YOU'RE WATCHING TVPN and today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPL on the Temple of Technology, the Force of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Uh bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor are partnering up. Uh more news out of images 2.0. a bunch of uh news out of OpenAI and uh Mythos. Uh a group of unauthorized users have been using Claude Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through there's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe Build forever, Angelist, Zancar, Vast Data Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, uh, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already?
Gong. This is gongworthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10 billion breakup fee.
Incredibly, incredibly.
I think I think it's a win-win. It's a win-win. I think it makes sense.
It's a win no matter both.
Uh, well, let's go through the facts first. So um SpaceX partner facts just just immediate takes we assume you already know all the industry post fact. Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see. But uh let's let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to quote create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. The deal gets Cursor whose agentic coding model Composer 2 basically operates at frontier level performance access to compute from SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer and that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing on. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one? Uh it it was like AI comput Gigafactory. Compute Gigafactory. They're all hilarious and and very good. I like all these.
Computer. Were they saying computer?
I don't know. The xAI timeline β I was thinking about it and I was like, when did this actually start? Because it just kind of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where the thing that started as Elon sort of being like, 'I want to buy Twitter,' is now an AI lab with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI. Because don't forget they own Graphite now, or potentially will, and a social...
...the code review company. Exactly. So, I'm genuinely so excited for the Graphite team. I'm thrilled for the Cursor team. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for Scott Wu.
Yeah. Scott Wu is licking his chops. He's like, 'What are you going to leave out in the wreckage?'
He really is going to have it. I also think we need to take one moment...
...and just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF, who...
Imagine β I don't know how this works in whatever prison he's in, but I imagine, you know, hopefully every few days he can go and talk to the outside world. And you can imagine him making the call. And he says, you know, for the last few weeks it's like, 'Sir, how's Anthropic doing? How's my baby doing?' And it's like, 'Sir, it's traded up north of 800 in secondary markets, and it's quite possibly going north of a trillion.'
And then he's like, 'Thank you.' Hangs up, comes back the next day. 'I haven't checked in with Cursor in a little bit. How are they doing?' 'Sir, you may not want to hear this, but there's a $50 billion acquisition on the table. They've agreed to sell for 60. And if they don't sell, they're going to get $10 billion of non-dilutive capital.'
Absolutely wild. Anyways, what a wild turn of events. Anyway, let's go through the timeline because it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon Inc. over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022 β it's April 22nd now. So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, 'Hey, maybe I don't want it.' It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44 billion because this was when the interest rate hike happened and the end of ZERP, and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was β even Meta sold off like 40, 50% post β although that was like an anomaly and they built back up. But the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a what, a $10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like 10 years. Like it was so far away and the revenue ramp on VR and metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of Meta winning the VR race, winning the metaverse at some point. It just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6% instead of 3% or whatever your risk-free rate is in your DCF. And so everything sold off, and Elon had locked in that pre-end-of-ZERP price, and there was a big question about could he get out of it? Were they going to twist his arm? It was a little bit arested. The arm was a little bit twisted. But Morgan Stanley came on board and a bunch of other...
...it was almost broken. But the people whose arms were twisted β Morgan Stanley and all the VC backers who came in β they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with xAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy as it was, it was never bet against Elon. Like that was the thing β surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market and where things are, but everything sort of penciled out. So, he closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, 2022, and he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sink day. Of course, he comes in with a sink. Something about β what was the joke about the kitchen sink?
Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't like I'm doing the whole β isn't the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well?
Yeah. Like throw the whole kitchen sink at it.
Okay. Yeah. Well, he did that because he threw everything together. Yes. Good job.
Yeah. So xAI came later. He publicly announced xAI on July 12th, 2023. And that's only nine months after ChatGPT, maybe eight months after ChatGPT. Google quick followed with Gemini. And it was a very fast following, I think, to get xAI off the ground. Just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech live stream, right?
I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah, I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition and I was sort of trying to justify it as a β you know, it was more about his desire for free speech than anything else. Like you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock-on effects for Elon's strategy. Anyway, so he was, you know, coming out on July 12th, 2023 saying, 'I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind.' Still remember that's why he founded OpenAI β he wanted to push back against DeepMind. 'I'm going to go up against Anthropic. Going to go up against OpenAI.' And so the first major product milestone came just a couple months later, November 3rd. That's when they introduced Grok. November 3rd, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7th, 2023 when Grok started rolling out inside of X for Premium+ subscribers, which was a new tier. It's actually crazy. Remember...
...I mean, that year on Twitter was insane. Like, just product feature, product feature, and they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand. Like I think the Community Notes idea had been workshopped and even engineered in the pre-Elon era, but he just got there and was like, 'Ship that tomorrow.' And there were a lot of things like that that happened, and there were other things that got pulled back and reviewed, and there were other pieces of the puzzle that were not doing so well, and he was just cut, cut, and so he sort of put it back in startup mode and it felt a lot more agile and it still does. And so that was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X experience. In early 2024, xAI started shipping updates quickly. March 17th, 2024, it open-sourced Grok 1. March 26th, 2024, Grok access expanded to X Premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12th, 2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then Grok 2, Grok 2 Mini. By the end of 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, xAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19th, 2025, xAI announced Grok 3 beta. Then March 28th, 2025 β so over a year ago, for some reason this feels more recent than that β xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28th, 2025, effectively merging the AI company with the social platform. After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok 4 Fast, Grok 4.1. Then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2nd, 2026. So the clean sequence is that Musk first proposed the Twitter acquisition, then founded xAI, then brought Grok into X, then merged xAI with X, and then SpaceX bought xAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team. And...
...yeah, and this just makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute, they need the resources, they need the capital to train a frontier coding model. They've also never done a pre-train, I believe, whereas the xAI team has, right? Correct. And the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has, you know, been through so much. There was an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces than it had been adopted, right? So more people had said like, 'You cannot use this product in the workplace' than were actually using it in the workplace. Cursor is a great brand, right? It's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of coding, right? Say in the announcement, to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI.
So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. You got everyone on Earth building a box that you can tell to do things and it does things.
Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist.
No, no, I don't. I think the competition is great. It's bringing out the best. But I think Cursor is like fine.
Cursor's always had a great brand. I saw someone else...
...wait, SBF replied to SpaceX's tweet saying, 'That's me.' Pull up the first post here and then scroll down. SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely β that should be like the first one in the timeline. SpaceX and Cursor β SpaceX AI is what they're calling it now. Is it not up there? And Cursor. I can find it and send it in. Let me find this post and send it into the production chat. Tuxedo Sam says, 'Do you think they'll make Elon take his shoes off at the Cursor office?'
Okay, so Richard Woo has some context. Yeah, there you go. Look, SBF is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail?
All these people in jail on X, I don't understand.
No, it says it in his bio. It says it in his bio. It says, we can use BOP-approved phone calls, emails to tell others what to post on our socials. Right. I think it would be a free speech violation to say like if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity, but it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet because it seems like having like a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to like start, you know, kind of like influencing public perception, right? I think this is Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like she, you know, her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like, you know, maybe maybe maybe she isn't so bad after all, right? Um, so,
Okay. Well, Richard Woo broke down the structure of the deal. He says the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is one, XAI is having trouble training a state-of-the-art coding model, hence co-founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. XAI says to Cursor, "Use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state-of-the-art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you." Four, Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for 60 billion or get 10 billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win-win. And I was reflecting on Michael Truell's β I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young β but his aesthetic is very much in like the Stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop and it's so welcoming and warming. It's like that is that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? Like and and to your point about like, you know, oh like if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics blah blah blah? Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Amani and all this crazy stuff? Uh but if it's just like Michael Truell from Cursor, he's so reassuring. Like I if I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, "Yeah, of course." Like we love Cursor, that's great. Like very very aesthetics do matter, vibes do matter, and I think uh makes a lot of sense.
Matt Slottnik says he loves math.
Okay, what is the math here?
What he's talking about, Julian, he's uh so Julian says at a 30x revenue multiple at first glance it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor, however the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue.
A 70x multiple expansion on two billion of revenue adds.
Wow.
Yeah, this is this is a notorious thing in corporate M&A and uh and occasionally it's gone poorly. Um but there is like an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple that is accretive to the stock and so there's a whole philosophy around that. But uh the smart investors should price each earning stream differently and uh having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market if that's what this winds up being. Uh it's a tricky tricky situation but Will Brown wow just hit a $10 billion run rate.
They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make 10 billion this year.
That's not even a run rate. That's just like it's locked in. It's more than contracted. I don't know.
Yeah. And and and it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit and that it's, you know, by by itself, right? They can, you know, they they'll be in a position to actually, you know, reinvest that. That's like a a nice little Neolab kind of series A basically. Uh but uh Ken says no, you got to multiply that 10 billion by 12 because in that month when they get the $10 billion check from SpaceX uh it will be $120 billion run rate. They will be the largest AI company in the world that month. Uh and then they just have to figure out uh they don't collect until end of year if they're still independent, otherwise it's more than 25 billion. Okay. Well, um, so you guys guess has some other thoughts. Whatever you want.
What is this post from? Uh, Patrick.
Wait, which one? Which one?
This is uh he Patrick is quoting Scott Wu.
Oh, yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because uh despite this does not look without images too. Without images too, we just this this kind of asset. I actually think this might have been done the old-fashioned way.
No, this is Nano Banana. This is Nano Banana.
There we go.
It's good at cutting out.
Thank you. Watermark. Yes. Uh he says, "Here we go again. Last of the Mohicans." Uh yeah, Scott Wu is the last one standing in this particular category. And uh yeah, he's licking his chops thinking about uh who might want to hop over to uh Cognition Cursor Cognition Windsurf Devon Cursor Zombie Corp. as the uh as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's uh territory. Um what else should we go through with the cursor? Uh the cursor cursor's viability was very happy for everyone involved.
Yeah.
Some news from Space News Inc.
This is very interesting.
China backs orbital data center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines.
They're pled.
They're pled.
Elon is interested.
8.4 billion in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing-based space startup has secured early stage funding. Early stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion. What are we doing here? Uh, and extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space-based computing infrastructure. Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously, this is the new meta.
Yeah. What is uh what is Cursor's real name? Anysphere. That's a that's a pretty good name. I like I like Anysphere and I like Cursor, but doesn't hold a candle. It's a Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited, also known as Orbital Chung Wuang, announced the completion of a Pre-AI funding pre-A1 or is that pre pre-A1 funding round April 20th. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors including High Capital, CIT IC Construction, Investment Capital, Cafe A Capital. They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there. Uh at the same time, orbital estate said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling 8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they going to build rockets with this? I mean, I don't I I I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not going to fab the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets.
Well, they're going to put a lot of GPUs in space.
I guess they're just going to buy a lot of Huawei chips or something. Are they going to go to Huawei and get some special stuff?
Yeah. I mean this is pretty interesting because I I feel like you know generally the main bull case for space data centers is that um the like regulatory environment in the US is going to be so hard to build data centers like you know supercomputers but normal land so Oh yeah yeah supercomputers so you got to send supercomputers to space because there's less no we can do data centers in space we just we we if it's on the ground it's a supercomputer okay yeah that makes sense because because we don't want any more data centers on Earth it's Earth Day by the way congratulations Earth you've done fantastically uh But but the whole thing like in China is like they you know you can just like build things there, right? There's like very little regulatory overhead. Yeah. Um so it's like what like I I feel like the the space data centers makes a lot more sense for the US. Yeah. If you're worried about if the if the bull case is regulatory, which it seems to be that's like generally consensus, I think.
Yeah. I was laughing about how uh you know how there's all this this fear about like data centers using water in America, but over in China they have the Three Gorges Dam which generates electricity from water and it technically uses a lot of water. The water's not destroyed or anything. It just passes through the dam generates electricity but they're using ocean of water. Exactly. The Hoover Dam, that's a nightmare if you just like like there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable so you can't drink it anymore. But there's another one where you think like water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like it should not be used. It should not flow through a water wheel. It should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. It should be left to its own devices still and just chill maybe. Anyway, orbital has incubated was is incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations. Uh the rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So large-scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide. But further growth faces ma faces major obstacles including heavy land use. Weird. Soaring energy consumption weird. Limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China. But maybe they are uh skating where the puck is going and maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction. Uh so uh they're planning a dawn dusk orbit about 700 800 kilometers above the earth aiming to achieve a large scale space data center to support space-based
computing by 2035. Wow. Thinking in decades over there. So they're going slow. They're getting there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year? We'll focus on core technological changes in a first computing manipulating phase. The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have like decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money. You can just yolo more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved. Although I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the three gorgeous dam. Anyway, moving on. More images out of ChatGPT images 2. Image Gen 2 images v2. These are crazy. Has anyone done that rune test of the guy driving the car into the, you know, the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I wonder how. I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the internet and so it no longer is a challenge. I'm going to have it make an crazy.
I am a tiny man. What is this? My space. My son was born. This is truly handed me to him. Never forget where you came from. Blink182. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying, horses are flying, trampolines are flying. The next one by Ethan Mollick has like every image benchmark in one.
You were asking about this. You said and explain the history of this.
So originally when Dolly first came out, the image that everyone was like, oh this is crazy, it was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon. Yeah.
So then it's like, okay, that's very easy, and then it became...
Well, it's very hard to photoshop that. It's very hard to go get an actual picture because wait, if someone's just like, make a picture of a dog and it's photoreal, everyone's just like, oh who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of astronauts riding horses on the moon.
There's people riding horses, right? And so like...
It should be able to...
Sense where it's like maybe it doesn't need to fully understand everything that's going on because there's a lot of references it can pull from. Totally. So then it became, can a horse ride an astronaut, right? It's like the reverse. And early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the astronaut on the horse.
Yep. Because that's more logical. So there's a number of these things where if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like okay, you just think logically like this is how it would look, but there's just like no reference images online. So another one was like a full wine glass. Yeah.
So you think of a full wine glass as like it's still only technically, you know, halfway, three quarters.
I never understood why that one didn't work. I saw...
There's very few images online of a full wine glass being like...
Oh, full to the brim because people typically fill them halfway and so in the training data. Okay, got it. Yeah.
Yeah. And then there was the clock. What is this image?
That's the one.
This is not the one.
This is not the one.
This is not the one from the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than this. This is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks...
The only thing is, would a horse's belly really look like that?
It is sort of like a...
It kind of looks like a human that...
But it does have the wine glass completely filled. And then explain, was Grok, I think.
Okay. Explain the clock. What's going on with the clock?
Yeah, that one's just another understanding thing where if you give it a time, can it do the clock? Yeah. Like the correct time? There's also one where you do a bunch of clocks all in different time zones.
Yeah. And can it do the clock? It couldn't do the clock. It has two hour hands.
Yeah. This one.
Do you know what that means? We're moving the goalpost.
Do it.
Moving the goalpost.
The goalpost. We all...
Do it.
It's time.
It's time. It's time.
We got to launch this. It's 99%, but it's not complete yet. It's not complete yet.
You guys have more work to do.
No. No. Sam was talking about this with Ashlee Vance. He was saying that he thought the job was finished with ChatGPT images because it was really good and then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do. And this is like the Karpathy thing about, yeah, you get the self-driving cars to 99% and then it takes another year to add another nine, and then it takes another year to add another nine, and then another nine, and it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding, folks. Keep grinding. Anyway, there are a lot of other fun posts. SemiAnalysis, I thought this was just a real image of Dar Kassh taking a selfie and then it was recontextualized via a meme. It is in fact an AI image.
This doesn't even look like the new model though.
Hi, I'm Dar Kassh. I grew up all over the US and now SF based and always down to nerd out about AI science and history. A little about me. I host the Dar Kassh podcast, studied at UT Austin, just published a book on the history of AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer because of course this is a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of new people that have been hired and moved to...
So the other thing I've noticed with images too...
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that I think it has fully...
The new model actually has taste.
I agree.
And it has fully democratized like high quality lifestyle and product imagery.
Yeah. And I'm shedding a tear just a little bit.
Yeah.
Because you used to be able to tell like the kind of...
Somebody who's working on a CPG company, you could kind of clock their ability...
Yeah.
As a founder based on the quality of their images, right? Because maybe they're not super creative themselves. Maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money, but if they're scrappy, they can meet the right photographer, they can put stuff together. And now it's like everyone just has great product photography.
Yep.
And I saw it this morning with that Anduril company that does like electric scooters. Oh yeah.
They were just like ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent...
Tens of thousands of dollars doing them, but they're clearly like AI.
Which is cool. It's just like funny that we've entered a world where...
Yeah, I've seen some people. I think that the end result will be like you will see more opinionated and creative and more people like there will be a collapsing around like everyone will copy Apple or Linear, but then on the flip side you will see people that are doing things that are really unexpected and those things will be copied. But if the brand can run through and actually establish itself as like, oh, it has this unique aesthetic, it won't matter that somebody can recreate it. Because plenty of people did that with the Red Antler stuff. It was like there were brands that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic and then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked those. I was reflecting on the fact that for a long time Midjourney felt like it had a very unique aesthetic like at ArtStation and like painterly and sci-fi really well and then ChatGPT Images V1 and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography and now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with ChatGPT that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic and it can do more of like the sci-fi stuff. Although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photorealism. I think you got to get kind of crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract because I was taking some Midjourney prompts and I was putting them into ChatGPT images and I was noticing that it was just putting out stuff that was like the prompt was like make a video game of like a car racing and it just looked exactly like a video game because it just looks like a screenshot instead of like the idea of a video game.
Okay, last one we're going to pull up and then we have our first guest. Yes. Post from Ben Hilac, the legend.
Says nightmare blunt rotation.
Oh yeah, it can do 360 images.
It can do 360 images which is really cool.
You got Sam Benson.
So it generates a full equiangular image which is something you could view in VR and then you can load that into a panoramic stereoscopic image generator. I wonder when 3D images will come and also I mean the big question is like people are going to want to animate these. What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point? We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it and it should help with like front end and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on design and layouts and all this stuff. Well, we have the perfect person to talk about AI imagery, generative AI, creative tooling and more because we are joined by Anil from Adobe where he is the president. So let's bring in Anil. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on. It's great to be back on TPN and congrats on your acquisition. Great.
Thank you. It's great to see you. Great to see you again. Uh I would love to just get a general update on what has changed with Adobe. What has what have you been working on since the last time we spoke?
Yeah, look I'm coming to you from Adobe Summit. We are here in Las Vegas. You know, big show, 14,000 people. Uh you were just talking about Jensen. Jensen was here on Monday and really talking about how Nvidia and Adobe are working together and you were just talking about 3D. I caught the tail end of your comments there and that's actually one of the big things we announced is how do you have digital twins um so that you can take the digital twin and carry it all the way from product design into marketing and customer experience. So you know with HP for example uh they have 15,000 new SKs every uh every year with all the products they have and they're working with us and with Nvidia and to bring it together into into marketing. So we are super excited about you know what we call customer experience orchestration which is how do you use AI how do you use all the software you have to deliver personalized experiences how do you bring the right content the right data about the customer uh and then put that into the channel that they care about and u and and really get the most out of the customer life cycle build loyalty that's what we're that's the big topic of the conference here
yeah uh walk me through that HP example because if if if they have a a skew, uh I imagine that there's a CAD file at some point and then they might want to instantiate that in in text or imagery or video or 3D rendering and they might want to go over to uh one of your 3D products or bridge to another. uh how how important is Adobe at the center of like uh asset management and actually creating some sort of abstraction on top of what the actual core item is versus just translating from one sort of output to the next in the way that someone might take uh a PNG from Photoshop and drop it into Premiere Pro.
No, no, that's exactly right. So they start with the uh the 3D uh image that they have or the 3D uh ren uh uh as you said a CAD file. Yeah. From that what we do is we create the digital twin. Okay. And then we apply the brand intelligence on their behalf. So in HP's case for example if it's a new PC that they are releasing they have all kinds of things on what they want when the uh when they say it's a it's a laptop and the laptop is open. What's the kind of image they want on the laptop? What's the kind of lighting they want on the laptop? And then they release it all over the world. So there's pictures of people they always want to show a business professional in the laptop. That's the the along with the laptop. They want them showing them using the laptop to do something. So they have all kinds of brand guidelines of course, but then there's a lot of tribal knowledge on what makes an ad successful and it's not only for them. Then they have to get all of that traveling through the entire marketing campaign because one of the big problems has been you know in the in the current world they use the 3D uh CAD files for everything in manufacturing and so on but the marketing the content starts with a photo shoot they're not actually using the 3D u uh CAD file that they have the source of truth and that's what we're you know enabling them to do use the source of truth so that the the uh images are completely completely high fidelity. They are brand preserving but then you can generate everything around that. You can generate the background, you can generate the foreground, you can generate the users and then of course you can do what we call transcreation which is the translation into different languages. All of that can be generated based on their brand guidelines and what works for their brand.
So is your relationship with Nvidia that you want to marshall enough compute that you can be delivering inference to a customer? Because I remember using content-aware fill back in the day. It ran locally on my device. As the models get more compute intensive, they eventually won't run on device. They'll run in the cloud. I know you have API partnerships, but is there a vision to deliver inference to the customer all in one go?
Exactly. It depends on the campaign. Let's say HP is running a back to school campaign. Then they want a set of imagery. They want a set of things that they can transfer over to their channel partners along with accurate product data. Uh or if they're running for example a holiday campaign, a different set of imagery and so on so forth. So depending on the campaign, depending on the geography, depending on the customer segment, making sure that they have the right campaign that is obviously the content, but it's also the product data. making sure that that's super accurate because it's got to match what exactly the customer is buying and then anything that's relevant for the particular channel partner. It could be through their own direct channels but it could equally be through CDW or through other channels and they want to make sure that the entire thing carries over. So that's what we're doing for them is not getting the workflow right, getting the Adobe brand intelligence, which is one of the big things that we announced uh this week at Summit, getting all of that together so that they can have a single seamless marketing workflow and get the benefit of both AI and the 3D technology together.
Jord, uh you guys announced a big uh buyback uh this week and and uh that that's been exciting, but uh what do you think you need to do from a result standpoint to show that you guys are an AI beneficiary versus a versus a victim, right? Because the narrative is obviously against you. Uh the market has has spoken. Uh but at the same time, AI is a powerful creative tool. you guys have massive distribution into, you know, millions of individuals and businesses and so uh I think people are waiting to actually see see the story in the numbers and there's like only so much you can say to kind of like give people confidence but how are you thinking about it?
Yeah, exactly. As you said, we announced a $25 billion buyback. That is a a signal of our confidence of uh you know, this is going to continue to be a very profitable business for years to come. And we wanted to make sure that everybody in the market knew that. Uh and you know, look, I think to your point, first step for us is AI adoption uh and making sure that AI is delivering real value whether it's to individuals and real value to users or to enterprise customers like we were just talking about. And for us, what what that means is how do you really embed it into the tooling so seamlessly whether you are a marketer, whether you're a creative or whether you're a business professional using Acrobat, that AI works for you flawlessly. Uh and it does what you want. I I love the example from the last show that you had, which is sometimes you do want the the horse riding the astronaut. That was an interesting concept. But you know that may be but we have a lot of customers like Home Depot that just want sawdust and nails and that's that's what makes their campaigns authentic. Sure. So depending on what the customer wants, depending what the user wants, making sure that AI is helping them get value, not AI is getting in the way. Mhm. That's our focus right now is just making sure that customers whether they are enterprises, individuals, small businesses, students understand that AI is critical to the next generation of uh of uh creative platforms and marketing platforms and tools, but it's in the context of what they're using. It brings the UI, the agentic uh the agents and the reasoning, the models and the data all together to work for them. So that's I think we've made a we made a lot a lot of strides on that front here at summit in over the last couple of years. I think as as the results show one thing for us is I think from where we are in the market for the market even to see us continuing to the performance that we've had we're a double digit grower you know we have very healthy margins even continuing to see that for the next couple of years I think will change a lot of minds uh and then I think uh we also see the opportunity through customer experience orchestration uh to reach a real inflection point so that's that's what we're looking to do
Jordy you can yeah I was going to ask how how are what's your M&A outlook? It seems like there's a ton of really talented teams building building creative tools that could could fit into to Adobe. Sure. Uh hopefully, you know, you're spending a lot on the buyback, but uh hopefully there's still some uh dry powder uh for some talented teams.
We we do. We we have plenty of dry powder. We uh we haven't overextended ourselves. In fact, we are uh really pleased. We just announced that we have uh received all the regulatory approvals for SEMrush and we are in the in the in the waiting period to close it. So uh in
In the next few weeks we'll be closing Semrush and we're super excited about that because Semrush, along with our portfolio, solves a real problem for marketers. You know, marketers β I mean, we heard a lot from customers at Summit. Every brand is like, 'How do I show up in the right way through OpenAI, through ChatGPT obviously, but through Claude and Gemini and Perplexity?' I don't even know how β consumers, they know consumers are going there in droves.
What they don't know is what are they even prompting for that I should know about. So if I'm a brand in the cosmetics world, how are they β what are they actually prompting? And I don't even know what they're prompting for that I should be aware of. Then how should I make sure β what do I need to do to make sure that I am included in the response? And then what do I need to do to make sure that I'm included in the response in an accurate manner? And then how do I get that traffic coming to me?
Or how do I close the sale right there if it's something that I can close right there. This is a new world for marketers. Marketers have no idea how this whole thing works. I mean, they don't know, for example, what happens when you put a prompt into ChatGPT. What are the queries that get kicked off? Where does it get kicked off to? How is that information assembled? How does it impact their brand? They don't know the first thing about it, is what they're telling us. And they're saying, 'Adobe, help us.'
I'm interested to see how this category plays out because there's obviously a bunch of companies doing β they call it answer engine optimization, AEO, or GEO, whatever they're calling it. But the big question was always β this feels like a very natural thing for someone like Semrush to enter in a big way. They already have the distribution. So it'll be an interesting battle between Semrush and some of the upstarts like Profound and some other players.
Well, I think the battle will be over pretty soon, according to me.
There we go. I think James β I think James at Profound. We should have you guys both on and go at it.
That's great. I want to talk about video. So I mean, we saw OpenAI pull back from Sora. There are some really amazing models that are happening, some of them are in China. There's a whole bunch of IP stuff. What I'm interested in is that Photoshop continues to be an important tool even in a Gen AI world, because there's so many fine details, having Gen AI as just one possible tool is valuable.
The models are getting better. We're three years into this boom, but video is moving slower. It's more inference demand. And I'm wondering about how you're taking lessons learned and strategies that you applied to the evolution of Photoshop, how that integrates with different model providers, different tools, different in-house solutions, and how you're planning to bring that to After Effects and Premiere, because this feels like a place where you would need even more opinionated editing. Like we're nowhere near text-based editing β like, you know, take 40 hours of video into a movie, that's just not β like, we're so far from that.
Exactly. So look, this is where we believe Adobe brand intelligence will be a huge differentiator, because that's what then gives us the right information to pass on to the creatives to say, 'This is how β this is the kind of β how you use the Adobe creative agent, and this is where you want to let the AI take over, and this is where you want to be opinionated.' I mean, what we have done is provided that flexibility.
You know, we announced over 30 integrations now, you know, whether it's Runway or Flux, and obviously Google with both Veo and Nano Banana, etc. So we've been very open, and we're very open to integrating any other models that come up as well.
The key, though, is the creative themselves. If you're working for a brand β I mean, if you're working for β I mentioned Home Depot earlier, or if you're working for Coca-Cola and so on β they don't have enough information by themselves, unless they really get a really super detailed creative brief on what exactly β where they need to take control, where they can let the AI run.
Yeah, we believe we can automate that and provide the right information at the right time to the creative. They can bring the brand idea, they can bring the hero asset, they can bring the creative idea, and then you can apply the intelligence. And exactly to your point, you can be a lot more opinionated in what you produce.
Yeah. Yeah. It is very fascinating that we got like fully generated video before we got a tool that puppeteers Premiere Pro in a way that can sync up music and edit to a beat and make cuts just on normal non-AI generated footage. That's just the nature of computer use and whatnot. So I'm sure it's an exciting time. Lots to build, lots to work on. Congratulations on all the progress.
Great to get the update. Yeah. Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Goodbye.
Up next, we have β one quick thought. I think like right now, the great image models, the Nano Bananas, the Imagen 3s β it is like you're just talking to somebody who is a digital guy or girl who is very good at Photoshop.
Like that is the experience today. And it was not that way 12 months ago. It is that way now. I no longer need Photoshop. I don't need to go to Fiverr to say like, 'Hey, I need somebody that's good at Photoshop.' I don't need to text like Ben and be like, 'Hey, can you help me Photoshop this?' And you can just actually just prompt your way. You do not need any UI anymore.
That's true. That's true. For the average β for the average β yeah. I mean, we are β we are β
And I'm just saying that's going to get there with video, where you just have a timeline and you can click on a scene.
Speed is really, really important here. Like if there's one word that's wrong on an image and you need to regenerate it, you're going to wait 45 seconds, and it will be faster to have done that in just a traditional workflow. Now it's getting faster.
It's so fast now. It's very fast.
But if you're creating a two-hour podcast and you say, 'Oh, I want you to cut to Jordy in minute 45,' and it has to go regenerate the entire thing β like that is slow. You're going to need to puppeteer the tools. You're going to need tool use in here. I think β I don't know. Just because β I was just shocked because I was playing around with like generating product photography, and you're able to say like, 'Put the text here,' you know, 'turn it around, put it at a different angle, more shadow, less shadow,' all this stuff. And it's wild what you can do without any UI.
But without further ado, we have Naveen from Build Forever, the former Pinterest CPO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
I like the bomber, Jordy. Nice piece.
Thank you. Thank you. It's a one-of-one β New York Stock Exchange.
Oh, NYC. What date was the New York Stock Exchange founded? You tell me. 1792. 11 Wall Street. Wow. That is a very old β great address. Great year to get into business. Great year to get into business. Best day to get into business.
But it's great to have you on the show. Yeah. First time to the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.
Yeah, totally. So my name is Naveen Gavini. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Build Forever. And honestly, we're just a group of engineers and designers and people that love building products that people love to use. And we've worked β as you said, I was early at Pinterest, and we worked on a number of consumer products that people use around the world today.
But our focus has been on a product that we launched yesterday called Extra. And it's really a re-imagination of email as your life's inbox. And so for many of us, we spend all day kind of working, sending email. And when we have time to get to our personal email, it often feels overrun, overwhelming, and just like β I don't know. I personally gave up on my personal email. I had over 250,000 unread emails.
And so we were just kind of looking for a solution of just making email more manageable, more fun, and delightful. And so with Extra, it keeps track of what's important for you, so you never have to miss something. It helps you clean up your email, organize it around your life, and it does things proactively for you in the background, and helps you get stuff done. And so this endless to-do list feels not so overwhelming, and it just feels delightful and joyful to open up your email every day.
Is it a For You page for email?
Um, yeah, essentially. Yeah, that's how you could think of it. That's a good analogy. Yeah. So everything that's important in your life, we turn every email that you have into a short vertical looping video. It's not quite that, but your β
I know what you're saying. It's basically like β
Yeah, just actually picking and choosing. You know, it's always been so silly that inboxes were primarily based around who messaged you last, not based around what was actually important or actionable or anything like that. Um, yeah, and I feel like we need to move β
Like the whole idea of inbox zero is just such a pre-AI idea where you are just getting flooded with more and more and more and more spam, and I think products that can help here are great.
Also, it feels like you can kind of just β yeah, I'm curious. So you're built on top of Gmail. I don't know if you're supporting other email providers. Google is like aware that AI can be powerful in email. They're working on a lot of features, but I feel like this is one of those things that is going to require like really, really rapid iteration. And so I feel like you probably have this beautiful window of like maybe three to four years where they're kind of just slow to figure out some of this stuff, and you can probably build a cool business in the meantime.
But where do you want to β where does this go? How do you know β how are you thinking about this as a venture scale opportunity?
Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, maybe starting where you kind of left off. I think one of the challenges in email is historically for the past 20 years, like all of the innovation in email, if you think about it, has gone into the enterprise and it's gone into really sending emails faster, right? So that's like kind of all the email clients that you've seen have been like, 'Let's help you get to inbox zero and send faster.'
And when in reality, like our different take on email is that when you think about your personal email, not your work email, the amount of emails you send is actually very little relative to the amount you receive. And so the entire experience actually needs to be rethought from information consumption, not as a communication tool. And I think that's the big pivot with email to think about on the personal side, is that it's more around information consumption, delivering to you the right information at the right time.
And then from there, there's an entire business to be built on how do you actually get things done for people in their lives? How do you help them along that next point in time in the journey without them having to do work? And so you're seeing, you know, a whole ecosystem of amazing companies being built on the agentic side around fulfilling different actions, but all of them need kind of a distribution entry point of like, how do we start that journey and what is the personal data that we actually help achieve some of those actions upon? And so I think email is a really great place for that.
And if we could build an experience that starts to make that seamless for a user where they don't have to go and, I don't know, set up an API key or connect to a service, and they could just seamlessly launch that from an experience that feels native to them like email, it could be a really compelling experience. And I think, you know, we previously built a very big business with ads at Pinterest and other companies. And so this idea of being able to show people products and services at the right time could lead to a really incredible consumer product that's also accessible to the masses.
Ads β I was not expecting that. Well, that was at Pinterest. No, I know. But you're saying β aren't you saying like in theory if you build a really β
Yeah. You pay to get the top of the inbox. Everyone's sending you a thousand emails, and if I advertise and pay, I can get more surface area. Maybe. Also, I think people β I mean, our stance and many people's stance, I'm sure your stance, is like if you get a really nicely targeted ad, it is like additive to a product experience. And so I think in the world in the future where, you know, somebody's using Extra for their email, and you decide to turn on ads, you could probably serve really high quality ads to users.
Yeah. Some of our beta users really love actually finding deals and products from brands that they actually love that often get buried and missed in their inbox today. And when we show CMOs and marketers the product, they absolutely love the idea of their products being displayed natively, not buried in a promotions tab. You know, their CTRs are through the floor with kind of the existing treatment in many people's mailboxes.
So if you're actually interested in a brand and you've bought something from them before, the idea of being able to see other complementary products or things from that brand in the future could be very compelling. And I think we're thinking about multiple tiers. Like I think there's obviously a lot of folks that, you know, may just want to not have ads and pay. And so I think there's lots of different ways to go about it. We're still early in the journey, but right now we're focusing on getting as many people to have a joyful inbox experience as possible before we start to monetize.
What's the beachhead agentic experience? Is it just unsubscribe?
People love coming in to clean up their inbox. It's crazy. I recommend everyone that's listening in, like if you're tired of your inbox being overwhelmed, five minutes with our onboarding flow will give you an inbox designed around your life, and you'll feel a lot lighter and cleaner after using Extra.
Is that specifically for the person that's sitting on like 200,000 emails? If they have like 10 β I probably have like 10 emails in my personal, and they range a lot from like need to write a thoughtful response, to need to do some flow in some web app, or need to send a payment, or need to do β and I'm like, I don't know that I would hand over the keys to an agent for most of those.
But I would definitely love a For You page on my promotions and updates tabs in Gmail, which are like basically newsletters and sponsored stuff. And then I would love β because Gmail's done like an okay job with the unsubscribe button, but it misses it a lot. And then there's some services that are just like, 'We're breaking the law, and you have to call us to unsubscribe from our emails.' And I'm like, I'm not going to chase this down. So I'm just going to keep getting like, you know, random 'our privacy policy updated' from some like telecom service usually.
Yeah. So I think with Extra you would get an amazing For You page with the information that you want. And I think honestly a lot of people just feel the sense of control and clarity of being able to see it in a different view of like, here's what's important, here's what I need to do today. And you know, it's distilled down to just a few items versus this long list of things that you have to do in your inbox.
That's cool. Is the app live on the App Store?
It is. Um, yeah, we went live yesterday. Your life's inbox. Here we go.
Happening now. I'm getting it. Thank you. There we go. Very excited to try this. Great to meet you. Well, thank you so much for coming on, breaking it down for us. Congratulations. Excited to give it a try. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye.
Up next, we have Avlok from AngelList. And I believe we might have someone else as well. Ankur is joining as well. Fantastic. They've both been on the show before. You know them, you love them. They have a big announcement today. AngelList is launching USVC, a public venture fund alongside Naval Ravikant. How are you doing?
Yo, yo. Hello. Feeling great. Thanks for having me on the show.
Big day. Big day. Break it down for us. What is USVC?
All right. Perfect. I'm going to let Ankur break down what we're working on.
We're working on getting a four-up. Just give us one second. We can just hang out. Great hair. Did you just get a haircut? Here we go. We got everybody. There we go.
Yep. Got a haircut just for TBPN, you know.
There we go. I thought so. Great to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Massive day.
Ankur, it's been too long since last week since I've been here. Every Wednesday afternoon blocked out. But no, today's launch is really fun. I mean, we couldn't reveal that much last week, but really the last month has been gearing up towards this. And I think Naval mentioned it when he first started AngelList. This was such a big part of his vision of what this company could become, and it's really fun to finally get this out there.
Let's get right into it. Describing the product. Yeah. Let's talk specifically about the product. Everyone is aware of the companies that are a key part of it, but talk about kind of the decision-making that went into the product, how it's different than other products in the market, all that stuff.
Cool. Um, yeah, so the idea with USVC is we wanted to open up access to the asset class of venture. Right now it's, I believe, very siloed. You need to know a lot of people. It's very, very hard for most of America to have access to, you know, the place where most of the wealth is created. So that's the goal with USVC. Can we build sort of a high-quality way to index into venture as an asset class?
What's unique about this structure is there are a lot of private market ETFs. People may have seen the Destiny ETF, the Robinhood ETF, all of that. The difference with this is that this is set up differently, where it's a closed-end tender offer fund, which sounds like a lot of heavy words, but what it really means is when you're investing in this, you're actually holding something very close to the underlying business.
So the price of what you pay and what you redeem at is roughly equal to the price of the underlying companies. It's not driven by FOMO or like markets being super excited or down. And I think that is structurally very different.
I don't know if I've β and you know, part of the challenge with some of these other products is they can have great assets that make up the fund, but it's hard to justify if they're trading at five, six, seven times NAV. It doesn't matter how good the underlying assets are. No good investor can kind of confidently say, 'I'm going to invest in this fund,' unless you truly think that the assets are kind of mispriced fundamentally by five or six x.
Yeah. That's exactly right. I think the way to think about USVC is it's meant to be a vehicle that you can think about over the long term. So rather than trying to think about am I getting it at the right NAV, am I getting it higher or lower than it's valued, you can just trust that when you invest in USVC, you're getting it at the right NAV and you can hold it for the very, very long term. That's why USVC made the decisions that it made.
So how do investors actually onboard?
It's very easy. So right now it's β yeah, it's very easy. We'll get you all to invest soon. But it's fully self-served, usvc.com.
And that's sort of been the innovation here. Like historically, these types of funds required people to be accredited investors, but now access is truly open to anyone with as little as $500.
How are you thinking about number of bets? It's open-ended. So it sounds like uncapped, but is this the kind of thing where you want to β I feel like is it you want to concentrate on like 20, 30 core positions similar to a venture fund? I imagine this isn't like you want to spray and pray at seed, but maybe you would if it's the right founder. How are you thinking about it?
Yeah. So I can talk about portfolio construction. You'll see a lot of the names we've gone out with today are the names everyone has heard of. You know, xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic. However, long-term, I think a lot of the long-term alpha is not even necessarily in these names. So we absolutely will also start investing in a lot of seed-stage companies.
The idea is these are bets. It's not just about the next one year, but bets that will pay off in the next three, five, seven, ten years. So about a third of the portfolio, the goal would be to have it skew early stage as well, just because we want to be finding these companies before they're actually discovered.
So similar to a kind of a platform VC where they're going to concentrate a lot of their capital into later-stage established winners that are more stable, and then you can still get exposure to the early stage of super promising companies. That's very cool.
Can you talk about the concept of direct ownership? How many layers of abstraction? I think that there's just like FUD generally among retail investors that I've talked to, that they will see a name that they're excited about and then they will find a product that sort of proxies that name, but it's seven layers deep. It's very confusing and they don't really know how to process it.
And mostly they're not even necessarily worried about fees or anything like that. They're more worried about like, I thought I owned SpaceX and then it just turned out I didn't. And we've talked to Matt Grim at Anduril about this. There's been all sorts of people promoting SPVs that don't have access, don't have anything. And it's just like β yeah. And I think that messaging is important. So can you talk us through how you think about ownership, what rights you actually do need, what rights you don't, how you think about delivering exposure to the end investor.
I'm going to let Ankur take this because AngelList as a platform has drawn the line on what they will expect as an SPV. So Ankur, why don't you take this one?
Sure. Yeah. Well, one of the unique things about USVC is that it runs on AngelList. So we're able to have it take advantage of all of the infrastructure of AngelList. And one of the things I tweeted out a few months ago was AngelList, as an example, had banned all layered SPVs by default for the reasons that you mentioned.
In fact, when we did it, we lost revenue because of it, but that's because we didn't know who the underlying owners were and we had no way to actually even trace it. And so we banned it. So in general, when it comes to the infrastructure that we're running at AngelList, we are always thinking first and foremost about ownership of the underlying assets because we're running infrastructure for funds, SPVs at scale.
So from that vantage point, you can think of it as USVC, in the way it thinks about acquiring assets, has the exact same ethos, which is you want to only look at assets where you actually know where the underlying assets are coming from, rather than these layered SPVs that have fees that are not disclosed and carry that's not disclosed. That's something that we effectively banned from AngelList a while ago.
Makes sense. What is the pitch for founders? Why should they take USVC money? I can give reasons, but how are you positioning it?
I think that this is the most fun part, and you're going to see this soon, where, okay, you know, you'd argue that Anthropic doesn't really need more promoters right now, but we're going to be taking some bets on companies and startups that have very loyal, very passionate communities, but they may be a $50 million business, $100 million business, something in that range.
And to them, it allows them a very scalable way to actually let their community share in the upside. And that's going to be one of the magical things here, where it's not obviously an IPO or anything, but now we can have a vehicle for people to get their communities involved in their upside. And for most founders, it's, you know, generally pretty cool to be able to say, 'Hey, by the way, if you are a customer and you want to participate in this, you can invest in USVC.'
There's a $500 minimum. Is there a maximum?
There's no maximum. So load up, load up, load up the truck.
What happens if Elon, Sam, Dario, these guys are like, 'You know what? I want to just team up with the other guys. Let's throw 50 billion collectively into each other's companies through USVC.' You know, let's just all create a keiretsu. This is the Japanese way, correct?
You did strike something interesting, that the nature of this fund is different, right? Effectively it's an evergreen fund, which means we can accept kind of unlimited amount of capital, but from a deployment perspective, every time that happens, effectively we have to kind of come up with a strategy for that. So it's a very different structure.
Yeah. How should investors think about the time horizon? I've talked to people that have LP'd into VC funds and they're like, I don't even know if I'll see it before retirement. I mean, there's people who got into like early rounds of SpaceX and they're like 20 years into β like it looks great on paper, but I still don't have liquidity. And that's a benefit, but it's also a drawback. And I think going in with eyes open is important.
But how should the investor β should they think about this as a 10-year journey or something that they're throwing in the retirement bucket mentally? Or should they think about it β obviously it's not something that they're going to be trading in and out of on a day-to-day basis, but what's the right mindset to go into this with?
So I'll caveat that this is not a liquid instrument, right? Like we've been told to repeat, this is not a liquid instrument. However, the goal with this type of structure is at our discretion, if things are looking good β and this is our goal β we will have up to 5% of the fund available for a redemption every single quarter.
So the idea is that people, theoretically once we get into a good rhythm, can kind of pick and choose for how long they want to be a part of this journey. Again, it's not the most liquid instrument, but from a timing perspective, people can kind of come in and come out. However, only through quarterly redemptions.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Anything else? No, this was great. I'm very, very excited. This is the most AngelList product ever, I think, even though you guys are more than a decade in now, right? And yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. I imagine you guys are going to be spending a little more time on the East Coast with this. I guess you're already over there, Ankur.
We're already in New York and the West Coast, so we have good coverage.
The website is usvc.com. There's a beautiful video of Naval. And I have no doubt we'll have many of your new portfolio company founders on the show. So keep us in the loop. Excited for it. Great to see you guys. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
This launch video is very funny because there are clips of Naval and then there are clips of founders, and the first clip sort of makes it look like Naval is talking to Steve Jobs if you just have the sound off. But what a fantastic portfolio. Go check it out at USVC. There are seven companies in the portfolio currently: xAI, Crusoe, who's been on the show, Anthropic, Sierra Technologies, Bret Taylor, Luma, OpenAI, and Vercel. You have seven different companies here representing. Go check it out, usvc.com.
Well, wow. Before we go into the breaking news next guest segment, I'm trying to β this hasn't been posted by any super reputable sources yet, but there's a number of sources saying that Thoma Bravo actually, according to Reuters, is nearing agreement to turn software firm Adallia over to creditors, which would be a $5 billion loss. That is rough. Absolutely brutal. We'll dig in here more next.
Anyway, we have Joel Edwards from Zanscar in the waiting room. Let's bring Joel in to the TVP and Ultradom. Joel, how are you doing? What's going on? Good. Hey guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Great. Thanks for hopping on and thanks for cleaning the camera. I appreciate that. Always want to look sharp on TVPN. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Hey guys, Joel Edwards. I'm a geologist by training. I'm from Zanscar Geothermal. We're a group that we wildcat for new geothermal resources out west to make power.
Okay. What's the best β actually, music to my ears. What's the best β if I got one more AI agent, I was β no, I'm kidding. Name every geothermal resource. Like, concretize it for me. Like, what are we talking about here? What does striking gold look like?
Yeah, striking gold. In your head, have you guys ever been to Yellowstone National Park? First national park? Yeah, I think so. Seen the Old Faithful geyser, any of those thermal features? Okay. These are the types of systems we're looking for, except for the systems we're looking for are hidden or blind. Okay. So there's nothing at the surface. There's no geyser. There's no hot springs. Okay. Nothing. But there are massive geothermal resources at depth that you can tap with a well field.
You can pull that heat out of the ground and you can put it in a turbine and make electricity.
Interesting. Yeah. Take me through the geology 101. Where's the heat coming from? Why is this underground? How do we get it out? Is it just that there are just like pockets of hot air? Hot water? Like, really dumb it down for me.
There are pockets of hot water underground. Okay. Not hot air. Yeah. And they're fairly discreet, fairly local, but when you find them, they're incredibly energy dense. So think in your mind like volcanoes. Yeah. Right. That's a manifestation of a geothermal system. Okay. Think hot springs and so forth.
There are parts of the world of the crust where there's just a lot of heat. Yeah. And that gets manifest in these different thermal features, and you can drill into these things and you can pull steam or hot brines out of the ground, and then you put it into a power plant just like, you know, all thermal power plants β nuclear, coal, combined cycle gas. Yeah. They all put heat into turbines. Turbine spins a generator and you make electricity and so forth. Yeah.
Is that classic meme? We discover a new way to generate power and we're going to use it to boil water and generate steam and spin a turbine so we get more electricity. And this is like we do every time we discover something new. We're making β
What is the business actually going to look like? Is this a whale hunting where you're really trying to find a single site in the next 24 months and then you'll spend years β do you want to commercialize it or do you want to sell it off to another company at that point? Like, how full stack do you wind up going here?
Yeah, we already own and operate a power plant, geothermal power plant in New Mexico. So we sell electricity to an investor-owned utility and then they service Albuquerque and Santa Fe and so forth. Interesting. So the business is to find geothermal resources, build a power plant, and then sell the electricity to a customer. Yeah. So this is part of that.
Yeah. Sorry. Is there β this feels like eco-friendly. Is there pushback to geothermal energy production generally? Like, people are worried about earthquakes or something. I don't know. Like, it feels like this is a step forward. People are going to find a way to find anything. So what are they going to hate about this? Like, are you renewable? Are you clean energy? Like, what category are you in, do you think?
Yeah. Right now we are beloved by both sides of the political aisle. So you show up in β enjoy it while it lasts, buddy. Yeah. Exactly. Somebody will find a way. Triple glaze. We're one of the few bipartisan things where you show up in DC and everybody loves you, shakes your hand. It's a really exciting moment. Cool.
There's attributes about geothermal that people love. It's baseload. There's no emission profile. It's domestic, so all these resources are in the US. You know, it uses US supply chains. It uses drillers. Everybody loves drillers. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people love drillers. And so forth. So it has a lot of those attributes that speak to both the left and the right.
And then probably, you know, another attribute is the underdog attribute. Everybody loves a good underdog. Geothermal is an underdog. We're a niche small industry. We have a lot of the same setup that oil and gas had like 100-plus years ago, where it looks like there's a lot of resource out there. Looks like a ton of potential. It's still niche. Is it going to scale?
Yeah. Is this one of those things like rare earths are not actually that rare? Hard to find. We don't find the refining nearby. How much geothermal energy is there? Like, are we talking like tens of gigawatts potentially if we were to put in like AI data center plans?
Yeah. I think tens of gigawatts is near-term super duper realistic based on the tools and the tech that we have today. Yeah. So exciting. Yeah. Obviously there's people talking hundreds of gigawatts, terawatts. We'll see what happens, right? As industries scale, nonlinear, unpredictable things happen, right? Cost and technology and all these things change. So it's hard to predict what's going to happen 10 years from now.
But basically, there's two things that drive scale for resources. It's the number of resources out there in existence. Yeah. And then it's your ability to extract the resource, and that's really technology dependent.
So geothermal β Zanscar really focuses on finding more geothermal hotspots. We have a thesis that there's a lot more out there. We've already found a bunch of sites. We've announced a few of them. There's more to come. And then there's other groups that have focused on how do you get more out of these systems? And those are in the unconventional bucket. It's like the oil and gas play in the Permian in West Texas. Right. They came in with unconventional well fields. They drill horizontal wells. They stimulate. They get more hydrocarbons out of the rock. Yep. That process is happening in geothermal right now as well. Okay. So you have the exploration piece, finding more, and then getting more out of it.
Yeah. Double-clicking on the exploration piece. It sounds like AI can be used to do more computational discovery, actually interpret data, but what's the gold standard for actually obtaining the data? Like, what sensor are you using to detect the potential of a geothermal discovery system? What's the secret sensor?
The trick in geothermal is that there's not a single type of geological data that tells you if a system is in existence other than just drilling a well into the thing and measuring.
There's nothing you can do just like radar or like pulse something through the ground and find it that way?
Unfortunately, no. I wish it was that easy. You got in oil and gas exploration, they use seismic reflection imaging, and that was kind of their silver bullet tool set to find a lot of these reservoirs. Yeah. In geothermal, we use a mix of data sets to try to find these hidden systems. Interesting. And that's where AI tools really flex, because they can handle the hyperdimensionality problem really well, better than humans.
So we basically build the sandbox in which the models learn how to find systems, and the building the sandbox piece is the really hard piece. You have to put the right data in there. You have to put the right learning objective rates and so forth. That's the piece that we live in. We build the sandboxes for the models.
Interesting. Last question for me. I feel like you guys are bending towards the meme template, like the world if it ran on geothermal energy, and it's like this flying car, everything's green. Hypothetically, friend of the show Marc Benioff, he's out in Hawaii, he's big on AI. Could we put a cap on a volcano and capture all the energy out of a volcano and use that to power Salesforce AI?
Sure, why not? A cap. What does the cap look like? Is β I don't know. I'm just imagining a physical something to trap the heat that comes off of the volcano. Maybe you want to drill into the volcano and extract the lava that way. But has anyone actually at least theorized about capturing energy from volcanoes? They seem very powerful.
They're pretty powerful. We have a lot of active operational geothermal well fields on volcanoes today. Really? So the main island of Hawaii has a geothermal well field. They've drilled into the side of that volcano and they make electricity out of it. That's crazy. So I guess if that's the cap β but they are extracting energy from the volcano. That's remarkable. That's right. Wow.
Yeah. So there's a lot of geothermal operations, power plants in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, where a lot of these big volcanic systems live. In the US, we have some volcanic systems generating power in California. Yeah. And then most of the rest of the systems are generating from cracks or fracture zones in the crust. Sure. Yeah.
That's very exciting. Did you raise money?
We raised some money. Yeah, we've got some cash.
I want to ring the gong for you. It's exciting. The gong is coming. I knew the gong was coming. Yes.
We raised $115 million a few months ago and just β
Congratulations. Thank you. Wait. $40 million. What β credit facility?
It's a credit facility. Yeah.
Massive. It's all good. I'm really glad you're doing this. Yeah. This is amazing. I'm really glad you're doing this. You know that people talk about AI bottlenecks in AI, right? You know, talent, chips, energy. And there's sort of like this cycle in technology live streaming right now. And right now there's sort of like a talent bottleneck and an equipment bottleneck, but if we keep doubling from here, there will be an energy bottleneck in technology live streaming. So I'm glad you're doing this work.
Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Have you ever been on a drill rig? I have. You guys have not lived yet. I mean, this is the American experience, is to be on a drill rig.
I know. I know. Tell us when you're in Southern California. We would love to go live from the rig. Yeah. So anyways, thanks. Talk to you later. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Cheers. Goodbye.
Up next we have the founder and CEO, Vast Data. Just hit a $30 billion valuation. Congratulations. $1 billion Series F. Absolutely massive news. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.
We're good. Would you mind just giving us a little bit of the journey, a little bit of background? I'd love to know all the things that went into building the company to this point, since it's such a massive milestone.
Of course. It's been 10 years in the making. We started in 2016. We wanted to redo infrastructure. We thought AI required a new infrastructure stack way back then. If you remember 2016, it was very, very early days of AI, but it was already clear that you needed fast access to a lot of data to train these massive systems. And now we needed to infer and to fine-tune and for reinforcement learning. And so we've been on this journey with AI throughout its various evolutions. We started from storage, building a β
Was there any point on that journey where you were like, maybe we were too early? Did we pick kind of the wrong category, or was it kind of like steadyβyou felt like there was steady progress being made and you had line of sight to getting to where you are now the entire time?
We definitely did not have line of sight. When we started, if you looked at my presentation that I built for myself, the last slide had a picture of a brain on it and it asked, can we build a thinking machine? I'm not sure we still have today line of sight to doing that, but it's been our north star. And over the years, we always partnered with the organizations that were on the bleeding edge of AI. Before generative AI, it was hedge funds and life science institutes that were doing massive analytics using GPUs. And then of course once generative AI hit, it became the labs and the AI clouds that became our biggest customers.
Yeah. Do you have insight into how hedge funds are scaling compute resources? I just saw, didn't Jane Street invest a billion dollars in CoreWeave, and it seems like I saw another company that they funded that was doing custom silicon, and it feels like they have incredibly advanced compute stacks that are a little bit more opaque because they maybe just have a different recruiting flow or different public messaging flow.
That is exactly right. In fact, Jane Street is a customer of ours both directly and through CoreWeave, and so we know them well. We play in that space now for seven or eight years. I found that before the big AI labs, the hedge funds were the ones that had the biggest GPU clusters. Yeah, they're ahead of their time and they're very secretive. So we don't know much about what's going on there.
What about the social networks and the social platforms? They feel like ad delivery is also potentially underrated as a source of large-scale machine learning, large-scale compute clusters. We've seen, you know, Meta trained the Llama model on the real-sized cluster that they built as sort of a bonus. But how big is that of a business for you, and how do you think it comps to the hedge fund world?
I think the hedge fund world is a lot more secretive, but I would dare to say that it's bigger in terms of size. There are very few of these Metas out there, and there are a lot more hedge funds.
Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, talk about what the next phase for your company is on the back of this financing round.
So we're trying to fill in that software infrastructure layer. Jensen gave a really good analogy of a five-layer cake: power, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. We're that middle layer. We want to abstract this new hardware away from these new models and applications. We want to make it easy, make it secure for everybody to generate AI agents and use AI in production. And especially as we move from the labs into enterprises, I think it needs to be simplified. And it's always been that software infrastructure layer, what I call the operating system, that took a new technology from new hardware and a killer app to making it widespread where everybody can use it. And I think we're at that moment with AI, and we're trying to do our part in accelerating the adoption of AI.
How have you been processing the CPU shortage? This idea that like as agents get more and more robust, they need more CPU. They need to be fed. You got to feed the GPUs. Is that something that you're working on particularly, or do you have a view on the overall CPU shortage which sort of blindsided I think a lot of people in tech who had been following the GPU ramps, but then they're saying, 'Oh, well, what's going on with the CPU crunch?'
I think these AI factories are bigger pieces of technology than we've ever built before. It includes CPUs, it includes DPUs, it includes GPUs, in some cases it includes TPUs.
DPUs. Can you break that down?
The data processing unit.
Yes. And so all of these chips are in high demand. We're seeing a NAND shortage that's extremely severe right now. We're seeing a memory shortage, and so I don't think there's anything that is of abundant supply right now. The fabs need to be built out. Nobody was expecting this type of curve in the growth of AI, and I think it's going to continue for definitely a few years to come, if not many years to come. And so the hardware vendors need to build out a lot faster than they have been.
Yeah. Can you walk me through at a deeper level your relationship with CoreWeave and how that fits together? I think a lot of people think of CoreWeave as servicing, you know, the companies that are training and inferencing models specifically. What are you getting out of that partnership?
So CoreWeave has been an amazing partner for us. They're the biggest of these new AI clouds like Nscale and Crusoe and Lambda. You see them around the world also as sovereign clouds. And basically they're building this new stack and they're making it easy for end users to consume this new stack in a cloud environment. We're just the software builders. And so we try to provide them with as much software as we can such that they can turn that around into cloud services, whether it's a storage service or a database service or a streaming service, as we add more and more layers of this stack. Those are the things that are required from those end users.
Okay. So we were just talking to the president of Adobe. It sounds like Adobe is doing inference and they're training some models and they're doing a lot of different things. They might go to CoreWeave and then VAST Data might be powering the software underneath, and they might not even necessarily have a direct relationship with you because they're getting just access to the best possible product from CoreWeave directly, effectively. Is that right?
It is right. Adobe specifically does have a direct relationship with us. Most of these larger enterprises tend to have both a cloud environment that they're leveraging and on-prem and hyperscale, and what we've built, what we call a data space, basically allows them to do all three of those and have one abstraction layer that enables a seamless experience.
Interesting. Given your exposure to the world of hedge funds, are there a bunch more Situational Awareness-esque funds that have absolutely printed over the last year or so, but just done it a lot more quietly, and the West Coast kind of hasn't picked up on it?
