Bill Gates foresees massive AI job loss: these VCs disagree | E2330

0:00 Bill Gates published a six thousand word essay today. Called the turbulent AI era is here. AI will, quote, either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and that right now, quote, there is no plant. Some jobs are probably gonna get go permanently go away. Humans just kinda sort of get in the way. I trust tech more than I trust. Government. Every time somebody really adopts these tools inside of my firm, three or four new opportunities open up for our company. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Rippling, don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to Ripling.ai slash twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire organization.

0:43 That's R I P P L I N G dot AI slash twist. Sign up for exclusive access today. Northwest registered agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life.

0:54 Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at www dot northwest registered agent.com slash twistmain lightfield. Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you. It even prospects and books your meetings, used by thousands of startups. Free at lightfield.app. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startupslash This Week in VC. Every Wednesday we do a V C round table.

1:21 Uh ten AM? On the left coast. one PM on the right coast and here in the great state of Texas, we go live at noon on Wednesdays. With me today. What a lineup.

1:32 What an amazing amount of news. The docket runneth over Shiel Monat is with us. How are you doing, Sheel? Great. Good to see you. You and I getting into it, minimum wage, jobs. I love it. Great debates on Dave McClure. founder of five hundred startups now five hundred global he's got a great podcast About strip mining the V C industry called trading places. I just came up with that. I give him a promo for his podcast, uh instead of paying him the

2:03 four hundred dollar minimum wage uh for his SAG after a uh appearance here. Uh he's with practical venture capital. We launched uh we launched on your show year ago. Yes, and I get your shorts. Your shorts are great. TikTok shorts are great. He's talking about my video clips, not my pants. No. He Dave is known for wearing short, uh in completely inappropriate settings like conferences, his office, et cetera. And with us, I think for the first time you've seen Kanji is here. We're saying It's first time you're on the program, yeah.

2:35 Dialing in from London. So making it closely. Oh, great. And Dave, where are you dialing in from? I'm in Sunnyvale, which is very sunny today. Shall I assume. San Francisco? And I'm in Austin at the ranch. Uh lots to talk about today. Three great investors on the program. And I think we start out with Uh Bill Gates.

2:57 Bill Gates published a six thousand word essay today. called the turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. Uh obviously you have to hit exactly six thousand words. That's what Jensen and Zuckerberg did recently. If you don't hit six thousand words, we don't know if you wrote it yourself. I didn't write run this one through an AI checker yet, so we'll see if it's a d uh a drunken miller or not. Uh, but he argues AI will, quote, either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and that right now, quote, there is no plan.

3:30 Gates warns AI risks are outpacing its benefits. Interesting. Threatening jobs across law, medicine, and software, he's calling for. A new national institution of some type and AI usage taxes And

3:45 Making some jobs reserve jobs that can only be done by humans. Dave, uh you read The manifesto or at least the summary of it. Uh, your thoughts on Gates Coming in at this moment now, so from a meta commentary. perspective. Why is Gates commenting now?

4:04 And What resonated with you as True. And what resonated to you as Not true or

4:12 God forbid, a worse take. I don't know particularly why now, although maybe Gates had some bad press that he's trying to get past in the last six. I like that theory might be Some reason. Uh, I think the three main points I kind of agree with. Uh some jobs are probably gonna go go permanently go away.

4:30 Um Bad actors get superpowers, that's probably true. Mm-hmm. Not not just due to AI. I mean drones are already seeing bad actors get superpowers with not too much money. And then kids and human connection. Uh, and I guess that might be topical today because

4:46 Meta is just paying sixteen billion dollars in fines for Uh I guess potentially getting kids addicted to uh social media. Yeah, well definitely getting kids addicted. And that'll be our second story. Sheil, when you Read the missive. Any thoughts on why now? Uh Or

5:03 Any thoughts on what resonated as true? I think everything he says is broadly true. There will be a lot of job losses. I still in my head don't have an idea of Is this Like Is this actually gonna change everything.

5:18 Or is it some subset of the population that Yeah. gets job gets their job displaced, jobs displaced. And it starts out with like the jobs he's talking about. many of those were already displaced when we started outsourcing, whatever, twenty plus years ago. In terms of why now I don't I don't know why now. I think now is as good a time as any.

5:36 I think he talks about the enormous potential that AI has, which is awesome. Um I Can't say I understand enough about why uh about like

5:47 what we should do about it to have a strong, fully formed thought. He proposes that The AI companies should contribute. And like

5:56 There is a democratic participation f where everyone Um Everyone has a say in how this goes. Um

6:05 Which I think is a reasonable a reasonable idea. I think we've been operating as if the AI companies can just Yeah. Do anything. And clearly the public sentiment is very bad on that. So I think

6:18 There probably does need to be some change. And I think his proposal makes sense. I think the public sentiment I just saw something recently where it was mostly coming from environmental You know, sort of impact not so much the economic impact. Um which I think, you know. Maybe it's a little surprising. Probably energy and

6:35 Power usage or You know, primary on people's concerns. I I still wonder whether like You know, whether there's job displacement or not, shouldn't we be like thinking about AI Kind of like the new oil. Like shouldn't we be creating cyber wealth funds with our surplus coming from AI and sharing that broadly? I I I don't think Bernie Sanders taking fifty percent is the right story, but

6:58 Sam was trying to get in front of this and offer like five to ten percent, I think. So a tribute uh as the world's jobs evaporate, Hussein uh Any idea of how you would Get a coordinated effort because Gates points this out in his missive. How we Get the world coordinated in either reserving certain jobs

7:18 Not using robots for certain jobs, uh, which I think would be factories, maybe, or healthcare, he brings up over and over again. Um And then how to tax it like This is a tragedy of the commons, I guess, where you would need Hussein everybody to agree Okay, yeah, we won't give these jobs over, but if my company decides on the slide and sneakily uses AI to solve the problem, now I've got a better profit margin, right? So

7:45 Is there Any way to coordinate the world if we can't get rid of nuclear bombs or can't stop global warming, can't stop burning fossil fuels. People to stop using AI tools in some coordinated fashion, is that possible? I mean that.

8:00 The idea of coordinating global like like world different world countries since like post world war two. I mean, is there any evidence that we are good? kind of figuring out how to tackle any of the big problems. I mean so like Yeah. This is a human problem, not an AI problem. And maybe you have the keys over to the AI, maybe they might do a better job like it might do a better job.

8:21 But the general idea And yeah. automation's gonna happen, AI's gonna get better at the automation, human jobs are gonna get deprecated, and as a result, we'll like society Like the economy will be so much better run by automation that you actually humans just kinda sort of get in the way. It is probably like a real thing.

8:41 Like I mean, I I I feel like that's kinda sort of playing out. And if you really believe this idea that like a dollar of compute equals, you know, ten dollars of intelligence. It's I think it's only a matter of time before even the higher cognition things in society kinda get ru replaced and then there is like a genuine problem and this is not a new topic. I mean like

9:01 science fiction authors are usually like like decades ahead of everybody else on this stuff. Like Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this stuff, Player Piano is like the first book. Hory Doctor wrote about this stuff. Not in his book it was walk away. Like the old idea like in in terms of coming back. But it's It's manifesting and I think almost everyone who's in AI has thought about some variation of this. Like, you know, Sam had the UBI, you know, initiative like a decade, like five years. It feels like an eternity ago in our industry, but like This is I think of it didn't work. Which did not work. I think that's just implementation details. I think, you know, not giving people money, but giving people access to capital with some amount of debt Repayment is probably a better strategy. You think micro like we saw. What was the micro loans site that we all lost our minds on ten years ago? Kiva. Kiva. That actually worked, right? Like we do we need to double click on that again and go back to like micro loans for micro entrepreneurs? Micro lending. I was I was on the board of a company called United, the

9:58 Basically helped solve microlending in India twenty years ago and Was successful enough that now uh microlending is a commercial asset class in India. Alright, I'm here with Keith Pires. He is the founder of Lightfield and they Are a CRM system built natively in AI that takes all your emails, calendars, Slack messages, all the stuff you keep losing. puts it in one place and creates organization.

10:22 Out of chaos. So you don't lose any customers. Keith, welcome to the program. Thanks. I gotta ask you. I mean, it's twenty twenty-six. I've used three different CRM systems in my life. The team hates them. Everybody hates CRM. How does Lightfield? Help. me as the CEO founder get people to use a CRM system. The first thing is um your your team won't have any CRM admin to do. They don't even have to log in if they don't want. It'll update itself.

10:48 They'll have to occasionally approve some updates. Um, so all of the um the the clerical work is gone. Um second, it's gonna do work for your team. Um on their behalf. So they're gonna spend way less time doing follow ups, outbound prospecting, um, accountant health scores. Lightfield will do all of that for them. And then Third for you as CEO. Um it'll help you

11:10 Better forecast. Because now your forecasts are based off of sort of real unstructured customer truth, not just pipeline numbers. Um and it'll uncover new opportunities for you around what product areas you should be in, what industries you should be in, and proactively uh give you feedback from your customers on where to take your business. So everybody go check out heightfield. App. Let's be realistic. I don't think anyone trusts us as techies. to kind of figure this problem out.

11:40 And then the problem is you look around the you look across the aisle, right? Everyone in government. Like I don't think any one of us would really trust And you and and I don't even think you can converge on decisions in government to figure this out and then make the problem like a global problem. I trust tech more than I trust government. Well if you trust capitalism. If we look at if we parallel AI and intelligence. Job loss.

12:03 And this technical wave, and we compare that to say energy. Um Capitalism. And demand and supply. Innovation.

12:14 In the form of solar becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And batteries becoming denser and denser and cheaper. Seem to have solved the problem. It's now more expensive to either retrofit a coal mine or build a coal mine than it is to build solar. Great state of Texas. We're the largest provider of solar in the United States.

12:33 And I can tell you the people here are not precious about their oil. They're not like we're team oil, we'll never touch solar. They're what is the best Most profitable. you know, next energy supply I can create and in I think four out of five times.

12:49 It's gonna be solar. Unless you can build the data center right on top of a NADAS. Field. And so that would lead me to argue. Well, maybe there's gonna be a lot of displacement.

13:01 In jobs. I think we all know that's gonna happen. Displacement. Sure. But what I'm seeing is the people with these tools Every time somebody really adopts these tools inside of my firm. Three or four new opportunities open up for our company. And the ability to go faster and solve more problems happens. So

13:19 This g harkens back, Sheil, to the quote that I think Jensen got right. You're not gonna have your job replaced by AI, you're gonna have your job replaced by somebody using AI. That's what I see in the field in white collar work. Now For blue collar work show. I think it's distinctly different.

13:37 watching what I'm watching and I have a matter of time I have a lot of investments in self-driving car companies in in all of them essentially. from zipline to Uber, uh you know, anything that's public, I I I I dipped in. I don't know. That A person who learns AI.

13:55 is suddenly gonna deliver more burritos or do more airport jobs. I think they just lose their job, right, Sheel? I think that's probably right. Now That also was true, like Hundred and twenty years ago in the United States, everyone was a farmer, pretty much.

14:11 And now we're not. There have been other jobs where Things have been displaced. I think the timeline We talk about it and even Bill Gates talks about it as if it's instant, but it's really not. Like

14:22 It actually these things will take time. And uh your door dash driver is probably safe for the next five, ten years. And in that time by the way, like ten years. I don't think five, you think. So we're between five to ten. You take the lower end of the range? Yeah, I think, you know, we're seeing job displacement in knowledge industries very fast, but like Physical energy. You're not seeing it in the data.

14:45 Yeah. Not yet. You don't think like the jobs that we've been doing knowledge wise are much easier now with AI? Definitely easier. But we're not seeing the jobs. Yeah. But we have data on this and it's not happening yet. Yeah, I'm sure it will. I agree with you, but

15:03 We're still in the early innings of a lot of this. I think I think the thesis question is not that this is I mean, you could argue this is not gonna happen and jobs will get created, or you could argue that this stuff compounds so well that it becomes so much more competent than any of us needing the jobs. And then the question is what to do with us. Like Yeah. Yeah, I I think hiring in tech industries has definitely been like slimmed down a little bit. It's flat. We're not hiring yeah. We're not hiring as fast as we are like

15:30 Increasing productivity, which which is arguably a good thing. But like that's the nuance between both of your positions. Um when Shield says we haven't seen the the job loss and you say we're seeing massive productivity, both of those are true. And if you look at a company like Microsoft or Google or Uber or Facebook, in many cases they have the same relative number of employees over the last five years, plus or minus, let's say 10 percent. And if you were to do that. uh claud search or you did a you did a search on like employee account per year, you'd probably see flat across them and you would see earnings growing thirty, forty percent and top one growing ten to twenty percent.

16:06 Which is extraordinary, and that actually is AI. making the people working in companies more efficient. Net positive benefits for small business and small business creation due to AI. Like I think actually the biggest beneficiary of AI will be a whole bunch of sole proprietors and small business all the cross. Why unpack it. Why why will we see a lot more? I I think I have the'cause they will move fastest. They can move fastest, they can be creative, you know, the benefits of AI tools to someone who's running A small business is probably like pretty immediate.

16:38 Like if you learn how to like get customers better. Do your job better, faster, you know, you get the games immediately. They accrue immediately. There will be AI software companies that help people run their sole props much better. So like if you're a therapist, you used to have to have a receptionist, you had to have somebody scheduled like All this stuff billing. Now an AI can do all that stuff for you.

17:00 Which does speak to job loss. But also speaks to Sol Props. being able to function much easier than they could before. If the virtual thing is that you're going to be doing which of five jobs and now they're doing like ten jobs with AI. Yeah if the I mean simplistically if the virtual humans are better at doing the jobs than the actual humans and they're a lot cheaper and you can put you can d you can deploy a thousand of them like overnight versus having to deal with interviewing, iring, et cetera. Anyone who hires people

17:27 is is gonna probably benefit from this thing. That that's a simplistic way. The big question to me though, going back to this The the big question, like what happens if humans are deprecated, right? Then how do you build a market oriented economy? to figure out what the heck to do with the humans. 'Cause you probably can't get an autocrat to figure it out. You probably can't government institutions or global institutions to do it. So how do you build a market oriented economy?

17:50 to figure out how to solve this problem. Like this is this I the problem stuff is like kind of trivial to me. Like the solution stuff is like the real intellectual solution. Let's let's pull that string. I I'm gonna agree with Dave and Sheil on so pry. T pr so proprietorships booming, but Not just because the existing ones are gonna be Run better.

18:12 And then they maybe make more profits. So hey, the person who's the therapist is like, you know what, I just want to have an assistant to manage all the AIs and keep that train going because I'm so much more profitable, but I don't need the second and third one, right? I don't need the out source accounting firm. We can just do that in house. So there could be Лепопритерші.

18:32 But If you can't get a job Coming out of school At Uber Meta. Facebook and Microsoft because they're not hiring.

18:41 But you have been using AI to cheat your way through school. And you're an expert at it. Yeah, straight A's. Well you're talking about my kids right now. I've got a software. It is what it is. Like I as far as I'm concerned, if you learn How to cheat on your way through Harvard.

18:59 And then You're perfectly positioned to use AI to actually create. a company because it's the same tools. How do I get this task? Here's the goal. go get the goal and you just motivate it, set the loops up, et cetera. So I think we'll see a Cambrian explosion in sole proprietorships. Because you're just not gonna have four job offers. People graduating from college are not gonna have like

19:22 Mike unless they happen to be a PhD in AI, but they're not gonna have people competing for it. But let's talk about your question, Hussein, which is What are practical solutions? I have one that I've been talking about a bit. Um people tell me I'm a Libdard when I bring it up. Uh because God forbid we even consider humans and employment in this occasion and and and giving them You know, it's just complete weakness to have empathy for somebody who's an Uber driver or a door dasher. But in China

19:51 Um they are now giving out licenses. For self driving vehicles. And they have stopped giving them out. So they have A cap, essentially, right now.

20:01 Uh because in Wuhan in Beyang in Shanghai and the markets where you have three or four different people Flooding the zone with these. uh young men.

20:12 who are not making as much as drivers or you know can't get a driver job are getting restless. My prediction is the socialists in the country. who are rising up right now and saying, Hey, we're gonna defend workers, we're gonna make sure you're you have a more affordable life. Two ways to do that cut prices, which they can't do. That doesn't work. Second way, um, give workers protections through unions and minimum wage, et cetera.

20:35 they can successfully do, uh, in all likelihood, or it's an easier path. I bet you we say AOC. And Mandami. And Boston and DC, LA just say, you know what? If you want a self driving car license and you want to deliver burritos

20:51 Deliver burritos and I'm talking against my book right now. Um You just need a license. The licenses are auctioned off at thirty thousand dollar starting price. I think that's literally what we're gonna have in the next two years as people respond to it. Do you have solutions, Sheo? In the case that we had a quick

21:07 Um Job displacement occurring, a brisk one as opposed to a manageable one. Okay. So you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Uh not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers To take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C Corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're gonna give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course a phone number. And that's gonna take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam. And they make it easy to cancel at any time. So

21:54 Get all the advantages of a Delaware Sea Corp independent regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit Northwest RegisteredAgent.com slash twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes. I think that's a reasonable solution to say So there's a there's a license for a self driving car. And um There are externalities. But

22:16 that develop from that. Now There are huge positives that come from that. Like You have more trust. You um

22:23 You have fewer accidents. Self driving cars are amazing. But Um I do think that It's totally fair to say

22:31 Uh to society. that we need to tax these. And I I I don't see immediately.

22:38 a bad uh that that that that's a bad plan. Dave, any thoughts here for If we do see any kind of acute Job loss. As Bill Gates is predicting.

22:49 Ways society can manage it, do you think that we should be taxing consumption of tokens in corporations in some way? Should we be looking at the people providing the tokens and saying, Hey You know, when you sell hotel rooms, we put a twelve percent tax on it in New York City, whatever it is, and that goes towards You know, whatever infrastructure do you think? There's a there could be a time where there's a federal token tax of Five percent or ten percent that goes into the unemployment. So you're gonna be taxing a diminishing return asset.

23:24 Um, Gates is correct that right now incentives are probably, you know, because you can depreciate uh infrastructure and capex spend you're you're more likely to hire You know. agents and things that you can, you know, depreciate. So we we probably got to do figure out some way to make that a little bit more level Playing field, but

23:44 I think what we're really trying to do is how do we recreate the new DL program in an AI era? Where like before, you know. Tennessee Valley Authority, you know, building the highways, doing all that stuff. you know, back in the thirties and forties and and fifties Made sense?

23:59 But these days I would say How are you gonna think about more human oriented stuff. So like You know, maybe some kind of care economy for seniors and people, you know, human Services. May maybe we have an advantage. In providing emotional support and care for people over agents, at least

24:16 For the short term. Um Probably not to stone too. You know, liberal, but Hey Arts and Culture.

24:24 You know, if if everything is you know, jobs are being taken away in productive industries. Maybe we create, you know, cultural art that people actually enjoy. Um I I don't know, I I think it's gonna be hard to create You know.

24:38 hundreds of thousands of millions of jobs if those get displaced. But I do think we need to start planning for The equivalent of, you know, retraining budget and or support budget. for people who are going to be displaced. Like you're it's not gonna go well. If those people feel like there's a small percentage of humanity which is empowered and rich. And a large percentage which is depla displaced and poor.

25:01 That's gonna have end up looking like France in uh The eighteen hundreds. Dave, the the China the China model feels like it's trying to stymie progress, right? You're trying to put a barrier in the China has some big problems. Like we're we're taking a group of folks to China October about fifty people were gonna go to uh Shenzhen and Shanghai and take a look at what's going on. But China has significant unemployment problems for the youth. Like

25:27 But but but if you let's it let's assume if this thesis is correct, you don't want to stymie it. You actually want to accelerate. I don't get get the automation to be to be as fast as possible because remember, since the industrial revolution, we have largely w like lived to work. Yeah. There is a theory where we may not have to do that anymore and we could go back to kind of perpetually. Completely agree. Especially if and then like that's very Star Tracky, right? You know, the stuff just happens, but you wanna then there's gonna be a twenty year period, maybe a 10 year period, like a decent amount of time. Or it's gonna be awkward as heck'cause the jobs are gonna dissipate. You won't be the offset. But once you get past that funding trap. Like I don't think it'll take.

26:05 You think it's longer? I I think the big benefits of AI, like three big benefits that I do think will happen is We will get to free energy. We will get to free food. We will cure cancer and major disease. Those things are definitely on the horizon. But the distribution of those benefits to

26:24 All of humanity will be incredibly uneven. And and that's where I I have concerns. Like if we solve all those problems, but like two billion people on the planet are still you know, hungry and don't have access to power. That's not gonna be pretty. I I I agree with you on the power one. Um I I recently have somebody on this week in startups who has robots.

26:46 Taking panels. Driving them out. And installing them and then goes back to the factory, grabs another panel, installs them, and there's a human like watching it occur and just making sure, yep, that bolt's good. And I just said, Wait a second. We we're gonna have a twenty four hour factory, like Elon's gonna pop up a solar factory.

27:03 In the middle of a desert. And it's just gonna go. out in all three hundred sixty degrees and just lay solar panels, and then we just have to obviously get the hookups to g to go to where it's needed. Um, which then would of course, Dave from our time in the Middle East would make for free uh unlimited water if

27:23 Lunatics don't stop desalination. because they're concerned about like the guppies. So you have free energy. You have free so you have um free water. Free water plus free energy and a bunch of excess optimists and I Elon showed me like

27:37 one of the latest optimists. He he's not showing them publicly anymore, but he just happened to show me on his phone and I was like Whoa. That's moving faster. than what he showed me six months ago when I visited the Optimist Lab on a Sunday and it was packed. Like He's gonna make a billion of those. If a million of those were out there

27:55 you know, planting strawberries, like the price of strawberries is going to B. A dollar a pound. twenty five cents a pound. It's gonna be nuts. Sheil, your thoughts. On the benefits of the agree.

28:10 I mean I feel like we don't talk about the benefits enough. Yeah. And all we talk about. Sort like what Dario says everyone's gonna lose their job or whatever. Um

28:20 I think taxing tokens doesn't really make sense because you actually want to promote the use of tokens when it makes sense. But I think It is fair to say Hey.

28:29 If These companies have enormous excess profits. That concentrates wealth. than tax the excess profits. It also makes sense to say like, hey, if we believe that there's a particular type of harm

28:43 That's happening. And it creates costs. We should tax that. So like Yeah, the robo taxi, maybe there's a per mile Tax. Totally reasonable.

28:53 And then I think If People talk about the energy usage. Or water usage, I don't think is real, but people talk about energy usage, which is real. And I think

29:04 If it's consuming a scarce resource. Then We c we have the right to charge for that scarce resource. Um So I think you're right about the water usage. There's more water usage by pistachio and almond farmers than there are. Totally. It's all vulture. But people still people I don't understand. But the power usage is real. Power usage is going to raise bills for people unless we subsidize and take care of power. Which

29:31 Anybody building a data center has the brains to know that they should just go to the community and say, Not only are we not gonna increase your electricity How does free sound? Free for five years.

29:43 Sound good. But that's basically like we're doing redistribution on a piecemeal basis. And I think it's probably just better to get ahead of that and say, look Let's take ten percent of Anthropic and Open AI and solve our national debt problem. Um, thirty trillion. So you're proposing just yeah. The government takes ten percent of the companies is that we're proposing. I know that sounds anti capitalist, but I think it's a reasonably good thing. I mean, Trump is doing that all over the place. We have We have position. He's doing it with breath is what you're saying, Dave. Literally he just threatens people and gives them the car.

30:21 They give their shares. I mean how is it different than Norway, Dave? How is it different the way Trump? uses his carrot stick method to extract shares for the American people.

30:33 'Cause he likes doing it versus the the socialist saying Hey, you gotta give us twenty percent of your open AI and Claude to pay down the debt. How is it different? I I I just opened the city. So Venezuela and Norway both have extreme oil reserves. One country has done an extremely good job. Of providing for their citizens and their wealth and preparing for the future, and one nation has not. Rule of law? I don't know what the implementation details were that went different directions. Rule of law. It happens to every business at some point. You're nearing the end of the month. Or maybe it's the quarter, and your sales team is at risk of missing their quota. You could waste days pulling together data from across the entire organization, or you could just ask Rippling AI. Rippling's already built on your real time people and business data, obviously. So Rippling AI can pull metrics from both Rippling and your CRM. Into a meeting ready dashboard. See exactly how close you are to hitting that quota. Break down your revenue by region or sales rep or more, all in just seconds with rippling AI. Look, you're running a company, you're busy, you have critical questions that you need immediate answers to. And you can't just file a ticket and wait a week for your team to get around to sending you a report.

31:51 And you don't want to sit around waiting for reports. We need an actionable insight right now. So If you're ready to rule your business. head to rippling.ai slash twist to get the only AI bill to give you full visibility and let you take complex actions across your startup. Uh I th there's some really interesting, you know, historical reasons why Norway went that w that way that actually had to do with the shape of the country and how the timber industry developed Actually they they developed hydropower in

32:19 Norway before oil was discovered. And that was an actual resource. Like Norway is a country of like four or five million people that became a a timber in shipbuilding. Powerhouse across Europe. And I think the things that they did early to like develop timber and and hydropower actually Went very well once they discovered oil. Fascinating.

32:37 Um What do you think sheals about this? If the government owns Let's say ten or twenty percent of Anthropic and open AI, first of all, like How do you decide which companies they own a part of? Um

32:50 And then is there a regulatory challenge like Sure. Is the government gonna then B. Easier on the regulations. And I think that's probably what Sam Altman Why Sam Altman is proposing it in part.

33:02 Um, the government would have a financial incentive to r to protect their evaluations and and go easy on them. Um So I'm not sure that that makes sense to me. Uh all right, let's pivot to another technology.

33:16 That caused a lot of social harm and a lot of hand wringing. Finally coming to What it seems to be closure for parents and Americans

33:29 Meta Is Agreeing. to a seventeen point one billion dollar settlement with twenty nine states Over claims, it hooked kids on Instagram and Facebook.

33:41 The remedies are well beyond just writing a check. This is The most intense settlement I have ever seen for a technology company, and I think the briefest record was set by our friends at Meta.

33:53 Um so you get this huge settlement of seventeen point one billion dollars. But In addition to this They are going to put hard limits. Uh similar to what China has done and other countries are considering. Productive pauses interrupt scrolling after fifteen minutes of continuous use.

34:12 Then again at sixty and ninety. This is a self imposed uh feature that Instagram will give to kids. They will also have a nighttime block. No access from midnight to six AM to make sure kids Get

34:26 Uh sleep. And then no push notifications during the school day, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. They're adding age verification, they're redesigning the features. Um that they believe uh or that studies have shown will cause harm to kids like

34:42 Beauty filters. Oh my God, the fact that they even added those visible light counts. Um and then add stronger safeguards against bullying. And they'll obviously be as there typically are with these independent auditors. Um it would have been nice, Hussein, if Mark Zuckerberg And Um

35:03 Who's our guy running Instagram? Adam Masary. As I believe both parents. Looked at this data five or ten years ago and said we'll do this without. twenty nine attorney generals uh bringing us to court and embarrassing us and shaming us, but here we are, it's getting done.

35:25 Hussein, what do you think of this? Unprecedented Settlement. Long time coming. I mean I think the harms are

35:33 pretty clear in the academic literature and your parents definitely notice this thing if you have if you have kids and you you're starting to see other governments actually crack down Australia was was a big one. Okay. The real question is is it is all of are all of these changes really enough. Like I I'm I'm in the view, like You might actually not want.

35:51 Like prepubescentines. And maybe teens to be using some of these things. You might really want to gate these things. Like that this might and this is a reasonable and this is a big number in terms of a fine. That's a small, small, small portion of Meta's market cap. Like this is this is a small portion of like Meta's free cash flow. Like it it's a it's not that big of a fundamental. Probably ten percent of free cash flow. I'm guessing they have two hundred billion. And meta stock's up probably larger than seventeen billion, is if I'm gonna guess. It went up more than one percent on settlement, so it paid for itself. And you've all the problem. Jason, first of all

36:24 So my wife works at Instagram as a lawyer. But um Disclosure. Um you're wrong actually. Instagram instituted this stuff two years ago. Okay. So They actually have Teens uh have sleep mode from ten PM to seven AM. There's an automatic notification if you spend 60 minutes on the app. They did a lot of this stuff. The the difference in the settlement is it's now across apps. So it's Facebook and Instagram and I believe WhatsApp.

36:49 But um they actually self instituted this this policy a couple years ago. Got it. So we can give them a little bit of credit. Um give them some credit. I I think I think that they have And Like the AI world, I I think social media

37:04 Has totally bungled the PR. I actually think There are so many benefits from social media that are never talked about. During Covid, I was depressed. I'm an extrovert. I love talking to people. You are social media

37:18 Cure me, I think. Like from depression. I I um There's so many outlet for creativity that teens have that they did not have before. So I think

37:29 I think there's a huge positive that we never talk about. The studies show some negatives. Um which I think are real. I don't know. Uh Dave, you have kids. I have kids. Uh our kids grew up on this.

37:43 What's your take on the other hand? Yeah. What that generation experienced with these tools. I have a really funny story about this because uh one time I was in Palo Alto having uh brunch with some friends and my kids were there.

38:00 three and five at the time and one of them was playing with an iPhone, one of them was playing with an iPad. I looked over at the table next to us and Steve Jobs was sitting at the fucking table right next to us. And at the time I went over and said, Hey, you know These are actually really fun tools. My kids are learning how to like, you know, draw and read and do some other stuff. Thanks. And he sort of said, you know. You know, you're welcome, whatever. Later I found out he didn't allow his own kids to have just the bones at that age. Um I I would say we've had a mixed experience. I think at least with one of my kids. Uh yeah, sure, sure. Uh um privacy is telling average kids, you know, that you in

38:38 Silicon Valley. I live in Silicon Valley. I don't know what average means here'cause it's like completely weird and different, but you know. I I think there are some great things about Silicon Valley. We l we live in a very diverse community. Like my kids went you know, to school with people from all over the world. They got to experience a lot of other cultures, but you know Everybody had technology all over them, everybody had very high expectations. Pretty high pressure, you know, private school where

39:06 You know, a lot of negative things happen to kids. Some kids actually committed suicide, many of them had stress related from tests and things, so like It's a mixed bag, living in Silicon Valley. Um I kind of agree with Shield. I think there are both pluses and minuses, but there are definitely some minuses. Um And particularly I think when kids are, let's say, between twelve and seventeen, there's a lot of

39:30 Social pressures and challenges. I mean Without technology kids can be assholes to each other. Um, and you know, sometimes that's amplified. Not because of the technology, but because of the people who are on the technology. Uh and so bullying and shaming and like

39:45 Social pressure, body issues. Yeah. It's all contained in that window. That exists in real life. It's not like the technology is what's causing it. Well it amplifies it, I think, to a level. that is superhuman. So the same way You know, you could become famous and go viral and help your business. um or you know get people to read your novel, whatever it is, all those positive things, or if you're feeling melancholy. I I can't believe you would be depressed, Sheel. I'll just go with melancholy. If she'll hit a level of melancholy and, you know, talking to people online and

40:19 you know, having never ending threads, uh debating social topics got you to be less melancholy. I'm I'm for it. You know, I just had a hard rule. You know, the kids were allowed to have a certain number of hours with the controls Apple Belt. But no social media. Uh until seventeen. Uh and my oldest daughter's sixteen and

40:37 We're just you know, she'll be seventeen shortly, and we're just Doing read only accounts. Read only accounts because she's Really giving me the full court press. I'm the o she's literally saying I'm the only one dad. I'm the only on one without this now.

40:53 And I look at What are her friends posting? Um, most of her friends are great kids, um, and they're posting pictures of their outfits and their friends goofing off and nature and food and you know anything that we would all post. But it does start you down a how many followers do I have, how many likes do I have? And Already kids are coming back to the phones. And back to the iPads and this creates

41:20 The same addiction you and I have, Sheel. with Twitter. Yeah. You and I get pulled into it. It's not just kids. It's us. Like we have these problems too. It doesn't doesn't stop at eighteen or twenty one. Yeah. I bet you median time in the bathroom has doubled or tripled. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. Yes. Hussein. Go ahead. You you want to answer this. Do you have kids who say and do you have a I have a four year old, uh so much younger. But these kids are just so much more sensitive to it, right? And they're in like these growth the the these development cycles where The number of likes and if someone leaves a mean comment

41:55 We're more resilient than they are. Like we've lived through more. And we've had to deal with this stuff. And maybe the argument is kids have to go through this stuff, but I think shielding kids from this stuff is actually a good thing versus a bad thing. I would Despite the bad I I I would love to see Apple and Google Put this into the hardware level of the products. In America. So if you're a parent and you buy

42:18 An Apple or an Android based phone. Y you're kinda bought into the same Yeah, both of those ecosystems allow protection of kids at a very root level and The controls in Apple's products were

42:33 Extremely confusing. And uh complicated. And after hours and hours of managing them I after like a year and I'm a technologist you know, I've kinda got a grip on what I want to do. As an example

42:50 Mm I'm into audio books. I like to listen to them. I'm an audio listener. I like to hike around the ranch. I got the girls into Audible. They're addicted to Audible. I put audible, you could listen to Audible ten hours a day. Now we were having like the sleeping thing.

43:04 I let them put a sleep timer on. They can listen to an audio book. They put a thirty minute sleep timer on. You know, I of course we'll read them stories, but they're kind of getting to the age where that's not cool anymore, 10 years old. Like they're like, I don't want you to read me You know, a story which is sad, but They do want to listen to something when they go to bed and I'm like, Hey, if I can get them addicted to audio books That would be fantastic. And so

43:29 Yeah, I'm I'm I'm Starting to have the controls work in my favor. And if you want a child to behave well If they've got a device And you can say

43:40 After After these chores are done. Go to the clean the chicken coop, take the dogs for a walk. Yada yada. then you can earn more time on the device.

43:50 You you'll be amazed, Shill, when you have your kids. How quickly chores get done. When the iPad does not work. 'Cause you remotely turned it off. Oh my god.

44:02 This they just have to come to dad and I'm like, Okay, uh you were arguing with mom? You were disrespectful to your mother? And you didn't Oh she asked you three times to empty the dishwasher. Okay. Great. Let me know when the dishwasher's re I'll turn on your iPhone again.

44:15 Problem. solved. Or let's get into venture capital. Uh unless anybody wants to add anything there, but I think we beat it to death. Um one one funny thing, I saw uh Taylor Lorenz posted a thread Of all of the past

44:31 Moral panics. Mm-hmm. And there were studies done around novels. That said they were bad for teens. There were studies done around jazz music. saying they were bad for teens. Radio's bad for teens. Television, of course, bad for teens. And actually Dungeons and Dragons.

44:48 All remarkably similar to the The m the the stuff that we talked about social media too. D is definitely detrimental to your dating life, for sure. Yeah, dating life, but it's also good for your creativity. You're definitely not gonna get a lot of dates uh for that. Yeah, she's she's got a point, except You know, I I don't think we've ever seen anything in humanity as addicting as Social media. I I'm trying to think of uh like cigarettes and social media seem to be the two

45:16 And I guess sugar and fatty foods, right? And so if you were to think Of those three that just came off the top of my head. The damage they've done, the damage that You know. uh processed foods ha have done to America.

45:32 Tobacco, alcohol, carbs, and then you add to it the mental health issues with screen addiction. That's a pretty big uh th those are the four horses of the apocalypse for humanity. Um hey, question for you guys. Uh, is there anything left to fund outside of AI right now for us? Has anybody Looking through your last couple of investments. Was the company'cause there's two things.

45:57 A company that uses AI to build a company. You would be foolish not to. That would be a sure sign that your company's gonna fail. But then based on AI providing services that are AI related andor powered.

46:12 By AI. Anybody is funding? Uh I think that's an extreme statement, but it is probably at least half of the V C brain, if not two thirds. Yeah. Um But you know, uh let's let's say there's all these new sexy categories, space tech, defense tech, robotics. A I are probably like the hot

46:32 Hot and sexy categories? Um I still think fintech is like a big category. Um and it's not You know. overfunded. Um, particularly if you get outside the US and a lot of emerging markets, I would say

46:46 FinTech and e commerce are still big categories and they're still growing. They're they're not sexy in the venture world. At least not in the US. I was an an investor in a fund and I got a distribution for this New bank and new bank? And I'm like, what's a new bank?

47:02 And it was like this tiny little amount of stock and I I I'm like Well, if this legendary venture firm Found this company and I'll just hold on to the stock and see what happens. And then all of a sudden it became a very large amount of stock over a period of time. Um yeah, for sure. still much room to grow. What do we think, Hussein, of Stripe buying open router?

47:26 Those are two different things. Tokens And web hosting and Oh it's more than web hosting. It's like the it's the information layer. You kind of know exactly how the token spends kind of going through the economy. And I I mean, I think these are these it's an interesting strategic purchase. We all kind of scratch our heads with you two. Well we all scratch our heads when YouTube got bought. We all scratch our heads when WhatsApp got bought.

47:49 Like maybe a little bit less so for Instagram. I think if you're If you're leaning into AI and you're the plumbing system for the payments. being leaning into AI and knowing where the spend is actually happening, how these model like it's actually strategic. the why I think we're gonna figure out probably five years from now we're gonna kick our like look at it and be like there's such an obvious big purchase. Like yeah, I think you give a lot of credit

48:12 to founder led businesses. You can kinda think one or two steps ahead of the case. I like how your framing is like stripes infrastructure, open routers infrastructure. Infrastructure Respects infrastructure. That that could be the beginning. I never thought of that. Um that makes sense to me. They what do you think, Sheo, when you saw that purchase? I mean yes, Stripe

48:31 Routes money. payment methods, banks, et cetera. Open router routes inference, basically. And um I think broadly it makes sense. I think the price Is wild. Um and twelve billion?

48:46 Seven. Seven seven to eight. Seven to eight. And it was making a hundred or two hundred million? At the time? I think That was rumored. I don't know. I don't I don't know. It was more than that. I thought it was a little bit It was still fifty times revenue, a hundred times revenue. Something crazy, yeah. 'Cause they had just raised at one point three billion earlier in the year. Got it.

49:06 Seventy times revenue. Seventy times. Seven hundreds. Okay. Well, sorry, that was based on the ten billion dollar number, so I guess less than that if it was that. Okay. So between fifty and a hundred times. It's clearly a bet that Neutrality. And like that you need to

49:22 To route, which I think I see no evidence that that isn't true, but People are building their own ramp launch their own router.com. The same day that the deal was announced, which is crazy. Uh.

49:36 I mean, hey, it's been a fucking great week for Martin Cassado at uh Mdresen, man. Between Casado and Cursor. Uh Well, I mean a sixty billion dollar cursor DL. I mean explain how unprecedented that is, Dave, in terms of the last twenty years you've been a venture capital, and twelve I've been one. Uh I think Cursor was the biggest MA uh ever, sixty billion dollars.

50:03 Um, andreessen and Thrive, I think both invested roughly sixty million, fifty million Uh they both made Andreessen got six point six billion back on forty four million N, hundred and fifty X return in A couple years a and a big cash on cash number. So a hundred fifty times multiple might be small compared to some angel deals, but it's on a big number. Right.

50:26 Exactly. Um some of the angel investors even better. Like I think Neo, uh Ali Partovi, I think put in a million and a half and is getting I don't know, billions back, something like that. Challenge Y combinator. could ever compete with them.

50:42 And the Y Combinator people attacked him savagely. And I Wondered why they did that. Because he was a legit threat, probably. Cursor didn't go through the accelerator. It was an investment outside the. But still I agree with your point though. And what did you think when you saw that, Sheel? There were also investors at Replit, and I think they did go through the accelerator. What did you think, Sheil, about that? Like the Y combinator trying to put him out of business. I thought that was that whole thing was weird. Why come out with this personal stuff and you

51:12 You make claims that like Oh, he's a bad person. We know the story, but we're not gonna tell you. I don't like all that stuff. That's the Y C playbook. They did it to me too. Yeah, at one point. I can tell you from experience it's a very different thing when you are not competing with Y C and are competing with Y did it to you too, Dave. They went after you, yeah. Uh

51:30 I w I was Pretty close with a lot of people before I started five hundred. I even emailed you know, PG and Jessica before I started five hundred. Um, and then as soon as I left five hundred, things got very warm again. It was it was an interesting experience. Yeah, their circle the way I mean they don't it's so lame though to be You know, swinging your elbow like that and trying to

51:51 Yeah, it's like there's plenty of if you only ac if you accept less than one percent of startups then you should be happy that the other let's say Nine percent in the top Ten percent have a place to go. Because I I can tell you, Dave, you and I both know the business pretty well.

52:07 Do we know the difference between top one percent or two percent or three percent and does Y C? Obviously not. N not until seven years later. Correct. So what are we talking about here? Like You can be kind to each other and supportive. I'm super happy for him.

52:21 I think you know, entrepreneurs of all kinds are competitive and you know, you're probably Very familiar with You know, how Elon looks at people. How about before A year ago how Elon thought about Dario and this year now that E Dario is a big customer. I think he re underwrote his position on them after talking to them. Shamath reunderwrote his position on Trump. It's a lot of reunderwriting that occurs in our industry. Uh all right, let me just take a pause for the cause right now. I love using

52:51 AI, obviously we all do. And then I found out about this great product called harmonic. What is harmonic? It's a database. of every transaction, every investment in venture capital, every profile of every company.

53:05 And I've been getting into um Robotics, because when I was in Japan, I started seeing these robots fighting each other, and I was like, tell me about these. And it very quickly, as you can see on my screen here, Told me who who which ones are the ones being used at all these different fighting competitions. But then I was like, you know what?

53:24 I want to Um have this type of search going on, like an associate or a researcher at my firm might do. And so I've empowered my team to create Scouts.

53:36 Just like the Sequoia Scouts program. I was the first Sequoia Scouts. Uh and they named it Scouts. So I said, Hey, find me any robotics companies that are pre-series A. And if they went to Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, Stanford. Uh get me that list as well. And now it runs it every Monday for me. That's the power.

53:53 of harmonic AI. If you are in our business. And you don't have harmonic AI. You might miss. The next Uber.

54:02 Next micro one. The next Cursure. Give it a shot, folks. Harmonic.ai. Lots more to get to here, but let's talk about physical AI, robotics, defense industry.

54:14 Uh Hussein, have you jumped into it yet? Are you monitoring it? Because it feels like Frontier models, obviously that investment opportunity. uh seems to have manifested itself fully. there might be less opportunities in backing a frontier model. But

54:28 Feels like we're in that moment for robotics. And still for the for military tech still seems pretty nascent to me, especially on the uh implementation side, these things aren't in our homes yet aren't really in the factories, and if they are, they're kinda cluey. So your thoughts on physical AI and just Physical real world stuff.

54:48 being the moat now. That's what we're hearing from a lot of investors. Hey, there's no moat. But hardware, so we didn't do it. Now hardware is still hard, so we do it so we have some kind of defensibility. It's amazing how this industry has transformed from being anti hardware five years ago to very, very, very pro hardware across the board. Yeah, I am Yeah.

55:09 But the future is like Like it it's the everything language related is done. Like yeah, and every derivative of the language stuff is the frontier models that we all kind of know, open AI anthropic, and then you know, people building on top of the stuff. I think it is still up for grabs who's gonna win transformers AI for physical and transformers AI for biology. And it's no surprise that two spaces have kinda gotten hot. Um And there's a bunch of that stuff in Europe, which is kind of good news for us because that's where we kind of invest. And we've done one stealth one that came out of Imperial College. Uh

55:42 And a bunch of people are citing their papers. I can't talk about it yet because they're gonna launch in about like two or three months. But it's super exciting. It's like a new frontier model for for robotics that kind of upends the the figures and the generalists, et cetera, of the world, uh, with a different technique that requires a lot less training, um, and makes it much more efficient. So big believers in this stuff. Um Shell any Um investments in the area so far? Are you double clicking on it?

56:10 What are your thoughts? I mean you're early stage, so it's a little bit scary. To put I'm assuming your average check size. Two fifty to a million, am I correct? Or do I have all different versions? Um We're probably like

56:21 Two million average, two two and a half. Okay. So that would burn through like the prototype in nine months. Yeah. In a hard way. It is hard. In general, these AI companies Um We have not invested anything in physical AI.

56:37 I I'm super excited about what I've seen. I don't know if you saw the demo yesterday from Skilled AI that they announced something. They have a robot that like You show it flipping a pancake. And it'll just flip it'll flip pancakes perfectly every time.

56:50 Um They did a really cool thing where The demo had or The d they cut off a dog's leg? And

57:01 Like a robot a robot dog's leg. Oh. Sorry. Yeah. And this is a robotic dog. No dogs are have been harmed in the creation of dogs have been harmed. We're clear. They cut off

57:15 a robot dog's leg and show that it just learns how to walk on fewer legs. Or they cut off part of its leg and it shows learning how to walk. I the demos are amazing. And I can't freaking wait to have a robot in my house doing my chores. Uh and this is

57:33 from skilled AI um Skilled AI. Yeah, uh here is the hard male spin-out. Yeah, I mean I that's why I put that into my search. Here it is, folks. Now let's take a look. skilled AI person has um Some gloves or

57:50 Uh a harness, I guess a physical harness. Here's the pancake being made. Here's a uh plant being planted and they y you can see here the human has devices, cameras on each wrist, and it's studying the human Doing planting, uh you know, moving things from pots and and flipping.

58:10 Pancakes and lo and behold. Uh, this is like the scene from Planet of the Apes. Dave, you remember that famous scene where it was like Do and they were like putting the forks and the knives into the into the proper trays and

58:26 Uh it does look Like this is going to be the end of Chores and human Or your daughter is never always is always gonna have her iPad. I I mean basically she's gonna be like she's gonna be doing to the optimist or the skilled robot what I do to her. She's gonna be like, I'm turning off your internet access until that dishwasher's empty and the robot's gonna be like, Okay, I'll empty the dishwasher. But

58:50 This feels like it's getting close, yeah? It's getting close. Yeah. It's compounding at a rate, which is like exponential. And like I I think this is I mean I think if you're You can take the long view and be like it's ten years away, but I think it's a lot sooner. I mean, watching this, I think the training data

59:05 Is happening at such a fast rate. So Sheil, your thoughts on the compounding nature of what we're seeing right now. And when as these things get better and better, it's I just can't wait to have a a robot in my house. And I would easily pay way more than it costs to make one of these things. Like

59:25 Is a robot worth a hundred thousand dollars to me? Easily. Like if it's cleaning and cooking, it's worth a hundred thousand dollars. And what are these things gonna cost to make not that much. Sabson is uh I think what the first Yeah, what do they say? Build of materials or

59:42 Um bomb. Bill of material. Bill of Bill of Materials. I always say bill. Bill of materials. Bomb. The bomb I think's like probably fifteen, twenty, you put in some extra pricing. I think they gotta be twenty to thirty. So I think they're the cost of a Toyota Prius. So think about what that unlocks for humans. And it's just incredible. Like at that price point

1:00:02 It's incredible. Yeah. Everyone not you know. Unfortunately, not everyone's gonna be able to have one immediately, but like even for the average person at twenty, thirty thousand dollars, it actually pays for itself pretty quick.

1:00:15 We have Rosie. The robot. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Alright, listen, while we wrap up here. She'll is a beast on Twitter.

1:00:24 And we're gonna play a new segment. We're saying It's called Shell's hot as takes. Take number one.

1:00:31 Let's see. Um you disagreed. With Chamat's all in. That Silicon Valley has lost the idealism. That made it great and that uh people only care about money now, you suggest quote.

1:00:46 Most likely a function of who Jamal surrounds him with. We're supposed to take this personal. Um What do you w uh what do you think of this take, uh, Dave? And then what we'll end it up we'll end it with you, Sheel uh defending your take. That is below my line. It's below your line. Okay. I mean, is it too much about money right now and a little less Steve Jobs and you know idealistic, we're gonna index the web, Larry Page.

1:01:13 You know, you know it did feel like the Valley is always about the money, but it's also always about the innovation. Uh Jason, you were probably around uh well, I mean you may not have been. Were you here in the Valley in the late nineties? You can No, I was in New York still. Yeah. But I mean I would come out. Two or three times a year. But um Yeah, I mean it did get Well I think there were a lot of people who thought in the late nineties it was just people here for the money and a lot of them were just here for money. And then it was in two thousand one and a lot of them left town. And then again that happened probably two or three times. So like I don't I don't know that it's wrong. It's just not the whole story. Um The true believers versus the get rich quick people is I think a trend you are correctly identifying, Dave, and we are I think tipping into the

1:02:03 Get rich quick. kind of like, Hey, can I get in here to Gratterson? And I was gonna say, I mean, like in the nineties, there were a bunch of tourists who came in, they were definitely there to make a buck and they left. But like we did not see seed rounds and series A rounds of secondaries where founders were taking a ton of money off the table pretty much like life alter like not life altering money by today is like trillion dollar company standards, but life altering money and like like like millions of dollars. I mean if you break 10, life altering, yes. five or ten, it starts. It's becomes much more coin operated than than than it used to be in the past. Like there there's a and I think There's a there's a bit of a negative halo around some of this stuff because I think that that voice has become much more amplified, even among the most technical of founders and the most innovative of founders.

1:02:49 There's like a it's become a business in a way where it wasn't as much of a business twenty years ago, thirty years ago. It felt more cluby, that's for sure, ten or twenty years ago. So she'll um You defend your take? You still defend your take? Or were you S posting? Be honest. Were you S posting? No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. I think I think that So Chemat said

1:03:10 Silicon Valley lost the idealism that made it great in it only cares about money. Are there people that only care about money? Absolutely. Has always been the case and it ebbs and flows. On the whole. The people doing the great work. Like my friends at Anthropic and Open AI could give two shits about the money.

1:03:27 Like they're doing it for the mission. I think like this easy to say when you pass a hundred billion valuation. Yeah. That's right. But but also like

1:03:38 Their lives haven't changed. Like they haven't changed the way they live their lives. And What are they they could. They could easily just say, Hey, I'm done, I'm retiring. But if you look at the the number of people that continue to do stuff Th it's not in strictly money motivated. It's because they're excited about the mission. And I think

1:03:55 I've actually I didn't see that idealism. five years ago that I do see now. Because of the leadership having all Self selected out of the Sam Altman experience.

1:04:09 Which is the cutthroat experience in their minds and the Like the money people are gonna make the decisions, you know, code monkeys. Code monkey. But leave it to Sam to You know, uh take the credit. This is not my interpretation, this is what people say. Like Sam's taking the credit, Sam's doing the deal, Sam's the front man.

1:04:27 That got a little tired, I think, for that group of people. Anthropic is like oh we're a bunch of monks. We're a bunch of pious like We're doing this and we're giving all our money to the Anthropic Foundation and we're gonna cure cancer and but you're gonna lose your job. They seem like head cases to me a bit on the margins, like really delusionally

1:04:48 Uh committed. to being the last company on earth. It is a little weird. All right. What about Sam not having any equity in Open AI? I don't know if it's true. I mean I think we're missing the We're missing the point. He's got a lot of money probably in nonprofits and philanthropic entities that he controls and like

1:05:05 Who's to say whether that's you know Money in his personal pocket versus money in his philanthropic pocket. It's Fuzzy people need liquidity. And you know, obviously talking my own book here, but I just wanted to share a few interesting uh charts that might be relevant. Um, I've been doing this presentation for another talk.

1:05:24 This is like comparing hundred million dollar private rounds versus hundred million dollar IPOs. Uh that crossed over around twenty seventeen when South Bank Vidget Fund came out. Got a little nuts in the game. The blue line is hundred miljon dollar private rounds The red line is hundred million dollar IPOs and we see them bifurcate in twenty sixteen, just so people listening understand.

1:05:50 And now it's ten to one. Last couple of years the number of private hundred million dollar rounds Four hundred per year. Looks like we're gonna continue on that track. Number of IPOs of a hundred million dollars only like forty or fifty. Right.

1:06:05 And and I think that's what we've seen is the IPO market now is requiring half a billion to a billion dollars to go public. Uh it's not that it's closed, you just have to be a lot bigger. That results in companies being private a lot longer. Um The other graph I will show is this one. Which is the tender offer.

1:06:25 And this is corporate tenders or internal secondary offers for their employees. That is a booming business. Somewhere between thirty to forty billion dollars a year now and You know, growing probably north of fifty percent.

1:06:38 At least north of thirty, forty, fifty percent per year. Yeah, and here we're seeing twenty twenty three there were six point five, twenty twenty four twelve. Major jump from 24 to 25, 12 to 27 billion, so just over 2x, and then 27 billion to 37 billion. into the estimated twenty twenty six Tender offers, which for people who don't know, that's

1:07:00 Uh some investors coming in and buying common shares from employees. That it's it's corporate organized secondaries. Primarily for the employees, sometimes also for their investors. Early investors who have been patiently for a lot of companies. For a lot of companies like Databricks and Stripe and Chem and others, these are happening on almost an annual basis now.

1:07:20 probably distort it a little bit. Open AI did their own seven billion dollar secondary uh earlier this year, but still Who was the buy side on that seven billion? Was that Kushner? Uh it's secondary firms. It's the primary round VCs who, you know, want more equity when they're oversubscribed rounds. Uh it's retail market and family offices, you know, at least for the popular names.

1:07:44 Um, but it's kind of interesting'cause outside the top fifty companies There's not as much uh awareness of those companies. And I think this is what's going to start to happen is These companies are staying private for five years longer than they used to. Employees there wanna buy a house, want to put their kids to college.

1:08:02 They want liquidity. They're sitting on A ton of you know unrealized equity, but they can't buy a house in Silicon Valley. They can't, you know, pay for I schools and everything. Well and their concentration, Dave, is the real issue, right? Like you're basically ninety nine point nine nine percent of Shield's friends at Anthropic, their wealth is in one stock. Well Okay, one more one more graph and I'll quit here. Um we love your graphs. Keep them coming. Here's my segmentation of that market.

1:08:31 In that top category used to be SpaceX, still is anthropic open AI. Now it's like a trillion. Stripe. Well, but as soon as open thropic go out Then the the remaining ones will be like Stripe, Databricks, Maybe Revolute Ander all. A few others, I guess Bite Dance if you consider right around a hundred. Yeah, some of them just below, some of them just above. So that will huge amount of dollars there.

1:08:55 But like look at the rhinos and stallions and maybe the donkeys. These are like where the majority of the number of tenders are. They're not like huge numbers. These are like 10 to 50 million dollar tenders. Um, amount of market cap that's being sold here is probably somewhere between two to five percent for most of these companies. Kinda. Oh, so they're trimming very little of their cap table. For very large numbers. Right. And you know, let's just assume these companies are probably growing, you know, north of twenty, thirty, forty percent per year. It it's not at all unreasonable to say you would, you know, do five percent every year in sort of secondaries. Yeah, um back to employees.

1:09:29 Uh this is really the new IPO market. This is like where recording is coming from for employees. It's why real estate agents in San Francisco make a ton of money and car dealerships and you know private schools, but but the challenge here is it's still a pretty concentrated story. And and I think we're just gonna see more and more of these corporate tenders happening on a regular basis. If nothing else, just to be competitive. You know If you if you have the choice to go work for a company that has an annual tender offer and one that doesn't, which one you're gonna choose?

1:09:58 Uh yeah, and who's the loser here, uh Hussein? Who who loses in this new private marker tender offer? In your mind. And retail. Retail investors. Retail investors, right? Retail investors have to wait until these things are super expensive. And you're And in the old days, Dave, like in in like the nineties, like you take these companies out, like Really, really early. Like at market caps of a hundred and employees would have liquidity just immediately, like after the lock up. And retail could buy those shares. More importantly, uh a civilian could owe Microsoft at a hundred, two hundred, three hundred million. Well They can still do that, but the difference is now it's a fuzzy story because when those companies go public, they report their numbers, there's quarterly transparency on what's going on.

1:10:39 You have a two, three, four trillion dollar, you know middle ground market where these companies, you know, exist before they go public. But their financials are not disclosed to anybody that's not an insider or a primary investor. And so All the secondary hap uh trades that are happening on markets, you know, Hive, Forge, Equisend, Augment, all these other brokers. There's no underlying corporate financial data on most of those. Everybody's flying blind and buying that on vibes.

1:11:05 Yeah it's vibes. Yeah. Totally vibes. Uh and the buy yeah, the buyers who are buying it. Um are hearing people talk about these names. And when something gets a certain amount of PR. Then it looks great while SpaceX and Anthropic are going through the roof, but I guarantee you as soon as that market turns around. It could be like the SAS Pocalypse, right? Like late stage VCs.

1:11:28 They suspended disbelief. They bought air table, no no dig to air table, at ten billion. And it didn't get there. They got their money back. We could have a lot of those. We could have a lot of those. Like we I mean, I don't know how many unicorns there were back in twenty one, like you know, six hundred plus. Like how many of them are real, right? Like we were just talking about Headspace just got bought for two hundred, three hundred million dollars, but the last Private Mark was three billion dollars. Headspace got bought. Ninety percent. Who bought them? I'm I'm still a large shareholder in uh comm. I did take advantage of secondary twice during that opportunity on the way up for my LTs, but who bought Sword Health, Plans to acquire headspace and cash transaction. Wow.

1:12:06 And by the way, this same issue exists for a lot of seed funds. I think this is the big challenge for a whole bunch of fund managers is they're sitting on unrealized marks. They may have a fund that's at three, four, five X, you know, T V PI. But DPI is zero or you know barely, you know, zero point five. These funds are getting to ten years and there hasn't been, you know, one X return back to investors yet. And I and I think we need to start figuring out how we're gonna get liquidity for these funds. I I I really if I wasn't doing what I'm doing right now and so busy, I would do a roll up

1:12:37 Vehicle. I would raise five hundred million. And then just go straight down like um Bending Spoons is doing. Bending spoons. But I would do a private bending spoons and then just hire a bunch of AI kids, developers, give them like really Crazy bonuses for hitting. crazy profitability and just

1:12:57 Bye. Every head space slash whatever is out there with and maybe Headspace has fifty million in revenue and they get sold for a hundred or two hundred million and then you can Get rid of eighty percent of the staff, you can do what Elon did at Twitter.

1:13:11 You know, get rid of eighty, ninety percent of the cost, and now you've got a wonderful business. Um I remember Meetup.com, my friend Scott High from it, a starter that company, Kevin Ryan wound up buying it and then it went to Bending Spoons. And I had heard a whisper that it was making fifteen million a year. And then it got bought for twenty million and I was like Well how's that possible? It doesn't make any sense to me. And I don't know if that's true or not. That was just a whisper I heard, but I think

1:13:34 If it's not growing, V Cs just don't want to waste our time, but what an incredible opportunity. Well there's there's some stuff that's growing just not fast enough for venture return. Yeah. That was Airtable, right? Airtable is still growing twenty percent. And people were like, Well, this is a waste of my time. It's like really? Yeah. But okay. Uh I guess we'll see.

1:13:53 It all depends on price, right? Well it it it's price and but I think more importantly, see, this is what I thought that too, Hussein. Then I realized it's not price, it's it's opportunity put plus price. You have a certain number of things mentally you can keep in your brain as an investor, probably ten. Uh, you know, like I said in board seats and you're like, Well if I have to I would say three. Okay, but you know, I'm being generous here. Let's say it's eight. Let's say it's seven. So you got seven and you're like, hey, these three are filling my space with a twenty percent growth company. And it's hard, and every conversation is hard and a bummer.

1:14:29 And we can't get out of the mud for four years. And I could give those three seats to, I don't know, this robotic company making pancakes. You know, it's just You only have so many

1:14:41 Um spots on your dance card. Sheil, you're nodding, I think. Yeah. No, I agree. I I think there's a there's a question of like are these companies ever gonna go public? Like Why would Stripe go public ever? Like they have unlimited capital if they want to break it. They don't have to. They have liquidity. If they want to acquire PayPal It seems like they can.

1:15:03 Uh because somebody else will give them money to do it. So why would they ever go public? Mloomberg never took Bloomberg public. Different. He owned it almost entirely. Sure. Eighty, ninety percent. Like'cause he didn't have to solve for like Stripe gets this tender thing that Dave's talking about. Solves for the liquidity question.

1:15:21 And The private markets have grown so much that they don't need But Bloomberg was a technology company. You know what he did in New York? He was famous for just paying fifty percent more than everybody else. If you worked at the New York Times, you made a hundred, you were making two hundred working for him. You know, if you worked at the Washington Post and you went to Bloomberg, you you got a fifty K, seventy five K raise and you didn't get any equity, but Right now. There's I think there's an arbitrage opportunity here where these companies have been priced on sort of venture scale projections, and now some of them are profitable, but not growing that fast.

1:15:55 And they're gonna be priced on free cash flow projections, you know, not just multiples of revenue or growth. And That's gonna be a different number. Yeah. Very important. I think cursor might wind up being

1:16:09 you know, this generation's YouTube acquisition. You you've got it. That's a great buy that was two trillion dollars and they brought in three billion and what what what was their runway? Three billion, four billion at the time? It's it's at four billion now and it's on its way to ten by the end of the year, but like that that's not even like the total value. It's like You know, to be to be kind, I would say X AI was a shell of a company that was mostly valuable because of Elon Free infrastructure Cabex that Elon bought. It wasn't because of the tech or or even the people who largely walked out the door after that acquisition. Uh but you know

1:16:45 Turns out that all that infrastructure was very useful to rent out to, you know, Anthropic and Google and then Cursor. was really the value that came in and I think that combination, like You gotta give Eon credit. The massive pivot that he's done in the last six, nine months with that company. Incredible. He's gonna have a line of business that is the majority of their revenue that did not exist. You on web services. Yes.

1:17:08 That is just my obsessed With Grock Bot. Just does what you tell it to do. Shill you have been obsessed with another agent which has a landing page that looks like it was built in seven minutes.

1:17:27 By a Python developer. And I signed up for it and people are losing their minds over it and the terms of service. Tell us about this Um New open claw abstracted into just I message that people are losing their minds over. Tell us everything. Yeah, so I I've been using Grockbot too. Um I this this company's called Instinct.

1:17:48 Um, it was funded at C by conviction and A, I believe, by Cleiner Perkins, not announced, but that's what I've heard. Um Also I've also heard crazy valuation numbers like C at a hundred, uh A at five hundred,

1:18:04 And I heard they have offers Uh at the billion plus range. Um What it does is it's basically like your assistant. You can

1:18:13 Damn, that's the website. Yeah, this is worth a billion dollars, folks. Here's your Yeah. No background? No? Okay. Sounds good.

1:18:24 Um you can text it and it just does stuff for you. Um, what's cool and I think valuable about it. Is It actually like goes the next step beyond what you would think to do. You would think a bot would do. So um Uh if you ask uh

1:18:40 Chat GPT work. to book a flight for you, it will Take you to the landing page, Google Flights. Here's The flight to take. instinct will actually go through and book it for you. And they're able to do that because

1:18:53 They have a vault where they store your credit card information. Um And they're probably violating all sorts of terms of service. Um, but hey, the thing works. Um I signed up for it. I saw the terms of service debate. I

1:19:09 Paused. I was like, I'm not sending anything until I find out what's going on here. Um Grockbot has been amazing for me. A bunch of the things I wanted to do with OpenClaw, but and Hermes I call that R mas because I think it's funny. Um it's a harness and they make bags. But anyway, um A lot of those agents in Claw Code just they had too many restrictions on what they would do and not do. I took

1:19:34 A clip of the YouTube file and I said. Analyze this into the five most important clips. And um Make me five clips. And it took this Meershimer, John Meersheimer video about tactical nukes, whatever, he's been on the All and Pod. It made me five clips. I was like, Whoa. And it's like, would you like one of these vertical? With captions. And I said, sure.

1:19:52 And then I shared it on my Twitter. And I was like, Well, that's a fifty dollar an hour video editor, you know, freelancer. That I would have done that back and forth with the right. Instead of Taking three hours, it took

1:20:05 Three minutes. And was essentially close to free. And then I asked it to do some things on LinkedIn and it just did it. Because it has a computer window that abstracts into cursor and it kinda works all the time.

1:20:20 I think that product If it goes multiplayer mode. We'll go. parabolic. And by multiplayer mode I mean Can I just add three team members?

1:20:30 to it. As comment only, can I add five team members to it as read only, you know, like uh the Google Doc Suite. If they add multiplayer mode to that, I'm gonna I would have Taken the docket.

1:20:43 creator for today and shared it with you guys. And we would have all been there talking with the docket. Really interesting product. Have you used Anybody used Grok Bot yet and any impressions? I'm using it too. I use them all. Like uh I mean I use the Which one sticks most? Which one is sticking most? Which one do you go to first? Oh open club is the least durable. Like like I switched over to Hermes uh and then Then Grotbot became the next one, then Instinct I just got I was it has a sign up list and I'm not cool enough like you guys to get after it. Dude, I put my name in it was instantly it was like okay, you're on the list. You're in.

1:21:17 I was like, okay. Okay. Yeah so I'm not working on that one. But but it's also amazing, like a year ago, none of these things existed. Like open clause, like a year ago, there's a Victorious like. Yeah, yeah. It's like the the pace is like super fast again. These things are compounding. I gotta say, with Sam Waltman, I mean I listen, I w I don't want to beat up on Sam here, but What he did to open claw

1:21:42 Was so sinister and cynical in my mind. He he like buys the guy Brings him internal. And then you know, Dave Morin like is trying to keep this foundation going.

1:21:55 And literally the second The um his name is Peter, I believe. I've never met him. The second Peter w to open AI Open claw just Sh

1:22:05 lost its voice, lost its momentum. Everybody was like, Well, this is over, whether it's true or not. I've never seen a project go from Everybody embracing it, talking about it. To completely toxic and people being like, Yeah, you know, I I gotta I gotta go find something else. I gotta find something else. And I don't know if that's because they thought it was part of open AI and they didn't want to

1:22:30 You know, they were open source people, or better options came out. I don't know. What do you think, Sheel? Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there. I I think to your point about Grogpot being like a we talked about this having a hundred million users, I I think that relies on the other guys not catching up. And they actually already have. Like

1:22:46 Chat GPD work already yesterday announced new stuff that's doing And by the way, Shale is Open AI work, basically what Peter is probably working on there. And it's basically open claw inside of Open AI. Totally.

1:23:01 Yeah. I mean, what did he get? You think he got three hundred million shield? Yeah, I think it was he worth. You heard that? I don't. That are somewhere between two to three hundred.

1:23:12 That's not right. Oh, men but maybe we have three hundred million valuation or four hundred million. That might be triple, it might be a billion dollars right now. What do you think Hussein? It's just one guy. Just one guy. Sorry, you know what? That wasn't uh that was the other company that was acquired. Um The uh podcasting bros was two experiments.

1:23:32 Yeah. You remember the Oh there was a social media experiment that they bought? Oh yeah, what was that? No, no, but I think Peter got the the the whisper number on Peter was two or three hundred million in equity. Yeah and that was when it was a three or four hundred million dollar company. If it goes out at two trillion, that could be five X, six X. Anyway, just want to point this out. Remember how crazy it was the open claw hype? The open claw hype was so crazy that there was a there was this malt book

1:23:56 That was the one that I was talking about. Multiple got acquired. I think that got acquired for like two hundred million by Meta. By Meta. Right. Yeah. Then there was like the open claw religion, like if someone planted that seed, like it was like there was a euphoria around this thing and then it just like died. Like It was about one month. The whole thing. Start to finish.

1:24:15 Well, I think the the hype was maybe overplayed, but the story was sort of for real. I think that was like original agency sort of adoption. But Wow I just want to put up this graph. This is kind of like crazy because people listen to it. So there's a little story here that CFO uh Sarah Fryer at OpenAI four months ago she was like Sam's like, we're gonna IPO and she's like, we're not ready to IPO. And then just recently, this was leaked from their internal conversation. She's like, we're definitely gonna IPO in 2027 and maybe sooner if our growth keeps inflecting. And I was like, what's she talking about inflecting? And I was like, this graph is what she's talking about. Look at those numbers sort of like go through the goddamn roof. Yeah, and what we're seeing here is uh open AI active agent users uh in

1:25:03 Back in January, two hundred thousand Breaks a million. Just a month ago. Like that growth went through. But it hits five hits five million in May. And then six million in July. ten million later in July, fifteen million in the beginning of August, twenty million

1:25:20 Towards the end of August. So you're talking about four axing in two months. Right. Unbelievable. And I don't have the graphs in front of me, but I know that Uh it was reported that OpenAI revenue was going faster than Anthropic this month. This is after they had quarter over quarter slowdown. Hm, interesting. All right, listen. Another amazing episode. This week in Venture Capital, uh special edition of This Week in Startups and Offshoot, whatever. Uh hey guys.

1:25:44 Best investment. What's your port what's what's uh what's your biggest Portfolio uh win. These days she'll tell us. When'd you get in? What is it? Which one is just

1:25:56 Gonna sprinkle all that beautiful DPI on your LTs. Tell us everything. Tell us Tell us where hope uh where is your hope tied to. It's a hard job being a real DPI or hope. Those are two different things. Hopium. Tell us about your hopium. I would say recently one is called Basis. It's a um AI for accounting. really automates the work of a junior if you think about Harvey Lagora for law.

1:26:28 Um and you've seen the growth in those companies. This is that. for accounting. Um, we led a seed, uh Keith at Kozla led the A and Excel led a B recently. And the growth that I've seen is amazing and companies, these these accounting firms are really using the product. Yeah, and it's just it's it's been

1:26:47 Fantastic. And you got in its seed. We I think we are investors in the uh the Uber to your lift or your DoorDash, uh whatever the analogy is, to attacks GPT. um that we incubated. So yeah, I agree. This is gonna be a fantastic space for both companies. What do you got, Dave? What's um What's making you

1:27:06 Uh we're talking about what we're gonna get DPI and what we hope to get DPI. Yes. Yes. Which one Do you when you talk about it put An eggplant emoji at the end of the sentence. Which one? Uh well, I guess because I worked at Founders Fud sixteen years ago, I have Carrie in Founders Fud two, and We when we started our our second Secondary fund. I I rolled in about a million dollars of G P commit.

1:27:28 In that fun thinking, Oh, this will perform pretty well. Yum yum. Turns out that was all SpaceX. Fantastic. Well done. It was our best investment. So that that was career maker. But But the things I'm actually excited about probably are not generally on people's radar. We we spend about ten percent of our capital in Latin America. And one of our best performing investments, I may have mentioned this on the little show before, was a company called Motu. And they are a motorcycle manufacturing and small business lending company. for delivery drivers in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

1:27:59 And that business is on fire. Uh it's doing over three hundred million in revenue, profitable Going sixty, seventy percent per year. Uh and it's very, very reasonably priced. Uh a lot of platem is actually sale and like to meet them. Yeah. And as Sheel knows, you know, we used to do a lot of investments all over the world in five hundred startups.

1:28:18 Now that I'm s doing secondaries, most of it's in the US, um, but at least some of it we're doing emerging markets. Um a different deal that's not a typical secondary for us is in a company called Equity Bee. Uh and we recently put money into that because they are a platform Sort of similar to secondary marketplaces like Forge Equities then, but they do employee stock option forward contracts. Uh and so again, getting back to those employees who are sort of locked up and and want or need liquidity.

1:28:46 before the shares are actually available to them. uh they can finance and exercise and hold those shares and get some liquidity. Um really helpful for people who are leaving companies. Who might otherwise lose those options. Equity B dot com. B E E. Amazing. Well done.

1:29:02 Hussein. Who do you got? Who's making you feel optimistic these days? This in the port. This year, this month, uh We did one in the AI space for material science called Cusp AI. We were the inception check. We wrote him a ten million dollar check. Uh great what what at the time felt like a crazy number. Uh it's not a crazy number in hindsight. It's worth two point six billion. Kleiner just marked it up two years in, like almost a fund returner for our fund three, like in in two years. Absolutely. Congratulations.

1:29:30 No, like our sister company to that in many ways is like the same type of thing, but a drug discovery company. So AI, um AI for biology called peptone.com, which Like Yeah, AI. this stuff really works and like we have a we have a drug against prostate cancer that might actually stop prostate cancer almost entirely generated by the computer and like we're going into clinical trials. So like that, that to me is like the one that's probably gonna generate the ton of DPI for us, but both both are great. Absolutely fantastic. Congratulations. I'll just give you two quick ones myself. Uh we love all of our startups equally, but you know, it's sometimes we see um things get marked up, and this is this week in VC. So um just on the markup trail.

1:30:10 On premier. Uh and sovereign AI became like a big deal, but we had incubated this company Apicus. eighteen months ago. And so for banking and healthcare, et cetera. They take this go one server, put it into your uh facility. And uh they help you build your own.

1:30:28 uh large language models, harnesses, et cetera, and keep you from having to give Uh all that data to a frontier or risk leaking it and they have a wait list for their product. And that is always a great sign. Second one, Micro One.

1:30:44 I met this crazy founder just high energy, you know, reminded me a bit of Travis and uh he was using AI to figure out who the top developer was. Top developers were Pretty interesting product. I think we invested when it was ten or fifteen million dollars. And uh then he pivoted into AI training. This week he announced he had five hundred million dollars in training revenue, everything from

1:31:07 Legal, et cetera. Um and that they Also uh hit a four billion dollar valuation. So that is a uh Fund returner times. Four, three or four, I guess. Um, but of course, long way to go. Still more work to be done.

1:31:22 Dave. She'll. Hussein Great job on the show and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.