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Your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this, Chairman Berb Bernanke? You can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for like, 20 years in a row and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight, and people call you psychotic. It's fine to eat the same dinner every night for a month. What's wrong with being a psycho? I used to do chicken and rice. Chicken and rice. Every night? Yeah. For months. For years. Yeah. That's a good point. Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those that take it seriously, they got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries.

Design system, context. Okay, we got through demo day. We got to go over to tennis, Tennis, tennis, tennis. There was a match that ended at 3:30am People are not happy about it. The Wall Street Journal's headline is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 3:33am it's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 3:33am isn't cool. It's ridiculous. What? What happened? Bill Ackman loved it. He said one of the greatest tennis matches ever and very few got to see it live. This needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors in the sports. What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change? Start the game earlier or cut it off entirely if it keeps going? Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out why. Why this ever worked, was, is, or was a thing. Hopefully the Journal article can break it down, but I watched a little bit of this game. You did? I went to bed. Yeah, I think I went to bed. It was actually a later night. I went to bed around 11. But the game was going at well past three. Ben Shelton, who actually won the match, it was an upset, was hitting 104, 46 mile an hour serves at Carlos. Carlos at one point was shooing off the camera crew because they were filming him and he was actively gonna throw up. He was pushing it so hard that he was gonna throw up into a towel. So, yeah, really, really crazy. Anyways, Wall Street Journal says sometimes this glorious sport can out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience. We're supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Shelton took the second set. I do actually have a family member that did exactly that. Like, blowout, second set. They were like, all right, we're good. We're good. And it ended up being this incredible game. The U.S. open has long cultivated the idea that the wee hours are part of its identity. As much of as much a part of the formula as the $23 Honey Deuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke wafting in from a nearby park. Even ESPN feigns enthusiasm for the apres midnight when it would never schedule a tent pole like the Iron bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis. Okay, how many 3:30am finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo on your back long after quitting time. The subway is 247 theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn. There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 5:45am it's zany. But Alcaraz vs Shelton isn't a corned beef sandwich at an all night diner. This sounds like AI slop. It's a marquee showcase for sport. I've been reading this and I think it's just like fun turns. It's good. It's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of us attention it can get. And it got buried like a Tom Snyder sit down with Buddy Hackett. Even people in Hawaii were like this Alcaraz Shelton match is running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate. Okay, I'm sorry, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of we're going to have to run this through Pangram parallelism. Yeah. This isn't a routine to celebrate. This is when someone needs to step in and scream, what are we doing? You know, I found two new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them. One of them is in our increasingly online world, when someone's writing about online culture or something that happened on the Internet or like with the boom of social media, like there's two phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using this phrase that got baked into the LLM and then now it's getting spit back at people. And so a lot of people are turning away from the phrase in our increasingly online world. So avoid that one too, I guess. Sash says nighttime. You wouldn't understand that. It's a New York thing. Yeah, it's funny because I feel like you can maintain the mystique of the US Open by just having games wrap up around midnight. It's still very much nighttime. Like it's dark out, you know, people are sleeping anyways. Definitely seems just incredibly rough and unfair to the players. This has happened in UFC a few times where the in order to hit a US time zone for the pay per view, the actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6am, which is just imagine waking. Imagine one going to sleep at like 10, knowing that you have to wake up and get in a Death match at 6am Sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know. Yeah, just try to, try to. Because it starts at six so you gotta get warmed up. Like the whole event is starting at probably midnight. I guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag. Like, get there on your schedule and just treat it like it's a 6pm fight for whatever your local time zone is. I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about.

There are so many good iPhone duo reactions. The toughest thing for Apple's marketing team, the sequel, they're going to call it The Apple Duo 2. Is it not the iPhone duo? It is the iPhone duo. Right? It's not the Apple duo. It's not a setup. IPhone Duo. IPhone Duo 2, iPhone Duo 3. That's going to be. It's going to be a mouthful. They never did. They don't have iPhone Air 2 yet, do they? It's just iPhone air. And then they just stopped it. They haven't refreshed it yet. Air Max. IPhone Air Max 95. They'll get there in 94 years. Something like that. Well, anyway, we have our next guest.

Oh, yeah, I can't. There are some numbers I can't. Like. How many employees you got? It's only me and my co founder. There we go. Well, congratulations. But needless to say, you're ripping. That's kind of the vibe I'm. Seems like you're doing well. Yeah. Most of our metrics are public. If you go through, like, our stuff. Yeah, Okay.

Experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone duo animation? Marques Brownlee shared it on X. Do you love this? What do you think? So when you open fades as if it's looking through the glass and when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual outside, but instead it animates so that it looks like you're looking through glass and it appears three dimensional. What do you think? It's so incredible. I mean, it really pushed, you know, it pushed personal computing into an entirely new dimension, I think. No, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Well done. Well done to the team. And I think this is what makes Apple so special, is that the folding phones exist. Somehow no one thought of this. How did they create an environment? Maintain an environment where you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that that makes something that's been around for a while. Gary has one. A folding phone. Still make it special. And now you got everyone talking about this. So good stuff. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring in Om from Olan Lab.

We had a little bit of iPhone duo coverage yesterday. We didn't see the crease. We had a key question in the chat from Sami Analysis. They asked, what do you guys think about the crease? I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders. Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. True. My accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease do matter at all. Especially if this is a mode where you're using two apps. You don't care about the middle at all. I have seen guys on football days have four TVs next to each other with full bezels. Like, you can see the line going down the center and they just don't care. So, like, this is not a big deal. Now. The interesting thing is, like, will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a film. But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by 9, and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom. Or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides. Not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this, like 4:3. So maybe you go back and you get some 4:3 content from like the 70s and 80s and that displays really well because you don't need to do the pan and scan thing anymore. And then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side, like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying. It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix. Like, what percent? Like, will this be as popular as the iPhone pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%? It's the fact that it's different. The fact that it's a way to stand out. It's their most foldable phone ever. Yeah. This was a comment from. Thank you to the listener. Prolific Spotify. The Spotify comedian Dave, he commented yesterday it's their most foldable iPhone yet. It is and it really is. This was. We should have. We should have. This should have come to us on the show yesterday. But thank you, Dave, for throwing that in the comments. So it has. Yeah, it has something if you're bored, but it's really like phone. Every year, this is a way to inject some variation. So. So really it's like when they introduced the iPhone Duo 2, which will quattro. I think they're gonna have to multiply them and get the iPhone quattro. Then they'll say, it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four until it's just a full accordion. Like a fan that just fans out. It screens. Yeah, the fan, the iPhone fan. It's just like this, you know. Yeah. 20 different folds. What was funny is I'm gonna put you on blast here a little bit as you come in, and you're like, yeah, this just makes me want an iPhone. And you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone yet. It's just a great phone. They made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, this is your joke. You fell for your own joke. But it is sort of like this. It could be, for some people, like an anti Halo phone. For some people, it's gonna be the Halo where they're like, I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing I got that. For other people, they're gonna be like, oh, thank God I don't have to deal with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 plus, you know, all these crazy things. You know, the catalog variety is valuable. You know, Blake Shoal jumped in and said, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone. Without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why why exactly you need a bigger screen. It's like, hey, we know some of you guys are spending hours and hours and hours a day. This is such a bad behavior. Okay, continue. Just finish your argument so I can rebalance. No, why don't you jump in, John? I just think that there is. There's cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain Roddy when you're on a bigger screen. Like games on your phone, like, which you. You would. From time to time. From time. I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate, I'm going Lawrence Arabia. I'm going Citizen Kane. Yeah, no, And I agree that that is the use case. Yeah. But I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff. Yeah. It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out is like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices. And so we get. We get. We're giving you a bigger screen. I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that, like, the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like, you can answer your emails, you can connect with your friends, you can text them, you can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah, there's some game that's brain rotty, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo. Like, these are. These are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing. Yeah. So being able to do more of that. Plus, it's just like, you don't know when you're. It's very hard to plan ahead for, like, oh, I'm gonna get caught with an extra hour waiting at the dmv or I'm gonna wait on a plane, or I'm gonna have some downtime, and I'm gonna want to actually, like, enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, oh, I should have broken iPad, because I'm going to be stuck waiting in this line for 20 minutes. So I want to watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the Duo in your pocket. You're good to go. I'm not. Sold me a sales job. I'm not sold. But get this guy a job at the Apple Store. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting.

More of a winner take all dynamic. It might be more like social, but there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways. It's been exciting. So 25% of the batch is hardware up 40x. What about the other 75%? What are the trends that you're seeing on the software side? Dev tools. I think a lot of like, part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking, well, I don't want to go, if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it in two days. So maybe I want a hardware component. But at the same time we're still seeing a bunch of early stage software companies rip. What trends are you seeing across the board with agents and infrastructure and all those things? Yeah, I mean, honestly, this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because my prediction would be you look at the public companies of today, any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way, like they're going to be replaced by a YC startup or a company like, like that that has maybe 20 people working there and those 20 people each will do the work of like 100 engineers themselves. Right. So you got like a 2,000 person workforce and you're just like blowing them out of the water. And so that's going to be the biggest shift. Like you're going to have AI native startup companies that are just brand new that have started in the last two or three years. They don't have any of the bad habits that were developed over the, you know, sort of ZIRP era and they're just going to come in and out, execute every single SaaS company that doesn't do it that way. And it's, it's going to be pretty epic. It's going to be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software. And, you know, that's sort of the rest of the story. Are you seeing pitches for like neoclouds, people that want to see. Yeah, yeah. I mean wafer is killing it. Form is killing it. I mean, you know, the amount of inference in the world feels like it's going to go up like 10,000 to 100,000 acts like people are just not really prepared for, you know, it's actually kind of the funniest thing. Like you can work in SAS where you know, things are going to grow 10x and then, or if you look at inference, you look at data centers you look at semiconductors, you look at GPU and even CPU demand, it's going to go up like a thousand X. Right? So that's even. It's even bigger an opportunity. And I think people are just not. It's not priced in. You know, personally, I think is. It's not priced in at all. Where does. Are you still using the term little tech? I always like. Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Where does little tech.

You know, whatever. I remember back tech Harvard, you know, I Remember back in 2012 is 170k, 150k and then 150k in cloud credits. And it was hard to spend those credits. Like you had to actually get things to scale because it was, it was only if you had the demand side solved then your, then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit. But from in actually going 0 to 1, that, that, that 150k on AWS was sort of just like I wish I could use and people were joking about like maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. But you couldn't actually use it in the R and D phase. And now you actually can pull those credits into the R and D phase in the form of tokens, which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the credit usage rate has gone up a lot. Yeah, people need to be token maxing. I mean, what's funny, I mean, yeah, you know, OpenAI will come and just give any YC company $2 million worth of tokens, right? Yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean that's a part of that, that's a part of the deal now, right? Like it's optional, you don't have to take it. But we tell people, look like if you're doing something hard, you should probably take the $2 million because, you know, if you can't figure out how to turn $2 million worth of tokens into $100 million worth of enterprise value. What are we doing here? Yeah, what are we doing here? Yeah, yeah. What do you, what are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go to market?

That we're doing bio stuff. Yeah, it's a crazy time on the hardware question, is it, are we seeing a boom in hardware startups? Because there are more cool things to do with AI. I'm thinking of, I have a sticker box. You push, the kid pushes a button, they say a prompt and then it prints a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool. Wouldn't exist before generative AI. But then there's the other side which is like hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles, you have to deal with manufacturers. And I feel like I can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chains in order, doing inventory management, all these different things. Is it both? Which one are you seeing be the most acceleratory? Oh, I mean look at what's happening with GPT6. Navier Stokes equation. Like that's insane, right? So if you're trying to do board layout, you're going to be able to do it much faster. Yeah. And what was the alternative to that? Like if you are a team of like one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some hard tech thing that you really need, I mean it's so close to zero. Or you need to have raised $100 million to convince that person to quit. Now you might not need that person on day one. You could just go to GPT6 Astra, you say, hey look, this is what I'm trying to figure out. And you're iterating with it. You actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or you know, that university. Like you don't need to convince them, you just actually get it farther along. You can show to an investor, you can get money, you can get there on 5 million instead of $50 million. It's sort of like, you know, multiple stacking things that are happening. Like you have intelligence on tap. Then any given founder who can identify a thing that need in the world, suddenly you can say, you know what? This is the path. This is like this is always what we've done at YC is, you know, we're giving you half a million dollars. What can you actually get done? You know, these days it's half a million dollars plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits. Right. So what's a million dollars in cloud credits if not like maybe the equivalent of $10 million worth of R and D for you know, whatever I remember back. Caltech, Harvard, you know, I remember back in 2012, it was 170k, 150k and then 150.

There we go. There we go. Okay. Yeah. I want to see your beautiful faces. It's just full resolution, you know. Fantastic. Got it. Awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute banger of a show. Yeah. Kick us off with the stats, like, where is yc? How big is this batch? What differentiates this batch? And then we'll go into the broader technology landscape, the startup ecosystem, all that. That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today. About a quarter of them are hard tech. That's up 40x since our low bar, maybe like 3 or 5 years ago. I mean, hard tech is in. It's big and it's here because of AI. I mean, intelligence is on tap now. Right. So what that means is instead of just doing bits, like it's time to do Adams guys. It's time to actually, like, create abundance for one another. And then the kind of stuff that people are doing, completely insane. I mean, it's, you know, some pretty pure research type stuff. We got a company called Frontier. They're. They made biochips that use basically neuronal cells. I think we had him on the show already. Yeah, I think he went viral earlier and we got him on.

It's even bigger an opportunity and I think people are just not. It's not priced in. You know, personally, I think it's just not priced in at all. Where does, Are you still using the term little tech? I always like. Oh, definitely. I mean, yeah, yeah. Where does little tech stand on the, the AI slowdown debate? Regulatory capture, risk. When I look at some of the companies that we're going to have on the show, I feel like they might not be affected positively or negatively by the discussions in Washington. But how are you seeing it broadly? Because typically regulatory capture can, you know, harden the position of incumbents and that's bad for little tech. But how have you been dealing with the current conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Coxon guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with hugging face, right? Like our agent swarms going to come and take over infrastructure en masse and then what are we actually doing about that? Like, I don't want to hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for two months. And I really care that there's a, you know, there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee jerk response. And like, the thing is, like, we shouldn't be, that's a smoke screen. You shouldn't be paying attention to that. We need to be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent, you know, agent swarms taking over entire data centers. Right? Like, what's our, what's our, what's our shutdown strategy? Right? Like how do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? Like, you know, what, what software can we build and what cybersecurity defenses can we build today? And like, you know, that's the level of discourse that I think we need and we just don't have that right. People are just saying, well, discourse is, discourse is one thing. Are there, is there a meaningful number of YC companies now that are focus on that set of problems? Because one way to think about AI safety is to go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts. And another way is actually build cybersecurity products specifically with like, you know, agent swarms in mind. And you know, thinking of Ilya's post about NEO cloud security, it's like, well, I hope there's five companies that saw that post and we're like, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure that Palo Alto Networks and Crowdstrike and all these companies are thinking about that opportunity as well, but it just feels like anywhere there's, like, fear, there's also an opportunity for commercial solutions to the problem that won't fix everything. Yeah, I mean, we got that too, right? We got a tenant company like Silmaril is able to do 100 milliseconds in request loop prevent prompt injection. Sure, Right. So you got an agent swarm it wants to take on, take over your AI systems and like, it's in production now. Like, it basically prevents prompt injection. And it can do it at a level that like, you know, it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cybersecurity. Like, if you have a kill switch on entire requests, because, hey, that's a prompt injection, like, that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction, man. I saw Terminator 2 also. Like, that's, you know, we're not here to talk about that. Like, we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with the agent swarms. How do we actually prevent that? And I think that, you know, little tech has a role in actually solving, actually providing the software, the services, the hardware, the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like, let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about instead of whatever a socialist says in the New York Times. I don't care about that. What are you telling YC startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities in selling data.