The Exchanges

Q definition for fundamentals. Like, how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically, typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals, but what happens when you don't have those? Um, but I, I think, like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue Every single asset is a is a meme coin in a way.

A What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I, I was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin, but, ah, then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was, was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time, and even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with WorldCoin, and you could imagine that WorldCoin is kind of an, is kind of, You know, indexed, or at least somewhat correlated with, like, Sam Altman's career, and, and even people that are in more, like, serious, less, like, meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another. Do you think that's something that's, uh, like, a temporary phenomenon, or something that will continue to grow?

AI assessment note: “What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend?”

Q Uh, what, what's been your read on our response to Deep Seek broadly? Do you think that US companies have been taking it seriously enough? There's this, you know, general lens from some, some, some of the tech community that says it's, you know, it's open source, you know, it's not sort of the, the same type of risk as TikTok. Uh, what's your read on it?

A Yeah. Look, a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies, and then, you know, almost certainly you have foreign, foreign actors, not just the Chinese, like many other foreign actors that come in. I mean, you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter buyout, you know, transition to X, and they basically are like, yeah, we had foreign, we had foreign intel services, foreign governments, like operating inside You know, ex formerly known as Twitter. Um, I think that's happening at a bunch of our companies. I think it's a huge problem, huge counterintelligence problem. Cause the question is like, what are they manipulating? Like, are they putting back doors in there? Are they changing content? Are they changing? Um, you don't know. And a lot of the companies, many of which my friends have worked at, um, they don't even have a way to think about this. And also obviously like, it's not politically correct to talk about it. Like, hey, maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign national that went to the, like, you know, military college of their respective nation and whose uncle is like the deputy chief of their Intel service. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies”

Q Who's at A-Six-Teen Z Games? Uh, I wonder if he, I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack.

A I, um, hear the story. It's funny because everybody has, you know, I would hope that everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails, but you always remember the negatives. There's this one guy, it wasn't even a fully cold email that I met in college because there's one company here in Santa Barbara, Decker Brands. They own Hoka and a bunch of other companies. Great business. Like Twenty billion dollar company. You know, shoe companies, when they have hit shoes, do really well. And I met him at the gym, and he's like, here, just, I was like, I love, like, let me, like, intern for you, work for you, whatever, I'll do anything, like, here's what I'm good at. He's like, yeah, just follow up the email, and like, longest, most thoughtful email, no response. Kept seeing him at the gym.

AI assessment note: “everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails, but you always remember the negatives.”

Q really? 21. You dropped playing different games or why Tiger is eating your lunch and your deals. Uh, this cycle, it feels like we haven't, no crossover funds have really made a name for themselves, but at the same time, Databricks is doing bigger deals than ever. There must be new pools of capital coming in. What does the late, late, late stage look like, and how is it changing?

A Yeah. So it's funny. I actually dropped a sequel to playing different games, like very quietly. I initially wrote it in 20, 22. And it was one of those things where like, I think it's like solid, but it's just nowhere near the banger that playing different games was. And so I had a lot of like sequel anxiety about it. And so I just like, kind of like quietly put it out there. Cause I'm like, I like it. My thoughts should probably be out there. Um, but it's called game over question mark, and you can go read it on my sub stack. And I think it's held up pretty well since I wrote it in 20, 22. And I think the, like, overarching message from that, um, and I use a Game of Thrones analogy in playing different games, so I'll use one for this too. Um, there's, like, you know, there's a part in Game of Thrones where, you know, spoiler alert if anyone hasn't watched the show, where, like, Roose Bolton for a while is this, like, lord who's kind of, like, one of the big bads, he's one of the main bad guys, and he gets killed by Ramsay Bolton, his son, and then you realize, like, oh my god, this guy is, like, so much worse, and it's, like, he has, like, The scope of his destruction is like so much greater than like this guy was actually kind of a pedestrian bad guy. And I think the kind of version of that that happened to our asset class is that, um, obviously people saw Tiger kind of fail …

AI assessment note: “I think the kind of version of that that happened to our asset class is”

Q This is. Switch your business to ramp.com. Do you have any comments on, on your, your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business.

A As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um, Shell comes into the talks, uh, from operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, Which like BP is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than two hundred billion dollars. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. Uh, it's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their, their desire, their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like The, the, those MNA sell side research reports that I was reading during the, uh, Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the longterm impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. So it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off, but then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so, um, more recently, Uh, Elliott Management, which owns mor…

AI assessment note: “Shell comes into the talks, uh, from operating from a position of strength”

Q Um, is it, is it a producer and this like the supplier producer?

A Yeah. But is that energy? Is that NVIDIA or is that the LLM, uh, you know, deliverer, right? It's a, it's an open question. Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline and then we'll give you a breakdown of grok three versus open AI deep research. So Uh, Creatine Cycle, who's been on the show before, says, oh, sorry, Autismos, it's time to grow some arms and social skills, and Jordy chimes in, says, getting diced continues to be underpriced, and he says, printing this out and hanging it on my wall in pack heights, uh, and he just shows the, the Grok three, uh, reasoning data, it beat O three mini high, uh, data, reasoning data. Some people were upset about this. Rex, Two slides later says, uh, they omitted O three from the chart in the live stream for some reason, so I added the numbers for you, and then, uh, but this was reasonable because O three isn't public, and those benchmarks can't be verified yet, so I think it's understandable that they didn't include it, but then again, Grok three with reasoning isn't publicly available, so people can't validate that eval, so there's a lot of, like, questions over, like, what counts for an eval that goes on the charts, but, you know.

AI assessment note: “Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline”

Q No. So, but, but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models, uh, and products internally.

A There was that drama with Steve Yege going back and forth with Demis about, like, what, what teams are using what models and stuff. There was a big back and forth, a big dust up on the timeline, like, a month ago about, like, whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't, and some of them are, and Demis chimed in and said, like, this is just complete wrong, and everyone's using AI. I don't know. Goes back and forth. Uh, there's also, people are benchmarking OmniFlash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There was a, there were a few, like, little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V-Aid was not correct. Maybe it was only a V-Six.

AI assessment note: “There was that drama with Steve Yege going back and forth with Demis”

Q Wait, yeah, why are they in two instances of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Uh, yeah, how are we solving this?

A I, I don't want to over-rotate on it. I think the last part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture of, of trust. Uh, you know, there's this whole game theory around like hawks and doves, you know, and it's, it, it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant state of, of, of shifting because if, if everyone's a dove, then the returns of being a hawk are very high and vice versa. If everyone's a hawk, then you can have these like clicks of doves that, that start emerging. I, I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of like the hawk. And like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust. And I really don't want to do that. Like, look, you're going to get screwed over very, very often. We had a good laugh. You know, the memes are amazing.

AI assessment note: “I don't want to over-rotate on it. I think the last part of what”

Q I, I, I won't, I won't put it past you, but it feels like the Meta Ray-Band ecosystem might be a little bit more open. What are, what's your read on the Meta Ray-Band or the Meta Glasses rollout? They just had an announcement this today.

A My read is that there is way more money in an all-in desktop assistant than people actually think. There's maybe two, three competitors in this, maybe, maybe two, three competitors who are actually trying to take a meaningful stab at a desktop assistant, and there's way more money and way more value in this than people think. We're still going to be using computers in a few years. Maybe we'll be using something else, but like, like, bro, these sales, Oracle, Adobe, these guys move slow as fuck, bro. Like they will be using Blackberry still, bro. Like they are moving slow. We're gonna have computers unlock a bunch of enterprise value for the next few years, and we'll be here to capture all that.

AI assessment note: “My read is that there is way more money in an all-in desktop assistant”

Q Um, no, no, no. I, I, I, I was more, um, how was, has there ever, you know, it feels like over the last two years, call it, there's been more of these sort of roll-ups than ever before. Was there, was there another, did, was there another kind of like general, like market-wide crack, or was it just sort of like individual areas, um, and opportunities versus broader trends?

A I struggle to think that the way to build companies is to replicate Another company that's succeeding. In these moments, what you tend to have is one winner and a bunch of followers that don't win. And so can there be a single version of a roll up? If you look at Android, they're great at acquisitions. That's a different phrasing of the word roll up. Roll up is either we're going to buy a bunch of things that are the same size or we're going to buy like one big thing and then tuck in some other smaller things around it. So I think unpacking the nuance In these words is more important than assuming a general like success across a wide variety of companies. I think the like moment in time where you probably saw fast followers or fast movers win was in the on-demand business, right? When Uber trained the world that you could touch something on your phone and something in the real world would happen, it unlocked like a A behavior across the world that was very different, right? And that was this phone to real world connection that I think opened up a ton of other businesses. I don't think they all worked, but I do think that that was a horizontal opening versus a business model innovation that has been used in other industries or financial industries and then applied in venture.

AI assessment note: “unpacking the nuance In these words is more important than assuming a general”

Q Can we run through your guys' style? Like how are you guys so well dressed?

A Well, we had to come out the gates. We, we were calling ourselves, you know, uh, we tech, tech bro is sort of derogatory. We were the technology brothers. We needed to kind of reclaim it, elevate it. And part of that was, was dressing, uh, dressing nice, but you've had your sort of, uh, hands across the whole sort of, uh, Elon empire, obviously have a relationship, uh, with Elon. I kind of want to go company by company and just kind of get your take on them. Uh, right now I think Tesla's very interesting. It's, uh, it's not a pure play humanoid bet, but it does feel like humanoids are the next platform for Tesla, especially when you look at, uh, sort of gen, you know, generalized EV sales, uh, for Tesla have not been performing great. Uh, talk about kind of the humanoid market. I'm sure you've gotten pitched by a lot of these, uh, companies. I'm guessing you're still, uh, uh, you know, a Tesla shareholder, but, you know, talk to us about that category because it seems to have, Everybody's attention for good reason.

AI assessment note: “We needed to kind of reclaim it, elevate it. And part of that was, was dressing”

Q and the fact that so much of our population is overweight is like the biggest drag on government. You know, spending and the economy overall, right? You think that, you think the U.S. government at the federal level would say, let's fast track GLP-I's being covered by Medicare because it's gonna save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost.

A Yeah. Well, I mean, there's another thing where it, like, just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure, like, it does kind of make sense if you go back 50 years and you look at, or 70 years and you look at pictures of beaches, like, America wasn't this obese, so it wasn't that much of a problem, and the big, like, oh, shit moment that happens in healthcare is, like, you get hit by a bus, you break your leg, you go to the hospital, and you're, and there's, like, a team of really, really experienced doctors working on you for, like, a week, and it's, like, those people are, need to be paid a lot, and then everything that they're doing, all the equipment is expensive, and so I think I, I have the breakdown here, but, um, A fair amount. Yeah, here it is. Uh, like hospital care is 31% of U.S. national health care expenses.

AI assessment note: “just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure”

Q really high expectations on Thinking Machines around what they put out first. I don't think these, these people leaving, maybe it makes it harder to deliver. Right? On those expectations, but the expectations are still sky high. I did feel like kind of rough messaging, uh, very, very rough messaging, right? You know, pushing this, like, unethical conduct angle. People at OpenAI have, obviously, their bias, but they've denied it.

A Some quick thoughts on Barrett Zoff and Madsen Schoenholz. Going back to OpenAI, Barrett was the vice president post-training at OpenAI before he left for Thinking Machines. He left OpenAI in September of 2024, Barrett would have probably, would have probably initially had options for about 10 to 30% of Thinking Machines. That's insane. They had six co-founders. How could that beat so high? Uh, post training was one of the more valuable skills at launch, I suppose. Okay. Uh, the seed round was two billion at twelve billion, so this would mean that he would have options now for around eight to 25% of the current company. This seems all, uh, hypothetical here. Uh, there were rumors back in November that Thinking Machines was in talks to raise at 50 to sixty billion, so this puts his equity at four Billion to fifteen billion valuation. Thinking machines could probably exit somewhere at between 30 and 60 today. Who has that money? I don't know. Maybe NVIDIA buys them or something. At least at some point over the next two years. I think the most likely acquirers would probably be Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and NVIDIA. Okay, large cap company that wants to build a frontier model. Barrett would have been just over his one year cliff, so assuming he was not fired for a cause or thinking He doesn't want to litigate. He still has about one to three and a half million.

AI assessment note: “Some quick thoughts on Barrett Zoff and Madsen Schoenholz.”

Q What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week? Wasn't it?

A I don't know if he had a number because, uh, who was it? It was, uh, Zuck had a number. And did Apple have a number too? That was a six hundred billion or something. Apple has thrown out a number at one point. You're completely right. Um, my, my, my point is that, uh, we've seen a number of data points. Oh yeah. Yeah. The number of thank yous is a lot. Um, but, but, but we've seen he's invested in, uh, in some semi, uh, some rare earth, uh, developments in the United States and starting to think about manufacturing internationally and, You know, the, the, the pro bullish bet on Tim cook is that like, if he was able to set up this in China and he's the reason he can set it up somewhere else because he's the guy who did it. And so, uh, even though he hasn't been really loud about his moves, because obviously if he says like, oh yeah, I'm not going to be manufacturing in China anymore, then like his important business partners over there are probably going to be like, well, yeah, like, We're not going to take your business seriously anymore. Uh, there are a ton of different geopolitical considerations, such an iconic line from the dinner.

AI assessment note: “I don't know if he had a number because... Zuck had a number”

Q Next up, we have Koki Moshida coming into the studio. Uh, our last teal fellow of the day, finishing it out strong. Welcome to the stream. Koki, how are you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We were running long, but you're here. Please introduce yourself and the company that you're building.

A Hey guys. Uh, thank you for having me on. Uh, thanks for the time. Um, I'm Koki originally from Japan. Um, you know, I spent a lot of time growing up thinking about natural disasters. I think, you know, in SF you don't, you know, it's like nice weather, everything's, you know, kind of nice and, and you get to work on really, really interesting things. But, you know, I was in the 2000 loving earthquake where, you know, 18,000 people died in a couple of days. And a lot of my friends, you know, homes were destroyed and you have these like, you know, typhoons, right. Um, that like blow away my grandparents' roofs every like three years or so. And I keep asking them like, like why, like, you can just like move Because, you know, you're in Typhoon Alley, like, what's the whole point of, you know, having to stay there? But it's like something so deeply ingrained, right? It's something, you know, that you accept, that you, you know, kind of just accept as, as a feat. And I was talking to the environment minister and the, and the infrastructure minister of Japan recently, and they were saying that they, they spent billions of dollars on, you know, disaster infrastructure. Like, they would build these, like, You know, columns under Tokyo, right? So like, when it floods, the water can go in. Like, they were like, oh shoot, we haven't actually solved the problem, which is the intensificati…

AI assessment note: “I'm Koki originally from Japan. Um, you know, I spent a lot of time”

Q a killer, but I think killer can have plenty of different definitions. I, you can think of a killer as like somebody that just like figures out how to win and is aggressive. But then I, I still think of someone like Eric Glyman as like a killer, but he's also extremely kind. And so it's possible to be like kind and a killer. How do you describe Ken Griffin?

A I think every single person that I've profiled on founders is a killer. And I mean, it is not a pejorative. I mean, this is like, they take what they're doing very seriously. The greatest, uh, I, I, this idea really stuck in my mind because there's this biography of Bernard Arnol. It's called like the taste of luxury. It's like really hard to find. I think it's like 3000 dollars online. And cause very few biographies of them in English. Right? And this one ends when Bernardo is like, 40, and at the end of the book, he calls his shot. You guys were just mentioning it earlier, I heard you on the show, it's like, well, if you wanna, like, do a competitor Rolex or some kind of luxury brand, like, you had to start a hundred years ago. And Bernardo had that insight, you know, 40 years ago, 35 years ago, and he's just like, oh, these things are very valuable, I think they're gonna get more valuable in time, and I had no competition because you have to start them, you know, two centuries ago, or two generations ago. And, but there's a line in that biography, I never forgot, where they were describing Him. And they say only killers survive. Um, so what I mean by killers, like, uh, we, I was actually out to dinner in Miami on Saturday, Sunday, Saturday night, the night before I was going to record the, this episode. And I mentioned somebody came over from the table that we know. And he w…

AI assessment note: “I think every single person that I've profiled on founders is a killer.”

Q How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving.

A Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there. I don't know. You sort of opt into it. You know, ideally, ideally, this is all out in the open. It comes out in the hiring process. You don't go in blind. You know what you're getting. But of course, of course, cultures change over time. If you've been with a company for a decade, you might say, I signed up for, you know, a chill monopoly. Why are we wartime? I'm a peacetime employee, you know, or vice versa. Um, and then might, it might be time to find another opportunity. Uh, so ABC summarized it as managers grading on the bell curve. Vanity fairs critique was harsher. They said former and current employees described stack ranking is the most destructive process inside Microsoft because it made employees compete with teammates instead of competitors. That's a good point. So the question is like, is this new? Is this, is this a new trend or is this just a continuation of the stacking process? It actually is new stack ranking. Would push out low-rated people. Sometimes it would block promotions, reduce bonuses, uh, force transfers, but they weren't necessarily doing mass layoffs around it. That's sort of a misconception. So even if they look at all the stack ranking at the end of the year and they say, okay, these people are clearly in the bottom 10%, they saw it more as an opportunity to reallocate talent from d…

AI assessment note: “Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there.”

Q if we don't make this investment, is the, is the world gonna be, you know, worse off? Like, does this company, you know, I think it's not the quite the same test, but I think it's important for investors to run that, that process and understand, are we really funding the future that we want, or is this kind of a rounding error and the dollars would be better elsewhere?

A Can you give us a white pill? Like, are there any other organizations that can come in and help? I, I always think of, uh, what happened in computer science and artificial intelligence. Uh, Google created the transformer architecture, not patentable. It created large language models and we got ChatGPT and we got all this great stuff. It would be amazing if we could find a way that the big pharma companies that are big and profitable wind up stepping in and funding some of the gap. Maybe there's nonprofits. Maybe we just, you know, the, the sheer will of the American people, we wind up voting for more funding, but how do we really make science amazing and ensure really strong progression over the next few decades?

AI assessment note: “Can you give us a white pill? Like, are there any other organizations”

Q Yeah. That's kind of what I was getting at. I'm one of my, Very first questions around the, the, the new terminal would just be ingesting and classifying all this data and then just immediately taking action on it without necessarily having a human in the loop, right?

A Yeah, this is one of the things I want to bring up to my, my, uh, uh, partner's colleagues next time I head out, uh, west is that, you know, one of the fantasies of AGI is that, well, if you do have the machine God, why not unleash it on the stock market? And, you know, it can self-fund you. It can make, you know, a hundred billion dollars. And, you know, you could, you know, Jane treated me twenty billion dollars and nobody would have noticed, you know, last year in profits. So if you have the machine god, and that's, you know, that's basically, I hate to say this, but that's a bunch of old algorithms. Uh, that, that, you know, they've dressed around some, some IMO dressing on it. And so, you know, the real machine God.

AI assessment note: “one of the fantasies of AGI is that, well, if you do have”

Q Is there, is there some weird world where there's like a capital war and I'm paying for a more powerful ad blocker?

A Yeah. I mean, that sounds good. Like another question is kind of to say like, okay, if you think that you either think that current like capital, uh, accumulation dynamics are going to continue and that, uh, the rich are going to continue to get richer. And if you believe that the question is kind of, well, how many people are going to survive in the future? How many people are going to have any modicum of independence? Um, right? Like you have some far AI people who think that there's gonna be a singleton, right? You think that there's gonna be literally one, right? Um, you know, some people maybe think it's 10, some people 1010 thousand. Uh, some people think that all the humans will get to continue to exist as independent entities. Are they already independent entities? That's a question, right? I don't know.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, that sounds good. Like another question is kind of to say”

Q Can you talk about how you would walk someone, uh, away from the cliff that is, uh, utilitarianism?

A Uh, I would just say, look, That's, that's probably not the frame that I would take. Um, what I would just say in terms of if I was, um, talking to somebody about faith, what I would just say is, I'd probably be more likely to talk to someone about, hey, look at what's happening in the world, and Are you, you know, are you happy with it? I mean, if they're happy with it, it's going to be, it's going to be hard to have that conversation. But, um, I think that part of the challenge with utilitarianism and a lot of these moral philosophies is we've seen them rise up and sort of cyclically break. And, um, I don't know, this isn't a great answer. I'm sort of fumbling my words, but I think that the Bible carries sort of the supernatural truth.

AI assessment note: “That's, that's probably not the frame that I would take.”

Q And then also a capital war for, for, for military boats and UAS and, and UAP, like all these different sub segments are going to wind up. If, if capital wars start popping up there, that could potentially, uh, be a headwind to Dellian's model. Is that, is that roughly correct? How would you, how would you, uh, how would you fight back against that?

A Look, I think it's, it's always, you know, sort of, uh, important to talk about, you know, sort of specifics here, right? Um, you know, one of, you know, sort of major investments in the last year is this, uh, you know, company called Captions that basically does AI captioning of, you know, various, you know, sort of videos on social media. Um, when I think about, you know, handing, you know, sort of two Stanford grads and a hundred million dollars to go try and, you know, sort of replicate that, Yeah. Feels like, you know, they could, you know, go do something like that. There's like, you know, clear, you know, voice recognition models. They can go, you know, sort of pay on ads on Tik Tok, et cetera. Um, and you could probably go and replicate that. And so, you know, you know, our one-liner at Founders Fund is competition is for losers. And so, you know, I think I was a loser for investing.

AI assessment note: “one of, you know, sort of major investments in the last year is this company called Captions”

Q Yeah. Do you think there's going to be that same path of like Uber for a while had a bunch of negative gross margin people going into it?

A Like, do you actually think that I want to pull this post up? Uh, Everett actually posted this January, January, 31 of 20, 24. So over 18 months ago, he said, I'm making a real effort to not take for granted the three dollar Uber across town era of AI. And I hope you are too. Uh, and so I, I, I guess the question is, uh, and it's funny because Because then, then a bunch of people, I, I thought it was a good point. I thought it was a hot take then. And I think then, uh, you know, a bunch of people kind of parroted that take all over the timeline. Um, stole your whole flow as you'd like to say. Um, but, uh, but, but, but I guess the question is like, are we in some sort of different regime right now where, uh, the, the traditional gravity and like, uh, fundamentals of software investing have changed because we are out of the zero marginal cost era. And does that impose risks? To the strategy that, you know, have you've sort of employed or like, we're kind of putting you in this whole, in this box. Uh, but if the, if the fundamental structure of zero marginal cost era is going away, that, that presumably, uh, forces like a rewrite of your logic around investing, I would imagine.

AI assessment note: “I guess the question is like, are we in some sort of different regime”

Q Yeah. Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts, or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

A I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were would probably have, you know, obviously I, I would want to like preface with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done. Um, you know, that's not something that I endorse either. Um, but you know, financial circumstances, essentially like no one really likes to work 1:40 hours a week. Right. But I had to do with this kind of out of necessity. Like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and Somehow, like, you know, I don't, I'm not a very people person, uh, uh, I, I don't share much in terms of, like, what's going on with my life, and kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of, like, getting more stressed with, like, hey, you know, I want to, like, come out of this situation, what should I do? So it's more, not, it was not more so kind of about greed, but essentially, like, necessity, and just, like, thought that if I work, like, multiple places, You know, like I can basically like help myself like alleviate the situation I was in much faster.

AI assessment note: “I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were”

Q Can you break down doing, how did he manage, I haven't, I've been so, uh, focused on TBPN this week, I haven't been able to listen to the episode yet, I'm gonna get to it this weekend, but how do you go from zero to netting six million Uh, or, or grossing six million in the first year. Like, what does that even look like?

A It's even crazier than that, where like, he started the company with a thousand dollars, no co-founder, no VCs. Okay. So like, this is what I mean. Like, uh, I, I, I, I've been getting a bunch of text messages and one of them was like, I don't think there's another, uh, like fucking startup story like this ever. I forgot what the text said. It's definitely an F word in there. And I posted it too. Um, because I, I just can't think of another, like that successful, that fast with so limited means. And he's, his head competitor was compact, which was, he's in Austin. He, he launches down in his, in his, uh, dorm room. Austin's our, uh, Dell, uh, compact is in Houston. They raised, I think, twenty-five million initially. So I think twenty-five million at the beginning, and then in the first early years of Dell, they'd already raised like a hundred million in capital, and he smokes them. Um, they wind up getting bought, and then, you know, Dell still is thriving, and Compact no longer exists. But one of the things that, um, is obvious in, in the stories is like, he, a lot of these outside successes, obviously, like, you have, you have to be the right person with the right set of skills at the right time. And You know, in 84, the personal computer, his, the first time, the first very popular personal computer, computer appliance is what Steve Jobs called it, was the Apple II. That's …

AI assessment note: “It's even crazier than that, where like, he started the company with a thousand dollars”

Q Yeah. Cause so there's now so much information online and it's impossible, like, What really matters now is getting perspective on certain information. So what does Brian think about, uh, what should churn look? I bet if you ask the Delphi app, uh, is, is what, what kind of churn is, is respectable for a sub ten million MRR.

A What's good headline copy for an email campaign. Like just any of these things, I'm sure he's written blog posts and talked about it on podcasts. So all of that just gets compressed down and you can just very quickly find that as opposed to trying to search Google and landing in some weird place. Um, So, let's go to Lulu. Lulu says, this clip made me realize why Mike Tyson's pre-fight trash talk has felt so much more convincing than Jake Paul's. Paul's bravado fluctuates. It's dialed up or down depending on the setting. Tyson is only ever one way. There's no on setting because there's no off setting. So when he menaces Paul, it comes across not as the usual bluster, but as straightforward description of what he plans to do to that unfortunate young man.

AI assessment note: “all of that just gets compressed down... So, let's go to Lulu.”

Q is something they, as a public company can't afford to be like, oh, we have 42 resorts and we don't make any money. We just need to add 20 more resorts and then we'll make money. Everybody's going to be like, well, what are you doing? Like you already own like the, you already have the Disneyland of skiing. And 40 other resorts, how are you not a real business?

A Yeah, I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost for the employees, because Vale has, like, a, an apartment in Vale is, like, 2500 dollars a month, which is very expensive if you're just, like, a ski patroller, but they have a whole bunch of, like, corporate apartments that are 500 bucks a month. So, but I don't think they build enough of those, maybe, so they need to build more, but there's a lot of, like, permitting and regulation. Did you know that they're trying to build a tunnel in Vale? This is really interesting. So the, the highway that goes through, I guess people complain about road, road noise, and I think that maybe during snow, it's tricky, so they're thinking about burying it, basically.

AI assessment note: “I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost”

Q become modality that people really want? Like live overview, uh, on their screen, on their phone? Like what's the, what's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally? Um, cause a lot of those use cases, like it's, they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models like, Way smarter at whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?

A There's a bunch of paths here going back to the clearly thing where one Roy is like right about the UX and like wins the market. And the other option is like, he's right about the UX, but like doesn't win the market. And then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever, but any of, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious. And that, and that Roy Lee ushers in the new, the new paradigm of, uh, for, for engaging with With language models. I'm curious, uh, any, um, is all the stuff around every B to B SaaS player descending on this sort of like single interface, like a chat interface that generates software? Was that predictable to you? Do you think that's, do you think that that's like part of a multi-year trend, or is that just FOMO?

AI assessment note: “I'm curious, uh, any, um, is all the stuff around every B to B SaaS”

Q Yeah. Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts, or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

A I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were would probably have, you know, obviously I, I would want to like preface with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done. Um, you know, that's not something that I endorse either. Um, but you know, financial circumstances, essentially like no one really likes to work 1:40 hours a week. Right. But I had to do with this kind of out of necessity. Like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and Somehow, like, you know, I don't, I'm not a very people person, uh, uh, I, I don't share much in terms of, like, what's going on with my life, and kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of, like, getting more stressed with, like, hey, you know, I want to, like, come out of this situation, what should I do? So it's more, not, it was not more so kind of about greed, but essentially, like, necessity, and just, like, thought that if I work, like, multiple places, You know, like I can basically like help myself like alleviate the situation I was in much faster.

AI assessment note: “going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were”

Q Yeah. Uh, you, you mentioned diffusion, uh, is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer based models or token prediction models? Like, is, is that a meaningful distinction or are you kind of using the term broadly?

A It gets really complicated, uh, in a sense that I think, you know, both of them Are good at, you know, kind of milking, um, as much, you know, information, you know, looking at, okay, what, what are the lane parameters? How can you, you know, figure out, you know, somewhat unnoticeable, um, characteristics within, within other models. But I think the interpretability, um, of weather models also become very important, right? Like if you can like characteristically like define, okay, which parameter within a high dimensional vector Right, it's creating a lot of bias. How can you, you know, tweak that so that you can, you know, get back on track? And it's like, weather is so chaotic that, like, even one small perturbation, um, in an initial condition can really mess up the forecast, and that's why it's really difficult to forecast, like, a week out. And so, being able to, like, assimilate data as you go, um, and that's why, like, we're focusing on, okay, how can you, you know, collect data that no one really has, um, So that you can, you know, make sure you're not, like, de-biased too much.

AI assessment note: “both of them Are good at, you know, kind of milking”