NEWSMAX

Yes. Everyone must answer this. You guys need to scroll this. So the options are Avi from Friend, Roy from Clulee, you sit in between them. Or you sit next to Theo and mkbhd. I don't know who a lot of these other folks are, but there's Paul Graham and Avi. That's a wild one. Then you sit in between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. That would be a wild one. Next to Fei Fei Li, one of the most serious. You might get caught in the crossfire in 10. 10 seems like a dangerous spot to. Be a dangerous spot to sit. You're be, you know, keeping people, keeping it back. You got Elizabeth Holmes down here, opted there, learn about biotech. So anyways, this would be a crazy flight in general. Yes. I could see this flight ending in an emergency landing in the Marshalls, boarding where would. And then there's the levels. IO I believe is on there. And in position seven, you sit with the indie hackers. Mark in the chat's taking six. Six. Six would be fun. Mqbhd would be good to hang with. I might just go in the lion's den. I think I'm going 10. 10. I'm going 10. I'm sitting next to Sam and Elon and I'm brokering a piece. I'm saying, hey, guys, we're on this. Many people have tried. I'm built different. I can change them. John can. I can do it. I can do it. I can say, hey, there's a lot of synergies here. There's a lot of common ground. Let's make it happen. Let's build together. 10 would be the most fun for sure. I agree. Hello. Hello. Terminally online engineer says bros have been vague posting about building the Machine gu God for three years just to end up building more ads. Yes. Well, why not? Both is part. The machine God is just beyond creating the ad inventory. The ad inventory, it says a lot that we built Machine God and all it wants to do is advertise. Ads are in the critical path for machine God. You got to fund yourself somehow. But also, I mean, I think that the machine God memes were honestly freaking people out. They were. I mean, you see the Eliezer Yudajkowski book, you see people, like, really getting nervous and like, thinking about, like, what if the world transforms completely in the next two days? Like, am I going to make it? What's going to happen? May not. Even if it's paperclip, I'm going to have a job. And the thing that I like is it going to continue to exist and all the evidence points to yes. Like you will still be able to buy the products that you like. You'll be able to sell them, it'll be a little bit more efficient and everyone will probably have a pretty good time. So I'm feeling pretty optimistic. Tyler, how are you feeling? Your P doom was somewhere between 0 and 1%, so I averaged that to half a percent probability of doom. Then what book did you read and how did it impact you? Yeah, so yeah, this is the Eliezer book. I still have one chapter left. I'm not actually done, but that just. Completely one shots you changes your entire. I mean it was like. It's like pretty black pilling. It is. Yeah. But was it effective black pilling or is it just black pills that just kind of bounce off you didn't really swallow them. We might. We might let you borrow the puffer for a little bit because those will be. The puffer is the ultimate white pelt. You see puffer, you just. Yeah, this is great. I mean, walk me through it. Like, I've read a lot of like the kind of og less wrong stuff. So not there aren't like a ton of new arguments in the book, but it's kind of just like a nice condensed form. But I mean it's like so part of the book is like this story that they tell of like a plausible, you know, future. Like if things are currently going how they're going, they stay like that maybe this could happen and it's like fairly reasonable and it kind of ends up with, you know, the earth is like turned into solar panels. Yeah, it's like nano. Um, yeah, I would say in the chat says. Did you get that book from the fiction? I wouldn't. Yes, it is science fiction. I don't know if my PDM is like way higher, but I think maybe there's more of me that. That wants to like basically go into like interpretability research or something. Sure. Because even like I think it's kind of interesting to see that like Doomers are basically like by far the most AGI pilled people. Sure. Like if you look at like, okay, OpenAI is releasing this consumer product for AI video versus like Eliezer coming out with this book. It's like there's a big distinction between what, like their revealed preferences. Yeah, exactly. So there's something interesting there where like Doomers are clearly much more AGI pilled. Yeah. But yeah, it was like. I think it's like a good read. Yeah. I think the sci fi stuff is interesting. I think, I think it is an interesting thought experiment and I take your word that the, the scenario that Eliezer and his co author lay out are plausible. My issue is timelines. So Eliezer is famous for kind of fence sitting on timelines. He says everyone who's predicted something has never predicted the right time of it, but they have predicted it correctly. And I think he makes a good point, but.

Your business on Shopify, they can give you AI to make new landing pages or design the original website that. But you still need the core infrastructure. Totally where it gets challenging. Going back to the Brett Taylor with Sierra example, if you're competing with Brett Taylor where Brett is saying I'm going to replace a lot of the tickets you get, we're going to be able to solve with AI and we're going to charge you based on the value that we're providing. So if you're paying for these many reps today, we're going to charge you so some fraction of that. Right. So you have Brett Taylor, but the. Challenge is he's competing with a company that is doing a seats based, you know, ticket management and customer service platform. Whose incentive is that for? They want you to scale the number of reps you have. And so for those businesses to turn over and say, oh, we're actually, we're just going to, we're, we're going to launch agents now. Yeah. And they have to basically fully renegotiate. Rebuild the product. Yep. Renegotiate all these contracts to charge based on value. Which is really hard to do because then they're like, wait, should we not look at a bunch of the options we have in the market and maybe you're not the best option. Maybe we want the one that's purpose built. I think. Yeah. If you're building a company you want to have, there's maybe five or so different attributes that you can compete with the big incumbents on. Right. And AI would only be one of those. Right. If you're going up against a sleepy giant, but you're not going to like no one's going to go up against a Shopify or even a what Some of these companies that are very strong and where an AI just seems silly to try and go out and pitch a company that's AI first Commerce. Right. It's a feature. But then if you, if you can double down and not just do AI but also do on the business model like what Brett is doing with Sierra with Outcome Base. Well, now you got something really interesting. Right. If you also change the unit economics, the more of these you can stack on, you've got, you've got a real shot at building a generational company. Well, we have for coming on. We have let's, let's, let's watch this. This. Oh, we have a new Sora. This is me searching through every bite. Okay. Riding a puffer fish was never on my bucket list, but I'm glad I'm doing it. Look at those clouds. We're so high up. Oh, he's puffing. Buddy. This is the best day ever. Flying, riding a puffer fish was never on my bucket list. It's really good. Is this sloth. I think this is our. We're in the post. You hear the audio. You can't hear. Yeah. Simon doesn't have the audio but the aud is amazing. Even the. The just you're. It sounds like you. Puffer fish was never on my bucket. List a little bit. Yeah. Look at those clouds. We're so high up. Wait. Last. Last thing I wanted to go through because we were talking off air about it was reasons. Reasons to raise. Sure. Which Simon was going through. You've got six reasons. Yeah. Six reasons to fundraise. Six reasons to fundraise. Because a lot of people have been trying to convince you to fundraise. That's right. And what I tell them is that there's six reasons to raise. The first and most important reason to raise is to fund R and D. You got to build your product and in some circumstances you're going to raise for that alone. In a lot of circumstances. The second one is to fund growth. So you have some type of way where you'd get dollars and you get mind share and more dollars out the other end. Could be a reason to do that alone. The third reason, and this one is it's very popular. It's probably the most popular reason to raise and is to fund your own ego. Very popular. It's also known as momentum raising or because I could and things like that. I think it's a very common practice. Irresponsible but common. The fourth reason to raise would be to fund liquidity for. For your employees. The fifth reason to raise would be for publicity and trust. So this can matter in some markets and depending on where you are to. Being able to say we're backed by Sequoia. Exactly. You have some halo of the S tier vcs. And then the sixth reason to raise would be from strategic partnerships or strategic investors. Right. I'd say one of these is probably not a phenomenal reason to raise. Two is a really good reason to raise. And if you hit on three, be a very, very, very good reason to raise. Yeah. So maybe you should ask if you have some fundraising announcements. We have a ton of fundraising announcements coming up. Thank you so much. I wish we could keep going. This was great. Let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster, you can get started for free. And we have our first virtual guest. We have Zach from Stripe coming in to the TVPN Ultradrome. He's been waiting in the Reese Room. Waiting room. Sorry, you're waiting. Thank you so much for hopping on. Welcome to the show. We've been wanting to make this happen for a while. Yes, finally. Have you. Excited to be here and tough to follow the pufferfish. It really is. I will try. Yeah. Give us the update on Stablecoin News. We've covered it on the show a few times. We talked about the acquisition.

Chat was asking why we have Patrick o' Shaughnessy here. Why wouldn't connection. Why not? But I did want to get your take on this Jeremy Giffon post. He said inorganic growth, acquisitions of competitors and suppliers, buybacks, debt, are all going to become much more native to the venture world. As cost of capital comes down and the lines blur between private equity and venture capital, expect more of a premium placed on founders with allocator backgrounds. You've interviewed tons of founders, tons of private equity investors, tons of venture capitalists. Do you think this is a trend that we'll see? Do you think it's already happening? How do you think that actually plays out? Because you talked to. Tony's a software guy. He's learned hardware. Can't you just add these, these skills on later when you need them? Is it really happening earlier? What's your take? Well, the reason that Tony and I are in town is for an award that he's winning later today called the Singleton Award. And Henry Singleton was a very, probably the most famous capital allocator in history. He was the person that Buffett would tell you, you know, he learned. And the cool thing that Singleton did was for the first 15 or 20 years of his conglomerate's existence, it was called Teledyne. He bought like 200 businesses, buying them M and A. And then the last 30 years, all he did effectively was buy back like 95% of his stock. So he completely turned and did the opposite strategy. And it was one of the best shareholder returns in market history. And so Buffett studied this guy. So Singleton has a foundation now that awards someone like Tony in the middle of their career. And someone it's Ken Langone tonight who started Home Depot at the end of their career that recognizes greatness in capital allocation. I would argue that Tony is an unbelievable allocator of capital and that the very best CEOs have to be if they're going to win. He said they've been. I like the sound effect when he went cash flow positive several years ago or whatever. When you start generating cash, your job as a CEO switches to be a capital allocator. It's crazy and no one's trained in this. But the very best people like him learn how to do it quickly and on the fly. And that's what distinguishes the great CEOs over the fullness of time. It's not. It's not just the products that are amazing doordash an amazing product, they will keep getting better. But really distinguishes the great CEOs over decades is how good of a capital allocator are you? Because that's ultimately, ultimately you just become an investor. After I talked to two SaaS CEOs, both public companies, both trading in the, you know, single digit billions. One has been buying back stock very aggressively. He's worth like $4 billion now. Obviously got diluted during the venture rounds. How about. So the percentage of Oracle that he. Owns, the Ellison versus versus Salesforce, that's been selling buybacks. I mean back in my quant days we found the single best investment of all time in terms of like dollars returned in some alpha cents was Apple's buyback program of its own stock. So that was a better investment than anything else that you can find. And that's a capital allocation decision where you don't have something better to do with the cash and the market undervalued. I think Apple's returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders in the past, like little over a decade. It's crazy. And my bot, I bet bottom dol that Tony, when the opportunity is right and doordash stock is too cheap and he's got excess capital, would make a decision like that. And so it's an amazing signal I think when people are buying back tons of their stock. It's historically been like an incredible sign. So I think we're seeing one of the greats emerge in Tony. Fantastic. Better and better. Well, thanks so much for coming on your question around. What does the street misunderstand? It's like, it looks to me like they misunderstand everything, but they're still like. There's this almost meme of yeah, you, you order takeout. We extrapolate the linear trend and he's gonna, he's gonna go exponential on all these things he's building. Yep. I think it's time for another Jeremy Giffon on invest like the best. I need an annual episode there. He's been, he's been, he's been posting. Yeah, he's getting back in the timeline a lot. He, he kicked off his run on the timeline, but with a, with a, a strong statement about how bad being online is and then just posted, posted, posted. He's a great young capital allocator in. The making himself of fun. Are you going to be. I'd like to have any plans to get More like public SaaS company CEOs on to talk about the state of AI we were covering last week. You guys doing a good job of it? Well, yeah, we're trying to, but I think you, I mean, honestly, I don't know If a public SaaS company, CEO stock is traded down 30% because they look like somebody that's not going to. Benefit from the victim of the SaaS apocalypse. I don't know if they're going to want to come into to your studio invitation. I'd love to host one. I think it's a fast. I mean, this is the big question that everyone has. I mean, the thing that's top of mind for me. Mark Leonard, Constellation Software basically was saying that he felt like he was flipping bearish on vertical SaaS and then a few days later, you know, fortunately stepped down. So I think it's a new wave of people. Right. Like I was talking to Barry Diller last week about this, asking him, you know, he was the Internet opportunist, fantastic investor, whether he'd be an AI opportunist. And he basically said like, no, no, I don't have. I don't have it in me. This is too hard. It's different. Leave it to other people to do. And so I think there's a question of which of these SaaS CEOs can make this transition. It's really hard to do. Yeah. When your business model is. Is very different, especially in the market. Yeah, it was Brett. Brett Taylor from Sierra was saying it's easier to change your business model to get something technology than it is to change your business model, which is. Which is. It's not just a tech problem. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by the TVPN ultradome. This was amazing. This was fantastic. While he rolls off, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I felt like I was dreaming. Yes. Because it felt like we're sitting here in the Ultradome, but sitting in on an episode of Invest like the Best, which is a podcast that Invest like the Best and Founders are the two shows that I' spent the most amount of time listening to the last five years. Yes, very cool. Well, in other news, the Meta Ray Ban displays which we interviewed the Meta team about now, two weeks ago, I'm losing track of time. But they're out, they're on sale today. And you can go. They're going to be doing demos. I think they'll demo very well. I'm still interested in what the churn rate will be and how many people will be wearing them at T + 30, T + 90, T + 180. I think people will. If you're big in WhatsApp, if you're in the meta ecosystem, you're going to have the best time. But man, that imessage feature. Some YC team has to figure out how to trick the meta ray ban displays into displaying imessages because having a notification screen, having a smartwatch, a smart device that doesn't have all of your messages is really, really fighting with one hand. I think we should have Simon. Yes. Let's bring in. Let's do it. Let's bring him on. The legendary. Play some soundboard for me while I tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You've seen the Turbo Puffer. The Puffer Fish live on the show. Is always with us in spirit. He sits right next to us. I'll let you hold your. Oh yeah. She's beautiful. She's beautiful. Yeah. Give us some background. You were at Shopify, Not Spotify. Yeah. For years. What is Trenches? What is that? Okay. It was a common mix up. Yeah, of course. And back in the day when you actually flew candidates into town. Yeah. Sometime would some people would show up and think that they were interviewing really.