The Exchanges

Q How much money are they making? Do you guys have, is this like a five million dollar company? 50? 500? Like what's going on with this?

A I would put it in tens of millions, but this is the interesting like bull case is that right now they have like a very respected analysis group, but they're also launching a fund allegedly according to the information to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups, and they're already doing angel investing. And then also they're going to do credit ratings. And so the real model to think about this, the comp is Moody's. So if you're familiar with Moody's, they do credit ratings and Moody's got started during the railroad build out because the, the, the railroad build that was so capitally capital intensive that there was a huge, there was a huge secondary market for like, okay, is this person that's going to build this railroad from, from Chicago to Atlanta? Like, are they good for it? Do they have the money? And so Moody's is now an eighty billion dollar business. And I, and if you look at the stock, like it, Moody's has not moved during the sell-off, like it's doing fine, and yes, this is very indexed to, to the AI boom, but the, the actual business can be very, very stable, very high margin, and very big, like much bigger than people think when they think of just like publishing analysis.

AI assessment note: “I would put it in tens of millions”

Q like a product that you could eat, you could drink, um, that wasn't software based and, but still was innovative. And so it was like kind of in this mix. And I remember Andreessen Horowitz got behind it and some others. And so it was very interesting thing. And I think it started out of like a hacker house, right? Like you guys had a crazy house. Is that right?

A Yeah. Uh, I mean, a bunch of funny stories from that. This was the, yeah, Warby Parker was like the first e-commerce company to kind of think about it from like a tech first angle. Uh, we were a couple of years after them, um, right around the same era as like Dollar Shave Club, if you remember that company. Um, but yeah, we met in a hacker house. Uh, my, my co-founder and I, we went to preschool, middle school, high school together, went to college in the same city. And so we move out to Silicon Valley. We're looking for a place. We find something on, uh, like Craigslist. It's like an Airbnb listing. And they're like, this place is incredible. It's got a pool. It's got five bedrooms. It's exactly like the social network. You're going to love it. We show up. The pool is filled with algae. The bathrooms don't work. It's just absolute squalor. So we grind for like six months there. Eventually we moved to the tenderloin, which is an even nicer community. And And, uh, we're living in technically a one bedroom with three guys. So I was living in the living room. Another guy, uh, Rob, the guy who actually came up with the idea for storyline, he was living in what was technically a closet. Cause it didn't have a window. And we were just, we were just hacking.

AI assessment note: “we met in a hacker house... We show up. The pool is filled with algae.”

Q John, you, uh, you're cool because you, um, I think you're like us, uh, but maybe even more extreme in the tech world and that you have your foot in the startup world and you're hanging out with these big wigs, but you're also can just joke around and shoot the shit and like you're pretty self-aware. Who, uh, what do you align with? Who do you align with politically?

A Oh, uh, yeah, I, I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas. Uh, he was, uh, he's a smaller candidate, so he's not polling super well, but he worked for the CIA, and he also was on the board of Palantir, and he would be the first computer scientist president, and I think that that would just be very, very interesting to see someone with a CS background. Obviously, I love programmers, and I, I think that they think about the world in very interesting ways, and we've had this very long, long arc of, you know, lawyer, lawyer, businessman, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, right? Like, that's the story, and he's like a younger guy, so, uh, I'm, I'm proud to endorse him.

AI assessment note: “I really like this guy, Mark Hurd, who's a Republican from Texas.”

Q Are you more Republican than Democrat, or do you vote both?

A Yeah. Yeah. I vote both. It just kind of depends on who is, who can have like the highest impact on mostly technology and the business community. I think that those are kind of the, the, the things that we need to be thinking about. I do think there's the interesting, um, as I look back on Trump, I didn't vote for him, didn't support him, voted against him twice. But, um, but I think that there's this weird situation where like the problems that Trump brought Were obviously really bad. I think he really like divided the country and just create a lot of chaos. And I think that was like probably net negative for the United States, but he did kind of get China right. And he started this, like he got people waking up about the fact that we are in a great power competition again. And so you could see a world where the China situation dissipates and things get better. And that would be phenomenal for the world. And that's what I hope happens. And in that case, Trump will be remembered as, like, an idiot, basically. But the opposite could also happen, where the China situation gets hotter, and then people look back to Trump as, like, a, like, a genius who foresaw this all and, like, took the first steps to, like, make things safe. And so, I think the, what's interesting is that the, the way we remember presidents is often not by what they actually did, but by how their decisions look …

AI assessment note: “I vote both. It just kind of depends on who is, who can have”

Q It doesn't matter what the thing was, right?

A It's like, oh, I was hustling sneakers or, Oh, I was like selling reselling, uh, concert tickets. Like my thing was I bought DJ equipment in the United States and then I would export it to Australia. And I was just like hustling that stuff in high school. Like everyone has one of these stories. I'm sure you guys have tons that you've told on the pod. Um, but so, so basically with the, with the, uh, we need, I want the Lenza for chat GPT moment. So Lenza, for those of you who might not remember was, I don't know what that is. So, so it's this app. That you would download and you'd upload, you know, 10 selfies of yourself from your camera roll.

AI assessment note: “Like everyone has one of these stories.”