If you do want to sell secondary, there's one neat trick, one neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you want to sell 10 million a secondary, $100 million a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do before. So you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out. She's selling out. That's not good, that's not a good sign. So what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So you get like $100 million of debt. Then you sell the secondary, sell another hundred million of secondary, pay off the debt and then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt. And everyone assumes it's like oh, they think it's credit card debt, they think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was an equity backed hundred million dollar line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part. But you can still get away with 100 mil out of the gate. It's possible. I wonder if anyone is doing it. Might be happening. Who knows? Who knows? Anyway, what? Semi analysis raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to Watts. 50 gigawatts. Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot. That's a lot of, a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this. Right? Did Gerstner say it was too bullish? Something like that. It seems like Semianalysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of the Semianalysis said so we looked at the data, they looked at the satellite photos. I mean a lot of these things like they were papered along. If the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not going to stop people from actually pulling out of the. I sent you this, I sent you this. Would you say this morning, would you send Rev Cap, which is Semi analysis saying if you're worried about demand air, don't be because there's going to be even more supply than you realize. Of course Semi Analysis is also saying that, that they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about air growth over the last two weeks that semianalysis is coming out and saying don't worry, there's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months. Yeah, yeah, I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though the Nasdaq sold off 5% last week, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks, we're not building this thing. Maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound. But right now it's not that it's full speed ahead. It's just like it's a train. You can't slow it down that quickly. It's just going to keep going. On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to their semi personal prosumer life, shopping and all, all the little agentic features. Now I think the tech is incredible. I've been using dot a ton and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do and it just sends me a little message being like, hey, you asked for this and you should follow up because they said that they would do it. You used it to cancel your roadster order too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like little things like that, it's just a better interface. I love, I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing. No cookie pop ups, no ads. It's truly like the best consumer experience. There's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that. But as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, Instead of having 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and scroll. Find the fact it's so much better to just have it, oh put it all together with the exact quotes, I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is like how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like there's that sort of bearish take that, even that the agentic commerce market. If you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40 billion market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify. No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks, automating certain roles or extending the capabilities of people. Right. Because we're in this era of obviously there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours talking about somebody having a 26 hour day. Yeah. Because they need to stay up. She's changing and manipulating time because they need to be online and available to keep their agents. Are you saying, are you saying she's crazy? I'm not saying because she's not crazy. She's not crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day. That's right. Not 26, but anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be. She's a special case, she's an entrepreneur. Yeah. The question is like for the 90% of Americans that aren't in. But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that one. We're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption but, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with a capabilities increase. And then what you're saying is like the other 99% of businesses, how are they going to be, how is their spending going to ramp? Will it ramp beyond the, you know, 2100, $200 a month subscription? Yeah, yeah. I mean in the business side, like the Jensen take of like, you know, a software Engineer who makes 300k should also get 300k in tokens or something like that seems to be happening. Basically it's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient, very efficiently. And like at a high roi, it is less clear for a marketer. For a salesperson, it's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be if you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in inference, like is there something that they could do with the best models to actually get generate $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise? Like, like those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like people are using the LLMs. No. And I'm, I'm just saying we don't pay for all this cat like the Capex is not going to be paid for by consumer. Consumer. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. So you're saying that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B2B beyond what it is. It has to 10x. So, like the small company that has basically everyone on a $200 a month plan and they're maybe spending $100,000 on maybe 10mil top line, they need to go to a million dollars of inference a year. Even though they're at a even though they're a $10 million business. Maybe they go to 15 million of top line for the speaking of 1 million dollar budgets, what we got, Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is.

Over the timeline, he broke his silence. Nathan with Katie. That's true. That's true. That is actually what happened. Yeah, he did. But, yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be. You can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this. There's a little bit of a. Like, you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like, oh, maybe she wasn't. Maybe she's not that bad. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times, potentially. Like, maybe. Maybe she's more of a. Some people might be like, she's bad, but she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. And. Yeah, and there's this. I don't know, there's some sort of, like, suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And I just, I just can't. I just can't stop thinking about, like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud. Like, it just seems like, like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0. Totally. And the whole time I was like almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught. The way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's, it's so, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she, she's making this point was like, we've been. We have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things. And like we test all this stuff and she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up. There have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category. It's like, it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical. We invented something. It takes information and stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product. Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry and they've made boxes that look Kind of like a Theranos box. And it runs a test, and they don't go to prison for 10 years. Yeah, they don't go to prison. And they. And they. And it's just. It's such a. It's such a tried and true playbook that it's actually like an industry that's boring at this point. These companies get funded, no one reads their press releases, and then they get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, congrats. You made $500 million doing another medical device. We know the playbook at this point. You get some intellectual property, you build the device, set up the supply chain, figure out the chemistry, get the FDA application in. It takes a decade for the FDA to actually approve it. You probably saw the company before then. Let's. Like, there is such an established playbook that there's specific VCs that just focus on this, and they're just like, oh, yeah, we'll just do these deals all the time. We just do them, and then, yeah, we sell them to this company. And this. This biotech company just loves buying these. And it happens all the time. And she never just says, like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm gonna be able to build a box that tests for something like this happens all the time. Instead, it's like. It's like I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not just admit what's. What's really happening on the field, which is that box diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. And it really, really frustrates me. As you can probably tell, Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said. One of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly where what I was picking up on. So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of the Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it. But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field there is, medical technology. When people ask how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in and she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so, yeah, it's so odd because there are a ton of founders who build medical devices and sell them and raise money and do all these different things, but they're boring businesses because touch consumers directly. Like you go to the hospital, they might say, oh yeah, you have a cough. But we're going to run it for some bacterial, some, you know, antibiotic resistant bacterial thing. We're going to take some of your blood and just take off a little piece of the blood and put it in this box to make sure that you don't have this thing. And they'll do this on site. But you never see the brand of the company that runs this because all you care about is like, am I sick or not? Right. And so you might wind up getting the lab test that says like UCLA or USC on it or whatever, you know, whatever medical network you went to. And the doctor is just going to introduce themselves as like Dr. Smith or whatever. They're not going to tell you, oh yeah, by the way, we just ran your blood on this small startup that got acquired by a big tech, big biotech company and it was a great deal and all the investors made money. So you're never going to hear about it even if you use the box. And if you don't, you don't care at all. And so there's other things which is that this is strictly regulated by the fda. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, like what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device, it's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes, like you can't, you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, oh yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the fda. And so by the way, can we do spoilers now? I think so. I think we can assume that everyone listening to this. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Don't wanna hear spoilers. Just leave the stream going. But just turn the audio down. Yeah. And we'll Just talk away. What spoiler do you wanna talk about? So Billy does this side deal. Yeah. To get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what. What that's exactly called. Yeah. Points on the back end. Points on the back end. So he does this thing incredibly good. And then. And then later, after the movie's totally been. Yeah. Like, finished, he decides it's gonna look pretty bad. Backs out. Right. Damage has already been done. Right. Like, he looks. He looks. He doesn't look great. Yeah. And Elizabeth is trying to say, like, oh, I didn't. I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like, the damage was already done, and now the movie is a massive hit, and it's gonna be. Continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. It's something that people will look back and I can see somebody watching it back in. Yeah. I can see watching it back in 10 years and being like, wow, that was a moment. Just because Nathan Fielder's, like, body of work is becoming so iconic. And I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm gonna turn on some Nathan Fielder. Just take me back to the good old days. And. But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy. Do you think it made sense for him to do the side deal? Because she has. She claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So of course she wouldn't want to make. Even if she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. Hmm. So she would want to route it through Billy. It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. In which case it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family. But then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors. That's what I'm saying. I think you might be onto something there. She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding. Yes. And so is your point that if she's in on the deal, sitting there, being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it. That's more tricky from a restitution perspective. Totally. I imagine a judge would be like, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that before. Yeah. A judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't care. I don't care that you didn't. Billy has to, like, go behind her back and make it really public that she's. Yeah, he's going behind her back. Huh? Yeah, good point, good point. So, yeah, the front continues. Potentially interesting. You might be right about the cult classic thing. I mean, I, I, from my perspective, it looked like we were experiencing, like, an absolute box office smash. Like it was taking over the timeline. I would describe it more as, like, a phenomenon. When I think of cult classic, I think of, like, slow burn, like, underappreciated at the box office. And then all of a sudden it becomes really popular. I think it's like, super popular. But, yeah, but I'm still talking to people, like, over this last weekend. I would say, like, Nathan Fielder, Theranos movie, blah, blah, blah. And some people be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I think I remember Therano. Like, there's still people out there that don't. Do you know how it did at the box office? It was not the number one movie this weekend. What was by a factor of two? Street Fighter. See what? See what I mean? See what I mean? Street fighter made $31 million, and you can see everything. Made 15 million. So twice as much money for Street Fighter, which, I mean, I'm sure it's a great movie, but I didn't even know it was happening. Maybe that's a cult classic for me. It seems like something I'd like. I saw, I think, 50 cents in it. It looked awesome when I saw a poster eventually. Also, a whale fall. Whale fall made 8 million. I want to see this movie. This is a horror film about a whale. Seems really cool. Anyway, someone gets swallowed whole by a whale. Spoiler alert. But I think that's in the, in the trailer and the name. Spoiler alert. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So I mean, the wildest part about the whole you can see everything Theranos thing is that one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. But he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos 2.0 and I was like, pushing back, being like, so you should go for, like, a specific diagnostic. Go for, like, do this. Like, I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook made $400 million in a very short amount of time. Like, this is tractable. And then he was like, when did you have this conversation? I talked to him like, last year. I. Okay, yeah, I think it's coming back to me. Yeah, I told you that. So basically, yeah, I remember you were like, yeah, like bearish. Yeah. The story is, is that Elizabeth Holmes came. Came back to X and was posting, like, funny things and was getting like, amplified and going viral. And everyone was like, wow, Elizabeth Holmes. And we were getting pitched to have Billy on the show loosely. So what was going on was that Elizabeth Holmes was being like, so edgy and based on the timeline, everyone was like, wow, like, she's innocent because she, she's actually a great entrepreneur because she's like, funny. And I was like. And I was like, these are two different things. Yeah. Comedy on the timeline does not mean you're a great founder. Often does not. They're not correlated at all. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you're innocent. And so my pitch was, I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I. I want to see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. You'll see like a Martin Shkreli put out a call about a particular quantum computing stock and then you can just wait and you wait six months and you're like, wow, Martin, like, say what you will about what happened in the past, the guy is dialed about analysis of public market companies today. And so that is. So you wanted to see Elizabeth do like a Trevor Milton where no. Tries to invent something new fails, and then now it's just running some random private aviation company. No, I mean, maybe. I don't know. That's kind of what. That's. I haven't read. No, that's kind of what you're saying is. No, no, don't try to. Don't try to like, create something new. Oh, just make a medical device company and do one thing that. So, so, so, so yes and no. Like, yes, probably from a, from an entrepreneurship standpoint, I would be in favor of that. But from a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was, was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve and then watch that happen and be like, oh, wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to. The crazy thing about the movie though I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science related. I completely agree. It was, it was just, it was Billy. That's the point. Learning about mitochondria. Yeah, that's my point. Like, like if, if, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around one simple trick that the medical industry hates. You can actually do that, that happens that like, like this stuff happens if you actually read the literature and you're in tune with the market and what's going on and you could call longs and shorts and, and you could predict different things about what's. How the biotech community is going to evolve. And some of those predictions would be right. And if a lot of them are right, you will be seen as someone who understands the industry. And you can see this with all sorts of people in AI where they post about AI progress and then you just wait a couple of years and you're like, oh yeah, like, like them or don't like them. They were definitely right about the cyber security capabilities of models that five years ago. And so at the very least we got to give them that credit. And I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027, give me your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out. If you're right. The very least, a market map. At the very least a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche or a tier list. A tier list of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah, show me. You're a student of the industry you're operating in, right? Yeah. And so I had put this out there as like, I want to see some real analysis, something that shows you that you're a live player in the industry. And then I did ask the Elizabeth Holmes account to do an interview over the phone on September 5, 2025. So about a year ago. And then I did talk to Billy I think October 17th or something, and it was nothing that didn't come out in the movie. So it all matched. But I was focused much more on the what is the business strategy going forward? Because if it's just the hand wavy, we're gonna do everything all the time. Well, no, in their words, it was Theranos. They're gonna do theranos 2.0. Theranos 2.0. Yeah. Which watching Nathan have that light bulb moment where they're pitching him theranos 2.0 and them not Realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos 2.0 to describe like massive things that they perceive might be massive fraud. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. In another world. Anyway. Yeah, I just also, when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was Diego Ray, co founder of Geneweave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. And it was basically just a lab testing machine. Previously size of a dishwasher at a lab down the street, you shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital. And then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria. They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science, it is hard science, but it's not magic. It's not future sci fi magic. And they basically would have these particles that would make the particular bacteria resistant, the antibiotic resistant bacteria light up, they would glow and then they would shine a light on it and then they would measure the amount of light that came back. And they'd be able to say in this hospital like, okay, you have this particular antibiotic resisting bacteria in this patient. You need to be extra careful about washing your hands. You might need to give them a different antibiotic. There's a whole bunch of different things that can happen. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to two days, everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother and people are going to be a little bit healthier and you're going to sell your company for $425 million, which is exactly what happened. They raised 25 million. It was a great outcome for founders employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by fda. They sold pre, they sold before getting FDA application, getting the FDA approval. But Roche took it through the final step because that's very expensive. But they have a lot of great lawyers on their team to actually move that stuff through and scientists. And so in 2019 it got authorized for the Cobas Vivo DX MRSA test, which is like not gonna be on the stage at TED anytime soon, but it should be. It's like real science. And it actually moved the needle forward. Okay, so. And it was good. The other funny thing about this company is that the name of the particles that they created that actually detect the antibiotic resistant bacteria, they call them smarticles. Smarticles. Which sounds so fraudulent. Going in prison, you're gonna go to prison. But it's like, it's just a normal boring company. No offense. It's a great Company. I love you, Diego. But like, it just, it was never, it was never like, we're gonna solve everything, cure death, and 20 million years in the future. It was just like, look, there's this test that happens normally, happens down the street, costs a lot of money. Now it'll happen in lockdown. Okay. Boom. So again, during the film, a fire broke out in Malibu. I was pretty distracted. So. You mean trying to figure out. Trying to figure out what was going down, how serious it was, etc. That being said, I came away from the movie, right, feeling like, okay, Sonny had done some side deal and got way. No, no, no. Sonny Balwani, the other co founder. I, My impression was that he was getting way less jail time. Yeah, Elizabeth, it had been like jail for like 11 years. Yeah. It seemed like Sonny, they were positioning it as, like Sonny was able to pin it on her. He got out, or at least he got a reduced sentence. And you told me afterwards, Sonny is in prison for like 12 years or he had like a. It's about a year long. 12 years, 11 months. Was, was a sentencing. Elizabeth got a 10 year sentence reduced originally from 11 years and three months. So they couldn't even rat on each other. Like, it makes it so much worse in my opinion. Oh, yeah, because you would think that like the prisoner's dilemma, they both ratted on each other and they both went to jail. I mean, maybe, but it just seems like that, like, if one of them had been more elite at deception, they would have been able to say, hey, Sonny, me and you, Elizabeth, Sonny. And the other thing is, we're taking this to the grave. According to the Internet, Sonny didn't sell secondary either. I know that's ridiculous. None of them. They both go down with the ship. They both don't make money. Jaw dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world. Potentially no secondary. Selling 11 billion, doing fraud purely for the love of the game. What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud. Like, it was, it was very clear that like everyone there, Sonny heard, they knew it didn't work. They didn't have the revenue profits. That's really like the Ted entrepreneur. They go to prison for the love of the game. For the love of the game. Insane. Just, just, just for the vision. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. Insane. Anyway, let 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.

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