Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Vox Sold, Tokenmaxxing Stats

I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. That's misinformation. >> Courtney declaring order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts by we are experts. Founder mode >> five good. >> I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. >> UAV online. >> Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Raw. Cook is cut. Team Deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right. >> Clearing order inbound. >> Come on, get up. position. Retreat one. Cup is win. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. Let's just roll. Right. Mark clearing order inbound. Get up. >> We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. >> Marky clearing order inbound. >> Five good. founder. >> You're watching TVPN. >> Little preview there for you. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. We are live from the TV Ultram Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, >> the capital >> capital of capital. >> Uh we're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. Some uh we can't tell us they can't tell us apart. You Is that what you're saying? >> That Okay. Anyway, >> but people have been saying I need something like a square jar. >> Okay. >> When I don't wear a suit. >> Oh, okay. I'd like that. >> And uh so so yeah, something something to consider. >> Yeah, >> it it should probably be a pretty big jar. 20 bucks to the OpenAI nonprofit. That's what you got to do. Um, no, we weren't unheard. Uh, we I mean we can pull up the full uh the full post later in the show, but uh there's a funny I mean it's a good good analysis of like uh you know what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key. Uh my latest for Unheard is on why tech shows like TVPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by ESPN and why it's working. And they said, uh, where where is it? They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, but uh, we don't always have matching suits. Usually Jord's the casual one, but yesterday we were both casual. Today we're both in suits. >> We do we do still get the brother thing a lot, >> but I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, uh, we have to react to Google IO, of course. There's a whole bunch of announcements. Uh, some really exciting stuff. some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all, but first we need to watch this video about humanoid robot ramp. >> Why is ramp? >> No, I'm kidding. >> No. Uh, uh, Sun Drip Woo says, "I'm crying. Watch this video." >> Let's get some. >> You got to go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You got to go to the beginning. >> Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. Little bit of a Oh, catches itself. Catches itself. Not bad. Not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. >> Another one. >> I'm liking it. >> Yeah. >> And then >> not good. And then I I wonder what it's thinking because you would think that there would be >> Oh, they got to cut the music. They got to cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your your boy's down. >> It just gets carried off like this. It's so crazy to just carry it off like this. Like this. This seems solvable. This seems solvable. Do do tele operation take over in that case or even just have like a if on the ground reset yourself by like doing a push-up like you could sort of hard code that I would think. Like that was a weird I I understand that it can't dance and walk upstairs. Like that is tricky. I understand why it fell down but I don't understand why it couldn't get back up after it fell down. Anyway, >> singularity delayed. Yeah, it's it's possible that uh the robot died from embarrassment. >> Yeah. Or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that like as it as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. Um but uh I'm fascinated by this. I wonder how many like this video was taken clearly in like the third row of an auditorium. Are people going to see robot dance shows? Was this an introduction to a tech conference? It's like I need so much more context here to really understand what's going on. Aaron Chen posted the full the the first video. Aaron Chen AI. They had the chance to stop this when the robot almost fell, but then it really fell. But the show must go on. So, who will dance on the floor in the round? Uh, beware. Well, uh, certainly solvable with enough time, but not quite there yet. If you're thinking of shelling out big dollars for a robot dance show, maybe uh make sure there's a refund policy in case the robot absolutely collapses. That would not be good. Anyway, uh Google IO, bunch of different announcements. Uh Brandon Guerell on our team uh posted on the TBPN newsletter some reactions. Sort of bucketed it into four key areas. Intelligent eyewear. This is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni, we talked about the videos, we played a little bit of that yesterday. Uh upgrades to Gemini LLMs, those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, uh which is an interesting place with an interesting history. So, uh let's start with intelligent eyewear. Uh if you had to pick Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, have you heard of Gentle Monster before? >> I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I I I'm a fan of of the business story. I super familiar. I I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market, but uh the Warby Parkers, I've always I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand. And I've also been impressed by the way they've built that business. They were early to the DTOC boom and then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's. Is that the same team or is that a different I'm thinking of? >> Maybe they were certainly when I when I think of DTOC, I think of Warby. Yeah. I think of Allirds and I think of >> Everlane. Maybe. Yes. But when you think of two, the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub 100 million. Allirds was trading at what 20 million or something and then spiked because of the AI thing. But uh Allirds Everlane uh not really sustainable businesses. Uh Warry Parker on the other hand uh current market >> has been sitting at three and a half >> billion. birds has pretty much been down only >> down only since the pump on their Neocloud. No surprises there. >> Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes? How it's going building their NeoCloud? Did they get allocation? Are they racking Cerebras? Are they racking GB200s? What are they racking and how fast are they getting power? >> Would be it would be funny. >> Jensen ends up having to talk about allirds on the earnings call today. There's a new >> Yeah. Yeah. Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? Was it going to be like bird AI or all AI? Like they were moving >> all birds still exists. >> Okay. >> But they basically kept the public entity. >> Yeah. >> And that's what they're building the Neocloud through. So >> fun. Well, >> lots of fun. >> Uh Orby Parker, uh resilient. I mean, uh in 2021 it was a $6 billion company. Now it's a $3 billion company. uh not the best scenario but surprisingly resilient I think in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct to consumer it was like either get rolled in to a bigger company or uh go or or like face the fate of the public markets but uh Warie Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung uh Google says we're partnering with Samsung Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. Uh, and people are This is I like Futuromics from Sam. Kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite Mag 7 on your face. Now, uh, you can. Uh, the Gentle Monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera. I I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance, uh, also met Ray-B bands have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So, when you see Ray-B bands and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking, "Oh, should I be looking for a uh for a camera lens? Am I being recorded?" Uh, but the gentle monster design, the silhouette, doesn't scream technology. It doesn't scream uh wearable face camera. And so, uh, these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Um, Warby Parkers look nice, but the camera pump on this, if you zoom in on the Warby Parker, >> it see, you know, it makes a lot of sense that that the Googles and the Metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes. Yeah. >> My expectation, my uninformed >> uh expectation is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? they will probably uh I I it's hard to see them taking the route at least early on of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language, but it makes a lot of sense that uh that uh Meta would partner with Luxodica. >> Okay, first look look at the camera bump on this. If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but uh the the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Uh interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in in uh in the real world. Um is that true about Apple? I thought that they had a partnership. I thought someone I I saw this on the timeline um that Apple would be uh partnering with someone on Frames. Maybe that was just a rumor. I don't know where it went. Uh okay. So yes, I it Oh, Apple has Carl Zeiss, which I guess is like a glass manufacturer. I don't know. Is do do they do they make glasses? Glasses. >> Carl Zeiss. AG. German manufacturer of optical systems. >> Oh, they make eyewear. They have an eye collection >> in Germany in 1846. >> Okay. So >> optician Carl Zeiss. >> The Zeiss eyewear collection. I don't know. Um, but this was all from a joke uh from Abdu says, "Okay, so Apple has Carl's Ice, Meta has Ray-B bands and Oakley. Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. Boring. Which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses?" Would you rock these, Jordy? >> I like safety glasses. You know what I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzz saw. Dust in your eyes. >> But these these look cool. These are sporty. I'm I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit. computer. Full full cyberpunk full. Yeah, full. You'd clank out. Full full cyberpunk. I think that's uh I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that. Maybe friend or something. Uh anyway, um what else? Uh so, Warby Parker traded down on the news, which uh Shield Monot was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14%. They announced a partnership at Google IO that's been in the works for a while. Is it because they aren't available yet? Um and uh and our friend Rat King M Isaac says, "Okay, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for Meta Ray-B bands." Google also said it would bring Gemini to glasses this fall with Samsung electronics and and the eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses which work similarly to Meta Ray-B band smart glasses come with a camera, microphone. >> Yeah. At what point at what point does Google just buy Warby Parker, right? It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well over the last uh over the last six months. It's up 43% the last uh 6 months although it's been um almost flat uh this year. Uh I would say I expect that uh uh smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first. Right? If you already have to wear glasses all day long uh for your vision, uh why not throw some smart features in there? it's going to be harder to get someone uh that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation, right? Yeah. >> Um and so uh you know, Warby Parker's, you know, done quite well. >> Um and uh has been surprisingly resilient, but they have, you know, incredible distribution. Uh and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point. I mean deeper integration into a traditional I don't know like workflow like like a lot of the Google IO we'll get into this but was talking about uh Spark the personal AI assistant and when I think about >> Spark >> it's an AI >> oh just look at Omni >> there yeah there there's a lot of names it's Google there's a lot of products uh you're referring to of course Nathan Clark's post it's it's in Gemini just created an AI studio oh it's for your personal goo Google account for workspace, you need Gemini Business. No, not Gemini Advance. That's AI Pro now. Unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents, you do that in Spark, actually. No, not Gemini API management. And it's the typical uh meme. But um the uh the the interesting thing is that I I do think uh meta raybands like it was always like okay you have a deep integration with WhatsApp you have a deep integration with Instagram DMs maybe Facebook Messenger some people are still using that but uh in terms of like wiring into your life there are way more people that see Google Docs Gmail as like the central node in their personal life like pe like people think of like I the all the stuff I have saved on my the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think okay for the important stuff I'll put it in Google Docs or Google Drive and then most things flow through Gmail. Most things flow through iMessage. There are some people that just are like yeah WhatsApp is the number one screen time for me. That's where I really organize things. But Meta doesn't really have this like knock-on effect of like, oh yes, you've you you're it's not necessarily an enterprise level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail, iMessage. I save my files in Apple files, Apple, you know, the the cloud storage. I use my my camera roll super important. So an an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable and an AI agent running through the Google ecosystem can be valuable. the meta smart glasses. It's a little bit trickier to go and do anything that because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. >> But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these Meta Ray-B bands. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse. I don't know. Ray-B bands are a very uh iconic silhouette and they do look good. So, um we'll see. We'll see how the response goes. I think uh from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground. On the flip side, uh the red the the the Wayfairer is just such an iconic it's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced. And that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade versus a century or something like that. However long Rayban's been around, long time, right? Uh anyway, uh Genie3, you can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with street view imagery. Google is sitting on a a motherload of real world data. I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and V3, V4 maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very datailled. He seems a lot of the Mag 7 CEOs seem very data pelled. There's that story about Mark Zuckerberg uh screen recording or or or re logging all the computer use from all the meta employees. The these important troves of data are increasing in value and street view certainly seems like it's one of them. Uh this is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be. How how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take to >> Yeah. Do they allow people to build games on top of this? Yeah, I just think about I don't know. I I mean, Deus has a background in games and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point or or at least be able to like scratch that itch again. Famously, he uh wrote uh uh a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. Very fun story. Uh but again, when I think about uh Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was not I think I I don't think he was actually working on that game. It was a similar uh theme park simulator. uh we are moving back into the simulator world. Uh but the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often when I think about the games that I've spent a long time with. Some of them have incredible graphics, AAA graphics. Uh some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so that is what gets me to >> the legend Bobby Chipman in the X chat says, "Can't wait for smart glasses to fully replace my monitors." >> Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta Rayban display certainly going that direction. The Orion I' I've been surprised. Uh wasn't the first episode we ever did? We were talking about Orion >> uh and they still haven't shipped it, right? >> I mean, they shipped the smaller version, the Meta Rayban displays, which have sort of the the Call of Duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting >> I was expecting we we we've demoed the Orion headset >> and it and in it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. Uh, and I I assumed that, you know, everyone was saying it's really expensive. It's clunky. It's not ready for prime time. But, you know, look at how fast things are going. In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next MetaConnect. Maybe this summer we'll see it. But, uh, hasn't haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive p pitch uh shift to AI capex uh might have taken a back seat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. Uh, I'd like AR and VR. I think uh I think we're we're we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro, Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want. Cheaper maybe, but lighter and same screen. Sc screen was great. Uh anyway, >> we know John >> Gemini Flash 3.5 looks pretty neat according to Tennibbrris and extremely fast, but still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google. Generally a pretty disappointing IO. Now, what's interesting is that uh Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-train. Felt like it had some of that big model smell. Felt like it was uh you know, really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here. And also, >> yeah, we're still waiting for Pro. >> Yeah, Pro isn't out. Uh but people are speculating that that 3.5 Pro won't necessarily be a new pre-train. And so, uh, it seems like it's a there's a little bit of, uh, you know, research being at odds with like the product cadence like Google IO is scheduled probably like two years in advance and whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to uh, package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with uh the the uh the independent labs or the open AAI anthropic the other labs XAI like they're launching models very much like when they're done and then they will like instantiates like something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post um a model card. Uh but if you're if you're grinding towards a specific date uh and the specific model isn't quite ready uh you come out with something that's looks a little bit more incremental. people were really really uh honing in on the fact that the uh the the cutoff date was January of 2025, right? Was that the was that the date that or was it December of 2025? Either way, yeah, I I don't know. I don't know how much cut off time cut off dates matter because you know all these models, you know, can query the web and and get up. But >> yeah, overall reactions from uh developers across the board were not good. Not good at all. >> Yeah, here it underwhelming. >> Cursor ranked it on cursor bench. Uh, it is below composer 2. >> Is that is that a fair thing? I mean, I'd like to see you rank another another live stream on tbpn bench. It doesn't match up, you know. It's like >> No, I mean they have they haveench all the other they have all the other frontier >> and some of them are ahead of cursor's own models on curs. just one. It's just one data point, >> but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> But here's here's the other thing. It's four times it it costs four time it underperforms composer 2 even though it's roughly four times more expensive. >> Interesting. Interesting. Uh yeah, I I feel like for a long time Google's positioning was, you know, frontier or near frontier but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy perhaps. >> Yeah. overall starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much uh capital and resources behind anthropic. Yeah, >> says uh seems to indicate that deep mind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do. Hence the TPU sales uh rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit and there was some uh context on like you know we were asking the question like will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area. Um uh Alli K. Miller shares one of the loudest applauses in the entire Google keynote. Uh, Nishia Nisha put on the gentle monster plus Gemini glasses. Tapped the side to summon Gemini. An all-in-one prompt said, "Take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google IO 2026." And within seconds, the preview of the edited photo from Nana Banana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere. And so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Uh, very cool demo. uh impressive technology, but Greg's Gadget says these companies truly have no idea what regular people want because uh yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case. You you need to be more creative with it uh for when you would actually use that because this is a very it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that like creative spark of like, yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time. like uh if you're not doing a demo, I don't think his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature. Right. Anyway, you want to move on to something where you want to go? >> Uh what next? >> IPOs. SpaceX IPO. We're getting more details by the day. >> Oh, the other the other thing the other thing that is was going pretty viral. The last thing on IO uh was that uh the Google anti-gravity team uh flashed a codeex folder. Oh, yeah. in their uh in their actual demo video. Uh Gurgley says, "I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for anti-gravity. You can see people use codecs on the anti-gravity team. Did no one double check the launch video at the very least?" >> Um not a huge surprise. Uh obviously anti-gravity looks uh a lot of people were saying looks quite quite like uh codec. So clearly >> more than windf they would have just rebuilt Windsurf. I don't know. Uh, we'll have to see. >> No. So, but but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Uh, Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models uh and products internally. >> What was that drama with Steve Yiggy going back and forth with Demis about like what what teams are using what models and stuff? There was a big back and forth, a big dust up on the timeline like a month ago about like whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are and Demis chimed in and said like this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know goes back and forth. Uh there's also people are benchmarking Omni Flash which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There was a there were a few like little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6. >> Yeah, it was missing two cylinders. >> It was missing two cylinders. Uh but it looked good to me. I don't know. Uh but now people are actually comping it to Cance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions. Uh because I I I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China. I'm not exactly sure how that works. Uh because Seance seems to be available in America. It it seems like maybe >> Oh, I think I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to US copyright law for a very very very long time. >> And it also might just take like years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate. >> Oh yeah. You you can just go like there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store. Yeah. >> And Nike has nothing to do with it and yet all the products >> they've been selling Swatch APS over there for decades. >> Yeah. Just ask just ask uh Rolex and Pac. >> Sure. Sure. >> Yeah. I I've heard fake cars too. Like you can get a full replica of like a G Wagon that's just made in a factory and then you could buy it, bring it over here and you take it to a Mercedes dealership and they're just like this is not a Mercedes but it looks like one like like you know to the millimeter from the outside >> but internally it's just it's just frauding. Uh anyway, uh Cance 2.0 looks great. Omni flash looks great as well. These are both like super useful. Uh we'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like like at what point like it still takes a long time to generate videos. Very hard to get them right. The last 90 like we're at 99% fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details. uh when will we be in a in a paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video 6 minutes 10 minutes like you would on YouTube uh very computationally expensive very difficult to maintain the the logic like what is the deep research report of omni flash these 8-second 10-second 20 second videos are impressive uh but not perfectly substitutable for a 20-minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine. They want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes. And so, uh, that's the next benchmark. We got to move the goalposts. Anyway, uh, SpaceX IPO, the prospectus is income is incoming, according to Zero Hedge, as soon as May 20th. That's today. We will see. Goldman lead left. This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth. He went back to Morgan Stanley. There's a question about whether or not uh there would even be a lead left because it was such a big IPO. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously, they're all going to make a ton of money off of this. So, good news from start to finish, but it is interesting that Goldman was selected. Do you have a soundboard cue you want to play? >> I'm always ready, John. >> Okay. Um Katie Roof has a scoop. >> Uh the scoop athlete of the century, Katie Roof >> has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever. Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than 60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia have more than 20 billion. >> Yeah. Was this was this somewhat of a reaction to uh D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week, right? Uh they they're they're set to uh to to generate roughly 20 billion uh in in returns. uh and maybe some of these other funds thought thought to put their hand up and say >> I don't think I I I I think that at this scale like there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates and they've been they've known the numbers for a long time. They've known the ownership, the holdings and uh you do some back of the envelope and you get to uh some pretty huge numbers will be very interesting. huge for Sean Magcguire, huge for uh Luke Nosk and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund and Antonio Gracios at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks. Uh really >> like Sequoia, Founders Fund, >> they needed a win. >> They needed a win. I mean, you go back like, you know, the these investments were made like 2004, 2010. Like it was not obvious. Certainly there was no Starlink narrative when these were made. There was no space data center narrative. this was a rocket company that was blowing up rockets left and right and not quite getting to uh you know massive business. So you really had to believe be a believer and they were >> they benefit. >> Uh PY was having some fun on the timeline. He's >> said megapunds are too big to generate returns. They're basically just be collectors >> and of course they're printing. >> Yes, they are printing. Well, uh, we have a very special guest joining us today, the CEO, the founder of Bigma, Dylan Field in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV. Dylan, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me back. >> Too long. Great to see you. >> First question, are you alive or are you dead? >> Ah, very alive. Are too >> It is such a white pill. Why? What? I I I mean, how have you processed all this? I guess I I we can go into the business and the product and the financials, but I'm more interested in just like the mindset, the emotional journey, like how do you stay sane? Is it an advantage to have been building this business for so long that you can draw on other experiences? Like what what has the process of going through all of this been like for you? >> I mean, what's the quote when uh in the age of AI, those who stay sane win? >> Oh, I like that. Uh, I think that that's pretty accurate and um, uh, yeah, >> you should you should you should own that. >> Yeah, I think I'm going to attribute that to you. >> We're going to attribute that, not mine. Uh, but but but really I think it's super important. You have to uh have a even mind about it. And you know, I I know that you guys know this, but social media not reality. >> It is. It is not reality. We see this all the time. >> Yeah. >> All the time. Uh, but >> uh Yeah. And the the the the thing that I've been thinking about this week is how AI generated design is seemingly becoming as easy to clock as the >> as AI text. >> It's not this, it's that >> this then that, right? Uh I feel like people kind of >> like uh right now I mean the entire market is just going through like rolling stages of AI psychosis and everyone's having it in different ways, right? So like if you do like equity research, you're obviously going to go through a period of AI psychosis because you can just like type in a few words and get like what what looks like you know uh days, weeks of of you know really really great work. uh and sometimes it is great work and if you're a designer web designer and you can do type in a few words and get what looks like a great website instantly you're also going to go through that period and and you can just see these sort of like pockets of of AI psychosis all around the industry broadly uh but it does sort of like fade at some point and then uh if you're able to stay sane you know through those periods and not let yourself succumb to it you can get exced excited about the potential and benefit from it but not uh lose your mind in the process. And I think like we were seeing that with you know early on with chatbt and like writing right before it was super obvious to clock and then we were seeing that with uh design specifically where uh yeah when you can just go and just generate uh uh stuff design that looks like good design. I'm not saying it is good design and um and I think we're kind of coming out of that now where you can just instantly clock when something was was generated and sometimes for a specific type of asset or use case it's totally the right move to just generate something quickly. Uh but I think we're already in a period right now where I if I go to a startup's website and it's clear that it was just like a oneshot uh you know uh prompt like that says something about the company could be good could be bad we don't know >> Jordy I think uh you're absolutely right but seriously I I mean it's just the the balance Oh thank you uh I I think it's the balance we had a strike with the Figma's design assistant design agent launch today. Um, and what we tried to do was make it so that we can really help you bring the context from your file uh into the agents uh context window and with that uh do things that maybe are what will be most helpful for the designer in the moment. uh spawn agents to do explorations variations uh do the sort of wrote tasks that um are more boring. So things like design system maintenance for example, how do we make it so that you're able to do that way faster with Thigma's design agent than you would if you're just manually clicking on all these variable names uh or or manually changing a bunch of components uh or text translation or uh any number of things. And so, you know, it's been really fun to kind of explore how does the design agent work and where can we make it better because there's so much more we can do to handle more of these tasks that, you know, designers are able to elevate themselves and work at a greater level to actually push aesthetic past AI slop to actually push past um, you know, the cliches and get to real innovation, solve real UX problems for users rather than making it so that uh you just have to go do this boring these boring tasks to just get through uh and unblock people uh or unblock your team. And I think that the design agent will really help there and bring more of it into the canvas where then you can share and collaborate with your team or with other agents. So, I'm excited for where it goes and uh I think today's really big and kudos to the team because they've been working really hard making it so that we're able to take uh all the advances with models and LMS uh and apply them to design. You know, getting these models to speak design well has been non-trivial and very cool. >> That's awesome. Uh I feel like a lot of uh a lot of software engineers who are interacting with coding agents are experiencing like incredible amounts of like bloat in the code and there's questions about like are you introducing are are are you like laying really shoddy foundation that will come back to bite you later and a lot of people say the answer to slop is just more slop. In the design context, are you feeling pain from Figma users where design systems or are you at least designing the agentic design tool in a way that >> is aware of that potential pitfall in advance because there is a world where you know, oh the drudgery is is taking my website and uh and you know uh uh doing design iterations for every single possible viewport or device and uh if that gets out of sync that can be very complex. Uh at the same time uh if you wind up you know instantiating all that and then it doesn't tie together you could wind up with some sort of you know misalignment and like it could be very difficult to manage in the long term and you could wind up with like bloat. >> Yeah. I mean, look, I think that um uh it's different context for sure when you're in a a sort of codebase and you're using cloud and it's over claiming and making stuff up. >> Uh or you're using, you know, open AI's chatbt models. 5.5 is amazing, but like >> definitely over complexifies things. Uh and >> you know, these these teams will deal with uh the sort of problems that are being identified and they'll fix them and figure them out. But um uh overall I think it's a different sort of class of problem than like when you're in a design file and really part of your mode is exploration. if we can help you with that exploration that can be useful for the user. And in terms of semantics, I mean the way that you represent a a component or you know the way you apply auto layout even um these are all examples of things that we've had to get more rigorous around how do we build evals for this >> um to make sure that we're doing things in a way that is both clear and opinionated but also doesn't get in the way of the user. Mhm. >> And I think the worthy year for us has been evalu side that, you know, we have to always be improving on. And part of the feedback that we'll get from this beta will be towards where have we missed the mark and what do we need to do better and I think there's lots of room to grow there. also to say that I think that um when you look at products like weave um there's so much potential to not have um necessarily this pylon effect but rather to explore more with AI. the outputs of the models are like clay you can mold >> and um you know it's like how do you take stuff that might be a oneshot slop that's generated but then actually apply it across multiple models in a pipeline in order to actually figure out a way to make it into what you want and sometimes the best way to do that is to get on a canvas and use your hands sometimes best way to do that is through a workflow you define other times it's by going back and forth with an agent and I think you have to very smart about what you do when and it's our responsibility as a tool creator to give you all the options. >> Jordan, >> what are you excited about uh in terms of using AI to help uh augment the creative process? Because when I think of uh part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like I don't uh right now right now it's hard like a human still has to have like the fundamental kind of idea right uh in and and you we know that because you have to like type it into a box right uh you need to you need to do the typing still so we we we're still uh we're still necessary there um but when I think about like iconic like startup brands I think of uh linear. I think of some of what like cursor has done over the last couple years. I think of like Figma's brand where there's so much work that went into just like coming up with that coming up with like the concept and and the look and feel of the brand and then like way way way more work in terms of like instantiating that brand across every possible surface area. And part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like we're potentially entering into a world where you can spend more time just doing that like heavy creative work, coming up with like a concept that can stand out. And then once you create a system, then you can like much more rapidly scale it across again all these different surface areas, whether it's like digital products, web, you know, email, ads, etc. Um, how are you thinking about like augmenting uh and giving creative superpowers on that on that like brand building process when you're kind of coming up with coming up with like the idea? >> Yeah, I think there's so much we can explore and do there and uh using design systems effectively is hard. We certainly have not perfectly nailed that. I think we've done much more on the maintenance side and we have a lot more coming on the execution side of how do you put the design system you've created together so you can fully productionize that uh and it's one of the things that you know we are looking at from so many angles and uh it is critical context to be able to figure out across code across design how do you use this effectively um but brand I think is something where uh on the weave side we see even more exploration with these workflows and people being able to define workflows that are more canonical and then branch out from them. And I think we'll see the same with assistant uh and with uh Figma's design agent as well. And the I I I also think that um this idea bank content bank can be established and added to over time and by more people. And what we're seeing with the last quarter results that we announced is that more people are starting to use Pigma in the organization. Thank you. >> There are fantastic results. >> Thank you. Uh but the breadth I think of um the usage expanding is a huge part of that. And the more that you can get it to the point where people can come in with their ideas, contribute to the conversation on a canvas, collaborate with others to refine um doesn't mean that you know these like sort of non-designers who don't know uh all the conversations are being had about the UX or the brand are going to be the ones that are bringing the idea that's the idea they're going to ship uh to the table right away. But I do think that bringing more voices into that conversation, more viewpoints only helps. How do you think about the concept of uh galman amnesia in like the in the context of like sa staying sane in the age of AI like uh because there's probably non-designers who use a genai tool and are like oh wow like designers are cooked and then there's real designers who use a genai tool and say oh there's you know yes it's maybe 99% of the way there but the battle is to get to 99.999 maybe 100% of what you can do and it feels like staying sane all all outputs, right? If you ask if you ask AI to generate you something around a topic you know really really well >> it's a different feeling than a topic that you're just learning about. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean I think that basically uh folks are in a place where they learn by comparative cases and >> the more that they see great examples next to sort of output that's not as good and they can learn why that's ultimately where you see folks uh then push further and um you know they can then take it on to to do more in an area uh and evolve their skills and their judgment and their their sort of taste or not. But I I do think it's really important to have those conversational loops going and also get your arms around as a design leader what is happening in your organization because what we're seeing is more people prototype things and then uh you know there's like this laden fear of oh no what are we going to ship? Um, and is it the thing that is uh uh sort of like a random exploration that someone thought was real or is it something that uh is like gone through our cycle and is ready to go and is like very well thought out. And in general, the other thing that I'd mention is >> it feels like there's a lot of tunnel vision right now. Um you know I I think that there's certain models that kind of went oh let's learn from 40 and um you know are sort of synopantic uh and doing that in especially for engineers and uh get very latched on to an idea and then it's kind of like the AI psychosis sets in and you're like this is the best idea ever and you're fully tunnel vision towards creating it >> and you can show massive progress but like are you going the right direction? >> Yeah. And I think it's really important to steer and to actually uh be building what you need to build and to think, not just wear a thinking cap. So, uh that is something that I think is critical right now. >> Yeah. And I completely agree. Uh yeah, there's been a bunch of great takes about that. uh help me uh if I meet someone and they and they have the next great app idea and uh help me pitch them starting with Figma as the front door to the experience if they're a non-designer but they're also non-technical and they're hearing about codeex and cloud code and those like codegen tools versus starting with a design starting and having the design be the place where the idea person sort instantiates their their app or their product and then yes there are agents and they might use different tools for you know spinning up backends and doing other things. Why should Figma be the front door to building? >> Yeah, I think that um as you're exploring an idea, part of it is thinking it through >> and actually understanding what is it that I want to build >> and you should not just start in a Figma, you should go talk to users. you should go think about like what is it that I'm trying to build? What are my goals and the problems I'm trying to solve? >> Yeah. >> Uh so that might look like starting a sketchbook or a doc or in live conversation. >> I think there's a lot of people that have not asked that question to the LLMs and jump straight to I spend seven nights staying up all night. I'm cutting this thing and >> forward. It's fun. It's box effect of like will it right this time or not? And uh that's >> variable reward. Yeah, very overward spinners box. And so, >> but then I think going from there to being intentional about okay, I know what problems I'm trying to solve. Let me think through the solution. Figma provides an excellent spot to do that with in conjunction with um you know, brainstorming tools like Fig Jam or you know, document editing uh spec editing and uh from there I think when you've got your direction, you know what you want to build, >> um it's a great time to use our MCP, go bring into code or go bring into make. >> Yeah. uh and make itself I well you'll see a ton of evolution on surface ahead uh we've already had a lot uh that we've improved and you'll see even more in the weeks and months coming and uh uh then I think that's a great spot where you can go back and forth because sometimes as you build it out you realize that actually there's more to explore and define on the design side. >> Yeah. >> Uh so use the best tool for the job. Um but I think don't be tunnel vision about there's one direction and that's the only thing that can work. That's where you'll fall into traps. >> Yeah. Uh last question for me. Uh huge revenue growth, massive success on the financial side. I'm interested in going a click deeper and trying to understand uh what is working the most because it seems like there's great retention among big clients and customers that are using Figma at scale across a huge organization. There's also new uh entrepreneurs that are a team of one and they might be using Figma. There's uh almost consumer cases >> the heaviest users of of coding agents are heavily using >> Figma because they're making more software >> and they need to add stuff to it. I mean I look at some of the stuff we've vibe coded and I'm like okay like it's time to level up and have Figma in the flow if it's not already. Uh even because you don't want some even like the dashboards like these things need to be designed at some point. as they grow and scale the the the first like most basic thing it could just be a CLI but as soon as we start building UIs and multiple users like it gets more complicated but but what is driving the growth is it both is one more of an opportunity for you over the next few years like what are you most excited about >> uh I mean I think we're seeing growth kind of across the board right now and we're very thankful for that uh but our eyes are always in the future and you know the same things that I've said when I've been here in the past and you know I think have become um their own memes around design being the differentiator uh and design as the layer above code as code commoditizes more and more design is I think increasingly the battleground this is where everyone is going to really duke it out to figure out um what the direction is that they should explore and what they should go build and we need to build for that world a world where design representations code representations can live together and a world where um you know you don't have to make these false tradeoffs between direct manipulation uh and AI or you know being able to explore broadly uh or make fast progress like >> both is the answer and so that's what we're really building for right now. >> Exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. >> Have a great rest of your week. Great to see you. >> Good to see you all. Thanks for >> talk soon. Goodbye. >> See you. Up next, we have Feras from Socket back on the show uh to discuss an series C by none other than Thrive Capital. We'll bring in Feras from Socket from the waiting room to the TBP and Ultra Dome. >> Get that gone ready. >> Welcome to the show. How you doing? >> What's up? >> Good to see you. >> How's it going, guys? Thanks for having me back. >> I I think last time you were on Oh, we'll see you soon. And here you are. Give us the news first. What happened? Yeah. So, Saka announced its $60 million series C at a billion dollar valuation. Did it again. Did it again. >> Yeah. Led by Thrive Capital. >> Congrats. >> And it's it's a big day for us. >> Absolutely massive. >> Is what you do important right now? >> Yeah. You know, you couldn't have really asked for a better, you know, perfect storm. Um, you know, you have just uh the confluence of, you know, AI, cyber security, and all the different attacks we've been seeing. and we kind of built the perfect product for this moment. Um, and it's been something that we've been building towards for, you know, it seems like it's okay. You know, we just we had the right thing right now, but the reality is, you know, we've been building towards this for, you know, four years plus. Uh, and so, you know, it's an overnight success that took four years, right? >> There we go. I love it. Uh, yeah. What what was the key unlock for the new round? Uh, growth needed the capital for specific expansion. uh just the broad tailwinds of the industry, people looking forward to more demand. What what's uh what's changed in the business? >> So the business is uh is just inflecting uh you know every year I feel like you know okay this is great you know certainly we're going to get like a regression to the mean or something but uh it just keeps accelerating. So, uh, over the last, uh, while, you know, we've had, uh, 500% plus ARR growth over the last 12-month period. Um, and, you know, it's just, uh, it's it's it keeps going. So, I think it's kind of we're seeing kind of three forces converging all at at once here. We have this kind of like perfect storm between, you know, AI generating more code than ever before. Um you got developers and increasingly non-developers too that are you know pulling in uh open source dependencies and thirdparty code at like a unprecedented velocity and you have more code being written than ever before both by humans and AI agents and the the kind of maybe counterintuitive thing is it actually brings in a lot of thirdparty code uh and that code is is really vetted less than it's ever been before and and that's kind of like the first thing the other thing is you got the the the frontier AI models like Mythos that are that are finding you know thousands of high severity vulnerabilities across you know every major operating system and open source library and um so the total volume of of of vulnerabilities in code is exploding right now and it's going to keep going as as you know we start to to throw these models against you know this backlog of code that's been out there for a long time and has a lot of vulnerabilities and then kind of the third the third piece is that the the attackers have really started kind of uh realizing that they can exploit uh the software supply chain to get into companies um so they're not really like coming in through, you know, finding vulnerabilities, but they're actually kind of realizing if we go into an open source component. Um, that's actually an easy way to get into an organization and not just one, but usually thousands of organizations that all use that same component. So, it's this like perfect storm of of all these factors right now. So, uh, walk me through how your business model interacts with the open source community because, uh, when we see things like Mythos, finding a bunch of bugs in open source repos, uh, you know, we we hope that everyone will just, uh, submit bug reports early for the good of the world. Uh, but I'm interested in like the economics of patching open source if there's a really important package out there that maybe doesn't have a Linux foundation behind it. Like how at some point like at the very least there's inference costs. Uh, who's paying to patch all of the open- source uh software that so many different companies rely on? If you go to a big company, they pay you. you they might patch like their dependencies, but how does this all flow together into an actually uh safer internet? >> Yeah. Well, I've been in open source for I think over 15 years now and I maintain a bunch of open source packages and you know have a a real soft spot for the open source community and so um let me tell you they were suffering uh under an enormous burden even before the current you know AI um trends have kind of made it even worse. um you know they don't get much support whether financial or just in terms of you know the number of people working on this really critical infrastructure is super low um for for how critical it is um and so you know we started seeing a lot of AI tools being used to create these slop PRs these slop issues u and that was already kind of causing a burden and then now you have um the various frontier labs that are you know finding with with with um their their models are finding a lot of vulnerabilities that you know were there were always there but but the the community didn't know about. And um I will say they're doing a good job of of providing a patch along with the the the bug that they've identified. So they're doing a lot of the work for the maintainer, but it's still it still takes effort to review the PR. And the thing that people don't realize is when you when you accept a pull request as a maintainer, you're not just kind of it's not this one-time cost. You're actually accepting the burden kind of indefinitely into the future to maintain that code and make sure that that code is is secure uh and you know is kept up to date with all the other changes. And so, um, I think what we're going to see, and we're already starting to see, is, um, despite the kind of best efforts of the Frontier Labs, and they are making good effort, um, you know, maintainers are going to fail to actually accept these patches. And so, we're going to see, um, a lot of libraries that may have a vulnerability in them that like literally have, you know, effectively, you know, code sitting on GitHub that anyone can look at and use to generate an exploit against that vulnerability. Uh and that's there's not going to be an easy path for um companies and for you know developer teams to go and actually patch their libraries because there's no version they can upgrade to because the maintainers just sort of sitting there on that patch and hasn't hasn't accepted it. So it's just creating this real risk where um you know um like there's more volumes than ever before and there's not really like easy paths and so this is actually something we try to solve. Um so we built a um a solution to this called certified patches. And what this is is is basically kind of a deterministic way to in kind of one click make um your vulnerabilities and your open source code go away. Um so we use we use a whole bunch of AI and kind of produce these um patches that make the vone go away without any work um on the on the part of the developer. There's no kind of burden of of um upgrading packages. You just sort of um in a click the vone is gone from your dependencies. Uh and you can kind of keep the rest of your code in your application the same. Uh and and so it's it's really a kind of a quick fix to the problem that we hope, you know, is is going to be part of the solution. And by the way, we're giving away um all the critical um the critical patches to the community for free so we can we can try to disseminate this widely to as many people as possible. >> Are there are you able are you finding any companies that are completely asleep at the wheel or is everyone like giving this? >> Who should I hack today? Uh no, I just want like I imagine like part of why the business is growing so quickly is this is like a hair on fire problem concern every single day, right? You're seeing uh these like vulnerabilities or issues uh pop up. And so I would have to imagine that every every software company online where the technical leadership there uses the internet which I would imagine is all software companies are like pretty like leaning into this problem. Um, but do you ever do you ever like I'm curious even from like an outbound sales marketing standpoint, are there people that are like, "Ah, this is just like not that important for us right now." Uh, or or or would like a no be like, "We we have a solution. It's with someone else." >> We Okay, so we've met one company um that has literally no software. They they produce toilet paper >> and they didn't have to of of of business. No. I I I think um yeah, I think that it's it's become a universal problem. When we started, it was kind of this like maybe more niche problem where people said, "Okay, you know, I got a lot of other problems that are more important than this." Um and we we initially had a really good uptake uptake of the product in uh the cryptocurrency community because they have um a lot of software supply chain risk and when when these hacks happen, it's kind of an irreversible thing for them where they like lose all their their funds. Um and then I would say kind of the AI labs were the next to pick it up and sort of you know SF tech companies realized that the kind of people that are ahead of the curve and now it's become uh I mean it's like a top I'd say top one or top two concern at like nearly every company we talk to. Um it's it's a it's it's a board level concern a lot of the times now and um CISOs and heads of engineering are being asked to figure out like what is our solution to make sure the next time one of these things happens um we're protected and the next time is probably going to be like you know tomorrow like it's so it's it's become so for it's literally like you know >> every day >> yeah literally our end of quarter was uh you know uh the end of last month uh we you know we already were super busy and then there were three major software supply chain attacks that happened that same day uh it's it's wild. It's It's like more than we've ever seen and it's totally unprecedented. >> Was the GitHub uh issue that I saw a supply chain attack or was that something else? I've saw like a couple posts, but I didn't get to dig into it >> though. I I don't think they've uh released that information yet. >> Yeah, there's definitely been some speculation. I mean, the the timing right now, every time a company gets popped or their source code leaks, it's it's uh it's the first question that people think of now. And the group I believe that claimed responsibility uh is this team PCP group that has been responsible for a lot of the attacks. And so you know I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we learn but I I don't think you know that's something that we know right now and I wouldn't want to speculate. >> Yeah. I wonder if there will be movements to find like the compute infrastructure for team PCP at some point or like the hackers because at a certain point you would imagine that they're ready. >> Well they don't I mean some of this a lot of this is still social engineering right? So it doesn't doesn't they don't necessarily need you know a country of geniuses data center they couple dudes with phones >> who knows. Uh well congratulations on the progress for coming on the show. >> Thanks for keeping us all safe >> and we'll talk to you soon. >> Cool. Thanks guys. >> Have a good one. Goodbye. >> Up next we have Tay Kim from Key Context, the hottest substack on the internet. We have Tay Kim in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV room. Tay, how you doing? >> Hey, guys. >> Here we go. >> Kicking it off strong. Good. Good fit. That You know what we need to do? We need to figure out how to uh do a uh like real time real time recognition of the face, face tracking, and then land the glasses on the correct on the correct face. >> Your next appearance for next video. >> Yes. Uh and m maybe before we get into uh AI and and uh different companies uh I'd love to just know how key context is going uh how like what what it's been like we since we last uh checked in. Uh how is life? >> Uh it's much better. It's going great. I think the last time we talked was March 30th and the market was right at the bottom. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Weary. Everything was going terrible. >> Yeah. >> You never worried though. >> I did not. I tripled quadruple down on here and that's CPU shortage by CPU by memory stops. >> Yeah, >> all those uh ideas are up 50 to 150%. So I uh I said uh I think 13 out of 14 ideas are solidly in the green. I I joke that like show Otani numbers with like three >> it's not going to last but uh it it worked out. I mean we trusted in the actual >> show would love memory stocks. Yeah, right. >> I think he would. I'm sure he's his uh his financial advisors long HBM stocks. I'm sure uh >> Yeah, he has. >> Yeah, I read some I read some report that in in South Korea there's folks who are uh liquidating insurance plans to go long SK highex. It's a huge huge moment over there in South Korea >> and everyone's making fun of these uh Koreans for being long memory stocks, but I mean we're talking singledigit P multiples probably going to lots two three two to three more years >> uh triple digit growth. I mean I I quoted this Michael Dell thing where he spoke to a Wall Street conference. Uh he says 2525 that's the thing you need to know about memory stocks. uh AI accelerators gonna have 25 times more like AI GPUs from Nvidia two years from now going to have 25 times more memory per GPU >> and there's going to be 20 a need for 25 times more GPUs. Wow. So he said multiply 25 by 25 you get 625 more revenue etc. >> And you layer on to the fact that four years ago all these memory companies saw their uh revenue you know get cut in half. So they didn't expand capacity. It takes three to four years to expand capacity. So we're gonna see like mega pricing power. Like we haven't seen anything yet. These stocks are going to go keep going higher and their revenue uh revenue rates are going to be >> astronomical. So everyone makes fun of these Koreans for piling into singledigit PE stocks growing at triple digits. And this cycle is different because there are only three companies that can make make the HBM memory. >> Yeah. >> So don't make fun of the Koreans. Don't don't uh is the the the pullback that you pushed to uh that you mentioned like the when they were beaten up was that the post uh crypto slump when uh semiconductor equipment and and GPUs were being used to mine crypto and then there was a pullback there. Is that what you're referring to? Like what is the prehistory? Why were these stocks beaten up? >> So in 2022 like we had a kind of like a tech recession like everyone's all these tech companies were laying off people. Even Intel and Nvidia had these 50% draw downs. Yeah. >> Uh the whole you know everything was it's almost like the the post uh co uh kind of overhang where people bought too many digital computers, electronics and uh there was too much over capacity and so that really is different. >> What was Nvidia doing uh during that 50% draw down? Were they buying the stock back? >> Uh not not really. Nvidia did they buy a little bit of stock back but not not really. And back then this is a different Nvidia where like data center is 10% of the revenue and gaming is 80 90%. Now now it's split right >> where data center is nearly everything. Yeah. Uh what happened with Nvidia back then is uh everyone's mining their GPUs to mine Ethereum >> and then Ethereum did the whole proof ofstake proof of work thing. So demand for GPUs collapsed and uh Nvidia had like a terrible quarter. They where they missed by like two billion which was a big number back then for that. Now >> that's a rounding error. back then it was uh 20% of their revenue and the stock uh got hit hard. >> Yeah. So what are you looking forward to from Nvidia this quarter, this year? What are you watching? >> So we had like two unbelievable quarters uh the last two quarters and I expect another great amazing quarter. I mean Jensen is out there saying GPU consumption is through the roof. On Monday he said AI demand is far exceeding supply and capacity. So I think the numbers are going to be great and this is without even China. So I mean the absolute scale of these numbers are mind-blowing. We're talking like 80% growth on an $80 billion number 79 or 80 billion. Just think about in three months, right? Yeah. >> So the absolute scale and the stock is like almost as cheap as it's ever been. Like it's trading at 19 times forward below the uh S&P 500 which is growing at like 10%. Nvidia is growing at 80%. So this this dichconomy where Nvidia is becoming more and more undervalued and we could talk about why. Uh >> yeah yeah I'd love to know is that just because they're the largest company 5 trillion it's hard to wrap your mind around a10 trillion company. >> So every year we go through this cycle um the last three years during this whole upswing up everyone says peak is here right Nvidia can't grow anymore and Nvidia keeps growing at some ridiculous uh growth rate. So the skepticism, the only reason why it's trading at below market multiple is that the AI skeptics believe that the peak year is near, right? There's going to be a no. >> Is it AI? Is it AI skeptics or is it uh TPU and tranium enjoyers? >> That too. They they believe competition is coming and they're going to gain market share. I kind of kind of laugh at that. And the numbers that people, you know, put out there for the competition, it's it's like a rounding error. It's like a small single low singledigit number compared to what Nvidia is going to grow in the next few years. >> And what people keep forgetting is like if you actually look at the numbers, >> I mean Nvidia has a trillion dollars in orders, right? >> They're the ones that have locked down all the memory like I met someone guy a guy at GTC. He he he's the optical startup and Nvidia locked up all the capacity for lasers and optical, right? >> So Nvidia has the supply components with memory, wafers, optical. So they're they're pretty much the only game in town if you want to actually buy AIG GPU capacity. Like TPU gets headlines, but I mean $5 billion like is nothing when you're look comparing it to a trillion dollars, right? So they had the volume, they have uh the great power, you know, power per watt uh numbers and metrics that um basically for if you're doing inference, Nvidia GPUs, even though they cost a lot more upfront, uh when you actually do the inference, performance per watt is excellent when these are uh four. >> Yeah. How did you grapple with the question of whether or not Nvidia is a car? There are competitors. You said low singledigit percentage of the market, but AMD is getting its act together. Intel's maybe back in the game in a few years. You have tranium and TPU. Competition is rarely a good thing. Uh, is Nvidia a car or not? >> It Okay, obviously it's not a car talking about how, you know, >> I would have loved to I would have loved to be in the room with you while you saw that segment. You just like taking your computer smashing. I mean I I think I was tweeting about it. I think I wrote a piece on it. I wrote like, you know, four or 500 words about that podcast. >> I don't know if we want to go into that on but uh they they you know they're going to be 80 90% of the market maybe they'll lose 10% of the market share in two three years but 80 90% of a market that is growing you know 50 70% a year and >> the hypers scale or capex numbers went up huge. There's like 780 billion going to a trillion dollars next year. Yep. Like the market believes with Nvidia's valuation that Nvidia is gonna stop growing within the next year or two. >> But the overall market I think is going to could keep growing at 50%. At least if it grows 50% in the next two or three years and is going to grow at even if they like maintain market or and I don't believe that's true. I think they're they're actually going to maintain or even increase market share. But even if market share goes down 10%. I mean the numbers are just insane. And I don't think Nvidia is going to trade at like 10 12 times earnings when they're growing at 50%. I mean that that doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's going to reray higher. And then the key thing here is the stock stock buybacks because that's like if you guys remember during the whole iPhone like when when the iPhone uh >> five and six came out when they actually had the large screen iPhone Apple was trading at PES7 >> like Xcache like people thought Android was going almost like the same thing like Android's come in and destroy the iPhone market share when iPhone went on this generational run uh with the large screen iPhones right >> but a big thing that Apple did was they started buying back stock and that's when their multiple started going from single digits to 15 to 20 to 30 times and I I think what and they already kind of hinted at it but I think Nvidia is going to start buying stock buyback and size they they said 50% of their free cash flow in the next 12 months they're a little bit cryptic on if that was after before prepaid uh the prepayments they have for the inventory and suppliers but I think we're going to get some more clarity tonight and if they if they actually put numbers maybe it's this quarter or next quarter if they actually put the actual you we're going to buy x hundreds of billions of stock you know in the next 12 months I think the the the PE is going to rate much higher >> so you know >> as soon as we get visibility that next year is going to keep growing at 40 50% or higher I think it's going to be higher and the year after that you know stock that stock should go on top of the rerating from the capital returns >> uh Gavin Baker was on uh our friend Patrick's show this morning uh he is making the point that it's possible that TSMC TSMC could uh prevent a a bubble just given that they are not investing in in capex as aggressively as let's say Jensen might want them to. He said, you know, basically said what you're saying, which is uh Nvidia could sell a trillion dollars of GPUs, you know, pretty much immediately if they if they had the supply. Uh what's your what's your read on that? Do you think that TSMC is >> I think well so I think I've been I mean I've been following chip the industry for you know 30 40 years so you know I I very good at reading >> I'm very good at reading the tea leaves and I've noticed that Jensen and what TSMC what the CEOs have been kind of hinting at that their tone has changed in the last two three months. Yeah. So TSMC just reported their Q1 earnings and you know if you read the transcept it's pretty obvious that they're just going to raise capex on on a different order of magnitude uh for the next year and the year after. They said their capex is going to be much higher over the next three years than it was the last three years. and basically and all the stuff they're saying, you know, they're saying and Jensen's been going out there during these speeches and Q&As's he's confidently saying the supply issues in two three years are going to be on a different level. Like even with memory, he's saying all these component issues that we have now in two three years, I think he even said that on the Dores podcast interview, >> two three years this all will be like less of an issue. So I'm confident that TSMC um memory might be a little problematic but TSMC wafer wise it you know it's going to be dramatically higher over the next two three years >> but even if they raise capex it feels like there might be like a I don't know a speed bump essentially because if they if they triple capacity and that takes two years uh but everyone's sort of pricing in or expecting 10x a year or or half an oom a year there's a mismatch there that's could be fine Right now, right now the Nvidia valuation is trading like it's growing at 10. It's going to grow at 10% the next year or two, right? If they grow at 50% the next two years, >> I mean, that's definitely, you know, like TSFC is going to raise our capex the next. So, so it's like a the numbers are way off like >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm more just thinking from a market perspective. >> The 10x is not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. >> But you know 50 to 75% the next three years. I think that can happen. >> Yeah. >> And and stocks will go much higher if that happens. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. >> 10x is you know >> Yeah. >> It's not software. I mean this, you know, you have to actually move physical and adds. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Uh how do you how do you think Nvidia will be positioning uh China exposure, China opportunity? Uh that that was an interesting point of debate on the Doc Cash episode. >> Yeah, I mean I I've given up on China. I mean at GTC it Jensen said you know he got approvals on both sides and then weeks later like that you know fell through again like >> it it's forget China it's probably isn't going to happen. There's also another report that gaming GPUs were incrementally banned in China. Like I I just think like you can't rely temp your expectations. I don't think China's going to happen. >> Not relevant to the business case or the valuation, but potentially important to like the geopolitical story. >> Um I I think it's just going to be the status quo where Nvidia is not going to be able to sell to China. And anything that happens is incremental upside, but it's not going to be a huge number anymore. Even the stuff that is allowed is is a limited number. The way the US has, you know, approved the licenses, it's China is the one that's saying, "No, we're not going to let you sell right now." Like, it's been going back and forth between China and the US, you know, who bans what and whatever. Yeah. But even the incremental numbers, even if China starts approving, it's it's not a huge number the way it was in the past. So, I would temper expectations on China. It's just it's been so, you know, so back and forth and unreliable the last last couple years. >> Yeah. >> Uh what was your reaction to Google IO? Uh, I'm actually pretty negative on Google right now. And they're, you know, they're basically non-existent in the whole coding agent stuff, which is like the one that's going to that's growing exponentially right now in terms of coding agents and everyone's paying tens of billions of dollars to anthropic and now codeex for open AI, you know, they're adding a million users every few weeks. Um, Google anti- anti-gravity is is nowhere to be found. you know, no one's talking about Twitter. Every anyone that talks about it says they don't like it. >> So the hottest thing which is coding agents that's gonna, you know, that's going to automate things and do actual work for an enterprise is the biggest market that's taking off like a rocket. Google isn't there. So I mean Google Cloud is doing great, you know. Yeah. Growth, >> etc. Did did uh seeing yesterday did it start to make more sense to you why Google had been committing so much so many resources to anthropic like do you felt do you feel like >> yeah so I think they at the time at a lot of at you know at the time uh everyone was like wow I wonder how you know Demis feels feels about this of course Demis is an angel in anthropic and and uh obviously you know thinks they're a great company and they have a good relationship But at the time it was like wow what like they have this new model incoming they have this massive comput advantage they have this massive distribution advantage they have massive data advantage like they have every single advantage they have this huge head start uh vend it in everywhere on all these platforms from Google workspace which is like a massively you know underrated uh distribution point to the Google uh you know docs and and sheets and basically everywhere like every single possible advantage and an incredibly talented team and exponential demand for tokens and it was still you know somewhat surprising to see them you know invest uh invest that much in in a competitive lab and they're benefiting you know with Google cloud and get getting that business but I think long-term strategically I think Google has to be very careful and I think Microsoft experienced this with open AI I is once the value acrews to anthropic and open AI um they're going to be the power players you know four or five years from now and be able to push people around. I mean we saw that when uh Yahoo literally used Google as their search engine right Google was nobody and Yahoo put it on their on their homepage and powered their search engine and then Google became the power player in a few years. Same thing with Netscape and Yahoo. I mean this is like history repeating itself. Netscape was everyone used Netscape. I don't know if you guys were around then, but Netscape was the browser, right? And the reason Yahoo became powerful is because you clicked on that little thing on the right on the homepage and it drove people to Yahoo the portal. >> Then Google, you know, took off because they started using Google the Google search engine inside yahoo.com. Yeah. >> So I I think all these companies have to be be careful like if you if you help open AI anthropic uh become super powerful and they have the best models and you know this thing is all a flywheel right the more people that use it more people that use uh cloud code you know anthropics is going to get smarter and make the better version of cloud code. Same thing with chat and if you let Gemini kind of like lose the market right now. >> Yeah. like and Anthropic gets all the business and all the revenue like Google starts losing power in the whole tech ecosystem. So >> yeah, it's almost like the whole industry is on a merrygoround but there you know it's like a Spider-Man meme with like you know guns. Everyone's kind of just like going around. >> Yeah. >> Very very >> What are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? What does that do to the market? They sort of jump straight into the Mag 7 in terms of valuation. Are they going to suck up liquidity? Well, it's really it's really tough to tell without the the S1 and we'll see versus you know all we have is like these spot leaks and yeah, >> you know, Star Darlink and now now with the you know selling the the the AI compute a colossus to anthropic >> um I mean >> the valuation is extremely extremely high. Even even uh uh the D1 Capital guy who who's up, you know, up. Yeah. He he was interviewed on on on Oshan's show and you could tell if you just read his body language, he's like, "Wow, this is a really high multiple." I mean, go back and listen to it. Even he even though he's going to benefit from it, like he's like, "Wow, this is really high." >> Yeah. Uh so >> I mean a lot of a lot of SpaceX investors were happy with you know uh investing at 60 billion but it was doing 10 billion in revenue and had great margins and it's a completely different business both on the valuation >> goes to them they saw stuff that no I mean like it you know the launch uh costs going down and it's and darling coming out of nowhere and adding billions of you know unbelievable telecom business total market great >> but like 1.5 1.75 trillion in off those Starlink revenue. >> He's earned the what was this from Gavin Baker? He was saying like uh Elon has just always delivered for shareholders and that means that he can marshall unlimited capital at all times and I'm just you know I'm just hesitant like you know at those extreme valuations that's less upside for a retail investor. >> Oh sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to imagine like the Tesla scenario. >> Yeah. the passive indexes if they go in at that price that valuation. >> Yeah. >> Like >> on the next downturn, it's just I I just I just wish Anthropic went out first. >> Sure. >> Right. >> Cuz the numbers are dramatically real. I mean, Open AI probably is accelerating now with Codeex 2. Yeah. >> And >> you know that that will help things a lot better than you know, >> you know, SpaceX. >> Oh, sure, sure, sure. might interesting thing right now looking at the valuations of the MAG 7 and then you add SpaceX in there and then you add you know Enthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX will look potentially make Anthropic and OpenAI look cheap on just like multiple basis but then it still looks very expensive versus let's say like a meta right >> um sitting at one and a half trillion with with one of the best businesses of all time. I did I did want to ask you about Meta, your kind of updated mental model. They obviously had a big uh painful round of of layoffs today to be able to afford uh their inference bill. Um uh I'm I'm joking there, but it does seem like, you know, they're effectively uh whatever they're saving on on uh comp, they're just sort of reinvesting into >> AI >> AI uh both capex, but also uh their their inference bills. Um, how are you? >> I think you asked asked me the same question, you know, six, seven weeks ago and, you know, they they reported an unbelievable quart. I mean, they're growing at 33%. Like crazy amounts of profits like um there's market skepticism that they could do well in AI models, but you know, there's also the plan B like you could say the same thing about what happened with Elon and XAI. like they were able to there's so much demand in this mega trend hypers cycle >> that even if they falter a bit they could sell compute capacity to to the highest bidder uh that's out there so I I wouldn't count meta out I actually think like I said um their core advertising dig advertising business is more durable than the Google search engine right now which if you go you it's filled with with ads everywhere it's not it's not a great experience and a lot of that a lot of that traffic is going to shift over to uh AI chatbots. So I if you actually look at the numbers, Meta is is their business core business is very durable, has competitive advantage, it's growing, still growing like a weed. Uh I I just wouldn't count them out. >> Yeah. Basically, as soon as they either have an AI breakthrough uh or they pull back on AI, the stock has to rewrite, right? >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's the same thing happened with with with the the metaverse stuff. As they start cutting back spending, you re rer rate higher because >> all all those losses don't don't hit the income statement. >> They look tiny now. >> Yeah. It' be so it'd be so wild to think about what Meta's stock would be doing right now if the metaverse debacle had never happened because the metaverse was like this high conviction bet on a category that was just way too early and yet AI doesn't feel And yet they feel like late on AI. I think Mark felt late or at least clearly felt behind enough to to to sort of, you know, 10x the seriousness. So um >> I think yeah, I think they're a little more skeptical because of what happened with the metaverse where they spent tens of billions of dollars >> that has pretty much gone. >> Yeah. Yeah. Becoming a Neocloud is a weird outcome for a hyperscaler that could totally have a cloud platform but has not historically. And uh you would imagine that there's a whole bunch of hard one lessons that Azure, GCP, AWS went through, organizational decisions, structures, just key people in place. It feels hard to spin up immediately. At the same time, there's neoclouds that are scaling revenue extremely quickly every day. So uh I I I agree with you that it is it is a possibility but a whole set of new challenges if that's the direction. >> That's the worst case scenario right like >> they they they want to use the AI compute to make their internal businesses better with all the ad personalization and monetization and >> create this stuff and actually I've been uh playing uh playing around with OpenClaw you know for the first time a few weeks ago and uh yeah I've been using WhatsApp and that's the future everyone's going to have a digital assistant. It's like so amazing. I ask it to give me the top 20 stories. It's powered by the latest version of Codeex. Uh it goes out there, searches every day for me, and emails me the top 20 stories I should read, and it's really smart. >> Um you guys should try it. It's actually amazing. And and the thing I'm thinking is like, why can't Meta do this? I mean, they have this Meta AI that's not powerful, but you know, having this little channel for my little T-bot, I call it T-bot. Um, and and all I do is WhatsApp it and say, "Do this. Do this. Find this for me. Find this for everyone's gonna have this. This is a basic thing." And I'm using >> I mean, the big the big head underline token number from Google was that they 7x token production across all of their services. That actually seemed a little low to me given how broad the the surfaces are and how crazy the models have gotten in the last year. Um, but I would expect to start seeing that out of Meta because uh now when you go to Instagram and you search, it gives you a little AI overview and obviously they have the Meta AI app and I would imagine that there's more AI hydration happening across the ecosystem anyway >> and this digital assistant thing is going to be like OpenCL like I was skeptical until I tried it. I'm like oh my gosh. >> So Meta should be all over this because it's on their >> and probably with the Ray-B bands they'll do it. Uh well thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great hanging out. >> Great to see you Tay. What do you do for Nvidia earnings? Do you do you just like turn off all the lights in the room and and uh like just like sit there >> case of beer, nachos, big screen TV? >> Super Bowl. Is it more like a Super Bowl or like a >> No, I I I wish like we should bring back those bar crawls like they had it. They did it once and then it stopped. >> Like we should bring that back. >> Too much of a top signal. >> It's going to be the number one most valuable company for a long time. Yeah. Like I'm sorry Alphabet. It's not going to happen. >> Yeah. So, we should bring those those bar earnings parties back. >> That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day. >> See you. >> All right. Thanks, guys. Good to see you again. >> Uh, before we bring in our next guest, I want to actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article. See how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see uh the first graph. The these are IPOs uh over the last seven years uh ranging from 0 billion raised probably 10 million hundred million all the way up to two billion. Continue to scroll down and you'll see what happens as the Blockbuster IPO starts stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of just in a few minutes, uh ARM, Cerebrus, uh Uber and Porsche. And then as you keep going, Saudi Ramco comes in at 25 billion if you keep scrolling down. And then eventually uh SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at 80 billion. It makes everything else look like a flat line on the chart. Uh absolutely Blockbuster IPO and should make for a ton of great uh takes and analysis and it'll be a fun fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes goes public soon. We're getting the S1 any day now. Well, our next guest, Ahmad from Mercury, is here with a big funding announcement. So, we'll bring him in from the waiting room into the TBN. Amad, how are you doing? >> There he is. >> Yeah, great to be here. Am I not going to get the dong? >> Oh, you'll get the gong, but you got to give us the news. Tell us what happened. >> You got to give us >> what happened. >> All right. There we go. >> How much did you raise? >> Yeah, we just raised 200 million. Uh 550 million. There we go. TCB is leading. Uh so excited about that answer today. >> That's fantastic. What was the traction that unlocked this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst? >> Uh you know, we've just been kind of grinding away for the last uh what is it 7 years since we launched. Um >> success seen a lot of growth in Q1 especially about 2.5x our Q1 last year in terms of applications. uh I don't know if you've seen the stats but there's been a lot of new business formation a lot of you know companies being built using AI so obviously we we hear about like these big startups in AI but there's also uh just like normal businesses being built with AI being a big catalyst u and we saw yeah big increase 2.5x over the last year which and last year was a big year for us >> how are you reaching those customers like what are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses they don't exist it's hard to reach out to them before you have be very aware. >> The other crazy thing for us is we most of our growth is organic. Uh but that even the percentage organic has been growing for us. So even though we're growing, we're getting more and more organic which you know uh is unexpected. Uh and the other big channel for us is LLM recommendation. So you know if you go into >> your favorite LLM and you say you know what bank should I use for my startup? Uh Mercury is often the recommendation. So that's, you know, we try to deliver the best customer experience possible and, you know, because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it and that's for us. >> What What is is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LMS is just because people recommend Mercury so highly? Like I I can't be I like I I'm just trying to get at is it like your team was like, "Hey, we should really optimize this or it was just >> Yeah, I think it's really hard. Like there's a whole thing called GEO which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X. Like if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds into the algorithm. >> Yeah, it helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business seven years. Uh not so long that you're the the articles are about the downfall or like the how you're a dinosaur. >> All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out. And so that surfaces, how are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations and sort of like the agentic commerce of actually opening an account? Is that something that's on your horizon to integrate? >> It's kind of interesting thinking about like the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI. We launched that was a month or so ago and we launched an MCP actually in December and our growth on like those is like through the roof. So you tons of people are using claw code or co-work or chat gpt to connect to mercury and then >> yeah I think the well not for everyone but for a lot of people they kind of running their whole business and their life in AI now and you know if you can pull in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your kind of existing workflows uh that's really powerful and I think if you there's a flywheel between like if you build great tools that AI can use it actually recommends those tools even more I mean that's partly why like you people like Superbase and like those kind of tools. >> Yeah. Then then how do you how do you deal with the tension of like you could build a dashboard uh visualizing uh payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it. Uh there's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane? >> I I think for us it's like do both. So we're building both kind of this CLI and we we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and those those services. We also have another team that's working on and we just launched Mercury insights which you know summarizes your transactions gives you like kind of AI insights on end lets you talk to your transactions and then later this year we're launching Mercury Command where you can do kind of complex workflows like hey I just hired someone set set them up in payroll and create a card and you know do all of that without me having to kind of click around all the all of the kind of mercury surfaces. Uh and I think number one, I don't know exactly where the world's going to go, right? Like maybe maybe everyone's going to be using uh AI assistance to do everything or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. Uh and B, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, you know, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions, whatever is, you know, Mercury's been far ahead, but if AI keeps changing the world and like you the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that and you know that's going to increase the spread between like what people get from Mercury versus like what they get from the incumbents. >> Yeah. I was reading an article in The Economist a couple weeks ago about uh stable coins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or like a maybe just a you know stable uh volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stable coin related features in fintech broadly? >> Yeah, I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. So I think if you're in the US and you're sending money to a US business or you can US consumer uh you know wires a all of the cards all of that works pretty smoothly. Uh if you're paying money internationally or you know you don't you know in the US and you want to have like a stable currency uh that's where USDC and these other stable coins are doing really well. So uh you know we don't currently support it natively but lots of our customers use uh you know some of these kind of stable coin services and we'll probably have uh kind of at least payment features that are based on stable coin especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for the US banking system in the US. I think it's it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer. >> Is Oh, sorry, Jordy. >> Uh why why was this year the right time to get into payroll? >> Uh you know, we've been expanding our services. So, obviously, we're known best for banking, but we've had a corporate credit card for three years and that's growing really fast. We have a bill pay invoicing solution and you know, over time, I really want Mercury to be the place that you do most of your business finances, right? It's kind of annoying like if if the money's here and your users are here and your finance team is here, you know, you want to have all of that kind of in in one place. Um, so yeah, we made an acquisition in payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running uh you know, we're continuing to run them and we're going to going to over time make it more like a fully integrated mercury payroll solution. Uh but yeah, payroll is like a big category. Uh you know, it's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider. You have to send money. it's kind of sits around for 4 days before it shows up on your employees. Uh, and you know, Central's done a really good job with kind of AI first, like they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack and you know, we we're kind of taking some of that learning and and putting in our own kind of command launch. >> Yeah. Is uh is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink uh product roadmap expansion differently than a few years ago? Like when I think about neo banks, fintech, modern technology enabled banks, I I think like you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer, you could do all sorts of the insurance. There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time, there's this foundational unlock in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension? Um, you know, I think number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't I don't want to like invent things that they might want kind of thing. Uh, it's definitely accelerating u, you know, I think the two vectors are like a it accelerates software development. It doesn't necessarily make like >> kind of the more financial like it doesn't make lending that much better faster or whatever. Uh, maybe you could underwrite a little better but uh there's still like kind of limitations but you can build software especially new software much quicker. So definitely thinking about that and like we're already seeing an acceleration in in kind of new software launches we're doing. Uh I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is you know interfaces tend to get cluttered over time but AI has a decluttering effect like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need and like you know I really think the future is people are not trying to do a specific thing but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like hey you know I just need to make payroll like you know help me think it through kind of thing. Uh so you can go like a level above like solve the problem rather than like be like a feature uh which I think like has a decluttering effect to interfaces. >> That's good. >> Yeah. It's so it's so amazing. I just think back to you know 10 years ago at this point like starting to to build companies and just seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees because like the function of a bank is to like hold money and let you do things with it. And yet obviously, you know, took took some time for you guys to enter payroll and then all these all these other things like just just the concept of uh getting getting an invoice wanting to pay it. Like you really should be as simple as like dragging it somewhere and then that's it, right? And so there's all these things that like right in this moment there's going to be an entire generation of entrepreneurs that like only knows this like completely frictionless business finance. And I'm very happy for them. Uh yeah, and I'm happy for I'm happy for all of us that that had to go through and do it the hard way for for so long. >> Yeah. When I started Mercury, that's actually got what got me excited that like after you build a bank account, there's so much more to do after that. You know, I really didn't want to this is my fourth company, so I really didn't want to do like this thing where you build the thing and then all you do is like incrementally improve it a little bit over like a decade. Like I really wanted to do something where like the start is just the start and it's kind of a platform to build a lot. So I'm exciting excited that we're like finally like getting to build build that kind of multi-product strategy. >> Last question. Deployment pace for angel investing. Are you accelerating it? Are you decelerating? What are you doing on the investing side? >> Maybe I'm a little old school, but like when I think when the valuations are the highest and the hype is the highest, you should like not accelerate. You should like, you know, we saw 2021 like I'm trying to keep like a continuous pace. Like I think it's total. >> Don't you know this time is different? Yeah, I you know I think that that the like there's a reason for the hype and there's really exciting companies being built. Uh but I think it's going to be even more fun when the valuations come down after the hype dies down and you can like then deploy, you know, it was crazy no one was deploying in 2022 and 2023 when like it's the same companies at like a massive discount. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean the smart funds were and uh a lot of great companies made it through grew even bigger and are bigger than they've ever been as you are. So congratulations on all the progress. Thank you for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. >> Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. >> Uh there have been a number of AI images hitting the type timeline. One was of Peter Teal eating ice cream in Buenos Aris. He has been spotted at a chess match. I think that image was not AI. This one is AI generated by Cat McGee. Uh but it still sparked a bunch of funny reactions. is one of them. The question you need to be asking is, "What delicious ice cream is almost nobody eating?" >> Question is, uh, >> is mint chip properly rated or underrated? >> Uh, mint chip might be underrated. I think it gets thrown in with the chocolate category. It's sort of a second fiddle to the vanilla, strawberry, chocolate. >> Always a mint chip kid. >> I like mint chip. I I was always strawberry. I like I like strawberry ice cream, but chip's good. But I think as you zoom in on this AI image, you can tell that it's uh it's AI. It's just too crystal clear, too well lit for uh you know, someone to snap a picture unnoticed in Buenosares at a uh at a at an ice cream parlor. Uh this would be this would require professional lighting to get something like this out of a camera on the fly if you saw someone. Uh zero to yum is what they say. Anyway, um, >> uh, question, John, that I was asking you this morning. >> Yeah. >> Uh, do you think it's better to rest on your laurels or sleep at the wheel? >> I think >> I have my answer, but I want to hear yours. >> Uh, I think in the modern era, sleeping at the wheel is increasingly safe because of self-driving cars. You can be you can be sleeping in a Whimo. You could be sitting in the front seat. I don't know. Do they let you sit in the front seat of a Whimo? I don't think so. Maybe if there's a fourth. >> Yeah. >> Can you Can you not Not behind the wheel. >> Not behind the wheel. But what if I'm in the back and I wiggle my body through the front two seats. Sit in the front. It'll stop the car. >> They're going to come on the phone. They're going to They will stop. >> Okay. Well, uh, then it seems like it's increasingly difficult to sleep at the wheel. And so perhaps resting on your laurels would be the better option. >> I think so because it allows you to one, one, it's obviously comfortable, quite relaxing. >> Yes. Uh but but just because you're resting doesn't mean you can't get back in the game. >> Yeah. Also resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to begin with. Whereas sleeping at the wheel, >> you just have a car. Yeah. It could be. >> It might not even be your car. It's also very Lindy, right? People have been doing this for thousands of years. You can imagine a Roman emperor resting on >> resting on their laurels. >> But they weren't sleeping at the wheel. They hadn't invented the wheel. They barely invented the wheel. >> I think they had the wheel. >> Well, they would ride on top of wheels. They had the wheel. were they were planning to reinvent the wheel. >> But no one had a w a wagon that had a wheel that would steer the wagon. You had res. They would take the horse by the reinss. That's isn't that the phrase? Take the bull by the horns. >> What's the res idiom? There's some sort of rains idiom anyway. Um >> uh yeah. No, I think I think personally >> resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to rest on. Sleeping at the wheel means that you just got behind the wheel. You could be in a sudden death situation. >> Yes. Much much riskier. >> High riskier. High risk, low reward. Almost very very >> plenty of people rest on their laurels and just fade into obscurity. They aren't met with a with true downfall if they're resting on their laurels. >> But sometimes you just rest, recharge, get back in the game. >> But ideally, you avoid both. Ideally, you avoid both sleeping at the wheel and resting on your >> laurels. Imagine just bunch of laurels in your driver's seat and you're just sitting. >> You could be doing both at the same time. >> You could be doing both. That is the riskiest possible scenario because you're gonna be the most relaxed. >> Yeah. >> Highest likelihood of, you know, careening off the road. >> You want to avoid both. You want to avoid both. What do you think of this desk? Herman Miller launched a gaming desk. People are saying it's tasteful. A tasteful gaming setup. For once, they thought it was impossible. >> You personally find pretty much all gaming setups tasteful. It's a big part of your culture. >> I love I love a gaming desk. Uh, I don't know. The the the thing is that I I don't know. This watching this video of the coil gaming desk, it doesn't scream that tasteful to me. It seems like a minor upgrade. Probably the best gaming desk out there. Seems very functional. I also I don't know why there's a back panel there. I don't know what that's for. Is that for uh passing wires through perhaps? But uh how would you rate this gaming desk? Is it tasteful? >> I like it. I like the red coil. I like a pop of color. >> Okay. Little color in there. >> I love that's that that color red is one of my favorite colors. >> Maybe it's Yeah, I think >> I have a uh I have a uh >> What is the coil for? Oh, it it takes the cable down so you can plug it in because it's adjustable. >> Almost certainly power. >> I feel like they could just thread that through the leg and it wouldn't even be there. But I guess it adds a pop of color. Chad is saying overdesigned. >> Overdesigned. We'll see. Herman Miller. Herman Miller has a whole gaming division, I suppose. Anyway, uh you got to remember, this is from Will Depw. You got to remember that there's some guy out there who's the Michael Jordan of steel processing. He's on a generational run right now. Everyone sees their niche as the center of the world. So many greats. You'll never hear of the Michael Jordan of steel processing. We got to find him, dig him up, get him on the show. We've had the Michael Jordan of acquiring rare parcels of land in Montana on the show. >> Fantastic. He's got to be pretty excited for this upcoming round of IPOs, >> data center buildouts, >> a lot of >> I don't know. >> Anyway, >> lot of those IPO. >> We can come back to the land the land strategies uh because we have our next guest here, Brian Chesy from Airbnb back on the show. Only a few weeks since we talked to you last. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing? Hey guys, how you doing? Good to be here again. >> Great to see you. We're not in I'd be better if we were in a blimp right now. >> It'd be better if we were in a blimp, but we're one show closer to hanging out on a blimp together. Uh give us the update. What's going on in Airbnb world? >> So, we announced a few things. Uh the first thing we announced is a whole bunch of new services. Um probably starting with grocery delivery. Uh a lot of people love that Airbnbs have kitchens. So, now when you book an Airbnb, you can have groceries waiting for you in Airbnb. A number of people tell us that if you go to Rome, it's hard to get an Uber. So now there's going to be somebody that can welcome you at the airport and pick you up and take you to Airbnb. We also announced finally car rentals. A long time coming. And so now you can get a car rental on Airbnb. Um and we also announced that we have now boutique and independent hotels. If you book a boutique or independent hotel, we are get creating a price match guarantee. Mhm. >> So if you see a lower price anywhere else, we will give you the difference back in credit and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. So those are just a few of the things that we announced. Really the basic idea is just continually listen to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our hosts, and just keep expanding and perfecting the service and trying to make our be a bit of an ecosystem of other developers and other apps. Yeah, this feels like uh the the fruition coming to reality of like a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. Uh what was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on uh new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas? Like a lot of these feel like they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel or button in the app. Yeah, I mean it's a good a good a good question guys. Um the app that most people see as maybe something like call it 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app but again most the work about Airbnb is what happens in the real world and um I think I said last time that we spent a lot of time imagine like you're living in a one-story house and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor but you didn't build the foundation for a four-story building. And so what we had to do over the last few years is kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things. Amazon had this problem in the late '9s. They were built on ISBNs for books and they had to basically uh take their website and turn into a bunch of primitives. So, we basically already done that work. To give you an example, it took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us two years to develop service experiences. It took us eight months to develop groceries. And it took us only two months to develop luggage storage, airport pickups, and car rentals. So basically looking at the time to launch from conceptional launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market sometimes within like a couple weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing one or two things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year. >> Yeah. >> Uh cars, why uh obviously hard thing to do, but uh I'm sure people have been asking this to for for you know decade now. Uh why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you why are you making those why was like why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such such a you know such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere, you know, give me one click to to add a car. Obviously there's more that needs to happen on the back end. But >> uh why? >> Yeah, another great question. And I asked myself that like why didn't we do certain things sooner and if I could I would have. Um, you know, I remember that, um, one of my early investors said, "Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down." I never realized when I started a company that >> I never realized. I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you'd have all these extra people to do all these extra things. But when you're when we were in hyperrowth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in the 2010s during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work. Tried in 2016, didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019 and then suddenly the pandemic hit. We lost 80% of our business in 8 weeks and we said, "Oh man, we don't have time to do this right now. We got to go back to our core business." So we kind of had three different starts and we tried it before. We just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So yeah, people have been asking for this for more than a decade. In fact, 15 years. 2011, we began thinking about it. And now I hope I'm happy to say that hopefully going forward, you won't have to wait 15 years for another service. So we'll be they'll be coming really fast now. >> Yeah. And and uh how how is it working under the hood? Are you partnering like is this a uh also kind of like sharing economy play? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you want to. >> Yeah, it's going to be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers. So, we're going to be working with a number of different partners um that be able to that can fulfill this. Um some of the services like Bounce, like we don't do luggage storage. They have 15,000 locations, almost as many that are Starbucks. So, that's more like an app store integration. And then sometimes we have to build the services first party with our own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. Um no one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more countries than Coca-Cola. So, you have to patch a bunch of things together. And I think over time we'll probably >> You guys are in more countries than Coca-Cola. >> I think that like we were at least last time we checked. >> What is What is What is Coca-Cola doing? >> They're asleep at the wheel. >> I know. Come on. >> Founder mode. >> I think we're in every country but North Korea. >> Yeah. >> Iran. Yeah. >> Syria. Um Russia. Bellarus. Maybe there's one other. So, we're just about every other country. >> Yeah. The other thing with cars that uh in as I was just like thinking about that as as kind of Turo came on the map the one of the and I love cars so I was always uh I I I thought very briefly of maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like and uh maybe turn into a little business. uh quickly realized that like it's like fundamentally uh a fundamentally a wildly different business because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it 365 days a year, if I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate. Cars are the exact opposite. Uh and it's just like a wildly different financial equation. And so um it made it always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like incurring some like heavy heavy costs associated with uh actually like supplying uh you know providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side uh you know again you're you you can get a bunch of rental income and not uh not occur any uh you know significant losses associated with the asset. Yeah, I mean I think that's a really really good point and um usually people's second biggest asset after their home is their car. And so I think now we have people's time, we have their homes, we have their cars. We would like to move to a lot of different other categories. Um over time I think you'll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next year or two on Airbnb. Essentially building this entire ecosystem of services. But you're right. I mean I think maybe one way to think about Airbnb is like just getting more capacity utilization out of assets. Um, you know, anything that's empty, it could be further monetized. And the world could be a bit more efficient. It could be cheaper to own a car. It could be cheaper to own a house if you could defer the cost by sharing with other people. That was basically how it started. I couldn't afford to pay rent, but that doesn't limit it to itself to homes as you mentioned. It could be anything. Cars, it could be boats, it could be equipment you have laying around, it could be kind of anything. >> Uh, how uh how do you think about the the previous uh services that have tied into Airbnb? Was there ever a power law distribution in those any few services? We've talked about uh you know fitness trainers when you're in a town or private chefs or anything that can add to an experience, a kayaking tour, a hiking tour. Uh was there a power law distribution in those? Are you seeing uh breakout successes in in those? Like what what's the shape of that side of the business these days? >> Yeah, so basically we learned two things with um these services. I'll talk about service and experiences. Yeah, >> there are three services. We launch a 10, three breakout hits. >> The three breakout hits are photography. A lot of people want photos on their vacation. And obviously, if you're a family of four, like one of you is not in the photo or you're giving your camera to someone else. And you you want to remember these trips. So having a professional photographer >> take your photos for 30 minutes, it's pretty reasonable cost. That's very popular. Chefs. Chefs are not as popular in very urban areas, but like let's say you go to Lake Tahoe, you have a big kitchen, maybe you have groceries, maybe you don't want to cook. A chef could come over, there's not a lot of restaurants there. And then the third one's massage, especially again in vacational or villa destinations. Massage is very popular. Other than that, it's really geography by geography. So we see like in Salulita, it's a different kind of experience than say in like the Caribbean. So it really depends geography by geography. With regards to experiences, we're seeing a couple things. Number one, no surprise landmarks. People, the first time you go to a city, you want to see a landmark. But the thing we learned is the second time you go to a city, you don't want to see a landmark. You want to experience food. And the third time you experience a city, now you want to get inside access. So a big thing we learned is is this your first, second, or third time to city or do you live there? And depending upon the answer to the question depends on the type of experience we offer you. This was a nuance that we didn't really appreciate the first time around and now we do. And I think my prediction is the thing that will make service experiences really big is people will start booking them in their own city. That's when the TAM goes by, you know, by a factor of 10. And not to say it'll be every day, but it just makes it a lot bigger TAM. >> Yeah. Uh yeah, it just just clicked for me that uh you know one of the challenges of all the marketplaces like photography, chef marketplaces, uh massage, all of them, we don't I can't even really think of their names even though there was like venture funded companies in those categories because the second you hire a chef, they're literally preparing you food. You immediately develop like trust and a relationship. And so in if you book find a chef in your hometown, >> you're talking about disintermediation. >> You're going to have this massive disintermediation >> and also economies of scale. If you're just the private chef booking company, very hard to support the entire operation, the back office, but Airbnb is big company. This can be one of many features and the the the can travel. It's like, yeah, I want a photographer here. I want a chef here. >> You bring up two points. Um dis I'll I'll bring up both points. So, one thing is most services there's not even one app in the world. So, if you want to get a massage United States, you might use an app like Zeal, but if you want to get a massage in Korea, I don't even know the app. It's probably a Korean company. And if you want to go to Brazil, it's going to be a different company. So, it's not even possible for most people to know which app to use in which country. And so, being able to aggregate all that demand is great. And these apps, these developers love it because we basically are their international expansion strategy. another much of these companies the hardest challenge they have is growing internationally and we say well we can introduce your brand to a global audience well now let's talk about locals yes >> I don't if you're going to do a repeat service we don't want to charge 15 and 20%. Mhm. >> We're going to have to decide a business model and maybe there is no commission or it's a very very low commission and maybe the value there is just we make your life easier. And I don't I think this brings up a larger point which is we don't need to monetize every experience on Airbnb. The best thing is have a great relationship add value and know that there's enough highv value assets we can make money on and we don't need to try to get every last dollar. We just really want people to love our service and as you know you know we generate quite a bit of free cash flow. So um you know we're one of the more profitable companies as a free thank you as a free cash flow standpoint. So we are able to pass a lot of value on to customers. >> Yeah. I think I think you know that that framing as like a concierge for the world where like if you're staying if you're staying at a hotel like the concierge is not always thinking like okay this person wants something to do today. How do I get the maximum amount of value out of them in this moment? Right? because then you'd always send them to why don't you eat at this restaurant on the property or why don't you do this thing on the property but just like actually taking a a positive some view and just know that like you want to be core to someone's experience wherever they are in the world I think is >> I like concier for the world by the way that's like a very good slogan actually >> coinage I love it uh >> it's all yours maybe this is a random pivot but uh the total solar eclipse is happening August 12th 2026 Uh I want to know it feels like it's driving a lot of travel broadly and I want to know like do these special events first of all like I feel like every time there's like one of these things it's like this will never happen again for for 600 years and then it happens in like two years. >> No no no it's a very specific happens every years but there's a lot of things. >> Yeah. So, a couple years ago it happened in Texas and uh and this time it's happening in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal, and Spain. And so, there is a lot of travel and I've heard stats from other companies. And I'm just wondering about these like big events. First, like how much do they show up in the data? How how much do you see them? And then second, like what are you doing to like amplify and get the most out of these? Let your customers know because you you frame this as like sometimes the best experience is like when you know it's the first time visiting a place, second time, third time. But at the same time as a user there's this tension between I love it when a company knows something about me before I have to fill out a form. But also it gets a little creepy if they know too much about me and this like this weird tension where I want you to know but I don't want you to tell me that you know and I don't want to fill out the form but I don't want you to spy on me but I sort of do want you to spy on me. Walk me through all of that. >> Okay. So, yeah, two parts. I'll do the solar eclipse and then we'll talk about essentially personalization without being creepy maybe is the point. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, on the solar eclipse in 2024, I think it was the spring or I don't know when it was in 2024, >> we were able to see a heat map. So, yes, you saw in the data and we were able to see a heat map of the exact path of the solar eclipse and you could look at a heat map of all of our bookings and anyone that was in that line of the eclipse, you saw a massive increase in bookings. When the Taylor Swift eras tour came out, you can literally follow the tour from the data on Airbnb. >> When the World Cup came in Paris, um, sorry, the Olympics came in Paris, 700,000 people stayed in Airbnb. That's like eight, nine Olympic stadiums worth of people. In Milan, 200,000 people stayed in Milan Cortino for the Olympics earlier this year. The World Cup's coming up in Mexico, US Canada. We're expecting that to be the biggest event in Airbnb history. Um, you're actually hitting on a really key point. The only maybe the reason Airbnb exists is this weird phenomenon where people list their homes for an event. Most people have only intention of listing one time, but about 50% of the people continue hosting. >> Yeah. >> And so it's kind of a hook and a lot of people like, I don't want to host, but they do it once. They make a bunch of money. They realize it's not weird and they keep doing it. If it wasn't for this phenomenon, there may not have been an Airbnb. We used events to grow. So that is basically a core part of our strategy whether it's financial or LA Airbnb futures. I should be able to go buy buy I should be able to go, you know, see events that I know are going to happen, Olympics, World Cup, and basically buy and then resell. I'm kidding. Um >> Oh, and then I want to I want to answer the second part of I think John's question, which is personalization without being creepy. Um, so right now I think most websites um and most apps don't really ask you questions. They infer things, right? They think that if you ask somebody a question, that's friction. And so for 25 years, this is Amazon, this is Instagram, this is basically every app, including Airbnb. We're mostly just looking at what you click on, what you book, your prior behavior, and we try to infer based on that what you want in the future. I think going forward, we're going to go beyond that. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to ask you questions. That's what an agent does. An agent asks you questions. So your concierge for the world should ask you questions. You went to a travel concierge but they they didn't ask you a question. That'd be pretty weird. So I think that's the social contract of the app is more conversational. We're going to get more information. But the other thing is designing preferences. We found that people are fine giving us their information if they know why, where it's going, that it's vaulted, and what we're going to do with it. So we're going to develop a preferences panel. Like we announced today, one of the things I'm most proud of is the design of our privacy page. Most people they either don't care about the privacy page and like the people that it's like their entry level work or they make it sometime sometimes maybe make it purposely hard. Um but then I ultimately that erodess trust. So we're making preferences. I want to basically build a preferences library where we show you here's all the stuff we know about you. >> Do you want to edit anything? Do you want to add it? And here's what we're going to show to whom? And you can say show this to the host. This is only available to an agent. This no human can see. It's vaulted, but the app can see it and eventually maybe it's encrypted. So, that's kind of where we want to go. >> Mhm. >> 2034 total solar eclipse in Egypt. You can stand at the pyramids and watch it book your Airbnb futures. >> I'm going to go I'm going to go and offer cash today. >> You should start buying property all over Egypt. And >> uh last question. Uh what what's the last major fitness or health unlock that you've had and then we'll let you go. >> Interesting. >> Oh, very good question. um fitness or health unlock. Um >> could be a habit, could be a supplement, could be anything. >> Great question. Um protocol >> actually. Okay. If you're sleep I I've been taking creatine um five grams since I was like 17, but I read that um they did some studies that if you didn't get a good night's sleep, you can take up to 20 grams of creatine and you are nearly as alert as if you got a full night's sleep. and I don't know >> seems to work. And so if you don't get a good night's sleep, instead of taking a normal dose of creatine, take a much higher dose. Um the only other thing I'd say is um for those listening, I'm a big fan of compound movements. I think the most important exercise if you only do >> one is the squat. >> Um and I uh I'm very >> sorry. Sorry Brian, I don't mean to laugh at you. We have these sound effects. So John, talk sound like this. Can you push? >> It makes my voice sound like this. And Jordy was doing it to you during that last bit and it sounds ridiculous. >> Yeah, I really like compound lips. >> Compound lips. >> That's That's good. That's exactly how I'd want to be able to say it when I'm talking about the spot. By the way, before we go, I just want to tell you something. Are you guys still interested in doing the Blimp Experience? >> Absolutely. Yes. 100%. >> We're ready. We're ready. We packed our belly. >> We've been talking to brands. We've been talking to people. And I want you to know that we're going to make this happen. >> I I'm very excited. We're going to make it happen. The team is pumped up right now. Everyone's fired up. >> We're fired up. Uh, congrats to the whole team on the on on all the new releases. It's very much great progress. Fantastic. Always fun. >> Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Goodbye. >> Unfortunately, the the first Chad guest very fitting. So, unfortunately, the chat effect uh the >> guest cannot hear it. >> Only only you can and the two of us. Uh, but we're going to keep using it strategically. It's really good effect. I was so skeptical when you launched these buttons. I was like, can we get the comedic timing to work? Will it hit? >> Turns out we can. >> Yes, it's working beautifully. Well, our next guest, get that button ready cuz I think we're going to be using it again. It's Marcus Malone from Minted, New York. Did I say your last name correctly or did I mispronounce it? >> That bodgeged. >> It's Million. I'm sorry. >> Yeah, I've been getting Malone my whole life, so it's fine. I'm used to it. >> It was It was It was written sort of tiny on my sheet, but >> dude, it's it's incredible to finally on the show. Uh way way overdue. I've been following your path for a long time now. You've been absolutely on a tear and uh yeah, we're excited to have you. Uh since it's your first time, >> zoom out for us. >> Zoom out for us. Uh you know, all that stuff. >> All right. So, um I don't know how far back you want me to go. Let's >> go all the way to the lax days at least. >> All right. So, I played lacrosse in college. Uh I played at St. Joe's University in Philly. Um >> from there, moved to New York >> after I graduated. Um I was working at a smaller regional bank doing commercial real estate debt. >> Yeah. >> Uh until like a year or a few months into COVID. As CO started, um Minted kind of spawned after I I was posting uh on social media, Instagram, Tik Tok. >> Were you just doing your own accounts first or or were you thinking like I'm going to I'm going to build something or was it experimental? Like what was the actual flow? >> Um well, I was a little bored during co I was at my parents house. Um I thought I was >> You didn't love regional banking. >> What's Yeah, >> we love regional banking here. Um yeah, so I thought I was taking a long weekend at my parents house and co would like blow over over a long weekend and then um so I just started posting about things I liked mainly around like fashion and fitness on >> on Instagram and Tik Tok and then the brand kind of spawned out of that. >> Yeah. What was the first format? Direct to camera like scripted unscripted yapping get ready with me >> phone in front of my face yapping. Um, I guess that was mainly Tik Tok and then Instagram was more just like outfit photos. >> Okay. >> Like I like putting outfit out outfits together. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then what was growth like linear? Was there a was there a key turning point? A lot of times uh like with my YouTube I started a YouTube channel during co very similar story and for the first year it was like a thousand views and then I cracked the code on one video correct structure and it started it went I think it got 60,000 views which was like an insane takeoff by comparison to the thousand views that I was averaging and I credit that a lot to I had the editing dialed I had the script out but I really got like the structure and the title and the thumbnail all like packaged up so it like could fly and I'm wondering like what the what the process was like for growing on on Tik Tok and Instagram. >> I mean, I kind of viewed it as a reps game. I told myself, at least on like the short form video stuff, since I had no background in it, I was like, I'll just do three videos a day for 365 straight days. And >> by that point, you know, you start to see you get feedback from like the analytics. And so after a certain point, you're like, okay, well, this did well here. Let me like, you know, try some variation of this next time. Um, but really, yeah, it was just like a reps game. I would try any sort of of video style, but a lot of it was just talking. And I think at that time there was a lot of like it was still a dancing app, right? Like people were just doing dances. And I wasn't doing dances. I was trying to just provide some form of value to the viewer. Um, and you see it a lot more now, but at that time it was kind of like not as prevalent. So I think it helps. >> Yeah. I think of you I mean I think of you as like the the a new generation of like founder-ledd company which there was like you know great companies have almost always been uh well every company started by a founder but uh but uh you're like the first generation that was this like hyper online you're in public you're >> you're building your personal brand >> you're building your personal brand as well as like you know people are following along building the company. Also, like your own uh journey as like an athlete and doing those things together and just having this like hyper presence where historically a founder even if they were pretty online, they might pop up and do like an interview every few months and people would be able to tune in there or they might post like post a little, you know, somewhat actively on Instagram, but it wasn't like three video three like medium form videos a day for a year kind of thing. Um, and I just feel like that built so much momentum because there was like multiple things to latch on. People could latch on to like how are you how's your how's your actual running going? Like I I you know remember video after video where you're like pushing yourself >> super super hard and then there's also like some people can latch on to the business side which you're like giving people behind the scenes and really making people feel like a part of building that which >> has ultimately led to where you're at right now. you had this uh drop this week that uh I hit you up yesterday. Must have been extremely uh chaotic. You guys sold out uh so quickly that you were you were going back through like trying to identify like bot like people that were botting it to resell. Uh but >> yeah. Yeah. Take us through >> take us through but like before we get there uh like kind of the key moments along the journey. You start out you're just making videos. At what point were you like oh I can quit like when did you quit your job? >> I got to make some money off this. >> Yeah. So it was like month eight uh of kind of after we started it started January of 2021 and then by month eight we had kind of had four large releases under under my belt and it was starting to become too much to try to juggle between real work and not like letting anything like slack there because obviously that paid the bills. But I remember talking to my dad and trying to figure out, okay, what's, you know, a good exit plan. And so we came up with like a revenue number that we would hit over the next three months. And if we hit that, then you know what? We're going to take the jump and and quit our job. And so then very next release, we hit it in like five minutes. And I remember I remember being at home and being like, well, >> I guess we're just going to >> Well, that was part of what must have been nerve-wracking, quitting, right? because it was a dropsbased approach and so you have super spiky revenue. So it's, you know, you're thinking like, okay, well, if this drop goes well and this drop goes well and this drop goes well. >> Doesn't feel like a paycheck every two weeks. >> Yeah. It doesn't Yeah. It doesn't feel like it's streaming in. >> No, I mean, and you're also, you're betting the farm like the entire time. Every single drop, I was just run the bank account to zero dollars on production. Um, and hope that it went well. I guess at any point like it could have blown up in my face and gone to zero. >> Yeah. Uh so that that happens. Uh what what when when you when you're looking back, what was the next like significant moment? You're like, "Okay, this seems like a real business. People like what we're doing?" >> I would say that that following Christmas, like that December, so 12 months in, um we had like the largest release of of the company's history. It was like going into uh Christmas season and holiday season and we released and I remember being like so blown away by the number on the screen but then also realizing like okay all this inventory is in my parents' garage and we have to ship all this out as fast as possible. >> Yeah. So I need all hair hands on deck. I've got like I've got my my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad, like everybody is there packing and I'm like this is going to take us two days. It's like no problem. And it took us like six days of packing every day like through Christmas. Might have ruined Christmas. I'm not even sure. Um but it was so new. Everyone was so excited. Like I mean obviously toward the end we were definitely getting on each other but it was so new and exciting for everybody that um yeah it kind of just it was a blur. >> And then and then this whole time uh like running is blowing up. Running got running got cool. you you you clearly thought it was cool before you started the brand, but I think a lot of people realized that maybe it was cool uh you know around 2022. Is that like when it when you felt like it was really becoming part of popular culture and in a bigger way? >> It was I mean yeah it was really becoming part of my life then too. I think I probably started in 21 and then really picked up and wanted to start racing. >> What were you running from? honestly a lot of different things probably now that I think about it. But um yeah, I mean like it started like everybody else. You sign up for half marathon, you're like, "Okay, I gotta train and I'm going to give myself a time goal." And then like anything else, it's a sickness and then it just gets worse and worse. >> Uh did you start do you still feel pressured? Were you feeling pressure to be the best runner out of your customer base? Like I mean like I I feel like you you you're you're kind of running two races. You're building a business and then uh I can imagine it really gets in your head because you start sharing some times that you're running and then you know you're competitive and you want to improve. Walk us through that that journey. >> Yeah, I mean the beauty of posting on the internet is that you get to hear commentary from everybody on the internet. So, uh, I always approached it as if we're going to make a performance running apparel, I better have some halfrespectable times. I'll never be elite. I may never be sub elite, but I at least put in the time and effort and try to run fast. Yes. >> Uh, and then what at what point did you start getting approached uh to do, you know, big partnerships like this drop this week? Uh >> because these type of things are typically you know you brands need to like meet in the middle. The best the best partnership right is like a win for you know sort of like legitimizes the rising brand and then makes the the this maybe the more legacy brand like you know cooler and more relevant and and uh but timing matters a lot for these things. >> Yeah. I I think it was toward the end of 2022. Um so we you know coming to the end of our second year I got an email uh from Jason over at Sakin who kind of heads their uh it's called energy but uh partnerships and it was really cool. I mean they the email started out just lifestyle because at this point the brand wasn't as heavily focused on the performance running piece and it was a lot more men's wear and jewelry and stuff like that. So, he wanted us to work on a lifestyle shoe that kind of fit into that world. Um, and then when they brought us up to Boston, I kind of pitched the idea of, well, we should do a running shoe, too, cuz we run and we're also making performance apparel. Um, and so it was lifestyle first, then the running shoe came. And then now we've had two uh running shoes. >> And then, and then how are you thinking about beyond beyond running? like what are there other are there other categories that you're particularly excited about or do you want it to be a brand that can exist anywhere that your kind of like idealized customer goes? Yeah, I look at I mean an athlete spends a lot of time outside of sport and so I think that being able to provide products uh like as I call them offc court uh is important. But from like a performance sporting side of things, I think we're really focused on running right now, but I'm I'm interested in a lot of the endurance sports. You know, cycling is very interesting, but uh for right now, just just the running piece. How are you thinking about like growing the business? It's such an interesting uh like origin story because it's not okay, I was in business school, I raised some money, I went to a design firm and set up an DTC website. Like that era existed and there were a couple companies that made it through. A lot of companies that we've talked about that uh didn't quite make it or wound up selling off at a at a discount. And it feels like at some point, if you're not already there, there might be like a crossroads of like, are you going to take a run at being, you know, the next Nike, raise as much money as possible, retail footprint all over the world, like go crazy or, you know, more, you know, family business, compound slowly, grow, grow, grow, do things tastefully. And there's obviously like a whole, you know, a whole gradient of of pathways in between, but what what what feels natural to you? >> It's hard to say. I mean, like we're bootstrapped now in year five and uh obviously like >> take it all the way. >> Take it all the way. We're hitting the gong for that. >> The gong for the anti- funra. You love to see it. So, so obviously like you know it caps what you can do and how big you can do do certain things but I mean in my mind I want the brand to be as big as possible on like a global scale. >> I don't think when you're trying to build something like that going slow and building a really strong foundation is a bad thing. You know, I I don't think us being almost handicapped in the bootstrap way from from a money standpoint isn't >> Yeah. Look at look at the last look at the last, you know, month. You had Airbnb pivot to being or sorry, uh Alber's pivot to a Neocloud. You have Everlane, you know, sell to Sheen. Uh examples of uh high growth uh if you're doing anything like cool in apparel and you're executing well, you're going to go grow quickly. But high growth appears to be entirely at odds with like building a lasting uh consumer lifestyle brand. >> Yeah. I mean I think the there's a playbook where you just turn on the meta ads faucet and just like throw money at it, right? But I mean we do very very very little advertising at all. I mean we're really just I would say 99.5% organic. Um, and that feels like a really nice strong foundation where if we want to turn on the paid advertising, it it just makes our life a little bit easier because we're building a brand that people know and you're not just like getting fed ads all the time and then you end up buying it and you're not you have no real like affiliation with the brand. >> Yeah. And the worst CPMs you'll ever have are when you're, you know, there's no brand awareness. like every year you delay that it gets uh the economics probably gets stronger and the TAM gets even bigger. >> Um how are you thinking about bots? What is a do not buy decoy listing? Explain to me like how all this fits together in the modern era. >> Yeah, so I mean when when their shoe is anticipated in that way like we saw it with the Speed 4, which was the first shoe we released, we got slammed with the bots. Um, and you know, it's people submitting orders for 30 pairs. They want to resell them um, a lot of the time. And so this time I took to Twitter before the release and and called upon people who you've either like bought it in the past or are current botterers >> to try to get a little focus group together to figure out how I could jam up the bots. So, I'll give you the sauce on what I did. I had those two decoy listings on there because I guess, you know, the bots don't look at the screen. They're just going right to checkout. And so I had those be the correct listing naming structure, everything. And then the real listing, the one with the green border, um, had none of the real terminology associated with the shoe on the listing or in the the kind of like the metadata. >> And it seemed to work. I would say like 99% of the orders were manual. Some people did uh bought it, but it was very easy to catch and then go ahead and cancel those orders. So, >> wait, what was on the decoy pages though? You should have you should have sold like sand for like a,000, you know, like $200 a pound. >> We had it so that the the shoes were like£10,000. You couldn't get a shipping rate cuz they were so heavy. So, you would get to check out >> and then the whole thing would break. Oh, >> that is brilliant. >> It's really clever. I feel like this uh cat and mouse game is gonna go on forever. >> Yeah, it's such a it's such a Yeah, having like hype and and way more demand than supply is like that, you know, it is is a is a blessing for for a brand. But it is such a uh it's such an interesting challenge because you want to get your product. You don't benefit at all from shoes sec selling at two three times whatever it is in the secondary market. And so like your entire focus has to be on like how do you get the shoes to the actual people that are a part of building this brand with you? And it's um there's probably like a pro has anybody built like software to help with this? It's a pretty niche problem because most brands are like we'd be happy to sell out with bots immediately but it feels like there's like a software product there. you can go the raffle route um where like you know you can collect entries and like pre-charge cards a dollar and then if they win the raffle I think like people like the idea of first come first serve and if you get in there you enter your card information you get past the age capture like you are rewarded with the the shoe and the ra the raffles I've I in talking to a bunch of people who buy sneakers and are a part of of that stuff. They It just takes a lot of the fun away from releases like that. So, try to keep it as pure as possible. >> How are you thinking about Nvidia earnings? >> John, you you're you're laughing, but Marcus has a dedicated account where he just talks about Marcus. >> Yeah, but he's been live with us while the earnings dropped. >> I know. Does anyone have any numbers? >> Uh, beat on topline and bottom line. EPS of 187, revenue came in at 81.6 6 billion double B and the stock's down 2.4%. No, it's popped back up maybe. I don't know. It's jumping around >> just as tim predicted. >> Plant truster over there. Nvidia earnings live. Uh are there any IRL events that are small right now that you think have uh the the seeds or showing promise of becoming the next, you know, uh run club? like we went through like the Padell and uh pickle ball booms and uh that I'm wondering if you're tracking anything that feels like uh could be a source of communities in cities something outdoors or I I don't know anything in that realm that's like run clubshaped that's really small right now but shows like oh there's some deep interest there I I that might go somewhere I don't know where but uh it's at least showing popping up on your radar now >> you Well, I I don't know if I'm like the best answer to answer that question. I I'm not too sure. I stick to running. >> Yeah. >> I see people go on group bike rides. They seem like a lot of fun. You know, you go on a 50- mile ride, you stop halfway, get a coffee and like a donut with your friends, and then you bike back and it's like, you know, you're exercising, you're out in nature. That I don't have a bike, so I can't participate. But if I were to do another group activity outside, it would probably be that. Jord's been getting really into the laring the live action role playing where you dress up and go to the park. Go to the park suit of armor and you just thrash on each other with >> I have been I have I haven't been getting into it personally, but I have been sending you videos of there's some there's there's some I'll send I'll send you after this. >> There's um there's a Yeah, John has a helmet. He's ready to LAR. Uh there's this account where they they have like uh laring like pretty high uh pretty high skill laring going on where they're hitting each other legitimately so hard. I'm like you you're going to give each other concussions, but it seems like it's fair play. >> Now with this helmet on, I'm good to go. >> I think I've seen some of that stuff. That might be a good Maybe we get like a little tech version of that going. >> How big's the team these days? >> Three people. And then my my sister's part time. She uh she does the customer service and she's the goat. But yeah, three full-time. >> That's amazing. >> Three full-time and uh all all inhouse like in in in office in New York. >> Uh how how like >> what is um >> how are you thinking about supply chain? Like you're making a lot you're making some stuff in New York from from what I recall, but I imagine you're making it all over. Yeah, a lot a lot of the performance stuff is made over in China. Um, you know, the the shoes were Indonesia. That's a that's a Sony factory, so that's not us. Jewelry Italy. I mean, we're kind of spread out, but um we have a lot of good manufacturing partners. I would like to bring some more of those pieces here to the US. I think it's just we're not super agile, you know, as a company. So, switching uh a factory overnight isn't really possible. And there's a whole like resampling and and reproducing process that would need to go into that. So, um we're we're focused on like catching up to the fashion calendar right now cuz right now we've been behind since day one. We've been behind and we kind of release uh when we can, but we're >> this year we will catch up to the calendar and be, you know, releasing products in the proper weather. >> Is that a double-edged sword? >> Yeah. I mean, >> it's like, hey, we have a winter coat in August. >> Oh, we've done it. I've done hoodies in the middle of August. >> Yeah. Wait, but is that a double-edged sword where like if you're the only hoodie that's going on sale in uh in the summer, like at least it's like not a noisy time and you're not getting crowded out and so maybe there's a benefit or silver lining. >> No, it feels bad. >> It feels bad. >> It feels bad. Yeah. Don't want to do that. >> You don't want to do that. That's funny. Uh when you say uh like the the calendar, are you just talking about the seasons or are there specific moments where all the brands you know sort of coales around like this is the day or this is the week when like fall collections go on sale or like how how how precise are we being because I know that there's a whole fashion runway show circuit, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if there's a real cycle to it or a logic to it. >> Yeah, it I don't think it's that crazy for for like the performance stuff. I think you want to hit like spring, summer, fall, winter. Um, and even that is a little more relaxed. Like you can kind of do it based off when people start training for certain things or or how the weather is shifting. But, >> you know, there are times uh if you want to do stuff around the the world marathon majors, then you kind of have to like prep for that. And a lot of those start, you know, November, October, November. Uh so yeah, I mean depending on what you want to hit from like an event standpoint that kind of shifts uh shifts stuff cuz it does get cooler then but you're still releasing, you know, obviously tanks and stuff that you're running in to stay cool. But yeah, I mean spring, summer, fall, winter for the most part is is good enough. >> Yeah, that makes sense. >> Are you a nominative determinism guy? >> The chat thinks you're basically a millionaire. Marcus millionaire. >> Marcus millionaire. >> Yeah, I don't know. There's bait. >> I guess on paper, yeah, the company would be worth worth Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, congratulations all the progress. >> Yeah, great to finally have you on the show and uh yeah, just congrats to your to your team of three on accomplishing what what uh what would be difficult for for even a team of 300. It's super impressive. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. I appreciate both of you. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Thanks for hopping on. >> Talk soon, dude. Congrats again. Yep. >> Yeah. >> Jensen Wong talked about the quarter that Nvidia just had. He said, "The buildout of AI factories, boo. The largest infrastructure expansion in human history." Yay. Is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay. Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that uh there is progress being made. A gentic AI has arrived. He says, "Doing productive work." True. Generating real value. True. And scaling rapidly across companies and industries. Also true. Lots of good stuff. Nvidia net income, uh, it rose to 42.96 billion. They almost hit 43 billion. Um, not too bad. Um, a year earlier they were doing just 18.8 billion in net income. Huge, huge increase. >> Really wild. >> Really wild. >> Sprinting. definition of printing. >> All good news. Uh the stock is sort of up and down, basically flat, but um Nvidia revenue jumped 85% to 81.62 billion from 44 billion last year, the company said. >> Shocking. >> Yeah, great stuff. Uh in the timeline, uh you know who I mean, Steve Waznjak crushed the uh crushed his commencement speech. Well, we we have to debate this to see did was he actually a good communicator? Is he setting the tone correctly? But we should still play the clip of Steve Waznjak, the co-founder of Apple at Grand Valley State University because he talked about AI and unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get boo off booed off stage. He actually got cheered for his comments. >> Wait, this was uh who was it, Tyler? >> Steve Washniaak. >> No, no, no. shots. >> I'm a big fan of Sew was now. >> I love the W. >> Shots fired. >> Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State University on Instagram here. >> Can we play this from the beginning? >> Months. >> It might loop back, but he's doing bits. He's getting laughs. >> You all have AI. You all have AI. Actual intelligence. >> Oh, mic drop. Knee slapper. Hey. playing to the crowd. Who knows the audience? He knows the audience. >> We're trying to figure out how to make a brain, software, hardware, synapse chips, and I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain. >> Takes nine months. >> Um, yeah, knee slapper. But he knows the audience. He's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI pled? Is he super intelligence pled? Probably not. But uh it is uh regardless I think uh it's it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience and uh and and that is a way to bridge to a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post AGI world. Uh I don't know. We'll have to go watch the full >> Let's uh close it out with this video from Tyler that we can pull up. >> Okay. What is this? Uh, this is the video I was referencing uh with with Marcus. I'm very concerned about these gentlemen and what they're doing. >> Pull it up. >> Uh, pull it up. >> What's happening? >> Let's get >> like this is this is insane contact. I mean, the helmet is getting dented. I think this is breaking. >> Got an issue. Skill issue. >> They really hitting that, aren't they? >> Run it. Run it back one more time. One more time. You just >> This is just wrong. >> They're taking it too far. >> I don't I don't see how you leave this without a concussion. >> Mhm. But we'll try it out after we >> have the gong mallet. >> Yeah. that that seems like it would do some damage. >> Uh thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. Uh it has been the honor >> of uh of our lifetimes to podcast with you today. Uh we hope you have an incredible evening >> and we'll >> leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter tbn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.