The Exchanges

Q today. It feels like it's still on the horizon around these sort of like, you know, eyewear based computing, you know, potentially net new devices that we're, that, that we'll see from, uh, you know, companies like open AI over time, but where do you, Like, like, how, how real is the threat, you know, this year, ah, versus 10 years from today, and, and kind of, what's your framework?

A Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think the biggest ultimate danger, I mean, the biggest ultimate danger is very clear, which is just, like, at what point do you not carry around a pane of glass in your hand, you know, called a phone, um, you know, because other things have superseded it, and, you know, look, everything, you know, everything becomes obsolete at this point, um, so there will, there will come some time to make sure when we're not, you know, carrying phones around, and we'll, we'll watch movies where people have phones, and we'll be like, yeah, look at, look at how primitive they were, right, because, because we'll have moved on to other things, and whether those things are i-based, or, You know, uh, you know, the other kinds of wearables, or whether it's just kind of, you know, computing happening in the environment, um, or just, you know, entirely voice based, or, you know, who knows what it is, but, um, you know, there will come a time when that happens. You know, is that fine three years from now, because there's like some, you know, huge breakthrough, you know, from, from some company that figures out the, the, the product that obsoleses the phone right away, or is that 20 years from now, because the phone is just, you know, such a standard platform for everything that we do in our lives, and everything else, you know, kind of remains a peripheral to the phone. I m…

AI assessment note: “I think it's highly likely that we'll, we'll have a phone for a very long time.”

Q applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times? Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies. It's easier work. Maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about, it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that?

A Yeah. So it feels counterintuitive. Like if I was in need of money, like why would I work for, you know, startups as opposed to big tech because they clearly pay well, they have a nine to five schedule for the most part. Like I would say, you know, people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing. Um, the thing with me is like, if you're spending, you know, Multiple hours a week, like working on something, you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out. Um, like I said, you know, each of these companies that I've worked for, and again, uh, you know, founders, some of the founders have spent meaningful time with me and vouch, um, you know, would, would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't like cold email without context. Like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who their customers were, I had great ideas about, like, you know, what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like. Um, you know, I did deliver, like, beyond engineering for a lot of these companies, and, um, yeah, like, it was more kind of like, hey, if I'm spending, like, 1:40 hours, like, I want to do something that I actually care about. Like, I don't want to, like, you know, do nine to five and kind of, like, send out a div in, …

AI assessment note: “it was more kind of like, hey, if I'm spending, like, 1:40 hours, like, I want to do something that I actually care about.”

Q Has this broken tech Black X and broken containment into kind of your, your, your, your world beyond just people asking you about this?

A Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural. Like a ton of people have been asking about this. Uh, what's also funny is like, you know, some of the memes, like, um, I, I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday. So this was a lesson for me in social media in general. Like I am not a social media person. So you just like, I was like, you know, very overwhelmed with it in general. Um, obviously, you know, Feeling shitty about it as well. Like I, like I said, you know, I'm not very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in, in a much different manner. Um, so there was a lot of like reflection in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. Uh, you know, like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. I, you know, a lot of them reached out, you know, they, uh, to essentially be like helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next. Um, even like, you know, sometimes like staying through With me, like, you know, uh, just to make sure that I'm, like, all right. Um, you know, like, um.

AI assessment note: “friends and family have been strong... a lot of them reached out”

Q IOI sample problems, I think this would be a 20 year process for me to figure out how to achieve that, and I can do the Arc AGI on my phone. Uh, is this the spiky intelligence concept? Is this something that a small tweak in, in algorithmic design just one shots AGI, Arc AGI, or, or is there something else going on there that we should be aware of?

A Yeah. I mean, I think, um, part of this is the beauty of RKGI as well, right? Like, um, I think I'm not sure if there's another kind of like human intuitive, simpler benchmark, which is for the models. Um, and I think really that's one of the things they really optimize for on that benchmark. Um, I do think when it comes to models though, like there's just a little bit of a perception gap as well. Like, you know, uh, models aren't used to this kind of native, um, you know, like Just screen type input. Um, I think there's a lot we can bridge there. Actually, um, even O for many, um, it's a state of the art multimodal model in many ways, including visual reasoning. And I think, uh, you know, you're starting to kind of build up the capacity for the models to take images, manipulate and reason about them, um, or generate new images, write code on images. And, um, I think it's just been kind of under focused, but, um, I think When I talk to researchers in the field, they all see this as a part of intelligence too, and we're going to continue to focus there.

AI assessment note: “when it comes to models though, like there's just a little bit of a perception gap”

Q Interviews. Okay. And, uh, has there been, it, it, it, this was controversial when you launched it. Is it still controversial in the comments? Are you getting flamed? Has anyone big, Dunked on you and has that driven virality? Is that actually a net positive?

A Instagram is not like Twitter. Like you could post the craziest shit on Instagram and they will still not think it's controversial. So how to make it controversial, like we have to engage in bait some other way. Like it's hitting tool is controversial on Twitter, but on Instagram, you could, you could have like a white guy say the N word 10 times and it's still not controversial. Like, like you need crazy shit on Instagram. That's what we crack. Every single person here has like very great viral sense. And watch the reels that do go viral. You see, there's like ways that we've engagement baited the videos and this is what we'll keep doing to, uh, Probably a billion views a month.

AI assessment note: “you could post the craziest shit on Instagram and they will still not think it's controversial”

Q Can you talk about other maybe underrated uses of open AI models? Obviously everyone knows you can gibblify your dog. Everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like AP bio questions, but, uh, that use case is pretty interesting. What else, where else are you seeing, uh, usefulness in the models?

A Yeah, one thing I'm like on a kick with this recently, um, that I'm like really, really trying to get better at is just remembering to use these tools for learning, right? Um, I think that like, you know, there are a lot of things where I'm like, okay, I do this every day. I wanted to do, I want to do it better. Like, you know, here's a way for me to use deep research, et cetera. But I think the opposite is kind of interesting too. It's like when I don't use these tools or where I like, I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use. Um, and I think like an example of this is like now that I have, you know, something that like, Can give me a McKinsey style report in like, you know, minutes, right? Like I shouldn't be using this all the hell, like, like every single day, right? Like, so before I go to bed, like I like generate like a deep research. I like, you know, remind myself, like, you gotta read the deep research tonight. Like I gotta, like, you know, it's just like brushing your teeth or something, right?

AI assessment note: “just remembering to use these tools for learning, right?”

Q up at the top of the cap table. Uh, has that been Something that's been kind of a drumbeat internally, or has there ever been like a moment when it's been kind of harder to establish that foothold because of like crossover investors coming in or overpaying or valuations or anything like that? There's the WhatsApp example, which is like really famous, but I'm sure there's a million others, right?

A Yeah. I think our, you know, our North star, we want to be the largest outside shareholders in the most important companies of tomorrow. And, um, It would be amazing if we were the seed investor in every single most important company of tomorrow. Um, and we actually do a decent job of that. Um, and if we don't do the seed, we try to do the series A. If we do do the seed, we'll often try to do the series A. Um, and at any given round, you know, there's a relative risk reward and, um, and also like, you know, we can't, um, We can't forget that we're in the, you know, net multiple of money business, right? We're focused on investment returns, and if, you know, being the fourth biggest investor of the most, most, most important company is a good investment, we'll do that too. But I think the ability to Um, double down and triple down on companies that we really believe in and hold them for the long term. Like that, that's the, the other thing that, um, you know, often gets lost is, is, you know, there's a famous example of like Sequoia and Apple. Like, do you guys know how much money Sequoia made on Apple? No. Okay, well, I'm not going to tell you, because it's, it's, it's not nearly as much as you might think. Um.

AI assessment note: “our North star, we want to be the largest outside shareholders”

Q The bigger, the bigger growth rates scare me. It's okay. Your growth rate is perfect. Growing faster is unsustainable, right? Disaster. You're growing the perfect, right? The Goldilocks effect, the Goldilocks growth rate.

A I mean, that's just, you know, that's Eric and Kareem just doing what they do. I think just like really nailing that. But I do think there is something about that that, like, really actually does, uh, does scare me that fast growth and just like how easy it's become. So really the, you can build more with fewer people. I took to me kind of two different things. Like one, it just made me scared. And this was like back in 20, 22, like really scared about software in, in general, uh, because you can go out and build with five people, a company that grows really, really fast. And two, I think the other point of that, that essay was, uh, because we have better tools and because you can do more with fewer people, startups should be able to just like actually start fresh and compete with these companies that you never thought that you'd be able to compete with them. Writing, uh, you know, A follow up on primer right now, which is taking on K through 12 education, taking on public schools, like not a group or a group of incumbents that like you thought you'd ever be able to take on. And I think they actually can, you can like put education on a Moore's law, like cost curve and get, make education better for less and less money. Uh, and so like, that's pretty amazing. Obviously, annual, you know, is like starting to get, starting to approach kind of primes valuation. Uh, and so like tha…

AI assessment note: “I do think there is something about that that, like, really actually does scare me”

Q And that was the book launch strategy, right? Was that your first stage? You've done live.

A No, I've done lives before, but that was obviously intentional. And then, um, and then interactive, which is not like sure there's chat interactive, but like, How do I bring the audience in so that we can talk? That's where you see the, uh, first it was cash cows now at scale or fail, which is a show we just launched. Um, and we're doing, we're doubling down really hard on that because if you think in a world of AI, it's like, what are the things that can't be faked? It's people, you know, like I want stakes. So for example, like if Mr. Beast store, uh, videos, if it was not a real five million dollars, um, or not a real Lamborghini, the stakes disappear. Now to be fair, there's for sure other, like a fictional story, the whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it. And The story is the story and I will crush that. But people still want stakes. Like right now, chess is more popular than it's ever been, but like humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time. And so there are definitely some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's going to change at all.

AI assessment note: “No, I've done lives before, but that was obviously intentional.”

Q And you said Birchall was very dry. Like, was that intentional? That feels like that does not work in favor of, like, swinging a jury? Was that more for the judge? Like, what was the goal of that, uh, of that, uh, testimony?

A I think it was to really just sort of show how Musk was trying to set up this, like, like, structure things as a non, non-profit, and like, hammer home, like, he's always wanted it to be a non-profit, and he's not sort of like, so it was, it was, uh, I believe it was Musk's witness who OpenAI then cross-examined, and OpenAI used the occasion to Show an email that had, like, a proposed equity structure for Musk, and so, like, they both kind of used him differently, but I think, like, Burchall's like a, essentially an accountant books guy, like, behind the scenes, so I think it was like, here's the people behind the curtain, here's how they were dealing with the finances, here's how, uh, Musk was like, this is only a charity, and then, uh, opening eyes lawyers were like, actually, Check this shit out. So, I, but I think, like, I don't, I honestly don't know. They also struck some of his testimony because, this is a little complicated, but if you remember last year, OpenAI, or, um, Musk made a bid with Ari Emanuel and some other companies. That's right, to buy the whole company. And that, uh, opened the door, or that sort of, um, complicates, uh, things for Musk's side, because there might be, uh, some of those discussions around that bid admitted into evidence, and that may not be good for Musk, because if there's, like, weird compromising emails in there, so, like, it's gotten c…

AI assessment note: “I think it was to really just sort of show how Musk was trying”

Q with kind of the, how Bitcoin went, where people were just mining it on their laptop, and then it turned into a data center, and then it turned, like, hunt for the cheapest energy possible with the ASIC, uh, because the algorithm was so stable, um, Like, what, ah, what does it actually take to scale a network like this over time, and where are you in that scaling curve?

A Yeah, so Bitcoin's a bit unique in that I think it's the only major network left that does proof of work. So basic stuff you're mentioning, you know, like all the crazy things like volcanoes, mining bitcoins and stuff like that's all really just participating in the consensus mechanism. All the other high performance blockchains today that I know of at least are probably proof of stake, which is a much more energy efficient way to do things. And it's economic security, not Like computational security. So on hyper liquid, there's not much innovation being done on how the networks stay secure. It's the, it's a relatively solved problem economically, which is that basically people, people put up the native token. Like it's very important for the network to have its own token, which on hyper liquid is called hype and people put it up and they basically say, I'm like vouching for the Usually it's kind of like delegated. It's kind of like, um, you know, you vote for your congressman kind of thing. So it's like you delegate it to a validator and the validator says anything I do, the stake that is staked to me is at risk. Um, and. You can do some math and then the, basically the economics work out such that if like most of the stake in the network is honest, then it's fine. And if you want to acquire enough stake to do something bad on the network, where bad here is like the canonical …

AI assessment note: “the security is in the economics, not in like, you know, create creating crazy ASICs”

Q Apple makes these editorial decisions, but it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team and being like, what apps do you like? What apps are you using? Making decisions that way, right? I think, I think part of Grok over the last month or so is like figuring out like, how do we get strong Consumer adoption. Which categories are we going to get strong?

A I'll tell you how they get strong consumer adoption. Sock to compliance. They need to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. How can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way. I wonder, it is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, like why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say, hey, we're actually going to be the everything app. You can use Grok fully and you're all the upgrade and you can get on Grok heavy and you can be paying 200 dollars a month for a Top tier, the super insane level LLM, but it all exists and it's all managed within the X app that already has a lot of it, a lot of installations.

AI assessment note: “The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird.”

Q question like looking back over the, you know, maybe 10 or 10 or 15 years was, was what moments did you feel like there just was not a lot of action happening? Because this summer is just the pace, uh, from so many different teams has been absolutely insane. Everybody's like trying to keep up. And it didn't used to feel that way, at least from my point of view.

A So my, my view on it always is there's like these, there's this, this, these disconnected, you know, kind of patterns or trends. There's, there's sort of the, the sort of day to day phenomenon where like engineers show up every day and they make things a little bit better. And then every once in a while, you know, you, you get a technical breakthrough or a new platform and, and, and that process kind of this, you know, kind of sawtooth kind of up to the right kind of process kind of plays out over time, kind of regardless of what else is happening in the world. And so it, it keeps happening through recessions and depressions and wars and like all kinds of crazy. Crazy, crazy stuff that's happening, but basically, you know, the, the technology keeps getting better. So there's, there's kind of that curve. And then, and then there's the, the sort of enthusiasm curve and, and the, and then the adoption curve, you know, which is basically like, when do these things actually show up in the world? And then by the way, when are people actually ready, uh, you know, for, for, for the new thing? Um, like, if you talk to the people who worked on like, I'm sure you guys have talked to people who work on language models, they will tell you that they were surprised the chat GPT was the breakthrough moment. Cause they thought everybody already knew what these models could do for, you know, thr…

AI assessment note: “arbitrary disconnection between what's actually happening in the substance and then what people are seeing”

Q uh, max out contract with Cluelay. They would probably pay you, uh, uh, a pretty, Penny to, to join the team over there, And I also, it sounds like you're interested in joining ah, ah, ah,, uh, uh, as a founding engineer ah,, uh, of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now? And, and, um, how can you turn this into a win?

A Yeah, look, like, I've, you know, regardless of the situation, like, I've been privileged to, like, work for some of these companies, like, you know, um, Antimetal, you know, the founders, like Sync Labs, you know, Prady, uh, they're one of the most, uh, you know, crack places I've been at in general, partly because they had me, maybe not, I don't know, uh, I guess I'm with that, but, um, I think the main thing is, like, I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next, so, Um, you know, working with a company called Darwin. They are essentially, like, building a new, like, AI-driven, like, data platform, like, you know, video platform, essentially, for more kind of, like, you know, uh, UGC-style media, and we're gonna release to the market very shortly. Um, this is the only thing I'm going to focus on. Um, I, I think, you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove, um, and there's, there's not a lot for me to say, so, yeah.

AI assessment note: “working with a company called Darwin... this is the only thing I'm going to focus on”

Q going forward? Because we saw this with, uh, GLP ones. I mean, I'm sure, or CRISPR, these stuff, this stuff was NIH funded at one point. There was a ton of research, and then we get this big boom, like, but it's 10 years later. What's on the frontier? What are you most excited about? And what should we be fighting for? Let's keep the funding there no matter what.

A Yeah. Great, great question. Uh, in fact, the most important question. So regardless of whether or not this 40% cut happens, if it's less, if it's kept the same, um, a couple of things. First of all, despite the fact that NIH funds basic research and that many laboratories, including my own for, for many years, focused on basic research, like how does the visual system work? We always had an eye. Every laboratory has an eye toward, you know, what, what the translational implications could be. Okay. So we were actively involved in trying to solve You know, blindness due to glaucoma, even though we were focusing on some basic questions. So I think it, it, it's a statistical issue. If you step back and you say, okay, in the field of, let's just say vision, my, my former field, um, what is the leading cause of blindness? Cataract. But you know what? You can fix cataract. You can slide out the lens and you put in a new lens that's being done now.

AI assessment note: “actively involved in trying to solve You know, blindness due to glaucoma”

Q What kind of, um, general guidance are you giving to, uh, somebody that, uh, maybe was an active trader and wants to get more into the actual, you know, kind of venture side of the game?

A I've been investing in, in venture funds and crypto funds for a long time, just sort of after I sold my first company. In fact, Mark, Mark Andreessen and I had done it together for a long time. Um, and I think it's just, it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to, you know, non-consensus right, right? Like, As much as we hear about crypto, it's still very non-consensus. A lot of, a lot, a lot of venture funds just simply, maybe they'll have a little bit of Bitcoin, but they'll, otherwise they'll rule it out if there's tokens and things. Um, you talk to fund funds, um, they, a lot of them will say we have the no crypto rule, you know, sovereign wealth funds, so all the kind of giant pools of capital that fund the venture world. And so it's still kind of this, considered this kind of weird sideshow. Um, like obviously the past doesn't predict the future and so forth, and we don't know how things will play out, but it's still very non-consensus. I think from a, from a financial investing point of view, the broader crypto world. So I, I, like, I believe that's where the opportunities are in, in, in, in venture investing. Um, obviously you have to also be right. And so, and time will tell, but it's, I think it's still much more not, it's surprisingly non-consensus in the investing world.

AI assessment note: “it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to, you know, non-consensus right”

Q with the AI thing, if you get Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft using stable coins in an agentic application, the user might never know that I'm paying a fraction of a cent to access a Wall Street Journal article. It just happens, and I'm not even aware. So, what are the key drivers for the different, ah, the different constituencies, and then the different applications, and how do they fit together?

A No, that's a great question. And I, like, I have a broader kind of framework I like to talk about, which is sort of, I, I sort of like to distinguish technologies between what I call inside out and outside in. And so inside out of things that sort of start with established institutions, like AI to some extent is like that, you know, the iPhone was like this. It came out of Apple, a very established institution. AI came out of, you know, Stanford and so forth. Um, whereas crypto very much, you know, Bitcoin started at the fringes, right? And sort of like open source software and there's, you know, other kind of tech movements have started at the fringes and it sort of worked its way in, right? So stablecoin started for, The main use case was settling, you know, crypto trades, you know, seven years ago or something. And then over time, you started to see more and more like, you know, payment providers in Argentina, for example, and that, you know, sort of more, more kind of moving to the center. Now Stripe, you know, I think of Stripe is, is very much probably the, I think the smartest, a lot of people think the smartest, one of the, if not the smartest fintech company is all in on it. You know, they did a billion dollar acquisition bridge to, you know, to ramp up their efforts. Um, I think the main, the gaining factor, like I said, Speak to a lot of like, like what I would love …

AI assessment note: “I sort of like to distinguish technologies between what I call inside out and outside in.”

Q the union from your perspective? How would you grade the, the, the, the different executions across the original goals? Some of them have just kind of fallen by the wayside as, We found different solutions to those problems, but what are you, ah, what do you think we've knocked it out of the park on, and what do you think we still have a lot more work to do on?

A Well, the ultimate vision for crypto was always economic freedom in my mind. In fact, that's the mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom in the world. So that's like how to give people more self sovereignty, more control of their money. It enables them to not only like live a freer life and have not have things taken away from them, but it also, it's better for society because if we have a society with good property rights and sound money and like rule of law and these things, you can actually Try more things. If people are rewarded with the upside of their labor, they're going to go, they're going to go try more ambitious things in the world. So you see that there's actually economists who measure across different countries, like how high is economic freedom? And you see that in high economic freedom countries, there's like higher GDP per capita, but there's also like less corruption. There's less war. There's lower infant, you know, lower infant mortality, like all these kind of downstream effects. So the ultimate potential of crypto is to get more economic freedom in the world. And we've been trying to push on that through a variety of ways. Like one way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the U S or pushing on that. We had a big influence in this last election. Uh, the crypto voters showed up in a massive way. We had like two million advocates who …

AI assessment note: “one way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the U S”

Q Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building?

A Yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was a little tiny kid in, like, fourth grade. I was sitting in this classroom, and I was watching some guy doing real science, and I saw him, I was like, dang, I, like, know how to do addition, I know how to do basic algebra, and, like, where the hell am I going with my life? And I realized that the world is a really scary competitive place, and I had to have some kind of heuristic by which I should get better, and so I thought to myself, alright, Every two years, I want to double in the metrics I care about, which at fourth grade was coolness. And so at that point, growing up in the South Bay, I grew up to exceptionally chill parents, an opera singer and electrical engineer who were just like, oh, son, just do whatever you want to do. And I was like, okay, every two years I will double in coolness. And so that's exactly kind of how I structured my life. And in the next two years I did stuff like tried to memorize the dictionary. Cause this is what I thought cool was when I was like.

AI assessment note: “the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization”

Q Or is he building his, is he building the biggest house, the most expensive house ever, and he's like, you know, gonna post up there and, and ride it out?

A One of the things, again, like, I, I picked the people I cover very carefully, because like, I want to be inspired by them. And one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the research, um, was I would watch some interviews and for hours and literally only just like pull out one line and was that he says that he's been obsessed with the stock market since the third grade for reasons I don't entirely comprehend. That's the line. He doesn't even understand. He's like this. There's a great line that Jeff Bezos says that I believe in where it's like, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. And Ken clearly is like completely obsessed with this. So where he was even saying, he's like, I don't know if I was interested in entrepreneurship. I was just interested in solving problems. I am addicted to solving problems. And guess what? Entrepreneurship and investing, like he says, the public markets, like that's the biggest, you know, the biggest game in the world with the, the, the, the biggest, hardest problems to solve. So that's what I'm addicted to. Usually people like that, I don't think they ever stop. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Usually people like that, I don't think they ever stop.”

Q What, what, what, what, what's your reaction? Are, are you long, I, I, I'm personally, I'm short the word slop But I'm long the underlying trend, but I'd love to hear your take.

A Uh, you know, I'm going to relate it back to defense, which is, you know, sort of marker maps are no good. Focus on a long tail winner. There's like a whole fucking set of like a hundred like AI image generation companies that all just got, you know, fucking Sherlock by open AI and are going to be totally irrelevant because like they've got the biggest brand and know they have the best technology. Good luck catching up when you're like, you know, sort of losing on both angles. Um, I think you're going to see this stuff got implemented into Hollywood like ASAP. I mean, there's like a whole set of things where you can like, Look, there's gonna, for sure, still be like human fine details. There's things that it's not perfect at. It probably never will be like quite perfect at it. But if you want to start like throwing together like rough draft, vision boards, et cetera. And then what you end up seeing is like the equivalent of like, you know, that there's, you know, sort of now, you know, sort of two, um, you know, two engineers can build like a billion dollar, you know, AI company, like two animators and a director can like make the next Pixar film basically. Cause like, you know, they have so much, you know, sort of leverage.

AI assessment note: “I think you're going to see this stuff got implemented into Hollywood like ASAP.”

Q memo that went out right as the market was collapsing. I believe this was during the housing crash. And it's this really deep macro econ analysis of what's going to happen. And I'm wondering if, is that macro DNA still alive and well at Sequoia? Do you guys still look at consumer confidence and what's happening in the credit markets and all of that, or is that less relevant today?

A No, it's, um, you know, Sequoia is a interesting, uh, business, you know, in the sense that there is, um, people talk a lot about, you know, multi-stage VC firms and what that means. And, you know, Sequoia, we have this, you know, thriving seed and early stage business that was sort of the heart of Sequoia dating back to the 1972. Um, and, uh, you know, a growth equity business that spans series B's up through crossover Uh, um, crossover investing into the public markets. We have this overlay Sequoia Capital Fund vehicle, um, which is the permanent capital, uh, behind all of these funds. We have Sequoia Heritage, which is a multifamily office, um, that is, you know, it's a, it's this independent business affiliated with Sequoia. We obviously, you know, we see them all the time. Sequoia Capital Global Equities, which is, I think at this point, the largest TMT long short hedge fund in the world. Um, So you, you know, put all that together, it's, you know, uh, one of the benefits we have, I think, um, you know, for being quote unquote multi-stage is you get, you know, different bites at the apple as companies scale and, you know, you try to catch everything at the seed and if you miss a few, you can do the A and et cetera, et cetera. But also you do turn, you know, it's hard to really lose your mind on things if you have the forcing function of the public markets, you know, around…

AI assessment note: “it's hard to really lose your mind on things if you have the forcing function”

Q Yeah. Do you think that X, you know, killing links, uh, you know, We all kind of understand that it, that it probably makes sense for X as a business, right? But it's disappointing as a user. Is that part of what's creating an opportunity for dig, uh, to come back and, and potentially thrive?

A It's, you know, I had not thought of that. It is so annoying that we all have to put it in the second tweet, but, but to your point, it does make sense. Um, from their standpoint, look at, at the end of the day, if you build a community platform well enough, I'd imagine, you know, at least a majority, more than half of the content that will be talked about will be stuff from the community, right? At Reddit, there were self posts, and that was just an invention by some random Redditor who guessed how to sort of hack and make self-referential links. But, but I do think there is an opening as you, as you mentioned it. Yeah. There, there is an opening for like more traditional, just link sharing. Like here is some cool thing on the internet. Go, go take a look. And you know what, actually, as I'm thinking about it live, the other wild trend, you've seen this guy levels who's building, who's code vibing the flight simulator.

AI assessment note: “I do think there is an opening as you, as you mentioned it.”

Q of knows, okay, Super Bowl, like, it just looks good, it looks like a six to seven figure spend, but how do you, everyone wants to know, You know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating? Like, does this make sense? And did we make money from it? What's your early read? And then what do you look, what signals are you looking for down the road?

A It's incredible. Um, so there was a couple of things and also there was even kind of in ramp fashion, some things that made the, um, the, the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So, um, by being By buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like it's sort of is a little insane to say, 11 days before the Super Bowl, you know, what if we did that? Um, and so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl, you know, you know, we were able to find someone that had incredible relevance to what people were watching. And of course, Saquon is an amazing one of one talent. Um, That was phenomenal. Next, um, there was, without getting too specific, a lot of folks that, um, for various reasons would normally buy Super Bowl ads, insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that, that dropped out of the Super Bowl. Um, you know, didn't want to be advertising at a time when, you know, we're, we're sort of, uh, coming under attack, and it meant that some of the, the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots. Um, for people who were watching closely, we were the very last ad Uh, going in to the Superbowl. Um, uh, and that was nationally aired, um, for folks in other markets saw the ad twice. And, um, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what…

AI assessment note: “I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think.”

Q Also like this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V six, right?

A Is it? I don't know. Is this good for video explainer channels on YouTube? Bad for video explainer channels on YouTube? Certainly commoditizing the production of video explainers. I've seen a lot of these video explainers that will show you, like, inside of a rocket, or inside of a, an RPG, or, or an AK-forty-seven, or a Glock, and those get, like, tens of millions of views. They can be viewed in any language, but they're very intense from a, from a CGI perspective. You have to go and model every little detail, every pin in The, in the weapon or whatever the object is that's being visualized in this particular video explainer close to being on command. And then the question is, where does the value set? Does if you prompt YouTube and you ask for a video explainer of, uh, you know, uh, a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the innards. Will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that or will this still sit below the creators?

AI assessment note: “Is it? I don't know. Is this good for video explainer channels”

Q Do you, you don't trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want, Doug from Semi-Analysis really doesn't, does not want Intel to fail.

A Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I, I'm, I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate has been raging. Like, is this, is this socialism? Um, and so we're going to the socialists who are self-proclaimed the people's line, uh, from Carl, uh, Beher. Uh, and Carl says, no, But that hasn't stopped Democrats from complaining about it. And this is interesting because, um, obviously the Trump camp is very pro this deal. And they're saying, this isn't socialism. What are you talking about? We're just doing art of the deal. We're making good deals. And we're, uh, we're, this is an America first agenda project. Um, the Democrats are saying, oh, wow, Trump is a hypocrite. This is socialism. The socialists are saying this isn't socialism. It doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't count as socialism because it's not a controlling state. So, uh, uh, Carl says, Former under Obama undersecretary of the state Rick Stengel is freaking out right now over the news that the Trump administration has taken a 10% equity stake in chip manufacturer intel. This is a quote from Rick Stengel. Uh, Trump, Trump's strong arming intel for government equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of once the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up. The state owning the means of production is called Marxism.

AI assessment note: “I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate”

Q what you're seeing on the LP side, but we've heard that there might be some fatigue from LPs on what's going on in venture, but at the same time, it feels like that David Goggins meme where, you know, venture just keeps on chugging no matter what, uh, you're going to the AGM. Uh, what, what are you seeing broadly in terms of LP appetite for ever bigger venture funds?

A We're a small, adorable seed fund based in New York city. So I, we are not, we are not responsible to answer that question. I think our, like your job, if you take LP capital is to give them back a lot of money one day. And I think if you haven't, um, you, you owe that to them. And so at some point the patients should run out. And I, I appreciate that. I think the challenge is the, Time for liquidity in early stage venture has gotten pushed significantly from where it was more predictable a decade or two decades ago. You could say seven to 10 years on an early stage fund and mean it. Today, I think you say seven to 10 years, and you're like, by that, I mean, like, 12 to 15. And that, that's a substantial difference. And I think you need to align with your investors on what that timeline is, because it's in a rational timeline. Like, The people we fund, if you go back 15 years, they were, like, pre-elementary school for the most part, right? Like, if you look at the young founder that you're investing in today, a fifteen-year timeline is two-thirds of a life. Like, it's an irrational number, and so these, like, the go-in motion of making an investment to the return the fund to LP's timeline is so decoupled from, I think, a psychological standpoint that, um, your stakeholders are just Dramatically, uh, unrelatable.

AI assessment note: “We're a small, adorable seed fund... we are not responsible to answer that question.”

Q Um, and so you just get more out of deep research, which is what you want from deep research, right? You're not looking for, uh, you know, Perfectly summarized, you know, handful of paragraphs. Exactly. The entire point is to let you kind of figure out what's important.

A So Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick vibe check over two hours this morning, Grok three plus thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of open AI strongest models. Oh, one pro for 200 dollars a month and slightly better than deep seek R one and Gemini two point O flash thinking, which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch one year ago. This timescale to state-of-the-art territory is unprecedented, and that is undeniable. Uh, this gets at the first Grok III takeaway. It's simultaneously surprising and not surprising. Start with the latter. XAI famously built a 100,000 GPU cluster in Memphis and now has 200,000 GPUs and used 20,000 of them to train Grok III. And so they're still building the larger cluster. So even though you'll see a lot of people posting on the timeline, oh, uh, you know, Grok III, A 100,000 GPUs. That's not accurate. They, they only use 20,000 for this, but it's still impressive.

AI assessment note: “So Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick vibe check”

Q your own software and, you know, spin out software companies or develop, uh, stuff internally, and we said, uh, what, with what hours in the day are we gonna do that, and why, why would we deserve to win? Over a team that is, you know, entirely dedicated to a certain problem. Where has content to commerce worked within Condé Nast? Uh, and where have you experimented or avoided it?

A You know, the, if you think about from an advertiser perspective, the reason advertisers have always come to Condé Nast is the influence that we have with audiences, right? That, that, you know, whether it's fashion or travel or home, you know, it's, it's, it's the influence that we have. Now, You know, that, that was very, very true in the print era. It's very true today, but they also have many more avenues to reach audiences than, than they used to. So for us, when we look at commerce, we think that ability to influence audiences certainly exists even more than before because of how much larger our, our reaches. And so we can use that maybe not to create the New Yorker protein powder, but to sell fashion, to sell Travel.

AI assessment note: “maybe not to create the New Yorker protein powder, but to sell fashion, to sell Travel”

Q But as, as some of these, you know, new coding, uh, Cogen tools came out, Claude Code, Cursor, Devon, et cetera, were, did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting, you know, more efficient or do you still handcrafted code, farm to table, organic, you know, handmade?

A I mean, obviously like, you know, uh, having more like, uh, you know, AI assisted tooling, like definitely helped, but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs. Um, because Like, I would still love to spend, you know, a justifiable hour, like, working on something, and it doesn't have, like, a measure. It's not like, hey, you know, I'm gonna split time, like, four hours for this company, for that company. Like, I was essentially, like, working until I got something done for that day, and, um, I think people around me will probably say this, that I am notoriously known for not sleeping. Um, I am, uh, you know, I'm a serial, like, non-sleeper at this point, is what I would say. Um, but yeah, and as far as the interviews go, right? Like, so one there, there's also been a lot of things that aren't like, Hey, you know, I probably used, uh, you know, some sort of like to like, clearly, which, you know, I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say, if I'm a paying customer, I'm not. Um, but, uh, or, or some sort of like, you know, how to game the system. The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems. And if they did, I would have bombed interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much.

AI assessment note: “definitely helped, but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs.”