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Coming in the studio from the Restream waiter, Amina. How are you doing? Good. Welcome, how are you? Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Give us an introduction, explain the product, some of the trade offs and then we'll go into go to market and how everything's playing together. And first I have to tell you I saw the domain sandbar.com available at some point back in the day and I was just thinking to myself that is such a good domain. So as a domain enthusiast, I'm happy that you picked it up and are doing it justice. Appreciate that. It's got sand, it's got a bar, it's got everything you could want. It's got a nice feeling. I have positive feelings about sandbars growing up in California, but yeah, would love an introduction on yourself and the company and how you got to building Sandbar. Totally. So I'm Mina, I'm one of the co founders at Sandbar. I originally met my co founder Kirak at a startup called Control Labs that was developing these wrist worn neural interfaces and we got acquired into Meta and we're working on a lot of devices there. And in parallel I started exploring a ton with LLMs and started trying to think about what it would take to have a more effortless interaction with these new speaking thinking machines. So we started to explore a lot of different forms and that eventually led us to two products that I guess we're announcing together that we call Stream and the Stream ring. And Stream is, as we say, a self extension for talking through ideas and capturing them into notes. We have this very Sandy app that has a log of interactions you've discussed, notes that you've asked Stream to save, as well as the ability to zoom out of interactions and see what you've been discussing over time. And especially if you're on the go, your phone is in your pocket and you want to perhaps talk about an idea or save something into a note, that's where you can use the Stream ring. So you just hold this touchpad, whisper into the top and then release. And if I do something like that, I can say, hey, can you give me your hottest take on AI wearables? Sure. The hottest take. Most AI wearables chase novelty instead of intimacy. They brag about features. But the real frontier is emotional calibration. You know, why don't you start a list with some, some of those hot takes and it'll scurry away and save those away. There you go. Sure. For when you need a list of hot takes. I love the live demo. It's always risky but yeah, that's so what. So the key, the value that you're delivering to users is not, you're not trying to say I'm going to be this personal assistant that's going to do everything in your life. It's simply like you're just trying to build that interface with effectively just building this new surface area for a mobile device that people are already using in a new way to just input ideas and thoughts into a computer and have them be organized generally. Right, Exactly. We're really focused on letting you talk through ideas and save thoughts into notes. And normally I wouldn't have my phone out, I would have it in my pocket and maybe I would have earbuds in and already so much of our thinking either happens in the go or lives in Apple notes and it's this beautiful mess of grocery lists and you know, letters to a parent and career plans. And we see Stream as the most effortless way to either build those ideas through conversation or save them away. Very cool. What's the timeline till you guys are shipping the product? I know you're doing pre orders now. Totally. So we've been building now for around two years and it's good to be coming out of the cave. We are actually right now kicking off our next build with our manufacturing partner in Taiwan and and then will be fully ramped to mass production in summer of 26. That's when it will start shipping. Very cool. Very cool. What are your hottest takes on wearables? Obviously it sounds like you maybe trained your, your, your, your, your internal model to. Here's, here's one. Do you, do you think like how confident can you be in predicting success of a wearable? Because it feels like it's something where you need to just run a lot of tests and the speed of each test is a little bit slow because you have to iterate on the actual hardware and you might one shot it but that might be a lot of luck. How much luck is it? Or do you think that there is a way to empirically know that you have a hit on your hand before you go to market? Yeah, I mean we definitely didn't start with this. We've worked on a lot of different devices, a lot of different use cases and now we've been living with some form of stream for the last call it year and a half and Kirak and I wanted to get to a point where we felt like it was useful in our daily life. And then the people who were having test the device, our friends and our family who we've given units to, are themselves finding it valuable. And, you know, we have a marketing professor who will be driving to work, and she'll talk about her lesson plan and. And then she'll watch her kids in the playground playing, and she'll be able to keep her eyes up as she takes notes on what she wants to improve for the next day. We have a bodywork coach who will walk her dog and be talking about clients and also riffing on Eastern versus Western medicine. And after enough time living with it, we got to this just really high degree of confidence that it was super useful in our lives, and we're exploring other forms and other use cases, but they always have to hit that bar. And I would say having built always in New York, where we get to wear devices easily outside and not be noticed and also be in touch with people outside of tech, has helped really ground us in something that we think will be useful for everybody. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I was laughing, thinking about a future where the average human has exactly 10 rings. I was thinking the same thing because the Oura ring is so popular. It's like, this is my thinking ring. Well, then you get into the gauntlets and the. Yeah, yeah. Big. And the chains, bracelets, and you pierce both of your ears for the wearables and eyeglasses and headphones. All these things. Yeah. Well, I'm super excited about this. John knows that I have a hilarious way of, like, keeping track of the thoughts in my mind, which is texting myself. Yeah. I'm constantly texting myself, like, stream of consciousness things that I need to remember, do, or whatever. It's unhinged. I'm excited to try this out. Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks a ton. Thanks. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adeo Customer relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is Alessandro Chesser.

Video for that podcast. I think it's audio only. Audio? Yeah, man. Sam really understands the Trump takeaway from the election. Like, I believe, like the whole. The whole podcast election conclusion was just attention is all you need. You need to do as many podcasts as possible. You need to be high volume. Volume wins. And Sam Altman just will not turn down appearances. And so he does Tucker Carlson, and there's a really rough clip that comes out of that. But then he just goes and does another podcast, and then he does another podcast. And then on Friday, everyone was talking about the Brad Gerstner, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman clip. And then the next on Tuesday, there's a new press cycle and I haven't seen any bad clips from the Tyler Cowen interview. So it just feels like the number one thing you don't want to do in comms is go into hiding. You just want to power through, keep posting, post through the Pain podcast through the Pain. I love it. I think it's a great media strategy and I think it will ultimately be victorious. But the question about Isaacman, he.

Ability to do that like a million times. Yeah, that makes sense. You're the coo. Give me some best practices for acquiring companies post merger integration. What makes it successful? What are you watching out for? What are the pitfalls? What are the nightmares that you've heard anonymously from your mentors about what can go wrong when a large scaled software company like yours acquires another software company and the integration doesn't go quite right? What are you looking for? So we've acquired 10 companies now, about 10 companies of various scale. I think it comes down to the founders. And I've done my last three acquisitions on the balcony of my favorite pub. And so honestly, like on the balcony. So it's like if this doesn't go down, you're going over. You're one of those guys, you're kind. Of like old Patty down at the pub is going to throw you off, break your legs if you don't do the deal. I mean, that's. Yeah, yeah, kind of. But we're not threatening anyone. We're not threatening anyone. But like, you got to get the cut of the jib of the founder you're acquiring. What are their motivations? Why are they in it? Yeah. Does one plus one equal ten? So the companies that we find best acquire, they've got an amazing piece of technology, they've got an amazing founder, and that founder wants to get the power of what they've built in way more hands than their current distribution channel. So if we can plug the power of their technology and team into our distribution channel, one plus one equals 10. And you can see if they get a glint in their eyes when you talk about that. And it's that glint in their eyes and just deeply understanding their motivations that is going to make it successful or not successful. If they're just after a quick exit, that could be fine if you're just after technology or just after their customer base. But if you don't deeply understand the founder, and that's why I don't have an M and A team, like we do have an M and A team, but we don't have a head of M and A because I feel when you're acquiring companies, it is so deeply personal and the person that's going to sponsor the success of that company once it joins your company needs to be involved in that process and they need to be the ones making the decision. And when that's delegated down, I feel that leads to a lot of carnage. And most of the founders that we've acquired and some we've acquired, like, eight years ago are still with us today and are in leadership positions in the company. So I think that's sort of testament to the success of a lot of the acquisitions we've done. That's very cool. What's the chat? Wants to know the biggest fish you've ever caught.

With the current geopolitical situation. So that's an interesting question, but I do think that there's a new debate which is what happens below the moon, what happens in low Earth orbit, what happens with the data center in space? Question. Because six months ago, I'm not kidding, six months ago it was a non issue. It was just like, oh yeah, there's like a YC company that's working on it. This is some sci fi thing that people are thinking about. But now we have Jensen Huang, we have Elon Musk, and we have Sundar Pichai all saying we're going to do data centers in space. So collectively you have what, 10 trillion in market cap? That's like, hey, we're going to, we're going to be taking this seriously. And I do think that that's a NASA question. And I think NASA will have some say over the speed at which this stuff gets built out. Now maybe it's a decade, maybe it's two decades, maybe it's five, five years. But there will be policies that are overseen by Jared Isaacman that inform how seriously the idea of data centers in space gets taken. And he could be completely anti and he could just be like, I think this is fake, I think it's impossible to diffuse the heat. I'm anti and I'm going to block it the whole time I'm at NASA. And some people might be very upset about that. Some people might be, thank goodness. We didn't want to waste any time on that. But, but he hasn't chimed in on that. And I think that that's an interesting next discussion for the government to have and a government administrator, the NASA administrator to have, which is what is the US government's position on data centers in space? Because the hyperscalers are chiming in left and right. Yeah. Elon's post from a couple days ago. Quantum computing is best done in the permanently shadowed craters on the moon.

Great products together. Let's hear from Brandon Jacoby. What did he say? Jordi Jacobi says as someone who had the decision to start a job at Cash App and get a big tech salary or go further into debt to do my fourth year of college, financials is a big factor. Yeah. And I think it, I think it is. It just feels like it's does get reduced a lot. And I think there's this interesting thing where like there's almost like a, there's like an inverted U sort of bell curve thing going on because if you can get the full ride, then you might want to drop out and just go straight into entrepreneurship because you're cracked. But if you're not so good that you can go to the Ivy League for free, but you can go to the Ivy League but you don't have to pay, then it's worth it. But if you do have to pay, then it's not worth it. And it's more of like this big matrix than just like is it it good or bad and how much does it cost? Yeah. The other thing, school is a way to buy time to figure out how you want to spend your time. Like with, with Brandon Jacoby design doing graphic design as a teenager. And so the opportunity to go work at company like Cash App instead of finishing college made a lot of sense. Yeah. But if you don't know how you want to spend your time and how you want to spend your career, how you want to start your career than school. I think a lot of people are just doing it to kill time so they're not just sitting somewhere. Do you know that there is a job intact in venture capital where the number it's extremely prestigious job and.

Valuable is the chips in the data centers being built. Yep. The depreciation is just going to be crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And so look, I think the one thing that's for sure about this bubble that's different than anything else is that the innovation is real and the innovation is profound. And I think that innovation and what it's going to unlock is challenging. And you have geniuses like Elon Musk and others out there that are, how can I say, they're inventing so much so fast and they have so many resources. If you think about it, the CEOs of the Magnificent Seven and SAM have a lot of influence on how the world is going to play out over the next three or four years. Right. You could, you could add a couple of chip guys. You could have Hawk and Hawk Ton and CC Way. And you could add maybe there's three women that are up and comers, maybe Feife and. And Mira and Lynn at Fireworks that could become more influential. But right now, the assets and the power is in the Magnificent Seven and Sam Altman and those guys are going to have an amazing impact on how the world rolls out in the next five years. Three to five years. So, I mean, when you think about that, those are. The guys are going to shape the politics of what's actually happening. In fact, I kind of think that we're in for a different world where right now we're worried about immigration and we're worried about all kinds of social issues. I think in the future, when robots are walking around, we're going to be more interested in like, wow, who has. Who are the AI haves and who are the AI have nots? And I think that better or worse, the magnificent 7 and 8 are going to change the political dialogue in this country pretty dramatically within three years. And I think they know it, which is why there's some pretty good ideas that I've heard about giving every child $1,000 in the stock market. Something like that could be a great idea. That could be a great idea. I heard Jensen and Brad talking about it. That could be very helpful because there will be a have and have not world in America. And that will be the primary dialogue, I think, in the future, not the stuff we're going through right now. How have you processed the boom in private credit?

Most of the companies are going to be first generation AI and they're not going to be the right side technology platform. Right? I mean first of all, most people are betting on these large language models. And what we learned at Santa Fe we had in middle of March we had the top research scientists from all the hyperscalers. The 40 person conference I hosted with the scientists and the thing that came out of it is everyone's too focused on LLMs. Not focused enough on the complexity between the humans training them and the humans consuming them. And I think the secondary part of that is that LEMs are, we're going to find a new, new technology and cheaper forms of models that are going to come out. I'm certain that what China did with Deep Sea by releasing open source, there'll be many, many more open source models in a year and you won't need to spend all this money on an LLM. I have a feeling that will be a multimodal world with lots of free open source models going down the road. So if you buy a company that's based on, you know, foundational models technology, it may not be so valuable in the next wave of AI. Can you bridge this to trade for me? I heard an interesting stat last night.

Overall investing thesis throughout tumultuous times. Well, the difference here is AI is affecting everything. You know, Bezos is right, it's an industrial bubble, not necessarily a financial bubble because the value of AI is not going to, not going to go away. That is absolutely the future and it's here now. It just isn't here at scale yet, in my opinion, at least not for enterprise. So I do think that the problem with buying up companies is what do you buy? Is it going to be valuable, you know, down the road or not valuable? And it turns a lot on the quality of the management points, a lot on the technology. And so buying SaaS companies hoping they're going to be more valuable in five years, I think that's a questionable, questionable strategy. I think you have to think about, like I said from each, if you assume that there must be some disruption, like it was a Covid types disruption where it's you know, literally a few months, then you know, and the Fed bails you out, then you know, people just keep going, the bubble bounces back and it just keeps rocking. If on the other hand it's, it's a serious economic issue right now, M2 money supply is all time highs so you've got massive amount of capital out there. It's not a liquidity crunch, it's just going to be a challenge with the overall economy and then there'll be a liquidity crunch because the debt that's out there is massive everywhere. So I think here in this particular case, if you're going to strategize to buy up a bunch of things after a bus, that's a bad strategy. Most of the companies are going to be first generation AI and they're not going to be the right, how I say, technology platform, right? I mean first of all most people are betting on these large language models and what we learned at Santa Fe we had in.

You know, I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, but we've got some of the smartest minds in physics and math in the world. Irrational things like bubbles can last a long, long time. And you can say, oh, it doesn't look like a bubble. Well, I hate to say it, but I think a lot of these hyperscalers are going to regret the capex commitments unless they can get out of it. We'll see. I think what's interesting to me is I think they may be underestimating the sort of drop in token price. I mean, I really think that the, that, that the, that the amazing power of the chips and things that Jensen has done is going to outstrip our ability to get electricity to really power this. Yeah, that's what Satya, Satya has been saying this for over a year now. I'm more power constrained, I think. I think if you look at the amount of chips he sold and look at out there, I don't think there's a power out available today. They have to find a new source in order to be able to sort of benefit from all this buildup. And if there is a economic recession, then the enterprise, the expected enterprise, you know, explosion of usage will be delayed. Right. And if there's any kind of a sort of major security problem around AI that'll scare off the enterprises, that'll also delay. So I don't think you can, I don't think you can continue the AI boom without Fortune 5000 getting on board. It's not going to happen without that. And so if there is an economic interruption, a serious one, then the demand is going to, is going to change. That has to happen. How do you think about different opportunities to buy assets, buy whole companies through.

And change the strategy for a new world. The one thing we learned from that lesson is that when the boom ends and the crash begins is that all those companies on the old platforms, the old technology, are not going to be very attractive with the next boom and the next thing happens, right? So think about web companies in 2008. They were before that crash, you know, they were looking great. And then mobile companies became what was important after 2010, right? So if you weren't mobile, you weren't very attractive. And I think we're going to have the same thing here when this next cycle goes down. There's three major trends, right? We only talk about AI today, but crypto, I think, is becoming more and more important. And eventually, not sure if it's five years or 10, but quantum computing will become a major platform. Sure, absolutely. So the question becomes is when does the crash happen? And then how long does it last? And then when you come out of it, what are the new technologies that all the companies have to be built on? What was your state of mind in, let's say, 1998, 1999, and then.