The Exchanges

Q You founded and you've been operating the company for quite some time. We have shifted into a new administration. Has this new administration been supportive of Archer and the industry?

A The new administration has been extremely supportive. Um, they've been great. And I think they look at us, um, as a sort of a couple of different things. One is we represent safety and aviation. I think that's really important, especially today where, you know, aviation is kind of going through some, uh, you know, some, some tougher times. And so we kind of represent the future and a safe product that can be brought to the market. So I think that that's really compelling. Um, two is we represent, um, jobs and manufacturing, um, in America, which I think is also really important. And three is we represent defense in terms of, uh, you know, building autonomous, attributable aircraft to help, um, you know, really protect the country in the, you know, kind of the next generation conflicts. You can see it today by looking at the conflicts that controlling the sky Um, you know, has been, you know, critical to winning the wars. So, um, making sure the U.S. leads in aviation has been a very high priority, and I think as the sort of next generation of aviation companies are born, it's critical that they're built here in the U.S., and so the administration has been extremely supportive. You've seen that, uh, President Trump, uh, you know, uh, signed the executive order, um, which had, uh, you know, big emphasis on, uh, on the eVTOL industry. Um, Secretary of Transportation, uh, uh, Sean …

AI assessment note: “The new administration has been extremely supportive. Um, they've been great.”

Q So what is the ride difference on an electric boat versus gas? Because I mean, there, there's the same for cars. You get jolt, it's much faster, but does that transfer in the water?

A It's more noticeable in different ways. So when you first pull away from the dock and you don't hear anything except water, it is a wild experience because you're so used to that like roar of an engine. Then you punch it, and it's, I mean, we've got over twice the torque of even the most premium boats out there, and we size up our propeller, which is, you kind of think of it like the tire for boats. Um, it, it's what allows you to transfer power into the water. We have a bigger propeller so that we can transfer more power before it starts to cavitate. That translates into just a really snappy experience when you punch the throttle. If you've been on a newer boat, you punch a throttle, and there's multiple seconds of lag before the boat's like, okay, I'm gonna start moving forward now. Very different experience. When you corner, like when you turn this wheel really hard, it handles like a jet boat, and you'll hear people say this, like, this feels like a jet boat, except it's a 24 foot, or like, you know, 23 foot, uh, 7000 pound wakesport boat. Um, And then, again, the, like, software experience of it, and not inhaling fumes, and being able to hold that conversation, like, it, it's a great experience for, for many different reasons than you'd find in automotive.

AI assessment note: “That translates into just a really snappy experience when you punch the throttle.”

Q Okay. So for, to start things off, break down the video. What was the creative direction here?

A Um, you know, when we initially launched November last year, so less than a year ago now, we parodied the Humane video. It was like the perfect, I remember seeing that video where they, you know, they took out the little devices on the table, and they put the pin on, and they're just stale face, and, um, you know, RIP Humane, uh, rest in peace, but it was the perfect medium for doing a launch video where you have a phone on a table, and I had this, like, whole vision in my mind, and I called up our video production agency, I was like, we need to parody this video, and now, um, Here we are, like, nine months later, closing the Series A, and I'm like, we need to parody another video, and like, what do we do? And the latest video to have gone viral with a bit of that, like, cringe element is the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive, IO announcement video, and so we, we originally were not going to do it. I actually was like, no, we shouldn't do this. We should do this, like, cool futuristic video showing, like, the MetaCore receptionist before and then after, and Very serendipitously. I was on a call with someone and she was like, I'm a massive shit poster on Twitter too. And we were talking about like launch videos and she was like, you should do another parody video. And I was like, yeah, I have like one idea in mind. And she goes to the Johnny Ive video. And I was like, all right, fuck it. W…

AI assessment note: “we need to parody another video... the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive, IO announcement video”

Q Do you have to get different regulatory clearances for each one? Like what's that?

A No, there's no like individual specialty regulations we have to jump through, but we are, we do have to be HIPAA compliant. We do have to sign BAs with every customer. We hold like very high liability insurance. And so, and then we bear a lot of risk in terms of, we can never leak patient data. We can't give an AI like unfettered access to an electronic health record system. And so, There's a lot of things that we have to do to protect patient data, which we do, and we try to save as little as possible to our systems. Like I don't want all the patient data living on my, like on my, in my databases basically. And so anyway, we sign all those agreements and then we, we bear risk there. We also bear risk when it comes to like telephony communication laws. And so making sure that we're not like calling people at midnight or texting them at three AM or 10 times a day. So, um, there's a few different like regulatory hoops to jump through.

AI assessment note: “No, there's no like individual specialty regulations we have to jump through”

Q Are you worried about their copying strategy? Do you think that even matters anymore? Are we just two separate entities?

A I absolutely worry about it. I mean, part of the narrative is that Apple didn't worry about it. I think they had a certain hubris that they could always stay one step ahead. And they absolutely could in the early years of the iPhone when Johnny Ive really was changing the design and improving it. But at a certain stage, you got yourself a six inch glowing rectangle with an infinity pool like design. I mean, there's no sort of step beyond that that Apple has to introduce. And so to some extent, it's just easier for the Chinese companies to catch up. Um, But, you know, one argument I make is that we often think of Apple killing Nokia, that Nokia couldn't keep up with the touch screen and software features and such. And I say that, like, just look at the numbers. Apple's not big enough to have killed Nokia. Market share wise, the iPhone has never been more than 20% of the global market. So who has more than 20% that can actually take on Nokia? It's the Chinese competitors. They have 55% market share, right? So you couple that with Apple, couple that with Samsung, you basically get to a hundred. So it's those companies that are able to kill off Nokia. And how did they kill off Nokia? Well, Apple trained all of their suppliers, and then the suppliers in turn supplied Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo. So that's why Nokia couldn't keep up. It's that China had this amazing ecosystem built fo…

AI assessment note: “I absolutely worry about it. I mean, part of the narrative is that Apple didn't”

Q In the first example you gave for Dylan Field, you mentioned a couple questions that you would have to assess the founders at the time. Do you remember the questions you would ask to assess them? Cause I know it was like, it was quirky. It was a little weird. Like, What were those questions?

A There were a number of questions. There were questions on the application, and then there were questions that actually we had in the, in the finalist round. So I'll go over some of the application questions. Um, at the time when Dylan was applying, we actually did ask for SAT scores, uh, and things like that. I'm not a huge fan of standardized tests as like a creativity indicator. It might tell you about some horsepower. Um, but I also think you might negate looking at certain people Uh, just based off a score like that. And Dylan was really interesting because the way he answered that SAT question was, this isn't important or like, this isn't relevant is what he wrote. And for me, I was like, yes, this is great that he's saying it. Um, cause I wasn't yet ready to go to battle on that question of like, should we take it off or not? And then we had a second question, um, which was sort of like what has almost become like, Farcical at this point, but at the time, no one was asking questions like this, which is, what's something you believe to be true that no one else believes? Like, what's your contrarian truth?

AI assessment note: “what's something you believe to be true that no one else believes?”

Q Could you explain the structure of the fellowship a little bit more?

A So the fellowship structure was that we were offering 20 young people a 100,000 dollars to work on a project of their choosing. And we use the word project a lot because we didn't have it as startup or only research or only nonprofit could be like any of the above. Um, the conditions were that they couldn't be in school. Um, you know, they couldn't have like a full, they couldn't be like employed somewhere working. Um, maybe someone who would mentor even do a little bit of interning somewhere to, uh, get their chops up in a subject, but we really wanted them to be working on their own things. And the whole idea was we were saying, Hey, the cost of college is so prohibitive. What if we gave a young person what they might spend on school and say, Hey, you're going to be self-educated. You're going to drive your future forward and we're going to give you the resources to do so. And then within the fellowship itself, I come from the homeschooling world and in the homeschooling world, everything is about the individual who is in front of you. It's not about saying, Hey, here's a class of 20 fellows and we're going to treat them all the same. It's about catering individually and figuring out, Hey, who do we need to connect this fellow to? Um, you know, to help them move forward and, and go the distance. So a lot of it has that sort of homeschooling feel to it of we would work with ea…

AI assessment note: “we were offering 20 young people a 100,000 dollars to work on a project”

Q why we've trusted fourth wall for all of our brandware at Sorcery since day one. Use my link in the description to get free credits for your first order. And for any VCs DM me on X and I can get all your portfolio companies set up with a free samples credit deal. I'd love to hear from you. How did you first get involved and what was that like?

A Oh, wow. Yeah. Um, let's see. I got a phone call one day. And the phone call was from a woman named Lindy Fishburne, who worked at the Teal Foundation. And I picked up, and her exact words to me were, Danielle, the foundation has lost their minds. They're starting this new program. They have nobody running it, and you have to get over here. And I had seen the announcement, uh, I think it was the day before on TechCrunch Disrupt. Peter did an interview with Sarah Lacey, and it looked like the program was all fleshed out and speaking about it in the present tense. And previous to the fellowship, I had been a charter school leader and founder, and it takes a lot of operations work to get a charter school off the ground. So sometimes we, uh, assume what we had to do for something else might be similar elsewhere, but this was not the case. And Peter had, Uh, the idea for the fellowship, launched it immediately, and then we got to build it together thereafter. Um, but, uh, but yeah, that first phone call was really amazing, because I remember seeing the interview and thinking, wow, this sounds really right up my alley, a perfect thing, but I had assumed that they had a team and a staff and everything like that. I interviewed, uh, that same week with Jonathan Cain, who is the president of the Teal Foundation, And what I loved about interviewing there or that interview was that it was …

AI assessment note: “I got a phone call one day. And the phone call was from a woman”

Q So Brad Lightcap, he captured some of the momentum from their customers with GPT-Five. I want to go through some of these and then get something that you've heard from your portfolio. So he heard some really good momentum and I'll show the tweet from Cursor, Lovable, Harvey, Amgen, Uber, and Notion. I know you have a particular instance. Do you want to share this?

A Absolutely. Um, this is another example of what you said, which is The Twitter narrative was so volatile, but if you actually call the experts, the actual customers, and so we called a series of customers, we called all of the coding AI companies we know from, from, you know, a bunch of their customers, customers of the, the two or three largest labs to customer service and cybersecurity. And, you know, Early, right? Two weeks in, but good so far. Working with the team, as we said, there, it's a product in motion. But one particular one stands out is, uh, our company Expo. Their benchmark, on their benchmarks, they saw a significant step up with GPT-V, much better than any other coding or design or math startup saw in their ability to find cyber exploits. And, you know, summarizing, basically, the jump was from just under 60% to 81%, switching from, uh, Anthropik's latest model to OpenAI's latest model, GPT-V. And the jump was so significant. I think it was higher than what the team had expected, but certainly the Expo team had expected by quite a bit, but maybe even the OpenAI team. Uh, and so they've published the results, and it's becoming pretty clear that AI is much better than humans at this thing called hacking.

AI assessment note: “one particular one stands out is, uh, our company Expo.”

Q Okay. Well, we need to talk about where is spend today in AI and where will this be in the future? I know you have some great charts about this. They're not pyramids.

A It is probably the biggest question in AI right now. Where will the value accrue? And we've been studying this now for, for a couple of years, and you know, I, you know, I'm sure the audience sees the large CapEx announcements that the hyperscalers are making. Um, They add up to hundreds of billions of dollars that are going into the ground, building data centers, um, acquiring chips and the infrastructure to, to, to enable all that. And so we decided to study the same with the build of prior super cycles, with the internet, cloud, mobile, AI. And we put it together to see where does value accrue over time. And, you know, I'll summarize it for, for the audience here, which is in the cloud super cycle, you know, you have about. Four hundred billion dollars of revenue that is being earned by the applications. Let's call it the layer one. You've got about two hundred billion spent on infrastructure. This is AWS and GCP and Azure, et cetera. And you've got about fifty billion on semis. This is Intel, AMD, et cetera, the CPU layer. The shape of this is 402 150. Enter AI. Nvidia earned, Nvidia alone at the chip player earned roughly forty billion dollars in data center revenue in Q one last quarter. So analyze that's about a 160. Let's say the total industry is 170, 180, maybe let's say 200. The, uh, infra layer is, um, 20, thirty billion. This is inference revenue that's being earne…

AI assessment note: “Nvidia alone at the chip player earned roughly forty billion dollars in data center revenue”

Q So we need to get into Vulcan. What is Vulcan? How did this begin?

A Yeah, so Vulcan Elements is a manufacturer of rare earth magnets, uh, which has been in the news a lot lately. This company started about two and a half years ago. Uh, I had just gotten out of the Navy and was at Harvard Business School, uh, completing my MBA. Was looking at really the three critical components that will define the 21st century. Semiconductors, batteries, and rare earth magnets. And the way that we generally like to describe it here is, if you think about your own body, a semiconductor is like your brain, a battery is like your heart, and a rare earth magnet is like your spine. And everyone was focused on semiconductors and batteries. Uh, frankly, those are critically important and they should be worried about that, but we weren't thinking as a country about the third leg of that stool, the rare, the rare earth magnet, which converts electricity into motion. And we saw that China was producing over 90, up to 94% of the global supply and the US was producing less than one percent. And when you think about the next generation technologies that will define the 21st century, whether that's Autonomous vehicles or robotics or the data centers that enable AI, drone technology. All of that has to have a rare earth magnet turning that motor, sensor, actuator, generator into motion so that we win the national security and the economic fight that we're going to be in for …

AI assessment note: “Vulcan Elements is a manufacturer of rare earth magnets... This company started about two and a half years ago.”

Q Let's talk about your team. So how did you assemble the talent for your team? We're in your facility right now in North Carolina. What kind of local talent did you pull or talent from outside state lines? Tell us about it.

A Asking who's on our team is my favorite question. That's the best question that you could ever ask me. Uh, so my co-founder, he's a PhD in electrical engineering with a focus on magnetics. He opened one of the first rare with magnetic slabs in the United States in two decades. Uh, down at the University of Central Florida. Our COO, uh, his name is Jake Bowles. He was a boots on the ground SpaceX engineer for several years, and then, uh, was a senior manufacturing engineer at Ursa Major. Our chief of staff, Jonah, uh, he has deep defense background, uh, working at the Pentagon, thinking about, uh, academic research around Military readiness, uh, ensuring that America continues to be the America that we've had for the last 75 years. And when you think about the technical team that we have, one of the reasons why we're in the research triangle is we did an analysis of the top 50 cities in the country. And we really, we really looked at four parameters. The last two are the most important. The first was proximity to customers. Second was proximity to suppliers. But then the last two were states that were open for business. That want advanced manufacturing in their state. But the fourth most importantly is where can we find pockets of the U S where you can find incredibly talented PhDs, engineers, and technicians all within a 45 minute radius. So you can't build this in the middle o…

AI assessment note: “one of the reasons why we're in the research triangle is we did an analysis”

Q How are you able to do that? You're such a young company.

A So I think it's two things. One, it's the amount of pre-work that we did getting this facility ready, making sure that all of the wraparound utilities and electrical and heat exchangers and water chillers were ready to go, that they were at spec. I think that that's something when we talk about re-industrialization and building new manufacturing companies, it's not sexy, but if you miss it, you're delayed six months. Or you get your equipment and you need to completely redo all of the piping or all of the welding, which that burns money, that burns time, that burns trust. We nailed that in this facility. And then the second thing, and it's why we nailed that in this facility is our team. Uh, one thing that we have done is The rate of learning here is exceptionally fast. So our COO, his challenge was when he started the company, I told him, go and build a team like you would have seen at SpaceX or at Ursa Major, where you were moving, you were executing, you were kicking down hard engineering problems every day. We're not admiring problems, we're fixing problems. And that's what we've done. Uh, I mean, we're very fortunate in that You know, the last five positions that we've filled, we had over 500 applications and that's with zero marketing. Uh, that's with a very low media presence. People hear about the mission and they want to come and work here because they know that this i…

AI assessment note: “So I think it's two things. One, it's the amount of pre-work”

Q What do you think the biggest misconceptions are around nuclear waste and reactors? Is there still, are there still misconceptions? I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm in an echo chamber, but I feel like everybody's on the same page.

A I think, I think there's definitely a little bit of a, a bubble in, let's say American tech or, you know, American re-industrialization. And that's because I think we're all very, very tuned in with energy needs, right? We all recognize that energy is so important for what all of us need to do. Re-industrialization, Artificial intelligence, national security, all of these things are energy issues. So I think that we're a little bit more tuned into it, but there, there is still pretty broad based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste. Um, I like to, to point out to people that if you took all of the nuclear waste ever generated inside the United States, right? And by the way, we, we generate a lot of power with nuclear today. About 20% of our power comes from nuclear. But if you took all of that waste over the last 70 years, It would not fill up an Olympic sized swimming pool. All of it. Right? So we're talking about a very, very small amount of physical material. And when you have a small amount of physical material, it's actually very easy to protect. Right? So we can encase it in concrete. We put it in safe places. And the comparison of that is, you know, carbon in the atmosphere and particulate matter in the atmosphere when we talk about oil and gas. And oil and gas is fantastic. I love the industry. I think that it's powered humanity to this point. But if…

AI assessment note: “there is still pretty broad based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste”

Q I think because Carta has scaled so large, people might forget that you guys were once a startup. I want to know who are some of your investors and what kind of funding have you reached to date?

A So we've raised shockingly about a billion bucks, uh, in total across, I think, seven rounds. Uh, so Union Square Ventures did our, our, um, Series A, Spark Capital did our B, uh, uh, Menlo did our C, uh, Meritech did our D, Tribe did our, uh, uh, E with, uh, Andreessen Horowitz, um, Lightspeed did the next one, and Silver Lake, uh, Premier did our last one. So We just, as we, as we keep moving further up into the, um, uh, the stack of, of private capital, we went from small seed funds to large, uh, venture funds to gross equity funds, and then most recently, um, private equity. We've got a board of seven. We've got people from like Will from Lightspeed. We've got Matt from Menlo, Mark, uh, from Andreessen Horowitz, um, Joe from, from Silver Lake, um, Barbara, who, who is the, um, Uh, first, uh, female vice chair at Lehman and then, uh, RBS. Uh, so we got a, a great board. It's been a, a fantastic, um, you know, the evolution of a board over a company's growth, um, is something I, you know, I learned you don't get to do very often. Uh, and it's pretty amazing when you look at the board at an early stage and the board at late stage and pre IPO, it's, it's a very different, uh, dynamic. It's a different group of people to work with. Um, and it has been fantastic. I've learned so much from, from this, uh, generation of the board.

AI assessment note: “we've raised shockingly about a billion bucks, uh, in total across, I think, seven rounds.”

Q And you've expanded now into private equity, private credit credit. Those categories might've not been served before, but now you're serving them a product. Why did you get so excited about the opportunity there?

A I would say CART is good at, uh, two things. One is, uh, entering services industries and turning them into software industries. We, CapTables was a service industry before we got into it. Four and nine A was a service industry. Fund administration was a service industry. We're, we're, we've turned them all into software industries. So we love doing that. The second is we love doing things that people today do in spreadsheets that they shouldn't be doing. And if you look, CapTables is a spreadsheet problem. Value at four and nine A was a spreadsheet problem. Fund accounting is a spreadsheet problem. Private credit is a spreadsheet problem. Private equity is a spreadsheet problem. Uh, and all we do is we take those spreadsheets and we move them into the cloud. And so when we saw these other problem sets that they were seeing in private equity and private credit, we're like service industries dominated with spreadsheets. That's like perfect for us. We, we are the best in the world, uh, at taking on those, those kinds of problems. And what's really exciting is the market size of private equity is six to eight times the size of venture. And then it's another three or four times private equity and private credit. And then you can go to infrastructure and real estate. You just start knocking down these dominoes. Uh, it, it's really interesting. Uh, in my small market to concentricall…

AI assessment note: “what's really exciting is the market size of private equity is six to eight times”

Q Because of that, are you working closely with the new administration? What's your experience been?

A We're, we're working very closely with the DOE. So even, even before starting the company, We had conversations with the DOE about what we thought needed to happen, and, and there was a lot of support for, for this, given the goals, uh, you know, of the country around nuclear. And so we've been, we've been working closely with them since day one, since before day one. Um, and, you know, throughout the last year, we were selected for a couple large programs, really historic programs that the DOE has led around Um, enrichment capacity, both on the low enriched side and on the HALU side. So the high assay, low enriched uranium, that's just under 20% that most of these new reactors use. And just, just as background, they choose to enrich to a slightly higher level, um, still below 20%, but that is so that you can get more energy density into a smaller core. And so you can then build your core in a factory, ship it, avoid a lot of the build costs. That historically have plagued nuclear. So the DOE created that program to help the advanced reactors and make sure that there was a supply chain for them, and then following the Russia import span created a second program called the Low Enriched Uranium Acquisition Program to help encourage U.S. production to offset Russian imports and just in general set up U.S. capability in the area. So through those two programs, we've been working re…

AI assessment note: “We're, we're working very closely with the DOE.”

Q So since then, a lot has happened. You hosted Hill and Valley. We're at re-industrialize right now. And next week, you're going to be hosting another thing. So before we get to next week, let's talk about now. What brings you to re-industrialize and how does this fit into the one, 37 portfolio?

A Yeah, so this is actually my first year, um, and it's incredible. Uh, my partners and colleagues have gone before. Um, my friends are, you know, involved in organizing and setting it up. A lot of our portfolio is involved. Um, and so, you know, if you look here, uh, obviously Hadrian is heavily involved. Palantir, um, is a major sponsor. Brex is a major sponsor. Um, and Palmer's here. Andrel, obviously one of our largest investments. Um, so it is very much a, a, a fun place to go see friends. Um, and, uh, I think coming for the first time, I now get, you know, why folks have really enjoyed coming every single year. You know, there, there's Mobile World Congress, right, for that broader industry. There's these major gatherings for industries, uh, CES. There is not one for manufacturing, right? There is not one for the industrial base, and there's a couple of trade shows, there's things in Vegas, like, there are things here or there, You could argue the Paris Air show, but I think what's going on here could be very, very special across industries. Um, so it's great to be here, um, doing a panel a bit later, um, with some friends, Lee Mosey from Palantir and some other folks. I'm looking forward to that, and, uh, it's been a great time.

AI assessment note: “A lot of our portfolio is involved. Um, and so, you know, if you look here”

Q Yeah. Um, I'm just thinking, like, in terms of alts in general, are RIAs coming to you asking for access to them, or is it really just for retail?

A So retail, when I think about RIAs, I think about retail because our clients are retail. So, um, that's typically what we mean when we say a retail customer versus like, say, a Robin Hood investor, right? Um, If we think about, because a vast majority of the retail wealth is actually managed with, you know, RIAs or wealth managers of some type, um, RIAs are coming in troves and their clients are coming in troves, asking for alternatives. So platforms like Case and iCapital, um, have taken off in recent years, um, simply as a result of RIAs need access to private markets. But for a while, they've only really been limited for the last couple of years to mainstream Like mega cap managers. So think about that as Apollo, Blackstone, Blue Owls, kind of a new entrant, and it's typically shorter duration credit products. Um, so it's like private credit is probably the most exciting thing. It's why Blackstone paid twelve billion dollars, or sorry, BlackRock paid twelve billion dollars for HPS, um, a similar amount for GIP, Global Infrastructure Partners, because retail wants alternatives and alternatives are a higher fee stream. And, you know, can provide, like, kind of returns that you couldn't necessarily get, um, in the, in the public markets. So, or in, in public fixed income. But it's not necessarily been venture. It's been, you know, mostly private credit or infrastructure or real…

AI assessment note: “RIAs are coming in troves and their clients are coming in troves, asking for alternatives.”

Q I have so many questions on this. First, like what is the range of clients that you have? Like what, where does the band go till?

A So we've got clients that are well in excess of like You know, we've got billionaire clients, but they've got individual accounts well in excess of one hundred and fifty million dollars on our platform. And then we've got client accounts that I kid you not are 200 dollars, like really, really small. Like we want to be able to service all clients. We kind of have this principle of like meet the client where they are. We want to be able to service all clients, all different types of accounts across all asset classes. And it's a really interesting problem because the problem can only be solved with technology. Because if you threw humans at this problem, And said, Hey, I want you to figure out asset allocation for a 10,000 dollar account or a hundred million dollar account. You know, you would throw, you know, a ton of resources at the hundred million dollar account and very few resources at the 10,000 dollar account. Um, and you know, we think that, uh, all accounts should be functionally treated the same.

AI assessment note: “well in excess of one hundred and fifty million dollars... client accounts that... are 200 dollars”

Q So let's unpack Palantir a little bit more. You're a software AI company. What problems are you solving?

A Um, it, it, it ranges tremendously, um, on the war fighting side, as I mentioned with, with Maven, you know, we're using things like computer vision to be able to identify the battle space. So how do I be able to see in these swarm of threats, you know, is that a T-ninety or T-ninety Russian tank? Am I seeing different patterns within the battlefield that are identifying a particular risk to our allied, uh, forces? We're doing things like, um, Time sensitive targeting. So as I'm deploying and seeing a target, what are the right weapon systems I have there? Which one is best to use based on fuel munitions consumption with the next mission and the next mission? We're doing things around logistics optimization. So as I'm expending munitions and fuel, how do I best reorder that into my supply chain and then make sure that that's stocked with the right place at the right time? We also do really interesting use cases around, uh, basic things like how do I be able to track a dollar through the life of, uh, the entire labyrinth of the Pentagon. And that's where the, the, where the financial statement audit comes in. We're looking for fraud, waste, and abuse efficiencies, uh, as well. We work on different vaccines with, with, uh, HHS and CDC, but then we're also doing some really cool use cases in, In, uh, commercial. For AIG, we're using AI to be able to dramatically improve their clai…

AI assessment note: “we're using things like computer vision to be able to identify the battle space”

Q What was this process like versus previous processes?

A It was actually incredible. So, you know, our, our series seed in series A went very fast. A series B was a, uh, the hardest round we've ever done, which I don't think is uncommon for deep tech companies because to the market, and I'm sure your audience will appreciate this, is any deep tech company is usually like a deep tech B, but a seed round revenue, and it's always in between. Um, this one we're really lucky where When we launched, ah, like the factory to all of our customers in January, we basically 10 X revenue in four quarters last year. Um, the automation was really kicking into gear. You know, no one's ever scaled the manufacturing company this fast. So actually we were done and closed within the round from starting to pitch to term sheets being signed or a deal done within, I think three weeks.

AI assessment note: “our, our series seed in series A went very fast. A series B was”

Q In your space specifically, what are the biggest deals that have happened in M and A and why are they so significant?

A Yeah. So the ones that, I've been tracking really closely. The first one that comes to mind is Capital One and Discover. Huge deal. This is not a tuck in. This like materially changes their whole business model. And the reason is because it creates the largest credit card issuer by loan volume, because it allows Capital One that is a bank and Discover is a card network similar to MasterCard, Visa, and American Express. There are four in the US. And so now they can create what you would call a closed loop system in that it's the card That now is on a network that they own. So they both get the, the interchange revenue when you swipe, but they don't have to pay the network rails for everything because they own the rails. And so the reason it's significant is that it touches on two themes. Number one, the bigger, the consolidators are getting bigger and number two, vertical integration, because now Capital One issues cards on Visa, MasterCard and Discover and Time will tell to say, hey, maybe they move all their business to themselves because why would you pay Visa and MasterCard for their rails if you own your own payment rail? So that one we're watching, or I'm watching very closely, and that was just approved. So back to my point at the beginning is that like large M&A that potentially could be anti-competitive or whatever the, like, you know, could cause regulatory problems is…

AI assessment note: “The first one that comes to mind is Capital One and Discover. Huge deal.”

Q Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Apollo is like integrated a little bit of like Crypto into their strategy and how they're thinking about flows. It's been really fun to watch. What, what are some other like broad trends that you're excited about in this space?

A So look, I think that my take is the use case will start with consumer as many new technologies start in the sense of, I thought the Shopify Coinbase announcement, uh, was super interesting, uh, last week. And then today there was another announcement about Uh, with Fiserv integrating stable coins. And so I think folks are basically anchoring that there's consumers that want to cut out merchant fees, which makes sense and make it cheaper to buy things and stable coins and USDC will make that, um, make that happen. I think the challenge on the B to B side is that, uh, first of all, you basically already have a global banking system that Is trying to cut out as many FX fees as possible if you do it in the right way. And so I'm just not sure. Of course, stable coins will become a mainstay for B to B companies, but I believe it will take a lot longer.

AI assessment note: “the use case will start with consumer as many new technologies start”

Q Um, okay. So to start, um, you know, you know, Can we break down browser base for some people? The audience is like pretty diverse. So there might be beginners. There might be more technical people. There might be more finance people. What is browser base to the normal person?

A Yeah, absolutely. So when I think about browser base, first to start with, what is all of the work that we do in our day-to-day lives? A lot of that is in a web browser. You know, we're interacting with software. We're interacting with web apps. You might go to crunch base pretty often and. There's this idea that we want AI to do work on our behalf. AI is going to take some tasks that we have and take care of them for us. And if we want AI to do the same work that we're doing, we need AI to use a web browser to, to work the same way we do. And BrowserBase is providing that web browser as an infrastructure product to developers who are building these AI features that are going to know you use in your day-to-day life. So you think of us as a developer tool. We're an infrastructure platform, and our product is browsers at scale. So if you want your AI to control the web, you need to give it a browser. We provide that browser. It's kind of like a database company in some ways, right? You know, every application has these primitives, you know, maybe storing data, maybe it's like manipulating images, and also now it's controlling a browser. And not only do we provide the browser infrastructure, browsers at scale in the cloud, but we also have this framework called stagehand, and it's the code interface for the browser, which gives developers and LLMs an easy way to programmatically c…

AI assessment note: “BrowserBase is providing that web browser as an infrastructure product to developers”

Q What's the typical profile for your customers? Does it span a range? Like if it's self-serve, is it a lot of consumers? How does it work?

A Yeah, they're all, all businesses, all startups. So we're very much B to B, um, mostly developers. And I think the, the customer profile browser base has really changed over time in the early days when, you know, people were just kind of building on the edge of AI in early, Um, it was a lot of startups, you know, it was a lot of people and we were a startup ourselves, so we didn't really earn the right to go get a larger customer until we grew more and really proved out our infrastructure. These days we see customers from like all different types of business sizes from, you know, still the early stage startup that's innovating to maybe the scale up that has a thousand employees and really wants to double down on some internal automation they're building or the publicly traded company that already used some sort of a, you know, headless browser technology in their cloud and wants to Look to what's new and what's innovative. So it really has spanned a lot more different types of companies as we've grown. Um, but I think that's very traditional for infrastructure companies. You prove yourself out to these early startups, and then over time as your platform becomes better, um, you win the right to work with larger companies that can trust you with their cloud infrastructure.

AI assessment note: “they're all, all businesses, all startups. So we're very much B to B”

Q Is Twitter your biggest distribution channel? How do you think about the different media channels?

A Yeah, it is a Twitter. I definitely use Twitter the most for getting stuff out there. I think it's just because I've built the audience there and like, I try and direct people there. I'm trying to get better at LinkedIn. Um, Marty Kraus, shout out Marty, just dominates LinkedIn from pylon. He's so good at it. And I, um, I think that like. I'm, I kind of, I've always tried and been like one channel and actually the journey of Browsebase in 2024, we started. My goal was that when you thought about headless browser infrastructure, um, you thought about Browsebase and specifically those people in San Francisco in the AI space thought about Browsebase. So I really tried to go where they were, which was on X and it was, you know, at events and really trying to get into that market. Now that we're going more broad and we're trying to target more types of companies, we are trying to shift across more channels. We're doing more YouTube, more LinkedIn. Um, and still trying to like find the breakout success there that we found on X, but we're definitely seeing good results, and I, I think we just have to get better at multi-channel, and as we bring more people onto our team, they bring their own expertise in certain channels, and, um, I'm excited about some of the success we've had there.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it is a Twitter. I definitely use Twitter the most for getting stuff”

Q Do you think people think that you are?

A I think, I think BrowserBase is a category creator which is still trying to define and share with the world what we're doing. So no, if you're watching this, we are not, we're not even really an AI company. We're an infrastructure company. We, we help companies use model, but people bring their own models on BrowserBase. Their models control our browsers, right? So we're more of a primitive, we're a building block, and When you think about the LLM OS, the LLM is the brain. The browser is just one of the tools it needs. Same with file systems, same with like video and voice inputs, same with embedding and vector databases. These are all the primitives that help power these like agentic applications. And we seek to build the default browser for AI.

AI assessment note: “So no, if you're watching this, we are not, we're not even really an AI company.”

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A Yeah, when I was getting ready to leave Andrel, really the two main things for me, one was a very small, extremely high caliber team, and I had a pretty high bar coming from Andrel, and then before that, SpaceX, and meeting the initial folks at Nominal, it was, it was evident from those conversations that this team was above and beyond even those groups I had worked with at Andrel and at SpaceX, so that was extremely exciting. Checked that box immediately. Um, and obviously I knew Cameron as well from our Anduril days. And then I was looking for a product that I just really believed in, um, and really could passionately develop and sell and, and be a part of that process. And I wasn't actually at the time very picky about hardware versus software or, um, you know, whether it was SAS or something else, but got the product pitch, saw the demo and immediately tied it full circle back to my sort of career path, which was starting at more of a prime, Sierra Space, a small group within that organization, having to build a lot of this software tooling myself, um, and doing it also in air-gapped environments for secure testing, and really there was just no buy option. You know, I had to go and build it with some teammates, um, over multiple years. Going to SpaceX, they've invested millions in their tool chain, everything from ERP to fleet management. Um, to data analysis, obviously. An…

AI assessment note: “two main things for me, one was a very small, extremely high caliber team”

Q You guys have had tremendous unlock in the last couple months, probably last year. What exactly was that? Cause I remember in the beginning you guys were shoes, right?

A Yeah. So we started with software that facilitate people to buy sneakers, um, or clothing or any of those goods. So like I said, we kind of grew up on the internet. I started in high school selling sneakers and clothing and hoverboards and headphones and all these things online. In order to get a lot of these items that are hard to get, you need to use something called a sneaker bot. So during COVID, when everyone was trying to get a PS five, because everyone was home and quarantined, They were selling out instantly and they were selling out because people were using these same sneaker bots to sell them. So we found a discord forum of people buying and selling software license keys as if like you were buying a Microsoft word license key and someone sold it to you. Very discombobulated forum. People were scamming each other. It was Venmo and it was cash app. It was PayPal. So we were like, okay, this is not good. This is a very discombobulated market. Let's quickly build a quick website. So we built a, Airbnb likes website where you can buy and sell and actually rent out software for a duration of time, and in our first month we processed, I believe it was like 14,000 dollars, um, just simply moving that form over to our website. Month two we did about 50,000 dollars, and from there we just kept, kept building everything that people kind of wanted.

AI assessment note: “we built a, Airbnb likes website where you can buy and sell”