The Exchanges

Q Yeah. So take us, well, actually take a few follow-up questions. When the wave of acquisitions was happening, why weren't you guys acquired? Were you not ready to go that route?

A No, I mean, candidly, and, and, you know, hindsight's always twenty-twenty, but kind of, as I mentioned from the beginning, our goal was to change the world. Um, I, I think our goal still is to change the world, right? Like we're, we're, I know everybody says this, but I, I promise if you walk through the halls of Ford, you'll find the most mission-oriented people you've, you've ever seen in your life. Like they, we didn't, we didn't get into Ford because we're like, oh, we're looking for a quick buck. We got into Ford saying, how do you create like literally the, The most important, uh, company in healthcare that affects the largest amount of lives. And so, I mean, during the SPAC era, we really didn't entertain those conversations. During the acquisition era, we didn't entertain those. Like, that wasn't really what we were trying to do.

AI assessment note: “During the acquisition era, we didn't entertain those. Like, that wasn't really”

Q an emotional relationship with them while they're playing on and off the court. NFL is like, One click above that, it's very, it's harder to see the players' faces, and so, you know, and then when you come to esports, it's like the players are fully obscured by the, by the digital representation, right? So is it, is there something about the humanity that gets in the way of storytelling?

A I don't think so. Um, I, I, I really think it's a penetrating, like, you know, pop culture. You know, kind of thing. Like a real, it's like, you have to watch it because it's what everybody else is watching. And maybe for the seven year olds, it is, but that then doesn't, for some reason that hasn't like translated yet into when they become adults or people who have money that can support ad based systems, right? And that's why a lot of these esports things are pretty challenging other than for the game developers themselves, because they can sell a lot of copies of their games because parents buy kids games, right? But any other model in terms of the esports portion of it is really tricky.

AI assessment note: “I don't think so. Um, I, I, I really think it's a penetrating”

Q Open router. Routing. Everyone wants cheaper stuff. AI, the mixed multiplication commodity. There's no reason to pay a PhD to fold your laundry, but you also don't want to give open router all your data, or do you, or do you not care? Like, how does that play out?

A I, I do think that the bigger question here, which is going to also bifurcate, it's not going to be one takes all, is open versus closed. And, um, I am saying this obviously with a bias, as I've said in the past, that where you stand on the issue depends on where you sit in the cap table and where large investors and hugging face, which made a lot of news over the past few weeks. But I think that the future is for the more sophisticated users who serve for the enterprise, it's going to be your longitudinal proprietary repository silo of data that is yours. That is exactly as we were just talking about, uh, not ingested by the machines. And if you have that and can run open source models, On that time series of data that is exclusively yours, whether you're a pharma company, a finance company, insurance company, a retail company, a venture firm, increasingly you are realizing that to get the benefit, you're giving a benefit. And you're going to say, I'm not going to give that data, especially if I'm not going to give that data and watch as one of the closed labs competes me away. And you saw that first with Figma, which was sort of scary. And I think the push now from Anthropic and opening eye to go into pharma and pharma companies saying, well, do we want to do this? Do we want to give them our data and then potentially open up competitors? And I think there's a big move right …

AI assessment note: “you are going to say, I'm not going to give that data”

Q Are you still using just one? I have, like, So many agents, because I'm trying all the different agent Harnesses and platforms and like, because I want to compare them as we're moving along in this race, right? But are you just using one, Sam? And is that where you think most people are going to net out here?

A I, it's an interesting question. I mean, I, I basically, I do, I guess it depends if you define what an agent is. Like I use Gemini for things that I actually care about security in, right? So like for health and finance stuff, I just use Gemini because honestly I trust them. Like, and I think there's like value to that. It's like, I'm not even sure they're not like, I have no opinion about them being fundamentally better. I just like, I generally trust. It's like, it's kind of like my dad used to say, you can go on Disney World rides because they're a public company, right? They're not going to screw you because it's too expensive. And so I'm like, okay, like, it's like, that is my Gemini thing. And like, I use like Grok for image stuff because candidly, it's just way better. It's like not even close. Like Grok is the only one that's cared about image stuff. So like their image stuff is just way better. And then, I mean, I use tons of services and agents, but they're all for me wrapped through like a central like setup I have built around Right, so like I have, like, Claude controls everything else, and it controls a huge number of services, but like, it's kind of the tip, and I have multiple instances of it running, and I email, I mean, like, it's like, but it's really hard to even define what an agent is. It's like, I have an infrastructure that has a huge amount of access t…

AI assessment note: “I use tons of services and agents, but they're all for me wrapped through”

Q much ever. Uh, the product is Equally amazing, right? Like everyone I know is using it every single day being like, this thing's insane. Like it's crazy. I can do the most nuts things with it. Right. And then with the investors hat on, you're just like, how does this business ever make sense? Right. And so there, it's such a dichotomy. It's like hard to, hard to work through.

A Like I have no, I don't knock anyone who has done these rounds and participated in these rounds. Like I, Like, I understand why people would do it, and also most of the funds that are putting the money into these rounds have very different Their needs and wants, and they, their capital that's in them has different needs and wants, and we're just like talking about a different thing than the business that any of us are in. You know, one of my problems with a venture right now is that it's like some, any, any firm that is a venture capital firm, it's like we're all supposed to be competing with each other doing the same thing, but like the business that we are in and the business that the funds are in that are investing at 50 or a hundred or three hundred billion dollars in OpenAI, like I have as much in common with those companies as I do with like a gas station.

AI assessment note: “most of the funds that are putting the money into these rounds have very different”

Q listen. Joanna and Samantha Bee have a wonderful Daily Beast podcast, and I feel like you're always saying, how crazy is this story? How crazy is this story? And, and so I'm, I'm curious what is sort of at the moment, you know, work that you have done or things that you've seen that have really jumped out at you as sort of epitomizing this Shakespearean nature of the moment.

A Well, I think what we, first of all, thank you for all that. That's nice. And, you know, I think what we try and do, and what, um, certainly Ben Sherwood, who's my business partner, along with Barry Diller at the Daily Beast, what we try and do is focus on the characters and the people. There are lots of people out there writing about policy. There are lots of people chin-stroking about what should happen, what I'm interested in, and what Ben and Hugh And the Daily Beast team are interested in is the rivalries are other human instincts that make all this play out. So you've got the richest man in the world. You've got the most, the man, and obviously that's Elon, and we can come on to what, what this association with Donald Trump and what he's been doing at Doge, how that has personally impacted him and his brand. Cause actually I think it's an uncovered story. I think what's fascinating is the, you know, to some extent it's the seven deadly sins. It's betrayal. It's, uh, greed. It's power. It's ambition. It's lust. It's all of it. And we started, you're completely right. We started a year ago at the Daily Beast, and we actually started on the first day of the Stormy Daniels trial, and we thought it will never get better than this. You know, for a smart tabloid, what, what could be better? It's got all the elements. And in fact, that who even remembers the Stormy Daniels trials…

AI assessment note: “You've got the richest man in the world... Elon... his association with Donald Trump”

Q Well, your opinion on personal liberty could, is this the direction?

A Yeah, and yes, sorry, these, this would be the staff opinion writers of the Washington Post are going to make arguments and follow topics that follow those, um, those beliefs or advance those agendas, and my reaction to this was actually, yeah, Bezos has finally figured out why a lot of people want to own newspapers, which is actually, The opinion pages, and this is controversial, but there are many people who view the opinion pages as where the proprietor of said publication should, um, advance their agenda, or it is more open to that, and so even if you look at the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch, um, people, this is arguable, but there are many people who think he would have used the opinion sections of the Post and the Journal as To advance his political agendas, and journalists like myself like that out of the news coverage, but it's a more accepted place for it to be, um, in the opinion section. Now, of course, I think people are right to want to be vigilant about what happens over there in the editorial page, in the news pages as well, but my reaction to this wasn't surprising that an owner of a publication wants to use the opinion section to Promote beliefs they believe in. But it was, like, one of the first times when, like, I was like, oh, someone's told Jeff what he can do with the newspaper. Like, he actually seems to be-

AI assessment note: “staff opinion writers of the Washington Post are going to make arguments”

Q Does anything about this potential like deregulatory moment shape your view? So like, there are a lot of people who were kind of skeptics on the sideline, but who now are saying, okay, with the Trump administration and change of administration, the rules are likely to change. And obviously that's fueled a huge run up, but what, what do you make of that?

A Oh, I mean, the Trump administration is very bullish for, for anybody doing crypto. There's no question. I, I was, I was, Treating it from a very purely like, you know, sort of OCD sense of like, like, will this be a good way to build a network on the internet that is not financial? And, and so I was just laying out the case why that probably wouldn't work because of these sort of incentive dynamics that you have for what it's worth, despite I, I unfortunately have to agree with you. I'm actually fine for people to do whatever they want. If they're educated on, on, you know, the risks and the rewards and all that. And like, I, I, I laugh at meme, you know, coins all the time, like to each their own. My point was, was sort of, and again, we all kind of collectively saw web two arrive. I, I was getting a little bit, you know, anxious and nervous about this idea that web three was being described as sort of like somehow hearkening back to the origins of web two when everything was sort of mashups and interoperable and, and then looking at an architecture that I didn't, I didn't think could build You know, deliver that kind of outcome, uh, based on what I was seeing. Like, it's not, it's not an argument against just general decentralization, but, but the architectures that I was seeing get kind of created, I didn't think could lead to that for, again, non-financial use cases. Finan…

AI assessment note: “Trump administration is very bullish for, for anybody doing crypto. There's no question.”

Q so I think it just threw people into a panic. And now we have like the uprising of the artists being upset at the technologist as we always have to Dave's point earlier. Um, but, but do you see a world where the two end up working in harmony or do you think this is going to be the next five years of sort of the artists versus the technologists?

A I think they'll work in harmony for sure. I think the smart people will, will learn how to use it the way they want to. But I guess my question for you guys is how do you feel about prompt engineering as people that have like design backgrounds as well as, you know, like technical backgrounds. The thing that always throws me is that like, I don't like to struggle with prompt engine. Like when you're trying to think of an idea and express it, it seems more frustrating to struggle in like a little text box and it is To do it in Photoshop. You know what I mean? So I, I always wonder, like, how do filmmakers or artists, visual artists feel about, that's the most frustrating part of AI is that.

AI assessment note: “I think they'll work in harmony for sure.”

Q of crypto, and also what I'd call maybe others who are just crypto curious, so kind of know that we're in this big moment. We've seen a ton of deregulation. We're seeing, once again, so many exciting things take flight, but I'm curious from, like, where you sit, like, what is happening? Like, what, what does this moment feel like? How is it different from a year ago or not?

A Um, I actually see a lot of parallels between crypto and a lot of other tech movements, like open source and the internet and things like that. And it kind of starts with... Yeah. AI is more of a product, honestly, and less of a movement. I think it's, uh, yeah, I think you see the punks do it first, and then kind of the hoodies built a bunch of stuff and commercialize it. And then the final stage is when the suits take over. And we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think, as the, the hoodies are making progress and getting PMF and growing companies. In your early stages of suits trying to figure out how to take over the industry and make it like everything else.

AI assessment note: “we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think”

Q They're all going to do that. They're all going to do that. Right. Like, and they're already doing that. I think the question is, I think was what Peter started with, which is like, at some point, like you do have to expose something to them or you just build your own, but like, who do you trust? Right.

A A lot of companies are building their own. It's not rocket science to build it. And, you know, Josh, I'm on the same side as you. I'm a board member at Arena. We see every week the models change in who's the, who's the leader. And not only that, Arena has a great insight into exactly for each use case, accounting or whatever, what is the actual leaderboard for it. And quite frankly, you don't need to drive a Ferrari to do the task of a certain smaller job. You're going to see a lot more of this, like, I, I believe in a multimodal world, and I believe there's going to be a lot of customization And tuning and you got companies like apply compute. That's doing this many others as well. So I think it's going to be a pretty tough road for something like a router. I just, I feel like either roll your own or you've got to find another way to make a model your own.

AI assessment note: “A lot of companies are building their own. It's not rocket science to build it.”

Q real criticisms of what's going on. I, I wonder just your views on kind of tech policy a little bit. Like, what do you think both like how the administration's done, but what that needs to look like going forward? Cause there are these huge questions at stake and, and right now the path just seems like a heavy hand, but, but what's your view? You talk to these people.

A I don't think so. I, you know, if you look at the AI executive order, It was very bipartisan and agreed on. I spent a lot of time with the Hill Valley Forum both this year and a year ago. Almost every meeting I've been to, half have been Republicans and other half, you know, either congressmen or senators, and the other have been Democrats. So I do think policy has been reasonable and balanced. I think the Europeans, for example, have ensured they'll never participate in tech again. You know, they keep shooting themselves in the foot. So I, I do think it's reasonable. I don't buy, you know, there's always a degree of regulatory capture. And, and I do think that's somewhat true. But look, Disney was the one who extended copyrights. If you remember the late nineties copyright law, you know, beyond any reasonable measure of social good, Let's just extend it because we can. I would like regulation that says no publication can publish an article where the headline isn't written by the writer. Headlines are written for clickbait. How can it be honest to let somebody who's not dealt with the story write the headline? Every major newspaper.

AI assessment note: “So I do think policy has been reasonable and balanced.”

Q really clear-cut cases, I find it hard to see that benefiting the ecosystem. And, like, just one more note on this, you know, Adobe, a ton of different design software, obviously, Figma, In the design software arena, but, like, I do worry about the precedent this kind of sets, and if it says that, like, really all kinds of acquisitions are off the table, but what do you think, Britt?

A Okay, so first of all, Scott Belsky, who was a key part of this acquisition, was our only fifth wheel this season on more or less, and did not comment on the status of the acquisition at the time. But if you guys remember, Adobe announced this intention to acquire Figma in early September, twenty-twenty-two, which was A, before the AI craze burst with OpenAI and everything else, B, before the markets really kind of fell out from under us. And, you know, if you look back in time, I think that the valuation that they were giving even then was probably part of the bubble valuation. And I do think that Adobe has really stepped it up quite a bit this year. Thanks to Scott, actually, a lot of their new product releases and AI integration has been really compelling, I think. And if I'm Adobe, I'm like, I kind of dodged a bullet. I think that we've got a lot of our shit together. We are building a lot of really cool things. And maybe this was too high of a price to pay for a really great piece of software, but Something that, you know, within the last 15 months we maybe could have made a big dent in ourselves. So I think that the time lapse that this has happened in is really interesting as a bullet point to the story.

AI assessment note: “And if I'm Adobe, I'm like, I kind of dodged a bullet.”

Q that Got, you know, a silver spoon and screwed it up. But I feel like a lot of them will also not graduate with college debt or debt for whatever education ends up looking like in the future and have a little startup capital to take a risk in their lives and all the other stuff. So we're not going to solve it for everyone, but isn't that net better?

A I'm very pro the Trump account. I think it's good and smart. I'm pro it. I I'm not convinced that the picture of how it compounds Is so certain, especially as we're talking about resets and all this other stuff that, you know, we're trying to figure out right now, but like, I'm certainly pro it. I just, except with the exception of when people start lobbying for regulatory capture by giving a 500 bucks that are stocked to someone, right? Like that seems insane to me, and we got to figure out how to like not have that happen. I want to pivot one or two more times before I lose you guys, and I really appreciate you, you joining for this fun conversation. OpenAI Exec Exodus. Brad Lightcap out. Kevin Weill, who we used to work with, out. Peter, you've been out for, like, years, so, like, you were just, you're a forebearer on this. Like, why and, like, what, what's going on?

AI assessment note: “I'm very pro the Trump account. I think it's good and smart.”

Q Yeah. But I think like the macro points to like, there are just shakeups happening at all these like frontier labs. I think a lot of Google employees might see this as a sign that maybe they should leave. Is it unstable? You know, I think anytime that just one, not only two leaders like this leave, It creates some instability.

A The world has changed a lot. Like, you just think, like, these AI things and the types of orgs required to run them, the leaders required to run them, has just changed a lot. Like, you know, a lot of these guys have been doing this a long time. They're a great research leader. They're not gonna, like, be the operational leaders you need to do. By the way, half of them are so fucking rich. They don't want to, like, lead some big team. That sucks. Like, they want to work on, like, frontier cool stuff, right? Which is, like, health or things like that. So this is, like, we're in the cycle where Especially at, like, big companies. The right people aren't the right leaders at different phases, and I think it's good and healthy to, like, recognize that and then reshuffle the decks when you can. Like, the worst thing you want is to have some guy who's, like, the wrong leader for this phase. They're not in it because they're too rich and they want to work on health. They're, like, an amazing research leader, but they don't care about driving some random metric up. Like, you want to cycle people out In healthy orgs. So I actually think turnover and these types of changes are good. Now, the interesting thing when you're at a really big company and you kind of keep people around cause you can afford to. And so it is sometimes comp inefficient. You don't fire anyone. You're just like letti…

AI assessment note: “So I actually think turnover and these types of changes are good.”

Q tanks? And also the sense that like, You know, he's been talking a lot about the robots at Tesla. We had a whole episode on the Morton's love of robots, and the sense that he might, like, kind of even be giving up on the car business for the robot business, which is kind of crazy. So that, that's what people here think about Doge. What, what about out there?

A Well, you know, when I look at Doge, I mean, I come from looking at the, the business side of things with, with what Elon did it. Twitter, or X, it was just rip everything out. See what needs to be plugged back in. And, you know, so they're gonna now have to try to plug things back in, and two thoughts about that. One is that it's very difficult to rehire or just hire federal employees at all. There's a sort of, Ben might know more about it, but it's sort of, there's like this lots of bureaucracy around, you know, approving any hire, so you can't just stick them back in. Very difficult to do. And then the other thing is, because it's so hard, I kind of think they might be handing the Democrats, like, uh, uh, some, a weapon, which just is to say, like, oh, you missed this. Well, the, the opposition or the people who get to plug it back in, you know? And so to me, it, it, it is, it's, it's messy. Um, it's ineffectual. It doesn't look like it, like everyone agrees. I think Very bipartisan issue. You know, you said everybody loves Doge out there, but it's like, people like the idea of more efficiency. They think there's too many government employees, but in a way, the way he's doing it just seems like it's kind of like a guy, like a, you know, like someone's in the garage just chucking things behind them, you know, and it's like things are clanging all over the place, and it's like…

AI assessment note: “people like the idea of more efficiency... but the way he's doing it just seems”

Q Answered, you ask anyone, is like, biology sounds like a good idea, and then everyone's like, everything else is like, eh, I don't know, like, there'll be something, right? Like, you know, no one has, but I am curious, like, what capital light shots on goal you think are worth taking effectively, knowing that, like, we don't know, and like, that is, should be, and very scary to everyone, right?

A Yeah, I think it's a lot of, um, if you ask, what is this wave of generative AI good at, at least on the LLM side. And again, I think there's all sorts of things you could talk about in terms of image gen and video and text of speech and all these other areas. Right. But I think it's a lot of things which are highly repetitive email jobs. Right. That's, that's what this wave and right now is really good at. And then we'll start layering on more and more complex forms of reasoning and memory and other things over time. And that'll expand the, the suite of things that can be done. But if you just ask, where is there a lot of people doing stuff that's reasonably repetitive and is effectively cutting and pasting text or data and manipulating it in small ways. That's a lot of stuff right now in our economy. And that's the places where I think this will be most impactful in the short run.

AI assessment note: “places where I think this will be most impactful in the short run”

Q Ok, but, they, why can't they just sit on their beach?

A You can feel that way. I wanna, let me finish my point. Because there will be a next CEO of Google, and listeners of our pod may be interested, in my opinion, and other people's opinion on who that's gonna be, which again is grounded in reporting. When I saw Demis at Davos this year, he was talking, like, it was like a CEO road tour. Google was trotting him out to every publisher, and he wasn't just talking about Gemini, and he wasn't just talking about DeepMind, he wasn't just talking about isomorphic, he was talking about Google Cloud, he was talking about regulations, he was talking about all of this stuff. So, I don't say this with super high confidence. I think this is actually a really interesting and open question in the technology business right now about what path Google goes on, but I don't think people should read this as like Demis is totally out of that game. I think he is very ambitious. I think the platform of running what will be the world's most valuable company is interesting, and I don't think it necessarily has to evolve like a lot of day-to-day management and people reviews, which I don't think he's interesting.

AI assessment note: “I think he is very ambitious. I think the platform of running what will be”

Q It appears that this thing is very, very much in limbo after some pullback from Trump, but Amir, I know you're actually following where this is at this moment. So what, what are you seeing and what do you think is going to happen here? And then Dave, we'll let you talk a bit about why you predicted this.

A Well, the, the different factions are, are really interesting because while you have the, the fight between Anthropic and DoD over these various guardrails that Anthropic was insisting on, it's still the case that much of the national security establishment relies on and loves Anthropic models, and they want to keep using them, and they want the relationship to be good, or at least to have unfettered access to whatever the, the models are. Mythos And the introduction of Mythos only kind of accelerated or emphasized that, but it's always been the case. And I think people at Anthropic and OpenAI and other labs, they understand, I think fundamentally that like at the end of the day, the government is going to be involved in one way or the other with these, these models. So yes, there's this EO and limbo. Maybe not a lot is going to happen in the near term, but through a combination of this becomes a national security Kind of thing and the growing kind of backlash that you do see in public with kind of trepidation around job loss. You saw it in Rome over the weekend with Pope Leo, who got a tremendous amount of attention for his encyclical on AI. I don't know how many of you read all 43,000 words. I only read maybe 5000 words.

AI assessment note: “So yes, there's this EO and limbo. Maybe not a lot is going to happen”

Q edit skills? Does it edit The system, whatever it needs to do. And so I guess the next step for us is how do we figure out how to enable that? Because if we let it edit everything about itself, it can edit itself out of existence. It's like emo, like I'm done. I'm done with this world. Or you can just get into itself into a bad state, right?

A That was part of, you know, the reason we worked on the dreaming feature this week. It's a old Peter. One of my favorite ideas that Peter talked about early on when I was first talking to him was this idea of what if the agents can dream, you know, he, I think one of the brilliant things about open claw Is that it beyond the technical things that we're talking about is that there are these like very basic files that have very interesting names. You know, he took the idea of soul.md, which was a idea written by somebody else, but Pete was kind of, I think the first to implement it in this sort of very beautiful root level way where This agent has a soul. You should define its soul. You should figure out how you want it to be, how you want it to show up, what it's, what, what its essence is, and it should be different for you. Like your, your agent and my agent should be, you know, very, very different. And then And he also added this memory.md flat file. Just like, here's the things the agent has remembered from all of its interactions with us. And the thing that we implemented this week was this idea that as time goes on, your agent, you know, you talk to your agent a lot. You have like all these long session files. There's many, many, many, many memory files. There's a daily log in the OpenClaw agent. And all of this stuff has things to learn from. The agent should be able to …

AI assessment note: “reason we worked on the dreaming feature this week. It's a old Peter.”

Q And Ricky, if you were, like, starting College Humor today with AI as it exists, would you do anything differently?

A I'd probably use it as a tool, and it, you know, in the, being in the partnerships org, like, we think about how to empower creators with AI. So, You know, an example, my colleague, the wonderful Eva Chen, who's a big fashion person and a great person, you know, she gets asked the same question 10 times a day, which is like, which Apple watch band do you have? Right? Because everyone sees it and they, and they want to know. And like, she doesn't have time to respond to everybody and you would leave some fans hanging and not to, they want the question answers not answered, but like with AI, like you can solve that problem. And The viewer can get their question answered. Eva can, uh, gain, uh, uh, maybe another fan or viewer, and it's like, and it's a win-win, you know, and of course the viewer knows that it's an AI that's responding because Eva is, you know, so those type of things that we look at and think, like, what are the pain points for creators now, and how does AI solve those rather than some, like, wholesale reimagining of the entire ecosystem, that sort of thing.

AI assessment note: “being in the partnerships org, like, we think about how to empower creators”

Q Can you talk a bit? I mean, we've got a lot of tech and business people here. Like, what have you guys made work? I know you've done some different things that people said were crazy with regards to wholesale and customer acquisition.

A I also think the secret to any business working is you being the customer. And that's really what we are, is like, we really think of what we want, and what we want to see, and what price point we want to see, and Sarah and I have run in a circle of girls for a long time that are high fashion girls. They're spending 1200 dollars on a freaking anything, right? They're spending 3000 dollars on a bag. We don't do that. We just have never been high fashion girls, and so we were always going to events like this, and being sort of intimidated because we weren't wearing the Roe or Kate, and wondering what we can wear, and have somebody, like, ask us You know, what we're wearing because I think it's cute, and it turns out that is who our customer is. Our customer is a girl who wants to go out and be proud of what she's wearing and wear something cool and trendy and unique that doesn't, she doesn't want to pay more than 300 dollars for it, and she wants her friends to covet it.

AI assessment note: “the secret to any business working is you being the customer.”

Q venture capital of the last decade where you get tiger to Mark up your round or whatever, right? It's clearly we've seen a tremendous shift, and we talked a little bit about that with the exit market, but Yolanda, I'm curious, do you feel a shift in investing now versus kind of five years ago, and if so, kind of what is it, and how has it affected your strategy?

A It feels like we've had, uh, three or four different shifts happen over the last decade, right? If you go back 15 years ago, the types of venture capital firms that existed are very different from today, right? In terms of stages, in terms of multiple different areas of investment and dedicated funds around one umbrella across lots of different areas. And at the same time, you had certain types of specialists that didn't exist before in terms of crypto and hiring engineers and doing all sorts of things. So I think there's been lots of shifts, right? And I think what people are mixing together in different ways are shifts in business models. The fact that we just went through ZERP and basically really weird monetary policy, global pandemic, et cetera, and all the stimulus that was associated with that. And then, you know, what should venture capital look like long term? And those are, I think, overlapping topics.

AI assessment note: “It feels like we've had, uh, three or four different shifts happen”

Q Wait, can you explain, explain some examples of what they're doing to regulate it?

A So there was a, a, a California bill that passed but was vetoed by Newsom, I think, roughly. I might have gotten the details of that wrong, um, a year or so ago, and it was part of, I mean, it was during the Biden administration, and it was It was controversial among the models, but Anthropic kind of got on board and helped shape it, and I don't really remember the details, but it was aggressive, right? I mean, it was sort of putting up guardrails around training models and all that kind of stuff. Scott Weiner, who's running now for Nancy Pelosi's congressional seat, was, was the, a big lead on that bill, but I mean, it obviously got vetoed by the governor, but since then, I mean, California was also a first mover on privacy legislation, In the lines of Europe that, you know, spurred a wave of other things. So Sam, make the case. I mean, I know you're, I don't think you're a constitutional lawyer, so there is that question, but.

AI assessment note: “there was a, a, a California bill that passed but was vetoed by Newsom”

Q The regulators are coming around, aren't they? Or, or not really?

A Uh, they are this year, but yeah. For them to pass a bill, right, it just took six months. For that to take effect is going to be the next two to four years. So I think the stablecoin thing is, it's going to be like a fundamental change to finance globally. That's going to be pretty weird to watch. The other use cases Bitcoin is its own weird religion thing that I don't, there's no engineering that I could do to help it. The other use cases are all kind of like internet use cases when email took off. Nobody knows what they are. Everyone's talking about the internet. And we'll see, we like, it's just too hard to say. Like, I don't know.

AI assessment note: “they are this year, but yeah. For them to pass a bill”

Q this stuff are going to come down, you know, building software is nice. I do it all the time and like people will build a lot more of it, but if the marginal cost of building it goes towards zero, And like, that's the general alternative history. My big concern for your company will be, you're not going to get paid enough for it, right? Because like, it'll be commodity.

A Well, you still need the infrastructure to run it, right? So it's not just about like writing the code, but if you have, if you merge writing the code, if you merge a great experience for designing, if you, if you put in a lot of the taste that I think is really important into the process from the creator point of view, because AI mostly generates a slop. That's something I agree with you actually like, We do have to hold AI to an insanely high bar because there's way too much spending and way too much hype, and a lot of it is the slop. It's just like, a lot of it looks horrible. Uh, and one of the things that actually we, we've differentiated in is, uh, the vast majority of generations we produce, uh, embed our taste into how we would design software. They embed even our, like, sort of like, uh, design system component library, and from there on, we allow you to customize things. So you have to find that Sort of balance between it has to be really easy, but also it has to be high quality, but also customizable. And I do think that, um, making something 10 times or a hundred times more abundant will, will have very, very, very, uh, deep, deep, uh, implications to the industry.

AI assessment note: “Well, you still need the infrastructure to run it, right?”

Q they all kind of went way up and then they kind of crashed out and nobody remembers any of them in terms of like, it was just simple photo upload. And then Instagram came out with like, okay, we're going to have the common unit and we're going to have the feed and a network structure and all the rest of it. And so that's the thing that stuck, right?

A Elad, how do you think about that? The thing that strikes me is so different about this AI wave though, versus mobile and the fuck around experimentation when you have something early, new and weird is just, The scale of capital that's being played with right now, where the amount of money, I mean, it's one of those things where like, yeah, like you have a bunch of small teams of two people fucking around with some APIs and maybe they build an app and maybe they don't, it's super cheap and dah, dah, dah, dah. This is an era where like, you're talking about billions and billions and billions of fuck around dollars, right? Being thrown around. And how do you feel about that as an investor, right? And as a capitalist, when you think about, yes, I mean, I agree. In enterprise value from some of this fuck around stuff, but the cost is going to be a trillion dollars of capital sunk to create that three hundred billion dollars.

AI assessment note: “The thing that strikes me is so different about this AI wave though, versus mobile”

Q And you're suggesting we're inviting China in right now?

A Well, we invited Kimmy in to clean up our own mess on OpenAI. OpenAI will invite an anthropic. Like, all these things will be like, oh, shit, we screwed it up. Let's open the doors, and we need their help. And then once the army's in, they say, well, I think we're gonna stay here now for security, of course, because we need to make sure everything's safe for you, right? Like, that's how these things will play out, right? And so, it's gonna be really interesting. I mean, there's, I was in, there was another conversation going on in Silicon Valley this week that I got a debrief of, because clearly we're not there. And it was really interesting. A bunch of, like, political people and AI people And the tenor of it was basically, which is unsurprising to any of us, is, like, every country is into, like, sovereign infrastructure and sovereign models for obvious reasons. Like, that's how you, like, leave your doors open or close your doors, right? And what's gonna happen from conquest perspective, digital conquest, will be, like, a bunch of these countries will try that. It will go badly. Shit will start breaking. They'll be like, oh, shit, we need, like, the Americans. We need the, we need someone to come save us. And then whoever gets to come save you now runs your country.

AI assessment note: “Well, we invited Kimmy in to clean up our own mess on OpenAI.”

Q Okay, so we've talked about meme coins. We've talked about stables having a huge moment. What, like, what's going to happen with these IPO valuations, Anatoly? All these big, the circles, and like, what's going on?

A There's too much hype and not enough hype as usual. It's really, really, it's really, really hard to imagine five trillion dollars worth of stable coins issued. Like, what does that mean for the world? It means the money has been digitized and it's become global and like everybody in Europe, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia has dollars and they use them all the time. That's a very, very kind of fundamentally different world than we live in today. And I think we're accelerating towards that. Like, I think it's crazy that there's quarter billion dollars has been issued in this like very non-scalable, like no support from, from the United States, like fighting tooth and nail, like against regulators and stuff, like environment that's already got to a quarter billion dollars.

AI assessment note: “hard to imagine five trillion dollars worth of stable coins issued”

Q Trust in these institutions. And so we have the media companies, we have the social media companies, we have government, like how are each of these impacted going forward?

A You know, I do think that the Trump folks communicate in modern ways, and like, that although this was really, I mean, incredibly dumb, and particularly just the part where Hegseth is sort of telling the Futhi's friends when they're gonna get attacked, basically, like, really dumb. But the fact that they communicate like normal people on, you know, in real time, as opposed to having could only talk to each other by huddling in basement skiffs once a month or whatever, Like is, and I think that's, you know, there is this, there's sort of been an acceleration into the present that's a rat in a lot of the Trump team's communications, whether it's public or among themselves, that I don't think people should necessarily like mock or object to, but it does make it hard to sort of respect government. This is actually an old Julian Assange theory that kind of like government can't function if it doesn't have secrets because secret, like, because once you see the sort of, you know, random people doing random stuff that is any institution, it can't function anymore and it loses its prestige. Um, but I, yeah, but I, I think that aside from, you know, aside from Hegseth's texts, there's a, there, it just reveals a kind of normalcy, actually, to the, uh.

AI assessment note: “it does make it hard to sort of respect government.”