LIVE CLIPS
EpisodeĀ 7-14-2025
Looks fantastic and Jensen is wearing it very well. So we need to do a deep dive on RM because the story is crazy. It's basically this longtime executive who decided he was going to make a luxury watch brand and to actually just decide. It's easy to say I'm gonna start a watch company. Very much harder to like actually crack the code and be able to sell watches in the. I'm surprised some of our friends haven't started watch companies given how many companies they're spinning up every two seconds. Yeah, a certain one in particular. It'll happen eventually. It'll happen eventually. The last another post somebody posted RIP McKinsey, you don't need a 300k consultant anymore. You can now run full competitive market analysis using Grok4. And our friend Buco Capital bloke says, I'd like to see an LLM provide regular consulting to turbocharged opioid sales, be a trusted partner for autocratic regimes and help young people get hooked on e cigarettes. Very negative on the consulting firms. Who speaks for them? But we got it. We got it, we got it. Let's give it. They do a lot of good work, the white shoe firms. They do great work. Yes, some mistakes were made, but overall good farm team for future PMs and big tech. Yeah. So in other news, Monumental Labs has raised some money, over $8 million, most recently in a $7 million seed round led by Alexis Ohanian. 7. This is the company Stone Carving alert. Yeah, they're carving stones. They're carving stones. You heard Monumental Labs, you thought new foundation model. No AI robots can already carve stone statues. Entire buildings are next. The stone carving startup Monumental Labs has raised money. They have a new HQ, almost 40,000 square feet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Wait, so the cool thing here. So they are opening this new facility. Facility in Greenpoint which is makes total sense to be the home of what will become the largest fine art stone fabricator in North America and possibly in the world when it opens in the fall. Makes so much sense. And this, you know a lot of people would, you know this company was non obvious but then if you think about what we would pay for stone statues here in the studio and I think what a lot of people will. Pay of all the MAG7 CEOs potentially, just hypothetically. I don't have like a mood board for that or anything thing. It's not like saved on my phone as like an idea. We want to make the Mount rush rush. More of the manosphere. For sure. Andrew Huberman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Mag seven watching over the manosphere. No, but I think, you know, if they can really crack. Congratulations to the Monumental Labs team. That's a very exciting company and led. By Alexis Ohanian, a friend of the show. And also he says looks like the secret is out. Can't wait for y' all to watch because he is gonn be a guest shark. He's going to Shark Tank, the upcoming season of Shark Tank, which will be Wednesdays this fall on ABC and stream on Hulu. He's gonna really have to really go shark mode because Alexis is known to just be a really nice guy, really. Founder for Very Sharky. That's very funny. I mean sharp elbows, I'm sure getting into deals, you know. But yeah, he's gonna. I mean but there's always room for just offering an entrepreneur on Shark Tank a nice fair deal. He's not gonna be offering. Just give me 20% of top line forever. Yeah, I mean, as a personality, I think you'll fit in great. I think you'll really add something to the show. So very excited for him. Go check it out. And final post from Adam Singer. I was gonna end on this too. CMO of Adquick out of homemade Easy and Measurable says Love seeing out of home from the new gen of tech media brands. Great brands do things online and in the real world. Our software makes this really easy for all and I just want to give a quick shout out to Adam for betting on us early. Bet on us when we just were two guys, two suits and a stack of posts. We will never forget that. Go do yourself a favor and sign up for ad quick after you're done with that. Make out of Home advertising Easy and measurable. Come on people. I don't even need it. It's really not complicated. After that, leave us a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcast, wherever you listen. And I can't wait for tomorrow. There was a couple weeks of news since last Friday and I'm sure there will be quite a bit more tomorrow. The other piece of news, the information launched a competitor to us and they had some technical issues. So if you know things about computers, please contact them. Yeah, tell them. Tell them the technology brother sent you. And that's our show. See you tomorrow. Cheers. Goodbye. Have a great Monday.
Even without even trying the product, they just go to their customers, they ask them, you know, what. What they want, and they just say, it's Windsurf. And, and now they. They can say Windsurf and Devin, that's amazing. Yeah, I, I was getting multiple messages from people Friday and Saturday being like, I want this team. I want this team. And that was what. And, and. And I think that it is. It is just. It's such a. This whole deal and everything is. Is really a testament to the caliber of the team, which was one of the major disappointments Friday is if you were on the team that was staying behind at Windsurf. There's this sort of almost like signaling, right. Of like, I took this company. Let's say you joined last August and you brought the product to market, you launched it, you grew it to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, and then don't get to kind of continue the mission. I'm just really happy for everyone involved. Yeah, I'm interested. Oh, sorry. Yeah. I was just saying now, you know, now we're all one big team and it's. I mean, we're kicking it into another gear. I think we're all so amped up to take this and just go, you know, we're going to go full speed basically, for the next while, and we get to play on offense now and go for it all. So are you guys already making plans to get under one roof? We have a lot to figure out, but, yeah, working to the point there's kind of the product collaboration, there's the go to market collaboration, and then there's the literal kind of like team situation. A lot of work to do over the next couple of months. Well, we tell our customers like, we got there back now, and the product is going to get so much more. Cool. That's amazing. Well, you guys turned something which was in many ways, you know, a disaster. I was just waiting for. I was waiting for the New York Times piece on Monday. And getting to see the New York Times push out this news and turning this whole thing into a win is incredible. And you guys have done a service to the team and the industry, so thank you. Yeah. Honestly honored to get to be a part of it, to work with such a great group of people. And I just want to see you guys. You guys have no idea how things went with all the legal and everything last night in terms of figuring these things out. Are we going to make it there in time? Are we not going to be. It was. We, we. We've been through A lot. And I think it's. It's. It's. It's just the sort of thing. So, just so you know, Scott was like, we are announcing Monday hell or high water. And we. We just did not sleep for the last like 72 hours. Yeah. So it's been a crazy. It's been crazy. I mean, we. Yeah, we, we. We appreciate you hopping on the stream. Do you have anything else, Jordy? Should we. No, you guys deserve. Probably. Probably too early to sleep, but you both deserve a power nap at the very least. Thank you for coming on. Anything else that makes sense to share now or should we let you go? We're all good. Awesome. Yeah. Stay tuned. We're going to have a lot more announcements soon. Thanks for having us. Amazing, guys. Great work. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye. And next up we have Carl Pei. No, not yet. One second. That is amazing. Yeah. What a great story. Absolute dogs. Absolute dogs. That is the perfect. Cemented in SV lore. Tech lore for sure. For sure. Didn't know. I mean, I knew Scott could fundraise. Yeah. I didn't know he was this kind of. This caliber of deals guy. Absolute dog. Absolute dog. Well, read through some timeline. What else do we do? Big Ma has such a homey feeling. I spend all day and I really enjoy it. Feels cozy, safe. Good to come back to shout out. Zach giving Figma a little shout out. Let's bring in our first. There he is. First Carl. Studio walk in. First studio walk in. Let's go. Welcome to the stream. Carl. How you doing? Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. How you doing? It's great to have you here. You haven't done this much before. No, we've had a few people in studio. Done a few. Usually when we're in person, we're on the road, but good to have you come here. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, the company? Yeah. My name is Carl. I have a company called Nothing. We're the only new smartphone company to have emerged in the last 10 years. I felt like tech got really boring. I was a big, big tech fan. I got the latest iPhones all the time. I sat up to watch the keynotes. I was based in Europe, so the time zone wasn't always the best, but in the recent five years, I haven't done that anymore. Every iteration is pretty much the same as the previous one and I wanted to do something about it. So what did you do to spice it up? What was the first feature? And then walk me through all the other features. Please show us. So we're in a very big industry, right? Like, 1.2 billion smartphones are sold every year. So we're not trying to reimagine the category. We're trying to find.
And somebody was replying to this being like, he's building the cube. Oh, Sam d' Amico from. He's been on the show a bunch from Impulse. He's building the cube because there's this old visualization of like, if you put a billion people in one building in Manhattan, it would just be this cube. And so everyone who's like extremely pro building housing is like, let's build a cube. Let's build a cube. Anyway, the news is that Mark Zuckerberg is giving more details. He's announcing that, like the superintelligence team is real. It's been only rumored reported. He hasn't actually said, hey, we're doing all this. That was all like leaked reporting. He came out and posted on threads and he posted on Facebook too, saying, like, this is real. And here are the details. He says he's going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in Capex, which is, which is what they're doing like 60 to 80 a year now. And so I guess, like, it's more just like he's going to continue that for the couple years. He's not giving specific guidance on where. The rank 2024 EBITDA was.84 for 85 billion. Oh, CAPEX or EBITDA. That was EBITDA. Okay, yeah, look up the CAPEX. CAPEX was between 38 and 37 billion. Okay. And then some of that goes towards like reels, and then some of that's used for AI. And then the AI stuff kind of slips over into reals and just other data center uses. But in general, you know, he's going all in. He's continuing to invest billions. What's interesting is that he claims that Meta will be the first lab to finish a 1 gigawatt supercluster. So he's basically racing against Stargate and thinks that he can bring Meta's next data center online before Stargate. And he's calling his 1 gigawatt supercluster Prometheus, which is a hilarious name. The guy loves the Roman Empire, apparently loves Greek mythology too. But Prometheus is a very, very edgy name to pick in my opinion because Prometheus is the guy is the titan who stole the fire from the gods. And it's like, I get that it's like the seed as lord of like the new. It's like the seed of humanity. It's the seed of this new thing. It's a great name in many ways, but also it's like if God's real, like he might not like that. And that could be a problem, could be bad. But, you know, Zuck seems to like, like Icarusian names. Yeah. Because Orion, he likes flying. I mean, he objectively likes flying close to the sun. He does. That's kind of where he feels at home. He does the warmth of the warmth of the sun. And, you know, the hot take on Icarus is that, you know, everyone talks about, oh, like, you know, don't fly too close to the sun. You don't want to be Icarus. But you know who. You know the person who was, like, telling Icarus to do that. No. Surprise, surprise. No one remembers his name. His name was Daedalus. And Daedalus was like, oh, don't fly close to the sun. Who do we remember? We remember Icarus. That's right. And so maybe hot take. It's better to be Icarus than Daedalus if you want history to remember your name. Even if you fly too close to the sun, even if you have a great fall, you will be remembered. That's right. So maybe it's a, you know, icarus gets rich, Daedalus sounds smart situation. Daedalus sounds smart, Icarus gets rich. That's right. I think that might be the. What's going on your mental model. Anyway, I mean, I was also on one of the first shows we ever did. I was talking about how the name of the new VR headset, Orion, is kind of awesome because Orion is, like, this hunter, but was notoriously, like, over his skis with the hunting and was killing all the animals and, like, was smited by the gods and, you know, and. And basically, like, it was. It was like a textbook case of, like, hubris and over aggression. Like, like, the moral of the story of Orion, who is the hunter in the stars, the reason he's in the stars is because of hubris. And so it's very funny to name your product, like, a. Like a Tale of hubris. Maybe it's a reminder. I seriously want to talk to Zuck about this because, like, I'm very interested. Like, how many layers deep does he go? Because, I mean, the guy's like, clearly, like, studies the stuff. Like, he's like a student of the Roman Empire. I just Google it. When a new name comes out and, like, look at the summary, I imagine that he reads it much deeper and I imagine that he gets the joke and is doing this almost ironically, which I think is cool. Anyway, the other news is that they're aiming to scale up Hyperion, so Prometheus will come online in 2020. 6. So that's probably one year away, maybe a little bit more than one year if it's toward the end of 2026. And then they're building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years. And that feels like simultaneously like crazy insane. Ambitious. Amazing. I love it. I'm super excited for the capability coming out of that. And also the biggest glass of cold water poured on the AI 2027 folks of all time, because I feel like everyone in the AI is going to be self reinforced.
Sometimes, but massive weekend. As soon as we got off the stream on Friday, the news broke that Windsurf was being sort of pseudo. It was a trade deal. It was a trade deal. It was a trade deal. I believe this broke at 3pm Pacific, which is just after market close. Just after we went off air. Just after, yeah. Which one were they targeting? That's the big question. I think they were more worried about the TBP and coverage than whatever the market had to say say about the deal. But the deal was that Demis Hassibis here has a post. He says, very excited to welcome Windsurf AI founders Mohan and Douglas Chen and some some of the brilliant Windsurf engineering team to Google DeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini effort on coding agents, tool use and much more. Great to have you on board. And so this was received sort of. As like, oh, okay, so here's kind of the timeline as far as I'm concerned. So immediately our initial reaction, we were here at the studio, we were off air. Our initial reaction was, okay, another one of these quasi acquisitions. People call them shellcountters. Yeah, everybody's not really good care of, it's fine. And immediately a lot of people started kind of freaking out on the timeline, saying that the employees had been screwed. Our immediate reaction was, this doesn't make sense. Why would we be very stupid? Why would all the parties from the founders to the investors to Google tolerate something like this and then call it? 24 hours later, I was still getting messages from employees that thought they were getting total zeros. And at that point in time, I started kind of re evaluating what may have happened. And there was, I think, to be. Clear, the current employees, they saw the news and, and they didn't get a check, they didn't get a wire transfer, and they also didn't even get an email saying, hey, we did all the calculation and based on the share price, like, you'll be expecting this much money. It might take a month for it to clear, a couple weeks to clear. But like, here's your expected payout. There was nothing like that. People apparently were crying, crying in reaction to the news. Well, here's the thing. This was a unique company, right? So, so Windsurf launched In November of 2014, the product, or sorry, 2024, the product. But if you had joined a few months prior to launch, worked on the lead up to the launch, launched it, seen this, you know, incredible growth, and then scaled to what you originally thought was a $3 billion exit to OpenAI and then you find out that you're actually, you're getting to, you're actually going to continue working at the company while dozens of your best engineers and your founders go and leave effectively to then go and compete against you right in CodeGen. And that roller coaster is just absolutely insane. And so really unique dynamic. That was different than a lot of these other, the character AIs, the scales, et cetera, where in those situations many of the employees had been there long enough that they had vested a meaningful amount of shares. They had certainly reached their cliff. In this situation. You could have joined in August of last year and not hit your cliff. Not hit your one year cliff, but been there for the entire run of Windsurf as a product, like from zero to what, 40 million? ARR. Was there a rumor? So yeah, I mean, you watch the launch and you're like, cool, I got it right. I picked the correct, I picked the correct startup, I picked the correct rocket ship. I'm on board. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, you know, these options, these stock option contracts, they're kind of like lottery tickets. But my number came up. And then you go to the gas station or something to cash it in and you're like, wait, we don't know how much it's actually worth. And it's not just like a tax issue. And so, yeah, a lot of people very upset. And we'll get into kind of some of the debate around this. So what's interesting is that I have Varun Mohan, who is the CEO of Windsurf. He has not posted at all. Still. The last post he posted was on June 20th, so I think maybe it was a little bit more recently. Yeah, to be clear. But he was completely muzzled. Yes. I mean, that's what we believe to be true. But it was weird. If he's not muzzled and he's just chosen. Silence. Yes. The last time he really engaged with anything on X, at least was when. Wait, John, I have to interrupt because it's now live. Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf. Let's go. The acquisition includes Windsurf's IP product, trademark and brand and strong business. And above all, it includes Windsurf's world class people. No way. We've privileged to welcome to our team. The whole team. That's amazing. We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured that 100% of windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all their vesting cliffs. Waived. What? And will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work today. At Cognition, we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents while windsurfing.