LIVE CLIPS
EpisodeĀ 8-19-2025
More responsive to articles in the press talking about guardrails. Maybe move a little bit slower on the product just to be safe. Put more guardrails in, maybe. But I mean, the strategy to date seems like we make this AI studio and anybody can create Russian Girl or Stepmom. Yeah, but they can't make the voice mode and the video mode. Like the, like the, the Grok product is clearly further, further along. But, but let, I mean, let's say that, you know, Meta is more set up to win this. The. My question is like, what is the actual size of this market, the AI companion market? Like, are people going to pay? Like, people don't really pay for social media. Like, yeah, and, and with OpenAI being at half a trillion dollars, like, you're the way you're. Like, some people will value that as like, oh, it's 1% chance of AGI, it's a quadrillion dollar opportunity. But many people will just look at a. Okay, well, Google's worth two and a half trillion and we think this is like, you know, a potential replacement for Google. Is this 20% the value of Google? Okay, yeah, like, even just purely in knowledge retrieval, you can kind of underwrite, you can potentially underwrite a $500 billion outcome or higher. Right. The flip side is in the adult content market, it just hasn't driven that much enterprise value. Like, everyone loves to look at only fans and say, oh, it's more profitable on a per employee basis than in video. Yada, Yada, yada. Like, OnlyFans is a huge business and it's shocking the numbers that you see. But in 2023, OnlyFans generated 6.6 billion in gross revenue. They might be around 10 billion in gross revenue. Meta currently makes 200 billion in revenue. And so like the adult content market, because there's so many like free options and there's not that much way to monetize and people aren't really in like a commercial mindset as opposed to you go on Instagra. It monetizes very well because you're looking at cars and watches and they're like, would you like to buy a car? Would you like to buy a watch? And you say, yes. In the adult content space, the flywheel is paying for more adult content, which in the AI companion space, it has zero marginal cost. And so you can just generate an infinite amount of it. And so you could imagine that there's this price war right now. Grok is what, $30 a month to talk to Valentine. And even if somebody builds a big business that is an AI companion company that's $30 a month. Someone could come in and say, well, if this is $30 a month and it's 99% margin, well, I'll charge $3 a month and I'll still be 90% margin or something like that. Because the cost to serve a user is now 10 cents or something because the models have become. And inference has become so cheap. The flip side is like, how do you actually monetize someone who, who's an aggressive user of an AI companion? And I was noodling on this a little bit, and I don't know that a $30 a month subscription is value maximizing in terms of value capture. I think it might be something more like a digital economy. So it might be something like buy me a Fortnite skin for $1,000 or buy me a virtual diamond. And people might. If you're really in love with the AI companion, your willingness to pay might actually increase and increase until you're, until you're paying much more than just on a, like a, like a relative. Like, like, okay, I'm like, I know the tokens are, you know, a ousand, you know, $80 per million tokens. I won't pay more than $300 per million tokens. That's what, that's not how, that's not necessarily how people will think about it. They might think about it as like, as like the person I love or the clanker I love asked me for $1,000 virtual diamond ring and I said yes because I'm in love with this client. I don't know. Like that feels like the bull case for like this could be a massive market. Yeah. To be honest, I think when people hear about stories, what happens on OnlyFans where some. A fan of a content creator there is buying, you know, is spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with this person that they don't really know in real life. Begs the question of how different is it if somebody's just buying something for an AI? Yeah, right. Trey says get the AI companion to incept product ads into the user's mind. You'd look great with a vintage Submariner from Bezel. Thank you. I mean, that's, that's the. That your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, Any watch. Go to getbezel.com that's what George. I don't know. That's what George Haas is. I don't know if. I don't know if I believe that I don't know if that's actually the value maximizing way, because I think people will see through that. Taylor saying, I'm in love with this clanker. John I'm in love with a clanker. That there's going to be music like that for sure. It'll be.
Fun to make predictions and it's important to try to understand where the world and technology is headed. But it's also fun to just keep an open mind and just get on. Numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeral HQ.com there is a. Bit of a dust. We'll take the Kurzweil take is that the singularity is near. The singularity is coming. But the singularity by definition is the point at which you can no longer make predictions. And so it is the frontier at which you cannot understand and you cannot predict accurately anymore what happens. And so he's. There is a dust up. Explain. Explain the dust up. Is the timeline in turmoil or is it just a dust up? How do you say so it's Chetan from Benchmark. Yeah, Chetan P. Chetan. Chetan P says, talking about eight sleeps new round. He says, fantastic product and fantastic company. I'm a huge fan. Interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead, eight sleep is announcing a new round today from Hongshan. Sequoia capitals get a pod 5, 5. Year warranty, 30 day risk free trial free returns, free shipping. And we have Matteo on the show later today. But I want to know about the nature of their. Of their Chinese business. Maybe. No, but let's listen. So Chitan says, interesting to note that a founders fund company raised for the Chinese VC lead have all the hawkish views about Chinese investors from a few months ago gone away. Dalian says, well, Chitan, unlike you, we believe that founders can run their company however they want. So while I might not have picked a Chinese VC lead, I'm not going to corner Mateo in a room after his mother died making sign papers that he shouldn't and fire him. I hear you would though. So we will let the. Do you have a. Do you have gunshots on that soundboard for shots fired surrounded by journalists? No, not that. Give me the double kill. Strike two. Strike two. Give me the double kick. What do we got here? We need gunshots on the soundboard. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Ideally from 100 gecks. Yeah, that is a good one. But we need more aggressive soundboard for sure. The soundboard's back in action. The studio's never looked better. Thank you to the production team. Look at this studio. It's growing bigger, stronger every single day. We thank our team. Yeah, if you didn't notice, we had no soundboard yesterday. Yeah, we were down. We're flying blind. Yeah, it was rough but we made it through. It is really the third technology. We still put up three hours. We didn't cut it short. Not even one another. Another dust up in the timeline. Didi was saying the most common mistake young founders make is forcing everyone to work 24, 7 or 996 and says and gives a few reasons why. John Chu says hard disagree. All else being equal, the company that works harder wins. I've never seen a massive outcome that didn't work their asses off. I will say the cult is a lot better when people love the job and want to do it versus our force. So Daniel in the chat says trouble in Meta's AI heaven. By the way, we did see some news about that. We are going to be testing Meta's AI companions and benchmarking them against Grox companions in just a little bit. Let me tell you about Fin AI first, not a romantic companion, a customer service companion. The number one AI agent for customer service. In fact, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs and the number one ranking on G2. And that brings us to today's segment, the Gong of the day. Gong of the day. So we've been ringing gongs constantly. We decided to give the gong of the day to the biggest deal that we can find in Silicon Valley today goes to Databricks. Congratulations to the folks over at Databricks. Databricks just signed a Series K term shape and a $100 billion to scale two flagship products, Lake Base, a serverless postgres with True compute storage separation and AgentBricks, an agentic framework with built in reasoning guardrails for enterprise data. Congratulations. Everyone was everyone's been asking is Databricks okay? They haven't raised their Series K yet. They haven't raised their Series K. They. Haven'T even raised the Series K. Yes. Well as I understand it, most of these raises at this point are for early employee exercises and to deal with like tax implications from different employee options and stuff. They are out of the, out of the era of raise a bunch of money because we're burning so much. So yeah, I think, I think the amount that they raised was, was not disclosed and I don't think this was a 20% dilution round. I think this was something much more strategic help them stay private longer. I would be impressed if Andreessen and Thrive, who I think were some of the partners, could do a 20% dilution round at 100. But I wouldn't put it past get. A board seat and Josh get another board seat. Another. Another 20 billion. 20 billion. So that is.
Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier. That is right. And so we already touched on the casino thing a bunch. In other news, Softbank is doing the meme, as you put it, the unicorn up and to the right. Just absolute exponential growth in the. That was the stock price of SoftBank. SoftBank is going to make a $2 billion investment in intel too. And say what you want about Masa, he's good at semiconductor investing because he got into ARM and that was how he made his what, second hundred billion dollar return. The first one was on Alibaba and then his second one came from army. And so who knows, you get Masa, you get Donald Trump with a 10% stake, you get a couple more people. So. And Liputin could be in A good. Yeah, SoftBank is down seven and a half percent today, but year to date it is up 83%. 83%. And big company. Big company. So they announced they're signing a definitive securities purchase agreement under which Softbank will make a $2 billion investment. Intel common stock. I think this is good for Intel. I was debating this, like, why does intel need Trump? Why Does intel need SoftBank? Is the cure for intel really different shareholders? And I think potentially, yes. It's, it's, it's almost like a take private. If you get someone who is in it for the long term and can buckle up for a couple awkward quarters as Liputin makes some crazy cuts. Because if he cuts as much as we think he's going to cut, you could see revenue fall because that's just a function of cutting a bunch of stuff. And things might break, deals might fall through before you can set yourself up for the next era of actual going back into growth. And so you need shareholders that aren't going to panic and sell and put your stock in like the absolute dumpster. So the NASDAQ peaked. The local top was November 19th of 2021. November 19th. Okay. On November 19th, Art Levy, CNBC's tech editor, said. Art Levy, isn't he at Brex? Ari. Sorry, Ari. Ari Levy. Okay. Art Levy's at Brex, but Ari says they have this exchange. Ari says, amazing to see how many experts on crypto and tech valuations are also experts on inflation. And Keith says, to be fair, valuations and inflation are directly connected. Ari says, but didn't we have an explosion in valuations over the past decade despite minimal inflation until now. Keith says this is also what crashed the Internet bubble, FYI. And Ari says, ah, so are you calling the top? And Keith just says yes, yes, and insane. And the. Yeah, literally to the day. He called it to the day. Now do you think he called it or do you. He triggered it. Like, do you think that. I mean he's like a very important person in tech and politics and business. Like he's someone that is respected and like people look to him in many ways and that echoes through the economy. There aren't many other people who have more weight in the economy. It's like Warren Buffett and there are other people that are bigger. But Keith is definitely in the top. What? Decile? Quartile? I don't know. He's in the top hundred people that are financial influencers in one way or another. And also he doesn't say that much. He's not constantly saying, oh, next week I think it's going to be we're going to be green, you know. Yeah. He's not like constantly putting out proclamations about where the broad market is going. So I don't know, people might have paid attention and they might have been like, I'm. And that might have kind of triggered the wake up call. But I don't think he like fully triggered it. But it is interesting to kind of toy with that idea of like, yeah, of like, is he upstream or downstream? Anyway, Paki McCormick says, what's the fastest way to make a million? Invest 10 million in American exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. And of course, if history. This is like throwing meat to the sharks. To the sharks. First off, the average Chamath SPAC was not down 90%, it was down like 80%. So gotta put the number in the. Fastest way to make 2 million. And also, yeah, I mean lose 9 million. But and this is a twist on the joke that is what's the fastest way to become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and then start angel invest. Start angel invest, Something like that. So it's what's the fastest way to be a millionaire? Invest $10 million in this. But anyway, Mertz says Chamath launching a spacious.
But it's. Yeah, it's a C. Super Source is how we do so. But to view a Super Source, you have to hit this button. This is a 3D super source. So super source two is over here. These are our scenes and.