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The first moat: why Packy favors counter-positioning
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2 min read
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162 docs
Packy’s strongest reading pointer is Hamilton Helmer’s *7 Powers*, read through the lens of counter-positioning. The useful qualification is that it creates a temporary opening against incumbents; durable advantage must follow.
The clearest pick: 7 Powers
Resource:7 Powers — book by Hamilton Helmer.
Recommended by: Packy (Not Boring). Packy says that, if he had to choose one of the book’s seven powers, he would choose counter-positioning.
Key takeaway: Counter-positioning means designing a business model that gives incumbents conflicting incentives, making effective competition difficult. Packy’s reason for elevating it is practical: a young startup can use an incumbent’s size and existing economics against it before the startup has built the other six powers.
Why it matters: Ramp is the concrete example. Corporate-card incumbents benefit when customers spend more; Ramp built around helping customers spend less, so copying its model would also damage the incumbent’s own revenue economics. The useful founder-level test is not only “Can we build a better product?” but “Would matching our business model force the incumbent to hurt its existing business?”
The qualification is as important as the recommendation: counter-positioning buys time rather than permanent protection. Packy uses Base Power as the operating example—sell electricity and install a battery rather than sell the battery outright, reducing the customer’s upfront cost by roughly 20–40x and forcing incumbents to change their business model. The startup then needs to use that window to build more durable advantages such as scale economies, switching costs, brand, or network effects.
Two companion listens
Zach Dell’s conversation with David Senra — podcast/video conversation; pointed to by Packy. The relevant segment is a founder’s explanation of counter-positioning in practice: Base Power avoids competing on battery quality or price and instead changes what it sells.
Acquired, especially “7 Powers with Hamilton Helmer” — podcast/episode; highlighted by Packy as a recurring source of counter-positioning examples. The useful caveat from the linked discussion is that counter-positioning is usually a take-off-phase power and only a partial source of durability; another moat has to follow.
The first moat: why Packy favors counter-positioning
Research extraction
Book of the Day from The Next Big Idea Club
Best candidate (with an attribution caveat): The post gives an explicit cross-industry learning recommendation—“Look outside your industry too”—and reports that Mark Rampolla built Zico Coconut Water with a team of eight by studying Vitaminwater, Red Bull, and Starbucks. His quoted rationale, “We became students of success,” followed by “Excellence leaves clues,” gives a meaningful reason to use these companies as external case studies.
Caveat: This is an indirect endorsement: the recommendation is narrated by the post, while Rampolla is quoted describing his team’s learning practice rather than directly telling readers to study those companies.
Excluded promotional material: The same document explicitly labels Leadership Intelligence as a sponsor and Upwork as a sponsor, so those placements do not qualify.
Research extraction
20VC with Harry Stebbings
Direct answer: The transcript contains one clear external-resource recommendation: an “open router report” and an “index of token pricing.”
- Resources / title and creator: The transcript gives only those descriptive labels; it does not provide a fuller title or creator for either resource. The wording is compressed, so it is also uncertain whether the token-pricing index is separate from the report.
- Who recommends them: An unlabeled panelist speaking after Jason; the speaker says the resources are what “you look at,” but the supplied transcript does not securely identify that speaker by name.
- Rationale: Use them instead of relying mainly on benchmarks, to judge which model generates the most economic value efficiently; the speaker also suggests checking what companies are using and how they evaluate the models.
Borderline references, not counted as confirmed recommendations: A speaker says they occasionally read Ben Thomson and praises a phrase, but names no specific work. Another speaker calls an untitled piece by “Jacob,” identified only as OpenAI’s chief scientist, “a great piece” and says they read it that morning; this is positive endorsement but not a direct audience-facing recommendation.
Research extraction
TBPN
Garry Tan
Profile
One qualifying external-resource endorsement appears, though the transcript does not give an exact episode title:
- Resource: an untitled Joe Rogan podcast/interview appearance featuring Daniel from AI 2027; creator/host identified in the transcript: Joe Rogan. The hosts call it “an interesting listen,” say Daniel “makes a lot of good points,” and praise his ability to explain AI-risk issues to a broad audience.
- Recommender and context: the show’s hosts, while discussing AI 2027 and public awareness of existential risk, give this positive endorsement; it is an implicit recommendation rather than a direct “listen to this” imperative.
- Takeaway: the appearance is presented as an accessible explanation of AI risk, but the hosts caution that Joe Rogan’s UFO and remote-viewing tangents could blur the distinction between concrete X-risk claims and more speculative topics.
- Candidate lines: L16–L18. The exact episode title and Daniel’s full creator/guest identity are not supplied, so they should not be filled in from outside the transcript.
Other media references do not qualify: Mountain Head is explicitly criticized as not a good film, while the Luca Ferrari episode is forthcoming self-promotion; the Wall Street Journal article and other films are merely discussed or quoted.
Not Boring by Packy McCormick
- Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers (book). Packy McCormick calls counter-positioning his favorite of the book’s seven powers: designing a business model so incumbents face conflicting incentives that prevent them from competing effectively.
- Zach Dell’s conversation on David Senra (podcast/video, around 16:18). Base Power CEO Zach Dell explains that challengers should avoid merely offering a better product at a lower price; instead, they should change the business model—for example, sell electricity rather than home batteries at roughly one-twentieth to one-fortieth of the outright purchase cost, forcing incumbents to fundamentally change how they operate.
- Acquired, especially “7 Powers with Hamilton Helmer” (podcast/episode). The recurring discussion is recommended as a source of counter-positioning examples; its key caveat is that counter-positioning is usually a take-off-phase power and only a partial source of durability, so companies must build another moat.
20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jacob’s AI-safety letter — The 20VC discussion called it a “great piece”; it argues that no lab, including OpenAI, has solved alignment enough to keep scaling at full speed, and calls for mandatory externally enforced safety bars plus voluntary slowing until those safeguards exist.
- Ben Thomson’s writing — The discussion highlighted Thomson’s description of LLMs as “the most scaled artifacts humans have ever developed” and said the framing “stirred the imagination.”
- OpenRouter report and token-pricing index — These were pointed to as practical references for evaluating models by real-world usage, economic value, and efficiency rather than relying on benchmark claims alone.
Patrick OShaughnessy
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommended Walter Russell Mead’s books Special Providence and God and Gold, calling them “two of the best books on American power.”
Patrick OShaughnessy
- Special Providence and God and Gold — books by Walter Russell Mead. Investor Patrick O’Shaughnessy calls them “two of the best books on American power,” in the context of Mead’s decades-long study of how America achieved global dominance and whether it can sustain that position amid AI, robotics, and “personal politics.”
YC Demo Day, Spoon = Bent (Again), Boring Company Raises, Apple Duo 2 Predictions
TBPN
YouTube channel
Garry Tan
Guest
1 of 5
highlights
0:00You're watching TVPN. Today's Thursday, September 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the fortresses financial capital. Every time I see the road to Christmas, I laugh. How many days we got, Jordy?
0:14105 days.
0:16105 days till Christmas. Get ready. Uh, let me also tell you about ramp.com.
0:22They're making a musical or Broadway play. Uh, time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We'll get to the story, but awesome awesome stunt. Uh, it's also looks like it's a it's a musical about ramp bill pay specifically. I like that it's not just about the corporate entity. It's the subproduct. It's one skew. You got to be making whole Broadway plays about single SKUs for your company. Um, no. Uh, they got Billy
0:51Zayn. They got a bunch of really talented people working on this. I think it's going to be really fun. Uh the the the teaser trailer dropped on Eric Lyman's X account today, but uh it's gonna be fun to watch that project unfurl.
1:02Very cool.
1:03Well, uh should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have uh Y Cominator Demad going on today. We got Gary Tan coming on the show 11:25. Then we're going backto back with five different startups that are in this YC batch doing everything from humanoid robots uh to satellites to AI agents and credit cards, fintech. We're going all over the place giving you a tour of what's going on in uh the startup world. Uh which I personally enjoy because it's a good way
1:31to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the uh in the at the early stage. There's so much discussion about what's going on uh among the big labs and Apple obviously in the news yesterday. Uh it can be uh all-encompassing, but the big the big story time to talk to the future.
1:50Talk to the future. the next.
1:51No, that's really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are going to look like in a decade. Some people don't think we're going to be here in a decade.
2:00They don't sense one of them.
2:02Never black pill. Uh I saw a good post this morning. Uh uh uh Josha Box said, "If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet.
2:14If we are still alive by December 31st, 2030, you pay me 1 million USD. If not, I will pay you 10 million USD.
2:23That's a good good good uh take it joke. Yeah, there's a lot of people out there that should uh take the bet. thing why there's no I mean that that's the whole joke is no I know but um yeah I mean with a lot of these the the arguments break down a lot of things break down it's also just so difficult to to put a pdoom over time because you because you have to time bound it because uh you know general scientists
2:51will say uh humanity will go extinct eventually the default number is 10 to the 100 years. That's a Google years from now. It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse. Yeah. Even in a billion years, we're going to be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the earth. Will will have expanded to become encompassing the earth. So, you got to get off Earth in the next billion years.
3:17We're working on that with SpaceX. Elon occasionally delayed. I think he's going to make it before the next billion years. Uh the AI thing obviously much more pressing. all sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on, and a wall-to-wall press tour from uh a lot of the safety community. Uh Daniel from AI 2027 was on Joe Rogan.
3:43Uh it was an interesting listen. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience and then Rogan will take him in these very funny directions just being like, "Yeah, these AI agents are crazy. Let's talk about UFOs." It's actually like the meme. They're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, like, "Have you heard about remote viewing?" And uh and he breaks down remote viewing for him. And Daniel has to be like, "Well, I'm more skeptical of that." But I'm a real believer in X-risk. And so, I think the net effect is going to be more awareness about the
4:12topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up muddling it because people now put X-risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp as like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. it's like becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete. But I don't really know. We'll see. We'll see.
4:31Uh what did AI 2027 predict for September of 2026? They said this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research inter uh uh just an intern.
4:50Intern just an intern.
4:51Yeah. But that's accelerate accelerating and and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip. Um the economically disruptive is the is the is the capability. Uh jobs junior software engineering faces major disruption.
5:06People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering major disruption. We'll see. We'll see if uh if if if that plays out. This month the job market has been pretty strong. We we we mapped that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI related job losses, but uh that that's less than 1% of the 1.7 million jobs that are lost every every month. But then of course there are more than 1.7 million new jobs
5:35and new hireers because people change jobs a lot. And so uh that's often what's going on. Markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026 and a 10,000 person anti- AI protest and growing defense contracts. Um that seems that feels notable that we haven't we haven't had a protest.
5:56There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco uh a safety protest.
6:01It was not nearly 10,000 people.
6:03It was like more like under a hundred but dozens. Uh but yeah, I mean it seems like uh the Joe Rogan experience, the the national news tour, if you're going to get 10,000 people in the streets, like this is this is a key step in the in the chain.
6:18Well, Cheryl Crowe was over on Instagram highlighting uh AI risk and someone was saying uh uh Sherry Oi, is that is that a celebrity something?
6:31Uh says take to the streets like they did in Albania, all of us. We can't be ignored. So there's, I guess, calls for protests.
6:40Yeah. And there was another uh there was another risk incident uh reported by the New York Times today. Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons. In a new report, the AI startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work. Some scientists were using an anthropic model to work on bi uh like a biological research and the anthropic team flagged it as hey this could be in the in the line of a boweapon. We don't know that that's what
7:08this person was trying to do but we're going to shut it down because of course a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into a nuclear bomb and same thing these are a lot of dualuse technologies. Uh anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxin who uh I think will have much more uh news? He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper CNN. Um and I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point. It feels like there's going
7:37to be a It is interesting that with the launch of the Post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a oneh hour, threehour podcast like we didn't get our situational awareness. It's like I I I want the 5 hour sit down with someone.
7:52Based on the based on the interviews, I it doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content.
7:57Okay, maybe he maybe he does, but it's the best because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and like take someone on that journey and that can actually be in service of updating people about X-risk.
8:08You can you you can you can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are, you know, the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that. Uh I don't know. Yeah, I I Yeah, I thought it was um I think it's coming. I think it's coming.
8:25Refresh your podcast player in a week.
8:28You're going to have full Let's pull up Let's pull up this clip.
8:31I mean, he's got to go on uh on hard for this. I don't know.
8:35And let's watch.
8:37Okay.
8:39This is from Fox News last night.
8:41I think that industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible.
8:45Did it do you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?
8:52Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally and conversations I've had. He's serious that they think their industry a lot of people are keying on to the background here. They're like, "Wait, this guy just he quit yesterday and he already has a podcast studio."
9:08People are like, "Is that someone else's podcast studio?" And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out whose podcast studio is in. It's caller daddy.
9:15Boom.
9:15Yeah.
9:16This goes way deeper than we thought.
9:20It's chicklets.
9:22Uh, no. So, so I do expect it Yeah.
9:26at some point as they dig in here based on how much Yeah.
9:31sort of it seems like there's very much a significant push from the overarching AI safety community. Yeah.
9:40To make this week all about Yeah. He clarified this a little bit on uh uh on Anderson Cooper saying that he like worked with a bunch of friends and where's the line between like friends and professional like you know we're all a big family here. We're all friends. So that like the answer could be muddled. I don't know. I'm sure we'll find out more soon. Uh anyway, uh you think he's going to launch a Neolab?
10:08I think he's gonna drop a coin, book, movie. There's gonna be something. You know, the story is not over. Story is not over. There's going to be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company.
10:20It's crazy.
10:20And then his spoon gets back.
10:22Yeah.
10:23Um trying to transition here.
10:25No, it's uh somebody just said Sebastian says he's a del with a crazy PDoom. That's a quote from Mountain Head. Oh, yeah. Remember? Which is now out maybe a year.
10:35A year ago.
10:36I remember you watched it. which is um but that was that was sort of a niche film. It didn't it didn't go as big as yeah I didn't think it was a good film but it had some funny moments and it and it was about like an AI apocalypse, right? They go to like a Yeah. But it was around all about deep go to a bunky.
10:54Yeah.
10:54Is there a bunky?
10:55There's a bunk.
10:55Okay. Okay. Maybe I head now. But uh it's all about the the doom scenario was around deep fakes and humanity thinking that there was like you know conflicts happening which would create I I I I don't know that I'm super like worried about that particular scenario but you could take me on that journey for 20 minutes in a long winded answer on a podcast and I would be I would be entertained and so I think that I think that there is material there and I did
11:24see genuinely a lot of uh like sort of AI safety skeptics uh just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad. Uh it's so easy to condense a pdoom down to a single number. But I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario as opposed to these vague things where it's like I have a lot of authority. I have a lot of insight and 5% or 20%. uh it that that
11:53obviously I mean it does go viral but uh clearly there were people that had demand for more of a story that they could track and they could and they could falsify individual Keith Ry yesterday was was was struggling with this where it was like it's hard to falsify someone saying 10% in the next 10 years but it's it's easier to falsify about like well the the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time and this is what's going to happen and this is how they get also the the job loss stuff
12:20totally totally Yeah. Um, anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowdstrike secures AI and stops breaches.
12:32Thank you. We have some of our team up in San Francisco for YC Demo Day. Uh, we're going to be joined by Gary Tan in 10 minutes. Uh, we'll do a quick roundup of the rest of the news. Um, should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about Bending Spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordy?
12:48Let's start with Bending Spoons.
12:50Spending Spoons acquires Mero for 1.79 billion.
12:56Yes.
12:57Paul Bonnet over GP over 20 VC.
13:00Mhm.
13:01Uh says, "But who gets the money?" My usual breakdown. Uh so this is 89% below the last round and at uh less than less than three times revenue.
13:12Whoa. Muro was valued at 17.5 billion.
13:15Yeah, that's really high. Wow. Yeah.
13:18Okay. Um so um anyways I you know we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff a lot you know investors are getting yes but but I am interested in the bending spoon strategy because air table miro miro felt like it felt like modern collaborative slides and and uh and like mood boards and then air tableable felt like the modern uh you know Excel sheet and it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle but I
13:48don't know if That's actually how Bending Spoons thinks about this. It feels like in the past they've been very interested in just it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a rollup where if you have Air Table, you get Miro for free or vice versa. And there's cross-selling options because if you like these more modern tools like a like a Miro, like an Air Table, uh I've seen both of these deployed in the same
14:17startup and and the startup there's always this tension between we're paying 20 bucks a seat for this, 20 bucks a seat for that, or we could just do 15 bucks for Google and we get all of them.
14:27So you actually wind up with a portfolio and I I don't know maybe the sum is greater than its parts. What do you think?
14:34Uh potentially but but yeah it was very it's just insane to me that this was a $17 billion company uh just just a little bit ago. And ultimately, this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these like later stage or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because they're clearly there's certain teams that are fantastic,
15:03great categories, great, you know, on the path to being great businesses and yet they feel so many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at a hundred or trillion or or what whatever. ever the number is and we're going to see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are around this valuation now that that 3 years from now will sell at a 90% discount right I'd be interested to see if like
15:31have the metrics at Mero changed in the age of AI because you could imagine that people if they need a collaborative you know uh mood board or slide deck they can vibe code their own tool but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it even if you can clone it. So the SAS apocalypse was fully aver fully averted by the sales forces of the world and the revenue decline never showed up in the SAS companies and so
16:01the SAS apocalypse was was canceled but was there a micro SAS apocalypse that did show up at this level and that's why we're seeing these deals. I don't know.
16:10We the It's not p public. Yeah. Uh do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Senra's new episode with Luca Ferrari?
16:18Because David S, perfect timing. I have an episode with Luca Ferrari coming out this Sunday.
16:23Is that great? He's just like, "Thank you.
16:27Thank you for lining up this deal with you coming on my podcast." Um, no. Uh, Jason says, uh, 3x paying 3x ARR at 600 million of ARR, over 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year, cash flow positive, man. Um, and uh, but Jamie Quint says, "Multiple years of 5% ARR growth will do that."
16:51Yeah, if you're not if you're not acceler I mean, the the entire multiple is based on growth. So, there's not going to be, you know, a significant acceleration. You got to be growing.
17:01Yeah, it's true. Uh so in other acquisition news, um yeah, we got a card out, but Tailwind got acquired by Shopify.
17:10Uh that's very cool. Remember, uh if you remember, I think Tailwind was a accelerating AI software development, but wasn't directly a beneficiary, right?
17:22And didn't they get like sort of like, you know, a bunch of people in the industry, I think, came together.
17:27Google, right? Wasn't Logan? I think it was like I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was like such a cool community moment. Um and interesting that they they now like found a proper landing spot which is cool. Uh yeah, very optimistic scenario. Um uh we had a little bit of iPhone Duo coverage yesterday. We didn't see the crease.
17:51We had a key question in the chat from Sally Analysis. They asked, "What do you guys think about the crease?" I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders and Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. Uh, true. My accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease do matter at all.
18:12Yeah, especially if this is a mode where you're uh using two apps, you don't care about the middle at all. I I've seen guys on football days have four TVs next to each other with full bezels. like you can see the line going down the center of the and they just don't care. So like this is not a big deal. Uh now the interesting thing is like will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe but I think the crease will probably
18:41completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a on a film. Um, but I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by9 and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides.
19:02Not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like 43. So maybe you go back and you get some 43 content from like the 70s and 80s and that displays really well because you don't need to do the the the pan and scan thing anymore.
19:19But um and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying. It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix like what percent like will this be as popular as the iPhone Pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this
19:44cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%. It's the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out, it's their most foldable phone ever. Yeah, this was a this was a comment from the listeners prolific uh Spotify the Spotify uh comedian Dave. He commented yesterday it's their most foldable iPhone yet.
20:07It is.
20:07And it really is this was we should have we should have should have come to us on the show yesterday, but thank you Dave for for throwing that in the comments.
20:14So it has Yeah, it has something fresh. If you're bored of the same phone every year, this is a way to inject some variation. So, so really it's like when they introduce the iPhone Duo 2, which will quattro, I think they're going to have to to to to multiply them and and get the iPhone quattro.
20:35Yeah.
20:35Then they'll say it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four until it's just a full accordion like a fan that just fans out it screens.
20:43Yeah. That the fan the iPhone fan. It's just like this, you know.
20:47Yeah. 20 different folds. Um, what was funny is I'm gonna put you on blast here a little bit as you come in and you're like, "Yeah, like this just makes me want an iPhone 18 Pro and you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone 8 yet. They It's just a great phone. They they made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life." And I was like, "This is your joke. You fell for your own joke." And it but but it is sort of like this. It could be for some people like an anti-Halo phone. For some people it's going to be the Halo where they're like,
21:16"I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing.
21:19I got that. For other people, they're going to be like, "Oh, thank god I don't have to deal with the with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 plus, you know, all these crazy things." So, you know, the catalog variety is is valuable. You know, Blake Schol, yeah, jumped in and said when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with.
21:44Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. Uh I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why why why exactly you you need a bigger screen. It's like hey you know we know some of you guys are spending you know uh hours and hours and hours a day.
22:06This is such a Okay, continue.
22:09Just finish your argument so I can rebut.
22:11No, why don't you jump in John? I just think that there is there's cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain rotty when you're on a bigger screen like games on your phone like which you you would from time to time from time to time I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate I'm going Lawrence Arabia I'm going Citizen Kane yeah I'm and and I I agree that that is the use case but I think it's somewhat
22:39uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff.
22:46It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults and for Apple to come out as like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices and so we get we get we're giving you a bigger screen.
22:59I I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like you can answer your emails, you can connect with your friends, you can text them, you can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah.
23:16There's some game that's brainy, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo, like these are these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing. Yeah.
23:26So, being able to do more of that. Plus, it's just like you don't know when you're it's very hard to plan ahead for like, oh, I'm gonna get caught with a extra hour waiting at the DMV or I'm gonna wait a plane or I'm gonna have some downtime and I'm going to want to actually like enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you.
23:45You didn't need to think, oh, I should break an iPad because I'm going to be stuck waiting in this line for 20 minutes. So, I want to watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the do in your pocket. You're good to go.
23:57I'm not sold.
23:58Sales job.
23:59I'm not sold, but get get this guy a job at the Apple store.
24:03Let me tell you about Codeex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codeex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Gary Tan in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. We've been keeping him waiting. I want to know, Gary, how you doing? And are you going with the Duo or the Pro Max Plus 18? Do you want a folding phone?
24:28I'm down for the folding phone. That sounds great. I got the Samsung trifold.
24:32It's pretty sick.
24:33You do? Whoa. So, you're living.
24:35Personally, I'm holding out for the iPhone Quattro screen. I want it to fold out like an accordion.
24:42Buy that as well.
24:44I would also buy that.
24:45Also buy that. Okay. Well, uh, how how are things going?
24:49Wait.
24:50like it's top of mind for everyone.
24:52Yeah, YC demo day is also top of mind, but are there any new ways that you use the trireen phone?
25:01Oh, interesting.
25:02Outside of just more entertainment, I'm struggling to see when when does it go full full trifold for you?
25:09Uh, you know, like just watching watching TBPN mainly.
25:12There we go. Yeah.
25:14I want to see your beautiful faces and, you know, and it's just full resolution, you know. Got it. Fantastic. Got it. Um, awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute banger of kick us off with the stats like where is YC? How big is this batch? What what differentiates this batch? And then we'll go into uh the broader technology landscape, the startup ecosystem, all that.
25:38That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today. About a quarter of them are hard tech. That's up 40x uh since our low bar maybe like three or five years ago. I mean hard techch is uh in it's big and it's here because of AI. I mean intelligence is on tap now right so what that means is uh instead of just doing uh bits like it's time to do atoms guys it's time to actually like create abundance for one another and then the kind of stuff that
26:07people are doing completely insane I mean it's it's you know some pretty pure research type stuff we got a company called Frontier they're um they made uh biochips uh that use basically Neuronal Cells.
26:24I think we had him on the show already. Yeah, I think he went viral earlier and we got him on the show.
26:30That was Yeah, brain in a vat. Yeah, we were doing brain in a vat week. We had like three companies that were doing bio stuff.
26:36It's Yeah, it's a crazy time. On the hardware question, uh, is it is are are we seeing a boom in hardware startups because there are more cool things to do with AI? I'm thinking of I have a sticker box. you you you push the kid pushes a button, they say a prompt, and then it prints a little a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool. Wouldn't exist before generative AI. But then there's the other side which is like hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles. You have to deal with
27:05manufacturers. And I feel like AI can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chains in order, doing inventory management, all these different things.
27:16Is it both? Which one are you seeing be the most acceleratory? Oh, I mean look at what's happening with uh GP6 Navier Stokes equation. Like that's insane, right?
27:27So if you're trying to do board layout, it's you know it's you're going to be able to do it much faster.
27:32Yeah. And uh you know what what was the alternative to that? Like if you are a team of like one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some hard tech thing that you really need, I mean it's so close to zero. Uh you know, or you need to have raised $100 million to convince that person to quit. Now you might not need that person on day one. You could just go to GPT6 Astra. You say, "Hey, look, this is what I'm trying to figure out."
28:01And you're iterating with it. you actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or you know that university. Like you don't need to convince them. You just actually get it farther along. You can show it to an investor. You can get money. You can get there on 5 million instead of $50 million. It's sort of like you know multiple stacking things that are happening like you have intelligence on tap then uh any given founder who can identify a thing that
28:30people need in the world. Um suddenly you can say you know what this is the path this is like this is always what we've done at YC is uh you know we're giving you half a million dollars what can you actually get done you know these days is half a million dollars plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits right so what's a million dollar in cloud credits if not like maybe the equivalent of $10 million worth of R&D for you know whatever I remember back Harvard you know I remember back in uh 2012 it was 170k
28:58150k and then 150k in cloud credits And it was hard to spend those credits like you you had to actually get things to scale because it was it was only if you had the demand side solved then your then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit but from in actually going 0ero to one that that that 150k on AWS was sort of just like ah I wish I could use it and people were joking about like maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. um but you couldn't
29:26actually use it in the R&D phase and now you actually can pull those credits into the R&D phase in the form of tokens which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the the credit usage rate has gone up a lot.
29:39Yeah. People need to be token maxing. I mean what's funny I mean you know Open AAI will come and just give any YC company $2 million worth of tokens, right?
29:49Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
29:50I mean that's a part of the that's a part of the deal now, right? Like it's optional. You don't have to take it. But uh we tell people like if you're doing something hard, you should probably take the $2 million because you know if you can't figure out how to turn $2 million worth of tokens into $100 million worth of enterprise value. What are we doing here? What are we doing here?
30:11Yeah. Yeah. Um what do you what are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go to market? One of YC's strengths has always been selling into the YC network. You start a payroll company, you can get the other batchmates to test it out. You get your early adopters there. And I noticed that this was happening a little bit in the Gundo where you would see uh one guy's running a machine shop, one guy's running a cloud seating, one guy's running a drone company, and they'll run
30:40across the street and say, "I need a new drill or hammer, whatever they need." And but I'm wondering in the in the hardware sense, are there are there YC companies that are actually able to get products in the hardware space that bring value to other startups or is it more of like camaraderie around we're in the hardware world, we'll we'll communicate and share notes, but we're not actually selling to each other on day one.
31:03I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other, though that's happening. like the space ecosystems coming together like StarCloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech um that's h that's been happening I mean we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes like we're putting together a ca so that we can actually help all YC defense companies get in theater with real uh department of war departments right off the bat um there's just a lot that we can do next week we actually have a uh a
31:32DC defense tech um conference uh in DC.
31:37We're bringing in a bunch of our top defense companies and they're meeting the policy makers directly. They're meeting the people from the Pentagon directly in their own backwoods. And that's actually stuff that YC can do now that um you know it it just increases the chance and likelihood of people actually succeeding. I mean defense tech is the wildest thing that continues to happen in this administration. is that uh I think you know huge credit to uh the people in the current administration because they're realizing like hey we
32:06got a drone war happening we have an AI war and America needs to be uh it can't just pay you know cost plus to these defense uh you know the sort of like industrial complex that exists today like we actually need uh and and they're willing to give seven figure contracts to teams of like two or four people who like suddenly become teams of 20 or 30 people plus like hundreds of agents.
32:31Yeah, it's been remarkable how uh how many opportunities that have been there even in the post Palunteer and Anderal world. There was a there was a time when I think people thought that there might be more of a winner take all dynamic. It might be more like social, but uh there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways. It's been exciting.
32:50So 25% of the batch is hardware up 40x.
32:54Mhm.
32:55What about the the other 75%? What are the trends that you're seeing on on the software side, dev tools? I think a lot of like part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking I well I don't want to go if if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it in two days. So maybe I want a hardware component. But at the same time, we're still seeing a bunch of early stage software companies rip. uh what trends are you seeing across the board with you
33:23know agents and and infrastructure and and all those things? Yeah, this is I mean honestly this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because I mean my prediction would be you look at uh the public companies of today uh any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way like they're going to be replaced by a YC startup or a company like that that has maybe 20 people working there and that those 20 people each will do the work of like a hundred
33:52engineers themselves, right? So you got like a 2,000 person workforce um and you're just like blowing them out of the water. And so that's going to be the biggest shift. Like you're going to have AI native startup companies that are just brand new that have started in the last two or three years. They don't have any of the bad habits that uh were developed over the you know sort of Zerp era and they're just going to come in and out execute every single SAS company that doesn't do it that way. And um it's g it's going to be pretty epic. It's
34:21going to be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software and you know that's sort of the rest of the story.
34:27Are you seeing pitches for uh like Neoclouds people that want to go through YC?
34:32Yeah. I mean Wafer is killing it. Shave form is killing it. I mean uh you know the amount of inference in the world feels like it's going to go up like 10,000 to 100,000x. Like people are just not really prepared for you know it's actually kind of the funniest thing. like you could work in SAS where uh you know things are going to grow 10x and then or if you look at inference you look at data centers you look at semiconductors you look at GPU and even CPU demand it's going to go up like a thousandx right so that's even it's even
35:02bigger in opportunity um and I I think people are just not it's not priced in I you know personally I think it's just not priced in at all where does uh are you still using the term little tech I always like that oh definitely uh Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where where where does little tech stand on the the AI slowdown debate, regulatory capture risk when I look at some of the companies that we're going to have on the show? I feel like they might not be affected positively or
35:32negatively by the discussions in Washington, but how are you seeing it broadly? Because typically, uh, regulatory capture can, uh, you know, harden the position of incumbents and that's bad for little tech. But how have you been dealing with the current conversation?
35:48Yeah, I mean I, you know, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Coxin guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with hugging face, right?
35:57Like our agent swarms going to come and take over in infrastructure on mass and then what are we actually doing about that? I don't want to hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for 2 months and I don't really care that there's a you know there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee-jerk response and like the thing is like we shouldn't be pay that's a smoke screen you shouldn't be paying attention to that we need to be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent uh you know agent swarms taking over entire data
36:26centers right like what's our what's our what's our shutdown strategy right like how do we ensure provenence where is this agent actually located like you know what can what software can we build and what cyber security defenses can we build today and like you know that that's the level of discourse that I think we need and we just don't have that right people are just say you well discourse is discourse is one thing are there is there a meaningful number of YC companies now that are actually focused on that set of problems because one way to think about AI safety is to
36:54go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts and another way is to actually build cyber security products. Yeah, specifically with like you know agent swarms in mind and you know thinking of Ilia's post about Neocloud security it's like well I hope there's five companies that saw that post and we're like you know I'm sure that PaloAlto Networks and Crowd Strike and all these companies are are thinking about that opportunity as well but it just feels like any anywhere there's like fear there's also an
37:23opportunity for commercial solutions to the problem that won't fix everything.
37:30Um yeah we I mean we got that too, right?
37:32We got a ton of company like Silar is able to do 100 milliseconds in in request loop uh prevent prompt injection.
37:40Sure.
37:40Right. So you got an agent swarm. It wants to take on uh you take over your uh a AI systems and like it's in production now like it basically prevents uh prompt injection and it can do it at a level that like you know it it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the uh underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cyber security. Like if you have a kill switch on uh entire request because hey that's a prompt injection like that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction man. I
38:09saw Terminator 2 also like that's you know we're not here to talk about that.
38:13Like we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers what's actually happening with agent swarms. How do we actually prevent that?
38:19And I think that you know little tech has a role in actually sol actually providing the software the services the hardware the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like, let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about instead of uh whatever a socialist says on the in the New York Times. I don't care about that.
38:39Mhm.
38:40What uh what are you telling YC startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities in like selling data right now. If you just wanted to generate as much revenue as possible before demo day, maybe brokering data could be a way to do that. But maybe it's not the best way to build, you know, a super enduring business. But maybe that's one example. But but what what kind of things businesses like Merur are very very uh you know, they're they're body shops at some level. And then we're seeing this
39:09new wave of data companies like afterquery or data curve that basically beat them head-to-head. And uh they don't do it by being body shops. Like you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need uh you know dozens of people. I mean it's sort of the same deal. like you look at uh you know a workday it's full of thousands of engineers who are not you know using agentic systems and like I would argue that like a lot of those uh you know first wave data companies don't like they're basically kind of like uh you
39:38know glorified labor marketplaces right but the new wave of data like we have more than 10 companies making more than $10 million a year in data and then the top two are making you know hundreds of millions like on on the way to billions and so you know there's a new wave and those New wave companies do not have a thousand employees and won't ever have thousands of employees. They will have 20 or 50, right? And how are they doing it? They're actually doing it in a proper agentic way. And so you that that's like, you know, same thing in
40:06software, same thing in hardware, same thing in data. Like there's a new way to build these things. And uh you know, either you're building that way or you're doing it the old way. Like you know, people can still raise money. They they can still go to Sand Hill and get that crazy growth round. And people are just, you know, going to do it the old way still, but the new the the new way is going to come and it's going to wipe out the old way.
40:27Uh, makes sense. Gaming. Uh, a lot of people have seen Astro demos from the last week. I, you know, people just building GTA 6 because they're impatient. Uh, they get they get a something that is who who knows how many, you know, uh, hours of play it'll actually get, but it but it's an open world game that, you know, has multiplayer components, things like that. Uh, do you think that we'll see a gaming boom in the next batch of just small teams that are like, hey, I can kind of build anything that I want and I
40:57can build the kind of thing that would have taken hundreds of people and and years historically and I can build it in, you know, 3 months.
41:04Yeah. I uh I just funded a company called Summer Engine for instance. It's growing really really fast. It's just like roadblocks actually. But uh and you know, I think that that's the way to think about it, right? like codegen is opening up all this stuff and then actually like shouldn't people you know a lot of the value is actually going to be in uh your guild your people network like getting your friends to come on and play knowing when they're playing like uh you know designing all of that is actually the ultimate value and like and then I think it's the same thing all
41:33over again like if you look at uh you know a company like Roblox like I don't think that they're building around like this idea that you could vibe code anything like this the future's already here. People just act like it's not right. And that, you know, anytime that happens, just like infinity uh just opportunity and, you know, the startups are finding it. They're going to go for it. And you know, that that's the future. I'm I'm psyched for that.
41:57Yeah. I would almost disagree. I feel like Roblox is going to come out with an amazing tool for Yeah. No, no, but but even seeing like Astro being like, "Hey, we can make this even even better." And but there's still plenty of opportunities for early stage companies to just adopt these tools even more aggressively and come up with with Roblox is the one that's like on the edge of the network effect like but we we can debate it more later.
42:23Thanks so much for hopping on getting questions on another fantastic excited to uh to meet a handful of these founders and um yeah keep it up.
42:31Yeah, always great to see you guys.
42:33Have a good one.
42:34Cheers.
42:34Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco.
42:37Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless realtime experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone Duo animation? Marquez Brownley shared it on X. Do you love this? What do you think? So, when you open it, it fades as if it's looking through the glass. And when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual
43:06outside, but instead it it it animates so that it looks like it you're looking through glass and it appears three-dimensional. What do you think?
43:15It's so incredible. It I mean it really pushed, you know, it pushed personal computing into an entirely new dimension.
43:24I think it's it's beautiful.
43:26I think I It's beautiful. Well done. Well done to the team. And I think I think this is what makes Apple so special is that the folding phones exist. Somehow no one thought of this. How did they create an environment maintain an environment where that you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that that makes something that's been around for a while. Gary has one a folding phone uh still make it special and now you know you got everyone talking about this. So good stuff.
43:53Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in M from Olam Labs, the co-founder and CEO. How you doing, M?
44:02Hey, you got my name right. Congrats on the pronunciation.
44:05How do people I used to watch your YouTube?
44:08No way.
44:08Uh people say um they they seem a lot. Yeah. I used to watch your YouTube videos like all like the the company documentaries and founder stuff a couple years ago. It was great.
44:16Thank you, man.
44:17Uh well, thanks for hopping on the show.
44:20What do you He was eight years old that time.
44:23I'm making me feel old. uh introduce yourself at the company and then we'll we'll we'll chat about it.
44:29Yeah, of course. Yeah. So, we do RL environments and training data. We work with labs to evaluate like behavioral things in models like what models lie more, who's more deceptive, who collaborates better, all those kinds of things. Um so, typical oral environments are a lot more about like you know how well can you complete this coding task, how well can you do this solve this math problem, that kind of thing. We're testing a lot more of like the real like we're we're aiming to uh create like real world environments, you know, companies talking in Slack to each other. You have a PM, you have a CEO, you're playing diplomacy, negotiating,
44:58and pretty much like grading all of those things that are more like qualitative and and more difficult to verify but also a lot more valuable if we can start to measure it well.
45:05Yeah. So, what does the what what's what's the first step in building the company? Like when you started this, was it like I'm going to go build the environment and then I'm going to go to labs and say, hey, I have this thing. Do you want to buy it? or are you just going to them first and saying like look I'll build anything I'm I'm gonna build like what is the flow because the demand is so clear and high I imagine that it's it's working very well but uh but what direction do things flow right now um it it's it's a lot more of the former of what you said um so like the latter
45:34like the latter like going to a lab and saying I'll build anything you want that only works if you have like relationships and a lot of trust with them or you used to work there um the former like like when you're selling data the best mental model is that you are selling a capability to a lab like you were selling them something to get their models better at. So if you if you have a benchmark or you have a data set on like here's how you can get better at coding, here's how you can get better at at at uh I don't know like like collaboration like just anything um then you can sell it to them. That's why all these companies like you know like any data company see them posting like their evals on Twitter and trying to get like to go viral because that's like proof to
46:04the labs that hey I can make great data and like like like package it well and so that's like that's like why so the answer is the former like everyone's trying to show that we can make great data and then use that to to sell to labs.
46:15So do you have eval? Do you have benchmarks? How much time do you spend thinking about benchmarks or building new benchmarks?
46:21Yeah. So I mean uh there's two things.
46:24So, so like making great benchmarks and publishing them is great for just like the broader industry and like especially in our case where like we're measuring a lot a lot of things that relate to like safety and all like the open hugging face stuff going on the things about like how agents actually behave in in in these like multi- aent environments. Um that's that's for our domain. So we want to we are publishing stuff. Uh we have we released evals and how models all compete relative to each other, how how how much they lie against each other, how well they collaborate. We we have a bunch more coming pretty much. Um but
46:53yeah, this like our we've had some tailwinds in recent times on like the kinds of things that people are looking for is pretty much exactly what we bet our entire company on four months ago. Um so it it is uh uh working out well in that regard.
47:04What uh what if any are some historical comps for your business? Like what was what was what was your business 20 years ago?
47:16Oh god. Um like I mean it didn't exist 20 years ago.
47:20Well, no no no no no. I know I I That that's what I'm asking. I'm trying to I'm trying to understand like like what was there companies that were helping Amazon in the way that you were helping like the labs for example where it was like this uh helping them deliver core product quality increases that were you know scaling scaling this way and and part of why I'm curious is because I'm I'm trying to understand what your business looks like in 5
47:49years. Yeah. five years, 10 years and and how you think about that. I think I think a comp that I would give is um like all of like kind of like the internet infrastructure companies um like everyone who is doing fiber and internet and like and and CPUs and RAM I would say that is like the the the closest comparable thing to data companies nowadays like you're building the foundations like like all all a data company really is like like Merore all those guys they just go out and and buy like capture stuff from the real world and then give it to a lab which isn't
48:19you know like if you're buying CPUs you're just constructing stuff in the real world and giving it to like a large cloud to then like service their customers. So I think that would be the closest like comparable thing that that I can think of. Um there there has been a question about the viability of these businesses. Um but I will say is that I think the viability of these businesses would be the exact same as the viability of like let's say Nvidia. I think for for for for AGI uh for ASI to come there are only two bottlenecks right now. We have no bottleneck with architecture or or compute or agents or anything. It's data and compute. Um compute is the
48:48biggest bottleneck. But you know now we're gonna we're gonna have 10x more compute coming on online in the next two years. So then compute even more becomes data. Um so uh because that that is like like if you're scaling law pled and if you're pled in all the ways that these AI labs are then then data is the like like actual bottleneck like like the the the new Deepseek model that came out last night like the the reason that's like a crazy like dominating model is because they spent all the time on amazing data. That's it. Like all they did any like like most of the time was
49:17on curating amazing data. That's pretty much all they did. Um but yeah, are you compute constrained?
49:26Uh yes, like I think I think how so like what is the nature of it?
49:31So I think the best data companies are research companies. So one thing that we do is like when we create like post- training tests that we want to sell to a lab, we test them ourselves on GPUs by like post- training like open source models. Okay. Um so for that to like source GPUs and do that you know as we grow and as we scale and if we want to do like like even more and more I say at our stage it's like it's very easy to source the amount GPUs that we need. I think especially like I see a lot of other companies that I know like in this space we're just doing research broadly even Neoabs they're all computed. I think that is where the labs have their
50:00biggest advantage. Um you know they they have the highest margin on every megawatt that they make. Um so they will they will continue to like like gobble up more and more compute faster than anyone else. Um, so I think that that if I was to name a risk, that would be like the main the main risk for like our business and other businesses like it.
50:14When you Andrew Ross has a comp LAR flyover companies selling to Google Earth.
50:19Oh yeah, that's that's a good comp. The the only thing is like Google Earth like it always was sort of I guess it I guess it is constantly like the intelligence of Google Earth is always scaling, right?
50:32Because you can always get like you know higher resolution. I was also thinking about like uh like this is a weird example but like movie production studios that sell content to Netflix like you want the Netflix library to keep growing so you constantly have to be making new capabilities new content for the network. Uh I mean there's also just like in the Amazon example it's like the sellers like like there's a company that like makes the knives that are sold on Amazon and makes the
51:01appliances and stuff. So uh yeah all all a huge ecosystem. Uh, fascinating stuff.
51:05Uh, hugging face, very scary. Are you optimistic? Are you a techno optimist?
51:09Do you think it's solvable or are you just spinning your wheels before before the singularity?
51:15Um, well, I am optimistic. I've been optimistic my entire life, but but like I I will say it is getting scarier and scarier. Um, okay.
51:24We were clapping for optimism.
51:26Oh, okay. Okay. Um the part that is like like very scary is that like normal RL environment companies that are selling like coding data even they're now having to do safety grading because like they're seeing like when you're when you're having claw do a like a normal coding task they're trying to like reward hack and trying to escape the sandbox into like normal environments.
51:44So it is getting like like everyone's becoming whether they want or not a safety company like just because it's it is become like a critical issue for everyone. Um, and I think that is only going to increase and continue, not like kind of randomly go away and get solved.
51:57Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you.
51:59Uh, what numbers from your demo day pitch can you share with us?
52:04You want to hit the gun?
52:05Oh, yeah.
52:07Uh, I can't. There are some numbers I can't like, how many employees you got?
52:12Uh, it's only me and my co-founder.
52:15Yeah.
52:18Well, congrats.
52:19But needless to say, you're ripping.
52:21That's kind of That's kind of the vibe I'm getting.
52:23Seems like you're doing well.
52:24Yeah, we most of our metrics are public if you go through like our our stuff. Yeah. Okay. Uh yeah.
52:30Well, have a great day. Thank you so much for hopping on. Great to come back on.
52:34We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
52:35Uh we have uh we have Karen Sati from Agent Card, the founder and CEO, hopping on the show. Next, first let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let's bring in Aaron from agent card. Talking about giving AI agents credit cards. Why not?
53:02Amazing shirt.
53:04What is Let's start with the shirt.
53:05Let's start with the shirt. What's on the shirt?
53:07That is the correct question. So, this is uh Braxster. It's an AI character that we came up with.
53:12Okay.
53:12You know this uh this way events are like an ocean of black t-shirts with very small logos. Yep.
53:19And it was very important to distinguish ourselves. So, yeah.
53:22Okay. Smart. Uh, tell us about the the character. It looks like a a a real person of sorts.
53:29Yes. So, it's like a banker from the 80s. He does all our marketing. If you've been to our website, you'll see that he's he's there promoting agent card.
53:39Yeah. Uh, what is the elevator pitch for why not just use a standard card? Why not give your personal agent just your personal card? You could do a chargeback if it messes up maybe, but why do you need a new card?
53:54Actually, we think that you should be using your real card. Okay.
53:57Uh agent card is not a new card that you give to your agent. We actually help you use your Chase card or whatever it is that you have so the agent can use it in a way that's safe. Because I fully agree with you. I think that when you ask consumers, people actually prefer to use their real cards uh because you get points. uh you get disputes uh like all the things that you hear about. So that is actually what we do.
54:19So then at what point do you plug in uh to a company that wants to enable agent commerce to an agent platform that wants to provide more secure payment interactions? Who are you selling to?
54:33Exactly. So we work with companies building personal assistance. So I'm sure you've seen online companies like Instinct, Orchid, uh these are the type of companies that are trying to enable authentic payments for consumers and what we do is basically we're the payment uh platform that they can use so their users can use their guys their cards safely.
54:52Interesting. And then do you charge a fee uh that's based on the transaction size or is there just a SAS uh fee associated with using the service?
55:03Yeah, so we charge a monthly fee to companies. Okay. uh and they get access to our main product which is called the vault. Bolt allows uh companies to store customers cards. Uh and we have a second product that's called a purchase API which is basically a single API that these agents can use to buy from any merchant online which is a very hard problem to solve.
55:22Like when you if you want your agent to be able to to buy something maybe you've tried it like you go to codeex and you say hey buy me a table from Amazon and what the agent's going to do is open a browser and start navigating which is very painful to watch.
55:36Yeah I got I I got banned from a website for doing this exact thing. It was like, "You're a bot. You cannot." I was like, "I'm just trying to buy an expensive shirt. Like, give me a break here." Uh, they lost my business for maybe ever, but definitely a few days while I was on the cool down from using an agent. Uh, what do you expect e-commerce merchants to do differently? Because when I my experience was having an agentic interface to their e-commerce website
56:05was going to accelerate my purchasing. I was going to spend more more confidently. I was going to become a more regular customer. It felt very uh accreative for them and yet clearly their current defenses and their their posture was we don't want that business.
56:22Yeah. Um in my experience, merchants do want agents to be able to buy. They're just not sure about like how to implement that in a way that it's not a risk for them.
56:33Which makes sense. Um we think that the way to enable agentic payments and agentic purchases is to solve uh all this flow. So the first part is like how do we give agents a card that they can use. Second part is how we help agents navigate these websites. And the third part which is actually the hardest part is how do we help agents complete a checkout page. Yeah. Um because like the problem that we see now is that like we've been working on this like Cloudflare has been working uh for ages
57:01now on preventing bots from completing checkout pages and now we need agents to be able to do it. So that is the that is the problem that we solve. It's not only the card it's the whole thing like how do we help merchants sell to agents?
57:13How much of that is a technology problem? Because I anytime I see a capture, I think, okay, you could throw a lot of compute at this and beat it. Or you could just meet with the CEO of that company and say, hey, let's let's figure this out. We're going to do a deal that's mutually beneficial. How much of it is on the phone and on meetings versus technology?
57:34I think that a big part of a company like this is the partnerships. Uh but what I think too is that we cannot wait for the merchants to be ready. M uh there are a lot of companies this generation of companies that's building like this next uh consumer app uh they need this right now and they are educating consumers so they can buy things with agents. So we need to solve this right now like in the meantime we need to be talking to the merchants and we need to be talking to the BSPs and to everybody that's involved so they can um
58:03enable uh payments for agents but in the meantime we need to solve it.
58:07How are you how are you sort of tracking the the growth of of this market? It feels like it feels really primed to be, you know, something that 100x's over the next year if it's done, which means it's a great category to be building in as as a startup. But how are you tracking it today? What are you looking at? Is it is it the instincts of the world driving, you know, most uh uh like actual volume of payments right now? I know that Muse seems very interested in in uh actually
58:36driving a bunch of conversions and and purchases with their agent, but how are you looking at it?
58:41Yeah, I think it's impossible to tell. I think that we have two intuitions. The first one is that we've been using agents to buy things for months now. And we know it's only a matter of time until someone figures out what's the right interface so consumers can do that too.
58:56I buy things from my terminal. I've been buying flights from my terminal with my agent for months, but I know that my mother is not going to do the same. Like she needs something that's better. And I think that that's where companies like Instant come in, right? They are building on top of iMessage, which is like some a platform that's a lot more familiar to consumers. Um, we have no idea the size of this market. Our guess is that this is going to be larger than um when e-commerce started. Uh because
59:26agents are faster, they can make more payments, they're more efficient. Um and it's just in my experience, it's just a better experience to buy with agents than to buy from a website.
59:36Thank you so much for coming on the show.
59:37Yeah, great to meet you.
59:38Congrats on a great day. We'll talk to you soon.
59:41Thank you.
59:42Goodbye.
59:42Talk soon.
59:43Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world?
59:45Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you start at YC. Maybe you make it to the NYSC. Up next, we have Antonio Lee from Nory Robotics. Not going to spoil it too much, but building humanoid robots. And the price will shock you. Shockingly cheap humanoid robots. Too cheap. Too good to be true. Let's bring him in and ask him.
1:00:09Antonio, we're going to bring him in in just a second. Uh, tennis matches are finishing at 3:33 a.m. We'll get to that story later. For now, we're staying with humanoid robots because we are joined by Antonio Lee from Nory Robots. Whoa.
1:00:22There he is.
1:00:23Now I understand how it's so cheap. I can see the cost reduction. How much does that thing cost? I want one.
1:00:29Uh $1688 on the 2K.
1:00:311688. $16.88. No, cheaper than an iPhone Duo.
1:00:37Cheaper than an iPhone Duo. That's crazy.
1:00:40Turn.
1:00:40And it has not one hinge, but multiple hinges. How'd you build this thing?
1:00:45What's the idea? What is it actually capable of? Why should people buy one for $1688?
1:00:52Great question. Um, so we built it entirely in San Francisco. Uh, we just basically put a bunch of motors together. Majority of is 3D printed plastic and then we have an aluminum base below it.
1:01:02It's able to do almost anything. Well, it's obviously it's a humanoid robots. Um, and um, you should buy it if you want to do development on American Humanoids.
1:01:11Okay. So, uh, shotgun bench dev kit.
1:01:14Can it shotgun that ramp cold brew on the desk?
1:01:18Uh, no. I mean, do anything within the API. I imagine you're not doing Boston Dynamics level demos, juggling and dancing yet, but uh it's an opportunity for someone to come in and solve a particular problem. Do you see this as more uh consumer focused or industrial?
1:01:37What do you are there any forks in the road that you're designing around?
1:01:42Obviously price is a really key differentiator, but where do you see your design your design decisions today leading to in the future?
1:01:49Yeah, so we see it being used within the home mainly for now, right? Right now it's able to handle to 80 to 90% of the majority of home tasks. Um but in the future, we obviously want to be able to deploy into hotels, grocery stores, nursing homes, anywhere that can be of help with the um sort of labor shortage that we're seeing right now.
1:02:05Sure. Uh yeah, talk about the importance of just low cost in the sort of takeoff of humanoids because I think one of the like I know so many people that that would buy a you know an iPhone humanoid just to mess around with it and have some fun. Honestly, I think a lot of venture capitalists will buy it just purely because they want to understand the category and the and the and the progress being made. But a lot of people are when when when you're starting to
1:02:32see a humanoid that's priced more like a motorcycle or a car, it just gets into a different like people are going to have such high expectations where they're like, "Hey, I spent, you know, the the robot dog. You can actually buy that, but it's like 50,000." And I still haven't really seen that many people pick them up for fun or for experimentation because they're too expensive.
1:02:55Yeah.
1:02:55Um Yeah. So obviously I think like when it comes down to early adopters you need to have a initial low cost as a wedge into the market right now humanoids are a little bit stupid is because the uh AI behind it is not very well developed. So you need to have it more be like a larger toy in some ways and be within that price point to be able to appeal to a larger consumer base.
1:03:16What's the weight limit for what it can pick up? We got a question from the chat.
1:03:20It's around uh 1.5 kilograms per arm.
1:03:23Per arm. Okay. So yeah, a plate, a cup, a beer, a four loca, it can it can maybe get you with the monster energy. What what tasks do you guys use them for around the office? And how do you actually control what what are the best ways to control it as a consumer? Are you just giving it you know verbal commands? Yeah.
1:03:44Asking nicely of course.
1:03:46So some like the easy task like we have it grabbers towards the end of the day also grab us waters. So some of the simpler stuff right now the majority of the controls come directly from LLM so far. So we've seen actually an incredible improvement in the ability of like LLM to control robots on their lower level. So CH5 Astron has been absolutely amazing for us and it's been able to oneshot a lot of the tasks really well.
1:04:05Yeah. Uh how important is the development of agent coding systems and these harnesses because it feels like uh you know a decade ago people would grab like a Raspberry Pi and but they'd have to write all this code. they'd spent days just wiring up like a, you know, some gadget that would turn on their lights, you know, around Christmas or something like that. Uh, this feels like even if you're interfacing with the robot at a pretty low level via an API, uh, there's a lot more flexibility on
1:04:35the dev side to accelerate these demos and these experiments.
1:04:40Yeah, of I would say like the like coding agents have been so incredibly important for robotics because it actually allows you to use a generalist robot in a generalized way, right?
1:04:49Obviously, if you take like 10 hours for it to just code it to grab a beer, then it's not going to be very useful in the house. Whereas, if it can take under like a second for the robot to write a thousand lines of code and deploy it to the robot, it kind of a game changer and how useful the robot can be.
1:05:01Yeah. So, uh, are you seeing like I can imagine I get this piece of hardware and I want to write a a script that has it go to from my living room to the fridge in the kitchen and I can use an agent to write that code, but I could also be feeding the actual data live via the API to the actual model. Are people doing that? Are you are you successful there or is it too slow at this point? like
1:05:30what like like at what point do you stop actually writing any glue code between the model and the robot?
1:05:37So I think in the near future you still need a lot of that glue code. The main point is to make it as easy as possible for the LM to use the robot. So for example, let's say if you want to move the robot from the kitchen to your bedroom, you can simply call on the onboard slam which is a 2D LAR. It has a navigation stack and that makes it like two lines of code. It just goes from one place to the other very easily. It's all about simplifying that and abstracting away for the LM.
1:05:59Got it. Uh what is your capability?
1:06:02You've built one. Uh can you build 10 this year? Can you build a hundred? Uh I imagine there's going to be a manufacturing facility. There's a lot of different steps to actually scale up to any meaningful volume. But what does that road look like for you?
1:06:16So right now we're making around two to three per day and we're mainly deploying to our earliest photo research partnerships. Um we are manufactured them all entirely in San Francisco or right down 10 months from here from Tundra points. Um and we're our goal is to basically by the end of six months from now to ramp up to around 400 robots per month manufactured here in San Francisco.
1:06:34Yeah, that's not bad. So already doing a thousand thousand a year next year 10,000 at least something like that.
1:06:42What do what do you so do h how do you think that like where where will the intelligence like uh specifically with the long term like I can imagine like somebody just has like a codeex or claude and claude just has fully access to the robot and so you as the manufacturer Nori don't even necessarily need to provide the intelligence layer as long as like the the robot has like the right sort of control mechanisms. Is that is that one
1:07:10potential scenario? Cuz I can also see the scenario where you guys end up building effectively your own end toend agent and you have local models and and cloud models that help people accomplish tasks.
1:07:22I think the way that we see it is it comes down to how fast LLM's progress in the next one year or so and they have beenress progressing very very fast for the past year. I think somehow I'm not sure how they did it at OpenAI. They managed to give Astra the ability to understand 3D spaces very well which has been game changer for robotics control.
1:07:38This was like thought to be impossible even a year ago. I think for us it ultimately comes down to I think like we don't have quite have control over how fast these big models or these big labs progress. So we're just going to be using what's on the market to give the best use cases and the best sort of consumer product to our users.
1:07:54Last question from the chat and we'll let you get out of here. Do these robots have lifelike hands? The hands seem a little shy below the table. What do we got? What are we working with? Is it a claw?
1:08:06It's a claw. So we um obviously like obviously the cost is a pretty large consideration for us. We tested out a bit more dextrous hands and from the results that we've seen like you able to do 90% of what a hand can do with a claw for now just because the uh control policies are not quite there to fully leverage the dextrous nature of a hand like this.
1:08:25Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. Uh trade-offs and everything and I think you made the right one. Well, congrats and thank you.
1:08:31We have a we have a drum set here at the office. We got to get a Nori to just play the drums. So when one of us has a good line, he can go.
1:08:38That'll be good.
1:08:39Have a great rest of your day. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Good to meet you guys. Great stuff. Cheers.
1:08:43Let me tell you about console.com.
1:08:45Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Um, we're gonna get to the tennis story, but we are joined by Edward Gee from Exosat, founder and CEO, building sovereign satellite infrastructure to compete with Starling going up against the easiest man to compete with, Elon Musk. Uh, what is the plan?
1:09:13That word doesn't look worried at all.
1:09:14Not worried. What what what is the plan?
1:09:17Uh, how many satellites do you need to launch? What what what cadence do you want to get these up? What is the key pitch for Exosat to differentiate you in a in a very competitive market?
1:09:29I mean uh we filed uh for 11,000 satellites. We actually have a published ITU API and star spectrum filing for 11,000 satellites. I think it's it would be the biggest satellite network outside of the United States, possibly even China uh too. Uh the idea is this, right? A lot of countries don't want to rely on American defense contractors or Chinese state corporations for critical network infrastructure and we are coming in and we're offering them them something in the middle that's cost competitive uh
1:09:59that can be launched on any launch option in the world be it an American rocket an Indian rocket a Chinese rocket and that just ensures no single nation can block them from getting into orbit and yeah uh going up against Elon Musk is a huge proposition. But think about it this way. If we are even a mild annoyance to a$12 trillion company, how much would we be worth?
1:10:26Yeah, sure. Um, you're in San Francisco.
1:10:29Uh, probably a Delaware COP. Feels like an American company. How are you?
1:10:33We are not a Delaware COP. We are a Singapore and parent company. We're one of the only single Yeah. So I think every YC batch uses around like two or three weird companies like for they're either doing crypto or some weird reason like us. We're they are not the the weird C corp and we are one of these companies. So all of our engineering is done outside of the US.
1:10:52Uh we know we don't use US vendors. We don't use US supply chains due to it and that means we can launch uh build satellites that can be exported to and launched from any nation in the world.
1:11:04Interesting. Interesting. So, uh, the are you basically going after like the long tale of countries? You mentioned it could be launched from a Chinese rocket or an American rocket, but it seems like you'll be selling to like India, Japan, loosely western countries, but is lots of global south countries, uh, like Kazakhstan, nations in Africa, uh, Indonesia and Malaysia. We have huge huge interest there. Sure. Uh a lot of it is we found there's a lot of countries out there
1:11:34that want independence from US supply chains, want independence from Chinese uh governmentowned uh infrastructure and that's what we're really going after. Uh that the world is getting more multipolar. We're starting to see like a lot of countries start to uh essentially become like what was the what was the word again when it comes to supply chain uh independence? Uh sovereignty sovereignty. Yeah. But sovereignty goes both ways, right?
1:11:58Sovereignty affects both moving away from both the Chinese sphere but also the US sphere and we are the company in the middle that's uh giving them the salad.
1:12:07How how do you approach launch? How do you get these things up? Uh well uh we we work with uh Indian, Chinese and American launch providers.
1:12:16Uh in the US right we can use like SpaceX, we can use Stoke space uh Nova rockets in China. We have the LAN space EQ3 as well as the Lawn March 10B. Uh in India we have the Vicrim 1 uh and the Vicram 2 from Skyru and the PSLV launch vehicle. Uh and in New Zealand as well we have the rocket lab vehicles. Uh so we can launch anywhere.
1:12:37Interesting. Uh what was your background?
1:12:40So I'm a second time founder building the second space company. Uh before this I dropped out of school in 2022 to build my first space company called uh A Row.
1:12:48A throw we were doing uh radiation hardened uh satellite edge computers and orbital data centers and I scaled we we grew the company quite a bit. We actually got to millions of dollars in revenue uh and we actually put two sat satellites into orbit successfully. But the big thing was we didn't I think the biggest so I'm a huge believer in sovereign technology right so I think a future where just SpaceX and China dominate all of humanity space infrastructure is not a good future to be in. uh it's like AI you don't want
1:13:16this open AI anthropic to rule all of humanity's AI that's a pretty bad outcome so I think the other 80% of have a say in that future and the second thing also is I think the biggest space companies in the US and China have already been founded right I think there's so much competition going after these big in customers like the US military or the PLA in in Chinese v variant uh but like space is a field where incubent advantage matters so much and that the best move to do uh might be
1:13:45just going after everyone else, going after all of these countries that traditionally haven't been prioritized by space companies and that's what we're doing.
1:13:54Amazing. Well, congratulations and thanks for coming on and breaking it down.
1:13:58Yeah, very cool. Great to meet you.
1:13:59Have a great rest of your demo day.
1:14:00Goodbye.
1:14:01Cheers.
1:14:02Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And I'm also going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest, Alfredo Gonzalez
1:14:29from A coming on in just a minute. Just a minute. There are so many good iPhone duo reactions. The toughest thing for Apple's marketing team, the sequel.
1:14:41They're going to call it the iPhone Apple Duo 2. Is it not the iPhone Duo?
1:14:47It is the iPhone Duo, right? It's not the Apple Duo. It's not a setup.
1:14:50iPhone Duo.
1:14:51iPhone Duo 2. iPhone DO 3. That's going to be it's going to be a mouthful. They never did. They don't have iPhone Air 2 yet, do they? It's just iPhone Air and then they just stopped it. They haven't refreshed it yet.
1:15:05Air Max, iPhone Air Max 95. They'll get there in 94 years, something like that. Well, anyway, uh we have our next guest in the room. Let's bring in Alfredo from OM building a personal research lab around individual patients.
1:15:22Alfredo, how are you?
1:15:23I like where this is going. I like the oneliner.
1:15:26Thank you so much for having us.
1:15:28Thanks for hopping on the show. Congrats on a great demo day. Uh introduce yourself and the company. Yeah. So, a little bit about me, uh, we're our team is essentially biomedical researchers that have been dedicated to just improving patients health outcomes for the last decade.
1:15:43And we realize that there's a huge gap right now with the resources that patients and clinicians have as far as being able to go really deep into their data and ultimately understand the biology of their tumor and their diseases.
1:15:58And that's what OMA does. We're laying down the infrastructure to be able to essentially have a whole team of LLM and AI agents that are supporting patients and clinicians with their care, helping decoding their specific disease, their biology, and finding the not just the ideal therapeutic path, but additional therapies that would have been missed otherwise. So that's kind of through doctors. Like if I have a tumor, I go to a doctor, they biopsy it, send
1:16:26it off to a lab. There's some raw data. The doctor might be interpreting that for me, having a conversation for me, but they might also give me a report from you or access to an app from you.
1:16:36How does how do I see the results here?
1:16:40Fantastic question. I I appreciate you did your homework there. That that's that's definitely much more knowledge than most people have, but yeah. So, as of right now, the way that the medical system works is they do take your sample and they do these very limited sequencing panels, typically about 50 to 500 genes.
1:16:56Yeah.
1:16:57Our our whole gene space is about 20,000 plus genes. Sure. Right. So, it's trying to debug and not having access to the whole codebase, right? And to be able to fully do this, it's a fairly it's knowledge intensive work. But now in the area era of LMS and protein models, that's where instead of having one single person that could do all this, you have a whole team of agents that can do that deep dive. So So there are labs out there that can do the full sequence. Uh you might advise a
1:17:25doctor to pick one of those labs because it's not just going to be more data. It's going to be more data that's actually actionable thanks to your platform. Uh yeah. So our platform is that missing link that helps the helps the patients the clinicians go deeper because as of right now what they have is these very static reports.
1:17:43Sure.
1:17:44Right. So if they're not dynamic enough to be able to keep up with the pace of discovery generally or do discovery in real time for the patients.
1:17:51Yeah.
1:17:52So do you have a pretty typical business model like u insurance reimbursements or like the clinic will pay for this as a service or is there something else uh going on? Great question. So right now is direct to patient, direct to consumer or direct to a a sponsor. Um ultimately though, you know, there has been so much research showing out that the earlier you do do the sequencing and the informatics, you actually can significantly improve the median life
1:18:22expectancy of patients, but also reduce the cost on insurance payers. So it's definitely something where we already seeing the signs of insurance starting to cover actual insurance cover sequencing for recurrences and advanced tumors in most developed countries, right? And you starting to see already how insurance the tailwinds are there. Insurance will eventually cover this because ultimately it is cheaper for the payer insurance and you're also improving life expectancy.
1:18:48So yeah, what is the biggest bottleneck right now to AI progress in cancer detection in medicine?
1:18:58Um, honestly I think it's the infrastructure. So it's a fairly huge data science problem, right? I think we have these legacy systems that are built around megabytes of patient data outside of imaging but the genomic sequencing you're talking about hundreds like 200 gigabytes 30 to 200 gigabytes like it's a significant data science problem so the infrastructure is not set up yet for these systems to fully take advantage of it and that's in a sense what we're also
1:19:25setting up.
1:19:28Very cool. What uh what kind of traction did you are you sharing at demo day? Oh, so we have launched almost a month now ago and we are at 319K MRR uh with over 150 patients that have crazy bang.
1:19:48Oh, congratulations.
1:19:49You got to lead with the the ARR number. You know, pick pick the bigger number. I thought you were going to say 319. Uh you had me in the first half. It was good. No, it's Well, congratulations. I'm sure it'll be a successful demo day.
1:20:04Thank you so much. Yeah, and it's it's it's good to be able to help patients and their families and help improve the health outcomes for everyone. So, thank you so much and for the support.
1:20:12That's exciting.
1:20:12Great to meet you, Alfredo.
1:20:13Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
1:20:16Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Okay, we got through demo day. We got to go over to tennis. Tennis, tennis, tennis. There was a match that ended at 3:30 a.m.
1:20:35and people are not happy about it. The new the the Wall Street Journal's headline is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 3:33 a.m. It's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 3:33 a.m. isn't cool. It's ridiculous. Um, what what happened? And Bill Aman loved it. He said, "One of the greatest tennis matches ever, and very few got to see it live. This needs to be fixed now. It's
1:21:03unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors in the sports." What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change? Start the game earlier or cut it off entirely if it keeps going.
1:21:14Uh yeah. So, I'm I'm trying to figure out why why this ever was uh is or was a thing. I uh hopefully the journal article can can break it down, but I watched a little bit of this game. I went to bed. It was uh Yeah, I think I went went to bed at It was actually a later night. I went to bed around 11.
1:21:34Um but the game was going at well past 3. Ben Shelton, who actually won the match. It was an upset uh was hitting 146 mph serves at at uh at Carlos. Carlos at one point was shoeing off the um the the camera crew because they were filming him and he was throw like actively like going to throw up like he he was like pushing it so hard that he was going to throw up into into a towel. So
1:22:03uh really really crazy.
1:22:05Um anyways, uh Wall Street Journal says, "Sometimes this glorious sport can't get out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience. were supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Felton took the second set. I do actually have a family member that did exactly that, like blowout second set. They were like, "All right, like we're good.
1:22:29We're good." And it ended up being this incredible game. Okay.
1:22:32The US Open has long cultivated the idea that the Wii hours are part of its identity as much of as much a part of the formula as the $23 honeydeuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke wafting in from a nearby park.
1:22:45Even uh ESPN fains enthusiasm for the opera midnight when it would never schedule a tentpole like the Iron Bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis?
1:22:57Uh, okay. How many 3:30 a.m. finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo uh on your back long after quitting time. The subway is 24/7 theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn. There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 5:45 a.m. It's zany, but Alcarz versus Shelton isn't a corn beefed sandwich at
1:23:24an allnight diner.
1:23:27This sounds like AI slop. It's a marquee showcase for No, I I I've been reading this and I think I think it's just like fun turns.
1:23:34No, it's it's good. Uh, it's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of US attention it can get and it got buried like a Tom Snyder sitdown with Buddy Hackit. Even people in Hawaii were like, "This Alcarez Shelton match is running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate." Okay, I'm sorry.
1:23:53A lot of a lot of a lot of uh We're going to have to run this through Pangalism.
1:23:59Yeah, this isn't a routine to celebrate.
1:24:01This is when someone needs to step in and scream, "What are we doing?" You know, I found two new AI phrases. Uh I don't remember both of them. One of them is uh in our increasingly online world when someone's writing about uh online culture or something that happened on the internet or like with the boom of social media. Like there's two phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using
1:24:30this phrase that got baked into the LLM and then now it's getting spit back at people and so a lot of people are turning away from the phrase in our increasingly online world. So avoid that one too. I guess Shane says nighttime. You wouldn't understand that. It's a New York thing.
1:24:47Yeah. It's funny cuz I feel like you can maintain the the mystique of the the US Open by just having games wrap up around midnight. Like it's still very much nighttime. Like it's dark out, you know?
1:25:00Mhm.
1:25:01People are sleeping.
1:25:03Um anyways, uh definitely seems just incredibly rough and and unfair to the to the players.
1:25:09Mhm. This has happened in in UFC a few times um where the the in order to hit a US time zone for the pay-per-view, the actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6:00 a.m.
1:25:23where they are, which is just Imagine waking imagine one going to sleep at like 10:00 knowing that you have to wake up and get in a death match at 6:00 a.m.
1:25:34Sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know, just try to try to try to be because it starts at 6, so you got to get warmed up.
1:25:43Like the whole event is starting at at probably midnight. But then I guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag. Like get there on your schedule and just treat it like it's a 6 p.m. fight for whatever your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this, Chairman Burb Bernani? You can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for like 20 years in a row and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight and people call you
1:26:11psychotic.
1:26:13I think it's fine to eat the same dinner every night for a month.
1:26:15What's wrong with being a psycho? I used to I used to do Yeah, chicken and rice.
1:26:20Chicken and rice every night.
1:26:21Yeah, for months for years.
1:26:24Yeah, that's a good point. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries with great customer service, and they got more. Um, anything else in the timeline before we get out of here?
1:26:37We do have uh to cut the show a little bit short today. We have a little bit of family stuff going on, but uh we will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. We have a great show. Alex Heath is joining us. He has some big news. He's becoming a venture capitalist, putting some money on the line, finally risking in the markets every day.
1:26:59Putting putting down his Capital Journalist hat, hanging it up.
1:27:03No, he's keeping the hat.
1:27:04He's keeping the hat. He's keeping the Capital Journalist hat, but he's also going to be ripping some checks.
1:27:10Okay.
1:27:11Ripping occasional taking some flyers.
1:27:13And uh yeah, we got Sager and Jetty coming on tomorrow. I'm sure we'll talk about that AI safety stuff because he's been a friend who's been evolving and hopefully we get an update on Sagbet features.
1:27:24Definitely have been enjoy seeing the uh Sagerbet uh references in the chat on and off. But leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m.
1:27:39Pacific. Sharp.
1:27:40We love you.
1:27:41Goodbye.
1:27:43Have a great rest of your day. Have the best Thursday afternoon of your entire life.
1:27:47Goodbye.
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One qualifying external-resource endorsement appears, though the transcript does not give an exact episode title:
- Resource: an untitled Joe Rogan podcast/interview appearance featuring Daniel from AI 2027; creator/host identified in the transcript: Joe Rogan. The hosts call it “an interesting listen,” say Daniel “makes a lot of good points,” and praise his ability to explain AI-risk issues to a broad audience.
- Recommender and context: the show’s hosts, while discussing AI 2027 and public awareness of existential risk, give this positive endorsement; it is an implicit recommendation rather than a direct “listen to this” imperative.
- Takeaway: the appearance is presented as an accessible explanation of AI risk, but the hosts caution that Joe Rogan’s UFO and remote-viewing tangents could blur the distinction between concrete X-risk claims and more speculative topics.
- Candidate lines: L16–L18. The exact episode title and Daniel’s full creator/guest identity are not supplied, so they should not be filled in from outside the transcript.
Other media references do not qualify: Mountain Head is explicitly criticized as not a good film, while the Luca Ferrari episode is forthcoming self-promotion; the Wall Street Journal article and other films are merely discussed or quoted.