Intel ❤️ Apple, Brian Chesky Joins, WNDR Leaks, Trial Reporting

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Deep engineering work. The great lockin continues. >> The great locking. No, we will go into uh a review of the last few days, but first we'll give you a review of the next three hours uh because we have Josh Reeves from Gusto coming on, Jonathan Eman from Sweet Green, >> Z from Reef Factor, and then Brian Chesy from Airbnb >> coming in to the TVPN Ultradome. We're very excited. Uh lighter schedule. It's Friday. >> Friday. We're having fun. We're going to be hanging out here on the stream telling you about the American economic roller coaster. You've heard this story >> before >> just nonstop. Okay, so the the the American economic >> be back. We miss you guys. >> It's good to be back. Uh yeah, we got a bunch of stuff going on. Um so uh the the a whole bunch of economic news over the last couple days. Stock market is absolutely ripping. We should be in white suits. Intel's up 20% today, so almost. Um, and there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that like you need to puzzle together to get uh a picture of what's going on. And then I'm discovering that there are K shapes within the Kshapes. Even in the real economy, there's divide between different companies. And so, I wanted to walk through that. So, uh, let's start with the Intel news. Uh it's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. Uh there's a report in the Wall Street Journal about this. They've released reached a preliminary chipm agreement. It's not completely locked in, but there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last 6 months, 12 months as uh some of this was expected. The revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for. Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks, uh, Leopold Ashen Brener, we're all hoping for something and and plans are starting to come together. So, uh, the talks have been described as intensive intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing for more than a year. Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting. Of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for what, all the 90s, 2000s up until the Apple Silicon program where uh, they started going Apple started going direct to TSMC. Uh, can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're going to dig into it. So, uh, they have hammered out a former deal in recent months. And it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for uh, and and manufacture them, both its own designs. So, Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a and a design unit. uh and in its uh foundry unit um both businesses have been underperforming for years before Liip Bhutan came in as the new CEO and uh was vowing to revitalize them and so uh the last summer the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock uh giving the US 10% 20 $21 a share. It's now at $125 a share. So, White House has got to be feeling pretty good. >> Yeah, huge. I mean, I I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over a billion dollars on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today if it's up 20% and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So, just today probably a one or two billion dollar print. Um and so uh the reporting here in the journal says that uh the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table putting pressure on sort of both sides to say hey let's think about the future of American manufacturing resiliency reducing Taiwanese depend in dependence on a on a foreign supply chain uh and and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fad that they want to build. >> Nvidia got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investments. So up uh around a 5x. >> Not bad. That's not bad at all. >> The guy really needed it. >> He paid for Grock with that. That's pretty sick. >> Oh yeah, >> he just paid for Grock perfectly. >> That's why he wired before they actually >> Yeah. He's like, I'm up. I'm I I I I got gains. I need to offset these. Uh, so Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik has met repeatedly over the last year with high ranking Apple officials including CEO Tim Cook as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Wong, uh, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should Nvidia dual source the grace CPUs from Intel. Uh, SpaceX and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been uh, discussion there. there was that rumor about global foundaries and Elon's always been in the in and around the fab world uh and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term terra fab project. So, uh uh commerce secretary Howard Lutnik was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people familiar with matter said with with the Apple deal, Intel is now signed partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals. This is from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics after a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation, led outside foundry customers to pull or curb their businesses. When Ta Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year ago, uh I guess a year and two months, uh to replace ousted chief executive pal Gestinger, uh President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very very dramatic moment, but Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. Uh and the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after. Following the investment, Intel's shares uh price rose sharply on Friday morning. It rose 7 a.5% to an all-time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. TAN has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, uh including hiring former TSMC executive Jen Low, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So, they're not friends anymore. Intel CEO has oust also uh also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units as well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A and that is the node that uh Intel is hoping that all of the uh potential customers will jump together and say, "Hey, we're going to buy from this. If you make it, if you build it, we will come." Uh, President Trump personally advocated for Intel to cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally, but he's no, he's he's advocating for Intel uh to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said, "I like Intel in January." Uh, he said that the government had made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in. Trump said, uh, Nvidia, the world's largest chip firm, invested five billion in Intel in September and the two companies announced partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems for Nvidia. And last month, Elon, of course, announced the Terra Fab project. Uh, and so Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers. There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source in independent of the geopolitical discussion. Uh, on Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter, affecting several Mac models. Cook said, quote, "We think looking forward that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply demand balance." Um, and after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac Mini starting price. And so TSMC's manufacturing capacities capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel. Makers of other kinds of chips for memory and short uh and storage, for example, are more competitive with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although of course they are memory constrained. Uh, Apple's been long long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity from Nvidia and other designers of AI chips means Apple's no longer uh has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs uh based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple silicon. Uh and so um there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion dollar tech companies. Intel's starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. Uh I saw one report that referred to it as the MAG 10 and they'd added a few other AI names to that group, but there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority of returns in the stock market. Uh there's a couple slides that we can pull up uh that show the uh um the the the scope of what they're calling the it is now a bubble. Everyone >> the concentration. >> Yeah. The concentration. >> Yeah. We went we went through we we had three sort of beautiful weeks where >> Yeah. >> pretty much everyone started saying there's no way it's a bubble. >> Yeah. >> Look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble. But now >> uh people uh Steve over at Bloomberg, we can pull this chart up since you mentioned it. >> Which one is this? Uh this is um the concentration. >> Sure. >> Uh in >> Yeah, I've seen this >> uh the market you can see >> the AI big 10. So Mag 7 plus uh AMD, Broadcom and uh one other >> who is that Micron. Um >> now make up 40% of the market. Uh railroads for reference during 1835 to to 1910 were 63% of the market. uh and he comps it to Japan, the nifty50, teching telecom uh throughout various periods of time. Uh and uh yeah, it's uh it's an interesting uh uh dynamic. Uh and so I was reading this post by uh or this piece by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy. What's uh where is the growth coming from? He uh sort of backed the envelope. He said the AI economy grew 31% while the nonAI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Uh personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're building we're spending more on data centers than housing now or office buildings, I guess. I I think it eclipsed office buildings uh and factories and transportation equipment like trucks and aircrafts. Meanwhile, investment soared 43% in tech equipment, obviously that's chips and GPUs. Uh 23% in software, surprising um and 22% >> had a pretty meaningful bounce back >> certainly on the revenue side. >> Data dog, Atlassian. Yeah, there's been some >> acceleration. It really was extremely widespread where you had I mean you had like Door Dash and and and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their moat. Uh they still had to go and answer to the market and some of them got in and out of that in a week or a month and some of them it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten beaten down. Um but overall uh you know software is still doing very well. And so uh on the flip side uh there's another headline that hit the journal yesterday. US adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors. Retail, transportation, warehousing and healthcare all showed strong growth and led uh to expectation beating jobs growth. And so, uh, this is the the weird dynamic that, uh, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the in the AI economy and yet, uh, the overall employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from the Wall Street Journal, but, uh, the US job market blew past expectations in April, buoied by gains in in industries including retail, transportation, warehousing, healthcare. uh not completely unexpected given that those are not particularly AI uh targeted uh areas whereas you might see you know the layoffs in the tech community but that doesn't it's just not enough uh because the the US employs over 100 million people and so a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking >> breaking news from Gabe in the chat Texas Roadhouse is up >> what >> why >> he says 20% I'm seeing 15% % either way. >> Why is it up so high? >> Uh he says you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been. >> Maybe they beat uh Yeah, >> everyone says this is a Kuryaku uh filter. It really It really is. >> It's crazy how vi how viral that meme format has goneal. >> I thought that was just like a thing that I I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. It's quite po quite popular. Broken containment fully. Uh so the the the American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. Uh this was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March. Uh but it was much better than what expectations were for April. Uh analysts pulled by the Wall Street Journal were ex expecting 55,000 jobs and the real number came in more than twice that which is like it just breaks the narrative a lot. And it's this there's this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Sager about this. It's like that in in some ways it's like AI is Nvidia earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the global stock market. It's not actually holding up the the the economy. If you view the economy as as all of the different uh jobs and and and activities that happen, even if there isn't incredible growth there, there's actually a a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So, the unemployment rate >> I'm I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come in at. Uh >> we haven't seen any revisions from March this time. I don't know. Maybe >> it comes like it comes like it comes like over six months later. >> Yeah. But that's why I wanted to have Josh from Gusto on today because I think that uh Gusto has data on hiring it that is very different from what the labor department what's going on at the labor department. It's just a completely different dynamic. and you can look at like what's actually going on in small businesses. We've talked to folks at Stripe about this and uh and and and there are a lot of other data sources that ADP payrolls and stuff there. There's there's plenty of like pretty standardized uh formats for reporting and uh while there might be revisions to to to some government stats, it's it feels like there's plenty of places to get data and it's all pointing in the same direction, which is not Oh, yeah. they they they said they beat twice they they they delivered twice as many jobs as were projected and it was actually down. No one's really uh you know suggesting that. So uh the April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While healthcare is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing and they have weathered the tariffs. So many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. Uh in the first four months of the year, monthly payrolls have averaged 76,000 up from an average of 42,000 during the same period last year. Uh still the US has shed jobs over the past six months and many companies are reluctant to bring on new workers and mass companies grappling with changes in everything from trade to immigration to tax policy have for the most part held off on large scale hiring and firing. It does seem like the the the chaos of the tariffs and all of the early like EOS like that creates a lot of business uncertainty that settles eventually and then you get back to okay there there were a bunch of changes but at least we know that there aren't wild changes coming in the future uh at least that that are expected. So uh Diane Swank, chief economist at KPMG says it's still a high anxiety job market. those who have a job are clearly clinging on while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. Um and so um I was uh I was digging into you know where where is their strength within the real economy once you go outside of AI what is going on and uh there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of disconnected but showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and uh washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making appliance for for over 100 years. Uh and they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never they've never suspended their dividend. Even through all the great recession, the dot crash, every year they've been able to pay that dividend. They just cut their dividend. uh which is a really really big deal for this company since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news and the stock is down 80% of the past five years. Um and they're in some financial trouble like they have a lot of debt and they have a lot of competition but you could play that as like okay um this uh that like the real economy is like completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had Six Flags, which is should be the thing that is the most discretionary. Like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing and they're growing attendance and customer spending. And so, uh, now Six Flags, it's not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth 2.3 billion. Uh, and the stock is down over the past two years, about 50%. Uh but the business is growing and you wouldn't expect that during a time of like deep economic weakness and so there's something odd going on there where as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary roller coasters as the ultimate like you don't you you can definitely skip it if you are cashstrapped uh but the actual dynamics of the market are very different. And so Whirlpool sells big ticket necessities, these uh these refrigerators. Um but they are deferable. So you you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight. Uh but your kids are only really roller coaster age for a limited time. Uh and Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition and existing home sales are down 3% month overmonth. uh and so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades and they are not and they are not necessarily a beneficiary of all the international competition that they face from LG and Samsung and other international players and so uh I I've sort of >> quick correction Six Flags or or new information Six Flags is has been uh up since uh since around >> around the around November it sort of bottom Travis I remember I was thinking of this cuz one they have the ticker fun, which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun. Uh, but Travis Kelce and a group put in 200 million. That's right. >> The stock traded down pretty substantially. >> Yeah, I remember that. >> After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was and uh >> well, it's still down over the past like 5 years. Like two years ago, it was it was like a $5 billion company. >> Yeah. Down big. But but but but but that what's interesting is that at this time of like economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about uh economic resilience. Uh they are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend. Uh and that's what's driving the stock today. Uh and so there's this I I was looking at these two companies and I was like they they sort of fit into this uh this barbell thesis of the AI future which I've been seeing pop up more and more. And the two examples that I always give are one the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle. And then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers. And then Josh Kushner is doing a similar thing with Open AI and the San Francisco Giants. Like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Uh and so you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop uh because you can't vibe Code Space Mountain. Um but uh but but it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy and the American economy and seeing like where the unsuspecting uh winners are. Um Ryan Peterson shared a post from the or chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this is in uh the uh uh in the in the Financial Times, but they they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction tech singularity and the end of scarcity tax singularity. Uh in the bull case, uh real GDP per capita goes north of a million dollars. And in the human extinction, uh scenario, it goes to zero, of course. Um but the AI boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is the that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for. Uh potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. Um but uh it is uh it is fascinating and I and I think this this chart that Ryan shares is sort of sort of I think why there's anxiety in the market because uh there's this uh like you know that the whole like you're not prepared if it's not a bubble concept but uh there's there's like a dual anxiety where like if if AI gets too good there's mass unemployment everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety for both the not necessarily the true doomers. I mean obviously they they face a similar uh you know opinion but uh but but even if you're just like in the it's overheated camp there's real risk to the stability and I think that's where a lot of the the the bubble concerns come from. Although we're certainly not seeing very many uh signs of of of uh of the bubble. I mean, obviously the valuations are high, but uh so are the revenue growth charts. So, we can go through um some of the folks that are arguing. >> Are you more of a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy? >> Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from Wonderco from the uh event I brought in. >> Oh, would you look at that little souvenir? >> Um I like uh I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin. It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope. You get a big envelope. You can get an envelope that's eight and a half by it's effect it's effectively >> an envelope is sophisticated. An envelope is is is kind of a core business utility, right? Napkins can be used for anything. >> If you're in napkin math, you got to pivot. >> I will say I'm much more of a napkin math guy. I can't I mean just just just um >> the phrase >> spiritually spiritually and the phrase that I pull but >> uh if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin >> then I'm I'm never going to get excited about it. Right. There's usually like >> So you think a napkin is is definitionally smaller? It's a less amount. >> Totally. It's not it's not it's a it's a lesser vehicle than >> an envelope. >> Yeah. Because a big envelope you could do a full spreadsheet on. You could totally you could you could write out comps. Totally and have multiple cells. >> Um no. So I'm I'm I'm in in practice I'm a napkin math guy, but if something was really serious, I would probably trade >> pull out the envelope. >> Yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. It's time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope. >> Speaking of Speaking of envelopes, so this morning I was telling Tyler Yeah. Um, I'm I'm incredibly overwhelmed with uh Slacks, emails, you know, DMs on every platform, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, XDMs, all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking, how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to and then every day they would print out all of the different messages and then bring them to you >> and you could put um like a box. >> Yeah. put you could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there and then at a specific time, you know, maybe in a roughly like 2hour window, you could go out and grab all the printed out messages and sort of >> sort of like leave through them, decide what you need to respond to. You would potentially because you're only getting messages once a day, you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth, right? Um, and I think that could be >> sort of the opposite of Earthlass mail, those virtual mailboxes, because they'll they'll they'll take your physical mail, >> but I want everything. I want everything in this box. I want to put a box outside of my house and people put >> um and I think there's something there. >> Yeah, >> Trump I mean, Trump literally does this. >> He does that, right? >> He gets emails out and then he'll he'll write with a big marker his response and then his assistant will scan it and then email it back. >> Yeah. Uh more more on uh C Fry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true. Often the best often the best business meetings >> were not scheduled as a business meeting. >> So there aren't envelopes around. There's >> there's no envelopes around but there's plenty of >> nap. Also I mean you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you want those can be pretty big. So you're you're but I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant like you're not supposed to ruin the napkins or do you carry a pen that has washable ink? >> You have the crayons for the kids, right? People are >> The chat is saying they don't ask you. >> The chat is saying I could call my service the United States Post. >> That's a good name. >> Thank you, Alex. That's a great name. >> That's sort of like the the San Francisco artificial intelligence company or something like that or the the browser company of New York. It would be inspired by that. Yeah. Uh I I I I think that even with the crayons crayon closedfisted grip right on the table. >> On the tablecloth. Okay. I Yeah. I I feel like uh I if if you give if you're given crayons, you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu, which is typically made out of paper, very disposable. If you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene. >> Jackson says digitize this service and call it email. >> There we go. >> We got to we got to get we got to establish the mailbox first. >> We got an idea. >> But then we can go there. But I like where you're going. >> I got an idea. Um well, there's some other uh there's some other posts about the the the markets. Justin Spitler says them. Be careful buying semis here. Obviously, the market's very, >> very overheated. >> Travis, >> let's play this video. >> Oh, this is Travis Pastana. >> Yes, >> that's amazing. Nitro Circus. We mentioned many times on the show. >> Is he drinking a Red Bull? What a great >> Yeah. No parachute. >> No. Oh, no parachute. >> Yeah. So, he jumps out of the plane. No parachute. Drinking a Red Bull. >> And then he connects. He's got to do some tricks first. >> He's really taking his time here. The tension is building building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up. And then do they pull the parachute connect to each other or do they >> they they strap him to them? >> Oh. Oh, okay. There is a strap >> because it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and and hope for the best. >> You're bearing it's Red Bull. Anything could happen. Um >> I would I would I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute that he then, you know, dawn and and but he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Uh anyway, um how was your last two days, Tyler? What What did you get up to? >> It was sick. I was at the uh I went to the trial. >> You went to the trial >> opening on Elon trial. >> Okay. Walk me through it. You left the the studio on Tuesday. >> Yes. right before this. The chat is still going. They said if Gary Tan gets a hold of this service, he's going to call it Gmail. >> Gmail is good. >> Something there. >> Gmail. If he vibe codes a full Gmail replacement, anything's possible. Uh so you leave the office at uh two after we wrap the show on Tuesday. >> You went straight to the airport. >> I did. >> Okay. Y and then >> what time did you go to bed because you woke up really early, right? >> Yeah. So I I I got to the trial. So it's in Oakland. I got the courthouse at I think like something around like 5:30. >> 5:30. >> Yeah. Cuz you got to get in line. So basically, you know, it's a public cuz it's like a federal case. Um there like has to be some room for the public. >> Uh but there's only like I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30 cuz I I think it's closer to 20 because >> uh I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media. >> Okay. And when you got there at 5:30, were there already people standing in line? >> Yeah. So So there were I think there were like three or four people there already. >> Okay. um in line early bird getting the worm. That's >> Yeah. Well, I because I didn't want to be late obviously because >> did you talk to people? >> Uh a few of them. I So >> were you there before Mike Isaac? >> I was there before Mike Isaac. Wow, >> but he is a media pass. >> So So yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that because each like news >> Yeah. New York Times got one pass and he was splitting it with Cade Mets and so they were sort of going back and forth and I guess he had a media pass that day. >> Yeah. So that day he had a media pass. He got there pretty late. He got there like 7:30 or 8. >> Okay. Um, >> so you're there from 5:30. He gets there at 8. What time does the trial actually start? >> I think uh around 8:30. >> 8:30. Okay. >> Yeah. So, basically I'm just posting up for like 3 hours. >> Okay. >> Um >> and then this is Wednesday. So, walk me through like what what are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge. They sort of welcome everyone in. >> Yeah. Jury comes in. Okay. >> Um, so there are basically three main like segments. So, basically, I'll say it starts 8:30, ends at I think 2:00 p.m. There's uh two breaks, two 20-minute breaks. >> Okay. >> Um, so starts off and we we watch like the deposition of Mirati. So, this is all live streamed, right? The the audio is live. >> The audio is live. You're seeing a video. >> We're watching the video of her deposition. >> Okay. >> Um, it's mostly covering the the ousting, the timeline of the ousting. And this is where this is where all the the text came out that days. Did were they showing you the actual text? Were they playing a video? Or were they playing the AI uh reenactment of the text? Because we have this someone turned uh Sam Alman's text to Mirror Morate into a 2011 style emo teen teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio. Can you indicate directionally good or bad? You anxious. >> Good motion graphics too. Whoever made this talented. >> What is this? Can you put in text into >> the show? play this for an AI skeptic. >> Yeah. >> And and see what their reaction is because >> how do you see this and not want to build um I I'm I I've seen these before and I've always really enjoyed them. But um with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results. But does happen. >> So the author uh said his steps to make this. So first he OCR the images and turned them into plain text. images of the actual text messages and then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted into iterated like 20 to 30 times >> and then finally thought this one was catchy. >> Okay. >> Um yeah, so I think it's still like this is still but I think you still have to iterate on I like this. I like this. Yosh is really having fun with this. Uh put up a version of this with the uh with the Jenz brain rod slang. Yo fam, can you give me a vibe check on am I cooked or not? For real. For real. Satcha and the gang low-key stressing. Uh, Murmur Morati. Yeah, you're Skiibbidity. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio level generational or a loss. Little bro, who ratioed me? Sam Alolman says Mir Marotti. Some rando zesty NPC Twitch looks maxing Sigma. I'm not even going to go further, but Yash is having fun. Lots of people having fun. Uh, what else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video? >> Yes. So the first like hour >> it's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day to the movie day. >> The judge actually did get angry uh because like the she was like, "Oh, the jury's going to get bored." And like she was like offering them coffee and stuff. So basically, yeah, the first like maybe hour was um mirror deposition video and then we go through some of the actual like documents again of the text messages >> and then uh Siobhan Zillis is testifying. So she's physically there. Okay. She was a open board member 2020 to 2023. Okay. >> And she steps down when Elon uh started XAI. >> Yep. >> Um so that was I have no idea how long that was. It that was the majority of the >> during the whole conflict. So >> perfect person to testify. >> Well, no. So So she actually uh left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. Sting is November. >> Oh, okay. Interesting. I didn't I the timeline always gets so jumbled up because like there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilia and Elon and then there's the board. >> Yeah. Because all throughout this hearing there's like Yeah. There's sort of two main moments, right? Yeah. And we're sort of clicking back and forth between them. >> Yeah. Uh chat wants to know what kind of wombos were being thrown around. Was Lraine being used? People saying, "Can you please Lraine this email?" Uh Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I I I don't know if I remember anything. >> Yeah, it's something uh like Mike Isaac always uh talks about like they keep referencing Dota and they keep everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargony was it? Was it like Dwaresh Patel podcast level jargon or like actual like researchers like talking to each other jargon or >> I would say it was not very sophisticated especially among the lawyers, right? Um >> okay. Yeah, Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo. I I Yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI about, you know, acceleration and all this. >> Okay. Okay. >> Um and then after that it we watched another like hourong video of Helen Toner's deposition that was just about the the ousting. >> Okay. >> Um yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed a lot. Like basically, you know, >> almost everyone like sitting in my section which was basically the public and the and the media. Yeah. Like everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just get the media pass. >> So everyone surrounding me is is on their laptop like typing basically. Yeah. Just like taking down what's what's being said >> and then I'm just sitting there enjoying it cuz it's like you know >> it's good stuff. >> How would you rate Mike Isaac's like snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn? >> I believe he did bring the butt pillow. >> It seems like he's not making progress on the food front. I would expect by day seven of this he would have a smorges board in front of him. Full Thanksgiving. >> I mean honestly like Nathan for you where he brings chili into >> he's got the chili the chili soup. >> You should you should bring chili soup. >> I was I fasted the whole time. I just kind of I just >> Why didn't you figure we we have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there? >> I just wanted to make it more challenging. >> Okay. >> Yeah. I was like this is going to be too easy. >> Yeah. I believe Ilia is early next week. Maybe Monday or Tuesday. >> That'll be interesting. And did you go two days in a row or just one? >> I just went one day because uh Wednesday the people testifying I think were like not going to be as interesting. Oh. >> Uh but maybe that's a diss. So I apologize. >> I think everyone's everyone's equally deserving of uh some attention especially if there's a nice warm bowl of chili being served in the courtroom. Uh anyway, should we play this uh Altman uh uh AI music experiment from Daniel Green? The uh the Hamilton recreation of the texts. Everyone has uh enumerated their various uh their various techniques. >> Ryan says, "John, you should go to the trial dressed as Ilia." >> Yeah, I do have the costume ready to rock. >> It only takes 5 hours to set up. >> Get up at 2 a.m., then go stand in line. I think I'd get kicked out immediately. Anyway, let's play this. I want to hear this. >> How does a startup founder late stage get fired by a board on a Sunday? Oh, so it's actually like >> so it's not the direct quotes from the textig >> or maybe it is >> he is now saying they need end of day and I said that doesn't work and we need to start >> this is much more uncanny valley for me. This doesn't sound like a real musical in the same way that the pop punk one sounded pretty accurate. I don't know. Anyway, >> we can move on to some other news. Uh, Deepseek is raising a monster 7 billion round at 50 billion valuation making >> it China's largest ever AI raise. But what shocks a Jaws here, Crypto Punk the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. Three billion coming from the founder directly. Owns 90% of the company. Unheard of at this valuation. Deepseek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful funds. What a beast. uh he's got to acquire as much compute to push out new DeepSeek models. You know, we saw that chart that showed that uh o Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different growth curve in terms of performance, but uh you know, he's certainly betting on getting back in line having a uh you know, Frontier model within within a couple months. Um oh, uh Tess has an interesting idea. If I was running a Frontier Lab, I would have the model versions countdown. Ominous, >> extremely ominous. Be like, "Yes, we're excited. Version three now and next year version two." Uh, somebody would do that. Well, uh, folks over on Amazon are reviewing The Art of War by one star. >> Nothing but common sense. How this became a classic is beyond me. So much of it is common sense to the point where it brought out my snarky no kidding reflex. Like if an enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in. Wow, that was deep. Keep your money if you're thinking of buying it. >> That's very funny. Leaving a bad review so my enemies don't read it. Yeah, that's the game theory. Um, uh, Zach Brock says, "Congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grock in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy." >> Yeah. Basically, every time we take, every time we take a day off the show, like something big happens. >> Yeah. uh and that uh on Wednesday was the was the uh XAI or SpaceX anthropic deal. A lot of people have been predicting that. I I was not simply because I thought there it it was like the rational decision for the parties, but I thought that the tension between >> um you know Elon who had only a couple months ago been you know hurling insults at the anthropic team. I didn't think they would be able to uncover that those cultural differences. Totally. >> Uh but um you know demand for compute finds a way. >> Yeah. I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a neocloud selling the compute. >> Last last year last year I was talking about that a lot all the time. I was like look they're incredible at building infrastructure really really fast bringing power online. This feels like a very strong um a strong uh use for Elon Inc. >> Yes. Uh, and uh, but I but but as things evolved, I just didn't see I didn't see this coming together. >> I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the cursor deal. I thought the cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute and then the compute sort of got sold twice maybe. But of course, uh, there were multiple clusters, multiple Colossus data centers, and plenty of work to be done as, uh, SpaceX continues to, uh, grow their ambitions of artificial intelligence. Well, we have our next guest, our first guest of the show, Josh Reeves from Gusto in the waiting room. Let's come in. How are you doing? >> Good to see you guys. >> Welcome back to the show. Always great. >> It's good to be here. It's It's a fun time to talk tech. It's a lot of big moves happening, huh? >> A ton of big moves. Um, >> yeah. Intel. >> We've had over the last year, we've had a decade worth of big moves. >> Yeah. So, >> progress. >> There was a time when when Silicon Valley was a cottage industry. Not anymore. >> Yeah. a garage industry and now uh the largest companies in the in the world for sure. Uh well, your business is growing. You're quickly becoming one of the largest businesses in the world and you also power uh tons and tons of American businesses. Uh give us the update. How are things going? >> Yeah, excited to be here. Um I think probably what you're alluding to, we shared a milestone. Um, to me it's all a byproduct of of helping customers, helping small businesses. But >> but yeah, we uh passed actually a few months back a billion dollars of trailing revenue. >> Whoa, did you hear that, John? Trailing. That's not something you see very often. People want to take today's revenue, multiply it by 365 >> and and lead with that. Obviously, talk about >> is is much higher. But yeah, trailing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Talk talk about that. talk about that decision. >> Yeah, I think for us, I mean, we we when we started this company now over a decade ago, you know, I I said you always start with a problem, something you need to go fix, you have to create a solution, actually show it works, but then you have to have a a business model where your unit economics, how much it costs you to serve them, how much it costs you to acquire them makes sense. Otherwise, it's kind of like gambling. So, at Gusto, you know, we've been free cash flow positive, too, for for a number of years. is we reinvest that money to build more product. But we knew the the potential was there to be at this milestone and frankly much much further. There are 6 million employers in America and twothirds of them are less than five employees. Small businesses are a huge part of the economy. So yeah, we're excited about this milestone, but much much more work ahead. >> So cash flow positive reporting trailing 12-month revenues instead of ARR. These all feel like real strengths to eventually go public around. At the same time, >> Monday, you should report ARR. Come back on Monday. >> Yeah. Uh but but but at the same time, like it's an incredibly tumultuous time in the public markets. There's winners and new favorites every day. Everyone SAS apocalypse narratives like how are you thinking about the benefits of being private right now versus uh potential future in the public markets? >> Yeah. I mean our our focus is on just execution. I would not expect Gusto to be private in the near term. We'll let all the like big folks >> sorry public in the near term. Yeah, correct. >> What are you announcing here? >> I would not expect us to stay. >> I will leave that all to like the SpaceX and anthropics and open AIS in the world. There's lots of good noise in that. >> Um I I would say like we're going through this massive paradigm shift in how AI affects not just like our product for example and how we help small business, >> but also how a company's run, how a company's built. And so that is where I'm spending all of my time. It's an exciting time to be spending focused there. It actually is is a net net pretty big tailwind in gusto, but like absolutely no plans to be public in the near term. Um, super focused on small businesses and execution and at some point the timing will make sense, but yeah, we haven't had any of that process get started. >> Uh, we covered the April jobs report uh this morning. Uh, it surprised a lot of people to the to the upside. What are you guys seeing in in your data? uh you guys basically have a have a a forwards view at least on the >> yeah to to set the table the Wall Street Journal had pulled analysts expectations were at 55,000 new jobs and the number came in at 115,000 after a very strong uh March as well and so things are although there's so much anxiety so much an uncertainty about the future of the American economy at least over the last few months things have been looking strong, but we've seen revisions before. I think there's a lot of questions about as you dig into that data, what's going on? And uh so we'd love to know what you're seeing internally. >> Yeah. So, two stats we look at quite a bit. There's the kind of state of new businesses being formed, new employers. Obviously, companies can exist before having an employee. >> Um and then there's the state of hiring across the base of customers. Uh I would say you know on the customer small business hiring front things are uh more depressed uh over the last few years and that's continued relative to um call it the last decade if you will. Uh we think there's many parts of that including some of the uh effect of of AI on on frankly company growth rates. On the flip side, uh we are seeing a lot more new businesses being formed and new employers out there and that's showing up in our data that's showing up in a bunch of third party data. We think that's a really good thing. You know, there's a there's a scenario with what's happening in AI. We call it the happy path where a lot of people decide to take the plunge and become business owners. >> You know, the uh non-happy path to me is is the Pixar movie Wall-E, which uh is a future I hope we avoid. >> Yeah. uh how have you been uh how have you been thinking about getting to customers and small businesses earlier? Like have you ever explored uh trying to meet customers before they incorporate, help them with incorporation? anything that gets you into the the system because Gusto I feel like is always one of the first tools but it sometimes happens like a month after >> you have I mean one one really powerful dynamic is you're you're paying you know millions of employees many of many of whom will go and leave companies like I had a good experience on Gusto how should I pay myself >> I'll use Gusto >> yeah I mean first off the biggest way we grow is word of mouth and often it is from not just the employer but the employee also we'll have people join Gusto and I ask how you heard of us and they're like I was paid through Gusto. So we don't try to recruit from our customers but sometimes it happens and it's a wonderful dynamic where they truly truly get the value of the product. Um to answer your question directly absolutely like we we think payroll is one of the best products out there when you're hiring someone obviously if you don't pay them they quit. So it's a really important front door for that interaction. But there's a lot of companies that exist as one person, the founder for some period of time. And so we have an offering we call Gusto Solo that's very focused on that. Uh turns out, you know, the founder still needs to pay themselves. There's specific tax uh dynamics at play. There's a lot of compliance requirements. We acquired Mosee to help with expanding our work around business compliance. So all those kind of headache compliance things that you still have to do as a oneperson company, Gusto is going to be increasingly a great great partner to help with. And then when that business owner decides to hire an employee, obviously we hope they continue their relationship with Gusto. But stay tuned. We're going to be launching some more products in the next several months. Really focused on uh building that relationship more deeply with um employers or even uh businesses before they become employers. >> Yeah. Uh do you think the uh are you expecting the velocity of new product releases from Gusto to go up an order of magnitude in the next few years or do you do you see it as a smaller of a smaller family of products with a bunch of and higher velocity of like new feature creation? >> Yeah, I was like few years next give me the next few months. Uh it's fun to be accelerating. I think of it as as this is the most amazing time to build. people can smaller teams self-s serve iterate faster maintain high quality but just literally velocity is increasing dramatically so we apply that to both breath and depth um to answer your question so within the world of what we do uh whether it's 41k health benefits uh payroll people getting paid when they want how they want where they want faster um we're excited to be doing a lot more work there but absolutely expanding the breath of the product it's still way too hard to be a small business owner so uh you you will see a lot more new product launches is coming from Gusto in the coming several months. Things that we maybe thought of as like the next two to three years, I now think of as the next, you know, 3 to 6 months. And it's it's really fun to say that and actually then back it up and see it happening. Do you uh one one question that I've been having as we've seen like LLM usage exploding is uh the the shape of LLM spend across a software engineer who fires off a coding agent builds something that's new but it is deterministic code that runs in perpetuity new features new designs new copy versus LLMs that are baked into an existing workstream. where every time payroll runs there is a trigger and it is not something that's fired off by an employee. It is and I don't know if one of those is more agentic or we need a different word for those but can you kind of characterize the shape of those two applications for AI right now? Yeah, I mean there'd be a couple cuts on that. Like I think new product development generally um more accelerated dramatically higher velocity with AI. If you have an existing product, existing codebase, there's just by definition more the dynamic of you know building the train, rebuilding the train, running the train at the same time, accelerating the train, laying the tracks kind of all in parallel. Um so I think it's more complex on existing product surface area. >> Yeah. >> Um so that's one cut. I think on the kind of cut around the ongoing interaction dynamic I guess we've always believed since we're serving small business that you know what we do it's mostly compliance centric >> um it's just better done by technology right you think about the potential for human error whether it's from the customer or a guesty we want to have as much of that as possible be codified into >> software into a system that can scale that can do it repeatedly that can do it in millions and millions of situations to your point some of the newer technologies obviously not fully deterministic. So then having the right eval, having the right feedback loops, having the right review and audit process is super super critical. Um, so as we do all this velocity acceleration, you can you can imagine there's a lot of focus at Gusto on uh not just maintaining but actually improving the quality of what we do and the accuracy and the reliability for our customers. And it does feel like it can have a win-win outcome here where the product gets easier to use, it gets even more accurate and reliable and actually we can build and ship it faster. >> Yeah. Do do you have a do you have a feeling for which bucket is bigger? Because I can imagine LLM's being very useful to scan every PDF and do translation and do it do things on an ongoing basis baked into the the systems that you've built versus uh you know augmentation and amplification of engineering efforts and design efforts. Uh do you have an idea of like in terms of spend which one's bigger or where it goes? Yeah, I mean I would say for us most of the ongoing systems and how they run if you're talking about the back end don't generally involve a lot of uh LLM technology >> and then those are probably efficient too, right? Because even if you do use an LLM to process a PDF, well, you can pretty efficiently get to some sort of, you know, small language model that's tailored and probably pretty cheap. So >> yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean and that's a world where you want accuracy reliability and it's pretty deterministic. I think like if you look at risk, if you look at things where you have to make more judgment, um that's where I think LMS can actually complement humans quite a bit. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh Jordy, anything else? >> Incredible update. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> The focus, everything is incredible. The intentionality, the uh the humbleness of of looking backwards versus forwards. >> I love it all. >> I love it. >> Great to catch up, Josh. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. We'll talk to you soon. >> Yeah, pleasure. Talk soon. >> Have a good one. Goodbye. >> And up next, we have Jonathan Neman from Sweet Green >> live with us in the TDN Ultra Dome. >> Welcome to the show. How you doing? What did you bring us today? Brought >> lunch. >> What did you bring us today? You brought lunch. >> Brought you lunch. >> Fantastic. What is it? Wait, what are you launching? Give us the updates. >> So, uh this week we launched probably our biggest uh new category in in company history. We launched raps. We've done it in in our own way. So we spent about a year designing a custom tortilla with only four ingredients. >> Most wraps in the market. It's about 22 ingredients full of seed oils, preservatives, etc. So really wanted >> Yeah. I had a devastating moment yesterday where I was eating a box of crackers, like the the sort of default cracker in my household, >> and they they updated the ingredient list without without me realizing cuz like when I bought them, they were seed oil free. >> And then some point in the last like two years, they added it. And so I looked down at the ingredients list and I just I was like, "No." >> I just walked over to the trash and >> um devastating. All right. Anyways, continue. Four ingredients. >> Yeah. So, we created a tortilla, four ingredients, and and launch wraps this week. So, we launched with uh four signature wraps. Anything can be customized. The response so far has been awesome. >> We launched it on Wednesday. We brought you three of them to try if you guys want to give them a give them give them a taste. >> Fantastic. >> On on air on air taste. >> On air taste. Yeah. >> We'll give it we'll give it a try. >> What uh uh was this uh customer pull? Was there demand for this? Like how do you measure that? like now is the right time to launch a new product. >> Yeah. So, we wanted to reach kind of different customers in different occasions. And one of the things we heard from our from our guests is they wanted something that was portable. They also wanted food that, you know, was healthy but a little bit more cravable. >> And so, this was one way to to get >> Yeah. There's like a stated verse revealed preference. Just like you want to eat healthy, maybe you want to eat a salad, but sometimes you just need something that feels like a bit more dense. >> Exactly. And and how does that feedback actually get to you in practice? Is this like interactions with cashiers and they're taking notes or are you sending out surveys afterwards, polling customers, doing like, you know, some instore marketing that someone's standing there and they're asking people about their experiences. >> Yeah, we do a lot of things in order to get feedback. One is, and let me see which one you got there. >> Uh, this is the chicken jalapeno ranch with a little dipping sauce on the side. >> Fantastic. What else we got here? >> Fantastic. We never get a lunch break. >> We don't. We don't. This is chicken Caesar. >> Chicken Caesar. >> And then you got a Cali Chicken Club. Fantastic. So, a lot of ways I you know, one thing I say all the time is all the restaurants, all all the answers are in the restaurant, spending time in the restaurant, actually talking to guests. We also do a lot of, you know, traditional things like focus groups, etc. Recently, uh, >> do you ever go do you ever go undercover? >> I do go undercover a lot. >> Like behind the counter? Oh, all the time. All the >> all the time. >> Um, I spend a lot >> wear mustache. >> I spend about, you know, a third of probably like a quarter of my time in restaurants. >> Um, talking to customers, talking to team members. I get all, you know, really I get all my best feedback there. Both how to make the experience better for guests, but also how do you make it easier to run from a >> easier to run from a team member perspective. Um, we do a lot of social listening from a feedback perspective. >> Um, and recently, uh, about a year ago, we started working with a company I think you featured here, Listen Labs. >> Oh, yeah. uh we were one of their first customers and it's it's helped us accelerate our time to feedback by about 10x and about half the price and so you know this was actually one of the first >> uh it's been a while since we've had listen labs on but basically there's like a like what what are the core features of the product again it's social listening but then also like surveying >> it's it's surveying focus groups and insight so in in you know typically when you do a focus group takes a long really a long time to get it set up and and you know it can take weeks to get that feedback. With listen labs we can get a diverse cut of customers by demo you know age, psychographic group, geography. >> I feel so rude. >> No, come on. Um and so uh and so that's been a really uh powerful way as well. And then social listening is is huge. You know just seeing what people are saying online and then you look at the competitive landscape and where the business need is. You know, we do really our business does really well Monday through Thursday, you know, when people are looking to be healthy and then you see it on Friday falls off a little bit and Saturday. Yeah. So, it's how do we have that cheat meal that you could still feel good about? >> Oh, sure. Sure. Um, where and in social listening like where is the sweet green community? Where are people actually having conversations that are valuable? >> Tik Tok and Instagram. >> Tik Tok and Instagram. >> Tik Tok. I mean, and >> not Reddit. >> No, Reddit as well. You'd be surprised how >> how much juicy information some of that Yeah. So, social listening, uh, how how manual is that versus like scrape Tik Tok and transcribe everything and roll it up? >> It's not manual at all anymore. Okay. So, a lot of software can do it. Yeah. >> Huh. Uh, >> there's a lot of companies that are offering this now. We've looked at we've tested a bunch of that. >> Sure. Sure. Sure. And is it valuable to find stuff that's not viral but still on Tik Tok like the the Tik Tok creator or just like person that expresses themsel through Tik Toks or vertical video to loosely just their friend group like they don't have a following. They're not a professional creator. They're not making any money on it. But like when like like someone would post a photo on Instagram, they post a front-facing uh Tik Tok. Uh, is is is is that as valuable as the big creator that goes viral for some like dunk or stunt or Tay hot take or something? >> You want to find it before it goes viral. >> You know, like there's this thing going on viral on Tik Tok right now about this like Chimmy Cherry steak poll. We like the Jim Bro. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And you know, we should have done something with that, but we should have done it a month ago. >> What is there to do with something like that? Like I feel like a lot of times if there's something that's good that's organic that's happening like and you step in as the brand or the corporation like you risk like making it uncool and corporate. >> Well for us if it's something we could actually serve like that happened to be something that we can put on our menu. >> Oh sure. Okay. So you make a change on your world. You're not trying to go and like create your own content around it. Let them >> we would create the content and then actually serve it. >> So we put a video out this week on it to see what happens. And if the reaction is good, we'll actually put that on the menu. We have all the ingredients. It's effective bowl without lettuce or any grains. It's just steak, cucumber, tomato, onion, you know, feta cheese. Great. >> Uh I've seen random videos of uh focus groups. Do they really do a one-way mirror or two-way mirror, whatever that is, where like they can't see you, but you can see them. Is that a thing? Have you ever been in one of those? >> When I do them, I I actually like to sit in >> Okay. So, just sitting in a conference room. >> Just sitting in a conference room. >> Okay. When we when we tested wraps, we brought in we brought in customers every day for a week, different groups of customers >> and just tasted them. Tasted them a few different ways really to understand, >> you know, how important was the sauce on the side? How important was it to get cut? Like little details. Like for example, we we decided >> the wrap was best when you had it mixed first and cut. >> It sounds like such a stupid little detail, but it has huge operational implications. >> You mean mix the ingredients mixed? Yeah. >> Yeah. Because that's a that's a worst my least favorite part about any wrap or burrito is you get in there and it's all like spaced out. So you have like avocado bunched over here, >> all the chicken over here, and then like rice or whatever. And it's like you're you want to be having the full blend with every bite. >> That's exactly right. So it sounds like such a small minor detail, but it's huge operational implications. We also had to figure out how to make this work in our infinite kitchens. >> You know, over 10% of our fleet in growing is powered by the infinite kitchen. Mhm. >> How do you make this this, you know, work in that operation as well? >> Yeah. >> How are you thinking about other verticals like uh like I don't even know what you call it like prepackaged in uh in in other grocery stores or consumer packaged goods or like product line extensions outside of the the retail stores. >> We're really focused on our retail stores and the experience. We don't, you know, so much of what we do is based off of the scratch cooking we do in our restaurant. So, we're really afraid of extending that out into retail. And >> you want to get into like salad dressing at the grocery store. >> Uh CPG is something we will eventually get. >> Okay. You you will. >> Yeah. We we think CPG like, you know, dressing being an obvious category, you know, right now really focus on the core business, but eventually that's definitely a category >> uh was was uh my my immediate reaction to this is it's it's uh it's incredible. We'll add it to our our our uh reoccurring lunch orders. Uh, it reminds me of Chipotle in like 2005 to 2010. Like some of the best vintages vintages. Uh, like seriously, back back then it was I I I yearn for that time when you could just go into any Chipotle and eat something that actually felt uh that tasted like fresh and uh clean and a small number of ingredients and they had such an extreme uh commitment to that and and somewhere along the way I just I just stopped going uh because it didn't it didn't feel like that anymore. Um but uh but that's that's my review. To me, to me, the best food, the best prepared food product that was widely available in history was that, you know, 2005 to 2010 era, uh, Chipotle. >> It's funny, that was kind of the inspiration for Sweet in a lot of ways. I was in college, you know, 2005, seeing Chipotle take off, eating Chipotle all the time, and the idea was to create just kind of a healthier, fresher version of that. And the one you ate, the chicken jalapeno ranch, >> is, you know, it's effectively a burrito. Um, some of the other ones are more it have lettuce in them. That one is, you know, rice, avocado, chicken, corn. >> Saved you a half. >> Yeah. So, and I brought you guys more as well. >> Amazing. >> And the other thing about the wraps is they start at 11 bucks. So, we were also, you know, given where the consumer is today. Really trying to create something that can, you know, meet their needs today, can be something that you can eat every day. So, the chicken Caesar in some markets is all the, you know, all the way down to $1045 and no wrap is above 15 bucks. >> Yeah. Let's talk about that because we have uh consumer sentiment right over I think there was some reporting over the last couple days. It's like as bad as it's been in like a really long time. Stock market at all-time highs like insane disconnect there. Uh jobs report today came in uh better than expected but uh ultimately consumers aren't feeling great. Um part of I guess part of the approach there is you know introducing products like this that you know are high calorie or not high I don't know if you describe them as high calorie but maybe higher calorie and great value. Uh but what else what else are you doing across the business? >> I think the key is around the experience. You know in restaurants fundamentals wins championships. So it's really about delivering a consistent experience around quality and hospitality and that gives you the opportunity to layer in the menu innovation. So right now, you know, we've been very focused on innovation for a while and right now we're really just trying to dial in the basics. It's what you talked about Chipola. Yeah. >> It's like what what made you love it wasn't all the new stuff that they're now doing. Yeah. >> It's just being really excellent at the basics. >> Consistent. >> It's consistent. It's making sure >> the quality is there. You're not out of stock on things. You're staffed at peak. People are, you know, smiling, friendly, and warm. It's all of those little things which create, you know, the system behind that >> is highly complex. But it's all of that that really creates. >> Yeah. So, so put another way, Sweet Green, you know, started in, you know, as like my view is like it's it has the DNA of a technology company and maybe that drove you guys at some point to focus too much on on on like on the things that ultimately don't drive always drive that consistency. Does that feel like somewhat? >> Yeah, I'd say the, you know, early on in like the 2010s, the technology side of the business from a consumer perspective was an advant was was a competitive advantage. We were the first ones to have digital ordering, delivery, >> mobile payment, all that stuff. It's it's pretty much been commoditized for the most part. All restaurants have it. >> Yeah. >> You know, I think our digital experience is better than most, but at the end of the day, you can order online anywhere. >> Yeah. We do have a technology infrastructure that allows us to scale. So if you look at like our GNA, it has it's been flattered down for five years. So as we continue to scale, a lot of the tools we've put in place and now with how we're leveraging AI, like we can continue to scale without adding headcount >> and our data and reporting and all the tools we have to manage our kitchens >> are really incredible. Like we have tools that you know kind of predictive ordering for how we order food. >> You know predictive apps that teach us teach our teams or guide our teams as they make the hot food and the cold food because what's different about sweet green is we pretty much make everything in the store every single day. >> Yeah. >> But to your point at the end of the day it you know it's it's about >> but you can't get you can't start spending maybe you're spending half your time on innovation half your time on like the the basics. >> It's yeah it's probably even more so on the basics right now. It's on delivering on a great consumer experience. Someone asked me the other day about how we build our brand. And you know, we do a lot of stuff, culture, social media, events, all great, but the way we build our brand at the heart of it is just creating an experience that people love. >> Yeah. >> It's an environment, a store that looks beautiful, clean. It's that, you know, team member that goes out of their way and is friendly. It's a culture of like saying yes when someone wants something that's a little bit weird. just figuring out, you know, that how to say yes to that to that customer. >> No, there's nothing worse as a customer if you're in in like a uh fast casual experience and you can see everything that's in the store. You can see all the ingredients and then you ask for something and they say, well, that's not available. And it's like, well, you're you're just making a call on the fly, not to combine those things in the way that >> that I >> put the pizza in the deep fryer. >> I know you have both. >> So, our our team knows it's a culture of saying yes. figure out figure out a way to say yes. Take, you know, take care of the guest. And I remind our team all the time, our number one marketing channel is word of mouth. 80% of people find out about Sweet Green through a friend, family. You know, it's the you know, they walk by a store, they had a good experience, and they come back. Like our critical metric that we use in in tracking like the health of how we're doing is what we call our comeback rate. So, of customers that come in, how what percentage come in within 30? What percentage come back within 30 days, >> right? And we can now track that across analog and digital customers. And we've kind kind of gotten the whole organization aligned around, you know, from the people making the menu, people running our loyalty and CRM and most importantly the people in the in the restaurants. Like your number one job is delivering a great experience where that guest comes back because that's what drives that, you know, that lifetime value. >> Where was the first store? >> First store was in DC in Georgetown. >> Yeah. What was uh what was the key to making it work? key to making it work I think originally was probably the simplicity of it. >> Yeah. >> You know originally the idea was create a healthy fast food restaurant but the size of the first store. It was 500 square f feet. >> So small store but great location >> small store good location had to keep the the >> keep the operation pretty simple in order to execute it. >> And I think just you know we were maybe lucky in the naive we had never worked in restaurants and so we were able to approach things a little bit differently. Yeah. >> And create a brand that just didn't look like the other brands. Whether it be how we sourced, you know, how we went to market in the early days, you know, like one of the things that helped build the brand was we threw a big music festival for eight years. >> It was like, you know, we threw a 25,000 person music festival with huge, you know, like the Strokes headlining. And the idea was how do you make healthy eating cool? >> Is that within reach for some brands? Like what's the cost to throw a 25,000 person music festival? Do you charge tickets? >> We charge tickets. Yeah. So it was effectively a break even event. >> Oh, that's cool. Okay. >> Yeah. It was called the Sweet Life Festival. >> Okay, great. Yeah. Uh any plans to bring it back? >> We are looking at it. We have our 20 year anniversary next year and so we have some some some ideas. >> Yeah. Where's uh where's the store footprint these days? >> Almost 300. We'll end this year with about 300 restaurants. >> And do you have a target? Do you want to grow that? >> Yeah. Focus. >> If you look at Chipotle, they're at about 4,000. They they give a target of 7,500 stores in the US. So, you know, our first target is a thousand stores, but we think over time should be able to get to about 5,000 units in the United States. >> Yeah. The uh I I always appreciate looking at the forecast for some of these some of these brands, whether it be Starbucks or Chipotle, because in our in our chaotic modern world, everyone's like, it's so hard to plan more than two years out, especially in tech, everyone's like, it's hard to see two years out. And if you look at like the forecasts of store growth, it's like Chipotle is like in 2030 we will deliver exactly, you know, 200 new doors across these geos. And it's like you actually can like think long term like consumers are still going to want to eat food. They're going to want to eat healthy food in 2030, 2035, 2040. And uh you know, taking that long view, I think, is is super important >> in the in the Adams development world. like you, we're already building our 2028 pipeline and we're looking at 2029. You you have to get get ahead of it, especially when you do a lot of groundup development, building drive-throughs, >> that sort of thing. You're about two years ahead. >> You're doing drive-throughs now. >> We do. Yeah, we have a handful of drive-throughs. They do really well. Um we actually just opened our first drive-thru feature featuring an infinite kitchen. >> It's close by. It's in Costa Mesa here. >> Oh, nice. >> Um and it's awesome because now you have the power of the infinite kitchen from a speed perspective with the drive-thru. Um, and stores store is doing awesome. So, it's a model for the future. >> Why have you never done anything in Malibu? >> I would love to do Malibu. It's probably my favorite place in the world. Um, doesn't really have the the density. Yeah. >> Um, from a consumer perspective and >> that's been my So, I lived there for um coming up on five years and early on every time I would leave Malibu and go to somewhere else, I go to Monaceto. there's like much better restaurants in my opinion in in like Monaceto, Santa Barbara, some of these other beach towns >> and I was trying to figure out why and it's entirely because the town is spread out like you said the density it's spread out on this huge line. That was my intuition. And obviously I don't have restaurant experience, but you can put a restaurant in Malibu, but it's still like 40 minutes in the car for like the average person in town essentially because you have to like get on PCH and drive like miles and miles and miles. And if there's a little bit of traffic, then it's 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back, and then it's like >> I'm not, you know, people are just like, I'll just I'm not driving 40 minutes for >> the bigger challenge in Malibu is actually the staffing side of it. Yeah. >> Oh, interesting. It's like nobody in Malibu wants to work for 20 $25 an hour >> and so the people that are going to be coming there are coming from really far away >> and that's what becomes a problem. You can probably feel it in a lot of the places you go to like I'm sure you can see the staffing. >> Yeah. Like labor labor, you know, turnover will be higher general. You just have to pay significantly more for somebody to be >> willing to kids but that that's somewhat limited. So >> yeah, limit limited on the Malibu kids working working at the restaurant. >> Yeah. >> What uh how do you like I'm I'm curious how you spend your time with uh with like the capital markets and investors today. You've been public for a while now. Uh I'm you I'm sure you have have had investors come and go, but also some that you've developed like you know really meaningful relationships with. Uh what is that like as a you know public company CEO? Yeah, you know, I think we were fortunate before we went public, we had a lot of these kind of crossover investors. >> Yeah. >> Investors like Tro or Fidelity, Bailey Gford that we were able to build those relationships with and, you know, took long long-term positions, believed in what we were doing. >> So, that really helped us as we made as we made that transition. >> You know, I I talked to them, you know, our our large investors every quarter. Um, and it's like I always say with investors or with anything, it's really the people behind it than just like the name on the name on the door. >> Totally. >> Um, and building trust and confidence in what we're doing. And, you know, I think there's investors that are looking for short-term results and there's other investors that really, you know, kind of believe in the long term, believe in the management team and the goal is to just build trust with them over time. >> Yep. >> Makes sense. >> Yeah. So no, no, no. We can't expect like an allirds like local inference provide pro provider out of out of sweet green. >> I was going to ask who's going to bid on eBay. >> I mean that's an amazing story to watch. >> You got a couple hundred stores. You could go to Sweet Green and verify your baseball cards to auction them off on eBay. >> Funny. Our our COO uh Jason who's been with us about a year uh spent a long time of his career working at he was actually the COO at GameStop for for a while. He ended up more recently he was at Chipola, but uh before that he was at GameStop from like 300 stores to, you know, 3,000 stores. >> Wow. >> So, it's been fun watching all of the developments now and and talking to him about it. >> Yeah. Yeah. We were looking up. It seems like GameStop has like shrunk the store footprint a ton, about half since Ryan took over five, six years ago. Um but like wildly different business because of digital distribution. Like there's a direct competitor. you can't uh you can't download a a rap on your phone like you can a game and so uh they've had to change the business model significant amount >> for me it was interesting learning how much of that business model was dependent all the margin was dependent on the trade business >> so the new releases they didn't really make as much money on it all the the yeah the margin came from >> GameStop's famous for being like oh you bought that $60 game we'll give you $5 for it and they sell it for 20 and that's not bad >> that was and that was the business >> yeah yeah >> what uh general real estate trends, not just restaurants, but um that you're seeing across different markets uh across the US. >> Um drive-throughs are hot. Uh >> yeah. What makes for a good drive-thru? Like there's a few in LA, but it doesn't feel like a drive-thru city. >> LA is more about zoning. >> Okay. and and getting the right permits for it. And they're not adding more drive-throughs. So, you have to take over an existing drive-thru >> in order to get one. >> I typically only see big chains. >> Yeah. And so, you're you're competing with, >> you know, like some of the drive-throughs that we've taken recently have been like old Jack in the Boxes for >> sure. Sure. >> But, you know, who are you competing with? Chick-fil-A, raising Canes, and they have very high AUVs. >> Um, you know, some of these, you know, Chick-fil-A, I think, does eight or so million dollars per restaurant. So they can they can just out >> they can they can out bid you um and they need you know the acre lot with the you know with the egress for the parking. >> So drive-throughs are really hard to come by but we do see a pretty significant lift when we put a drive-thru in people are really looking for convenience and that's only accelerated since >> co and do delivery drivers prefer drive-thru is that faster for them or >> no we actually most people actually don't want the delivery drivers going through it so you have to build a model where you have a separate area. So if you go to like McDonald's or any place >> Yeah. Because they're not doing the ordering, they're just doing the pickup, which would just be taking up space. >> Yeah. So you have like separate uh parking spots for the delivery drivers, >> having them come in. Some places are experimenting with the double drive-through. >> I was going to say, is that possible? >> It's possible, but you need so much space in order in order to do it. Okay. >> Don't have a lot of space in California. >> Don't and you don't have the space in California. other you I think the thing about uh what we see in retail is the best streets continue to be the best streets. So like you know and we see it like if you look at LA like you know Melrose Place just like rents continue to go up >> um >> because there's more customers and there's more profit >> more customers. It's it's like there's this this thing about like this these moments and these uh you know this condensed uh attention and traffic in these great high streets. And so on those areas, prices have only gone up. Everywhere else, the market's been pretty stable. We haven't seen things, you know, collapse. We have seen that the biggest challenge we've seen is around uh what's happened with interest rates because landlords have le less money to give from a tenant improvement perspective. >> Oh, interesting. >> So that's been, you know, the issue there. Even though there's probably less demand, you know, when they're uh, you know, interest rates from zero to where they are today, they're not giving you as much uh improvement allowance. Uh last question, how is the drone delivery market evolving from your view as uh as an operator, as a brand? Like are you are you uh do you expect drone delivery to be you know double double digit percentage of delivery orders >> nationally or in specific markets? Like how how do you see it evolving? >> I think uh I think what's Keller and Zipline is doing is really interesting. We've done some early work with them looking at it. It's not something we're hugely focused on right now, >> but they have had some breakthroughs. And so I, you know, if you said 10% in the next year or two, I I probably don't see that, but over time, absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> it's very market dependent, right? You have to be like, let's work on something in Texas. >> It's Yeah, it's Texas more suburban. You do have to change how you build your restaurants a little bit, having like the portal where you where you put the food in. >> But when you think about the >> drone portal >> Yeah. When you think Yeah, you need like a drone portal. But when you think about the speed of delivery, you know, for delivery, getting sub 30 minutes is >> huge >> is a it's that's like kind of like the number when people are opening the app, you want to be sub 30 minutes. And what you can do with with drones in getting there, it's it's pretty amazing. They still can't do really large orders. So like the >> sure the >> what it fits in order for a whole office going to work. >> I I do think over time um they will they will figure it out and more of restaurants will be built around that. >> Yeah. I mean, it's what's amazing to think is how much your radius can increase and like what that means for your footprint over time, if that's true. Like, >> yeah, I mean, LA since, you know, we're here, when you look at this market, the the craziest thing is putting when you put, you know, you go into maps and you put an address in and you're like, it's 7 miles and it's going to be 50 minutes, which is like a normal a normal thing. It sounds crazy to anyone else in the country, but it's like a drone going seven miles is like, you know, feasible. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you've seen the videos. They like they're able to just drop the, you know, just literally have it parachute like right on your doorstep. >> So, it's uh it's pretty amazing. It's coming, but I think it's a little early for us. >> Yeah. >> Very fun. Well, thank you so much. >> Thank you for the food. >> Let's hang Let's hang soon. >> Thank you guys. >> Put this in here. Throw these back on. And we can click over to um to uh some of Jason Frerieded's favorite watches. He was a fan of Nike's early 2000s era watch lineup. Have Have you ever Have you ever seen these before, Jordy? >> I have. I have. I have not. >> I've never seen one in person. >> You've never seen one in person. Where's my other headphone? There we go. Um, yeah. This I Has this design aesthetic come back yet? I feel like uh there's enough posts about it at some point I feel like a tech startup is going to really run with it on >> someone will do it. I like the kind of soft lines. Yeah, Avi from Friend was sort of doing that with the material that went into the friend pendant, but he was he was talking to Paul Graham about like how do you differentiate from Apple? Like if you launch a product like this, it it it does stand out from an Apple Watch certainly aesthetically. And so you at least creates some like distance that's maybe defensible. Even if they even if they come out with a competitive product, it's not and if you become iconic with this design or or a similarly uh bizarre design, you don't uh stand as much chance of getting commoditized. Um well, Ryan Cohen's in the Financial Times. Uh people have been processing the uh his bid for GameStop to take over eBay. Uh very fun story. Uh not too many updates on what's actually happening. I think there's uh sort of a wait andsee approach here. Um but the uh the Financial Times has a little bit of a deep dive here. Uh Ryan Cohen spent much of his career being dismissed. It's a pattern that has turned the chief executive of video game retailer GameStop into a leather jacketwearing outlier with a loyal base of meme stock investors. I saw someone commenting the legal the the leather jacket very Jensenesque. Um although I I has he been dismissed? I feel like through the rise of Chewy, there was a ton of respect for him all along that journey since e-commerce is such a challenging uh business. There's so few companies that have exited at north of a billion dollars. There's been a ton of a ton of attempts to make uh e-commerce uh companies, but they they often run into Amazon head first. Uh he the Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor has built his cult-like reputation by repeatedly betting on ideas that many institutional investors labeled as absurd. First it was online pet supplies. Okay, I guess that fits. Then a dying strip. >> Why has Why has Chewy >> Where is >> Why is Chewy So Chewy is a $9.6 billion company? >> Yeah, that's great. >> Why has Amazon and Walmart not eaten them alive? Um, I don't know. I mean, I think a lot of people have pet food on subscription and they just don't change it. And so, you acquire that customer and then even if it's on Amazon. >> So, the CAC equation just works. >> I think the I think the retention is is remarkable because the dog doesn't tell you, hey, I'm bored of this particular food. It's just like awesome. >> I feel like my dogs would would grow up and they'd be like, >> but how would they communicate? I they had this look and I know I'd had to go take an egg, go get an egg from the chickens and crack it on their on their >> but that's not you're not getting that egg on Amazon, right? They don't make egg laced uh dog food on on Amazon. Like switching e-commerce platforms isn't going to solve your your uh your belligerent dog problem. Uh >> yeah, one one response from eBay could be uh focus on yourself, King, because Chewy's down 40% the last year. Well, is Ryan even >> No, he's no longer he's no longer he's no longer the CEO, obviously. >> Uh but still, you know, uh I guess it's down since IPO. It had a it had a quick rise in 2021. The stock was up at $101, now at 23. Uh so some selloff there, but uh let's read through more of this. Uh uh now he is focused on this 56 billion attempt to acquire eBay and an e-commerce giant roughly four times the size of GameStop. Wall Street, right? Wall Street's immediate response to the hostile bid has ranged from skepticism to outright mockery. Analysts have questioned how GameStop, valued at roughly 11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth around 47 billion. "None of that has dissuaded dissuaded Cohen." "The more eBay fights me, the more I'm going to not take no for an answer. I'm not going away," he told the Financial Times. The 40-year-old billionaire first set out his his stall for the takeover bid in an awkward interview with CNBC on Monday that instantly ricocheted across social media. He responded to questions about the financing details with a blank expression and clipped mono syllables explaining that it was half cash, half stock. Of course, that became a massive meme. The interview generated waves of memes online as X and Reddit users speculated that Cohen looked drunk high or exhausted. Do you think the half cash half stock meme is good or bad for the prospects of successfully acquiring the company? >> I think once it clicks it sort of makes sense and but it is a big jump to eBay shareholders to you know to roll into that at that at at that price. >> This Yeah, the the decision or or the sort of like situation would be wildly different if eBay hadn't been performing since Jamie became CEO. >> Yeah, it's outperformed the S&P 500, right? Which is pretty remarkable. So, uh, yeah, it's not it's not beaten down, and the shareholders seem pretty happy. Uh, the Financial Times says, "The script has played out before. Born in Montreal in 1986 to a teacher, mother, and father who imported glassware, Cohen did not attend university. As a teenager, he built websites for family, friends, and small businesses, teaching himself coding. Now, uh, in 2011, now in his mid20s, he founded Chewy from South Florida with the ambition of creating a pet online pet supply business that could compete with Amazon. Investors thought the idea was ridiculous. I knew that significant capital would be required to finance the growth, that's for sure. A lot of inventory uh very very uh very capital intensive business. He said he he approached dozens of VC firms, even flew out to Silicon Valley, went doortodoor on Sand Hill Road. Can you do that? I don't think you can just knock on Sequoia Capital. >> Someone should I think some of these NEO labs are hot enough that they actually drive down, no meetings, and just go door to door. Hey, I'm in the middle. >> Be like, cool. I'll come back in like 20 minutes, grab a coffee. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. Uh so he went door to door on Sand Hill Road. Probably a turn of phrase. He was probably scheduling meetings, but uh he was explaining how Chewy would succeed by delighting customers and running an ultraefficient operation, but everyone turned us down. He couldn't raise money. The skepticism was understandable given the failure of Pet Supply website, Pets.com. In the doc.com bubble era, pet food was bulky, low margin, and expensive to ship. Venture capitalists doubted consumers would buy 40 pound bags of dog food online. Cohen ignored them all. Instead, he focused obsessively on customer service. Chewy employees wrote customers handwritten cards and sent flowers to grieving owners who animals had died. That's really sweet. That is a good touch. He doesn't come across as that. He comes across as, you know, this like ruthless operator, but uh that is really I mean obviously that >> Well, he comes across as an absolute dog, John. >> Yes, he was he was raised by dogs essentially grew his career through the dog economy. Uh, the approach helped to create unusually intense customer loyalty. By 2017, private equity backed PetSmart bought Chewy for 3.35 billion, then the largest e-commerce deal on record. It cemented Cohen's reputation as a rare entrepreneur who had successfully challenged Amazon on its own turf. Flushed with cash and credibility, he launched Ryan Cohen Ventures, RC Ventures, his investment vehicle. That led to his most controversial bet in 2020. While much of Wall Street viewed GameStop as a doomed relic of the physical retail era, Cohen quietly amassed a large stake in the company and began pushing for a radical digital transformation. I really wonder if there's going to be What is this? Just horses. Why are we just playing horses? >> The team had this on this morning. I thought it was incredible. >> Yeah, the horses are good. Uh I wonder I wonder if there will be >> subway servers. Some people do subway servers. We do >> horses. I like it. >> Horse b-roll. Do you think there'll be a Ryan Cohen GameStop type deal of the SAS apocalypse era? Like the most seatbased SAS, you know, uh, like lagard who's getting absolutely beaten up, shorted, huge short interest and some wildcard operator comes in and and turns it around or at least turns it into a meme stock. I don't know. >> Yeah, it feels I mean it's just felt like so many people were were too too afraid of of you know catching a falling knife basically. Uh, but I'm sure we'll see some of >> we can dig into it more. We can ask Z about it because we have my good friend Z from Refactor in the TBP and Ultradom. Let's bring him on down to the seat and I don't know, are those plates left over? We can work. >> Anyway, great to see you. >> Great to meet you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Let's Let's introduce yourself and then I want to hit the gong. I want you to hit the gong. Tell us tell us the news today. Introduce yourself and then tell the story. >> Yeah. I'm Z from Refactor Capital as you know led Lucy's seed round a decade ago. >> That's right. >> Um and it's been a pleasure. Um yeah and I run a deep tech heart techch fund. >> Hey pretty well. >> I like it. >> Yeah. >> Uh and by the way I do have swag for you guys. So that is for you. And I got got some >> How did uh how did John how did John pitch Lucy to you back then? Because this is this is like this is what 4 years before >> Zins were like a common you know word. >> Well no no no it was a it was a smoking alternative jy that's what he was pitching. >> It was before Zin launched. >> It was before Zin launch. >> I know. Yeah I know. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean the pitch was basically >> the main thing the main thing is like I if I was getting that pitch >> I mean you're you're very compelling. I probably would have invested if we knew each other back then. that uh you know a pouch. Yeah, it's popular in Europe. >> Well, we weren't doing pouches yet. We were just gum gums and I think we maybe had mapped out lossenes. But the idea was basically that nicarette was uh >> a horrible product. >> Horrible product, but had grown into like a billion dollars a year in revenue and had been around since the 70s. Had been really well studied by the scientific community. Had been loosely effective at getting people to quit smoking, but delivered in the most medicinal way and had not had a consumer brand wrapped around it. So very much in like the Hims and Roman tea health like let's take the you know the scientificbacked product that we know works but then package it in a in in a new way and go direct to consumer. Yeah. >> Chewy style. >> Yeah. >> It was fun. It was a it was a blast. It was a blast. >> But you were doing a lot of other investing at the time. What else stands out from your investing career? >> Yeah. Well, I've been but can I first say like I have had a fantastic week. Can I tell you about the week that I've been having? Yeah, >> I think it's my best week in venture and and I've been doing this for 12 years. >> So, uh, let me let me paint the picture, right? So, Wednesday, >> Astronis raises a 450 million series E. >> This was the first check I wrote after I left Andre and Horowitz. >> That's right. >> Very first check I wrote. Great company. >> I led the seed round. >> Uh, introducing the A16Z, which which did the series A and they've also done subsequent rounds. So, that was on Wednesday morning. >> That was amazing, right? Um, you know, $2.8 $8 billion valuation. >> Um and then on Thursday, of course, I launched my new fund, uh fund five, right? And so I've got 300 million under management. >> Thank you. >> Yes. 10 10 years and change. Yeah. At this point. So another 50 million. I just raised $50 million funds. And we can talk about that in a sec. >> And then, you know, I'm I'm like waking up yesterday morning and I'm like, you know, getting all my tweets and my LinkedIn posts together for the launch at like 6 a.m. >> And something pops up in my feed and my emails. It's like one of my company teams just got acquired. I'm like, okay, well, I got to take a look at this. Like, what what happened? Well, Path AI got acquired by RO for a billion dollars. >> There we go. >> That's incredible. >> And I have two founders that have had kids this week, babies this week. So, it is just good stuff. >> Best best week ever, guys. >> Uh I mean, I I I know uh >> So, it's time to rest on your laurels. We're here to announce here. thinking about getting a bed of laurels that people here could could physically go and rest on. >> Yeah, exactly. >> One day. Uh, what were you doing before Andrea? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, originally from from the Midwest, born and raised in Indiana. My dad had a computer business growing up. So, I built computers in our basement and we sold them to people's homes, doctor's offices, you know, 80s and 90s pre-dell. >> This basically like we'll build you a custom PC for your use case. >> Do you remember 386s and 486s and Pentiums and all that? Uh I was born in 95. >> Okay. So maybe not, maybe not. But this was like the era of the 80s and 90s before Dell like really kind of took over >> and so you know we built that business. So I got into hardware, software coding at a young age. >> Um and then uh I went to Penn and I did the Wharton undergrad program. What I didn't understand when I got there was that 90% of my classmates would go into banking and consulting and I did internships in both and I hated it. >> So I didn't know. senior year comes around and I'm like what am I going to do with my life and I was so lucky. I was so lucky guys. Microsoft came to campus and recruited me to be a product manager. >> Okay, there you go. >> Right. And so that started under the goat. The >> goat Sa running it. >> No, no, it was Steve Balmer at the time. But wasn't he like a rising PM? >> He was a ris he was he was VP of product at that point. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You're working under the people knew him. Of course people knew him. >> Insane aura. >> Yeah, >> that's awesome. But it was like a time when like Microsoft stock price was just between$25 and $30. >> Yeah, the bomber era was rough. >> It was it was rough and they didn't understand the internet. This was 2004 to 2006. >> This was like while they're missing mobile basically. >> Correct. They missed the whole they and I was like this is not this is not happening. I'm wasting my career up here in Seattle. So I moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago. Okay. And I got a job at Google. Yeah. >> I was a PM in 2006 on the AdWords team. >> Sure. >> Um that Let me tell you a story on that real quick. So this was Susan Wjiki's team. So Google was founded in her garage, you know, back in the day. >> Uh she passed away a couple years ago of non small cell lung cancer, but she was an amazing leader, amazing human. And the talent that she had put together on that floor in building 42 on the second floor was amazing. >> So I'm in this cube. Eli Gil is sitting next to me. >> Satcha Patel from Homebrew over there. >> Josh McFarland who was at Greylock and now at Boom. >> Uh Ben Sberman from Pinterest. >> No way. Kevin Sysroom from Instagram and from Optimizely. >> Wow. >> Tom Tungis now from theory and Goku Rodram who's on the board of Coinbase and Pinterest, not other adsense. We were all within three cubes. >> That's incredible. >> It was insane. I don't know what was in the water there, but like we've all done pretty decently. >> Yeah, for sure. Uh what is what does a PM on Adwords do? Yeah, >> because there's a there's like the ad matching product. that's a product but then there's like the dashboard with which consu brands go to advertise and sites and there's like you know two-sided marketplace effectively like what is a day in the life like >> yeah so there's you know back in the in the core product offering at Google back then was AdWords and AdSense yeah >> so Adwords was like okay I go to google.com I type in a search query you know the ads show up AdSense is putting ads whether it was text or display or image ads video ads on other publisher sites so that publishers can start making money from the Google search algorithm based on the content of scraping that page. Yep. >> Surfacing the best possible ads. Sure. >> So my job was to kind of think about new concepts or new product launches to make more money on the AdSense side. >> Sure. >> But they were AdWords products on AdSense if Right. But then we acquired YouTube. Yeah. >> And so I was asked to move over to YouTube. Okay. >> And another OG Hunter Walk Sach's partner at homerew uh brought me over. That's awesome. And so I was working at YouTube for three years. Cool. >> And this is when we were bleeding cash. Everybody was suing us. >> The Sony, the music labels, like the movie studios. >> Uh we were burning cash like crazy. And Eric, Larry, and Sergey um come to us and they're like, "Hey guys, this is like 2007, 2008. >> Hey guys, like we need to turn on the revenue spiggot like yesterday." Yeah. like go figure out how to get the Fortune 500 to feel comfortable putting their brands on YouTube because remember with UGC user generous content people were really worried about it again 20 years ago right so >> we had to build all new products to get them more comfortable with making that uh making that uh their their brands and their products available on YouTube >> and so you know we built that business to a few hundred million in revenue I think they did like 20 billion last year >> linear linear or something >> linear TV execs at the time were they saying like no one's ever going to put dollars against YouTube because of that UGC risk? Were they were they were people saying that? >> Yeah. I mean, they didn't they didn't they didn't want to um uh put they didn't want to risk um because honestly YouTube's filters for content were not as good back then. So like like weird stuff was like popping up. >> Totally. This was like the tagging age where like you could upload a video and tag it like skateboarding Los Angeles and then you hope that that's what's in the video. But there wasn't an AI model that could look inside every frame, listen to the audio and actually understand what it was. At least I got what what what were the I'm I'm super interested in, you know, every every platform every platform that has traffic and usage is like different. So like you know just screen space is on on a website is different than screen space on Instagram is different than screen space on you know a Google search result right. What what were the unique challenges with building an ad product for YouTube given the consumption habits and the way and and the state that people come to YouTube uh in. >> Yeah. So um you know they actually had to create a new role for me because they called me the big ads PM. So my job to your point on linear TV, you know, execs, they wanted a they wanted their 30 secondond TV spot on YouTube, but we weren't we weren't going to do that. That's just like so orthogonal to the YouTube uh thesis. >> So what we did instead is we let them buy the homepage. >> Oh yeah. >> Do you remember this? So we had homepage takeovers. >> So you could put like these big banners up >> and our sales team would have this calendar of 365 days >> and they go sell them >> and they go sell them for a million a pop, two million a pop, whatever it was on Christmas or whatever it was like three million or whatever, right? And so um >> and it got tons I mean hundreds of millions of views. >> Yeah. So much traffic. Everyone lands on the homepage. Then it was pre-appro they wanted to put their brands up there >> and you know that was getting them comfortable with like a known display ad product that they were using on AdSense or somewhere else and bringing them on. But in with that million-dollar ad buy, John, we were we were forcing them to actually spend money as part of that million on YouTube.com through the search engine. >> Sure. >> So when people search, they'd have to have their display ads and their other search up there and running. So it got them comfortable with using YouTube because it was otherwise it's like, okay, it's just a 24-hour pop. Don't you want to continue the campaign for the next month and leverage all the gains that you made from brand awareness by coming people coming to YouTube.com? >> Yeah. And they're not tied to a specific video at random. Yeah. >> Which is where the real brand risk comes because it's like your ad was shown on this particular ad. It's like no, we were on the homepage. There's a lot of things. If you're mad at that one video, take it up with with Google or YouTube. Right. >> Exactly. Interesting. Exactly. And then after YouTube, I went to Netflix and I was their first head of mobile. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh this was like six months after the iPad launch from Steve Jobs and we had to rebuild all the phone and tablets from the ground up. >> They were they were growing like a weed and they looked like uh >> this is like Forest Gump level Silicon Valley lore. It's like then I was at Andrea and then I was at Netflix. Then I was at >> you know there definitely gray hairs here at every big tech company. Uh there's like three on the Mag 7 that you still got to go do tours at at some point. >> Well I did LinkedIn after that. So I got Microsoft there. So but it was I was basically at LinkedIn. >> Please tell me you were you were put pitching them on short form vertical video on LinkedIn back when you were there cuz they finally added it. >> They finally did. They finally got comfortable with it. Um, we were talking about it back then, but they were not they were not going for it. They were not going for it. >> So, yeah. What was the experience? >> It's too addictive. I spend I spend four, five, sometimes 6 hours on LinkedIn just scrolling on the vertical videos. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, Netflix was great, man. I mean, um, a very small team back then. This was 2011, 2012. >> Only eight PMs in the whole company. I was responsible for all the phone and tablet apps, you know, across Android, like the the tablet nook. Remember those? And the Kindred Fire, Kindle Fire, rather. Um, and so we had to build that. And um, you know, >> no one really gives Bezos enough credit for using the Gen Z slang. Like he made like a fire phone. And like that's what like kids would say like, "Oh, we should make a fire phone. Like this phone is fire." And he and he roll it into an entire brand. But today people would like call that out as like being too like patronizing to the younger generation. But the Firephone just sort of slid under the radar. >> Oh, well it was a complete flop, too. Horrible. >> Yeah. Well, he also has like, you know, he clearly picked up people say, you know, the the derogatory like, oh, you're basic. >> He flipped that around and tried to turn it into a positive with Amazon basics. >> Oh, yeah. >> Like, it's okay. It's okay. >> Gen Z slang over there >> at Amazon. >> That's right. That's right. >> Anyway, >> yeah. So, that was that was a great time. And then, you know, uh Andre and Horowitz about 12 years ago were looking for kind of junior folks of like like their channel partners who were product people like me to come join the investment team. >> Sure. and help them source, evaluate, and work on investments together. Yeah. Right. And so this was 2013. I ended up joining. The firm was only four years old at that point. Investing funds three and four, which were each 1.5 billion in size. >> At that point, they had not launched any sector specific funds like the crypto fund or the gaming fund or anything >> or American Dynamism. >> Exactly. None of that was a lot. It was just one fund. >> And they didn't even have growth yet. It was just one. >> It was just one fund. Yeah. It was just one one vehicle each. >> But they were doing weird deals. Like the Skype thing is always so funny to me. Were you doing SPVS? Yeah, we were doing SPVS in a Pinterest Skype, uh, Facebook even. >> Yeah. Yeah. It was very creative deal making. It was not, which I think was like a to their massive benefit. >> Yes. >> Just so many experiences obviously of financial wins, but also just like the breadth of activity at the firm allowed for those expansions to go successfully. >> That's right. And so, you know, obviously you can imagine it was just an amazing whirlwind of an experience. And when I got to meet you and Rob, soilent journey too as well. Um, with Chris. >> Yeah, with Chris Dixon. And that's when I started actually getting into hard tech. Yeah. >> So, I was kind of uh bored trying to find the next Netflix, the next Google. It wasn't as interesting to me as like the world of atoms. >> And so, I ended up starting getting into digital health, computational biology, synthetic biology. I don't have a bio background, but like very smart people like you guys got me excited about where some of these directions were going, especially in food and chemicals and materials. And then a few of us convinced um RLPAC to actually launch the Bio Fund. Yeah. >> Which was the A16Z's first sector specific fund that they launched in 2015, right? Which was a $200 million fund to go after the intersection of life sciences in computer science. And that's when I spun out and started Refactor, you know, about 10 years ago. >> Yeah. >> Um and so >> yeah, um if you recall, I started it with David P from SV Angel and then he ended up retiring, but I've been solo since and uh yeah, I haven't hired anybody. It's literally just me running running the firm. >> So you have SAS for the tooling on the back end, fund administration like lawyers on contracts like there are certainly things that in a day you can't do. Do you not even have a executive assistant? >> I I had an executive assistant for nine years part-time. Okay. >> Um who would just do all my scheduling, all that stuff. But there was a new company that Sequoia Sequoia partner actually ended up in uh leading called BlockIt. Okay. >> And it's an AI calendaring tool. And I just I just I just made that change 3 months ago. It has been amazing. >> Amazing. >> So I have like I don't know what SAS is, John, but I know what AI is. But I'm kidding. Um but I've got like a whole bunch of you know setups that I can actually like >> amplify my time. I have my fund admin. They do all my compliance and my I have a tax and audit team. They do >> fractional back office. >> Yeah. But as far as employees go, fulltime employees, >> you're looking at them. >> That's amazing. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> That's wild. Uh then why why keep the fund size the same? Why not at least inflation adjust it? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean so this I get this question all the time. Oh you because I had more than 50 million of interest in this fifth fund. Yeah. >> Right. And so if I increase the fund size then one of a few things might happen. Uh a I have to write more checks. Right. Mhm. >> And so that's, you know, as a as a single person, like it might be a little stressful and like I won't be able to give as much time to my founders >> and marginally you might be adding like the the company that wouldn't make it on the margin in the previous fund. So you're just adding in like worse performance. Adverse selection. >> Exactly. Exactly. And so if I I only do 20 or 25 companies every fund. It's a concentrated portfolio. I'm writing1 to2 million checks. All things hard tech, bio, energy, aerospace, critical materials, robotics, physical AI. Yep. Um, so all of these things like need my time and so if I and I and I want them to actually be a fun driver, right? If I'm starting out with 10% ownership in a business, maybe after dilution, I have 5% of that company. Well, what's 5% of a billion dollar unicorn? $50 million. What's my fund size? Million. >> So it it makes it work, right? And I hope they're much bigger outcomes, but like path AI, it was a it was a great great outcome, right? And so >> um I wish I had more in it but um >> on on dilution is the level of dilution increasing? I mean you look at the capex numbers from AI labs you look at the capex and spending and dilution that's going on at largecale hard tech companies that are growth stage. Uh is is that dynamic shifting? Are you worried about that or are you changing your strategy based on what's happening with some example companies? Oh yeah. I mean, we're seeing it in the last 6 months in the areas of hard techch, deep tech, whatever you want to call it, right? Like we're seeing it um the the valuations increase both at preede and seed. And so I have to be able to make certain adjustments to make sure that I can get into the highest quality companies, right? Because like 10% of a bad company is still a bad company, right? And so to your point on average selection, you know, I want to avoid that. And so, you know, I've made um very conscious decisions and exceptions on being below my target ownership to get into some of the very best companies, right? And so, especially in this world of AI where I feel like the outcomes may not be a billion, they might be 10, might be a hundred. Yeah. >> Right. And so, >> and we're seeing that constantly even with uh like uh there's so many markets. I mean the the the uh the coding agent market across cursor winds surf cognition like you have three companies that are all north of there three decacorns in the same category effectively like that is a wild situation. Uh I I can't remember the last time that happened in a in a competitive industry. Yeah. Um certainly you had Uber and Lyft but there was a divergence there at some point and the third company was I forget what it was called but uh I think it topped out at like a hundred million in valuation maybe a billion but uh it was very power law driven and we're seeing many more categories be more oligopolistic early on which is >> f the venture math is pretty simple for a seed fund of like like mine like like refactors um you know if I want to be a top desile investor you go back and look at 40 years of venture capital indry. >> What is a top desile investor? A net 3x fund. So I take my 50 million and I turn it into 150. Yeah. >> Right. >> But in order to do that, there's a lot of ways to make money invest. But the vast majority of those funds that hit that top decel net 3x mark had at least one fund returner, meaning they had one company return the entire fund. More likely a multiples like a two, three or 4x. Yeah. Right. And so you only can do that if you have su sufficient ownership at entry. Yeah. Right. Which is why I've done done more of a concentrated strategy versus you know I love you know uh SV angel box group. I co-invest with them. There's a bunch of other seed funds that I love working with. They write smaller checks and they they probably do like a 100 investments a fund. Yeah. >> Right. And they get into some amazing companies. So I love working with them because they're they're a great source of deal flow. Um but you know they've got a whole team that can go and like just meet companies all day long. That's all they do. They just meet companies. >> Um, and I want to really spend more time building like foundational relationships with my founders. I just get a lot out of that. >> Yeah. Right. >> How are you uh sourcing and vetting hard techch founders? It feels like there's the SpaceX alumni mafia and then there's the the wildcatterers, the the college dropouts who are doing a bunch of interesting stuff. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I have one here in LA, General Galactic, uh, X SpaceX, XV Farta team, building the fastest engines in space using electrolyers. So, water on board. You guys, you guys remember the TV show um, The Expanse and all for all mankind? The whole idea is like, can we use water as a fuel, right? And we think that there's water at the south pole of the moon. Imagine being able to actually have a satellite uh, powered by water that can go all the way out to the moon and refuel and come back. And if we're going to have a civilization on on on the moon, you know, that is going to be required water as propellant. >> So, what is your diligence process for that? Because that sounds like amazing, but I don't feel equipped to answer will that work or not. How are you deciding to make the investment? >> Yeah, I mean, when I invested in their preede like uh you know, what was it three or four years ago? Three year. Yeah, three or four years ago. Um, it was just uh Halen and Luke uh with a deck and an idea. Yeah. And I just love them as founders and uh they were extremely well referenced. Okay. And I feel like they had a sense of urgency about them. And that's what I look for. I mean, I don't really have a market map saying I need to invest in this idea. I want it to exist. That's where I make mistakes, >> right? Where where if I fall in love with an idea more so than a founder, I I have to really watch myself. >> It's more of the other way around. I need to fall in love with the team. I may not know what the business model is going to be or the product like this team has pivoted once before, right? And so like but they figured out this new idea and it's like it's going to work and the space force loves them and like you know we're we're getting some great momentum there. And so >> uh that's an example of one but like you know when you're doing hard techch investments across all these categories I leverage my network of professors, advisers and founders and I don't have to pay them because they just want to meet these companies for free because sometimes they may want to invest, sometimes they want to be an adviser. Yep. And so it's it's great to be able to do >> and so they can sort of fact check some of the scientific claims. Jordy, any other questions? >> Uh is is the is the business getting more, you know, running the firm getting more fun now that you have over a decade of investments that are kind of you know some of the most exciting companies in hard tech are the ones that were started 10 you know 20 in the case of SpaceX 20 years ago things like that. I think of companies like um you know, Zipline, uh Keller's uh company that are that were incredibly exciting probably in a deck back then, but then now are like actually coming to real like fruition. Um >> uh at least here in the US. Um and you mentioned like weeks like this with a lot of activity. Uh I've certainly felt that way as an angel investor. It's like the more time that passes, the more fun it is to be an angel investor because you're not just making new investments, but you're getting to see the see the sort of stories of of all your previous investments play out and you start to like really notch wins and it's a great feeling. >> It's a really great feeling. I've, you know, I've got six unicorns in the portfolio today. I've got many more hopefully coming, you know, uh, nuclear energy company and all these things. So, it's Oh, yes. >> It's great. Um, and so, you know, there are just so many amazing companies to be built and and I'm ready to work with them. And I don't know if you guys saw my my my new website, but I've got my call sign. >> Okay. What's your call sign? >> Better Call. >> Better Call. >> Better call. Like the TV show, how you pronounce my name, and it's the call sign I was built for. >> Well, thank you so much for taking it. Always good. I'll give these to the guys. >> Fantastic. >> Perfect. >> Um, we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb joining in just a minute. Uh we can uh pull up what else is in the timeline in the meantime. Someone Oh, uh there there are some uh birthday announcement. David Atenboroough turned 100 years old. >> Uh he's called the most consequential broadcaster of our time. Uh and uh if you haven't gone down the David Atenboroough rabbit hole, I highly recommend it. uh major inspiration for travel and I'm glad we have Brian Chesy from Airbnb here uh to talk about all things travel and his business. Uh he's in the waiting room. We'll bring him in to the TV room right now. Brian, how are you doing? >> Good. How are you guys doing? >> We're doing fantastic. Welcome back to the >> long. >> Yeah. Uh why don't we kick it off with just uh you know an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going, what's new in your world. >> Yeah, I mean things are really good. Um we've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. Um we grew 10% >> um last year in revenue and this quarter we announced that revenue was 18% so from 10 to 18%. Which is a pretty big acceleration. Yeah. Thank you. Um and and marketplaces are really really hard, right? Like it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size doing around hundred billion dollars in gross bookings a year start to come down, it's really really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it. >> So how'd you do it? Um, you know, it's kind of funny. Um, a number of years ago, we so I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit that startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself like, how can we get that energy back? And we basically took a very small team, um, we we named the team Project Hawaii. The name doesn't really matter, but it basically I took a very small team of people and we said, we're going to focus on a very very small service area. And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we're at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Jon and I started. And I said, "We're going to act like a startup." And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We were very small team, grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing over the customer experience, really looking the data, and we really got a lot of points in the board. Then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really like tried to bring in like world class people onto the team. They got very very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way. >> And it's been a couple years. And in fact, we were doing this last year. But one of the things is, as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the the the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a startup again, like more than ever. if we're like we feel much younger and smaller than earlier and I think with AI that would be the other thing is 60% of our code is now written by AI which is twice our benchmark of our competitors and peers and it's really really helping us AI I think is a huge boon to us I don't know if it's helped the OTAAS but it's helped us with customer service the cost per customer service ticket down 10% 40% people who contact every me the AI solves the problem for them and um we brought it through the entire entire journey. So everything is really accelerating >> on the uh on the the the the special team that went into optimize conversion rate. I imagine you have folks internally whose job it was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team and is there some sort of culture clash there? like how do you set people up for success to you know not get too political in that environment actually see it as an opportunity for a win some fresh eyes some fresh ideas like what what is required to actually have success because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKenzie and they put together a big deck and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired and maybe some of the good ideas are surfaced but it never really goes through. So what like what what what what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving information from this new uh this new quai team? >> Yeah. So it's a great thing. I mean really what I'm talking about has played out over like really five years and the term founder mode what it really meant that Paul Graham wrote was about me like skipping layers of management and going into the details with teams and instead of trying I mean here's my advice. If you're a CEO or a leader of a company that's big don't try to change the whole company. try to change a corner of the company. It's kind of like don't renovate the whole house. Pick like one room and make it perfect and then go room to room. So, I really told teams like, hey, like I actually I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working. I like handpicked some people on the team, but I really just taught them the pace and I would review work very regularly. So, I'd sometimes review the work weekly or even daily to just teach them a level of intensity, a level of perfection. Um, and it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And I will tell you that not everyone liked it and some people didn't stick around the company because they didn't like that way of working. But those who stuck around and the vast majority did, they realize, wow, actually when the CEO is involved, it's actually easier. There's less bureaucracy. I try to make the work better and I try to clear all obstacles. And so I basically did that group by group. And the great thing is like I was in massive number of details reviewing everything for years. But eventually it's like muscle memory. It's like a I don't know an instructor or a coach. You have to teach them. But once they learn and they have the muscle memory like a golf swing, you can step back and now it's muscle memory. So now I don't have to be in all these details all these teams. But I would just say a couple things of people listening like great leadership is presence not absence. I think a generation of management consulting or management school, management teaching taught us that CEOs um should trust their people and get out of the way. And I don't think trust and getting out of the way are the same thing. Again, I think leadership is presence. And if you if you you should actually be partnering with your people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a if you're a cavalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not like you're not overseas somewhere else just writing out blueprints. You got to be on the field with them. You got to be leading from example. I think leadership from the front, not from the back. And so these are just some of the things we do. And I think AI is going to create like the equivalent of an AI founder mode, which is now you got to be even more hands-on. And I don't think in the era of AI there should be any pure people managers because you're so close to the details through the data that everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on. And it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents. So, I think this hands-on approach is for everyone inside of a company. >> How did uh Jordy, please? >> Do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from 10 or 15 years ago and you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like, is that is that a helpful exercise? And >> yeah, and it's slightly and it's slightly scary because I think that I've told I had a meeting with our team recently. And I said that 26-year-old me and Joe and Nate could could f us up um if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what I would do. >> But that's because but that's because you understand this market better than anyone else. You know you know the key drivers. Like I don't think any 26y old off the street >> Hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if me sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30 year olds could also disrupt us. >> And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe, by the way, maybe that's not true and maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a global network effect. >> I I think it's actually hard to build a network that may not be possible. But the software and the app, I told our team like we can't sit still. Like our app is beautiful. It's really nice, but we got to be in a world of AI native. And here's a key point I would make. I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce. That might be a radical statement. ChatBT launched thirdparty apps last year. In March, they shut them down. I don't think a chatbot's the right interface. It's got four or five problems. The first problem is it's textbased. Um, you know, photos are an afterthought. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't like add filters. You can't cook around. Um, the third problem is um it's hard to compare. A lot of e-commerce and travel is comparison shopping. If you have thousands of options, the AI has to know exactly what you want to be able to show you one or two things, but you usually want to see more choices and you get lost. And most AI is single player. It's not collaborative. Let alone the fact that Airbnb it requires people to have an account that 85% of people send a message. So, what I'm trying to do is >> But sorry, sorry to push back there, but I'm I'm uh my wife's planning a vacation and there's like threeish hotels that we're looking at and we're looking for specific dates and she theoretically, I'm not saying the products are there yet, but theoretically you could ask a chatbot, I'm interested in staying in this location. I'm interested in these hotels. I have XYZ number of people and it could go and the agent could go and pull together like relevant sort of like listings or or room types etc. pricing, show me pictures and then actually do an analysis of the trade-offs based on all the information available as well as information in other parts of the internet and pull it together and then she could share that chat with me and we could both review it together. >> Yes, I agree. That's the future. And that's not a chatbot what you described. >> Yeah, >> that's not a chatbot. It's going to be a completely different interface. It's going to be um well, I guess you'll have to wait and see, but I I I think the future are not apps. The future are agents, but I don't think they're going to be text forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface. Okay. >> Um and so I think the current chatbot paradigm, what you're describing, it can do it. I just don't think it's the best way to do what you just described. I think there's a much more immersive way to do that. >> Got it. uh a as you think back I mean it feels like uh at at various points clearly there's been like oh is is all of this going to move to chat bots or is all of is are there going to be a million competitors that are all vibe coding exactly what you have and so is software remote uh the stock has not been beaten down during the SAS apocalypse but have you had to process those with investors have you had to walk people through Airbnb strengths again >> I'm sure I'm sure you did after the like the 2028 8 intelligence crisis. Thankfully they picked Door Dash instead of you guys, but they're very I really appreciate them picking on someone else for once. But um yeah, no absolutely. I think like there were entire like actually when Chach launched the third party apps, their stock probably went down like 7%. And by the way, I thought it was a really good idea for them to do third party apps. I think it could have been successful, but they would have needed a richer SDK for it to work. And it would have like like the app store, Apple's app store was good for Airbnb and it was good for every company because they had a really rich user interface. Maybe this is the point I'm making that imagine using iMessage on your iPhone to do everything when in fact like every other app has a unique interface. So what I think is e-commerce you want a very rich user interface. >> It would be a you be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. It could talk back to it. But I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a textbased interface is for some solutions and a chatbot that's visual. Yeah, that would work. I'm just saying today's chat bots aren't the right solution. But the answer to your question, um, I had a couple new employees like one of our one of our new team members is the name of a guy named Ahmed who is the CTO of Airbnb now. He led the llama models at Meta. And one of the comments he made to me was he said, "Wow, yeah, Airbnb is so much more than the app." >> And in fact, the app that you see is like 20% of Airbnb. I mean, we have typically four or five million people staying in Airbnb every night in more than 100 countries around the world. So, there's a lot more to do around payments, around customer service, adjudicating everything. We have to, you know, we have a $3 million guarantee against theft or property damage for a million homes a night. That's $3 trillion. Um, you know, there's just so many types of things around managing five and a half million host. We have a host app. So, there's a lot of things that are beyond the guest app. I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy and I think in an age of AI you can make a better app than ours and we want to make that app before anyone else does and we want to be agentic but I think the key is most of is not the app that you use it's mostly the off on experience it's the operation >> yeah that makes sense yeah the the iMessage example is good is even maybe even going deeper into like old SMS because iMessage has hydrated so many things with the reactions and you paste a link and it hydrates it and it's becoming more of a visual tool But it is a long road >> question. >> And one of the things Yeah. Well, before you say it, one of the things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll I'll make it again. >> Almost every AI company is an enterprise company. And um the last stat I think I said on TBPN was like 3 months ago and the stats haven't changed. I think it was 175 companies in a YC batch and I think 16 were consumer. Um that trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone's going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point though is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for AI. And I think it's going to need to be a richer user interface. I think people that want to do more things, they want it to be I mean the modern AI today is text, photos, and buttons. >> Yep. >> Mostly in some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that can be much more immersive. And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. So the exact example you gave of trying to book a hotel, yeah, you can do it on chatbot, but there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that, to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something, I think, richer on the horizon. Yeah, that was I was I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some some different uh AI companies specifically because I always I already felt like an LLM like the chat the chat bots were helping me browse around the internet. >> It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the internet. I like that it's brought together in a standardized way, right? If I like the example um you know of of comparing like different hotels, right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So, I'm looking at it. I'm not being like influ I want to be influenced by the images and like the the property, but not necessarily the design of the website, right? Because that they they can be disconnected. Um, I wanted to ask if you think LLMs will impact travel in the world in the way that social media did uh and travel trends specifically because Instagram nowadays like a place like Marfa and like uh Texas, right? It's like this random town art, you know, artistic type town in Texas and then it just becomes a cool place because of Instagram and then and then and then the entire kind of town evolves because of that. I can imagine like people researching like places to go with LMS could ultimately drive some of that and then ultimately um reinforce each other. But but what what do you think? >> Yeah, maybe the simple framework is think about a travel journey. Um, step one is destination discovery. Where should I travel? Step two is flights. How do I get there? Step three is where do I stay? Urban beer, hotel. Step four is like, what do I do when I get there? Restaurants, activities. And step five is typically like logistics, car rental, services. And then step six is you're in the city. And then you might want to do things that time spontaneously. I think LM or that let's call the LM technology applied to I'm arguing a slightly richer user interface than typical chatbot will be revolutionary for step one step two for destination discovery and flights also because flights are not very hard to build there's just three global distribution systems anyone can pipe in an API and have a flight booking app pretty pretty quickly and so I think the LMS are really really good at destination discovery if you want to say like hey I want to go somewhere that's like Paris but it's a little more affordable It's good to go in August. I like Opera. Like it's going to give you like a a very rich like suggestion of places to go. Now, I think the current chatbot doesn't have really rich maps. I think it could do a lot more visually. I think eventually chat bots or with this new interface could be very video based. So, imagine a chatbot that was actually video-based or very very photo-based rather than a little less text based. I think that would probably be what you'd want for travel. I think what I'm describing would disrupt travel um more than the current chat bots which are more acting like Google sending referral traffic and they actually the referral traffic from these chat bots are converting higher than Google and so actually the chat bots are actually additive to travel companies to remediate travel company you would really want to dismediate the travel journey it would have to be much richer >> yeah I feel like do you remember that company Hipmunk I think it was founded by some founders right uh and actually the CEO of Reddit. Um, >> that's right. Steve Huffman, right? Uh, >> wait. Ste, you're talking about Hip Camp. >> No. Uh, >> Hipmunk. >> Hipmunk was a really cool flight book. >> It was a really cool flight booking uh dashboard, and it would it would uh rank the flights by pain, like a pain index. So, it would say, well, you're not going to face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover, or you do have to get to the the the airport super early. And so, it would blend all these things together. And it's something that it feels like could be vibecoded over a weekend now. Totally. Uh and yet it is weird that when I open up the app store charts, I see chatgbt, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps. And we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was uh on stage at YC actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding and you're 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now and yet we don't have like a new AAA game or a new video game that everyone's playing and I'm wondering like is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of uh of risktaking that there's just too much money? too it's too it's too obvious to be able if you're if you're good in AI just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money get a bunch of customers it's really easy to make money and it's more risk on in consumer like what do you think needs to happen or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there and maybe the next model is the one that unlocks it well this is such a good question um I think there's like three or four factors going on >> um the first factor is I saw a tweet recently that I think there's like 60 new neolabs being formed >> and Um, I've met a number of these researchers and a lot of them are interested in doing the same things. >> And I think what I'm noticing is most these teams are purely AI people. >> Yeah. >> They don't have product people or designers on their team. >> They're picking things like science. They're picking things like coding. They're picking things like we want to create a different type of model. This is great, but I don't know if all 60 companies should be doing the same problem. And so what you're seeing is you don't see a big focus on people wanting to do consumer. I think some people think that the AGI can just figure out consumer. I think that's um maybe simple overly simplistic thinking. I do think you have to have a a point of view about consumer. So I think that's the first point. I think the second point is you know Silicon Valley's become more vibe and trend based than when I came to Silicon Valley 2007 although it was back then. And one of the things I think when people see enterprise companies doing well they go into it and I think there's this like natural flywheel. Um the other thing is I know in Y comary for example we teach the Y comary companies to use the other companies as their customers. Yeah. Now back in the day we would get them to use our product as consumers. But I think everyone's figured out actually it's way more efficient to get them as to to become customers. >> Five code five codegen startups all being like you code with me you code. >> Yes. Exactly. And so I think enterprise makes a lot of sense until everyone does enterprise and then suddenly like everyone's saying consumer is hard but you know what's also hard like competing with 10 other companies in enterprise doing your idea too that's also hard >> I think additionally the image and um in video generation models are having a I think image 2 is almost like a claude code breakthrough. in the dance video where suddenly going beyond text AI generated interface in the next year or two. So my prediction is this has been the era of of of enterprise even chat GBT's breakout success I would predict that most of the revenue is going to go be going to codeex that's my I might be wrong but just given how much money is going to claude >> and I think in the next two years you're going to see a massive revolution in consumer and I think you're going to need a couple companies to lead the way um I think we need reference points I mean even me saying the chatbot's not the interface people probably asking well what is and someone needs to be the one to do that I mean we're going try to do our part. I'm not sure Airbnb will be the company to blaze the trail, but I think someone has to. I think in another era, it would have been Apple, like the Steve Jobs era, Apple would have done that. Maybe Apple will do that, but um they would have been typically the company that would have done that. >> Yeah. >> Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing? Um, >> and when I say exact same thing, I mean agents that can do things on your computer andor, you know, look at the iPhone app store chart or look at uh look at the early stage startup market, right? A lot of companies, you know, whe the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to neolabs to >> I I'm not I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs if they're like the 10th company doing something. I mean like Peter Teal was one of our earliest investors and he used to he wrote this book 0ero to1 that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying competitions for losers and you want to kind of try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day that was enterprise because everyone was making an app and now I just I to be careful about being the 10th company um doing something unless you're going to be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So, you want to kind of zigg when everyone else is zagging. Um, so I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kind of accidental, but like like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something something as well. It was accidental that we inflated through air beds one weekend and created air bed and breakfast and people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked, but we carved our own space as did Uber. Um, and we weren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like Deep Mind, but AI was not the thing when OpenAIthropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once it's a trend it can be a little crowded and to try to claim out your own space and I would say there's so much of the US economy that AI hasn't yet touched. >> Yeah. Um, on that note, how are you talking to or how how would you talk to designers or Risdy students about applying non-technical skill sets or or nonAI disciplines, non-computer science backgrounds to consumer? I the reason I ask it is I feel like there's a lot of there's a lot of push back against AI in design communities uh in colleges right now broadly AI is not particularly popular and there's a lot of fear of job loss but at the same time you know I'm sure like the tools have changed throughout the history and there's an and I feel like you believe that there's incredible opportunity but I'm worried that some people are not jumping on that opportunity because they have hesitations about various oh well does this displace this tool or what you know how was this made or you know is this uh is this is this the right tool for the job should I even be using this >> yeah I'm really worried that um an entire generation of designers artists and creative people are going to decide to kind of sit out AI and I think it's the biggest opportunity for creative people in my lifetime by the way this is not the first time designers relate um we we created to the internet and web. So going back 30 35 years um most the prestigious designers did not get into so-called web design. Web design was considered a lower tier lower status design and they stayed with print all the established people and so they did not really chase design. What ended up happening was because you had a lot of these really excellent designers that did not go into web design. Um I think what happened was a lot of there were a lot of good people that became web designers but I think there became a gap between web design and engineering. You had people that you know maybe didn't have the full full design skill set. And what happened was this function emerged called product management. Product management I'm not arguing against. We have product management. It's very important but in industrial design there's no product managers for the most part. They're industrial designers. In architecture the architect is the product manager. And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers were very, very narrow. There was a void. Product managers filled that void. I'm not arguing against that model. But I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them. And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for intents of purposes. Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and claude code. Um, >> and I'm trying to do it now. I'm doing it for fun. I'm not really going to be doing anything productive Airbnb. But if I was 26, I would have thought of myself as a technical person. I think all designers should think of themselves as product people and as you know, front-end design engineers if if anything. And so I think this is a boon. I don't think that the future of of the internet has to be all textbased. I think it can be very visual. I think the photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly rich interfaces. And this is, I think, the best time in the world for designers and creative people to get involved. I think they're just a little bit afraid and I whatever we can do to enlist them to just get their hands dirty. Many designers are I just think more should get involved and not be you getting getting out of typical wireframes. Just start coding. >> Do you think so assuming we we we solve this problem of not enough you know uh creative people working in consumer. We we build you know we as a society build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. there's something that deserves to be at the top of the app store. Has distribution and uh the acquisition of customers and and and users changed structurally? I I you know, you were very good at SEO and Google and uh there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work? Are they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be uh that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great, but they need to get in the hands of consumers broadly? I think I think we need new patterns. Um, this is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive in Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnovers of CTO's, but like Amazon was famously and I I don't know if part of my theory is that like what works in marketing changes every few years. You have to be adaptable and your old playbook gets outdated. So marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people marketing because once something works, it almost becomes stale because then everyone does it. And so like influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it and then people kind of tune it out. It's this thing called banner blindness. Banner blindness is after you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it and so you need a new tactic. So I think that a couple thoughts. Number one, I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did like bizarre things like we sold collectible cereal boxes and we like when social media was new, we were all over social media and when when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and like try to get them to write about us. But like people ask me, "How do I get users?" like all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So, you got to be relevant and you got to find new tactics. Um, the second thing I'd say though is you're right, the distribution is mature. >> When we started Airbnb, the app store was young. In fact, the internet was still young. I mean, we could just you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the internet. And it's hard. The internet is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on the internet in hundreds of millions a year new users. So, I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the app store are new apps. They're they're they're mostly chat bots. So, what that tells you, if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And, um, so that's I think I think the two principles are do something so revolutionary, um, consumers will find you. And number two, you're going to have to find your own new tactics. And, you know, anything that is standard is probably stale. >> Well said. Yeah. Looking out into the future, uh you've ridden the growth of the short-term rental market, you dominate it now. Is is the biggest opportunity to just continue to make the best product in the category, ride the continued growth of it, or do you think there's another STR size market for Airbnb? >> Um I think the biggest opportunity for Airbnb is to go beyond a core business. Um, I do think, you know, a core business does close to hundred billion dollars in gross sales if you net out all the other businesses. Um, gross booking value, the total amount of reservations going through the site. Um, I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, eight or nine stay in a hotel. I think we can get one extra person in an Airbnb eventually. And I think that can get you to 200 billion. I think there's a market much larger than Airbnb, which is hotels. Again, hotels about eight or nine times the size of Airbnb. I don't think we'll ever be a hotel dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels. A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques. They're not chain hotels, and they're not really happy listing on the OTAAS because they pay a higher commission the chains. A lot of these independent hotels are being forced or they feel like their hand is being forced to franchise to Marriott, to Hilton, other brands because they have loyalty programs. They can, you know, they can negotiate lower commissions. So we think we can be a distribution channel for these boutiques independents. That is a multi-billion dollar market. I think another one would be services. There's no Amazon for services. And you know, think about like you can hit a button and a car can pick you up. You can hit a button and food can be delivered to you. But what about hitting a button having 80 other things possible? You know, I don't know if any one market is large, but if you add up the 80 different service verticals, that to me is another pretty big market. And then maybe the last one is like living stays longer than 30 days. Um, more and more people have a job via laptop. More people are nomadic. More people are moving around. That's another really big market. So, I think for Airbnb, we're looking at really expanding to a lot of different categories. And I think that's where most of the growth is going to be in the future. >> Do billboards in San Francisco work on you? Going back to marketing, it's one of these old things where like, yes, I I completely agree with you. like the the the CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the 50s probably printed legend you know books written about them uh >> well the billboard campaign that we're sell was just buy so many billboards that people are like wait how did this company buy so many billboards right >> and so I'm wondering is your is your thesis on marketing that the the these things go in cycles and yes we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now but it's going to come back in 5 10 years who knows or Or is it rise and fall and then never again? >> I think these channels though they they don't go away. They just stop being like if you do this thing you're going to grow like crazy. You still need to do that thing but it's no longer an art. >> Okay. Yeah. What do you think >> you guys are? Okay. So, so one thing I have to acknowledge is I think all of us advertising works better on us than we admit. Y >> I I honestly I I like we we spend a lot on like all these ads and I kind of think to myself, does do these really influence people? like and if they do and if they didn't we wouldn't be spending like a billion dollars a year on advertising. So I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's I think a last studies that show like oh that doesn't change my mind but you see something seven times and it probably even if you don't want to believe it you might start believing it. >> So clearly it works. >> I do think though the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spent a lot on advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu, we turned the Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse >> and it was like new and the whole internet talked about it and the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done, right? We've done things like that. So, I do think doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice, >> like I mean, you guys are successful cuz you're different, right? I think >> I think being different is the key to marketing. And so if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced, but if you if it looks different than another billboard, it's going to work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you got to stand out. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh the the the Red Bull uh Bombgartner, the the skydive from space is I think like a thousandx ROI. I think they spent less than a million dollars on that. And it would it I think it has a billion views or something like that. Great example of that. But if like 10 people did that, then the 10 would work as well. >> And that's probably why they didn't do a sequel and then another one another one. They went and found something else. Let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a you know a hot air balloon upside down or something. >> Get a blimp. Get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go on a sky cruise. >> Sleeping in a blimp. Yeah. >> So that would be that would be that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about >> I'd love that. We'll podcast. >> Yeah. I don't know how long it takes to get to San Francisco. >> Yeah. LA to San Francisco. If it takes me two days, three days, but I have a beautiful view. >> Would you guys do that? >> I would 100% do that. Good advertisement for us and you. >> So, so, so, so, so we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh yeah, like we'll definitely like do do something and often times it's hard to schedule, but we have been talking about blimps for like over a year. We know we can broadcast, we've been having to happen with a blimp. >> We've been having guests call in from their jets with Starlink, and the connection is perfect. So much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a plane. >> Okay, you heard it here first. Airbnb and TBPN are going to work together on a blimp partnership. You guys are going to broadcast across the country on a blimp and everybody's going to be a part of that. I want to make this work. Let's let's figure it out. We'll talk. Uh, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. >> You're the man. All right. Bye, guys. >> We're going on a blimp, baby. We're blimp maxing. Let's go. We've been waiting for this for so long. We've been thinking about Blimps, what we could do with them, and we finally >> have the perfect fit. I couldn't be more excited. Thank you for tuning in to TVPN today. Uh, it's a fantastic show. >> Thank you to our guests and our audience and leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com. >> And that was supposed to cut to John. There we go. You got >> All right. >> Anyway, >> we love you guys. >> Sign up for our newsletter. Leave us five stars. Thank you. We'll see you on Monday. >> Have a great weekend. >> Goodbye. >> Flashbang out. Something like that. Right. >> Oh, no. The flashbang's broken. The >> throwing flashbang. What do you do?