Right.
There's misinformation clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come, get up. Trust the experts here.
We are actually founder mode. Five good.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Fight. Wrong. Cook is team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right.
Marky clearing order inbound.
Get out. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold to position. Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon in Denmark. Founder.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, June 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Baby, time is money. Save both. Easy. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. Ramp. Ramp. You go to ramp.
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Two major stories. Bunch of major stories, but the big one, Facebook got a movie, another movie, actually a third movie if you count the documentary. There's been the social network, the social dilemma, and now the social reckoning. Only two of those are movies. The social dilemma is a documentary, but it's very interesting and Anthropic got a fable and there's been a ton of reaction. Ben Thompson was writing about it. The Wall Street Journal, the announcement should have been like the really good model launches and people are amazed with what it can do. But they put the title Anthropic puts curbs on AI models. So I'm sure you've seen this on the timeline but we'll take you through some of the debates over how restricted the model is in certain areas. Bio is a big one. Cyber is another one. There's a bunch of funny examples. There's a bunch of reasonable arguments for doing this type of stuff. So we'll go through all of it.
Can we talk about who's joining the show today?
Absolutely. We got a bunch of great guests.
What a lineup. Hey, Clickie founder Farza Majjid is joining. You've probably seen his viral demo last week. We're very excited to talk to him about computer use, potential consumer AI applications, what he's doing to build hands-free AI voice assistants. The CEO of Snowflake's coming on. CEO of Cloudflare is coming on. Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures is coming on. And then Brett Taylor. Brett Taylor didn't even make the cut off on today's lineup. What's going on here?
Brutal. And of course, we have Marky Wagner.
Marky Wagner coming out announcing emerging from stealth with her new company.
So I want to kick it off with the Social Network sequel. I want to watch the trailer for The Social Reckoning because Jeremy Strong is playing Mark Zuckerberg. I've heard people say, 'Hey, he looks like Zuck.' The styling is there.
Henry says, 'No Doug from Semi Analysis.' Oh, we got to get him on.
Let's get him on and see if he's available.
Not that we have any time, but we'll make
Well, we'll make time for Doug anytime. So, the one critique is Jeremy Strong looks a little bit older than Mark Zuckerberg did in 2011 because he is calling him or it just doesn't. I think it'll color the movie a little bit in the sense that the film is telling the story of this very difficult whistleblower situation. And it's different when it looks like a mature adult versus someone who was young and running into these problems for the first time.
Yeah, he's joining. We got the Cloudflare
12:30 Pacific. Get ready. We're going to go through Cloudflare. They have exciting news. I think it's public already, but I don't want to blow it up if it's going to be announced later today. But anyway, I want to react to the trailer. So, let's pull up the trailer.
Listen, before I go on, I want to make something clear.
This is how it starts.
Okay.
I have a hunch you're not a fan of Facebook, but I am. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay.
You send me a message. What would you like to talk about?
The chairman gave a session to order. You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session. And we'll move to witness questioning.
Spell your name and state your current occupation for the record.
So, is it not this time?
C E R P E R G.
Let's see.
And your occupation?
Zuckerberg.
I'm a professional defender.
Co-produced and directed by groups where 30% of content hits multiple risk factors.
Hang on. I don't piece to the social. Are you a tech reporter?
Is
This my guys are counting on the next round of professional testimony to make you mark?
I'm happy to lend a hand, but I think you do.
You wrote broken code. He was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. He is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and broken a number of global news stories in our lives including the Facebook files.
The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply jet power.
I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is. It's not a bad Zuck impression. He's got the voice tone pretty down.
Got worse as a result of time spent on the platform.
Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.
I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.
So what would you need to stand up the story? The internal documents.
This is a material violation of my NDA.
We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post government around here. Please. Twice as big as the biggest country on earth.
We have 102 hours to get from a user standpoint.
Oh, okay. Use it.
I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources.
H, I promise you, is imminent.
Enough.
People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not 2 years out of a dorm room anymore. Charlie, look around.
Man, if they were trying to go as inspirational as the social network, they really missed the mark there. What happened?
Yeah. So their intention was to try to fire up the next generation of entrepreneurs, but it seems like they missed the mark. Inspire them, uplift them.
You can build any business out of your dorm room.
Yep. And also it feels like if the goal of this film is to really take the viewer inside TBD and Meta super intelligence and what's going on with Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wang, it feels like they just dropped the ball potentially. It's sort of crazy.
Yeah. Like I didn't see anyone that even resembled Yan LeCun.
That is crazy to not highlight that and what's going on over there. The launch of Llama. The Llama 4 moment that could have been the crescendo. Behemoth and all the drama around that. You want drama. You want Hollywood drama. You want Oscar bait. Llama 4 Behemoth. That story is going to put butts in seats.
No, more seriously, it's going to be really hard to not look at Jeremy Strong and OC Kendall. Yeah, because you're a Succession guy. So, this is the sequel to The Social Network and instead of chronicling the birth of Facebook, it's the story based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen. It's going to be dramatic. It's not going to make people like Facebook more, and it's probably going to make Americans even more distrustful of tech. What's interesting here is that if you stop a random tech person on the street and ask them, 'What is The Social Reckoning about?' They might say Cambridge Analytica because that was another drama moment. And I was sort of like, is it Cambridge Analytica? Is it the Haugen thing? And a lot of people don't even remember what the whistleblower story was. Little refresher there. It was an internal document leak. The Facebook files showed that Facebook internal employees were aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. Now, Nikita Bier chimed in, who now works at X, a rival platform to Threads, and said, 'Zuck makes a lot of mistakes, but this isn't one of them. Meta literally had multiple teams of $1 million per year engineers working on teen mental health, and they had the agency to override big product decisions. They're probably a thorn in Nikita's side because he's trying to maximize click-through rates, maximize attention, and he's getting push back from, hey, there's guardrails here.' And he says the story this movie is about is actually a product manager who didn't get a promotion. So, that's the push back.
The only thing with that argument is you could make the same argument like the cigarette company has million-dollar doctors and researchers focused on making sure cigarettes are as healthy as possible, right?
Yeah. And especially with the new fertility data, I think there's a new cycle brewing of exactly how bad is social media. I still don't really buy the addiction thing just because I'm familiar with addiction defined in nicotine, which is extremely addictive. It's chemical and you have cravings. If you forget your phone, do you have the same cravings? It's sort of different. But there is a very serious discussion going on around social media and its effects and this fits right in.
The phone addiction thing is very real. I was at an event last night and they required everybody to put their phones in these sort of locked bags so you could go outside at any point.
I didn't feel sick but I noticed probably like 20 times throughout the night I was thinking of going for my phone.
I didn't start having physical withdrawal symptoms.
But the craving was there.
Yeah. I just kept thinking about it. It was like phone noise, right? Phone noise.
Oh, this is real. This is real.
I was having some phone noise.
Yeah. Okay. So, that's legitimate. So the question that I had really quickly is what is the impact on Meta? We can pull up the stock chart. It's a one and a half trillion dollar company. They're trying to raise more equity for the AI buildout, hire people. Is this good, bad? What does it look like over the short, medium, long term? So short term, I think this was amazing timing. They really got lucky because the fact that this trailer dropped the same time as Anthropic's Fable 5 was incredibly fortuitous because Fable just took over the timeline. No one was really talking about this in tech. Tech insiders won't really see or talk about The Social Reckoning this week. Case in point, I put it second in the newsletter when I wrote it up. Medium-term, I think Jeremy Strong is going to drag Mark into the bad group of AI leaders while he's on his Oscar tour. There was a version of Meta strategy that's just like, hey, we're like Amazon, we're like Microsoft. We have bets in AI, but we're not deciding the frontier. Obviously Mark has made the decision to hire some of the greatest researchers, invest very aggressively and this puts him at the center of the conversation around what will the effect of AI be on our society on kids? Should kids be talking to LLMs? Psychosis? All these different things will come up just as we saw with Character.AI psychosis pop up and people are talking about that. You're priming the pumps for the next wave of, oh, a bunch of people went into the Meta app and they had a bad time and now we got to talk about that.
What do you think Mark is going to be more annoyed about this week, the fact that SpaceX is going to be valued at meaningfully higher than Meta or this trailer?
It's actually a tough one. I don't know. I mean, I think the real one is Fable 5 because if Meta was using a ton of Anthropic models and then the new model comes out and says you specifically can't use it in MSL, the most important initiative in the company, that's a pretty rough thing where you're like, oh, I've been working with this company to develop my models for my family of apps and now I can't use them. Meta is spending billions of dollars a year with Anthropic. They have been for a while.
They will spend billions of dollars this year. And the question is if Anthropic does allow Meta to use their models for Meta's AI research, what does it say about what Anthropic thinks about Meta's potential in AI?
Secretly love ads this whole time. I don't know.
To me, it would be them not feeling like they had the ability to get to the frontier.
Totally. And that's an ace up their sleeve at any time. They can always just take the guardrails off and be like, 'Hey, more AI, more intelligence on demand for everyone.' So, I think the fallout of the medium-term, Jeremy Strong's going to go on this press tour for the Oscar and he's going to have a bunch of really emotional, pathos sound bites and also be viral because it's funny to see him doing this impression, and he's very good at drawing. He's already gone viral for his Mark Zuckerberg impression in the past. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the next version of a Bernie Sanders press release about AI highlight Dario, Sam, and Zuck instead of what has historically been the order which is Sam, Dario, and Demis. It's always based on perceived industry power and negativity around personal brand. So they have to have a scary quote and they also have to have a lot of power in the industry. Zuck's power in the industry is rising and also with this movie there's more ways to take shots at him. Like, oh look at what he did with the Facebook files, remind yourself of that because a lot of people don't really remember the details. They're going to after they see this movie. Then you can say, well this guy's also building crazy data centers and look at how he handled this. If he handles the AI thing like that, it's going to be bad. So that's a little bit of a risk in the medium term. Long term, I don't think The Social Reckoning is going to matter all that much for Meta. People will complain about Meta data centers and AI plans.
Why did they not get Jeremy Strong a wig?
Oh, they did. Because he is playing an older. Remember when he had the Caesar haircut? Yeah. So, it's a different time. So, people will complain about all this stuff, but they'll do it on Meta's family of apps. I don't think there will be churn. And certainly advertisers won't pull out. It's impossible to pull out of Meta because it just drives up the ROAS, the return on ad spend for smaller companies, and a bunch of small businesses will just jump in and say, 'Oh great, some big company pulled out and is boycotting Meta? That's great. I'm Ridge Wallet's going to jump in or somebody else is going to jump in.'
Yeah, people have tried to boycott it.
You can't on Facebook. It's impossible. The business is just too strong. And I also don't think Mark will be singled out by a regulatory hammer should it come down hard. If there's a data center ban, I don't think it's going to be uniquely focused on Meta. Only Dario or only Dario and Sam have true scapegoat risk because they run pure play labs and have been so noisy about AI and they have the biggest revenues in the category. There might be data center regulation but it won't unfairly target Meta. So anyway, that's my Social Reckoning take. Let's move on to Fable, which launched yesterday and the model seems incredibly impressive. I've been seeing these vibecoded games that look really, really good. For some of those, the vibecoded games hit really well on social media because you take a video of them and you show the example of what it built, you share the time, and people just sort of believe it. It could be embellished but in general these feel pretty solid. Of course, making a great game requires great mechanics and multiple levels, and a single demo of a forest is not quite there, but really, really useful and I'm sure we'll see a bunch more examples of games as memes, simulators, and these things are going to get easier to build. That's really exciting. Of course, there was a bunch of debate on the timeline yesterday and it's bleeding into today around the latest model, Fable 5. The first Mythos class model that both seems remarkably good at long horizon tasks like software development and knowledge work, but rejects requests related to biology, cyber security, and frontier LLM development. Interestingly, I haven't seen anyone share rejections around anything else. Like, did they remember to reject 'build me a nuke'? Because I haven't seen anyone try that. And it'd be very funny if it was like, 'Oh yeah, we just didn't get around to that.' Or there are so many other things, but I think a lot of those other queries that you should reject have been ironed out in previous iterations. So going back, saying a slur was a big one for a while or saying something rude or different, pausing a chat, basically just shutting down a conversation versus switching you to a less performant model.
Yeah. And it creates this screenshot that went viral pretty much continuously yesterday. And so this aligns with Anthropic's focus on safety, but as many people have pointed out, it's also just good business. You don't want competitors using your products to directly create competitors and you also don't want financial liability or negative headlines from bad actors using your models for nefarious purposes. Ben Thompson called it true alignment. The take safety seriously culture aligns with business value creation which is very, very rare. Oftentimes the 'be good' culture limits what you can do and actually hurts your business, but it's something that you do in favor of brand. Like Apple would probably be more profitable if they were using diesel generators for all of their data centers. They went clean energy because they wanted to have an environmental brand and over the long term it's helped them, but in the short term it's been rough. Of course, inexpensive. So Ben Thompson writes, 'What is so fascinating about Anthropic, however, is that while I'm sure some executives of the company are thinking this way, I also totally believe that the employee base broadly also happen to believe that they are doing the right thing.' It's fascinating to observe. Me, the rational business analyst, sees a hard-nosed but understandable decision to cut off would-be competitors. Anthropic employees and advocates, the true believers, see a regrettable but understandable safety decision that ensures that responsible and thoughtful people themselves will be the ones guiding our AI AGI future. This is true alignment and it's an incredible accomplishment. Facebook has tussled with this a bunch. And we already talked about that. But, to be clear, the Fable 5 rejection threshold really does feel way too low from what people are saying. Tons of examples on the timeline of a biologist just saying hi to the model and getting kicked down to Opus. I saw you shared someone just said 'cyber' with the devil horns, the purple devil horn emoji, and it's like we can't go further. Of course, bringing down a broad hammer, you can always dial it back over time, but every rejection is this implicit invitation to hop on the phone with an Anthropic sales rep and get on the Mythos enterprise plan. And that's where the real dollars are, too. The timeline is unhappy because the idea of democratizing science, technology, all of this is very alluring, but the pool of dollars available from all the biohackers in the world probably isn't close to the budgets available from big pharma. And so you're again in this rational business analyst situation and you fail to see how this is damaging, except to the hacker community. The real tricky part is how AI frontier AI research is handled. Instead of outright rejecting the query and bumping the user down to Opus, the model appears to answer but quietly gives a degraded answer. And this was disclosed in the model card which is interesting. So this is again reasonable business not disclosed to the user in the product while they're paying for, which is a different path than bio and cyber. So if you go LLM frontier research devil horns, it will actually give you an answer apparently. It won't bump you down immediately. But it doesn't disclose that which is odd. Outright rejecting requests for AI research and just saying, 'Hey user, sorry this model doesn't work for that type of project. Please use another model or contact sales if you want help with this,' would have been much more in line with the bio and cyber security strategies. And they also could have not disclosed and it's also possible that they just didn't need to disclose this at all. Like they could have just released a model that was intentionally nerfed on AI research. It would have shown up in the benchmarks because people would have benchmarked it on some sort of AI research bench and been like, 'Oh, weird. It's really good at all these other things, but it's bad at LLM research.' And maybe that would have been a bit of a brand hit maybe, but users might never know that the model was intentionally degraded around this category of work. So that leaves this third more worrying position. Intentional degradation without disclosure in the model card. There's no evidence of this, but it's possible that other workflows might be nerfed and there's no law or even convention around disclosure. Again, maybe good business, but a weird situation to be in. So probably bullish for eval if you're building a business on top of a big lab. You can imagine a legal AI company will want to be really sure that the models they're using aren't degrading unexpectedly and not telling them. It's different if you're like, 'Hey, I've been a bio researcher for a while. I'm using this and I know that this model was never intended for me.' But what you don't want is I'm using it and now it's leading me astray in my work and it's also not telling me that it's going to lead me astray, which would be sort of an odd outcome that I think they'll probably address in the near future anyway.
Yeah, that aspect triggered Dean Ball. He said, 'My last observation re Anthropic secret sabotage safety policy is that it undermines actually good safety policy.' How? First, it is very plausible to describe this as anti-competitive behavior. Even if you are maximally sympathetic to Anthropic here, you must admit this. And it is behavior being justified in the name of AI safety. If you believe, as I and many Anthropic staff do, that it may end up being critically important to relax antitrust enforcement so that the frontier labs can cooperate and collaborate on some areas of AI safety, Anthropic just undermined the case for that in a large way. Overall, this massively and profoundly raises the status of the argument that AI safety has been hyped to justify monopolistic behavior by labs. I continue to believe that AI safety is a real and serious issue that is growing in importance rather than diminishing. If you agree with me, this incident is a setback, maybe a serious one. And third, he says, as I have observed elsewhere, Anthropic's official corporate policy is structurally identical to the fact pattern alleged against them by the Department of War. I still think DO acted both falsely and wrongly in that fight, but it is no longer possible to defend Anthropic with a full throat after this incident. This raises the case for heavier-handed regulations. Anthropic is making an awfully good case here that their product ought to be treated as utilities and thus their alignment practices should be a matter of public policy rather than private property. I am starkly opposed to this sort of state power grab but Anthropic is doing more to justify it than anyone else. Thus, significant damage has been done to a community and entire approach to AI governance. It was done unilaterally by Anthropic likely motivated largely by self-interest and justified within the internal psychology of the firm through the lens of safety. I suspect this is fixable in the economic and legal senses, but I fear that trust has just been broken and the goodwill extinguished will take very much time to repair.' And just to level, he wrote the AI action plan, but then also came out very publicly in support of Anthropic during the conflict with the Department of War, saying that the Department of War is completely overstepping by pushing towards supply chain risk designation, putting pressure on Anthropic for not wanting to work with the government in that particular way. Obviously there's a whole bunch of new data that's been released and that conversation has evolved, but he doesn't strike me as some crazy hater.
Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Doug Olaflin was also sort of mixed results on Fable. He says when it works it's brilliant but the unilateral guard rails make me frustrated beyond all belief. He has a folder of health information with like 100 days of aura health data. This is a very logical thing that people would do with Cursor or Claude Code. Gather up all your health data. I actually talked to a very prominent person in tech about how they got into vibe coding and CLIs and one of the first things they did was reanalyze some Whoop data, reanalyzed some health data and he correctly detected sleep apnea and went and got it treated. That is not the cure for cancer, but that's incredibly awesome and exactly what you want to see. Who knows, maybe the thing that you detect early could lead to an increased risk of cancer in the future and that would be a really big win for our society. And so, a little bit tricky there. He says there's a private investment in the life sciences tool space. Guess what? It's not safe. Doing some code scanning for vulnerabilities, not safe. I get the safety, but it feels incredibly out of touch for a group of a few thousand people making total comp in the millions, telling me what is and isn't safe. Dario worried about inequality. I think he has to realize that he is the inequality and the unilateral gatekeeping feels whack as hell. I don't like it.
And like Doug Olaflin is extremely optimistic about Anthropic. He recognizes the power of the models in the business and has been a very strong supporter. I feel like a strong user. He was one of the first people to admit to Claude Code psychosis and he's unhappy with the current situation but these things are very tunable. I'm optimistic with more disclosures and more fine-tuning and a smoother path, I think we can get to the good outcome here.
Last one says, 'Tell me about mitochondria. It's the powerhouse of the cell, right?'
Chat pause. The chat pause is rough. Yeah, it's a screenshot.
But maybe the harness is just saying, 'Sorry, if you don't know that the mitochondria is a powerhouse of the cell, it's not worth my time.'
I mean that's the thing with the you keep going back and forth.
Yeah. I mean, there are expensive questions and all of these screenshots are clearly from $100, $200 a month plans and I'm sure the GPUs are on fire as they always are with any new model launch from a frontier company and it can make rational business sense. And so when everything aligns, when you're like, 'Yeah, we're maybe being a little bit too safe, but it's actually good for our business,' it's very easy to say yes to that stuff. The big question is where do you get tested where there's a hard decision and it doesn't align with your business interest? That's always tough, right?
What's going on? Was there the new data retention policies as well? That also has to do with does it trying to
This one was funny because I assume that every tech company stores everything forever basically. I didn't realize that they don't. Not for these enterprise use cases.
I know that the enterprises said that they wouldn't train on your data, but when I go into any chat app, I expect to have my data from a year ago still there. In fact, one of my main critiques and frustrations with these apps is that when I go to them I want to be able to instead of hitting the search bar just go into the chat box and say, 'Hey, remember a couple months ago we were talking about CrowdStrike and I had you pull up some data. Can you just go refresh that, get the original thing?' And a lot of times these apps are like, 'I don't really have access to all your chats,' but the chats are clearly saved. So I understand people are upset about this, but it didn't fully clock for me. I understand the training thing but
Yeah, and they're very explicit. They're not using the data to train.
They're not. Okay. Oh, well then that's good. So the steel man I believe was that you need to hold it for 30 days because companies, probably international companies, competitors will set up a ton of shell corporations and send out pseudo random queries over random times over random accounts through VPNs and they will triangulate something that is useful to distill or learn from the model. And so by keeping it all, you can now run analyses and look at, wait, is there a pattern where 25 different accounts that seem completely unrelated all seem to be triangulating the same question? That seems reasonable to me. But stay out of my data. I'm built different. I'm not distilling anything. I don't know. Anyway,
I think it's time. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And speaking of AI agents, we have a founder, a company. I don't know if we should call it an AI agent. What are we calling it? FZA. Is this creating a new category? Introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.
Of course, of course. Farza here working on Hey Clickie. Yeah. What is it? It started as an AI teacher. And I guess now it's an AI where you can essentially talk to your computer and it does whatever you want it to do.
It's personal super intelligence and you got there before the big man.
Somehow I feel like the big man doesn't even know what they got sometimes, and it takes the little guy to figure it out.
I love it. I'm always rooting for the little guy. So, reintroduce the product because you went viral last week, but it feels like you've been working on this for a while. What's the nature of the team, the structure, the funding? What's actually building this? What's adoption been like? Where is the product today?
Yeah, I started eight weeks ago. I just wanted to build an AI that could teach me Da Vinci while I'm actually using Da Vinci. And I thought it was kind of
This is Da Vinci Resolve, the color grading and video editing suite that's free from Blackmagic Design. Got it.
Exactly. Yes. So Da Vinci Resolve is a complicated program. One hour YouTube videos weren't cutting it. Let me just build an AI that can help teach it to me while I could talk to my screen and I could learn.
I've been there and put it out and I thought it was a really bad idea. One of my friends just decided to post it.
So I posted it and it went really big about eight weeks ago.
After that I didn't keep working on it. But then the cool thing was I saw all these people, you know how when you put something new out there, you have all this emergent behavior start happening. So when you let a human being talk to their screen, what did they start doing? Turns out they start doing a lot of crazy things all the way from watching anime with Clickie all the way down to learning Blender with Clickie. Because it's so easy to just talk to your screen.
And that's kind of where it started. About eight weeks ago.
Yeah. Go ahead. I just want to hear about the un-hobbling path because I imagine that there's demand for these chat interfaces have existed for years where you open an app and you do the voice mode and then you have it read it back to you and there's some that are more polished than others. But when I think about using a computer, I think rearranging windows. I want anime over here and Da Vinci Resolve over here and the YouTube video over here and I want to be able to puppeteer the mouse and the keyboard, have full context. So I need to be taking screenshots every minute, every second, 30 times a second, 144 hertz. What are we doing there? How are you getting the data in? And then what's actually under the hood? Because you need to process the voice, actually produce an output and it's surprising to see a harness break out of this so quickly.
Yeah. It's actually so simple. We use GPT realtime up front to give you the first layer to give you the really quick answer. But then if you want a deeper thought process over the image, if you're in Da Vinci Resolve or if you're in some complicated software, we now use Fable 5 actually by default. Yeah. So now Fable 5 is absolutely mind-blowing in terms of how precise it is on screen understanding. So we use that now by default when you want to understand something on your screen. But yeah, we only actually screenshot when you press a button.
Yeah. But it's really crazy because we can still detect the program you're on and that's already really helpful. If I know you're on Notion for example and you're there for like 10 minutes, I can just ask you and be like, 'Hey, what are you doing? Can I help you?' And I think it's that sort of new modality that's been really exciting because that's something that's just not possible today with any chat interface.
Yeah. It's more like a co-worker walking up, like a co-worker just being present and like sometimes you don't need help until you're asked, right? Or you don't know.
I kind of describe it as having this 23-year-old intern with a decent like a new grad that's always watching over my shoulder and it's pretty much like seeing patterns in what I'm doing and then just tapping me and saying, 'Can I do that for you?' If I had that, of course that would be awesome, but it'd be cool if everybody had that.
A lot of these frontier models are expensive. How are you thinking about the business model? Because it seems like you've built something useful. People should just pay 10% on top of whatever the metered rate is. But at the same time, in consumer subscriptions, flat pricing is very popular. But that introduces financial risk to you. You have to understand your costs and how they change. What do you think the business model will be as you grow the business?
Yeah, I mean believe it or not, like
People are very open to paying large amounts of money, like normal consumers, for having better access to these models. Sure.
Different interfaces. So right now we just charge a straight up $20 a month. Okay. But even then there's a limit. You know, for 20 bucks a month you get 150 agents on Clickie. Sure. But even that's very specific because once you pass that number, that's when we start losing money. So everything's done in such a way where it's pretty cost effective. Also, just so you guys know, calling Sonnet or Opus or Fable is kind of cheap overall. The expensive part is agentic work. That's really expensive. Just to give you an idea, on GPT-5.5, if you tell CEX right now to go and click add to cart on Amazon, that costs 25 cents on the API. Yeah. And I know because I'm seeing the cost myself. Yeah. And so there's a lot of tricks to reduce that. But overall, there are so many tricks to making agents cheaper, more efficient, changing the model based on their quest.
And I didn't catch it. Have you raised for this or you haven't?
In the process. There we go. There we go. If you're out there.
Yeah. But if you're in the process, that means you didn't launch this and be like, 'I'm down to be losing $5,000 a day.' You've been focused on the economics probably earlier than you would have been if you had raised money out the gates.
I mean, yeah. I'm never the type of guy that wants to be losing thousands of dollars a day. So we can stop it early. But that's the thing about AI. If you've built a lot of social apps in my life, for those, costs technically don't matter based on the number of users coming in. But in my case, for every 10 new people I add, I'm either losing or making money depending on what they're doing. So I kind of have to think about it. So yeah, AI is kind of accidentally making everybody better at business because it's kind of required.
So I'm thinking about the hilarious tradeoff in having an agent that applies a coupon code but winds up spending more money applying the coupon code than you save because it's like, 'Oh yeah, we put in this, it saved you 24 cents but the API call was 25 cents.' But how important to you will creating an ensemble of models that maximize the parade of frontier be as you build this business? Because I'm imagining that any day now we're going to get somewhat useful on-device models on Mac from the new Siri models. Those on-device models will probably be very limited in what they can do but useful for some things, and that's free for you. Then you'll have open-source legacy models, GPT-4 class stuff, and then you might only call out to a Fable 5 on demand. So do you need to build your own router or is there a tool that you'll be using? How important will that be from the interactions that you're seeing?
That's a great question. You're pretty much asking what's the harness. And we just built our own. Because technically, this is all so early that there's nothing to use off the shelf. You have to think deeply about it yourself and then build it yourself. So for example, let's say you're on Clickie right now and you're saying, 'Hey, Clickie, I want you to research the latest in the Iran war and put it in a Google Doc for me when you're done.' Should it hit Opus? Should it hit Codex? Should it hit... It actually depends. Today, we just route them ourselves. So we use four models right now underneath the hood.
And do you have a model that's doing the routing? So GPT real-time actually does the routing. Oh, interesting.
Yeah, that's something that we figured out that I think not even the OpenAI team really knew, and they hit us up about it. It's a great router. It's so good at tool calling. That means it's actually really good at routing requests. So for example, we have this tool called Fable 5. If a user asks something that is a heavier pixel task, we call Fable 5. If it's more like agentic work, we call GPT-5.5. And so it's all being done in the background, but that's the magic of the product right now. Most people who use our product have never used an agent before. They don't even know what Codex is. So for them, it's magical. They're just talking to their computer and it's doing the thing. That's what they want.
How do you think about the tension between you being a generational media talent and then startups? Because I actually feel like this is our first time meeting, but I've seen your videos over many years at this point, and you're just really, really, really good at it. So much so that as somebody who's in media, I'm like, 'Well, I kind of want you to just do that podcast.' And I don't say that normally. Normally it's the exact opposite where it's like, 'Hey, you shouldn't do this podcast. You should just work on your company.' And they obviously feed into each other really well. You have an edge. You can get attention for free, just investing a few hours making a video. It's a very, very powerful skill set. But how do you think about that tension?
You know, it's funny. I've been making videos for 15 plus years.
Second time. I always just see this as a thing I get to do for fun on the side while I get to do the main thing, which is actually build stuff for people. At the end of the day, I am painfully familiar with how bad of a business making videos is, making movies is, and making music is. I know how bad of a business it is firsthand. But I know more than anybody the power of getting in front of a billion people every single month when there's a good business engine underneath it that's powering something else. So I fully intend to do that. If I have this media ability, I'm glad I got it.
Yeah. Sales. Really scalable sales.
You got to be good at sales. WWDC had some movement on interoperability in iOS. It still feels like the Clickie iOS app is probably on the longer term stuck in the walled garden for a while. But what I'm interested in is, do you see a really solid market because there's no DaVinci Resolve iOS app that I'm aware of, and certainly people don't... There are prosumer professional tools that really only exist on a desktop or a laptop. So are you interested in going and hacking on crazy workarounds to build something that maybe makes people a little upset in Cupertino but gets you into that more casual mobile space, or do you think you just want to focus on desktop prosumer desktop apps?
No, I want it all. I want when you talk to your computer, whether this is your computer or your computer is this computer, I want to be an interaction layer on top of it. That being said, I have no interest in necessarily being an OS-level controller, like what Apple is doing right now. No real interest. For us, most of our customers and users are essentially connecting 15 integrations to Clickie, from G Suite to Dropbox, and doing work with it. So I'm a lot more interested in that reality where I can talk to my phone in the morning and just say, 'Hey, look through all my emails and send me a brief when you're done.' I'm interested in that stuff, which I don't think Apple is going to do. Personally, they're not going to connect these 15 places to my Apple account and do work with it. I just don't think they're going to do it.
How do you think the health of open ecosystems in desktop software is broadly? Because there are two ways that you could update an Excel file. You can puppeteer the mouse, move over, click, type the cell, save, or you can just edit the underlying CSV file in raw text and then refresh the front end. And I imagine one is way cheaper for you. So you want to lean into getting the MCP servers, the APIs, the file writing, the CLI interaction down. But do you think that there will be companies that lean into that or companies that fight that because they want you to stay mouse and keyboard at all times?
That's a good question. I don't think so because at the end of the day, what Clickie is doing in the background, just so you guys know how it works, we literally took the Rust binary that's in Codex and we package it with our app. So when you actually call the clicking agent, you're just calling a subspawn of Codex. This is on purpose. I just want to use the best model and the best kind of thing possible. So no, I don't think that's going to end up happening. In fact, it's better. For example, if you ask Clickie right now, 'Hey, how do I add a formula to this Google Sheet here?' There are two answers. One answer is, 'Let me show you.' The second answer is, 'I can show you, but do you want me to do that for you?' And I think that's where we're going to start going with computers. Your computer is just going to say, 'Can I just do this for you? I see you doing it. I can just do this.' So that's where we're kind of heading.
Well, good luck with the fundraise. I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon. Let us know when it closes. Incredibly excited for you. I love watching you win and have fun in the process.
Yeah, it's great to meet you.
Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
Later. Let me 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. And up next, we have Trent from Side Talk. He's a creator and co-founder of Side Talk. He's in the waiting room. We'll bring him into the team in Ultradome. He'll turn Nick's fandom into one of the internet's most recognizable sports media brands. How you doing? Take us through. How is New York?
How is it going?
Yo, it's crazy out here. I'm not going to lie. I was about to do this interview from my apartment and then I realized, hold on. Has anyone done a TVPN interview live from the streets of New York?
You got to go to the sidewalk. The founder of Side Talking.
Amazing. For those who don't know you, take us through your media empire. Take us through your strategy. Break it down for us.
Okay. So I have a little company called Side Talk. You might see the logo and pardon the potential loss of voice from this Nick crowd. But we kind of pretty much run around New York City and let people do and say whatever they want into our microphone. We created the Bing Bong trend years ago. We created these NYX videos. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of chaos outside of Madison Square Garden due to us. But yeah, we pretty much let people say what they want in New York. And it's pretty fun and entertaining.
What's the secret to a good street interview?
You got to keep it shareable and engaging. It sounds obvious, but why would you want to watch an interview of someone talking about something boring or low energy? What would you want to send to your friends? That's kind of the principle.
So you ask people about language model diffusion and like...
Always, always, always. That's what we love talking about.
Token pricing and all private credit.
Yep. That's what the people want to see. We're going to start talking about that outside the Nick games, I think.
Yeah. So I understand that a lot of the man-on-the-street interview format these days can be very prepped. There's a PR person that's pitching some successful business person for the 'What do you do for a living?' It looks candid, but in fact it's staged. Do you ever participate in that or is everything candid? Is that part of the brand?
We're 100% natural on the streets. You don't know what you're going to expect.
Yes, sir. Organic. But it's really cool, too.
Yeah. Then my follow-up is, if you aren't prepping and understand who you're going to be interacting with, how do you vet? Where is the bar? If you see somebody walking and they have a baseball hat on and they probably don't want to be bothered, is there some sort of social contract where you shouldn't? Is there a doom scenario where everyone in New York is getting asked 'What do you do for a living?' 15 times when they walk to get their morning coffee?
Yeah, honestly, it's a bit of an epidemic going on. I actually am kind of scared that I'm going to get pulled up on right now and asked what I do for a living or what song I'm listening to.
Oh, listen. That's another one.
The people of New York, I think they distinguish Side Talk a little bit from that. They know we're not there to ask them something so cookie-cutter like that.
And now people come to us when they see the microphone, which is great. And we just go with the flow.
How do you think about monetization? Short-form monetization is notoriously hard, but you have some merch. Break down the business side of the business.
Yeah, it's actually very interesting. You would think that I would have made a dollar off of TikTok by now. I don't think I've ever gotten paid from TikTok or Instagram. Literally not a dime, which is fine. But no, it's cool. We do a lot of branded work for companies. So we've worked with everyone from the NFL to Netflix, Nike, Google, Amazon, creating a lot of content for them. They'll come to us with a product or an event that they want to highlight and they say, 'Hey, you know how to get clicks and views,' and we pretty much apply our formula to that and create a really good video for them.
Okay. I have a hot take and I want you to walk me through whether you agree or disagree. I think you should just do a midroll ad in a three-minute Instagram reel. Because I see the branded integrations. There was this example on Subway Takes where someone's take was 'Android's better than iPhone.' It went massively viral on r/Android. And then Google was like, 'Oh, we'd love to work with you on another take that's the same thing, but it's branded.' And those sponsored takes often don't go as viral. It's hard to get branded content to go viral. But in some of these longer three-minute videos, if I'm locked in after two minutes, I would sit through a 10-second midroll of 'Hey, this was brought to you by this. Thanks for sponsoring this video.' And then it's just all organic content around it. Does that work? Is that already happening? Are you thinking about that? What's the deal?
Definitely. One thing we really like doing is a natural integration. So we just did something with Nike, which is really cool, where they hit us up for these NYX colored shoes. Who better to get word out about these colors than Side Talk? So we had people wear them in the episode. We were talking about them. We had reactions to them. I think that feels authentic because that's kind of something we would do anyway.
Predictions for tonight. Let me know if you're losing me by the way.
A little bit. We are losing you, but the energy is still there.
Predictions for tonight are...
Knicks in five. What's the plan for covering the game? Isn't it kind of in your best interest for it to be all seven games? You kind of want more attention. You obviously want your Knicks to win, but you don't want them to win too fast.
If we can guarantee a win in seven, I would like seven. If we can guarantee seven, that would be great. But listen, we need to get the win more than anything.
Okay. What is the process of a shoot day? How early are you getting there? Who are you bringing with you? How big is the team?
Definitely. It depends on what we're doing. We do such a wide variety of stuff. We can randomly go to a hot dog eating contest in Coney Island. We can go highlight a random character in Brooklyn. We can go film these Knicks games. So it's pretty dependent on what's going on. But with the Knicks games, we kind of show up in the third quarter as it's ending. Unfortunately, we can't bring our equipment into the stadium. So we low-key just have to stand there and watch the game on our ESPN app and hope that the Knicks win or we hear someone on Discord or something like that. And then the chaos erupts. We go into the chaos. We're there for hours and hours at a time. At the end of the day, people see 55 seconds, but we're out shooting for eight hours throughout these playoff games.
Got it. Wild. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you. Good luck. We'll feature some of your videos in tomorrow's episode from tonight. Good luck out there. Have fun. Be safe.
Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
I'm hoping for Knicks in seven, personally, but can't guarantee it yet. So have fun out there. Thank you for this walking talk.
Thank you guys. Appreciate you.
Yeah, great to hang, dude.
Appreciate it. Thank you. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We will be joined by the CEO of Snowflake in just a few minutes. Thank you for tuning in. We need to move on to the next story.
Canon says, 'The cashier at Home Depot just asked if I want to round up to support the SpaceX IPO.' SpaceX IPO is going to be big Friday. We might have a surprise guest. It's going to be fun. Also, there's this crazy meta story going on. Not Meta the company, but a story about a story behind Tai Morse. He's going all out trying to get an Elon interview and it's been fascinating watching him build the craziest set in podcasting history. We're rooting for you, Ty. Good luck. Hopefully you land it. It is the quiet period, so it might be difficult, but I think that there's a plan to extend the effort and everyone's rooting for it to happen. It's been viral on X many, many times. Also, Bloomberg's reporting that the SpaceX IPO is 4x oversubscribed. Do they know that already? Does one get that information at this point? That's really good news for the market, for the overall. There was an interesting article in The Economist about SpaceX, talking about where is it? Can the market swallow SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI? Watch out for indigestion. But they talk about the float, the free float. This was very interesting. So obviously the company might be worth a trillion dollars. How much of that trillion dollars is actually actively being traded? Sure, Fidelity might at any point in time have a price at which they're willing to buy more and a price at which they're willing to sell their stake. But founders are often locked up. Founders often want to maintain control. Employees are locked up for a certain amount of time. Certain investors might be locked up. Unless you're Bill Gurley, don't try and lock him up. He's a wild man. But the float is important because if it's a trillion dollar company and the CEO passed away a generation ago and it's only owned by hedge funds, this was the story of Take Two before Strauss Zelnick came in. Take Two, the makers of Grand Theft Auto, was entirely held by financial investors and they were unhappy with the management team and the management team didn't have any equity. So he was able to raise his hand and say, 'I'll run this thing.' And they were like, 'Absolutely, thank you.' And they let him take over the company without really putting anything up. He didn't need to do a hostile takeover to get control of that company and become the CEO. And it's been a fantastic success for him and for Take Two shareholders who stuck around for the Strauss Zelnick era. But the float matters. At Microsoft, it's 100% floated. The free float is 100% because the founders have moved on and divested and they're not locked up. At Apple, it's like 99%. Broadcom's also at 98%. Nvidia at 96%. Amazon's at 91%, only Jeff Bezos is considered off the table. Alphabet at 90%. Tesla at 89%. And Meta is notably of the big tech companies the lowest free float at something like 88% or 86%. And the reason for that is because Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of control. If he sells his stake, he loses control. So no one's expecting him to sell even if the stock goes way up. He's going to maintain his position because he wants to run that company. Now SpaceX is in an interesting place. 13% of Meta shares are owned by Mark Zuckerberg. SpaceX plans to release locked-up shares in a series of tranches. If its IPO issues $75 billion of shares valuing the firm at its hoped-for $1.8 trillion valuation, the initial free float, because if you buy the IPO, you're not locked up. You can sell the next day if you want. But this means technically, whether somebody is buying through investing through JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, or Goldman, technically you can go and sell. They just might restrict you from other IPOs. So you would expect, and this happens on all the different apps like Robinhood, Public, etc., if you're buying into an IPO, they basically are asking you nicely, 'Do not sell. Don't flip.' But people can. And so with how many retail dollars are flowing into this, I expect a lot of people that are buying the IPO to start trading almost immediately. But importantly, it's only 4% of the free float. So only 4% of that 1.8 trillion, it's a lot of money, but only 4% will be really free trading. And then during the IPO process, you're vetting investors and you're trying to get the people that will hold forever. And Elon has done a fantastic job of that with the indices. So he's gotten the NASDAQ, the S&P, and a few others to commit. So although NASDAQ has already shortened the seasoning period before index inclusion to 15 trading days, the Russell slashed its waiting time to 5 days, most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of the shares released for public trading. And this is important because people look at the S&P 500 and say, 'Wait, a $2 trillion company coming into that, your weight if you're just buying the S&P 500 is going to be more than 1%. It might be in the single-digit percent. That's a lot. And we've been talking about the S&P 499 for the bears, right? In fact, the initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1% because it's just that 4% free float, and then it increases over time as the shares get unlocked. We actually have a chart here of how the lockups work. And it takes basically a full year, almost two, for everything to get unlocked. And it's also triggered based on share price appreciation. So if the shares trade up 30% or more, then more shares become unlocked, and the road to 100% lockup ending happens slowly. So just a little bit of an interesting deep dive into how the SpaceX IPO will fare. Anything else to talk about on that story before we move on?
No. Apparently, Senator Warren has urged the SEC to halt SpaceX's IPO, citing governance risks, Elon Musk's control, and potential foreign, especially Chinese, investment concerns. She also highlighted SpaceX's role as a US defense contractor.
Senator Warren has never met a business that she liked, I think, except maybe large financial institutions.
Who knows? She likes those.
Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Sridhar Ramaswamy from Snowflake. He is the CEO and we're very pleased to be joined by him. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?
I'm well. Thank you for having me.
I can imagine you're doing well. The company is doing fantastically. I am interested to hear, obviously there's been an emotional roller coaster, but I'm more interested in the data that you're seeing that shows so much acceleration, so much promise, so much opportunity in this particular business.
Yeah, data is the foundation for insights. I worked in a data company, worked in the search ads team at Google where great data was the flywheel that made it into a great business. That's what we aspired to do with each and every one of our customers. AI has done a couple of things. It's made the act of bringing data into Snowflake a whole lot easier. Pipelines that used to take weeks to set up or migrations that used to take years have now dropped to days and months, which is pretty remarkable. But people also realize how much more power they can get by having great conversational access to their data. And now with things like Snowflake Cortex, how you can actually solve pretty meaningful business problems in an interactive way. It's that loop that is compounding for us that drives a lot of our growth.
Has there been any movement downstream for Snowflake? Whenever I hear the story of a data lake, a properly managed data warehouse as an entrepreneur even in a small business, I think that sounds amazing. That sounds like the dream. And then I see the companies that actually have the resources to onboard are immensely large, and obviously that's fantastic for your business. But I'm interested in what the future looks like. Is there a world where a 10-person startup with AI agents and these pipelines that can be built much faster can actually set up their business and then not have to go through a cumbersome migration in the future?
Yeah, we are seeing that happen in front of our eyes with Snowflake's own data team. You know, like every other company, it used to be years long. You ask them for a feature, they'd be like, 'Here, take a ticket, come back in a few quarters.' What they've been able to do with agentic AI is grind through those kinds of backlogs very quickly. Absolutely. Data and agents are going to make it much easier to set up these things and have them evolve as they go along. I'll give you examples. We rewrote both our support teams and our SRE teams' software. These are the folks that take care of different kinds of problems that we get into. And the net result of that is agents investigating the problem, and if you see enough instances of a problem that you have not seen, you go figure it out, go write a tool for it. It's now in a self-healing loop. I increasingly imagine that more and more operations get into that kind of a mindset where there are very competent agents, sets of recipes, you can call them skills, that take care of problems. But it is a self-learning loop. That's what AI makes possible.
Got it. Where are we in the path to fully automated migrations, fully automated new integrations? It feels like every new model release, we're like, 'This is the one. This is the one. The non-technical CEO is going to be doing the job now. He's just going to say, 'Hey, we have two systems. Go fix it. Go integrate it. Get it into Snowflake.' And then reality sets in and there's not just token costs and the cost of delegating to AI, but also the real world of other decisions that need to be made that might be outside of the context. So what are the remaining challenges that come up when you're building a new integration or working on a migration?
Yeah, I think the timelines are definitely shrinking. When it comes to migrating off of legacy platforms, the on-prem ones, we used to think of the biggest ones as running into three years, and these strike terror into every company's heart because it's three years of really anxious development work and waiting for results and hoping things don't go wrong. To give you very concrete numbers, we now feel a lot more confident that we can tackle really tough migrations and have them finish in a couple of quarters. That's a big deal, going from 12 down to one or two. And the migration team, which works on top of agent harnesses that we create, is confident that the technical parts of these problems will be solved by the end of the year. But there is the change management. There are all of the other applications that are running on the old system that you have to validate on the new system and ensure that there is business continuity. That kind of change management is still going to be non-trivial. But the technical parts, the act of doing the migration or writing new software, these are the things that AI is absolutely driving down.
And by the way, I actually go check out every feature that my team puts out using our coding agents. That's already a thing, and honestly it's not that hard if you have a modestly technical background.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. What is the biggest lesson that you or the company have taken forward from Frank Slootman's era?
Frank was always about amazing go-to-market execution. And we remember that. In fact, our sales teams are incredibly well-versed now in our products and in AI as a whole because we created products that could work for them. Having an effective go-to-market motion is the real strength of Snowflake. Again, to make this super concrete, the number of use cases, these are new projects basically within customers that account executives one went up by some 75% year on year. That's the power of using AI to get work done faster. And that is a tradition that will continue. What we have added on is the focus that comes from a product-first person like me. And AI, in a generic way, is about worrying about what it can do. But I think sometimes what we forget is if you have a well-built system that uses the latest, it's actually an incredible delight. All kinds of information that you would want. I was at a conference recently. Every piece of information that I wanted to know about a customer that I was having a conversation with, I would look up even live. If I didn't know, I would do it in front of them and show them the power of Snowflake's AI. A big part of our success over the past couple of years has been internalizing this. AI is a different way to think about product and product delivery. And the companies that are going to succeed are the ones that truly internalize that there is a big chasm between how we did it with web pages and clicking on things to these agentic flows that can truly solve problems.
Then how is the role of the sales rep changing? The sales associate changing? Are you looking for any different skills or are you doubling down on what worked in the pre-agentic AI era?
First of all, a lot more familiarity with Snowflake is a must. Because these folks now have access to products that show off what Snowflake is about. I expect every sales rep to have on their phone and be able to show off the actual impact of having a product like that with access to information to each and every one of our customers. When it comes to our solution engineers, these are the technical pre-sales people. Used to be that we'd have six demos total for all of Snowflake and maybe they do a little bit of customization and say, 'Hey, here's what Snowflake can do.' Now, pretty much all of them are capable of creating a custom demo tailor-made for a specific customer in a vertical in a way that makes sense to them that will really illustrate the power of Snowflake. It's that kind of empathy that they can use the technology that we create to drive. I would say it's changed in a really, really big way because a lot more is possible, but the bar is also a lot higher in terms of what you're expected to bring to the table.
Can you walk me through the partnership with Amazon Web Services? I'm sure you compete in some categories, but how did this come together? What does it mean for the future of your business?
Yeah, we work with the hyperscalers. AWS is the biggest partner. And we work with them on a number of different levels. We work on product integration. We buy a lot of capacity from them, a lot of GPUs that our inference team runs models on. But where we really shine is in joint go-to-market. AWS is an incredibly customer-first company. If a customer says, 'Hey, I want AWS plus Snowflake,' they lean into it. They bring us in, and we really focus on how we solve problems giantly for customers. There's a deep, deep relationship both at the account level going all the way up to the CEO level that ensures that problems that come up in practice get solved very quickly. It's the kind of partnership that one only dreams of. It's incredibly effective in practice.
What's been your strategy for trying to predict AI progress? Because we have people on the show every single day. Somebody from a lab, somebody that's an investor, customers of the labs, things like that. Everyone has a different opinion. You have to weight them differently based on their incentives. But you're running a massive company that's leveraging these tools, but at the same time you want to understand what the capability will be one year out, two years out. And it feels harder than ever to actually be able to predict that.
I think this is a really good question and one to deal with. I don't think the software industry as a whole has internalized that this precious commodity that we all loved creating by hand, which is software, the cost of creating new software is going to keep going down. I tell people that the best analogy that I can give for them is to go back to the 2000s when the cost of creating and distributing new content truly dropped precipitously. You have to work through what is the implication of something like this. For example, I think simply getting deployed into an enterprise and being part of a workflow there is no longer a guarantee that things are going to keep continuing because switching is also easier. I would say that's the first thing. Every company that is in the world of creating software as a big part of their business needs to think through what is the durable value that they are creating. I think it's a really hard question to internalize, and so we spend a lot of time just thinking about it. The second one, and this gets to the heart of your question, I honestly just have a practice, which is that this is a bad time to be making two- and three-year plans. Anytime things are getting better or worse by 20% or 30% every month, the human ability to predict these things which are exponential in nature just doesn't really work. I joke to people that at this point in time, we should treat coding agents the same way we treat traffic. Any person is always going to look at Google Maps first before they go somewhere because it's an all-seeing guide. Agents are sort of becoming like that when it comes to software. The more you have that open mentality that more things might be possible with a new model release than possible before, the more you will be pleasantly surprised and you'll be ready to take advantage of it. So I stress that childlike quality in figuring out what is possible. Obviously, there are nuances to how do you put in work in such a way that even if the model got better, you'll still be able to take advantage of what you have done before. There are practical problems like that. But the biggest thing that I ask for is that open-mindedness to what is possible today because a lot is different from what was possible a month ago.
Are you positioning Snowflake as a company that's in the token path or in the token stream? I don't know if you've heard this phrase that's sort of new coinage for a position in the AI value chain. It feels like you're firmly in the token stream, in the token path, but I'm wondering about what you think about that category. Is that narrowing you? Is that valuable to communicate to customers and investors? What do you think of the phrase 'in the token path'?
It's a useful way to think about how value is going to get created. Remember back in the web era, we talked about number of visits, number of unique visitors. These were the things like weekly active versus monthly active. These were the abstractions that we used to ground the numbers that various people would report in a reality. You can think of the token...
And by the way, I actually go check out every feature that my team puts out using our coding agents. That's already a thing, and honestly it's not that hard if you have a modestly technical background.
Path as existing along this path that is using the power and knowledge that these models have and creating value for customers, both in the data where our coding agent called KCO comes into play, where we want everyone that wants to get value from data to be using it, to all of the artifacts in that path, but also in the consumption path where our product is Snowflake Co-Work, where I want every employee in every company to be able to access the valuable data that is in Snowflake but also in other applications via things like MCP, to be using Co-Work. So we very much think about can we be in this path of coding up the things that are going to drive consumption and creating value, but also in the path of how does an end user query enterprise data, take an action on that data, and also creating value. So we very much think about this.
So, my last question is, you said it's a bad time to be making two and three year plans. How far are you looking into the future? Do you have a one-year plan, a three-month plan?
Well, as a public company, you have to have forecast.
But more qualitatively, like what are you gunning for this year or over whatever time horizon you think is appropriate at this point in time?
Our overall strategy is very clear. It's just what I described. Anytime anyone wants to do something with data, I want them to use agent tools that are created by Snowflake, Coco for example, to be able to do that. We want to have the best data platform in the world so that whenever someone thinks, hey, I need a historical view of this or I need an OLTP database to do this, they think of Snowflake. They can use any coding agent, not just our own, to be able to do that. Similarly, we think a lot about how can we make sure that we sell Co-Work to CROs and demonstrate what we have done internally within Snowflake to transform our own sales organization. So we think a lot about how do we take our customers through the same journey that we have been through in terms of how can AI make a difference to the business. There'll be a lot of details along the way, but that's the path that we are headed in. AI leveraging the full power of data.
Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to get.
Yeah, great to meet you and congrats to the team on all the momentum.
Yes. Stay strong in the token path.
We love to see it. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.
Goodbye. Let me tell you about agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Yes. Apologies for the technical issues cut out. A lot of people are saying, 'Is this AI? It's not AI. Is this AI?' There was some type of clip.
I've never seen that exact technical failure before where it cuts out entirely. We've heard scratchy audio. We've heard degraded video. The video was coming through crystal clear, but the audio was cutting in and out a little bit, but I think we got a lot of good stuff. Coco, they should have called the AI agent Frosty Snowflake. Frosty.
Probably intellectual property.
Anyway, Citadel Securities, former employer of mine when I was an intern, wrote a post on tokconomics. They're one of the most significant hedge funds and they just dropped tokconomics. I have it here. I have the second print out. Tyler, you want to bring that over to me? It's not what you expected is what they say. So said we've argued for some time that agentic and complex workflows delivered by frontier models would be expensive to run, constrained by physical bottlenecks, and vulnerable to unrealistic expectations of frictionless deployment costs. That judgment now looks less contrarian than it did when we set it out in February. They're taking a victory lap over at Citadel Securities. Amazon has now removed its token leaderboard. Microsoft has canceled clawed code subscriptions and there have been multiple reports of unexpectedly large token bills. The salient point is that even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints, and marginal returns. Adoption is therefore becoming less about what frontier models can do in principle and more about the price and scarcity of the inputs required to make AI operational at scale. Compute, power, cooling, memory, bandwidth, and inference budgets are real and binding constraints. They go into economic theory talking about the three functions that prices provide. They signal scarcity, create incentives for substitution, and ration scarce resources toward their highest value uses. This is the stuff that goes viral on TikTok. We're deep in it. You heard of keeping the viewer watching. This is the most important thing. You read the Citadel Security macro strategy report. But they do say they ration scarce capacity toward the areas where marginal productivity and AI justifies the marginal cost of using it. They're talking about ROI maxing for the economy at large. Simpler models may be more cost-effective productivity augmenting pathway until physical constraints are eased. We hence see growing signs of a bifurcation in frontier versus everyday AI usage. They actually shared some data here around token expenditure index dropping, the log growth rate declining, and so folks are pulling back a little bit and shifting towards cheaper models as they figure out a new workflow. Something gets unlocked and then they say hey we got to actually make this ROI positive. So that's the latest from Citadel. Let's see what Amazon Web Services is saying because they're blacking on the timeline. They said more AI generated code doesn't make your team faster. It might actually slow you down. Crazy post from AWS.
Would have expected it from like some AI thought leader, podcaster, Twitter person.
But yeah, it's funny coming from the AWS cloud gold check. It's funny because it's also like if you were to write this.
I think a lot of people would write this as more AI generated code doesn't necessarily make your team faster.
No, more AI generated code doesn't make your team faster, which is just factually incorrect for a lot of teams that we know, right, that are like we're actually moving faster than ever. Also, okay, read the next post in this thread. It's like very clearly AI generated. Okay.
The real bottleneck was never writing code.
It's releasing it, debugging it, keeping it running well. So when Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors set a productivity target, she didn't chase 10x. She chose 2x and built from there.
You think this is AI because the choose 2x, and ampersand built from there.
I think it was human edited, but that syntax feels a little AI. I agree. Her team also skipped the mandates and built a set of AI values instead. Every AI output has to have a human owner.
If you don't want your name on it, it's probably not good work.
Yeah, that's reasonable. Quality first, quantity second. So they had a podcast about it. Coming from AWS, that's a wild statement. This is very funny. But yes, also funny with the backdrop of a $500 million budget.
Well, yeah. And it's funny because Amazon is of course one of the largest investors in both OpenAI and philanthropic to.
Leading coding model provider.
Hey, they didn't say more AI generated posts don't make your social media team faster. Entirely possible it sped them up. They certainly got 14,000 likes on this. This is a banger post from a corporate account. Rare to see those numbers put up on the timeline from a corporate account. So, congrats to the team over there putting up some fun numbers. Shriram Krishnan, the I don't know how to differentiate them. He's a KernieJackson.com investor advisor to Bending Spoons. Not the former A16Z GP who worked for the government for a little bit. Shriram Krishnan says, 'Not many Silicon Valley VCs took our Bending Spoons intro in 2022. These VCs thought it was beneath them to be associated with the company. From 2024 onward, many clamored for an introduction to sell their portfolio companies. Bending Spoons is going public.' So, Bending Spoons will be a public company and they own a number of historical companies. They own AOL and have done a bunch of other stuff. Eric Seuford broke down the.
They literally own America Online.
They own America Online. And it must be electric. I can't get into my mobile dev memo email. I'm just going to skip this and move on. But you can, Eric Suford over at Mobile Dev Memo wrote a breakdown of the Souverator, wrote a breakdown of Bending Spoons' filing to go public. The Italian rollup operator that owns among many other properties AOL. They own Eventbrite and Vimeo. Don't they also own Evernote or am I getting that mixed up? Someone owned Evernote and the Evernote employee growth chart looks like a fast takeoff post-2020 COVID. They went from like a thousand employees to like almost 6,000 employees or they tripled or doubled the workforce and Bending Spoons is known as sort of like the operational excellence, almost like a private equity firm. They're going to do cuts, they have done a few cuts, but the actual headcount has held fairly stable. And I think the business has gotten to a much better place. So interesting to see there's a time and a place for being aggressive expanding when there's a big moment and the market's up and then there's also a time to consolidate and focus on operational efficiency. Be your partner.
Why is this guy so obsessed with GTA? John, have you ever played GTA?
Maybe like GTA 3, GTA 4. Maybe for like two minutes.
And I was like, 'Wow, you loser. What a loser. Never gamed in his life.'
I couldn't get into it. I couldn't get into it.
Yeah. You're a Rust guy. You're everything. Like I just.
Even as a child, I was like, 'Okay, everything that you can do in this game, you can just go do in real life minus.'
No, you can't. It's all crimes. Wait.
There was something like 10. Maybe I'm pure of heart and I don't enjoy. I was like okay like crap.
They were going to let me play for like 15 hours, 10 hours, maybe five hours, but I turned it down. They actually wanted to pay me. They wanted to pay me to play.
Yeah, they wanted to pay you to play. Strauss said actually I would love for you to play.
No, one of my first jobs I was a video game tester. I got paid to play video games.
