NEWSMAX

Full cartoon character on it. Why not? Dolly Bali says is showing a screenshot from I believe is Biz by sell of a laundromat which is selling. It's got 421,000 of EBIT asking just under 3 million. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024. Wow. So they just made business in a couple years lifestyle and they're like I would like $3 million for it now. Okay, couple more posts. John Fio, friend of the show, says the Sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last hundred years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be, but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience instead. It's what Apple and Meta were trying to go after, but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A Sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of ST stadium. It will suck in only the best acts and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life. This is how you capture value over the next cycle. And I agree with this. I think this is a great take. So yeah, rewind. A year ago, companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Nvidia orders. Do you want to. Meanwhile, we have the Sphere, which they built the Sphere. It's one concert venue. They built a really cool concert venue in Vegas. They got a bunch of debt, but it's awesome. Which one do you want to own? And of course on Nvidia you were still up 100% over the last 12 months, but if you had bought the Sphere, you were up 442%. Yeah, did very well. I made a whole YouTube video about the sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it. Had dug into the founder and how it got built and it was just a fascinating, fascinating story. But I think he's right that there will be a Sphere in every major city. There is technically a Sphere like location in Los Angeles over by Sofi Stadium. It's not technically a full sphere with LEDs on the outside, but it has a big screen and you can go and watch a football game there. And I think it's doing well as well. I haven't dug into that one nearly as much, but I do think that these types of immersive experiences. The Sphere is unique because it grabs attention from all over the world. You fly by on a plane, you just see it and you see the emoji on kind of a miss that. We've never done anything with this fear. No last a little white.

Going on in the timeline. Jordy, anything else? The must have item in Silicon Valley is $178 sweater with a CEO's face. Leaders from companies from Nvidia to Palantir are now driving fashion, signaling a new era of the cult of the founder. We saw Nick on our team rocking the Jensen sweater from gtc. It looks great. This is a very beautiful. It does look great. Very funny, very silly, and just a nice departure from just a normal T shirt, you know, for, for what, 20, 30 years? The tech, the tech merch was just a T shirt with a logo on it. That's fine, but why not mix it up? Why not go in a different direction and make a sweater with the CEO's full, full cartoon character on it?

There's some huge news in the world of robotics because they made a slot machine that can follow you across the casino floor. We actually got a slot machine stalker before. A humanoid demo. Yeah, this is before. I guess not demo. Well, this is before it can actually fold your laundry. Like, we've been seeing a lot of laundry folding demos. We got the slot machine across the. Never ask a woman her age, a man, his salary, or humanoid robot founder to let you be alone with the robot for 30 seconds. Okay, but what is actually happening here? Because obviously, like, the joke is that it will follow you around so that you never stop gambling. But that can't be why they actually built this. It must be because they want to be able to reconfigure the layout easier. It's probably that, but also the novelty. Okay. Oh, if you see something moving around, if you're walking through, you'll be like, I gotta chase that down and throw a couple. Oh, that's funny. Robot slot machine. This also looks like. I don't know what Novomatic is, but this does not look like it's. This does not look like it's at an actual casino. This looks like it's at a trade show for casino equipment, which I think might be. This is a demo of something that this company is going to try and sell to casinos. I don't know that this is actually at a major casino just yet, although people are walking around, but it looks like. It looks like trade show bags to me. I don't know. This says trade show all over it. I do wonder if this is being teleoperated or if this is end to end machine learning. I need to know. I need to know the tech stack and I need to know, is this. Is this truly. Is this truly autonomous or is this just being puppeteered by an Xbox controller? Because we gotta get. For the studio. We've had. We've had. This is not. This could be just a remote controlled car which has existed since like, what, the 80s? Maybe longer. But we're in this phase where we want to layer on. Oh, this is AGI. This is truly AGI.

More science focused, Neo Labs, Neo Cloud. Like I feel like 5, 500 will like really can kind of like seed a bunch of different players. But, but yeah, how are you thinking about like the dynamics of like early stage startup fundraising right now? Yeah, I mean in the UK actually we are seeing those hundred million dollar and even billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a, in a founder who's out of DeepMind, which is incredible. Let's go. And there's been a bunch of those in the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it the other way around. So we're saying we're going to give you tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars possibly of government procurement contracts. You can build it if it's good enough. If you are world class, we're the customer, we're ready to buy. Sure. Same thing with compute. We're able to give a sort of, you know, a significant amount of compute early stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayers taking all this risk backing you, what's our upside? Right. We want to be on the cap table. Right. We want to do it on commercial terms. It's going to be on the same terms as an index, as a Boulder turn, as an Excel, as a 16Z. Whoever's there, we're going to be good partners. But the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting, you know, getting on the cap table is also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, you know, still, 5, 10 million pounds can make a difference. I don't want to be like too flippant about it. You know, those things, early stage do matter. Yeah. But you know, we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking supporting all the companies. Yeah, I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, you know, as a commercial vc, it's hard to compete purely on capital. Right. Especially in AI right now when the numbers become so, so huge. I think that something I've been really excited to see from the sovereign AI fund is exactly as James said, is this of hands on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large data sets that the government may have access to that, you know, portfolio companies will have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said. And then obviously we're going back to the million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, which is, you know, a huge, huge help. So you know, it's not purely trying to compete on a capital basis, which I think, frankly, would not play to the strengths of what the fun can do. So AI is extremely popular in China and India.

Interested in is like how big can the widget be? Or can you actually take over the whole home screen? We can take over. We basically ask you to install two widgets, a medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. Those work in dynamic together. So the medium widget will basically what we call a wildcard widget internally, which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time. That's right. The big widget is what we call a for you widget, which is just a feed. And you know, what we're doing, John, I think is we're building kind of the new iteration, the Facebook newsfeed 2.0 that's entirely AI generated about your life, highly personal and that lives directly on your home screen and you can browse it as easily. The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals. And the beautiful part is that it's all AI generated and AI mediated. We have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feedback. It's funny because like everything, everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then like getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right but like it feels like, like, like, like I'm still in like prosumer territory. But that's a good place to start and then you can hopefully make it easier and then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like the biggest thing is like I, these new surface areas are explored. I mean you mentioned Nikita but like he's, but he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating like new ux, new experiences on top of like what Apple gives you and it feels like that's really underexplored. So have you thought of, have you thought about trying to build any products within, within any of these.

It is insanely powerful. If we can activate that. No, that's a tall order. But at the same time, you know, like I've posted about ads and advertising. Look, I've, I've been in technology for such a long time from consumer, you know, whether it's like feeds at Facebook or you know, even Google and whatnot. But you know, you start to think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world. You know, it has actually made things accessible. And I think generally if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality and services to people who would otherwise not been afforded. So I believe in advertising, I believe in good advertising. I believe in advertising that is actually like complementary to the user experience, not necessarily taking away from it. It's tricky to do. But the worst ad experience I've ever had as an ad enjoyer was in college. I was buying a Kindle and they were like, do you want the ad supported Kindle for like $100 or the ad free Kindle for like $120? And as a college student I was like, I don't think I'll mind ads. Why not? Let's. Were they bad? And it's on the home screen when the device is locked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just showing me books that I would never read. So it's bad targeting. So it's terrible targeting. And it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time and it kind of looks like, wait, you're reading that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you can avoid that. Yeah, definitely. There's a question from the chat.

Seemingly scared of it. You know, I posted about this a little bit with, with respect to Apple, Apple relies on a deterministic world, right? Like a world where lots and lots of elements from design to the experience to the underlying context that doesn't change as much and it's very deterministic. So for example, iPhone is very much kind of software is very broadcasty, right? It's a one to many, they write it once and it runs for everybody. And roughly speaking, it runs exactly the same way. Now with a non deterministic world that could change drastically. For example, when we give this out to everybody, everybody has a very different experience with our app because it's completely non deterministic. Apple lives in a deterministic world and having to transition into non determinism and non deterministic software, it's actually a really non trivial transition, especially for a company like Apple where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So I think for us we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of expectations and determinism with the beauty of non deterministic elements of AI and create a really great user experience around that that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So we're kind of maybe in some sense moving ahead of Apple who has to deal with a few billion users, just minor amount of users. So I think that this world deserves more experimentation like what we're doing in terms of both user interfaces and experiences and feeds and ranking And Jordi, going back to your point on monetization, I think that's the number one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture real estate on your device that is the home screen that is available at a glance. And I think I posted about the greatest billboard of all time. Exactly. I mean it is insanely powerful. If we can activate that now, that's a tall order. But at the same time I've posted about ads and advertising.

Is just to make things easily accessible for these individuals and I think we're going to attempt to do that. Very basic. Yeah. What is your more as a CEO? It sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and are just in an experimental phase. Is that generally the right Reid? Yeah, I think generally I would say two things. Number one is look, we built a really fun product that we're going to give to lots and lots and lots of people. Turns out, you know, this era is non zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital but you know, inferences is non trivially expensive and especially if you operate at like agentic inference or just background inference, that stuff is just consistently going unlike you know, Claude or GPT where people actually make requests or go on there and type something. We're doing it on behalf of you. Right? Like we're doing those things in the background. We where we anticipate, we listen to contacts, we turn every time, for example, every time you get an email, we process it with one of our agents. It sort of turns out it buckets that item. It tries to figure out what to do with it, it tries to see if it deserves some higher order ranking and then it tries to figure out oh, can I complete this task? Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay, hey, here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know and it's a very look really replying to emails has been 30, 40 years, but this is a new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world and apply that to any aspect of your life, whether it's health or finance or even where you are. One of the underlying things that we do is location. Imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice, by simply it being on your home screen, wherever you are, if you're at a museum, if you're in a new neighborhood and that's a one tap away. Our goal is to make intelligence either zero or one tap away, not one prompt away. Burning question how do you.

And there's going to be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly, after all. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers, necessarily so. In meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after this is the future. Trust me, I used it once. Shulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology, from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all hands, Shulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary. So to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives, just dig your own grave. He's literally the title of this article. He's saying, AI is coming for your job. And everyone knows it. In tech. In tech we're starting to, you know, every company's adopting this technology at a rapid rate, but everyone's like, hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tasks. Right. This sort of narrative is building, like we need to figure out how to. We've built a bunch of very useful tools and they are going to have powerful effects in our economy. But we have to kind of change the narrative around this because a fear based approach is not working. And meanwhile, AI is coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary. Write your obituary. So not helpful. And they're not even doing AI related job cuts. No, I just don't understand. I don't understand. This whole press cycle he just comes in, just immediately starts blackpooling. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackpooling. Do you think this is a setup for a much deeper layoff than they've done historically? I don't know. I mean, it's possible, but I think that they would need to do some serious AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out. I mean, I would be surprised if all those 90,000. I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. What are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet and I email it to somebody. That type of job, yeah, that's probably gonna be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organ. But for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're working on bigger projects than just throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem at the same time. Who knows, Maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Shulman and they weren't half bad. He said, like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I happen to like it. I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or like when fire was first invented. How cool would that be? He continued, we're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that. I like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Shulman and.

Up next, we have Pippa Lamb returning to the show from Sweet Capital alongside James Wise from Balderton Capital Partners. I believe they are in the waiting room. Calling in from across the pond. Are you both over in the UK today? They better be. Yeah. We have given the news. Well, welcome to the show. Pippa, why don't you reintroduce yourself? And, James, since it's the first time on the show, you can introduce yourself as well. Yeah. Big day. James's first time on tvpn. We're very excited. Fantastic to have you. Yeah. So those I haven't met before. I'm Pippa Lam. I'm a partner here at Suite Capital. I'm also an active angel investor here and also scout with a six, but generally sort of sit between the ecosystems of the US and the UK tech. How do you. I didn't know you were. You were the triple threat there. How do you. How do you decide who gets. Who gets. Who gets the deal flow? That's interesting. No? Yeah. Secret secrets. Yeah. James. James. Yeah, first time caller, but longtime viewer. Thanks, guys. Great to have you having me on. So, I'm a general partner at Balderson capital. We're a $7 billion venture firm. We're based here in London and we used to be called Benchmark Europe. There we go. We got the buzzer. So back, back in 2001, we were benchmark Europe. We spun out in 2010 when the European market really took off. And for the last four months, I've also been helping set up the UK Sovereign AI fund. Okay, yeah, take us through that. I think that's what we're here to talk about. How long have the talks been going on? How big is the fund? What's the strategy? What makes it unique in that it's so linked to the uk specifically? Yeah, well, about a year ago, we kicked off this big AI opportunities plan. There was huge news about it at the time and we've been working through all the various parts of that and people can talk more about things we've been doing and data centers and compute. But the fund was set off to really accelerate some of the UK's big UK successes, but with a lot more than capital. So we've got about £500 million. It's a starting point, it's the entry ticket in this game. But more importantly, we're providing access to UK supercomputers here. So huge amount of compute. We're providing fast track visas, we're providing unique data sets, we're providing government as a customer. So procurement through Government, basically to give a lot of the companies say they could benefit from working with the government a massive boost. Yeah. I have to say that supercomputer is such an underrated term. Whoever thought to rebrand supercomputer to data center terrible is an idiot terrible because data center sounds so boring and terrible. Futuristic supercomputer is awesome. Not gonna take my job. I'm so into supercomputers. What were we? Yeah, so. But that's your grandfather's data center, right? It's the supercomputers like what IBM used to build. Yeah, yeah, ye. And they have them in like cool scientific locations, like CERN has one. And like you always hear about, oh, they're doing astrophysics on them. There's so many cool things. But that does link to, you know, where will the UK get the most leverage out of investing? Because I imagine that there's not a lot of value in just trying to like clone Google Search or Instagram for Europe. Like those platforms, it's fine. But at the same time, sovereign AI does have value. Where in the stack does that live in your mind? Yeah. So we're building out a whole range of talent. Right. So we're going to be doing everything from electron to token, but obviously working with American partners doing that and international partners as well, sometimes at the chip level, sometimes at the model level. And then we're starting to focus on where the UK has huge advantages. So life sciences is a huge area for us. Right. If you look at isomorphic, which is actually a spin out of Google, you know, they're based here in London. The whole team basically is European and that they may be the closest we get to a AI company getting a drug all the way through to approval. That sort of end to end AI design. Yeah. Outside of life science is loads of stuff in physics and materials sciences. So a lot of the AI science end of the spectrum rather than the AI slop end of the spectrum. Yeah. Pippa, are you seeing, are you seeing like a, an effect where entrepreneurs from around Europe are moving to London in the same way that folks from Chicago move to San Francisco to do startups? Like, is there, is there a proper movement to make London like the destination for ambitious European founders these days? Yeah, I think it's, you know, obviously fairly biased, having spent a lot of time here, but I think that the UK has always batted above its weight in terms of the deep R and D pockets we have here. You know, in terms of universities, the talent that are coming out of the local schools, that's already created a very fertile ecosystem. And I think that, you know, one of the reasons you wanted to jump on here today was because it feels like, you know, UK is having a bit of an AI moment. It's not to say that we weren't already at the forefront of many of the innovations happening here. You know, of course we always talk about Demis, Hannah Sabas from, you know, DeepMind, that was founded in the UK. Obviously we would have loved to have kept that here, but of course it also went with Google. But, you know, we have long been at the forefront. I think it's super critical that, that the DeepMind maintains such a big presence in, in the UK because you guys now at the sovereign AI fund, if someone wants to leave DeepMind, spin out, like, you guys can be there to provide capital and. Exactly. And that's what we're seeing now, I think both from the idea that we want to be an AI maker, not just an AI taker, we're seeing, you know, grassroots innovation come out of the schools here. But as you say, we're also having people either leave DeepMind. Also in terms of our partners across in the US, I think, you know, James can correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like a lot of the, you know, the first destination headquarter within Europe is usually in London. I think that that is pretty much most of the large companies we've had. So I think that there is definitely, you know, it's always been a good hub for AI, but we are seeing a lot of additional tailwinds of which sovereign AI is one of them at the moment as well. We went through this period last year and it might still be going on. I don't really have a pulse check on it where every AI company seed round was in like the hundreds of millions of dollars. And I imagine that you're not going to spread this fund over just five companies. And so do you think that. No, John, it's one bet. It's one bet. But I mean, do you imagine being like investing alongside other funds and doing more structured rounds where a lot of capital comes together to take big swings, or is there actually some sort of structural shift in the type of startups that are getting built today, where 5, 10, $20 million can actually put some points on the board early on and get in the game in a meaningful way? I can see that you guys can make a number of bets. On the app layer. You talked about energy. Yeah, there's a lot of different stuff. More Science Focus, Neo Labs, Neo Cloud. Like, I feel like 5, 500 will like really can kind of like seed a bunch of different players. But. But yeah. How are you thinking about like the dynamics of like early stage startup fundraising right now? Yeah. I mean, in the UK actually, we are seeing those $100 million and even billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a, in a founder who's out of deep mine, which is incredible. Let's go. And there's been a bunch of those in the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it the other way around. So we're saying we're going to give you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars possibly of government procurement contracts. You can build it if it's good enough. If you are world class, we're the customer, we're ready to buy. Sure. Same thing with compute. We're able to give a sort of, you know, a significant amount of compute to early stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayer is taking all this risk backing you. What's our upside? Right. We want to be on the cap table. Right. We want to do it on commercial terms. It's going to be on the same terms as an index, as a boulder turn, as an Excel, as a 16Z. Whoever's there, we're going to be good partners. But the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting, you know, getting on the cap table is also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, you know, still, 5, 10 million pounds can make a difference. I don't want to be like too flippant about it. You know, those things, early stage do matter. Yeah. But you know, we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking, supporting all the companies. Yeah. I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, you know, as a commercial vc, it's hard to compete purely on capital. Right. Especially in AI right now where the numbers become so, so huge. Yeah. I think that something I've been really excited to see from the sovereign AI fund is exactly as James said, is this kind of hands on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large data sets that the government may have access to that, you know, portfolio companies will have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said. And then obviously we're going back to the million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, which is, you know, a huge, huge help. So, you know, it's not Purely trying to compete on a capital basis, which I think frankly would not play to the strengths of what the fun can do. So AI is extremely popular in China and India, deeply unpopular in America. Where do you think the UK will land? Do you think there's a chance that the population broadly will be supportive of artificial intelligence? They're like, AI allows me to spend more time at the pub. That's the way to sell it. That's what I'm saying. No, look, the uk we've been pretty strong and early adopters almost of every wave of new technology. Right. Whether it's financial services, like, you know, paying with this thing, the Brits are way ahead doctors in the world. And when it comes to sort of first generation AI tools, your Claudes and GPT, I think the UK is number one or two in Europe for adoption. So, so far so good. But of course there's loads of issues. You know, I think that there's going to be need to be some really strong political leadership to explain to people the tradeoffs between, you know, these things can be transformative, make you know, your wealth and your health and your security of your nation better off. At the same time, you know, we're going to need more energy. There's a load of issues we need to navigate on online harms and copyright. So some of those battles have been fought publicly, some of them are still to come. Yeah. Are you say that there's an opportunity for the government to be a buyer? I think a lot of people jump to defense and military. I'm more interested in if you're seeing any opportunities in non defense sector opportunities for efficiency. I feel like at least in America everyone laments like the DMV is a huge weight and like if they just had a piece of software instead of a physical form, things would speed up. Are you seeing opportunities for startups to increase efficiency across non military portions of the UK government? Oh yeah, I mean, I mean everywhere. And I think, you know, there's a bunch of businesses here in Europe, I'm sure there are in the US as well who are using AI for you to complete procurement contracts. You know, these like 400 page things you have to do. So private companies have been doing that in response. You know, the UK government at least is already smartly using AI to read them as well and right. They don't make any decisions but they help you, help you navigate some of these processes. Same thing in transcription and voice. Obviously we're already seeing GPS and doctors benefit hugely from being able to use these tools. To quickly take notes and actually look at the patient rather than spend all their time sitting in front of the computer filling out the health records. So there's been some early wins. And I think, you know, part of the job at Sovereign AI is to work out which of the companies we should work with and the government to see where else those wins are. Yeah, makes a lot of sense, Jordy. Super smart. I hope that you can work out like, on the cap table to just say the United Kingdom. Because, like, I feel like as a founder, if you just see your country on your cap table, you're like, well, I got to, I got to, I got to deliver. I got to deliver. Deliver. But very cool. Yeah. The country's lucky to have you both, you know, leading this effort. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Have a good rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Bye.

Up next we have Eric Anderson from Alloy Therapeutics. I love, I love messing with you. You love messing with me. Never gets old. Well, without further ado, Alloy Therapeutics has raised a Series E to build full stack AI biotech infrastructure. Eric Anderson is here live. What's going on, Eric? How are you doing, gentlemen? I'm doing great today. Yeah. Good to have you. So much for hopping on. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit. I'm Eric Anderson. I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics. We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world helping people discover and develop drugs. Okay, infrastructure, what exactly is going on in the biotech stack? Imagine everything from centrifuges down to writing PDFs for the FDA to trials. There's so much that goes into that. What do you focus on specifically? You got that? So the technology we have is really around more drug discovery and then into drug development. So the folks that do regulatory, the folks that do clinical, we work with them to discover drugs with the companies that we help to support. So we work with big pharma companies, we work with small biotech companies. What's going on in the industry today? The big trend right now is when we talk about infrastructure, who's going to actually do the wet lab work today in the lab? In addition, we've got everything going on with techbio of all of this in silico work that's happening that's really exciting and sort of bringing those things together. Yeah. And the idea, the idea is like you can have like a million times more ideas for different drugs, but then you still have the constraint of the physical world needing to kind of be able to actually run experiments until ideally we could simulate a lot more in the future, but maybe we're not there. Exactly right. And you can simulate all these things, but it's a bit of the design, build, test and then you learn. It's that loop we all know. And right now in the biotech space, we've made some incredible progress with Gen AI and machine learning capabilities to come up with a lot of those ideas. You got to close the loop then and actually be able to test them. And, and then there's a lot of skill that goes in, just the skill of drug development of what makes a good drug and connecting those things together is what we do really well. So how much of this will wind up looking like an AWS for drug development? I can provision a certain machine and you have it and I can interface with it all over the Internet and you will do all the physical stuff for me? Yeah, that's part of it. So AWS just launched a service, Amazon launched a great service that connects these generative companies back to a back end of how you manufacture the protein and you test it. That's one small piece to the process. I would say a lot of scientists out there that can design things in silico and then send them to a lab like that. Is that not like a crazy side quest for them? AWS has centrifuges now and. No, AWS is actually just connecting them together. No, it's pretty close. Got it, got it. I think what they're going for there is that they want to be the cloud. If you're going to do your compute to come up with these, with these in silico things, they want to make sure they see all the traffic and then just connect it to anyone else on the back end. Yeah, I think what they're doing. Got it, got it. Yeah. So can you zoom out for me and just do a temperature check on biotech? We, we read one article about how Boston's going through a really tough time. At the same time, like, every time I open up the Wall Street Journal, there's a new billion dollar acquisition. Yeah. So last year felt like, like the dark. The dark ages for biotech. Felt like everyone, every, every. Every bio. Biotech investor that we were talking to was like, I don't even know why you'd keep investing in these companies. Like, the returns have been so bad. And then this year is like the biggest year of biotech. M and A. Yeah. Since it feels like they're just rich from the GLP1 boom. But I'd love to hear your sort of like narrative setting. Certainly the GLP1 boom. One of the trends that's going on here is that the industry has to restock the shelves for new drugs as drugs go off these revenue cliffs. And so big pharma is sitting on probably the largest pile of capital they've ever sat on and they look to acquire a lot of their innovations from small companies. Those are the folks that we support to create new medicines. So there's definitely a huge M and a trend that's happening this year and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. A big thing that's happening, as you read about that news in Boston though, is we're doing drug discovery and development here in the U.S. but there's been a big shift to move it overseas and to Offshore IT and for pharma to acquire assets from outside of the United States. And so that's, that's been more of the big, I would say, the headwind for the domestic biotech space. Okay, how are you feeling about just acceleration in drug development generally? Like, you know, in, in cybersecurity, agentic coding, like there's these very clear scaling laws and you know, we have the meter chart of the amount of time an AI system can work on a single problem. It's doubling, it's on a very clear trend. I haven't seen a chart that's like that for biotech, but it feels like we're going through advancements and we're just getting more cures. So something's happening. But are you tracking it at a quantitative level yet or just qualitatively? How do you feel about drug development? Sure. We're living in an era right now where the trend of all of the drugs that we're discovering, we have an acceleration in the amount of innovation that's coming from our labs. So, so that is just an incredible trend that is supporting everything we're doing in the lab. So that the byproduct of that is of course generating massive amounts of more data, making sense of that data. And this is where a lot of the machine learning is coming in is how do we digest all of the data that's being created in the industry, making sense of it, and then turning that into new cures as rapidly as possible. So that is an enormous trend right now in the industry. And the advances that we have just from literally using Claude and OpenAI even in the lab, and just day to day things, you're seeing a handful of things come together. So first of all, you see this explosion of data, you see the wet lab capabilities largely looking the same. And what's happening then is we're trying to organize that data and turn it into new cures as rapidly as possible. And in the background, what we have is a number of new companies, new entrants in the tech biospace that I think are just natively better at understanding this massive data problem and being able to make sense of it. And then on the other side, you have the pharma and biotech which are actually, you require all of those skills to actually make sense of what's going to work in a human biological system. So what's coming together this year, I would say, is that there's a lot more folks in tech bio that are getting better, but then we're just seeing the bio folks actually get better at tech. So basically you're at this place where the tech bio folks need more bio and the biotech folks need more tech. And if you're bringing those things together, I do think we're going to have an acceleration in a lot of the cures that we're making. Interesting. Give us a view into how big pharma executives are thinking right now. Are they confused why everyone and their grandma is injecting themselves with Chinese peptides yet at the same time, like hype? More skeptical of vaccines than. Than maybe ever? I feel like this kind of, this interesting dichotomy. Yeah, it's. Well, in the industry today, I would say the executives and pharma are looking at it from the same place they always do, which is about efficacy and patient safety. And we're looking drugs that work and then proving that they work in animals and then ultimately in humans. So peptides being injected into humans, I think everyone's just saying, hey, what's safe? What's efficacious? The FDA has done some pretty amazing things in this administration, I think, to give flexibility for what's allowed. There's been some incredible changes that have happened that I think will accelerate the pace of innovation. What we do in the regulatory space, in the clinic, as we're testing it in humans. I think pharma is apprehensive about the changes, but overall they're excited that things are moving along and that we're going see a lot of new drugs coming on the market. Can you help me understand the flow to get to like a data boom in biotech? Because I would assume that that's more driven by like dropping costs of DNA sequencing than anything from the Genai world. Because maybe there's something where the gen AI world can process data that was previously locked up in PDFs or something. Like, what is actually driving the data boom? It's those things really coming together. So certainly the continued falling cost of DNA sequencing and then the falling cost of all the other types of data that you can generate along with when you're sequencing someone's DNA. So if you go to a place like Function Health here, like what you can pull off your OURA ring or your Apple watch, there's actually a massive amount of data that is being generated passively. And right now, the ability to connect that data to, I would call it real world data that we can connect to what's happening in patients is a level of complexity that we just haven't seen before in the data side. Yeah, but it's got to be rooted back in basically the wet lab. You're describing these things of taking your DNA or your tumor DNA and you're learning from what's actually happening in a patient. Yeah. And bringing those together is actually a huge data problem. I imagine you work with mostly big pharma or real biotech companies, but we're also seeing this boom in a single person vibe coding cancer cure for their dog. Like yeah, it's pretty crazy. Do you have a policy for whether like how small a team can be? Because I imagine it's not far from you getting like an inbound from like a single person who's like I want to do this by myself, I'm a solo, can be trusted with advanced AI and maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't be. I don't know. I just want to know how you've like grappled with it. Maybe it's just not a business concern so you don't need to worry about it. But I'd love to know like how are you processing that idea? I mean I think everyone could be trusted with this generally. So that's actually not the term. Don't, don't worry about, about kind of these fear mongering that's happening on this front. Okay. At our company we service anyone who is interested in discovering new drugs. And so that's a lot of what we try to do with our company is how do we democratize access to many of these tools. We started in a particular place nearly 10 years ago and that was before we had any of this gen AI work going on. Sure, sure. And it is lower that single person biotech company or maybe just more of the virtual biotech company where you've got five or ten folks and they can work with a different contract research organization to help do their drug discovery and development. That's been a trend for a while. What's happening is we're just getting more efficient at it today. So I do think the future biotech company is going to be much, much smaller and be able to plug into these different resources and be so much more efficient at coming up with ideas and testing them. Yeah, yeah. I mean it is interesting. Tech loves to sing the praises of like the 5 or 10 person team. But there are a lot of biotech companies where it's like one genius researcher who discovered something and a couple and then a lot of outsourced stuff all the way to okay, we're ready to sell it. And it's mostly just a research organ. This is not entirely new. There you mentioned that you're not worried about, like, doom related to, like, bio, but like, you know, how are you grappling with the idea of, like, somebody making a super bubonic plague or, you know, some new flu? Like, do you feel like there's safeguards or how have you processed that question? There's lots of groups of folks that are worried about this, and I think the United States military and some of the consortiums that we've been involved with are giving that thought. It really comes down to, though, is you can make a lot of things that might be dangerous. There's always a bad actor problem. The way that we think about that is through our biosecurity division, we try to make sure that the capabilities that we need to have in the United States are always available and accessible to us. So call it medical access capabilities. We've learned a lot of lessons in Covid everything from could we actually just test for viruses in the community and do we have the reagents available to do that? And then, of course, we had masked and everything else. So from our perspective, we think about biosecurity as a way of making sure that you do all of those components, from being able to surveil what's happening in the theater all the way out to can we discover and develop a drug very rapidly? And there's some great different initiatives that are going on of these ideas. Can you go from a threat to 100 days later actually have a drug ready to go, and our company and others participate in making sure that there's just a really robust response available with incredible supply chain and sort of make sure we can do everything here in the United States at all times. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it certainly seems like the advancement in the positive side, like we're seeing a major, major swing to the upside right now. Every time I hear one of these new medicines or new treatments, it seems really positive. There's a huge story about pancreatic cancer recently, which was a complete whiteboard. Right now we've got a conference that's going on, and we saw two different studies that were showing just for some of the patients that were on drug, it was six years later, they still had no disease. And that's another study about pancreatic cancer. It is really, really tough. Oh, it's really incredible. It's one of the worst cancers we have. But I think this is the overall trend. We are living in a world where we will cure everything that is cur think in the next three decades. It's really just a Question of. And maybe even faster than that. It's a question of how fast can we accelerate and really give as many people as possible access to these incredible tools. And just like in tech, I mean, where you saw these very small companies be able to do incredible things in the last five, 10, 15 years. I was investing back during the first Internet bubble, back in Venture Capital 25 years ago. And in those times the world just looked a different place. We actually middleware. Were you 10 years old? I'm like 48 right now. Now. So yeah, I was still a child. You look like late 30s, so that's good. Good for you. I was a child at the time. But it was incredible because there was a lot of the same criticisms that we're hearing in the tech space right now. And as it relates to biotech, it was like we were wrong about everything back then except for what we were right about. We did see the flow of investing coming in and many, many things went bankrupt. But the things that didn't go bankrupt changed the world. And that exact same thing is happening today that you're going to see an incredible number of winners. And I do think biotech to be an important part of the big market that everyone's going after in the AI and the ML space as well. The tech space is going to go conquer biology as much as it has in other places. But I would say also that pharma and biotech very much have a seat at the table. Our academic researchers have a seat at the table there. And it's really about bringing the two domains together. They're going to be critical. One of them is not going to go it alone without the other. How much did you raise? How much did you raise? Raised $40 million. This time. Yeah, we hadn't raised any money. There we go. Thanks, man. Appreciate that. We've been working hard to build a real business. So, yeah, this was the first round. This is our Series E. I'm a little old school. Back when I was a child, when I was a baby investing 25 years ago, I. I learned that you just. It's okay to just letter your rounds just like normal. Our last round was in 2022. Yeah, I'm kind of old school in that way. So in 2022 we did a round and between then and now, we really laid down the infrastructure so that we had operations across 17 time zones. Now we're operating the United States, Japan, the uk. We have an incredible group that's actually working in the GCC right now, in the Middle east, obviously. There's a lot going on there that's, that's creating a bit of a headwind. But we're very bullish on the work we're doing in Saudi Arabia, uae, Riyadh and Doha, and over in Abu Dhabi. So, yeah, bringing all this stuff together has been really important for us. And just our view is you stitch together the supply chain of innovation, you link it to great real world data, and you bring a lot of AI and ML in there, and we're going to really accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development. Very cool. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Great to meet you. Enjoyed the conversation. Have a great rest of the week. Thanks for having me on, guys, today. Have a great day. Appreciate it.

Up next we have Matt McKinney from Loop. He's the co founder and CEO raising a big series C in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in Ultradome. Matt, how you doing? What's going on guys? Not too much. Good to have you here. First time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company. I'm Matt McKinney. I'm the co founder and CEO of Loop. And our mission is to unlock value that's trapped in the operations that power the physical economy. And we started specifically in a back office where no one else wanted to go and back office services and automating things like accounting and junior ledger coding and payment services. And all we do to exist is to make our customers more efficient so that they can better serve their customers. And we work with some of the most important companies in the world. 20% of the Fortune 100 and excited to be on with you guys. Yeah, I mean there's a different world. When you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like we're an agentic accounting firm or something. And it feels like this is much more cross functional. How are you actually positioning like the integration? Who's the buyer? How does the business like instantiate itself inside of your customer? Yeah, we started with a very acute problem, which is if you look at the supply chain industry, roughly 30% of invoices are wrong or they have an error. So clearing of them is really painful. And because of that, a bunch of services firms popped up, specialized services firms popped up. And all they do is address that specific problem, which is you've got to adjudicate this invoice. You got to ensure that it's accurate. You got to remit payment to the truck drivers and the carriers across the world. And that's a big industry. It happens to be a $5 billion industry alone. And it's all done with human labor. And obviously LLMs presented a perfect opportunity for that. But I think what got my Covid and I most excited is really the data. If you can go organize the data, then you can obviously automate things like we just mentioned the accounting, but you can use that as a wedge to expand into adjacent use cases, whether it be in compliance or planning or procurement, and continue to unlock value for your customers. Yeah. So what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices. Whether things have gotten paid, there's often like multiple versions of a particular Invoice and then you need to plug into bank data to see what's actually moved around or accounting systems, like how long does it take to integrate and how key is that? I mean what's so wild about supply chain? Supply chain is just a network of networks and you've got a transportation carrier, you've got a supplier, you could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. A lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M and A and so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take for example the weight and dimensions of a package or a shipment. There could be seven different versions of the weight dimensions for that package. And so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources. We get it from email, we get it from edi, we get it from API connection, we get it from Excel, spreadsheet, PDF, you name it. It's just really messy, unstructured data. Data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLMs came out. When you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all? Yeah. Are they trying to buy AI or do they just want a solution? How are you thinking about how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch? All our customers want is just outcomes and they don't really care how you deliver it. Now sometimes they might have a top down AI mandate, sure that they're looking to check the box, but at the end of the day they don't care how the sausage is made. They're buying an outcome, that's all that they want. And if you can demonstrate that you can deliver a superior outcome, it's better, it's faster. For example, you're finding more errors or whatnot and you faster resolution time so you can close your books faster. That's what they're buying. They're not buying agentic buzzword fit into their checkbook. They really want to buy the value. Yeah. What is the value of like getting this business to scale? Is there something where you can optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product at the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of how the economy is moving? We've seen that from some fintech companies. How are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform? You mentioned procurement for example. There's more obviously when you have a bunch of data that you can use and say this is good, this is bad, or you should be working with the supplier and you're not because we see it over here. But I think that really building context across the network is probably where we see the most gains. Where you can take learnings from a carrier that's working with suppliers, working with multiple parties in the network and then say, oh well, this carrier always likes to build a specific way and so propagate that learning through the LMS context across all the, all the companies that work with that carrier. And I think that's really, I'd say the unlocking automation that you get at scale. And then obviously you mentioned the intelligence one the time to value. You're able to get someone on much faster because you're working with 95% of their suppliers instead of 2% of their suppliers. That's a huge win as well. What were you doing before this? Did you always have a love for back office supply chain optimization? I can tell he has since he was a boy. I came out of the womb and I just said I want to automate the back office. Yeah, complex. Yeah. I've always just been assessed the systems and making them more efficient. And I think when you look at the physical world and it's supply chain, the trucks and the train and that stuff's just so exciting, you feel like it's the last frontier where you can truly unlock value. Supply chain alone just in the US is $11 trillion in spending. One of the largest contributions. Huge. Yeah, yeah. If you want to have an impact on gdp. Oh, too high. Sorry, I was giving you that for the 11 trillion. You said the biggest number, so that's huge. If you want to have impact though, on gdp. At the end of the day, GDP growth is just productivity growth and technology is the leading advantage in that. You're saying $11 trillion in spend goes to supply chain and no one's really touching that. We got to go attack that problem. Yeah, yeah. I have so many more questions. But yeah, before that, my co founder and I were at Uber early on the freight team and we saw a lot of the real world there where you had nasty PDFs, you had bill Ladings proof of deliveries. Just a total data mess, to be honest with you. And we knew that there had to be a better way. Yeah, dude, perfect VC pattern match. Uber freight team. That's a great team, great company. We know so many entrepreneurs that came out of Uber. Tell us about the round. What's, what's going on? How much did you raise? We raised $95 million. Couldn't pull together that last five. That last five. What was going on? Sandbagging. Sandbagging. No, you had to set up. Had to set up the next round. Fig a little bit for the next one. Yeah, exactly. Super excited. Really stacked. Where are you guys based? Valor, Atreides, avc, Founders Fund Index, JP Morgan. You got everybody. You got it. Congratulations. Wait, where are you guys based? Sorry, I missed. Based in San Francisco. We got offices in Chicago as well as in New York. Is that because Chicago's a major, like, logistics hub with the trains and trucks and stuff? Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of. There is a major. I'm not making this up. Right? Like, with the boat. Because the boats come through the lakes and, like, it was, like, a major hub of transactions. Is that because Chicago has trains and trucks? They do. This is real, right? Am I wrong? You're not. You're not wrong. I'll give you stats. So 30% of goods that enter America go through Chicago. Thank you. Thank you. 30%. Not bad. That was right. That was right. You're like, oh, Chicago is such a weird pick. It's not. It makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much. Great to meet you, Matt. Congrats to the whole team. And hopefully, hopefully, you're back on the show this year with some more news. Really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Love the show, by the way. Thanks. Have a good one.

Which is robotic marathoners. And there's new. This is crazy. There's a crazy video. I don't know if the video relates to this, but. A Chinese robot beat a human best time in a half marathon. After a stumble, tech companies are making progress to fixing humanoid runners malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing Humanoid. A humanoid robot half marathon race. The first runner to cross the finish line took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever. Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics, a field American tech leaders including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Tesla's Elon Musk say is the next big thing Beijing. This video is pretty wild. Is this the. This is one that's failing. Didn't make the half marathon, but you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back. This pull it off. Interesting. Which is like very cyberpunk. Whoa. That's crazy that you have to load it up with dry ice as well. I like that. About 220 yards from the finish line, the 5 foot 5 lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to state media. I feel like if you fall down and you're human in a half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish. This probably still counts. Last month, the human, the actual human world record holder from uganda finished in 57 minutes and 20 seconds. In Lisbon, Portugal, Lightning and two siblings from Honor swept the podium. All three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one time help. The champion got the race penalized. The completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under 50 minutes. But it was teleoperated. The Tiankung Ultra, which was developed by Beijing based lab Ex Humanoid and won last year's race more than halved its finish time this year, clocking in at one hour and 15 minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive. Like they cut the time in half in just one year. The 13 mile course included more complex terrain than last year, such as slopes, narrow passages and sharp turns. Testing robots abilities. Do you assume an acceleration in progress? Eventually one of these humanoids is like running a marathon in like an hour or like 30 minutes. Just like truly insane, insane speeds. Yeah, I mean as fast as a cheetah. Tyler could still take it out though. I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain. While the US controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains, China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem system for humanoid robot bodies that has been reported many.

I believe he is. So let's bring Ethan ding in from TextQL into the TVPN ultradome. Ethan, hello. How are you doing? What's going on guys? Oh, how you doing? How's it going? It's good. We have two of you, so please introduce both of you. And it looks like it's being filmed on a phone camera from 2005, but we're excited to have you on. Hi, I'm Ethan. I'm the CEO and co founder or this is my co founder Mark. They're a cto. We're actually at a customer office on site and this is actually a company that does not I think IP bands like zoom from their intro network which I found out last second. Interesting. Okay. No, no, it's great. We're super excited to have you guys on. Walk us through history of the company since it's your first time. Yeah, I think we started this like late 2022, right before ChatGPT came out. We had this idea that if we spent a lot of money and time on trying to make analytics work, it'd be worth something. We really didn't know what we were doing when we first got started. Since then what we've really realized is after two years of rebuilding the product like 10 times over, we landed on something where I think the typical enterprise has 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, BI tools, they have like 20,000 different charts, another like 400,000 tables and every single vendor wants you to migrate into their thing and drop another $20 million on Systems Integrator for another 10 years to do the migrations. Let's build things that can connect to everything and hopefully be do for analytics. What like high frequency trading firms like stock markets? What was the first analytics stack? Because if you're pre GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? What was the initial like? Okay, there's a stream of data, there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases. How are you giving the customers value from that? That? Well, it was pre chat GBT but still post GBT, so we had GPT3. But I think as we all know at this point the IQ of that was way overstated, at least for business stuff. And so yeah, text box on the right, we type in your question like how do I get revenue? Then a text box on the left with the SQL and then you run it, then you copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool and Then that was it. But we've come a long way from that. So walk us through. I mean you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but what does actually as a group of co founders going to a customer site, like what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high level pitch or are you rolling up your sleeves and working on actual integration? Yeah, well, I think today's session was basically walk us through. Every single Fortune 500 company basically spends nine figures on AWS, GCP and Azure. They spend another 10 figures on labor that manages all these systems. And it's kind of this constant war of you go from spending $20 million to a Teradata on prem to spending $30 million with a Databrick in the cloud or something. And so what we're trying to map out with them is anthropic, is telegraphic, that they want to be the size of AWS in three years. Right. And they're an enterprise oriented company. They expect that basically come out of companies that we're working with budgets. And so they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of let's say 200, $300 million, double it, and materialize this money out of thin air and spend it on inference. They're walking us through the parts of their roadmap where what kind of SaaS can they sunset, what kind of labor costs are they thinking about the trade offs around on what time horizons to free it up and also what kind of workloads that are going to be extremely expensive that they can kind of start basically triaging off the large models. Because at the end of the, these are kind of the people. When you see the token charts, everyone token maxing, these are kind of the people that pay the bills on those tokens and they notice the size of that bill blowing up like 10x year over year. It's interesting side of the equation, I guess people don't spend a ton of time talking about yeah, how have you been processing the SaaS apocalypse narrative? Benioff was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted. Although you know, you could talk about the long term but slowly grow the growth. Like these companies are still growing even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies. Yeah, I, for like the, for the longest time I assumed that like everyone likes to buy like good enough I think really in the past like three months I've heard like like six different CIOs or CEOs of like Fortune 1 hundreds like talk about how they're ready to like like Salesforce is like increase like they're headless like tax and they're ready to like do like a two year migration like off into like like postgres or something. It's not like they're going to another vendor. They're just like I need to free up money to like set on GPU to set GPUs on fire. Sure. And I'll pay like anybody to like like move me into like like a postgres instance and like like Google Cloud or like aws. Interesting. Okay. So that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration. That one's kind of adjacent to us. We look at a lot more low level infrastructure like databricks, snowflake tableau and otherwise. But it's interesting. A CRM is basically the second most important system of record at an enterprise next to the ERP. They're willing to entertain like moving entirely off CRMs within a two year time maybe they'll completely fail. But the willingness to forge into that is then an order of magnitude more higher than I expected and surprising based on the profile of company. That's something you normally expect from Google or Facebook, the most mature engineering companies in the world. You see this effort starting to come from 100 year old companies as well. Interesting. And is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a net cost savings to having their own system or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business. It's mostly not. There's an interesting thing Larry Ellison talks about when it comes to enterprise sales which is that like like enterprise sales is like buying like, like like Gucci bags. It's much more like like at any given year you have a CIO come in like right. Like the half life of like a CIO is like like five years before they retire, new one comes in, they have to like start a set of like new initiatives. Often like they're going like they're finger testing like the market and trying to figure out like who has the best vibes. Sure. Like basically who. Okay, whoever has the best vibes I'm going to throw like eight figures against and I'm going to like that eight figures away from like someone like a company that has like, like worse Vibes. Sure. There's this like weird self fulfilling prophecy where they're vibe procuring. Yeah. You walk into a room, you can tell when that company stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is extremely cocky. You can tell when the fdes and the salespeople are like, listen, you don't even have to move this today. I'm going to get your business next year no matter what, because I know we're on the up and up. And you can also tell when a vendor is desperate and they're moving for discounts. Right. As long as the perception that a company like the market is short a given, like SaaS, vendor customers start asking for discounts, the most aggressive ones go first. But now like all the sellers on that team are like they're traumatized between the next set of renewals, so they're progressively going to give more and more ground. It's kind of a rough. Yeah, wouldn't want to be one of those right now. Interesting, interesting. Well, your business is growing, you're raising money. Tell us about the latest round. Yeah, it was actually like a two part round. The first led by Haas Capital and the latest part like Blackstone. How much did you raise? I think it's 17 in total. Well, this was awesome, guys. I really enjoyed speaking with you both and thank you for making time while you're hanging out with your customers. We appreciate it and appreciate the perspective. Let's do it again soon and good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day.

Key utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill, like their phone Internet bill is like pretty. It's like one of the probably the least elastic things. Like they will just keep paying and stick around. Now they might move to sprint or AT&T and there's going to be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly after all. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily so. In meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after this is the future. Trust me, I used it once. Shulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology, from improved customer service service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all hands, Shulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary. So to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives, just dig your own grave. He's literally the title of this article. He's saying AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it's so in tech, in tech we're starting to, you know, every company is adopting this technology at a rapid rate. Yeah. But everyone's like, hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tasks. Right. This sort of narrative is building. Like we need to figure out how to, it's, it's, we've, we've built a bunch of very useful tools and they are going to have powerful effects in our economy. Yeah. But we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear based approach is not working and meanwhile like is coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary right here. Obituary. So not so not helpful. And, and, and they're not even doing AI related job cuts. No, I love, so I just don't understand, I don't understand this whole press cycle. I love that he just comes in, just immediately starts blackpooling. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackpooling. Oh, so do you think this is a setup for, for a much like deeper layoff than they've done historically? I don't know. I mean it's possible but I like, I think that they would need to do some serious like AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out, I mean I would be surprised if of those 90,000. Like, I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. Like, what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Like, form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet, and I email it to somebody. Like, that type of job. Yeah. That's probably gonna be automated in some way, and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization.

Well, without further ado, we have Signal here in the TVP ultra dome. Let's bring in Signal, who is launching sky, an agentic AI home screen replacing the iPhone app. There he is with content. Handsome fella. Driven intelligence. Dude, I can't believe it's been too long. This long. We've reacted to your posts, like, so many times. So good to have you. I. Oh, my God, it's incredible. Be on here, guys. Welcome. It's been a long time coming, but I just want to start off with saying congratulations. This has been ridiculous. Yeah. Been watching you guys since day zero. Really? You watched the first episode? No, because I think we were covering. I think we did. Your post would have been making it into, like, the first episode for sure. You're probably like, why are these two guys in suits? Yeah. Reading. Printing out my tweets. This is. I. I tweeted this out a little bit, but I was like, man, when I read that. And you guys were reacting to what I posted, because I didn't really think about what I posted, and you guys analyzed it, and I was like, oh, my God, this is ridiculous. Holy crap, what did I even write? I don't. I don't remember. You have a ton of bangers. They're all good posts. A great time. That was the lifeblood of the show. It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about, you know, the. The first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching. What? You're very smooth, John. I try. I try. You guys invite. Yeah. Come a long way, for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit, Introduce the app, introduce the product, where you want this to go. And I have a ton of questions. No, absolutely. I've always been in consumer software, and I think there's just not that much other than the sort of main players I noticed. And there's a lot to be done, and what a time to be alive. So, you know, we're experimenting at the very basic layer of how to make this stuff really easy to use, really easy to access for normal people that have not really come into this agentic AI world in full speed, other than sort of chatting with chatbots and whatnot. And I think it's an early experimentation of what we're up to is kind of how AI will kind of speak to you, as well as how, you know, sort of ambient AI will be in various surfaces, starting with your phone. Right. Like, maybe your phone may not look exactly the same. Way even in the next couple of years. So we're kind of operating at the very earliest stages of experimenting of how AI will communicate with you. And we're trying to think of creative surfaces and one of the, one of the most interesting places you always, you know, people take out their phones and they glance at it and turns out, you know, this stuff hasn't really changed in such a long time. Yeah. The iPhone home screen is 20 years old. That's two decades. And it's just static icons. Yeah. Roughly speaking, it has not really evolved in any. They one shot. They One shot. Yeah, that's the steel man. The steel man is like, it's good. It's the final form. It's the final form. Some things don't change. We're all going to. We're all going to. We could always do a three wheel car, five wheel car, six. I mean, the thing that I've been, the thing that I've been pressing on is like you would think, you know, if I could rewind two, three years, I would not expect. And knowing how much progress there would be in AI, I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the App Store and only see LLMs, like chat apps. I would expect to see like a variety given. Given just like how many magical experiences people have had. A variety of like new products, like a new uber new Instagram and that's like some previous app boom. That was like very diffuse. You got, you got Candy Crush and what's the one with the pigs, the Flappy Bird and Angry Birds and like you got all these different apps, Run Keeper and diet products. And it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps. Yeah. And you know, I actually recently got a new phone and I was installing apps. You know, I always like to set up my phone bare. Like, I don't like to transition my phone. Interesting. Mainly really, it gives me a little bit of a reset on not only what I need and what I don't need, but also how to think about software as a exist today. Like, I don't want to be tied to what I was before. I want to kind of be anew, if you will. And you know, it turns out I installed, you know, GPT and Claude and whatnot. And I was like, man, I don't think I really need that much stuff. You know, these LLMs are kind of collapsing how and what you do into an interesting dynamic. And I think generally they're incredibly powerful. And the fact that those top five apps are all LLMs roughly speaks volumes to the Zeitgeist and speaks volumes to the impact of the actual technology. I don't think previous I think technology has always been a little bit more evolutionary than not. Obviously hindsight is 20 20, but this feels so, so different. As a technologist, this world feels very different. It feels the things are going to rapidly change from here on out in terms of how people experience their lives, how people interact with each other, and how we're going to facilitate brand new interactions potentially or completely reinvent old ones. I'm very excited for that. I think our company and the way that we think about it from a consumer perspective is just to make things easily accessible for these individuals. I think we're going to attempt to do that Very basic what is your more as a CEO? It sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and are just in an experimental phase. Is that generally the right read? Yeah, I think generally I would say two things. Number one is look, we built a really fun product that we're going to give to lots and lots and lots of people. Turns out this era is non zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital, but inferences is non trivially expensive and especially if you operate at agentic inference or just background inference, that stuff is just consistently going. Unlike Claude or GPT where people actually make requests or go on there and type something, we're doing it on behalf of you. We're doing those things in the background where we anticipate, we listen to contacts every time. For example, every time you get an email, we process it with one of our agents. It sort of turns out it buckets that item. It tries to figure out what to do with it. It tries to see if there's it deserves some higher order like ranking. And then it tries to figure out, oh, can I complete this task? Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay, hey, here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know and it's a very look, replying to emails has been, you know, 30, 40 years. But this is a new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world and apply that to any, you know, any aspect of your life, whether it's health or finance or where, even where you are. Right? Like one of the underlying things that we do is location. And you know, imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice, by simply it Being on your home screen, wherever you are, if you're at a museum, if you're in a new neighborhood and that's a one tap away. Like our goal is to make intelligence either 0 or 1 tap away, not one prompt away. Burning question, how do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? Will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone? Ad supported. I think ad supported could make sense, right? I'm walking by a coffee shop and I get an offer. There's ads in Apple Maps now. So Apple Maps, you're seeing my notification stream in. So you, you can really, you know what I like? I, I think the interesting thing here is like, like you guys can operate like you can kind of wake up and ask yourself like what would Apple do if they were like truly Excel excited about AI versus like seemingly scared of it? You know, I've posted about this a little bit with, with respect to Apple, Apple relies on a deterministic world, like a world where lots and lots of elements from design to the experience to the underlying context that doesn't change as much and it's very deterministic. So for example, iPhone is very much kind of software is very broadcasty, right? It's a one to many, they write it once and it runs for everybody. And roughly speaking it runs exactly the same way. Now with a non deterministic world that could change drastically. Like for example, for when we give this out to everybody, everybody has a very different experience with our app because it's completely non deterministic and Apple lives in a deterministic world and having to transition into non determinism and non deterministic software is actually a really non trivial transition, especially for a company like Apple where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So I think for us we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of expectations and determinism with the beauty of non deterministic elements of AI and create a really great user experience around that that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So we're kind of maybe in some sense moving ahead of Apple who has to deal with a few billion users, just minor amount of users. So I think that this world deserves more experimentation like what we're doing in terms of both user interfaces and experiences and feeds and ranking. And Jordi, going back to your point on monetization, I think that's the number one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture Real estate on your device, that is the home screen that is available at a glance. And I think I posted about ads. It's actually the greatest billboard of all time. Exactly. I mean, it is insanely powerful. If we can activate that now, that's a tall order. But at the same time, I've posted about ads and advertising. Look, I've been in technology for such a long time from consumer, whether it's feeds at Facebook or even Google and whatnot. But you sort of think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world. It has actually made things accessible. And, and I think generally if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality in services to people who would otherwise not been afforded. So I believe in advertising, I believe in good advertising. I believe in advertising that is actually like complementary to the user experience and not necessarily taking away from it. It's tricky to do. But the worst ad experience I've ever had as an ad enjoyer was like in college I was buying a Kindle and they were like, do you want the ad supported Kindle for like $100 or the ad free Kindle for like $120? And as a college student I was like, I don't think I'll mind ads. Why not? Were they bad? And it's on the home screen when the device is locked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just showing me books that I would never read. It's bad targeting. There's terrible targeting. And it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time. Yeah. And it kind of looks like. Wait, you're reading that? Yeah, yeah. So if you can avoid that. Yeah, definitely. There's a question from the chat. Why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous? I mean, I imagine as you grow the business, like it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever. But you know, at some point a journalist will want to know. And I imagine that unless your opsec is super tight, it'll come out. Not that it's like bad. I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the Anon thing? That's a great question. You know, my entire online existence as it exists today with respect to this account is a giant accident because I was trying to find my old username and password because I just wanted to post a little while ago, maybe whenever I started posting, but I think when you guys actually started TVPN as well, and I think I was. Yeah, your account must have gone from like A thousand followers to, like, over 100 within the first few months of us. It was kind of nuts. Okay, so the whole story is, you know, I. I was kind of. I was like, you know what? I just want to read. Maybe I'll reply or something. And I had a lot of fun. And, you know, whenever I'm having fun, I like to double down on things, you know, maybe not change. Change it around too much. Look, I think certainly this. This world is going to change at some point, but in the meantime, you know, I love leaning into fun, new things. You know, if you want to do anything new in the world, you got to do it a little bit differently. You got to be a little bit more unique. You got to be a little bit more mysterious, a little bit more. Yeah, I don't know. All of this stuff is just so wild to me, right? Like, the anonymity aspect of it and the axe culture and the anons around it, and you guys have had, you know. Yeah, you can never dox. I'm sorry, you can never dox. I mean, like, Banksy. Banksy getting unmasked. Is that good for the. Is that good for the brand? Like, you could be. You could be, like, taller than John Gigachad. Everyone just imagines it won't be enough. Right? We all picture you as a philosopher, king of swords. Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? I mean, my bio and my, like, the actual content are, like, sometimes. Sometimes the same and sometimes disjoint, but that's, I think, the beauty of it. So in that realm, you know, like, I was actually talking to some people around this, and I was like, sometimes I basically kind of do what I feel like. And right now it's, like, just been so much fun to kind of lean in on this world. But I think certainly I'm more like, I'll marry myself to the Zeitgeist, if you will, and if that calls that, then I'll continue and we'll see what happens. Not married to the game, Married to the Zeitgeist. Okay, take me through iOS development, like, current status, because this seems like a really good idea that people would want. I do think people are bored of the grid, and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense, and I think you could deliver a ton of value. But my fear is that Apple's just like, no, that's our real estate. So is there a clear path right now through, like, widgets and shortcuts, API to actually do interesting things, or am I going to have to side load a different os. How consumer friendly and easy will this be? Or will you be bumping it up against the walled garden of Apple pretty quickly? That's a really great question. Look, every single thing we do is within the confines of the Apple ecosystem and experience in the way that they've designed and made it work. And we've designed our product to fit almost like a glove into that ecosystem. When you onboard into our experience, you just connect the things in your life that you think you would want more. The server side connections. I totally get all of that makes sense. You can oauth with email and use APIs or MCPS. There's a million things you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is how big can the widget be or can you actually take over the whole home screen? We can take care of. We basically ask you to install two widgets. A medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. Those work in dynamic together. So the medium widget will basically what we call a wildcard widget internally which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time. That's incredible. The big widget is what we call a for you widget, which is just a feed. And you know what we're doing, John, I think is we're building kind of the new iteration the, the Facebook newsfeed 2.0 that's entirely AI generated about your life, highly personal and that lives directly on your home screen and you can browse it as easily. The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals. And the beautiful part is that it's all like AI generated and AI mediated. We have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feed. It's funny because everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then like getting people to install two widgets, I'm like that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right but like it feels like like, like, like I'm still in like prosumer territory. But that's a good place to start and then you can hopefully make it easier. And then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like the biggest thing is like I just love when like these new surface areas are explored. I mean you mentioned Nikita but like he's, but he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating like new ux, new experiences on top of like what Apple gives you and it feels like that's really underexplored. So have you thought of, have you thought about trying to build any products within, within any of the LLM ecosystems just given that they, they already have an exist, you know, massive existing user bases? That's a great question. And you know, I've definitely explored like every single thing with respect to an API or a platform that comes out. You know, I, you know, for example, the WWDC APIs that come out every year, I, I read them like, like the Bible, you know, like I would, I read, You know, that's my religious holiday or whatnot. And every time Tim Cook is the pope. He's your pope. Yeah, exactly. We get it. Yeah. And you know, so I scrounge these. I think generally these API, the sort of apps or ChatGPT apps are. It's unclear to me what the incentive structures are for the app developer just yet. And it's unclear to me why applications deserve to exist inside of an LLM just yet. Besides just adding more context. Because theoretically the LLM is powerful enough to even generate an app to be able to do something. In which case I'm not sure exactly, unless you bring some highly proprietary data like Zillow or whatnot. Maybe some of these experiences work, but otherwise I don't know if the small time developer. You guys remember the flashlight apps and the lighter apps on the iPhone? Like you know, you're not really seeing those. All I remember as a probably 12 year old was the beer app. The beer app was good. Just thinking that, thinking that that was like, that was peak humor. What about the I'm rich app? That is like thousand dollars just to show a picture of a diamond. And it was just like you could just open a picture on your phone. But if you bought that app you could show people that you just wasted 10k on an iPhone app or whatever. I think it literally maxed out. It was the most expensive app you could possibly type into the App Store. I think the guy sold like over 500 copies before Apple removed it for not offering real person. So I think he made 500 times $1,000 and it was incredible. See, these are the kinds of experiments and creative elements that you know, I think deserve to exist in the world today. And I think, you know, we're a few handful of individuals that are kind of trying to make that happen. And we're Trying to be really creative, really fun, really interesting, engaging. And AI is a super powerful tool to be able to do that. More powerful than the original iPhone APIs. Like, holy crap. So I think we're, we're early but we're going to try to dream like, like there's so much like you're doing this, you're doing this the right way because there's another scenario where like you could raise a series A right now. Like, or like, you know, you have a team, you have the technology and the wait list. Like, you'll be able to test things and experiment and learn. Like there's so much opportunity. Well, what an exciting time. Thank you so much for joining the show. This is great. Thanks a lot, guys. Great to finally have you on and congrats 1000% and maybe next time we'll talk about hot take for sure. Oh, yeah. What do you think about this? AI powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards. I'll have to, I'll have to start. John. So John was, John showed me like a screenshot. He was showing the website for this this morning and I didn't realize today is 420. So that's like, this is like a 420 joke. Is it a joke, though? I think it's a real website. Like, I think it's. Yeah, yeah. John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that? I know, I know, but I. John. Claude design, man. Claude design. You can do anything. Okay, so you're telling me if I put this in the Wayback Machine and it shows up as of yesterday, it's not a joke? Because I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see, let's see. I bet you if they were planning to make a April 6, it's in the Wayback Machine. What does it say? It says, let's see. It's loading. It's got blockchain still. I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trend to go as viral as possible. I don't know, we'll have to dig into it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show. Signal. Fantastic news and congratulations on the progress. Have fun and we'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

Like, why not just get her a dog or multiple dogs? Yeah, I don't know. So how does this, how does, how does Salesforce's view compare to the Verizon CEO? So, so Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Schulman. I don't think he's related to John Schulman, the co founder of OpenAI and thinking machines, but he is stepping into the AI debate. He says for a. The Wall Street Journal says for a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications. Dan Shulman doesn't pull punches about the pain that technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20 to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years, which is staggering. Staggering. I can put that into some context. He says, he warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still seen as safe today. And he has pushed for more education and reskilling to help workers adapt to intensifying tech disruption. Put this into context for me. So he's. So this is an insane. And yes. And so this is like potentially the most aggressive stance. I mean, there are even. Even. Even Dario. So Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year talking about risks to entry level white collar job. Yeah. And Dario, which is like, you know, I would say, like on the frontier around being concerned around AI job loss, was not calling for 30%. Well, no unemployment. The headline number, he says 50%, but he's an entry level white collar work. Entry level white collar work. And that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has 5 to 7 million entry level white collar workers and the US labor force is 170 million people. And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall unemployment rate would sit somewhere between six.