The Exchanges

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: “I think friends and family have been strong. Uh, you know, like I said”

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.”

Q to like go try a startup and then maybe I'll invest later. Uh, and obviously the Teal Fellowship is kind of like a scaled version of that, but there's a lot of other, you know, initiatives. Uh, how has that changed your strategy? Has it changed your strategy at all? Uh, and kind of like, What, what does the early stage market look for you look like for you today?

A I think they're like, there's always been these splashes of noise. Um, and Very, very little, like, if you go back again, I'm old, and so I've been doing this through these microwaves of, uh, change in the early stage market, um, very few products stay where they are. They move in different directions. They either get later. So if you think about new entrances as funds into the early stage market, most of the ambition is to become a bigger fund, and in doing so, you Become later by nature of scaling, uh, your business. And I think on a product side, uh, you're only as good as the product you're offering. And so what has been amazing to me about YC is they've just continued to compound quality of the satisfaction to their customer. They are, they are not free, right? You're giving YC equity. And yet if you look at like the happiness factor, the, the MPS or whatever, uh, cheesy acronym you, you call reviews, but like, People go to YC because other people who went to YC loved it, and they think it was entirely worth it. And so I think the products that get invented need to live up to the cost. And if the cost is free, like nothing is really free. And so what comes with that freedom? Is that attaching to a brand? And if you attach your company to a brand, is that a good thing to have done? Or is there some negative, uh, externality that comes with that? And so I think Um, and it's …

AI assessment note: “there's always been these splashes of noise... very few products stay where they are”

Q bit about the, uh, the religious vibe shift in tech? I've had a number of, uh, reporters reach out to me. Hey, I'm writing a piece because I saw Augustus Dorico had a cross on his neck or something like that. Uh, you've been in this, uh, milieu for, uh, forever. Uh, uh, what, what, what is the mainstream media getting wrong or right about that narrative and that shift?

A Let's see. So I'll just give sort of my take on the shift is, um, we've had a few things happen. So the first thing is the more online you are, I think the more that you've looked at what's happened basically since about 2012, maybe 2016 last 10 to 15 years. And you've just said something is strange about society right now. You see COVID, you see the Hunter Biden laptop story. I mean, there are so many ways that we've been lied to. Um, I was thinking, you know, Uh, in the early 20 tens, if you went away for five years and you came back, what would be really confusing was the rise of social media. In the late 2010, if you went away and you came back, what would be really confusing is how much morality had changed. What you could say, what you couldn't say completely changed. And for me, I looked at, wait, hold on. The, all of our moral codes are ebbing and flowing. There's all of these ways Where we've gone from a kind of a democracy to a bureaucracy and, and I don't want to live in that world. And as I looked at it, I traced a lot of that to a kind of atheism where Malcolm mudgridge, he has a great line. He says, the problem with atheism isn't that you believe in nothing. It's that you'll believe in anything. And so I watched people with empty their, their bodies as empty vessels adopt completely rotten and corrupt ideas. And I think a lot of people, including myself, by the wa…

AI assessment note: “I'll just give sort of my take on the shift is”

Q we just need, Hey, it's okay to pay yourself a really like reasonable salary. Uh, a lot of founders are out there kind of like starving even after they've raised twenty million dollars. What do you think about the structure of Silicon Valley? Like is the Silicon Valley playbook setting us up for, to create the next James Dyson or the next, uh, or, or, or the next Todd Graves?

A So when you say, what do I think about that? I don't think about it. So it's really bizarre to me. Again, like I have an unfair advantage because essentially I just talk to dead people all day. I have one sided conversations with history's greatest founders, right? So like for like the first four or five hours of my day, I'm usually just reading biographies and then, uh, I usually have lunch and then in the afternoon I like reread highlights of the stuff I've read over the last like eight years while building the podcast. Um, and one of the main lessons from all that is just like, they do like the people that usually get to the top of their profession are the best of what they do. They do what's best for them regardless of what works for other people. And so the weird thing that I have is like when I open up Twitter and people are arguing about like, you should raise from this person or you shouldn't raise at all, or you should do this. It's just like, you should do whatever's best, whatever is best for like whatever mission you happen to be on. Um, so I don't have like an opinion of like how other people should do it other than like, what do you actually want to do? And then figure out what's the best way to go about doing that. And then this is, this, this is my issue was like, uh, remember when Paul Graham released like found the founder mode episode or a essay, so many peop…

AI assessment note: “They do what's best for them regardless of what works for other people.”

Q a renaissance, like with the AI stuff, like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model, but can you talk a little bit about Um, specifically like, are, do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level?

A Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but, you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like, and Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know, like I, I'm sure I, it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook. And, uh, Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back, uh, to YC, the first thing he said was, all right, well, if you were the founder, Uh, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And, uh, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the U S government. Like, you know, I think, uh, I just stepped in it by bringing that up, but Hey, like, you know what, this is actually how, uh, you should be a leader. Like you actually have to think about things, uh, from first principles from zero based accounting. Like if knowing what we know now, Would we do that thing that we're doing? And, you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, uh, you know, thinking.

AI assessment note: “I'm trying to do founder mode, but... you don't have to be the founder”

Q Uh, how do you think as an investor and even a writer and somebody who's called a lot of trends, you know, early You know, what do you think the next, you know, talk to us about the next five to 10 years?

A Oh, the next five to 10 years. Uh, you know, you know, what I found really fascinating is that a lot of the stuff that I'm not investing in has been super overvalued. Uh, and then a lot of the stuff that I've been investing in has been undervalued and underappreciated, and I think it's going to be worth like a lot more in the next kind of year or two. So that, that's kind of my take. I, you know, I'm not a figure investor, big fan of, of their videos. And actually my daughter loves Bigger videos and was like really psyched to see two of them, uh, two of them together. I don't know. I mean, I think like there's a lot of probably overhyping AI. There's probably going to be like a couple of 10 trillion dollar AI companies that are going to pay for the whole thing. Humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor, because it's like this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really, really smart people working on it, where like, if you pull off this impossible thing, then you're competing against these 10 other companies and like who wins a big consumer surplus event. But there's, you know, like human labor doing things. There are some people I've heard who don't just kind of podcast and Right, who like, do you like, you make cars or whatever, physical labor.

AI assessment note: “There's probably going to be like a couple of 10 trillion dollar AI companies”

Q This is interesting. It's brave. The problem is cultural. I, I, I, I don't quite get what he's saying with, is he just saying that, like, there's too much, like, rah, rah, okay, we need to bring manufacturing back and not enough people actually doing it?

A Yeah, I think he's just alluding to the fact that, like, the deindustrialization of America is something that should be unwound. Like, we need to focus on industrializing, reindustrializing, reindustrializing, however you want to put it. But, um, yeah, not every single category is, like, conducive to a new venture-backed startup or roll-up. Um, and, uh, anyway, so Jai is somebody, I don't know him personally, but, uh, you know, Good investor. I think he's back, uh, with his own company. Uh, he actually had a fund and, and decided to return capital at one point because he felt like everything was too overvalued at the early stage. Uh, but he's back to building himself now, and, and, and, and, uh, we should try to learn more about his company.

AI assessment note: “I think he's just alluding to the fact that, like, the deindustrialization”

Q know, a friend, things like that. And he mentioned that currently. Your chats are not privileged. They can be used in, in, in a, in a lawsuit or, or other, uh, situations. Uh, how, how optimistic are you that our sort of legal system in the U.S. can get some of these issues right where maybe it can't just be, you know, total free markets, kind of lawless, whatever goes?

A You know, so in the case of training data, I think that there, I mean, there's a bunch of these copyright, you know, kind of lawsuits happening right now. There's, you know, the big New York Times opening, I won, and there's, you know, been a bunch of others. Um, I, I think in that, for that particular problem, my guess is that problem ultimately has to be solved through legislation. Um, it's, it's, it's ultimately a legislative question. The reason is because it goes to the nature of copyright law itself, you know, which, which is legislation. And, and, and of course, you know, the, the, the content industry is already claiming that, of course, you know, using, using copyrighted data to train You know, without permission or without paying is, is, is sort of, you know, they, they believe illegal on his face, you know, due to violation copyright law. The counter argument to that, which, you know, which we believe is, well, it's not copying, right? There's, there's a distinction between training and copying. Just like in the real world, there's a distinction between reading a book and copying the book, you know, as a person. And so there, there, there's going to need, I, I think, you know, the courts are trying to grapple with that. There's a whole bunch of cases. There's jurisdictional questions, you know, probably ultimately Congress is going to have to figure out a, um, You kn…

AI assessment note: “You know, so in the case of training data, I think that there”

Q world to basically Ignore everything else in every other data source that even could be put in and just operate purely on the order book data, um, just better than everyone else. But so that feels like, okay, I wouldn't know how to, you know, create any extra value there with something else, but it sounds like you found something that they all need in common. Like, what is that?

A Yeah, I think there's, it's, it's a, it's a series of tools across Wall Street. I think it's just one thing. It's just a myopia that, you know, and just sort of a laziness that's enveloped the bigger Companies, again, you know, there's the, so, so we have this data that shows that around five percent of Jane Street and Two Sigma use Bloomberg, and the reason is because they view it as an entry-level tool. You know, uh, Chamath is looking at it and says, wow, this is like an exclusive social network with the best finance, you know, it's true, Peter Thiel's on there, 24 seven, I see his little green light next to his name, but the, uh, the point is that, you know, Wall Street changes, and the tool, the tool sets are changing, even for fundamental equity guys, so Credit card data, you know, to the minute is something.

AI assessment note: “the tool sets are changing, even for fundamental equity guys, so Credit card data”

Q So my, when you say quant, uh, are, is there a bifurcation between like high frequency trading and just quantitative trading?

A Yeah, and I think it's gonna get, my goal actually is to make it more of a spectrum. So the fund I was at yesterday, I said that you guys can do what Renaissance does. You know, it's not a secret anymore. It might have been a secret in 1995, but the amount of kids that have come and left every one of these firms, hopping from Jane Street to Citadel to the next shop, everybody knows what everyone's doing. It's just a question of your risk tolerance, your leverage. Execution is very important, but I think that, you know, trading You know, the, the stock pickers are kind of going the way of dinosaur. And I think by moving up the power curve for Bloomberg, helping people become quants, you know, the, the quant industry has sold, I think this tremendous lie. And again, these are customers. Some, you know, I love those guys, but I think that is in their vested interest to tell people that look at this blackboard with all these math equations. There's no way you guys could understand this. You're too stupid. You have to be an IMO winner. You couldn't possibly come here And make billions, but we saw what Jane Street did.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, and I think it's gonna get, my goal actually is to make it”

Q Do you think that the narrative around stable coins is still going to morph into micropayments?

A Briefly, the way I think about stable coins is today, we don't really have a global payment system or global financial system. We have, you know, a 195 countries. Each one has many different banking systems. When you send money, uh, to another country, like I said, you wire money, like actually we've had this experience at the firm where we wire, uh, investment and it ends up going through like a bunch of humans and paperwork. It's really just a mishmash of systems. And so the way to think about Stablecoins is similar to how, for those who are old enough to remember, text messaging was like this at one, like in the 2000. You would send a text message, you would say you don't have a plan to send to Canada, you got to sign up, and it was all these different systems, and then WhatsApp and FaceTime came along, and they built this sort of, what they call, over-the-top global network, right? So think of sort of stablecoins and blockchains as an over-the-top network. It's, it's from day one, global, um, low fee, credibly neutral, programmable, Uh, payment system that just sort of works everywhere. That, that's kind of the simple way to think of it. Um, and so, as you mentioned, um, you know, one of the obvious benefits is just cross-border, and that's where a lot of the uses are right now. And so, for example, like SpaceX has a program where they move, you know, they'll sell a Starlin…

AI assessment note: “Briefly, the way I think about stable coins is today”

Q Yeah. How would you, how would you grade your predictions?

A Well, I obviously grade myself excellently on all of them. The, um, no, I mean, I think like, look, I try to pull up every few years and just, especially in times of uncertainty, just be like, what is going on? Like, where should we be spending time and attention? I think You know, two years ago, you know, the, those were the big themes for me is one, we were very used to for 10 years as a fund, effectively operating this factory line. We take in companies at a certain stage. We know what metrics they have to hit. We give them the money. We then package them and send them on to our friends at Series A, who then send them on to B and dah, dah, dah, dah. And the whole thing works beautifully because at the end, we pop them out into the public markets and retail investors buy them and life is good. And I was just saying, like, after the pandemic, you know, people wanted that to come back. And I was like, this is not coming back. Like this whole, the market is, it's a mixed up market. You know, we've basically produced a bunch of these things, which are on paper unicorns, but like, they're not fundamentally important businesses. And more importantly, there's been this huge release, which is the biggest platforms in the world can just keep getting bigger. Like I remember a time when like a hundred billion dollar company was a huge company, right? People thought there was a limit to …

AI assessment note: “Well, I obviously grade myself excellently on all of them. The, um, no”

Q love that. Uh, is, is that actually a bull case for the regulatory regime in America working as intended, and we should have companies that can go test things elsewhere and then bring it back when it's mature and the technology is ready, or Are there specific regulatory changes that you'd like to see over the next decade to either spur more innovation or just make what you do easier?

A You know, it's a good question. When we were launching, we really had this sense. There was such an unclear regulatory environment with regard to what we were proposing. You know, we thought someone would build an automated logistics system for Earth. That seemed like a really important idea, but it was so unclear from a regulatory perspective that I think we really just concluded we have got to go do the most obvious life-saving thing imaginable because that would maximize the chances that we could Um, you know, I mean, it was both powerful because it was an amazing mission and because it would maximize the chances that we could innovate and get started and operate in the real world. And so, uh, we needed a public healthcare system to do that. Uh, we didn't want to work with a whole bunch of, you know, helter skelter health systems, which you kind of, uh, in the U S we gotta be good if we could have a public healthcare system. And so that immediately caused us to go to certain parts of the world. Um, and then I think also there's just a lot of, you know, people think, oh, the regulatory environment must be so different in Africa than the U S actually not true. Pretty much the same regulatory regime when it comes to airspace, because planes fly back and forth between them. So you need the same rules. I think the difference was finding a government that behaves more like a start…

AI assessment note: “finding a government that behaves more like a startup, a small, agile government”

Q lot of people that are like, oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Karpathy is like, I vote by vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, There's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding. Like, is there still value to learning to code in 20, 25?

A I, I, I think there, I think there is, but I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if, you know, in the up case, like, you know, what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. You know, I assume this optimization path we're on where agents are going to get better and better and better. You know, the answer would be different. The answer would be no, it would be a waste of time to, to learn, learn how to code. Um, but like, you know, you could have different predictions and I think different people will, will make different assumptions. I, I, I'm at this point, like sort of. Agent pilled, you know, I, I, the, the progress we're seeing with agent, we, we just, uh, are rolling out V to agent. I've never seen a sort of like an AB test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy. Just be just by improving the agent, like a hundred percent, 500% on certain metrics and on success that users are having. And so, uh, I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there, there's the guy that lost six months of work on, on Reddit. There's the guy on Twitter that, uh, leaked his API keys. Like on the upload, we do get comm…

AI assessment note: “I think there is, but I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction”

Q You know, ramp is the Superbowl felt like this first moment where ramp was going mainstream. Right. And you know, what does that look like over the next like couple of years, uh, in terms of, you know, getting, uh, there's, there's many more businesses that, that, uh, aren't on ramp that then are, uh, what does the next two years look like in term, in terms of going mainstream?

A Two things. I mean, there's something just timeless about, ah, RAMP's core ideas. Um, you know, I need to paraphrase, you know, Jeff Bezos, when he was talking about Amazon, he couldn't imagine, ah, 10 years in the future, people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I, I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I, I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a, a little bit slower. You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices, um, you know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And, Uh, in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. Um, for a business owner, you know, in the US, average profit margin is eight and a half percent. Um, it means a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned. Uh, you know, a dollar of cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your revenue by 12 dollars, and, uh, I just think that we, you know, looked at the math, uh, and just took it seriously. Um, and I, I think that, um, You know, simple truths in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in, in, in business. Um, uh, when I look at where we are, it's, it is incredible to be serving, uh, empowering. I, what we believe is one to two percent of all corporate and small business card spend in the U S which is maybe the market that we're largest in. Um, you know, it's 98 to 99% to go. I think part of going.

AI assessment note: “it is incredible to be serving... one to two percent of all corporate and small business card spend”

Q Is that the best way that you see artists using AI as, uh, essentially pre-visualization, like What would happen?

A That's what I see. The guys that I know, you know, the producers that I know, I talk to them, you know, and I, I, I keep in touch with a lot of producers cause I was a producer and I relate in the record business. I'm, I really relate to record producers that had journey and stuff, you know? So when I was at Interscope, it was driven by record producers, you know, Swiss Beats, Pharrell, Dre, Timbaland, you know, uh, Will I Am, uh, Polo to Don, all these guys who were at Interscope, At one time or another. I hope I didn't leave anybody out. I'm sure I didn't. I'm sorry. But, um, you know, they, they are learning how to use this. They, it will come from them. And, yeah, they'll be, look, there are, there are artists out now that can barely sing happy birthday. Ok. Ok. So, So what's the difference between, if you can barely sing happy birthday, if you can't sing happy birthday at all, right? So that, they will always be boring, silly, You know, records like that, right? But the great artists and the great producers will maybe create real masterpieces, you know, because of this, it'll spark something. So I'm very pro AI. I just think that in the beginning, there's always the Wild West in anything like this. You just gotta, you've seen it enough, you just go, okay, it'll, but I, I, I, the, the guys that are running the labels are really trying to do The right thing here. And, ah, I …

AI assessment note: “That's what I see. The guys that I know”

Q Thanks so much for jumping on. Uh, have you been tracking the Ukraine story closely? Uh, any insights there, anything in the portfolio that's, uh, at all relevant in the defense tech world? Uh, do you expect a response from the US government, or guidance, or change to any strategies? Really, any takes on that?

A I mean, first shit, what a, what a time to be alive. I mean, uh, you know, I'm sure your, your, your Twitter feeds and, and your, uh, group chats were blown up, uh, pun intended over the weekend. Um, I mean, it's pretty crazy. I mean, let's be honest, like first, I'm not shocked that, that the Ukrainians did this. Uh, I mean, the execution seemed to be flawless from what we can pull from, from open source Intel. I do think though, I mean, again, it's not a surprise that the Ukrainians have been mastering drone warfare for the last Handful of years. And, you know, you want to call it that, you know, they called it spider web. Like this was their, this was their Trojan horse. This was their, you know, Israeli beeper. Um, and, and the outcome is, is, is, is pretty impressive to be honest. I mean, what, what, what, from the outside looking in, like the Russians woke up, uh, over the weekend and they thought they were getting their four dollar team orders. And what did they get? They got a thousand, you know, FPV drones, you know, blowing them to smithereens. So it's pretty impressive. I mean, my, my, my takeaways from this are really twofold.

AI assessment note: “it's not a surprise that the Ukrainians have been mastering drone warfare”

Q What would you do if you were actually running a fifty million dollar series B stage image generation company?

A Yeah. I mean, look, this is very tough of mind. Like I literally met up with Mike, I think it was like two weeks ago to like talk about, you know, what he was sort of working on. And I'm like, I'm a huge fan of Mike's. We've worked together on a, you know, sort of handful of things. Obviously he's like crushed it with snowflake. He's like clearly one of the valleys, you know, sort of best incubator entrepreneurs, investors, you know, you know, execs leaders, et cetera. I'm like, yeah, like I don't envy being in that position, but you know, I think you're seeing this in a bunch of different fields where it's like, You know, you've got the, you know, sort of, you know, mice that are trying to dart around the, you know, sort of elephants and like these like big tech companies are both very sophisticated, like have great engineering, but also massive, right? Like, I mean, again, just look at like what SpaceX is doing with Starship and like, you know, stomping out a bunch of, you know, other, you know, sort of mice in there, the elephant, what Andrew is doing, stomping out a bunch of mice. It's like, it's not an easy time to be like a mid-stage company that's trying to dart around all these major players that are like, not like old school incumbents that are moving slowly, but like are led by Sam Altman. And like, you know, are really pushing the fold. And so yeah, tactically, like …

AI assessment note: “tactically, like if I was in Mike's shoes, I think it's like”

Q It's pretty safe, right? You don't, you don't have this startup, you know, you're not sure if it's going to work or not.

A Everyone's focused on the AI wars, not enough attention going to the Sana wars. The real heated rivalry is at the bathhouse. Yes. From bathhouse to other ship to alter a wave of bathhouses. In New York City are popping up just blocks apart, igniting a war of Zen. This is especially relevant to the TBPN team because we've been in somewhat of a sauna war ourself, which we'll get into at some point in the story. The Flatiron District in Manhattan has been a center of Nouveau Wellness for around 15 years with its many boutique fitness classes, gyms, acupuncturists, and stretching and recovery centers now wave of bathhouses that offer dry heat and cold plunges face off In a few blocks. There's bath house on west 22nd with other ship two blocks away and alter set to open this winter. You could walk between all three in mere minutes. Williamsburg has its own cluster, right? Parallels.

AI assessment note: “Everyone's focused on the AI wars, not enough attention going to the Sana wars.”

Q Yeah. Wasn't, wasn't there news out of California this week or, or last week around some of this stuff?

A Yeah, yeah, there's, there was a huge fight, which had an unlikely set of bedfellows where you saw Andreessen and others leading the anti-legislation, anti-regulatory brigade against some other folks who are much more pro-curtailing. By the way, I, I will just say the other interesting takeaway for Tech, not to totally dovetail away from your question, but the interesting, other interesting takeaway for us, I think, in this is the deciding vote in the Senate on the overall package, the reconciliation bill, was J.D. Vance. And so, if you're a Vance head looking at twenty-twenty-eight, right, you already see that Ocasio-Cortez and others, AOC and others, are gonna use his deciding vote on this bill, which includes huge amounts of Medicaid cuts that Tom Tillis from North Carolina, in particular, thought were politically toxic, as a wedge against him when he comes and runs for president in four years. So sorry, that was, you didn't answer, you asked a question about California, and I dovetailed it back to the federal level.

AI assessment note: “you asked a question about California, and I dovetailed it back to the federal level”

Q I know, but that, that's, that's the argument, right? Is it fair use or isn't it fair use? The artists and the labels think it's not fair use. And somebody is making a lot of money on a new company thinks it is fair use.

A But, but here's, but here's, yeah, yeah. And, you know, these, Companies are making money providing a tool, and I'm not, I'm actually not taking aside one way or another, but they're making an art, they make money from selling a tool that lets you create music, and, but the, the, What's also happening is people are creating that music, and then they're going back to the labels, and they're going back to artists, and they're making new music that then gets listened to and monetized the, the normal way. So I would argue, I would argue in some ways that the music industry and artists are, yes, they, their, their music is being used to train models that, that then create other music, but they are also beneficiaries of that.

AI assessment note: “I'm actually not taking aside one way or another, but they're making an art”

Q and according to Emil, Dario was in a meeting and, and was busy, and wasn't really respecting the deadline, which maybe he felt was kind of artificial, but in hindsight now looks like it was a significant, because the Department of War was, you know, taking the, the, Uh, country into a conflict and wanted to know, hey, can we lean on one of our, one of our AI partners?

A I don't know. I mean, I, I think that seems pretty arbitrary to have cut, I mean, I'm hesitant to speculate. I don't know what was going on. I don't know the angles. I think, and that's why I didn't sort of delve too deeply into it, and I also think some of the specifics like this supply chain risk probably overbroad, and almost certainly the way it was stated in the tweet is definitely overbroad if you actually go and re-read the statute. I think the goal that I was, and again, this is where I wish I had sort of put more caveats to say, look, I'm not actually talking about all that stuff. I don't really care. I do care, but that's not the point of this article. The point of this article is there's all this talk about alignment. That's why I put that in, in the headline. And On one hand, alignment is aligning AI with humanity generally, but for the foreseeable future, and you could have a philosophical argument about the long-term viability of nation states in the age of the internet, much less the age of AI and whatever that might be, that certainly is, you know, a more pressing conversation than probably ever before. Anthropic exists in the context of the United States, and That's why I put that quote, you may not be interested in politics, but politics has an interest in you. What is politics? War by other means. You might not be interested in that. It is going to have an in…

AI assessment note: “I'm hesitant to speculate. I don't know what was going on... That's not the point”

Q go and really start thinking that through. I, I, I certainly, it seems like Anthropic is pretty engaged. Uh, you know, should that conversation really start happening? And I think this is the year it needs to really start happening. Uh, and so I think they all kind of get it. And so it's just a question of like, how do we as a society start moving in that direction?

A Yeah. I, I, I think, Uh, you know, obviously, there's, there's, I'm still processing part of the piece, I agree with some of it, I disagree with some of it, but, ah, what's really underrated is just, like, how useful this process of writing an article for a particular audience is. Like, I, I, I disagree with a lot of, you know, something big is happening, but it hit with a very different audience than machines of loving grace, or the adolescence of AI. Or, uh, machine intelligence. Um, and, and there's, there's pieces that are written for, like, you know, AI, insiders, leaders, researchers, then there's, like, the broader tech community, then there's, like, everyday people, and you clearly hit the nail on the head with, like, speaking to the financial community, and we see that in the markets. Not amazing results, but maybe it's, maybe it's worthwhile, because we will get really great solutions and a better conversation around it, so. Uh, I, I, I, I think, uh, I think in, in due time, uh, this discussion needed to be had. So, thank you.

AI assessment note: “what's really underrated is just, like, how useful this process of writing an article”

Q the, the, the experience of creating, uh, these assets is, uh, wildly innovative. We saw stories get cloned. We saw, saw, uh, you know, algo video short form feeds get cloned. I, I expect many other platforms to be looking at this functionality and realizing that this might be, uh, the future. You guys certainly believe, uh, that, that it could be, uh, important, so. How quickly do you think?

A We're actually totally okay with a world where we do the product innovation and everybody else copies, and I don't think it works for them as well as they think it does. Like the, the, you know, a lot of people have tried copying ChatGPT, uh, in, you can go look at some of our competitors' apps, and they even copy the mistakes. They even copy the design decisions we really wish we hadn't made. And maybe it's worked well for them. I guess I kind of hope it has, but it's been fine for us. I, I think like the, the, the, the key to this is not any one innovation, but it's repeatedly Putting them out again and again, and being first to come up with them and put them into a cohesive offering, and you know, that's what we want to be good at. And if other people want to clone the stuff that works, we also sometimes clone stuff that works. That's fine. But, but mostly we want to be able to drive the innovation, and I think Bill and his team have done an incredible job of figuring out how people actually want to use these video models, what the models need to do. Really, they've approached this as a full stack problem from How do you train the video model to how do you make this enjoyable for users? But cameos are one out of many ideas they have from here on the journey to like the product that we hope to eventually build. And so if people take some inspiration from us and copy us along …

AI assessment note: “We're actually totally okay with a world where we do the product innovation and everybody else copies”

Q them as like a YC company, right? Uh, and it found, it seemed like that the story of Airbnb was like, COVID was a transformational moment for them, and they emerged like a stronger company than ever. Um, Do you expect that to happen to any startups, uh, maybe in your portfolio or just out there in the market that are getting beat up but might emerge stronger than ever?

A So, so like if you isolate tariffs, that has a sure impact on a subset of companies, various side of software in many ways. Um, I think there's software companies that involve logistics and shipping that definitely, uh, are impacted, but I don't know that the, like come out of the tariff, uh, is a predictable framework. Like, what does that actually mean? Do we get to free trade in reality? Do we get to some equilibrium? Is this China? Only that we're talking about, and I think within there lies a very hard to foresee, again, point of stability, whereas at least in COVID, if you said we return to a normal world, that was a more predictable endpoint. Um, if you assume, you know, early in COVID, it was wait two weeks, and then the world will start again, and then it was some longer period, but I think there was an appreciation for what coming out of it, Could look like. Whereas I think right now you're in like the creation period. Harder to, to guess. Um, yeah. You know, the, the easy guess is like American manufacturing windfall, but that feels Like a big stretch, like no one's building a factory overnight. I feel like that happens in other parts of the world, not here.

AI assessment note: “I don't know that the, like come out of the tariff, uh, is a predictable framework.”

Q it feel to, uh, Not only achieve it again, but exceed it dramatically. And what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in those sort of like the darker days, uh, where again, this sort of public narrative was that, uh, you know, these valuations were never really real. Uh, and, uh, yeah. So how, how good does it feel at this moment?

A I think someone really has to do just like a deep in-depth piece of like the big comeback and building up from like these 20, 21 companies and, and, and what it took because there really were, uh, companies that would raise at, you know, a hundred X revenue multiples. Um, I, I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all, uh, really quickly. Um, you look at a lot of the companies that have transformed Uh, their industries, Amazon, Google, uh, Apple, like you, you name it, uh, often started with, um, some kind of bubble or hysteria. People were investing a lot in it. Uh, I think it does interesting things to businesses. Uh, I, I can tell you that, um, you know, our, our mission has been very consistent, start a business that is obsessed with saving our, our, our customers time and money, um, help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further. Um, And when you have, uh, a large amount of capital behind you, uh, you of course think about what are the results that you produce next week, but you start obsessing over, um, could I make this outcome, uh, 10 years from now larger? Um, instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it, um, how do we put it back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, um, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in fas…

AI assessment note: “I think someone really has to do just like a deep in-depth piece”

Q Do they have a comically large baton? Like, like we have our scoop?

A Yeah. Oh, Mark Gurman, the scoopinator, he's a scoop doggy dog, scoop athlete, the scoop, the scoop, the scoop is on fire. Yesterday evening, Mark was the one with the scoop. Tim Cook will assume the role of Apple's executive chairman, and John Ternus will take the reins of the company. Mark followed up with a scoop with internal memos from both Cook and Ternus announcing the transition. I don't, I mean, I understand, uh, I, I don't know, I don't know, maybe I don't understand what it's like to be a 65, but I was always optimistic that the Warren Buffett 65 to 95 would be the new trend, and that people would just say, you know what, I'm, Tim Cook's healthy. He, he's, he's going, he's an outdoors guy.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Oh, Mark Gurman, the scoopinator, he's a scoop doggy dog”

Q There was some controversy, uh, when the, you know, Cheeky Pint, Elon interview came out and John Colson, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?

A Okay. Okay. That was a bit of palace intrigue. How many, how many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace? We're getting somewhere. He did. He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He explained, he explained. So, so years ago I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. Uh, the country was beautiful. He said, Uh, highly developed democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, this, there's gotta be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're gonna be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along, along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above or above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.

AI assessment note: “That was a bit of palace intrigue... So, so years ago I was talking”

Q career, just broadly of a company that, where that is an important factor in Kind of their longterm strategy. I've always, I've generally, the meme has been like, stay private as long as possible, but you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits, but, uh, what, what, what are the, what is the M and a dynamic in public and private markets right now?

A Yeah, I think the, you know, there's what you learn when you start out at Goldman Sachs and it's, you know, it's, you have access to the capital markets, you can use a public currency for M and a, you know, blah, blah, blah. You tell your story to me. The, um, the, the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago, and just like feeling the energy, you guys were there, you felt the energy amongst the community, like the incredible community surrounding Figma. Um, and then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the broader world. Um, you know, in the S one we reported, I think, thirteen million monthly active users, two thirds of which are not designers. And, um, you know, they got.

AI assessment note: “you can use a public currency for M and a, you know, blah, blah”