The Ledger, every show

“By the way, I think remote work can really work, but it's not going to benefit the people who think like, it's not going to be people making 250,000 dollars a year hanging out in Jackson Hole. It's going to be geniuses in the developing world Making, you know,…”

“I haven't met anyone who said, oh, because of these tariffs, I'm gonna start doing production in the U.S. I've read some headlines on it, and they've done some White House announcements and things, but like, those aren't my customer base. And my customer base …”

“What we've seen over the last few weeks is it's gonna decrease American manufacturing.”

“They passed this rule that the ships have to wait a 150 miles offshore so that the carbon, so that the pollution wouldn't hit LA, like reasonable, good. But then they kept using the same metric for how many ships are waiting right outside the port. And it went…”

“And if you don't fix it, if you don't solve it, if you're not able to at least get parity to Amazon's value proposition of two-hour delivery, you will go bankrupt.”

“I think selling SaaS to tech companies is gonna be the toughest, because we can build stuff for ourselves.”

“But agents can go all the way. Like, we think we can automate the full end to end.”

“There's a realistic scenario that they decide the compute that they have is more valuable for training super intelligence than it is for letting customers use it. And they stop, you know, just cut us off.”

“Almost all of our competitors have had major hacks in logistics. Like, it's been a major target area for cyber, and there's been a lot of, like, ransoms.”

“I don't need to raise any money ever again.”

“So I told Ron Conway about this situation and he emailed the late Ed Lee, who was our mayor. And I, Ron was like one of his big donors and friends. And we got the license within six hours.”

“Bicycles can be imported duty free, but bicycle components cannot. so they've decided after a decade of manufacturing in the U.S. That they now have to produce overseas because they can import the finished goods and not pay duty, but if they import the compon…”

“I've seen a dozen examples in the last few months of companies that are, were producing in the U.S. And decided to stop.”

“It's mostly Chinese manufacturers. So talk about that. This is a very important point. Yeah, it's mostly Chinese companies setting up setting up an entity in the country, hiring many cases actually getting the workers that have to learn Chinese, Vietnamese wor…”

“Computers are exempted right now. There's a computer and everything, so everybody in the world is trying to claim that this is actually a computer. It's not a watch, it's a computer, and then you get, you know, how do you get I've seen a lot of different peopl…”

“What a lot of people don't realize is a huge percentage of the world's apparel, of the American apparel brands had set up fulfillment in Mexico and Canada. To do the same thing, only they would do ocean freight from wherever the goods are made, deliver to Mexi…”

“And the immediate result is a huge surge of needing to put fulfillment, wanting to put fulfillment back in the United States. There's no reason to fulfill from Tijuana. It's pretty far. You're shipping to New York from Tijuana. You're better off having a fulfi…”

“Well, they're very big global companies first off, so yes. And they're already finding ways, you know, they have to pay duties, but they're just back to being a level playing field, so I think they're, you're gonna see them, one, produce in other countries, an…”

“Humanoid actually doesn't solve a lot of problems because you don't get more density out of your warehouse. You want real estate density. You want to be able to stack the goods all the way to the ceiling, jam them in. So it's more, the form factor is not going…”

“I think it's 60% of all the sellers on Amazon are these Chinese registered. They're not registered in the United States at all, just Chinese companies selling.”

“Having talked to a bunch of companies that are in active, active planning mode on building factories, they've actually paused that right now because all of a sudden the machines that they have to buy are going to cost 20 to 50% more depending on where they're …”

“And the tech industry will be the natural place to target. It's our best industry, our best companies. And if you wanted to retaliate against America, that would be the place to hit.”

“I believe there will be deals cut. I don't know if in time to pause the tariffs altogether, but and I believe that because a cabinet secretary told me that there would be a pause, a negotiation, I should say, not a pause, but he said two weeks ago that this wa…”

“I give it like a 70% confidence level that they negotiate some deals. I think the China tariffs probably stick.”

“We have on April 17th, no one's talking about it right now, but they're in 10 days, they're going to impose fees on ships made in China when they make a port call in the US. It's going to totally rearrange the shipping networks and make ocean freight incredibl…”

“It's going to crash the price of air freight would be my prediction.”

“My suspicion from having analyzed a few of these and working with them is that the companies will keep, keep going and just have to pay the duties.”

“Short term is going to be a lot, a goods recession for sure. I mean, there'll be less goods sold because prices will be higher.”

“I would predict, and I don't have any evidence for this, but my intuition tells me I would predict some tariffs on other countries besides just Vietnam, that a lot of these people think they have a safe haven for their products, but maybe we'll wake up to a ru…”

“Founders one actually has a vendor compensation structure. It's almost all tied to the outcomes, the performance, but like a lot of VCs just make super huge. You'd be surprised how high the salaries are at a lot of the, at other VCs.”

“We have members of our team who are not hype, They're not subject to hype. Very, you know, realistic living and reality types of engineering leaders who are really believe that we're on the verge of some breakthroughs within our own business of automating, lik…”

“The Suez canal is too valuable in my opinion, Too valuable to civilization, to the modern world, to believe that, you know, a group of rebels, no matter how well funded they may be, is going to be able to disrupt that for any long period of time.”

“We let go of a lot of amazing people a few weeks ago. We let go of about half of our engineering team. We know we grew our engineering team this year from 450 software team members, product and engineering team members to 1300.”

“Shipping it from Fiji to the west coast of the United States emits way less carbon than running a truck from the Rocky Mountains to the west coast.”

“Our ports operate with a lower throughput and productivity level than Mombasa, Kenya.”

“I'm really worried that we're going to find out in six months or in some time period in the future here that people have ordered way too many goods, that these companies expected demand to stay high and keep booming. At some point, consumers start going to res…”

“And then but those as a condition of renting the port, you must agree to hire the ILWU. You can't run a non union port in the United States.”

“It will reduce the supply of shipping capacity and slow everything down another 30%. That, that takes place January first, 20, 23. It's getting very little attention, but to my view, it's going to be massively disrupted. If we slow everything down, reduce the …”

“There's seventeen billion dollars allocated to ports. I went and read it, and I couldn't find any money that was going to be spent on building ports.”

“There's not infrastructure and subcontractors and other vendors to make consumer electronics outside of the Shenzhen, Guangdong province. There's just not in, you can't go to another country.”

“Our goal is to get to 20 or 40% market share. If you do that, you're the biggest company on planet earth. Like full stop, like bigger than Saudi Aramco.”

“We didn't have a board at Flexboard until we'd raised thirty million dollars and just created the board after the Series B when we raised another 65.”

“I'm not, we're not going to sell the business.”

“I think this year we're gonna get to basically break even.”

“And I think we'll do 600. I mean, the goal is to keep going 30% every year for 10 years.”

“I mean, one of the big tech companies that runs like a hyperscaler, let's call it has one of our direct competitors has 130 full-time employees that work at that company that have badges that show up to work every day that run their logistics for them. And we …”

“We've got about, well, Probably like a hundred core workflows that are costly that we have AI that we're building AI agents for right now. And like five of them are live and working and saving us money and 95 that are under development.”

“And I got a call from U.S. Customs saying, hey, we just talked to Steve Jobs and he's really pissed about this. You need to explain where you got this data. Sort of like threatening to show us out.”