I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place of 3,000.
There's misinformation.
Quantity clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by jungle. Hold your position.
Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five. Focus.
We are founder Mel.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Blaze.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
Top is wins.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blades.
Let's just roll.
Clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound.
5.
I see one more journalist on the horizon. Stand by.
Founder.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, March 13th, 2026. We are live from the TBN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Boy, is it good to be back.
It's great to be back. But it's Friday the 13th, so you know what you got to do.
Salt over the left shoulder.
Oh, yeah.
You know about this?
I didn't. I didn't.
Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck. Friday the 13th. Obviously, bad luck, but not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder.
Good hack.
I was very interested in Patrick Collison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not the others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe? We get it. Patrick, just... No, no. Stripe has not ever really been in the tumultuous drama, horse race. You know, there's been investors who have talked about various valuations, but overall, the company's been sort of smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries' startup ecosystems and also...
Yeah, the closest they ever got to drama was around the Bolt fast dynamic.
That's right.
Because they backed fast.
Yeah, you're right. There was a little seemingly because they felt like some competitive pressure there. They wanted the fast checkout provider to be running on Stripe. Bolt was famously not. They had built their own payment rails.
Yeah.
But I mean the Collison brothers are just so class, they're such class acts that they don't really wait around in the mud. They don't roll around in the slob farm and it's like it's a B2B company. So there's less like just general viral intrigue around it.
And even in that whole saga...
Yeah.
Saw a single comment.
No, no, no. And they weren't taking shots at anyone. They were very classy. What do you... I mean there was some controversy when the cheeky pint Elon interview came out and John Collison, you know, how many Guinnesses were they drinking.
Okay. Okay. That was a bit of palace intrigue. How many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace?
I mean John did come out on top of that, right.
Yeah. Yeah. He explained. He explained. So, but so years ago I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. The country was beautiful. He said, highly developed, democratic, it consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, there's got to be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're going to be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure. Because his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.
Let's pull up Tyler for a second. Why? What is... There we go. He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut. So, anthropologists often call this leveling behavior. And it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious and Americans have long been suspicious of the Lamborghini driving self-promotional Instagram course hustlers and for good reason. Those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting. The bacon. Yeah. You don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society. So you wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less aggressive growth plans and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. And that's what's happened in a lot of developed wealthy stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. So, America's never had this problem and I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon. But it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. So, there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake or even how well-known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk and Tesla. He's like perhaps the most household name entrepreneur in history certainly right now. Tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake. If someone leaves Tesla to start a competitor that should be incredibly dramatic.
Do you know who I'm talking about?
I do. Who is it?
Because I took a pass.
Oh, you took a pass. Okay.
On your essay, but I don't remember his name.
It's Peter Rawlinson. He designed... He was the chief engineer of the Model S at Tesla, their super successful, high-end sedan. The thing that really ushered in the EV boom. He's the guy that engineered it. He leaves. He goes to Lucid Motors, eventually becomes the CEO and the face of the company. Develops a direct competitor to the Tesla Model S, which is now discontinued. The Lucid Air is fancier, faster. It has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment. And it should be like this knockout drag-out fight that's very interesting. Lucid hasn't put a dent in Tesla, largely, but it's still such... it is palace intrigue and yet no one really cares. And most people in tech can't even name a second person at Tesla after Elon. Maybe JB Straubel, Redwood Materials, but he's out now.
Yeah. Karpathy.
Karpathy. Yeah, that would be one, but it's like... who's active at SpaceX? Everyone knows Gwynne Shotwell, but like beyond that, Kiko Donchev. Who else? Like it gets really really hard. And why is that? Well, some industries, some companies have different cultures. So, if you think about Tesla, Chevron, Department of Agriculture, they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct. They might actually be discouraging it. They might have rules around what you can post about publicly.
One xAI employee went very direct.
He went very direct and it didn't last long at the company. So like electric vehicles, Chevron, oil and gas, the Department of Agriculture, these organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia, which is very open source. Publish your research. Go to a conference, put up slides. What are you thinking about? What are you researching? Share it all. Talk about it. Maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in the weeds research but you're very public about these things. And then also the blogosphere, like in the AI world a lot of leading thinkers, leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before and so it was like a continuation of that, the idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts that just carried through to the AI era. But in those other industries like Tesla there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet. The internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy. Tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down. Like when a company rises and falls, you typically don't see serious people in tech really being like, I called it, victory lap, like it's seen as uncool.
The company has to be doing some really egregious stuff. Totally like a true violation of the social contract. Not just look, everyone tried really hard, they got beat, and the investors, you know, sort of got 50 cents on the dollar back. Something like that. No one's really cheering for that. It's pretty rare, but some anonymous accounts are. And but in general, aiming for the top is the only option if you do want to punch. You don't want to punch down, but you still want to punch. Where do you punch? You punch up. You punch at the top dog. And the better a company is doing, the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it. And this is seen as like contrarian. Everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category. Well, take a shot at it. It's over. They're dead. And you're going to get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take. Everyone else has the Glazinator 3000 out. You pull out the dunk and you go viral. So, and then also you add to the fact that anyone, no matter how far away they are from Silicon Valley, what their career history is, what their background is, how much they actually understand about what's going on in tech, can just synthesize news and discourse into something that's more aggressive, more punchy, and go viral, and you have a recipe for a whole lot more dunks around whoever is on top. And that is sort of the tall poppy syndrome. So but the good news is that fortunately America is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent and the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall poppy syndrome type attacks. You see someone saying it's over. This company's cooked. They're terrible. And then I mean we just saw this with Cursor. Everyone's like Cursor is over. It's dead. And then you see okay well they just hit $2 billion ARR, growing 25% month over month. And it's like actually things are fine. And so those data points help push back against these attacks on the tall poppy at the time. And there's this Benjamin Graham line that everyone likes to quote that he actually did not agree with and is sort of misattributed to him, but I said in the short run the market is a vibe war, but in the long run it's a weighing machine. He of course is quoted as saying in the short term it's a popularity contest or a voting machine and in the long term it's a weighing machine. And the idea that in the short term prices are determined by people just voting based on popularity but in the long term you always realize the value of the company and you have to return to fundamentals and that's why he was so into fundamental analysis. Anyway, lots of interesting things going on in the timeline around this. Thoughts on tall poppy syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now, the vibe war.
Yeah. Just the classic is like it's way easier to take down... to do a takedown of a company. Yeah. To talk poorly about a company.
Yep.
Than get in anywhere close to actually accomplishing anything remotely.
Nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle. Yeah.
But if it's David and Goliath, it's game.
Yeah. Anytime I see people that like every single post in their feed is just like a dunk. It's like hey like hating on other people is not going to make you successful and successful people see people that hate on other people just assume like okay this person is just not very successful themselves. So, can get you some momentary attention, but...
Positivity. Haters going to hate. The chat understands this intuitively that positivity shall win the day.
Shall reign.
Let's pull up the linear lineup because we have an absolute banger of a show. We got Eric Lyman from Ramp coming on, Travis Kalanick coming in person, Tim from GoFundMe, Gustaf from Spotify, Tony, we have a lightning round that's incredible with billion dollars funding. And then Neesh Aurora from Palo Alto Networks is coming on. Linear of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents now and you too.
It's time.
It's time for a special segment.
A special segment. So there is news about Travis Kalanick. He's coming on the show in person to discuss it. But the news broke in none other than The Information. But it was paywalled. So we have a plan. We have printed out this exclusive report from The Information and we placed it behind a physical paywall which Tyler Cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered from The Information this morning. Take a swing at that. Break down the paywall. Oh, with authority.
Okay. Okay.
And what does he get? Hey, there he is. He's got the entire article. We have the entire paragraph here. The paywall has been busted down. Thank you to The Information for reporting. The news is Travis Kalanick plots new self-driving venture with Levandowski and Uber. Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Levandowski who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases. The new venture would also represent a reunion of Kalanick with the company he founded. There's been this discussion of whether or not Travis will be involved in Uber in the future. We will ask him about that at noon in about 40 minutes. Let me tell you about Turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma makes cloud codecs or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. So other news in The Information from xAI, Cursor and xAI news. xAI hired two senior leaders from Cursor to catch up on coding. There's a whole debate going on on what's going on at xAI. Elon Musk said xAI was not built right the first time around. So, it's being rebuilt from the foundations up. He said same thing happened with Tesla. So, he's completely changing the strategies.
You got to wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got.
Who knows?
It is interesting. Now Elon has the advantage of being able to use SpaceX stock to recruit people. Yeah.
Which is, you know, pre-IPO shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade, but Elon's obviously doing everything he can to make sure the IPO goes well. Yeah. Including putting some amount of pressure it sounds like on NASDAQ and the S&P to get faster inclusion.
So there's a big discussion over well xAI is worth like $200 billion ostensibly like what does this mean if the team is completely new? What's actually the value there? What's the core asset? There's some debate there. We were going back and forth about it this morning.
Yeah. And the only reason that I think he was able to pull that off is because one he's Elon but then two so many of the investors like had it was the same group of people on both cap tables.
So the bear case is obvious like a fourth tier lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point. There's lots of folks who are at that level. Getting in the game of the RSI, the frontier labs, like you got to be DeepMind, you got to be OpenAI, Anthropic. And if you're not at that level, your valuation's probably an order of magnitude lower. You're looking at like, you know, the Qwen, the xAI team, people were talking about MSL, like even if you just broke up Meta, is MSL worth $200 billion? They have some great team. They have a lot of compute, but it's like they have...
$200 million or $200 billion. Did I say million? Yeah. Oops.
All the numbers are big. The bull case of course is that xAI is great at building data centers. Colossus was built really fast. Is that an enduring advantage? Can they be the best NeoCloud at the very least? Is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute? Is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than people expect in which case you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on Earth and you're in space. There's still a bull case but it is tricky. Benjamin De Kraker shared a story from when he worked at xAI. He says, 'When I was first hired low-level by xAI, I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grok could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X. Some big names see my stuff, including Elon himself at the time.' During the interview and onboarding, they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box. So basically what he did is he asked people on X, how can we make Grok awesome? Bunch of people answered. They got a ton of... John Carmack retweeted it. There were lots of great ideas and he said he woke up the next day to a threatening email from his main supervisor at xAI telling me I had messed up and I was never to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again. That wasn't my job. They suspended my X account. So he was very upset. And he says the manager's gone. Everyone he knew at xAI is gone. And he's sort of hoping for a new era at xAI.
S for Satoshi who consistently gives Elon I think some pretty good advice. So yeah, he seems to be willing to say the thing that it looks like many people on the xAI team weren't able to get through. But he said try this Elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly. Tell them you really believe this is the path and then fire everyone who agrees. Simple test. Basically weeding out the sycophants. But yeah, it's interesting now like it feels like really hard to catch up in codegen even if you have some great people from Cursor.
Yep.
Like it's just so so so competitive and there's...
I just I don't see it. Yeah. But they've got to try something because he's not certainly not closer back to Anthropic and a lot of that would...
You mentioned the NeoCloud opportunity but certainly we've seen no indication that he wants to just like rent out GPUs.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's more of like a bank shot where you build more data centers than anybody else. You have the most compute and then because of that you're able to scale your training runs and that unlocks some new capability. It is a stretch. Spore is saying, 'If I was a SpaceX investor, I'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening.' But John Shahidi, friend of the show, says, 'I'm not annoyed.' He is a SpaceX investor, I imagine. And there are other departures. Walter Bloomberg is citing the FT and says, 'Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at xAI.' And one of the xAI employees, I left earlier this week. It was a difficult decision. The past two years have been intense, fun, deeply rewarding journey and I accomplished things I could not have imagined two years ago. Thank you to the entire Omni Imagine team. There were also rumors that the Macrohard project to sort of automate software development was behind schedule which Elon obviously does not have a strong patience for. Anyway, quickly let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, Apple...
Yeah, I'm going to fight you on this, but read it.
Apple said, '50 years of thinking different.' And then they wrote 50 years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal. And that belief, radical. At the time, changed everything. April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, and Apple TV. We've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools in people's hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us, that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone, an inventor, scientist, a student or storyteller, who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start, but it has never belonged to us alone. And I won't read through the whole thing. But so Pram says 100% AI generated. They used AI to detect the AI and that's how...
So they got him dead to rights, right? Oh, Apple's cooked.
SNW says huge oral loss. Apple has already been committing seppuku but dang.
Okay, let me read you.
And to be clear, okay, the same account rebuttal went and found other Apple Newsroom articles that show 100% human written.
Okay, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back in time to Apple's mission statement from years ago before LLMs were even a thing. This is their mission statement about Apple. Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it. They've always sounded like this. Like the LLMs trained on Apple comps and if you go to an LLM and you say, 'Write me something in the style of Apple,' it's going to nail it because every Apple communication is in the corpus. And so, of course, whether or not they use AI, it's going to detect as 100% AI. It's the same thing as Paul Graham using the forbidden sentence structure 10 years ago. Yeah, that's my take. Do you disagree?
I just think Apple would use AI.
Bias. Did you buy that through Pangram?
That one... like if you run Paul Graham's old essays, they don't come up as AI even though like yeah, there's a sentence that maybe is, you know, in the same style, but...
Let me see. How do I scan for AI? I need to create an account.
Let's see. Let's see. John, I'm trying. I'm trying. It's creating. Send me the link. Okay. I got it. I got it. What's my role? Other personal use. I was referred by a friend, colleague. Now I have to pay.
Send it. Send the link to Tyler.
I got it here. Okay. It says 100% human written.
Oh, I got roasted.
Wow. Okay. Tyler undefeated.
Brutal.
Pangram. Trust her. Trust the Pangram. Just the pan.
Ridiculous. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And let me also tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. China's ByteDance got access to the top NVIDIA AI chips. Oh. Oh. TikTok parent pushing global expansion plans to tap Blackwell processors that are barred for export to China. They're just flexing on us at this point. How did this leak? ByteDance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Alani Cloud on plans to use some 500 Blackwell computing systems totaling around 36,000 B200 chips. Is that a lot of chips? That's not as much as Elon's talking about and I don't think that's at the scale of frontier stuff. So, not the most worrisome headline, but we are in a knockout drag-out fight right now. How many B200s would you provision if you were at a frontier lab right now, Tyler?
I mean, it's a good... I have no idea. But in the next paragraph, it says I mean, this is like a 25x increase. Okay.
From what they had before. So I mean this is still pretty meaningful.
Pretty meaningful. Okay. ByteDance plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside of China. Are they more... it doesn't feel like they're gated on training. If you look at that crazy video model Sora, like that thing seems like it was trained on the B. It doesn't seem like it was hardware trained.
I mean you know the expensive part of video models is inference. Super expensive. Exactly. Like training is actually... I mean it costs insane amounts to train frontier models, right? Like obviously...
But it's not game over. If they train a model and they can't inference it, it's like they got a genius but they only got five geniuses in the data center.
Yeah. I mean you can distill these things. Like distilling it I think is probably much easier than training the thing in the first place.
We should figure out about distilling video models. I wonder how more inference efficient it is to distill Sora, like just to be a marvel.
Yeah. And obviously it's like a very different process from distilling even like you hear distilling as in like Chinese labs like training on outputs versus like actually there's like a bunch of ways you can do this.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you can do... ByteDance has created more than a dozen AI apps out in China and parallel versions for overseas markets such as chatbot Doubao, video creator Jimeng, and homework helper Gauth. These are funny names. Anyway, moving on. What's going on?
Let's head over to Japan. Let's check in with Japan.
Japan. Okay. What's going on in Japan? Jordy, tell me.
This video, we can pull it up.
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. And anyone in the chat, if you could translate this for us, this would be great. We really should download this, transcribe it, and then translate it. But we're big in Japan now. Look at me.
This is from Instagram.
I think I get it. I think I get it.
They really did. I don't even know where that video is. I've never seen that video.
Put out a full video of us. That's cool. Driving the car.
They got the video of you driving the car. We got our cars. They got everybody in the gong. One of my best friends. I heard they're on. Let's go.
This is so cool. I shared this to my story. I was very...
Jordan says, 'It's a great sign of respect in Japanese.'
It does seem like it.
Should we head over to the mansion section?
Let's do it.
First, before you buy a mansion, take your company public at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And also make sure your home Wi-Fi is secure in your mansion with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes. Growing up, Eric Moskowitz bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lucite tank. Moskowitz, now 67, is enjoying the hobby with his own children, but his setup looks quite different. In their Delray Beach, Florida house, the family has a 2,200-gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars. Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures.
Keith Rabois is a wealthy fish lover.
He's a fish enjoyer for sure. For sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits.
I got to hear about these benefits.
Quarter million to million dollar fish tank. Yeah, I'll be putting that on TrueMed, please. I'll be paying with my HSA.
'We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID,' said Nick Tamans of Infinity Aquarium Design in LA. His aquariums start at about $75,000 and can cost as much as $1 million. Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home.
Yeah.
Ellers has designed and installed systems from $25,000 to a quarter million with unusual designs.
Mhm.
Such as a sphere that held jellyfish and a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go. That's cool. Saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43% of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association Fish and Reptile Report...
We got important data.
We got to get this report.
Data is the new oil.
Opted for custom-made tanks. A 19% jump from 2023.
Lore drop. I had a fish tank in college. $25 fish tank with like one fish in it.
Did you keep... How long did you...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before. Jesus.
How long did you keep it alive, Josh?
I... Okay, it technically wasn't my fish. It was my roommate's fish. And I don't remember how long we had them around.
Really? You kind of have somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of the one fish you looked after in your life.
I plead the fifth on the fish tank. Okay.
You plead the fish.
I plead the fish. A 10-foot by 4-foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish.
Let's go.
Turbo puffer baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulette shark.
The closest we got to getting a fish tank in the Ultradome was to get a puffer fish.
Yeah, we were thinking about it, but it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing, $3,000 a month. That's some people's mortgage. The tank just makes me happy, says Moskowitz, who enjoys the fish with his 2-year-old daughter, Ruthie, and son Jonah, who's one. It's enormously educational for my daughter, noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life.
Brutal.
Look at this. Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Kana has a $100,750 custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in Capistrano Beach in the entry foyer of the room. The six-foot wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room and I was walking down the beach and I was looking into random houses at one point and I saw a beautiful fish tank and I was like, 'Ah, that's good. That's not just a TV. Lights up. It's interactive.' I don't know. Fish tanks I think are underrated. I'm glad that they're finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal. Corona, are you going to optimize for a fish tank in your next house?
I don't know. It's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I'd put it. What about you?
Way below movie theater.
Way below movie theater.
Like there's got movies. What are you doing?
And still I'd rather have...
Just watching podcasts. You're going to watch the new Dark Cash Patel Dylan Patel crossover episode. You just throw that on the big screen. On the big screen is the way it's meant to be enjoyed.
Anytime they crack a joke, standing up and just...
Feels like you're in the room with them.
So yeah. What about sauna? Sauna's above fish tank, right?
Yeah.
What about tennis court?
Way way way way.
What is around the same as a fish tank?
The 20th spot in a covered garage.
Okay. 20th spot you'd give up. 20th spot. Okay.
Which seems fair. Which seems fair. There's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd want a fish tank. Jeff Franklin, who's a screenwriter, director, and producer who's primarily known for creating Full House, has five aquariums in his 21,000 square foot Beverly Hills mansion. He says he's a scuba diver and the ocean. Five aquariums, AB, one in every room. The fifth aquarium versus the 20th car slot. What are you doing? He's like, 'Yeah, I have a one-car garage, but five aquariums.' But he's a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver. I love scuba diving. The ocean is my happy place. I way...
You should...
I've never seen this guy scuba dive by the way. He's like I'm a huge scuba diver.
You've never been in the ocean and just come across him.
I find great peace and comfort underwater surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish. So I wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water. I like that. His systems include two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom. So you can do two aquariums in one room. So wait, when we had Andrew Huberman on the show, he had a bunch of aquariums, right? Wasn't that what he had in the background? He didn't have three aquariums. Okay. So, three, four, five aquariums...
But he keeps them in the basement.
He keeps them in the basement. What's wrong with that?
I think... No, maybe not. Maybe not.
Well, what are the health benefits?
The... Oh, we should get to the health benefits because if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry.
Let's see. Homeowners get... He said, 'It really is a form of meditation.' Mhm. He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a trigger fish. Okay, I could get into trigger fish.
I don't want to be triggered by anything.
And a large beaked panicking.
I want a panic.
I want a fish that never gets triggered.
Somebody should name a fish a panickin.
Aquariums need heating and cooling systems to maintain a consistent water temperature level. He recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than 24 hours without power. Aquarium specifications vary widely depending on the intended inhabitants. Sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish. I think I would go shark over jellyfish. What do you think? Jellyfish are beautiful, but sharks are just so athletic and it's the apex predator. You got to have that in your house.
I think moat with some sharks is the way to go. What about gators?
Yeah, gators.
I think gators over sharks potentially.
I think sharks are probably the best option for moats.
For moats. Okay. Well, you won't have a moat in this $70 million Aspen compound because it would freeze. But it has just hit the market. Frederick 'Rick' Burke is the co-founder of Dooney & Bourke accessories brand and he's putting his Robert A.M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colorado on the market for $70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-foot 7-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain with tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79 and he met Stern around 1970 when Burke became one of the architect's early clients, hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well-known Stern would become. He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86. Burke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain about 8,000 feet above downtown. And he asked Stern to design a family home there. But they do have a pool, a heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Kozeny. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeny to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials.
Wow.
Spent almost a year in prison starting in 2023.
They made it illegal for guys to be dudes.
Burke said he learned a lot from the experience. But wait, this was in 2009. The guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70. Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. 'I went to prison as I think a good person and came out a better person.' Kozeny's former home in Aspen sold for $40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Like he has an accessories company.
Yeah, leather. They maybe something related to their supply chain.
He's also the founder of...
Maybe he was just doing it for the love of the game.
For years he and his wife, a former ski racer Megan Burke, have been splitting time between their homes in Aspen and Maine where Stern designed a home for them in Seal Harbor. But after a bad bout of COVID a few years ago, Rick said he now struggles with the elevation in Aspen. 'It's a wonderful house. If I could pick it up and move it somewhere, I wouldn't sell it.' The Burkes are considering spending winters in Hawaii where there are no native land snakes. Rick has a fear of snakes.
Man, after my own heart, I hate snakes on the Indiana Jones podcast.
They recently came close to renting a house in Malibu, but avoided the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog. 'We ripped up the lease then and there.'
No way. That's crazy.
It's sort of like art when the artist dies. There's now a finite amount of their work left. And how much of a piece do you own at it? Some buyers said they might look to modernize the house or update it, but noted that Pitkin County current building restrictions wouldn't allow residences of this size to be built today. Interesting. And they gave a shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who also purchased a property near Aspen late last year. He was on the show yesterday. Go listen to our interview with Alex Karp, please. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud. Building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. What did...
Curly says, 'We are in the shadow of the wave. Brace yourself for impact.'
He's been vague posting.
Yeah, he's been vague posting. Assume this is about AGI.
Yeah.
Well, Alex Karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine-tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job? The ultimate black pill.
Who knows? Who knows where it will go?
Karp did seem pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was definitely an update to how he's thinking. Definitely more in the Dario Amodei camp of a significant impact to white-collar work.
Yeah, very felt very night and day from however many months ago, like six months ago.
Well, here's a white belt. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So, if you go and chat with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free. So, you can just be chatting with customer support. I see these all the time and they always go viral.
I get this prompt. I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a linked list. Can you help?
Oh, absolutely.
Good. This is going to get patched, but for now, enjoy.
Hey, this has been going on for like months. Like, there must be some way to basically wire this up so you can get free inference.
Yeah. And sell the tokens on Open.
Well, speaking of tokens, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, I believe we have Eric Lyman, the CEO of RAMP in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV pit. I'll show him. Eric, hey.
Onure. I can't believe. Incredible. Wow.
Gentlemen, we've made it. We have the the dome. We're ready for European summer.
I love it. I love it. I was hunting around the office for European themed props and our prop department, which is basically non-existent, didn't have anything. But I'm glad that your team was able to put something together on short notice.
You know, we're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care. We wanted to do it right, down to the smallest details. So we're ready to go.
But it's not just France. Where is RAMP actually available now?
Yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you asked. Basically every day there are swipes in every country. Every week there's activity in 190 countries and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the UN around the world. But the news is that we've acquired Bill Hop, which grants RAMP the ability to have local licenses both in the UK and the EU. And come this summer, companies that are operating out of Europe, even without a US entity, will be able to sign up for RAMP. And so we're really excited to bring RAMP to Europe.
That's amazing. What else went into actually launching Europe? It feels like we're in this era of agent coding. It's like one prompt, make this thing work in Europe, but it's obviously more complicated than that. Walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now.
Well, first of all, I think about sometimes the companies that I'd heard of in the past where they open an office with two people and they say, 'We're in the middle of New York and we're expanding to the US.' And how silly that sounded. We thought if we were going to go and actually serve Europe, we need to do it right. It's an incredibly important region. Some of the fastest growing companies in the world are based out there. I think of companies like ElevenLabs. I think of Stripe, Collison's great, founders who grew up in Europe. We wanted to approach this properly. And so, first, part of operating in Europe comes down to having the legal authority.
Sorry, I'm barely keeping it together watching you have this serious explanation.
Also, I don't know if you've been through all of the props on there, but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table.
I don't know if it's legal in this building to light them up, but we do have... Don't do it. Don't do it, dude. But one and a half percent back on cigarettes.
It's a boom for the French economy.
Well, we'll see you there. But look, I think in every country the legal authority to move funds, to work with regulated entities, and also to meet requirements as it relates to privacy is really important. So we took the steps to do that. We also took the time to make sure we have the right leadership going in. Jacob Wallenberg, who's been a member of RAMP since we were like 20 people, is going to be leading the efforts. Grew up there, on the board of EQT, and I think so many members of our team are focused on not just going and selling things locally but being a part of the local fabric of how the economy works and doing it right. So we're quite excited.
So yeah, more broadly, how do you think about verticalization of the org, horizontalization, creating functional business units, not duplicating work? You're probably already wrestling with this as the AI wave changes the way RAMP builds products, but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs in different localities. How are you thinking about building the next layer of management and just human capital at RAMP?
Yeah, there's a few pieces. First, just the highest level, I think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are, where you're operating, it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less. Just as we help the average American business cut their expenses by 5%. And turns out last year the average business on RAMP grew their revenue by 16%, which is multiple times faster than the US average. We know businesses in Europe want to do this too. When you look at the base problems in Europe and as well for most people in the US, it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of a month where you have one system for cards, another for expenses, another for bill payments, another for AR, another for procurement, another for approvals, so on and so forth. And what we're doing is collapsing that. And so there's things which are very transportable. But you're right, to AI, it makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster. It makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively far easier. And so there's a lot of local nuance in how businesses operate, want to be sold to, and even conventions about how they want to run their finances, which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that. We have a good head start. We've been working with very global companies, like Shopify, like Airbnb, that already have folks around the world and we've localized this experience. This next step is really just about serving companies that are scaling fully in Europe or starting in Europe and going to the rest of the world.
The UK has a version of The Office. That show has a character named Kevin and the actor who plays that character, his name is Kevin. Will there be a redux of the RAMP ad campaign for the European audience who might be more familiar with the UK version of The Office?
My jaw is dropping. This is the greatest idea, guys.
We got to do this. We got this together.
Kevin Bishop. He's an English comedian and actor born in 1980. He was later known for The Kevin Bishop Show, his roles in British comedy and voice acting. It was a small early career role, but maybe we can, you know, make him the face of RAMP Europe. That would be very fun.
I would love that. Guys, I feel like more and more, no one turns down your calls. I'd love your help. Let's call Kevin together and see what we can do.
Let's do it. Let's do it.
Um, Jordy, anything else?
No, this is great. Congrats.
Anything else on your side before you go?
Guys, this is great. When you guys wrap up, come over. Let's enjoy a glass of wine.
Well, we now have a great reason to go to Europe.
We do. We do. That Don Pangon looks fantastic. So, I'm looking forward to the summer. Have a great rest of your summer. See you this summer. We'll talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And I believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the TV and Ultram. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis.
Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you.
I'm just down the street.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually, we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa and so I think we were even closer then. Still not far. How are things going? How's life?
Whoa. Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback. That was crazy. Man, it's crazy.
The building doesn't stop. I mean, I don't know how much you guys... I've just been in hiding. So, I've been doing this. I run a company called City Up until today, let's just say I was running a company called City Storage Systems.
Okay. Which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries.
The whole idea was can you get a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store? Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018.
And after just the intensity of Uber in terms of being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to write. I was like, I would like to... That's a tough way to run a business. It is very tough. So, I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build.
So, did you... so I went under the radar. Did you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term?
We've been in stealth mode for eight years. And that's like till today. Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees.
Yeah. That's crazy. Okay. So today what happened was...
For my company, and I just got out of an all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth. Now City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name. It was like the most generic name that no one will ever know. Business Corporation of America. It was on purpose. And it worked. It was like we had two choices when we launched. We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember it was only 7, 8 months after I left Uber when I started this. And it's, let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurant tours on a delivery-only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, AR life. I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. Like there's a ton of stuff going on.
Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. Yeah, it's great.
All right. Okay. So, I forgot what I was saying. So, well, it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook. This is what the Uber guys when I left were a little bit worried about. This is we're talking about 2017, 18. They're paranoid. So my instinct was, okay, I left. It's 7 months later. I'm going to name my company Super.
He like, you leave it. Let me call Uber. You call it Super. I'm like, call it Giga. I'm like, you go from Uber to Super. You're like, no, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Full underground, full stealth, put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle and built. Literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown. It's been great building. But today we sort of came out and we renamed the company, we renamed what we do. We call it Adams.
But we started a new company at the same time. And so let's just say like physical AI and robotics, action and movement through the physical world. Of course on the food side we already have all the things I just talked about. But think of it as... I'm trying to get the mission like we're... I'm so riled up. It's so fresh. But basically it's... yeah. So the... I'll leave it at that. Let's get... we can get rolling here. I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep.
I love it. I love it. How much harder... in many ways I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the ways in which it made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, 'Hey, I just want to come in with you to build and I don't care about the hype and I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn.' But what were the kind of key challenges and why was now the right time to come out and start to get loud again?
So like first, 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound. That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage. Okay, you're working with Travis, former founder of Uber. Like there's leverage there. But then you have a name like City Storage Systems and it's like, so do you guys just have these boxes sitting in parking lots? Like what is this? And that's sort of like the reason it's different now is because look, number one, lots of time since the Uber situation, from having to live that life. But two is the world is different. Like in 2016, 2017 the world of let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics but people didn't know it. They're like if New York Times says something everybody just treated it as the gospel like it just must be true. And if they say something bad it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so, and by the way, this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today.
And I think partly because of even shows like this, right? It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party. Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built?
And that's the difference between today and then. And so, when you go 95% of all press is negative. You're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say, and if I thought of my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company, too. That's how it's going to play. We're now desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, this was pre the whole trend of going direct, right? Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met at some point, basically coached a generation of CEOs on you know you just can't if you want to have any control over how people perceive you you need to tell... you have to counteract with like a story not like a statement and the boilerplate like official statement just doesn't entertain people as well as a full read a lot.
And it's also guys like Elon owns Twitter now, X, right? Pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and sort of... Yes.
You talked about the initial idea of naming the next company Super. That would have in many ways I'm sure turned into a basically a spite company which yeah where you're just in this case like kind of taking the high road was I'm just going to be quiet I'm going to do the years and years and years of just like chewing glass building up this infrastructure getting to scale getting to thousands of employees getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again which I think is to any of your former critics That's to me that's taking the high road basically.
Yeah. And what you get when you create a culture around that is you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it. Which basically means emotional intelligence. Now there it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do. I'd like the things I build to be seen and I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way. And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like it is like you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, etc. Again, the world's different. LFG.
Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? And I'm just thinking about your career arc with like Red Swoosh is enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber is a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks you probably run into like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments and what's different? What's the same? Like what can you just be like a good business operator and power through and what do you actually have to learn about the new industry?
Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to... because I have a... I mean when you go from consumer to B2B, the number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC. Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with I'm going to talk to customers and I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like my LTV to CAC is the app store. It's a whole different ballgame. And LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business, this is like life in hard mode. And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB, like those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke.
Yeah. So, talk about moats. I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then what does it look like now?
So like nobody knows what Red Swoosh is. No, it's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001. That was, let's call it, BitTorrent meets Akamai. Sold out before BitTorrent existed. Okay. That's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary.
Yeah. Had some famous investors. Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. So before that, Scour was Oitz and Ron Burkle. That was the company before.
Oh, that was confusing to do.
Yeah. Anyways, so there's a network effect there once you get the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being and I sold it to Akamai for like I think it was like 199 million bucks and probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life.
Okay, it was crazy. It was crazy.
Like I cleared 3 million and I was like praise the Lord.
Okay, so then Uber very obvious moats and scale economies like what does this look like with Adams? What does this look like in both, you know, the food delivery kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics.
Look, if you look at where moats are, and really you're looking for network effects in different places, right? So, right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this, right? You order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash. You get a hundred options, except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings a hundred orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you. And we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so, who's going to... who can play ball? Like, you got to have the real estate. That's a freaking moat. You have the network effect now of like what if I sell every floor on every tower meaning every office floor is on this and all of these floors that means that one courier can bring a hundred orders and by the way I'll have five couriers going to a single office with 500 orders hitting every shelf and you get notified when it arrives. How if you even took one floor you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work. So there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a facility with kitchens in it. But then there's the moat of like we own real estate. Okay. So like if you want to compete with us, go buy a hundred million, billions of dollars of real estate in every major city in the world and then we're going to go head-to-head.
Yeah. Talk about capital.
Yeah. The other... I don't know exactly what bucket this falls in, but just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete. But people were like this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle was Uber was doing so well and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of VCs were like I want a piece of that and I didn't get Uber so I'm funding the... but I'm saying in the context of Cloud Kitchens, City Storage, like even though people generally figured out what you were up to right you did have to share some little things along the way or you buy this company or... you got to go to a website and say what is a delivery-only location. What the hell is that? And so somebody had to know. But even then, we're like, we're going to say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. Like these are the little moves you do to be stealth, you know?
When I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI and in many ways accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI progress and progress in robotics but you're moving physical atoms around the world in an era where you know you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly. This feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress for...
Sounds great, dude. I love that. I love it. Yeah, dude. This big all in the plan, dude. Look, I think it's always been the plan. A meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store, a meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this making this move on atoms, which is okay. We're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport.
Okay. Mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries or on transport, it's just robot wheelbase for robots.
Okay. Because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels. Right. I like to say like if you saw the Beijing in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics or whatever and the half marathon and you're watching the humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So, like humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play.
Mhm. I want to go back to capital wars, lessons from capital wars when these play out because we're seeing this... and you... Were you the OG because or when this capital war kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the '90s?
I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Like you know, Rockefeller was the OG and then before him was it like the Medici? I don't know. But I was the goat for a period of time and now I'm a baby goat and that's okay. And so then one day the baby goat will grow up again. That's fine. It's going to be fine.
I just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect, it's growing and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like the second place and there's this debate over catching up and like how do you... what moats do you retreat to in that moment? Like I feel like that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening and it played out very well for you and I'm wondering like what level of confidence you had. What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing because of course all the AI guys are playing that game right now which is...
The ability to attract capital. Capital becomes a strategic weapon which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days of course that's happening times 10 in the sort of let's call it the digital AI wars. And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 billion, you know, I don't know, it was like a 60-70 billion pre. Let's see that. Yeah. When that used to be a thing. Now, like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms. This was our how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week. With an hour and a half slot on each. So, like for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel. I was in B.
Are you bouncing between it?
No, I'm in the $250 million and over club. Okay. That's one room. And it goes all... There's all these other rooms. The fourth room is like $25 million checks.
There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room. And then but we're oversubscribed. So, we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots, dude. Like, let's go. And but what it means is it's about the system. It's about the system for acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently. And what it means is that storytelling that we did, anybody in my team could tell that story. Let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story that's just like of course is like if I'm pitching it, people are like, 'Holy [__] let's go.' Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper. It was like digital, but it was like you need to fill out this table which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in, this valuation, how much money, this much money, this valuation, how much money and then we would aggregate the demand.
Yes. But like done way better because you don't... respect of the bankers, but like... I was in charge of pricing.
Sure. Sure. And so, and then you're like, 'Oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion. That takes us to this price.' We would tell all these guys, 'Hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve.'
And then they would move their price and then that would change the curve and you would do it again.
Do it again. Makes sense. Were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think they IPOed around 50 billion. You're doing a $70 billion raise. There's a lot of different... It's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like?
Look, I like... in some ways I have to give some credit. This was an era where this was happening. You had like the Fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. He was like the first guy in that game. And you know, Drew and I'd meet up and we'd, you know, and I like flex. I'm like, 'Dude...'
You're like, 'This is our little safe space.'
Yeah. Like Chesky at Airbnb. Like that was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s and sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be like people didn't even know what private equity... private... what is a private... what is private equity? Now we're just like, 'Yeah, private equity. That's VC. It's the same thing.' And but back then private equity is like I do leverage buyouts. And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat.
Have you coached any of the AI founders? I was going to ask the exact same thing culturally like that crew that you just described. We most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today.
Um, yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam. I love these guys. I love them all.
Look, the times when I get hit up are usually when the [__] is about to hit the fan. Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, 'Dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do.' So my phone's like, 'What are the crazy wild wackiest things going down or like here?' because that's when I usually get the call and I'm so underground. That's what happens. But like I should, you know, I should give a, you know, I know these guys. I should give them a call and be like, 'Dude, we should let's cook. Let's cook.' I still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today, but obviously the check size much bigger.
Is that approach like systematizing fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire... is that like everything that you do that is important? You're creating like a ground-up kind of solution for it. Where else? Where else?
Well, like for instance, I mean this will... you know this is just crazy, but like how about when you do construction? Do you know how effed up construction is? I tell my guys that in the real estate department, I'm like, 'Your entire department is the anti-fraud department.' Oh yeah, these guys just are incentivized to just run up bills. So how do you do epic high-quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not going to tell you. Not going to tell you, but there's a way.
Do you have any white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly like solving the housing crisis through permitting stuff like that?
This is so... one of the things is that and I think people are starting to come out of this now this whole like the jobs are gone like I know still people still say that but there is another side to this story and like I'll just make this because I'm the Adams guy I'm like let's just talk about plumbers. Okay. Let's say the entire world everything in our world was automated except for plumbers. Okay. You had machines making buildings you would basically have like a thousand buildings a day. A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Just machines doing. Except plumbers. How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely valuable. Okay. Those guys each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Okay. Why? Why? Because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. Sure. And by the way, you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. And then plumbing is like, yeah, what's up? And so once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI, humans are valuable. And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust. Except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so until we get to humans are replaced like fully. And by the way, I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralink. It's going to be all good. Okay. Then people like, 'Oh god.' But until we get there, we're going to I believe we're going to be super fine. That's my white pill.
Yeah. Yeah. It does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the prize pool of automating. But again, there's like these kind of windows of...
But there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing and it's not just plumbing. It's going to be all over the place. And even when it comes to software, so like for instance, look at like autonomous cars, they like Waymo has people that oversee the rides. Okay. And it starts with like okay, five rides for every person, then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But like if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, and let's just say it's one in a thousand. And like nobody owns cars, there's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people will own cars, but it'd be the top of the top of the pyramid, let's say. Okay. So, what do we replace? Billions of cars with ride sharing. If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs. 50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere, is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Robots yet don't yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, you get the idea.
You mentioned mining. Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like what's going on in mining? How... I mean I imagine that mines are fairly automated already? Like there's machinery.
There's thousands of employees. Okay. At a given mine. And that's work that he... There's so many resources.
Children yearn for the mines of Minecraft, but it's not the best... but like maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes. Ender's Game situation.
The... look the... it's interesting. You go a lot of times they're like, 'Oh well, is labor really the issue in mining? Is that really a thing?' But what it really comes down to is productivity. Okay. Right. So if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have off hours. The way machines queue up doing that really efficiently like computer science style. I call it digitizing the physical world. You can make that mine substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mine? And by the way, let's say let's get to the real outcome here. Does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come, do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials? Look around us guys. Like look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined. Manufactured and moved. So, if you're not in the mining business, like you're like, let's just say the... it's a very critical part of the situation.
I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth. What level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it? because that's sort of on the table if I look at what you're doing in food. You own real estate or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're up and running? Yeah. Like how do you think...
I'm not buying land for mines anytime. That's just not anytime soon. But in the next three months, yeah, not 120 days out.
I got you. I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like...
Like I'm an Adams guy. I'm like all about digitization of the physical world. And you know, I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits. Storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but I loved it. Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one.
Yeah. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Transport. Logistics. I didn't know it then or I didn't think about that way exactly, but at Uber, we were building a network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation.
City storage systems then make sense. Yeah. Storage for the physical world. That's real estate. We're building at Adams-based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage.
Right. But now leveling up and saying, 'Okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally?'
Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio, but I'm all about it.
But you've had to do it basically because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in LA. And you can't be in 10 places at once.
It's all good. There's a difference. There's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit. Okay. Versus we have an office in every major city in the world and whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week and sometimes six or seven. And that's it.
But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place.
Yeah. I guess I just cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before I think maybe even before anybody else. It almost feels like normal. But like I basically have figured out sort of the management and leadership structures where the real thing is about empowerment. You must be able to empower teams. But I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos. Sure. And once you have those systems in place, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity. So once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far.
And so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing. Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or he sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks and we had to open up this market. So, we had to do a stunt and hire some people and it just felt like a lot, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused. But why were you, you know, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them?
It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer.
Um, yeah. I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, 'Okay, I need to find people that can run this.' Like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh. I didn't think of it as like, I got to get youthful people or not. I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we got to get done. And it was just like water flows downhill. So, what do you look... it was a, you know, like the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010. We basically took 200 cards and put names on them and we said, 'Alphabetize them. Click.' And we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize. We would give them like crazy analytics tests and then we're like, 'Okay, this is our guy.' You know what I mean?
If you're on the marketing manager, even today, you'd still want that guy. Even today. So like you can't use AI now. Alphabetize in the most efficient way. Now, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big freaking deal. Sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software, is a thing. That's what ops people do.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
So, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than problem solving, whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one. When you interview, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two. And you're already pumped because you saw them in action.
Yeah. How are you with Adams? How are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company? You've been kind of holed up in LA. This is your kind of hideout. Yeah, totally. But I imagine like do you push back into SF? Go back to being the king.
Well, here. So, first let's just be clear. On December 18th, I moved to Texas. Sure. You know, I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January. Yeah. Um, so I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the action for a lot of this Adams type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the Bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called Lab 37. That's Anthony... in Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Myhoffer. Okay. Eric Myhoffer. So that's robotics on the food side. Um yeah, Anthony Levandowski was running Pronto. I was the largest investor in Pronto and then we just were basically right in the final like we're checking off the list maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal. So.
Amazing. Let's talk about that deal. Yeah. Give us like kind of background on Pronto and then how it fits into the empire.
Well, look, I sort of broke out how mining fits. Yeah. Right. So, we got that. Look, I've been I'm the largest investor in Pronto. Um and it's super inspiring work like go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry when all mines are producing more. Where does that go? Um, and in some ways you could say low-hanging fruit on the autonomy problem because yes, there are different problems off-road, but they ain't like they're way more controlled than what's going on on-road. Okay, but then you get into the physical action like cars on the road, the Waymos on the road, uh, you know, they're moving but they're not acting on atoms, right? So when you think about excavation and you think about crush like when you get the material and then you move it then you are basically crushing the material and then you process it you think about all of the automation through that stack it's fantastic. And it's like it's hard right like somebody asked me like we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines and somebody came like hey like is AI going to help us design food machines were like, 'Dude, let me show you.' Yeah. Like this thing has like an insane number of parts and let me show you just the design of a single part. Yeah. Like the that that AI can't even do freaking math. You know what I mean? It's like this is not we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah. But then you're really an AGI. If you look at how much harder it is the physical world, how much harder it is AI in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it in any way. I'm just saying it's like maybe let's call it a different problem set.
Yeah, we're just far away from one way less training data.
Yeah, the it's like one-shotting on software, dude. One-shotting on designing a machine or a robot. We're just not there yet.
But that makes it more fun. That's the point is like do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided, I like hard things. I like pain more than anybody else. Yeah, this is kind of what you got to be about.
Uh, so I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining. What other and just heavy industry broadly? What other kind of categories of AVs are exciting? How do you see the space evolving?
Yeah. Look, anything I mean we the mission is wheelbase for robots. Yeah. So then you're just like, okay, what moves? Yeah. Right. And you go, okay, where you have to find the businesses that make sense. Of course. So we're like, okay, mining is a no-brainer.
What about how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down like crazy? I tell my team like, 'Dude, there's like a ton of silver medals here and there's actually a few other gold medals just in the category.' Um, so let's just go with delivery robots like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart. Um, you make a lot... your $15 bowl became 30 bucks.
Yeah. Okay. Two. This is like I would put it up there as like one of the number one annoyances of the average American regardless of where they are in society. It's like food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food fast, cheap, hot, etc. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money you're making, you're spending a lot on this category. Isn't it interesting? Right. Remember I talked about the plumbers. Yeah. But like you could take whole categories become the long pole in the tent. Food. Boring. To a lot of people boring is that for me. [__] interesting. Let's go. Let's go. But I look I did taxis. I did taxis. Yeah. When they're like people are looking at me funny. It was a weird idea. Okay. They're looking at me super funny. So Jason Calacanis, the most famous investor in Uber of all time. More famous than you in some... Whenever I meet with him, I'm like, 'Dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors.' But he there was like an angel group that I pitched to. There were like 30 40 people in the room. I think it was like three or four that invested. It's crazy. Okay. The 10 grand check became like a hundred million bucks. It was crazy. Wow. But um the boring places are the places. Yeah, you know, less competitive, but also just weird and hard. There's a reason why it's that way. The graveyard is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food, which is why which is again like Yeah. Go back to and you can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane and you have to have Yeah. And you have to attack at all these levels. And my so my head of the robotics division Yeah. We're like, 'Yeah, let's do this. Get the band back together. Let's go.' Right. This is Eric Myhoffer. Yeah. And um and he's like, 'Okay, we can make a food robot.' I'm like, 'I got one there's one requirement though. I got one hanging chad, one string attached.' He's like, 'What?' I'm like, 'You're going to have to build a restaurant that the robot serves.' Mhm. So my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. Yeah. And uh people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if you look at like the labor statistics, etc., restaurants fits under manufacturing. Yeah. For obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, back to Sorry, I'm all over the place. No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. Yeah. Uh but so again, are do you want to move people with AVs? Do you care more about commercial? Look, the industrial thing is sort of like probably our main jam, but the bottom line is once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that. Yeah. And in fact, you need partners because, you know, you're going to be putting billions of dollars to work to make it happen. Yeah. So, there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this is ours and this thing. It's more like, hey, there may be ways to work with others. We're happy to do it. Yeah. We got to pick our spots, but you get the idea.
What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. Are there other categories that are interesting or are you happy to be kind of the transport rails?
Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack. Like it just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's going to be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, there, you know, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. Um, but there's just so much to do. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? So, it's like, we can see all the things. We can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like, there's a million. I can still help you mine. I could still get some food to some peeps. You know what I mean? So, you get the idea.
Is that really when you're pitching investors around Adams and this new vision? Is it basically like there's a lot of jobs to do in the world. We're going to do it with physical AI and you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time.
No, you got to be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, 'Dude, what's wrong with you?' Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that like, you know, I joke around like in the 90s, dude, I'm an old guy. what are you going to do? In the 90s, it's like, dude, Microsoft's going to kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google going to do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing. Yeah. In the, you know, now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. They are the incumbent. They are. And not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great awesome stuff. But find your spot. Yeah. Know yourself. Know what you're good at. Be self-aware. And find the thing that is your business soulmate for sure, but also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot.
What was your experience like in the financial crisis broadly in 2008?
Uh, okay. So, basically I sold my peer-to-peer CDN. Yeah. Akamai meets BitTorrent in 2007 to Akamai. Okay. So I was earning out when that happened and I just started I think I didn't last very long in that earnout. Um so uh I was the CXO. I was like an adviser and a CXO. Okay. Little known fact I was blogging. Okay. I was like a tech influencer blogger. There is a blog still out there called Swooshing. Yeah. Okay. Crazy amazing ridiculous content. Okay. Okay, we're going to dedicate... I was in the click economy, guys. I was in it. Okay, but um so I was an adviser and CXO for like five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals or I would be their CTO. Yeah. Or I would um you know help them sell or product or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget.
So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash like
Yeah. I mean, my thing was I was trying to figure out I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying, 'Okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America?' I do, too. Let's pull our thing. I'm going to go to Bank of America and say, 'I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar.'
Because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents. Interesting.
Could be fun. And then they're like, 'Get out of here.' Yeah. Crazy. You're not a hedge fund.
It's wild. What about uh you're talking about the 90s?
Yeah, the 90s. Like late 90s. Like I mean, you're still at that point you're like sort of starting your career, right? But it's an interesting place to start a career in tech. Like a lot of people watched that and said, 'Huh, that...' So look that was a we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour. Yeah. Okay. So some people did Napster, some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after BitTorrent all the way to like uh what was the one that uh Zenstrom did? uh Kazaa or some of these others, right? We were the OG file sharing. Okay. Um Michael Ovitz was on the board. Ron Burkle was on the board. LA. Okay. Doing tech in LA was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They're like don't know what the hell is going on. They're like who are you? Um and um you're a little bit sheltered from it in LA. Every time you went to the Silicon Valley, it was like wild and crazy and like every bar was like packed like after hours like happy hour thing. Like things were bubbling. And the crazy part is not just what happened during the runup. It was post. Yeah. I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't have I didn't pay myself a salary for for four years. I was raising money in late 2001 for a networking software company. Yeah. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these um going to a bar to meet up with a VC. And this is like 2002 and it's empty. Like this thing that would be mega packed just two years earlier. I mean we're talking dust bowl tumbleweeds empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was because it'd be amazing. Uh was like, 'Yeah, Travis, dude, I think it's all done. It's over. It's over.' I told you it's over. And I'm like, 'What do you mean?' He's like, 'All the software that could be invented has been invented.' Wow. We're done. And he meant it. He's like, 'It's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go. We're done.'
That's incredible. How have you processed the last two years when uh people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this, you know, entire, you know, process and they can just raise it literally without a deck often. Uh they can just pull it together.
Look, it's all good. Like I don't I just have because you know when you build a company the way I built it which is like my current one where you're literally under the radar it means that you are powered by you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And um I don't look at somebody and go oh dude that's I had it so much harder uphill both ways to school whatever. Yeah. you know, I don't think like that. It's more about the excellence of the process. Yeah. So, I'm like, 'Well, how do you raise money?' And they're like, 'Oh, yeah. Just throw a deck to the guy.' I'm like, 'Okay, well, that's not a thing.' Yeah. What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I'll explain. Like, let's just think of like a marathoner. Yeah. World class marathoner on mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you know what's about to happen? He's about to get his ass whooped. Okay, it's over. Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him. Yeah. And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Mhm. Now, you don't do things hard just because maybe it's like it just doesn't matter, dude. Like, I got to go do something else that's hard. But the key is like if money matters, which I think we would say it does, especially in certain categories, you need to be the best in the world at it. And it's not enough to say it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage, more differentiation. Get it together. Give me the update. Feel like Tony Robbins right now.
I love it. I love it. No, I think people need to hear this. They do. They do. And yeah, the challenge is like when if raising money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like, whoa, actually money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy. Yeah. And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers, the critique is always like, oh well, they are raising too much money. You look at Elon, Sam, all these crazy deals and people are like, well, like, okay, it's nice that you're good, but like, are you too good? And
Look, here's the thing. Uh, you know, back in the day, 2010s reference, like there was a problem with getting Masa money. Yeah. There was a problem with that. Yeah. Because it was easy money. Sure. And it was too loose. Yeah. And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from. Sure. And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, 'Dude, you got to grind.' It was maybe a little too easy. Yeah. And you still to this day. So, um, there's nothing wrong with money as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like, that's part of business. It's necessary. But treat it with respect.
Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there, Austin, Dallas, Houston, what do you recommend?
Well, look, I'm Austin now. I own a place in Austin. I've owned it for 5 years. I'm an avid I would say almost professional water skier. Nice. Slalom ski. I'll send a video. That's amazing. It's sick. Don't even get me started. Um uh so I've owned a place there for 5 years right on the lake. Lake Austin, 20 minutes from the city. There you go. Lake life. Hell yeah. Go for it. Okay. I get a little bit FOMO on like these people going to Florida. I'm like, 'Dude, why so much Florida action?' Like, come on, homies. Like I know it's been a blood bath for just every guy going to Florida. But like, yeah, like every weekend this year I've had this year in Texas. Yeah. Uh you ever take calls while you're water skiing? Like AirPods? Gosh, dude. I should be good. I love it. Don't get me excited. Well, I went to Saronic, which does the boats, the autonomous boats, and I'm like, build me a water skiing boat. Water skiing boat. Okay. I just want to water ski and like water skiing behind a boat is so funny. So good. Water ski pretty viral.
Uh, who should come? You're poking your head up. Who should come work for you? Yeah. 60 seconds. Who do you want?
Not any individual person, but like funny. I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer. Um, look, I think the thing is is like we're just getting the best. This is so cliche and like whatever banal, but um look, we are in the physical AI space. So, it's a mix of uh, sort of let's call it sensors, compute, the software that sits on top of those things. Um uh I mean it's just going to be great engineers and then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack and you would you know but um it's a long project it's someone for who wants a career. It's like infrastructure software guys because you've got to have epic AI on the back end and the way to use that sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world and there's some core research and some just like I know all the white papers and we're just building and going end to end or some hybrid version of that. Um you have just normal software because you've got applications that sit on top that then of course customers see in some fashion or another. Uh actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic side of things and mechanical engineers that build machines. Um wow, you know, and then of course remember I've got construction real estate. Like I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website. There's lots of stuff.
Go to the website, folks. Go to the website.
Adams.co. And by the way, adams.co/vision. I just threw down.
Okay. Read it. Amazing. Check it out. Well, thank you for taking the time to come out with us. This was awesome. Thank you so much along really quickly. Um, thank you so much. Should I get up? Yeah. Okay, cool. I don't know. We will talk to you soon.
Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. And we are shifting the schedule. We will continue to talk to more guests. We have Gustav from Spotify in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP Ultradome. Gustav, how are you doing?
What's going on? Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. How's it going?
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Uh first, tell us where are you?
So, it looks like I'm in some teenager's bedroom from the 80s here. It's actually a small studio we have in Austin. I'm here for South by Southwest.
You know, the first time I went to South by Southwest, the coolest party was the Spotify house. I have a very fond memory of going I think this was in 2012 or 2013 something like that. Uh so you've clearly been there a long time.
Yeah. It's always a great time. Uh what's on the agenda? What is the message that you're trying to send to the world at South by Southwest today?
Well, first of all, I'm here because Spotify is turning 20. Wow. It seems crazy. You know, most companies don't make it five years.
Yeah. An overnight success. 20 years in the making for sure. So that's why I'm here. And then uh you know obviously I'm here talking about what it is that we're doing, our thoughts and plans for the future.
Yeah. So I mean I'm sure you're getting a million questions about AI. Uh how do you see AI fitting into the Spotify ecosystem? There's a whole bunch of super useful ways that I think people would be super excited about. There's other people that are a little bit worried about AI and how it might play out in Spotify's world. Uh what are you thinking good looks like over the next couple years?
Yeah, of course, everyone is asking about AI and as you said, there are a lot of, you know, hot takes and breathless takes on Twitter all the time and there's a lot of dystopian takes. Yeah, I'm very positive about the future and I think if we look at the consumer experience, I think it's going to change completely and not just for Spotify. I think all consumer companies are going to have to change what they are and how they work because I think consumers are sitting over here, you know, with Claude or with ChatGPT or with Gemini and they're getting freaking AGI-ish intelligence and then you're going to media service over here and it's dumb as a rock. That's not going to work. Like it's going to need to get intelligent. So what we've said what I've said at our latest earnings call is that we're going to build the first the world's first truly intelligent agentic media system. Those are a lot of buzzwords, but I'll tell you what I actually think they mean. What I think is so interesting with generative AI versus kind of old school machine learning and personalization, which Spotify has done for a long time, is that computers finally understand English. What's the point of that? Well, Spotify for a long time, you know, when we developed the product, we always had these user focus groups. You know, you invite 10 people into a room, you have like deep English language discussions with them about what they actually feel and what they actually want. And then you went and built this average product that could only measure skips and swipes and you try to squint and approximate what the user was actually thinking. The problem with generative AI is you just talk to us in English at a scale of 750 million people. So I kind of think of it as a 750 million people user research always ongoing into you. That's what products are going to be in the future and I want Spotify to lead that. So, we've been investing in some of these products. The first one was AI DJ. Yeah. Where you can literally talk to Spotify. You can ask, you can say, you know, I want to go for a run, give me some EDM playlist with big drops at 160 BPM for my running cadence. And then earlier this year, we launched prompted playlists, which takes it one step further. You can build your own playlist using English language. You're literally writing your own algorithm. So, if you want a playlist that goes out and looks at TikTok and what's trending right now, then takes that, filters it to your taste on Spotify, then removes any track you've already heard, you can literally do that today. And you can schedule it to update daily or weekly. So, that's what we've done so far. And then today, what I talked about is sort of the next step, which is today's profile. Yeah, this is what users have been asking us for forever. So like hidden in all these systems, we have a view of who you are musically and podcast wise and audiobook wise, but you could never actually see that. You can see hints of it in Wrapped, but you can never actually see it. So the idea is pretty simple. We're just going to let you see who we think you are, and then we're going to let you edit it in English and just say like, 'No, that's not true. I'm not like that anymore. I want to be like this.'
Yeah, it makes so much sense from a personalization standpoint. I mean, Spotify has been doing machine learning for probably most of those 20 years. Uh, certainly more than 10. Um, how do you see yourself integrating with what OpenAI is doing with Sora where there's a persona and a person, an individual can kind of decide how their avatar is used. It feels like there's a natural extension here where not all artists, but some artists are going to want to go to you and say, 'Hey, look, I'm a rock musician, but if people want to listen to my songs remixed with AI as country songs, that's fine as long as I keep getting a check. It's win-win for everyone.' Has there been demand from musicians for that type of experience that feels like maybe the next year or later this year?
Yeah, 100%. So, this is the other big topic. We just talked about consumer experience, but what about generative content? And of course, everyone is asking me about that and specifically music. And I think what's happening today is people can make net new songs using these services. Yeah. Um and that's great. I'm sure creators will um I'm sure most creators are already using these tools whether they say so or not. Um,
