NEWSMAX

Maybe the downstream critique of the teal monopoly thesis is that it's actually really hard to go start a business that is in the social networking category or in the online commerce category. It's just harder to do that. And so maybe people. Some people read 0 to 1 and they said, hey, I gotta start a company. But then other people read 0 to 1 and said, like, hey, I better not set my sights too high, because realistically, how am I going to compete in, you know, some of these monopolistic categories that have been truly dominated by the hyperscalers? It's going to be hard for me to go zero to one in those categories. And so I need to maybe find a smaller market. I don't know. Maybe it's a trend. One of the things that surprised me about them is they don't really have anyone that they're really following or looking up to. They're very much their own people, and they're kind of making it up as they go in. They're writing the rules kind of based on what they think makes sense. They don't have. Like, when I grew up, I had two people. I have two CEOs. Steve Jobs, Jerry Garcia. Those are my two heroes that I tried to base my behavior around. And they were my Coruscants. These guys don't have Coruscants. The other thing that's interesting about all of them is like, be yourself. Everyone else is taken. They're all very, very, very different. Homo sapiens, like Vlad Tenev is very, very, very different from Parker at Ripley. Anton from Lovable is very different than mati from 11 labs. They are all quite unique, which I like to see that. And they're their own people. They have a lot of agency. Are you interviewing. Interviewing anybody that runs their company remotely? Nobody's doing remote. Everybody is in the office. Remote is dead. And Everybody talks about 9, 9, 6. I think there's a lot more talk about 9, 9, 6 than walk on 9, 9, 6. I don't think very many people are actually doing it. The CEOs are, though. Every CEO I talk to is under. Like I say, what's your stress?

Timeline. Not one shot. I suppose one of the founders of Chad Ide says he quoted my post and said really great post. However, it doesn't apply to Chad Ide. We're five steps ahead. Different plane of thinking. But really great posts are reposting for visibility. Nice post, lil bro. Nice post little bro. I want to say I think that's a pretty hilarious I did sneak a peek at your post during the show and I don't think you got called Unk as bad as I expected. You made it sound like you were getting destroyed. You did very well. You got over a thousand likes and people are like, oh, you're taking shots at Gary Tan. No, Gary Tan chimed in. He said good points, big thanks. A lot of people did identify that you were rage baiting the rage baiters, which is funny. I had to use their own tricks against them. Yeah, you did. I think in this case you used the tricks for good and I think it's a great post and I enjoy. But maybe we have to have the there's always room for follow up. Maybe we'll talk to Gary Tan later this week. We'll get him on the show. Think about how he's thinking about the future of yc. Maybe we'll have the founder of Chad Labs, Chad Ide. Whatever. We will also be demoing the product at some point. I believe we'll be getting a preview of what the actual product is. If there's something awesome behind the scenes, we're going to tell you what what that is. Let's also just love responding and being. Like, yep, actually it doesn't apply to us. We're five steps ahead or five steps ahead. I mean that is just a complete trump card. How do you respond to that? Levels, levels. I think he wins. Much like Wander Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views. Hotel graded men's dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

Your bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I want to do a lightning round. We got a bunch of posts. We're going to try and go through them as fast as possible. First, Brian Johnson does did confirm. This is from Brian Gorell. Brian Johnson confirms he was not one shotted by a recent magic mushroom trip. You said if Brian Johnson comes out of this five gram trip, he says yeah, we're going to conquer death. We're still on then he's certainly a true believer. What do you say? He replied to TVPN's post. He said we're going to conquer death. So Brian Johnson is feeling good. Looking good. Back on the timeline. Not one shot. I suppose one of the founders of Chad idea.

What happened there? Tell me the full story because I think that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, so. And by the way, I'm, you know, also based in Miami now for the last five years. So, you know, not only did I learn a lot of stuff from Ken about finance and business, but also that South Florida is a good area. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, so, so the, I guess, you know, the thing with my time at Citadel and you know, so I was 18 when I finished Harvard and actually even while a student. Let's give it up for finishing Harvard at 18. Congratulations. Continue. What's that account? Like VCs congratulating themselves or we're congratulating you. You just said a fact. You just said a fact. But yeah, so. And actually, like even at school I did some trading and was working on kind of a side project with two friends around options. And so, you know, so I was doing that and that didn't quite get off the ground. But I got to know the team at Citadel through, you know, essentially like the research firm. So, you know, it's not, oh wow. You know, it's not like Ken personally gave me a call or something, but I got to know the team and they wanted me to join. And then kind of towards the end of the process, Ken got involved and spent a bunch of time with me, you know, to tell me more about what their high level goals are at Citadel and their strategy and why it would be a good fit for me and kind of making sure that I'm comfortable joining them. And I guess without going into too much details, I mean, he made it a very attractive proposition for me and was pretty involved, you know, the first couple of weeks, especially of my work there. And yeah, you know, he's to this day someone I thoroughly look up to. And yeah, I do hope he's gonna lineage here. There's just fascinating lineage here. Obviously Ken Griffin went to Harvard, was trading in his dorm room. It took him a couple extra. He didn't, he didn't graduate at 18, so you sort of mogged him on that front. But. But then of course he had a deep relationship with Ro Robinhood and Robinhood Markets came in and invested in this round. And so there's a whole bunch of full circle moments. I did want to quickly ask if you think that the industry fully learned its lesson from ftx because I feel like I've seen some chatter over the last few weeks around various exchanges saying, no, your funds are frozen, but don't worry, we're working on it. And it's, you know, maybe sending some alarm bells. Right. So October 10th was an interesting moment for the space, I think.

Okay. We have this crazy RPO that's going on all over the tech industry. What was your reaction to coreweave's quarter? Jim Cramer was going pretty hard. What did Kramer say? He was just like. He was blackpilling. It was. Yeah, it was just a funny interview. He's like what's going on? What's going on? Because they doubled, they doubled revenue but they sold off. Yeah, well I mean they sold us a ton in the last month. I think year last like 20, about a. Yeah, 26% something like that. But Kramer was saying like why are you relying on a bitcoin miner to like help fill your capacity? Are you sure they can deliver? And he was talking about Core Scientific, which core we've attempted to acquire. It got rejected but I know it was Core Respond platinum on cluster max. That's all I need to know. Buy and hold. Get lost. Yeah. And the CEO was saying like, yeah and like he didn't name semianalysis because I think the CNBC audience is maybe not familiar yet but he was saying like we're platinum rated. We're platinum rated. Oh he said platinum rated. Oh that's amazing. I love it. Yeah, I mean it's in the earnings call semi analysis mentioned I think three times. But that's definitely. Yeah, we went into this the, we're. Very excited for this. This is big. Yeah, I think we like we went into this. Jeremy and the data center guys, Rake Dan, they put out a note earlier in the day to the Core Research subscribers that the Core weave is at risk of short term delays in their capex but not to their revenue which is driven by the data center partner Core Scientific. So yeah, when you're relying on somebody to add 250megawatts and you know they're only going to get you 150 by the end of the year, that changes your guidance on CapEx. And I think the, you know this is like, yeah look, this is the, the reality of the industry right now which is that when projects are so big, measured in the hundreds of megawatts, small delays or small changes in a plan can really impact like short term financial guidance that, that people have in place. I don't like personally I don't think this changes any of the fundamentals of like core Waves engineering or a lot of the like experience and what customers they have signed. But we saw the same like a very similar reaction when, when the information put on an article about Oracle having a delays. Right. Yeah. And you know I think people are people who don't know about the data center industry or, or things like this. They, they see things like, oh yeah, these, these GPUs take a month to come online after they get installed and they're starting to depreciate the asset, but they're not generating revenue yet. Like, what's going on? It's like, yeah, that's, that's typical. I mean, you, it's completely standard. That's business. Yeah, stuff takes. I mean, you know, maybe US Federal government is, is different, but in my previous job, we tried to hand over these supercomputers. The US Federal government would take like a year and a half to pass accepted. But at the same time, if investors aren't aware of that and then they learn that for the first time, they could be surprised. And so that could be something of what we're seeing in the gyrations in the public markets. I suppose it makes sense. I think there was a broad recognition that the Bitcoin miners have an uphill battle to figure out how to run these facilities when compared to established players like in equity.

I don't think beer gives anybody an edge. I think it helped me connect with some employees along the way, for sure, particularly salespeople. What do you think about co CEOs? Yay or nay? Okay. I think Sandhill Road is very negative on this, except on stewards. We have co stewardship. Yes. We can talk about that, too. But I talked about this on one of the POD episodes with Vlad Tenev. He was a co CEO for like, the first seven or eight years of the company, and I was very surprised to hear that. And he was very positive on it. I think you can do it. I think it's a little dangerous. You better know the person very well and be able to finish your sentences. Like my co founder, Dharmesh and I, we weren't co CEOs, but we ran it like a partnership and we thought of it like a partnership, and the employees thought of it like a partnership. If we called ourselves co CEOs, that would have actually worked quite fine. That makes sense. Yeah. Want some other things that surprised me? Yeah.

These chips for five or six years in the data centers themselves. Hmm. I wonder, do you have a reaction? So, Ben Thompson's been writing about the AI buildout and the bubble, potentially the benefits of a bubble. And one of his bull cases for a bubble was basically that in previous bubbles, you get a glut of IT infrastructure, or even just steam engines or railroads. But his example was dark fiber, and the idea was if you overbuild well, then you get a bunch of extra infrastructure that you can use and it's cheap. And his counter to the AI build out was that depreciated H1 hundreds just aren't as valuable as fully depreciated fiber lines. But I just don't know if that's true. I feel like if there's a ton of depreciated H1 hundreds out there in 10 years from now, I think there's still something useful that you can do with that in the same way that you can push bits across fiber lines. It won't be super intelligence, but there will be a base load of generic knowledge retrieval or just, hey, people just want to chat. And the fact that it's so cheap now because the assets are fully depreciated means that you can just have a chatbot in interface, every single conversation in every app, and it'll just be so much. It's sort of like a Jevons paradox thing. I'm not saying that the economics will stay the same, the margins will go way down, but you. There will be a benefit. It's not like these things just disappear after five years. They don't just break. Yeah, no, they don't just break. I think there are some new. Your comparison makes sense, but there are some nuances compared to the fiber line. Just to say that if new GPUs come along from other providers that are so much more performant than the current ones, then at some level, it doesn't make sense to keep the power turned on for the old one because the operating expense is too much. Like, we estimate this at 30 cents per kilowatt. So if the bottom of the H100 price gets below 30 cents or somewhere close to it, you're probably better ripping them out and replacing them with something new. Even if, you know, for the car analogy, this is still a beater that somebody else could drive for the price of gas and insurance, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to Jordi about it, and I was saying, like, there is a world where to just put in really concrete terms that most business people might understand, just if your job is you have a Diet Coke business, you deliver Diet Cokes, you have a gas car that delivers the Coca Cola and you have the opportunity to switch to an electric vehicle, you might do that because bringing down your total cost of ownership, your annual OPEX would be great. But sometimes companies just don't want to spend the capex to actually do that. And so I'm wondering if there's a world where the GPUs get traded down to a point where people are like, yeah, the OPEX is higher, but I'm still running it for this niche use case. There are still mainframes that are running, there are still on premise cloud, there's companies that haven't fully moved to the cloud. And I'm just wondering how long some of these GPU racks might just be sitting around where someone gets it cheap and they're just like, yeah, that's the thing that filters every invoice that we get and it just runs and it runs Grok 2 on it or whatever and it's fine, it's good enough. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I put in the article to Azure's announcement from September.

More insight on the depreciation. Comments? Yeah, definitely. So there's a section of the article that kind of goes through this. I think you guys asked me this on Monday. I didn't have a properly prepared answer because I actually didn't know what Michael Burry had been tweeting about and kind of talking about with this. So maybe for background, Burry is claiming that the hyperscalers, like including Meta, but also Azure on Oracle, Google, are artificially boosting their earnings by extending the useful life of the IT assets. You can see from 2020, when they would report their numbers. These IT assets, like servers, switches, storage, would be three to five years on a life cycle and they've now extended that to five, five and a half or six, all the way across the board. In some ways, I think this is a bit of a, you know, game of catch up. If one provider does it, everybody else has to follow suit. Sure. But we go into detail in the article about, like, what this actually means and, you know, Burry's argument that this is understating the amount of or it's boosting their earnings, it's understating the amount of depreciation that's going on these GPUs is really predicated on Nvidia's comments that the product cycle is now two to three years long. Sure. But that's on the development of a new chip. From my perspective, depreciation, although there is the economic question about how much value can you get out of the tokens that you sell generated by an A100 in five years? That's a good question, but that's not how we think about depreciation. If you buy a mechanical arm to put a glass windshield on a car at an automotive factory, you're just wondering how long until that mechanical arm breaks. And. And I'm sure there's been immense pressure on Nvidia to let the chips not burn out in two years. Like, you know, they probably have done. A lot of work. It's a very expensive chip. It's a very expensive rack. Like, is it that crazy to assume that. That the 50th percentile might be five years now? No. And there's basically no precedent to say that a chip would fail or wear out, as you're describing it, in two to three years. Like, there's the hardware OEMs, they have contracts that are standard for three to five years and they offer extended warranties for six and seven years. The big supercomputers in the world that run as a total system where even individual servers kind of get life cycled. They run for five, six, seven, some of them up to 10 years in production. Right. Not to say the years that it takes to actually turn this thing on. And these are the environments that use liquid cooling and of the latest and greatest chips that are actually, you know, similar in comparison to the GB 300. And then even if you go to the providers directly and you try to rent a V100 today, which was launched in 2017. Right. Seven, eight years ago, I can still rent V1 hundreds in data centers from providers like Amazon. I mean, there's plenty of a 1/ hundreds for sale right now. So there's, there's nothing to me, you know, the, the proof of this argument would be predicated on Nvidia releasing chips that so drastically outperform the current generation in two to three years that all hyperscalers everywhere are so incentivized to go through another capex cycle, they got to buy all new chips and rip out all the existing ones. And we're still so power constrained that they have to do all that. And that seems like a much farther leap than saying we might be able to run these chips for five or six years in the data centers themselves. Hmm. I, I wonder, do you have a reaction so.

Promote that. We put out a companion article that comes out with the interview. Oh, fantastic. Was in there. He's being called out by some other people on Twitter for hunting around in the background while they're interviewing the Azure teams. Wait, Dylan Patel? You mean we got to go through frame by frame and find him? Like, oh, he's going to go look because he's actually break down. What does a Dylan Patel scoop look like when you're on site and security turns their back? Is he looking for like, oh, instead of this Nvidia switch, they're using AMDs. I've seen him call stuff out where it's like, wait a minute, this company is using a different company's technology? Is that what he's looking for? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if he was looking for the credo cables or anything. So those are obvious with the purple housing. But if you look at his last tweet, he just said, to be clear, While Scott was explaining the data center, he was super intently focused on figuring out the fiber patch panel config. We know about some of the. So we know about some providers that have gone out and bought cables, like 20,000, 40,000 cables, and then they mess up the config of the patch panel and they end up finding it too short and they just have to send them back and get all new cables, which is like, not a negligible amount of money. These cables are like at least a thousand bucks a piece. They're really heavy. We've been talking about internally, how many cables can you bench? Okay, there we go. There we go. Yeah. Dylan Patel seems like a bit of the fox who in Microsoft is the hen house. And they really shouldn't have let me.

You want to know some surprises? Yeah, please. Yeah. Okay. A couple things. There's a breed of CEO that I see a lot of these days that I call a five tool CEO. Now I'm a big baseball guy and there's such a thing in baseball as a five tool player. Someone who can hit, someone who can hit for power, someone who can catch, somebody who can throw, and someone who can run at elite level. Very, very rare in baseball. Who's an example, who's an example of a, of a modern five tool player? I mean, a six tool player is Shohei Otani. Okay. But he can do, he, he can actually run, he can hit, he can hit for power, he can throw, he can catch. Yeah, he's very talented and very unusual. Cat. Alex Bregman's one of those on the red. Some red. Subscribe. But there's a bunch of these folks who kind of remind me of that in, in the software industry where they've got vision, they can code, they can design, they can recruit and they can sell their product. That's, I think, was pretty rare in software. They're all over the place now. They're getting funded and I work with a bunch of them. Just a few examples like Parker's one for sure. Brett Taylor for sure from Sierra's one. Gabe Stengel from Rogo. Kind of a new company's rippings one Mati from eleven Labs. I have no idea how to say his last name. Kareem from Clay, Dara from Delphi, like on and on and on. I'm super impressed with the new breed that's coming out and how talented they are. Who do you think the Barry Bonds of.

Pilot mode. It's better than Atlas or Comet. Okay, Interesting. Maybe they don't need a copy then. They're good. But there has been a debate over. Over how hard of questions we ask. Is it hard? Is it a hard question to ask Mustafa at Mai, you know, what type of model he's training, or should we ask some sort of other hard question? I wanted to practice some hard questions. I think we should start asking harder questions. I have some hard questions here for you. And I think if we practice, we'll become better interviews. Are you guys ready for these? We just started hitting guests with, like, insane math. I wouldn't call them insane. I do have one here for Tyler. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. He's looking around. It's a simple yes or no question. Every even number. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Just answer the question. It's a yes or no question. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? It's an unanswerable question. Of course it is. The Goldbach equation or the Goldbach conjecture? There's also. Can there exist an algorithm that decides whether any computer program will halt or run forever? It's the halting problem. It's a possible question. What will OpenAI's valuation be in 2035? 100 trillion. 100 trillion. Oh, you answered that quickly. We'll come back to that in 10 years. See if that was a hard question. What's the nicest thing ever done by Adolf Hitler? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Karp was on a roll yesterday. Some of those. Those clips were. Here's a question we should ask a lot of founders that. Come on here. Does your dad know you're bankrupt? I think if we hit them with that, people will be like, that's a hard question. That's a hard question. Here's one for Tyler. Prove God exists. There was the Godel. What is truth? That's a hard question. Have you ever done illegal drugs? Tyler, answer the question. No. Answer the question. Good answer. Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question. I'm My favorite shots. What is time? I like these hard questions. Okay, Jordan at semianalysis is down to hop on.

Mm. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream, reach your audience wherever they are. There is, there's this post by Shield Monot here who says met a very successful founder who said, I chose Fund Blank because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how AUM weighted brain rot or AUM weighted Slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. Like if you put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the Internet and be like, we are the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent in your face company. Even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not gonna be able to say like no, no, no, no. 99% of my investments are just like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely or like actually trying to improve developer productivity. Or like 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway, like good businesses. But 1% of them, I took a flyer. 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets 1,000 times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're gonna be known as the Slop fund. So like you need to be careful about that because. Because the nature of the Internet is that, is that a viral rage. Baity video can get a thousand times more views than your latest bet on a legal services that might actually be helping improve lawyers efficiency or something like that, you know, so like in terms of branding, part of it, it's real, It's a real. YC has always had, you know, one of YC's challenges as an institution.

To the most. The most powerful AI data center in the world. I feel like everyone's been saying they have the most powerful AI data center. It appears that open that Microsoft has leapfrogged Colossus 2. Well, I think maybe this is wrong, But I think Colossus 2 will be bigger. It's just currently it's not big like this is the current. Current biggest. It's the current biggest. Okay. Okay. Okay, great. So you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview before we started the show. Can you give me some takeaways? Where should people. Are there any timestamps that we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it? Yeah, I wrote a bunch of notes so maybe some of these aren't as interesting. But before you take us through those notes, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. GitHub, of course, is a Microsoft product. Yeah. Okay. So I think broadly, I would say it was pretty enlightening. I usually think of Satya as being very non AGI pills. And I think this was a bit of an update. So there's, there's a bunch of reasons for this, I think so. So early on he like in the very. I think this was one of the first questions, he's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things. This is Satya saying this, there's cognitive like enhancement. So this is like your like tools or this is your autocomplete. This is your copilot. Yeah, copilot. Stuff like this. And then there's like the Guardian angel. And this is like the very AGI pill where if you, I mean it's like kind of lording over everything. And so he actually does say these two things are very possible. And then we kind of move on. He says, copilot and actual pilot. Yeah, basically. Okay. So the next thing he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing. And he says, I think he's broadly more focused on, at least in the short term, on this subscription kind of thing. Right. Which like he makes a big emphasis on this. Right. Because you need to be very specific on how you price these things because doing actual serving of the models is so expensive. Okay. So then throughout the interview he keeps emphasizing the point that Microsoft is a hyperscaler and so that means like a bunch of things. That means that they're going to keep supporting multiple models. It means that they are going to like, they want to prioritize the kind of long tail of like high margin users. So you can like, you can kind of compare that to Oracle, who you can think of Oracle as basically prioritizing. One potentially low margin. Yeah, exactly. You're giving bare metal essentially to one customer, OpenAI. Yeah. And you're betting the whole company. And he says like, if you're going to do that, you should just vertically integrate that company. Like you're part of that company. That's what Satya says. Like in response to like, why is Oracle basically eating your entire business? Sure. Like you. In the past like five years, Microsoft was super ramping up their CapEx, their build and then they just basically stopped and let Google, Oracle, Amazon basically build that up. So that's kind of the main reason there's a bunch of other stuff he's talking about. They ask him about chips. So all the big hyperscalers have their own chip play, right? There's Trainium, there's TPUs. OpenAI is doing their own chip and Microsoft does have their own chip, but it just kind of, it's like the actual production is like way behind everyone else. It's like, okay, why is this chip so bad? Or why are there so few of them? And then Satya basically brings up that like Microsoft has IP to everything OpenAI has except for consumer hardware. And chips are not consumer hardware, they're chips enterprise. So he's like, well, okay, how do we get the best chips? The best, like, you know, model specific chips. We'll just take OpenAI and we'll just like build on top of that. I wonder how much that actually transfers though, because where does the chip development live? Where does the IP live? Like if OpenAI it's designed and they. Can get line time at TSMC, then they can just produce it and sell it to any customer they want. Yes, but what if they do it within Nvidia or something? Like what if they go to Nvidia and they're like, hey, for the next run of Nvidia chips we'd like you to consider this architecture. Why would they need to do that? Because they want their models to be more performant on the chips and so they go to Jensen and say, hey, we're one of the biggest buyers, so make the next version extremely performant for our chips. And I think they're already doing this. They're co developing chips with Nvidia they're co developing chips with other companies and if they co develop with Broadcom or they co develop with AMD or maybe even intel in the future, but that IP lives with intel, then no, Microsoft doesn't just get it right. Yeah. So it's like only in the event that, I mean both of these are going to happen, like there's going to be internal efforts and there's going to be external efforts. But it is a funny reminder that the internal efforts get copy pasted over to Microsoft. One other, one other note. Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from neoclouds like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda Iron N scale. Isn't he already doing that to fill the. Yeah, he is, but Semianalysis has a concept called the pause which is basically a gap of this insane period of demand that's trying to meet that demand. And Satya actually says specifically you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview. Interesting. Yeah, I think continuing on, why he basically stopped building out the chip question is also very important because you can think of it like if you build a bunch of data centers right now, they have very specific power requirements that are directly based on the chip. If you're building based off the H100 chip, that's different than if you're building a data center based off GB200. And it's like you can't really, it's not like fungible, like you can't just trade one out for another. So that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane build out right now. Because you think, you don't think, you know that chips are going to get much better. Sure. Like, especially with like asics, right? Yeah, exactly. Nvidia is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. Yep, yep, yep. You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that like are using, you know, the old gen chips or two generations back. Yeah. Anything on depreciation? Capex? Yeah, I mean so yeah, basically he gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers. Right. Because you think of data center basically depreciating in like five years or the chips which is a big part of the, the cost. And so there's basically two ways to justify the actual build out. One of them is basically you can think of research as just being like R and D spend. So you basically just have to. You got to do the research like you need to do the spend, basically. Then the other is just like he keeps bringing this up is everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not. It's like again, in comparison to Oracle, Oracle is basically, maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going or trying to figure that out and then doing a bunch of debt, et cetera. And then Microsoft Satya saying, no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand, basically? Exactly. If we're not fully built up, then we can lease from the Neo clouds. Yeah, makes sense. I'm super excited to listen to this full episode. The Wall Street Journal also had an article about the news as well. It seems like this is all in line with Microsoft's just announcement that they have a super factory. I like it. We went from AI factories to AI super factories. We went from regular artificial intelligence to super intelligence. We're ramping up, but we're still like seven levels away from the final boss. Because after super intelligence, of course you have giga intelligence, then ultra intelligence, then super duper intelligence and mega factories, exifactories, terrafactories. There's all these different terms. Okay, so I will say one last. Thing I thought was extraterrestrial intelligence factories. Yeah, for sure. Okay, one last thing. Dwarkesh asks Satya, like, does he buy basically the revenue growth of like when OpenAI or Anthropic says they're going to be like 70, 100 billion in like three years, he's like, well, you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that. Wow. Such an absolute dog. I love him. He's the best. Cooking. Chat was asking about hair routines. We have to comment and unfortunately disappoint because I think we both ride the apply the same approach, which is sleep, diet, exercise, baby. Well. And no hair products. No hair products. No hair products. Just water, some sauna, some workout. Just keep the rest of your body healthy. And I think the hair will be healthy as well. I actually think that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just funny. We're never gonna have a shampoo or a hair product sponsor because we don't really use either of them. No, but I like creatine. And people say that that's bad for. Your hair, but it's creatine, the hair loss medication. The hair loss medication. People think it. People think you'd lose your hair if you're on creatine, but I certainly haven't experienced that. I have experienced that. Julius helps with maintaining good hair because it's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, stop pulling your Ha. Plain English. Get insights in seconds. No coding required. Yeah, stop pulling your hair out and get on Julius. What are the other factors in here? Microsoft spent more than $34 billion on CapEx during its first fiscal quarter and said it would increase its total infrastructure investments over the next fiscal year. It is among several tech companies pouring a combined 400 billion into AI efforts this year with demand for AI computing and companies saying they need ever more capac. Very fun. You have one last thing. Another thing that I was, I was surprised to hear is that Satya, he made a big point of saying that, like, there is a superintelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models. Yeah. Isn't that. Mustafa Suleiman is running it. Yeah. Yeah. And so he says maybe they'll be completely trained by Microsoft. Maybe they'll just do like fine tuning and training on like GPT OpenAI models. Yep. But like they are going to like actually have. They're going to be training their own models. They're doing kind of the full stack. Yeah. When we were about to go on stage with Satya, I was texting with Doug o' Laughlin from Semianalysis and he was like, ask about MSL or not msl? Mai. Ask about mai. Like, what's the strategy for Mai? And we asked a couple people and we got a little bit. It was sort of hard to like really pin down a clear strategy. I don't think that they were ready to really divulge exactly the full strategy. It'll be interesting to see what model they train. Like, do they just go bigger? They have the biggest factory. Could they just take this, this Fairwater facility and say, hey, let's go. Let's go train something that's 10 times bigger than GPT 4.5. Do they believe that pre training scaling laws hold or not? That's what I'm curious about. Or are they going to do something that's more precise? Like, will they do a pre train for Excel? Will they do a pre train for Word or something like that? Is there some other tactic that they're going to employ? There's a bunch of interesting things. They clearly very GPU r. Tons of sharp engineers, tons of interesting product service area. Where will they actually go? Interesting times. Yeah. I mean, he talks a lot about, like, Application layer stuff. He actually says, like the wrapper model wrapper companies are basically debunked by models getting better. So I think he thinks that Microsoft will basically take over a lot of that, like application layer stuff. Right. He talked about Excel Agent a lot. Yeah, there's like the PowerPoint stuff. That's why I've always felt like the dynamic between OpenAI and Microsoft is so interesting because OpenAI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise they want to create. Sam, you know, alluded to a AI native Slack recently. Microsoft has teams and imagine those going. To be AI native. You can imagine OpenAI having like word processing, Excel, like product. You know, you can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including at the, eventually at the cloud layer. What do you think the dynamic is between this? Like, you know, Microsoft always loves to say like, hey, yeah, we have all the ip, but it feels like they're not actually fast following. Like they could like OpenAI launched Atlas, like they could have launched like Edge Atlas. Microsoft could have launched like Edge Atlas, like the next day. And that would have been like, whoa, what are we doing here? Like, that's a shot. They could have launched Sora 2. They could put Sora 2 in Excel. How about that? Brain rot. Excel, you know, they could have done that. They didn't. And so there's clearly like, even though they have access to all the ip, they still have a differentiated view on like how the products get built. They're not just saying, oh, yes, one copy of Atlas, please. One copy of Sora 2, please. We'll just launch our own competitor app. They could have put it in LinkedIn like, they could have. There is a way to integrate that. Microsoft's clearly not moving so fast on that front. They're being a little bit more methodical. Yeah. This is why I'm very excited to see what comes out of Mai, because it seems like they have a lot of good people. Like they've been doing a bunch of talent acquisition stuff. Yes. So I'm curious if they're going to start right now. It just seems Microsoft is still very slow. They're kind of reactive and they're like, okay, we should add, you know, another AI helper to Excel or something. But it's not like really kind of built in, like low level yet. Yeah, I'd like to have Mustafa on. I'd like to talk to him about where they're training models. Whether or not that seems like an interesting conversation, I'd like to ask him some hard questions. There's been a Debate on the timeline, John, how hard of questions We Edge. Has every single feature that Atlas has. Copilot mode. It's better than Atlas or Comet. Interesting. Maybe they don't need a copy then. They're good. But there has been a debate over. Over how hard of questions we ask. Is it a hard question to ask Mustafa at Mai, you know, what type of model he's training? Or should we ask some sort of other hard question? I wanted to practice some hard questions. I think we should start asking harder questions. I have some hard questions here for you. And I think if we practice, we'll become better interviews. Are you guys ready for these? Should we just start hitting guests with, like, insane math? I wouldn't call them insane. I do have one here for Tyler. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. He's looking. It's a simple yes or no question. Every even number. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Just answer the question. It's a yes or no question. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? It's an unanswerable question. Of course it is. The Goldbach equation or the Goldbach conjecture. There's also. Can there exist an algorithm that decides whether any computer program will halt or run forever? It's the halting problem. It's a possible question. What about what will OpenAI's valuation be in 20? 30? 500 trillion? 100 trillion. He answered that quickly. We'll come back to that in 10 years. See if that was a hard question. What's the nicest thing ever done by Adolf Hitler? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Tyler, ask that. The carp Karp was on a roll yesterday. Some of those clips were. Here's a question we should ask a lot of founders that. Come on here. Does your dad know you're bankrupt? I think if we hit them with that, people will be like, that's a hard question. That's a hard question. Here's one for Tyler. Prove God exists. There was the Godel. What is truth? That's a hard question. Have you ever done illegal drugs? Tyler, answer the question. No. Answer the question. Good answer. Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question. I'm my favorite host. Taking shots. What is time? I like these hard questions. Okay, Jordan at semianalysis is down to hop on and correct a few things we said on the article. I'm going to drop him the he was listening, said Al in the chat. Where is he? Let's bring him on. I'm working on getting him the zoom link. Fantastic. Fantastic. In the meantime, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. You can get started. Let's see what else. Henry Kravis gave a talk. The founder of kkr. The post appears to have been deleted, but I won't say who it's from, but I will read it to you anyway. The world needs another fund. Like it needs like a hole in the head. I think it was supposed to be off the record and I think one of our friends was maybe live tweeting it against their request. Or maybe he just corrected it and realized that he didn't want to post that. But there are a lot of funds. I suppose I was doing a little deep dive on Blue Owl. I want to get to know Blue Owl more. It's a fascinating company merger. There's a SPAC involved. They have two CO CEOs and three CO presidents. The top ranks at Blue Owl are absolutely stacked from what I read. They are of course powering the AI build out with debt. Private credit. They are a private credit fund up there with ares. They've done very well. They actually have three different businesses. Only one of them is doing AI data center build outs. And even within the AI data center build out fund, they fund other stuff. So it's interesting to see how much risk they're taking, how much their business is really dependent on the AI build out. It's also there was a. They got in a little battle with Jamie Dimon because Jamie Dimon was saying that some of these bank failures are the fault of private credit. When you see one cockroach, there's usually more. He's kind of saying like, hey, like, you know, we see these defaults. We see these, we see these, these large companies defaulting. Maybe this is the start of something bad. Maybe there's a lot of other bad companies out there. Yeah, there was something with BlackRock had lent I think $100 million to a business recently as of like two weeks ago. They had it, they had it marked as, you know, fully sound. Yeah. And then the company almost immediately went bankrupt. So concerning we have. Anyway, Jordan from semi. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey Jordan, good to see you again. Welcome back. All right, what do we get wrong? What's going on. This is all, of course, Tyler's.

Strong to shape our future. Reaching the feeling. Sam, you're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, November 12, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital. What's going on over there, shorty? You got caught? Lacking. I was publishing an essay. You were publishing an essay? It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe@tbpn.com our substack will email you every morning with the tbpn newsletter. And 500 words from me or Jordi. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. Also check out ramp.com, time is money, Save both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payment accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. The thing that got Jordi to learn to type was this video, this launch video. You were like, I gotta write an essay. I gotta learn. I gotta lock in. I gotta learn how to write because I gotta respond. This is. This is. It's. It's enraged me. Were you enraged? I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the Internet make me mad. Okay, but they were trying to enrage you, and they were rage baiting me. Made you angry? Yeah. You got angry. You weren't enraged. You were. You were below enragement, but you were above angry. And so you had to put him in the truth zone. You had to write a long post, an essay about it. We'll go through it, but I'd love to watch the Chad Ide Brainrot code editor video first. I want to see. I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it. Okay, so he's got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette with the Stanford, lights it up. He's got the cut off Stanford Cutoffs. What is this music that's playing? He's got the. The guitar in the backgr. And what is he playing? Some sort of. This is steak. Oh, this is steak. Okay, so this is gambling. So he's gambling, and he's gambling in the ide. Okay, so I assume. I assume that means he's won something or other. I actually don't know what the stake UI looks like. Okay, so he's done winning. He has won the gambling session with stake. And now he's back in his ide. And he writes a prompt and he says, test the code. And it pulls up some sort of mobile game that it's playing. Do you. Do you know this is Clash Royale. This is Clash Royale. Okay, have you played I have played in middle school. Yeah, interesting. I never played. I never really got into any mobile games. I did play Polytopia. I like Politopia. That's a good game. It's a mobile game. It's like Age of Empires but on your phone. Elon is a big fan of that. Elon's a big fan of it. And with Polytopia, actually the entire Elon universe is sort of into Polytopia. It's like, it's like how you gain status at some of these companies is like Polytopia. So I'll start by saying I think the video is funny. Okay. And I'm sure the founders are smart. Okay. And I think they. They for. For a low budget launch video, I think they did well. They broke through. That is a very low budget video that. That literally cost nothing. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's great. And I'm not. And I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders at all, but this made me think of something and I'll read through my post. So the title of the essay that I just put out, rage Baiting is for losers. This is in itself rage. If you have been rage baiting, there's sort of levels. But I said yesterday YC announced Chad Ide, aka the Brainrot code editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok and use dating apps while you work on coding tasks. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention. On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong in the official YC account? To understand Chad Ide, Cluly, icon friend, and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the Internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral, you know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple. You make something that makes people angry and people comment, share and dunk. And because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. Rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view, was pioneered by coarse bros. People like Tai Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt Lamborghinis, make a bunch of people angry, and as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy. Historically on X, rage baiting was a marketing Strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like Sweaty Startup, AKA Nick Huber frequently post things to get an angry reaction and the subsequent reach. But behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy. Cluley started as an app for cheating on coding interviews. Chad Ide's only known differentiation from the other hundred AI native ides is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps. In it, the ragebait is sitting at the product level now. It's becoming clear that while ragebait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy. Running a successful VC backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media investors, talent and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential investors, customers or team members to actively prey on your downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high quality, generalizable advice for startups. And I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go through YC and even those that don't launch now make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors are just some, some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice. Rage Baiting is for losers. So again, I think, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure that there's like more to chat Ide than we've seen so far. But I do think it's notable that Rage Bait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level. And I just don't think that's going to create a lot of enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy. Yes. So the, the, the reaction to this was very negative and I think there's a few. It really has to also layer the stack. It ends up, it ends up, it ends up impacting the brands of the firms that fund these ideas. Of course, of course the post, I'll try to pull it up here. Let's see here. The most important, different, like the most important thing in your piece that I liked was this idea that there is Rage Bait marketing. Doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality product is separate from making the Product itself, rage baity. And so I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fool's joke. And Google's been doing April Fool's jokes for years. Some of these April Fools jokes I was looking at were insane. In 2000, just a couple years after they launched, they created a fake mind reading search engine. Then they did Pigeon Rank an explanation that Google's algorithm relied on trained pigeons. They launched a free home broadband service so Internet delivered through your toilet. They announced Google Translate for animals. You could talk to your dog and it would try and translate. These were all jokes. They were never real products. It was just the Google team having some fun. On April Fool's Day, they would get a bunch of attention and then they would route you to the safest, fastest, most secure email system possible, like a real product. But they would have a lot of fun and sometimes they would even build a little web experience around it. But at the end of the day, it was like, yeah, but also we're ready to sell you servers with Google Cloud platform, or we're ready to sell you, like, you know, ad units on Google. Like, it was like, we have a serious business. And so the question for me and the question I had for Tyler was, what's actually under the hood at Chad Ide? The company is not called Chad Ide, it's called Clad Labs. The steel man here is that, hey, Ides are boring. You gotta do something funny, film a funny video, create a fake product, but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation and is maybe something that. A real product try to sign up that might need a code. Yeah. So what happened? We asked you to sign up. And one thing I would say before we go further, I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt. If they did it as a stunt and it wasn't core to the brand that they're building, it wasn't core to the product if they did it. Yes. If they released a product and then later said, hey, we're adding this brain rot function. Totally, totally. Like, that would have been, that would have been like, I think a good. Reaction if it was April Fools and. And Michael Truell at Cursor or Scott Wu with Windsurf were like, we're doing Brett. We're doing a Brain Rod version of the Ide. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious. Okay, now back to using Windsurf and Cursor. Right. Like, that's just what. Yeah. And I don't think it. It certainly probably is not a fit for Cursor's brand. No, not at all. Creating something to try to compete in that space. It would have been a great. A good strategy. But again, there's a. I would actually fight you on that. I think that Cursor has this very. Michael Trill has only done like a few podcasts. He did that podcast with Patrick Collison. He's this very, like, thoughtful software engineer. Scott Woo is this IMO gold medalist. Like, there's something that actually would be very funny and might actually break through if they did some silly brain rotty stunt. Because it would be like, well, obviously they're not actually doing that. Obviously what they're focused on is just improving developer productivity. And instead this, it just, it hasn't answered a lot of the question of like, what's behind the curtain, what's behind the marketing? Because if it's brain rot stuff, if it's jokes all the way down, like, what are we really doing here? But Tyler, what was your experience actually trying to use this product? Yeah. So I go to the website. You can't download it yet because it's still in beta. You need a code. I DM the founders, but they didn't get back to me. But like, I mean, the company is not Chad Labs, it's Clad Labs. Yes, it's the Chad Ide. But like, this is obviously a marketing stunt. I kind of disagree. Yeah, but can you get a product from Cloud Labs? Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon based algorithm or something like that that would be out. Or like Google Translate for animals would be@likeanimals.google translate.com that day, but Google Translate would still work. So like, walk me through the Cloud Labs product. Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously I haven't tried it, so I'm kind of giving them the benefit of that here. But like when you go to the download page, there's options like, which brain rot do you want? Yes. And it's like, you know, steak or like Minecraft Parkour or whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want brain rot. Okay. So there is obviously a product here that is like, not just. It's not just the brain rot. That's not the entire company. Yes. Like when you go to the pricing page, it says, it says like there's, you know, the free, pro, super whatever tiers. It's not listing like, oh, this one has the Minecraft one. It says like, oh, it has unlimited agent tool use. Okay. Like there's obviously a product here. This is a marketing stunt. I believe that. Okay. I like, I kind of disagree that this. I just think, I just think it's. I just think it's a poorly executed. Stunt because you have not told me what the differentiator is. Like, how is this better than Windsurf? How is this better than cursor? Like what is their value prop other than just like, oh cool. It's a newer, it's a newer cursor with less funding and the team's less serious but they're good at making viral videos. Like what does it mean? Part of the reaction here that I think is there's an account developing. Valhalla is quoted. The post from YC said this is what we're promoting. Instead of telling young 20 year old founders to take us to the moon to create better societies, to improve the material conditions of our fellow man. YC is funding garbage that is only making our society worse. You don't hate VCs enough. So I think there's just naturally like I just look at YC as an institution that has consistently provided just very sort of like the best quality advice that's generalizable. Right. For just any person that wants to get into startups. So let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. There's this post by Shield Monot here. He says met a very successful founder who said I chose Fund Blank because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how AUM Weighted Brain Rod or AUM Weighted Slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. Like if you put, put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the Internet and be like we are the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent in your face company. Even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say like no, no, no, no. 99% of my investments are just like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely or like actually trying to improve developer productivity or like 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway. Like good businesses, but 1% of them, I took a flyer. 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets 1,000 times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're gonna be known as the slop fund. So like you need to be careful about that because the nature of the Internet is that, is that a viral rage baity video can get 1000 times more views than your latest bet on AI legal services that might actually be helping improve lawyers efficiency or something like that, you know. So like in terms of branding, part of it, it's real, It's a real. YC has always had, you know, one of YC's challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like I think it's like less than 1, isn't it? Less than 1%. Oh yeah. So super small, you know, very, very low acceptance rate. Yeah. And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, they're going to be, you know, those founders are going to be even more frustrated. Right. I want Tyler's reaction. But first I want to tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Tyler, what do you think? Okay, so like as a steel man, like say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor. Yes. And it's like, like it's actually works way better than Cursor, it's way better than Windsurf, it's better than everything else. And I applied to YC with this thing. Okay, there's like probably what like 10 other YC companies that are like literally YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor stuff. How do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable, like to get more views. Like imagine, I think from their opinion, the idea is like, okay, we get some users that are think it's like funny to gamble in their ide and then they realize like, oh, this is actually a pretty useful feature and this is all assuming that they actually have good tech underneath. But like what like Jordy, if you were in YC and you had a coding editor company, like how would you launch it? Yeah, how do you like recommend? Like instead of doing stuff like this, how do you, how do they differentiate themselves? If cloud labs had launched something and they were just like, hey, like we're you know we're building a better ide. Here's how we use our model. Oh, Cursor. They're currently in a fight with Anthropic. The rates are through the roof. Ours is cheaper for this one reason. And we have the. This better UI and better functionality. And we also have this engineer who figured out this little solution. And we work on mobile and they don't. Or we work on iPads and they don't. Or we work for Fortran and they don't. They only do Python. You know, there's a million ways to, like, articulate your differentiation. They certainly. It doesn't seem like they even tried to do that. It doesn't seem like they even tried. Sure. But I think there. You could probably find companies in this YC batch doing exactly that. Yes. You don't know their name. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that is true. That is true. I just go back to what I said, which was. Which was separate out the RA from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt. I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention. But then people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool novel. I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing that. This seems to like, when I read this, I see it as a marketing, but it's like. So I would agree with you if I could go to cladlabs.com and see the actual product, but it's like cladlabs.com is not even purchased. Like, they. Like, there's literally no information. Okay. Cloud labs. But I. But when you go to the site, it is just like the brain rods. Exactly. Like, like, where is the real product? Like. Like, there is no real product here. And that's the. And that's what Jordy's risk is, is that. Is that they. They're entire. They haven't built anything behind the scenes. It's all marketing. It's all stunt. And it's like, yeah, doing a stunt is maybe fine, even if it's designed to enrage people. It's like, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe people are against even doing the stunt marketing. I think it's actually okay. I think we went through this. Cluley. Like, there was a moment where, like, it was. Cluly was doing rage bait marketing. And there were people that were upset about that, but there were other people that were upset about this idea of, like, the product you're making is to help people cheat and cheating is Bad. It's like the product you're making is to help people gamble, and gambling is bad. And so if you are anti gambling, you are anti this product that they built. And now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, here's the real thing. And they haven't done that yet. And there's no, like, oh, click seven layers deep in the menu and you can see that it's like, oh, this was a stunt for this other thing. They haven't actually put out any breadcrumbs of what they're actually building. And so I think that's why it leaves such a bad. Is that it feels like they spent all YC just working on a stunt. And I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that I. I'm sure they're. I'm sure they're smart and I'm sure they have a. Have a. Have a deeper, broader vision and I think solve. You know, the. The reality is, is like having these moments between prompts, like, is a sort of. Is a sort of an unsolved problem. 100%. 100%. And so, yeah, they. It feels like. It feels like they. They risk sort of going the clulee route, which is over optimizing for rage bait product development even. And. And then they have to, like, figure out what the final product is where. It's like, okay, I think it's okay to spend. To spend, you know, a day in YC thinking about, like, what's our marketing strategy? That that video did not look expensive to film. Yeah. What feels. What feels expensive is like, it seems like they actually built the full product. Like, it feels like they built the full brainwrap product. And it's like, you didn't need to do that. You could have just gone viral for the video and then followed up and been like, it would have been so easy if at that end of that video been like, be like. Like, that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs build. Yeah, but we didn't want to do that. So we actually built this video. But I'm not gonna. I want to try the. I don't want to gamble, but I want to see it actually, like in id. That's like, funny. But if they, at the end they say, oh, it's all a joke. It's like, okay, it's another ide. I don't need another one. But I want to. What do you. I want to try it. You can just do window management. Like, what are we actually talking about here? Just put TikTok on the left side of your screen. I have two windows open right now. This is a Mac native feature. Okay, well, let's pull up this video from Sharav Arora, who's going viral this yesterday. He said, tips to apply at YC batch winter 2026. And I think. I think Sharav is literal. Is a literal child. It seems to be under. Under 10 years old, something like that. He looks very young. Yes, very young. And the reason that I think. Why tell you. Cognition. Here's the Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. You want to play this video? What'd you have? First tip, you should have some clear code, like what you should do after funding. And you should have at least. I can barely hear this, but okay. We can pause it. But the reason. The reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like Sharav and tons of young people that look to YC as like, like whatever YC is promoting, they approve. Yes, yes, yes. They give a lot of advice. Yes, yes, yes. If. If they're sharing something on their social account, it means it has weight. It means it has. It's a valid strategy. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the Shirovs of the world think that they need to rage bait in order to, like, break out in this industry. Right. Because it's just. That's not. It's not the reality. You can just build a great product. You can get. Let that speak for itself. You can find ways to market it along the way. Yeah, I mean, I feel like. I feel like that's part of the reason why Gary Tane was tapped as the. As the president. Like, he, he. I don't know all the complex behind the scenes stuff, but he was putting out content on his YouTube channel and certainly carrying the torch of YC forward, where he was definitely speaking to the next generation of entrepreneurs in an extremely positive way, telling all these fascinating stories about his entrepreneurial career, his values. I mean, he hosts meetups at churches and has really focused on building an extremely positive community. And there is a question about the YCX account. Is it a portfolio list? Is it every company that launches, or is it a library that they're building for startup advice and they stand by everything that happens there. There's two different things that you can use the account for. Right now it feels like it's a little bit of like, hey, like, you know, if it gets views, we're gonna put it up there. If it's fun if somebody's doing something fun. But you don't always have the same. You don't have the same. Like, like the context really matters. Like, I think that video goes more viral because it's on the YC brand account as opposed to, oh, some people got into yc, they pivoted, they came up with this funny video. Like they're just having fun. Like they're kind of after yc. There's a whole, there's a whole era where you go through yc, you hit demo day and then a few months later there's companies that still have a little bit of cash, but they're not really building the same thing. And it's not like I would not hold the YC partners responsible for what YC companies do post pivot, post demo day. Where, yeah, the company is still a YC company. You do have, there is sort of a code of conduct in YC and they can kind of kick you out a little bit. But legally, like there is a contract where once they invest you can't just take the money back because they think you're doing something immoral. Unless it's like fraud. If it's legal, they can't just ask for the money back. Teddy Blank says sharing a video of Albie, who is a 14 year old applying for YC went extremely viral earlier this week. Got 3.6 million views. Wow. 14 year old founder. Yeah, let's play it. I'm Alby, I'm 14 and I'm based in Sydney, Australia. I've been building things. Good editing since I was 6 or 7. Don't get the joke. Really good editing. Well, I've been building things ever since I was nine. First writing code at code camps, then building Roblox games and even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12. Learning platform where teens learn the real world skills that school forgot. Coding, AI, content creation, etc instead of boring techniques textbooks, you level up, earn XP and unlock challenges as you go. All while learning from top founders, creators, innovators and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends how to actually build, create or launch. Teddy says my default reply to high schoolers hitting me up for VC funding is put me on the phone with your parents. I'm Alby, I'm 14 and this is awesome. I love this. I hope he gets in. I should recommend this guy. If he doesn't get into yc, Alby, we'll hire you. Yeah, head over to Los Angeles. Head over to Hollywood. Yeah, I don't. It's interesting because it's sort of a. Sort of a. Like you're not really supposed to do this when you apply to yc. The application video is not like they definitely don't want a game of like a Red Queen's race where it's about the video production, but at the same time, like, you gotta play the game on the field. Like you're supposed just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to yc. One shot it. Yeah, you're supposed to just one shot it. No editing. Because they don't want it to turn into oh, to apply to yc, you spend two weeks doing an edited video. They're like, no work on your product. And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top. Like that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this Cloud Labs thing. Although the weird thing is like the video, I love the video. It's funny and it's cheap and it's clearly just like a bit. And they did it and it was two seconds. But then it feels like they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay, you guys are funny and you're working on something cool and interesting and hard and different. And so I just feel like I didn't get the payoff of the joke. The beauty of those Google April Fool's Day was that that was the era when they were on such a tear. You would go and you would go to a Google April Fool's joke and then you would land on their product blog and you would be like, oh, wow, they did some crazy update to Google Maps and now you can see your house from the street because they just invented Street View. This is incredible. They were delivering on so many different levels that they earned the right to make the April Fool's joke. They earned the right to joke around because they also had a massive monopoly in search engines. And so they were printing money. So no one was like, oh, this is so unreasonable that they took a couple hours out of their developers time to go build some funny gag. Anyway. Bigma.com Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. SHIELD says met a very successful founder who said goes fundraise. What? I read this one. We covered this. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we jumped ahead earlier. Yeah, this was my point about even if you put 99% of your AUM into boring B2B SaaS or even curing cancer. If you do one deal that's gonna get a little craz, go viral, like that's going to have a big impact on the fund overall. Should we go to more drama in the adventure world? Ev Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebbing's show 20 VC and is putting the timeline in turmoil over some comments about other funds. I'd love to play this clip from the actual interview. It's in a minute. I don't think Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point point. I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool and say, hey, this, this basket of funds that we're making you invest, party, pursue across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make or inventure to make high money on money returns. Like they had PE for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from pe. They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmark competitive position in today's market. Because we can go to LPs, we can say, hey, we're shooting for higher 5 than 5x net. We have the historical track record to back it up and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well. I mean you had miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the very clear math of hey, do you know how hard it is to return forex net on $8 billion, $10 billion? It is immensely hard and it's, it like defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, like the, the rubber is like the rubber won't meet the road because as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology and they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight. But I think On a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different gps, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture like returns. Boo. He's not AGI pilled. Boo. 10X. You're going to 10x the fund. Just 10x it again. Just 10x it again. 10x the fund. Raise it. Raise $100 billion fund and 10x it. Just 10x it and we're going to 10x it again. No, obviously Ev was on a little. Bit of damage control. Wait, wait. So I want to hear what, what exactly did he say? The first line. He says they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5x net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What do you say? I don't think rather Hamont or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs. One of those legs of the stool said, I don't say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest, party, pursuit across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. We're going to get you 5x. I don't think they can say that. Right. Because maybe they can go with a straight face and say we're going to get you 6x net. Boom. We're going to get you 10x net. Maybe they can say that with a straight face. Taylor knows Nancy Pelosi is not afraid to say, I'm going to 10x it. I'm going to 10x it again. I'll take it. Then I'm going to 10x it Again. Yes, EV is fighting for his life a little bit. Tagging big shots, quick edits, clickbait call outs, giving me pick me vibes. People are not happy about this clip hitting the timeline. People are taking shots back and forth. What actually happened here? Part of the reality is I don't think, I think no fund manager can really go to LPs and you can share that. You believe there's a chance we'll get a 5x net. But isn't it like 99% of funds just don't come anywhere close to that. Yeah, that's for sure true. Also, I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like I saw some other post about like there will be fortunes made just by getting, getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world into the private mag7. So the OpenAI's the anthropics, the SpaceXs, the andurils. There's a whole host of companies. That was also an EV Randall tweet. Oh, that was him from. Was that him recently or. Yeah, that was I think yesterday. Okay. Yeah. So like there is a world where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations but also lower risk and it's a great deal and LPs love it. And so I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it certainly put the timeline in turmoil. Christian Garrett here is sharing the gif of digging himself deeper into the hole, I imagine. So what did that. Part of it is that benchmarked feelings feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fund, they have four. They have fireworks. What's the other one? They have a number that are. That have that they have a bunch of multi 10 baggers at this point in that fund. So they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying, look, we still got it. Still cooking. Yeah. And yeah, I mean ever in Benchmark. Newly at Benchmark. Benchmark has not become the platform fund. Mega scale fund has not 10x the the LP base. Certainly EV says to be clear, I slash. We love working with our friends at all of these funds. And this part was not meant as a slight slash commentary on the qual on their quality as investors. Just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of Benchmark. I think it's. I think it's a fair, fair tweet, but it's, it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just trash Spencer Peterson in the comments there. I took that personally. I run a big fund. I'm at CO2. We got 60 billion. What are you saying about me, buddy? You don't think I can put up a 5X? Watch me. Watch me. I take that personally. I'm gonna put up 5x. I'll call you when I have 500 billion under management. I think part of what made it feel super personal is that Harry tagged Ravi. Totally, totally, totally. And Ben. Yeah, we actively try to avoid tagging people if is talking trash about someone else or like subtweeting them. We don't really try and like hand hold into drama, but it is an art and it is delicate. Like. Like sometimes it's like oh wow. Like they're really talking trash about that person. Sometimes, sometimes it's fun. Like sometimes we've done this where. I mean we've done this with Ev, right? We've We've had Delian on the show. He's called out Ev and we've tagged Ev in a clip. And then. But it's all been fun. We've all been. Been chatting about it behind the scenes and then obviously had them all on the show to duke it out and stuff. And that was a lot of fun. This felt personal. This. I don't know, it doesn't feel that big of a deal. But let's go to Scott Kapoor, obviously speaking for his former colleagues at Andreessen Horowitz, now he is the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Scott Kapoor says, since my former colleagues at A16Z are RIAs and thus cannot legally comment on what they can cannot say with a straight face to LPs, this sound a lot like what crappy board members say. They think they understand your business in depth and make inane comments about what you should should not do when as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens day to day in the business. Buyer beware. What? What? I. I'm so confused by this. Okay, so, so he's saying that everybody. EV thinks he understands Andreessen's business, but in fact he does not understand Andreessen's business. But I want to know what is the misunderstanding? Because the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that EV is making the claim that they will make more money, dollars, total dollars, because they're investing out of a bigger fund size. They don't need to go and say we're going to 5 exit. So it's a different pool of LPs. Also, part of the major appeal of investing in a 16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company through this one single check. Okay, so yeah, maybe that's something that EV didn't articulate fully. I don't know. I don't know. That's my point of view. I'm not an lp, but I happily would be. And it's because you know you're going to get get some exposure to pretty much every important company. Not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle, it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from a 16Z. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder how the RIA Dynamic is playing out at Benchmark. It seems like such an advantage in the vibe wars to be able to speak freely if, if Andreessen can't defend themselves because of RIA rules. And EV can just go on podcasts and talk Trash. You kind of win by default. You got to get out there, guys. You got to convert. You got to deconvert from the ria. I don't know. You got to get on the timeline, fight it out. What does EV say? He says, I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. This must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him. Incredible non sequitur. Thanks, Scott. Chad Buyer says, while I actually agree with Scott in general, my lived experience is most board members are useless. I've been on a board with EV and he was consistently the most prepared. Slash Founder raved about his contributions. And Alex Klein is saying, love you both because they're beefing. Interesting. Yeah, smaller funds can produce. Smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. That seems to be like a reasonable take, but I don't know what they're actually saying to LPs. Where is. Wasn't Emil Michael going, chiming in as well. What did Emil have to say? That was. I tried to pull that up, but the underlying post got deleted. Oh, it got deleted. Okay, well, we'll move on from it. We'll tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance. Manage risk, improve trust with Vanta. Banta helps get you compliant fast. We don't stop there. AI, automation powers everything. Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying. Calling me Unk. They're saying I'm a boomer. Oh, yeah. For my. For my post. Which I think is fair, but again, there's more nuance. I don't necessarily. There's a lot of it that I think is cool. Should we have the founder on the founder. Open invite to the founder. Okay. Open invite to the founder of the Brain Ide Clad Labs. I am actually very interested to hear what the actual product is. I feel like the narrative around these rage baity stunts is always like, oh, don't play into it. Don't play into it. I'm happy to play into it. We played into it with Cluly. We. We had Roy Lee on the show three times. And what I said the first time was what I continue to say, which is that like, hey, and part of my gonna have to build a real product. Part of my thesis is that Roy effectively ran this strategy as aggressively as you could. Like there was a picture of him with a stripper. Yeah, that was very rage baity. And that was like the peak. And then I think he's walked it back and he's adapted his strategy and now he's. And so. And so our take was like, he's gonna have to build some good, good software at a certain point. Good product. And we tried the product and Tyler churned and, like, it just wasn't adding a ton of value. It wasn't moving. But now they're opening, iterating on the. Product, and now they're iterating on the product. And so now I would imagine during the Cluley heyday, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing, and 20% were spent on. On product. Maybe now I think it's flipped, and I think that's very bullish. I think that's good. But, Tyler, you had a ribbon. Yeah. I mean, I would just say, like, this seems very different from, like, you see the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like, from other accelerators. Like, this feels very different. Like, this is like, the marketing. Like, I think people kind of tend to group all this stuff together where it's like. Like what Grand Ganiel was talking about yesterday, where it's like, some of these are, like, immoral companies that you could say, sure. I think this feels different than that. It feels much. At least to me, it feels much more of a marketing stunt than, like, this is the product. We want people to be gambling while writing code. Yes. But what if the whole product is. And this is all we've. This is. All we've seen is a, you know, a VS code fork with minimal autocomplete there always, you know, a year or two or five behind Cursor and Windsurf. And yes, it has the ability to add Tinder and steak and sports betting in it and like, that the product that they are telling us they're building is what they're building and they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then? Yeah, then that's not good. Okay, so basically you're just saying you're open to a pivot. It's not even a pivot. It seems to me like the company is. Is everything, at least in my opinion, points to this being a marketing stunt. The company is named Cloud Labs. It's called CAD Labs. This feels like a marketing. Yes. Marketing stunts. It tells me that there actually is something different underneath than just adding. Yeah, no, no, I am super optimistic about it. I would love to see, like, I don't know, by the end of the month we know what is actually going on here. Certainly by demo day. When's demo day? December 3rd, I believe. December 3rd. We should know what's actually going on with the company. What's the real product? So they did their stunt. They got a bunch of people, hopefully, to sign up. Check out the website. You got your early user base. Typically, in yc, you just ask your other YC batchmates to try it. Maybe you need to go broad. Go viral. You did that. Now draw the rest of the owl, basically, is the prompt. Or at least, least. Or at least say what you're planning to do. Say what you're planning to do. Let's move on to Dharkesh. Dwarkesh. I haven't watched the full thing, but a massive interview has hit the timeline. Dwarkesh Patel. Dylan Patel sat down with Satya Nadella, and they got an exclusive tour of Fairwater 2, the most. The most powerful AI data center in the world. I feel like everyone's.

SA. We came to this world to reach the stars. We came to this world to shape our future. We came to this world to shape a future. Retain to feel the new Sam SA. We came to this world to reach the stars. We came to this world to shape our future. We came to this world to shape our future. Reaching to feel the new SA. You'Re watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, November 12, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital. What's going on over there, shorty? You got caught? Lacking. I was publishing an essay. You were publishing an essay? It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe@tbpn.com our substack will email you every morning with the tbpn newsletter and 500 words from me or Jordi. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. Also check out ramp.com, time is money, so save both. Easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payment accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. The thing that got Jordi to learn to type was this video, this launch video. You were like, I gotta write an essay. I gotta lock in. I gotta learn how to write because I gotta respond. It's enraged me. Were you enraged? I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the Internet make me mad. Okay, but they were trying to enrage you. They were baiting me, made you angry. You got angry. You weren't enraged. You were below enragement, but you were above angry. And so you had to put him in the truth zone. You had to write a long post, an essay about it. We'll go through it, but I'd love to watch the Chad Ide Brainrot code editor video first. I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it. Okay, so he's got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette with. The Stanford lights it up. He's got the cutoff Stanford cutoffs. What is this music that's playing? He's got the. The guitar in the background. And what is he playing? Some sort of. This is steak. Oh, this is steak. Okay, so this is gambling. So he's gambling, and he's gambling in the ide. Okay, so I assume. I assume that means he's won something or other. I actually don't know what the stake UI looks like. Okay, so he's done winning. He has won the gambling session with stake, and now he's back in his ide, and he Writes a prompt and he says, test the code. And it pulls up some sort of mobile game that it's playing. Do you know this is Clash Royale? This is Clash Royale. Okay. Have you played? I have played in middle school. Yeah. Interesting. I never played. I never really got into any mobile games. I did play Polytopia. I like Polytopia. That's a good game. It's mobile game. It's like Age of Empires but on your phone. Elon is a big fan of that. Elon's a big fan of it. And with Polytopia, actually the entire Elon universe is sort of into Polytopia. It's like, it's like how you gain status at some of these companies is like Polytopia. So I'll start by saying I think the video is funny. Okay. And I'm sure the founders are smart. Okay. And I think they. They for. For a low budget launch video, I think they did well. They broke through. That is a very low budget video that. That literally cost nothing. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's great. And I'm not. And I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders. Yeah. At all. But this made me think of something and I'll read through my post. So the title of the essay that I just put out, rage Baiting is for losers. This is in itself rage bait. If you have been rage baiting, there's sort of levels. But I said. Yesterday YC announced Chad Ide, aka the Brainrot Code Editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok and use dating apps while you work on coding tasks. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention. On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong in the official YC account? To understand Chad Ide, Clulee, icon, friend, and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the Internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral, you know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple. You make something that makes people angry and people comment, share and dunk. And because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. Rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view, was pioneered by course bros. People like Tai Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt lamborghinis make a bunch of people angry. And as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy. Historically on X, Rage Baiting was a marketing strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like Sweaty Startup, AKA Nick Huber frequently post things to get an angry reaction and the subsequent reach. But behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy. Cluly started as an app for cheating on coding interviews. Chad Ide's only known differentiation from the other hundred AI native ides is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps. In it, the Rage bait is sitting at the product level now. It's becoming clear that while Rage Bait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy. Running a successful VC backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media investors, talent and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential investors, customers or team members to actively prey on your downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high quality, generalizable advice for startups. And I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go through YC and even those that don't launch now make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors are just some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice. Rage Baiting is for losers. So again, I think, you know, I'm sure that there's like more to chat ideas than we've seen so far, but I do think it's notable that Rage Bait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level. And I just don't think that's going to create a lot of enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy. Yes, so the, the, the reaction to this was very negative and I think there's a few. It really has to layer the stack. It ends up, it ends up, it ends up impacting the brands of the firms that fund these ideas. Of course, of course. I'll try to pull it up here. Let's see here. The most important, different, like the most important thing in your piece that I liked was this Idea that there is rage bait marketing. Doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality product is separate from, from making the product itself rage baity. And so I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fool's joke. And Google's been doing April Fool's jokes for years. Some of these April Fool's jokes I was looking at were insane. In 2000, just a couple years after they launched, they created a fake mind reading search engine. Then they did pigeon rank an expo explanation that Google's algorithm relied on trained pigeons. They launched a free home broadband service so Internet delivered through your toilet. They announced Google Translate for animals. You could talk to your dog and it would try and translate. These were all jokes. They were never real products. It was just the Google team having some fun on April Fool's Day. They would get a bunch of attention and then they would route you to the safest, fastest, most secure email system possible. Right. Like a real product. But they would have a lot of fun and sometimes they would even build a little like web experience around it. But at the end of the day it was like, yeah, but also we're ready to sell you servers with Google Cloud platform or we're ready to sell you like, you know, ad units on Google. Like, it was like, we have a serious business. And so the question for me and the question I had for Tyler was, what's actually under the hood at Chad Ide? The company is not called Chad Ide, it's called Clad Labs. The steel man here is that, hey, Ides are boring. You gotta do something funny, film a funny video, create a fake product, but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation and is maybe something that a real product. Try to sign up. Need a code. Yeah. So what happened? We asked you to sign up. And one thing I would say before we go further, I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt. If they did it as a stunt and it wasn't core to the brand that they're building. It wasn't core to the product. If they did it. Yes. If they released a product and then later said, hey, we're adding this brainrot function. Totally, totally. Like, that would have been, that would have been like, I think a good. Reaction if it was April Fools and Michael Truell at cursor or Scott Woo with Windsurf were like, we're doing a Brain Rod version of the ide. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious. Okay, now back to using Windsurf and Cursor. Right? Like, that's just what. Yeah. And I don't think it certainly probably is not a fit for Cursor's brand. No, not at all. Creating something to try to compete in that space, it would have been a good strategy. But I, but again, there's a. I would actually fight you on that. I think that Cursor has this very. Michael Truill has only done like a few podcasts. He's. He did that podcast with Patrick Collison. He's. He's this very, like, thoughtful software engineer. Scott Wu is this IMO gold medalist. Like, there's something that actually would be very funny and might actually break through if they did some silly brain rotty stunt. Because it would be like, well, obviously they're not actually doing that. Obviously what they're focused on is just improving developer productivity. And instead this, it just, it hasn't answered a lot of the question of like, what's behind the curtain, what's behind the marketing? Because if it's brain rot stuff, if it's jokes all the way down, like, what are we really doing here? But Tyler, what was your experience actually trying to use this product? Yeah. So I go to the website. You can't download it yet because it's still in beta. You need a code. I DM the founders, but they didn't get back to me. But like, I mean, the company is not Chad Labs, it's Cloud Labs. Yes, this like, it's the Chad id. But like, this is obviously a marketing stunt. I kind of disagree. Yeah. But can you get a product from Cloud Labs? Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon based algorithm or something like that that would be out. Or like Google Translate for Animals would be@likeanimals.google translate.com that day, but Google Translate would still work. So, like walk me through the Cloud Labs product. Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt? Yeah. So I mean, obviously I haven't tried it, so I'm kind of giving them the benefit of that here. But like, when you go to the download page, there's the options, like, which brain rot do you want? Yes. And it's like, you know, steak or like Minecraft Parkour or whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want brain rot. Okay. So there is obviously a product here that is like, not just, it's not just the brain Rod that's Not the entire company. Yes. Like when you go to the pricing page, it says, it says like there's, you know, the free pro, super whatever tiers. It's not listing like, oh, this one has the Minecraft one. It says like, oh, it has unlimited agent tool use. Okay. Like there's obviously a product here. This is a marketing stunt. I believe that. Okay. I kind of disagree that this. I just think, I just think it's, I just think it's a poorly executed. Stunt because you have not told me what the differentiator is. Like, how is this better than Windsurf? How is this better than cursor? Like what is their value prop other than just like, oh cool. It's a newer, it's a newer cursor with less funding and the team's less serious, but they're good at making viral videos. Like what does it mean? Part of the reaction here that I think is, you know, there's an account developing Valhalla is quoted. The post from YC said, this is what we're promoting. Instead of telling young 20 year old founders to take us to the moon to create better societies, to improve the material conditions of our fellow man, YC is funding garbage that is only making our society worse. You don't hate VCs enough. So I think there's just naturally I just look at YC as an institution that has consistently provided just very sort of the best quality advice that's generalizable for just any person that wants to get into startups. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. There's this post by Shield Monot here. He says, met a very successful founder who said, I chose Fund Blank because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how AUM Weighted Brain Rod or AUM Weighted Slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. If you put, put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the Internet and be like, we are the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent, like in your face company. Even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say like no, no, no, no, 99% of my investments are just like you Know, trying to cure cancer genuinely or like actually trying to improve developer productivity or like 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway, like good businesses. But 1% of them, I took a flyer. 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets 1,000 times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're gonna be known as the slop fund. So you need to be careful about that because the nature of the Internet is that, is that a viral rage baity video can get 1000 times more views than your latest bet on AI legal services that might actually be helping improve lawyers efficiency or something like that, you know, so like in terms of branding, part of it, it's real, it's. A real YC has always had, you know, one of YC's challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like. I think it's like less than 1, isn't it? Less than 1%. Oh yeah. So super small, you know, very, very low acceptance rate. Yeah. And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, they're going to be, you know, that those founders are going to be even more frustrated. Right. I want Tyler's reaction. But first I want to tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Tyler, what do you think? Okay, so like as a steel man, like say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor, right? And it's like, like it actually works way better than Cursor, it's way better than Windsurf, it's better than everything else. And I applied to YC with this thing. Okay, there's like probably what like 10 other YC companies that are like literally YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor stuff. How do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable, like to get more views. Like imagine. I mean, I think from their opinion, the idea is like, okay, we get some users that are think it's like funny to gamble in their ide and then they realize like, oh, this is actually a pretty useful feature and this is all assuming that they actually have good tech underneath. But like what like Jordy, if you were in YC and you had a coding editor company, like how would you launch it? Yeah, how do you like recommend like instead of Doing stuff like this. How do you. How do they differentiate themselves? If cloud labs had launched something and they were just like, hey, like, we're, you know, we're building a better ide. Here's how we use our model. Oh, cursor. They're currently in a fight with Anthropic. The rates are through the roof. Ours is cheaper for this one reason. And we have a. This better UI and better functionality. And we also have this engineer who figured out this little solution. And we work on mobile and they don't. Or we work on iPads and they don't. Or we work for Fortran and they don't. They only do Python. You know, there's a million ways to, like, articulate your differentiation. They certainly. It doesn't seem like they even tried to do that. It doesn't seem like they even tried. Sure. But I think there. You could probably find companies in this YC batch doing exactly that. You don't know their name. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that is true. That is true. You do. Like, I just go back. I just go back to what I said, which was. Which was separate out the RA from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt. I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention. But then people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool novel. But I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing that. This seems to like, when I read this, I see it as a marketing, but it's like. So I would agree with you if I could go to cladlabs.com and see the actual product. But it's like cladlabs.com is not even purchased. Like, they, like, there's literally no information. Okay, Cloud labs. But I. But when you go to the site, it is just like the brain rods. Exactly. Like, like, where is the real product? Like, like there is no real product here. And that's the. And that's what Jordy's risk is, is that. Is that they. They. They're entire. They haven't built anything behind the scenes. It's all marketing. It's all stunt. And it's like, yeah, doing a stunt is maybe fine, even if it's designed to enrage people. It's like, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe people are against even doing the stunt marketing. I think it's actually okay. I think we went through this. Cluley. Like, there was a moment where, like, it was. Cluly was doing rage bait Marketing. And there were people that were upset about that, but there were other people that were upset about this idea of like, the product you're making is to help people cheat and cheating is bad. It's like the product you're making is to help people gamble and gambling is bad. And so if you are anti gambling, you are anti this product that they built. And now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, here's the real thing. And they haven't done that yet. And there's no like, oh, click seven layers deep in the menu and you can see that it's like, oh, this was a stunt for this other thing. They haven't actually put out any breadcrumbs of what they're actually building. And so I think that's why it leaves such a bad piece of. Is that it feels like they spent all YC just working on a stunt. And I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that I, I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're smart and I'm sure they have a, have a, have a deeper broader vision and I think solve, you know, the, the reality is, is like having these moments between prompts, like, is a sort of, is a sort of an unsolved problem. 100%. 100%. And so yeah, they, it feels like, it feels like they, they risk sort of going the clulee route, which is over optimizing for rage bait, product development even. And, and then they have to like, figure out what the final product is where it's like, okay, I think it's okay to spend, to spend, you know, a day in YC thinking about like, what's our marketing strategy that that video did not look expensive to film. Yeah. What feels, what feels expensive is like, it seems like they actually built the full product. Like, it feels like they built the full brain route product. And it's like, you didn't need to do that. You could have just gone viral for the video and then followed up and been like, it would have been so easy if at that end of that video been like, be like, like that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs build. Yeah, but we didn't want to do that. So we actually built this go down video. But I'm not gonna, I want to try the. I don't want to gamble, but I want to see it actually like in the ID that's like funny. But if they, at the end they say, oh, it's all a joke, it's like, okay, it's Another ide. I don't need another one, but I want to. What do you. I want to try it. You can just do window management. Like, what are we actually talking about here? Just put TikTok on the left side of your screen. I have two windows open right now. This is a Mac native feature. Okay, well, let's pull up this video from Sharav Arora, who's going viral this yesterday. Okay. He said tips to apply at YC batch winter 2026. And I think Sharav is a literal child. It seems to be under. Under. Under 10 years old, something like that. He looks very young. Yes. And the reason that I think I. Tell you about cognition, here's the behav, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. You want to play this video. First? Tip. You should have some clear, cool secret. Like what you should do after funding. And you should have at least. I can barely hear this, but okay. We can pause it. But the reason. The reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like Sharav and tons of young people that look to YC as like. Like whatever YC is promoting, they approve. Yes. Yes. They give a lot of advice. Yes. Yes. If they're sharing something on their social account, it means it has weight. It means it's a valid strategy. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the Shirovs of the world think that they need to rage bait in order to, like, break out in this industry. Right. Because it's just. That's not. It's not the reality. You can just build a great product. You can get. Let that speak for itself. You can find ways to market it along the way. Yeah, I mean, I feel like. I feel like that's part of the reason why Gary Tan was tapped as the. As the president. Like, he, he. I don't know all the complex behind the scenes stuff, but he was putting out content on his YouTube channel and certainly carrying the torch of YC forward, where he was definitely speaking to the next generation of entrepreneurs in an extremely positive way, telling all these fascinating stories about his entrepreneurial career, his values. I mean, he hosts meetups at churches and has really focused on building an extremely positive community. And there is a question about the YC X account. Is it a portfolio list? Is it every company that launches, or is it a library that they're building for startup advice? And they stand by everything that happens there? There's two different things that you can use the account for, right? Now it feels like it's a little bit of like, hey, like you know, if it gets views, we're gonna put it up there. If it's fun, if somebody's doing something fun. But you don't always have the same. You don't have the same. Like the context really matters. Like I think that video goes more viral because it's on the YC brand account as opposed to, oh, some people got into yc, they pivoted, they came up with this funny video. Like they're just having fun. Like they're kind of after yc. There's a whole, there's a whole era where you go through yc, you hit demo day and then a few months later, like there's companies that still have a little bit of cash but they're not really building the same thing and they're. And it's not like I would not hold the YC partners responsible for what YC companies do post pivot, post demo day, where, yeah, the company is still a YC company. You know, you do have, there is sort of a code of conduct in YC and they can kind of kick you out a little bit. But legally, like there is a contract where once they invest, you can't just take the money back because they think you're doing something immoral. Unless it's like fraud. If it's legal, they can't just ask for the money back. Teddy Blank says sharing a video of Albie, who is a 14 year old applying for YC went extremely viral earlier this week. Got 3.6 million views. Wow. 14 year old founder. Yeah, let's play it. I'm Alby, I'm 14 and I'm based in Sydney, Australia. I've been building things. Good editing since I was six or seven. Bruh. Don't get the joke. Really good editing. Well, I've been building things ever since I was nine. First writing code at code camps, then building Roblox games and even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12. Where teens learn the real world skills that school forgot. Coding, AI, content creation, etc instead of boring techniques, textbooks, you level up, earn XP and unlock challenges as you go. All while learning from top founders, creators, innovators and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends how to actually build, create or launch. Teddy says my default reply to high schoolers hitting me up for VC funding is put me on the phone with your parents. I'm Alby, I'm 14 and this is awesome. I love this. I hope he gets in. I should recommend this guy. And if he doesn't get into yc, Alby will hire you. Yeah. Head over to Los Angeles. Head over to Hollywood. Yeah, I don't. It's interesting because it's sort of a. Sort of a. Like, you're not really supposed to do this when you apply to yc. Like, the application video is not. Like, they definitely don't want a game of, like a Red Queen's race where it's about the video production, but at the same time, like, you gotta play the game on the field. Like, you're supposed just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to yc. One shot it. Yeah, you're supposed to just one shot it. No editing. Because they don't want it to turn into. Oh, to apply to yc, you spend two weeks doing an edited video. They're like, no work on your product. And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top. Like, that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this Cloud Labs thing. Although the weird thing is, like, the video, I love the video. It's funny and it's cheap and it's clearly just like a bit. And they did it and it was two seconds. But then it feels like they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay, you guys are funny and you're working on something cool and interesting and hard and different. And so I just feel like I didn't get the payoff of the joke. Like, the beauty of those Google April Fool's Day was that that was the era when they were on such a tear. You would go and you would go to a Google April Fool's joke, and then you would land on their product blog and you would be like, oh, wow, they did some crazy update to Google Maps and now you can see your house from the street because they just invented Street View. This is incredible. They were delivering on so many different levels that they earned the right to make the April Fool's joke. They earned the right to joke around because they also had a massive monopoly in search engines. And so they were printing money. So no one was like, oh, this is so unreasonable that they took a couple hours out of their developer's time to go build some funny gag. Anyway. Bigma.com Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. SHIELD says met a very successful founder who said goes funded this what I read this one. We covered this. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we jumped ahead earlier. Yeah, this was my point about even if you put 99% of your AUM into boring B2B SaaS or even curing cancer, if you do one deal that's gonna get a little crazy and go viral, that's gonna have a big impact on the fund overall. Should we go to more drama in the venture world? EV Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebbing show 20VC and is putting the timeline in turmoil over some comments about other funds. I'd love to play this clip from the actual interview. It's in a minute. I don't think Ravi or Hamont or even Ben and Mark at this point. I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool and say, hey, this, this basket of funds that we're making you invest, party, pursue across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make or in venture to make high money on money returns. Like they had PE for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from pe. They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmark's competitive position in today's market. Because we can go to LPs, we can say, hey, we're shooting for higher 5 than 5x net. We have the historical track record to back it up and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well. I mean, you had Miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the very clear math of, hey, do you know how hard it is to return forex net on $8 billion, $10 billion? It is immensely hard. And it's, it like defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, like the rubber is like the rubber won't meet the road because as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology and they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight, but I think on a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different gps, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture like returns. Boo. He's not AGI pilled. Boo. 10X, you're going to 10x the fund. Just 10x it again. Just 10x it again. 10x the fund. Raise it, raise $100 billion fund. And 10 exit. Just 10 exit and we're going to 10x it again. Ev was on a little bit of damage control. Wait, so I want to hear what, what exactly did he say? The first line? He says they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5x net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What do you say? I don't think rather Hamont or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs. One of those legs of the stool said, I don't say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest party pursuit across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. We're going to get you 6 net. I don't think they can say that. Right. Because maybe they can go with a straight face and say, we're going to get you 6x. Boom. We're going to get you 10x net. Maybe they can say that with a straight face. Taylor knows Nancy Pelosi is not afraid to say, I'm going to 10x it. I'm going to 10x it again. I'll 10x it again. Yes, EV is fighting for his life a little bit. Tagging big shots, quick edits, clickbait call outs, giving me pick me vibes. People are not happy about this clip. Hitting the timeline. People are taking shots back and forth. What actually happened here? I mean, part of the reality is I don't think, I think no fund manager can really go to LPs and you can share that. You believe there's a chance we'll get a 5x net. But isn't it like 99% of funds just don't come anywhere close to that? Yeah, that's for sure true. Also, I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like I saw some other post about like there will be fortunes made just by getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world into the private Mag 7. So the OpenAI's, the anthropics, the SpaceXs, the andurils, there's a whole host of companies. That was also an EV Randall tweet. Oh, that was him from. Was that him recently or. Yeah, that was I think yesterday. Okay. Yeah. So like there is a world where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations but also lower risk and it's a great deal and LPs love it. And so I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it's certainly put the timeline in turmoil. Christian Garrett here is sharing the gif of digging himself deeper into the hole, I imagine. So what do you have for. Part of it is that Benchmark is feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fund, they have four, they have fireworks. What's the other one? They have a number that are. That they have a bunch of multi 10 baggers at this point in that fund. So they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying look, we still got it, still cook it. Yeah. And yeah, I mean ever in Benchmark, newly at Benchmark. Benchmark has not become the platform fund. Mega scale fund has not 10x LP base. Certainly EV says to be clear, I slash, we love working with our friends at all of these funds. And this part was not meant as a slight slash commentary on the qual on their quality as investors. Just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of Benchmark. I think it's, I think it's a fair, fair tweet. But it's, it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just trash Spencer Peterson in the comments there. I took that personally. I run a big fund, I'm at CO2, we got 60 billion. What are you saying about me, buddy? You don't think I can put up a 5X? Watch me. Watch me. I take that personally. I'm Gonna put up 5x. I'll call you when I have 500 billion under management. I think part of what made it feel super personal is that Harry tagged Ravi. Totally, totally. And Ben. Yeah, we actively try to avoid tagging people if someone is talking trash about someone else or like sub tweeting them. We don't really try and like hand hold into drama, but it is an art and it is delicate. Like sometimes it's like oh wow. Like they're really talking trash about that person. Sometimes, sometimes it's fun. Like sometimes We've done this where. I mean, we've done this with Ev, right? We've had Delian on the show. He's called out Ev and we've tagged Ev in a clip and then. But it's all been fun. We've all been. And chatting about it behind the scenes and then obviously had them all on the show to duke it out and stuff. And that was a lot of fun. This felt personal. This. I don't know, it doesn't feel that big of a deal. But let's go to Scott Kapoor, obviously speaking for his former colleagues at Andreessen Horowitz, now he is the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Scott Kapoor says, since my former colleagues at A16Z are RIAs and thus cannot legally comment on what they can cannot say with a straight face to LPs. This sound a lot like what crappy board members say. They think they understand your business in depth and make inane comments about what you should should not do when as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens day to day in the business. Buyer beware. What? What? I. I'm so confused by this. Okay, so, so he's saying that everybody. Ev thinks he understands Andreessen's business, but in fact he does not understand Andreessen's business. But I want to know what is the misunderstanding? Because the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that EV is making the claim that they will make more money, dollars, total dollars, because they're investing out of a bigger fund size. They don't need to go and say we're going to 5x and it. So it's a different pool of LPs. Also, part of the major appeal of investing in a 16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company through this one single check. Okay, so yeah, maybe that's something that EV didn't articulate fully. I don't know. I don't know. That's my point of view. I'm not an lp, but I happily would be. And it's because you know you're going to get, get some exposure to pretty much every important company. Not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle, it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from a 16Z. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder. How. The RIA Dynamic is playing out at Benchmark. It seems like such an advantage in the vibe wars to not to be able to speak freely if, if Andreessen can't defend themselves because of RIA rules. And EV can just go on podcasts and talk trash. You kind of win by default. You got to get out there, guys. You got to convert. You got to deconvert from the ria. I don't know. You got to get on the timeline, fight it out. What does EV say? He says, I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. This must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him. Incredible non sequitur. Thanks, Scott. Chad Buyer says, while I actually agree with Scott in general, my lived experience is most board members are useless. I've been on a board with EV and he was consistently the most prepared. Founder raved about his contributions. And Alex Klein is saying, love you both because they're beefing. Interesting. Yeah, smaller funds can produce. Smaller constrained funds can produce. Use higher returns in venture. That seems to be like a reasonable take, but I don't know what they're actually saying to LPs. Where is. Wasn't Emil Michael going, chiming in as well? What did Emil have to say that was. I tried to pull that up, but. Did it get deleted? Post got deleted. Oh, it got deleted. Okay, well, we'll move on from it. We'll tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance. Manage risk, improve trust with Vanta. Banta helps get, get you compliant fast. But we don't stop there. AI Automation powers everything. Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying, Calling me unk. They're saying I'm a boomer. Oh, yeah. For my, for my post, which I think is fair, but again, there's more nuance. I don't ne. I like there's a lot of it that I think is cool. Should we have the founder on? The founder. Open invite to the founder. Okay. Open invite to the founder of, of the Brain Ide Clad Labs. I, I am, I am actually very interested to hear what is, what the actual product is. I, I, I feel like the, the narrative around, around these, these like, you know, rage, baity stunts is always, is always like, oh, don't play into it. Don't play into it. I'm happy to play into it. We played into it with Cluly. We, we had Roy Lee on the show three times. And what I said the first time was what I continue to say, which is that, like, hey, part of my thesis, you're gonna have to build a real product. Part of my thesis is that Roy effectively ran this strategy as aggressively as you could. Like, there was a picture of him with a stripper. Yeah, that was Very rage baity. And that was like, the peak. And then I think he walked it back and he's adapted his strategy and now he's. And so. And so our take was like, he's gonna have to build some good, good software at a certain point. Good product. And we tried the product, and Tyler churned and like, it just wasn't adding a ton of value. It wasn't moving. But now they're also iterating. Iterating on the product, and now they're. Iterating on the product. And so now I would imagine during the Cluley heyday, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing and 20% were spent on. On product. Maybe now I think it's flipped. And I think that's very bullish. I think that's good. But, Tyler, you had a ribbon. Yeah. I mean, I would just say, like, this seems very different from, like, you see the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like, from other accelerators. Like, this feels very different. Like, this is like the marketing. Like, I think people kind of tend to group all of this stuff together where it's like. Like what growing Daniel was talking about yesterday where it's like, some of these are, like, immoral companies that you could say, sure. I think this feels different than that. It feels much. At least to me, it feels much more of a marketing stunt than, like, this is the product. We want people to be gambling while writing code. Yes, but what if the whole product is. And this is all we've. All we've seen is a VS code fork with minimal autocomplete. They're always, you know, a year or two or five behind Cursor and Windsurf. And yes, it has the ability to add Tinder and steak and sports betting in it. And like, that the product that they are telling us they're building is what they're building and they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then? Yeah, then that's not good. Okay, so basically you're just saying you're open to a pivot. It's not even a pivot. It seems to me like the company is. Because everything, at least in my opinion, points to this being a marketing stunt. The company is named Clad Labs. Yes. This feels like a marketing marketing stunt. It tells me that there actually is something different underneath than just adding. Yeah, no, no, I am super optimistic about it. I would love to see, like, I don't know, by the end of the month, we know what is actually going on here. Certainly by demo day. When's demo day? December 3rd, I believe. December 3rd. We should know what's actually going on with the company. What's the real product. So they did their stunt. They got a bunch of people hopefully to sign up. Check out the website. You got your early user base. Typically in yc, you just ask your other YC batchmates to try it. Maybe you need to go broad, go viral. You did that. Now draw the rest of the owl basically is the prompt or at least, or at least say what you're planning to do. Say what you're planning to do. Let's move on to Dwarkesh. Dwarkesh. Dwarkesh. I haven't watched the full thing, but a massive interview has hit the timeline. Dwarkesh Patel, Dylan Patel sat down with Satya Nadella and they got an exclusive tour of Fairwater 2, the most powerful AI data center in the world. I feel like everyone's been saying they have the most powerful AI data center. It appears that that open. That Microsoft has leapfrogged Colossus to. Well, I think maybe this is wrong, but I think Colossus 2 will be bigger. It's just currently it's not big. This is the current. Current biggest. It's the current biggest. Okay. Okay. Okay, great. So you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview before we started the show. Can you give me some takeaways? Where should people. Are there any timestamps that we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it? Yeah, I wrote a bunch of notes, so maybe some of these aren't as interesting. But before you take us through those notes, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. GitHub, of course, is a Microsoft product. Yeah. Okay. So I think broadly, I would say it was pretty enlightening. I usually think of Satya as being very non AGI pilled and I think this was a bit of an update. So there's a bunch of reasons for this, I think. So early on he like in the very. I think this was one of the first questions. He's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things. This is Satya saying this. There's cognitive, like enhancement. So this is like your like tools or this is your autocomplete. This is your copilot. Yeah. Co pilot, stuff like this. And then there's like the Guardian angel and this is like the very AGI pill where I mean, it's like kind of lording over everything. And so he actually does like say these two things are very possible and then we kind of move on. He says copilot and actual pilot. Yeah, basically. Okay, so the next thing he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing. And he says, I think he, he's broadly more focused on, at least in the short term, on this subscription kind of thing, which he makes a big emphasis on this because you need to be very specific on how you price these things because doing actual serving of the models is so expensive. Okay, so then throughout the interview he keeps emphasizing the point that Microsoft is a hyperscaler. And so that means a bunch of things. That means that they're going to, to keep supporting multiple models. It means that they are going to like, they want to prioritize the kind of long tail of like high margin users. So you can like, you can kind of compare that to Oracle, who you can think of Oracle as basically prioritizing. One potentially low margin. Yeah, exactly. You're giving bare metal essentially to one customer, OpenAI and you're betting the whole company. And he says like, if you're going to do that, you should just vertically integrate that company. Like you're part of that company. That's what Satya says, like in response to like, why is Oracle basically eating your entire business? Sure. Like in the past like five years, Microsoft was super ramping up their capex, their build and then they just basically stopped and let Google, Oracle, Amazon basically build that up. So that's kind of the main reason there's a bunch of other stuff he's talking about. They ask him about chips. So all the big hyperscalers have their own chip play. Right. There's Trainium, there's TPUs. OpenAI is doing their own chip and Microsoft does have their own chip, but it just kind of, it's like the actual production is like way behind everyone else. It's like, okay, why is this chip so bad? Or why are there so few of them? And then Satya basically brings up that like Microsoft has IP to everything OpenAI has except for consumer hardware. And chips are not consumer hardware, they're chips, enterprise. So he's like, well okay, how do we get the best chips? The best, like you know, model specific chips. We'll just take OpenAI and we'll just like build on top of that. I wonder how much that actually transfers though, because where does the chip development live? Where does the IP live? Like if, if OpenAI's design and they. Can get line time at TSMC, then they can just produce it and sell it to any customer. They. Yes, but what if they do it within, within Nvidia or something? Like, what if they go to Nvidia and they're like, hey, for the next run of Nvidia chips, we'd like you to consider this architecture. Do they need, why, why would they need to do that? Because they want their models to be more performant on the chips. And so they go to Jensen and say, hey, we're, we're the biggest, we're one of the biggest buyers, so make the next version extremely performant for our chips. And I think they're already doing this. They're co developing chips with Nvidia, they're co developing chips with other companies and if they co develop with Broadcom or they co develop with AMD or maybe even intel in the future, but that IP lives with intel, then no, Microsoft doesn't just get it right. Yeah, so it's like only in the event that, I mean both of these are going to happen. Like there's going to be internal efforts and there's going to be external efforts. But it is a funny reminder that the internal effort get copy pasted over to Microsoft. One other, one other note, Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from neoclouds like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda Iron N scale. Isn't he already doing that to fill the. Yeah, he is, but semianalysis has a concept called the pause, which is basically a gap of this insane period of demand that you can't meet that demand. Yeah, and Satya actually says specifically, you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview. Interesting. Yeah, I think continuing on, why he basically stopped building out the chip question is also very important because you can think of it like if you build a bunch of data centers right now, they have very specific power requirements that are directly based on the chip. Like if you're building based off the H100 chip, that's different than if you're building a data center based off GB2 hundreds. And it's like you can't really, it's not like fungible. Like you can't just trade one out for another. So that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane build out right now because you don't think, you know, that chips are going to get much better. Especially with like asics, right? Yeah, exactly. Nvidia is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that are using the old gen chips or two generations back. Yeah. Anything on depreciation. Capex? Yeah, I mean so yeah, basically he gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers. Right? Because data center basically depreciating in like five years or the chips which is a big part of the, the cost. And so there's basically two ways to justify the actual build out. One of them is basically you can think of research as just being like R and D spend. So you basically just have to, you got to do the research like you need to do the spend basically. And the other is just like he keeps bringing this up is everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not. It's like again in comparison to Oracle. Oracle is basically, maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going or trying to figure that out and then doing a bunch of debt, et cetera. And then Microsoft Satya saying no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand basically? Exactly. If we're not fully built up, then we can lease from the Neo clouds. Yeah, makes sense. I'm super excited to listen to this full episode. The Wall Street Journal also had an article about the news as well. It seems like this is all in line with Microsoft's just announcement that they have a super factory. I like it. We went from AI factories to AI super factories. We went from regular artificial intelligence to super intelligence. We're ramping up, but we're still like seven levels away from the final, the final boss. Because after super intelligence of course you have Giga intelligence, then ultra intelligence, then super duper intelligence and mega factories, exa factories, terrafactories. There's all these different terms. Okay, so I will say one last. Thing I thought was terrestrial intelligence factories. Yeah, for sure. Okay, one last thing. Dorakesh asks Satya like does he buy basically the revenue growth of like when OpenAI or Anthropic says they're gonna be like 70, 100 billion in like three years, he's like well you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that. Wow, Sasha, absolute dog. I love him. He's the best. Cooking chat was asking about hair routines. We have to comment and unfortunately disappoint because I think we both ride the. Apply the same approach, which is sleep. Diet, exercise, baby well. And no hair products. No hair products. No hair products. Just water, water and water. Some sauna, some workout some. Just keep the rest of your body healthy. And I think the hair will be healthy as well. I actually think that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just funny, we're never gonna have a shampoo or a hair product sponsor because we don't really use either of them. No. But I like creatine and people say that that's bad for your hair, but. It'S creatine, the hair loss medication. The hair loss medication. People think it. People think you'd lose your hair if you're on creatine, but I certainly haven't experienced that. I have experienced that. Julius helps with maintaining good hair because it's the data analyst that works for you. Connect your data. Pulling your hair out. Plain. Yeah, plain English. Get insights in seconds. No coding required. Yeah, stop pulling your hair out and get on Julius. What are the other factors in here? Microsoft spent more than $34 billion on CapEx during its first fiscal quarter and said it would increase its total infrastructure investments over the next fisc year. It is among several tech companies pouring a combined 400 billion into AI efforts this year with demand for AI computing and companies saying they need ever more capacity. Very fun. Okay, one last thing. Another thing that I was. I was surprised to hear is that Satya, he made a big point of saying that, like, there is a superintelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models. Yeah. Isn't that. Mustafa Suleiman is running it. Yeah. And so he's saying, says maybe they'll be completely trained by Microsoft. Maybe they'll just do like fine tuning and training on like GPT OpenAI models. Yep. But like, they are going to like actually have. They're going to be training their own models. They're doing kind of the full stack. Yeah. When we were. When we were about to go on stage with Satya, I was texting with Doug o' Laughlin from Semianalysis and he was like, ask about MSL or not msl. Ask about Mai. Like, what's the strategy for Mai? And we asked a couple people and we got a little bit. It was sort of hard to like really pin down a clear strategy. I don't think that they were ready to really divulge exactly the full strategy. It'll be interesting to see what models they train. Like, do they just go bigger? They have the biggest factory. Could they just take this Fairwater facility and say, hey, let's go train something that's 10 times bigger than GPT 4.5. Do they believe that, that pre training scaling laws hold or not? That's what I'm curious about. Or are they gonna do something that's more precise? Like will they do a pre train for Excel? Will they do a pre train for Word or something like that? Is there some other tactic that they're going to employ? There's a bunch of interesting things. They clearly very GPU rich. Tons of sharp engineers, tons of interesting product surface area. Where will they actually go? Interesting times. Yeah, I mean he talks a lot about like application layer stuff. He actually says like the rapper model wrapper companies are basically debunked by models getting better. So I think he thinks that Microsoft will basically take over a lot of that, like application layer stuff. Right. He talked about Excel Agent a lot. Yeah, there's like the PowerPoint stuff. That's why I've always felt like the dynamic between OpenAI and Microsoft is so interesting because OpenAI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise they want to create. Sam alluded to a AI native Slack recently. Microsoft has teams. Imagine those. It's going to be AI native. You can imagine OpenAI having like word processing, Excel, like product. You know, you can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including eventually at the cloud layer. What do you think the dynamic is between this? Like, you know, Microsoft always loves to say like, hey, yeah, we have all the ip, but it feels like like they're not actually fast following. Like they could like OpenAI launched Atlas. Like they could have launched like Edge Atlas. Microsoft could have launched like Edge Atlas, like the next day. And that would have been like, whoa, what are we doing here? Like, that's a shot. They could have launched Sora 2. They could put Sora 2 in Excel. How about that? Brain Rot XL Excel, you know, they could have done that. They didn't. And so there's clearly like, even though they have access to all the ip they still have, they still have a differentiated view on like how the products get built. They're not just saying, oh, yes, one copy of Atlas, please. One copy of Sora 2, please. We'll just launch our own competitor app. They could have put it in LinkedIn. There is a way to integrate that. Microsoft's clearly not moving so fast on that front. They're being a little bit more methodical. Yeah. This is why I'm very excited to see what comes out of mai. Yes. It seems like they have a lot of good people. Like they've been doing a bunch of like talent acquisition stuff. Yes. So I'm curious if they're going to start like, like right now. It just seems Microsoft is still very slow. They're kind of reactive and they're like, okay, we should add, you know, another AI helper to Excel or something. But it's not like really kind of built in, like low level yet. Yeah. I'd like to have Mustafa on. I'd like to talk to him about where they're training models. Whether or not that seems like an interesting conversation, I'd like to ask him some hard questions. There's been a debate on the timeline. John, how Hard Edge has every single feature that ATLAS has. Copilot mode. It's better than Atlas or Comet, actually. Ok, interesting. Maybe they don't need a copy then. They're good. But there has been a debate over how hard of questions we ask. Is it a hard question to ask Mustafa at MAI what type of model he's training or should we ask some sort of other hard question? I wanted to practice some hard questions. I think we should start asking harder questions. I have some hard questions here for you. And I think. I think if we practice we'll become better interviews. Are you guys ready for these? We just started hitting guests with like insane math. I wouldn't call them insane. I do have one here for Tyler. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. He's looking around. It's a simple yes or no question. Every even number. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Answer the question. It's a yes or no question. Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? It's an unanswerable question. Of course it is. The Goldbach equation or the Goldbach conjecture. There's also. Can there exist an algorithm that decides whether any computer program will halt or run forever? It's the halting problem. It's a possible question. What about what will OpenAI's valuation be in 2035? 100 trillion. 100 trillion. We answer that quickly, we'll come back to that in 10 years. See if that was a hard question. What's the nicest thing ever done by Adolf Hitler? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Tyler, ask that Karp was. Karp was on a roll yesterday. Some of those clips were Here's a. Question we should ask a lot of founders that Come on here. Does your dad know you're bankrupt? I think if we hit them with that, people will be like, that's a hard question. That's a hard question. Here's one for Tyler Prove God exists. There was the Godel what is truth? That's a hard question. Have you ever done illegal drugs? Tyler, Answer the question. No, answer the question. Good answer. Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question. I'm my favorite host. Taking shots. What is Tom Time? I like these hard questions. Okay, jordan@semianly.com is down to hop on and correct a few things we said on the article. I'm going to drop him the he was listening, said Al in the chat. Where is he? Let's bring him on. I'm working on getting him the zoom like fantastic. In the meantime, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. You can get started. Let's see what else Henry Kravis gave a talk the founder of kkr. The post appears to have been deleted, but I won't say who it's from, but I will read it to you anyway. The world needs another fund like it needs a hole in the head. I think it was supposed to be off the record and I think one of our friends was maybe live tweeting it against their request. Or maybe he just cracked it and realized that he didn't want to post that. But there are a lot of funds. I suppose I was doing a little deep dive on Blue Owl. I want to get to know Blue Owl more. It's a fascinating company merger. There's a SPAC involved. They have two CO CEOs and three CO presidents. The top ranks at Blue Owl are absolutely stacked from what I read. They are of course powering the AI buildout with debt private credit. They are a private credit fund up there with ares. They've done very well. They actually have three different businesses. Only one of them is doing AI data center build outs and even within the AI data center build out fund. They fund other stuff. So it's interesting to see how how much risk they're taking, how much their business is really dependent on the AI build out. It's also there was a they got in a they got in a little battle with, with Jamie Dimon, because Jamie Dimon was saying that some of these bank failures are the fault of private credit. When you see one cockroach, there's usually more. He's kind of saying, like, hey, like, you know, we see these defaults. We see these, we see these, these large companies defaulting. Maybe this is the start of something bad. Maybe there's a lot of other bad companies out there. Yeah, there was something with BlackRock had lent, I think, $100 million to a business recently, as of, like, two weeks ago. They had it they had it marked as, you know, fully sound. Yeah. And then the company almost immediately went bankrupt. So concerning, we have anyway, Jordan from. Semi Intensity, welcome to the show. How you doing?