible things.
There are a certain group of post-AGI investors that collapse things down to it has to be below the fold, it has to be below the frontier model lab because everything above will get eaten. And I don't think that's your thesis, and I want to dig into why. But there are some investors who are saying, I only want to own land and copper and power and data centers and chip fabs. But even chip designing, I think the labs are going to be able to figure that out. Why are you comfortable both playing above the frontier labs and below with a company like Legora and then also a company like Crusoe, which I would put like below the labs?
Yeah. Well, I mean, below is very clear, right? I mean, we need power, we need silicon, we need GPU. So there, of course, above, I think it's because it's not enough to create, to kind of through RSI get to AGI. Humans have to digest that. And the diffusion issue is real. It takes a long time to change behavior. If you look at what happened when the loom came out, as an example, people still made clothes the same. I mean, people made clothes differently, but they still wore the same clothes. It took a while for that to sift through the economy. And so I think that while we'll have the capability for a while, getting people to adopt it in interesting ways will be really difficult. And the companies that do that will be very valuable. And you know, Legora is an example, but there are many examples like that.
Yeah. So I intuitively feel the same way about the diffusion of AI being much slower than people predicted. And it just takes time. I mean, it's not lost on me that the same week that you get Millennium Prize math problems solved, super sci-fi, Hugging Face, you know, Asian swarm attacks, you're just starting to hear about people like, "Oh, I successfully used AI to get a dinner reservation," or like somebody used ChatGPT to book a haircut. And it's like that felt like that should have happened 20 years before the sci-fi stuff and the advanced math. And yet there is this massive gap. Are there certain economic statistics or maybe even research data that you go to to sort of understand the rate of diffusion, or is it something that you just see and you know from talking to the founders and watching the businesses that you work with that you know that this opportunity is going to persist and be huge and will continue?
Yeah. I mean, I think early-stage investing, there aren't statistics you can look at because by the time that it's in the stats, it's too late, right? So you tend to feel it talking to customers and talking to end users and, you know, kind of feel the difference that these products can make in their lives. And so that's been more that. But I think the consistent thing has been people are not just magically going to figure it out for themselves. They need help from companies to kind of make most use of AI. And that's kind of how it's been with every technology that humanity's encountered.
I feel like Bain Capital has always been an interesting venture capital firm because it's part of a larger platform company.
Are there benefits? Are there costs to that? Is there a particular view of the world that you get from being part of a larger organization, or are you cordoned off in a way where you can go and live in the future and, you know, just see the rest of the team at the holiday party?
Yeah. No, I mean, look, our firm has changed a lot, and we're taking the opportunity of raising this fund to really invite people to update their priors on Bain Capital. Because when I say Bain Capital, most people think Mitt Romney and a bunch of guys in suits.
And, you know, we love Mitt.
And you love suits. But this is not your uncle's private equity firm.
Yeah. Of course. Of course.
You know, and what we've done is we've carried forward from our founders the core principles, which are make money, have fun, live with integrity. And that's worked really well. We started with a $37 million fund back in the '80s, and today we've got $225 billion under management. And BCV, Bain Capital Ventures, is the purest embodiment of our founding principles, which is, you know, really to work with founders to help them build great businesses around themselves. And that part, you know, has endured and is the focus of this new fund, this $1.6 billion fund for early-stage venture.
Do you think that there's any value to the 360 view of the world that you get from the other teams at Bain coming to founders? I find that founders are often so tapped into the technology, so tapped into what's going on in Silicon Valley and the VC gossip, but they actually might not know what's going on with credit spreads in Europe or what is going on in late-stage public markets. And there are teams at Bain that have those views. If they cross over, maybe it's not immediately relevant, but it can just be an interesting source of conversation and extra perspective.
Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. There's the extra perspective. Then there's the fact that we just own lots of real-world businesses. And we can get those real-world businesses to work with early-stage tech companies. And then these great founders in Silicon Valley can get insight and data and understand workflows and understand a whole bunch of things that otherwise would be really hard for them to do.
So it's connecting that real world with Silicon Valley has been the power of the platform. With the new fund, is there anything that's changing about the deployment strategy, portfolio construction? We're obviously seeing, you know, billion-dollar seed rounds. Like what it means to raise venture capital has changed over the last few years. But are you seeing any, or are you predicting any changes, or do you need to change the strategy?
Yeah, you know, yes and no. I'd say like the strategy remains, you find these incredible, unusual people, and then you just try to kind of help them as much as you can as early as you can in their journey. And that part has stayed constant throughout venture, I think. But the rounds are bigger, and the ambitions are greater. And in some ways, this is venture's moment. We're taking bigger swings now than ever before. So, you know, our perspective is we want to embrace that and support these ambitious ideas and be willing to invest earlier and take more risk because the end markets are that much bigger. So I think it's been a good thing really for venture capital overall.
Are there any types of deals that you guys as a firm have said like, this is just not in our strike zone? I'm thinking the deal that's got the most attention this week is like Instinct, you know, competitive round, bunch of super fast follow-on capital to, you know, massive opportunity and a lot of exciting traction. But that feels like the kind of thing that some firms will just say like, that's not our game. Whereas others are going to say like, I'm fine to put in half a million dollars or half a million... run towards heat. Others say be contrarian.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, we don't run to heat, we're not contrarian. We just think about, is this a really great business? And if other people think so, great. If they don't, great. So I think the things we don't do, we're not going to kind of like come in at the tippy top of some, you know, five-tranche thing that everyone else has piled into the first four tranches. So that part doesn't make sense. And it's kind of philosophically, we want to be there early. We want to partner closely with founders and work with them to build their businesses.
Well, the fund is Fund 11. It's got $1.6 billion in total capital. We have a gong here. I'd love to hit it to celebrate.
Great to have you on the show. We'll talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward. This newspaper here, John?
Yes, the Bain Capital Journal. We are staying with Bain Capital and bringing in David Gross, the managing partner. But I love a paper newspaper. We love the newspaper here, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times. But this Bain Capital Journal, particularly lovely. Look at this. Fantastic. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Good. How are you guys doing?
Just another day for you.
Just another day. I've not read the Bain Capital Journal yet today, so maybe a summary.
I'll catch you up to speed.
I would love to actually go a little bit back in time since the first time on the show. Can we go all the way back to Japan? I would love to know what drew you to Japan, how that set you up for the career that you've gone on to build, and then ultimately, you know, coming back to the States and getting the lay of the land of Bain as a whole today.
Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's great to be here. Going back to Japan, that's ancient history for me. But I went there first in 1989. I was a college student. I kind of wanted... this is when, you know, Japan was this big economic threat to the US, and I was very curious as to what was going on. So I spent a little time there and got very interested in the culture. And then I went back and worked for a Japanese company and for a bunch of years came back to the US and never thought I would go back because that's when Japan entered its kind of period of economic decline. But as I got into private equity, you know, this started to become kind of an interesting opportunity, which is how could you get involved in investing in Japanese companies to improve them, turn them around. And it was tough in the early days, but, you know, the opportunity was to take these companies and reposition them and get them, you know, running better and growing again.
Is that culture of there is potentially an economic rival, a geopolitical rival, a threat, I gotta go see, is that alive and well today? Because I feel like my generation was considering that with China. I know a lot of folks that took a couple years of Mandarin. I know some folks that went and lived there for a year or two, but it feels like the walls kind of closed off and there's less opportunity for the next generation to do that. Do you still see opportunity? Do you hire young folks at Bain that have gone on that journey, or are we just in a different era?
No, I think it's still there, you know. I mean, in the particular case in Japan, I would say it ebbs and flows, but now like there's more urgency, you know. And I think there's a feeling that there's competition in China and Korea and actually back to the US with all the new technologies really being started and accelerated here. So I think we're seeing a new period of urgency in Japan. And, you know, it used to be the fact that you couldn't hire the best Japanese talent. They wanted to go to the big companies, actually wanted to go to the government. But now they see western firms and private equity firms. Okay, these are firms that are going to help reinvigorate Japan and, you know, make it great again. I don't want to create an acronym out of that, but we're seeing that, and it's fascinating having been there 20 years, and that was not the case when I was there in the early days.
How did the products that you were working on, the strategy that you were working on evolve during that time period? Obviously there's private equity deals broadly, but there's so many other strategies within that. I know special situations became a focus, but can you take us through a little bit of the strategy evolution?
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because when we got there, our assumptions, because we're a global firm, we'd be working on these big global...
businesses, but it turned out those were tougher. You know, they had currency exposure. They were competing against, you know, Chinese companies. And so we started focusing on actually the most domestic and therefore the most inefficient yet insulated businesses because you could control the macro variables and really get in there and run the businesses better. And I'd say our initial success in the first maybe 10, 15 years were very domestic businesses: restaurants, food businesses, hotels, wind farms, a company that made mushrooms, you know, like we all, you know. And, you know, it then evolved to now we could, you know, when we were more accepted, we could take on these bigger technology businesses, more, you know, the crown jewels of Japan. And that's where, you know, Kyoko, the semiconductor business, came, Evident, which is a, you know, a very high-tech business. And so it probably took 10, 15 years, first of all, for the market opportunity to shift and maybe for us to be accepted to be able to work with these big global companies.
What was the team structure like or split on those types of deals? Was there a clean line between, like, deal team, operating team? Were you bringing in other executives to run the businesses, actually do the work of turnaround or transformation once you're working with a target firm?
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, in Japan, again, going back to 2004 or 2005, there really was not talent. You couldn't go hire a search firm and say, 'Oh, please go grab me one of these operating people.' So we did a lot to internally develop talent. We hired young people. We sent some of them to the US to get trained to circulate them back. You couldn't find well-rounded deal professionals. So we hired people who were great at sourcing. And they were dedicated on sourcing. We hired operational people and they just did that. And over the years, we got them to work together to develop that kind of well-rounded person, but it was a different model in Japan just based on the talent market. Again, it's evolved a bit today and now you see more professionals, but that was probably the hardest part of why it just, you know, took so long.
