You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, February 24th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology. The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
We're running down a dream today. We are surviving the Catrini apocalypse. Live to fight another day. A lot of chaos in the markets. A lot of reflection about the story behind the story, what happened. We had a lot of fun debating the Catrini report. A lot of good stuff in there. Some other kind of crazy stuff that sort of got everyone twisted in a knot. But it didn't stop the markets.
It did become the current thing and I think a lot of people were talking about it. I mean, my feed was covered in Catrini stuff, but today is a new day and there is a ton of new tech news. First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy to use. Corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. The goats. And then second, I want to pull up the linear lineup because boy, do we have a show for you today, folks. We got the Collison brothers joining together at 11:40. Then we going over to Bill Gurley, the height moger himself.
Oh, he mos. It's over for me. That's why we said you can't come to the studio. You can't be seen next to John Kugan in person. You're staying remote.
The right pair of cowboy boots.
Yeah, I might have day. You might have it. The right pair of lifts as well inside those cowboy boots. Then we got Ivan from Notion and a whole bunch more funding announcements during the lightning round. Run, Reiner, Devanch and a ton of other folks are joining. It's a crazy.
James from profound James. Yeah, James Unicorn.
Very very fun. Well, linear of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. So, the story behind the Catrini story, I had some takeaways. My big update mentally was just that, you know, we are the cellside research now. Basically like new instack but X and Substack like independent researchers and analysts are really moving the markets. I feel like Ben Thompson has been a source of alpha for the market for a long time. He's been a source of investment thesis, but he doesn't put a buy or sell rating on things and much more long term.
Long term. Exactly. Here's how strategies are converging. Here's how the market is evolving. Make your own decisions.
Yes. And then I see like semi analysis is thinking more in like a couple years out and it's still like they get held accountable for oh you said Microsoft was going to do this and they did that blah blah blah like and they have a different model that they actually sell to hedge funds. And so they're very much in the research business. But what's interesting about semi-analysis and a lot of these other independent analysis firms is that they're not sitting inside banks like we are very much used to sellside research being done by Morgan Stanley or Bank of America, Goldman Sachs. You get these equity research reports that your friends send you the PDFs for because you can't afford them. No, seriously, if you're working in an industry, get the sellside research report on your industry as fast as possible. It's very very informative. There's always good data in there. But yeah, my big update was like, wow, okay, this is like a viral post that completely broke containment. There's people making Tik Toks about it now. And also, it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
Doom cells. Yeah, over cells.
That's the Yeah, that's one of the narratives. And there was this funny funny thing about like, oh, well, it's just one scenario. It's just one scenario. Why? It's low probability. And then let's pull up Eric. Eric was like, 'Yeah, it's just one scenario, but you only gave us one scenario and you spent 100 hours on that scenario.' So like what do you expect people to take away from it except like this is the one scenario that you think is most worth considering? But of course, you know, it is possible that software is cooked, everything's cooked, and if there's a 5% chance that everything's cooked, yeah, the market should probably sell off by a couple percent. And you know, the market didn't even really sell off a couple percent. Like a couple names went down a few percent. Some of them already popped back up. Markets, I think, doing pretty well today. Yeah, green on the Dow, green on the NASDAQ, and a lot of green on that ticker down there, which is of course provided by public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And I'm also going to tell you about Octa. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any.
Let's head over to Derek Thompson, the Thompsonator. He says, 'I really want people to see the story above the story here, which is that whether you're reading Catrini or listening to Jamie Diamond at a cocktail party. The conversation about AI is a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. That's not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick. You know, we covered this a couple weeks ago. He's feeling the AGI. That might be a little bit putting it too aggressively, but certainly he sees the potential impact, but Derek says, but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality in supply of real world real-time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so poulry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. And I think that observation sets up another important point. I feel lucky to be able to have conversations about the frontier of AI with executives and builders at Frontier Labs, economists, investors, and other AI folks at off the record dinners where important truths can theoretically be shared without risk. I can't emphasize enough that nobody knows anything except for us is about as close to the reality here as three words are going to get you. Nobody knows what's going to happen this year or next year or the year after that. There is no secret cigar filled room of people except for us except the back room. I think we do have some cigars back there. You have unique access to some authentic postcard from the future. When you drill down underneath the bluster, the boosterism, the fear, the anxiety, what's there at the bottom is genuine uncertainty, a vacuum into which storytelling is flooding. The frontier labs don't really know what they're building exactly, but we do. And economists don't really know how to model the thing they claim they're building, but we do.'
Yeah. I wish more people talked about and thought about this subject through that sort of lens. We're trying to model the economywide effects of a technology whose properties the Frontier Labs can't even really describe yet. Whatever you think of AI today, be prepared to change your mind soon. Yeah, this was something with Allup yesterday is I didn't when I asked him why do you think that so many of the internet predictions were deeply wrong? His answer was it's just a continuum. AI is just a continuum and so like give it more time basically.
Yeah. The rebuttal that I heard from him when you said that he was like well no like look at all those predictions did come true and it was like yeah but over 20 years which is like wildly different than two years because the fear article is called the 2028.
Exactly. And so if you tell me also so many institutions just adapt it. Yeah. Like if you go to somebody and you say hey in 20 years your job is going to be radically different. They're like I hope so. Like I'm going to be super bored doing the same thing for the next 20 years. In two years there's going to be no industry that you're currently in. Everyone's going to be like, 'Oh, okay.' Like that's crazy. It's wildly different to be like, you have 20 years to adjust what you do. Like, you know, if you're in Hollywood and you're like, 'Okay, I got to learn digital film making. I got to learn how to integrate CGI. I got to learn AI as a tool.' That's way different than just like next year we will be oneshotting holiday at Hollywood films and you will have no employment prospect whatsoever. Not even as a prompter because the labs will be prompting them themselves for AI videos. And maybe that's possible. But I have a feeling that it's just like it's not a year away. It's not two years away. It's a little bit farther. Still on the 10-year camp. Still on the Kershw timelines. But interestingly I'm impatient about it. Like I want it to go faster. I want the acceleration. I want the progress. I think the progress is good. So I'm not like a doomer pessimist. I'm just like trying to grapple with the fact that I had to wait four years in between GPT3 and models being good enough to not hallucinate. I had to wait another four years between like the early Dolly experiments and like the nano bananas. Like it has felt like something happens and I'm like oh wow like okay like AI can generate images but it's sort of sloppy. And then I wait like four years and it's like, okay, it's like a lot less sloppy, but it's like still not like dialed. Like it went from 90% to 99%. And I'm waiting for it to get to 99.999999999999999%. That's where I want it to go. Anyway, is Door Dash cooked? Let's go over to Ben Thompson on stratey. He said, 'Okay, fine. While I'm here, the Door Dash example is just unbearably dumb.' He is a believer in the power of Door Dash to weather the AI storm. I saw that the Door Dash CEO put out a like an SEC letter to the investors. Did you see that?
Like full PDF filed with the SEC like this is sort of guidance but telling the investor base like here's what's not going to change. Like basically disregard the Catrini report, disregard sci-fi doom.
He says, 'Set aside for now the question of agents and aggregation.' That's a post that is definitely in my mental cue. What is notable about the assertion is the total denial of any positive reason for Door Dash to exist or to be so successful. There's no awareness that Door Dash provided a massive consumer benefit restaurant food at home from scratch. I liked Keith Reoy's take that Door Dash is the I'm hungry button on your phone and then there's a whole bunch of crazy things that you have to do to make that happen, make that button work. I ordered Door Dash last night. I felt like I did it in protest of the doom. I was like, I'm still supporting I'm riding with Door Dash. There's no awareness that Door Dash provided a massive consumer benefit from scratch, that Door Dash massively increased the addressable market for restaurants, or that Door Dash provided brand new jobs for millions of drivers. Instead, the article just sort of takes it as a given that Door Dash exists and that it is a rent extractor preying on weak-willed humans in their habits. This is the exact sort of view taken by some of the most frustrating anti-monopoly activists. All large successful tech companies exist not because they created a market with virtuous cycles solving all kinds of thorny problems along the way, but rather because the government didn't regulate hard enough. I was thinking about in antitrust regulation, you know how they'll stop two firms from joining because that will create a monopoly, but they don't really have a tool in the tool chest for stopping a company from just shutting down and stopping competing. Like if Xbox goes away, as people are predicting, doom around Xbox, PlayStation gets a lot more powerful. Obviously, it's like the only game on the block. And so, should the FTC have a hammer to be like, 'No, you gotta lock in Asha. You gotta make more Xbox games. You got to compete harder. We want you to get GTA 6 out exclusively on Xbox faster to put the screws to Sony.'
You don't have time to spend three months gaming.
No. No. Lock in. Give us a new Halo. Give us a new Modern Warfare. Give us a new Fable. I don't know. What are the other great Xbox games throughout the years? I was never that big of an Xbox gamer.
Never owned an Xbox. Wow. Oh, I'm a gamer. No, you never say that.
I was working. It wasn't I didn't have the what was an Xbox back then?
It was like 300 400 bucks expensive. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's like it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life. I was thinking about the SAS apocalypse in the context of the fact that today's launches no there are a lot of launches but well no the disconnect in the SAS apocalypse is that AI native SAS is getting funded at an insane rate.
Yes. While you have these massive sell-offs in the public markets, yeah, there is a little bit of there's private companies that are getting lots and lots and lots of funding that if they were public would have traded down 20% over the last week or so.
Yeah. Anyways, continue. The thing I was thinking about was there's this whole idea that like you'll be able to build your own like CRM or your own ERP and vibe code it and open-source CRM exist like there's one called sweet CRM there's ODO there's ERP next there's plane for task management open project red mine like there are open-source alternatives to almost every piece of software. There's an open-source Photoshop that people use on Linux and they've never really gotten adoption. I used an open source forum software for a while and very quickly I called the person that was maintaining it and was like I'll pay a thousand bucks to just like do this for me and then it became a managed service very quickly and there's an open source capy bar simulator.
Is that open source? No. But it's interesting because open source has always been this like pressure on SAS and it's always withstood that and like yeah maybe like if you can just prompt it and it feels like emailing your SAS provider to reconfigure things like that is a real pressure but I think it's underrated that open-source CRM have existed for decades and never really taken off because there's something else that's valuable there. But Tyler has a report because he thinks everything's going to get slopped.
I think that's like mostly cope like the comp to open source stuff. It's just annoying to maintain so no one ever does it and you're kind of just paying whoever to maintain it, right?
No no in open source like you don't need to pay someone to maintain it. Use the open source version of the open source thing. It's like you're basically paying someone to maintain it.
Yeah. Yeah. Host it all. Make sure uptime like models keep getting better and they'll just like do all for you.
They'll do all that for you.
And it's like Yeah. I think that's like very obvious.
Yeah, it is possible that you would just say like, okay, run in a loop and just go around and fix everything and if there's uptime or security patches, like patch them immediately. So the open source software gets better. There's two narratives, right? There's the okay, everyone will just vibe code everything in any department. Yeah, you can just have an employee just make the software, tell the agent not to make mistakes and or tell the agent, hey, fix this thing. So, that's one thing. And I feel like that is maybe a part of the sell-off, but the bigger reason for the sell-off is maybe what Derek Thompson is talking about, which is that like the world is getting weirder and a lot of people are feeling the acceleration.
And if you just don't know what the world looks like or what work looks like in 5 years, you want to take some risk off. You're not willing to pay the same revenue multiple that you were three years ago.
Yeah. I do want to dig into that point that you mentioned earlier a little bit more which is like you have the Tyler philosophy of like you could vibe code everything and the agents will be able to go around and maintain and everyone will have personalized software individuals where the value occurs to the person using the software but then also the lab providing the software the inference and then there's like the private markets boom right now in AI enabled software where companies are saying well we were able to pull our roadmap way forward. We got to an MVP in a weekend and we're able to ship fast features way faster. So when we onboard new clients and they ask for something, it's like boom and we get it done in a few days as opposed to a few weeks of engineering sprint. And so the narrative is like we're moving faster and we're creating like AI enabled products that couldn't exist otherwise. And it feels like both of those can't be true. So I don't know which way we'll Ben Thompson called out the real estate example. We took a segment out. This is from Catrini. 'Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate where buyers had tolerated five to six percent commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly.' And then Ben Thompson says the real estate example makes the exact opposite point the author thinks it does. The truth is that the internet already obsoleted real estate agents in terms of information flow. You can go online right now and get a listing of every house for sale with pictures, its full history, etc. There is no information asymmetry, but rather information abundance. The fact that real estate agents still exist despite that shift is actually one of the more compelling arguments that humans will be remarkably resourceful in giving themselves jobs to do even in areas where they ought to be pointless.
Yeah. How hard is it to disintermediate a real estate agent? Does it happen on the buy side or the sell side? Like if I find a place on Zillow and I go knock on the door and so or I write them a letter and I say, 'Hey, I want to buy this but I don't have a real estate license and I'm not using a realtor and I don't want to pay a fee.' Will they be like, 'Cool.'
I think I mean you can do it from either side, but I will just say the reason that you don't is that I'm in process. I'm currently in escrow on a property and the guy representing me is gonna make a lot of money. Yeah, but he's extremely helpful and he does a lot of real estate transactions. I don't do any.
Yeah. I mean, I've done one in my life prior to this. So, like he's an it's like technically entrepreneurs could negotiate their own legal docs with Claude.
We have a buddy who got a real estate license, right? Didn't Spencer from Day Job.
Oh, yeah. They did. Yeah. So it's possible boxing his real estate license, but well, yeah, and Spencer is probably a lot better now that he can use ChatBT or Gemini or any of these models to do stuff like this. But that being said, you're paying for effectively therapy throughout the deal and like general guidance.
And I can't be your therapist. It's doable. I don't know. Tyler, will you ever use a real estate agent or will you ban them on principal? Go direct.
I mean, seems like I think models can do this.
Okay, we'll see. Over what timeline?
Like total real estate commission. Well, it's like I don't think I'm going to be buying a house in the next two years.
Yeah, but houses will be bought over the next two years. So, what will the fall in real estate commissions be over the next two years?
I think like Okay, you're seeing a lot of these like big rounds of the big labs. All the researchers going to be buying houses. I think a lot of them are going to try to do it without real estate.
Yeah. I'm sure that someone's going to write like a cool blog post about this.
Okay. That's the thing though. Cool blog post and that's the benchmark.
It's viral article. Not actual impact on the economy.
I'm sure it's like going to work like so, right now, we should have you buy a property.
Yourself. Buy that town in Maine. That village. Yes. Get the village. Anyway, speaking of day job, they just did a fantastic ad campaign with none other than Kim Kardashian. While we pull this up, let me tell you about apploving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. So, Kim Kardashian, she has a product called drink update. And here is the photo shoot from none other than day job. Some of our closest friends and folks who we worked with on the TBPN brand.
Looks very cool. It's crazy because I know another founder who has an energy drink company called Update.
Wait, really? That is cooked now.
Well, I don't know who's cooked.
If Kim Kardashian is coming for your consumer product brand, I feel like you're in trouble. She's almost a lawyer. What if she almost sues you? What if she uses Claude to pass the bar and then she sues him?
Oh, maybe maybe. I actually think this company is effectively just relaunching with Kim. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is a common thing.
Okay. Okay. I got it. So, I met this founder a while ago. They have a special ingredient in here that's sort of a caffeine alternative. It's called parazanthine. It's called So, yeah, they've been building this for a while. I know it's available in it. No, no lean. No lean. But parasanthine is jitter-free and crashfree.
They're saying you can have a free lunch, John.
I like it. I'm here. You like the sound of that? They should have called it fou. I like a foustian bargain. Anyway, Doug over at Fabricated Knowledge who's coming on the show tomorrow. That's from semi analysis. He said, 'Okay, finally read the Satrini piece. No one knows the future and I think that there's a lot of disclaimers like being like yeah this is speculative but the core thrust of it is that information work itself has a real premium in pricing power that has been embedded into it and that oneway trade can go backwards really hard all at once I seriously think there's a huge risk and while prices go down we just consume more prices going down one time 50% we net consume less for a bit I have been and continue to be worried about deflation something I think is that selling tokens raw is probably bad but selling solutions is probably really really good think the problem is good enough is a good enough model that kind of eat a solution no matter what and so let's say claude made co-work go giga expensive and it's 10k seat a year great less deflation but China low-end model massively eats that price it's a race to the bottom anyways great piece always appreciated as always catrini.' This is the first post I've read where I've said like maybe it should be passed through an LLM. Maybe that needed an MDAC to make it more readable. I love you, Doug. I was stumbling over that. And we will close the Catrini mega cycle with the close of the software mega cycle as has been predicted by Wilmanitis. He says, 'The software mega cycle started with PayPal going public and it will end with PayPal going private.' We will see how long that takes. PayPal could be public for another decade. Who knows? But it's certainly getting beat up in the public markets right now. Anyway, Burn Hobart says, 'Hearing that the latest anthropic job offer is a negative $10 million salary, you got to pay to work there, but you get access to their upcoming blog posts and tweets 24 hours in advance and permission to trade in your personal account with no restrictions. I don't see how any other labs have any talent left.' Of course, he's joking, but very funny to think about the insider trading that could be happening based on if you're
Yeah. The only thing is if it came out that Enthropic was effectively day trading against the companies that they want to sell their models to. Yeah. It would be basically over. It would create like a very anti-anthropic alliance for sure from the business community and potentially the government as well.
Anyway, you don't want to be in hot water like that. You want to be using turppuffer serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper extremely scalable. Stacy, who's been on the show before, says, 'Telling my kids that if they don't clean their rooms, Satrini will come for them.' Dangerous stuff. Dangerous stuff. Anyway, this is like a lunar landing but for business and technology podcast. Oh, Matt Slick is sharing the news that Salesforce chair and CEO Mark Benioff to discuss Q4 and full year results on TBPN company to debut evolved earning show format. We're doing a show with Salesforce. We're putting on a show. We're so excited for this. Anyway, in other big company announcement news, there's a lot of announcements. You may have missed this one. You may have been, 'Oh, Bill Gurley's book launched. Oh, Stripe announced a massive fundraising round. Oh, Profound is announcing a funding round.' Well, there's bigger news and that's that McDonald's just launched the biggest burger ever. The Big Arch.
The Big Arch. It finally arrives in the United States. To me, I'm thinking this how did they not have this burger the whole time.
How have they not done this before? I feel like that's been more of Jack in the Box's wheelhouse is like the quarter pounder, the $6 burger. That was a thing. That was a campaign for a while before Tyler's time, I'm sure. But the $6 burger was something that you'd see, right?
Burger has not been a thing the entire time Tyler's been alive.
No, he doesn't. Inflation has come for the burger. The $6 burger was an ad that you would see right in between ads for different Xbox games on the original Xbox. For sure. I congrats.
There was a time there was a time before you were born when I was just a boy. My parents would give me like 10 bucks and that was like they'd be like that should be worth two meals. So, make it last.
Make it last. Yeah. Happy meal. We lost that. We lost that. Good times. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. This is big. This is big for podcasters. This is arguably a bigger announcement than the big arch. Yeah. Which is that Supreme has come and launched an official Sure MV7 microphone.
You've been waiting for it. Asking the hype beast microphone. Now, can we get a Chrome Hearts RE20 from ElectraVoice? Isn't that what this is? This is the RE20 Chrome Hearts RE20 because you know the MV7, if you don't know your podcast mics, it is a more consumer focused, more prosumer focused microphone. The actual shore has been riding this Aura from the SM7B. That's the one that Joe Rogan uses. It was also, I believe, the microphone that was used to record Thriller. So, Michael Jackson used it in the studio. So, it has a lot of aura, a lot of lore. And so the most successful podcasters adopted it and everyone was like, 'Oh, we got to go with the shore SM7B.' But the SM7B it needs a lot of power. It needs a lot of gain. And so yeah, if you wanted to just like plug it into your computer, you needed this thing called the Cloud Lifter. It required a whole bunch of configuration. It wasn't just plug it into the USBC port. So Shore responded to the demand, the overwhelming demand for that iconic Shore look that you know it a long cylinder basically. And they came out with the MV7 which was a USBC. You can also plug it into an XLR cable, but you can plug it straight into your microphone or into your laptop, which is great for Zoom meetings and just easy simple podcasts. But we've used these before and people have complained about the audio quality. Jordan Schneider over to China Talk actually told me directly. He was like, 'Upgrade to the RE20s. They're better. They sound better. You guys should do it.' We did and I think it's been good. But it completely opens the door for other brands to get in here. We need a BGA.
We need a Chrome Rick Mill. We need a Rick Owens RE20 for sure. Jane Street accused of insider trading that helped collapse Terraform or Terra Luna. The court-appointed administrator of Dwan's Terraform Labs alleged that Jane Street used non-public information about Terraform insiders to trade. We don't have to read this entire article. There was some snippets actually pulled out.
Zero Hedge has a little bit of the details here. James was behind the 2022 crypto winter, destroying Terraform by first deping the token and destroying the ecosystem, then pretending it would rescue Terra while effectively it was soaking up what little value remained. And mixed response to this. Some people are calling it based, some people say it rocks. I guess they don't like crypto, but they love Jane Street. It's an odd take, but people are having fun with the timeline. Here's the thing. So the insider trading allegation, apparently they had a group chat. They were talking with somebody at Jane Street who had previously worked at Terraform. Oh, wow. And so that individual at Jane Street was like talking with D and the team. The only issue is it's a public blockchain. And so the allegation is that 5 minutes after the Terraform team pulled money out of one of the liquidity pools, Jane Street also pulled money out. But theoretically they could have had software that said like if any amount of liquidity is pulled out, like we basically get out before there's kind of like a run on the bank.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. But Jane Street is like endlessly fascinating because it's such a quiet organization. I mean they do some tech talks and stuff but many people don't fully understand all the strategies that are going on over there. So it's been a fun good podcast strategy though.
They have a great podcast strategy. They're advertising on door cash. But they also put out tech talks and they bring guest lecturers to talk for like an hour. They did a great one about the custom hardware that they use to run some of their systems. That's very cool. Highly recommend it. You know what they should do? They should start streaming these on reream. One live stream 30 plus destinations. If Jane Street wants to multiream, they should go to reream.com. Anthropic announces a new feature on Claude Max which allows its users to get fit without going to the gym or taking GLP1 shots, just prompting on their keyboards. And Planet Fitness is down 5% on the news. Of course, a joke due to their Q4 earnings. Conor McGregor is pretty excited about a new game. They just got a game for everything now. It's like the bull marketing games right now. There's so many games as memes. This new game is called Copy Barara Simulator. A relaxing game where you become a Capiara, explore the forest, and do nothing.
It looks quite enjoyable. I think TVPN needs a game.
Yeah, we definitely need to build some sort of game.
I This is a true This is a lower lift than like a realtime strategy game, I think. So, like Scholto is trying to ship. Yeah, we definitely should. Conor McGregor says, 'Take my money.' I mean, clearly there's demand for Capi Bar Simulator.
38,000 likes. Yeah, we should move the goalposts. We need to be able to vibe code a game that's fun pretty quickly. I don't know what that means. One hour.
Leading. You think you could do it in an hour?
Exactly. If I have the Cerebrris chip. Yeah. If I use X on Spark. Yeah. Yeah. I think that might be the solution. What were the other simulators that we looked at? Data center simulator. And then there was another one that we looked at that was funny. There were a few. There's been so many of these games that have popped up. You know, what was the one we were talking about yesterday?
That was Data Center Simulator. Insider Trading Simulator.
Oh, Insider Trading Simulator. That one's good. Yeah, there's definitely a variety of these. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-size businesses. There is some controversy timeline. Leading report is censoring words that don't need to be censored. In this case, the word war and I was thinking, why would they do this?
Yes. But as I was reading over it the first time, I noticed that it makes you kind of pause and kind of think about, okay, what are they actually saying? And then you're thinking, why would they censor that? And I think what they're doing is they're sort of hacking your attention to drive their posts up in the algo because people are pausing reading it instead of reading like quickly. What does this mean? That type of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the original headline is breaking representative AOC calls for no war with Iran. The first time I read this, they put a little minus sign where A should be in war. W A R. It's W-R. It sort of rewired my brain and I didn't see the no. So, it looked like AOC calls for war with Iran because I kind of jumped ahead. It was hard to read. And that actually does increase the virality. I think you're on to something here and 9 millimeter SMG agrees with you. News account that censors the word war. You guys got to stop. It is very very odd. Especially because on X, that's certainly not a word that's like censored downrated. If anything, they're going to be like, let's send to as many people as we possibly can.
Yeah. But if you look at the comments on this post, people are not talking about a potential conflict with Iran. They're talking about not typing out war. So, the top comment, why are you not typing out war? censoring the word war. What are we in elementary school? Why are they subtracting R from W? Why am I missing? You know, and people are like very confused about why they would do this. But that drives a bunch of engagement and virality. So very very odd scenario here. Speaking of war, Musk XAI and the Pentagon reach a deal to deploy Grock in classified systems. If you loved Grock on the timeline, you're going to love him in our classified system. I guess they did a deal with the government broadly, but that was probably for the unclassified systems, but now it's getting access to the classified systems. Any Terminator fans out there are going to be having a great time with this news.
Yeah, it's going to be wild. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super plus supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Deepseek is responding to Distillgate and they are looking for a public relations harmony manager. Let's read.
One of the best job postings I've ever seen, says Chris Paxton.
It's pretty interesting. They say, 'Ha, ancient capital of the Wuay Kingdom, where King Chian Lu bequeath to his descendants the instruction, serve the central plains with grace.' This is so do not cling to territory. From this ground posting should start like this. From the ground rose the seeds of Song Dynasty civilization, the morning bells of Ling Yin Temple, the rain falling on West Lake. And this is a job posting. This is amazing. In recent days, certain misunderstandings and noise have appeared in the external public sphere. We have noticed that large numbers of kind-hearted observers have spontaneously spoken on our behalf for which we are genuinely grateful while simultaneously feeling a degree of unease. We do not wish for anyone to suffer on our account, including those peers who currently find themselves navigating difficult public waters. In order to honor the legacy of Wuay and the spirit of Ma Mahayana Batva path, we are now recruiting a public relations harmony manager. So clearly this has been translated from Mandarin into English, but it sounds pretty cool if you ask me.
Yeah, the distill gate is going back and forth. Everyone's distilling everyone else. We distill you, they distill us. There was something about I don't know how real this is, but when you ask Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Chinese, what model are you? It responds in Chinese. I am DeepSeek. Is that real?
So, I tried it in the chat model. It didn't work. It said it was like sonnet 46. Apparently it might just be in the API.
Maybe I should test. Yeah, it also it's unclear just open router, but that sense I mean Will Brown was making a great point about this that there is distillation where you're aggressively trying to farm responses from the API for training data. But then there's also just crawling the web because if you just download every X article, you're probably going to get a lot of Groc and GPT and clawed responses in there and then that will just update your training corpus. And so there's a whole bunch of different ways that you could just wind up with a bunch of training data that leads to this type of response. But I'm sure there'll be more back and forth more legal debates over what's going on there. There was some dust up about someone was able to extract 95.8% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone from Claude Sonnet. At the same time, there's a question about like, does this actually reduce sales of Harry Potter? Like, are there damages associated with this? That would be sort of harder to prove. So many people have talked about so many different pieces of Harry Potter. It's not crazy to me that an LLM could just reconstitute that from the internet. Yeah, from the internet. Now there should probably be a harness in place that says, 'Oh, this person's trying to just get me to give them a free book.' Like, 'No, send them a link to Amazon so they can buy it. Maybe give me an affiliate fee.' Don't just give them the thing for free because that's violation of IP. But if you're being really tricky and you're trying to sneak out a whole bunch of different pieces one at a time and then reconstitute it, like, yeah, I'm not surprised this is possible. It's not the worst thing ever. Anyway, let's Well, we have the Carlson brothers joining in just a few minutes. Are there any other timeline posts you want to go through? And while you look at that, let me tell you about Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to finn.ai.
Where are we in the Yeah. Data acknowledgements. Fati says, 'My son asking me a lot of questions. It's a distillation attack, obviously. Do not let your children I love it. A distillation attack. I love They could become like a mini version of you. They could. They could.'
Anyways, I believe we have our first guest. We do. So, let's bring them on in. We have John Patrickson, the OGs from Stripe. How are you guys doing?
What's going on? Greetings.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is huge. I went through YC. You guys were massively influential in my career and it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day. But I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking today?
We had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees and that and kind of the valuation everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines. The thing that was honestly more work was we released our annual letter where every year we sum up all the trends that we're seeing on Stripe. And Stripe is growing a lot. We grew 34% last year because the businesses on Stripe are growing a lot. And there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need TVBN. This is why we need a non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. So, yeah, we'll move to 24 hours event. Eventually. Exactly.
I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are, you know, never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? Because there's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy like people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. What do where is AI actually moving the needle?
Well generally speaking I would say from the stripe data it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape and there's been to say the least there's been some degree of volatility in markets over the last two years and you know all sorts of different events and deepseek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy time series, if you look at what's actually happening substantively over the last two years, things it's always hard to prognosticate the future, but over the last two years, things really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention,
One second because I'm just curious, have you guys tried to think about maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, kind of like forward-looking, extremely tapped in, you know, working on the right things. And if you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down that maybe are feeling affected just overall consumer spending. Like have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic?
It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But I think there is some of that composition effect. And we see it I guess both in stripes data compared to say public earnings from others like clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently but I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers where what tends to happen say for some incumbent is they built some business they installed some system long before Stripe even existed maybe there's some sense that well it's not broken don't fix it but then decide hey we're going to do something new and when they're doing something new then they want to use the best infrastructure that'll enable them to move the fastest and launch the most countries and support stable coins and do things with AI and whatever and then they tend to launch that on Stripe and so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative new retool what have you they're more likely to come to stripe
Are you seeing an overlap between stable coin activity and AI activity there's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stable coins, but I feel like agents can use legacy payment rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stable coins that are not really AI native necessarily. And so I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.
I would distinguish between how things work today and how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today, agents absolutely can, you know, a lot of people build with Stripe. You know, you can have a one-time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of agents having to solve captures to be able to kind of do stuff on the wider web. Clearly, the web is not built for agents. And as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real world tasks. And that's true in kind of economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stable coins and AI because we think you're going to need
Blockchains and better blockchains. Honestly, this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents.
Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about mobile, social commerce, one-click checkout, Apple Pay. There's so many things when I think about the agentic commerce boom that's coming. It could be hooking a better version of Siri up, ChatGPT rolling this out very aggressively, smart speakers, smart lamps, your watch. There's so many different pieces to unblock and unhobble the actual agents as they go about their day.
Well, can I answer a slightly different question, but then we can come back to that.
A point I just... sorry, this is a brother.
We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answers. So you know how brothers are.
So I just want to lose one point for the prior question about what we're seeing in the economy. I feel like this is very arbitrary obviously, but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. Maybe in three years in hindsight that'll look completely delusional. I don't know. But what we're seeing, there's the macroscopic picture of the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth. But when we look at the cohorts, the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024, and then the businesses signed up in 2025, there's been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them and on a per business basis they are on average doing better. Which is really striking because you might think, okay, well there's this cavalcade of new lightweight vibecoded applications or something but there's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more businesses getting started and the average, the median business is in fact performing better. We're only a couple weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant leap of 2025. So, I don't know. We've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple years. There's a bit of a question of how and when and how should we think about how it'll translate to the economy. I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe, 2025, end of 25, beginning of 26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.
That's super interesting data. One, because there was some survey that came out yesterday or maybe it was late last week that said they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no. But clearly if you look at...
Come on, that's hogwash. Like find me one executive who wants a refund on their tokens. Find me one executive who said, oh yeah we started augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive but we're just going to go back to doing it the old-fashioned way. Or we're spinning our code by hand and we don't need any of this automated Loom technology.
No, I'm not saying I agree with the pessimist. No, I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One reason it might be wrong is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools and so they just think...
They might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under...
They're not feeling the acceleration because they're not... I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like Tempo. When I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there, you think even in your most wild projection that you had early with Atlas, like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the S-Corps in the United States could be built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane and yet here we are.
Gosh, I'm not sure what to say really except we just try to pay a lot of attention to the... as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that go into starting a company. And we just try to take them seriously. And then it's the line, so much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Like Atlas is now this great overnight success but we launched Atlas I think in 2014 maybe 2015. And so 10 years of compounding and yeah now it's at some pretty meaningful scale. And look, I think Tempo will probably have the same shape where we think it... again to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unmoored and untethered, I think the world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. But even in the success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing. It's going to be five, six, seven years and then maybe we'll have conversations about how Tempo suddenly became an overnight success or something.
I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water who doesn't know things are wet. My framework would be you can't get too MBA brain about new products. You can't have your spreadsheet that's like, oh, the TAM is this, and just reason about things internationally.
You should never say we want 1% of global GDP running.
No, we didn't set up. Exactly.
You guys never pitched that?
Well, companies, we actually never thought about Stripe in GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on...
That's such an important lesson because so many founders, how many pitch decks have you seen over the last few decades? They're like, yeah, we just need 1%. And it's kind of a meme. You can go back in the wayback machine and find the early Stripe websites, but we were very focused on payments for developers and making that experience good. But where I'm going is I think you have to reason in product specifics. And so again, I think any MBA would have told you that the adjacency of incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to what's our right to win? There's all these things people say whereas when you actually go talk to founders they're like, guys, this is the single biggest issue I run into starting my company. And similarly with Tempo and just as we think about incubations we're trying to solve a real problem here where we talked in the letter about Bridge having operational issues not because of Bridge but because of blockchain congestion where you have coins or blockchains both used for memecoin trading and also serious real world payments. And so we just want low latency, high throughput payments and we're going to need much higher throughput for the agents. But anyway, I think you have to reason in very specific product terms.
What specific products are you excited about in the unhobbling of agent commerce?
We laid out in the letter basically these levels of agent commerce because I think like everything in AI people want to sell a hype story and so they talk about how the machines will buy everything without even consulting you and people aren't actually... that seems far off, they're not that excited about that. You can start from just the basics of why are we filling out forms? Like you were talking about the progression of commerce, why can't I just send a link to ChatGPT and have it buy it? Or why can't I search outside of just doing a basic keyword search or something like that. And so, a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure. We're working with all the big retailers that you would expect, the Etsys and Shopifys and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product catalogs viable within the AI apps. And there's basically a ton of boring API and protocol and infrastructure work which we love, that's our business, but people just want to be able to do shopping, do discovery, do purchases within the AI apps. And maybe just more abstractly, we've been there kind of the specific agent commerce thing and then there's just the general question of how software will change because of agents. And I've been thinking about it a bit. Maybe software becomes a bit like pizza. That is to say, software historically has been created months, years beforehand and then freeze-dried and you prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption. We're actually going to... software should be like pizza and it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass-produced industrial scale software. You want bespoke custom software made for you that moment. That's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the... up until now the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed cost and then monetize as much as possible that has these kind of winner take all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved it really shifts. It's kind of the non-Walrasian software regime and I don't quite know where it goes but I think it's going to look very different.
Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?
Ireland was big into pineapple on pizza. Ireland not a big pineapple growing country. I will concede. But a lot of pineapple in the pizza. Good memories.
We know a very large fraction of the banana markets, don't forget. So we punch above our weight in fruits that don't grow there.
There we go. The round is exciting. The overall growth of volume is exciting, but we wanted to hit the gong for how many books you guys are selling.
Can you give us the numbers there? The scale of that operation.
Stripe Press just... well actually we announced in the letter we sold our millionth book but in fact since then... incredible. No, books. We've actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book. So, but we'll come back for the next Gong too. But yeah, it's great. We love books and they're very AGI proof.
Oh yeah. No, we've been a huge fan of so much of the Stripe Press catalog. I haven't read them all, but I'm collecting them one at a time, and I'm working through them, and every time one drops, it's always a moment, and we love them. So, thank you for everything. Great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team. TBBN is an amazing startup and it's super cool to see you guys grow and...
Built on Stripe, built on the streaming world and our sector needs...
Incorporated on Stripe, built on Stripe. Our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charged $50 and I sent someone a Stripe link. We're talking about the 25 being the fastest ever feedback, but well, we'll have to have you to our internal Stripe show. So, we'll follow up.
That'd be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations, guys. Cheers.
Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And I'm also going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have Bill Gurley. He is the author of Running Down a Dream. Bill, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congratulations on the launch.
It is a busy launch day. Yes. Yes.
How many podcasts are you doing this week?
I can't imagine. It's some number beyond my comprehension.
Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Why...
Well, before we jump into everything, I got to say somebody, I think it was a week or so ago made a fake TVPN graphic that was pretty silly, and I just wanted you to know we didn't make that. That was somebody.
Okay. I almost emailed you about it, but...
No, I tried to jump in on the parody myself.
Yeah. No, you did, but then I was like, wait, does he... I don't know.
Well, we did. We did early on when we were a little smaller and a little more loose with the jokes. We posted a picture of Bill at a basketball game as a spotter. And you replied and said like, 'No, the person next to me is like the owner of the team.' And the whole joke was like, 'We know you. We don't know basketball, but we're doing the paparazzi thing.'
Never heard of him. But we're very excited to have you. Why the book now? What was the impetus for actually writing the book?
Yeah, look, I think, especially for a show like your own, I'm known as someone who spent 25 years in venture capital and the book's not really about that. So, I developed a side passion project that started about eight years ago on this topic. And it was at a time where I was reading a ton of biographies and I noticed a through line between three different subjects of things they were doing that I kind of felt most people weren't doing but could do. And I put it together. I gave it as a presentation at my alma mater where I got my MBA and they put it online. Few people noticed. James Clear noticed. That was one of the things that kind of woke me up to the possibility. And as I began to hang up my boots in venture, which takes a while, I turned my attention to this and it was something that meant a lot to me. I could have written a book on VC. I don't know how many humans that could have possibly helped, but a small fraction compared to what I hope this can do.
I mean, I think the projections are by 2030 there'll be more venture capitalists than people if the trend continues. So, but it is an interesting point. Maybe I made a mistake. I do feel like this is a book that you can read if you're a venture capitalist insider startup founder and be like, 'Okay, I'm seeing the world from Bill's perspective. That's helpful.' But I could also give this to someone who's never heard of you or venture capital or knows what a SAFE note is, and they could get value out of it. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the translation that's happening right now around AI narratives as they break into the public consciousness. We saw this with that viral X article. Something big is happening. I had that forwarded to me by family friends. I overheard someone in a restaurant talking about it who clearly is not an investor in an AI lab. They're just some random person and they realize that there's something happening. And I'm wondering about these transitions of communication that what's happening in Silicon Valley is going to have an impact and how what you've seen in the past translates to average Americans.
I haven't seen, if you think of... so first of all, the venture capital community appropriately gets excited about these big tech waves because they lead to disruption and they lead to kind of accelerated new wealth creation around these companies that break out. And that's happened over and over and over in my career. And I don't remember one... I mean if you take the mobile wave or the PC wave or the client server or SaaS, I don't remember any of those kind of being thrown at the public consciousness this fast. And so I do think it's different this time on from that front alone. That said, we've had pretty high market caps for tech companies for a long time now, starting with the dot-com period, and you're getting to a place where anytime the market switches from half full to half empty and a skeptic's mindset, we have had those moments. So maybe not driven by the wave, but we certainly have those moments. And it's all okay. It will always be okay. I think people freak out. Buffett says he's a net buyer of stocks. If people are intellectual and curious and hungry, they should be sharpening their pencils right now trying to figure out where they want to find entry prices on some of these companies.
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it feels like a lot of the book is about finding a career, and I feel like that will resonate specifically with people who are...
Yeah, it resonated with me because when I was thinking about when John and I first met, we had both built some companies, we both invested in some companies, but we were trying to find our life's work. And it's such a pain, that period where you're searching. If you're a high agency person, you like doing a lot of things, it can be deeply painful because you're like, I want to be productive. I want to be making the number go up, but I don't have a number right now. And if you had asked either of us when we first met, hey, would you ever think about broadcast media? Would you ever think about being in front of a camera? Both of us, John had made some YouTube videos, but it was just for fun. And if a network like CNBC had said, 'Hey, would you guys consider hosting a show?' We would have been like, 'Yeah, like honored, but no way.' I never imagined. And then you sort of just... and so as somebody who wants a lot of control over their life and their destiny and feels like they have historically had control, that period of just searching is painful. And I feel like a lot of the book is helping people through that moment. So in some ways when I got our copy I was like wow I really wish I had this.
I'd like to go back to the phrase you used of high agency. I think one of the problems that has kind of evolved is that our common college pathway has actually become more restrictive and I think there's less agency and kids are being encouraged... they have to sign up for a major before they ever go to the college. They get stuck on these pathways and there's not a lot of exploration. There's not a lot of search for creativity or obsession or the kind of thing that really gets you going. And I think the journey you went on is perfectly fine. I think that's another thing which is letting it be okay for people to bounce around and see what they can find because once they latch on and we have examples in the book where that doesn't happen till 40. Sometimes it's at 30, sometimes... I didn't become a venture capitalist until I was 30 and that was clearly my dream job. I mean the first two stops were fine and interesting and building blocks towards that. So I think that is part of the message is to get comfortable with that and give people permission to do that type of exploration.
Yeah. Enzo Ferrari, Estee Lauder, I think the Red Bull founder, too, all were, I think, in their 40s when they started their companies. And so there's this intense pressure in our industry and everywhere to figure out a job and then attach your entire identity to that job and it's so constrictive.
What are some... I circle back to the first question just about this AI stuff that's out there. I think there's this massive paradox where if you are not engaged at work, if you don't love what you do, you go home and you don't try and improve on your own time. AI feels very threatening for high agency people who are kind of on their own custom career path, which I hope this book encourages more and more people to be on. AI is like a superpower. You can learn constantly, you can find people who you should be connecting with. You can have it do things for you so that you're operating with the power of more than one person as you move forward. And I just think that's quite an ironic paradox that for certain people this is the best of times. There's never ever in the history of the world been a better time to self-learn. Like it is all out there at your fingertips. It's like magic. But you have...
Yeah. I think the ability to... anyone can ask a dumb question at any point all day long and you don't have to be embarrassed about it. And I think that is underrated today in terms of how many... generally there are no dumb questions and yet people still don't like asking dumb questions to their peers or mentors or whatever and I feel like that's an underrated element of AI today.
No doubt. Yeah. No doubt. What do you think about hyper financialization, young people day trading meme coins, all of that? It feels like a trap for young people where it can feel like you're learning about AI or learning about technology, but then instead of actually building a product, creating value, you're sort of just trying to shuffle chips around the poker table and ultimately just take risk.
Yeah. I mean, based on my understanding of day trading in a Wall Street context, prior to maybe the crypto world, I'm not aware of any signal that suggests that's a durable skill. And I think the data points the other way. But one of my messages is like do what you love, do what you're passionate about. So if that's the thing that you're going to wake up every day... I don't want to be discouraging.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just maybe you'll land or start a fund that takes it really seriously and creates some captured value or...
You know, I was probably overly skeptical of at least many of the crypto messages that were out there but the stablecoin rails seem like a real innovation and something that has scale.
And I think maybe we're still yet to see some disruption coming down the path.
Yeah, I mean we just talked to the Collisons about that. Ken Griffin started as a day trader. He was in college. He was buying convertible debt and he was looking at where the convertible debt was mispriced and made a bunch of money and then grew it into a massive team with a fund and high frequency trading arm and all this stuff. What are you making...
I was just going to say the thing that will differentiate you more in your career than anything else is to be the most hyper curious person that's trying to do this thing. And once again, that's put on steroids with these AI tools. But if you are the most curious person that's constantly learning in your field, you will do extremely well. And I said it in the book, but I'll say it here. I can't make you the most talented person in your company or your group or your field, but you have no excuse not to be the most knowledgeable person because the information is all out there.
What kind of things were you doing to learn about industries and companies at the beginning of your venture career that maybe you'd be using a deep research query to do today?
Well, the first thing is you develop, and I think this is all the great VCs in the valley, you develop this hyper FOMO of anything and everything. And one of the reasons I know that it's time for me to move on is I haven't put together a clawback yet, but I know my older self would have done it immediately. And it's just that kind of thing. You can't sleep on not knowing something, or hearing that there's a company you don't know about. And you develop that as an instinct, as a positive tool, to just be hyper paranoid about new companies, new things, new information, new technologies.
Is venture capital eating the world? Is venture capital scaling so much that it's eating into other asset classes? We're seeing mega funds. I'm interested to think about what's durable about your approach to investing. What's additional? What's substitutive? How is venture changing?
I think from the minute I entered venture to today, venture has gotten nothing but more competitive. As an asset class, it's gotten more and more competitive and people get more and more aggressive. We're in a very interesting time where people have grown funds to the size equivalent to the largest PE funds and they're moving money. Especially you just had the Collisons on, you look at the Stripe or the Databricks case, they're using those large funds to convince the companies to stay private longer, maybe forever. That's just a very different world than the one that I grew up in. I think they turn around and the people that do those rounds turn around and tell the LPs, their investors, look, if you want exposure to these growth years in these companies, you need to come through us. And so they've, if I were using cynical words, I'd say they've hijacked the growth years of these early IPO companies. You know, Amazon went public below a billion in market cap. Like it's hard to fathom that today with what we have going on here. And that's...
What's the solution though? Because there's different... AngelList has been available and scaling for a long time now. Robinhood has their new...
Yeah, I know. I know. The problem with getting the retail investor into this crazy world of venture capital is most venture capitalists are well aware that in a fund of 10 investments, seven are going broke and bankrupt. And I don't know that the retail investors got the right frame of mind for that type of activity. I also... there's a reason that public companies have public audits and file these financials in the way that they do. And I can tell you when a company gets ready to go public, everyone sharpens their pencils. The auditor, the lawyers, everyone really tightens up. And I think every venture capitalist knows that numbers that are in a PowerPoint may or may not be correct. But I don't know that retail investors know that. So I think it could be a dangerous world to go down that path you're talking about.
Yeah. But ideally the thing to do would just to make it a lot easier to be public, lower the cost of being public, really scrutinize the cost of D&O insurance and the lawsuits that come to the table because that makes people not want to be out there on the field. It would require the SEC to stare themselves in the face and say, 'Look, the number of public companies in the US is half of what it used to be.' And is that a problem? I think it is, but is that a problem? And what are we going to do to fix it? But there's not an overnight fix. It's going to take someone being very determined to make it happen.
Do you think that there's a world where the AI backlash is less if the big labs got out earlier? I'm just thinking about the average American can't get allocation in SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI and they're seeing bills go up and they're worried about AI but they don't have exposure. And if they could at least see that they're somewhat allocated to that...
In the same way housing prices going up sucks until you buy a house and then...
The way you describe it sounds more like how a politician would describe it. But then I actually think it might play. I don't know that there are that many retail investors out there going, 'Oh, my job's under threat from AI. I wish I could own Anthropic.' Like I mean...
Well, isn't that part of... I mean this sort of fear-based fundraising approach that some of the labs have taken where if somebody's telling you your job's going to go away, of course you want to give them as much money as you can as a hedge, you know.
I don't look... there's an interesting irony that if you wanted AI exposure, you're pretty good just owning the index. Nvidia is such a large part of the index. You have exposure to Microsoft and Google and Facebook. Like I don't know that you need to be in that place. And we are now already at a place I would say, every time there's a new technology wave, people get rich quick. When people get rich quick, speculators come in. Charlton's, those kind of things. And eventually that leads to a bubble. People are confused when they think, they say, 'Oh, you say it's a bubble, you're anti-AI.' No, the fact that it's real causes the bubble and that's why fools rush in. I mean, the beginning of the gold rush, there was really gold there. They were finding it. At the end, it got speculative.
It will get speculative. I think it would be really ironic if we invite retail investors into a Goldman SPV of OpenAI or Anthropic right before the... which I think would be the most likely thing that would happen.
Sure. Sure. How are you... what are you thinking about around China as of today, February 2026? We have distilled Gate this week. A lot of people are talking about it. But what's on your mind?
Can I ask you a question about that? This is remarkably naive on my part. So these model companies are saying that their API was hit 16 million times. Is that correct?
Something like that. I don't even know if a bunch of...
How did that happen? Are you not tracking who connects to...
Yeah. You set up a whole bunch of different front companies or you're reselling access. So if you go to the iTunes app store right now, there will be an app to set up 16 million accounts...
Or if you just... you can go to the app store right now and look for like chat AI and it will hit the other APIs but you're going through an American company maybe they don't have security. So there's a lot of different ways to exfiltrate data and then also a lot of data just hits the open web because you go to ChatGPT, you run a deep research report and then you just publish it on your blog or on the internet.
But now they've been able to... those things down and now...
I share the skepticism Elon does and this goes way back to my speech at All-In on regulatory capture. I said then and I still believe now the biggest threat to the US AI hedge is the Chinese open source models and the developers even in the US that are working on their own are using those and you can see that on all the tables that are out there. And so it is a highly competitive, just globally competitive reality that in an ecosystem where there's six to ten open source models that can all learn off of each other, that's going to be a really incredible primordial soup if you will for innovation to evolve. And I fear mainly because I'm well aware that Anthropic is the biggest spender on lobbying whatsoever. I always fear when these things come out that they're just trying to encourage more of that regulation. And if that happens, I think it could be like if they try and make it illegal to use a model that has any Chinese ancestry. I think that could end up in a really weird place. And the place to really pay attention to and look out for is who's going to serve the rest of the world. In the internet era, there was a fence around China and the US companies served the rest of the world. If we get super heavy on US regulation, you may find there's a fence around the US and China serves the rest of the world. That's what I'd be worried about.
How are you thinking about great power competition more broadly? Like I'm an American bald eagle, as American as they come. At the same time, I feel like I've been worried about a confrontation over Taiwan for years. Things... there's been trade wars. Yes, and things are tense, but nothing's really happened. Is China somehow underrated in your mind? Is the geopolitical risk overstated in some way? Like what are you seeing that's not consensus?
If you've seen some of the stuff I've posted and I think the stuff I'm posting is highly consistent with Elon's point of view, it comes from a place of if you're going to declare that there's this relationship that we need to optimize, I think, and if your goal is to lower the risk of any major blow up between the two, I think it's imperative to have as much knowledge as possible. And so one of the things that I don't like is when you see people out there spreading rhetoric that's just not consistent with the reality. And so I'm just like let's get eyes wide open first. I also think that there are things we could learn from China about how to run infrastructure in the US. They're clearly better at it than we are. And if you just close your ears and say, 'Oh my god, they're the evil competitor and they cheat all the time,' you don't ever get yourself in a position where you're going to learn from them maybe what they're doing well and what we're not. And so I'm... Elon, we were... I guess he was on Cheeky Pint with the gentleman you were just talking to, John.
Yeah. He talks about how competitive they are. And I'm just like, let's be realistic. Let's not... I also worry a little bit that the venture community's gotten into all these military companies because venture capitalists start to look like warmongers. Right. It's ironic way back when the All-In pod just got started, they were giving... what's her name was on the Boeing board. Nikki Haley wasn't yet. And they were like, 'Oh, she's a warmonger. She's looking after the defense company.' Now every VC is in Anduril. They're doing the same thing. Let's be consistent.
Are there any other industries that you do think are interesting that sort of butt outside of the typical mandate of venture capital? You know like AI fits very neatly into the software continuum, internet, cloud, mobile. I thought crypto was a little bit outside of the wheelhouse but a lot of VCs made it work. Industrial, energy, defense. These are sort of things that are a little bit outside of the typical software business.
I would... I'm going to have to run, but I would tell you one thing. Every time venture capital gets easy, people take risk with companies that are less of a great fit for the venture capital model. And when I say a great fit, like they're either heavy capex or they have low gross margins. They require tons of capital to keep surviving. And history's pretty good at bringing people back around to how hard those are to do with venture capital. So, it's interesting for me to see those experiments being run. There was near death with Tesla many times and it's a lot easier to get in those difficult situations when you're using debt and leverage which we're seeing all over these data centers. And so I just a word of warning, be careful, it ain't easy, you know.
Okay Jordy last question. Now we got to let our guests jump. But congratulations, hope everybody can get out and buy Running Down a Dream. It's available everywhere books are sold. Go check it out. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Good luck.
Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. We have some news from the public markets. Intuit shares jump 5.4% on pact with Anthropic. This is... you like advanced talks, you like talks, you like advanced stock talks, you like deals but pacts are really the top tier deal making that you turn your deals into pacts. Accenture also turned positive up 1% during the Anthropic event and DocuSign rises 5% after partnering with Anthropic. So, lots of folks in the public markets in software that are facing pressure are doing deals and announcing partnerships as opposed to... I don't know, competition, coopetition, what will it be ultimately, but it's a lot of stuff. Anyway, Grace says, 'Return flight from NYC gets canceled by snowstorm. Call United, connected with customer service. Rare voice is uncanny. Deaf AI, but they gave it a human-like accent. Takes 20 minutes to get rebooked. Pretty good. I ask if it's AI. Haha. No, ma'am. But I get that a lot. I ask it to calculate 228 * 6,647. It runs the calculation. GG.'
Do you think this is real?
Maybe. You got to test this. That is... I mean this is past the uncanny valley then. Or it says voice is uncanny. So it's...
Also pretty easy for a human to just type this in.
That would be hilarious. Yeah. If you... this is where the real alpha is. If you have the chatbot open, if you're on customer service calls, you need to be...
Yeah, maybe they're just using...
Maybe Gear Tickets has the real alpha guy who vibe codes a billion dollar SaaS on a United Airlines customer service call. They're just using them for their token. The tokens are free.
Free compute. Well, if you want... if you want AI voices, head over to ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with ElevenLabs. Continuing on, what is this hoodie? The Fred hoodie. Oh, this is amazing. I love Fred. So, Fred is the Federal Reserve. What does FRED actually stand for? Fred St. Louis... the... what is...
Federal Reserve Economic Data.
Yes. So this is basically the best website for economic data. Huge in my early economics career. So many useful charts and graphs all free open source just like you just click it and you get exactly what you want. So whenever you want to go back to some ground truth setting you hit fred.stlouisfed.org or something like that. I think it's fred.stlouisfed.org is the website. Highly recommend it for GDP data and more. Good charts. And here we go. We got the Fred sweatshirt. Absolute dripped out economic brother. What else?
How popular is the name Fred?
Fred. I feel like you look that up. Let me tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one. With Figma, introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options. Push ideas further. With Figma, you can design your next hoodie in Figma potentially. Okay. So, Fred in 1950 was the 84th most popular name.
And guess what it is now?
It was 84 back then. I imagine it's fallen. I would say it's like 150.
How about 2007? 56. Fred. Such a huge opportunity.
Yeah. Name your kid Fred. That's a great name. Strong name.
Yeah. All these things go in cycles though. It's the business cycle. There's news over at Meta. Meta has shaken hands with AMD. They're forming a pact. Today, we're announcing a multi-year agreement with AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, to integrate their latest Instinct GPUs into our global infrastructure with approximately 6 gigawatts of planned data center capacity dedicated to this deployment. We're scaling our compute capacity to accelerate the development of cutting edge AI models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions around the world. Very exciting and pretty cool little hype video. You see the camera move on this video. This feels like you speed that up, you cut in some other stuff and you got yourself an Instagram reel, right? You see this little... Have you seen those tutorials about like how to make a car? Yeah. SD kit on this. I think it goes pretty hard. You double the speed, you add some flickering, you add some frames, frame interpolation, all sorts of stuff. But Lisa Su is on an absolute tear. AMD's doing great.
Meta. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is planning a stablecoin comeback in the second half of this year, eyeing a third party vendor as a key partner to power payments across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
This is great. If... they should have something. If your friend sends you a meme, it's good. You should be able to tip them easily.
Tipping for great shares.
Well, if you want to build a social network built on tipping, you'll need Plaid because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Sean Frank, soon to be a new father and dear friend of the show, says, 'Manis from Meta just doubling my ad budget every 15 minutes. This is the best new format.'
I like this. This is only possible... This is the best AI image I've ever seen. I think this is so funny because this definitely doesn't happen in the actual movie, but it's...
This is what Burr is like now.
I know. I know. Sean Frank really in a tear. I saw him in the chat yesterday. I forgot to say hello to him. Hello, Sean. And also, congratulations on the new baby. Very excited for you. Anyway, this is hilarious image, but we will return to the timeline after our next guest because we have Ivan from Notion in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Ivan. How are you doing?
Good to see you. Good to have you on the show.
Long overdue. We're so excited. First time we've ever written. Fantastic. Well, we're glad we caught you on today because there's a big launch in Notion world, but I'd love you to take us through it. What was announced today?
We're launching customer agent today. It's one of the first, if not the first, multiplayer agent product for knowledge work.
Oh, so it does real work for you in the background. Very easy to set up. Host in the cloud. Yeah.
Connect to all your work products. And the best part is you don't need a Mac Mini.
That's a good line. They are going out of stock. I don't know if you've seen but the Mac Mini is in short supply. So walk me through some of the most obvious use cases. Like Notion is... I think of the amazing... because you have what is essentially a document but also a spreadsheet and you can kind of move between different data structures and visualizations on top of data in a sort of consumer app UIs. And so I could imagine creating a document and then having an agent go and do a bunch of work to populate extra fields. So where are you seeing or where are you excited about these agents actually taking hold in the product?
So what you're describing was the Notion probably two years ago.
Two years ago, like during the SaaS era, our strategy has been consolidating all different use cases into one product.
We talk about knowledge base, you're talking about documents.
Talk about project management.
And we want to... we have been bringing together into one tool that's very flexible. Like for example, Ramp actually, the companies that sponsor you guys. We brought Ramp last year as a new customer for Notion.
